hey do y'all remember the howling void? This one? From TBOB?

ALT

do you wanna read an entire fic about how Bill screwed things up with his first girlfriend? hahaha yeah you do!!

here’s chapter 1 of 7-ish. no content warnings for Bill’s behavior apply… yet; but he’s already waving red flags before he even manages to ask her out.

also available on ao3 if you’d prefer to read it there!!

[Love/Gravity] Will Tear Us Apart - ch 1

####

When Dimension 2 Delta (posthumously named “Euclydia”) as well as pieces of more than half a dozen adjoining 1D and 2D dimensions (posthumously named “Euclydia’s least fortunate neighbors”) had spontaneously combusted and collapsed into Dimension 0, reality’s maintenance workers had had to get creative to keep the whole multiverse from destabilizing. They’d restructured D0’s closest surviving neighboring dimensions to keep things propped up, in a manner similar to replacing a parking garage’s crumbling concrete support column with a ladder balanced on a stack of flattened pizza boxes. They were operating on laws of physics held together with quantum bubblegum and electromagnetic duct tape.

The self-styled King Zero—who, for the sake of convenience, we’ll call “Bill Cipher,” even though he wouldn’t adopt that moniker for hundreds of billions of years—did what he could to help stabilize Dimension Zero from the inside, in spite of having no diplomatic relationships with the people outside his “Dream Realm.” But the efforts of an immortalized mortal with no training in cosmic civil engineering were—to borrow a phrase that also wouldn’t exist for hundreds of billions of years—not exactly OSHA compliant.

As a consequence, Dimension Zero was far from watertight. It was riddled with wormholes and interdimensional rifts.

And all kinds of things were falling in.

####

Absolutely fuming, a quadrilateral we might as well call Kryptos barged into Bill’s room. “The aliens built another slum on the edge of reality.”

Bill was leaning on a wall, watching over a line. “That’s great, Krypt,” he said dismissively. “How’s it feel?”

The line—whom we’ll name Lynn Segment—had body paint that alternated between pitch black and glowing gold depending on the angle light hit it at, and at the moment she was shivering so hard that her paint seemed to flash on and off like a strobe light. She looked at Bill with an enormous pupil and mumbled, “I can taste the sounds colors make.”

“Okay, fantastic! Then I got the chemical right! So why isn’t it working?” Bill looked at a handful of spiral-shaped tablets—a pre-dimensional-liberation club drug that he’d spent the last couple of centuries painstakingly recreating from the molecular structure up. He extended his tongue and licked another one up. When it didn’t do anything, he licked up half a dozen more, and incinerated the rest in frustration.

“Bill?” Kryptos tried again. “Magister Mentium? King Zero? Your majesty?”

“What! What?!”

“Slums,” he repeated. “On the edge of reality.”

Bill gave him a dead-eyed stare.

“They’re in our Dream Realm. We didn’t invite them to our eternal party—”

“I know, I know.” He waved Kryptos off and returned his full attention to Lynn. "Maybe I only got the formula right on your pill?“

Without warning, Lynn’s body inverted itself, intestines and veins splayed out in every direction like squirming thread-thick tentacles, blood vaporizing into a fine mist. Bill extracted the molecules that had once made up a tablet, re-verted Lynn’s body, directed her blood back in around her eye in a stream, and swallowed the reformed spiral tablet.

Suddenly incredibly sober, Lynn shrieked, "What the hell was—!” She gagged, clapping a hand over her mouth.

Bill directed her stomach contents back where they belonged. “If you’re gonna throw up, do it in your own room.” She socked his arm.

“Biiill,” Kryptos whined.

Bill sighed loudly to make sure he knew just what an inconvenience this was. "I heard you the first time.“ And then, to the other shapes, he seemed to momentarily vanish, flickering out of sight as he rotated in impossible directions (i.e., "up”), looking for the clumps of living matter cluttering up his empty void without his permission. “Ugh, I see them. When’s the last time we had a pest problem, like fifty years ago? I can’t catch a break for a minute…" He didn’t feel like cleaning the dimension today; he tried to think of a compelling excuse to procrastinate. "All right, fine, let’s go.”

