Archive of Our Own ^beta

Fiddleford Hadron McGucket had never been much of a dreamer, from the furthest he could remember…

A stark contrast from who he was in the light of day: For there wasn’t a mind in his natal Tennessee that was as bright and lively as the kid he’d turned out to be. From a young age too, he outshined most the adults that would make it to his Pa’s farm, and as such, was as much of a local attraction as the occasional two headed calf that was reported.

He talked early, and at such a cadence his own folks had troubles keeping up with him. His curiosity came with deft hands too, and he soon picked up what anyone could put down, and make it his own. The spark in him was tangible, vivid, and it didn’t take a genius to notice it.

Sure he would have his moments when his parents couldn’t wrap their head around how to make him calm down, or stop fidgeting on the benches at church, but overall he had it good, and he knew it. Fiddleford was loved, consistently, absolved from all harm by a merciful amnesia that came with the high hopes placed on him. If this boy was trouble, no one would dare call him that to his folks’ face.

His nights were crowded, and stuffy, and thus, he never had too much time to dream them.

One of the memories he still held had been of his mother on such a night. He didn’t have a lot to dream about, but he had a quaint memory. He’d have called it photographic, but photographic didn’t encapsulate it quite fully when he could still summon the grain of woods rolling under his fingers. Counting the knots that had not been sanded out of their kitchen table.

There, he drew small constellations on dead tree. When they were at the table, he would pull the tablecloth off, his mother always warning him somewhere in the back of his head to leave it be, lest he spilled something and stained it. The thing that was their kitchen table was ancient anyways, crowded and narrow, especially for when his latest sister would come along. But he reckoned he could help.

At night he had all the room to examine it closer. Its tablecloth was drying, hung from an opened door, where the light shone, projecting shadows of weird geometric monsters. His ‘Ma was moving discreetly and frantic, loading a laundry basket with sheets he had soiled. She’d arranged a dishcloth under the warm cup of fresh milk and honey, she cared too much about that table, and sometimes he wondered if some of his tidier side came from her.

He thought she was gone, but she grabbed his wrist, stopped him dead.

“Stop tapping this or it ain’t gonna give you no more luck.” She incentivized him, making him jolt. The poor woman looked at the edge of her wits, but she maintained her patience.

Fiddleford found it hard, especially this young, to stop himself. But he remembered trying, locking his fingers together under the table, trying to suppress the bits of him that bothered, so he wouldn’t drive no one crazy. It mustered a strength his scrawny little body didn’t have, and soon enough, it got his leg bouncing, reflexively.

Once she completed the thankless chore, she would pat his back up and down, with a giant hand on such a little boy. Reassuring him that if he was still an inconvenience he was at least a loved one.

“Now what was this horrible dream about?” She asked, patiently.

That was the part Fiddleford hated the most…

When he closed his eyes, he was drifting, tethered to safety only by the grip of a snake on his calf. Strange air suffocated him. Behind the thin skin of his eyelids, shapes and lights moved, eldritch, and out of his mind’s feeble reach. He knew opening his eyes would only reveal what even his nightmares couldn’t bear. He was tossed there, in the eye of a gigantic storm, and he could do nothing about it, as shards flew by on whole sides of him.

Then the lights flashed, and his head was set ablaze.

It wasn’t the dream. Honestly, Fiddleford had never recollected his dreams. He would wake up, screaming like the devil was after him, and drown himself in the puddle of his tears if no one came. However, the dreams always escaped him. Just the fear remained.

“I… don’t know…” He answered, plainly.

His mother’s look got… Complicated. He was a clever boy, but he never got clever enough to figure it out exactly. At this age he knew little of emotions. The most complicated thing he ever had to experience was patience, and disappointment, and he only did so when it was held up against him to try and make him behave.

He was familiar with shame, another show of precocity he found no delight in. He had a big family, some older siblings, and if everybody had his privileges — which he knew they didn’t — it wouldn’t leave his ‘ma time to sleep. Would he still do that when the new baby came? The woman needed sleep, Fiddleford.

“T’s okay…” She reassured him. “Night dreams are fickle… ‘Long as you hold on to your day ones, you ain’t gonna get lost, okay?”

“Day dreams?” Fiddleford interrogated, as if it was the first occurrence of hearing about them. This wasn’t unsubstantiated claim: For he didn’t remember any prior referrals of them, therefore, it might as well have been the first time it registered to him fully.

His mother smiled at him, in confidence. The night was so bright, and it seemed the stars sparkled inside her, from so far away their distant lights didn’t seem like a threat.

“Don’t tell me you ain’t full of them…” She laughed with an air of machinations that doubled as complicity. “‘Got a hard time containing them, I bet that’s why you got no place left for silly nightmares… Your day dreams? They’re the real treasure, alright…”

He didn’t remember when his leg had stopped bouncing, or his fingers stopped torturing one another, but she had channeled something he would hold onto. He had never felt more close to his mother than on that day, it was probably how he so easily directed his “I love you” to her. The poor woman looked taken aback, but she laughed it off, and held him close.

He wouldn’t run to his mother’s arms now, even if the world was breaking in two under a rift of hubris. God only knew if she would only be so welcoming. Mothers always loved their boys with much more earnestness when they were that… Boys. By the time they were expected to become men, they didn’t bear the burden of sentimentality anymore.

If he had a dream one day, he had lost the plot.

A well-tailored lawyer stood on his side, planted like a flower in the pot, they looked like two righteous twats. Flowers dressed up fancy, with suits and ties, and suitcases filled to the brim with papers attesting from how royally fucked they were… But flowers nonetheless, but maybe it was the peculiar shape of his curls that made the metaphor so striking.

Fiddleford hadn’t bothered to learn the name of his coiffed savior — or maybe he had. Emma-May had insisted he defended himself, however revolting the idea of investing their money in the lost cause of himself seemed. She had hooked the two up against his wishes anyways, and it seemed he was a pleasant fellow, who would have done a decent enough job, if Fidds had any fight in him.

“Well… At least it’s gonna be quick.” He had declared, but he remained background noise.

On the edge of his vision, behind the crowd of curious, drifters, and law students probably having the time of their life discussing the shitshow that had taken place; he spotted his soon to be ex-wife. She was choking down all emotions that didn’t align with her righteous contempt at the situation.

His mother was here too, somewhere, he knew because someone had told him, but he hadn’t seen her in so long, it was a hard spot. She extended her sympathies to her, now revolute, daughter-in-law. A support she couldn’t afford her son: They had a grandson, you see? And now that his father’s capacity to care for him was questioned, there was a chance they would lose him too.

At home, Tater was in the good care of… Whichever one of their siblings that could have made the trip from the old country to Cali… Probabilities were, it was his sister, but now that he’d missed her graduation (the second McGucket to go to college, if you could believe it), she wasn’t much for talking to him either…

Tate… The thought of his son was a suckerpunch. The boy wasn’t much of a talker, but he was hiding a lot behind his reserves. Emma-May had said he'd sure follow in his father’s footsteps one way or another, and in the utopic past it had been a compliment. Not too much, Fiddleford hoped, just enough to find his guiding star, and latch on to it. He’d grow smart enough, to make a good life for himself, that’s all he absolutely hoped for, whatever life it was, soon as he was happy with it.

All sound wishes from the mouth of the hypocrite… What kind of a father was he, that he was absent for two thirds of his boy’s life? Seeing his lawyer defend him when he couldn’t have acted like a wake up call, he did have something to fight for. But when came the questions of Tate’s birth, his mouth had dried with horror… A cackle rang like the tolling of a bell, like a doomsday alarm. His mind was mocking him. He was rightfully losing himself… And now they had had a break, because he couldn’t stop pulling at his hair.

When he left Gravity Falls, he wanted to make it right, but the road to Palo Alto was missing.

On wheels, it was a 15 hour journey, and though the night was going to fall on the east coast, when he set his mind to it, he knew he would have made it in time for Tate’s birthday, even if the sun was setting a little…

Driving back was becoming automatic, he rationalized, it was why he didn’t remember most of it. Although he remembered turning the corners of rows upon rows of residential streets, on foot, mind you, until he found his own front door.

Hope was a wry beast, but it would certainly be a surprise. He had lost his hope of convincing Emma-May he was serious about giving her the life she deserved, but he would make sure she knew he would not wrong their son. However, when he had met her, her face turned to a bloated dread.

He wished he could forget this expression, but it was one sure to haunt him.

“Your son’s birthday?” She kept screaming, more and more until neighbors’ windows lit gold and piss yellow. He could see the shapes of them, black witnesses made of shadows more than flesh, peering at him through the triangular windows and their curtains. Bile had shot up his throat. Emma-May was unconsolable, looking a hair away from punching him. “Your son’s birthday was four months ago! We’ve called, Fidds. You never answered. Where have you been? Where’s your car?”

“You’re not gonna fight any of it are you?” His lawyer asked, they were sitting somewhere behind the courthouse, in the shade cast by the high wall, protecting themselves from the golden eye of the sunset. None of his outer walls were made of bricks, that’s how he knew. A cigarette was consuming itself in between his fingers. Ashes fell on his pants, the cigarette burned him between two knuckles. Did he even take a drag? “What does she have against you that could possibly make you give it all up? Does she know where you buried the body or something?”

Fidds shot a look up at him, a threat his newfound lawyer found better not to argue against.

Silence, a merciful silence, bathed in surface tension, greeted his mind for the first time in months. Fiddleford tried to hang up to it. Memories of silence. Memories of quietness. Of serenity… Something enough to tranquilize him, for there was no ease to be found here. Most of the time, he found days mushed themselves together, leaving very little space for this kind of quiet.

Something deep in him was broken… Something so unfathomably wrong it couldn’t have been entirely natural. One minute he could remember taking a walk, and the other he was in the middle of the forest, having shouting matches with ghosts. The natural order of things had been turned on its head. So little he could actually make sense of.

If he had killed someone, would he even remember it? If Emma-May had married a killer, wouldn’t she tell the police? Was her love that unconditional when she knew damn well he used her… Solely so he would be left alone. How had he gone so far knowing so little?

He remembered being a killer well enough, he just didn’t remember the bodies…

The comforting weight of a gun in his hands, that he could fathom. A glass cannon pressed at a spot on his right temple, alleviating him of doubts. Was he suicidal? He was plagued with the doubt of it. If he was, he had never been brave enough to press the trigger… That much he was sure of. He wouldn’t risk his life when danger brushed him, he seldom had to. There was always someone, stupid enough to liberate him from the thralls of his inept self.

As far as he knew he was the only skeleton shoved in his closet. A stuffed thing now. He had pulled the same trigger on it, over and over, and yet, he refused to die.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, tapping a rhythm against the nearest surface. Fidgety again, he couldn’t stop his leg from bouncing. One day, he would forget what he was holding at harm’s length, the thought made him sick. One day, he would pull the trigger anyways, and there would be nothing left to scrape off the floor than concrete molasses of his blasted humanity.

His index clenched against the weapon, but he found no trigger. Only empty space.

What in God’s name was he holding?

A distant, muffled sound led him there. Like a phone ringing. The tears shook him, purging him of thoughts. He pressed a trigger… He pressed a trigger to make the world disappear with him, yet he was standing. Quarters fell from his trembling hands onto the floor of the machinery, but before he could remember exactly how he was locked there, or where exactly there was, he reached target.

“Alright…” A deep and groggy voice came from the cheap plastic. It probably had to do with the hour of the night at which he was calling, but the man on the other end of the line was almost unrecognizable. “You won. I am cutting the phone line. Bye bye.”

“Stan…” His voice fizzled before he could make it. Sorrow overwhelmed the small space in his throat. Only then, did he actually permit himself to cry. From the spot he had nestled the phone, just next to his ear, he perceived a hitch of surprise. An opportunity. For now the threat was lifted. “Stanford?”

“McGucket you’ve got to stop calling…” The voice of Stanford was unanimous, but so distant he couldn’t hear his anger, only a deep seated exasperation. “I can’t deal with it…”

Despair was a wave over him. He was already a mess, but something about this entire situation made all the flags in his head a bright red. How many months had it been? If it took him four months to make it from Oregon to California? If the court hearing had already taken place? If he was already freshly divorced now? How long had it been? How much time had he spent abusing his own body, and what did he last take away from his best friend to warrant such uneasiness a phonebooth away?

He had gone too far to turn back this time. He was sure of it… He had entered the wrong prompt. Oh, he thought he was clever and meticulous… What if he had only warped Stanford’s mind in a worse state than his? He had erased too much, and now there would be consequences to be suffered.

He gripped the phone line tighter in his hand, registering only when blood stung the inside of his palms.

