Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When the knock came, Stan's heart leapt into his throat. “Just give me a few more days, Rico!” he called, voice cracking, and grabbed for the bat he always kept close to hand, not taking his eyes off the door. “I'll pay your goons back, I swear!”

He hefted the bat, palms sweaty against the smooth-grained wood but grip rock-steady even so, ready to swing on the first asshole to burst in through the door. That they'd get the better of him he had no doubt – they'd have guns, Rico was a professional, and he may have been an idiot but he knew what happened when you brought a baseball bat to a gunfight – but he'd be damned if he made it easy for them.

No one kicked the door in. There wasn't even so much as a second knock. The mail slot simply spat a card out onto the carpet with a rusty squeak, accompanied by a total absence of door-rattling, swearing, shouting, threats, or anything else Stan had braced himself for. More curious than afraid now, he heaved himself off the bed and peered through the peephole. Standing on the other side of the door was a scruffy old man in a blue uniform – his eyes said cop in the split second before his brain realized mailman . An unlikely goon, Stan had to admit, but he stayed glued to the door until the man had crossed the street anyway, just to be sure.

Satisfied he wasn't in for an ambush, he crouched down to retrieve the card. Even with one hand on the door, he overbalanced, knees thumping into the dirty carpet. He grimaced at that, but, hell, his knees had seen worse, and there was a mystery to solve, namely, who would possibly be sending him mail? He hadn't even been in this pit for a full month, and he couldn't imagine anyone who knew the fake name he'd rented it under wanting to send him a postcard, of all things. And what the hell kind of name is 'Gravity Falls', anyway?

Then he turned it over, and his heart flipped over in his chest.

PLEASE COME! - Ford

He'd signed it, the absolute fucking dweeb, even with his name right there on the other side of the card. A wave of mixed emotions washed over Stan, one part fond exasperation to several parts confusion, concern, and growing irritation. The signature and return address were wholly unnecessary – only Stanford would send him such a terse summons after ten years of radio silence, without so much as a greeting or hollow courtesy or even a whisper of explanation. Not that it wasn't obvious, both from the desperate jagged handwriting and the fact that he had written Stan at all, that Ford was in some kind of trouble and needed to be bailed out. The real mystery was how he'd gotten ahold of this address.

Part of Stan – the ugly, resentful part which seemed to take up more of him every year – wanted to tear the card into pieces and pretend he'd never seen it. What business was it of his if Stanford was in trouble? He'd spent the last ten years in trouble, and the only person who'd even bothered pretending to care was Ma. (Who, come to think of it, had probably given Stanford his address. She had an uncanny knack for knowing where he was, sometimes even when he didn't.) If he had a lick of sense, he'd get rid of it and deal with his own problems. Just push it right back through the flap. Tear it up into pieces.

Instead, he grabbed the doorknob, dragged himself to his feet with a groan, knees popping in protest, and sat heavily down on the sagging mattress. He held the postcard between his knees, rubbing his thumb over the writing. Whatever had driven his brother to send for him like this, it had to be bad. Stanford was every bit as stubborn as him and had always been the colder one, better at putting up walls, so he must have exhausted all other possible options first.

“Oregon, huh?” He looked around the cramped room – the sagging stained ceiling, ragged peeling wallpaper, the carpet discolored from years of ground-in dirt, the tattered curtains that barely covered the smudged and cracked window, all of it illuminated in a wash of red light from the flickering neon sign across the street. It stank, of earthy mold and stale cigarette smoke and the toilet that barely worked and the ripe smell of his own unwashed body, of despair. Eau de Rock Bottom , he thought with a humorless chuckle, and flopped onto his back, bedsprings squeaking mournfully at him. He held the postcard loosely in one hand, flung up above his head, and settled the other one on his rounded stomach.

There was not, of course, any question that he'd go. He'd known he would as soon as he flipped the card over and saw that handwriting, as familiar to him as his own. For all his bitterness, he'd never been – would never be – capable of simply turning his back on his brother in a time of need. Sure, it was presumptuous of Ford to expect him to drop everything and come when called, but it wasn't as if he had much to drop in the first place, except for a whole handful of problems he'd be happy to leave behind.

And, of course, the one that he couldn't. It made itself known in its usual fashion, turning and squirming and kicking restlessly inside of him, and he found himself stroking his belly on automatic, as if that would soothe it.

“Feelin' cramped in there, ya little freeloader?” he muttered. “Tell me about it.” That one at least would resolve itself with time, provided he didn't get his head beaten in first. “Huh,” he said slowly, mind catching on that thought and starting to race, “maybe a trip'll do us good after all.”

No doubt he'd be sent back on his way as soon as he finished helping Stanford out of whatever mess he'd gotten himself into, but if he could just have a few weeks – a few weeks hidden safely up north away from the likes of Rico and every other shark he owed money and favors, a few weeks in a house, a few weeks not alone , with family, with his brother -

A spark of hope flickered to life in his battered heart. He'd long since resigned himself to dealing with it alone. (He'd long since resigned himself to the fact that he likely wouldn't live long enough to deal with it one way or another.) All these months he'd been pushing down the fear, numbing out the parts of himself that said he couldn't, didn't want to, couldn't , and now here it all was crawling up his throat and squeezing away his breath because for the first time in months he had a chance. Hoping hurt after so long spent hopeless. The urge came over him again to rip the postcard up and throw it away and keep on living his miserable fuck-up life, because all he would do with a chance was waste and lose it the way he'd wasted and lost every other chance he'd ever had.

Another flurry of fluttering kicks interrupted his self-pity. “Fine,” he said, giving his belly an absent pat. “I'll stop feelin' sorry for myself. Fine.” With a groan he sat up, then pushed himself to his feet to get dressed and figure out his plan of action.

The sooner he left, the better. The urgency in Ford's message was unmistakable, and he doubted he'd be able to fob Rico off much longer. That he'd done it for two weeks was unbelievable enough. If he left all the unsold product here, the boxes of trinkets and the vacuums and all the clutter of useless crap, it might buy some time between leaving and Rico figuring out he was really gone, maybe enough to get far enough away he couldn't be followed.

Aside from that, he had precious little to bring. There were the clothes on his back, the slightly nicer set for when he needed to make a good impression, the battered and eclectically assembled first aid kit in the bathroom, and the baseball bat. After a moment's thought he took the dirty comforter off the bed, on the reasoning that it was cold up north and he might not be able to make all twenty-odd hours of the drive in one go, and that was it.

