Chapter Text
Fidds had planned for the possibility that there would be some form of explosion when the portal reached full power, but Stan is still caught off guard by the acrid smoke that permeates through everything just before Fidds’s exhaust system kicks in and starts suctioning it off towards the surface. They’re definitely breaking about five emissions laws. That’s Ford’s problem as far as Stan’s concerned.
Speaking of. Who’s thinking about emissions laws to keep from freaking the fuck out that his brother should be back any second? This guy. He’s run through every possibility, like he did on many a sleepless night before coming out here, and only left himself a nervous wreck because of it, so he’s just not thinking about it. Nope, no sir. Queso-ra-so-ra or whatever.
Off to the side of the portal, there’s a hiss of rapidly releasing steam from the rift containment tank doing its thing—good thinking, Fidds, as always—and Stan’s just finished coughing a lung up into his elbow (seriously, why has this shit gotta smell like shit) when Ford’s disgruntled form resolves from behind the smoke. He’s dressed in some kind of stupid vest with too many pockets and the type of dark utility wear that you see in action movies and shit.
And his first words, true to form, are “Stanley, what in the absolute hell.”
Look. Stan likes to think he’s maybe…okay, so “mellowed out” is not the term. Nor has he zenned in any way. But he has cooled his heels a tiny bit, and yet, still, Ford seems the person tailor-made to get directly under his skin, thick though it may be. A whole year of bustin’ ass for this shit? So he rolls his eyes and goes, “Great to see you too, Ford. It was actually super easy getting you back, no trouble at all—”
“Getting me b—do you have any idea what a colossal fucking risk you took, reactivating this thing?! Did me begging you to hide my journal where nobody would ever find it not, perhaps, clue you in? I mean, of all the harebrained things you’ve done—”
“Oh, sorry I wanted my brother back from whatever hell I sentenced him to! God forbid a guy try and fix his mistakes—”
“Do you realize that you may very well have doomed the entire planet? The entire dimension? The fabric of reality itself?”
“That’s what the rift containment tank is for, asshole!” Not that you clearly thought of that BEFORE you started fucking with the fabric of reality. They’re interrupted by a low clang from off to Stan’s right, and he winces. Fuck. Fidds. So easy to forget your traumatized engineer is curled up in a ball on the floor when your asshole brother returns from lands unknown only to berate you; could happen to anyone.
And Ford, the maniac, rounds the bank of computing equipment with some kind of stupid high-tech gizmo-gun at the ready. “Put that away, you lunatic,” Stan hisses at him, then drops to a crouch beside Fidds, who has on the faraway stare that means nothing good is going on in that pretty head. The number one thing you should never do around him is turn the portal on, and the number two thing is yelling. And. Well.
They’d planned for this. Some things are just unavoidable. “Fidds, hey. Are you hearing me? Hm?” It takes a long moment, but eventually Fidds hums a low noise of assent. “I need you to go upstairs, okay? Yeah?” Stan’s impulse is to squeeze his hand or something, but he’s all too conscious of Ford staring daggers into the pair of them.
“What the hell is going on here,” Ford starts, but Stan gives him his best death-glare.
“You can wait to yell at me until he’s outta here,” Stan says, in a tone that brooks no disagreement. As Fidds rises unsteadily from the floor, Stan nudges him in the direction of the elevator. He tries to gentle his voice some as he says, “Keep your glasses on, and—nuh-uh. Elevator.” Little bastard was heading for the stairs, as if he isn’t weaving like a drunk.
“Quit hoverin’,” Fidds mutters, and his eyes flick to Ford once, and then he flinches, and then he leaves. Oof. That’s gotta sting. Not like Ford left on the best of terms with anyone who knew him, really.
When the elevator’s closed behind him, Stan at last turns back to Ford, who’s staring at the elevator door with something mildly anguished on his face. “Where were we?” he asks dryly. “Oh, right: you were telling me how reckless and stupid and selfish I am, yeah? You wanna pick that back up, or are you ready to move on?” God, he’s tired. They were up all last night getting this thing started, and then he was dealing with Fidds all day, and now this. The constant helter-skelter of the last 13 months is finally at a dead stop, and his body’s most definitely getting the memo.
Some of the bite has gone out of Ford’s voice when he speaks, bled into bewilderment. “I just—of all the things, Stanley, the one thing I asked you to do, you would think you could’ve—”
“No, I could not have, are you fucken kidding me? Leave you stuck god-knows-where, where my ass got you stuck in the first place? Sorry, jackass, but I ain’t the guy who does world-saving shit, that’s clearly you. You’re the one who builds shit and I’m the one who breaks it, right?” He juts his jaw out, crosses his arms, daring Ford to—whatever. Agree, disagree, he’s an asshole either way.
“You should have broken it. You should have broken it down to scraps and—and sold it off. Instead you drag poor Fiddleford back into this mess—”
“I didn’t drag him anywhere!” Stan shouts. “How fucken dare you.”
“The one bit of solace I had during the hell I’ve been through is that at least Fiddleford escaped while he could—”
“Escaped? Escaped?” Stan barks out a rough, humorless laugh. “God, you are beyond deluded. If you actually think—Jesus, for a genius you sure are blind as hell sometimes, wasn’t this guy, like, your best friend or some shit? He never escaped, Ford, he was just whittling away at his own skull trying to—you’ve got no idea.” It’s the angriest he’s actually been during this whole exchange, and he turns away with a low hiss, running a shaky hand through his hair. Jesus. The other stuff, he’d expected. Typical Stanford. Also typical Stanford: finding the one thing Stan wasn’t really thinking about and digging his nails in. Always an overachiever.
“What do you—what are you talking about? Stanley? Did he—oh, god. The memory gun—I thought he destroyed that—”
“You’re an idiot for believing him.” Stan schools his face back to gruff annoyance, then turns to face his brother again. Ford looks like he’s flickering between anger and exhaustion and guilt and confusion, and Stan notices, for the first time, the short-cut side of his hair, the scar bisecting it, still pink and raised, rendered with surgical surety. “He was—it was bad. It’s still—anyway.”
