Archive of Our Own

It’s 1978 and Marilyn is shouting. It’s all bright lights and bitter sound and the words aren’t there — you know what they are, you know what she’s shouting, you just can’t hear it. It was nice while it lasted, but you knew it would end this way.

The thing is, you even tried this time. Set up in Vegas and everything, a sweet little gig doing phone service just like Ma. (Well, maybe not just like Ma. And Marilyn never believed you — your voice is like gargling glass shards. HA. But everybody’s got a thing, right?) So you can talk the talk just fine, talk it like a pro. Year, make, model, vintage, region...you lost the plot. Point is, it’s not the same, walking the walk. Doing the...well, doing. See, Marilyn wants kids, right? Got it all planned out, two boys and a girl, one boy will be a doctor, one boy will be a lawyer, and the girl will marry rich.

So every night, it’s the same awkward dance between the whiskey-stained sheets of your tobacco-soaked studio apartment, and she’s sick of the excuses, the sorry I drank too much (sorry I didn’t drink enough), the sorry I worked too late (sorry I didn’t bring my work home with me), the sorry I got a headache, the sorry-sorry-sorry but never yes. You could just say no. Maybe you should’ve three months ago when she batted her pretty brown eyes at you and said you’re gonna marry me someday, Lee Aspen. You definitely should’ve Friday night when she suggested it was time to make it official. You just got a weakness for ladies who know what they like, and it’s not like you don’t want to fix yourself for her, you just don’t know how. With the talent you got for taking broken junk and turning it into something passably functional, you thought…

Doesn’t matter what you thought. You thought wrong. That’s you all over, Stanley Pines — wrong. 

Her eyes level with yours, and they’re blue, and it’s 2013 and Ford says, “Mabel wants to speak with you on the cellular computing telephone.”

You’re somewhere you’ve never been, on a beautiful beach following the trail of some deadly something-or-other that may or may not be a literal alien. Could also be a biggish squid that hangs around when people are dead, who knows. Ford’s really excited about the regional folklore, but it’d be great if he were half as excited about remembering this dimension’s technology. Even you managed to get onboard to keep in touch with the kids. The man’s got a ray gun, he ain’t living in the dark ages.

“For fuck’s sake, Stanford, it’s just a cell phone,” you grumble, and take the phone from his six-fingered grip. Put on a grin for the kid to hear it in your voice. “Hey!”

“Grunkle Stan! Grunkle Stan,” Mabel shouts into your ear. 

“Language,” sulks Ford. You’ve heard him say worse. In front of the kids, even. Not in English, but that’s beside the point.

You roll your eyes and focus on the conversation at hand — or ear, as the case may be. One of these days, you’ll make sure she gets her own hearing aids even if you and Ford have to build them from scrap, because yeesh. If she could hear herself talk, she might be convinced everyone else can hear her, too. “What’s up, Pumpkin?”

“We’re turning 14! We’re having a big party, and you have to come,” she gushes. “Grunkle Ford will come if you tell him he has to, right? So inviting you means you’ll both be here, right?”

“Now, Mabel,” you chide, making sure to enunciate and speak directly into the microphone, “what did I tell you about assuming people will just do what you say?”

“That it happens with confidence and repetition. Which I have, and I used. I’ll tell Mom you’ll be here next month for our birthday party. Have you met her yet? I don’t think you have.”

“No, I haven’t.” Your smile is realer now. All three of the people you care about are okay. Mabel will be fine, and she’ll keep her brother safe while you’re away. Great to have some confirmation. “And yeah, go ahead and tell her we’ll be there. I’ll make sure Ford’s got the right gear to catch it when we get there.”

“Catch what,” Mabel wonders, at the same time that Ford perks up and asks the same question with an alarming level of enthusiasm.

“Whatever it is that Dipper found,” you respond vaguely, answering them both. Mabel will get the hint and Ford will forget to pull one of his disappearing acts when confronted with the idea of meeting new people. 

“Ah, gotcha,” she says, and you can hear the smile in her voice like you hope she can hear the smile in yours. If she were here, she’d be doing some over-exaggerated nudge-nudge deal, because she might be sharp, but she’ll never be a liar like you. “And I’m making my Pixie Dust Surprise cake, so there will be fun for all ages.”

“Pixie dust?”

“The perfect addition to any baked good!”

“Horrible stuff,” Ford muses, already interested in examining a rock on the beach. Could be a rock. Could be a monster. You never know until you gotta punch something. “Potent hallucinogen. Tell her if she needs a sleep aid, fairy dust is safer and easier to measure. Wait — are children allowed to take fairy dust? I can never remember which dimension is which. Stanley, come and look at this. Does it look like cuneiform to you, or just suspicious scratches?”

You smother a laugh. Fun for all ages, indeed. “Gotta go, Sweetie. Your Grunkle Ford needs me to remove a cuticle or whatever. We’ll see you next month. Tell Dipper hello for us.”

“Will do,” she chirps. “Goodbye, Grunkle Stan! Dipper, guess-”

The line goes dead. 

Marilyn is long gone.

“Someday,” you tell your twin, “you’ll have to remind me to tell you about my ex-wife. It’s because of her I can fix your nail problems.”

“For crying out loud, Stanley, I said cuneiform, not cuticles-”

“Yeah, yeah, blah-blah ancient writing, blah-blah nerd stuff. What makes you think I can read it? I’m legally blind, Sixer. Take this to your grave, but I got that eyepatch for the double vision from my cataracts, before the left eye caught up to the right one.”

He gives you an appraising look — well, you know that’s what he’s doing because you’ve been reading people your whole life, but you’re not lying, for once. You know how people are looking at you by the way they move, and by the way the edges of their face shift, assuming they don’t have big hair that obscures that too much. Your spatial awareness is, and always has been, almost preternaturally good, and you can see motion and color just fine, but you still have to hold stuff about six inches away from your face if you want to read it, you follow TV plots mostly through the dialogue, and your doctor warned you against driving.