Stan fueled the El Diablo up with money he'd been saving to pay Rico back and was on his way west on the interstate within an hour.

The road unfurled in an endless ribbon of blacktop under his tires, the sky huge and dark and star-studded above, and the only other traffic was the occasional semi-truck. The car became its own little bubble of time, traveling apart from the rest of the world. Mile by mile the tension bled out of him.

How did he always forget how good it felt to be traveling? Sure, he was wedged tight in his seat, belly pressed up against the wheel no matter how far back he tried to move, and sure, he had to stop every forty-five minutes like clockwork to squat and piss beside the road, but that was such a small price to pay for the kind of peace the open road gave him. Out here no one expected anything of him. He didn't have to be anything. He didn't have to be any one . He didn't have to speak or even think, and for long stretches of time he didn't, mind as blissfully empty as the rocky red desert blurring by. Mile by mile, he settled back into his own skin. He always felt most like himself when he was going somewhere, though he never quite knew who that was anymore when he got there.

The landscape changed by degrees. Dusty yellow scrub turned into dusty red desert turned into towering red mesas turned back into more desert and scrub, all flat and spread out with the sky a huge cupped bowl above. The sun rose and stained the horizon all pink and bloody orange, then rose further and baked the sky a hard cloudless blue. On and north he drove, 'til the desert gave way again to rocky fallow scrubland.

Exhaustion dragged at his eyelids. He could have pulled over and slept, probably should have, but there was a nagging urgent feeling in his gut that kept telling him to hurry, hurry, hurry.

Anyway, the thought of falling asleep behind the wheel wasn't so bad. His eyes drooped shut and the scene painted itself across the back of his eyelids – the car veering, swerving, plunging over the edge of the road and rolling over and over until it finally came to rest in a tangle of broken glass and twisted metal, the bright hot flames licking up and the black smoke billowing... He'd always wanted to go out with a bang.

An insistent internal spasm pulled him out of that daydream. He opened his eyes, jerked the car back into the right lane, and rested a hand on his belly. “Don't like that idea, huh? Guess you wouldn't. You don't get a say though, y'hear? You're just along for the ride right now, ya little mooch, you don't get to call the shots.” Still, he stopped at the next ramshackle fuel station he saw and bought a tall cup of cheap coffee to keep himself alert.

God, it would be good to have someone else to talk to. Even Stanford.

Stanley Pines had seen some podunk places in his life. Glass Shard Beach had been a hole among holes when he was growing up, and the place he'd just come from would need a few years' worth of expensive civic improvement projects to even qualify as a hole. He'd seen and been run out of two-store towns, one-store towns, one- horse towns, towns where the population doubled when a bus drove through, and, on one memorable occasion, a town whose sole inhabitants lived above and ran its sole business, a gas station/gift store that sold the best damn praline he'd ever tasted.

Gravity Falls didn't even seem to be a town. It wasn't on any of the maps Stan already owned, though he didn't worry about that on his way through the southwest. Nor did he worry overmuch when he pulled over at a rest stop an hour south of the Oregon border and flipped through their maps without any more luck. But when he pulled into the tourist welcome center just past the state line and didn't find it on any of their maps either, he started worrying.

He didn't like the welcome center. The bored kid – maybe highschooler, maybe college-aged – sitting behind the information kiosk, which was just a folding table wedged between the vending machines, eyeballed him from the moment he walked in. When he finally gave up on the maps and approached the table, the kid looked him up and down, mouth twisted in disgust, and a cold sort of anger began working its way up through Stan's chest and into his throat.

“I need directions,” he said, planting his hands on the table and leaning in. “You ever heard of a place called Gravity Falls?”

The kid leaned back, mouth twisting harder. Her eyes kept flicking between Stan's face and chest and belly. “No.” Her tone made it clear she wanted the conversation to be over.

The smart thing to do would have been to just go on his way. There wasn't any help to be had here, and the longer the kid eyed him the more obvious it was he'd been clocked – what this snotty punk thought Stan was he could only guess, but there was the familiar mixed look of fascination and revulsion, the double-triple take that said 'what is it, what am I looking at, what a freak', the discomfort edging into hostility – but he was tired, he was hungry, every part of his body ached from spending eighteen hours cramped in his car seat, and the fact that he couldn't take it out on this kid for looking at him like that only made it all worse.

So he leaned in even closer, getting up in the kid's space, and gave her the kind of hard look he'd mastered after his first stint in prison. “Well, ain't that your fuckin' job? To know where shit is?” He dug into the pocket of his jacket, grimly satisfied when the kid flinched at the motion, and pulled out the postcard to shove at the kid's face. “Gravity. Falls. Either tell me how to get there or how to find someone who does.”

“I don't know! I've never heard of the place! It's not – I don't know every b-bumfuck town in this whole stupid st-state!” The kid pushed herself back against the wall, shoulders all hunched in and eyes wide, voice cracking as she spoke.

“ Then who does? ” Stan growled.

“I – I don't – there's a truck stop half an hour up the road, go ask there, Jesus!”

Stan stayed where he was a moment longer, maintaining eye contact, then stuffed the postcard back into his pocket and whirled around. His feet and ankles were swollen and sore enough that it hurt to stomp, but he still did it all the way out to the car, and slammed the welcome center door closed behind himself for good measure too. As he angrily fumbled with his seatbelt and jammed his keys into the ignition, a distant part of him suggested he'd overreacted. The rest of him kept thinking about how satisfying it would have been to hit the kid, even just once, and be damned with how recognizable he and the car were.

“Would it have fucking killed you to send directions, Ford? Or a map? Anything ?” He thumped the wheel and gave a disgusted sigh. “I tell ya, kid, your uncle Stanford's a real idiot for how smart he is. Dumbest genius I ever met. You keep that in mind when you meet him, okay? Don't be fooled.”

Right after he said that, he wished he hadn't. All the way up here he'd successfully managed to avoid thinking about how Ford would react to his...condition. Which was stupid, of course, because it was impossible to hide. He felt like an overinflated balloon and looked, even with his bulky jacket zipped all the way, like he was trying to shoplift a watermelon. Ford may have been oblivious, but he wasn't blind.

Even if Stan did somehow manage to hide it, that could only go on for so long. Hell, half the reason he'd decided to go was because it meant he could have Ford at his side when it came time for his little freeloader to make its dramatic entrance, instead of doing it in his filthy motel room with only the oversight of the streetwalker two doors down who did abortions on the side. Somehow he'd managed to hold that idea in his head without thinking about how he'd actually tell Ford .