“Goddammit—I tried to warn him—”
“Yeah, well, he tried to warn you. Problem with you smart people is that you think you can’t ever be stupid.” Ford blows out a long sigh, turning his gaze away to look around the space, some of the tension bleeding out of his frame. Some. Stan gets the feeling it’s exhaustion mellowing them both out right now. There’ll be more to come; there always is. After a moment of silence, Stan starts going through the last of the shutdown sequence for the portal at the console in front of him. “Look,” he says, once he’s finished, “Fiddleford wants to stick around and help until the portal’s dismantled. For, y’know, closure. Peace of mind. Whatever. I, uh—he does better in the upstairs bedroom. Less…less exits. Less entrances.” At Ford’s confused look, Stan sighs, “Long story.”
“He doesn’t need to…after everything, he doesn’t have to do that—”
“He wants to.”
“Well—all right. If, I mean, if it would help. And…you’re…?”
“Not leaving him.” Stan stares at him evenly, daring him to say some stupid shit right now. He barely restrains himself from a jab about how Fidds ended up the last time he was alone with Ford, but he can see from Ford’s flinch that he gets the gist, anyway. (And really, yes, it is so fucking annoying: where was this remorse, this reactivity, when it was Stan getting hurt from his bullshit?) A second later, Ford’s back to defensiveness, scowling at a point just over Stan’s shoulder.
“This is still my house,” he says. Stan shoves his hands in his pockets.
“You owe him,” he answers simply. Sees in his brother’s eyes that he’s lost the will to fight about it further, at least for now. Stan doesn’t have to say anything else; if there’s one last thing in the world that the two of them can find common ground over, it’s owing something to Fiddleford McGucket.
Ford follows him up the stairs, a few paces behind, then into the house proper. It’s dark, close to 10 PM now, and there’s a chill to the upstairs floor that wasn’t present in the lab; despite it being underground, running the search program to look for Ford out there in the multiverse was power-heavy and drew a lot of heat. Stan calls out for Fidds as he moves down the hallway, a drowsy “Yeah?” answering from the kitchen.
Ford stalls out in the doorway of the kitchen, as if realizing he was following on autopilot; Stan pays him no mind. Fidds is slumped over the table, but he raises his head as Stan turns the light on.
“Why you sitting here in the dark, weirdo?”
“Waitin’ for the microwave to finish,” Fidds yawns. Stan eyes the microwave, which blinks 0:00 at him placidly.
“It’s finished. Looks like it’s been finished. Airhead.” Fidds scowls at him.
“S’the Valium. Asshole.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He wouldn’t have been able to be down in the lab without being dosed to the gills, even this long after the Incident. Stan needed him to work some of the consoles, not to mention the silent, constant fear that he would do something stupid if he was left upstairs on his own while the portal ran. Fidds was more scared, in the end, of not knowing if something was going wrong than of being present for the actual run.
Sluggishly, Fidds turns to look at Ford in the doorway. Ford says his name, but Fidds rises unsteadily to his feet and slips past him without saying a word, headed for the stairs. Yikes, baby’s mad. Stan punches the button on the microwave again, and it starts its low hum.
“Fiddleford, you had better use the handrail,” he calls. Fidds makes a scoffing sound. Stan turns around, leaning a hip against the counter, and looks at Ford, who looks for all the world like a kicked puppy. “He’ll probably be more talkative tomorrow,” Stan says begrudgingly.
“Well. We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”
“Heh. Lotta that goin’ around.” Ford rolls his eyes.
“Very funny, Stanley.” He looks around the kitchen. “Why are—why are there locks on half the cabinets?”
Stan presses his lips together, looking off into space for a long moment. Why indeed. Some days he looks around and wonders if they’re really necessary anymore. Other days he wonders if they’ll ever be able to function without. “Ahh,” he sighs. “You’re the big genius, right? Why d’you think, Ford?” There’s no bite in his tone. It’s not his resentment to hold onto. He just doesn’t wanna have to explain it.
He sees it play out on Ford’s face: the corner where the knife block used to be, the toaster, too, for good measure. The realization appears to hit him like a punch to the gut. “He—really?” Stan gives him a look like, yes, really. “Is that why—the Valium—?”
“No, the Valium was because he can’t be down in the lab without losing his shit.” The microwave beeps, but Stan makes no move to open it. “Like I said, we been through a lot.”
“Christ…but I, I don’t understand, why would he—”
“Ask him that,” Stan interrupts, at last opening the microwave and retrieving the plate. “S’not really, uh, my place to say…everything.”
“Right.” Ford leans almost heavily against the wall, his eyes far away.
“We got a system. And the system works,” Stan says with a shrug, jamming a fork into the heap of macaroni on the plate. “Do me a favor and keep track of anything sharp, and—and probably don’t slam any doors during the night or whatever. Ha. That one was sorta my fault.” He brushes past Ford, plate in hand, towards the stairs. “There’s fresh sheets on the downstairs bed,” he says, “and—oh, shit—” Ford follows him to the door of what used to be Fiddleford’s room, which is now outfitted with a hasp and an unlocked padlock. Stan removes the padlock from the mess, then unlocks the top drawer of the dresser inside. “Spare keys to the cabinets in there, case you need ‘em. And to the outside doors, too.”
“Right,” he whispers. “I just—I had no idea.”
“Huh. Not sure I believe you,” Stan says flatly, sort of on reflex, because Jesus fuck is he ever tired of the look on Ford’s face. “But I guess it’s none of my business. Welcome back to Earth, or whatever the fuck.” With that, he beelines for the stairs, halfway dead on his feet.
Fidds is under the covers when he gets in, but not asleep, staring at the wall vacantly. When he hears Stan, he elbows upright sluggishly.