“Go where?”

Bill rotated back into view. “To see if there’s anything worth taking from the aliens before we incinerate them.” He stretched. (The other shapes pressed together to keep out of the way as his limbs filled up the room.) “So are you two losers coming or not?”

####

All the matter that belonged in Dimension Zero had either been brought in by the shapes—99% of which consisted of their own bodies—or had been created by Bill in the intervening ages since his dimension’s liberation. All this matter was concentrated together in the byzantine, inescapable pleasure palace where the Magister Mentium ruled over his people. 

All the matter that didn’t belong in Dimension Zero had fallen in through the leaks into the dimension and clumped together as space garbage. Loose change, lost socks, pocket lint, people, buildings, planets—if it was unlucky enough to be close enough to a big enough rip, it could fall into Dimension Zero.

Typically, Bill went around every few years to disintegrate the rubble and refugees and add their stored energy to his own reserves. It kept unworthy interlopers from invading their eternal party (which was what he told the others), and it ensured the shapes didn’t have anywhere to escape to (which he’d never say out loud). But he had, admittedly, been slacking off for a few decades now. Long enough for some lucky aliens to fall in, survive, and try establishing civilization. The “slums” Kryptos had mentioned were located in a debris field accumulating near the intersection of several particularly active wormholes; no new planets had fallen through yet, but there were a few rocks big enough to support a small nation if their inhabitants were able to take advantage of their full three-dimensional surfaces.

Among other things, the rock they visited first happened to support a night club.

A night club with tables. For sitting at. What kind of a loser sat at a night club?

“This is the worst club I’ve ever seen,” Bill griped. “No strobe lights, no dance music, no psychedelics being peddled in the restrooms…”

“Speaking of.” Lynn nudged Bill. “If that pill’s not doing anything for you, can I have it back?”

“No.” If he didn’t get to have fun, why should anyone else?

She grunted and turned from him to lethargically scan the club.

When Bill had started kidnapping shapes from neighboring burning dimensions to fill the emotional void left by the complete demise of his own liberating the shapes of his own dimension—who were so grateful and so alive—and haphazardly snatching up anybody he could reach choosing which of them were worthy of joining him in his nightmare dream realm, Lynn Segment had been one of his first and most eager converts. She had been just like him: embittered by her shallow world and its stifling social expectations that came with it; desperate to escape the pressures of reality into a dream world of endless leisure, pleasure, and parties; willing to risk burning it all down if it would show everyone just how close-minded and short-sighted they were, if only she’d had the means to do so.

She hadn’t had the means. Bill had. And she was eternally grateful to him. She was a bit of a drag whenever she sobered up, but that wasn’t often and Bill intended to ensure it would stay that way. He was one hundred percent certain that he and Lynn would remain besties until the end of time—or at least for the next, say, one trillion years—the same way he was one hundred percent certain that the core of his followers would always be his commune of several million 1D and 2D shapes, and there was no way it would ever dwindle to, say, a dozen-odd ragtag aliens who mainly pretended to like him because he kept the interdimensional cops away.

“I dunno. It’s not that bad,” Kryptos said. “It’s kinda nice to get a break from the noise.”

Kryptos, on the other hand, he didn’t plan to keep around long.

Although Lynn and Kryptos couldn’t see it, Bill had herded them to float over one of the unoccupied tables near the door. About half the tables had various aliens sitting at them; the nearest neighboring table had a pair of what looked like tarantulas with bear heads. One of them was squinting all eight eyes at Bill, as though trying to figure out whether he was who it thought he was; Bill turned to face the tarantula bear directly, showed it its own face mirrored in his eye, and then showed it its flesh mummifying and dissolving to dust. It quickly looked away.

Kryptos, who’d been following their king’s advice to practice looking in the third dimension, carefully tilted upward and said, “This place has one of those anti-floors.”

“Ceiling,” Bill said.

“Sealing,” Kryptos repeated. “Why’s it called that, because it seals off the building?”

