Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Mr. Pines, I need some more change for the register!” Wendy jogged up to Stanley from where he stood with his hands on his hips outside of the shack. As much as he adored traveling, it felt fantastic to be home. “Those new Mr. Mystery Junior bobbleheads sell like crazy as a set with the burpin’ Stans.” 

Wendy had trotted over to his spot as fast as she could, already starting to move backwards back into the shack from the moment she understood he heard her. He’d yelled at her a million times never to leave the register unattended with the possibility of customers being alone around it, but running out of cash for change was something that made it a necessity. Only he and Soos had access to the safe, and he knew for a fact that Soos was on a tour because he himself had only just finished one. 

Stan Pines took an extra second to stretch his broad shoulders and his back, feeling like he stood two inches taller even without his girdle the past few months, and started walking back inside behind Wendy. “Whatcha need, hun?” He hummed, loud enough that he knew only she could hear the term of endearment.

He loved that sudden flash of a grin that crossed her face on the off chance she noticed. “20s, 5s, and 1s. Right now I have enough quarters to drive a leprechaun insane, but those are going pretty fast too.” 

His eyes flitted around the room, the gift shop was full of happily paying customers, excited over whatever B.S. he and his protege had come up with in the last few weeks. The shelves with the bobbleheads were almost empty, and he made a note to himself to double the next order of merchandise stock for this exact kind of occasion. 

He hadn’t been too certain about the design when he’d pitched it to Soos. Hell, he’d fully expected to never have to make an order of Burpin’ Stan(ford) Pines ever again, especially if he did like it. Bobble-Headed Soos had been one of the few sketches Stanley had actually put care into for a long time, and he felt as though in a way it was a gift as they passed the baton between them. Instead, the man had welled up with tears and insisted they sit side by side on the shelves— and they seemed to fly off the shelves in pairs too. 

He slipped past a few customers on his way to the office to get Wendy’s change, smirking and ruffling the hair of some kid as he passed them eyeing the “totally real” gold nugget display with wide, excited eyes.

As the door closed behind him, he lifted his eyepatch and slid his hand up beneath his glasses to rub at his eyes, which felt sore and strained. He was unaccustomed to wearing the eyepatch again after nearly a year of going without it while traveling on the Stan O’ War, though even with the mild irritation it felt like a balm to be back at his old habits. 

Soos had taken very good care of the ol’ shack while they’d been gone. Stan had offered it to the kid and his grandmother to move in to, but Abuela had been content to stay at her own house, and after most of a year of going steady, Soos and Melody had decided to take the next step. Soos had moved out of his grandmother’s house and into the shack, then out of the shack and into an apartment with his girlfriend, who had reasonably requested some space away from her boyfriend’s odd job. 

That left the shack empty once again other than the knickknacks and makeshift artifacts that found themselves around the house— which was perfect for the fact that Ford and Stan needed a place to be when they couldn’t sail. As much as both of them would have loved to live on the Stan O’ War permanently, sailing needed funds and finding those funds was easiest on land.

Plus it was nice to do the Mr. Mystery thing again, even though it was weird to be Mr. Mystery Senior , rather than just Mr. Mystery. He’d caught Soos practicing the “Oh no, no- please! Mr. Mystery is my father!” Gag, and almost couldn’t hold in his genuine laughter when the kid followed it up with “Call me Mr. Mystery” As if the first half of the joke hadn’t even been told. Mystery Senior and Mystery Junior played very nicely with each other, plus they were able to up-charge for the “classic” tour, if they weren’t running two tours at once and swapping from interior to exterior to make sure twice as many people were happy paying customers. It also had slowly become a threat to Dipper to make him Mr. Mystery the 3rd if he didn't shut his yap on days he was being a pain. 

He grinned to himself, his shoulders relaxing as he knelt next to the large, incredibly conspicuous safe that no longer held the deed to his (brother’s) house, and started punching the numbers to grab the bills his cashier needed to keep the place running. It all felt so normal, but yet changed in a way he never thought he would understand. 

Stan had never had his own kids—not to his knowledge anyways, and if any came out of the woodwork at this point, he might just pass away on the spot— but it had started to feel like he had his own family. He had a son in his mid-twenties of whom he was slowly passing on the keys to the family business, his blood family in Mabel and Dipper, and the kids he realized he had adopted along the way like Wendy as a niece in and of herself. He loved these kids more than life.

It was the pride of coming home to see Soos in his suit, wearing the fez he had passed down to the next generation of Mr. Mystery. He had pulled Soos aside and told him the story: how his father had been a member of the Order of the Holy Mackrel, and that he wanted to pass it on to the kid because he didn’t have a son of his own to pass the torch to. Soos had taken that as a verbal adoption, sobbing like a baby and repeatedly asking for reassurance that Stan meant it and he was okay with all of the changes.

In truth, Stan had just felt like he was verbalizing the way he’d felt for a while.

Now he was home, and so were his two little bundles of joy— Mabel and Dipper “Mystery Twins” Pines were back in the town that adored them as heroes. He smiled to himself as he counted out the bills and marked exactly how many he was removing from the safe on a little post-it note on the inside of the door. He had so many ideas on what to do with them this summer, a year’s worth of hoping and wishing and planning, this time with the help of his brother as well. 

Ford was just as excited, if not somehow more so, for the possibility of exploration and discovery in Gravity Falls. It had been most of a lifetime between his opportunities to study this ‘sleepy lumber town’ as he had described it, and post Weirdmageddon he was not any less excited. 

While the twins were out with friends, or adventuring on their own, while he and Soos were the Mr. Mysterys upstairs, Ford was mainly downstairs in the lab. Stan knew the man wasn’t incredibly social in his element, but even all these years later, there was still research to be done and anomalies to categorize— Ford had noticed with much eagerness that the flow of weird had not stopped or even slowed post Weirdmageddon.

Weeks before they’d made port, he’d woken Stan from a dead sleep with excited eyes, looking like he hadn’t slept in a week and that he’d done cocaine about that problem. “The rate of anomalous energy flowing into Gravity Falls hasn’t changed!” He’d cried excitedly. Stan had nearly fallen out of his bed, Ford half hanging out of the hammock above him to just be a pair of crazy eyes, skewed glasses, and a mess up upside down salt and pepper curls swaying back and forth in the dim moonlight. 

He’d groaned when he’d finally caught his breath from the scare. “Thank you, Doctor Wisdom, for waking me up to tell me everything is fuckin’ normal.” He’d tried to roll back over and go back to sleep, thanking a God he hadn’t spoken to since he was a kid that he would have a few months to have a room to himself again. He’d missed his brother, but they’d been 17 when they’d stopped living together, and picking it up a lifetime later was not as easy as it seemed. They had very naturally gravitated towards Stan on the bottom bunk and Ford on a hammock above his head without any discussion of who slept where, just like back in the day. 

And just like when they had been kids, they seemed to have quite a few of these kinds of conversations at three o’clock in the morning. “No- Stanley, you don’t understand. We watched the rift close itself-”

“Yes.”

“Back in the day, Bill told me that the weirdness came from a leak— a rift of its own that I exploited to create the portal.”

Stan had groaned and rubbed his hands over his eyes, shocking Ford with his answer of “So, if he was wrong you can continue your research on your universal law of whatever. That’s fantastic. Never wake me up like a crack addict again.”

It hadn’t occurred to him until after the interaction that his brother might re-develop an obsession, but his fear felt unwarranted now. He was still researching, but he wasn’t being… weird about it. 

He was being incredibly tame, in fact far more tame than Stan had anticipated. It wasn’t just the fact that his brother was not falling into obsession over the anomalies and newfound weirdness of their little center of the universe, but the fact that he almost seemed not to care now that they were here. 

No, the thing Stan had to worry about was a different change from obsession, more like something more akin to apathy, which was just concerning if not more so. 

In comparison to that excited realization that there might be more or new weirdness within the confines of his old home,  Ford seemed… bland or subdued. He’d greeted his niblings with smiles and tight hugs, but Stan could see how the joy did not quite reach his eyes. It was a stark comparison, not only to the eager excitement he’d expressed about finding himself back within the realm of possibility that made his work new, fresh, and possible, but all of the ideas he had had for the kids. Ford had been like what he would imagine a kid writing a letter to Santa Claus might have looked like— pacing the room and eagerly coming up with ideas of things to do with Dipper and Mabel, even excitedly including himself, Wendy, Soos, and Fiddleford on some of his new and wild schemes. 

Stan hadn’t even been writing the ideas down, Ford had dropped his journal in front of the man to presumably dictate  as he excitedly circled the room around him, half cleaning their cabin and half simply buzzing. “Oh, I’d love to set up a treasure hunt for them…. something that could last the summer over, something where we have to hide in rooms and pretend to have arguments so they could eavesdrop— Stanley you have no idea how smart those two are! I mean- you must have some sort of an inkling, you were with them longer than I, but they deserve to be mentally stimulated with that eagerness and excitement! Maybe I could implore Fiddleford to assist me in rebuilding part of the old bunker— it would make for a wonderful field station as it were, but also perhaps we could build an annex of sorts- for the kids to be able to use at their leisure-” 

Yet all that talk and he was simply… quiet. He was not doing much research of his own either, making excuses to sneak himself into the lab after dinner, and Stanley would find him simply staring exhaustedly at walls or blank pages of notebooks.

It had begun slowly, too slowly for Stan to peg before it was a little late. They’d been in Gravity Falls for 5 weeks, 2 of those weeks now including the kids. The change had begun when they made their final course change to guide their ship back to its port of call, bringing them closer to home. Stan had read it as the gentle somber of the end of a journey, as well as the anticipation of a return to the place he’d struggled for so long, finally with no risk of something hanging over his head. There was no portal, no dream demon, no unfinished work that he didn’t leave for himself.

Over the course of the last 5 weeks, Ford had gone from pleasantly somber at the idea of returning home, to outright closed off. Of course, he wasn’t rude. That had been something he had struggled with a bit, especially in those first few months after his return to real life— like he had forgotten how to be human in lieu of being an academic or a scientist. 

More than emotionally or physically unavailable, the man hadn’t been sleeping much, even though he was not working as much as he could. When Stan was working and the kids were out socializing or adventuring, it would be the perfect time for Ford to get some work done; but there was no work, and no sleep after everyone went to bed either. 

It was relatively hard to hide when they were sleeping merely feet apart in the cabin of their vessel, but much harder to hide now that he was two stories beneath Stan in his own bed-which-was-actually-a-couch. 

Again, Stan was happy to have his own room again, but he also worried himself into wakefulness about his brother, softly padding down creaky stairs hoping to hear the soft snores he had become re-accustomed to over the months in such close proximity, only to be met with the scratching of a pen or a muttering voice. 

Stanley feared that his brother might be having nightmares too, that the man was facing the horrors behind his eyes on his own, but he could never catch his brother in the act of sleeping. He knew what it was like to have nightmares, he knew the feeling of those odd augmented reality dreams where he couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep, all he knew was fear— but Ford maintained a luxury Stan had lost about a year ago.

The privilege to keep things to himself. 

Today at least, Stan had been able to convince his brother to leave the damn house. Before opening, he’d just so happened to run into McGucket who was hoping for Ford’s help on— “A’tinkerizin’ somethin’ ‘r another”? To be honest, even with his recovery, Stan couldn’t really understand the man, even with the time in his life he’d spent in the south.

Stan sighed as he closed the safe, money in one hand as he raked the other through his silver hair, feeling a pang of guilt for possibly zoning out during his task as he lost himself in thought. Sweet Moses, his knees hated him for being in this position so long ouch. He felt them creak and snap as he used the top of the safe to pull himself into a standing position, his arms and shoulders having always held more strength than his thinner legs, stretching them a bit before spinning the knob of the safe to lock it and heading out once more. 

A cloud of worry floated above his head, almost like a melancholy cartoon character in a newspaper comic or a Loony Toons short. He could feel the shadow and the weight on him, and he knew it was a feeling of being preoccupied because of Ford. It didn’t feel normal for the man to retreat into his shell the way he had. Was it normal? They had had nearly one year, one blissfully full and adventurous year,  but did he know the man at all?

Stanley found himself lingering on the door handle, his hand wrapped around the cool metal as it slowly turned warm in the throws of his worried mind. He had to physically blink, nearly having to shake his head to escape the cloud and push forwards back into the giftshop. 

In comparison to the cloudy landscape of his doubt, the giftshop was bright and busy, almost disorienting him for a moment. He was thankful to be around people he trusted, in his distraction he barely recognized Soos as the man slid in front of him and slipped the wad of cash from his hand. “Oh, thanks Mr. Pines— I’ll give this to Wendy. You doin’ okay, dude?”

Stan took a deep inhale to steady himself, blinking to snap himself into focus. “Yeah, kid- just a bit outta it.” He had reassured the younger man that he could definitely just call him Stan— how many years had it been at this point? But if the kid was going to be respectful, there was only so much Stan would correct him. He took ‘Mr. Pines’ now with a chuckle, and relaxed when Soos took the chance to call him his name.

In return, Soos nodded solemnly “Why don’t you let me take this next tour group? You’ve been on your feet all day.” 

Stan felt his shoulders relax, smiling softly. He was this gentle with his grandmother too, he’d seen that the few days they lived with the two of them the year previous. Even though Soos had been the kid who was half naked and sitting on the floor to play with broken toy cars at 25, he was also the kid who scooped things up in the kitchen to take a weight off his grandmother’s hands if he had noticed Abuelita had been on her feet for too long. 

As sweet as it was, Stan didn’t consider himself as old just yet. “Nah— I’ll do this next one and then I’ll take my smoke break.” He hummed, rubbing the back of his neck with the hand that had once held the wad of bills. 

Soos gasped and put his hand to his chest, the fez almost falling forward to slide in front of his eyes, in absolute shock. “Mr Pines!”

Both hands came up in mock surrender “It’s a figure of speech, kid, jeeze!” He laughed as his adoptive son’s posture relaxed. “I quit a long time ago, I just mean a 15.”

“You used to smoke?” His brows furrowed, head cocking slightly in thought as he considered the previous words. 

Stan blinked and instinctually pointed to his throat. “I-” The joke came so easily, the way his voice had changed in puberty had sounded so much like a smoker’s gruffness that it didn’t seem to make a difference when he had started smoking at 16, only getting his brother to keep his secret by allowing him to run multiple experiments on him to see if they could mask the smell from their disapproving father. 

And the one time he and Ford had shared a cigarette and a six pack under a pier and had to sneak home after curfew, but that was another story entirely. 

Stan swallowed the joke before it came, his heart warming at the look Soos was giving him. It probably shouldn’t, the man had clutched the buttons on his suit like an old woman in a movie clutching a string of pearls, now looking at him with a slightly cocked head and gently furrowed brows— from nauseated to nosey. “Long time ago, kid.” 

The lie came easily, sliding out of his mouth with the smoothness of practice as well as the relaxation of a man who didn’t care if he was believed. The trick to lying, he had learned long ago, was to root every lie in truth. Dipper’s spaghetti went missing on a regular basis, and it was always Stan who took it, but he rooted his noes in a deflection of truth— Soos does like to eat. 

The truth here was that he had quit. He’d quit what felt like a long time ago (except for the occasional celebratory cigar, even his Wizkid-brother-turned-old-man couldn’t deny him the pleasure they’d watched their father indulge in on holidays and celebratory occasions). He’d stopped smoking the moment he’d heard the kids were coming— he’d cleared the house of cigarettes and beer over the course of a weekend and had suffered for a month cold turkey before they’d arrived to make sure they weren’t exposed to it. He’d completely planned to go back to it the moment they left. He hadn’t been lying when he’d weakly admitted to Dipper that he didn’t know if his life had been worth living anymore, and he knew that it was when they left and he felt no need to stock up again. 

Soos smiled at the tinge of honesty in his voice and held the cash up to bring attention to it again “I’mma give this to Wendy— We could split the group 50/50?”

Stanley reached up to fix the fez on the boy’s head before running a hand through his own hair, he wasn’t used to being on the job without it just yet. “Yeah,” he took a breath to stretch his shoulders. “I can take the outside tour and you take the inside? Then we can swap.”

“Two groups at once, I like it!” He smiled, as if they didn’t do this kind of a thing on a regular basis. Stan had only described it so that Soos might have a chance to call one location or the other, but it was fine with him either way. 

“Alright, let me-” Stan had enough time to take a few steps and open the door before the sound of a car breaking quickly on gravel stole his attention. 

When they had arrived back in Gravity Falls, the Stanley-mobile had been exactly where he’d left it with a full tank of gas, courtesy of Soos and Melody— but his brother had insisted on his own vehicle for his own errands and need to travel. Ford knew that Stan was possessive of the car, and Stanley felt like he had every right to when the vehicle had been the only thing that had kept him alive all this time; however he had been more than willing to share until Ford had gotten a deal on the beater. 

Stan’s brows furrowed as he watched his brother stumble from the driver’s seat of the tarnished gold colored car, not clumsy but also far less graceful than the man he had become, very inwardly focussed. The man’s eyes darted everywhere but the direction he was going, giving Stanley a flash for a moment about the man who had answered the door with a crossbow in his hands so many years prior. 

The circles beneath his eyes were dark, darker than they had been in the morning when he had left the house to venture with McGucket elsewhere, his entire demeanor curled anxiously inward like he was trying to hide something from himself and the world around him, and in the process of doing so accidentally knocking into a woman and her child coming out of their own car.

“Watch where you’re going-!”

“—Oh my gosh I’m so sorry-” Yeah, those rushed words sounded far too painfully familiar to Stanley’s ears, watching his brother’s eyes bulge out of his head in horror at his own carelessness. 

Those words had been rushed at him all those years ago, tears brimming in his eyes as the searing pain of his shoulder cauterized into a scar, words that should have brought them from 10 back to 0, before the situation had actually geared from 10 to 100. 

Something was very wrong with Ford, something had sucked him back to that sleepless man who had genuinely been afraid of having his eyes stolen by the next person who had come to his door. He was sleepless and anxious, his eyes flitting around like someone might come for him at any time. It was a huge regression from where they had been and it made his chest pang tightly. “Soos-”

“Take as much time as you need, dude. I’ve got them.” Soos reached up and squeezed his shoulder with his free hand before turning to jog the cash to Wendy at the register. 

Stan swallowed in turn and took a breath before making a beeline towards his brother—

—who buzzed right past him as if he didn’t exist.

“Woah-” He could have spun on his heels with the way that Ford surged past him, trying to recover and follow as the man marched up the steps and towards the door of the giftshop. “Six-… Sixer- Stanford, slow down.” He tried to force a  laugh, reaching out to let his hand find purchase on his brother’s ratty trench coat as he moved.

The door opened to a lively scene, a room swarming with accents and people from all over as they chose items, talking excitedly about the tour or scheduling if they were in the next group or the group after. Soos was gesturing close to the door and announcing that the 5:15 and the 5:45 tours would be the last for the day and to purchase their tickets now with the kind redhead at the desk. 

Stan didn’t need to be in front of his twin to see him scowl darkly at the throng of tourists standing between himself and the vending machine that hid the door to his underground laboratory. In his mind’s eye he could see Ford snarl, eyes flashing almost violently at passers-by and muttering something before stalking through the crowds towards the door labeled “Employees Only”

Stanley could more than understand why his brother did not want to be seen entering the lab with the swarm of tourists within its sight, and he probably had been a contributing factor to that, having offered time and time again to add a new attraction to the shack:  a third tour with an up charge to see the nerd in action, the same kind you saw in Jurassic Park where the scientists were working behind glass while Mr. DNA had narrated their activities vaguely. Ford had promptly threatened his life, and in increasingly violent ways as the joke made its reappearance in conversation. 

He followed Ford through the thrum of people, closing the swinging door behind them in time to hear Mabel excitedly call for Ford to join them on the couch. 

“There’s a new episode of Ducktective !” She smiled happily, laying upside down on their couch.

This exclamation was followed by Dipper’s “And Tiger Fist right after!” where he sat right side up beside her. 

Ford took a breath and then forced himself to catch whatever vile thing almost instinctually came from his mouth, hyper aware that the children did not deserve his ire no matter where it had come from. “Perhaps in a few minutes children-”

“Your Grunkle Ford needs to eat, he’s gonna die if he doesn’t.” Stan said very pointedly, making Ford finally spin and look at him to glare.

The look in his brother’s eyes was so much of a flashback that it made his skin crawl, almost physically. He could feel the legs of spiders up his arms and into the anxiety in his chest. Instead of arguing, Ford acquiesced. “I was on my way to make a sandwich.”

“I’ll come with you,” Their voices were tense, tense enough that the kids took a second to pause and look at one another before the two grown men walked from the living room into the hallway and down to the kitchen.

“I hate this stupid shack-” Ford muttered when he was out of earshot of the kids “I should have built a back door into the lab-”

“Hey, hey, woah-” Stan began, standing in the doorway and watching his brother stalk to the folding table by the window and hold the edge with his large hands, leaning the entirety of his bodyweight onto it and making it creak precariously. “What’s up with you?’

“I need to be in my lab, Stanley-” Ford snapped, probably without thinking, spinning around to look at his twin. He paused when he finally looked at Stan’s face, the look of confusion and genuine concern making him pause. “I’m-” He sighed and scrubbed his face “I’m sorry— I was- focussed on something.”

Stan folded his arms over his broad chest, not in a condescending or an angry way, but almost in a self soothing manner. What was the word Mabel used for when something brought on anxiety? Tripped? Triggered. 

Stan had his fair share of experience with anxiety and depression— you didn’t chew your way out of the truck of a car in Arizona heat without some sort of PTSD to show for it, and he knew the case was probably the same with Ford hopping dimensions and fighting demons or whatever he had spent the last lord knows how long doing when he was portaled away in the nth dimension.

He’d never been to a therapist, goodness knows Ford hadn’t either, which meant Stanley didn’t necessarily have a grasp on the language used around the feelings, or any official strategy to get rid of it, but he did know what it was like to feel it and how to see it in other people. He could see it in his brother. He didn’t know how to go about fixing it. 

“Listen, I get it that you’re frustrated, but you gotta be—”

“—More responsible around the kids. I know, Stanley, I’m well aware about how impressionable young minds can be.” Ford huffed, turning his back onto his twin again to hold the table and bow his head in thought– or frustration. 

Stan made a face, but didn’t snap at his brother, no matter how frustrated he was slowly becoming in turn. “You need to eat.”

“I’m fine.”

A scoff “You’re obviously not.” And Stanley moved to begin preparing the man some sort of snack. “Who pissed in your cereal?’

“I said I’m fine-”

“McGucket making another murder bot? You have to talk him down?” Stan looked over his shoulder at his twin who was suddenly looking at him with wild, confused eyes.

Ford blinked “He- what?”

Stan shrugged “Yeah, ‘e used to do it all the time. Kids caught him makin’ a robo-replica of that Gobbledygook thing in the lake.”

Another blink, then a third and fourth, all in rapid succession. “The Gobblewonker.”

“That’s the bastard!” He snapped and turned back to get the bread from the shelf above his head. “What’d’ya want on this thing?’

“He recreated the Gobblewonker?”

“What aren’t you understanding here?” Stan asked, crossing in front of him to get meat and cheese from the fridge, not really caring what he grabbed since Ford hadn’t named any sort of preference. 

“Why?” Ford whispered, sounding to be in either shock or awe. 

Stan shrugged “Kids said somethin’ about his son. Better than the fire-breathing pterodactyl 20 years ago.” He took a second to smear some mayo on the bread, layer it with roast beef and pastrami that he hoped was still good, and two slices of provolone before he closed it and squished it all down. 

He turned to see Ford with furrowed brows, seemingly doing math in his head to justify what his friend had done, while Stan was mildly confused that he’d never known. “I’m gonna take that as a no, he’s not.”

“No… should I be worried?” Thank goodness for his shock, it was much easier to pawn off the sandwich on him now that he was busy processing something else other than being upset.

“I dunno, he’s your friend.”

Ford took the plate with the sandwich and blinked, his eyes so tired it was a wonder he could see the damn thing in the first place before he took a bite. They stood in relative silence for a few moments as he chewed quietly, before Ford responded “Thank you,”

Stan leaned on the counter “Don’t mention it. What’s wrong with you?” 

The words made Ford flinch a bit, not that Stan had said it roughly, only that it had been said. “I’m sorry,” his voice was smaller, less lion and far more lamb, the thunderstorm that rumbled in his chest turning down to a drizzle. “I haven’t been sleeping, that’s all. It makes me irritable.”

“So go to bed,” Stan muttered, turning to make himself a sandwich of his own. “I can tell you’re tired because you look like shit.” His voice lowered so the vibrations of his gruffness wouldn't carry where the kids could hear him curse. 

“It’s only-” Ford extended his arm upwards so that his sleeve came down his wrist and he could see the watch he wore “5:20? That’s far too early-” He groaned and took another bite of his sandwich. 