He was beginning to think he might be a little too good at compartmentalizing.

The truck stop was actually closer to an hour up the road. Stan had just begun to think the kid had lied to get him out of there – couldn't blame her – when he saw the sign advertising FOOD – DIESEL – COFFEE come rising up above the treeline like a guiding star. He followed the curving road, crested a hill, and saw it there spread out below him in all its pothole-pocked glory, one weathered little building hunched in the middle of a wide sea of tarmac dotted with diesel pumps.

There were four vehicles in the parking lot, three semis and a single battered station wagon with four differently colored doors, all parked haphazardly at angles to each other. Presumably the parking lot had once had stripes, but weather and wear had long since erased them. Stan pulled around to the empty side of the lot and nosed the car up ten feet from the building, more or less straight, and called that good.

The encounter at the welcome center was still fresh in his mind. The last few months spent hopping from shithole border town to shithole border town had gotten him too used to people who knew better than to poke their noses in, made him careless. It couldn't happen again. So before he went in he dug through his cluttered back seat until he unearthed a heavy coat, a souvenir of winters spent north up on the east coast, and a button-up he hadn't worn since he was twenty. He got out, thankful for the bite of winter in the air which meant the layers would be merely uncomfortable rather than sweltering, and circled around to shelter in the lee of his car while he changed.

Red jacket off, wallet out of his jeans – button-up on, buttoned tight across his chest and left open over his stomach because there was just no way – red jacket back on, zipped all the way up to his neck – and finally he struggled into the heavy coat, sucking his gut in as far as he possibly could in order to button it up. He examined his reflection critically in the sideview mirror, turning to the side and smoothing a hand down the front of his body, and decided that he probably passed for potbellied rather than pregnant. As a final step he ran his fingers through his hair, trying to comb out the worst of the tangles, grimacing at the greasy texture of it. Nothing much he could do about that, nor the way he undoubtedly smelled.

He stuffed his wallet into the pocket of his overcoat, took a deep bracing breath, and went in.

Two truckers sat at the front counter, one was slumped over onto a table in the far corner, and the only person who looked up when the door opened was the single tired-looking waitress. She called out a perfunctory welcome, which he returned with a smile and a raised hand. After a moment's deliberation he dropped himself into a seat one over from the two at the front, crossing his arms on the stained counter and leaning forward.

All of these places had the same air: slightly stale, warm, and heavy with the scent of coffee and the kind of salty, greasy food that stuck to your ribs and warmed you from the inside out. This close to the kitchen he was bathed in cooking smells, which only served to remind him just how long it'd been since he'd eaten a hot meal. His stomach growled noisily as the waitress handed him the laminated menu, a single badly copied sheet with the plastic peeling off one corner. Her red lips gave a little twitch of amusement at that.

“Long drive, huh?”

He gave her his best aw-shucks grin over the top of the menu. “Yeah, been about eighteen hours. Came up from New Mexico.” By now it was second nature to smooth the Jersey out of his voice and slip into the sort of vaguely Midwestern all-American accent that fit in anywhere.

“All that way?” She leaned hipshot against the the counter, gaze flicking around the room, disinterest apparent in every line of her. Stan knew the way this game was played; as soon as he'd bought something and handed over some cash she'd thaw right out, try to chat and net herself a good fat tip. “Need a sec with the menu there?”

He scanned it over quickly, looking for the lowest price on there. “Nah, but I could use a coffee – two sugars, no cream – and, mm, how's about an omelet?” He'd be able to afford all that, just barely, though he'd have to figure something out for the tip.

“Sure thing, hon. You want a sausage link or bacon with that?”

He handed the menu back over with a shrug. “Bacon's fine. Say, you got a bathroom?”

“For paying customers, yeah,” she said, and looked at him expectantly until he dug his wallet out and handed over everything in it, still smiling.

Cash in hand, her demeanor visibly shifted, and she fetched him the key and directed him around back like she was jazzed as all hell to be doing it. He took it, thanked her, and ambled on back.

Maybe his luck was changing. There was only one room, a single-person affair with a urinal on one wall and a cracked toilet set crooked into the opposite corner. It smelled of poor aim and unenthusiastic cleaning, and his shoes stuck to the floor with every step he took, but the important thing was that he could lock the door.

The most important thing was the machine bolted to the wall between the urinal and questionably functional toilet. One side of it advertised flavored rubbers and sensual oils, the other Tampax, either available for just a nickel. Grinning like a cat in an aviary, he made his way over and felt along the sides and bottom and top of it, looking for screws, a catch, something.

He had to unbutton his overcoat to get at his pockets and the little roll of tools he always kept on his person. Three months ago it had lived in his boot, but that was before he'd started taking his life into his hands every time he bent over. At this point his front pockets were about as hard to get into, considering how tight his pants had gotten. He hadn't been able to button them in months, and only by the grace of God and his belt did they stay up.

He made quick work of the condom/tampon machine, tucking the front of it under his arm once he'd pulled it free. The haul wasn't anything to write home about – maybe a buck fifty – but it'd be damn near a 50% tip, and if that didn't get him some good directions then nothing would. It took some juggling to stuff the fistful of nickels into his pocket without dropping the front panel, but he managed, and fumbled it back on without much trouble. Then, just for appearances sake, he flushed the toilet, ran the sink, and buttoned himself back into his coat.

The bathroom did have a mirror, stained and cracked though it was, giving him the first good look he'd gotten at himself in longer than he wanted to think about. He looked like a man who'd driven halfway across the country on a few hours of sleep and a cup of coffee, eyes all bloodshot and bruised-looking and half-lidded, jaw rough with a few days' worth of uneven stubble, hair greasy and tangled and wild despite his earlier attempts at finger-combing. With some disgust he noted his face was breaking out, too. An impressively swollen pimple had sprouted just below his left nostril, and there was a whole cluster of smaller ones just to the right of his chin.

At least the layers did pad him out enough his stomach didn't stick out. He rested a hand on it, drumming his fingers in time to the fluttering movements from within. Just in the last few weeks his little freeloader had hardly stopped moving, turning over and kicking and pushing impatiently at his insides at all hours. Sometimes he barely felt it and sometimes it kicked hard enough to hurt, but he couldn't ever forget it was there.