“Sure, why not.” Bill didn’t even need to deliberately “look upward” to see it. Since he’d been born, he’d always passively seen the stars in his peripheral vision. Aliens’ three dimensional rooms, with their upward ceilings and downward floors, made him feel like he was trapped between two vast solid stones just waiting to crush him. He always felt a little claustrophobic under ceilings. (He always would.) 

The tables were oriented toward a low stage with a couple of bizarre contraptions that Bill suspected were alien instruments—one device with a keyboard looked sorta like a 3D reimagining of an instrument he’d learned to play as a small child—and a microphone, which was currently occupied by a 3D alien made up of weird fleshy tubes. It was poetry open mic night. Reading off a soggy notebook paper, the alien said somberly: “Summer never ends; the world spins out of control; my tea’s overbrewed.”

The audience applauded politely.

“Thank you.”

Lynn mumbled, “This is aliens’ idea of a night club?” She fake gagged, then coughed when she accidentally made herself actually gag.

“This is the worst.” Bill elbowed Lynn. “Hey—which alien do you think would be the most fun to squeeze and pop like a meaty balloon?”

“Ooh, good question…” She turned on her side so she could scan the room from one side to the other, taking in each guest in cross sections.

Bill was just making plans to take the mic, announce he’d be performing a poem called “Fire Alarm,” and set the whole club on fire; when something he’d never seen before floated onto the stage.

An eerie silence seem to fall over the club

Like a hand dragging through a lake and making the leaves on the surface part around the intrusion and merge back together behind it, the room seemed to bend around a perfectly circular void that had ripped in reality. Support beams and wooden boards visually warped in its path and then straightened out untouched after it passed. It was like a dark tunnel through spacetime—the exact opposite of the force that had created Bill. The red curtain at the back of the stage fluttered as it passed, pulled toward the void. The empty space stopped behind the microphone—then hovered toward it and said quietly, “Hello? Is this on? I—” The speakers squealed with feedback. “Oh.”

“What the heck is that?” Bill asked.

“What?” Kryptos tried to tilt himself properly to see what Bill was looking at.

“There, whatever’s on stage at the mic. It looks like some kind of… black hole in the fabric of reality?”

The bear tarantula that Bill hadn’t terrified turned toward him to helpfully answer, “She’s a black hole.”

“Oh.” Ask a stupid question… He’d heard of black holes before, he knew what those were. He’d thought they were bigger. Well, all right, who needed psychedelics? This view was trippy enough to keep him entertained the next couple of minutes.

He noted that the bear tarantulas were quickly packing up their things. He waited until they’d left the table; then stole one of their abandoned drinks for himself. (Trying to figure out how to drink a 3D beverage was a briefly interesting challenge; but unfortunately the substance itself had no more impact on his brain than the useless spiral tablet had.)

“Um, hi,” the void said. “My name’s Yvonne Torizon, and the name of this poem is ‘The Bone-Crunching Pain Of Collapsing Into A Singularity Mingled With The Guilt And Grief Of Involuntarily Killing Everyone You Know And Love When They Came Closer To Try To Help You Which You Never Had Time To Emotionally Process Because Any Mass You Absorbed Expanded Your Event Horizon Until You’d Crushed Your Entire Solar System Into Your Soul.’ Abridged version.”

And then she shrieked into the microphone like a dying death metal vocalist for five minutes straight without pause.

When she finished, the night club was dead silent, and half as full.

The void awkwardly floated in the middle of the stage. She mumbled so quietly the mic barely picked it up, “thank you.”

“Wow,” Lynn said. “That was almost as bad as the time you tried to make entropy audible.”

Kryptos said, “Can we burn this dump down already?”

“Yeah. I needa go find something strong enough to make me forget that.” Lynn looked where Bill had been a minute ago. She just saw an equally-baffled Kryptos. “Bill?”

As Yvonne self-consciously slunk off the stage, Bill was zooming up to meet her. “Hiya oh wow that was amazing I’ve never heard anything like that it was so deep and profound and raw and honest it felt like you were screaming directly to me you’re a true artist you really get it I mean nobody ever gets it but you get it I just don’t know what to say that was genius!”