“Forgot your macaroni, chief,” Stan mutters, handing him the plate, caressing the top of his head for a moment. Still reflex to check for fever, too, even so long after the worst of it.
“Rather go hungry than look at ‘im right now,” Fidds whispers, and Stan tries to put on a neutral face.
“Good thing you didn’t have to choose, then, huh?” Stan says, turning to grab pajama pants out of the dresser.
“Christ, I dunno if I can do this.”
“You can do it just fine, Fidds. Real question is, do you want to.” Stan changes, then falls onto his side of the mattress, too exhausted to consider doing anything else at the moment. Fidds manages about half the plate, which is better than Stan was expecting, before handing off the rest to him.
“It’s juss a lot,” Fidds mumbles, sliding down against the pillows until his head is resting gracelessly on Stan’s elbow. Doped-up little dork.
“Yeah, it is a lot.” What do you want me to say? He’s my goddamn brother, you think it’s a lot for you?
All things he doesn’t say; instead he just finishes the plate. He knows it’s different. It’s not a competition. But—god. Jesus fucking Christ.
Fidds’s eyelids are drooping shut, and Stan silently counts down from three in his head, at which point he will magically gather the strength to stand up and take the plate and fork downstairs. Three…two…two and a half…one. Magic, baby.
“It’s a fork, what am I gonna do with a fork, Stan?” Fidds drawls as he heads for the door. Stan gives him a heatless glare over one shoulder.
“You think I’m gonna leave a squirrelly engineer alone with a sharp implement under these conditions? Please. I’m a better zookeeper than that.” Fidds lets out a low huff of laughter. Stupid blue eyes always getting Stan into some kinda trouble. He’s pleased, Stan knows, to still be thought of as a threat, for some reason, the little freak. This game they play. They both know the locks are a formality at this point. If Fidds really wanted through them, it’d take a good hard yank, maybe a solid blow from a heavy book, and he’d be fine.
When he gets back, Fidds is sprawled diagonally across the bed. Fucker tries to do that in his sleep, too. He’s like a really annoying dog that way. Stan grabs him by one leg and rotates his spindly ass until there’s room to climb in, handing him his seizure meds. “Fuuuuck,” Fidds grumbles. “Thought I already took ‘em, I’m so loopy.”
“Valium’ll wear off by the time you wake up. Probably.” Fidds makes a grumbling noise but doesn’t put up a fuss otherwise.
All things considered, he’s in better shape than Stan expected. Which…probably means it’s all just gonna hit later, when he’s least expecting it, knowing Fidds.
Better sleep while he can. Fidds slumps down to laying again, and Stan reaches over to the side of the bed and turns off the light.
“Stay up and read if you want,” Fidds says quietly into the still dark. So still. For once, everything’s at a standstill. Stan breathes out slowly against that terrifying revelation before reaching out, until the back of his hand hits Fidds’s arm. Just to know he’s there.
“No way, I’m beat,” Stan answers. He listens for a moment for Fidds’s reply but instead, he gets the even, whistly breaths that mean he’s asleep.
Stan’s turn to breathe. Inhale once. Exhale.
Inhale. More ragged than he wants. Fuck. This day, this year, this decade. He’s raw, worn thin. Rudderless, now that his one mission for the last 13ish months is complete. Exhale—in bits and pieces.
Fidds, beside him, shifts, and Stan takes the next breath a little easier. Not his one mission, really, is it: he picked up a second, peskier one somewhere along the way—keeping this scrawny nerd afloat. Out of necessity, then guilt, then something approaching a shade of love, not that he dwells on the word often. And guilt still, yeah. That’ll always be there, but it’s hard to feel guilty for this long if it isn’t out of some kind of love, yeah?
He'd like to believe so, anyway.
“St….” Fidds mumbles, half asleep. Sometimes he half wakes and isn’t quite sure where he is.
Exhale. “Right here,” Stan whispers. God. Fuck. Nights like this, where it feels like the night has crawled inside him and is ballooning to an unsustainable size, pressing out at every seam, sneak up on him just when he thinks he has a moment to rest. There’s something in his breathing, maybe, or his body, that makes Fidds wake up just a little more, though. He rolls closer, inelegantly, squashing Stan’s arm under his body, breathing wetly against his chest.
“Stay right here,” Fidds says raspily. Stan thinks, anyway. He’s pretty sure the other man is still half-dreaming. His chest is tight, but he manages to breathe in again and adjust them, so limbs aren’t squashed all willy-nilly everywhere and Fidds’s cheek rests more easily against him. “I’m awake, juss—gimme a second,” he continues, though the long pause belies the contrary.
His body loosens, all at once, and he can breathe again. Oh, Fidds. “I’m okay,” he murmurs. “Everything’s fine, so just go to sleep, okay?”
A long, doubtful pause, before Fiddleford releases a sleepy grumble. “’Kay.”
If Stan clutches him like a weirdly-bony teddy bear until he drops into a heavy, dreamless sleep, nobody needs to know.
*
In the morning, they wake late and slow. They stand beside each other in the bathroom to brush their teeth, half-dressed. Fidds leans his palms on the counter and looks at Stan in the mirror.
“What’d you tell him?” Fidds asks, his voice still raspy with sleep, squinting at him, sans glasses.
“’Bout?” Stan grunts around the neck of his toothbrush. He’s messing with his hair, which can no longer be called a mullet, as it’s all around the same length.
(He was sick of looking disheveled at the beginning of this winter, had planned on taking clippers to the whole thing, but Fidds had said, “That short?” from the doorway. He’d sounded so betrayed that Stan had looked at him until he fidgeted, color rising to his cheeks. “It’s nice,” he’d muttered. “But—you just need a trim. And to brush it more often, maybe. Conditioner, too. …I have sisters, okay? So shut up.”)
