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Stanley is having a weird dream.
He’s back home, back in his old room, laying on his bed without a care in the world. This isn’t the weird part. The weird part is that he knows this is a dream, sort of, and he can’t bring himself to care. He squints up at the slats of wood holding up the upper bunk, painted gold from the sunset coming in through the window, and drifts idly. It feels more like a memory than anything else, a random recollection of many wasted afternoons.
Ford comes into the room. Or maybe he was already in the room. It’s a dream. It doesn’t matter.
The point is that Ford is here and grinning at him. That’s another weird part, because when Stan dreams about this version of Ford, clearly seventeen, Ford does not grin at him. He shouts, and scowls, and throws a punch, and watches as Stan gets thrown out. Sometimes he throws Stan onto the street himself.
Stan waits for the dream to shift and for that to happen, but Ford keeps looking happy.
“It worked,” he breathes.
“What worked?” Stan asks.
Ford doesn’t answer. Instead he crams himself into Stan’s bunk with him, shoving Stan towards the wall to make room, still looking so pleased with himself. It shouldn’t work like it had when they were ten, but the bunk just magically seems big enough to fit them both.
Once they're crammed together Ford looks closely at Stan’s face like there’s something there he’s expecting to see. He even grabs Stan’s head to hold it still, drumming his five fingers—and they are his five fingers, Ford had once explained that some definitions said that a hand had fingers and a thumb, that a thumb was not one of the fingers but a digit, five fingers, six digits—against the side of his face.
The rhythm is old, familiar, and unique. 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5 instead of just 1-2-3-4.
It’s impossible to know why Ford’s looking at his face; there shouldn’t be anything weird about it. He feels a little weird, that slight hint of all-over ache that comes with a cold, but Ford isn’t doing the classic hand-on-the-forehead check for a fever.
Stan pulls the ugliest expression he can. Ford snickers, eyes crinkling.
He mumbles about something working again.
“Your machine?” Stan asks, because the machine had consumed Ford both in Stan’s dreams and in real life. “Is that what’s working?”
“No!” says Ford, and his own expression twists. “No, that stupid thing doesn’t matter, it never mattered, I don’t know why I ever gave a damn—”
Stan laughs. Yeah, this is definitely a dream. Years of separation have made it clear that Ford is never getting over that mistake.
“What worked, then?”
Ford falls silent for a minute. He drums his digits again, and it’s oddly soothing. “It’s a secret.”
“Can’t trust me with it?”
If he was saying that to the real Ford, it’d be tinged in bitterness. But this is a dream, and Ford’s in a good mood, so Stan’s in a good mood too, and it all doesn’t really matter. So it stays joking.
“Not yet,” Ford says. “Think of it like a birthday present.”
“Our birthday is months away.” Stan isn’t sure why he’s so confident about that, but whatever.
Ford gets back to grinning. “That’s why I said it’s like a birthday present. I’m still figuring it out—but one of the big parts is working. I just need to sort out the rest, get all of the parts…and I will. I will.”
There’s a deep, deep conviction in his voice, the way he got while planning out how to make his machine, the way he got while talking about the boat. His eyes are wide and bright. It’s a little different though. He can’t put his finger on why. He should ask if he can borrow one of Ford’s to put on it—that was a classic chestnut.
“Sure you will, Sixer.”
Ford finally stops touching his face, which Stan is grateful for, because it was a bit weird. Neither of them had been very touchy-feely even as kids, and especially not by the time they were teenagers.
There’s a book in Ford’s hands, produced from somewhere, and Ford starts reading out loud.
“Seriously?” Stan says. “I’m not five.”
“Shhh,” says Ford, and he continues to read instead of explaining anything.
"I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation..."
It’s one of those old horror stories that Ford had obsessed over around fifteen, Dracula or Dr. Jekyll or something like that. Stan always preferred the hokey-as-hell movies, personally.
Ford seems hellbent on reading, so Stan lets him, drifting in and out. When he tries to look at the book in Ford’s hands, it’s all jumbled nothing, but Ford’s voice rings clear.
Man, Stan hadn’t realized he remembered that much of those books. Weird.
He waits to wake up.
Alone in the dark, a man lugs a large bag out of his car and into the log cabin in front of him. He goes as fast as he can, at last stopping at the first room he can get into. It is filled with papers, bones, jars full of liquids and preserved specimens, all strewn across the floor.
The man pulls the body out of the bag and onto some of the papers. The bandages wrapped around its torso cannot hide the blood soaking through them, cannot hide the broken arms and the battered face and deep bullet wound at the shoulder. What it can hide is the hopelessness of his condition. He checks the body's pulse. His hand comes away with sticky, drying blood clinging to all six fingers.
“You’re alive,” he says to it. “You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re not allowed to die, Stanley, you can’t do that to me.”
The body does not seem to hear him. It breathes weakly and with great difficulty.
The man takes a book from his coat. He flips through pages with his bloodied hand, mumbling under his breath. He pulls away to draw a circle on the ground, marking each symbol carefully. He ransacks his own house for countless magical items and monster parts.
He returns, places all his things in order. He drags the body into the middle of the circle.
“You’re not allowed to die,” he tells the body, and then ceases speaking English.
Then, with a knife in hand, he severs his brother’s head from its body.
