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Stan awakens to an alarm clock he doesn’t remember setting. Groaning, he sits up, eyes not quite open yet, and his back makes an ugly popping sound he knows he’s going to feel as soon as his body is fully awake. He blinks his eyes open slowly, and takes a few moments to re-familiarize himself with his twin brother’s old study room. He turns, to check the time and stop that infernal beeping sound, but his neck is so stiff that it makes him want to blow chunks. That’s what he gets for sleeping on a couch, he supposes, but he’s certainly slept on worse, and even if Ford did have a bed somewhere in the mess of a shack he chose to call home, Stan certainly didn’t deserve it, because people who are probably responsible for the death of their family don’t deserve nice things.
Grunting, he swings his legs off the couch, and stands so he doesn’t have to bend his neck in any more weird directions just to turn the alarm off. Its obnoxiously bright red letters blink 5:31am, and Stan scrubs a hand down his face as he punches the clock’s OFF button with the other.
That’s right. The only reason he set the damn alarm in the first place is because a stubborn customer who couldn’t speak a lick of English refused to leave the gift shop until she found the perfect gift for her little kiddo back home despite the Shack having closed nearly half an hour prior. It’s the only time in his life he’s ever been grateful for the year he was trapped in Colombia, because he’s sure if he wasn’t able to heckle with her in Spanish her into leaving with one of everything, he has a feeling she’d still be wandering back and forth across the shop. Stan laughs to himself at the thought, and makes a mental note to make that sort of thing an attraction someday if he ever gets a customer as stubborn as she is again.
But no, that’s not what matters right now. He bends over to pick up a hairbrush that’d been carelessly tossed to the floor the night prior and runs it through his soft brown hair that he promises he’s going to get cut as soon as he has the time and money, and as soon as his hair manageable enough to brush through it without snagging on any tough knots, he carelessly tosses the brush over his shoulder and heads out of the room, navigating himself around the place with a flashlight. He’s aware that it’d make things much easier to just turn the lights on, but keeping the gift shop lights on all weekend is already burning a hole in his wallet, and he’s not sure he could afford the electricity bill if he left the lights in the study room on by mistake for even ten extra minutes.
When he reaches the staircase leading to the basement, he flicks the flashlight off and sets it down on the counter by the cash register. It’s much easier to navigate down the winding steps with both of his hands free in case he falls and needs to catch himself, and the faint blue hum of the portal is enough of a light source to show him the way to the basement anyway. He sits down at the desk, adjusts the framed photo of himself and Ford at boxing practice in high school, and pulls Journal 1 out from the hidden shelf in front of the monitor. He’d spent all of last week desperately looking for 2 and 3, but the harsh winter snowfall had cut his search short and he didn’t want to waste any more time when he could just try to get the damned thing working without them.
“C’mon, Poindexter, y’gotta give me something to work with,” he mumbles, opening the desk drawer and pulling out a pad of paper and a pen. “I spent weeks memorizing all of your fancy shmancy ciphers. That’s more than I ever studied in high school. You can’t ramble on for two whole pages about how to crack them and then switch to this…” he squints at the squiggles scattered across the portal’s blueprints. “...Cooky alien language, or whatever. This is real life we’re talkin’ here. This is your life we’re talkin’ here. It’d be a lot easier if you didn’t write this thing in Klingon, or whatever”
Stan knows, at the back of his mind, that talking to the journal like it’s Ford himself isn’t going to get him anywhere, but in a weird kind of way, it makes him feel less alone. Helps a guy out from feeling too lonely, y’know?
He chuckles to himself at his own joke, taking comfort in the fact that if Ford were here he’d probably be rambling off about how Klingon is one of thousands of different intergalactic languages and how he obviously wrote it in Hqjolvk, thank you very much, and Stan can’t help but roll his eyes fondly as he flips through his notepad. He’s tried everything, he’s tried translating them to whichever letter in the English alphabet they just happen to look closest to, he’s tried throwing sentences in gibberish into three different ciphers at once to see if he could get anything even relatively close to whatever it is, and even when he “bought” a book at the store on ancient hieroglyphics and ancient symbolism the closest thing he got was just a bunch of dumb numbers. And even then, translating all of those dumb numbers back to English from a1z26 just hit him against another dumb wall.
Frustrated, he throws the pad of paper against the desk and kicks off from its edge, sending his swivel chair flying backwards across the room. When the chair finally stops rolling, his gaze fixes on the portal through the window in front of the desk he’d just been sitting at, and it’s really only now that he’s looking at it from this distance, from this angle, that he notices….the same weird squiggles from the journal carved all over the circular ring in the center of the portal.