(Actually, what she said was “A trained bear would be safer behind the wheel than someone with your eyesight, Stanford,” which gave you an amazing but ultimately unworkable idea.)

“We don’t have a family history of cataracts,” he finally says, “or hearing loss, for that matter.”

“Someday you’ll have to remind me to tell you about Rico, too,” you reply with a shrug. “Can you manage a picture of the rock? We can blow it up on the screen. See if I see what you see. Y’see.”

“...Yes, I think I can manage to take a photograph,” he acquiesces, and the tension you didn’t realize was coiling inside your gut releases. He’ll bring it up again eventually, because Stanford Pines doesn’t let a mystery go unsolved or a question go unanswered. But at least you have some time to get a story together that won’t sound as awful as it was.

So many things he wants to say, locked behind his teeth. Stanford is not, by nature, the kind of man who lets things go, and hero or not, brother or not, Stanley is a hard man to love. He’s crass, he’s insensitive, and what’s worse—

he’s so genuinely obnoxious sometimes

He plays stupid. Ford may have initially disparaged his electrical engineering skills out of principle, but Stan used more than just duct tape and WD-40 to fix a machine that Ford himself didn’t build and still doesn’t fully understand. It’s so frustrating to listen to Stan slip into his hustler’s lilt, listen to him call Ford “Poindexter” while pretending not to understand things. It’s academic elitism — Ford knows this, just as he knows how fallible it makes him — but sometimes he can’t stop the resentment.

Stanford Filbrick Pines was always the genius. West Coast Tech didn’t give him a chance for an early scholarship, but he still got in; he got into MIT, Miskatonic University, and Harvard, too. Backupsmore was just the only school that would offer him a full-ride academic scholarship. So much of his identity hinges on being the genius, and Stanley refuses to even acknowledge his own spark. It’s important... and if it isn’t, then what’s Ford’s identity, aside from “hero’s brother?” Not that it’s a bad thing to be, but he’s got a lot of years left in him. If he has his way, so has Stan. Who is he supposed to be, going forward?

And then there are the personality clashes. Things they don’t talk about, even though maybe they should — things that make Stan clench his fists and smile wider than necessary, things that make Ford pretend to take notes in his new set of journals just so he doesn’t have to look at that irritating smarmy face any longer.

The truth is, Stan says things Ford just flat-out disagrees with, or that Ford finds mildly horrifying (like: if we captured a mermaid we could charge hundreds of dollars for live pictures. like: wouldn’t it be funny if we capsized and some random fishing village darling made it her life’s work to decipher your weird notebook? like: we don’t actually need all this food, Sixer, we can make half this much stretch twice as long. like: don’t worry about it, I’ve been beaten worse in prison!), and he never knows whether he should say something or keep his mouth shut. He’s already lost Stan three times now, twice as a direct result of his own hubris and once because he was too angry to speak up. The last thing he wants is a fourth goodbye until they’re both too old to keep living.

Honesty is supposed to be the best policy. Honesty is also the hardest choice. For some reason, Ford assumed old age would be easy.

It’s funny: you spent so long cooped up with Stanford’s notes that you’re more likely to know the specific masses of the stars than the mythology of them. You can’t see what he’s pointing out, even on moonless nights like these when they’re the only light source available, but you let his steady voice and the rocking of the boat lull you into a quiet, almost meditative state as the numbers flash through your mind.

You never wanted this. Well, this specific moment is all you ever wanted until the kids came into the picture, but the part where you’re too old to see it and you can only relate to the math seems like such a lame reversal of roles that you’d resent if it weren’t entirely your fault. 

“And that’s Pegasus,” he sing-songs, like he tends to do when he slips into teacher-mode. It’s too bad he slipped dimensions. If you were the one who’d gotten lost, he could have terrorized the local high school kids. It would’ve been hilarious. “Here’s a fun fact about that constellation — it contains IK Pegasi, a binary star system. IK Pegasi A is the nearest known candidate for going supernova.”

Yeah, and Ford worried Bill Cipher might try to speed up the life cycle to mess with Earth’s composition and destabilize the seal on the Nightmare Realm. In supplementary, coded notes that were an absolute bitch to translate, he wrote extensively, and with increasing mania, about all the ways that “he” (you didn’t know, back then, the name or the origin of the asshole who’d violated your brother) might force a return even without the portal, and since there’s really no way to protect Earth against an ill-timed cosmic event…

“I swear you’re making half these words up as you go,” you tell him, resettling the curve of your skull into the palm of your hand. 

A few beats of tense silence.

“I’m not an idiot, Stan.” He sits up, but you don’t bother. It’s a nice night, and you’re comfortable. Physically, anyway. “It took a while, but I know when you’re pretending not to know something and when you really don’t know something. You do realize you don’t have to pretend for my sake. We don’t have to talk about the stars if you’re bored.”

“Maybe it ain’t for your sake.”

He makes an aborted noise that might be amusement or irritation, it isn’t long or loud enough for you to know for certain. He leans back against the railing of the boat and sighs. “There’s so much we still don’t know about each other. We’re in our sixties but we’ve only known each other for twenty years, and even then, that was mostly as children. Sometimes I worry that if I ask you about something, you’ll pat me on the head and tell me you’ll explain when I’m older.”

The image is pretty funny, so you don’t mind laughing. “Would it work?”

“Would it — of course it wouldn’t work. Has that ever worked on an actual child, ever, in the history of children? Still...there’s an experience gap that I don’t know we can ever breach. You ran a business. Got married. Learned complex pandimensional physics. Went to prison. I just… read some books, wrote some papers, made some really bad deals, made some gadgets, and tried to survive.”

