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It happens in the middle of a conversation.
One second, Ford is sitting at their cramped little kitchen table, talking with his mouth full of baked potato, stabbing his fork into the air while he laughs and says, "And the princess was a pufferfish, Stanley, a huge orange pufferfish with five eyes, and she wanted to marry me!"
The next second, Ford is still doing all those things, but he's not speaking any language Stan has ever heard. He's not even sure if it is a language. It’s grating and harsh and has clicks in some of the words, but at the same time it’s almost musical and lilting. Ford doesn’t even miss a beat when he switches over to it.
“Hey, Ford?” Stan asks. Ford stops and stares at him quizzically. “I dunno what just happened, but I think you forgot to speak English.”
There is real, genuine panic in Ford’s eyes when he says, “What?”
“Yeah, like one second you were telling me your fish princess story, and the next you’re talking in some weird alien language. I used to do the same thing with Spanish when I got out of Colombia, I get it,” Stan says. He goes back to cutting up his own baked potato and waits for Ford to toss some easy comeback, but it never comes.
Instead, what Stan finds when he glances back up is a Ford who is frozen, pale, chest heaving with shallow breaths.
“Ford? You good?” Stan asks, concern twisting in his stomach. He puts the fork down and reaches out a hand. Ford flinches, hard.
“Okay, not good,” Stan guesses.
Ford almost rockets to his feet, chair scraping back with a harsh noise. He’s across the room in two long strides. The drawer rattles under the force with which he pulls it out, silverware clattering to the floor as he searches for something. Stan can only watch, confused and feeling a little out of his depth, as Ford grabs the paring knife.
“What’s going on?” he asks, but then--
Then--
Oh, God.
Ford takes the fucking knife and makes a swift cut behind his left ear, hissing softly. Blood beings to drip onto the floor of the kitchen, and Stan’s stomach lurches. Ford throws the knife into the sink.
“Stanford, what the holy fuck are you doing?” Stan demands. He gets to his feet and tries to get between Ford and the drawer full of other sharp objects, but Ford isn’t paying attention to anything in the kitchen anymore. Instead he turns and flees, leaving Stan to chase after him, following the blood trail like his brother is some wounded animal in hunting season.
He catches up to Ford in the bathroom. Ford is standing in front of the mirror, craning his neck to the side, and he’s… digging around in the cut he just made.
Stan’s seen some fucked up shit in his day, and this is far from the worst, but he thinks he might be sick anyway.
“Stop!” he says, trying to grab Ford’s arm. Ford shoves him off and does his damnedest to get his fingers back up behind his ear, but Stan twists his hands in Ford’s bloody sleeve and holds tight. “Sixer, stop!”
“No,” Ford grits out. It comes out half wrong, weirdly accented, like he doesn’t quite know if he’s saying it right.
“You’re hurting yourself!” Stan protests.
“No,” Ford says again, and punctuates it with a growl that makes all the hair on Stan’s neck stand on end. Ford’s never done that before. Ford’s also never sliced open his own head and decided to do some digging around in there, either.
It startles Stan enough that he lets go. Ford takes the moment’s hesitation to wrench his arm away, hands back up to the cut immediately. Stan goes to reach out to stop him, but Ford… finds what he’s looking for.
A tiny chip, about the size of a pinkie fingernail, clatters to the countertop in a puddle of bright red.
Ford lets out a sigh and grabs the nearest hand towel, pressing it to his neck, totally ruining it in the process. Stan can only stare as his brother turns on the faucet and rinses off the microchip, pink water running down the drain. The chip is small and high tech. Ford stares at it like it’s personally wronged him.
“What the hell is that?” Stan asks.
Ford looks up at him sadly and shakes his head. He moves to leave the room, but Stan blocks him. That unsettling growl fills the silence again, this time accompanied by a snarl and a gnash of teeth.
“What the fuck is going on with you?” Stan says, not expecting an answer, but somehow still being disappointed when he doesn’t get one.