But...if the weird squiggles in the journal came from the portal, and translating those numbers from the Egyptian book through a1z26 just gave him gibberish...could...could it be that easy? Could it be-?
“Coordinates!” Stan yells, jumping to his feet, and tears build in his eyes at the epiphany. “Sweet Moses, they’re coordinates! How could it’ve been so obvious?” he cries, and nearly trips over himself in excitement as he scrambles back over to the monitor, and his hands are shaking as he flips through his notepad. Once he finds the page he’s looking for, he forces his hands steady as he enters the number into the keypad.
The tiny, logical voice in the very back of his mind is screaming at him that it’s never going to work, he only has a third of what he needs, he really shouldn’t get his hopes up, but the slamming of his heart against his chest drowns that sound out as he frantically enters and re-enters the numbers when he’s sure he accidentally entered the wrong ones (damn his chubby fingers), and when he’s finally, finally certain he’s gotten them all entered correctly, he presses the dark red SEND button, takes a few steps backwards, and waits.
For what couldn’t be longer than two minutes but feels like six hours, there’s nothing. Stan’s about to sigh, call it a good stopping point for the day and kick himself for getting his hopes up too high, but then a flash of blue lightning sparks from the portal and strikes the ground.
“HA!” Stan exclaims, pumping his fists in the air. “I knew it! I knew it! Nothing can stop Stan Pines!”
He sprints into the portal room, pausing only briefly to grab the toolbox on his way in. Two more bolts of lightning strike against the ground with a loud pop as he enters, and the grin spread across Stan’s face rivals them in brightness. Kneeling down in front of the lever, Stan opens his toolbox and pulls out his lucky red screwdriver that’s gotten him out of his fair share of car trunks, and goes to work on fixing up loose bolts and that awful crunching sound the lever kept making the last time he tried turning it on.
Three bolts emerge from the portal, and Stan is too ecstatic to notice their uncomfortably close proximity to his head. He stands, once he’s absolutely certain he’s got the lever all fixed, and puts everything he has into shoving the lever from its off position to the on position.
He can hear the gears turning in the machine, and his heart is pounding so hard against his chest it makes his ears ring. He’s tearing up again, but he doesn’t care, just as long as he gets to punch Ford in the shoulder and tell him off to never scare him like that again when he emerges in the next couple of minutes. The circular ring in the center of the portal begins to spin, slowly, and those weird symbols carved along it start to glow blue.
Stan nearly drops to his knees, but no, he can’t let Ford see him at rock bottom, and maybe that’s a little selfish, considering all of the places Ford’s probably been the past two years, but the last thing he needs Ford to see is how much he’s been killing himself working to get him back. The ring spins faster, and faster, and where there was once a hole in the center of the portal that leads only to the back wall of the room, there’s now a blindingly bright flash of blue light, and Stan is knocked to the ground by the kickback.
He goes to stand again, but the sound of shattering glass turns his attention elsewhere. He looks behind him, and the lightbulbs in the other room are exploding like it’s nobody’s business. He’s lucky his hearing was heightened from the ten years on the street, because he’s just quick enough to hear the cracking of the bulb right above his head that he’s able to dodge out of the way of the shattered glass as it rains down towards him. He jumps to his feet, brushing his clothes off, but he’s horrified to see that the portal’s ring is beginning to slow to a stop with no twin brother in sight.
“No!” he cries, and sprints back into the other room to reenter the coordinates into the monitor. But it’s just his luck, because the monitor’s glass is shattered to pieces as well, and there’s a thin line of black smoke rising from it. “No, no no no! I was so close!” he shouts, and sprints back into the portal room. He switches the lever from on to off and back to on again, but nothing changes.
When the ring comes to a complete stop, the bright blue light fades away, an ugly kind of rage boils in the pit of Stan’s stomach. “This is all your fault, you dumb machine!” he yells, and launches at the portal like it was a thug trying to rob him of his wallet, and starts punching it like there’s no tomorrow, like if he gave it enough left hooks it’ll obey him and spit Stanford right out to his side.