The sight of himself in the mirror pulled him out of his thoughts. Standing there looking all unfocused with his hand on his belly like – like an absolute cliché, that was what, like some doe-eyed soft expectant mother in a magazine article about the perfect ratio of duckies to bunnies on the nursery wallpaper – it was ridiculous. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and wheeled around to leave, something somewhere between shame and anger coating his throat.

A mug of coffee was waiting for him when he got back, receipt tucked under it. He put the sugar in with slow, deliberate movements, tearing the top carefully off each packet and stirring it thoroughly in before he added the next. The ritual helped distract him from that image of himself. When the waitress came around with his plate he was calm enough to grin at her.

Eating distracted him further. The omelet was rubbery and burned on one side, the bacon limp and chewy, but he hadn't eaten anything since he'd finished his last bag of jerky in the motel three days prior and it was, therefore, the best goddamn thing he'd ever tasted. Only the fact that he was in public kept him from picking the plate up and licking the grease off it once he'd finished the food.

“You stopped anywhere since New Mexico?” the waitress asked, clearly taken aback by the speed with which he'd inhaled his food.

Stan picked up his coffee, downed half of it, and heroically smothered a belch. “Nope. I'm in a bit of a hurry. Y'see, it's – oh!” He smacked the heel of his hand into his forehead and dug out the change he'd just liberated out of his pocket with the other one. “Can't believe myself, forget my own head if it wasn't attached... This is for you, darlin'.” She made an appreciative noise when he dumped the pile of coins into her outstretched hand. “And give my compliments to the chef, too.”

“Sure will,” she said with a wink. “So what's the hurry, huh?”

“Oh, well – it's my brother, you see, he lives in some little place upstate, haven't seen him in a while, but he called me up the other day and told me his wife's expecting any day now and he wanted me to be there. Our parents ain't around anymore, you know, so it's just us, and, I mean, I couldn't miss it, y'know? Not for anything. But, ha -” he leaned in conspiratorially, voice dropping - “poor guy's so frazzled he forgot to give me directions or his number or anything. And I've been askin' around and I can't find the place anywhere on any of the maps.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, nodding, “all these little logging towns all around, you practically have to be from there to know where they are. Lucky for you, sugar, I've been all over the place. Where is it you're headed?”

He plastered an expression of beatific gratitude over his face, hardly even faking. “Place called Gravity Falls. Y'ever hear of it?”

She frowned thoughtfully, tapping one long yellowed fingernail against her lip. “Gravity Falls, Gravity Falls...” For a moment he feared she wouldn't know it, that he'd be doomed to drive around 'til he stumbled upon the place or ran out of gas in the woods, and then recognition lit her face up. “Yeah, but, boy, that's out there. I've been through a couple times, got a cousin who lives in Blue Creek just next to it. Nice, quiet little place, good place to raise a family.”

“Yeah?” It took every ounce of self-control Stan possessed not to reach out and shake her and tell her to get to the goddamn point already. He just kept his hands around his mug and the smile on his face, head cocked.

“Yeah. So, okay, what you wanna do is, you wanna keep heading west 'til you hit I-395, then you take that up north and east for, oh, a good couple hours, 'til you hit Riley. Then you go east on the 20 'til Burns, and then north on I-395 again 'til Seneca. It's about an hour past Seneca, down some little county roads. I don't recall exactly which, but if you ask around up there they'll tell you how to get there.”

“ Thank you, ma'am,” he told her fervently. “I've been driving myself crazy worrying I wouldn't get there in time.”

She actually giggled, though the sound spoke less to girlish excitement than to a pack-a-day habit. Stan rounded out the conversation with a few more well-placed compliments, drained his coffee, and made his exit with a new spring in his step. Take that , unhelpfully cryptic shithead brother!

Twenty minutes down the road, his stomach started to cramp. A wave of anxiety rolled over him, drying out his mouth and making his chest go tight. “Just the eggs,” he told himself, and almost managed to believe it.

The pain crept up the front of his belly, squeezing, and he knew it wasn't just dodgy truck stop eggs. After a few seconds it went, then came back, then went again. Minutes passed, and just when he'd started to hope it was past it came back and didn't let up.

Stan tried to breathe. Tried to focus on the road, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. Tried to swallow down the panic clawing its way up his throat. When it finally passed he didn't dare hope it was gone for good. This wasn't the first time – just a couple weeks ago it had happened on and off for three hours, until he'd been scared enough to go two doors down to Deanna, who'd told him it was just false labor.

She'd told him how to tell the difference, too, though just right then his mind was blank of everything but the terror that it was happening, it was now , while he was in the middle of the fucking woods with half a tank of gas and not a cent to his name, and he couldn't remember a thing she'd said.

Minutes slid by without pain and he managed to calm down enough to think and remember. Real contractions were regular, that was it, and the fake ones just came and went and didn't tend to get any worse than they already were. And it took hours, anyway, so even if it was happening – and it wasn't, it couldn't, it wasn't – he'd have time to get somewhere. He'd be fine. A little voice in the back of his head whispered that that wasn't his luck, that had never been his luck and he knew it, but he shoved it away.

He peeled one hand off the wheel and placed it, shaking, on his stomach, fingers digging in. “Stop it, okay? It's – it's a bad fucking time right now. Just – you just stay there a while longer. Few hours. Please.”

Half an hour later it finally stopped. He sped up, speedometer jittering up past 80, car shaking underneath him. Anything to shave some time off. Just gotta get there , he told himself. Just get there first and it'll all be fine.

He did 90 dropping down to 80 on the curves near the whole way to Seneca. Just south of the city, though, the grey sky finally opened up and dumped the snow it’d been threatening to all afternoon. Big fat flakes drifted down, slow but relentless, frosting the trees and grass and sticking to the road. He kept on speeding until the road got slick enough the car started fishtailing through its turns, and even then he only grudgingly dropped his speed. For a time he hoped he would be able to drive through the storm, but it followed him north, blowing harder all the way.

The directions he got in Seneca were of the 'turn left past Old Jimmy's mailbox, it's the one that's shaped like a fish, then take the second road to your right and if you see the lake you've gone too far' breed, always a dicey proposition, but it only took two trips down the wrong unmarked dirt logging road before he finally got it right. The third road narrowed steadily until he was almost sure it was going to be a dead end too, but then it opened up and there was a sign, and Stan was so happy he could've cried.

Gravity Falls - Nothing To See Here, Folks! the sign proclaimed proudly, which was a slogan Stan could get behind. A few minutes past it he saw the giant wooden lumberjack he'd been told to look out for looming above the trees, all lantern-jaw and weather-faded plaid, drifts of snow piled on his head and shoulders. He marked a gas station, apparently, and sure enough, once Stan got close enough there was the building, a tiny wooden shack sagging in Paul Bunyan's mighty shadow.