“About,” Fidds says, drawing him back to the present. His steely blue eyes bore into Stan with some measure of uncertainty that Stan is not awake enough to deal with. Us, he doesn’t say. It would feel almost trite, wouldn’t it: about us. Like not enough, cheesy almost.
Stan spits. “Didn’t tell him nothin’,” he answers, then rinses. He feels protective of this thing they have, which just kinda comes with the territory where Fidds is concerned. “D’you want me to?”
“D’you wanna?”
“I asked you first,” Stan says, dragging his fingers carelessly through his hair, trying to get rid of the knots.
“I sort of—don’t.” The admission precedes a ragged inhale, and Stan feels a tug of fondness just behind his breastbone.
“It’s none of his business, anyway.”
“But if you want—” He’s just a little too loud, expelling the words as if he has to get rid of them.
“Fidds.”
“—he’s your brother. I mean, I don’t, I can—"
“Fiddleford.” God, it’s fucked-up, but Stan has always thought he’s kind of cute when he’s panicking over something that doesn’t matter. Flustered is maybe the word for it. He takes Fidds by the back of the neck. “Easy, quit freakin’ out, it’s too early, yeah?” Fidds just gives him that boundless, caught, wet-cat stare he did right before the first time he ever kissed Stan. “I don’t really want to tell him, either. Not right now.” I don’t trust him with this. With you. Fidds is his softest spot.
“I would say it’s kinda obvious,” Fidds says after a moment. “But it’s Ford.” Stan snorts at that. It’s true. Then a quiet tension takes over the bathroom, both of them doubtless thinking about the big question of the next few days. The future, with all its pieces to pick up, or not.
They head downstairs and Fidds sits at the table while Stan scrambles eggs. It really is crazy what a semi-normal sleep schedule and regular meals will do for a guy, even when he still lives half the time in survival mode. It’s working for Fidds, too, whose ribs are no longer showing like they were at the worst of it. They both sit there and try to act normal, as if the air isn’t heavy around them, as if they aren’t both feeling Ford’s presence in the downstairs bedroom like a bright spot in their heads.
Down the hall, the door opens and shuts quietly. Stan aggressively stares at the eggs and Fidds aggressively stares at his decaf. They share a quick glance just before Ford appears in the doorway: here we go.
Ford pauses in the doorway of the kitchen, uncertainty all over his face. It almost physically hurts, so Stan breaks the silence. “It’s decaf in the pot, Ford, but there’s normal stuff in the cabinet.”
“Ah.” A long pause. “Got it. And, er, good morning.” Immediately following the words, he gives Stan a look of utter dismay, and they both wince at how jaw-numbingly awkward this all is. Ford looks aimlessly around, at anything but Fidds, who’s just emitted a low hum of acknowledgment, and Stan returns to throttling the eggs with his eyes.
But then Ford says, “Stanley,” quiet and a bit—afraid? “Is he—” Stan turns to see Fidds staring into the middle distance, frozen and vacant, his lashes flickering.
“Oh, fuck.” Stan turns the stove off. “He gets—yeah, it’s a side effect of the memory thing, he gets stuck in a loop sometimes.” Stan goes over to him, leaning a hip against the table. “Fidds? Hey?” Stan carefully pries the coffee cup out of his hand and sets it down, his other hand grasping Fiddleford’s jaw. “Hey. It’s March 9th, 1983. You’re sitting here drooling into your decaf.” Fidds sucks in air sharply. Stan knows it the moment he comes back into himself, into the present, because he stares at Stan in that almost awed, relieved way, like Stan’s the only thing keeping him anchored. It’s not inaccurate, but he knows he’s a bad person for the way he craves it.
“Stan?”
“Yeah. You’re here, you’re good.”
“Jesus,” Fidds sighs, pulling his face away and pressing his fingertips to his brow.
“Headache?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Yeah, that looked like about twelve mornings at once there,” Stan remarks. “Luckily in this one I’m cookin’, huh?” Fidds still looks drained, slumping on his elbows, but Stan knows if he hovers it’ll only lead to crankiness, so he returns to the stove to plate the eggs. “Ford, are you eating?” Something clatters from Ford’s direction. Probably fumbling around, not expecting to be directly addressed.
“Uhh,” his brother says, “well, that is—yes, if there’s enough.” Stan just grunts an affirmative, pulling another plate down. He plops all three down on the table, which traps his brother into sitting down; Ford realizes it with a wince of dismay only after his ass has hit the chair. Ha. Now you can’t get up without feeling like you’re breaking the social contract, fucker. Fidds is still sitting there with his face in one palm. He jumps when Stan nudges his foot under the table.
“You hear that fox out in the yard again last night?” Stan asks him.
“Was she out there?” Fidds relaxes by a tiny, seriously minuscule, increment, picking up a bite on his fork.
“Uh-huh. I heard her yapping out under the window when I came back down here.”
“Didja get a look at her?”
“Nah. I peeked out but I didn’t see nothing, and I was beat anyway.” Across the table, Ford’s fingers flex and release over and over. Probably hating the small talk. He always did.
Fidds is in the middle of saying something about how the fox is probably gonna have her babies in the yard when Ford blurts out, “Can we. Sorry, can we just—”
A beat of silence, during which Fidds stares stubbornly at the wall and Stan looks at Ford expectantly. “Can we just what, Ford?”
“Not sit here pretending like any of this is normal.” Jesus, always straight to the chase with him. Some things never change. As if hearing his own tone belatedly, Ford chews at the inside of his cheek and drops his fork with a huff.
“Gee, tell me how you really feel,” Stan drawls.
“That’s not what I—all I’m saying is—”
“Nahh, you’re right, it ain’t normal,” Stan interrupts. “It’s fucken weird. A normal well-adjusted guy, his crazy twin—that’s you, Ford—and their shared-custody hillbilly walk into a bar—”
“I’ll show you custody,” Fidds says under his breath. One of those stupid, nonsensical Fidds jokes that always turns all the more hysterical the longer he spends trying to explain why they do make sense to him. It’s a conditioned response: Stan barks a laugh, quite without meaning to, and Ford has on that quietly martyred look he’d always get when he felt left out of a joke.