“So it wasn’t that different,” you offer up to the sky. He makes a disbelieving noise, so you continue, “Really, my gadgets just weren’t as advanced as yours. I read how-to manuals, and then your journals and notes. I wrote my own notes and kept ledgers. Did some shady jobs, made some bad deals — made and sold things. Everything I did was about survival, or getting you back. Even...well, it sounds bad, but even marrying Marilyn. She had a steady job and a home that wasn’t a car in a place where it didn’t snow, and she liked me. When you’ve been homeless for longer than you’ve been an adult, and you come across a chance like that, you take it.”

“Oh,” says Ford very quietly.

“Don’t get me wrong, I liked her. Such a firecracker, and smarter’n anyone else I ever met other’n you, in that I-know-something-you-don’t-know-and-I’ll-tell-you-for-a-price kind of way. She was beautiful, too. Long fingers, strong wrists, big brown eyes — I caught her trying to pick my pocket on the Strip and fell for her right then and there. Didn’t even mind all that much when she tried to steal my car. It was cute! But when it came down to it, I was all talk, and I made promises I couldn’t keep. She gave me an ultimatum, and I ran. Divorce was a magic word.”

“What did she want you to do?”

You’re not even gonna go there, not without context, which is too embarrassing to just barf out on the deck between you. So you laugh a little and reply, “She wanted kids, Stanford. I was practically a kid myself. We scraped up enough money to pay the bills and put aside a little bit every month for three months just to afford a wedding — we couldn’t afford kids. Couldn’t even really afford to be married. But it’s a good thing I got out when I did.”

“Why’s that? Stanley, you could have had a family.”

“Well, Marilyn wouldn’t have picked up and followed me to Gravity Falls.”

“I don’t follow.”

“She had a life in Vegas,” you explain, wondering how, exactly, logic has failed him. Then you remember this is the same man who sets his face on fire because it’s faster than shaving. He’s the smartest person alive, but he’s still an idiot. “We couldn’t afford rent on her place and the mortgage on the Shack, so it would’ve ended anyway. At least we broke it off before we managed to have assets to fight over.”

With heavy disbelief in his voice, Ford asks, “You really don’t think you would have prioritized a wife and children over my failed project?”

“I think there isn’t a special level of importance where family is concerned,” you correct sharply, “and Marilyn and I were never going to have kids. Nah, things worked out like they were supposed to. Although, if I’d brought her along when you asked me to take your book, maybe things would have gone differently.”

“You think so?”

You smile. The memory of Marilyn, now that she’s not just inside you anymore, isn’t so sore. “Her second job was a stage magician. Well, a magician’s assistant, but it was all her ideas, all her tricks, he just got all the credit. Her sleight of hand was a thing of beauty. She’d have taken the journal and left the house while you and me argued, but without it we wouldn’t have been shoving each other, right?” Your laugh is more of a snort. “Then again, she’d have read it — probably kidnapped a gnome for ransom or something. That gal was all teeth. She deserved better’n someone broken — way better’n a two-bit con artist.”

You watch the sky and feel the boat beneath you, solid and not-so at the same time. It’s wild, to be out here like this. You feel like you’re young again, like the long thorny history around and between you never existed. Only the clouds in your eyes and the persistent twisted ache in your spine tell you differently. If you hold still and close your eyes, you can imagine you’re young again, you never accidentally ruined your brother’s science fair thing, and he still chose adventure over college.

Eventually, Ford’s quiet, measured voice shatters the smooth illusion. “You know, reality is funny — each dimension will eventually reject foreign elements without either significant magical power or a genetic anchor. I spent thirty years getting shunted from dimension to dimension, studying humans and non-humans alike wherever I went, knowing I could never get attached to any of them. If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that people don’t break, Stanley. Different isn’t broken. Sometimes it’s a quirk of genetics, sometimes it’s a medical condition, sometimes it’s a science project gone wrong that gives you ethically-questionable superpowers — but it’s other people who are the problem. The problem is — and this is a multiversal constant — social structures and dynamics. I’ve come across social structures built entirely around sign language, and in one of them, there was nothing to allow paralyzed or similarly disabled individuals to communicate; I’ve come across a social structure built around winged creatures, and when I was there, non-winged beings were petitioning for recognition and accessibility measures. I’ve come across so-called Utopias built to accommodate only a fraction of the population, and anyone who doesn’t fit the given norm — in one case, it was twelve-legged arthropods with psychic communication skills, if you were curious — is hidden away or killed off. Tell me that doesn’t sound familiar.”

You make a sound a child might make if you tried to feed it live squirrels.

“Quite. Was it your eyesight? Your hearing? Because that’s just ridiculous. If this Marilyn person told you that you were broken…”

“Never outright. Never out loud.” There’s something safe about speaking to the stars. The night is a sort of binding promise. It’s a Pines thing. “Just, well. I was less of a man, to her, because no matter how much I loved her I just couldn’t force myself to, y’know. Every night, up to our wedding night, I promised and put it off and — whatever. I tried and tried, even after her. Broken’s not her word. ‘S just me.”

“It bears repeating that different isn’t broken,” he tells you firmly. Normally, you’d think it sounds like he’s trying to sell you something, but he was so bad at it the one day he tried to help out at the Shack that you’re not inclined to believe your own first impression. “Remember how happy we all were when Mabel started dating that pink-haired girl? For the given value of dating at thirteen, anyway. I think they held hands and giggled a lot.”

“She turned out to be a vampire,” you reply, voice flat.

“Granted, Mabel apparently has supernaturally bad luck with dates, and I mean that in the literal sense. But when we didn’t know the girl was out for her blood, we were happy for her. If she’s not broken, then neither are you.”

