Wayfarer [Bill Cipher x Reader] [REVISED]

Chapter Thirty-One: Be

You were running down a hill into the foggy underbrush of a forest. Branches whipped your face as you dashed through the conifers and aspens, where there hung feathered faces, silently weeping.

"There is no escape," they whispered as you passed. "Abandon all hope. Surrender. Surrender and join us..."

You kept running. Despite not turning around, you could see that darting between the trees behind you was a... creature. A huge, wolf-like thing with a mane, its large, square teeth gleaming in the moonlight.

It loped after you as your feet pounded the forest floor. Leaf litter leaped up as you scrambled downwards, the pull of gravity adding extra speed to your stride.

Its long howl as it closed in made you sprint harder. Don'tletitgetyoudon'tletitgetyoudon'tletitget... The mantra rang through your head as every cell in your body burned with the need to escape.

A snarl rang out behind you, and you jumped. You pressed forward as rank, hot breath surrounded you, the edge of a tooth touching your shoulder, and...

You were sitting in an empty clearing in the same forest. Pale fog ringed the ghostly conifers and silvery birch trees that surrounded the small patch of grass and dandelions, everything beyond five feet of the clearing an indistinct blur.

In the center of the clearing, sitting on a rotting log, was a little boy. With his face pressed into his small, stubby fingers, he choked on the force of his sobs, tears dripping onto a pair of black shorts. The soft blond waves of his hair moved in time to each wail and gasp as one of his hands cupped his right knee.

You gasped and moved to hug the boy, pressing his face into your shirt. The flash of irises, black as night, told you who you were looking at.

It was Bill.

He clutched your shirt with tiny fingers. Slowly, you began to make out words coming from his mouth.

"I wanna go back," he muttered. "I wanna go back. I wanna go back."

"Shhh, shhh, it's okay, it's okay," you muttered to him as you rocked him. "It's okay."

He continued to mutter, clinging to you. You stroked his hair, the golden strands feathery to the touch as you clutched him, your fingers tracing the raw ridge of his spine. He was so small... and so docile. Since when had he been this nice about being hugged?

An odd feeling came over you. A crawling sensation danced along your spine. There was something, something off, you could just feel it...

Then, it came to you. You took the younger Bill's face out of your shirt and held him at arm's length. You peered into his face.

Sure enough, the moment you saw his long, blond eyelashes, you knew. "Bill's eyelashes are black," you found yourself saying to the thing-that-was-pretending-to-be-Bill. "You're not Bill. Who are you?"

The pretend Bill stopped crying.

Then, snarling, it began to shift, skin peeling back to reveal the hulking figure of the creature that had been pursuing you. "HA!" The single laugh reverberated around the clearing as the fog pressed in. "You're perceptive, I'll give you that."

It leaned in, exposing all of its unnaturally white and square teeth in a grin. "But you'll have to be a LOT more than perceptive to have any chance of getting past me." It chuckled. "And unfortunately, you're not!"