Yvonne was silent until Bill ran out of words. “Hi,” she said. “Um—thanks. That’s nice of you to say.”

He floated a little closer. “Can I hear the unabridged version?”

She floated a little further. “Oh—you don’t want to hear the unabridged version. It’s six hours long.”

Fervently, he said, “There is nothing I want more.”

“No, I couldn’t. It's—it’s very personal. I can’t imagine someone else listening to it.”

For a moment, Bill’s golden corona flashed red—no one said no to him—before quickly returning to gold. She was an alien, she didn’t know she was talking to someone important. He didn’t want to force her. He wanted her to like him. “Okay, okay, you win! At least let me buy you a drink.”

“I… sorry, I… can’t hold a glass. It gets sucked into my… me.”

He processed that. “Okaaay… how about I hold the glass and pour it on you? Does that work?”

“I guess, but—why would you go to that much trouble?”

“Because,” he wracked his brain for something clever-sounding, “your gravitational pull is irresistible.”

“What?”

“I’m feeling a really strong force of attraction. Between us,” he tried. “I wanna… wanna make… spaghetti. with you.”

She stared at him. He was pretty sure that was staring. He floated there like an idiot as the awkward silence dragged on like the heat death of the universe. Where was the nearest wormhole he could dive eye-first into? He was never flirting again. First and last time. This was not one of his talents.

“Wait,” she said. “Are you—asking me out?’

"Yes!” he said, relieved. “Yes, that’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Oh. Thank you, that’s… I can’t remember the last time somebody—I mean, sure.”

“Great!” He tilted toward the bar. “Shall we?”

As she followed him, she said, “Sorry, I—didn’t catch your name?”

He looked at her. “Oh. You don’t know me.”

His surprise must have been audible in his voice, because she immediately said, “I’m sorry—”

“No no, that’s cool! It’s cool." He’d momentarily expected himself to be infuriated; but, it actually was cool. This was the first time in millions of years that he’d met someone who didn’t already know who he was. He’d almost forgotten it was possible.

He wasn’t beholden to his reputation. He could start fresh with her.

So don’t say King Zero, don’t say the Magister Mentium. "Call me Bill,” he said.

As they passed Lynn and Kryptos on the way to the bar, he gestured excitedly at Yvonne, as if to say, look what I caught!

Somewhat dubiously, Kryptos mouthed, “A circle?”

“Shh!” Bill hissed, “She’s a point, she’s a point that looks like a sphere—shut up, you don’t know anything!” He waved them off and hurried to catch up with Yvonne.

Lynn—who had also discovered one of the bear tarantulas’ abandoned drinks and downed it herself—blinked dazedly. “What’s a sphere?”

“A higher dimensional circle,” Kryptos said.

“Then just say that. There’s no need to make up stupid new words for…” She shook her head, mumbling to herself, and turned to leave.

Kryptos watched her go, then turned to Bill, not sure what their instructions were now or if they were even allowed to leave without him.

But as far as Bill was concerned, Lynn and Kryptos had ceased to exist.

####

The Magister Mentium regularly assured his followers—millions of 2D shapes, nearly but not quite like himself—that they were all from the same world, a world he had liberated. But all the same, many of his followers had heard rumors that the Magister’s home reality had been completely destroyed—destroyed so thoroughly, in fact, that the destruction had spread to neighboring 2D realities. It would explain why so many of the shapes had different understandings of history, or science; or why they looked so alien to each other, eyes and mouths in the wrong places, hands and feet the wrong shapes, skin the wrong texture, faces ranging from “strange” to “monstrous.”

But the Magister said those rumors were spread by nonbelievers and saboteurs who hadn’t deserved to be liberated and wanted to undermine their progress. The Magister said his followers looked so different from each other and remembered different histories because they were at different stages in their spiritual journeys, on higher and lower levels, and thus now that they were all united on a single level they could see how they’d all perceived reality differently. He never publicly explained what these spiritual “levels” consisted of except in broad strokes. He only told people how far along they were on their journeys in private. It made it harder for them to compare notes.