Stan spoke through a mouthful of food “So, spend time with the kids.”

“Can you please swall-”

“They’ve noticed you’re not here.” He said just before he swallowed.

Stan watched Ford blink again, his brows furrowing and twitching in concern. “I’m- I am here, I’ve been here all summer-”

Stan took another bite, not tasting the food at all, just needing to break up this conversation with something. He hoped the meat was good, otherwise they would both have crap sleep later. “I mean you’re here. You’re walking and talking, but they’ve noticed you‘re makin’ yourself busy. Dipper’s thinking you’re hiding something and making a mystery for him.” He leaned backwards and looked down at the sandwich, almost guiltily murmuring “He’s muttering about the ‘Mystery of the Missing Grunkle.”

It was hard to watch Ford grapple with the idea, which felt completely understandable: how do you face the idea that people you love feel like you’re not there when you are? Two six fingered hands reached up to scrub his face with a groan “But, I’m right here-” He repeated earnestly. 

Stan sighed “You’re not acting like it. You make yourself scarce everyday, you weren’t like this on the ship, where the hell are you?” It wasn’t rough, it was pleading, like he had also lost track of the man.

His head fell backwards “Touche,” he murmured, staring at the ceiling.

“Look,” Stan sighed, finishing his food and swallowing “I’ll take the last tour from Soos, you go and take some quality time with the kiddos. When I’m done, I’ll shower and change, then I can take over while you hit the hay.”

Ford stared at his food, only having taken a bite or two, sighing quietly to himself “I don’t- want to sleep… I have research to be done—” 

“Ford,” Stan made his voice as gentle as he could make it, looking earnestly at his brother. “You’re dyin’. Go to sleep.” 

“The kids first.” Ford responded “Always the kids first.”

They transitioned from being men to being Grunkles once again, as they wandered down the hall and into the TV room once more. Ford slid down onto the floor with a grunt and laughed gently when Mabel shot into his lap and hugged around his neck. Stan flicked Dipper’s hat off his head to ruffle his hair as he passed and slid back out into the gift shop again, feeling far more relaxed that his twin was being watched by their niblings. 

He could see the symptoms of something being wrong, he’d been worried for a few weeks now, he just had no idea what was wrong. His heart ached, watching his brother regress like this, not only to behaviors from before their time on the Stan O’ War, but to behaviors that hadn’t made an appearance since before the portal incident. Stan would never be completely certain where his brother’s mind had been when he had been in the portal. He could never be sure if there was a time even before that where his brother had been completely healthy— but what he did know was that even on the nights they sailed on turbulent waters, or when the sky was clear and his sleep turned from pleasant snooze to shaking nightmare with no other prompting, Stanford had never regressed this far. 

He shook his head, stepping back into the giftshop and across the floor as Wendy picked at her nails absently waiting for the next tour group to make their way back. “I’m gonna step outside, lemme know how big the 5:45 is for me, eh?”

The redhead looked up, raising a curious brow “Soos said he was gonna take them?”

“Yeah well, my 15 is over.” He grumbled, taking off his glasses to rub the one eye not covered by his eyepatch as if he could clear his head manually like clearing off the windshield of a car.

Wendy shrugged “Let me know if that changes,”

Stan gave a non-committal grunt and exited the door of the giftshop to catch some of that fresh air he had hoped for before Ford had pulled into the parking lot like his own life didn’t matter. 

“Dad, when do you want me to pick you up?” Tate McGucket called out of the window of a dingy green pickup truck, his father exiting the passenger side door. 

Fiddleford looked so much better than he had in years prior. Gone were the ill-fitting overalls without a shirt or shoes, gone were the poorly wrapped feet and the smelly, ancient cast, gone was the long beard, so old he had grown hair into the adhesive of a bandage and it had remained for years on end. 

Instead, the man that exited the older truck had regained some of his height, walking with a cane to steady himself where before he had haunched over to the point of near permanent spinal and muscle damage according to Ford. He was dressed in dark blue slacks, a cream button down, and a forest green blazer— his beard trimmed close to his face and the old scarecrow’s hat removed to reveal slowly but steadily growing white waves that grew in place of the dishwater blonde Ford had reported him as. He cut a far more striking figure this way, having returned some of that dignity that Ford had said he’d had so long ago. McGucket was a very changed man, both from decades prior and just over a year ago, which felt almost blindingly stark.

He shook the man’s hand in a greeting, he’d spent far too long writing the man off as insane and had not afforded him the same man-to-man dignity that Filbrick Pines had taught him that men deserved. 

Granted, not many of Filbrick’s lessons had stuck over the years, but this one had and had become a core foundational piece to Stan’s personal art-of-the-deal.

“McGucket.” He greeted with that firm handshake, marveling that Fidd returned the grip firmly with that jolt of a handshake. “Lemme grab Ford for you-”

“Actually-” Fidd let go of Stan’s hand, but instead of gesturing for him to lead the way, his hand returned to the brass handle that was the grip on his cane. “You’re the man I was hoping to see.”

Stan’s bushy grey brows shot up and he barked a laugh “Me? What for?” He tried to play it cool, even though his old habits told him there would be police involved somehow. “Can’t teach you how to fix a portal.”

Fiddleford chuckled and shook his head “No, not something I need to know. I jus’ need to talk to you. It’s important… and private if you wouldn’t mind goin’ on a walk with me.” There was a sadness in Fidd’s eyes and his voice as he spoke that made alarm bells run in Stanley’s head.

He froze, looking at the blue eyed man and blinking for a moment with the urge to just bolt to try to escape the situation, yet something in him knew exactly what the conversation was about “Yeah… yeah lemme tell the others.”

Fidd nodded and stepped back from the Shack’s steps to peer out at the forest.

“Wendy give-”

“-The last tour to Soos. Like I was going to in the first place. She smirked, feet up on the table as he walked towards the back door to go into the house proper. 

He rolled his eyes and knocked her bots from the counter “Alright smart— Alek.”

The younger woman smirked, knowing he almost slipped up, but said nothing, just repositioning herself as he shoved her legs and stalked past her to poke his head into the living room. 

Ford was still on the floor, Mabel laying across his lap as he sat between Dipper’s knees like an oddly positioned totem pole of Pines. Mabel was definitely a cuddler and Dipper didn’t like to admit it, but he was too. 

Stan found it amusing, knowing that on good days, both sets of twins were just alike. He and Ford still continued some of their childhood habits: squeezing into the same chair even as two grown men, Ford reading while laying behind Stan on the couch as he watched TV. Even abroad on their travels, Stan leaned full body against his brother when they talked, and hung around his shoulders while talking to point things out. 

It was nice to show he was a good influence for once, watching Dipper become more and more comfortable with himself in his own skin, and in turn become comfortable showing a healthy level of affection with the people around him. Eventually during the show, Dipper would reposition himself so that he was laying down, one arm slung around Ford’s shoulders and absently playing with his sister’s hair as all three of them became invested in the mystery. 

Yet even with that knowledge, his heart sank; he knew that dead-eyed stare on his brother’s face, the face he had under the mask, the face he prayed the kids never saw. Enraptured in the mystery, partially. The man remained just engrossed enough not to slip out of the room completely, even with his body tangled between the bodies of his kids. 

“Hey, ‘m goin’ out for a sec.” He grumbled through the door.

Three sets of big brown eyes flicked away from the TV towards him and back to the idiot box in perfect sync. “Where?” Ford asked absently, coming back to life as he was interacted with. He held a single bite of his sandwich in his hand, resting on his niece’s hip, forgotten as he became progressively more invested, or more disassociated. 

“None’ya.” Stan sneered, and for a moment Ford was 6 and sticking his tongue out at his twin. It didn’t happen, but the annoyed look that snapped over and away again communicated the exact same thought. At least he was there enough to be annoyed. “Mabel?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re in charge.”

She grinned like she’d been given permission to make the two men around her paint their nails. “Aye aye, captain!” And she saluted, something that she knew would make Stan grin and Ford roll his eyes. 

Ford scoffed “You mean after me.”

Stan blinked “Huh?”

Now Ford tried to feign a laugh. “You mean I’m in charge of them both, and Mabel is in charge of Dipper, correct?”

The twin in the doorway crossed his arms “Not a chance. You haven’t slept in 6 weeks. Makes Mabel more qualified.”

Dipper was floundering above his Grunkle Ford, who had begun to glare daggers at Stan. “But— why not me?”

“You’ll get it next time. Mabel’s turn today.” He turned on his heel and headed back out of the giftshop. “Don’t abuse them, sweetie!”

“Aw man—” said by both Dipper and Mabel, for very different reasons, echoed behind him as he walked to find Fiddleford again waiting outside. 

Fidd was waiting for him with his back turned, facing the parking lot and watching all the cars from tourists currently being led by Soos either through the woods in a golf cart or through his house with an odd sort of sadness in his eyes as his eyes surveyed the trees. Okay, it wasn’t odd— Stanley knew exactly where that sadness was coming from. 

He knew the story, different versions from Ford, the kids, and McGucket himself once. This house had once been his home too, and in a way part of him would always be trapped inside of its walls. The ghost of Fiddleford McGucket had always roamed the halls in the form of the little trinkets that had survived the last few decades: the ashtrays, the carpet Stan still had in his room, hell half of the shack’s air conditioning unit whispered his name. He periodically came over, but it was rare he ever went in, and the Jersey native felt he could understand why.

“Give it to me straight, Doc,” Stan tried to joke lightly, coming down the steps towards the man, who turned and chuckled softly.

Fiddleford seemed to understand where the joke was coming from and shook his head solemnly ”I’m sorry, Mr. Pines… But your brother has a terminal case of-” Then paused and smiled sheepishly “Naw, that’s mean of me, I won’t say it.”

“If you were gonna say a terminal case of stupid, I fully agree.” Pines hummed, finally extending his hand to the southerner to shake.

Fidd seemed a bit surprised at the greeting, but he shook his hand like it was welcome anyways, and laughed at his comment. “There’s a level of that, I s’ppose…” Then the voice turned sad “I need to talk to you about him, Stanley. ‘M worried.”

Stan took a deep breath, grounding himself in the seriousness of the conversation. He was a man who coped with horrible situations with humor and it had nearly cost him his life quite a few times, but there was no laughing where his brother’s sanity was involved. He gestured vaguely to the cane “You said you wanted to walk, you sure-?”

“Oh, this ol’ thing?” He held up the cane he’d been leaning on to smile gently “I’m a’right, it’s mostly for ‘m posture anywho.” 

Stanley gestured for them to begin down the path, one of the more steady trails off to the side of the shack, a path where he knew neither of them would risk possibly slipping and falling on thinner “old man legs”. There was something about aging that made you not steady on your feet, your knees grew weaker, your ankles unsteady, and it led to a loss of balance far more often than in your youth on the same terrain. Stan prided himself on still being pretty nimble, granted the location of his secret punching bag had had to move now that his brother was back into the picture, but he had worked quite a bit to retain his agility over the years in case he even needed to fight someone. Not that it had helped him when his brother had punched him and pinned him down upon their first reunion, but it had been a big help to him when it came to the fact that he was, in fact, aging. Nothing would slow that down, but certain things did speed it up.

It had been something he pondered when it came to comparing himself to his brother: two identical twins separated by one trait that was not genetic, yet they had turned out so differently. Ford had explained it to him twice in their lives, once as an excited teenager and the second as a mildly tipsy old man. “We’re identical genetically, but we show different phenotypes.” He’d probably looked at his brother like he had magically sprouted a second head, so the man hadn’t wasted time before continuing “All genes are possibilities, we can have the same ones, but the traits that show is a roll of the dice. We’re identical, so most of those genotypes share the same phenotype— the dice all come up the same because they’re weighted similarly.” Stan had appreciated the gambling analogy even if his brother had probably been thinking of his stupid nerd game. 

In reality, Stan had skipped the science and chalked it up to two men who lived very different lives, and boy howdy had that been true. He'd thought his brother had lived a cushy life with school and research in his house with heating. He himself had been to prison multiple times, slept out of his car, gained weight from a combination of eating junk, not eating at all, and having long periods of stagnation, as well as other factors. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be because of some of the activities he had engaged in during his early years on the run, his teeth came from having to chew his way out of situations quite literally, but most of his problems now came from living at the shack like his back and his knees. Ford’s version of that had been similar but different; he’d still been on the run but he hadn’t been in the same scenarios, and from what Stan had heard he had encountered more allies overall due to a common interdimensional enemy. They were nearly the same man, rubbed smooth in different places from different forms of weathering.

Neither of them exhibited this more than Fiddleford McGucket. Ford had once very sadly admitted to Stan that he felt at fault for the man’s descent into madness. He’d always been a slender man, but once he had been taller than both of them, stronger than anticipated with a smaller frame. Stan had known Tate since the man had gotten his job at the lake, but he’d had no idea about the rest of it. He’d left his wife, left his home, left his son— the man had gone insane and his body had followed suit. After Weirdmageddon, Ford had made it his mission to help him, removing a cast that was close to rotting away flesh, helping him find his stature again, healing his legs and other issues in ways the man wouldn’t have had access to under other forms of care. 

The man walking beside Stanley was so much different to the man he had hit with his car years ago. Even on his cane he was walking straighter, having gone basically from hip level to eye level as his body found its stature again— he would never regain his proper height but he was far closer than he had been since Tate had been a young man. His hair had grown back and was combed neatly, still white but far fluffier than Stan had imagined it to be, his beard trimmed up and giving him an older, distinguished look. Ford had initially helped him shave it, but they had both decided to grow it back and keep it tame, something about strengthening his jawline. 

“So…” Stanley finally sighed, the thoughts gathering in his head becoming too much of a fog to continue on their current path. “You uh- you said you’re worried about the guy?” He began awkwardly. 

A thick brow rose above the thin line of the glasses perched on the end of Fiddleford’s nose— not the green pair today, but he still periodically wore them. “Y’ haven’t noticed nothin?”

“No, no— I uh.. I have…. I just wanna know what you’re seein’.” He tried weakly, unable to really look over at the man now that Fidd seemed to be studying him as they walked. He kept his head ducked lower, his eyes trained on the path as if looking for obstacles when they both knew none would come. 

Fidd sighed softly. “I think he might be depressed.”

As if the ghost of Filbrick Pines possessed him for a split second, Stanley made a pffft sound with his mouth. “Ford?”

Fiddleford stopped in his tracks and looked at him. Stanley paused and looked up, but didn’t turn to meet his gaze. His eyes were worriedly trained on the horizon as he felt the formerly ‘crazy’ man’s irritation tick up. “Don’t tell me you don’t see it. You, of all people, should see it.” Fiddleford’s voice was eerily calm, very soft-spoken in the way they had always feared when their father mysteriously went calm at a function. 

“Of course I see it-” he began quietly, but the southerner was beginning to get riled up. He crossed the distance between them in a blink and rounded in front of him, suddenly feeling so much taller as his eyes flashed with ice blue flame. “Was he like this on the boat?”

“No-”

“Then what happened? Was it-” Fidd’s brows twitched to furrow, but Stan could see it was an emotion that wasn’t anger. “Was it me?”

He couldn’t bring himself to meet his eyes yet, his own trained on the snow white of the man’s hair line. “It wasn’t you-”

“Then what is it Stanley-”

This time it was Stan’s turn to flash dangerously with rage. Did this country bumpkin think he didn’t care about his brother? His own twin? The man he had literally faked his death to save? “I don’t know what it is, McGucket. You think I don’t see it?” He turned on his heel, feeling this rash of anger creeping from his mind and into his hands as it usually did and needing to be away from the cause. “He was fine— He was fine and we were fine and everything was so good and then suddenly we’re home and-” When had he come nose to nose with a tree? He’d stormed away from the thinner man so blinded with emotion that he was clenching his fists to punch the nearest hard surface, and the realization made his whole body slouch, the energy drained right out of him. 

Apples and trees.

“Suddenly we’re home and— and he’s still out at sea.” His voice almost cracked for a moment, turning to finally look at Fiddleford, who suddenly looked around the same level of emotionally exhausted as he did. Stan leaned back against the tree he almost hit and sighed. “He was so excited, too. Talkin’ ‘bout anomalies and adventures for the kids, reconnecting with you and publishing work…”

Fidd smiled softly, sadly, and it made Stanley’s stomach do a sickening flip. It felt pitiful. It felt like loss. “I’m sure you’ve tried to be a lighthouse— but-”

Again they had traded places, now it was Stan’s turn to ramble, unimpeded by interruption as he felt worry spill from him like a sudden fountain of springwater in a hole dug too deep in the ground. The one thing that could hit that aquifer hidden in his chest: his love and worry for his family. “Of course I’m worried about ‘im. I’m worried about his head. I’m looking at him and seein’ the man who answered the door and asked me if I was there to steal his eyes. ” His hands came up to scrub his face, but he instead pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes violently, like he could force the thoughts out from behind his eyes and away from him entirely with enough pressure. “I didn’t spend most of my God-damn life trying to find him, to lose him while he’s standing in front of me.”

His hands dropped in front of him as he sighed, and he was met with Fiddleford’s sad blue eyes again. The man seemed weakened by the topic, where he had been walking mostly fine, he seemed to be using his cane for balance, walking up to Stan and finding his own purchase on the thick tree trunk beside him so he could lean as well. “I take it he hasn’t admitted to anything when you’ve asked.”

Stan took a soft breath, feeling a bit better than a moment before with the acknowledgement that Fiddleford didn’t actually assume that he was blind or uncaring. His brother meant a lot to both of them. What kind of emotion that was for Fidd, he didn’t know— he had his suspicions, but there had never been any real conversations that had voiced those ideas. He didn’t care, he knew his brother had a broad range of tastes, they’d bonded over the shocking fact that they both found little limitation at the bar so to speak, but he’d never asked about Fidd.

He filled his lungs until his chest stung and then let it all out in a huff of weak emotion. “That fucking metal plate shit can keep a demon out of his head, but he can’t block out the memories and the nightmares… if it could, they would have put one in me a long time ago.” 

Fiddleford seemed to wince at the idea— a little like he knew who the ‘they’ entailed, but neither of them wanted to be the one to talk about it. “You think it’s nightmares?”

“I know it's nightmares— He cries in his sleep then wakes up with a jolt and then tells me it's nothing and forces himself to laugh it off. He’s been-” he scrubbed his face again, almost knocking his glasses off his face and tossing them into the dirt. “There was one here and there on the Stan O’ War. Something, but not every night. We talked all the time. It felt like-” he swallowed thickly as the word almost choked him “It felt kinda like healing. I dunno, a big bandaid over something that bled too long.”

“Did… Did it get worse when you arrived?”

He sighed deeply again “Before. About a week before we finally made port, he slipped into that shell again. You.. You called it a lighthouse. I’ve tried. I thought the kids would help too, he was so excited but-” he cut himself off.

“I ain’t sure men like him look for a light house.” Fidd sighed. 

Stan’s brows furrowed roughly. The bastard was the one who brought it up, why the sudden change? “What do you mean?”

“T’ be a lil’ honest with ya… I guess he reads to me like a boat on a turbulent sea. He reckon’s he sees a hole ‘n he’s doin’ all he can t’ plug it before the damn thing goes all capsized, but the hole ain't necessarily there. There’s water on the deck from the waves he dont wanna admit that ’re there.” Fidd pushed himself off the tree to continue walking, like there was something compelling him forwards. “Hard to focus on where land is if you ain’t sure you’re gonna make it.”

Stanley nodded quietly. “Yeah… Yeah I guess I can see that.” He started after the thinner man, the sounds of the woods around them quiet as dry pine needles crunched beneath their feet. “Again, I was hopin’ the kids would fix it… They’d do anything for him, ya know? But… seems like they’ve made it worse.” His shoulders slumped and his head fell back as they walked, looking to the sky like he could beg a higher power. “God— I can’t imagine how they’d feel if they saw through his lil’ smart guy mask.”

The thinner man slid on a wry smile. “Well to be fair, my son didn’t see through the crazy guy mask for most of his life… reckon Ford’s safe from the kidlets.”

It made Stan snort a bit, shoving his hands in his pockets as they walked further into the woods. “No offence McGucket, but you really were crazy for a while there.”

“Yeah well-…” He cut himself off and sighed “There wadn’t anyone present enough to see me spiralin’… I walked away from everyone, includin’ your brother for a few reasons… I thought I could save them and myself.”

“I’m not lettin’ him walk away.” Stan huffed “He’s stuck with me now. And those kids. I just- I’ve tried to offer help, but he’s not…” he growled in frustration. “He’s not reachin’ back.”

Fiddleford swallowed the information “He’s a man in a troubled situation determined to save himself. You’ve been throwin’ him that line, but he’s certain he can swim himself t’ shore.” Another wry smile. “He’s always been like that. ‘Least since I know’n him.” 

For a moment, Stanley almost snarled, then he sighed “He wasn’t always. We used to lean on each other all the time… I screwed that up and I need to make it right.” He sighed “But he won’t let me help.”

“ So don’t,” Fidd began simply, but it made Stan spin angrily towards him again. 

“What am I supposed to do, leave him to fuckin’ sink?” He snapped. He wasn’t sure when they had decided to stick with the boat metaphor, but if it had been Fiddleford’s plan to make something clear to him, it had been crystal clear since the start.

Fidd’s eyes were calm even in the face of Stan’s flame, something that caught him off guard once again. “That’s not what I mean. He’s determined to do it himself, he probably don’t even recognize he’s in a pickle, and if he does, he’s too proud t’ ask for help.” He took a breath, his eyes weaving through thoughts clearer than Stan had ever seen them. “If you can’t save him, y’ give him the tools to save himself.”

Stan stopped, crossing his arms. His eyes projected incredulousness from behind his glasses, but he wasn’t going to outright refuse an idea when he felt like he was drowning himself. “How?”

“Well, part of that is making sure his body is healthy and he’s being watched over. ‘S one of the reasons I invited him over today. It wadn’t ‘cause I needed help, but more because…” He swallowed “-because I couldn’t stand the thought of him isolating himself, n’ we’ve both seen it.”

Stanley sighed “Yeah… yeah, away from me, away from the kids… I was happy he went with you, I was hopin’ it would do him some good.”

Fiddleford’s entire body seemed to sag, losing several inches in height like a balloon stabbed with a needle. “I just— I’m afraid I made it worse…”

“How?”

The thin man wrung his hands together over his cane, carrying it now rather than leaning on it, which made sense as his posture shrunk further. “I- erm-… dagnabbit, how would I put this…”

Stan was shocked at the patience in his own voice. “You had another episode?”

A bitter laugh led into a whisper. “…shoulda known you two were thick as thieves.” But there was no malice behind it, only sadness.

The broader man shrugged, trying to brush it all off again. “Not really. I mean- yes and no. He mumbles to himself when he’s stressed. Always has. Didn’t do that around you?”

“Oh, always!” Fidd chuckled “Quizzin’ himself with his mouth full and staring into the fridge while debating-”

“drinking the OJ straight out of the bottle.” Stan finished, and they found themselves with matching mischievous smiles. “Yeah… Mom thought he was the gentleman out of the two of us. He just never got caught .” The conman was an expert on getting what he wanted, even just information. There was a level of give and take when trying to get someone to trust you.  “Tell me how it happened?”

Fidd glanced back down the path they had just come, checking his watch “Y’ sure you don’ t need t’ get back?” It was obviously something he was ashamed of, otherwise he wouldn’t evade the admission he had been about to freely give.

Stan shook his head, his mind focussed on the piece of information, knowing he might have to go a roundabout way to get back to it again. “Nah, Soos took the last tour. ‘M on a smoke break.”

“You smoke?” The white haired man laughed a bit at his own question, gesturing with a hand to his throat. “Sorry, I don't know why I asked.”

The joke made him smile a bit, harkening back to earlier when he’d made the reference with Soos. “What, my voice give it away?”

They shared a laugh “No, not at all.”

They walked for a beat in silence, starting back down the path where they came, but walking slower this time. For a moment, Stan floundered as to how to pick up the conversation from their awkward and anxious interruption. 

As a con man, as a professional liar, Stan had learned long ago that the best lies were rooted in a seat of truth. If your story is 2 truths and a lie, the lie blends in much easier. He’d found that gaining information was somewhat similar. He didn’t necessarily need to lie, and frankly he didn’t feel the need to, but he knew the man would feel far more comfortable opening up to him, if he opened up first. 

Stan took a soft breath and broke the silence with his truth. “Yeah… started when I was a kid, thought it made me look cool. Ford never took to it. I don’t- well— I’ll have 2 fingers and a cigar with Ford when we celebrate a good catch, but otherwise I’ve quit for good… i-it wasn’t for me, it was for the kids.” He laughed softly, the truth coming out far easier than he expected. “I think if Mabel ever saw me put— what’s she call it? A cancer stick in my mouth, she’d just break down in tears.”