“I am sorry— Sorry for everything… I was supposed to— And I fucked it up. I fucked it all up…”

“Grab a ticket…” Stanford stifled. But it didn’t sound like him, nothing did… Fiddleford was hung on the other end of the line, and the coils of rubber would only snap his neck but the gravity wouldn’t settle yet. He was still floating, with his eyes closed, somewhere he couldn’t escape from. “You have to stop calling, man. I can’t help you.”

Then again, it was not in Fiddleford’s temperament to call in the middle of the night either. Sniveling like the hounds of Hell were after him. Paranoid enough to scare himself with the triangular showers of streetlamps and the low buzz they were emitting.

“Emma-May… She… She took the kid. The judge asked me about him and I… He’s my son, and I couldn’t…”

He couldn’t make words of it, the court case was a blinding kind of pain. The weight of his grief fell on him like a meat cleaver, cutting the world on its axis. Severing him from the reality of the big picture, stuck on minute details. Did it matter to remember what exactly had transpired? He had lost everything, and he had not fought for it. He had no right to mourn.

The phone remained mute, inanimate object. Fiddleford closed his eyes, praising the silence from the other end of the line as much as he dreaded it. Ford wouldn’t just hang up on him, and Fiddleford could hang up on this serenity. Nothing had been quiet since he left him. There was always a scream, an alarm, the whirling whine of unfathomable winds, laughter and sobs. Fiddleford craved the quiet.

If there ever was a stoning, he would lend Ford rocks and ropes, so he could tie back the pieces of himself that kept flying loose.

“I know you told me not to come back…” He continued, for the silence, for the big great void and the telephone cord tight around his calf.

On the other side of the latticed wood, was the man whose judgment he would take over the word of God. With shoulders like a giant, and in his eyes, the only absolution he could fathom. Around him, the world warped into kaleidoscopes, and spirals, as the lowly payphone and the middle of the road were collapsing on themselves. The hurricanes were catching up to him, hungry to devour. He tried to keep his voice leveled, his intent true.

“But Ford, I’d do it… I would… I would work on anything… I’ll destroy the g—”

“McGucket. I keep telling you. I am not Stanford.” Stanford’s voice came back, irrevocable. “It’s a quarter to 3. We’ve had the same conversation at least a dozen times… You’ve gotta stop calling!”

Fiddleford looked at the handset, in shock.

“You’re not Stanford!” He realized in a cold chill, accusing the phone of being honest.

A sigh sent a chill up his back. Flashes of yellow lights catching him like the headlights, as a car came around the corner. In the cone of light, he was paralyzed.

Connected only by a chord, there was a monster on the other end of the phone line, and it was swallowing everything around him.

“Well if I haven’t heard that one before…” The voice came back with an annoyance mixed with something… Complicated. It wasn’t revulsion, yet. He heard the man who wasn’t Stanford groan, wallowing in his own frustration. “I get it, your life sucks… He was your only friend, and now, everything is toast, and he’s not here… For what it’s worth I am sorry, and I’ve been there. But you’re hurting yourself, buddy… You’re hurting us both… And maybe I deserve it. But you can’t keep doing this…”

Fiddleford stumbled backwards, letting the phone go, and his crying picked up, silently at first, then in full force. The line grew quiet again, but there was no trace of the man he had been ruthlessly bothering hanging up on him. The scenery continued shifting around him, crumbling on itself, until there was nothing but darkness, and the phonebooth.

What was wrong with him? Was it even true or was he made a fool off? Had he called so much? Why had he no memories of it? Why couldn’t he remember anything?

He needed to go home… Needed to find a hole and bury the rest of himself, and let the dirt take over, to grind him back into the ash and dust that he had been promised from sermons. The old preacher couldn’t do anything for him, his words and his bible hadn’t been updated in a while. All the Ave Marias sounded like gibberish from a distant age of binaries. He wasn’t catholic enough to pay for his sins at the gates of Heaven, like you’d punch a ticket in on the subway.

He had washed his impurities out with the salt of his tears, alone in the floating phone booth, and unable to confess just exactly how sinful he had been. Snot bubbling like soap, punctured by facial hair he had no memory of entertaining.

Excusing himself longer than he had talked, he hung up, the receiver seeming to pay no mind. This stranger was a saint in himself, he kept reassuring him with a voice that was just a little off kilter for who Stanford had been. The patience… People were too patient with him, that’s what ‘Pa always said. His sense of self was slipping away from him, he had pulled the thread first, and he was coming apart all by himself.

The darkness made the little phonebooth bob, like a bark on the ocean… It sat as far as his eyes could go, condemning him to the scrutiny of invisible fishes. Not a star up above to tell him where he was going, or what he could expect to find at the edge of the night, but at least there were no lights here.

Fiddleford curled up like a dog, so he wouldn’t grow seasick. He pressed his foot to the glass, and was baffled to see he had only flesh and nails where socks and shoes usually went. Did he go to the trial dressed like this? No wonder he lost Tater. He didn’t even belong in the uncaring streets, he wasn’t sure the good honest folks who tried to survive could add a wreck such as him on themselves.

Wherever the fuck could he go from here? He had no access to his personal computer operation, since the house was Emma-May’s now… He could not make it up to the only one that mattered, because he was a kid, screaming and thrashing at the sight of him, barely seeing a father in him. And Ford… Ford… He was his only friend in the world, and he wouldn’t even pick up the phone.

The world had no room for him, only the phonebooth…

But he couldn’t stay here forever, now could he?

Months could have passed there until he mustered up his courage. It was a peaceful spot, if not somewhat dirty, and cold. There were quarters on the ground, so he picked some up, blessed the fool who let them go, and slid it in. He would leave… He promised himself he would. But first, he had to warn Ford, there was an intruder in his house.

“I thought it was an interesting question…” Stanford joked.

Fiddleford turned to glare at him, trying to picture, with authority, that he would not be submitting himself to this debate twice. At the sight of him, a coy smile developed on Ford’s features, making a statement on how amused he was at the idea he could bother his lab partner with this little anecdote until the end of times.

A thing he hadn’t expected of Oregon, was how hot their summers got… The trek they had taken from the cabin with their supplies loaded made sweat drip down their backs, in most all ways but one. Rays of sunshine would catch in between the birch, setting for a cozy atmosphere, but the wind wouldn’t pick up. As pretty as it was, their blood would boil much quicker than usual, which accounted for the absolute state of vexation Fidds found himself in at the end of the road.

In his hands stood the crumpled answer to the question he had deposited inside the phonebooth, and it took strength unlike any other not to shove it back down where it came from. It was not even that he felt peculiarly targeted by it… It was just that he had been promised to be met with the “less harmful oddity in Gravity Falls”, and instead was pierced with a resounding uneasiness.

“Has it ever answered your questions with another before?” Fidds tried to ascertain, his voice coming out as annoyed more than anything else. “Or is it just reserved for me?”

“First time I see something like this…” Stanford finally let go, he just finished tying his button up around the small of his waist in favor of a shirt, which, by the look of it alone, was already puddling with sweat. He readjusted his glasses and his attitude, to read the words again over his friends’ shoulders. “Does it ring a bell? To you?”

A tinge of guilt, and a world of dread, it was all these words evoked Fiddleford. Under the unexplainable reds of the wax seal, they rested, at the same time freshly inked and already set deeply into the fibers of paper.

Is a sin forgotten still a sin?

Worst of all, he had no recollection of what he had asked in the first place to warrant such a cryptic piece of answer. Something, at the back of his mind… Tingled. Advising him with a caution that, even in context, made no sense.

“Have you sinned recently, maybe?” Stanford asked, matter of factly, but enough to make Fiddleford choke on his embarrassment. “I am asking in earnest… Maybe, this mailbox just adheres to the philosophical principles of whoever seeks its wisdom.”

“I am not…” Fiddleford killed the lie before it escaped him.

Scientifically, he knew it was a fallacy to revoke the existence of a God, as much as it was a fallacy to assure it could not be proven yet. Therefore, most of the future scientists they had the pleasure to encounter on the benches of Backupsmore were either very adamant for a point or another, and standing awkwardly there, Fiddleford was crushed, between years of rationalizing, and the superstitious habits that resurfaced easy as breathing.

If God was real, which they had no way to prove, the next words could cost him his soul. And somewhere in the depths of Ford’s journal, they had verified that souls did exist: He had witnessed some coming to “life” with his own eyes. The wails they made still plagued him, limiting the time he had to rest with increasingly draft questions.

If God was real, he hoped he would be kind enough to excuse the thoughts he couldn’t distinguish from the compulsions. The ones that moved his fingers before he could think of it, to rearrange the colors of the Cubic’s cube, or tap on all the phalanxes he found weighing his shoulder, counting them down, soothing himself on the thoughts of them.

Ancient persians used to count from twelve to twelve, it was how many phalanx you could touch on one hand with your thumb, granted you didn’t suffer from a deformity — what an ugly word. Ford could go to fifteen, maybe that was why he was always three steps ahead. Fidds didn’t think he qualified as deformed, unless you didn’t count being beautiful as an oxymoron…

That sounded like a debate they had had one day, but he was too high then to recall.

The warmth was crushing, but Fiddleford decided to be light.

“Hey, Stanford, ever tried mailing back something you got from the mailbox?”

He knew he had caught Ford by surprise at the sight of his eyes, bent out of shape like that, they still looked lovely, but he was being partial. There was a warmth to them, as his smile curled, mischievous and awestruck. Sometimes, when the smartest man in the world looked at you as if you were a wonder, it was hard to distrust his judgment.

“I don’t know if it wouldn’t create a paradox…” He went on, hypothesizing, not noticing Fidds discreetly stepping closer to the haunted mailbox. “Hey, oh- Fidds!”

It was too late to be helped, Fidds had shoved the piece of paper back inside before Ford could stop him. Not that he didn’t try, as he felt his weight stumbling up on him.

Traitorous feet tangled itself on his robes, and they were soon catapulted into the nearest surface. Papers flew around him in a thunderous storm. Fidds tried to grab at something to hoist himself, but only grabbed a fistful of them. His wrist collided with one of the desk chairs and he heard himself yap in pain. But adrenaline picked quick enough to dull it down. The weight down his back was compressing him painfully. Snarling and laughing like a rabid animal. Tackled, he didn’t have his legs left to kick. He had the upper hand, and if Fidds couldn’t act fast, the story stopped here.

Fiddleford didn’t care. He ruffled through the papers, catching it in a glimpse. A third brush stroke that was neither Ford’s nor his usual calligraphy. He cradled it, the single piece of evidence he had needed, to prove himself right. Even when hungry nails burrowed through his scalp, yanking him backwards.

It remains. The letter read.

A tongue clicked, both men baffled.

“Welp… This is getting existential…” He posited, flicking at the paper.

Ford still had his hands on him from their playful bit of wrestling, already useless as the mailbox answered almost instantly. He knew this, because Fidds had taken to tapping his fingers against his, counting from one to fifteen. Ford allowed it, from one invasion of personal space to the other, tapping almost fell under prescription.

“And underwhelming…” Ford seconded, finally moving away in a place he could be seen if not touched. The sun was a backlight behind his head, it formed a halo in his dark curls. “Can you make sense of it?”

“No…” Fidds confessed, feeling terrible. “This… This one beats me… Entirely.”

“Next time we’ll ask easier questions…” Ford promised, his eyes set on a point in space and time Fidds had no access to from his vantage point. It was it. The single line that could resume their entire relationship. He was three steps and a century ahead of anything, and one couldn’t help but be forced to keep up with him, however fast the pace.

Fiddleford, him… Watched him go, from one recollection to another, immobile, despite his efforts.

How could he when there was this hand, keeping him complacent.

“Stop fidgeting like that!” His father ordered. “The whole church can hear you…”

He wasn’t sure they could, the woods didn’t creak as much. But they sure could hear his ‘Pa’s angry whispering. God was watching from the ceilings, peaking through the tinted windows, making a cascade of light fall at the altar, he would be merciless with their petty dispute.

“I am sorry ‘Pa…” He choked back, if he cried now, he’d surely be stricken, and he wouldn’t let this punishment inform the stained glass shard’s judgment.

“Stop being sorry, be quiet.” He snapped again, mindful, if only to appear commandeering and stop garnering attention at the same time. Fiddleford wouldn’t look him in the face, wouldn’t shine a light on the disappointment he was certain to find here.

Habit had made emotions more memorable than traits anyways. He cataloged them carefully inside himself. Most of the time, the subtleties of them made more sense felt than seen… He didn’t need to look everything in the eye, to know what was going on.

His father would make a scene off the sacraments. Fiddleford would only have to cringe through them. He just hoped he wouldn’t pop the shoulder out of his socket before they made it there. All because he had gotten caught…

There was this boy…

It was always a boy that would put him in trouble… Most of the time because he wouldn’t find the strength to fight them back. For a farm boy, he was a weak link. His breath wheezing ten minutes into any chore that involved engaging his core, which constituted most of them. He’d come back to the house bruised and battered, and his Pa would make it his problem, like he didn’t already have enough on his hand.