“I’m serious,” Ford says quietly. “We should—we should really—”
“What? Talk?” Fidds’s voice is shaky, but grating. “Hash things out? Clear things up? Seem to recall that not goin’ so well when I was the one askin’ for it.” Fidds hasn’t told him everything about the tension pervading his relationship with Ford in the weeks leading up to his leaving the project, but Stan read Ford’s version of events in the 3rd journal. Fidds moves eggs around on his plate jerkily. “Sorry,” he adds, almost under his breath.
“You don’t have to be here, you chose to be here,” Ford blurts out. God, he just can’t help himself. Fidds sucks in a pained breath, and Stan sighs quietly. This is just great. “The only reason I’m going along with this is because—because Stan said it would help—”
“Okay, so then what is there to talk about, then?” Stan asks bluntly. “You just wanna get shit done so you can kick us out. So then why are you making a fuss?”
“If either of you would let me finish a sentence.” A low thud as Fidds drops his fork, his eyes doing the thing again, pupils flicking back and forth rapidly like he’s lost in thought. Memory loop again. Stan sighs and reaches towards him, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“Fidds. Fiddleford.”
“For god’s sake,” Ford mutters, and Stan feels a flash of irritation. God forbid it’s not all about you for two seconds.
“Fidds,” he repeats. “C’mon, now, come back. It’s March 9th, 1983, and we’re kinda in the middle of something.”
There it is again, that big-eyed puppy stare lighting on Stan’s face, and then Fidds sucks in a breath and shoves away from the table.
“Are either of you going to tell me what the hell is going on?!” Ford exclaims, clearly fed up and flustered, and when Fidds looks at him it’s with wild eyes, wide and animal with emotion, and that never means anything good.
“Just stop,” Fidds whispers. “Just—”
“You can’t just—”
“Ford.” Stan says his brother’s name with cold seriousness because he knows where this is going. Ford is gonna say something accusatory and Fidds is gonna collapse into a memory-tornado of recursive guilt and fear and Stan’s gonna have to pick up the pieces. He can’t do it today, not when he has a chance to head it off. The two brothers stare at each other, a crackle of white-hot tension in the air between them, before Stan looks away, towards Fidds. “S’all right,” he says, and Fidds gives him a long look before taking it for the permission that it is to flee back upstairs. It’s not all right. Don’t leave me with this, he thinks, just for a moment, before he shoves the feeling down and looks at Ford again.
“You have to lay off him a little bit after the memory thingies,” Stan says matter-of-factly. “Especially if they’re back-to-back. You can’t go cornering him when he’s like that.” A flicker of annoyance crosses Ford’s face at being told what to do, being told something he doesn’t know, before it’s replaced with a tired sort of sadness. Uncertainty. Guilt, maybe.
“Explain what you mean by ‘memory thingies.’”
“S’exactly what it sounds like. All that shit got crammed back in his head at once and now it’s, y’know. Getting unpacked or whatever.”
“‘All of it,’ what do you mean ‘all of it?’” Stan gives him a long stare. “What was the extent?”
“I mean everything, Ford. Who he was, right down to his own name. Heh—he still kept the accent, though.”
“But—why?”
“Why the fuck not?” Stan finishes the last of what’s on his plate. “You were both chasin’ shortcuts, way I figure it. Other worlds, empty skulls. Inventing new ways to run off. You really gonna sit there and judge?”
“Oh, as opposed to what, Stanley? Selling cheap garbage on late-night television?” A flare of old, familiar resentment. Funny: in a year of Fidds being the biggest part of his day-to-day, he’d forgotten how all-encompassing it could be, if he let it. “That was…perhaps uncalled for,” Ford says after a moment, looking down at his untouched plate. Huh. Stan wasn’t expecting that.
“No, by all means,” Stan mutters dully, standing to stick his dishes in the sink. He downs the last of Fidds’s decaf, too. “I went to prison, too, in case you wanted to get precious about that while you’re at it.”
“I don’t. I don’t want—I never expected to be back here. I suppose I just—I just don’t know what to do with it.” Oh, god. Of all the things Stan was not expecting outta this morning, uncomfortable sincerity has to top the list.
“Yeah, well, you let me know when you figure that out,” Stan says briskly, grabbing Fiddleford’s plate off the table. “I better go and….”
“Right. I’m—I’ll be downstairs. Quicker it’s torn down, the better.” Then why didn’t you do that in the first place, dumbass? Stan thinks, but doesn’t say, not wanting to get into it.
He steels himself outside the bedroom door, inwardly cursing his brother and the world and even Fidds for everything, then walks in. Fidds is on the floor beside the bed, staring at the ceiling with his head tipped back on the mattress, a book unopened on his lap. “You’re gonna give us ants if you keep leaving food all over,” Stan says, setting the plate on top of the book.
“We already have ants,” Fidds answers. “Well. We will, once it thaws out.” A flicker of uncertainty in his face. They haven’t really talked about…after. Nothing beyond a general admission a couple weeks back, on Stan’s part, that Fidds is gonna have a hard time shaking him off, even when this is all done. And now sure isn’t the time. “I don’t really got an appetite right now.”
“Just try.” After a moment of sulking, Fidds shoves a bite into his mouth. He’ll probably be fine, finish the whole plate. Stan sits beside him while he does, their shoulders pressed together, and takes the plate and fork when he’s done. “I’m gonna go down in the basement,” he says. “Ford’s down there. Getting started. You gonna be okay up here on your own?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Fidds says, leaning his cheek on the mattress and staring up at Stan. “I might try and come down but—I dunno—”
“There’s always tomorrow,” Stan says.