Either way, he knows that there’s probably nothing he can do to actually stop Ford from doing whatever weirdness he’s set out to do, so he moves out of the way. Ford slips by him and makes a beeline for his lab. Stan follows, careful to avoid the blood splotches on the hallway floor. He’s gonna make Ford clean that up, as soon as he figures out what kind of mental breakdown the guy is having and how to stop it.
Ford has the microchip in a pair of tweezers when Stan catches up. He’s got his desk lamp angled over it like a spotlight, and he’s poking at it with some kind of little tool. Stan only really understands about a third of what Ford gets up to in here, and he’s fine with that, so he doesn’t try to ask questions. He has a feeling he probably wouldn’t get much response anyway.
The chip sparks and the smell of burnt metal fills the air.
“Was that supposed to happen?” Stan asks.
Ford makes a noise that sounds vaguely like a word, if the word was made of windchimes and smoke.
Then, he takes the chip and shoves it right back in his head.
“Oh, what the fuck!” Stan yelps. Honestly, this cannot get any weirder. Or grosser.
“Can you understand me now?” Ford asks, like he didn’t just carve a microchip out of his fucking head, electrocute it, and cram it back in, without using sane people things like painkillers or, Stan doesn’t know, antiseptic? Shouldn’t there have been antiseptic involved?
“Uh, yeah, so now you get to explain to me what the literal actual fuck just happened,” Stan replies.
“OhthankGod,” Ford murmurs in a rush, and promptly collapses.
“Stanford!” Stan says, dropping to his knees next to his brother. Ford’s hyperventilating in earnest now. He’s shaking too, entire body shivering hard enough to make his panicked breaths rattle on their way in and out of his lungs. His hands are clenched, white-knuckled, in the fabric of his coat. There’s blood on the sleeves. There’s blood everywhere. His neck is still bleeding freely onto his collar.
Stan reaches out a hand, but Ford makes a whining noise and shrinks back.
Okay, no touching. Stan can work with that.
“Hey, you’re okay,” Stan tries.
Ford responds by cramming himself under the desk.
“Alrighty,” Stan says. “Uh, I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“No!” Ford shouts, wildeyed and terrified. He bangs his head on the underside of the desk in his haste to reach out and take a hold of Stan’s elbow. Stan lets himself be dragged until he’s sitting in front of the underneath of the desk, effectively blocking Ford in. Ford doesn’t let go of his arm. He just settles back down to hyperventilate.
“You’re gonna make yourself pass out,” Stan tells him. No response is forthcoming, so Stan sighs. “C’mon, Six, work with me here. You’re gonna pass out if you don’t calm down.”
Ford chokes on something that might be a retort or might be a sob.
Stan’s never had to deal with this before. This is entirely new territory, uncharted and terrifying. Sure, he’s had to pat one of the kids on the back after a bad dream, and he’s good at making jokes to bring Ford down from the adrenaline high of a nightmare, but he’s never seen his usually so put-together brother break down like this before. Not even when they were little. It’s scary and he hates it.
Stan doesn’t know what to do, so he does the only thing he can think of: he waits it out.
It happens slowly, but Ford gets control of his breathing eventually. It evens out into slower rasps and then into just regular, albeit shaky, breaths. His grip on Stan’s arm loosens, and he lets his head lean back against the desk with a soft thud. His eyes are closed, but there are tear tracks on his cheeks.
“You okay?” Stan asks eventually.
“No,” Ford replies wetly. “I’ve just realized I can’t speak English anymore. I’m as far from okay as it’s possible to be.”
“You’re speaking English right now,” Stan points out.
“I’m not,” Ford says. He says it like he’s broken. He says it like it’s breaking him to say it.
Stan waits for an explanation. Ford delivers.
“This chip behind my ear is a translator. I installed it a few years after I first went through the portal, when I realized I could never hope to learn enough of the many languages of the multiverse to function effectively. It works by--well, it doesn’t really matter how it works, only that it does work. Usually.”