Most importantly, he assured them that they were all from the same reality, and that the reality was called Euclydia. The word sounded strange to them, as though it was a word some alien had assigned their home without ever seeing it. Sometimes, they thought the Magister said it like the word was alien to him, too.

All the same, they believed him. They had no choice but to believe him. There was nowhere else for them to go.

####

“So, that’s how I accidentally devoured my whole solar system and everyone I’ve ever known and loved,” Yvonne said. “What’s your story?”

It was the most pitiable story Bill had ever heard, and he’d only paid attention to half of it as he tried to think of some safe, lighthearted conversation topics to bring up once it was his turn to speak again. Gossip he’d learned while eavesdropping on strangers; the interior decor in children’s hospitals (considering the contents of her story, he gathered she’d had as many youthful opportunities to develop opinions on the topic as he’d had); dying; dyeing…

All of which he had to chuck out the window at Yvonne’s question.  "Oh. Me.“

They’d only stayed at the club for another half hour before Yvonne had gotten uncomfortable and suggested they go somewhere less crowded (there were maybe fifteen people in the whole building), and then they’d spent another hour at a coffee shop she knew until they were politely asked to leave after Yvonne accidentally sucked a stool into herself. It had been one of the most fascinating sights Bill had ever seen. He’d been tempted to start feeding other furniture into her singularity, but she was so embarrassed about the stool thing he figured it would ruin his chances for a second date. And now they were on a lone asteroid, with no other people or innocent furniture nearby, stargazing.

Inside, she’d looked like nothing but a vague floating black ball; but outside, free from the electric lights, lit only by faint and distant nebulas, she was faintly visible in a way she hadn’t been indoors. She wasn’t just a lightless ball; that was more like her "head.” Beneath it, the rest of her translucent body hung down, like a dress—or a half-real black funeral shroud—and she had two faint arms and hands she didn’t seem to use for much other than nervously wringing her fingers around each other.

And she was very pretty, in a funereal, surreal sort of way. Like a goth alien ghost. 

“Oh, me. I’m from the second dimension,” Bill said.

“Which one?”

He grimaced; but after a reluctant pause, he said, “Euclydia.” He said the word as though it had both the name and the flavor of a bitter medicine.

Yvonne flinched in surprise. “Oh. Isn’t that…?" 

"Yeah.” Bill laughed wryly. “It is.”

“Then you know what it’s like to lose your world, too. I’m so sorry.”

Any attempts to say no, it wasn’t like that, we’re all fine, we were liberated died before he could get a syllable out. “It’s not that bad,” Bill lied. “I mean, sure, I lost one world, but gained another—and this one’s great!”

“You’re with them, right?” She bobbed toward the three-dimensional labyrinth glittering silver-white at the center of Dimension Zero like a vast crumpled wad of brittle, flaky marcasite, visible from anywhere in the dimension like the eye-heart of a panopticon.

Home.

Bill had built this eternal party palace for the poor suckers neighboring his home dimension who’d gotten trapped in here with—er, sorry—for the grateful followers from his own dimension whom he’d liberated alongside himself. For those who’d taken his teachings to heart and learned to tilt into the third dimension, it was clearly exposed to outer space above and below each level; but for those who hadn’t learned, it was an endless maze of rooms and nightclubs and hedonistic pleasure dens with nowhere to step outside and catch a breath. He’d taken full advantage of his new access to the third dimension to arrange his labyrinth in strange, impossible geometries: several parallel realities stacked atop each other like pancakes, perpendicular realities tilted to intersect at 90° angles. These intersections were strange, terrifying places, where cross-sections of people and items you couldn’t see might come hurtling through at any moment, revealing themselves in flashes of bone and internal organ before vanishing again—and they could no more see when you were coming than you could see when they were. It became the habit to let out little chirps or whistles or cries when approaching these intersections to ensure no one accidentally barreled through just in time to be T-boned into bisected halves by another shape.

Eons before the dimensions containing earths and humans came to be, eons before English speakers with a taste for the macabre began using the phrase “non-euclidean geometry” as a shorthand to describe environments unnatural, otherworldly, and hostile to sane and rational life, the shapes under King Zero’s control began using the exact same phrase the exact same way. There was something viscerally wrong about these intersections. Their geometry was not of Euclydia.