You feel like it’s different. It should be different. But you’re not in the mood for an argument, so you just shrug as best you can and say, “You’re the expert, Sixer. Is that really true, about reality in other dimensions? It rejects you?”

“Yes — which is why Cipher needed me to build a portal to the Nightmare Realm. It wasn’t magical, but it could act as a focus that merged our dimensions.”

“Mi casa es su casa, and all that?”

“Ha. Yes, precisely.” You hear a slosh. It’s his never-empty canteen of seriously industrial-grade cider. At least dimension-hopping taught him the value of lightening up a little. “One of the first gadgets I ever built after I got sucked through was a device that determined my own dimensional frequency. I kept hoping I would somehow find my way home. But it’s impossible to deliberately jump dimensions without a thorough understanding of where you are and where you’re going, not to mention a link of some kind, and that wasn’t my field of study. It’s a miracle you managed to isolate my frequency and pull me through before Bill was able to take advantage.”

“Hey, that was no miracle,” you protest. 

“How did you manage it? I keep forgetting to ask.”

“Fed your gene info into the coordinate thingy, put some illegally-acquired toxic waste into the fuel receptacles, and turned it on. Doesn’t take a genius. Clearly.”

“Stanley, you— actually that’s brilliant. It could have destroyed the world, of course, but it bypassed the need for variable sequencing, and I had that replicator project just lying around down there, but how did you modify and recalibrate the enfibrallixer? That’s some seriously advanced applied transdimensional theory, it took me six months to figure out what Bill was even trying to explain to me, let alone get it built properly!”

“The defibri-what, now? I just put some of the blinky bits in other places and hoped for the best. Dial back the nerd stuff, Poindexter, yeesh.”

The thing is, you know exactly what he’s talking about, but talks like this make you uncomfortable. It took you thirty years to learn what Stanford learned in six months, but you did learn it, and you’re not sure if that means you’re not as stupid as everyone thinks you are or you’re just the most stubborn sonofabitch in the world. Either way, it’s a bad look. You’ve been playing dumb all your life anyway, making it easier for Ford to be the smart one. It worked out because you never did well on tests, and classrooms were stifling, and bullies were awful. The names they called your family — well, in 1950 when you were born, everyone was still sort of running on the high of “winning” the war, but the locals didn’t seem like good guys to you. Ford, though, got a kick out of school, and as he got smarter, you got dumber and rougher so he didn’t have to. You’re old men now, and you don’t have to take up old habits if they don’t fit anymore, but it feels wrong to show all your cards. To not have a game running. To just be Stan Pines, whoever that is.

“I’m surprised you didn’t kill yourself,” he jokes.

“Me too,” you agree, and if you close your eyes, you can pretend you’re joking too. The Stan Pines you are today wouldn’t do it, so it counts.

Ford’s never been a particularly violent man — although he knows how to apply judicious violence where necessary — but sometimes, he wants to hunt down every last one of the people who ever made his brother feel unsafe. It’s a childish and selfish urge, though, especially since he’d have to hunt himself down.

He always assumed he was above this unfocused aggression: an intellectual, a thinker, a brain carried and kept alive (and also, occasionally, hindered) by its flesh casing. Whatever aggression he felt, therefore, must be justified, because he was a rational creature. 

In retrospect, that was foolish and arrogant.

Espero que muera, Rico said, but when it came down to you or Jorge, he chose you.

Of course you know why. Rico’s apparently got a bunch of things cooking in the States, although you don’t know what yet, and aside from being a mitigating presence with the racist dicks you had to deal with at the airport, you’ll be useful as a contact. It’s all strategic thinking — he’s always been a planner, even on the fly, which breaking out of prison in Colombia definitely was.

“Stick with me, Kid,” he tells you as you make your way to the clearing where you left the Stanmobile months ago. It’s still there, surprisingly. “I’ll make sure you’re never homeless again.”

Hope wells up in your gut as you realize this is more stability you’ve been promised since you left Vegas. You wait until you’re both seated to ask, “What do you want from me?”

“Just a few errands, is all,” he promises, appraising you. “Before the kids’ birthday-”

You blink. The Stanmobile gave up the ghost last year; this one’s not new, but it’s new to you, and it’s Ford, not Rico, in the passenger seat. “Say what?”

“Supplies,” Ford repeats, enunciating carefully. “I want to be certain we’re prepared for whatever monster Dipper and Mabel found.”

Oh yeah, that little charade. “What, you don’t think a net and a couple of fists are good enough?”

“Three days ago I had to give you a crash-course in ancient Sumerian just to keep a spell alive long enough to trap a minor demon masquerading as a hermit crab. At the very least we need more chalk!”

If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was angry at you, but you do know better now. This is, unfortunately, Ford’s best approximation of lighthearted banter. He’s never going to stop being condescending, but you’ve got your own flaws. Like cheating at cards and lying about more things than not. 

You shrug and let the shapes on the road guide you. You’re so used to looking at the world through thick, frosted glass that you can’t really remember what a clear view looks like. You’ve got another week before you have to show up for the twins’ birthday, so you don’t mind going to some occult store to load up again. Surprisingly, they’ve got a lot right, anyway; according to Ford, using magic (you’ve never been able to keep up with that kind of thing first-try, but you know how to nod and say mm-hmm in all the right places, and you do that long enough, stuff starts to stick) is more or less conceptual. The pre-made crystal wands work just as well as making them from scratch, the runes can be strung together to form the right words for spell bracelets (Mabel wears an amethyst one on her ankle that protects her from mild-to-medium bite damage, after that vampire business), and the incense is powerful enough to ward off most of the monsters that hunt by scent, although it does tend to attract stoners, which are just as bad as the monsters, in your opinion.

Ford says it’s impolite to broadly call them monsters. But Ford can’t even drive in this dimension anymore, so he can suck it. “Where are we going?”