It was a moment before he realized Fidd had stopped walking again, and when he turned the man was looking at him with such a softness that he could barely stand to take it in. “You can’t stand to disappoint those kids, can you?” Fidd asked gently, his head cocked just slightly as he searched Stan’s face. 

It had started off as a strategy, yet somehow he’d found that talking about it felt… good. “Nah… I’ve disappointed a lot ‘a people in my life. Don’t want them to be on the list, y’know?”

Fiddleford nodded, taking a breath and letting his eyes fall from stan to the dry pine needles of their walking path. “Don’t I know it. I’m… I’m makin’ up for lost time right now, I think.

Stan nodded and swallowed. He didn’t mean to keep talking, but it just… happened. “They.. erm..don’t realize, but they saved my life. I was-” he took a breath and wrung his hands together, wishing for a moment that he’d brought his own cane to fiddle with as he could see Fidd was. “I was hoping they’d save Ford’s too.” 

The implication was grave, but the fear was definatly real.

Fiddleford’s brows furrowed, concern etched on every feature like a stone. “He say anythin’?”

Stan sighed and rubbed the back of his head anxiously. “He keeps sayin’ shit like… like ‘So much to do, so little time’ and I don’t know if he means the kids or himself. I-” His breath shook and he forced himself to swallow and steady it. “I wanna say I’m overreacting, but I know the statistics. I almost was one, ya know?” This time he did take off his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think he’ll do anything stupid but… I guess that’s my own evil voice creepin’ in. I like to tell myself he'd be too good for it, but we’re more alike than we want to admit.”

Fidd nodded gravely. It was odd to realize this was the same man he’d seen scampering around the streets of town for years, ducking into alleys and communing with raccoons. He’d been this little creature from some sort of fantasy novel, small, emaciated, haunched over from neglect. Stan had moments where he looked at himself in the mirror and thought he was wasting away. He’d lost his teeth, and he’d lost part of his hearing, but Fidd had lost his teeth, his voice, his stature, and his mind. To be standing nearly eye level with the man felt insane, let alone to be having such an in-depth conversation with him. 

Fidd broke the silence. “Can I tell you something in confidence?” Probably what he’d been about to freedly reveal some time earlier. 

Stan couldn’t help but laugh under his breath. “This is so weird— sure.”

A raised brow met his words. “What’s weird?” 

“I dunno,” He shrugged. “Having a real adult conversation with you? You’ve been the crazy guy for years and now you’re talkin’ about mental health and using phrases like ‘in confidence’ in your crazy man accent.”

Fiddleford barked a laugh “Big change to the man y’ hit with yer car all those years back.” It almost made Stanley throw up, the sheer nonchalance to the statement. For a moment, his body felt like it had entered fight or flight, telling him to run away from the issue at hand. 

Instead he did what he did best. He lied. “ Pffft , y’ can’t prove that was me-”

A smirk paired with a raised brow appeared on Fiddleford’s face “Bright red ‘65 El Diablo?” He chuckled again when he watched Stan full body wince. “Yeah, I don’t blame you- there was that one time I tried to eat your roof canvas so all’s fair I suppose.” The thinner man reached out and put a hand on his companion’s shoulder, a gesture of compassion and forgiveness.

Stan anxiously sighed through his nose “You- uh… you had a lot goin’ on, didn’t you?”

A soft, sad smile “You could say that.”

Stan lowered his voice even though they were still a ways away from the shack— again, he knew part of the story, but he had always had a feeling there was more to it than Ford or the Kids had told him. “Drugs?”

Fidd blew air from his nose, a huff that sounded like disappointment. For a moment, Stan thought he’d offended the man.“Might as well have been,” he held his hand up to his head in a two finger gun gesture, his thumb a trigger going off over and over and over 

The disappointment wasn’t with Stan, it was with himself. “Shit…”

“Yeah… forgetting is… it's a drug. Euphoria. Suddenly the pain just…. stops. I HAD what I thought was the solution to my boat taking on water… now I see that I was standing in a wreck and bailing with seashells.” The sea metaphor persisted, but what could have been better for two old men? Being in a situation like that… like both of them had once been in was really like drowning. Substances, depression, anxiety, homelessness— it felt like treading water in roiling waves, sometimes perfectly able to breathe, but sometimes choking on the only thing keeping you afloat.

He tried again gently, trying to feel out the information that could lead him to helping his twin.  “So… this episode-”

“I-” Fiddleford sighed and Stan saw the resignation in his shoulders as he finally got what he’d been looking for.  “Well, the doctor says it's not dementia or Alzheimer’s, so get that out of your brain.” 

Stan held up his hands in surrender, eyes wide and primed to defend himself. Instead, Fidd waved it off in advance, pinching his nose “Sorry, keep havin’ to REMIND Tate and Ford that what’s happening to me ain’t the end yet. And I’m hoping it won’t be. I’m takin’ care of myself now. I just- sometimes I get confused as a long term side effect.” Had either of them realized they were at a standstill again? Standing in the woods, sharing pained glances as the story unfolded. “Ford is…. Ford is scared it's a sign of what’s t’ come. Today it wasn’t even an episode… I was always forgetful about my tools but—”

“He’s already decided that you’re one step closer so—”

“—he’s seein’ the end in everything, that’s right.” 

“So when he came home today in a rush…?”

“It was to hide from me.” The sadness in Fiddleford’s eyes felt not only like regret, but of guilt— guilt for something he had done so long ago and could not undo now that he was seeing side effects.

He knew a lot of what Ford was grappling with was guilt too. He’d spoken about it in the past, never at length, that feeling of having made mistakes he should have never been forgiven for. Stan had tried his best to reassure him. If he could be forgiven for all the shit he had done, what were a few mistakes while fighting a demon? But, he knew there was more there than he wanted to acknowledge. He knew there were mistakes in his past that Ford couldn’t own up to out loud or else it would break him. 

He also knew he would never think any less of his brother for any of it.

Stanley sighed and started their trudge back to the house one more time. “What I wouldn’t do for a cigarette right now.”

Fidd nodded almost too eagerly. “I haven’t smoked seriously since college, but I’d bum one off you right now. Tate would kill me the same way Mabel would kill you…” he grinned conspiratorially “Lil’ brats”

Stan barked a laugh “Let me inhale my cancer in peace” he joked back, and they both shared a rolling chuckle that faded like thunder over the valley. “Damn it. He won’t eat tonight then”
“I fed him breakfast, so there’s that.” Fidd offered, and Stan nodded.

“Yeah I got him to eat a sandwich. Hopefully those’ll tide him over. I’ll-” he sighed and swallowed “Let me sleep on it. He’s too exhausted to have a rough conversation anyways.”

He didn’t want to admit that things had in fact changed since his run in with a dream demon. He did not want to face the thought of how his own mind might have been damaged, like Fiddleford had revealed Ford was already worried about for him. How was he to grapple with the fact that there might be things that he would need to face down the line like , that there might be challenges to come? He did not want to face the thought of memory loss that didn’t come from already half chewed trauma or bad drugs in cities he couldn’t name— but the reality of all of it was there. 

And it was just as real to Ford as it was to him. 

They had agreed that every little thing needed to either go into a journal, a recording, or be told directly to Ford so that he could keep some sort of note, not only about the way that Stan’s mind had been healing, but also how it might regress in some moments. Stanley had been doing exactly that. Every new memory, every new image, every dream or nightmare that was not already familiar went straight to his brother to verify if it could be true, to run tests if needed, to at least acknowledge “There was another one,” even if they did not get into details. Ford had been incredibly patient with Stanley reliving years he did not want to remember, but Stan had not received the same luxury in return. 

“I’m fine, Stanley, really!” Came the laugh, Ford never seemed to take him seriously with that concern, content to wave him off with the hands he still instinctually hid from people as the circles under his eyes got darker and darker.

He felt like he was slowly coming to find a Ford that he’d only seen once in his life. A tired, dirty, and lonely man with bloody terrified eyes haloed in the blue and hazy yellow bruises of sleeplessness. 

There was a bit of resentment that Stan didn’t want to face. The clinical need, the prescription to have himself and his life laid bare for the good of his health, while Ford slowly reverted back to this older version of himself. If Stan could hide his past in good conscience, he would. His life, his memories, his regrets— years of experiences he wouldn’t even tell the kids as playful passing lessons, they were cards he held close to his chest. Some people thought of life as a game of poker, but to him it felt like a fast paced game of Blackjack: not too many cards, making split decisions to hit or stay, coming out on top or losing it all and having to do what you could to start again. He couldn’t afford to forget, but he had wanted those memories to die with him. Now he had no choice but to share when the nightmares came.

Yet Ford hid his own whimpers in the night with incredulous laughter that sounded as fake as a laugh track, which would crescendo to “It’s none of your concern, Stanley-” his brother suddenly turning up the dial from familial to cordial when he felt concerned for his privacy. Something kind of like that movie Mabel had forced them to watch the other night— “Freezing” or something? Where the one prince with the ice powers had said he needed to “Hide and Set it aside-” something like that. Stan felt bad he’d fallen asleep 45 minutes in. 

When concerned with a friend or family member, there are varying levels of how to approach the situation. For some, the solution was clear: ask the person some questions, express your concerns, try to work out a solution. 

Stanley Pines did not consider himself to be a “people person”.

Sure, in situations where he needed to swindle a John, convince someone to buy more merchandise from his place of business, or even to redirect a shopkeeper while his brother swiped something they couldn’t necessarily afford, but needed on their monster-hunting expedition: he was very well versed in the art of conversation and distraction. He also didn’t have a problem chatting up someone he might have found attractive at a bar, though with his brother tailing him around everywhere lately his attempts at being alone with another human being were almost moot.

No, when it came to expressing genuine concern for someone in his life and having those concerns communicated and gently dealt with in a way that felt supported? Stanley Caryn Pines was definitively not your guy. 

Stanley was the kind of guy to give a non-specific excuse by saying the words “Non-specific excuse!” out loud to whomever it concerned at the moment. When he felt like he needed to talk to someone like Dipper about something serious, there was usually either a non-committal grunt involved, a fishing metaphor, or a football metaphor. He had decided a long time ago that he was not going to be held accountable for any ‘supportive wisdom’ that came out of his mouth after the age of 40, and– at his“big age” as Mabel had started to call it— he was well past that point. 

However, Ford was a different ball game altogether. Ford was…

Ford was both a different man, and the other half of his soul. He was the yin to his yang, if you wanted to believe any of that spiritual mumbo jumbo. Stan didn’t believe in many things anymore other than the power of money and how easily people could be swindled out of it. They said death and taxes were the only things in the world that were inevitable, and he’d found a way to get out of paying taxes for 20 years. Why would anything be unavoidable? But, he knew without doubt in his heart and or his mind that he and Ford were connected at the root, and that it transcended location or how they currently felt about each other.

That being said, the man was fickle, obstinate, and horrifically unconcerned with his own well being. 

Yes, it did sound familiar. 

The conversation had waned as they finished walking back, both men with their chests tight and craving some sort of relief they had only experienced in the thick exhales of nicotine they’d both quit for similar reasons. Stan kept glancing back at the man, wondering how similar they were, wondering how their minds had been  damaged in service to what they had deemed a greater good.

When Ford looked at him, did he have the same obsessive spike of worry as he did with Fiddleford?

Did he look at Stanley as another burden that was coming down the road? Did he see the possibilities of his twin’s fate as a punishment for the things he did in his life?

The old green pickup was idling in front of the shack when it finally came into view again; Stan was loathe to imagine how long Tate might have waited for them, knowing how the man used to be incredibly impatient with his father— but the slightly awkward wave from behind the wheel eased his worries that they might have trampled over the man’s generosity. 

Fidd turned to Stan in front of the truck and extended his hand again, that gentleman’s accord of greeting and dismissal, the momentary acknowledgement that they were equals. “Thanks f’r hearin’ me out. I’m glad he’s got more ‘n one of us in his corner.”

Stanley took the hand that was extended to him, then cupped it with a second hand, making earnest eye contact with brows furrowed in worry. The movement caught Fidd’s attention immediately, making him pause and his eyes dart back from the hands that held his own to Stan’s anxious eyes. “Thanks, Fidd. For uh-” his intensity lessened as his mind caught up with him, letting the man’s hand go with a bit of sheepishness. Stan took a breath and returned one last time to the metaphor they’d been using in the woods. “He needs to know There’s more than one light on the shore for him to come back to.”

Fiddleford’s gentle blue eyes smiled— tired, worried, but smiling nonetheless. “Maybe with enough light, he’ll find his way home.”

Chapter Text

Ford blinked back to life at the sound of what had been a lowly purring engine revving just enough to get traction and the heavy sound of a large vehicle pulling away from the shack on the gravel road as the jingle of a bell told him the door to the giftshop opened and closed. He could tell that Stanley had come home, the giftshop finally empty, Wendy calling goodbye as she walked out for the day and traded places with his brother. 

He could hear the television running. He hadn’t understood the shows his niece and nephew had become so fond of, initially writing many things that Mabel was into as childish. With closer inspection he could definitely see the merit in shows like Ducktective, excited to share knowledge of actual detective work with her as well as bonding with his twin over catching up on the show the same way Stanley had reportedly done when he had learned she was fond of the show in the first place. As much as he loved Dipper, he was not certain whether or not Tiger-Fist as a concept was for him, but he was far more willing to try as a man who had grown out of his self-centeredness and into a family once again. 

For a moment, he blinked back into consciousness, looking over at the door to the giftshop and wondering if the pickup had been Tate’s. There was a short spike of anxiety in his chest, the idea that maybe Fiddleford had sent his son— or worse, had followed him off the property when he had gently excused himself from the situation nearly made him nauseous. 

There was something bitter in his mouth about the looks they were giving him. It tasted of bile and failure, the way the family members he was so concerned about, the friend whose forgetfulness had once been a handsome little quirk now concerned the health of his mind and his future, looked at him with worry and sadness. Ford had, multiple times since they had made port, had to remind himself that he had a penchant for paranoia. They couldn’t know anything. They couldn’t see anything. 

There was no way that he was hearing Olive Oyl; the sound could have been any sort of a vehicle, not necessarily a truck, and the idea that Fiddleford would follow him home was not only preposterous but a brand new level of self absorption for him. A penchant for apprehension, at times his very nature seemed uneasy because of the things he had experienced across the multiverse, and it was his self aggrandizing— habits? Personality?— Made that anxiety automatically center him as the target of something.

His behavior had been perfectly justified, he had been incredibly polite, it was getting later in the day anyways. There was no need for anyone to express worry or concern because there was none to be had. The looks he was given were not for him.

 Ford blinked himself back to reality, a pang of guilt stabbing through his chest as he realized he completely disassociated through Dipper’s question about science behind attaching additional limbs to animals and whether splicing nerves could achieve a realistic range of movement. A six fingered hand reached up to scrub his face as he inhaled sharply through his nose as he came back to himself. 

Stanley was coming back from wherever he had been to relieve him of his duty with the kids and he could excuse himself gently into the lab for the night. The guilt of leaving them alone was strong, but the anxiety that had burrowed into his chest that whispered for it’s need to be alone felt much stronger. 

Could Stan have gone out to talk to Fiddleford? Impossible, it made no sense that Fiddleford would have followed him home to begin with, and he would have had to enlist Tate’s help to follow him. He would have seen them on the road behind him, wouldn’t he? Besides, there was no way Fiddleford and Stanley would get along long enough to talk about anything.

Ford blinked at the colorful screen on the television, not quite registering as Stanley slipped past and up the stairs to change out of his suit. Where had this random paranoia come from? Perhaps it was the possibility the kids might see that he wasn’t sleeping well? Periods of sleeplessness were perfectly normal for a scientist, especially in his case where he had every opportunity to lose himself in an idea for days on end. Fiddleford knew that Stanley had come very well to know, and the kids definitely understood that his sleeping habits were far more along the lines of the intellectual, rather than the slothful.

Perhaps it was his sleeplessness that had filtered this lens upon his thoughts, making every micro-expression seem somewhat grey-scale in the grand scheme of emotion, tricking his brain into thinking there was something to be concerned about. 

Tricking his brain into thinking there was a reason for other people to be concerned about him as well. Tricking his brain into seeing those looks of concern on the faces of his loved ones when there was no reason for it to be there. 

That could be an indicator that his sleep levels were increasingly low, which had become something he sorely needed to pay attention to as his years on the run progressed. If his sleep was not timely and efficient, there was more and more of a chance that his exhaustion could get him captured or killed. He had felt as though he’d mastered it on the Stan O’ War, sleeping easily above his twin like he had for years in their childhood, only rarely waking up to the memory of that one auric eye… Perhaps a chemical imbalance in his brain was affecting his sleep to wakefulness ratio: low adenosine or a lack of magnesium in his diet would both contribute to—

“Geeze, Sixer,” Stan began from the staircase with a yawn. “You look like your sleep was stolen by a siren or somethin’” 

Ford turned his head to glare at his identical twin, his jaw clenching and his teeth grinding back and forth twice in an attempt to swallow his frustration. His goal was always to hide the ways he lacked from the children, always fearing they might think less of him if he was not closer to perfect than they had already ascribed him to be. To find out that he had been a victim— nay, a willing participant in Cipher’s initial plan for multi-dimensional domination, he needed all the help he could get.

He took a gentle breath. Sirens couldn’t even steal sleep, his brother knew full well of that. “Stanley, I am perfectly-”

Dipper gasped as an idea seemed to suddenly enter his mind. “Great Uncle Ford!”

Ford smiled genuinely, loving how inquisitive his nephew was, even if it was at some of the least opportune moments. Dipper and Mabel were very much like him and his brother as children: excitable, curious, filled with imagination and a need to satiate those ideas by finding a root in reality. He and Stan had very frequently fallen into verbally sculpting possible memories of shenanigans the children had gotten up to growing up, always wishing they had been there to see the truth. 

He let his head fall back onto the couch cushion to turn and smile at where his great nephew laid. “Yes, Dipper my boy?”

“According to Journal One-”

Stanley sighed, long and suffering “Oh no.”

Dipper was not deterred, and there was nothing in his chest that could make Ford want to redirect him. The boy was brilliant, albeit young and needing direction. There were very few moments where he did not afford the boy the absolute truth, seeing even the simplest or “dumbest” questions as a way to both learn and teach. In his admiration for the boy’s curiosity, he had vowed to afford him the most comprehensive answers he could possibly manage—

“According to Journal One there was a time where you dated a siren-” Except maybe on the subject of his sex life. “Is that true?”

The boy’s eager eyes were sparkling enstatite gems of eagerness, shimmering back at him from the mind of a boy who just needed to know— he was so much like him in that way. The boy also had this singular determination, an inability to be dissuaded from acquiring that knowledge that came from Stanley, as well as the beautiful scheming imagination that found clever, albeit sometimes circuitous ways of finding out that information. How could he say no to answering such eager, seemingly innocent questions?

“I- well-”

Stanley had saved his life many-a-time, and tonight was proving to be one of them “Dipper, can it. Can’t you see the guy’s low on juice?”

Mabel laughed from where she still laid across his lap, repositioning herself suddenly and without forethought of where she was laying as she did so. Ford’s head popped up off the cushion to swallow a yelp as she pinched his thigh with the movement of her spinning around to sit up. He was going to ignore the way his eyes watered at the sharp but fleeting pain. “Yeah, Dipper, look at him! He’s been falling asleep in between commercial breaks!’

Immediately he took a breath to defend himself, looking down at her with a sudden spike of dread that she might assume he was uncaring of the activity she and her brother had so eagerly attempted to include him in, but there was no need. Her eyes were smiling, a little twinge of gentle pity sprinkled in the look the same way their mother had looked at them when they were trying to stay awake til the end of a film late at night.

He could remember that look vividly, the kind smile of his mother as she enlisted the help of her husband’s broad shoulders and burly arms to carry him and his twin into bed. It was those moments that he had woken up just long enough to see his father without his sunglasses, smiling softly and whispering to his mother that he was glad the two of them had broken a rule, if only that he had been able to see them like this. His mother’s eyes had been almost sad, chocolate diamonds shimmering with the tears of knowing her sons would eventually grow older, and out of the habit of falling asleep tangled together on the floor watching The Twilight Zone far past bedtime.

How similar she was, obviously not a pathological liar, but she had Stanley’s heart and Caryn’s look of adoring gentility when it came to the people she loved. She was a child who relished in the fact that she was a child, not dying to grow up like Dipper seemed to be; in these moments she seemed wise and patient beyond her years. Perhaps her contentment to enjoy her youth hid a far older soul, or perhaps he was simply proud of the young woman she was becoming. 

“I’m sorry, my dear-” he began sheepishly and she made a soft pffft sound with her mouth to wave him off.

“Nahh, you were tired when you came home today! I’ve been trying to get Dipper to stop asking you questions so you could sleep.” She offered kindly, almost trying to feign flippancy. Across the room, Stanley Pines melted into a puddle of warm, adoring goop, never to be heard from again. 

Dipper gasped for a moment. “Ohhhh- I thought you were trying to get me to shut up just to shut up.” He started to laugh, leaning down to shove her head and begin the chorus of her laughter in return.

Mabel reached up to swat at his hands, rolling Dipper into Ford’s shoulders and head while rolling her into his stomach, effectively creating a “bully one another” sandwich with Ford as the meat in between. He couldn’t even bring himself to be upset, the ghost of a smile dusting on his face even as his body was jostled between his two kids.

That's what they were, what they had become: his children. Granted— he knew he could never take credit for them. They were two marvelous human beings and it was not his, nor Stan’s doing that they had been raised to be intelligent, compassionate, determined, and steadfast. He and his twin got them for the summers now, their parents had eagerly agreed to the arrangement but—

They were his kids. 

They were his kids and he was disappointing them.

The absent smile began to fall from his face as his mind became lost behind hazy, tired eyes. Was this the first time this summer that he had sat to watch TV with them properly? He had sent them on several quests, pointing them in one direction or another, but rarely accompanying them anywhere. He had promised himself that he would be so much more involved this summer, to be more than the man of mystery beneath the floorboards. Last summer he had promised his twin to stay away from them, and he had holed himself up in his lab except for communal meal times— was he doing that again?

 Stanley must have caught him mid-fall, because he interrupted. “Hey, hey, hey! You’re gonna squish ‘im, we just got him back! I know he’s a bug but c’mon.” And the man smirked as Ford’s lip curled in his direction. 

Mabel smiled wickedly up at him “Grunkle Ford, if you’re a bug, can we pin you up like those fake moths in the museum?”

He didn’t hesitate in answering honestly, actually excited for a moment about the idea of sharing something so dear to him with his niece. “Fake ones? Oh, my dear, those are real! I used to pin insects myself, I had quite a collection of unique moth specimens— If you’d like, I could teach-” He caught himself midsentence and nearly full body winced at his mistake. 

She was still such an unknown to him in some ways, both of them were. He anticipated a trembling lip, teary eyes as he rapidly explained that he was not killing the moths, simply preserving those that had deceased in a way that could be appreciated or studied. Instead her eyes went wide and her mouth opened, reflecting the stars in a way only hers could when the sun was still out and there was a roof over her head. “Can you do it with other bugs too?” The eager reply came, and her excitement flabbergasted him. 

He was learning something new every day, not only about being a guardian, but about the souls and characters of those around him. Girls had always been a mystery to him in his youth, he was glad to see that the preconceived single-dimensional memories he held were false in Mabel and her dear friends. “Would something along the lines of a praying mantis do?”

There was no maliciousness in her face when she exclaimed, “Oh my gosh , since they’re already praying, can we make it look like it’s begging for mercy?” Which felt more odd than if she had been full of malevolence.

Stan interrupted them then “Nah, that’s a bit more Taxidermy. That’s the kinda stuff I do.”

Ford chuckled, blinking a bit as he grappled with the hilarity of her eager comment. It made sense since his brother had long since used his Amateur taxidermy skills to create attractions for the shack, and if that horrifying turkey, beaver, opossum amalgam that sat in their living room had anything to say about it, Mabel held his shenanigans with fondness. 

“Alright kiddos, I’ve been trying to get this knucklehead down to bed for like a week.”

Ford caught himself groaning and chastised himself mentally for being a child, knowing that there was a far more mature way of avoiding his sleep than whining about it like when they were children hoping to stay up to catch an episode of something after bedtime. 

Dipper tried helpfully, far more quietly than his sister. “If you want, we can trade places and you can nap during the show?” A sweet gesture, paired with the soft vulnerable request to still remain around him. 

Ford smiled softly, but Stan shook his head “Nope! Puttin’ my foot down. Smarty Pants McGee needs to shower and sleep in his own bed.”