(Which was ironic, since by human definitions of mathematics and geometry, these flat planes with their easily-mapped XYZ cartesian coordinates were perfectly euclidean. They just weren’t 2D.)

(The shapes might not have known what human euclidean geometry was, but to be fair, they didn’t really know what it was to be Euclidean, either.)

Before Bill could confirm that, yes, he was with them, Yvonne said, "I heard they were all prisoners who weren’t allowed to leave their fortress.“

Defensively, Bill said, "Hey, whoa, no one said leaving’s illegal.” (He hadn’t outlawed it—he just tended to capture and torture anyone who tried to abandon him, that was all.) “We just don’t want to leave. We’re all here on purpose—we were trying to reach a higher dimension! Aaand landed in a lower one, but, pfff,” he shrugged expansively. “Same end result. This is our Dream Realm. Our paradise!” He gestured at the rest of reality. “Anyway, there’s not much to do in Dimension Zero outside our place, so, why leave?”

“I’ve never really thought of this place as a paradise.” She curled up smaller, arms around her trailing body, looking half like she was hugging her knees to her chest and half like she was carrying an armload of laundry. “But—I kind of get it, I guess.”

“Do you?” That was exciting to hear. Aliens typically didn’t rate his Dream Realm highly. Probably because he hadn’t made it for their needs. And tended to kill them.

“I ended up here after inverting out of existence—but, before I got here, I couldn’t get within a solar system’s distance of anybody without involuntarily pulling them in and crushing them with my gravity.” She held herself tighter, as though she were trying to turn herself inside-out now. “But, for some reason, here I just… don’t affect people as much until they touch my event horizon? And my event horizon’s a lot smaller. I don’t know why. The laws of physics here are just… odd, somehow.”

“Oh, that’s because I capped how strong gravity is.”

“You—what?”

“Capped it,” Bill said.

“The gravity.”

“Yeah!”

She stared at him.

He elaborated, “Okay so once the force of gravity pulling on something reaches a certain strength, it just kinda… stops? See, whenever I let it get any higher, it started messing with all our stuff,” he gestured to his distant glittering 2D compound, “so I just went, hey, why does it need to be any higher? So I capped it.”

She stared at him.

“It’s pretty complicated, I don’t know all the fancy science terms for it—I had to DIY a couple of fundamental forces and exploit a loophole in physics—buuut now I can just slide the gravity up and down with my brain. Like a dimmer switch!”

She stared at him.

“You’re welcome,” he said cheerily.

“You can’t affect gravity,” she said, “what are you talking about?”

He paused. “Oh. Riiight. Didn’t mention that part, did I.” Because he’d been trying to hide his identity. Well—as long as he’d blown his cover, maybe he could at least salvage things by using it to convince her that he was cool. Chicks digged powerful guys, right? “Yeah, I control everything! This entire dimension!”

“No way.” He couldn’t see so much as feel that she was turning away from him, as though embarrassed to face such a ridiculous claim. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Hey, no no no, I wouldn’t do that!” Not until he was sure she liked him enough to let him get away with it, anyway.

He was losing her. How could he convince her of his power without terrifying her? He blurted out, “What’s your favorite color?”

“What?”

“Favorite color!”

“Uh—magenta…?”

“Ooh, tricky one. Not a big fan of magenta, personally—but okay! Here ya go!” He gestured with both hands out toward the wild, swirling, technicolor sky. “Bam!”

And just like that, the colors between the shimmering stars shifted. Shades of pink and purple and red-blue filled all of visible reality. Even Bill himself momentarily popped a deep pink as he focused on the feat, before he noticed and, with a noise of disgust, brushed the magic hue off his golden glow. “Okay, it coulda looked a little better—but in my defense, magenta’s hard.”

Yvonne was silent for a moment, taking in the view—the entire expanse of reality that had been changed on a whim at one word from her. “How did you do that,” she asked, voice hushed. “You’d have to… You’re the king of Dimension Zero?”