“Y’all ain’t gonna run power to it or nothin’,” Fidds says, but it’s a question.
“No, baby, we ain’t. If he even brings it up, I’ll kick his ass.”
“And if he starts actin’ weird, or his eyes turn yellow or somethin’, you have to—I dunno. Knock him out?”
“I will, Fidds. Hey, c’mon. It’s like you don’t even remember our first couple weeks together.”
“There’d be some irony in that, wouldn’t there,” Fidds drawls, and Stan gives him a crooked grin. “Just be careful,” Fidds says after a moment, almost at a whisper.
“Yeah, yeah, quit worryin’.” Secretly, in the dark, ugly parts of himself, Stan craves it—being worried about. By someone, anyone. He leans in to drop a kiss on Fidds’s brow, almost as an apology for the thought, and Fidds pulls him back in by the collar when he goes to pull away, kissing him squarely, the shape of his mouth familiar. He always kisses like he needs it but he isn’t sure he deserves it. Stan always stays until he’s let go of. “Keep your radio on you,” Stan tells him, once they’ve broken apart.
“I will.”
“Arright. I’ll be back up in a couple hours but holler if you—”
“I know, Stan. Stop fussin’.”
“Okay, all right. Later, baby.” Some part of him still shudders at the idea of being floors apart for very long. Fucking separation anxiety or something. Most of the worst things that have happened in the past year have been when he’s left Fidds alone. He shoves down the panic reflex and washes and dries everything from breakfast, puts all the forks and ceramic stuff into their respective locked cabinets, almost ritualistically. It’s tedious, it’s fucking exhausting sometimes, but anytime he thinks about taking shortcuts or leaving them in the sink for later, he fears that that’ll be the one time he really shoulda locked everything behind him.
Maybe love is superstition. Growing up, it always seemed that way, anyway. He cuts off that train of thought with clinical accuracy and shuts his head down as he descends into the basement. If he stops to think about it all for too long, he’ll start to get that kind of restless fragility that usually leads to multi-day gambling binges and mysterious black eyes—or used to, anyway.
Ford is past the safety tape borders, studying the rift containment tank Fidds dreamed up and built. Deeper onto the lab floor, the portal looms with that ominous, void energy it’s always had. Crossing too close to it has always felt like walking into a pocket dimension, like horror stories where the whole forest goes dead and still and the wind stops. Fidds said it had something to do with EMFs and quantum stabilization mechanisms, that sense of animal dread. Like watching or being watched.
Stan usually dealt with it by jacking up the audio on his Walkman (though never enough that he couldn’t hear his radio, or his beeper, which connects to the EEGs built into Fidds’s glasses for seizure detection). With Ford here, he doesn’t think he can do that.
“I was going to get started on the disassembly,” Ford says distractedly, “but I don’t want to disrupt power to this without knowing—well—the specifics.”
“Fiddleford built that thing mostly on his own,” Stan answers with a shrug. “It detects the riffles or whatever and sucks ‘em up like a vacuum. I call it Hoover. Like the vacuum, not the Fed.” God, it’s basically reflex at this point, his malapropisms, because it’s funny to watch Fidds get all ruffled by it, and before that it was fun to fuck with Ford; from the look on his twin’s face, it’s just as annoying now as it was 11 years ago. “And the things, they wanna be compressed. Helps ‘em stay stable, so the machine does, like, a handshake or something and squashes them down like a soda can.”
Of course it’s more technical than that, but watching Ford’s face go through several stages of grief is more fun than flexing that he knows how Hoover uses a combination of pressure, temperature, and kinetic energy to force the rift energy down into a liquid crystal state.
“Like a soda can,” Ford repeats exasperatedly.
“Liquid crystal state. You ever heard of it? Could revolutionize the meth industry, but Fiddleford said no.”
“That—huh.” Ford trails off, giving the unit another look. “He must’ve predicted the rifts could be ordered in a crystal structure that would render the instability—if not inert, then at least in a state of neutral energy with no reason or ability to affect surrounding quadrants…I suppose we can figure out disposal as slowly as we need to—”
“He’s thinking a copolymer,” Stan answers. Ford appears to short-circuit again. God, he’s still so easy. Especially now they’ve been apart for so long, it is incredibly fun to watch him get so conflicted over how smart he thinks Stan is or isn’t. “Repeated microphase separation, keep it occupied messing with itself with no reason to attack the rest of the universe. Or somethin’ like that. And then, y’know, maybe we launch it into space. Or in the landfill. That part’s my idea.”
“A landfill?”
“Or make, like, copolymer rubber duckies and sell ‘em to kids. Make a quick buck, and then we hightail it in the ensuing chaos.” Ford just stares at him and makes a sputtering noise. “At least I have a plan,” Stan spits out, rather without meaning to. Okay, so maybe he isn’t as chill and suave as he’d like to be in this moment.
Ford looks away, his features tight with annoyance and anger. “You were my plan,” he says quietly. “I was—I hadn’t slept properly in weeks and nothing was making sense and so of course it seemed rational at the time. You were my plan, Stanley, you were supposed to—and instead you brought me back.”
“You can think whatever you want about me, Ford, and you always have. You’ve always thought just exactly what you wanted, and nothing else, but—lord knows I’m a crook and a conman and known to half the cops on the eastern seaboard, but I’m a stubborn son of a bitch and I wasn’t gonna just leave you god knows where.” It’s more than he meant to say, and his throat hurts afterwards, and he turns to lean against a bank of consoles and hisses out a sharp breath.
“You should have,” Ford spits.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t!” He hasn’t raised his voice in who knows how long, so used to keeping it in check around Fiddleford. “Fucken deal with that! You’re the one who called the bastard who always makes the wrong choice, yeah? You go to a chicken farm you’re gonna get chickens. Goddammit, Ford.”