Ford glared at his brother but sighed softly, acquiescing to the force of his order. He quietly bid the children goodnight, kissing Mabel on her forehead as she slowly pried herself out of his lap. She kissed him on the jaw in return, tiptoeing to reach his cheek but not quite making it before she flopped onto the couch. He ruffled Dipper’s hair a bit and bid them both goodnight, reminding him that he loved them and would see them in the morning. 

As he passed Stanley, he muttered “That’s Doctor Smartypants McGee to you.” Which got his brother to laugh and clap him on the shoulder in a silent gesture of affection. 

He was smiling to himself as he descended the staircase, his heart light as the laughter of his loved ones echoed in the hallway behind him— yet as he separated himself further and drew closer to the solitude of his bedroom, the sheet of happiness was swiftly pulled from under the tableware of his thoughts, leaving nothing but the base hardwood of his mind to weather the elements. 

The echoing thought of disappointing the kids reentered his mind in the relative silence of his bedroom. Dipper had so hopefully suggested he sleep with them, conjuring for a moment the thought of waking up with the television running and the children draped over his legs and chest, so eager to be close to him after he had isolated himself for the majority of the time he had known them. 

He had continued to isolate himself now, only partially on purpose. He was anxious to sleep around them, so nervous that he would wake startled and scare or harm someone. His sleep had been fine for so long, but now even in his waking moments…

Stan had made a comment that Dipper considered his silence a mystery. How wonderful was it that the boy was so eager to solve a puzzle that every piece seemed to lead to a picture? But the lingering thought was there, what puzzle piece had he become that Dipper assumed he was hiding something?

The Mystery of the Missing Grunkle.

“I’m right here.” He sighed softly, closing the ornate wooden door behind him to lean back onto it for a moment. Had he already become that much of a disappointment that they considered him to be missing even while he was sitting beside them? 

Poppycock.

He huffed to himself and made a beeline for the ensuite bathroom, reaching in and fiddling with the valve in the shower to bring on the scalding water, knowing the heat and the steam would assist him not only with relaxing, but with clearing his head of the filth and grime that kept him from thinking clearly. He knew that the state of his mind was not entirely healthy. People who were healthy and sane did not fear falling asleep because of the threat of nightmares that felt less like dreaming and more like augmented reality. He was running from something, running from his own mind the same way he had for years after he had finally escaped the version of the mindscape that Bill had control of. 

Since the death of Bill a year prior, the mindscape was not impossible to get to lucidly, but far less accessible and less focussed than it had been. It was never an entirely ‘Bill’ creation, much of humanity had postulated this inner gift, authors like Doyle or more recently Harris had touched on the concept of having an internal memory system like a palace or a courtyard of memories. His had been far more expansive and much less work thanks to the demon, but he had the right to take a good chunk of the credit for keeping it intact. 

“Everyone has one,” the demon had once revealed to him in his incessantly nasal voice “Just most of you humans are too stupid to access it properly.” 

Over the course of his time… abroad, he had kept himself vigilant both in body and mind, and keeping an eye on the vast expanse of his mindscape for intruders and stow aways had been part of that duty. In some places where Bill’s name was spoken in fearful whispers or devoted moans, he had slept only to patrol his most sensitive of vulnerabilities: the mind he had once promised to Bill for eternity. To lessen that burden, he had had a metal plate installed in his head to physically shield his brain from the molestation of a forced possession.

Now, however, he had returned to the populace that Bill had been referring to, the percentage of humans and humanoids that could not fully control the mindscape as he had once been able to. He did not consider himself stupid by any means, but he had in fact returned to that state where his dreams were far less lucid and more dealt to him, like a player at a poker table. With much meditation and focus, his mind had become a combination of the two ideas, he was still at the table with the dealer, he still had no control over what hand he was dealt, but he did have control over how he treated the hand and whether or not he played the game.

Most of the time.

He pulled his head from the tight neck of his turtleneck sweater and sighed for a moment at the feeling of the cool air of the basement, rolling his shoulders back like his body had been contained. The steam from the shower was beginning to fog up the mirror he stood in front of, the mirror he did not remember walking to or staring into as his chest rose and fell to inhale the newly humid air around him. 

The mirror was fogged, still reflecting certainly, but very little of what he was seeing was actually reflected in the glass due to the condensation. He could see himself clearly, the strong cleft of his chin, the slow greying of his curls, the shimmer of gold hardware on his glasses, all the way down to a strong body honed by years of desperate survival. In his mind’s eye he could see the tattoo on his neck that he desperately wished to shed, yet there was the conscious knowledge that he couldn’t see the tattoo, only that he understood it to be there. Likewise, how much of the way his mind worked now was created by this perception of his own truth, this… he refused to use the word depression and pathologize himself where there was certainly none needed. Perhaps the term he needed to surmise his mental state was more depression-adjacent? 

His point remained the same without the label: how much was real and how much was manufactured from the way he had perceived the snowball of his younger self’s actions?

Over the course of a person’s life, certain quotes stuck and repeated at intervals forever.  Even more so when the situation demanded self reflection, or more accurately when self reflection was not exactly welcome in a person’s mind. 

Stanford Pines had taken classes in his undergraduate degree that felt entirely superfluous to a man who was focused on simply moving forward into his master’s and eventually multiple PhD programs. He’d chosen mainly science based electives, ecstatic that topics like forensic anthropology were considered humanities courses, and that he could do something that seemed useful at the time instead of wasteful. Philosophy, sociology, literature courses— he could see their usefulness in the lives of others to a degree, but not to the goal he was hoping to achieve at the time, and certainly not as he did now as a ‘wisened old man.’

He remembered his philosophy class well, which was very surprising to him over a quarter century later, a mousy little professor who reminded him of a distant cousin leading the class. He’d assumed that the class would be an easy time while working on other, more rigorous classes— and yet she’d pulled ideas out of himself and his classmates that had… disquieted him. He’d sat uncomfortably through a lecture on guilt, a contemptuous sneer on his lips as his mind traveled back to what he assumed others would ascribe him guilt for. He’d nearly walked out when she’d asked, feeling interrogated by her quick read of the curl of his lip. It had taken nearly 30 years for him to realize why she’d assigned “Guilt and Suffering” by Herbert Morris, and he’d almost skipped the assignment out of spite.

Almost.

A quote from one of the first pages stuck with him “The man who feels guilty often seeks pain and somehow sees it as appropriate because of his guilt.” It made his mouth taste like bile, which made him feel violently angry. He felt no guilt. His brother had made his decisions, Stanley had ruined his life. 

It had taken 30 years to realize why. It had taken that long to understand the truth.

His mind began to wander down that path as he stripped himself of his boxers, socks, and trousers, then slipped into the scalding water, thankful of having his own water heater for the sake of how long it had taken him to get into the water. His entire body relaxed as he pressed warm palms to the still cool wall behind the water pipe and dipped his head into the stream of hot water to soothe the ache in his scalp and shoulders.

By the multiverse that felt good.

Stanford took a few seconds to breathe in that steam, never as soothing as the smoke from a cigarette had been in college, but far better to feel the sting of heat than of tobacco or nicotine. He did not want to use the word depression to describe the cloud of heaviness that weighed down his mind in the last few weeks, but in the privacy of the shower, naked to the world and himself, he would for lack of a better word. 

Perhaps he was depressed. Which- felt inconceivable. He was one of the smartest men in the multiverse, how did a mind like his develop the type of chemical imbalances that led to depression in the first place? Well— no, that was giving himself too much credit. He had been depressed once, the latter half of his senior year of high school had been incredibly tense as it had been the first time he had ever felt truly…. well… alone. He had never been without Stan, he had become the only adult son in the house to take care of little Sherman. and he’d struggled to find a college that would accept him, not only as a late applicant, but as a Jewish applicant in the early 1970s. 

All of his tasks felt… Sisyphean: the idea of getting into a college, the idea of having gone from one half of a pair to a single person, to possibly being more alone than he ever had been over the house of his time in university. Hiding that ever growing, ever persisting sadness had been a boulder rolling up a hill that he didn’t want to face.

College had been far better, meeting Fiddleford, taking his courses, he had recovered very much from that boy who had curled up on the floor in the darkness of a lab and sobbed because—

That was over. Let it go.

There had been another paper he was tasked to read in that same class, he recalled as he began to massage soap into his hair: The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, another one which had irked his mind. Absurdism and suicide. Pfft.

He wasn’t suicidal. Maybe once or twice in his life, he had bounced the idea around his mind, but he had never been serious about it. Even when Bill had threatened to kill him and stage it as such, or had reminded him that death was the only way out of their deal, he hadn’t fallen for it. 

Philosophers spoke of the absurd in a nihilistic perspective, that mankind sought meaning in a world where there was none. He wholeheartedly disagreed. He saw meaning in the why as much as the how in and of themselves. His meaning, the reason he woke up, had breakfast, went to work, went to the doctor, the reason he ate bananas, it all came down to his desperate need not only to understand but to convey. His mission was to learn and to digest so that others may hear his teachings and learn as well. Every thought written down, every query, every concern. His meaning was his work and his goals— the universal theory of weirdness was still out there somewhere.  

He had no urge to end that journey early, he had nothing on his conscience that he could not carry as Atlas carried the world atop his shoulders. Even a demon could not keep him from stepping forward and into the light even with all of his guilt. He refused to look at life as something he could not handle, he could always handle it and find a way through his problems, which made the paper not apply to him. 

Thinking of it, of the two papers in tandem, made his blood seethe in annoyance, which was probably better than the heaviness he’d been feeling. A good chunk of his cloud over his mind came from guilt, he acknowledged that— guilt for what had happened to Stanley, what had happened to Fiddleford— Goodness Fiddleford.

He groaned, digging short fingernails into his scalp for a moment almost in grief as he rinsed the suds from his hair. His southern friend had always been forgetful, forgetting where his tools were, setting a sandwich down and then finding that it had vanished from where he remembered it being a moment before. Ford had cheekily teased the man about gnomes- hell, he’d even made up a few mischievous anomalies or cryptids to blame his companion’s forgetful nature on, so why was it so different now?

The man hadn’t done anything different to his old habits, he had misplaced something in his excitement and it had made him anxious. It was… eternally familiar. For a moment, here in the shower as the warm water washed suds from his curls down his tense shoulders and weary legs into the swirling drain below him, he could see them the way they had been before it all went sideways. Before he had become mad with the power of knowing, and Fidd had grown meek in the shadow of the unknown.

 They were in their late 20s/early 30s, that time period that melded together of just them. When Fiddleford had made his way to Oregon, the outside world had ceased to exist between them. Fiddleford had compared them once to cowboys driving cattle across barren land, finding something new in the solitude between them. 

How many times had he slid behind his friend to take his hips in his hands to smile into his shoulders, making some sort of soft cheeky comment like “Guess the gnomes needed a wrench-”

Fidd would snort “Oh knock it off, you knucklehead-!” 

Why had this been so different?

He let his head hang and he whimpered softly to himself, a pitiful sound that made him want to fold in on himself in an admission of weakness. It felt different today because they were no longer young men overwhelmed with discovery— why did it feel like everyone was aging so much faster than him? He’d had his fair share of struggles, he’d bounced across the universe and through the veils of space and time for heaven’s sake. If anything, he should be the one who was old and infirmed, the memory gun had been used on all three of them, and of all of them Stanley had been touched the least, yet through all of this Ford felt untouched. Years of interdimensional flu, decades of injuries, alien bacteria, foreign bodies of solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, years of experimental surgeries— he had a metal plate installed in his head, most of his joints and bones were cast in a material he knew would not be accessible on his Earth for another thousand years. The tolls of such invasive messing with his own body must be severe. He’d once gotten so sick that his hair was falling out and the whites of his eyes turned neon green, but where was the aging? Of the three of them, the two people who meant most to him were old. They were deteriorating slowly as if water was dripping and eroding the limestone of their bodies, slowly dissolving before him

How had he avoided it? All the same age, Fidd older by maybe 5 months, Stan younger by exactly 15 minutes, and he was fine. His hair was still textured, still far more brown then grey or white, his prescription had changed but it had been the worst of the three all their lives, but his hearing, his body, his teeth—

He needed to get a government contract. It would cut into his freedom of research, his free time over all, but he could not only negotiate his brother’s record expunged depending on what they asked of him, but get his brother some sort of health insurance. Even if he couldn’t get insured, he would pay for permanent dentures, he would pay for state of the art assistance; he could no longer sit idly by and watch his other half deteriorate. 

They both scared him in different ways, Stanley’s recovery had gone very well thus far, but the thought of the long-term damage in him… the long-term damage in Fidd… Earlier today had been fine. They had been looking at a set of blueprints that Fiddleford had come up with for something that he felt might benefit the town as a protective measure. Cipher’s bubble of weirdness had inspired him to try and create some sort of protective measure within the same vein for the town, and had enlisted Ford’s help for making sure it all made sense. It wasn’t that he thought his design would be out of the realm of possibility, even insane this was the man who had been experimenting with things at the dump and had turned a house into a mecha like Giganor from their childhood, but there was a part of him that was full of doubt which requested a second pair of eyes. Everything had gone swimmingly, they had eaten, talked, reminisced, even begun to tinker with small scale replicas of the actual device. Then it suddenly crumbled. Fiddleford had met his eyes and for a moment it had felt like the man 

Wasn’t

Even

There.

Fiddleford had looked up and his eyes had been so blank for just a moment; maybe it had been a fluke, perhaps in his desperation to be wrong he had skewed his perception of events, but for a moment…

Ford shut off the water and hung his head, leaning on the wall behind the faucet again. His curls dangled low enough to see even in his blurry vision, large droplets of water spilling from his locks and into the tub with the movement.

He needed to sleep.

His mind was running away from him, the entire concept of— well… everything. Stanford Pines sighed heavily and shook the water from his hair before he stepped out of the tub  and wrapped a towel around his waist, opening the bathroom door to vent the steam. He moved with the ease of familiarity, brushing his teeth and combing his hair from locational memory before fixing his glasses back onto his face when he could see blearily that the mirror was beginning to clear, which meant his lenses would be too.

He looked old. He felt old. He felt tired.

Was it this exhaustion that was keeping him away from everyone? He knew he’d been hiding; he felt in his heart of hearts that he had been disappointing the kids, and Stan’s comment today had confirmed it irrefutably. The Case of the Missing Grunkle: an anomaly of a man who vanishes without ever disappearing. 

He could feel his shoulders sagging. He could see the bags beneath his eyes. Perhaps in the morning he could do it right, start over from the beginning of the summer and open his journal to the page where he had outlined so many adventures for the kids, for his friend, he’d even planned for Stanley. 

Had Stan ever seen the sirens of the lake? He’d seen an oceanic siren, they’d met a pod of shallow water sirens, but he’d never seen a deep sea siren, or a lake dwelling siren, would he also be in awe of their diversity of appearances? From a collection of skin tones, hair colors, and eye colors of human make, to those who had aged and dwelled deeper, evolving more fishlike qualities like the eyes and light of an angler or the mouth of a bass?

Did Dipper know about Geodites? He was a smart kid, in his year of studying the falls, he must have ventured behind the waterfall into the depths of the rock. Would he be like Fiddleford and inadvertently test the hardness properties of the crystals while looking for light? Such an anxious boy he was, he did so remind him of his friend at times with his fidgeting and fretting. Or would he be brave in the presence of his uncle, would he sit and wait with soft slow breaths until the creatures glowed in comfort and showed him a shimmering world of sparkles he would only ever see beyond the veil?

Would Mabel’s eyes sparkle like the oranges, browns, and gilded stars of the Carina Nebula when he moved a stone and revealed a pit of hibernating Tinsel Snakes? Would he have to hold her shoulders to keep her from picking them up to feel the spikes of fur that simulated cheap plastic-y cellophane as they coiled together like a neglected box of Christmas decorations?

When had he moved across the bedroom to his journal? Still slightly dripping and flipping aimlessly through those pages, the soft apologies in the form of sharing his passions and planning ahead. The summer had already progressed a few weeks, he had fallen so behind, would they forgive him enough to catch up?

The book closed with a soft ffwunk as air escaped the pages as the cover dropped weight onto his bedside table. His head came up to look through the stained glass window, for a moment having a flash of when it had been boarded up, thanking some sort of past self he hadn’t gotten a triangle print on the glass like he had in other places in the house. It almost filled him with a righteous rage as he turned to find his dresser drawers and pick out sleeping clothes for the evening. 

For so long it had been rage and righteousness in tandem that had kept him going. He could very honestly admit (to a trusted adult peer, not to the children) that his mental health had long since hinged upon a goal: the destruction of the demon that had not only ruined his life, but posed a risk to the universe writ large. He was going to be a hero, he was going to defeat Bill Motherfucking Cipher. He was going to accomplish what hundreds if not thousands of years of Ciphertologists of differing dimensions, universes, and time periods had failed to accomplish with droves of resources beyond his stolen pieces of technology. 

His chest puffed proudly as he shoved a pair of loose fitting sweatpants over his thighs and onto his hips, skipping boxers for the evening in his hazy focus, and grabbing the first piece of fabric resembling a shirt he could find. Perhaps he was Sisyphus, had been Sisyphus, pushing what had been seen as an impossible task before him for most of a lifetime before he had pushed the stone over the summit with the sudden assistance of his loved ones. Perhaps he had won, perhaps he had simply moved tasks. He had been told time and time again that his goal was impossible, that it would take the universe and then some to defeat the will of the demon who crept between minds like he belonged there. Unlike others, he had been victorious.

The ratty black t-shirt was soft against his skin as he laid down and pulled his blanket up to his chest, closing his eyes, determined to sleep. He was no longer Sisyphus because he was victorious , there was no longer a struggle to fight against— so what was he fighting? What else did he have left? Was there a reason for fuel? Was there a battle to be won other than those whys and hows that had driven him forward for so long?

The guilt in his chest should be a motive, a fuel to a fire that needed to remain burning to thrust on the engine of his life. His guilt for the children, for Stan, for Fiddleford should drive him to take care of them, to protect them, to do better-

He could feel himself already tossing and turning, unable to find a comfortable place to lay his back. He felt weary, like the creeping tendrils of sleep were snaking around the couch to entangle him in a fitful dream. The concept of rest felt so close and so far simultaneously, like he was being pulled under and pulled out all at once. It could have been 5 minutes or 5 hours later, where he felt himself sit up and turn his body to venture to his desks, sitting down where his journal lay open on the table.

He could have sworn he had closed the journal, and that it was on his bed side table because he no longer had a desk in this room, but what logic did a dream hold when one’s mind slithered away from the grounding tether of their body and walked into a nightmare of its own accord?

Chapter Text

Sirens

Crystals

Tinsel snakes

His journal had always been a comfort, tumbling down the rabbit hole like Alice as she drifted off to Wonderland in her dreams. He had never thought of the Mindscape as Wonderland, but he had considered Gravity Falls the closest a man could come. Lewis Caroll had postulated a land of oddities while padding a friend’s daughters around Oxford, speaking into life a story that would enchant millions for years to come, inspired by one Alice. Did Caroll have that inherent weirdness about him? Did he possess that spark that would have slowly but surely sucked him into Gravity Falls? Or was he simply a genius of the page as so many believed, a man with the ability to craft words from thin air like the verbal storytellers of old along with Homer and those bards of many cultures around the world older than time itself? 

Gravity Falls itself was his Wonderland, and in turn he longed to craft those same stories, lived stories, for the children he loved the way Caroll did Alice. In that little boat in Christ Church he had not the Hatter, nor the Rabbit, nor a caterpillar with a pipe the way that Ford had the tools to show his loved ones true to life anomalies to delight the senses in the same way. He had made a promise, even if it was to no one but himself, and he intended to keep it. 

Yet he felt so lost when it came to providing that experience in any way. He had gone through months of adventures with his brother, seeing creatures that would rival the Jabberwock and the Bandersnatch— creatures he had seen, touched, and in some cases fought with his own two hands. Caroll might not have known these creatures and tales held inklings of truth, but he did, and he was eager to guide them into the hands of his niblings. And again he was lost, so lost— but it was not the how, was it? It was simply him. 

He was not- able?

Willing?

No, he wanted to, which made him willing. There was much stopping him though, and the longer he went without doing, the more guilt weighed on his conscience. 

His eyes flit over the pages of the journal like they would turn in an instant, magically knowing what he wanted to see. It would have only mildly surprised him in reality, the thought that he and his journal would be so linked that it could manage such a feat, but the journal itself held no conciousness and remained lifeless on the desk. He must be so exhausted, none of the words made any sense. He could see them, read them even, but the words did not form clearly. Settling back into the chair with an obnoxious creeeeeak as the chair tilted with his torso, he took a suddenly breath to ground himself in the present moment. 

He didn’t remember sitting at his desk. He blinked a bit blearily, feeling himself in the wooden rolling chair he had in his bedroom. Ford furrowed his brows, swallowing and blinking again, trying to remember which bedroom this chair was in. There was no desk in the basement bedroom in the shack, even prior to his disappearance, there had been no desk when Stanley had boarded up the room so long ago. He had moved all of his research into the basement the moment he had finished it’s construction, trying his hardest to separate his work and his sleep, even if it was unsuccessful. 

No, this had to be the desk downstairs, paired with the ambient peripherals of the desk he had pieced slowly together for his travels on the Stan O’ War. The wooden rolling chair (which on the ship he had removed the wheels after a harrowing incident with a turbulent sea and Stanley’s midnight snacks), Stanley’s handwriting tagging the desk with their names as Ford had done to a cave wall so many years before, and the wall of polaroids that peppered the corkboard on the wall, which was now simply the peeling wallpaper of his bedroom. 

Ford gently took his glasses off his face to rub the blurry exhaustion from his eyes. Mental fatigue was a very noticeable thing, especially when the faces in the photos felt… obscured, almost like they weren’t fully formed in each image. He could clearly see each one, even with his glasses off— Mabel covering Stanley’s eyes as he tried to thread a hook, Dipper with a ribbon for a journalistic award from school detailing something from Gravity Falls, the four of them with Soos, Wendy, and McGucket, even a photo of him and his brother squeezed far too close into frame— but there were no faces. He replaced his lenses onto his nose and still could recognize but not see. 

The scientist chuckled to himself, running a hand though his hair. There was a weird sense of knowing, yet accepting: knowing his hair should be wet, knowing this desk was wrong, knowing he should be able to read words and clearly see faces, yet feeling as though all of these things were actually correct. Nothing was wrong, all of these things were perfectly normal.

Yet something still weighed in his chest, making him heavy in comparison to the air around him, making him weary like Atlas. Perhaps he should venture upstairs and take Dipper’s offer to rest with his niblings and his brother on the couch. It would not be the first time that he and his brother had fallen victim to their age and fallen asleep draped over eachother on the small yellow sofa in front of the television. He and Stanley felt so old at times, yet when they were together it was like all of that age melted away. They had not properly been brothers since they had been 17 years old, still navigating through the halls of Glass Shard High like it was the only social structure they would ever know. Together at times, it felt like their bodies reverted back to those old feelings, young and lively again, falling asleep during the Twilight Zone marathon rather than the Schmizney movie their niece was showing them. 

This time it felt a little different, though. 

This summer felt anxious, it was full of risks that only Ford could see and feel, therefore he was the only one who could save any of them. That danger was him. 

He did not practice the religion he had been raised with any more actively than considering attending Hanukah celebrations with the twins’ parents this year, but Lord forbid he gave them that opportunity to rest with him and it go awry. Heaven forbid that he was resting and startled awake— would he hurt someone? He had never hurt anyone before, but the sudden thought that the first time might come was agonizing. 

In that fear, he was breaking his promises. He had not only promised himself, but he had, in an unspoken way, promised Dipper and Mabel that this year they really would have two Grunkles, rather than one Stan and one… basement level mystery. But he had become a mystery anyways, hadn’t he? He had become the Missing Grunkle, and even though he was smiling and tangled with them on the couch, he remained just translucent enough to be seen through and therefore be more of a ghost or memory of a Grunkle rather than a man himself. 

Those kids meant the world to him. 

His hands scrubbed his face underneath his glasses, the ring fingers on both hands framing and squeezing his nose as they slid up and then back down with a soundless groan. He hadn’t even known them yet when he knew that he loved them. Grumpily he had listened to Stan announce that they were Shermie’s grandkids— grandchildren! Sherman Fester Pines was old enough to have grandchildren! But the feeling of knowing he was positively ancient faded in the same breath as he had realized “I have a niece and a nephew?” And without even knowing them, something in his chest had loved them and never stopped. 

He had saved the multiverse, and in the end it had not been for honor or glory, it had not been for the mission he had worked tirelessly for: it had been for those two knuckleheads who tormented him with bad television and board games. For the last year he had fallen in love more and more with the idea of family, with the idea of friends, remembering what it had been like so long ago to be stable and to be happy—

He knew that he would be devoted to his family for the rest of his life, and even if that meant temporarily depriving them of himself until he realized what it was he could do to make himself safer for them, it would be worth it to be able to make them happy. He would run into fire, battle narcissistic Gods, swim across a turbulent sea for those two children.