'Shack' might have been too generous, he saw when he pulled up. There was a single ancient fuel pump outside, every part of the building creaked ominously in the wind, and when he opened the door its hinges squealed like a dying pig. The woman behind the counter inside looked like she'd been hired sometime just before the Civil War. Stan meandered around as much as it was possible to in thirty square feet of space, trying to look interested in the shelves of dusty candy and canned goods, and made his way around to the counter.

“Afternoon, ma'am,” he said, leaning one elbow on the counter and trying to modulate his voice to 'charmingly lost'. “Think you could give me some directions real quick?”

“Sure,” the woman said in a voice as thin and cobwebby as she herself was. “Just passing through, right?” Her tone suggested the correct answer was to agree with her.

“Nope! Visiting family.” Her fearsome aspect softened somewhat, only to harden up even further when he gave her Stanford's address.

“Oh. That place.” Her wrinkled mouth puckered up like she was trying to juice a lemon with her tongue.

“Yep, that's the place! Glad you know it, I've had a hell of a time getting here!” Stan grinned at her with manic desperation. Good ol' Sixer, always such a social butterfly. What the hell have you been doing out here, Stanford?

“Yes,” she creaked, “we don't get many visitors. Quiet little place. We like it that way.”

“Quiet! Quiet's good, yeah, I love quiet. I come from a pretty quiet place myself, I know how it is. You just point me the right way and I'll be out of your hair, ma'am.” His face was starting to ache from the effort of holding his fixed smile in place.

“Mm,” she said, and noisily sucked her few remaining teeth. Frustration bubbled up hot and sour in his chest, but he just stayed quiet, waiting. Finally, after an eon, she spoke again. “Just take the main road through town 'til you get out in the woods. Gopher Road's the second right.” Duty fulfilled, she fell silent again, staring at him balefully until he left.

“You sure know how to pick 'em, Stanford,” he muttered to himself out in the parking lot.

Stanford's house, to Stan's utter lack of surprise, was about as far away as you could go and still be in the town. The El Diablo bumped and slid down a 'road' that was nothing more than a glorified deer path for long enough he began to wonder if the gas station crypt keeper hadn't sent him out into the forest to die.

It sure seemed like the kind of place a person could disappear forever into. The farther out he drove the thicker the trees got, crowding in so close he could've reached out the window and grabbed a handful of pine needles. Nothing moved out there between them save the blowing wind, and the perpetual gloom swallowed up all sound, so even with the snow crunching under his tires it was quieter than any other point on his drive.

Finally the little road spat him out into a round clearing with a wooden cabin huddled in the middle of it. There wasn't a house number that Stan could see, but he only had to look at the place to know it was his brother's. It hunched suspiciously in a ring of barbed wire and NO TRESPASSING signs, boxed in by the skulking pines.

It wasn't like he hadn't worried before. Every time he looked at the postcard, at those jagged, crooked words so unlike Stanford's usual flowing, rounded script, he couldn't help but wonder just what kind of mess his brother had gotten into.

Sitting there looking at that dark and sealed house hidden out in the middle of the woods, though, he felt the first flutters of real fear. This was not a good place for Ford to be. Stan could feel the oppressive atmosphere, the sense of something old and cold watching from the woods. Even at his best Ford tended towards paranoia, and a place like this could only make it worse.

Almost unconsciously, he settled a hand on his stomach. “Your uncle Ford's a little cuckoo-clock, you know?” Maybe that was all it was. Maybe this was like the fits Ford used to have when they were kids, when his overactive brain wouldn't stop convincing him the world was out to get him. Back then he'd always had Stan around to pull him out of it, but who knew how deep down the rabbit hole he'd been able to go out here by himself.

Stan took a deep breath, turned the car off, and climbed out. Silence rang through the clearing. The air was crisp and sharp and thick with the green smell of pines. Nothing moved save for Stanley, trudging his way through calf-deep snow up to the porch. That the snow was all unbroken was clear evidence Ford hadn't been out here in some time, another bad sign.

The back of his neck itched like someone was behind him. The closer he came to the house, the more his bad feeling intensified, until it was a nest of snakes writhing in his gut. He stepped up onto the porch, the creak of the stairs unnaturally loud, and froze before the door.

“You haven't seen your brother in over ten years. It's okay,” he told himself, trying to keep his voice steady, trying not to sound as worried as he felt. “He's family, he won't bite.” He needs me. He asked me here. Still, he stood in front of the door with his fist upraised to knock for an embarrassing amount of time before he could finally make himself do it.

Immediately the door jerked open. “Who is it?” Ford demanded through the gap, a rough and wild edge to his voice. “ Have you come to steal my eyes? ” There was a click, and before Stan could respond or even get a good look at Ford, he found himself staring down the business end of a crossbow.

He took a startled step backwards, curling a protective arm around his stomach on instinct, ridiculous though the impulse was. Nothing would protect him from an arrow to the face, not at that range, and for one taut moment there was no doubt in him that Ford would shoot. He'd heard that kind of raw, animal terror before, seen what it drove people to do. He couldn't stop imagining the iron arrow tip punching through his face, tearing skin and splintering bone, splattering his brains out the back of his head. Would he die instantly or would he fall back to bleed out in the snow? Would he live ?

Then he found his voice and said, “Well, I can always count on you for a warm welcome,” and the tension broke. The crossbow wavered, then lowered.

“...Stanley?” Ford asked, brows furrowed. He still held the crossbow at his side, tense in a way Stan knew meant he was ready to swing it back up and shoot with a moment's notice.

“You expecting anyone else?” For the first time in over a decade, Stan got a look at his brother. What he saw more than convinced him he'd made the right choice in coming out. Ford looked like a man well past the edge, bloodshot eyes sunken in bruised sockets and fever-bright, darting suspiciously around, hair and clothes nearly as ragged and dirty as Stan's. His jaw was shaggy with stubble, his movements jerky. He looked like someone old ladies would cross the street to avoid.

“I – you look...” Ford looked him up and down, mouth working silently for a moment, and then he managed, “Different.”

The gulf of the last ten years and all the changes they had brought yawned impossibly wide between them. He looked like Ford now, square jaw and stubble and all, finally the mirror image he'd spent his entire life knowing he should've been. In his mind it was the Stan of ten years ago who didn't look the way he was supposed to, and the face he wore now as correct and natural as breathing, new as it must be to his brother. Somewhere between his head and his mouth, though, that thought turned itself into dust instead of words.