Fiddleford was weak… Even when there was no violence involved, he couldn’t fight back.

The culprit was not in the parlor and he would never be again… When his folks had heard of exactly what they had done, Fidds had looked down the bottom of a barrel for the first time in his life. He would probably have been filled with led right then, and maybe it would have spared him the embarrassment of being made a pariah in public.

His mother shunned him, as she always did when it happened. Like she did after the hearing… It was probably why they all took such a quick dislike to Ford… From all the people he had ever presented his best friends to, only Emma-May had ever taken kindly to his presence. She was so trusting, that woman, but she had the right to be: Fiddleford had an oath, and in all the years they were wedded, he never so much as kissed the poor bastard, God knowing, he had the chance.

They all knew before he did, just how deep this little admiration really was. How absolutely lost to the path of righteousness Fiddleford was veering. Soon his name started popping off in more conversations than he dared to have, but it wasn’t Ford’s fault. Because Ford was never the one looking at him, he always set his sights higher on the horizon.

Not that the argument would persuade his ‘Pa. It was a decade too early for him to actually meet Ford, and an eternity before Fiddleford knew how to talk back.

In a month they would be back to pretending like nothing had ever happened, and Fidds would learn to live with it. He could scream and shout all he wanted, try to tear the skin of his bones, and sob into his mother’s lap, he would not change who he was, and he would not make anyone softer because it was torture. Sealed lips speaking louder in pupils… They were the window to the soul, exactly.

He forcefully kneeled down at the altar, feeling the resounding pain in his shattered knee. If the priest was to lay hands on him, he wanted him to know he was not scared, even if he only had one eye.

Red robes met his gaze… They were threading at the bottom, he would have to redo the hem a little higher for the next ones…

Ivan’s hand shook as he aimed the light bulb downwards. The plasma loaded in its glass tubing, containing memories he had shunned enough to have them banished from his mind… Filling up to the brim with unsaid. Fiddleford’s eyes took a moment to adjust to which scene exactly he had settled in front of, but it was where the gun became useful… He had no idea exactly why he had asked this of him.

In return, it made him all the more suspicious about how exactly he had ended up in these circumstances.

“Did it work?” The former carnie asked, a shiver remained, his voice was stuck in an endless winter. Ivan was a sweet soul, caring, and without an ounce of evil in him… Fiddleford could trust he was not betraying him, or maybe he was not confident enough to fake it. “Do you remember–”

He seemed to interrupt himself, conscient of how stupid it would sound out loud, now that his memories had just been erased. Although, if McGucket had been clever, he would have never precisely made clear what exactly he needed vanished…

The effects of the gun weren’t immediate, you’d need a few minutes for the body to respond accordingly to the signals. Which meant the electric signals of shame and guilt had not diminished just yet.

Not fear… He noted. There was no anxiety to his decision that would rattle him… Fiddleford might have asked for something else removed. But it wasn’t dread. In one of the many tubes that lined their storage room — that Ivan had lovingly renamed the Hall of the Forgotten — maybe he could find the exact answer as to when this gun turned into something sinister…

When exactly had he lost track of so much?

When did the coldness start to sip into him too? He could feel it, riddling everything around him with an uncaring eye. Ivan was trembling still, and he wasn’t extending anything close to an apology, or an encouragement.

He sighed, in annoyance with himself, but he couldn’t trust exactly that it was benevolent reasons. McGucket had known for a long time that he wasn’t exactly a good person. His motives had always been… Complicated.

“Rid yourself of doubt…” He instructed, the voice that passed through him scholarly, assertive, he was almost certain he didn’t have to search too far to see who he had taken it from. “We’re doing good here… We’re doing wonderful.”

Ivan nodded, taking the words into consideration, and Fiddleford took to the door… Walking… First. But his pace picked. Until he was running through the foliage, and through the snow fall. A shotgun barked, splitting the night, but it missed considerably. Bark exploded somewhere behind his feet, yet he kept strong. A cackling kind of laughter violated his ears as the bullets wheezed past, straining his temple. His head was on fire, but he couldn’t feel the bleeding.

He barreled into the first door he found. Twin pines, and the flickering light of the motel signs passed through him, pellicule on a film, too fast and too permanent to be considered. His motel room was a mess of photographic evidence. Papers strewn all about, as if there had been a fight. Graffitied corkboards, overflowing with contextless clues. He was searching for something in there, but he had no idea where to find it, before he did.

He checked at his temple in the mirror, because it wouldn’t stop burning him. A stabbing sensation, but no blood rush, no big mess of anything. A nauseating panic came from his stomach, yet he had to see. He had to take in exactly all the damage he was doing himself. All the good he proclaimed he did.

He looked but there was no Fiddleford H. McGucket in the mirror anymore… Here through the silver glass stood a ghost. A grotesque distortion of an abject reality, with an untreated beard that grew like weed on gaunt features. Pupils small and lightless, like ones of a shell shocked soldier. Age was tracing visible lines in his face, the infection of the damage slowly moving to his hair, they had been… Was he a blonde? Was his mother blond?

The only thing he could smell was the sharp odor of a chemical aftershave, and his hair were too white to be bleached exactly.

His fingers passed through the sparse remains of it, but hesitated. He was trembling more than a leaf that had just blown. The sound of the shotgun caught him again, and he jolted.

“What the fuck happened to you?” He heard, pronounced in an horrified gurgle.

Fiddleford’s breath hitched.

Light was on in the corridor, and there was a pine tree blocking his exit.

It wasn’t Stanford… But it had his face, alright… Just that nothing else fit. Not the sort of revulsed grimace that wrecked a hole into Fiddleford’s confidence like a shell lodged in his heart. It looked out of place here, as if two pictures had been overimposed. An approximation of what smile Ford would be capable of: This one was a painful tear.

His hand flew before he could decide, or even envision what was wrong. The razor glinted in the light of the bathroom.

He stopped himself before he flung it.

No light reflected off Ford’s lenses, and his eyes were soft. Properly worried for the prostrated form of Fiddleford over the porcelain sink.

“Bad dream?” He asked, without judgment, only sleep, still clouding his vision of the world before him.

Fidds swallowed, no words came out.

Tufts of his hair laid, spread unevenly in the sink, and nausea was causing his body to rise and fall. He was on the edge of a collapse he didn’t know how to stop, he closed his eyes only to see headlights closing in on him. So little was keeping the thin separation between him and all the critters lining the forest floor. One day, someone would find his body, curled up on the edge of a road, and take him for a badger.

“I wouldn’t know…” He confessed, ridiculed again. He didn’t need to take all the air out of this situation… Ford already knew all that. He wouldn’t lie to his best friend over something so easily refutable. There was no light to follow down the washroom’s sink, there was barely enough to keep them both visible to the other. “And you?”

Ford crossed his arms, making himself comfortable against the doorframe. His glasses were still on his head, although, the branches of them were twisted more and more from day to day. He had the bad habit of falling asleep on top of them at hard angles. Fidds would have found it adorable but for some reason, his specs terrified him.

“Awful…” He confessed, under his breath.

He probably punctuated the whole thing with a bitter expression of his skill at irony, before picking up the tufts of hair that were spilling down the drain before it’d clog it. There was a little foot activated bin somewhere around on his legs, but he just… Couldn’t find it yet, and it made him look like he was tapping again.

“You’re in most of my dreams…” Stanford continued, but McGucket barely listened, just granting him an unharmonious hum as he was trying to clean up the messes he had made.

Silence clogged the space they had made for vulnerability, like a puffed cotton ball expanded in water. Levity was abandoning the range of his competence by the day, and visibly, so was his capacity of reassuring his most adored colleague.

Having no answer, Stanford seemed to grow restless. He hung his head a little lower, before choosing his next words: “I think I am worried about you.”

Fiddleford stopped doing whatever, bracing for an impact that wouldn’t come.

On the little shelf that stood under the mirror was his wedding band. A simple, gold ring, that would sometimes catch the light in the worst moment. Generally he got it off of him before he was headed to the shower, but he could see the layers of dust settling around it. Probability was he had been welding more than usual, and for his own safety, he had to take it off. It would make an excellent excuse if he were to return without it one day, it would also call for his absolute doom.

Stanford held, standing vigil over the death of his friend with a steady spine. There was grief behind his eyes, but there was nothing yet to be grieved.

Fidds wouldn’t lie to him. He wouldn’t tell him he was okay, but he prayed he wouldn’t ask.

Because Stanford Pines was the only thing that could hold him together.

He had lent him his friendship. His home. The job opportunity of a lifetime. His dream, the only thing that propelled them forward. Without all of it, Fiddleford was just a footnote. A terribly lacking one at that… Betrayer to his wife, absent to his son, and now that Emma-May had spoken, in no uncertain term, about divorcing him — how far did he push that woman to make her betray the covenant of their church?

“Why are you still here…?” He heard someone ask, far out of his perception. Glitchy and unfathomable.

He turned his head to see, but Ford wasn’t in this corner, he was tentatively putting his hands around his shoulders, his voice all the more soft as it grew worried: “... if it hurts you so much?”

Usually McGucket would feel anything else than desperate. He would put a hand to where Ford’s hands settled on his shoulder, and silently thank him in code. But he had a fistful of hair in one hand, and a razor in the other. The mirror confusing exactly which was which. One of his index twitching over an invisible trigger.

He had had a dream once, but it died in college… What drove him? Buried under the layers of security he could afford to smother himself with for society’s sake. Maybe it was really what he was mourning, so late into the night, locking himself in unlit bathrooms, and needed Ford to rescue him.

“You can’t be asking questions like that so late in the night…” He lamented.

It sounded like a confession… It was quickly taking the form of it too. Immediately, Stanford looked like he probably had more than he bargained for, yet he remained so clueless about it all… So there remained the imprints of Fiddleford’s breath in the mirror, and the horrifying taste of his own tears, hitting the flesh of his lips.

“I’ve just had the most wonderful kid in the world… Just had him… With a woman I don’t love, so parents I resent wouldn’t ask questions…” He had no excuses for saying this, but he was without filter. The dam had just been broken, clean off, and he felt himself spill until nothing remained. “I just had a son, and I should be content. I don’t know what sin this stems from… If it is gluttony, or avarice, or lust… But I ain’t ever finding relief in what I have.”

Ford remained there, frozen in place, unable to back down from the offer he had just made, because Fiddleford found his eyes through the silver opacity of the mirror, and he was holding him hostage here. He had called him Icarus, but there was always a golden light surrounding the picture of him, the real danger laid there… At the unattainable nature of Ford. At what he really was.

A sun… The flame to his moth.

“I have chosen you…” Fidds heard himself continue. “I would again, in a heartbeat. Not once will I ever hold you accountable for the misery I am in, because I lost myself, and I am living vicariously through a dream you invited me to…”

But in the very corners of him, McGucket knew he was a killer… He could hold the razor up any moment he wanted, and slice into the thick of a throat. He would squeeze a trigger in his best friend’s face, so he wouldn’t have to remember this.

“I’ve been warned. People like me, Ford. All we get is suffering...” Fiddleford pondered, but he was not hopeful. “You already know that for a fact, don’t you?”

Ford took a step back, in the glow of his eyes there was a hurt. The one of a blade that was held up by a friendly hand. Fiddleford wanted to tell him, he was sorry, but the step he took had him almost collapsing on himself.

If hands weren’t hoisting him up, he’d have flattened himself on the floor like a pancake.

“McGucket…?” It called, in a tone of no one he remembered. “You good?”

Why did it keep happening to him? Why did everything keep shifting?

Helplessness was all he felt. Voyant. The face was not Stanford’s. The hands that were still digging their way into his arm had five fingers.

The few differences between Stanford and his twin laid at the brink of his perception. You could pick it up with a keen eye, but McGucket could do it with no eyes at all. Was Stanford not standing in his place a few moments ago, he would have taken note of the cleft chin… Of the longer hair. The larger proportions of his waist. Funny. How such a sight that appeared to be mundane could be so unfamiliar?

He looked snug, his brother… McGucket bet he could drift off easily on his shoulder, and wake up tucked in bed, malleable as a child. He bet he could trust him with that…

“I am sorry Stan… Stanley was it?” The second Pines nodded, and it only made Fiddleford wince, at the thought of it. “Stanley and Stanford… Some sense of humor your parents had.”

Stanley stood there a moment, swallowing something back down that would probably wreck McGucket even worse than he did there, before settling on a very brusque: “... Your folks called you Fiddleford.”

He would have found humor in it, he really would have. Had they not been sitting on the bathroom floor, sturdy floorboards creaking under them. On the edge of his vision, Fiddleford caught notice of an overflowing trash can, having been moved closer to the toilet bowl. It was still Stanford’s shack, but it wasn’t the same house he’d stayed in… Things had changed subtly all around him. He was left a blind man most of the time, trying to make sense of a world that was moving when he wasn’t looking.