So when he heard Mabel scream, he launched himself from his desk without any question.

“Mabel?” he called, trying his best to keep his voice level when the scream he’d heard from up the stairs felt like absolute abject terror. He never wanted her to sound like that, he felt the grip on his heart the way he had when Bill had threatened their lives, the same spark of anger, fear, and the overwhelming need to find her and fix whatever it was.

Mabel screamed a lot, it was one of the wonderful detriments of living with such an excitable child. He had never thought he would be good with children— however after the summer had ended, and he and Stan had been living at the shack alone, he had found himself not only missing, but longing for the minor chaos that came from two excitable twelve year olds. He’d admitted to himself that he’d written her off a bit in the beginning, and there was a guilt that settled in his throat like scum at the top of a slowly boiling stock. She hadn’t given him the impression that she was gifted in the same way her brother was, and she reminded him so much of his brother, he’d jumped the gun. 

His feet thundered up the stairs as his heart sunk into his gut, the scream followed immediately by wracking sobs and pleas of “Please- Please— I didn’t mean to hurt anyone-” 

There was a guilt that filled his chest as he heard her whimper in pain. This happened once before. She woke herself up from a nightmare, fearing that the townspeople would hate her for being a catalyst for Weirdmageddon. He had woken her up and held her to his chest, reminding her that she had never been at fault, that she had been merely been a child, that he had put her in that position-

He rounded the corner to check the couch, hoping that she had woken up from the same kind of nightmare, but the scream came again and this time it came from outside, the door to the Shack swinging open on broken hinges as if someone had broken through the door and dragged her out.

Normally he’d have the facilities to look for clues, he would have the presence of mind to rationalize the images he saw— but his eyes caught the pink flash of Waddles cowering beneath a table and the scream resounded again, this time further from where it seemed to have been at first. His brain shut off. Mabel screaming in panic-stricken fear was enough to put him in full protector mode, one of those same slices of consciousness so embedded within him and Stanley that their actions became synced and fluidly intertwined. In this case, there was no twin present to fall into step with him, sliding on his brass knuckles as Ford un-holstered his gun, though Ford found himself calling for his brother on pure instinct. 

“Stanley?’ He called to an empty house, the sound falling flat with the same power as a balled up tissue, even after he repeated it with more intensity. “Stanley, Mabel needs us-” too preoccupied to notice that his brother was not answering. 

He rushed out the door, feeling his weapon in his waistband, relieved that he had it on him as he sprinted though the forest and into town far quicker than he should have been able to. The forest passed in moments, a sudden blur of green trees and red-brown bark was suddenly the center of town as if he’d driven or flown rather than ran. His mind was processing slower most likely in his panic, his thoughts sluggish and only repeating Mabel, help Mabel, help Mabel-

When he called her name his voice cracked in worry “Mabel?” Cursing his short showcase of vulnerability, praying she would call back to him in a weak attempt to pseudo echo-locate her. He could hear his brother in the back of his mind make some sort of joke to try and blow off some of their steam: something about a game of Marco Polo with consequences— Stanley would never seriously joke about their niece at risk, but he’d always been good with using his quirks to focus Ford when his brain was beginning to short circuit.

“Mabel?!” Ford called more frantically now, not processing the buildings he saw as he ran, merely flashes of color and the textures of brick and stucco as he passed houses or businesses, weaving through streets and looking into alleyways as he searched for any sort of sound— in this case a growing hum of intensity of a crowd of people, louder and louder as he neared their location. 

He was body-checked by a passerby, someone attempting to shove him out of the way, and only moderately succeeding as his broad form stood solid against the coming perpetrator trying to rush past him to get to the same place he was headed. His first instinct was to use the contact to his advantage, where Stan could pick a man’s pocket without a conscious thought, Ford trained his body to automatically counter any contact made with it, if need be. He could plant his body and spin the blurred, genderless form into the wall, demanding they tell him the location of the mob seemingly terrorizing his niece.

Or, he could let them pass, and follow them right to the centre of the mob itself so that he could finally bulldoze past.

The scrambling, lanky body reminded him of the kind of goblin that Fiddleford always tried to portray as a Non-Playable Character in his more vicious one-shots, the same kind of haunched over scurry that was ape-like enough to remind him of Sméagol’s clambering scuffle. It didn’t seem quite human, but nothing in this town categorized itself in clean labels anymore. It passed Ford with a snort of a laugh and kept scuttling on, eager to reach the larger group. If what he was following was more anomaly than man, then he would deal with that when he finally found his niece and knocked the teeth out of whatever made her feel this type of fear. 

His vision felt like it was at a lower frame rate than usual, the shadowy being before him scampering out of focus and moving now in a weird frame-skipping visual, moving like a reel of stop motion with chunks cut out of it. It slipped around a corner and into an alley where bodies pressed so close in their attempt to surge forward, they might as well have been stuck, or attempting to meld together. 

Stanford slipped a hand behind himself, feeling the rage blossom in his chest like a toxin warming and spreading into his limbs and gut. The hatred he felt was unbearable, sickening. If it had come from any other situation, he would have been so ashamed; yet the feeling felt almost righteous as he slipped his weapon from his waistband and shot at the sky, having to consciously make the decision to miss rather than falling on his baser survival instincts from 30 years of danger. 

The crowd suddenly silenced, freezing in place, leaving only the sound of a sobbing young girl, desperately weeping at the center of the mob. Ford took a breath to speak, to call out to her, to order the horde to move- something. Instead they suddenly parted, an army of frozen figures of blurred and shadowed faces like demons in myth and stories meant to keep children in their beds at night.

Mabel Pines lay curled tight in the center, in a posture that felt all too familiar. She was bracing for something, her head tucked into her body behind her arm like she was waiting for a blow to land. Her pink knitted sweater had a tear where someone had very obviously grabbed the sleeve and tried to pull her closer, the area where the torso meets the shoulder ripped and revealed the lilac short sleeved shirt beneath it. 

There were no marks like she’d been touched yet, no purpling bruises on her face, only smears of dirt on her cheek and her knees from where she’d probably fallen trying to scramble away from this small legion of demonic townsfolk. When the crowd moved, her hiccuping sobs stopped, holding her breath and pulling herself tighter as if she could turn herself invisible and avoid whatever she was mentally preparing for. 

The grip on his weapon tightened, yet there was suddenly nothing in his hand. He balled his fist and released it in an exercise of control, wishing to turn around and start blasting at anyone who would hurt her like this— and yet would that not scare her just as much?

Ford knelt in front of her, crawling closer on his hands and knees, not even processing the sudden lack of weapon where he hadn’t dropped or holstered it, keeping his voice low and smooth. “Mabel… Mabel sweetie, it’s me-”

“No!” She curled tighter, a sob wracking her body like she had been physically jolted by the world around her. “Stop lying to me!”

Her words struck him, his brows furrowing, his body crawling closer once again— one more step. “Sweetheart-”

“You’re not safe!” The words echoed through the alley like glass splinters when dropped from a great height. Did she mean he was not safe for her? “You’re not safe, none of you are.”

It took Ford all the strength in his soul not to surge forward and scoop her into his lap and against his chest, to press her ear against his heart and tuck his nose into her hair to reassure her that there was nothing that could keep him, or Stan, or Dipper away from her. That they would be with her until the end of their days. Instead he swallowed thickly to ask her “What do you mean?” 

Her silence had bloomed into openly weeping now, a little pink ball of dirty yarn fuzz and long brown hair, curled away from him like she could disappear into the ground. “I started all of this— they’re right, I’m too evil to be forgiven.”

In his heart, he snarled. He turned towards the mob of angry shadows, still frozen and parted, and began to scream even if he didn’t know what. In reality his brows twitched together in concern, trying to wade through the emotions and find the truth. “I don’t understand-”

“I did this.” From sobbing to barely a whisper, a desperate plea of need she thought didn’t deserve to be answered.

Ford tried to reach out, letting his face soften into a smile even when his heart didn’t necessarily want to, needing to be strong for her, needing to be a source of comfort where she needed. “Sweetheart, you didn’t do anything wrong—”

How could he convince her that her weakness had only been love? That there was no fault in being twelve and needing the love your family and friends provided?
How could he convince her that there was no shame to be had in needing to prove to the world around her she was worth staying for, especially as the man who had almost stolen away her twin brother?

“Why would I trust you?!” She finally looked up, those gorgeous brown eyes suddenly nearly black with rage. “You’re- You-” So upset that she couldn’t get a sentence out, stumbling backwards away from him, away from his hands, away from his touch like he was not only a threat, but that he was disgusting. “You’re the reason all of this happened. You’re the reason they hate me.” She eventually stopped crawling backwards, hitting a wall that he couldn’t see, but that limited her movement again from being able to scoot further away from him. 

His mind latched on to the part of the sentence he assumed meant the most to her. This was Mabel, his Mabel, his sweet little Sparkle. “Mabel sweetie, they don’t hate-”

His great niece struggled to her feet on shaking legs, suddenly looking like she’d been through hell, like the mob around her had driven her through the forest. Though they hadn’t moved— frozen in space as a group of faceless people, the jumble of limbs almost like the gnarled, spindly branches of the white oaks in the forest, grown so tightly together in places where the branches had intertwined almost dangerously and made it almost unperceivable where one ended and the next began. These people, who had only been until that moment exactly that- people- were now something wholly stranger, entirely unknown to him, beings of odd silhouettes of which he could not recall encountering on his travels across the multiverse. 

They carried weapons now, from innocent— as innocent as an angry mob chasing a twelve year old girl can be— townspeople to aliens and demons of various humanoid shapes, tangled together like the branches of those same old gnarly trees. In their hands held aloft were old, rusted, archaic weapons, knives, pitchforks, hatchets, stakes, still crowded around himself and Mabel, parted for him and aiming for her. 

Mabel struggled to her feet, her hair full of twigs and branches, the bottom hem of her skirt torn up and her legs scuffed with both dirt and scrapes from stumbling to her knees and against objects as she ran. Her pink sweater had changed to something red, not the same vivid scarlet she would have normally used, but closer to wine or maroon like his own sweater, slowly darkening from the center where there had been some sort of design, the red growing darker as it spread out from just below her ribcage like it was growing wet with time, like it was soaking up liquid.

Like it was soaking up blood. 

“Do you see them?!” She cried, looking at him with shocked incredulousness, like she couldn’t believe that he would lie to her about something so obvious. She was pressed back against that invisible wall before him as if she could phase through it to escape. Usually when he knelt down, she was more around his eye level, usually he was able to cup her soft little face in his two massive hands and draw her into him to soothe her worries. In this moment however it felt like every second she looked at him like someone who she couldn’t trust, the taller she became. Or the smaller he became in her rage-black gaze. 

Her eyes began to well with tears, but these were not the tears of a little girl, the tears of a scraped knee or a bad dream, these were the tears of a soul irrefutably wronged, and maimed in the process. “They hate me, Stanford.” He full body winced at the use of his full first name, her voice sounding older beyond her years, like a teacher from his childhood or something of the like. “They hate me to the point of wanting to hurt me-”

“Mabel, darling—”

“And it’s your fault.” There was a tone of finality to her words, like she would accept no other answer to this problem. In her eyes she reflected all of his self loathing back at him, a sneer on her lips like he had never seen her make in his time knowing her. “Its your fault. None of this would have happened if you weren’t weak-”

This wasn’t Mabel. This couldn’t be his girl—

Mabel Pines was a sweetheart, eager and excitable with such an inability to be mean that it was hard for her to fathom that people would willingly be mean to her. He had begun to call her his Sparkle when it was just them, she loved glitter and sprinkles and anything that gave a “Touch of blam!” as she had told him, and he’d explained to her that she had brought sparkle back into his life after years of sterile seriousness. In truth, the family he’d been given out of the portal had brought color into his life once again. Color, sparkle, adventure, security— but he knew only Mabel would appreciate affection tailored in such a way, and so he kept his nickname between them. 

He tried once. Only once. “Sparkle-”

“Don’t you dare.” Her voice warbled with tears, angry and hot as they streamed down her face. “You were selfish and it almost got us all killed.” 

“I-” He was floundering, feeling smaller and smaller as she looked down her nose at him, blinking past hot tears of rage that felt like they could drown him at any moment. 

She sneered at him again “You were selfish and weak— so selfish you’d let Grunkle Stan suffer for years just because of one stupid mistake-”

“Mabel-”

“—You tried to steal Dipper from me because you can’t stand not to be around people who- who worship you for your intellect-” Her voice was raising now, standing with a wide stance, her hands balled into fists like she would beat on his chest at any moment— but at this point she felt so much taller than him, looking down at him like he was the child in the situation and she had caught his grubby little grotesque, deformed hands in her cookie jar. “You sacrificed the entire world for a chance at stroking your own ego and then pinned it all on me!”

He flinched as she swung her hands out to gesture at the creatures who had once been townsfolk, pointing towards their weapons and their frozen crying faces— the dead eyes of people who frankly didn’t matter because not a decent soul in the world couldn’t love his Mabel. “I didn’t-”

“It doesn’t matter, Stanford!” She screamed, the echo of which suddenly reverberated over and over again in the nearly empty blackness of this void— lit from specific angles like a stage play, respect with no designation of up or downstage, no limit to the proscenium, no lights to mark the lip of the apron. If he had looked behind him he knew he wouldn’t see the spotlight that illuminated her from the harsh angle. There were no shadows to indicate a single directionality either, but what could be said about the consumption of shadow by a void black as pitch? “It doesn’t matter what you intended. It doesn’t matter what you hoped. You made a selfish, stupid decision and everyone should have known not to trust a freak like you!”

The words echoed again, this time louder, the stage beginning to form itself on the edges of his vision— black curtains, a clear texture to the wall behind her as some sort of wooden flat, painted black to match the fire retardant draping fabric of the traveler curtains that split the stage into something far smaller than it could be. 

Ford flinched with his full body, instinctually holding his hands up in front of his face, palms outward and facing whatever danger might have been directed towards his face and eyes. A second spot illuminated his hands, narrowed to a pinprick to highlight only the ends of his extremities, the paleness of his skin seeming to make him glow in the white hot light of the stage. 

In the light of the pinpoint spotlight he could barely see anything around him anymore, Mabel seemingly gone. The hot light on his hands made him swap his focus from her to them, the light leaving nothing else to center his attention on. 

His hands. 

Duplicated middle fingers on ether extremity, changing the bone formation in his hand, forcing a wider, all around larger palm and silhouette by sheer placement of the digit. It took much of his childhood, but he convinced himself that there was nothing wrong with his abnormality— in fact it was a blessing in disguise! 

His version of his condition was probably the rarest of them all. In the research he had found, only 1 of every 500-1,000 babies were born with an extra finger. Central polydactyly, duplicated middle finger on either hand as he could see clearly on his own massive palms, was rare even among the rare condition itself. In that less than a point percentile of babies born with his condition, the fact that he could use the finger, both of the extra digits, was a statistical miracle. It was more likely for him to have been born with syndactyly or even a cleft hand, but instead his limb was fully functional if not extra functional.

He trained himself to see his uniqueness not as a deformity, as would be the medical term thrown in his direction, but as an evolution. He used his finger to his advantage, learning to play complex piano pieces at an incredibly young age to showcase his gift, to prove to the outside world that he was not a-

Freak.

The figures that had been chasing after Mabel, who disappeared with the light, now returned to turn on him. Creatures and demons of indescribable horror- faces he could not quite see, limbs and weapons still tangled like tree branches in the dead of winter, their noise now coming to a crescendo and he could finally make out what they were saying as they backed him away from the flat Mabel had been pressed against, through the proscenium arch and towards the apron of the slowly building stage. 

Freak. Weirdo. Mutant. Oddity. Monster. Demon Spawn. 

This time it was his turn to stumble back, falling onto his rear and using his feet to slide backwards away from these aberrations of anger and misunderstanding, swinging blades and clapping clubs into their hands as if threatening him for merely existing. His instinct was to hold up a hand extending it out as a shield once again, only to snap it back to his chest when the square blade of a butcher’s cleaver swept down and would have lopped him clean at the wrist if he had allowed it to stay up. 

Ford rapidly tugged his hand to his chest and heard the familiar crunch and squeak of his old bomber jacket, the one he had worn almost every day from the moment he’d gotten it to the moment he’d grown out of it. He’d been brave in that jacket, he’d worn it as an emotional shield where he couldn’t always manage a physical one to the bullies that made him feel inferior. 

He didn’t immediately look down, instead opting to add his hands to the endeavor of his feet to crawl backwards on the waxed, beige wooden boards of the stage. The figures grew larger and louder, the screams and jeers of names and commands to grab him or hurt him crescendoed until the echo was compounding the volume, making the sound ring over and over again in the chasm of his own skull. One of his hands moved past the edge of the stage apron and he almost fell into the orchestra pit, squeaking as his body rapidly fell back and was only saved by his presence of mind and his center of balance being well on the stage itself. 

It was too loud, there were too many, the movement too much— he felt small and meek again, the way he had when he was young, the way he had when he needed Stanley to protect him. The bomber jacket seemed fitting then, from an age where he had not fully come to terms with himself as a human being, let alone as a man, still hinging his self worth on the approval of the children and adults around him who couldn’t understand a medical marvel if it grew on their own body.

Had the figures grown larger? Or had he grown smaller? He ran all this way to be the hero, but here he was on the precipice of falling and cowering towards the orchestra pit to get away from the sound and the threat.

Finally one figure, always closer, smaller than the rest, haunched in a familiar way and ambling over like an old man with a large blunt object that looked mildly spoon like— a circular body attached to a long neck that made some sort of strum when he spun it around in his hand like a baseball bat— threw down his weapon. The instrument, which revealed itself to be a banjo as the strings clattered against the floor, skittered off to his right and the rest of the crowd stopped for a moment behind him. The figure stood completely in shadow, haunched and goblin like, hands twitching as the rest stood behind it. 

“W-What do you want from me?” he heard the high pitched voice of a boy where he knew should be the bass of a man, loathing how he immediately stuttered in fear.

His breath picked up to a pant, one hand on the lip of the stage bracing him, the other balled into a fist but held to his chest like he was holding steady a shield spell through sheer force of will. 

The figure—the creature—never spoke, simply standing a foot away from where Ford’s leg curled slightly into his body, twitching like a robot in need of recalibration. It looked so familiar, the silhouette, the cadence of his shuffling scamper, the sound of the banjo hitting the floor—

Suddenly the figure bore a mouth, an impossibly deep chasm of fangs, row after row of thin, thorn-like teeth of all angles and sizes like a sand tiger shark, opening wider than a humanoid jaw should allow. 

All Ford could do was stare in terror, hand clutching tighter to his chest, too scared stiff to really consider strafing left or right to try and get away, his body screaming at him not to tumble backwards into the pit even if it would only be a four or five foot drop. His hand clenched again anxiously and it sent the creature into paroxysms, twitching and screeching with its mouth open and teeth illuminated by the spotlight that was on Ford’s outstretched hand only moments before. 

The creature lunged, mouth open like it was trying to swallow him whole. Ford screamed in a high pitch, flinching in on himself as tight as he possibly could, curling into the fetal position with a wet, teary yelp of pain. He was going to be torn to shreds by row upon row of jagged teeth with nowhere else to go. 

The blow never came.

Shaking, scared, unable to control that unbridled fear, he looked up at the figure, but where it had been was a gap in the crowd. In fact, the entire mob of people suddenly looked… flat. Two dimensional. A gathering of cardboard cut outs, painted with angry faces reminiscent of Stanley’s childhood art style suddenly teetered forward and fell to the floor with a nearly silent fooh of air. The stage was suddenly empty, illuminated by lights that came from behind him. 

His breath slowly came back in puffing pants, his hands both having gone numb and slowly returning feeling in twinkling pins and needles. His eyes welled up with tears, and he felt his lip quivering, but his brain was mostly in a state of shock. He was shaking softly and he didn’t know why. They were fake. They were inanimate objects, neither he nor Mabel were ever in danger. So why was he so terrified? 

Stanford struggled to his feet, shaking on legs far shorter than they had been in a long time, standing at a height that gave the world an enormity he wasn’t used to anymore. How long had it been since he had felt so- small? He considered himself to be on the taller side now, never as tall as Fiddleford or a man like Buddy Gleeful, but he and his twin brother had grown to cut the same imposing figure their father had been, taller than most of the crowd, but not taller than everyone. He was also far broader than he had been as a child. His body had gone through many iterations: stocky, thin, neglected, pristine— all the while remaining broad shouldered and agile as the boxing protege his father always wanted. 

He had been a small and slight child, always the thinner brother, slightly sickly at times— always the twin in need of protecting and never the twin doing the protecting. The jacket was his costume, his padding, his stop closer to normalcy.

His skin bristled at the sound of soft murmuring from behind him, the hair on his arms bristling like the quills of a porcupine, brushing up against the undersides of his sleeves and sending his brain into a momentary electric overstimulation of panic. There was something behind him— or rather, guessing by the sound, many somethings. Whispering, murmuring, words of unintelligible shock and enrapture from behind him crawling up his back and into the fleece collar of his bomber jacket like the pinprick legs of spiders, each delicate thorny step feeling sharp like the sound of metal on metal. 

Ford felt his eyes brim with tears for a moment, overwhelmed by sensation in a way he hadn’t been in so long. Was that why he was shutting down? Even earlier with the creatures he had so securely trusted to be real, the sensations felt so real both in his heart and in the space around him— and then it had all been a lie.

He was still facing the back of the stage, an empty proscenium of curtains and half painted walls, the flats all pulled away like a rehearsal evacuated mid-queue. The feeling of a presence behind him crawled up his body and into the fabric of his shirt, the illusion of fingers sliding onto his chest and up his torso to pull him backwards made him want to tear his shirt off and expose the source, and still he couldn’t bring himself to move.

Whispering intensified for a moment, an angry gathering like the mob that summoned before Mabel before she had lashed out at him, pouring a wave of suffocating energy over him. 

He was on a stage.

What else could be behind him but an audience? 

His feet ripped off the stage-floor like they had been rooted with velcro, the tear of the hooks and loops not audible but felt, the force of his anxiety trying to hold him in place as his fear begged him to turn and check his surroundings. It was difficult, but once he ripped himself from the spot, it was like all force of physics had let him go, the velocity of his tugging battle with gravity spinning him around to finally check the rest of the room.

 The whispers began to increase in volume, almost upset like they had been cheated out of a show. How right that analysis had been, his glasses catching the stage lights from the mezzanine and making him wince for a moment before the fog affront his lenses cleared to reveal row after row of seats in an auditorium, filled with the shadowy figures of an audience. He turned to face his body towards the front of the stage, his movements feeling both sluggish and rapid, almost skittering like the repeated edits of a bad horror film. In tandem, the audience hushed as he made himself visible, laid bare for what could have been a stadium’s worth of glowing, reflective white eyes. They had been whispering in upset, now they were silent, enraptured. 

Why was he here? He would have never volunteered for anything that involved him being on a stage if it was not to explain a scientific theory or hypothesis of his own. He loathed attention when it did not pertain directly to his intelligence or accomplishments, and theater work fulfilled neither of those criteria from his perspective. Instead he was simply perceived, and in the worst way possible from what he could surmise, the reflective glow of eyes locked expectantly on him and willing him to perform.

He hated this. He had accepted many awards in his day, but the process of collecting said award had always been the most harrowing part for him. In a way it was sick form of humor, craving the applause and accolades that came with recognition, loathing feeling perceived on such a massive scale as a stage, especially if not among an audience of strictly his peers. 

Spit traveled like sandpaper down a dry and anxious throat, his hands shaking at his sides. His eyes darted around the room, praying on instinct for the telltale glow of those red exit signs in the back of the room, but to no avail. The room seemed endless, just more rows of people, living people, moving and twitching, not blowing as cardboard in the air conditioning of the theater. 

His gaze darted left and then right, searching for nonexistent stage stairs, the orchestra pit directly in front of him black as a chasm and reaching for his ankles. He swallowed again and tried to turn to exit stage right, only to be wracked with a vision that split his skull. 

The audience was laughing, it flashed from several directions and from behind people within the crowd as they pointed and jeered at him on stage standing with his hands in front of his face like he was fearing a hit. 

The man in a boy’s body wrenched his head to the left and opened his eyes to try and stave off the pain the vision gave him, opening his eyes to the same audience in near-possessed silence. Every eye in the house was on him, glowing, silent, observing. He struggled to his feet again where he hadn’t realized he’d fallen, forcing himself to take a breath to steady himself. 

In the mass of people there was an unintelligible voice, then a hush from 3 others before utter silence fell once again. Watching. Waiting. Unblinkingly focussed on him and his pain, nothing else to focus on around him beside the black curtain that separated upstage from downstage. 