Giddily, he said, “Haha, yep! Guilty as charged!” He felt so cool. He was impressing the living daylights out of this black hole, he knew it—which was no mean feat, getting daylight out of a black hole—

Her voice took on a sharp edge he hadn’t heard from her before. “You are making fun of me.”

All his coolness evaporated in a panic. “What?” Stupid, he never should have told her! Why would she care about a couple dumb magic tricks? Everyone knew what King Zero had done, she thought he was a monster, she had to—"No, no way! Not even a little bit!“

"Why else would you be talking to me? Did you just ask me out because you pity me?”

“No, of course not!”

“But what do we have in common?! I’m just a loser—a-a monster that destroys worlds, all I’ve ever done is hurt the people I care about—" (he tried to reach out for her; she jerked back, away from his touch) "—and you’ve acted so kind, but why would you want anything to do with me when you’re basically a god—”

“Come on, I don’t believe in gods—”

“You created a dimension! You made a paradise for your people! You can make matter and control gravity, and all I can do is destroy—”

“How did you think I got that kind of power?” Bill demanded. “Do you think I woke up with it?”

Yvonne fell silent.

“Why do you think I’m still alive? Huh? I’m not from one of the neighboring dimensions that got caught up in the '2nd-Dimension Incident’! I’m from the Euclydia! Ground zero of the fire! If my entire dimension was destroyed, why do you think I’m here?”

She must have known the rumors. Any alien who’d heard the name “Euclydia” had also heard the story of the monster who’d singlehandedly destroyed it. To the higher dimensions, all the word “Euclydia” was was the name of the victim in a cosmic horror story.

She stared silently at him for a moment. Finally, she whispered, “Why… why did you… do it?”

“For the same reason you did.” Please understand him.

“Oh.” She understood. “Oh. I’m… sorry. I’m so sorry.” She’d said sorry when she’d learned what dimension he was from. This one, somehow, felt more real. “How did it happen?” Not what did you do, but how did it happen. As if, in spite of his own role, it was just something that happened to him.

His instincts screamed no. But—she’d get it, wouldn’t she? She’d done the same thing. She’d understand. He needed someone to understand. "I’ve never told anyone else. So—keep this to yourself, all right?“ He leaned in closer—

—and she jerked back. "Don’t touch me!” He could see her curling in on herself, her ghostly hands wringing each other below her hollow head. “Don't— You’ll hurt yourself. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt me.”

“Have you ever seen what a black hole—”

“Hold still,” he said. “Look at this. I’ll prove it.” Before she could escape, he pressed his hand into her, as though he were trying to cup her face.

She let out a strangled shriek and jerked back from him, “No no no—!” But it was too late; his hand had passed through her event horizon. She burst into noisy, tearless sobs as his arm stetched out and spaghettified as more of him was pulled into her body—and more and more—and more and more, and more and more…

Around the time she’d devoured about five times more matter than his whole body should have contained, all in the form of arm, her confusion managed to break through her panic. Her sobs subsided to confused hitching hiccups as she croaked, “What?”

He pulled back his arm, stretching and snapping the spaghettified limb like it was a long string of taffy; and his arm regrew from his side. “See? Good as new!” He waved his new fingers at her. “You can’t consume me! I don’t think you’d be able to even if I shoved all of me in you on purpose. You’ve got nothing to…” He trailed off. “What’s wrong?”

She was shaking all over; the view of space behind her distorted from her gravitational waves, like ripples around a stone dropped in a pool. Voice thin, she wheezed, “I thought—I thought I was going to kill you… I—”

“Oh. Hey, hey, I’m fine. See?” He spread his arms, letting her see his pristine shining shell. “Cheer up, you didn’t kill me. I’m right here!”

She reached for him, then froze, fingers shaking, as though two opposing forces were trying to drag her forward and hold her back and she was trapped in the middle. He reached the rest of the way and caught her hands. His hands were instantly crushed, palms collapsed to a point and fingers dragged in after. He didn’t pull back; she didn’t let go.

“Still here,” he repeated. “I’m still here. Say it.”