He’s about to go in for another punch when he hears the sound of the machine’s gears turning again. He grins, rubbing his hands together, and steps backwards to watch the process in its completion. Four bolts spark from the portal this time, but rather than strike the ground, they lunge for him, and Stan screams in agony as they jolt through his whole body. He takes it as a sign that he’s probably better off watching the process from the desk in the other room, but when he tries to turn heel and run, five bolts of lightning reach out and snake around his leg before he can take another step further, and he collapses to the ground. Gritting his teeth to avoid letting out a choked cry of pain, Stan tries to inch himself towards the lever for support to stand up, but it’s as if the damned lightning has the power to read his thoughts, because it shocks the lever with such a thick bolt of lightning that it fries the thing black.
The charge from the lightning gives the lever just the right amount of static charge it needs to reactivate properly, and Stan doesn’t notice the hum of the portal’s gears getting louder and louder until he finds himself floating off the ground. “W-whoa, hey! Hey! Hold on a minute!” Stan scrambles around at nothing in particular, hoping his feet or arms will snag on something and prevent him from getting pulled in. “Let’s talk this over! We can work together!” He must be losing his damn mind if he thinks bargaining with the portal like it’s sentient is going to do anything, but it’s the only option he’s got left. “I just want my brother back! You want to stay on, yeah? You don’t like getting turned on and off at random, right? I’ll-I’ll keep you on! As long as it takes for my brother to find his way home, I’ll keep you turned on! I promise!”
The machine, of course, does not respond, and the higher Stan gets off the ground the blurrier his vision gets. Damn fear of heights. He flaps his arms around as if he could fly, but nothing seems to work. He starts kicking, as well, to see if swimming towards the ground could work any better, but he still doesn’t budge.
But that does give him the idea of kicking off of the portal itself, since it’s the only solid thing left, save for the ceiling, and Stan curls himself up into a ball to try and get himself to flip over. It works, thankfully, but when he turns his glance back towards the portal his heart drops to his stomach. Curling himself up had helped his body change directions, yes, but it also changed his course entirely. Rather than being sucked towards the edge of the portal’s entrance, like he’d been when he was hovering above the lever, he’s now heading right for the center of the portal with nowhere to kick off of.
“N-No! No!” He shouts frantically, kicking his leg away from the cold blue substance the portal emitted. When he spares another glance backwards, his feet are already sucked inside, and the rest of him is quickly following. “No! Somebody help! Somebody!” he shouts, his own words painfully echoing those of Ford’s when he’d been in the same situation.
Ford,
If the portal manages to stay active after he gets sucked in, Ford’s gonna be able to find his way home, but he’ll be all alone, left to wonder what could’ve happened to him. Vaguely, Stan remembers Ford had been saying something about shutting it down for good, and his panicked flailing at the thought that he may be the one never coming again only makes his descent into the portal quicken. “Stanford!” he shouts, in the odds that his brother can hear his cries from the other side of the portal. “Stanford, do something! Stanford!”
The blue substance within the portal is thick and flavorless as his head is sucked in. He closes his mouth, because he doesn’t want to risk suffocating on whatever the hell this stuff is made of, and closes his eyes for impact for the same horrors that swallowed up his brother just two years prior, and…
…
…
…
…
…
When he forces his eyes open again, he’s lying on a bed. An actual, decently sized bed with fluffy blankets and at least three pillows supporting his head and neck. He’s not sure he’s slept on one of those in….what, thirteen years, give or take, if he’s not including the bug-infested hotels?
All of his burns from the lightning strikes have seemingly vanished into thin air, along with that gnawing hunger that never seemed to leave his stomach even when he had the time to eat more than a single meal a day, and though the air feels cool, it doesn’t feel humid and stuffy like Ford’s old lab had felt moments ago.
The rest of his aches are gone, too, he realizes as he sits up, replaced now by a dull pain in his hips and knees that he supposes he could credit to getting sucked into a portal and falling thirty feet to the ground to...uh, wherever he is now.
Is this where Ford’s been stuck all this time? It’s no wonder he never tried to find his way back on his own, because all things considered, this place is actually pretty comfortable. Maybe he wound up on a friendly alien planet, and some locals rushed him to the hospital to get him fixed up. But there’s no calamity outside his door like there usually is in most hospitals back on Earth, and there’s no weird tubes attached to either of his arms and not a sight of ace bandages anywhere on his body. And...is he…swaying back and forth?
Stan glances down at his hands, and the rest of his body still wrapped in a thick comforter. No, it’s not him, he realizes quickly, it’s the room that’s swaying back and forth. If he squints hard enough, he can make out the foot of his bed gently rocking back and forth. Scratching at his head, he goes to stand up and investigate his surroundings, until he notices a round window next to where he’d just been laying his head, just outside of his current line of sight. He lies back down, and his breath nearly catches in his throat at the sight.