“According to this World Wide Internet Browser Application-” (You’re 87% sure he’s fucking with you at this point. You’ve never even owned a computer and you still know how to refer to the internet.) “-there’s a New Age shop about six miles north of here.”

“The kind that sells crystals and all that magic junk, or the kind that sells pot?”

“Oh, dear. I hadn’t considered that. Let me search for the name — Mabel says there’s a way for patrons to review places of business online! Also they may have an inventory list on their, uh, official website.”

You drive north at a crawl, grinning viciously at the aggravated honking from the car behind you. There’s plenty of space to pass, they’re just idiots. Holding up traffic is one of the things you enjoy doing simply because it annoys other people. Stanford wasn’t around to watch the speed limits crawl upward and the roads get bigger, so he’s still not used to the chaos, which makes it doubly entertaining. 

After about a minute and a half of this, he says, “Okay, it looks like it does sell what we need. They even have patchouli oil!”

“What do we need oil for? We ain’t cooking.”

He scoffs. “Your car smells like old tacos and aftershave. We’re fixing that.”

Point. You got it used, and El Diablo smelled worse, so you never consciously noticed, but it’s not the greatest scent in the world. “Fine, but only if the new smell isn’t terrible. Some of that incense stuff gives me a headache.”

“It’s fi— turn left two streets from here.” You put on your blinker immediately just to irritate the tailgater behind you some more. “It’s a decent scent. I’d prefer the nice sterility of a lab, or at least an ocean breeze, but I’ll take what I can get. Oh, for crying out loud!” The car behind you, finally fed up, passes with a long, angry honk of their horn (and, you hope, a middle finger, although you can’t see to tell). Your grin is all teeth, and Ford scoffs. “What a rude young person.”

“It’s all that television,” you say solemnly. It’s harder than you expected not to laugh as you turn left. “Zombies and magic and mayhem and blood. It’s poisoning their little minds.”

“You did something,” he replies flatly, because, well, he knows you by now, at least a bit. “I don’t know what, but you did something. Right at the next intersection.”

“What makes you think I did anything?”

“You — it’s right here, you probably can’t read the sign but the exterior is bright purple — you loved watching television with the kids, and you’d never use that expression. You’re more likely to condone mischief than condemn it. Yes, right here. Spirit House.”

“Sounds like the right kind of store to buy jewelry for your hippie girlfriend,” you tell him as you ease into what you hope is a parking space. Gravity Falls might have an uncommonly forgiving collection of weirdos enforcing their local ordinances and entirely ignorant of State and Federal laws, but the rest of the country will give you trouble. 

His tone is sour. “Yes, well. The alternative is purchasing from a retailer on the World Wide Internet, and I’m afraid that’s not an option, considering our lifestyle.”

The alternative alternative is normal adventuring, without the magic element, but you promised yourself you’d do more nerd things, since Ford is being so...accommodating. You’re not sure you want to know what changed his mind. You’re just glad to have this.

(Besides, some locals pay pretty good to have their supernatural issues solved. It’s a nice little side business that keeps you in the black.)

You cut the engine, slide out of the driver’s side, and shut the door behind you. It’s always wild to go shopping with Ford: he always wants the weirdest things, and you watch your accounts tick down every time. He’s never had to worry about money. Even during his dimension-diving days, he somehow always had enough. In this dimension, his articles and patents keep him comfortable, and he shares with you because you’re basically his research assistant, and you’re the one who finds clients when you’re in faraway places. You know, intellectually, that his purchases aren’t going to ruin you.

But…

You can’t get it to stick. Ford has his journals. You have yours. They both have numbers inside; his numbers are measurements, complex equations, numerical ciphers. Yours are painfully detailed records of purchases — profit/loss statements, if you want to get technical, which you don’t — peppered with notes about profitable locations. Your brother doesn’t get it (of course he doesn’t, most of his hunger pangs have been voluntary, the side effect of prioritizing science over self-care), but a piece of you will always belong to the streets. It doesn’t matter that you haven’t been homeless in just over three decades. You’ve never been able to let go of that curl of guilt every time you finish a meal in one sitting, every time you don’t cut a sandwich into quarters, every time you spend more than 5 bucks in a grocery store.

(It’s funny — you can always downplay that part of your history, because you’ve never been skinny in your life. Everybody expects you to be twiggy when you’re broke and starving, because they don’t realize that all the cheapest food tricks blow you up like a goddamn balloon.) 

You follow Ford into the shop and wince at the tinkling bell. It’s louder than it should be. The color scheme is garish purple and bright blue. You wish you’d brought your cane in with you so you could lean on it and look extra disinterested, but Ford doesn’t like it — he never says anything about your uncomfortable similarities to Bill, but you’re not an idiot — so you only use it when your back’s so bad you’re worried your hip might give, which (to be fair) happens less and less now that you’ve got that weird implant releasing electric pulses directly into you. It’s great, so long as it doesn’t kill you or something. Mad science isn’t something you tend to trust, but you took a leap of faith in the name of repairing your relationship.

You hate shops like this because the scent is overwhelming, something brown and thick against your throat, and the hoaxes are all unfamiliar. Angel icons. Dangly jewelry with Norse runes mechanically etched into powerwashed gemstones. Laminated cardboard tags printed with words too small for you to read, presumably explaining the spiritual significance of wearing a random Japanese kanji on a cheap chain around your neck. You can respect a good scam, and if people are buying then hey, way to hustle, right? But—

Maybe you’ve just grown soft in your old age, but nothing in the Mystery Shack was real, and that was on purpose. If you could bleed tourists dry with a rock that looked like a face, that was on them. But you always had Soos on standby if anything broke, and nobody (aside from Susan) ever got permanently hurt. Even at your fairs, you tested everything ahead of time and made sure everything functional stayed that way. The mystic kitsch in these shops is fine, but the real magic? That’s asking for trouble.