“You’re… still here.” Her voice wasn’t any stronger; but Bill was sure he felt her grip somehow, impossibly, tighten. “You’re still here. You’re still here.”

“And I’m not going anywhere,” Bill said. “You said you’re made of, what—the matter of twelve planets? Not even a star? You’re tiny. I’m not falling inside you; you…” he sprouted a third arm so he could gestured out at all of Dimension Zero, the whole Dream Realm, the distant swirling colors, “…are inside me.”

She was silent as she processed that. Even though she had no visible face, Bill was beginning to be able to feel where she was looking; her attention was like a pressure that settled heavily wherever she was focused, not enough to crush but enough to make it hard to breathe. He could feel her dark gaze scanning the roiling nebulae above.

“Okay,” she whispered. She tugged him closer and he wrapped an arm around her wispy, ghostly back; and she pulled his embrace infinitely inward.

He had a voice that could be heard from every part of Dimension Zero; but he confessed what had truly happened to his home in a whisper pressed up to her event horizon. Where the words would fall into her dimensionless heart and never escape.

####

To anyone close enough to see what was happening, what they did looked like an infinitely-regenerating fractal solar panel sliding an eyeball across its surfaces as it infinitely folded up into an infinitely small origami singularity around an infinitely black core.

But nobody could possibly be close enough to see what was happening. The view was sucked into Yvonne’s horizon, never to be witnessed by anyone but her. 

When a black hole consumes a star, it pulls it in a little bit at a time, in a string of light, like a hand unravelling a ball of yarn by winding the yarn around its fingers. Because of the way light bends in the vicinity of a black hole, no matter what angle you see it from, the light seems to surround the black hole in a ring, like a halo.

From every point in Dimension Zero, it was possible to see a halo of golden-white light at the center of reality.

For six hours, the howl of the void echoed through the Dream Realm.

####

And from that moment on, Bill would always be a freak in bed.

A moment of silence for his capacity to enjoy boring vanilla shape-on-shape missionary sex, dead before it was born. Only freaks, aliens, and monsters would do it for him now.

But to be fair to Yvonne, he probably would have ended up that way regardless.

####

She was shivering; the optical illusion of distorted light surrounding her rippled like a heat mirage.

“Everything okay?” Bill asked.

“M'fine.” Her voice was thick. “It’s just— It’s been a long time since anyone’s been able to physically touch me.”

“It’s been a long time since anyone’s been able to physically hurt me.” He hadn’t realized how badly he’d needed to hurt.

She terrified him. Nothing had ever shaken him to his core the way her voice did. When he gazed too long into her abyss, he could feel it gazing into him. It pulled him in. He wanted to fall into her and never come out. He wanted to be crushed into her core and…

He tried not to think about what he wanted to happen to him.

He loved her. He was going to spend the rest of eternity with her.

####

For their second date, she stood him up.

#####

(FINALLY I get to start posting this! I first thought up Bill’s first girlfriend the black hole who screams into the mic as poetry in like November 2023 and I started writing this fic like a week before TBOB came out. And I know it was like a week before, because when TBOB came out and gave him a howling void ex-girlfriend I looked like a goddamn genius.

This is part 1 of a 7-ish chapter fic about Bill and Yvonne. My goal is weekly-ish updates on Fridays and/or maybe Saturdays; I’ve already written it, it just needs editing and arting, but I fear I’m about to be in for a hectic couple months so we’ll see how editing actually goes.

If you’re like “so what’s with this commune thing Bill’s got, is this an AU,” the answer is no!! It’s not an AU! By present day, his only followers are the Henchmaniacs! This cult is just another relationship that Bill will inevitably screw up due to who he is as a person. You’ll learn everything you need to know about this group through the fic. (But if you WANT to learn more while you’re waiting for the next chapter, want a fic about the Axolotl?)

Do not be fooled by how sweet Bill is to Yvonne in early chapters. Watch the waving red flags. He’s still Bill. This is, ultimately, not a story about Bill in love; it’s a story about how Bill treats even the people he loves most.

Anyway!! I’ve been sitting on this a LONG time so I’m very excited to share! I look forward to hearing y'all’s thoughts!)