Stanley stuck with him, back against the cabinet, staring out of the window, where a modicum of night was flooding through. He had the same profile as Ford… A little bit fuller, a little more well groomed, but Fiddleford didn’t really know how he managed. It was horrifying… What had happened to him. What he must have done…

This house was haunted, and Stanley diligently took care of the ghosts.

“Was I… Was I lost again?” McGucket asked, scared of the question but twice as scared of being answered.

Stanley looked uncomfortable as well, but he pushed through with a grimace. Turning back to him, he looked at him through his brows.

“You just declared your undying love for my brother… It was intense…”

It was a punch to hear… He snapped his tongue again, his feet tapping on the ground, his hands burrowing through his hair, forcing himself not to tug, there was very little of them left to spare. The scenes rolled back with a vengeance, if he couldn’t remember exactly what he had told, he probably could remember what he was holding last.

He made a quick list of things in his hands… A letter… A cigarette… A napkin… A telephone…

No… The last thing he held was a weapon. He could feel the teeth of it burrowing inside his palms. It had been wrestled out of his hand, his wrist was still aching from it, probably from when they smashed on the desk chair. Then he’d hit the ground, and his nightmares had sat themselves atop his chest, smiling through yellow teeth.

“Did I swing a razor at you?” He asked, conscious he was on the verge of breaking into a sob if Stan was to answer.

Stanley inhaled, sharply, but it was surprise, not horror.

“Sheesh— Is that how the scene ended?” Stanley asked, and the more he talked, the less humor Fiddleford found in it… “I knew he was a jerk, but…”

“No… No, it’s not!” Fiddleford tried to take back, absolutely livid with the implications of what he had just said. “I got some things mixed up! I… He never hurt me… I–... I think he never tried.”

“Is that when he kicked you out?” Stanley asked, pressing the matter delicately. Like trying to get puss off a wound.

Fiddleford rested here with his mouth dry, realizing he had no idea how gravely any of this had ended for them.

For sure he remembered quitting, leaving. Tearing everything down from snowmen to research paper, and setting fire to it all. He remembered the hurt, and the little play car he had welded together with alien material, he planned on Tate’s birthday… The walk to his car, as he punched the wood of the dashboard until his knuckles burned.

“It would be… Uncharacteristic of him.” Fiddleford expressed, the same way you would a prayer. More as a hope than anything, but he was a man of superstitions nowadays. “I don’t reckon he’d be so cruel… But my head isn't all there, and that’s on me.”

Stanley grew hesitant, but this was a boy of many questions, and Fiddleford probably had many answers, however deep they were buried.

“Is it… Is it because of what’s in the basement?” Stanley interrogated.

Lights flashed, bright and blinding. Something was tugging on his legs, and although he should have screamed, it was the only thing that kept him safe.

“What?” Incredulity morphed into something else. Was there a basement to this property? Fiddleford did remember the bunker. Stanley was intelligent, however his specialized vocabulary was very limited. Was he referencing the bunker?

When he asked, he looked suddenly small. Insecure of exactly how to answer. Inadequate. It hit McGucket like a ton of bricks. He had seen too much of this behavior in himself not to be caught up with it.

He wanted to ask Stanley what was downstairs… But the cold tingle of alert had come back to him, this time a full blown display. As if he had locked the information away on purpose, and it would only be a bigger dam.

“The thing you were working on, down there…” Stanley continued “Do you think it may be what caused you to go cuckoo?”

Fiddleford swallowed hard, he felt whatever guilt there was making his airway tighter as gravity pushed it further down his throat.

He knew exactly why he was losing his grip on reality. And as the hurricane ripped the floorboards from under them. Raged on in a sonorous fury. Ready to tear down the only present he knew for a fact was real, Fiddleford held on to his lies like a tether.

“Can we…” He asked, feeling squeamish. “Go over it again?”

Stanley looked at him, and all the questions he had were swallowed back into the void they came from. There wasn’t animosity yet, but impatience shifted something in the folds of his cheeks. Nonetheless, Stan shuffled from the ground to face him, sitting criss crossed and with a straighter spine, making sure to keep him in sight. McGucket mimicked his attempt, holding himself a little taller, trying to regain human form. He was sure he’d been as tall as Ford once, but lately, he felt his posture lacking. Probably because he had gum where his spine should have been.

“I am Fiddleford Hadron McGucket…” He thought of stopping here but Stan nodded, encouragingly. After a moment of hazy blabbering, he swallowed the rest of his pride, offering him a hand. McGucket observed him carefully as he did, but he finally accepted, taking it in his own, tapping with his digits against the articulations of it. There would be twelve, there, but everytime he would reach the twelfth, he would feel a cold sweat up his spine. “You’re… Stanley Pines… Stanford’s twin brother… The year is… 19… 1980…”

“You want help?”

“No, I know that.” McGucket assured him. Stanley gave him a crooked smile, he always looked happy to see him fight his way through it. For a moment, he superimposed his lawyer’s suit on Stan’s shoulders… One of them had to be proud of him. “1983…”

“Attaboy.” He encouraged, satisfied. “Know what month we are?”

“There’s er… Cygnus. In the sky… And I haven’t been here too long…” Fidds closed his eyes, trying to focus, there were stars dancing behind his eyes. “June?”

“We’re in late July.” Stanley rectified. “August is at the corner.”

“... Really?” He asked, petrified. Stanley nodded, still confident, he looked like he was about to say something, but the taps intensified on his fingers and he refrained. “I missed your birthday?”

Silence swallowed them. He was staring at Fiddleford, but there was nothing he looked in the capacity to express. Afflicted, McGucket closed his eyes and lowered his head in the hand he’d offered him, trying to hide himself away.

“It’s okay, Fiddlenerd… Nothing to worry about.” Stanley probed, helping him up. He was putty in his hand, but Fiddleford wasn’t sure there was much left to his strength that Stanley couldn’t communicate. “Get some beauty sleep, trust me you need it. I’ll help you call your boy in the morning... And if you hear rattling around, that’ll be me trying to hide the sharp objects, okay?”

Fiddleford couldn’t believe he was chuckling, in a moment like this. He got up, not letting go of Stan’s hand, because it was the only anchor he could still be provided. Something about leaving the safety of the bathroom was making his stomach twist and knot around itself. In the corridor, something was waiting for him in the unfathomable golden light. It wanted something out of him, but there was nothing left McGucket could give.

Something in his pocket disturbed him when he walked, discreetly as he could, he tried to put his fingers on it.

It was sliced, somewhat, by the razor's edge.

He wouldn’t go into the corridor… Lest the light pulverized him to a pulp. McGucket wasn’t a ghost after all, he was a vampire. A parasite, leaching off people’s gentleness.

“You’re ready, bud?”

There was resonance to this voice, and it sent his heart racing.

His vision jumped to the door, but he didn't find Stanley there. Stanford was standing, and he looked uncertainly at the scenery around him. Fiddleford could not further his inspection of it, his attention was caught.

What a sight for sore eyes his former roommate... Dressed in the smartest three piece suit Fiddleford had ever seen. Flowers bloomed at his lapel, in a colorful mismatch of petals. They hadn’t thought of the flowers, he reminded himself, it was not an ideal match… But it was just the right kind of weird he’d had expected from him.

Fiddleford’s brows knotted in a sudden whirlwind of confusion. The last time he’d seen Ford, he'd been four years older, malnourished and overworked. Living off coffee shots and canned beans. Then again, last time he remembered anything, he was here, stopping Stanley from moving forward.

But Ford was here, dressed for a wedding… And Fiddleford felt… Defensive at the sight.

He watched him close in like he would contemplate a zeppelin crash, petrified, and mouth agape. Ford took the few steps that separated him from his friend, and the room stretched into an aisle. The lenses of his glasses not thick enough to alleviate the fondness behind his pupil, leaving Fiddleford to wonder whose wedding exactly he was at.

He met him at an altar of anxiety, with the door for sole officiant. His hand gesturing as if inviting him to take it. There was a dampness to his touch, an uncertainty, but Ford met him with steadiness, and warmth. Absolutely as confused as each other about what exactly was happening.

“F… Breathe in a little.” He smiled, shifting from his hand to his wrist with amusement to show the space where Fiddleford was struggling to put cufflinks on. Not knowing what had overcame him, Fidds was left muttering at the prospect of the failed handshake, but Ford was gracious enough not to comment on it. “You’re sweating bullets! At this rate, you’ll be drenched, and I don’t think there are many dry cleaners in this part of the countryside...”

He watched him work at the cufflinks with diligence and dedication. Confused as to which occasion would warrant to put a farmboy in cufflinks of all things. Failing to recollect exactly why or how.

Fiddleford’s eyes went back to the mirror, only if to remind himself it was there, and stopped dead as he caught his reflection. The scene crashing into him like a disregarded afterthought, at the sight of his body in a similar suit as Ford’s. Tinted glass catapulted him in a hazy rustic room that had been shoved around, clad in a white suit that ruffled at his neck, and a bowtie not yet tied, dangling from it. Oh, how many compliments he would get… How the cummberbond’s colour complimented his eyes, how beautiful he would look with the bride to be…

The suits…

They had picked it out with Ford’s help, he remembered… In one of the rare instances in which Ford had bothered to come out of hiding, after months of politely shutting his invites down. A busy period, Ford had said, coinciding with the news of Emma-May and his betrothal.

She was a fox, though, and had ambushed them on their third day of Ford’s stay. He remembered feeling dizzy as he witnessed the enthusiasm melt from Ford’s face into a bitter mask, but he was after all, his best man. They had relented, and Fidds tried a dozen suits, feeling vulgar in everything. Their lack of enthusiasm terrorizing the poor tailor as the air grew increasingly thick around them.

An hour in, Fiddleford had caved to the pressure, and declared they’d make a game out of it. Dragging Ford with him, and soon enough, uneasiness took a new face as Ford was forced off the couch into tuxedos upon tuxedos. From the silliest to the most elegant.

It was probably then that the ordeal became worth remembering fondly. They stood on the podiums, tipsy and joking as they made fools of each other in the wall mirrors. The crass feeling abandoned him, they were both ridiculous. Penguins. Tacky. And in the last one, Ford's eyes had caught him like a spotlight, and Fidds had felt something else than graceless.

Handsome… Distinguished… In the fractal reflexions of the mirrors, the only person in the world that could be graced at his side.

That was when one of them started crying, but details were hazy from there. He blamed the alcohol. The poor tailor had a lot on their mind, but kept most of it quiet. The price tag was the last thing they were greeted with. Ford paid for it all, tear stained suits and cheap but potent red wine. Emma-May had picked them up, and made a joke of how they’d match more than the bride and groom, and Fiddleford remembered Ford choking on his water, with a strangled half-laugh.

They did match an awful lot. Bad flowers and all… Fiddleford glaring at Ford’s polydactyl’s hand, wondering on which finger he would wear his wedding band one day. Or would he keep it around the neck?

His mouth was sealed and full of words at the same time. His tongue was sizzling meat subjugated to acid, fizzy.

“Stanford, I am terrified…” The reflection spoke for him. A confession, in a backroom altar.

His friend had been quiet, but it seemed he only grew quieter there. Morosity blurred the lines on his face. Fids had moved back to the tailor shop, Ford quietly sipping on the sample bottle, fidgeting with a magazine he had no interest in. Trying not to meet his gaze. Now he was back to finding it all inadequate… The cut of it was a perfect match for the slender lines of his body. Like wearing high heels to feed the pigs… It was perfect, and he didn’t deserve it.

“I can see that...” Stanford noted, nodding his head briefly, calculating his next words. “I haven't seen you so nervous since your thesis presentation… I am also remembering that you crushed it…”

“I knew what I was doing back then…” Fiddleford argued. Tugging on his wrist to get Ford’s attention back, so he knew this was serious.

Ford’s eyes drifted towards him, commanding and cold. The groom tried not to appear as hurt as he actually was, but Fiddleford had replayed the scene over and over. He already knew what little regard he had for keeping his heart off his sleeve.

Ford was his friend, he didn’t brush him off. He drank down his own personal annoyance, and pushed the wine glass on the dumb coffee table. Because they were friends, and they were there for each other, even through the worst day of his life.

“You know what you’re doing now…” Ford insisted, a hiccup of uncomfort shook him, as if he was trying to set the words in the right place. “You’re marrying Emma-May…”

He would never forget these words... So distinct he could have read them in a letter, or written over his research papers scattered in his private study. There always was subtlety to Ford’s words, as he pushed them out, almost forcibly. The last exhale of collapsing lungs.