And these yahoos don’t even have waivers. Probably because anyone who brought a suit against them on the grounds of magical damages would be laughed out of court, but still.

“Stanley, look, they have raw gemstones,” Ford says excitedly to you, or as excitedly as Ford gets, and immediately goes elsewhere. What — does he want you to take them? Not that you’re opposed, but that’s weird, considering how uptight about stuff like that he still is most of the time. 

You shrug and lean against the long, low table in the middle of the room. Ostensibly, it’s positioned for optimal browsing, but you know what’s what. It’s there to draw attention, and so that the shopkeep can watch it. With all the loose stones, there are bound to be people exactly like you, willing to palm a few. It’s not like they don’t have enough that they won’t notice now if a few go missing. You pick up a shiny blue stone and squint at it obviously while pocketing a few with your other hand, put it down with an affected grimace of distaste, and move into a different stone — green, this time. They’re all hand-labeled with such thin, loopy cursive that you can’t read what their names are. You’ve made it halfway around the table and gotten Ford a nice selection of gems by the time he’s done at the counter, so you make a show of being unhurried, setting the black stone down and examining a goldish one briefly when he appears at your elbow.

“Oh,” you say, pretending to be surprised, “you’re done already?”

“Yes — the proprietor was very helpful. I even got a lead on the maker of those human-skin tarot cards,” Ford enthuses, as much as Ford can enthuse anyway. Even now, his enthusiasm seamlessly dovetails with his manic fear of social interaction with other humans. He’s always had it, even when you were kids, but after his time jumping dimensions, it’s dialed up to eleven. It’s usually hilarious to wind him up when he’s like this, watch him run through his list of dimensional social protocols and end up accidentally treating Earth teens like the blob people of whatever dimension, but you’ve got stolen goods in your pockets just now, so you don’t. 

“C’mon, nerd,” you say instead, not exactly disinterested, just un interested, which is a big distinction when it comes to how people see you. It’s especially important when you don’t want anyone to catch on that you’ve stolen from them. You clap your hand on Ford’s shoulder and gently steer him toward the door. “This shop smells like hipsters. I need gas station coffee.”

Ford laughs awkwardly, clearly not in on the joke, and follows your lead. You have no idea how he can remember the 86 gender signifiers of the Valerian community he stayed with for like ten days but he can’t remember basic stuff about his actual home world.

(Sometimes you worry that he misses his travels — that he got a taste for the kind of adventure you could never follow him on. He might pretend you ain’t broken, but your twisted spine and piss-poor eyesight are disadvantages. If he had the chance, would he leave for those worlds again?)

You leave the shop and reach the car without incident and keep the stones to yourself. You’ll give them to him later.

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to pursue this particular minor demon without more preparation, but Ford had assumed they didn’t need it. They’ve been doing so well lately. 

He counts to three, dodges the swooping attack — this demon, apparently, is a physical hunter rather than a psychic one, and it needs a beat of its wings to gather enough pushing power to dive-bomb its prey, good to know — and pulls out his shock pistol. There’s only enough charge left for two more shots. 

Stanley’s distracting its twin with something shiny (Ford hopes it doesn’t imprint on them), so he takes careful aim, fires...success! 

...Or not. The twin lets out a roar of outrage and beats its wings once, twice, knocking Stanley off his feet. The first demon lets out a chirr, either an inborn involuntary call for help or simply an unconscious sound, and Ford aims the shock pistol at the twin. This would be so much easier if their binding array hadn’t been broken! Damn those seagulls. And the weird fish the seagulls dropped into the circle. 

(That probably, in retrospect, wasn’t a natural occurrence.)

Fire.

Unlike the first half of the demon, the twin seems to just shake off the electric shock in a rage. Ford fumbles in the interior pocket of his jacket, looking for his ray gun; it’s not ideal, not when they need both parts of the demon alive to fully exorcize it, but they can’t do that when they’re dead, either. Before he can draw, the demon slams into him, tearing a chunk out of his sweater and a line down his arm with its longest wing claw. Ford howls at the sensation as he goes down hard, some part of him hoping the claws aren’t venomous, most of him just screaming pained expletives in every expressive language he knows.

“You leave my brother alone,” Stan snarls with angry determination from just outside Ford’s field of vision, and then there’s a glint of metal and a loud, sucking thwack as a set of brass knuckles slams into the bank of eyes above the demon’s snub nose. Its blue wings, identical to its twin’s, go limp, and a spray of nauseating foam exits its gaping mouth-hole. Stan turns to him, reaches down, and says, “C’mon, Sixer, we gotta go.”

If nothing else, Ford knows the value of running for one’s life. It was how he survived some dimensions: pushing himself beyond his limits, running to the point of exhaustion and beyond, refusing to be caught by hunters or predators or law enforcement. Ford pushes himself up on unsteady legs and, once he’s taken a few running steps, almost trips over himself at the sight of Stan finishing their broken binding array with a few unpolished obsidian stones. Crude, and not very effective, but it’ll give them time to find cover, and lesser demons don’t tend to fixate. They’re scavengers, not predators. 

Stan and Ford run toward an opening in the mountain — this region of southern Utah is full of small caves, thank goodness — and they barely make it in before Ford collapses. He’s not so young anymore. Neither of them are.

Stan crowds him toward the back of the hole, looking spooked, and for want of something more intelligent to say, Ford asks, “How did you know to use obsidian?”

“Was that what those stones were? I didn’t know it had to be any type of thing,” Stan replies. He leans casually against the wall, grimaces in pain, and sits down next to Ford. “I just had ‘em in my pocket. Fixed what the demons’ little pets ruined. Guess we got lucky.”