All he could do was shrug and mutter, “Been a while.”

After another tense silence, Ford accepted that, or at least decided he didn't care enough to keep asking. He finally put the crossbow down inside the house, then went immediately back to scanning the empty landscape, pressed up against his door like he didn't dare step over the threshold.“Did anyone follow you, anyone at all?”

“Yeah, hello to you too, pal.” Annoyance was beginning to war with concern for his dominant emotion. With every passing second it became more obvious that Ford really was in a bad way, but somehow over the years Stan had managed to forget just how obnoxious he could be when he got like this. Or maybe it was just that Stan had always been the one person he always trusted.

Without further preamble, Ford grabbed him by the collar and yanked him inside. Stan made a strangled startled sound, too taken aback to resist as Ford held him in place and shined a penlight in first one, then the other eye.

Annoyance won. “ Hey ,” he snapped, grabbing at Ford's wrists and pushing the damn penlight out of his face. “What is this?”

Ford let go and backed away, hands raised apologetically. “Sorry, I just had to make sure you weren't -” he fell silent, gaze flicking nervously to the side, and his expression became closed off - “uh, it's nothing. Come in, come in.” He turned, waving jerkily for Stan to follow as he strode into the dark recesses of the house.

That's not concerning at all, nope... Stan pushed the door shut behind himself and followed more slowly, gazing around. By now his earlier fear was a blaring klaxon, screaming out that something was very, deeply wrong here. Hell, from where he was standing it would be easier to figure out what wasn't wrong.

“Look,” Stan said as he followed Ford into the front room, “are you gonna explain what's going on here? You're acting like Ma after her tenth cup of coffee.”

Ford had clearly taken a flying swan-dive off the deep end. That was obvious just from the way he looked, the way his words tripped off his tongue like his thoughts were racing too fast for his mouth to keep up, the way he moved like a marionette with a couple of random strings cut, but worst of all was seeing the inside of his house.

The air was stale and rank the same way Stan's motel room had been, ripe with the smell of an unwashed body and a total lack of air circulation. Drifts of paper and uneven piles of books spilled over every available surface and mounded up against the walls. The furnishings were more suited to some kind of mad scientist's laboratory than a home, all snaking pipes and wires and strange things – that couldn't really be a dinosaur skull, right? - in tanks and glowing consoles spilling eerie light out into the gloomy room. A very human skeleton stood against one wall, skull cocked and grinning at the doorway.

“Listen,” Ford said, rifling through the papers on the overflowing desk at the end of the room, “there isn't much time.” When he whirled back around he was cradling a fat leather-bound book close against his chest, like it was something very precious or very dangerous or maybe both. “I've made huge mistakes, and I don't know who I can trust anymore.” His free hand fluttered through the air as he spoke, punctuating the rapid flow of his speech. With a sidelong glance he reached out and twisted the head of the hopefully-a-model skeleton so its empty sockets faced the wall.

“Hey,” Stan said, a nervous chuckle slipping out. “Take it easy, okay? Let's talk this through.” When Ford passed within reach he put a comforting hand on his shoulder. Something squeezed up tight and hurt in his chest when Ford flinched at the touch, shoulders hunching up around his ears. Once upon a time the weight of his hands had been able to pull Ford back onto solid ground when nothing else could.

Ford turned to face him, shrugging his hand off, and said urgently, “I have something to show you. Something you won't believe.”

Stan couldn't help rolling his eyes at that. That it would be unbelievable – literally unbelievable, on account of only existing inside of Ford's messed up head – he didn't doubt, but the casual way Ford always assumed he knew things no one else could even begin to comprehend grated, even when Stan was trying to be patient.

“Look,” he said, trying and failing to keep the irritation from bleeding into his voice, “I've been around the world, okay? Whatever it is, I'll understand.”

It wasn't entirely a lie. Maybe he wouldn't buy whatever nonsense Ford was about to try and feed him, but he understood everything he needed to already. Being cooped up by himself for who knew how long in this spooky cabin had driven Ford batty, some small spark of sanity had driven him to call for help before he completely lost touch with reality, and now that Stan was here all they had to do was ride it out. He'd keep Ford from doing anything stupid until he came back to himself and later they would laugh about how ridiculous it all had been. Easy-peasy, just like old times.

Ford just looked at him, face lined and weary and impossibly old, like he'd aged thirty years in the last ten. Stan's hands ached with the desire to reach out and take hold of him and tell him he was safe and everything was okay until the uproar in his head quieted down enough for him to believe it.

For a second Ford looked like he wanted to say something. He opened his mouth, closed it, licked his lips, his hands clenching and unclenching all the while – but in the end he just turned and strode off deeper into the house, wordlessly gesturing for Stan to follow.

“See?” Stan muttered under his breath as he followed, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets. “What'd I tell you? Completely cuckoo-clock.” The little freeloader had nothing to say to that. Had Ford even noticed yet? Stan hadn't gone to any pains to hide it, but Ford could be oblivious at the best of times, and when he got like this...

“What was that?” Ford craned to look back over his shoulder, face pale under his dirty mop of dark hair, eyes hunted. “Who are you talking to, Stanley?”

“Nothing,” Stan said. “No one here but us, Poindexter. C'mon, you got something to show me, right?”

They went too fast for him to get much of a good look, but from what Stan could see, the rest of the house was every bit as much a shitshow as the front room. Every available surface was covered in paper and precariously piled books, every corner stuffed full of more science fictional weirdness, all of it jumbled carelessly together.

Ford finally came to a stop in front of a solid metal door that wouldn't have looked out of place in a fallout shelter. He glanced over his shoulder once again, then punched a code into the keypad set in the front of it, angling his body to shield it from Stan's sight.

Stan rolled his eyes again. A tetchy comment about having zero interest in Ford's weirdo nerd secrets was on the tip of his tongue when the door swung silently open to reveal a dark staircase. Cool air flowed out from the opening, bringing with it the dark and earthy smell of a cellar.

“Uh, Sixer?” he asked as they descended the creaking stairs, the tiniest hint of a quaver in his voice. “What is this? Some kinda secret bunker? You gettin' ready for the end of the world down here?” He'd meant it as a joke, but the words hung in the air between them for an uncomfortable length of time.

“Ha,” Ford intoned. “Come on. You'll see.”