Ford snaps his jaw shut with an audible click and turns away, apparently done with this line of conversation for now. It’s heartbreakingly familiar, the way he tucks his hands under the opposite armpit, fingers gripping at the sides of his shirt—Ford at peak overwhelm. Familiar, too, that Stan backs off. They often butted heads. That’s inescapable, they are who they are, but Stan almost never pushed past this point. He knows a breaking point when he sees it. Has done ever since he was a child. Ford’s, Mom’s. Dad’s.
After a long, weighted moment, Ford asks—his back still turned—“Can we start disassembly without destabilizing the containment unit?” and Stan lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
“Yeah. At least most of it. It’s on the same circuit as the primary lever, but we can get most of the heavy lifting outta the way, and by the time we get to the more granular stuff maybe we can get Fidds down here.”
“All right.” Ford palms the back of his neck and half-turns towards Stan, his eyes on the ground.
“It’s mainly the main, like, actual portal that freaks him out.”
“I would imagine—yeah. The accident was—well, of course he left right afterwards, but even as a bystander it was quite scary.” His brother’s face creases, and he says, “He just—he’s different. From how I remember him.”
“Well,” Stan says. And he doesn’t have anything to say after that. Not about Fidds, anyway. “Say, what happened to your head?”
“Ah.” Ford raps his knuckles against the side of it; a hollow, muffled clang plays out. “Metal plate. To keep Bill from entering my mind. It's etched with eight-dimensional sigils.”
“Okay, whatever you say, nerd.” Ford visibly chews on the idea of taking the bait before abruptly dropping it.
He follows Ford towards the gaping maw of the portal, feeling, as he always does, the tug of prey-dread low in his belly, rooting his boots to the floor. They both pause just before it, as if they’re both shaking off the pull, and then they begin. What, for thirteen months, was his sole purpose to get working is now the thing he wants nothing more than to see buried. You’ve worn out your welcome, he thinks, and then he tries not to think anymore.
His radio crackles about an hour in. “Fallin’ asleep up here,” Fidds says. “Say somethin’ scary.” He means, Are you alive down there? Are you still here?
“You don’t need to be scared to stay awake, nerd. Find a book to read or something.”
“Head still hurts.” He’s had trouble with reading, ever since the concussion. Stan wonders how much of it was that and how much was…everything else. And he’s probably overdue for an eye appointment. He’s probably overdue for a lot of things.
“Then sleep it off, what’re you staying awake for?” Silence on the other end. You, Fidds doesn’t say. Just in case. Stan sighs, distantly aware of Ford watching out of the corner of his eye, trying to pretend he isn’t paying attention. “Everything’s going as expected, arright? We haven’t messed with the power to the containment unit, and the frame’s coming down just fine. Power’s off to all the quantum stabilizing units and consoles A through H aren’t even running.”
“’Kay,” Fidds mutters after a moment. “Wait—what about D?”
“I rerouted it to Terminal I. What, d’you think I’m some kinda dumbass? I got my eye on that little fucker.” Terminal I is finicky, but it’s the best module they have for monitoring power disruptions besides D. “Sparky ain’t getting one over on me today.” They’ve christened themselves a ghost to blame any electrical issues on. Goddamn Sparky always ruining our shit.
“Mmkay,” Fidds mumbles. Probably half asleep already.
“Just take your widdle nap,” Stan says dryly. “I’ll getcha if anything crazy happens. And keep your glasses on.”
“All right, whatever,” Fidds slurs, and then the radio goes quiet. Stan waits for a minute before clipping it back on his belt beside the beeper. He can practically feel Ford buzzing with curiosity across the lab floor.
“Go ahead and ask your nerd questions,” Stan says after a minute of letting him stew.
“Why do you keep telling him to keep his glasses on?”
“EEGs,” Stan mutters. “Or somethin’ like ‘em. He gets seizures. We’ve got him on some meds but if he’s real stressed or whatever, sometimes he’ll still—” His throat feels rough again all of a sudden. It’s like sense-memory, Fidds twitching and rattling but still dead weight in his arms, the lights off, nobody home, blood pooling in his bottom lip from biting his tongue. “Anyway,” he rasps. “If he seizes, the beeper goes off. So I can—just in case.”
“Right,” Ford almost whispers. “I suppose it’s—what, a latent effect of the memory gun?” Stan winces.
“I dunno. Maybe it woulda been. But, well…so he had this reversal thingy. Some way to undo the process, right? I found it in his truck after he showed up here.” Stan drums his fingers restlessly on the top of the drill he’s holding. There’s some crazy-complex type guilt still bound up in the events of those early weeks. Guilt Fidds can’t even absolve him of, it’s just ambient. A part of everything. “Turns out you can, like, OD on your own brain if you’ve cratered enough out of it. And ever since then—yeah.”
“Jesus,” Ford says after a moment. “I had no—I didn’t know.” Stan just grunts quietly. That’s between Ford and Fidds, probably, but he can’t help feeling ruffled anyway. “I really d—I was so caught up in this fucking—this mess.”
“None of us got here by being on time,” Stan says bluntly. When he looks over, Ford is running a shaky hand through his hair, a sure sign of building emotion. Ford lets out a ragged breath and then appears to deflate a little bit.
“So he showed up here and—and ever since then, you’ve just been—”
“Surviving.” Medical restraints on the bed and saline on the shower curtain rod and Fidds limp against him in the bathtub, reeking of vomit. “You don’t want the details, Ford.”
“You don’t know what I want.”
“I don’t want to give you—the fucken details,” Stan answers sharply.