Ford isn’t inclined to believe entirely certain Stan is telling the truth. After all, if he didn’t know, then “Why did you have them in your pocket?”

Stan blinks and gives him an incredulous look. “Took ‘em from the weird new-age shop. Didn’t you ask me to?”

“Did I— Christ, Stanley, no, I did not ask you to shoplift. What would make you think…?”

“You mentioned them. Then walked away and distracted the cashier. Wasn’t that code or something?”

Ford almost says something nasty. He wants to. It would be easy. But there’s something about Stan’s code that makes an awful kind of sense if one thinks like a fellow thief — not someone who steals for fun, but out of necessity, someone who’s stolen things for others. Ford has never had to steal anything; he’s always been able to get his hands on things through legal means. His list of crimes in other dimensions tend to be morality crimes, like seducing a siren or making eye contact with nobility, and a few cases of well-deserved violence. He’s done some highly questionable things, but despite his garbage situation, he’s lived a life of relative privilege. 

So he doesn’t say anything nasty. He takes a deep breath and says, “I will never ask you to do that for me. I don’t want you to put yourself at risk for me over something so small — we’re partners, Stan. You don’t have to steal anymore.”

“I guess.”

“Can you promise me you won’t do that again?” Stan makes a face, so Ford amends his question. “Can you promise to try?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Stan replies, and that’s probably as good as Ford’s going to get. He’ll take it.

The cave’s quiet, and it’s on its way to going dark when you notice the blood. Ford’s been good about pressing his shoulder to the wall, but this most recent adjustment showed you a nasty scratch that isn’t quite actively bleeding, but it’s definitely not an old scratch either. 

“You’re bleeding,” you say dumbly. You should have noticed. You were so focused on remembering how the binding array had looked that you didn’t even think about whether the demon’s claws managed to get your brother.

“It will be fine,” he tells you gruffly. Clearly, you weren’t supposed to notice. “I’ve been applying pressure.”

“We shouldn’t have tried an exorcism. It was stupid.”

Quiet settles around you. This cave isn’t the greatest place to hunker down, but it’s better than nothing. If you can’t get to the car, at least you won’t get rained on or whatever weather they have out here. Probably not rain. 

Ford, eventually, says, “I assumed we could handle the demons. Our array was perfect. It could hold any magical creature with limited sentience.”

“Obviously not. These ones summoned their little seagull friends.”

“I thought the psychic call was a myth. We’re working off legends for many of these creatures. Cryptozoology isn’t quite a science for a reason,” he says dryly. “It was a risk, yes. But one worth taking in the name of research, don’t you think?”

Maybe it’s the stress, maybe it’s your brother’s knowing tone of voice, maybe it’s just a bad day, but for some reason, his attempt to justify this injury is enraging. You clench your fist, wishing for something to punch. “How did you manage to star in an interdimensional swashbuckler and still wind up a bigger idiot than me?”

“It wasn’t as dangerous as you’re-”

“Can it, Poindexter,” you snap, glancing at the rip in his flesh again. That’s going to scar, and if you weren’t close to a medical facility, it’d probably get infected, too. You scowl. “I know you’re a big hotshot criminal in a bunch of different dimensions, but in this one, breathing wrong at the wrong person gets people dead. We’re lucky it was demons. Next time, walk away.”

“A little hard to run when you don’t have anyone watching your back,” he snaps back mutinously, avoiding your eyes. 

Your stomach sinks — does he really not trust you? “I...oh. I have — but-”

“Stanley, I was on my own for thirty years, and before that, the only person I trusted was the only person I trusted because he poisoned me against everyone else. You’ve had a head start working with other people, but I’m still relearning how to — how and when to laugh at something, and you know I’ve never been any good at reading people at all. Trusting someone is an incredible act of faith; it always has been, but now, it’s twice so. And I do trust you, but I have bad habits. When I’m under pressure, the first thing I think of is how to best neutralize the threat. I don’t want to turn my back on something that can kill me. It’s funny…” He sighs and slumps, like he feels heavy. You can relate. “I always justify it with research, but it isn’t always. You were always the rough-and-tumble kind of guy, but when it comes down to it, your self-protection schemes are more academic, and mine involve a lot more violence.”

“I take exception to that,” you protest. “I ain’t a nerd.”

“No, of course not. Just a man who taught himself pantemporal physics and enough electrical engineering to rewire something even I didn’t fully understand,” he replies easily, and, well.

You grimace, already feeling bad about your little spat. “Look, Ford, I’m sorry. I get it, about old habits. But if I’m gonna try not to steal stuff, you have to try not to see the whole world as a big death ray. Because we’re both right — tomorrow we might be broke because of some freak accident and the whole world is a deadly, toxic mass of rock and sludge slingshotting around a carcinogenic ball of burning gas, and every creature on this hunk of mud could kill us, and plenty of them actively want to. Yeesh, I lost the plot. Something-something-bad habits, safety, four-leaf clovers? You decide.”

“You’re an inspiration, Stanley.”

“I’m gonna pretend that was sincere,” you tell him. There’s no use leaving the cave yet, because the world might be trying to kill you, but you’re in no hurry to run headfirst into a pair of lesser demons.

Finally — you’re in California, here for the kids’ birthday. Their house is smaller than you expected, but you’re not sure why you expected anything at all. Neither of them really talked about home when they stayed with you, and you only spoke to their mother once during that whole summer. It’s not that you think their parents are anything like yours, but you can’t help wanting to keep your eyes open for signs. Their parents put ‘em on a bus just to get rid of ‘em while they fought over their marriage and asked you to lie about it.

“Grunkle Stan!”