Bunker wasn't the right word. Stan tried out a couple of others, basement or cellar maybe, normal words for things normal people had under their houses, but other words kept crowding them out. Words like cave and lair and secret underground science lab . Apparently Ford couldn't even go crazy like a normal person.

“What the hell have you been doing out here, Stanford?”

“Oh, Stanley -” for the first time since he'd come Stan heard something other than fear in his brother's tone and when Ford turned to him the look on his face was rapturous and that was more frightening than anything - “it's been amazing . I've seen so much, things I never could have imagined, things -” his face fell, his tone growing low and dark - “things I shouldn't have. Things – no, there's not – it doesn't matter anymore.” He dragged a hand down his face, rasping over his stubble, then flapped it out towards the far end of the – room. “This is what's important now.”

“Is it?” Stan said doubtfully. This was an enormous metal triangle with a hole punched through the middle, balanced improbably on its tip, engraved with what looked to be all manner of arcane gibberish. Stan's first thought was that it looked like a giant planchette.

Ford tried to explain. He did so thoroughly and at length, using words like quantum and space-time and trans-universal and paradigm, and dimensional at least five times. He summarized multiverse theory, mentioned cross-dimensional contamination, and briefly sketched out the equation that underpinned the whole thing, pacing back and forth and waving his hands wildly around as he spoke. His voice rose and rose the longer he talked, echoing off the high rocky ceiling.

Stan tried to understand. Half the words his brother said didn't sound real and the rest of them didn't make any sense in the order they'd been put in, but that was how Ford's science babble had always sounded to him. What few bits of it he'd managed to process sounded impossible, but Ford's explanation had been so thorough Stan couldn't help but consider that it might not be.

While he mulled it over, Ford just stood there, arms folded behind his back, watching. Slowly, his gaze traveled down Stan's body, then back up, then down again. He frowned, a wrinkle appearing between his furrowed brows.

With a jolt, Stan realized he'd been absently rubbing his stomach – the little freeloader had started kickboxing his bladder halfway through Ford's explanation of his quantum meta-dimensional triangle vortex, or whatever it was, and didn't seem eager to stop anytime soon – and hastily stuffed both hands back into his pockets.

“Stanley -”

“There is nothing about this I understand,” Stan cut him off, more than a little desperately. It worked, just like he'd known it would, just like it always had. If there was one thing Ford couldn't resist, it was an opportunity to talk even more about how smart he was.

He started pacing again, sweeping one hand out towards the machine, and Stan could just imagine him imagining himself up in front of a lecture hall. “It's a trans-universal gateway,” he said in the very same tone he'd always used when he was trying to dumb down their homework enough for Stan to understand it, “a – a punched hole through a weak spot in our dimension. I created it to unlock the mysteries of the universe, but it could just as easily be harnessed for terrible destruction!”

Trust Ford to think putting holes in the fabric of reality could be a good idea , Stan thought sourly, and had to bite back a humorless chuckle. Among the many things Ford was oblivious to, his own flair for melodrama was near the top of the list, and he'd never taken kindly to being laughed at.

“That's why I shut it down,” Ford continued, reaching into his coat to pull out the leather-bound book he'd picked up earlier, “and hid my journals, which explain how to operate it. There's only one journal left, and you are the only person I can trust to take it.” So saying, he held it out, eyes fixed with frightening intensity on Stan's face.

Stan took the battered thing, surprised at the sheer weight of it. He was no expert book appraiser, but this thing was clearly a work of love, hand-bound and sturdy. Ford gave it into his hands like an offering, letting go only reluctantly.

“I have something to ask of you.” The sheer raw urgency in Ford's voice pulled Stan's attention back to him, away from the book. “Remember our plans to sail around the world on a boat?”

Hope roared to life inside of Stan, as hot and sudden as a forest fire. Every moment of the last ten years, all the lean months, all the years spent one step ahead and sometimes one step behind the law, every night spent scared and lonely in his car, Colombia – none of it mattered against the weight of Ford remembering, Ford needing him.

“Take this book, get on a boat, and sail as far away as you can!” Ford turned and stalked away from him, coming to a stop in front of his damned machine, arms folded behind his back. “To the edge of the earth! Bury it where no one can find it.” He stood there, so confident that he'd be obeyed, not even bothering to look back. If he had, he might have seen the look of devastation on Stan's face.

The pain was a physical thing, so huge it crushed the breath out of him, so huge he didn't think his body had room for it. Then the bottom dropped out of his stomach and all the pain drained away and fury rushed in to fill him up, all nice and hot and numb.

“That's it ?” he burst out, voice so jagged it hurt his throat coming up. “You finally want to see me after ten years, and it's to tell me to get as far away from you as possible?”

“Stanley!” Ford cried, frustrated, throwing his hands up. He finally turned back, only to shoulder his way past Stan, barely even bothering to look at him. “You don't understand what I'm up against! What I've been through!”

The fury overflowed him, pouring bitterly from his mouth. “No, no, you don't understand what I've been through!” He advanced on his brother, getting even angrier at the way Ford just stood there, looking taken aback. As if he had no idea where this outburst was coming from. “I've been to prison in three different countries! I once had to chew my way out of the trunk of a car! You think you've got problems?” Ford's eyes flicked down to his stomach, and the pity in them was unbearable. With minimal input from his brain, his mouth flapped open again to try and defuse the situation. “I've got a mullet , Stanford!”

But Ford just kept giving him that look , all bewilderment and pity. All Stan wanted in that moment was to make his brother hurt even half as much as he did. “And meanwhile, where have you been? Livin' it up in your fancy house in the woods, selfishly hoarding your college money, because you only care about yourself!” He jabbed his finger into Ford's chest for emphasis, snarling up in his face.

For just a moment, it worked. The barbed words hit home and Ford flinched back, uncertain. Then the moment passed and Ford's face twisted angrily. “I'm selfish? I'm selfish, Stanley?” He threw his arms out and Stan braced himself for the blow, expectant, exultant, but it never came. Instead Ford stepped back away from him, tone full of scornful disbelief as he spoke. “How can you say that after costing me my dream school? I'm giving you the chance to do the first worthwhile thing in your life, and you won't even listen!” His voice rose with every word until he was practically shouting, arms waving furiously.

Stan hadn't thought that anything else Ford might say could hurt. There it was, though, the truth of what his brother thought of him laid out bare between them, and oh, did it hurt. Some idiot part of him had quietly hoped that maybe he'd suffered enough, that naybe he'd finally atoned for his mistake all those years ago. It was obvious now that he never would. He'd never be anything but a worthless fuckup, not to Ford or anybody else.