Stanley is still dreaming. He thinks, at some point, that he must’ve woken up, but he can’t remember when. That doesn’t really bother him.
He’s on the Stan o’ War, bigger and better than it ever was in real life. It’s a proper sailing vessel in his dream. He’s on the deck looking out to the frothing waters as the sun begins to sink down below the horizon. He can feel the salt in the breeze, the roar of waves, the snap of the sail.
He feels alive.
Stanford isn’t here on the deck with him, but he is here. That Stanley knows. He remembers— something. Something about Stanford coming back and finding him, saying that Stan should come back with him. So they must’ve gone back to the Stan o’ War.
Ford’s here, probably doing his nerd stuff down below. Maybe Stan will go and find him, but he doesn’t have to, because Ford isn’t leaving.
He looks at the sky again. Half of it is pink and orange, the rest that pale almost-white blue that comes with the sunset. It’s clear, not a cloud in the sky. Picture-perfect. He almost feels like he’s floating, looking up at the sky.
It looks shiny. He doesn’t know what to make of that. There’s a distant sound of drumming fingers, of Ford’s drumming fingers, 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5.
Stanley thinks he feels alive.
The heart is pure sentiment. He shouldn’t have taken the heart.
Any heart would’ve done—it would’ve been better, perhaps, to make use of a heart that hasn’t suffered the strain of years on the road, a heart unburdened by the stress of constant fear and paranoia. Better to use the heart already waiting in a new torso rather than adding another surgery to preform. But he’s a sentimental fool no matter how deeply he buries it down.
It’s why he kept the old photographs, particularly the one of the two of them smiling in front of that old boat.
It’s why after he unwrapped the bandages he’d hastily applied and realized the torso is unsalvageable, just like most of the rest of the body, he still took his tools and cut in. There isn’t much cutting to do. Whoever had attacked Stanley (and he’ll know in due time, he’ll know, he’ll know, and he’ll find them) slashed at him several times. He pulls back skin, digs into exposed muscle and fat and to the organs below.
He is reminded, vaguely, of science class and the dissected frogs that Stanley had exclaimed over with delighted horror. The way everything is packed together, how one must maneuver to find the desired target. Except this specimen has fragments of broken ribs to get past, except the blood spills everywhere and he hadn’t the time to get gloves so it seeps under his nails, except it wears his face.
He takes the heart, cutting it out as neatly as he can. He holds it in his hands for longer than necessary for the preserving spell. Stanley’s heart.
He had applied the word “cold-hearted” to his brother for so long after that night. The ugly organ in his hands is warm. He casts the spell, and it beats once more.
(He takes a hand too. Those hands had once laced their fingers with his when they were children, raising them up and grinning and saying, “See, your hands are great! No one else can do this! Losers!” Then Stanley would laugh, high and bright. The right one has three broken fingers, so he takes the left.)
He took the heart and couldn’t bear to leave it alone, nor the head. He takes them with him room to room.
And that is how he stands in the parlor one night, smiling wanly at two police officers, well aware of the heart pounding faithfully in a desk drawer. The officers should hear it. They make no mention of it at all as they discuss a routine visit about the strange lights and noises around his house.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he assures them.
The heart thuds.
“They’re merely the results of standard observation of the local wildlife,” he explains.
The heart thuds.
The officers look supremely bored.
The heart thuds.
He smiles at them, thinks firmly of “the Tell-Tale Heart”, and does not ask them if they hear the heart beating even as he desperately, desperately wants to.
They leave in due time.
Stanley’s back in the trunk again, he’s back in that fucking trunk. Everything is dark and cold and closing in around him, he can barely move his arms even though the ropes are gone by now.
They left him here they left him here this is how he dies in some fucking broken-down car in the dead of night in fucking New Mexico and no one will ever know because he can’t get out he can’t get out he can’t get out.
Stanley slams his fists against the top, slams and slams and slams until he can hear something breaking under the tendons and skin, until that pain joins all the rest, and dammit dammit dammit this can’t be how he dies, he can’t let those bastards get him, why the hell did he ever trust Rico - ?
It’s so cold—
The pain in his hands burns, his whole body burns, it feels like he’s been wrenched just sideways of himself.
It’s so cold—
The trunk interior feels weird, feels smooth and glassy when it should be metal and stained fabric and secondhand smoke. He can’t get out he needs to get out where the hell even is he?
It’s so cold—
Where the hell is he?
It takes less time than one would think to source the right parts considering the specificity of the measurements. He writes letters to no one and receives vital information in turn, and soon enough he is going after the men who thought they could kill his brother.
He finds them in back-alley bars, in run-down apartments, in places one really shouldn’t be alone in. They’re alone when he gets there, and he makes use of the time.
Legs from one man, an arm each from two others. He looks a long while for a torso that will match well, and turns up with one a few states further than he intended to go. But no loss—it brings him straight to a man named Rico.
(Straight to is a stretching of the truth. He makes use of many spells and inventions to supplement his very underdeveloped skills at subterfuge and criminality, and it takes a while.)
He kills Rico, of course. He doesn’t even take anything for the project.
He feels nothing at the sight of the blood seeping into the floor.
From there, he takes his spoils home.
There’s a crack of thunder.
Stanley Pines breaths in. He wakes up.
His body burns, burns, burns like he’s touched a live wire.