You also can’t help smiling as your great-niece collides with you at the front door. Mabel’s always been a force, but her hugs are even stronger than they were last summer. Apparently, she joined a casual gymnastics team, and she didn’t take to the acrobatics, but she did take to the conditioning, so now she just works out like a gymnast without the actual sport or coaches forcing her to do it. She’s gonna be a tank if she keeps this up; as it is, she’s lost most of her baby fat already, transformed into something sturdier and imposing. You’re pretty proud of her, actually — the kid ain’t taking shit from anyone, that’s a fact. She’s already staked a literal vampire through the heart, something that takes more strength than you’d expect after watching Beth the Vampire Killer.

Dipper’s still noodly and awkward as ever, but it seems that he has more confidence these days. When he immediately engages Ford in talk of an enclave of pixies near Piedmont Junior High, he doesn’t show the same signs of withdrawn insecurity, and he’s still pretty sweaty, but he’ll grow out of that. Probably.

“Mom’s out shopping. We needed more ice cream,” Mabel says brightly, tugging on your hand as she guides you through the house and to the backyard. It’s not what you expected: Mabel’s little photo album must have captured all the interesting pieces of it, but all told, the house is spartan. There are no cutesy decorations, other than a couple of framed family photos and a generic flower cross-stitch on the sofa. The piano against the wall hasn’t been dusted in a while, and there isn’t much color. Maybe that’s part of why Mabel always looks like she went swimming in a rainbow.

You follow her, more easily than you did last summer now that your spine is finally being treated, and wonder where all the guests are. Mabel can make friends effortlessly, and while Dipper might have some hygiene issues, he’s not un social, or the kind of weird that is actively repellent. The patio is empty but for a table with a cake on it (Pixie Dust Surprise — as hilarious as it would be to watch your brother stumble into a hallucinogenic stupor, you’ll have to warn him). Maybe the kids’ friends are just coming later.

“Where is everybody,” you ask.

“Dad’s picking up our friend Ana,” Mabel replies, “and our friend Eliot has to work mornings with his stepdad, so he can’t get here until later, and Mom’s getting ice cream.”

“That’s it? Nobody else is coming?”

“We…” Her shoulders come up almost to her ears. Great, you’ve embarrassed her. “School hasn’t been great since I kicked Adam Smith in the you-know-where so he’d stop making trouble for Dipper. It didn’t work — he just started saying stuff about how me and Dipper are too close or whatever, and Emily Wesson just calls me Minor — she thinks she’s clever. Like Ursa Minor, Girl Dipper, but also like a kid, like she isn’t one. Basically we’re the weird kids now. I’m okay with it, because Ana and Eliot are my people and they’re good people, but don’t mention it to Dipper. He really wanted things to be different this year.”

Well, damn, if that ain’t a kick in the teeth. You’d offer to put glass in Adam and Emily’s shoes, but Mabel and Dipper can take care of themselves. If they wanted revenge, they’d have got it by now.

“-thing that we definitely found and is definitely here. Although we haven’t seen it in a while. It might be seasonal. Ha-ha,” Dipper says mechanically, clearly trying to explain your lie to Ford. Poor kid. He’s not even against lying as a concept, he’s just not very good at it, especially when he’s trying to lie to someone he cares about.

Fortunately, your brother is one of the most socially unaware people in the universe, and only says, “There are certain invisible species who have seasonal migration patterns, although I’ve only observed them in Gravity Falls. Or more specifically, I’ve observed their effects. What kind of tracks did it leave?”

“C’mon, Dipper,” Mabel says, dragging the consonants and letting go of your hand to go cling to Ford instead. It’s always funny to watch him try to figure out what to do about hugs, because you know he actually likes them, but liking something and being used to it are different things. Mabel makes an adorable pouty face. The girl needs to be an actress. “Can’t we put off the hunting talk until after the party?”

“Mabel, you put pixie dust in your cake,” Dipper replies flatly, but it’s not a no. Of course it’s not. If they don’t move on, Dipper will have to keep lying. 

Ford’s expression falls into something like concern. “What? Mabel, do you realize how powerful pixie dust is?”

“Psh. It’s only a pinch,” she says, waving off his worry. “It’ll give us nice dreams when we fall asleep, but that’s about it. It’s different when you bake it! You shouldn’t add it to Mabel Juice, though. That’s...not so good.”

“You’d have to have experimented with it to know the changing effects,” Ford points out. He still looks concerned. This is more amusing than you expected.

“Well, yeah? I found a colony of pixies here in Piedmont and they are so annoying. They drop their dust everywhere and all you have to do is scrape it into a jar.”

“Mabel’s favorite candy was Smile Dip,” Dipper offers by way of an incomprehensible explanation. To clarify, he adds, “It was banned in the US because too much of it makes you hallucinate. Mabel Juice is a natural stimulant that Mabel created. She’s really good at chemistry as long as you don’t actually call it chemistry, and she tests everything on herself.”

“Anyway, I thought that we all deserved a really good night, so I made my pixie dust cake. I promise it isn’t like straight pixie dust and I’ve had it like, five times since we found the colony,” Mabel says.

“I won’t say no to good dreams,” you say, even though you’ve got your own reservations. The last time someone messed with your dreams, you were locked in your own memories and you had to rely on a bunch of kids to chase out an invader you couldn’t see. You know now that it was a spell and a contract between Gideon Gleeful and Bill Cipher, but back then, you felt completely helpless. Mabel wouldn’t do anything malicious, but you’ll probably suggest splurging on a hotel tonight just so you’re enclosed in a private place while you dream. You’d do a lot for these kids, but they’re still kids.

“I...suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try a slice,” Ford agrees hesitantly, probably because you said it first. 

Mabel beams like the sun, her braces glinting and her eyes shining. You look between Dipper, whose smile is smaller but no less genuine, and your brother, whose academic curiosity must be tickled again, and you know that whatever the cost is, this is worth it.

You have your family back. Anything is worth it.