“I just—I did this to him, didn’t I,” Ford argues back. “This is my—my fault. He came here and it, it traumatized him, at every turn, and then when I should’ve seen it, I was so—”
“Stanford, shut the hell up.” Stan’s hands are shaking, and that fist is back around his sternum, like he gets at night sometimes, a torrent black as tar threatening to burst right out of him and rend him apart. “This is—you know what, this is not my problem. There is enough shit between you and me, I can’t be the gofer between you and him, too. You have shit to get off your chest for him, you talk to him yourself. And if he doesn’t wanna hear it, then that’s your fucken problem. Okay?” Where was this when I showed up in a bloodstained jacket and I was alone and I hadn’t eaten anything but gas station coffee in three days? For ten years, I was alone, and when I came crawling across state lines for the first two words you’d said to me since I left home, where was this? “And so no, I ain’t gonna give you the fucken details, because I already have to deal with one self-harming bastard on the daily. Okay, Ford?”
There’s a long silence, during which they’re both breathing hard, and the dread-pit from the nearby portal is only making it worse, so Stan staggers back some, toward the consoles, and pretends to be checking out Terminal I while he’s at it. His heart is in his throat, and he’s not sure where this is going when he hears footsteps coming towards him. There’s the sound of Ford sitting heavily in a chair nearby; Stan keeps his back turned.
“You’re right, Stan,” Ford says quietly. “There’s enough between us. You should have—you should have just left me.”
“Is that all you really think it boils down to?” Stan snarls. “That you were right, and I was wrong, as usual? Because—”
“No, Stan, you should have left me,” Ford snaps back, and when Stan turns to face him, he’s red in the face, pained. “You should have left me, you should have never come here—”
“—oh, fuck you, you sanctimonious jackass—”
“—because I did this, this was my mess,” Ford chokes out. Stan makes an incoherent noise and throws his hands in the air.
“For god’s sake.”
“I deserved whatever happened to me. Stan, when I gave you that journal, I—I never expected to live much longer after you left, you have to understand, I was—”
“Oh, for god’s sake, Stanford,” Stan repeats. “Jesus! What is it about me, huh, that I keep being the guy who has to cut the noose down?! Huh? Is something just fucked-up about me that nobody’s been telling me? You and Fidds both, I swear to god. What am I supposed to do with that?!” Ford looks taken aback, and it’s just—god! It’s enough! “What?! You can’t just drop that on somebody like it’s a lighthearted thing, my god, Stanford! ‘Oh, you see, it all makes sense ‘cause I was plannin’ on dying the second you left.’ Fuck you!”
He's crying. Goddammit. He dashes at his face with an angry palm. “That’s not what I—I’m sorry,” Ford stammers, and Stan hides his face in both hands. “When you say it like that—but it wasn’t that I wanted—I just couldn’t figure out a way out of this. I mean, Bill was…it felt inevitable that he would find a way, once I’d ensured he couldn’t use the portal like he’d intended, to kill me.”
“You shoulda led with that,” Stan sniffles. “You shoulda—we coulda figured something out, and instead you just—”
“No, we could not have ‘figured something out,’ Stanley, you have no idea what you’re talking about. I didn’t want you dead,” Ford snaps.
“Please. I’ve dealt with cartel leaders scarier than some pointy little bastard.” When he looks up, Ford is rolling his eyes, visibly trying not to rise to the bait.
“What I’m saying,” Ford grits out, “is that I was about to get what was coming to me, and then when I went through the portal, there it was. You should have left me because I don’t deserve to be back here after nearly dooming this entire dimension, not to mention—” He gestures, first at Stan, then upwards, indicating Fidds.
“The martyr complex ain’t cute anymore,” Stan answers flatly. “You’re just running away again, Ford. You wish I left you over there so you didn’t have to come back and deal with all this mess you left behind.”
“That is not true,” Ford snarls. “Or maybe it’s a little—I don’t—I don’t know. I just know that I—in all honesty, I had no right to ask you to come here.”
“Oh my god,” Stan seethes, “ten years all I wanted was for you to say something, anything, huh? Didn’t care what it was. To shout at me, laugh at me, ask me for the shirt off my back, because I knew no matter what else was true about me I would come through. Yeah? That’s me, the stupid bastard who always comes through, and so what do I do? I get a two-word postcard from my crazy brother. Two words. Do not argue with me about whether signin’ your name constitutes more words.” Ford shuts his mouth. Predictable bastard. “What do I fucken do? I drive my ass to Oregon. You try to get rid of me, I stay anyway, I’m like herpes. You hope I’ll let you die over there, I open the goddamn thing anyway and yank you back out. Fuck you. Motherfucker. I don’t want your ‘shouldn’t have.’ You did. And then I did.”
“I’m trying to apologize,” Ford says weakly.
“You’re doin’ a real shit job of it. D’you want me to make you up one of those templates they had us use in school? Alls I’m hearing is how much, after everything, you still wish I wasn’t here.”
“It’s not that,” Ford says, then trails off. “I don’t, I just—I’m trying to say.” He rubs his palms down the thighs of his trousers, face tipped up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I’m glad to be back here, but I do think I—I was acting selfishly.”
“Okay,” Stan says quietly.
“And I’m also—I don’t know, Stan, because I’m also sorry that I waited s-so long.” His voice is almost quiet as a whisper by the end. “That I waited until it was life-or-death and, and until I was at a breaking point. I forgot how to function without my spite and—and I told myself you would be fine. I—” Ford takes his glasses off and swipes at his eyes, then stares into the middle distance. “I’m just sorry.”
“Okay,” Stan repeats. “I mean—I didn’t call either. So.”
“Did you—did you ever get to go sailing, after all?” For a moment, Ford looks so absurdly, childishly hopeful that Stan simultaneously wants to laugh and to rip something apart with his bare hands.
“Yes, absolutely I did,” he bites out, unthinking, “I had a beautiful voyage from Cuba to a few miles off the Florida coast. Pity I had to swim the rest of the way.”
“Oh,” Ford whispers.
“Just—look, forget it. Don’t we have a portal to unbuild or somethin’?” Ford looks, for a very long moment, like he doesn’t want to let this go, but then Terminal I beeps out some stupid warning (it’s hallucinating again, but still) and the matter, for the moment, is dropped.