He could have chosen any words of reassurance. Evoked any feelings, as far removed as they were. “You’re marrying the love of your life”, “the wife of your dream”, “you should feel so lucky”…

But he used her name. He singled her out, for what exactly she was to him. Emma-May. Young Emma-May, that had a crush on him since they were playing house in the dirt piles. One of the many person in the backdrop of his life, a cardboard cutout he could pick in a crowd when the prompter read “safety”. An easy way out… An easy excuse.

Emma-May. Too smart for Tennessee’s countryside, they would leave it together. That was the least he could do for her. Make a name for themselves elsewhere, far from their families expectations, westward into the new world.

God, if he hadn’t been too clumsy to keep it up. They could have had it all.

“Don’t get me wrong… I love her.” He heard himself say in the mirror, caught himself wincing at the words.

“I did!” He screamed at his reflection, but it didn’t stop, the scene played on without his permission. Why did it sound like a lie? His mouth was dry, his tongue fat, and soggy in his mouth. Inadequate. The blunt burnt on both ends. Did he ever?

“But… Marrying? It feels a little extreme.”

“You were brave enough to propose.” Ford spoke, again, this time it rung loud like a judge’s hammer.

God, they divorced in the end… This sentence was a condemnation. Did he ever tell Ford on what count she got herself out of this masquerade? Did he ever tell Ford she accused him of adultery but left out the real criminal offense? Did he ever tell him that he had confessed to a crime he had not committed, because he couldn’t fess up to his own sin.

Let him be an adulterer, some good christians were adulterers. No one would forgive him for being a homosexual, not even God himself.

But this Ford wouldn't listen… He was a few years too early to hear about divorces, he hadn’t even married his best friend off yet. He didn’t get it. Fiddleford resented him for not understanding. He who could practically read his mind in college, missing the hints he was making so painfully clear, and when he needed him the most.

“This ain’t an act of bravery, Stanford.” He remembered arguing, brows furrowed. “This is cowardice.”

Ford’s concern turned to sympathy, and Fiddleford’s anguish thawed and turned. For an iota of second, he made painfully clear how much he knew of his cowardice. That he could empathize with exactly what he had done.

His hand hovered above the unmade bow tie, and for a moment he looked as if he was deciding between fixing his face or his clothes. In his wildest dreams, Fiddleford wished he could cup his face right then and there, lay his lips against him, and cut the ache at its root. But the lies he told himself left his teeth rotting from his maw, he wasn’t sure he wanted Ford to exactly see how corrupt everything was under the façade.

“You’re doing your family right…“ He argued with him, trying to keep him grounded. Were there other people around? He had a big family, and Ford was only his best man. Was Stanley still listening in somehow? “But this is your big day, not theirs… Don’t let what they expect of you ruin it.”

It was an invitation to run. Gravity Falls called, plans of building… Something? A life? Why did he go? Why did Fiddleford follow him?

It was always brighter in Fidd’s memories than in the reality of things. But then again, the eye and the photographs seldom caught the same sight, it was all a question of sensibility. They both knew they wouldn’t stop what was to come… Tears were welling up inside of Fiddleford’s mind, looking away from his best friend at the reflection in the mirror. He needed a blunt, just like in college, to calm his nerves.

“Yeah…” He sighed, he had become good at faking most everything. But he still knew how to be funny. “It’s not everyday I can have you all to myself, so… Let’s not ruin this with unchecked anxiety.” Fiddleford philosophized, and he was quite sure he watched Ford’s cheek catch fire.

“On your wedding day?” Ford chastised, but his smile was bright on his face, and his cheeks more flushed than they ought to. He scoffed too much not to have to be at least a little charmed by him. When did that stop happening? “Dear God, Fidds… Of all days, you can’t be a flirt now… How uncouth.”

“I can try!” He added, trying to conjure humor from the pit in his chest. “Wanna see me make the priest blush?”

“If you promise I can be the best man at your excommunication...” Stanford joked back, lighter.

A knock broke the moment. Some teenager in a flower-girl get-up that made her look like a porcelain door stepped into the room. She relayed the news with excitement, as Fiddleford realized he couldn’t see the face on her.

Five minutes and it was on. She said, with no mouth to speak off. A static blur covered her features, like the flash of the memory gun.

Fidds gulped so audibly it seemed to echo weirdly in the ranch, but when he came to, Ford was still looking at him. Smiling from ear to ear, all teeth, and lovely pink gums, the broad ratio of his face lovingly squeezed into it. The merriment of his friend’s face bothered him. It wasn’t appropriate for the situation, no… Fidds didn’t remember ever seeing him smile this big. Or ever standing this close…

He tried to take a step back, but his back was already pressed against a cold length of metal sheet that sent a sudden shiver down his back. Surprise caught in his throat, like a cornered animal. He searched for the mirror and found the round shape of a porthole staring back at his disheveled face. Beyond it laid shards of broken stones, unlit, covering walls to ceiling in an uneven fashion, a cave. A bunker.

An august wedding blurred into darkness again. They were plunged in the thick of it, where McGucket felt safest. He wanted to escape the light, but he couldn’t. The white in Ford’s eyes had a pale yellowish tint that, when hit just right enough, looked like he was emitting its own light, and he was drenched in it.

“Five minutes in Heaven, heh?” He joked. It sounded peculiarly cruel in his mouth, awfully unnatural and high pitched. “Or is it seven? Not that you would know, Specs… No one probably wanted you to play.”

The decontamination chamber purred from every corner at the same time, and Fidds knees buckled suddenly. It was a tight fit for two people, but then again, it was not designed with urgency in mind, and you weren’t shoving anyone in, two at a time, if you followed proper protocol. But something had occurred. Something terrible, that had warranted the quick escape, something that probably prowled on the other side of the mechanical doors from which only darkness poured.

Soon metal would swallow the little light from the window, and they would be out of reach, safe and sound in the research area. Now, it was Fidds’ stomach that lurched in agony. They had escaped a danger and ran right into the other. Intuition warped his perception, he was so sure his guts were telling him the truth, that there was nothing to be done yet, that his appreciation of the scene was tarnished… His eyes saw Ford, as he always was, probably dressed better… The memories weren’t complete, and he was still wearing the tuxedo from Fiddleford’s wedding.

It didn’t matter to Fiddleford that the real suit was ruined, that Ford had gotten into a fight wearing it, and that it came out ripped at the shoulder seam, and covered in stomach acids and wedding cake, as he escorted him out of his own wedding.

Here, it was pristine, from the white of his teeth, to the tip of his shoes.

“I bet it counts as a closet…” Ford continued to joke. Just in time for Fidds to account exactly for where his hands were. He felt the pulp of his fingers grazing the hair of his temple, plump and plagued with the coldness of a cadaver. Something was wrong, Fidds could feel it. Everything was off. “Why the long face? You’re right at home, aren’t you…?”

The door opened behind his back, and Fiddleford toppled backwards, away from what was pretending to be Ford. He fell, ungracefully to the floor, knocking his elbow against the sanitized plaques of metal, in the dim lit room. He made a sound, it reverberated through the chamber and died at the threshold of his memory. Music was playing. Strobes of light blinded his view.

Ford chuckled. Stepping out of the chamber and into the dancefloor, his face unmovable. A rock. Set in the dull glow of the lifesize cryogenics tube, and the dizzying tornado of a disco ball. Each step he took was on a world he owned, he had the sovereignty of the man who sold it.

“Ho, oh, how… Pathetic…” He mocked, in a voice that sounded like his but was not. Too high for him, too whimsical. “Where are your charming quips now-”

“Stand BACK.” He screamed, in a voice that echoed through time and space. His hand was clutched around something, it felt snug here, the weight comfortable, almost reassuring against his palms. It burnt a hole, simultaneously, he felt his temple tingle, Pavlov’s bell had an ominous tint to it. Red, and it stunk of spray paint.

Ford, and his unnamed puppeteer looked unimpressed with the device. Fiddleford’s aim was true though. He didn’t hesitate as he pointed in the space between his eyes. Whatever this was that took possession of Ford’s body, it was just a pale imitation of what was Stanford Pines, and he had already done what needed to be done, with a far heavier heart.

His index squeezed the trigger. He could not mistake the sound of the mechanism roaring to a start for anything else in the world.

It sputtered and died.

Fiddleford’s heart throbbed, a little more and he would puke it out. The music was making him dizzy.

“Oh… Specs.” He heard again, and caught the shadow hovering over him before it solidified its foot on his wrist. His yelp of pain was met with a spry laugh. “A good effort but that's just not how this evening goes…”

In the distance, a screech of metal against metal resonated, as the gun caught under the study. But pinned as he was, his back laid flat against the wall, there wasn’t any memory he could conjure up to stop it.

From above him, a Cheshire cat grin hung like the crescent moon, lowly and gloomy. The face of his friend malformed around it, hooked together with invisible fingers in an expression so painful it looked as if skin would tear off it. Once the creature understood he had caught a glance of him through Ford, it pushed against his wrist, and pain flared as if he had caught fire.

“Relax, Jack…” The impostor purred, uncharacteristically low, trying to sound like the vessel he had borrowed. Trying to put him at ease. Fiddleford grinded his teeth together, to not bite his tongue clean off. “I only want to psychologically torture you… If you want me to hurt you, that’ll cost extra.”

Pressure relinquished his wrist, and Fiddleford scrambled backwards as soon as it was free. Under a watchful pair of yellow eyes, like spotlights in the darkness. There was a hawk perched on the face of his oldest friend, and he was a vole in a wheat field.

Every foot he gained, the figure moved a step up, menacingly keeping pace with him, until he was sitting upright, trying to flatten himself into a cabinet, and the squarish figure of Stanford blocked his way out.

“You know, I feel kind of sorry for you…” The impostor continued, glaring from his height at his prostrated form. “You asked for dear Fordsy’s help, you hoped he would listen to his heart… Instead, he did the predictable thing. Extended the reasonable answer… The one a friend tells a friend, when there are no… Mushy gushy unmentionable tenderness that would probably kill grandma if she knew.”

His head took a sharp, dangerous angle, falling on his shoulder as if it had snapped.

“That poor woman… You missed the funeral! Your mom is righteously pissed. I think she knows for you… She prays like she does.”

Then lowering himself, dragging himself closer. To make a point: “You’re going to Hell, Fizzy, she’s dragging you there with her.”

He felt his ruined hand spasm into a fist, and before he knew it, he had punched the motherfucker in the face. What wasn’t Ford didn’t even stumble, but red was staining the space between his nose and his lips.

“You’re not Shifty!” Fiddleford managed to spit out, half the words registering. Ain't Stan either. “And you’re sure as Hell ain’t Ford… What the fuck are you?”

What wasn’t Ford grinned, as if it was possible for him to smile any more. His features moved, in an expression that he once likened to affection, but through the slit pupils, it was a gruesome mockery of anything Ford could have ever felt.

“Oh… You are smart.” The thing cooed, he could feel the slime of it as if he was tasting the disrespect on his tongue. “I still can’t fathom what he sees in you, but at least he was spot on with that. If only he listened to you more, but you’re too spirited for his taste…”

Once again, his hands were on him, and Fiddleford flinched at the touch of them. The inches of skin that came into contact with him came back tingly, and somewhat numbed. In his hands, Fidds felt a strength that he had never experienced before, maintaining him firmly in place, as the rest of his interest was dedicated to studying him. Nails, twelve of them, scratching the surface of his skin and drawing blood.

“Oh this one hurt… Don’t worry, once this is over you can take your best shot. I’ll give you the gun you really want, you’ll never have to feel anxious again! You’ll see, it’s gonna blow your mind.”

“What do you want?” Fidds argued back, snapping at a finger that came too close from his mouth.

“Hey, one question at a time, Specs. I didn’t even get to introduce myself… Do you want to know or are you just being feisty for show?”

The air in Fiddleford’s lungs was a cold chill, but he decided against proving whatever he was right. If he thought logically enough, he could remind himself that you couldn’t just swing at something blindly. Sometimes, you had to learn about them first.

“I am a friend of ol’ Sixer.” He beamed, but this last sentence sounded like an omen, and made Fidds spark with an unrecognizable anger. “I keep an eye on him when his lights are out… You wouldn’t want anything to happen to him, would you?”

Once again, his lips were sealed, and he looked away. Squeamish at the prospect. It came back to him that they were fleeing something massive, and Fidds remembered the strain it had been to his muscles to get Ford’s dead weight past the door.

Ford, or what was possessing him, held his hand, and suddenly, they were both on their feet. Waltzing around the bunker’s dancefloor at a speed that could break his neck, or ankles if he didn’t watch out carefully. He was so close to Ford’s face he felt the fetid air of his breath against his cheek. This was all he had dreamed of for an unfathomable amount of time, all the beautiful things he had hoped to share one day… And all of it was made with contempt.