It’s the biggest cluster of stars he’s ever seen his entire life, and if he looks close enough, he can see streaks of what he can only assume must be the galaxy itself. It certainly looks like the Earth’s skies, and when he looks again he notices the stars are reflecting off of… some kind of body of water?
Ah, so he’s on a boat. That explains the swaying. There’s a twinge of warm nostalgia in chest at the realization, of the days two scrappy little boys from New Jersey would spend their afternoons working on a sailboat of their own, musing dreamily about the day they’d finally sail away from the dumb town.
But...no. That couldn’t possibly be right. He got kicked out at seventeen, and Ford is god-knows-where in the universe. This must be some sort of sick joke, or an optical illusion that plays on his greatest dreams, or something. He turns away from the window, covering that half of his face with the blanket, and fully intends to fall asleep so he can bug the boat’s captain in the morning about where the hell he is and how the hell he wound up here in the first place. Just as he’s about to close his eyes, though, he notices a bulky, bright pink book sitting at his bedside table next to the lamp.
Well, he’s got nothing to lose, right? Maybe this thing’ll have some answers. He flicks the lamp on and sits up. The book is called MABEL’S SCRAPBOOK, and the title written in glitter pen in a child’s handwriting.
He snorts in laughter. Maybe the book belongs to the captain’s daughter, and she left it in here by mistake. Still, it could help to learn more about the family keeping him captive, and it’s not like she’ll know he ever read it, right? He chuckles to himself at the thought, but as soon as he grabs for the book to place it on his lap, the feel and smell of the dried glue and paint on the cover makes him feel dizzy, and his head’s suddenly swirling with so many thoughts that he feels like he’s drowning.
Grunkle Stan, it’s me! It’s me Grunkle Stan!
There has to be something we can do! I know my grunkle’s in there!
This is our first day in Gravity Falls, and this is when you let me take the grappling hook from the gift shop! Dipper thought I’d never use it, but he couldn’t be more wrong. Zing!
Over and over, all at once, the voice of two….wonderful, incredible rascal little nuisance kids keep yelling at him in his head, and he slams the book back down against his nightstand.
Damn memory relapses. Ford warned him they could happen, since McGucket had experienced a few of them himself before Stan and Ford left Gravity Falls, but Ford never said anything about the nightmares. Yeah, yeah, he could see it as a good thing, extra proof that his mind’s intact and they don’t need to worry that it’ll ever be gone for good, but nothing sucks more than nightmares that are so based in reality that they fuck with your sense of what’s real and what isn’t.
Stan rubs his eyes, and stands up. He figures it’d be a good idea to step out on deck and get some fresh air. He has no idea what time it is, but maybe if he goes and stares at the stars long enough he’ll eventually feel tired enough to crawl back into bed. He flicks his lamp light back off, and he’s maybe three steps out of his bedroom door before he notices that the light in Ford’s bedroom next to his is still on.
Stan pinches the bridge of his nose. He wants to be mad at Ford for staying up this late, and any other night he would tell him off and guilt him into sleeping by lying about how his light and excessive scribbling is what woke him up, but tonight he’s actually relieved by his brother’s dangerous sleeping habits, because talking out loud about his relapses and distinguishing real memories from fake ones always seems to widen the gap between his next relapse, and it certainly doesn’t help that tonight’s nightmare was about Ford’s disappearance. He creaks the door open slowly, to avoid activating Ford’s flight-or-magnet-gun-in-your-face response, and his mouth closes just as quickly as he’d opened it to speak. Ford’s desk lamp is on, yes, but his nerdy brother is not, in fact, hunched over with a thousand stacks of paper covering his face like he usually is this time of night.
Oh no. The lamp, it seems, was left on by mistake, because Ford’s curled up in his bed, fast asleep with his face half-buried in the pillow and his glasses tucked away in the drawer of his nightstand that he must’ve forgotten to close. Rolling his eyes, Stan sneaks into the room as quietly as he can and flicks the light off so he doesn’t have to replace the lightbulb when it subsequently dies out in the morning.
He turns heel, and he’s set on going back to his original plan of staring up at the sky until he feels tired again, but as he turns to close Ford’s door he gets another close look at his brother’s sleeping form and his chest warms with nostalgia at the sight as another memory, one from his childhood, resurfaces itself tonight.