A tear of pain ran down the side of his nose as he struggled again to his feet, having seen something before his vision spun into illusions of ridicule. Ford swallowed and determinedly turned to walk in that direction again.

This time the pain was not immediate, instead came a memory he had prayed to forget and yet could never run far enough away from. He was probably about 8 years old, sent away from the house without Stanley for some reason or another, a thing that stopped soon after it started. There were boys, laughing boys, faces he couldn’t make out calling happily for him to join them as they ran down the street calling about an adventure.

He remembers so clearly feeling elated as the older boys of his block invited him on their little adventure, reassuring him that they would keep him safe while his brother was preoccupied. In retrospect he knew they had purposefully tried to lose him, ducking in and out of streets an alleyways moving towards the beach and attempting to use their far more advanced motor skills to hopefully rid themselves of the six fingered child eagerly stumbling and wheezing to keep up. But Ford had known the best paths to the beach, even at such a young age, his mother knew that they would find the beach before they found home, sitting together on the same swing set even if they had started on opposite ends of town. 

When they’d arrived, they’d made him swear an oath of secrecy before revealing a manhole with a slightly misplaced edge— an edge that three 10 year old boys could lift away and lead a child inside. 

It had been exhilarating, Ford already wondering if there was a loophole for twins in an oath of silence so that he could somehow show his other half this wondrous find. It wasn’t often that one went without the other, and showing it to his brother would have been the crowning achievement of his entire week. 

He nodded in complete understanding when he was gently warned to stay at the back of the group, that they needed to be in front of him to make sure that he was safe, like a little brother with a gang of older brothers. He had been so determined to prove to them that he could keep up. 

He would keep up. 

The group had traveled through the sewer on their hands and knees, laughing and complaining about the smell and the muck they were putting their hands through. He’d tried to pipe up that it wasn’t garbage, just algae and sea gunk, but his voice had been drowned out by the echoes of laughter and jeering, the boys throwing ick at each other whenever they’d been given the chance.

Except when the light at the end of the tunnel began to peer around the boy in front of him, and Ford’s eyes had widened in excitement at where it would lead him, a thick barred grate had been slammed into the locked position just before he could swing his legs around to slide out. 

“Wha-” he’d began, then tried to play it off with a laugh “S-Sorry guys, I missed the door… c-can someone help me out?’

The group of boys had stood in front of the grate for what felt like an hour, backs to him— close enough to hide him but not close enough to touch him, ignoring his increasingly panicked requests for help. 

“G-guys? Please I- I think it’s locked-” He tried so hard to keep his voice from cracking, his throat thickening with tears and fear. If they had to grab a police officer or a firefighter to break him out, his father would never let him out of the house again. 

In a blinding glare of light, the eldest boy had turned and looked at him, his face obscured in the vision because of the blinding New Jersey sun. “Let you out? Kid- why would we do that?”

Even in the summer heat his blood had cooled like ice. “B-because I’m stuck-”

One of the other boys chimed in “Nah… Nah you’re in a cage kid!”

“Yeah, and cages are where freaks belong.”

His hands had been so small then, trembling as they tried so hard to grip the metal of the bars and push against the pressure of the lock and seal. The jeering had never stopped, screaming at him that he was a sideshow freak and they should charge a quarter for people to look at him. 

“Yeah, maybe we could charge a dollar for anyone who wants to hold his hand.” One of them had snorted, and another had gagged at the thought. 

“Like fingering a fucking octopus, you’re a fucking sicko.” And the entire group laughed. 

He held in his tears at the words, shaking in genuine fear and flinching away from thrown sand and shells before the boys decided to leave him to bake in the sun. “How’s he gonna get out—?” The name of the kid was lost to time in his mind, just as the names of all of these boys, remembered decades later as shadows and voices that would never leave him alone. 

“We’ll call the cops when we get home. Let his little daddy find him dragged home by the fuzz.” The slurs that had followed his father’s name and shop had turned his stomach even so young, the tears only breaching and bubbling up from his lungs. 

The next hour or so had been a blur, making his way back to the manhole and using nothing but terrified adrenaline to push it up and away enough for him to crawl out and make his way back home. 

He’d never told Stanley nor his parents why he had come home in tears and stinking of rotten fish, he’d only taken the spanking for bringing it into the house before getting hosed off in the backyard. 

This time when the memory ended, the audience was laughing, pointing and jeering at him like it was the punchline of a sick joke or segment of a play. Then silence again, spellbound eager silence, waiting for their show to continue. Had they been laughing, or had he imagined their reaction to the memory? Could they know?

Looking away triggered the visions, the laughing, the memories, which meant he had to avoid it. He was certain he’d seen the exit when he’d turned his head before, but he couldn’t risk looking again with the pounding ache behind his eye like an attempt at an icepick lobotomy. His eyes were leaking, but he was too frightened to raise his hands to his face and check to see if the substance was still tears, or if it had graduated to blood. 

He extended his hand to guide himself, his eyes out and toward the audience, his face frozen in a combination of fear and blank concentration. His goal had been to let his fingers find the wall, stepping slowly so that he didn’t accidentally slam his head into something or trip over his own juvenile feet, but his hand met something very clearly fleshy and the ear splitting scream that followed was one that had followed him for decades. 

Ford’s eyes shot to his hand, his fingers intertwined in one frozen moment with the gorgeous Cathy Crenshaw, her bright blue eyes framed with bouncing blonde curls wide as saucers and terrified, her mouth contorted into a disgusted grimace as she finally looked over at him. 

He was 15 again, standing in the mustard yellow and orange hallways of Glass Shard Beach High in his freshman year, his back against a row of navy blue lockers, the audience in the theater shifting enough to become a blur of rapidly passing students in a crowded hallway. Stan had pushed him ahead, egged him on, showed him exactly how do to it in a way that made the girl giggle and swoon for you.

And she’d been— fuck she’d been a dream. He’d had a crush on her since 6th grade in junior high, her perfect pale skin and bright intelligent eyes… they had almost every math class together for five years beforehand, and he realized how creative and capable she was just before his body had realized her attractiveness- something his body hadn’t done for anyone yet up to that point. It also didn’t help that she was so wonderfully kind to him, gently asking him for pencils over the course of the year and returning them, making sure to include him on Valentine’s day when the other girls were too afraid to approach him, asking him to teach her concepts she could have easily asked the teacher.

He’d had a crush. More than her body, but on her mind and on the heart that connected them. What made it worse was that he couldn’t really remember being close enough to anyone before her to have a crush.

Stan had given him the confidence, showed him the move. He’d used Carla McCorckle, his on and off again girlfriend as the perfect test subject, sliding his hand into hers and pulling her close to smile and ask her a question— she’d been positively pink for him by the time he had let go. Ford hadn’t assumed he could do all of that. He hadn’t assumed that he could softly ask for a kiss, or playfully pin her by her hand against the locker and have her giggling at him that this wasn’t the time, but maybe he could impress her by being smooth somehow.

That’s not how it happened at all. He’d spent days, maybe even weeks slowly working himself into her good graces, bringing her candies and flowers, helping her with homework, smiling at her— he’d done everything right. She’d been responding too, coming up to him in the hallway to talk to him, waving to him in the cafeteria…

She kissed his cheek so softly at the bus stop on the way home.

He’d thought-

She’d maybe-

He’d asked to walk her to class. He’d offered his arm in the past, shoving his hands in his pockets before she could notice anything out of place. At this point he thought she knew-

He’d smiled and threaded their fingers together finally, taking a step to lead her to class, already carrying her books for her in his other arm. On a phonecall with his mother 10 years later, he’d find out that her reaction came more so from her own childhood bullying than anything having to do with him, but the damage was already done. Cathy Crenshaw’s eyes had blown wide and her face morphed into a mask of utter disgust, like he’d circumnavigated her hand to touch her inappropriately instead.

And she screamed. 

She looked at him with such horror in her eyes, like his hand detached itself from his body like Thing from the Addam’s family and had skittered its way right up her dress. Cathy scrambled, snatching her hands away and falling back away from him with her arms holding her body tight like he’d actively attacked her. The blurring movement stopped as all the students turned to them, staring at him, pointing and laughing. He remembered an administrator moving through the crowd and taking his arm, someone he hadn’t known, someone who didn’t understand he wasn’t a pervert, he was just different, dragging him away from her and into the office to consider calling the police. He remembered them bringing in Stanley, somehow assuming that both twins were involved, getting even more upset that they would use his incident to pin something on his brother.

Instead of the memory continuing the way it should have, she pushed herself off the lockers with righteous rage in those beautiful eyes, those kind and intelligent blue eyes blown black with the adrenaline of fury “Miscreant-” And shoved him with as much power as she could muster to get him away from her. 

After years of getting shoved into lockers, he knew exactly how to brace himself so that his head didn’t slam into the only mildly forgiving sheetmetal of the flimsy door. He knew to round his shoulders and lower his head so that his chin hit his chest instead, the locker usually dented a bit, but his body remained intact. Instead, his body hit something far less dent-able than he had anticipated. The force of hitting a window pane stole the air from his lungs, stealing a whimper from his chest.

For a moment, he was afraid he’d gone blind, having changed locations one last time going from the brightly lit stage to a pitch black void. It was so incredibly dark for a split second before his eyes settled on his childhood bedroom. He was- still a teenager but definitely older than a freshman considering the state of his bedroom.

His and Stan’s bedroom. Their bedroom.

Stanley was still here. 

The gym clothes on the floor, his sheets still mussed up— he ran across the room to his brother’s mattress, the bottom bunk, lifting it up to find where he’d helped Stanley stash his collection of comic books from their father. Still there. 

“You ignoramus,” but not for long. “Your brother was gonna be our ticket outta this dump!”

 His father’s voice was almost never loud. He kept his voice low, gravelly, a whisper hidden in the chasm of his chest. Every word was a murmur, the soft squeak of bats and the fluttering of wings that you could only hear because of the rising volume of an echo in a tight space. Affection was a whisper, cheeky murmurs and compliments murmured into the collar of his mother’s coat or a low purr as he reached for her across the room ‘Caryn baby, c’mere.’ or ‘I love you, gorgeous,’ against her lips. ‘You did great,’ were words Ford heard murmured into Stanley’s hair after a fight, ‘Nice one,’ into his own after an awards presentation. The only way the words made it out and into their ears was because of the echo of that whisper in the deep dark cave of his chest.

Anger was a rockslide. 

Anger was a loud crack and rumble that erupted from the man’s mouth like his jaw might unhinge. If his mouth wasn’t open, his face set so completely that sometimes he feared the possibility that his jaw would crush to dust from the pressure of his scowl. Unlike affection, which began in near silence and echoed enough to be heard, anger began as the resounding clap of falling stone shattering into a million pieces. 

Ford knew to rush to the window, this time pressing his hands to the glass instead of holding the Westcoast Tech brochure like a childhood stuffed animal with its stuffing coming out. 

He didn’t remember the incident completely, honestly as a teenager he’d felt like it was so terribly vivid, every color, every sound, every physical sensation. Even now he felt that rage bubbling up inside of him, welling up like an eternal spring broken from the ground. 

Stanley betrayed him. He knew this was something that meant so much to him— Stan heard him wax poetic for months about how wonderful it would have been to be able to afford one of the bigger colleges, but that he wouldn’t even apply to save their parents’ money. Their mother would have done anything to make sure her sons were safe, she would have given anything, stolen anything, talked to anyone to make their dreams come true, so there had been a time where he and Stan had agreed not to disclose anything she would work herself too hard for. Sailing the world was a dumb little childhood fantasy, but college? College was something she felt like she had to contribute to. 

He’d known. They’d slept feet apart from each other that night and Stan had let Ford fantasize all night about the kind of education he could have unlocked on the west coast, the kind of life he could live. 

Now, a lifetime later, he understood. Stanley was just a scared kid, so scared of being perceived like a saboteur that it hadn’t even occurred to him to be honest. He understood the fear now. He understood the pain now. 

But all those years ago-

“All you ever do is lie and cheat and ride on your brother’s coat tails,” it had felt so true back then. All the tests he helped Stan pass, all the little things he learned to steal from a mother who was ashamed at the fact that sometimes she physically couldn’t stop herself. Years and years of detention, years of running from the cops and new awful schemes to screw with the tourists, no one even thinking of his merits. 

From the second floor he saw his brother stumble out of the door and fall onto the pavement in front of his car. The car he worked two jobs to be able to afford, the car that represented at that point, one year of perfect freedom for the twins. He couldn’t see his father, the man was still on the porch, meaning that he was hidden by proximity to the building, but his voice reverberated through the glass panes, crawling through the brick, mortar, and drywall as a sentient being. 

Ford remembered what led up to it, watching his father shove the boy through the house, berating him about all the things he’d done wrong while their mother tried to ask what was happening. Baby Shermie had been so small, not understanding, crying, swaddled tightly and needing desperately to be put back to sleep.

“Well, this time you cost our family potential millions! And, until you make us a fortune, you’re not welcome in this household!” He saw a bag fall into Stan’s lap and the door slamming shook the entire house.

“You knew, didn’t you?” a voice came from somewhere, familiar and nasal but not clicking any sort of pattern of recognition. “Did you understand that they were kicking him out for good? Or did it just go right over your head?”

“—Tell him he’s crazy-… Ford? High Six?” His ears were ringing. He felt so… angry and it suddenly just broke. He slammed his hands on the glass to get his brother’s attention, to tell him to wait, to let him grab his stuff as if he could follow him into the wilds of being alone. 

He’d closed the blinds in his memory, hiding himself from his twin before he could burst into tears as he had since noon that afternoon. He crawled up into the top bunk and curled up as tightly as he possibly could to weep. 

He wished at that moment that he’d never have to see the bastard again.

He’d nearly gotten his wish.

“You did know.” The voice came again, Ford frozen against the window again with tears welled in his eyes. 

“I didn’t- I never meant-” He couldn’t get the words out, his voice cracking as it hadn’t in years. 

The voice pulled at something inside of him, something sinister and tasting bitter like bile. “But no one can blame you… didn’t you want this in the moment?”

His tears ran down his cheeks heavy with the grief of knowledge. Stanley suffered in the years following his exile from their childhood home, the near complete excommunication of him from what had once been a close knit family. They were never close again, the trust between them dissolved and scattered like sand thrown into a tumultuous sea. 

He’d spent years avoiding news, assuming the face he periodically saw swindling people on the television with bullshit made up products was the face of a man doing well for himself. Who could blame him, his brother was on TV, he had to be some moniker of stable, right?

How wrong he had been. 

How many nights since they had reconnected had he curled up with his brother in the same bed like they had been little kids, curling in on themselves and each other to fit into the compact space they had chosen. He laid awake, Stan’s head on his chest as he cried and whimpered, wracked with nightmares of the life he lived before he founded the Mystery Shack. Stanley would wake and narrate what he saw before he even processed who or what might be listening, only looking up to notice Ford again when his twin was struggling to hide his tears.

He’d wished that upon Stanley.

All for an education he’d gotten anyways.

“I didn’t know-”

The voice interrupted him, snide and wicked in its intensity. “But, you wished for it. You remember… finding an empty chemistry lab to hide in, curled up under a lab table with your hands in your hair… crying like an idiot-”

“Stop-”

“—Hating yourself for wishing you’d listened when Stan learned how to lock pick-”

“Ple-”

“— because all you wanted to do was open a cabinet and find something with just the right GHS label-” 

He couldn’t even deny, the voice was absolutely right. He’d experienced lows in his life, but the end of the science fair was the first time he had consciously laid down and wished to die. 

Linoleum flooring was cold on his face, he hadn’t even remembered stealing into the room, let alone sliding himself under a desk and squeezing himself as tight as he could possibly go as if he could force the breath from his lungs by sheer force of will. His eyes were blurry from tears he didn’t even register, looking up through waterlogged vision up at the walnut cabinets he knew contained the extra chemicals from the experiments that were run in other laboratories. Ethanol, ammonia, copper(ii) sulphate, magnesium, potassium chloride, isopropyl alcohol, powdered dextrose, phenolphthalein— there had to be something in there, something that would hurt less than this pain in his heart from being rejected. Something that would hurt less than the pain of being betrayed.

As a child he’d contemplated self harm, knowing it was too expensive for his parents to remove his finger cosmetically, wondering if he cut them off himself would it be cheaper to simply save his hands? Emergency surgery had to be cheaper than cosmetic, right?

His pain had always been centered around his hands, like the spotlight on the stage had shown. The star of the Ford Show: not his brain, his abnormality. He’d never wanted to die, he’d only wanted to be accepted for who he was beyond the factors out of his control, a gift no human had ever been freely given. 

He’d stared up at that cabinet, wishing he’d let Stan teach him to lock pick until the name tasted in and of itself like cyanide in his mouth. 

Stanley.

“And of course when sadness turns to anger, suicidal ideation turns homicidal-” 

Ford whipped around and he could feel the tears sliding off his face as he spun with such velocity to scream at an empty bedroom “I never wanted to kill my brother!”

“No… but you marched up those stairs vowing to make him pay… you’d wished with every ounce of energy that you had that he would suffer.”

Ford spun back to the window in time to see his brother’s hand, extended up to where he had been peering down on the boy who had been searching for empathy. He remembered it so clearly. “High Six?” Stanley’s last ditch attempt to beg for help, searching for a human connection in the one person he never thought would leave him. Stanley looked up at the window and, without using the words, begging ‘Please- I’m scared and I made a mistake. I never want to hurt you. Please.’

Instead Ford had closed the blinds, too embarrassed to let Stan see him cry again even though the dark circles and tear stains were apparent on his cheeks already. He’d selfishly turned away when the other half of his soul was in need. 

His own pain hadn’t mattered. He’d ruined Stan’s life. 

He could hear his mother— sweet Moses, his mother— already in the next room sobbing. She’d cried the entire night after confronting his father, refusing to let either her son or her husband near her for the next day or so, going completely on autopilot to make sure that Shermie was fed and content. Her eyes had been so empty and he remembered not being able to make sense of it. Stanley wasn’t dead, he just wasn’t here anymore. Was that not for the better? Had his father not lamented the boy’s uselessness whenever he was frustrated? Had she not witnessed that Ford’s future had been needlessly slaughtered like a spring lamb in a town of vegetarians? Her sobbing was so soft and yet wracked with the grief of a mother in mourning, as if she was holding the limp body of her second son and not the curious form of her infant boy. 

It brought the rage back in full force. She had always loved Stanley more than she had loved him. Had she only wanted her normal son? He had made her laugh. Stanley had made her laugh, and to the primitive brain deep in the recesses of his soul it meant that she loved him more, and he had been unable to forgive either of them for so long.

He had been the success. He had been the one who would save the family, break them out of their generational curse of poverty, put the Pines family back to the greatness they had been in the old country, whatever it was that their grandparents reminisced about in languages he and his brother could barely follow. 

She was supposed to love him. He was the one—

“Didn’t he deserve it? You kept wishing he would suffer the same way you did.” The voice sounded so familiar, a toxic sweetness that screamed at you to spit, rather than swallow. The voice tasted like feasting on dead flesh. Ford stumbled back to the window, tearing at the closed blinds which seemed to be endless now, every tug adding another yard of dusty, sun-bleached red fabric. 

What would he do when he reached the glass, lift the pane? Break it open to crawl down the facade of the house, screaming at his twin to stop and that he’d forgiven him? The question was unanswerable, the curtains never parted. 

“You’ve never been anything other than a selfish prick, haven’t you?” The words felt like needles shot into his spine, sharp and quick. The sharp feeling seemed to pierce at nerves, rendering his arms and hands completely numb, and yet his hands kept moving by sheer force of desperation. “It didn’t matter the truth, it didn’t matter what other people needed, it only mattered what Ford needed-”

“-It was never like that-” 

“And yet you never stopped. Every decision you’ve ever made has been based on your own needs and wants, not the betterment of the world, and definitely not the people you claim to love-” This voice was too familiar, disgustingly familiar. It reached into his mouth and down his throat into his gut and settled at first like a hot coffee on a cold winter night, only to continue to heat and warm like acid eating through his stomach lining and dripping into the cavern that held his intestines. It made him feel like a warehouse, empty and desperate to be filled, desperate to be useful, but with the sinking feeling he would be opening his doors to garbage that would rot his foundation from the inside out. He trusted this voice with the same knowledge that he would be betrayed by it, the abused spouse to nestle their chin into a partner’s hand knowing there was a high chance of being slapped, yet still praying for the kiss. 

It made him feel sick. It made him feel like he was 26 again and begging to be allowed to change the world. He’d grown so far from that eager, needy child that had nothing going for him but a brain and the ability to neglect himself until he reached a goal. He was so far away from the teenager that had waited by the window and shut his brother away after hours and hours of contemplating—

“I love my family-” Ford finally found himself able to choke out, feeling like tears were leaking from his eyes, but never feeling the wet slide of droplets down his cheeks or the side of his nose. 

The voice laughed, too much of a nasal tenor to chuckle even though it seemed to try, “Yeah, but did they ever love you? Or were they so eager to see what you could do for them?”

His voice was still that raw, sobbing tremble it had been that night long ago“M-my family l-loves me-” 

“I wouldn’t be too sure! Besides, did Stanley ever call? Ten years apart and the only thing you ever heard from him was a stupid scam on the television.” 

It was right, on nights where his soul had sunk low and his heart cried for help, nights where he curled up in bed and wondered if he had ever really succeeded in his life, wondered if any of his research would be accepted, wondered if the university would pull his funding and disqualify him from his own grant money for the lack of results— he had reached down off the side of his couch cushions, praying that instead of finding the floor, his hand would dangle through time to feel his twin brother reach up and tangle their fingers together— sliding back to when Stan would wordlessly reach up to the top bunk to comfort his tears in the middle of the night. 

But of course, nothing ever came. How could it have? At the time he thought Stan had sabotaged his life, good riddance to the idiot who had always pulled him down. He couldn’t even reach out and apologize, he selfishly abandoned him—… now he knew that Stan had suffered horrors beyond his imagination in return for Ford having not spoken up out of anger. 

And he was angry. It made him sick. He was still so angry for those nights, even knowing the truth, even understanding that Stan had paid tenfold for a crime he had not intentionally committed— his only crime had been fear, and yet some nights when he woke screaming from a nightmare, he confessed things to Ford that made the man feel the need to weep, or stab himself in penance that his other half had ever had to endure that kind of pain.

It was exactly that which proved the voice right, was it not? That same sickening anger that spread through his belly and into his veins like the ache of residual lactic acid even when he knew the stories and he had felt the pain. 

It was only about him. He was self centered, self important— he’d put his twin out on the streets, he put the entire multiverse at risk, why? Because someone had told him he was important.

His hand tried to slam against the glass, watching the last moment Stanley could have been saved roll away from him on junkyard tires because he was too selfish to do anything, but instead of hitting the pane, his hand fell through and his body followed the force of the movement. Ford was suddenly falling, not into the street but into the dark, much worse than the orchestra pit at the end of the stage, something far more sinister. He tumbled forwards, flipping overhead until he landed on his back with a sickening crack of broken bone he could not feel, the painful puff of air escaping his lungs as the flat surface slammed it out of him, surrounding him in a void like tar.

He recognized the texture too intimately to admit. This smooth, cold, pore-less skin that felt dead yet moved like it was alive at the same time. He could recognize Bill Cipher’s hands in an instant: pitch black flesh, with the same hairless uniformity of smooth skin that became almost rough when touched from its lack of irregularities, human flesh catching as it moved in the same way skin catches on skin in a shower with hard water. His own flesh goose-pimpled at the thought, his eyelids flexing shut, lip trembling as he suddenly became hyperaware of the sensations around him.

Back when they had been close, Bill’s touches had been relighted to small hands on his much larger form, and the touches had been rare enough that he would want to relish in every moment. There had been an interesting sensation when the hand would linger on his skin, but Bill’s hands had been so small in comparison to his own, the thought had been fleeting other than the explanation Bill had allowed him once as they shared a night of casual conversation. Now, he could feel that same sensation multiplied by the fact that the hand was large enough to lay on. 

Cipher lacked fingerprints in the same way that human beings had them. The pad of a human finger was made up of ridges that would span only a fraction of a millimeter, 0.1-0.3 to be exact, creating a rough landscape for substances to stick inside which made fingerprints possible. If Bill had had a human finger, his fingerprint ridges would have felt odd, but mostly normal even at this great heft of a size. No— Ciphers flesh was completely smooth and pore-less upon first contact, almost feeling as though it was made of glass and the skin oils from Ford’s own skin caught on this glassy flesh as it dragged across his cheek. 