He wasn’t even surprised to feel himself be flung backwards again. But this time, he was up, and although his knees wobbled from under him, he held onto the desk to keep his balance right.

“And as for what I was doing… I was taking this puppy for a ride…” The false-Ford continued. Forcing himself back in his breathing space, inches away from his face, and circling him with the might of his arms, entangling his legs from under him. “You’re the ride, by the way!”

“I beg your pardon?” He choked.

But it was too late to protest. Ford had closed in on him. The slit of his pupils were the razor sharp of a dagger’s edge, aimed straight at his throat, and the only sight made Fiddleford weak. Ford was a hostage, as much as he was, all his movements were commandeered by a monster that hid behind his eyes, and Fiddleford managed to miss him, even staring right at him.

Everything else was overwhelming him. When he pressed against him, he could feel everything, from the edge of the desk burrowing into his ass, to the solid shape of his belly, resting on top of him. He had wanted this. He had wanted all of this, and his body was disobeying the frantic orders of his mind.

“Come on!” He implored, a whine that almost made him look a whole fifteen years younger.

His lips were inches away from his own mouth, biting into the plump flesh of his lips, drawing blood there. A shade of red that screwed with Fiddleford’s notion of sanity. His thighs grinded against the groom to be, forcing a mechanical reaction since Fiddleford wouldn’t agree to let go on his own. The puppet master explored the thin of his waist, his hand descending down his back, squeezing him to make him yelp and buck.

“I am a busy guy, and you both are already begging for it anyway… You consent… He consents. I’ve been in both your heads, I know how you play it out— See, he liked to imagine you on a desk, we’re halfway there. I am very knowledgeable in human reproductions, I can be trusted with your desires.”

“This ain’t right…” Fiddleford tried to push back, putting an arm between the both of them. His throat was so tight he felt like he was going to choke. He had not been able to prevent enough, he could feel Ford’s hands, puppeteered under his shirt, tracing lines in his skin he wished wouldn’t be delicious. “That’s not how it works! This…”

“Relax, Specs… Does any of this feel real to you? We’re in the bunker, cuz it’s the only place safe enough to support the utter and total collapsing of your senses. Great job of building it, by the way! Hope you got the same energy for the…” The next word he spoke sounded like static, and by the look of it, both of them were very conscious. “I am censored? In a dream? What in the Hayes Code is this madness? Brilliant!”

He was choking with laughter now. A grand display of convincing.

“You’re not making any sense!” Fidds answered back, feeling his grip on reality loosening with every pull.

“Coming from you?” Ford barked with laughter, a high pitch thing that didn’t belong to him. That Fidds wished he could tear out. “That’s rich… When is it you talked to Ford last? How old’s your son? What day is it, McGucket?”

Fiddleford looked around, distress grasping at the corner of him. What kind of question was that? How could you forget something as mundane as the day. He was in the bunker he had made for Ford and him. He could hear the familiar whining of the artificial lights overhead. Which situated them both in Gravity Falls, Roadkill County, Oregon, and today he was getting married to Emma-May.

Fiddleford took another look at his clothes, and realized, with horror, how unprepared he was. He was still wearing his lab coat and the green patterned button-up Emma-May had offered him after Tate’s birth… The flower girl told them they only had five minutes, and he just realized the constant tease of Ford’s borrowed thighs against him left him hard. He couldn’t just present himself like that… What would anyone say? Shit…

But why were the strobes already playing, and why was Ford looking at him like he had before he shoved him into the buffet. Hair in a mess, and flowers ill-adjusted on his lapel. About to go on a rant about what a huge mistake he was making. The air around them was freezing cold, and his putrid breath smelled of nog.

He tried, he really tried, a month came to his mind which he couldn't remember. Stanley was helping him up, he had missed his birthday. “Is it still July?”

A bulb lit behind Fiddleford’s eye. The short circuit lasted, turning all he wanted to express into pitiful whimper of shame. He wasn’t here. He wasn’t anywhere near any of these memories. All of them were long past… Which was exactly how he ended up here to begin with. Pleasure extorted from him by a monster with his best friend’s face.

“Oh you have issues, alright!” The thing that wasn’t Ford smiled with an excited glee. His pupils quivered with an eagerness that bruised, all his attention gathered on the hardness that was pumping against his legs, like a second heart. “Fear not, I am here to make it worse!”

He felt Ford’s thumb playing under the soft flesh of a nipple, and Fiddleford closed his eyes, trying to keep himself from sighing. Against his forehead, Ford’s lips settled, his nose ruffling his hair with cold breaths.

He couldn’t just let go now… He had to keep on fighting. It was not right, nothing was.

“If it’s a dream, you’re like… An incubus or something, I reckon.”

“The efforts you still make to rationalize it all! That must be why Ford likes you so much…” The false-Ford answered, the hand that wasn’t exploring his undershirt suddenly ressurging from nowhere to flick his nose. “You’re toast, Four-eyes. You lost it all! It’s already over for you. Don’t make me waste my breath on things you already zapped out.”

“But it’s a dream, right?” He hung off his arms with his questions. With the pit in his stomach and the fire in his breath. “It’s inconsequential?”

The approximation of Ford shrugged back at him. Weighing their options.

“I am not even Ford.” The thing expressed, again. “You two keep orbiting around each other… Every confession makes the other forfeit…”

This time, it was Fiddleford’s time to try and move about. Recklessly, he approached his hands from Ford’s face. Passing his fingers through the tuft of groomed hair on his cheeks, the five o-clock shadow on his jaws were as stingy as thorns on a stem, but the rose was there. Expressions flashed into the weird animal eyes, ranging from overwhelmed, to contemplative, a tinge of disgust that morphed into acceptance.

The entire storm stood to a standstill here.

“Is a little bit of him in there?”

And picked back up immediately, once the eyes flashed back onto him, the surprise subsided into a sudden glee. Ford flashed Fiddleford a triumphant smile, somewhat still stained with this childish eagerness.

He closed an eye, cupping Fidds hand, and taking it as its own.

It said, and kissed his palm with devotion. There was no lie to it. When he did, his voice came back as low as Ford’s: “Trust me… He wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Something might have burnt a long time ago inside Fiddleford’s mind. A fuse he couldn’t quite place, and had no idea how to replace. He freed himself from the impostor’s grasp, and clasped his chin between his fingers, pushing a kiss into the face of the man he had fostered misplaced feelings for years on hand. Just to hear his breath catch in his throat, and the delicious moan that could come from him.

Ford, and what was pretending to be him, answered enthusiastically… Worming their way against the flesh he was putting at disposition.

Everytime they rocked against him, Fiddleford saw stars. Envisioned them, clearly. Weightless in a vast expanse, almost suspended in animation. A cable had caught itself around his calf, and although it was uncomfortable, it was the only thing that was able to tether him to sensations he could fathom.

For some reason, bliss escaped him, replaced by a great big fear he couldn’t reckon with. Anxiety screamed at him to keep his eyes shut, his airways tight, if he didn’t want to absolutely cave in. You couldn’t breathe in space… Everyone was well aware of that, since they sent men to the moon, at least. And he had no idea where he would end up…

Fiddleford had never been interested in being one of the physical pioneers of outer space… He wouldn’t look. He wouldn’t grace it with a gift of sight. As painful as it was, to be on the edge of the world and keeping his eyes closed. Like a kid afraid of the dark.

“Open your eyes…”

Some voice, that sounded eerily like Ford’s was fustigating him for being the first to push that threshold. For having nothing to report back when he would make it back. He would make it back. He could hear his soft panting voice in his ear, beckoning him.

“I want you to look at me… Look at me.”

His spine tingled with unease, as he tried to brace himself. All his senses were screaming at him that he was going to get more than he ever bargained for.

He opened his eyes.

The floorboards were freezing cold against his cheek. Fiddleford flailed helplessly for a second, but gravity was a law for a reason, and his body finally toppled over, and off his bed. Stripping his bed clean of its sheets, in a tangle of limbs.

Sleep broke off of him, however, the dream wasn’t done with him just yet. When he tried to compose himself, his eyes caught on something that made his blood run cold. A triangle with an eye, drawn in light on the ground, and suddenly, his instincts kicked with his body. He swore with every words he knew in the english language, trying to scramble away.

A click, and then the entire room was dressed in yellow.

“What is it?” A growling voice came, and his roommate was jolting into fighting stance before him. “Did someone break in?”

Fidds couldn’t recollect anything, despite the single, transcending thoughts that: Oh my God, this guy is a dork… Which was a very hypocritical way of feeling the flush overtake his chest as he watched him come to his own senses, and turning to Fiddleford in a hazy, half awake, confusion.

He had been paired with the prettiest boy in the whole college, even in the middle of the night, with his brown hair all tangled, cheating on gravity with staticity. Sharp jawed, and built like a boxer, if the gloves hanging in his pantry were an indication, but still plump enough not to appear too intimidating.

He had also the absolute gull of being a sweetheart, and to put up with Fidds’... Less than usual specificities

When the sun was up, he took to messing with his compulsions, and sometimes, they would drive each other crazy with post-it notes and scrambled Cubik’s cube.

But the moon was high, and the adrenaline rush made him chivalrous. So when he turned around to find Fidds prostrated, and on a verge of tachycardia, he extended his hand with his sympathy.

“All good, McGucket?” He smiled. Taking his hand in the broad of his, as if he would help him up.

However, panic had Fiddleford riveted to the floor, unable to move, and when he was offered his hand, he only clung to it. Counting the fingers with the pulp of his thumb. His roommate had never taken offense to it, even though he should have, but they had been talking about it a lot.

“I am sorry… I am so sorry F…”

“It’s alright!” He answered, interrupting him in the process, but Fidds tried not to look too much into it. They stopped talking when they realized, and silence stretched, before Fidds invited him to go on. “What happened?”

Fidds squeezed his hand, drawing his roommate closer, with a mocked intensity in his eyes: “If I told you… I’d have to erase any memory you have of this night.”

The helpless savior that he had been saw his eyes widening, doubling in size. He was momentarily entranced. It lasted a second, but it was delicious. The punchline had him rolling his eyes, and punching Fidds teasingly.

“Night terrors, I guess…” Fidds stopped toying, passing a hand through his hair. “It’s pretty embarrassing.”

“Your mustache is embarrassing…” The other replied, extending a hand, and grabbing a pair of spectacles. “You can’t control night terrors…”

Where had his politeness gone? They’d been lumped together not too long, but they already acted as if they had shared the same air for a lifetime. Fidds wanted to say something, anything, but he was just smiling idly along.

“Maybe you could ask someone in the experimental psychology wing to help you with that?”

“Ew… No.” Fiddleford answered.

Ford finished rubbing his glasses in their varsity shirt with a chuckle, but only once he adjusted them on his head did Fiddleford recognize him. There was so much life in Stanford Pines, sometimes he had the vivid impression he was two persons masquerading as one.

“You don’t look like you without your glasses…” He reacted, not knowing exactly why.

“What did you say?” Ford’s voice came from behind him.

He turned back to the source of the noise. In the corridor of the Shack, there was a somber look on Ford’s face. Multiple emotions were conflicting. The knotted shoulders for the anger, the mournful sag of his brows he couldn’t identify clearly, the squeezing of his fingers that almost felt painful. When did Ford let himself go so much? His hair was a mess, long and knotted, his posture was atrocious…

“Stanford why am I…?”

Words failed him, something was wrong.

He counted his fingers, against the rough of his thumb. Just to make sure.

And only found five.

“F?” Ford called out to him, a hand on his shoulder, forcing him to focus.

The vision was gone in a blink, and they were back on the college floor. Sitting between their twin cots. Discussing night terrors and their triggers. Stanford trying to coax answers with a soft smile, and his puppy eyes.

God, Fiddleford was developing a very bad crush, but hopefully, it would be gone in a few weeks.

“Do you know what causes them?” Ford questioned, genuinely interested.

“No… Yes? Maybe stress?” His wisdom escaped him, the lack of sleep was dumbing him down. Blurring answers to questions he already had been asked a few times. “I am awfully unprepared… Christ on a stick, I am gonna fail.”

“You say that everytime, and I have to fight to get ahead of you.”

“You have three minors, Stanford.” Fiddleford defended. “You want to be the best at everything, of course you’re gonna find you struggle against something one of these days. You Icarus…”

“Do you remember them?”

Fiddleford’s spine ran cold. The hand that wasn’t in Ford’s clutched the gun. He turned to his college roommate, with an agonizing scrutiny.

Nothing in Ford’s posture had changed… He was not going off script. He was not shifting into something terrifying Fiddleford would have to grapple against for the rest of his life. He just sat by, wondering about his friends' state of mind. A young twenty something boy, with six fingers to each hand.