When they were kids, Pa was...never the comforting kind of parent. And yeah, while that was pretty obvious in that it was always Ma who helped patch up their skinned knees and splinters from the boardwalk and the occasional bee sting, there were times he’d be...more subtle about it, if that’s even the right word to describe him. If either of them came poking their heads in their parents’ bedroom after a nightmare, asking if they could crawl in bed and sleep with them for the night, Pa would always brush them off and send them back to their own room, giving them some excuse about the shop opening early tomorrow and how he can’t afford to lose any sleep in case someone tries to come in and rob them.
From a young age, Stan and his brother learned that it’d be easier just to stop asking Pa at all, and instead they’d resort to climbing into each other’s bed instead. They shared a bunk bed up until they were about fourteen, and they had this unspoken system going where if the other poked them awake or tried to crawl under their blanket in the middle of the night, they’d have to comply and let them in without asking why because it usually meant they were having bad dreams. Ford learned very early on never to hesitate for Stan, because he knew that if Stan was willing to climb to the top bunk despite his fear of heights that his nightmares must’ve been bad.
Stan pauses, and wonders if Ford still remembers those times as well as he does. He hesitates, his grip still tight around the doorknob, until he recalls that it had been Ford who had asked him to accompany him to the arctic, and Ford who kept their childhood photo tucked away in the pocket of his trench coat.
Well, here goes nothing.
Just as quietly as he’d been before, he tiptoes over to Ford’s bedside, and he’s thankful to find that there was still enough room for him to crawl under the covers without squishing Ford uncomfortably against the wall. Slowly, as not to jostle the blankets too much to wake his brother, he flips a corner of the blanket up, crawls underneath, and as soon as his head hits the extra pillow he’s out cold.
If Ford had to complain about anything from his thirty year trip around the multiverse, besides, well...all of it, he’d have to credit the worst of it to his heightened hearing.
Ages ago, when it’d just been two weeks since he was sucked into the portal, he taught himself to sleep with his eyes open, and he taught his ears to pick up on the tiniest of movements, even the wind blowing the leaves off a tree branch. He couldn’t afford capture, and if that meant he had to sacrifice sleep to assure it wouldn’t happen, then so be it.
He’d lost the habit of sleeping with his eyes open after all the time he spent with Jheselbraum, thank god, but he could never quite get over the habit of listening. Every time something creaked in the Shack, every time Stan or one of the kids awoke in the middle of the night in search of the bathroom, it’d wake him up in a jolt, and it’d always take him longer than necessary to fall back asleep.
The nights on the Stan O’ War II are usually the quietest and most peaceful nights Ford’s ever experienced since his childhood. Though he and Stan always spend their days tracking and hunting monsters, they’re always able to find quiet little seaport towns to dock their boat when they need a place to rest for the night where nobody makes a peep until sunrise.
That is...until tonight. He’d been awake just a few minutes prior, mapping out the coordinates for the next monster they needed to track down and how long it would take for them to find it, but he finally got to a point where he had been so tired that his handwriting was starting to give up on him and he decided it was probably for the best that he just go to sleep. Standing to stretch, he places his glasses in the drawer of his nightstand and didn’t bother with the lamp light because he could just replace the bulb in the morning if need be, and practically collapsed face first onto his bed and fell asleep.
He heard mumbling coming from the thin wall to his brother’s room, and since their departure from Gravity Falls he’s become so used to Stan’s constant presence that it no longer bolts him awake. In a way it’s almost comforting, knowing he’s never alone on the vast sea. He shifts, when he hears his brother’s slippers lightly slapping against the deck, but dismisses that just as quickly.
He can feel himself dozing back off to real sleep when he hears his own lamp click off and his bedroom door closing. Ah, Stan was probably coming in to check on him but left when he saw that he was already asleep. That’s fine; he did that a lot the week before they left for their trip. He’s used to it.
What he’s not used to is the blanket getting ripped from his shoulders, and the bed making a dull creaking sound of...something sitting on it. Baffled, he pops his eye open, ready to reach for his weapon in case some sea creature managed to slip on board and into his bed, but his heart rate eases when he makes out the familiar shape of his brother fast asleep in the other half of his bed.
The sight of it makes Ford want to laugh.
He can’t believe Stan remembers.
Closing his eyes, Ford shifts his position ever so slightly, like it’s a maneuver he’s been practicing for ages, and scooches himself closer to Stan without shaking the bed. He snakes an arm around Stanley’s shoulder, whose whole body seems to release itself of tension at the gesture. Unconsciously, Stan shifts himself closer to Ford as well, and snakes his own arm around Ford’s chest, like he, too, had been practicing the maneuver since they were separated all those years ago.