Chapter Text
“You haven’t seen your brother in over ten years,” Stan says to the wooden door in front of him. “It’s okay, he’s family! He won’t bite.”
Despite how little he believes his own words, he knocks a gloved fist against the door.
The door cracks open, and Stan finds himself staring at an incredibly familiar face, if not for how much better it looks. Stan once insisted that he was the handsome twin, but despite the dumb glasses failing to hide the dark circles beneath his eyes, having a house and access to semi-regular meals has done a lot for Ford that the incredibly disheveled Stan is missing.
“Good, you made it,” Ford says, undoing the deadbolt and allowing the door to swing open as he turns. “Come in, come in.”
Stan does so cautiously, scanning the entry room. It’s a verifiable freak show of random vaguely-scientific looking objects of unknown origin. Despite how strange it is— or perhaps, precisely because of its oddity— it’s somehow exactly where Stan imagined Ford ending up after all this time. Perhaps he imagined it a bit cleaner, though. Stan has no room to complain, obviously, but it’s a bit of a mess.
“Listen, Stanley,” Ford says, beginning to pace the entryway. He steps around the mess with practiced skill. “I have made a terrible mistake, and another has paid the price for it.”
Stan exhales sharply, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Alright, I think I’ve got a shovel in the trunk, but it’s gonna be real hard to break ground in this weather.”
“What?” Ford says, turning towards Stanley with an expression of pure bafflement.
“You sure you don’t have any fancy science ways to break down a body? Chemicals or somethin’?”
“A b— no! Stanley, there’s no body!”
“Good! That’ll make things easier,” Stan says, nodding to himself. “So what do you need? An alibi? Fake ID?”
“I didn’t kill anyone!” Ford snaps. “He’s not dead! He— he can’t be dead!”
“Oh, Ford…”
“I mean it, Stanley! You wouldn’t understand,” Ford sighs sharply. “But I need you to. Follow me.”
“Oh please, there’s nothing you could show me that’d surprise me,” Stan says.
Ford snorts, shaking his head as he approaches a bookshelf. He nudges a few books out of place in sequence, and with a great grinding rumble, the bookshelf slides out of place.
This does not surprise Stan. It delights him, because hell yeah you love to see a secret sliding bookshelf entrance to a dark, foreboding staircase, but it does not surprise him.
The rickety elevator indicating three floors of this place is a little strange, but it all seems in line with whatever weird sci-fi nonsense Ford is getting up to here.
They reach the bottom floor, and at that point Stan starts to feel a little out of his depth. The room is filled wall to wall with beeping meters and pulsing lights on metal consoles, none of which Stan understands in the least. Ford walks past all of it, leading Stan through the door and into a larger room. In front of him sits a massive metal inverted triangle, hollowed out in the middle. Around the open circle at the center, indecipherable blue runes pulsate faintly.
“… yeah, alright, this is a surprise,” Stan admits. “The hell am I looking at here?”
“It’s a transuniversal gateway, a punched hole through a weak spot in our dimension,” Ford explains, as if any of those words make sense. “It has taken someone from me, someone of utmost importance. I need to get him back.”
“Oh yeah? Who is this guy anyway?”
“Fiddleford Hadron McGucket,” Ford says painfully, and Stan can tell it’s not the mouthful of a strange name that’s troubling him. “My college roommate, research assistant, and best friend.”
“That’s what they’re calling it these days?”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Stan says, waving a hand dismissively. “How’re we gonna save this guy?”
“You’re going to stay here and maintain the portal,” Ford says, moving across the lab to grab a book off one of the desks. “This should tell you everything you need. Please study it carefully.”
Ford hands him the book, and Stan leans forward to support the unexpected heft. It’s a goddamn novel, like one of those fantasy tomes Ford used to read, and as Stan leafs through it, he finds the entire thing written in Ford’s cursive. This’ll be a pain in the ass to make sense of, but Ford is counting on him.
“Seesh, alright, it’ll take me a while but— wait.” Stan shakes his head, looking up from the book. “I’m going to ‘stay here’? What are you doing?”
“I’m going through, of course,” Ford says, turning back towards the portal with an expression of stony determination on his face. There's caution there, but no fear.
“Are you insane? Do you even know what's on the other side of that thing!?” Stan shouts, gesturing wildly at the looming inverted triangle.
“It can’t be that bad,” Ford sniffs, rolling his eyes at Stan’s dramatics. “I’m fairly certain it’s calibrated to a perfectly safe location.”
“Fairly certain!? How do you even know with this kind of thing?”
“There’s too much for me to explain right now,” Ford sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Just skim the manual and let me know if you have any questions. I need to make some final preparations.”
Ford turns towards the door out of the room, hands folded primly behind his back. The concern Stan was feeling gives in to frustration.