“No… Not my dreams.” Fiddleford answered, painfully, feeling the tears in his eyes coming back, the sting of them. “My ma always said…”

The next words he spoke were a brute static, fuzzy on his tongue, like he had been vomiting something instead of talking. All his body wretched over them, bending him in a shape he didn’t remember ever taking. His legs giving in under him.

His mother was standing over him, an arm maintaining his ribcage, the bar of soap in her other hands. Fiddleford knew he had been crying, because all his body was shaken with sobs, snot pooling its way up his lips. He felt the strength leaving his arms when he tried to pull himself up.

“This boy is trouble, Fiddleford.” Emma-May was warning him, on the porch, before he went. His plane for Oregon was living in three hours, and at this point, he wouldn’t catch it. He wanted to be angry at her, but he could just not conjure it… He was smiling through his teeth for the first time in a long time without the support of his meds.

“I am sorry, ‘ma…” Is all he heard himself say. “I promise I won’t do it again… I won’t! I won’t!”

“We can’t have you do that… Fiddleford, we can’t have you sin like that. You’re too good for this.”

“Em, It’s only a couple months, and we’ll be filthy rich.” He reassured his wife, holding her hand, squeezing it, counting the fingers on it. Five… He couldn’t count how many times he had done it with Tate, since they had had him. Just reassuring himself everything was in order. He loved the boy to bits.

“It’s Stanford Pines.” She insisted, as if there was another Pines he would have to worry about one day.

“And it could be Jackson Yang, I would still go…” He answered, already tired of bickering. “This is too big to just pass… I would never forgive myself if I missed it.”

“And I’d be fine with that, but he ruined our wedding–”

“He punched your uncle in the face, because he was too drunk to keep his hands off my cousin.” Fiddleford interrupted, more briskly than he had hoped. The shape of the cab pulled down their road, and he went to fixing his luggage inside of it. He sighed. “If you want my honest opinion about it, it’s your uncle that should have been sent home…”

“This is not what I am referring to and you know it.” Emma-May pointed, it was like having a dagger to the chest.

Fiddleford stopped, but the memories eluded him, and he just oggled her like she was growing a third eye. They seldom talked about their wedding night. It was a memory both would rather have kept buried. Once because Fiddleford had drank himself sick enough to force most events after eleven out… The few glimpses he had of his state had been retching over a toilet, with an Emma-May so patient and understanding, he had sobbed in her lap for hours. Then he had felt undeserving and filthy… To some degree he still was.

They didn’t talk much about Stanford, but once he remembered the chipper tone she had when he took the time to come over. The enthused excitement of sharing a friend with her fiance however awkward the beginning stages had been. To act now like he was a dangerous infrequentable delinquent out to steer Fiddleford into trouble… What did she remember that he didn’t? And why couldn’t she just let him forget?

“If I do that, Tater will be set for life… He will never have to need anything. We will give him the life we never had.” He tried to appeal, with all that was genuine inside of him, all the good he could conjure up the surface.

“I don’t know if I want him to grow up pampered… We didn’t have it all, but that’s why we turned out good people.”

Fiddleford munched on it, hovering by the cab door.

“Oh… Right…” He conceded, genuinely floored. He kissed her temple, virgin white and unscarred under the thicket of her brown hair. “I understand. See, that’s why I married you, you’re brilliant… I’ll call you from the hotel, we’ll talk about it, okay?”

He closed the door to the car, and gripped the steering wheel as hard as he could. He had not turned the key inside the ignition. Had not made a single movement. He smashed his left fist through again, and again, and again until he couldn’t feel anything but the bludgeon of pain. Screamed at the top of his lung, and the tall pines of Oregon swallowed everything he had to offer. His rage. His sorrow. The heartbreak that was like an earthquake. He cried, and his mouth was filled with soap.

Stanford fucking Pines…

He clasped the memory gun, and got out of the vehicle. Marching back to the research center, pulling the red hood over his head.

He had to stop him, at all cost… Before he ended everyone on the face of this earth.

When he entered, he was disoriented upon his first step. He passed through rooms that should have made sense to him and didn’t. He stalled, for most of the times he had, until he found the intruder wearing Ford’s skin.

Stanley Pines looked as disoriented as him, to see him on his porch.

“You’re McGucket?” The other Pines had said, and he looked so much like him, that Fiddleford had a hard time remembering what he had seen truly until it was too late. A monster of a man, if in proportions only. Rugged, and strong, that looked like Stanford in all aspects but one, was holding him with such a force he thought he would snap his arms in two if he held any tighter.

“I… I am not gonna lie, I am kinda glad to see you… And if you’re here, that means no more phone calls, so… ”

He pushed his door opened for him, welcoming him inside.

Fiddleford found him, that night, sitting half drunk and comatose in an armchair, sleeping his own regrets off. Cozying off to the sounds of a rambunctious late night show probably nobody bothered to watch with a steady head on their shoulder. Even through his sleeping Stanford’s twin didn’t look comfortable enough to let go of the tension.

Fiddleford had assumed he kept Ford’s room for himself, and that was how Fidds could stay in his own room. Seemed to have guessed wrong.

Was it still July in Gravity Falls? Moonless nights swallowed all indications of seasons, he couldn’t see the sky from here. Nothing was more comfortingly similar than the idea of an overwhelming darkness. Some blanket, the world could wrap itself in every night, and nothing had to be black, or white anymore. The whole world could remain monochromatic, compellingly gray.

McGucket had no evidence he was presently, occupying the safe space as his own body. Although he should have noted, that, as far as this joke he was living went, he was on the edge of something new. Under him was the big crevice of what would be, people pretended they could foresee. A future was afoot because he had a mission, from there, he exalted many paths he could take. All burgeoning with grim repercussions, he hadn't taken the time to analyze yet.

“I am sorry. I wish I could help you…” He whispered to the drunkard that looked like the man he had loved with so much conviction it had ruined his entire life. He inscribed his own name at the back of the machine, and aimed it at the stranger’s face.

Then… He wrote Stanford’s name, and squeezed the gun, just a little tighter to his chest.

No doubt the scene shifted then…

Past, this time. He was sure of it.

“I dreamed about you last night…” Stanford Pines confessed to him, over the poor excuse for a healthy breakfast that was the premade waffles and the stolen packs of diner’s maple syrup. An odd habit he had, which he wouldn’t answer for in any way, but Fiddleford was nothing if not observant when it came to Stanford Pines.

He cocked his brow, and by the sight of Ford’s expression, he could have been holding him at gunpoint. His roommate’s body flattening itself against the folding chair, bracing himself for the incoming disaster of a joke.

“You’re on laundry duty anyways, you can wash your sheets yourself…”

“Fiddleford, be serious for a moment.” He answered him, sternly.

The urgency in his voice was much too common for him to be surprised about it nowadays. Being overworked and sleeping less than three hours a night made him snappy and irritated, and when it came to McGucket, he couldn’t stand the tensions that brewed between them.

All of them had their problems, but only Stanford insisted on causing himself more.

“Ford… My woman kicked me out.” He tried to appeal, devastated that it didn’t even cross his mind. Their prior evening had been seeped in too much sweetness, acting like kids around a pack of snow. Fiddleford was just too naive, if he thought that could be their standards. “I have no place else to go…”

By the look of it, there really was guilt in the decision he had taken. Ford’s face was a mess. An unholy mix of all the bad habits they had taken, of the exhaustion in his body, of his obsession that had taken over his life… Fiddleford wasn’t in a better state… He could feel something grappling at the back of his head for the control of himself, he refused to shiver. He refused to tap the table, instead his legs just bounced, as chaos warped his perception of the room around him.

“It’s not safe for you here…” Ford exerted himself to spell out. Taking all his strength to come out as calm and composed even as Fiddleford looked defiantly inside of him. Safe? “I don’t think it’s safe for anyone…”

“Took you that long to figure out?” McGucket demanded, as a confirmation. “That’s it then… You’re shutting it all down, aren’t you?”

Something laughed at him, it had the resounding high pitch of the thing he met in the bunker. The Ford he would fight back against. The one who ruined all the good things between them.

And Fiddleford grew even more suspicious as Ford twitched. As if he’d heard him too.

“Why aren’t you stopping everything? Why does it matter so much to you?”

“He has taken quite a liking to you…” Was the only thing that Stanford answered for a long while.

Fidds next accusation died.

Why couldn't he remember what Ford was talking about? He had been so sure it was something serious. Something grave, even.

“I know you’ve met him…” The next words mixed themselves, like a goo. But in the moment, a shiver ran down Fiddleford’s spine, as his past self remembered something he didn’t. “He is very playful… Though, I suspect he misunderstands human nature, a lot more than he would like to admit. He wants to make himself helpful, and…”

“Stanford. Whatever you promised this…” He scoffed on the words. “I was already in danger. You’ve put me there. You plucked me from my home, and it has been danger ever since. I lost my whole life, because…”

“I love you too.” Ford interrupted.

McGucket’s whole world collapsed here, exactly. As the words hit him, with the realization. Such simple words. It was not a sentence of infinite poetry or wisdom. But did it have to be?

It wasn’t a soft collapse, it felt like a wrench to the guts. Like something splitting him in two, and grabbing at what spilled with greedy hands. How could he dare tell him he loved him when he was pushing him away?

But Ford’s all demeanor was alien to him. He used it as if it was a logical argument for Fidds to leave, as if the conclusion was sound, which was preposterous.

“Not… Probably not exactly like what you want… I don’t… I don’t think I crave the same things as you… But, if there was ever a soul I wanted to share myself with, it would be you…”

“Then let me stay…” He pleaded.

“Not after today…” He reaffirmed. “If you leave the project… If you quit, I can’t… I don’t know what he’ll do to you… You’ve seen what he did, to persuade you to stay?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Fiddleford asked. At the edge of his seat, feeling like the entire room was collapsing on itself around him. He held firmly then, sensing something was disturbingly wrong. “Ford? Why are you not making sense?”

The look on Ford’s face was a heartbreaking one. McGucket retreated further into himself. Was there another memory he was missing… He thought he still had enough to make a compelling argument, but when Stanford talked, nothing brimmed back. All the while, Stanford’s dejection overcast anything else.

“I know what he told you…” Ford swallowed, he was making such an effort not to look absolutely repulsed. To explain in no uncertain terms exactly where McGucket had fucked up. “He can be very persuasive…”

A tingle again, pain flaring from the damages on his temples. Rifling through his memories, only one felt truly alien from its substance alone. Frigid hands running up the sides of him. Swollen tongues and stolen confessions, whispered in mocking ears. The man that wasn’t Ford exactly, but who bore its traits like a mask, coaxing doubts of out him.

The cold of a december night was biting back down at him. The scene had rewired itself in circumstances that felt more acceptable. How could he mistake the strobes at his wedding for christmas garlands dangling in the opened basement…?

They hadn’t been in the bunker at all… They’d been underneath the house, in the space that he had shunned from his memory with the press of a gun. The edges of the room were still fuzzy, but he remembered them, vividly enough to know.

The astounding amount of pressure he had been under that night… Unable to free himself exactly from the pull he had on him. He could conjure the shape of Ford forcing his lips onto him, but he wasn’t exactly sure if he had pulled in or out.

He had never been a good fighter, but now he could feel all the bile in the creature’s throat when it praised him for being so clever…

Wretched hands clawed back at his face. He couldn’t feel much of anything as the scene replayed, exactly how it had happened. On the other edge of the table, his friend was staring at him with a pitying gaze. Traces of empathy painted heartbreaking traits on his features. How could he still host for him something so warm when all he deserved was to be thrown into the night.

A voice came back to him, speaking words of prophecy.

“This is nothing you haven’t done before.” It had told him, from Stanford’s mouth.

Recollection was a pain to power up from… It didn’t send him back anywhere. He didn’t feel his self fracture again, and plunge back into the forbidden lab. There was no jump to be done there. He was riveted to the chair he’d been sitting in. Unable to escape the terror he had wrought with it. A Hell of his very own making.

The scene wouldn’t budge, he would just have to replay it again.

“What have I done?” McGucket vomited the next words. His hands finally clasped against his mouth, after trembling their way up there. He wanted to die, but his fate was a cruel mistress.

“Fidds… It’s…”

“Don’t you dare tell me it’s alright!” He yelled, and he was on his feet suddenly. Trying to get as far away from Stanford as he physically could. His legs wobbled under him, blocks of jelly. A look of pain that flashed behind his best friend’s eyes, but he didn’t make a move forward to reach back. “Don’t you dare! Fucking trying to spin on this! Oh my God, what have I done…?”

“Fiddleford, he wouldn’t have stopped either way… That you said yes was a bl-”

“I can’t fix this… I can’t fix any of this, Ford… I can’t do shit…” Whatever Ford was saying, because he could still hear him talk somewhere outside the bounds of his reality, it was lost to him. A radio kind of static moved up and down his spine, chilling him. “I ruined my own life… I ruined everyone’s life… I am going to Hell… I can’t fix this.”