Realization dawns on Stan softly. “Oh, that’s what happened. Your thingy broke.”
“Yes,” Ford agrees. He sighs heavily. “It was a quick fix, luckily. Although I may need some help with the stitches.”
“Idiot,” Stan says, but he says it fondly.
“Thank you for that,” Ford mutters.
Silence falls again.
Eventually, Stan just can’t keep from saying, “So, if you’re not speaking English, the translator is doing it for you?”
Ford nods, head thumping against the underside of the desk with the movement. He hasn’t made any effort to get out from under it, and Stan’s not going to force it until he’s ready. “Yes. It mixes brainwaves, sort of like a cell phone jammer, I suppose. So I’m speaking in the language I’m most comfortable with, but it comes out as English, because that’s what I know I should be speaking. It’s far more complicated than that, of course, but that’s the gist.”
“So what language are you speaking?
Ford says a word that isn’t a word, and Stan resigns himself to just never knowing. Instead, he asks, “And you can’t speak regular English anymore?”
“I’m afraid not,” Ford admits, and that’s when the tears begin to fall. He hiccups a little, hands coming up to cover his face, but Stan recognizes the shaking of his shoulders and the way he hunches in on himself. Ford drags in a shaking breath and lets it go on a sob, which he muffles by clamping his hands down over his mouth, like he’s trying not to scream.
“Oh, Ford,” Stan murmurs. He feels his heart break, just a little. Every time he thinks he’s finally scraping the bottom of the barrel of horrible things his brother has had to endure, he finds something new to beat himself up over. If he’d only listened, all those years ago. If he’d only taken a moment to think.
“Stanley,” Ford says, desperate, about to start hyperventilating again. “Stanley, I can’t remember Yiddish either.”
Stan does the only thing he can think to do. He reaches out with both hands and grabs onto whatever part of Ford he can reach, and he pulls, until his brother is bundled up in his lap, shaking and sobbing and falling apart. He’s still bleeding.
“If it makes you feel any better, my Yiddish is shit, too,” Stan says. Ford only whines in response. Great job, Stan. Foot, meet mouth.
“I can’t remember our mother’s voice,” Ford admits, whispering it into the collar of Stan’s shirt. “I can’t remember our childhood address, or the name of our next door neighbors. I can’t remember what color the sky was in Dimension 17B and I can’t remember the name of the ship I escaped Dimension 99.4 in and now I can’t remember my own native language.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” Stan says, because what else is there to say? There’s nothing he can say that will make this any better. There’s nothing he can do but sit here and hold on and try to put back the pieces when Ford is done falling apart.
“I’m being insensitive,” Ford decides. He pulls back and tries to scrub the tears from his bloodshot eyes, only succeeding in smearing some of the blood from his hands onto his face. “Here I am complaining about losing memories in my old age, when you’ve actually had your entire mind wiped. By me.”
“Oh, shut up,” is Stan’s knee-jerk reaction. They’ve had this fight before. Stan doesn’t blame Ford, Ford blames himself, they argue about it and it never gets resolved. It’s like a twisted merry-go-round.
Ford huffs out a laugh. It’s not a happy one.
“I’m sorry I growled at you,” he says eventually. “I was panicking. It’s a bad habit.”
“I was a smoker for over forty years,” Stan offers. “If you wanna compare bad habits, I think getting a little growly sometimes ain’t gonna take the cake.”
“Yes, remind me to thank Soos and Wendy for finally getting you to stop that. I don’t think I could handle the smell.” Ford wrinkles his nose delicately. It’s an absurd look, on the face of a man who was hyperventilating only moments ago. His face is red and blotchy, smeared with tears and blood and probably snot too, but he’s making disgusted faces at Stan for something as harmless as secondhand smoke.
Okay, maybe not harmless, but still.
“You’re gross,” Stan says. “C’mon, let me stitch your head up. For the world’s smartest genius, you sure do make a lot of dumb idiot choices.”