“So that’s it, huh? You called me over just so you can fuck off into another damn dimension?”
“Something like that, yes,” Ford says dismissively, not even glancing at Stan as he lingers in the doorway.
“Are you kidding me?” he shouts, throwing the book over his shoulder. “I came here all the way from New Mexico, and you’re just gonna ditch me? Again?”
“If anything, you’re the one who ditched me,” Ford says, a hint of irritation creeping into his tone.
“You do not get to say that!” Stan rages. “You’re the one who always wanted to leave me behind!”
“Can you blame me?” Ford snaps, spinning around.
All at once, Stan goes cold.
There was no misunderstanding, no regret, no heat-of-the moment anger that fizzled out with time. Ford wanted him gone.
The chill settling over him melts in the face of pure rage. Before he even thinks about what he’s doing, he’s covering the space between them and slamming a fist into Stanford’s cheek. Ford stumbles backwards through the doorway, catching himself on the counter there. His hand slams into a series of buttons, and something behind them crackles. Stan can barely hear it over the rush of his blood in his ears.
“Yes! I can! You were supposed to be my brother!” Stanley shouts. Through the pulsing anger, he feels something stinging at the back of his eyes. How humiliating.
“Then you should have supported me!” Ford shouts, grabbing Stan by the shirt. The memories stirred up by the grip— rough kisses, bar fights, prison brawls, Pa— freeze Stan in place, long enough for Ford to throw him to the floor.
“I did nothing but support you!” Stan shouts. “All our lives I supported you, and then I made one mistake and you couldn’t get rid of me fast enough!”
“Don’t put this on me! You ruined my life!”
“I ruined your life? Seriously!?” Stan kicks out, hooking his foot around Ford’s ankle and pulling it out from under him. “It’s looking pretty fucking great from here! You went to your fancy little college and got some bullshit grant to buy this fancy little house where you got your fancy little boytoy killed—“
“He’s not dead!” Ford shouts, kicking at Stan from the ground. The blow itself doesn’t hurt, but it presses his back against the console behind him and that, that fucking hurts.
At first Stan just thinks he had some sort of scrape there that he’d forgotten about until it suddenly reared its painful and ugly head at the pressure, but it can’t be that because it hurts too fucking bad. Stan’s pretty tough, but he can’t help the startled scream that pulls itself out of his chest. It's a noise he hasn’t heard from himself in a real long time. He’s learned to muffle any sign of weakness, but it’s such a shock that it’s happening here, with his brother, that the noise erupts from him before he can stop it.
Ford’s foot leaves his chest as quickly as it had arrived, and he’s saying something that Stan can’t hear as he stands up. Stan covers his shoulder with his hand, blinking tears out of his eyes as he glares up at Ford.
“Stanley, I— I’m sorry, I didn’t—“
“Forget it,” Stan growls, forcing himself up to his feet. Ford backs away, hands raised placatingly. “It’s good to know where we stand now.”
“No, I never meant to—“ Ford stutters, stepping into the main room of the portal.
“And I never meant to break your project,” Stan punctuates the word with a push to Ford’s chest— “but that didn’t make anything better, did it?”
Ford stumbles back, hitting his elbow on some lever on the floor. Blue light fills the room with a droning buzz. When Ford doesn’t say anything in response, Stan scoffs and goes to grab the manual he tossed aside. He barely notices the line draw onto the ground it’s sitting on, but he does notice when the book starts floating. Instead of moving away— which would have been the logical course of action, because what the hell— he grabs for it.
It’s lighter in his hands now, probably because gravity seems to have forgotten about it, and Stan finds himself stumbling forward. He's not sure what it is that knocked him off balance, but he glances up as his next step lands more lightly than he expected. The portal looms before him, a pulsating shade of blue.
“Stanley!” Ford shouts.
As Stan turns to face him, he finds that his foot fails to hit the ground as he pivots. Thrown off by the realization, he leans back to compensate, and loses his balance entirely. He doesn’t hit the ground.
“Ford!” Stan yelps, kicking out wildly to try and hit something solid.
Ford glances over his shoulder at the control panel. Stiff with indecision, he takes a half step towards it before he violently shakes his head and runs towards Stan.
Stan’s leg doesn’t hit anything solid. Something hot consumes it, before it goes cold, prickling uncomfortably. He glances behind himself to find the limb swallowed by the ever-shifting blue of the portal.
“Not again,” he hears Ford mumble to himself. He watches as Ford stumbles to a stop on the other side of the safety line, before he grits his teeth and leaps over it, grabbing for Stan’s hand. “I have you, Lee!”
Ford’s six-fingered hand wraps tightly around his wrist as the hot-then-cold feeling begins to consume him.