When the demon left his hand on an object for long enough, the black flesh erupted, not in the speckle of goosebumps like a human, but the round, reaching suction cups of an octopus. When Bill was small, it felt interesting, but nearly unperceivable— now he felt every independently working sucker incredibly intimately, latching onto his clothing and his skin to search his body with chemo-tactile receptors, touching, tasting, and smelling every inch of his body they held contact with. 

The darkness lifted with light that came from one immensely large eye opening about ten feet above him at a little bit of a distance, like Bill was holding his hand out with his arm at an angle. There was no pupil yet, he only knew it was an eye from the surrounding lids and lashes, otherwise it was a milky white as if someone had pulled the moon down and leashed it to the grass. 

The sudden stench made him recoil and he didn’t need to look down to know he was no longer 17. He was 31. His clothing felt stale and stiff on his body from the filth he had forced himself to endure, and he could immediately feel the headache erupting behind his sinuses. He had neglected himself so completely in his attempt to repel and destroy the demon holding him that he had gone completely nose blind. He remembered the children at the library, holding their noses and beginning to cry: he was so used to being shunned, his hands shaking, knuckles bruised so bad it hurt to flex his hands, his eye periodically bleeding from strain that he was certain caused permanent damage and increased his prescription that he no longer cared about the reactions of these poor little souls. He had simply wanted to survive, his state of being had no longer become life.

The pupil finally rolled onto the eye from above and Ford felt himself snarl in rage, making the attempt to get to his feet with shaking limbs, only to be slammed backwards again as the hand moved closer and closer until the eye was mere inches from his feet. Again he made his mad scrambling dash backwards, the same full body crawl as his child self had made on the wooden floor of the stage, but the suckers had developed the same type of serrated teeth of a squid, pushing flat against his skin and his clothing to latch on and lock him in place, pulling whimpers from him as he tried to fight away from it. 

The hand pulled him closer still until he could feel moisture seeping from the surface of the eye. He saw the lids flinch just slightly from the proximity to the fumes of his stench, but the corners of the eye turned up in a smirk, like his lids were lips. “Fordsy, Fordsy, Fordsy… It’s pathetic, really. I might have been the only one to ever actually love you.”

The rage in his chest broke away from the fear finally and he sneered up at the demon, whose suckers held him tight in an open palm. “You never loved me—” the words ‘not the way I loved you’ left his lips like a stillborn, never actually spoken but still heavy between them. Their relationship was incredibly complicated— had there been something more between them than a muse and his inspiration? Perhaps Ford had felt a little more special for his relationship with Bill, perhaps he felt a little more devoted or a little less inhibited. He had gone to temple as a child, but had he ever believed in a god before Bill? “You never loved me.” He repeated again, but his words were softer, meeker. His soul felt like it had been put through the ringer. The suckers felt like they were leaching the fight from him.

“Shortens the list then!”

As suddenly as the suckers had appeared, they vanished, leaving him on a smooth surface again as the hand began to tip up, sliding his body feet first towards the eye, which sunk into a deep, cavernous, black and blue maw. He dug his heels into the flesh of the demon’s palm, listening to the squeak as the suckers receded and the flesh returned to its smooth glossy finish with little to no friction to keep him from sliding towards the ever deepening cavern of teeth. Eventually the lack of friction will out, his body sliding into Bill’s ever widening mouth without even a breath of time to scream. 

Yet the world did not go black, the darkness that quite literally swallowed him whole did not impede his vision with a black void as he had assumed it would—

The world went white.

Chapter Text

Breath came to him all at once, slamming into him with the same sensation as if it had been slammed out of him. His gasping inhale, his sudden intake of oxygen felt more like hitting a pool of deep still water with the flat of his back. It felt forced, like his body hadn’t wanted to take the breath and his environment had forced one into him, the same way his eyes had processed nothing but black and then suddenly saw stark white without so much as a blink. 

Some people consider black to be the absence of all color, void and dark in deep eternity. In some theories, black is the absence of light, while white is the absence of all color. White is true emptiness and void, and the inclusion of the biting wind drew out of him any color he might have had left. 

Was blind not in void? Did the blind not “see” the black absence of light but a stark void that was the absence of matter instead? It almost stung, his body ached both from the forced inhalation of breath and a sudden sensation of freezing cold. If he didn’t know any better he would have assumed himself nude, but the sensation of fabric brushing the inside of his biceps and forearms told him that he was in fact clothed. 

His eyes blinked a few times, stinging with both the intense light of the blankness around him even in dimmer light, and also a freezing cold breeze that dried tears before they could come. His body was shivering so hard that the freezing cold around him almost felt warm, and he wrung his hands together to try and retain some of the warmth he was losing from this sudden, blistering wind. 

He looked down, wondering why he felt like his feet were bare and buried in the snow, only for his eyes to finally process that he was not in a stark white void, he was in a winter landscape.

His winter landscape.

His toes were bare, buried in a snowdrift and teasing a ledge that looked all too familiar— the narrow flat of the roof of his home, alone in his secluded corner of the forest, far from where the echoes of need and terror reached the ears of man. He had chosen it this way. He had purposely sought out the solitude and peacefulness that came from the distance away from town, but it was not the first time he had wondered if that privacy he had so eagerly hunted would be his undoing.

He was standing in his pajamas with his toes mere centimeters from the edge of a long drop. 

He remembered this vividly. The last time he had woken in this position, he had been standing in place for much longer: icicles stuck to his face, his skin slowly shifting hue to blue as his body hinted at hypothermia, his eyes open and staring intently at the ground far below him. 

His hand threaded through his hair slowly, feeling the lack of scar tissue on his scalp, his eyes blinking rapidly as the wetness of tears began to freeze and the crust of ice crystals that hadn’t been there previously formed on his lashes and waterline. 

He was 30. 

Had he been so old when Bill had extended his claws into the flesh of his brain and seared his neurons permanently? Old enough to know better, old enough to recognize that praise and affection were often used as the carrot on a stick to the desperate to please.  Yet he had also been so young , falling for a predator that made him feel adored in a way no one had in so long. That had given him the same rush as “I’m impressed.” had so long ago.

His face had hurt from smiling when he had come to. He had assumed Bill stood there and kept him in that position for however long it took, probably relishing in the pain of the cold until he relinquished control to let Ford deal with the ache. 

He had gone from being praised so often from peers and professors, to alone in the wilderness surrounded by a town that didn’t like nor understand him. He was isolated from family, from friends, even just from his own scientific community. No “Universal Theory of Weirdness” meant he hadn’t felt comfortable publishing. 

He had been in this town alone, running out of anomalies, running out of fuel, running out of drive, when he had come along— and boy had he felt great.

Adoration had been something he had always craved and sorely lacked. Suddenly there was a God that wanted him— no, NEEDED him…

Today his hands were not bleeding, his body did not feel bruised, but unlike before he couldn’t find it in himself to step away from the ledge. He stood fixated on the ground from the roof of his little a-frame house in the woods, a part of him in the back of his mind thanking everything he had planned for the satellite module he could hear clicking softly behind him in the blowing of the snow that whipped needle pinpricks into his flesh. 

Ford could feel his body succumb to shivers, the adrenaline driven heat leeching from his body and leaving him to feel every shift of the breeze on his goose-pimpled flesh. Tearing, stinging eyes looked down at his figure as his hands came up to hold his midsection as if he could carry the warmth with him like a parcel. Pajamas: a simple black t-shirt and worn red flannel pajama bottoms were the only thing that insulated his legs from the blistering cold that blew him left and right, trying to topple him without the strength to do so.

This was a distinct memory from his past, blood leaking from his left eye, his head pounding like something was desperately trying to crawl its way back to the surface from where it had been long since banished before. He could feel the scratching, grating like nails on a chalkboard with the flat surface being the smooth inside of his skull. Bill had put him here, extended a single leg forwards to dangle over the edge while willing his body backwards to counterbalance the weight, waking him up just as he began to fall backwards. 

Now he was not bleeding, his stomach wasn’t trying to crawl up his throat and his head wasn’t going to explode, yet it almost felt like an echo of reality as he pictured it in his mind. 

The image of blood on the snow flashed across the back of his eyelids, stark white, the clouds diffusing the light enough to prevent shadow, a field of solid white except for a splatter of red matter and the mangled attempt at a body that was not quite in the right order to be-

Stop. 

Even with this image in his mind, he let himself balance his weight on his right foot, swinging his left foot forwards to dangle off the rooftop as if daring the universe to do something. The wind was not as rough as it could be, it was not blistering around and attempting to knock him off balance to throw him off the roof. He took a soft breath to sigh, his hands shaking both from the cold and from the intense shock of fear leeching now from his system. His foot came back, his stance balancing as he returned to standing straight. He shoved his hands into his pockets and took another breath, deeper this time, trying to calm his nerves. Nevermind that he was on the roof of his house in the calm of a snowstorm, nevermind the voice in the back of his head whispering for him to jump; he was home, he was in control, and he was—

“S-Stanford?” A familiar voice stuttered through chattering teeth behind him, and Ford couldn’t help but smile. 

Fiddleford.

The warmth that bloomed inside of him stepped in front of the sadness and the ache in his chest tempting him to lean forwards. His foot came back down to balance and he turned, having just enough space to do so. Ford’s cocoa brown eyes met his best friend’s— no, his former lover’s— worried blue gaze, and his heart dropped into his gut like a peach pit as he saw the face that haunted him for a lifetime. 

Fiddleford’s smiling eyes

Those gorgeous, blue like an ocean of tears, worried eyes. 

He hadn’t seen those eyes in— Christ, how long had it been since he’d been sucked into the portal? Not Ford, but Fiddleford himself? How long had it been since the accident that shattered their trust for most of their lifetimes. Sure, he’d seen Fiddleford since, but they were different, so unfamiliar now. Gone was the love, the soft adoration, leaving only the embers of a fire to keep it warm and the sadness that drifted through them like a fog. 

“C’mon—” Fidd laughed softly, one arm tucked around his body and his pajamas in the cold— had it been then when they had worn basically matching pajamas, if any pajamas at all? Tshirts and loose flannel pants, so easy to slip off in the middle of the night when all control lay abandoned with the setting sun, waking up in the morning wearing each other’s colors and pretending they weren’t pleasantly sore over breakfast as the witness of sunlight peeked through the windows. 

He’d worn red plaid flannel pants to bed almost every day since he’d lived on his own , finding the most comfortable set that he could afford and sticking with them as repeated washes and sleepless nights rubbed the fabric thin and soft; he had even learned to sew a crude stitch to repair the worn holes on the inner thigh.

Fiddleford had bought a nearly identical pair in green, his with a thicker, black and grey elastic waistband and solid in the evergreen color all the way down the leg. It hadn’t been purposeful, the man had started in a cotton set his wife had bought him as a Christmas gift some years before. He didn’t remember when Fidd had gotten the new pants, nor when the blond had swapped over to using them, but he also couldn’t remember what the old set looked like. 

He stood before him in the snow in red plaid pants and a t-shirt too broad shouldered for his thin frame.

It probably still smelled like them.

“C’mon, le’ts get you to bed,” he finished his entreaty, or was it repeated? Ford was so lost in his head now, so confused. What was real? What was memory?

He ran a hand through his hair to ground himself and again felt no scar tissue on the side of his head, no thin raised line from an incision years prior, and no lump of buildup from the panicked attempt to do it himself before he’d been given the chance to do it safely. The hair he saw blowing in front of his face was a deep, dark, chocolate umber, the same as his father’s eyes and his mothers favorite purse— he was 30. Or, rather, nearing 30 and feeling so much older, feeling the leaking of his left eye down his face as his body slowly broke into shivers. Had this been a nightmare? Was this Bill’s attempt at showing his control?

He remembered that night so vividly, even so many years later. Or had it been morning? It had been so hard to tell, the snow had covered everything, even the sky in a soft blanket of hazy grey, it had been as if his entire life had been wrapped in a thin layer of cotton, and it diffused moonlight the same as it had diffused the sun.

He’d fallen asleep in his bed, though not as comfortable as he could have been, he’d crawled in on instinct fully clothed from sheer exhaustion rather than an actual plan to sleep. His eye had been leaking blood for some time, as if Cipher was physically manifesting within his skull and scratching at the glass to be released. So tired, so achy, and yet he’d been jolted awake with his toes hanging off the ledge, his body nearly blue from hypothermia, lucky to have toes by the end of the day at all. 

But that had all happened after the accident, had it not?

Fiddleford had left him. 

“Stanford-” Fiddleford entreated once again, that singular hand that wasn’t wrapped around his waist extended in desperate question, extended to take Ford’s hand and pull him into safety from the ledge.

“You’re n-not real-” His jaw chattered with a chill from the cold he couldn’t even feel.

Fidd laughed incredulously. “Stanford, I think I would know if I wasn’t real.” He murmured with a gentle grin, mirth in those soul caressing eyes of his. When he looked at Ford— when he had looked at Ford— it felt like having the gentlest hands hold his heart. Fiddleford touched him in a way that felt safe, taking a piece of his soul and pressing it into his chest so softly, almost as though he could meld the piece of Ford’s heart with his own. Part of him longed to feel that again.

But that hadn’t happened in a very long time.

He felt thick, viscous liquid sliding down his face, but he couldn’t tell if it was tainted tears, or outright blood trailing a freezing path beside his nose. His lips trembled as if there were soul aching sobs trapped in his throat begging to get out, yet he stood there in relative shock and numbness. 

“You’re-” he began, but a familiar voice stopped him as a mirrored form slid from behind the man. 

“Dead?” The man with his face and voice laughed as he slunk out from behind the blonde, who never reacted to his presence. Fidd still smiled gently, frozen in the middle of another soft murmur to guide him into a bed—their bed. 

The man who shared his face was definitely him, which was a question one had to interrogate with images and impersonations when one was raised with an identical twin. The chance that a reflection was his opposite when he was half asleep was more likely than one might think, even if it felt impossible or improbable— but this was both him and not him. 

Was this what he looked like? All angles and shadows? He’d never seen Stanley that way, even before Stan had rounded out as they’d aged, and they shared the same face. This new Ford stalked around Fiddleford like a comic book character, all hash lines and stippled shadow, his mouth slowly sliding up into a wicked grin, like the Grinch in the animated film that had been released when he was a child. This was a version of him that was simultaneously sleepless and rested, the skin beneath his eyes sunken, his stubble dark and scratchy, yet his hair was pressed into various matted angles like he had slept too long in one spot. He was dressed in a white button down, skewed black tie, and a filthy trench coat, smelling as if death vomited up on itself. 

There was something horrifically wrong about this sight.

It wasn’t the fact that he walked on air like solid ground, or that he was a double that Ford was obviously not controlling himself. No. Two bright yellow eyes glowed back at him from the sunken recesses of stress and sleeplessness. Reflecting the diffused light like citrine spheres on a shelf in the sun, two thin slitted pupils locked on him as he made his way around the now frozen body of his friend, like a big cat coming around a bush to stalk cornered prey. 

As he passed Fiddleford, the man changed as well, now in his own button down, his green suit jacket replaced with a lab coat, his glasses perched on his nose over a blank-eyed smile. 

“You’re right, he is dead.” This was his voice- but it wasn’t his . There was something sinister layered atop it. In this moment, he finally understood Robert Louis Stevenson’s description of Edward Hyde: there was something wrong about his appearance, displeasing, disgusting, without an inkling of an idea as to why or how. This man who stood before him with glowing cat-slit eyes could have been a twin, perhaps a triplet, yet something about him was wrong. Stevenson had described Hyde as “giving a strong feeling of deformity” and that is what this doppelganger was. There was nothing visually wrong or evil, and yet his entire presence soured the air around it. And the voice, the voice that was his and not his, doubled with a layer of something high pitched and nasally that reminded him of the creature who scratched the inside of his brain until the blood leaked from his eye like tears ripped from an angel.

Bill.

Ford scowled, the hair in his vision faded from brown to its current salt and pepper, still clinging to the memory of melanin and deep pigment even as his age began to wane in its production. Could Bill not maintain the illusion of his youth? Or had he broken away enough to be himself? He was back to his more advanced age, or somewhere closer to present day if nothing else, staring at the recreation of what he had been when Bill held custody of his unconscious body. 

His throat tightened as his own body burned , his eyes forcing themselves shut as he suddenly felt hands all over his body. He was frozen, shaking, understanding that the feeling of fingers and palms roaming his body was an illusion, not a memory but more a representation of the things he remembered and felt from those days.

Filthy. 

Out of control.

Violated.

Ford wrenched his eyes open and tried to focus past the feelings, the hands dipping closer to his waistband, the fingers dancing around his neck, touches that would feel marvelous from a lover that felt terrifying from disembodied touches in the snow. He took a step back from discomfort and felt around with the heel of his foot for the ledge before planting it in the snow, attempting to be cautious of where the roof ended. “He isn’t dead.” He spat viciously.

The Bill in Ford’s skin grinned again, looking left over his shoulder at where McGucket stood, blank and friendly, not quite present in the moment. “Isn’t he? When was the last time you saw that face? The intelligent, PRESENT eyes?”

 “I see them every d-”

“You took that from him, you know.” This Bill-Ford murmured, like the hiss of an alligator passed off as a whispered temptation. He passed behind Ford to whisper from behind him, somehow walking off the ledge and standing midair behind him, hands sliding up his back and up onto his shoulders. “You took his life in that way.”

The moment Bill-Ford stepped back away from him, Ford took another tentative step backwards, his foot feeling out his limitations, not standing too close, but knowing any step could be the last if he wasn’t completely conscious. “Fiddleford McGucket is alive and breathing.”

Now his doppelganger stood behind Fiddleford, arms draped lazily over the man’s shoulders as he stood frozen. “Notice you didn’t say ‘alive and well’!” The man grinned, every smile more uncanny than the last, more twisted, more sinister without redemption. 

The wording hadn’t been purposeful, but the nausea of what Bill intended to suggest soured his mouth. Behind them both the old man stood, hunched and smiling dumbly with unfocussed eyes— 

It was like he could see through his mimic hanging on his friend, reaching forward to rub the chest of his frozen form, but Ford was focussed on the older man his friend had become. 

Old Man McGucket— when had they become old men? He even called himself the local kook. He was a fraction of the size he had been, even now with the help of people giving him the proper care that he deserved. From what Dipper had confided in him, the man had progressed very much from the beginning of the summer to when they finally met during Weirdmageddon.

“I feel guilty.” Dipper had whispered, sitting beside him on the porch and absently tearing a piece of scrap paper into smaller and smaller shreds while he spoke, channeling his fear into the paper as he told his uncle the truth he had asked for. “He made me… anxious.”

Ford had threaded his fingers together, resting his elbows on his knees and abandoning all semblance of proper posture slowly as the conversation had waned on. “Why?” he tried to sound impassive, he masked the sadness the image conjured. The man was supposed to be a father, a grandfather by now. Instead he scared neighborhood children. 

Dipper had scoffed, not in disbelief but simply as a filler word, standing and letting the shredded pieces of paper fly off his lap and littering the patches of dirt beside the house. “He’s just so- he- he was so… overwhelming. Loud and strange, he scuttled in alleys and screamed nonsense words and talked to raccoons— he tried to eat Soos!”

Ford’s brows kissed his hairline in disbelief. “He was a cannibal?”

“No-” The boy had sheepishly amended kicking the dirt a bit as he stood in front of his uncle. Had he clocked Ford’s posture, anxious because he could tell the man was heartbroken at the news of how his friend had so completely deteriorated in his presence?

Friend. Still no stronger than he had been to choose another word. 

“I mean- he did try to eat Soos, but Soos was in Waddles’ body?” he tried, his face contorting into a wince, the same kind he remembered on himself and Stan’s faces when telling a lie, or a truth they knew would never be believed. 

Thankfully, Ford also knew all the goings on in this place. He nodded in solemn understanding “Experiment 78.” It had been amusing when Dipper’s eyes widened as if he was shocked that Ford knew the object or incident, then smiled sheepishly when the realization dawned as to why . Ford fell into silence, letting his head hang downwards for a moment before he spoke again “You said- you said they called him crazy.”

Dipper had nodded, taking a breath and gently sitting himself down beside his Grunkle once again, closer this time, forfeiting his anxiety to assist in Ford’s comfort. “I- yeah. Yeah everyone did. I- he- was. Was-”

But that was all of the memory that would play in Ford’s mind’s eye before it faded back into the present day, looking through a double of himself nuzzling a frozen Fiddleford’s neck with his nose. Behind the now semi-translucent form of Bill-Ford and Fidds stood the cartoonishly stereotypical country bumpkin that was Old Man McGucket. 

The eyes unfocussed, the smile blank and near toothless as he’d stopped taking care of himself over time. His clothes were ratty and patched to match a hat that seemed to have been stolen off some poor farmer’s scarecrow, his beard dragged on the floor between two bare and bandaged feet. Was this the man he had shared his life with? Was this the man who had been with him for so many of his firsts? 

The man he had left behind was so— promising. He had felt like he’d lost his friend to the hegemonic regime, the need to fulfill that American dream of a wife, a house, and 3.5 kids playing on a hastily groomed lawn. When he had finally taken the chance to reach out to him again, to share the things that drove him forward, his life’s work, the man had returned to him as an eager scientist who was eager to serve the pursuit of knowledge with his gifts. Oh! What gifts he had to offer, the smartest man Ford had ever met, and he’d had the immense privilege of sharing his time, sharing his ability, sharing the project that, at the time, meant more to him than anything he had ever accomplished before.

All sucked away from him slowly, taken from him little by little until he was even physically less the man that Stanford had known. 

The opacity on the two figures directly in front of him suddenly shot back up, blocking the ghastly figure of Old Man McGucket from view. 

This Bill-Posessed Ford was nuzzling the jaw of his companion with his nose, eyes locked on FOrd as he teased the thinner man’s statuesque form, still frozen still with that smile. “Just like with everything else, your selfishness stole his life from him.” The two voices layered malevolently, sometimes sounding more of Bill’s nasal, and others sounding of his own chesty depth. 

For a moment, Fiddleford moved. Just a flash, suddenly an all too familiar image, his head thrown back in ecstasy, Ford’s hand sliding across his belly and towards his waistband with a rumpled shirt and already open trousers. He was hard, deliciously wanton as his mouth lay open in a wordless cry while he watched his own mouth crawl insatiably along the line of his jaw. For that momentary flash, just for that second, he could hear the man whisper his name as he always had, so delicate and needy, full of want and desire that would have normally stayed swallowed behind shamed and penitent lips. 

Then he was standing again, blankly staring with that soft smile, a hand outstretched as if trying to save him from himself still even with Possessed Ford’s hands still snaking around his body like he was wont to take from the man.

“You wanted him. You wanted him even though he was spoken for.” Bill-Ford’s mouth commented while mimicking the same seductive drawl down Fiddleford’s jaw. Bill was going to make him watch this. He felt sick.

He swallowed thickly, taking a third, tentative step backwards, shortening the distance he traveled to keep himself from toppling off the roof. “It takes two-”

“Yes, but one of you should have known better, shouldn’t you?” This was his own voice dominating now, not Bill. Vicious, wicked eyes flashed neon in their intensity, his already slit pupil narrowing for a moment, then widening with pleasured delight. “You don’t want to take accountability for that, do you?” He whispered, his breath wafting through Fidd’s blonde fluff before he slunk around the man to stalk back to Ford, a snake slithering towards a nest of goldfinch eggs. “You wanted something. What was it?”

“I didn’t-”

“Don’t liiie to me, Fordsy!” The thing cried, walking behind him again and making him freeze up entirely, feeling those hands slide now against his own arms and up to his shoulders, then forward to hang on him like he’d been hanging off Fidd. “You wanted something. You took something. Stole. Something. What was it?”

Ford could feel the lump in his throat swelling, tears he bottled up so often, refused to release, refused to notice. He was going to choke on that decision. “I needed his mind- I needed a friend-”

“Another lie, tsk tsk tsk-” Bill-Ford tutted from his shoulder, and one of the hands that had begun to lazily draw circles on his chest reached up to pop him in the nose, bringing tears of pain to his eyes as his brain short circuited in shock. “You asked for a friend but you took a lover, didn’t you?” The demon let him go and spun around to stand between him and the apparition of his friend with a swish of his coat and a wicked, unnaturally curled grin, more toothy than he himself had teeth in his mouth. “You stole that from him! You manipulated him into where you needed him and then you left.”

Ford took a breath to try and argue, his brows furrowing, but the creature turned on his heels to look at Fiddleford— yet only the old man remained. “You took everything from him. You took his wife, his son, and the thing you claimed to treasure most-” The creature glanced over his shoulder “His mind.”

It stalked behind the old man now, not touching him, hands clasped clinically behind its back, while McGucket absently scratched at his side. “He had so many dreams… He should have been a grandfather by now, shouldn’t he?”