“That was redundant,” Ford tells him, but allows himself to be hauled to his feet anyway. Stan leads him down the hall, avoiding the now tacky and half-dried blood spatter that makes their boat look like a horror movie set, and makes him sit up on the bathroom counter. Ford keeps glancing over his shoulder at the open door like something is going to come through and get them, so Stan closes it, swallowing his discomfort long enough to lock them in.
“This is gonna suck,” Stan warns.
There’s that unhappy laugh again. “It sucked when I cut it out, too.”
“Dipshit,” Stan says.
He does the stitches as quickly and gently as he can. Ford doesn’t ask how Stan is so adept at stitching skin together with fishing line, and Stan doesn’t offer an explanation.
“Hey, mopey,” Stan says, when he’s almost done. “I have an idea.”
Ford hums quizzically, thankfully not opening his mouth. It would probably mess up Stan’s craftsmanship. They’re beautiful stitches, if he does say so himself. Probably won’t even scar.
“Hanukkah is coming up. I bet if we charted a course today, we could be back in Gravity Falls in time. And I bet Dipper and Mabel would be allowed to come up, to spend the holiday with their sad, lonely Grunkle,” Stan says.
“Are you sad and lonely?” Ford demands. He looks like it’s breaking his heart to say it.
Stan rolls his eyes. “No, poindexter, but their parents don’t know that. Stanley’s dead, remember? And I’m you.”
“Oh.” Ford winces when Stan pulls the final stitch tight. Stan sets the needle on the counter and leans back to admire his handiwork. Yeah, he’s still got it. Rico always Stan would have had a good career as a seamstress, if he was a little less pretty and knew how to keep his mouth shut once in a while. What a charmer he’d been.
“Will you stop being sad about my fake death already?” Stan grumbles, though he’d much rather if Ford was sad about that than any of the other million things he’s sad about today. Stan decides to change the subject. “Besides, if you’re so worried about not being able to speak Yiddish anymore, I’m sure Mabel and Dipper would love to help.”
Ford brightens immediately. “They speak Yiddish?”
“Some,” Stan says. He doesn’t make any effort to stop the pride that leaks into his voice. “Their dad made sure of it. Mostly they use it to plot when they don’t want anyone else to know what they’re saying.”
“Sounds like another pair of twins I know,” Ford says. The brothers smile at each other, and Stan can feel himself relax for the first time in what feels like hours. Yeah, Ford will be alright.
“They can probably help with English, too. I know Mabel is just full of weird teen slang. And if you wanna learn Spanish, me and Soos can help with that, too,” Stan offers.
“You speak Spanish?” Ford asks, sounding genuinely curious.
“You don’t spend ten months in a Colombian prison without picking up a few things,” Stan replies. “Also, please never make me go back to Colombia. I’m pretty sure there’s still a bounty on my head there.”
“Lovely,” Ford says with a frown. Stan finishes wiping most of the blood off his neck, but the rest of Ford is still a nightmare. He’s going to need a shower to get all the crusted grime off, and his outfit is probably a lost cause. Stan has half a mind to use the sweater to chum the waters for sharks.
“So. What do ya say? Hanukkah with the niblings?” Stan presses.
Please say yes, please say yes, please say yes.
“Of course,” Ford says immediately.
Stan pumps his fist in the air. “Hell yeah! I’ll go call them!”
“I’ll check the maps, see how long it’ll take to arrive,” Ford offers. He slides down from the counter and starts toward the door, but Stan grabs him by the back of his neck like a kitten. Ford has to bite down on a growl, which makes Stan grin, a little vindictively.
“Not so fast,” he says. “I seem to recall somebody tracking blood all over my nice clean boat.”
Ford turns pink, embarrassed. “Yes, apologies for that.”
“Mhm. You can show me just how sorry you are by cleaning it all up. And take a shower, you’re nasty.”
Ford sighs, but doesn’t argue.