.
I just had a thought. Feral Monster Falls, right?
So, what if Ford got tortured so much that he didn't think about Bill as 'Bill' anymore, but as 'him'.
HE gives him food.
HE makes him hunt
HE gives praise
HE gives punishment
HE is the reason you're alive
HE is the voice you follow
HE is how you survive
Listen to HIM. That is how you survive.
What if Ford slowly stopped thinking of himself as 'Ford' but as the entertainment. As the party trick. As the beast that could do better. As the beast that needed to do better.
Bill conditioned Ford with pain, punishment, and praise.
Bill made sure Ford knew what he did wrong and what he did right.
He made sure Ford never stopped moving on his hunts because that wasn't fun for anyone. They wanted to watch the funny sphinx move. They wanted to watch it hunt.
They wanted entertainment and Ford would give it to them.
Because otherwise it would hurt. Something would hurt. Everything, most of the time.
Even if he knew it was coming, it would still hurt. Even if he knew how much it hurt, it would still make him cry out.
It would still make him be better.
Ford's only food would be the hunts, and he would only get the hunts when he was being good.
When he didn't bite. When he listened. When he wasn't anything more than a housecat with its nails trimmed and its teeth pulled.
Then Ford escaped, ran, through the portal and he thought it was a hunt. Because of all the overlapping scents, he couldn't tell what was what, but he knew it was fresh, and he knew it screamed.
So he figured that he must hunt, otherwise he would get hurt. Otherwise HE would hurt him.
And, well, if he smelt something vaguely like home, he ignored it. Because the pain was worse than anything that happened in a hunt.
Because, even if both hurt him, killing family would hurt less than HIS pain.
So, even if he smelled home, he knew it would hurt if it stopped.
Then the prey got away because he slowed down. Because he knew it couldn't be right. Because this was home.
So he ran, because if he ran, maybe HE wouldn't know that he failed. It had worked once, when he dragged back something else that wasn't the main attraction. Nobody questioned it.
And he found new things to hunt.
But there were too many for a normal hunt.
Too many scent trails. Too much.
He couldn't tell, he couldn't tell, so he ran and ran and ran, until he ran into a deer.
He killed it. Brought it to a clearing, and looked up to see-
Nothing. No faces. Nothing staring down on him. Nothing watching him.
Not even the ceiling of his- his... his what? His torment.
All he saw was blue, white, and fear.
So he looked down as his hunt. And he ate. Because, well, if there wasn't anything watching him, then there wasn't anything to stop him from hunting.
But because that also meant that he had smelled home. And ruined it.
But it was HOME. Home. Home. Home.
His home. A scent that he knew, surrounded by ones that didn't smell the same but carried his scent.
Home's scent.
He wanted home back, because it meant that there was no pain at home.
Because HE wasn't home.
HE would never hurt him again.
He didn't know his own name. He would recognize it eventually, whenever the time came.
He didn't know what words were. He didn't remember English that much. He barely knew how words worked.
But Stanford Pines would find his way home eventually. He always did.