Ford clenched his jaw shut to keep himself from speaking. He could have gone home. He was not at fault for Fiddleford’s descent into madness, he should have gone home—

“You took advantage of the fact that he was in love with you to make him stay. Even when it was killing him.” Bill grinned again, one hand coming forwards to grab the old man by the head. The blank eyed man didn’t even respond. “And then you did. You killed him.”

Ford closed his eyes in time to hear a sickening crack and squelch. Before he could come to terms with the image he might open his eyes to, he was for a moment back in the basement, Fiddleford laying twitching on the floor from his journey into the portal. 

He hadn’t said “Are you okay?”

He had asked “What did you see?”

“That man is dead , Stanford. He died the moment he saw me shed my skin.” Bill-Ford whispered in his ear. 

Ford wrenched his eyes open and saw the snow once again, and no one but himself and his double standing on the roof now. His duplicate was covered in deep red blood, the kind that had been left out in the air for too long and given time to age, slowly turning black as it dripped off him in coagulated chunks onto the pure white snow. 

“You might not have killed his body, but you did something much worse than I would ever do. You killed him and left him breathing. You killed him and let his son watch as his life fell apart.” The blood was on his lips and on his teeth, dripping down onto his shirt “You killed him and you were so focused on yourself that you didn’t care whether or not he actually went home. You ruined him and left him to beg someone else to pick up your damaged goods.” Bill snarled.

Ford’s face contorted in pain, imagining the things he missed. Was Bill right? Had he damaged the man beyond repair and then been too far removed to pick up the pieces when they shattered? Even before his incident with Stanely had cost them both most of a lifetime, he had spent weeks, perhaps even months still locked up in his own home, still focused on his ham handed attempt at saving the world— self importance wrapped in ego and victimhood that he refused to call by name. 

He’d heard it from Dipper’s own mouth, as well as several others: the man had lost his mind. He’d started a cult, hell bent on erasing the memories of a town that had never seen the anomalous in the first place, slowly damaging the minds of hundreds, if not thousands of both locals and tourists alike to save his own sanity. 

Fiddleford’s usage of the gun had eroded his brain, erasing memories and rubbing it smooth like a clean slate. He had damaged himself beyond repair, causing him to develop aphasia— a condition Ford knew was usually linked to traumatic brain injury like a stroke. 

Christ alive… He had killed the man. If not killed him outright, then condemned him to a slow and agonizing death over the course of the rest of their lives. Stanely had taken him aside and slowly reminded him that everyone is dying always, a soft, sad eyed attempt at soothing his worries when Fiddleford had started the morning worse for wear at one point. He was right. Everyone was dying always, simply at differing end goals, but Ford felt responsible for Fiddleford’s quality of life. He had been the one to make a mess of the man before he could have had a chance to recover. He met the pained eyes of Tate, a son who had watched his father crumble so young, slowly getting him back, knowing now it would be a matter of time before age and damage took the man from him again— this time permanently. 

He himself had reassured Fiddleford that he was still there. In his travels, he had found a technique used to repair broken machinery with a rare metal like silver— the race of creatures he had encountered had valued machinery above all else, reminding him so much of his friend as the large, mechanically clad behemoths anointed machines with smoke and sacred oils as he could remember his friend describing of childhood rites in the catholic church. They had taken what was broken and repaired it beautifully with a material that still conducted electricity and allowed the piece to be functional even after its initial changing of integrity. Fiddleford was a machine that had been broken and rusted but was slowly being repaired with silver, previously damaged but repaired and useful once again. 

Stanford Pines had caused that damage, and he had not only damaged him, but all the people around him. 

He had stolen Tate’s father from him.

He had stolen Emma-May’s husband, a bond she would never see returned to her before an early passing that she did not deserve.

The possibility of a relationship with grandchildren, if he’d ever had any.

The advancements and inventions he had watched the man credited for in countless other universes—

All stolen. All gone. 

He felt his eyes leak once again, this time knowing the cold feeling of tears leaking through pained trembles and leaving a frozen path on his skin. 

“You might as well have shot him and left him in the snow.” The Bill possessing his filthy body murmured, standing in front of him, inching closer, the visual of blood gone, but the stench of death still heavy on his breath. 

Stanford took another step back, this time not measuring his distance and not having the focus to feel out for where his foot landed. His toes found purchase, but the rest of his foot did not, nearly forcing him to lose his footing and tumble off the ledge. His eyes went wide and he instinctually reached forward, grabbing onto Bill-Ford’s coat lapels and anchoring himself to keep himself from falling. His foot came forward but he’d shifted his center of gravity in an attempt to save himself from falling, which left him at the mercy of the foul grin that huffed the smell of corpse inches from his face.

“What? But falling is the fun part!” Ford was too nauseated to risk commenting on the demon’s incorrect grammar, his eyes widening as Cipher’s possessed body took a step forward and then another, forcing him to lean backwards over the edge, his hands balled into fists but losing grip as gravity tugged him backwards, ever beckoning him towards the ground. 

“Alright-” A familiar voice from his left, a voice that felt like a punch in the gut at the same time as the softest caress. “Since you won’t listen to Skinny, maybe you’ll listen to me.”

Cipher-Ford’s face turned from an uncanny grin to a stomach churning scowl, recognizing the voice the same way Ford did, stepping back enough for Ford to regain his balance and let go.

Ford’s eyes turned long enough to meet with Stanley— not the Stanley he knew now, but a Stanley he had known so long ago. He was 17, chuckling with his acne spots and slicked back hair, hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Get off the roof before Pa strangles us both, will ya?”

The roof was wider now, flatter, giving them all a bit more room to stand so that Stanley could be beside him, his eyes kind but tired as they had always been that summer he worked double shifts saving up for his car.

Fuck, the image was so vivid he almost checked his own chest to see if he was suddenly smaller again. It was exact, a replica of the boy he had known just as well as himself, two halves of the same soul embodied with their father’s face and their mother’s heart. 

Ford stuttered an answer, the cold of the snow permeating his body and icily licking through to his bones “W-what?”

“If you fall ‘n break your arm, you know Pa’ll put it on my head, alright?” He was trying too hard to seem casual, yet his voice broke with the anxiety of a brother ready to risk his safety.

Bill’s eyes sparked, locked on Ford again, the face that was his own and yet so disturbingly different pulled into a Mona Lisa smirk. “Good thing he’s going to jump, then. No one can blame you for that, Stan.” Cipher’s body moved like a serpent, like a graceful predator, leading with his nose and slinking around the twins, so separated by age and yet connected beyond time. “But they can, can’t they? They blame you for everything that goes wrong in little Fordsy’s life… an extra boy… an extra bed…. another mouth to feed.”

Stanley’s brown eyes were scared, but disconnected enough to clench his jaw and recite the words “Three dollars or better offer.” without a stutter.

Ford’s eyes snapped over, momentarily forgetting the doppelganger slinking around them, waiting for a chance to strike. He’d forgotten that Stan had told him that, another nightmare ending in tears, clutching his twin to his chest as he talked about the singular abuse his father had never let him see. “Stanley, don’t say that—”

“But that’s what the sign said, isn’t it?” Cipher crowed. “Poor Filbrick wanted a boy, he planned to give him the world and then had to split it in two. Who wouldn’t loathe the reason? 15 minutes late to his own birthday and barely deserving of one in the first place-”

But Bill had chosen the wrong person to try and snipe at in Ford’s presence. “You shut your filthy mouth-” He attempted to step forwards, near foaming with anger that someone would dare talk to his brother that way, but his feet were anchored in place. 

“Why are you mad at me ?” Bill laughed, again the voice shifting to less of Bill’s and more of his own. “The way they treated him was your fault anyways.”

“Don’t believe that, Six-”

“You never saw the backhands-”

“— waddn’t often-”

“- or the screaming matches-”

Stan tried to interject again, but Ford could only hear Bill over the screaming of blood in his ears. 

“— Or the fact that your father had pre-packed a bag to kick him out!” It was as if Bill could hear the rushing blood, the pounding heartbeat, the churning gut, his volume rising accordingly. 

Stan had pointed that out once, a fit of rage fueled by beer on the bow of a boat where neither of them could walk away from one another. Ford had known so much and so little all at once, especially of that particular night— curled up on the top bunk and trying to muffle the sobs of excruciating pain in his heart that felt comparable to the loss of a loved one. He hadn’t even realized he was losing one.

He’d dreaded hearing Stan come home, having to talk to him— not entirely comprehending when his parents had begun their shouting match and his father had growled “I’m not changing my mind, Care. That kid has had one too many chances and maybe this’ll be good for him.”

“What? Do you think in 10 years he’ll come home and thank you? That he’ll come back and bail us out because of the lesson this taught him-”

“Caryn-”

“ He’s 17 years old, Filbrick.” His mother’s accent thick with grief, her voice breaking and the volume making the baby cry.

Filbrick Pines had waited until he was alone to whisper something along the lines of “That kid never stays too far from his brother. He’ll be back.” Yet all Ford could really remember of the actual words was the seething anger they had provoked. Whatever his father had said in a split moment of vulnerability had made Ford tear at his pillow and silently accuse his twin of the greed of co-dependance. In that moment he thanked a God he hadn’t spoken to in years that he and Stanley hadn’t been conjoined twins. Good riddance. At least this way he could get rid of the idiot that tied him down…

Had he planned to kick Stan out anyways? Had he prepared for a fuck up so monumentous that the kid needed to learn?

Through tears Stan had recited how he had to pick up the phone and pretend to be Ford while their father had called him to admit his mistake. 

Years after Stan’s own funeral.

On a deathbed of his own that Stan couldn’t bring himself to see.

“Yeah well— he was an old fart tryin’ to get into heaven when his heart was givin’ out. He woulda said anything for the big man upstairs.” He’s groused through sniffles. Both twins had known he didn’t have the anger to mean it any more.

Both twins had known if their father had the strength to apologize, he’d meant it. Stanley had been forced to listen to an apology aimed at him that he was never supposed to hear. 

“Do you know-” Bill began again, his teeth sharper now like rows of viper fangs, tinged red with blood as they had been before even though the mess he'd made had vanished. “-who he could have been?” 

“Don’t-” Stan began, but the horror had begun to dawn on Ford’s mind, and his twin was powerless to stop it.

Why had that thought never occurred to him?

Stanley had so much more potential than he had been offered, he’d been intellectually and emotionally neglected in lieu of Ford and his success- Christ how had he been so blind?!

“Stop.” Stan snapped, and he was in front of him now, nearly 30 as they had been on that fateful day, “Do not go down that road. It ain’t worth it, Six.”

How had Ford not noticed?

He was filthy. Sweet Moses, he’d looked like he hadn’t slept in a year, his body so much thinner than it had been, and not because he had suddenly taken to a diet of veg and vitamins. His red jacket had, in a way, been a mirror of Ford’s own body armor when they had been young, thick with a furry collar— but Stan’s was not well cared for as Ford’s had been, his was threadbare and hanging on for dear life, as if it was the only consistent piece of outerwear the man owned. 

His pants were just as bad, the shirt beneath stained with food and sweat, there were probably holes in his socks and the soles of his boots. 

This was not a man who had been doing well for himself when this all started— on the contrary, this was a man who had struggled for years without assistance before someone he once loved dearly asked him for help. 

And yet, through everything he had been through since Ford had been the catalyst to have him kicked out, the moment his brother had called for him Stanley had dropped everything— his happiness, his pain, his suffering, his pride— to answer him. How much money had it taken to get him from wherever he had been to Gravity Falls? How much time? How many days of driving?

“Who could he have been, if he hadn’t had to babysit you his entire life?” Bill murmured again, this time almost exclusively in Ford’s voice, and it made the man’s heart sink to his stomach, acid and bile splashing up into his throat as if it had been literal. 

Their father might have called Stan the extra, but he wouldn’t have been, had there been no Ford before him. Would Stanley have been treated better, had Stanford never been born? Would Filbrick have treated him with the same love and respect that he had been owed if he hadn’t had one too many sons for his attention span?

The same thing that had happened with Fiddleford began to happen with Stan, the man’s form became translucent and ghostly while a far more solid version of himself stood a few feet behind him, far more opaque to be seen through the snow. 

This Stanley was not the Stan that his brother would have painted his perfect self to be. He was not thin and muscular, he didn’t look like he belonged in a Mr. Olympia competition and could punch a pterodactyl in the face, but he looked healthier. His hair was more along the color Ford’s was now, still graying but much darker than the shimmer of silver he wore today. It retained the texture of their youth, those poofy little curls that Ford felt on his own head when he reached up, fuller and thicker due to a more variable diet with differing nutrition. 

He was thinner, but not thin, simply filled out like he was able to use his body in more ways than he currently was. This was a man who probably ran around with his niblings, taking them on hikes like Ford had planned to this summer. He still wore his glasses, a thing that was more due to age than neglect, but he smiled with teeth that were his own and laughed smoother after quitting smoking young.

The other Stan ran a hand through his hair and as his hand and arm passed over his face he transformed to be younger. Now he was in his 20s or 30s, perhaps? He was fit, still husky as he had been in his youth, but he wore his own suit rather than their father’s that he wore every day. He seemed to be a business man of some sort, a man who was smiling and laughing, a man who was successful.

A gold band shone on his left hand to match the gold chain around his neck. 

In a flash he was younger still, in high school now—or maybe college? He was wearing a football jersey, using that Pines build to his advantage, probably playing for scholarships. He might not have been the homecoming king, but he might have been a runner-up. He might not have graduated top of his class, but he would have graduated. 

His life might not have been perfect, but at least he hadn’t had someone who had dragged him down, or had him ostracized before he’d had a chance to make friends. He’d always had the opportunity to make friends. Everyone loved him sometimes, it had always seemed. Something in Ford’s mouth had always gone sour when he realized just how easy it was for Stan to be liked. If it wasn’t for him, he could have had it all. He wouldn’t have been perfect— it hadn’t been Ford’s fault that Carla McCorkle had left, or that Stacey Waterberg hadn’t given him the time of day, but it had been because of Ford that he’d stayed away from extra curriculars.

Stanley had taught himself quantum mechanics with nothing but books from a poorly funded public library. Stanley had rebuilt something that had taken Ford divine intervention to create. Stanley had run a successful business model based on nothing but his own innate creativity and his own meticulously crafted charisma. 

Who could Stanley Pines have been if he had had the resources to succeed the way Ford had?

Even though the translucent figure of Stan was frozen mid-scream, this past self, the dream self, smiled gently at Ford with eyes that didn’t seem to recognize him. How could he? This was the Stan who was whole by himself. This was the Stan without a Ford.

Maybe he would have been better as an only child.

Maybe he still would.

Bill spoke again, his voice slithering behind Ford beyond the ledge, “I can’t say his life would have been amazing- I mean, it IS Stan we’re talking about, but he would have had friends as a kid.” Those words stabbed through Ford’s chest like an arrow. “He would have had people willing to sit with him on the bus,” Another sharp pain slicing through his chest, like Cipher had extended claws and was slashing into his flesh with every sentence “He could have even done something with his life.”

The snake with demon eyes grabbed him with his own six fingered hands and slowly turned him to face the ledge, backing him up just a smidge even with his toes up against the ledge. “I mean- hell, even in a world where he had you, if you hadn’t been such a selfish prick , maybe he could have succeeded! Passed his classes, joined a sports team, went to college, got the girl-”

Ford watched through tears as Cipher brought this carbon copy of the brother he’d seen for years in his dreams right up to the ledge. “I wasn’t-”

But Bill tsked with a tongue that was not his own. “You did. You were. You are .” Answering rebuttals Ford hadn’t had the strength to speak aloud. “But-” The wicked smirk was back, smiling centimeters from the side of his face with a grin so curled, it made more sense on the Cheshire Cat than a human being. “You can make up for it.” He whispered, enunciating every constant.

“H-how?”

How did a grin simultaneously become a snarl on his face? Exuding both emotions at once, Bill-Ford’s hands grabbed him by the elbows roughly and squeezed. “A leap of faith.”

“Faith in what?” Ford asked, his eyes growing wide behind his glasses in terror.

This time Bill laughed as he answered “Your soul!” He let go of the man’s elbows to swing his own arms out wide like he was on the bow of the titanic. “I held it once, but I can’t remember, does it hold any weight?”

It took Ford a moment to sift through foggy memories to understand the reference. In Egyptian mythos, and in many like it, upon the death of a human being their heart— a stand in as a solid representation of the human soul— would be weighed against the weight of a feather. The feather represented the Goddess Ma’at, of whom was the patroness of truth and justice, suggesting if a man was honorable and guiltless, his soul would remain lighter than that of a feather. If his heart held weight, his soul would not make it to the afterlife, and the God Anubis would surrender the soul to be consumed, never to find peace.

For a moment, he flashed back to the present day. Would his soul be weightless? Or would the 21 grams MacDougall theorized be solely composed of guilt?

Ford’s brows furrowed. “What does that have to do with-”

“Well-!” The demon interrupted. “If your soul holds on weight, then this definitely won’t happen!” He cried joyfully, and took a step backwards to plummet off the roof and towards the hard, packed in snow.

Ford gasped on instinct, turning and shielding his eyes with the crook of his elbow, but unable to avoid the sound-

He screamed when another pair of hands took his shoulders, and almost melted into tears when Stanley’s face appeared again, the same face he’d told he’d needed out of his house so he could have his life back. The life he wouldn’t have at all without his twin. “Hey- hey I’ve got you- nothin’s gonna happen-”

“I’m sorry-” Ford sobbed, feeling less of a man and more a boy again as he crumbled in the arms of his twin. “You could have been so much and I failed you-”

“You didn’t fail nobody-” Stan tried, his arms wrapping around Ford’s head to pull him into his chest, but Ford could no longer feel his presence, being held tightly by a ghost. 

“I failed you- I got you kicked out- I sent you away- I-”

Stan’s voice was just as tear choked as Ford’s as he whispered gently “You were just a kid. Even in our 30s. You were just a kid.”

Ford was fully sobbing now, his body wracked with violent tears that had stayed trapped within him for years if not decades. A lifetime of guilt, a lifetime of pushing the boulder of those thoughts up the mountain just for it all to crash and tumble to the base of the slope once again. “I should have done more, Stanley- for you- for all of you.”

Yet even after his horrific tumble, Bill was right beside them again. “Just jump! Test it out! If you’ve been right your whole life, nothing’s going to happen!”

“Nothing is gonna happen, because he ain’t stupid.” Stan snapped. 

Ford felt his heart crumble like a can of coke. Even in this place, even where he had no control, even when faced with what he could have been if his deformed older twin had never cursed his life, Stanley instinctually protected him. Ford had spent so many years trying to be strong, suddenly realizing he was nothing but the extra weight on Stan’s shoulders. 

“I think he’ll fa-all-” Bill sing-songed, passing behind Stan— one moment covered in blood and the next moment cleaned up again, as if the entire graphic performance had been nothing more than an illusion. Of course it had been an illusion, Ford thought, how could he have been so stupid to believe that Bill would actually kill a vessel he was wielding— unless his plan had been to abandon the host before he’d hit the ground. 

Stan growled and finally looked away from his brother, snarling over his shoulder at the demon in human skin. “ Anyone would fall, you fucking Freak , that’s how gravity works!”

Bill stood behind Stan with a grin of malice. Gilded, slit-pupiled eyes glowing with delight as he inched them closer and closer towards the ledge once again.

It also didn’t help that he seemed to adore antagonizing Stan, who stepped forward every time Bill stepped closer, forcing Ford to inch back.

“Stanley, you don’t understand-” Ford began, ready to explain where Bill’s comment was coming from— perhaps the demon wasn’t insane, if his soul was weightless, would he fly? But he was weighed down to this Earth with so much guilt-

Stan groaned “I don’t NEED to understand, there’s nothing to understand. We’re going inside-”

“Your soul is not weightless-” Bill’s whisper felt like the flicking tongue of a snake in his ear, tickling into his hair and making Ford’s entire body twinge. His stomach roiled in sick as bile bubbled up his throat. 

Stan tried to interrupt. “No one’s is! We’re all fucking heavy and broken and in pieces— lay off, you fuck -”

“If he has one left.”

“If I have one so does he because its the fucking same.”

Ford began with a shakey “Stanley-”

“Don’t interrupt me, Stanford.” Stan snapped, his accent shining through as he sped through the word “inner-rupt”. “That’s what Ma used to always say, right? We shared a soul?”

“Stanley- it doesnt-”

“ Shut up!” he cried desperately, stepping back so that he didn’t outright pop his brother in the nose with wild and angry gesticulations. “Shut up, shut up, don’t give me logic, don’t give me myth, give me what you’ve always felt.” It was like the man was reading his mind. 

Ford swallowed, tears sliding down his cheeks. “Even when I hated it. You are my other half.” 

“If you jump, I’m going with you.” He was shifting, aging before his very eyes, his body growing heavier, his eyes older, his hair shortening and graying. “How do you think I knew you were alive? Why I spent a lifetime looking?”

“Why?”

“Because if you die, I die. No one can live with half a soul.” The words rang out between them, Stanley’s brown eyes reaching desperately for his brother, bushy brows twitching as he tried not to shatter himself. 

They completed one another. 

How could Ford’s soul hold so much weight alone, if he shared it to begin with?

Stan took a half step forward again, trying to reach for his twin’s hands. “If your soul carries weight, so does mine. If y’ think I wouldn’t fall, you’ve got another thing comin’.”

Ford knew his brother was a good liar. 

Of course, throughout the entirety of their childhoods, they had kept record of many-a time where they’d been caught. Their cat Munch, had accidentally ended up purple: they’d been caught. Ford and Stan tried to switch personas for a massive exam: they’d been caught. Mannequin arms and bad toupees had been found in their beds past curfew at 15: they’d been caught. 

Somehow they’d always gotten out of it with something light, if not nothing at all. 

Stanford could remember looking at his brother in awe, wondering that, if he wanted to, could Stanley get away with murder? Picked pockets, movies seen and never paid for, adventures had and survived that no one else but they knew of to this day— they’d done it all. For a long time, Ford had been convinced that the only person Stanley couldn’t lie to was him, but since they had reunited, he’d realized just how wrong he was with that idea.

This moment was no different.

In his shaking overwhelm, his brother— now the brother he remembered from the present day, the brother that slept three feet away from him on a boat that was probably too small for their needs, the brother he had found and almost lost merely weeks apart in the same summer— had slowly grabbed his shoulders. “Y’ didn’t do anything wrong, Six.” He murmured to Ford, and Ford felt himself moving, but couldn’t focus on where his feet were going in the need to correct how wrong his twin.

“I-I left you behind-”

“You didn’t.” How was Stan’s voice so soothing? Why did it feel like balm on a sunburn that he’d had for far too long?

“It was supposed to be us forever—”

“And we have that now.” Ford could only see Stan now, Stan against a blanket of white snow without the background of the rooftop that he had been up against. This didn’t quite sound like Stan. The voice was right still but the words were wrong. He was too calm, too reassuring, telling Ford what he knew he wanted to hear— yet he was too desperate to notice. 

“I ruined your life-” He was trying so hard to stop crying, so hard to suck up the cracking voice and leaking tears of his pleas.

“I ruined my own life.” Where was the bitterness? Where was the mocking? The reminder that those had been the words FORD had used? Something was wrong, something was so wrong—

“Don’t say that,” Why did this sound so familiar? “I chose- I chose everything other than you. I chose- anomalies and a prayer of fame that I didn’t even want-”

Bill crowed from behind him “LIAR! Oh, you sad sack of shit! ” He was cackling, if Ford turned around he wouldn’t have been surprised to see his own body rolling on the roof in laughing tears. “You crave it! You want applause! You claim to hate attention and then you miss it when it’s gone!”

Stan snarled over Ford’s shoulder and put a calloused hand on his twin’s cheek, trying to keep his breathing visible and steady— did Stan have experience with panic attacks? Did he see what was happening to his twin and remember the trembling pain, the elephant that sat on his chest? “Ignore him. Ignore him, we need to get you inside you’re turning blue-”

“You know-” The demon mused from over Ford’s shoulder “I think I really love that image. Two men with the same soul… tell me… when he falls, will you fall too?”

Cipher’s commandeered hands, all twelve digits burning welts into his skin as they made contact, suddenly shoved into Ford’s back, pushing his chest against his brother’s.

Ford had been distracted when Stan had swapped their places. The shove caused Ford to full body knock into his brother’s chest, sending the force of Cipher’s shove through one twin and into the other. In essence, he had made a Newton’s cradle of human bodies, any force applied to Ford without the conscious thought of resistance would be transferred to Stanley with equal weight. 

Stanford’s foot found purchase as he stepped forwards.

Stan’s foot found the air as he was forced to step back.

This felt too familiar, far too familiar, and he reached out desperately to catch his falling brother, Stan’s arm’s coming up and praying to find a hold that was far too late. 

They screamed each other’s names as the snow fell around them, and Ford’s world shattered in an instant.

He woke screaming to a pair of terrified brown eyes.