“Listen to me, please…” Ford countered, pulling through just fast enough to grab his hands in his. “You can run… As far away from here as possible… Take my journals with you, claim them as your own. I don’t care…! If that can make up for half the things I did to you…”

“What you did to me?” Fiddleford heard himself laugh, but there was no humor in it. All his words tasted like ash. “This was rape!”

Stanford’s eyes flared opened, the words bludgeoning him as if finally, finally the gravity relinquished and came back down to crush them. His lips formed voiceless words, stillborn excuses. A game of tug of war played behind his eyes, his pupils falling from arguments to arguments in debilitating agony. How could someone so brilliant not have seen the conclusion just before his eyes?

“It… No, it c— It wasn’t!” Stanford’s scoffed, his voice too airy for the weight of it. “Why would he…”

Pleading pupils caught Fiddleford off guard, sickness making Stanford’s face livid.

“Why would he do that…?” He asked, genuinely disturbed.

Would it have been anything else, Fiddleford wasn’t sure he would have been able to move. His friend’s distress was so apparent on his face, it felt like surge enough to move. It didn’t take much to confiscate himself away from Ford, sprinting on unsteady legs to the coatrack in the middle of the entryway.

“I can fix it!” He rambled, rummaging through his own pockets.

Steps followed closely behind him, too little too late.

“Fiddleford?” Stanford called after him, his voice still shaking. “What is…”

“It’s okay… I know… I know how I can make it right.”

McGucket’s hands finally clasped around his gun. With a triumphant, shaky laughter, he pulled it free, turning his hands to the dial.

Somewhere away from him, Stanford’s footstep stopped.

He only arrived in time to see it pointed right up at him.

“Fidds…” He heard him plead.

The expression on his face was… Complicated. Pulling pieces of former iterations, like a fractured mirror reflecting the same images a dozen times. Fidds had seen it all before. The rage. The fear. The bargaining. The acceptance. The sadness. The betrayal. Stanford before him was barely an echoing image. Cracking each time he pulled it. Fiddleford’s hands only got steadier as he pointed them.

“I thought you got rid of it…” He said in a bated breath, but he could have been a ‘I knew you were lying’, or a ‘Please, I don’t wanna fight’. He couldn’t talk the fire down. Either he burned or he didn’t.

“I can fix it!” Fidds proclaimed, a little crazed at the thought. His nerves were catching fire. All this time, it had been so easy… The only solution he needed. Stanford couldn’t see it now, but he was holding serendipity in the lines of his hands. Absolution, not for the sinner, but for their victim. Forgetting was a bliss. “This is what it was made for, Stanford!”

“Fiddleford, this is insa–”

He didn’t have time to finish, when he made the motion to come closer, Fiddleford steadied himself.

“I can live with the guilt…” Fiddleford assured.

“Are you kidding me?” Ford rebelled. “Don’t you see how misguided this is?”

“... But I won’t let you deal with the memory.”

“This gun is imperfect… It either deletes too much or not enough when faced with evidence.” He powered through whatever was keeping him out of arm’s reach, and marched, hands up towards Fiddleford. Menacing and trying to appear inoffensive at the same time. The mechanism in the revolver purred up, and he stopped, again. “Fiddleford, if I end up remembering… Then I could never forgive you. You know that?”

“Tell me what’s more selfish, Stanford!”

“This!” Stanford expelled, rocking Fiddleford enough to have him gain more ground. “You are taking the choice from me. Fidds… This! This is the crime! This is reprehensible! This I can’t forgive you for!”

“I love you, Stanford Pines.” He spoke, determined. “And you don’t have to forgive me…”

“Ask me what I did!” He finally screamed, out of breath and desperate. “On your wedding day! I got into a brawl, and I got kicked out… I know you don’t remember that!”

Fiddleford’s resolve wavered somewhat with Stanford’s demand… He felt his pull soften on the trigger, but he didn’t quite let go of it either. Taken aback by the sudden request. Memories flooded back in shards, spinning in a carousel in his head… What he had done back then was painfully clear, but it still felt like pieces of it were missing.

The way Emma-May recoiled at the sole mention of his name. The kind of look and warning she would give him after he had contacted him once again. The way her brow would furrow with some unclear concern, always unspoken. Fiddleford could remember only bits. He remembered being shoved into a table, mostly, and the huge, unbridled rant Stanford had gone on, but never in details solid enough to make the night back.

Through this madness. Through the sheer expression of hurt and the escalating violence. He couldn’t resist it… There was a curse in knowledge, but he had a cure for it.

“What did you do…? The night I got wedded?” Fiddleford asked, his voice broken. “What happened?”

Stanford swallowed thickly. His gaze never lifted off of him, and the magnitude of his eyes pinned Fiddleford in place. Somehow he was faced with another shotgun barrel, and he couldn’t even posit to look away.

“After I punched… That guy? You escorted me out… But you didn’t ask me to leave yet, we smoked and talked there for… Almost an eternity, and I don’t know if it was the alcohol, or the adrenaline, but I got cocky…”

Then after an eternity, he looked away, dejected at the sight of recollecting his own failings. He chewed on his lip, a face full of regrets sprucing back up to meet Fiddleford’s unwavering gaze. His recollection of events didn’t jolt back anything more than a dull sense of ache.

“... I kissed you…” He stammered, out, his breath a little thinner than he had accustomed him to.

Fiddleford’s arm went limp at his side, staring into the void of the room. Blood rushed to his ear, trying to drown out the sounds of whatever nonsense Stanford was confessing to. The big hallway made him appear so small and broken.

“I didn’t ask you,” he took a step forward, “and you didn’t want it… You rejected me so gently, and I got irrationally angry about it.”

“Don’t come closer, Ford…” He threatened, but he had no hold over his voice, just shudders.

“You tried to go back to the celebrations, but I kept pulling you back…”

Stanford reached him, then. Pushing the glass away from his face, cold clinging fingers brushing just under his jaw to a part of his hair. Fiddleford closed his eyes and braced, feeling the tension in his shoulders. He tried so hard to free his mind of the memory, before it could happen again, but it held him in a iron grip, under the pulp of his fingers.

The scene would not shift, as Stanford came ever closer, dismissing him entirely.

“I cussed you out, I exposed you, and when you told me to head back home, I called you a coward…”

“You were right…”

“Does it matter?” Stanford asked again.

It didn’t…

Stanford breached the small gap there was left, and everything McGucket still was shattered at the touch. Their lips grazed, dry, and cutting, and wet, and swollen. All the same their tongues were soft and sharp like glass. There was more than one kiss there, there were legions. Ill-gotten, drunken, shy, famished. Same repetitive motion, different ways to sever flesh from blood. McGucket couldn’t remember any of them. He hung to that one. Clung to it. Chased after Stanford, and he let himself be caught. Into the prisons of his fingers, roughing over his neck, the venom of his spit, the blood spilling out of his mouth. Not a celebration that could come without grief, like all things birthed of ash and blood, it died.

They held, breathless and coarse, to each other, like the rope of the hangman. He couldn’t turn the fire down.

Fiddleford’s love was a cage, and a death sentence.

He zapped him.

Stanford toppled, his pupils burning for a short instant before rolling back inside his eyes. Dead weight fell into McGucket’s arms, as he did his best to uphold his best friend for a moment longer, so he wouldn’t shatter against the floorboards like a porcelain doll. Numbness was a given after he’d put the gun to work, but it had never quite felt this dull.

He laid his friend, as respectfully as he could upon the dust-filled ground. Sparing little thoughts at the shocked expression still displayed here. Mouth agape, and breath settling uncomfortably. Stanford’s lashes fluttered, but his unfocussed gaze gave way, and slowly, he was falling into unconsciousness.

Against his better judgment, Fidds wiped his mouth with his trembling hands, and felt tears he wasn’t even conscient he had been shedding. They crashed on the floorboards with hollow thuds… He stayed longer, only because he didn’t find strength to move. Tinnitus ringing in his ear, uncomfortably. Down in his hand, he checked which gun he’d been holding, and found only the glass recipient of his mistakes.

Finally, when he gathered the strength to move, he hobbled to the coat rack he’d abandoned, grabbing his vest and his car keys.

“Thanks, Specs…” A shrill voice called after him, widening smiles and frivolous shards of indignity. “You just made my job soooo much easier…”

He didn’t have to turn to see him. The demon that sat behind Stanford’s eyes let out a stifled laugh. His eyes rolling back into his, slanted pupils watching Fiddleford’s every move. For some reason, though, he never left the floorboards. Stayed on the ground like a dead man. Probably Stanford’s body was already under too much pressure to warrant the extra effort, Fiddleford didn’t care… At least it didn’t feel like he had.

He didn’t want to answer him… If he had listened to his better judgment, he would have just, opened the door, and fled into the thankless cold. That was an embrace he felt prepared for. Something he would know how to deal with, but questions lingered on his mind.

His fingers landed on the dial, turning it around very carefully through the quakes in his being.

“Do you think…” His voice caught, but he turned to Stanford nonetheless. “Do you think sins forgotten are exempt in the eyes of God…?”

The paralyzed husk of Ford grew an uncharacteristic air of confusion.

“That axolotl can’t do much for you, kiddo…” The demon solely answered, without any of his mock joviality to spare.

Fiddleford nodded along, as if he had understood, when in reality, most of what the entity said evaded him. He inscribed two words into the memory gun. They meant nothing to him now, in the blurry ashes of his memory, but they might have meant a great deal back then if he felt so ready to make the call.

Then he directed it onto himself.

His cheshire smile still hung through his mind like a tether.

Countless hours he had spent rummaging through the personal effects of the mystery twin… Though it would be rendered useless along the line, McGucket still felt he would not have been paying proper respect to Stan’s… Attempt if he couldn’t do that… He owed him more than the roof he had put over his head generously for the past few months. But he didn’t find much that could shed more light on his question.

There was more to Stan Pines that met the eye, like a gigantic tree would hide a forest… Countless evidence of a troubled past littered the few cardboard boxes that served as his personal effects. Duplicates of IDs with wackier attempts at masquerading his identity than the preceding. Overstocks of faulty products launched under his name. A few calendar prototypes, Fiddleford thought better not to oggle for too long. Countless photos that could have belonged to Stanford, since both twins figured on most of them…

He stopped and stared at the obituary… Setting it carefully to the side, somehow obtaining the last answers he was seeking here.

His name was Stanley Pines… And he was Stanford’s Twin, only he didn’t suffer from the same birth defect as his brother: He had five fingers on each hand. Though he’d seen him squint at medication bottles long enough to guarantee he’d need a pair of glasses in the future, and the differences that were once jarring to his mind would become frayed. There was no closure here. Despite all evidence of the contrary his motives appeared relatively good. With the odds that were stacked against him, he’d need more luck than his life could ever grant him so far.

Fiddleford rearranged the contents of the cardboard box meticulously, setting it back where he had found it under the desk. He toured the soon to be unrecognizable walls of the house. A fortress he had come to see as his respite. Feeling the unfamiliar tug of something that had been altered just too little not to be familiar. Research transformed into attractions, labs traded for cheap merchandise and pamphlets, equipment repurposed to add to the air of mystery that surrounded it all. When had he let him do this? Had he even helped at all? Or did he agree, despite the pain, just to make sure they could eat for a day or two.

Before exiting, he spared a last glance at the impostor, nodding off in an ugly armchair he had propped in the living room. For all his mistakes, he was probably the one with the least amount of blood on his hand here... Fiddleford couldn’t muster the strength to be angry. Although his recollection was spotty, he knew that what he had done to his brother had saved the world in more ways than one. He knew, too, that he couldn’t accomplish bringing him back on his own.

He made his way to the unmoved coat rack and found he had not brought a coat. Summer was reaching its boiling point outside, and soon, Fiddleford found he might not have needed one anyway. Walking between the watchful birch and the hairy pines, he clutched the only thing he recognized fully as he made his way down the dirt path.

He was scared to do it, of course… There was so much he would leave behind if he took this decision. Stanford Pines had been a prominent figure in his life for a good-third of it. He was the entry point of so much, it felt as if all of Fiddleford’s decisions he had taken as an adult branched from rubbing elbows with him.

There would be a before, and an after Stanford Pines, and wherever he was. Whatever gruesome death he had suffered accidentally from his brother’s hand… Well… Now it was time for them to grieve, silently.

He erased Stanford’s name from the gun, before it would be too late. Sat on a damp trunk, he tried to pick something better… This would be the last time he made use of the machine, once he did that he could go back home… Make things right. Absolve himself. If not for him, at least for his son… He did… Have a son, didn’t he? It only felt right he did, this was the only love he could still feel in his heart.

When he zapped himself for the last time, he entered ‘Pines Twins’.