“Well, listen to this - you want me to get rid of this book? Fine!” He dug in his pocket, fumbling out his lighter. “I'll get rid of it right now!” He lit the lighter with a flick of his thumb and held it under the book, gratified by the look of utter horror on Ford's face.

“No!” Ford cried. He lunged forward, grabbing the book with both hands. “You don't understand -”

If Stan never heard those words again in his life, it would be too soon. “You said you wanted me to have it, so I'll do what I want with it!” He yanked the book out of Ford's hands and put it back over the flame. A tendril of smoke curled up past his face, sweet with the smell of burning paper.

“My research!” Ford tackled him.

Pop would be proud, Stan thought inanely as his brother's body slammed into him. It was a textbook tackle with nothing held back. Ungainly and unbalanced as he was, he went staggering across the room under Ford's weight. The journal and lighter both flew out of his hands. He got them under him as he fell, but then Ford's weight came down on his back and he collapsed, belly smacking into the ground.

A thrill of hot terror shot through him. As soon as Ford's weight lifted he rolled over and kicked his brother's feet out from underneath him. Now it was Ford's turn to fall flat on his face. Stan didn't even have time to feel smug about that as he heaved himself onto his hands and knees. Grabbing onto the huge lever sticking out of the floor, he dragged himself upright. He stumbled past Ford and went heavily to his knees to grab the journal.

“Stanley!” Ford yelled out from behind him. “Give it back!”

He turned just in time. Ford bulled into him, pushing him up against the control room door. It fell inwards under their combined weight. Taking advantage of the momentum, Ford grappled Stan across the room and into a bank of instruments. Hard metal switches dug painfully into his back, but Stan hardly felt it. All he felt was his pulse roaring in his ears and the sheer savage joy of knowing he could finally, finally hurt his brother.

“You want it back, you're gonna have to try harder than that!” he snarled, and threw himself forward. They both toppled to the floor again, but this time Stan was the one on top. Ford didn't even try to break his fall, just held onto the journal with grim determination. Stan reared back on his knees, trying to yank the book away. “You left me behind, you jerk!” To his horror, his voice cracked. He couldn't stop the words from spilling out. “It was supposed to be us forever! You ruined my life!”

“You ruined your own life,” Ford spat. He drew a leg back and kicked out, foot catching Stan in the solar plexus, heel digging into his belly. The force of it flung Stan back against the console behind him and pinned him there.

Pain burst across his right shoulder. A scream ripped out of his throat, not loud enough to cover up the noise of his flesh sizzling. The reek of burnt meat filled the air. Belatedly, Ford pulled his foot away, scrambling back across the floor.

Stan curled forward, arms wrapped protectively around his aching stomach, trying to breathe. Distantly, he could hear Ford babbling apologies - “Stanley! Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, are you alright?” - but they were just noise. The burn on his back throbbed in time with his heartbeat.

“Stanley -”

He looked up finally, saw Ford standing above him and hunched up tighter, ignoring the way it made his shoulder scream. “You – you're a fucking lunatic !” Ford flinched as if slapped. “You could've – do you have any idea -”

“I'm sorry! I didn't mean to – are you – is it – are you really – how did you end up -?” Red-faced, he flapped a hand vaguely in Stan's direction.

“The usual way, Poindexter, what do you fucking think? I'm sure you've read about it in a book somewhere,” he added nastily. Slowly, cautiously, he uncurled. Every inch of his body hurt, all the individual bruises clamoring for attention, but the pain radiating from his shoulder overwhelmed them all. Other than that, and being winded, he seemed to be fine. Nothing was broken or sprained or bleeding, and his little freeloader was still kicking – literally. Stan could sympathize. He hadn't liked being jostled around like that much either, and he had the benefit of at least knowing what was happening.

Ford held out his hand. Stan eyed it suspiciously, then reached up, clasped Ford's wrist, and allowed himself to be hoisted to his feet. They both let go as soon as he was up, Ford taking a hesitant step back, journal clutched against his chest. Stan dusted himself theatrically off, then spent an unnecessary amount of time straightening his clothes just to stave off the inevitable conversation.

Finally, he couldn't take the way Ford stared anymore. “Take a picture,” he snapped, “it'll last longer.”

“Sorry,” Ford muttered, having the grace to sound somewhat chastised, and looked away. “I just – uh, you look, um, fairly far along. How long until – you know?”

Without thinking, Stan shrugged, and immediately let out a pained hiss. “I don't know. Not long.”

“You don't know ?”

“Yeah, it ain't like the thing comes with a damn timer!” Nettled, he went on, just because he knew it would make Ford uncomfortable, “And besides, it ain't like I keep a time table of who I fuck and when, either.”

“Oh,” Ford said faintly. “And you're – you're really keeping it?”

Stan had begun simmering down, but Ford's tone cranked the dial on his anger right back up. “Yes, obviously I am. Why? You got a problem with that?”

The look Ford gave him was a familiar one. It said, quite eloquently, that he was being obtuse and he knew very well what the problem was. “Well, I mean, do you really think that's the responsible thing to do?”

“ You're gonna tell me about being responsible? Ten years I've been living on my own! No Ma, no Pop, no brother, no fancy scholarships, just me! Made it this far, didn't I? You think I'll be a bad parent, huh?” He shoved Ford through the open doorway. “You think I'm gonna end up like our old man, huh? Fuck you!” He shoved Ford again, then turned to stomp back through the door. Before he got more than a step, Ford grabbed his shoulder.

“Stanley! Don't – please don't go. I'm sorry, alright? You're in no condition to – well, anything, I suppose.”

“Fuck you,” Stan said again, no less heated, but he stopped.

“You know what I mean. Just – just stay here, alright? At least until, you know.” He waved a hand vaguely at Stan's middle. “It's not like you could take the journal anyway. Maybe – no, I'll just have to take care of it myself.” He heaved a weary sigh. “It would have been nice if you'd told me about this before you came out.”

“Well, excuse me for thinking it was urgent! You didn't exactly give me a lot to go on, you know! Believe me, though, if I'd known what you wanted me here for, I wouldn't have come.”

Ford barely seemed to hear that. “You could have called, you know. If I'd known, I could have asked someone else, but now -”

Stan wheeled around, furious all over again. “Now what? Now you have to actually see me instead of sending me off to – to fucking Australia? Oh, what a fucking nightmare! I'm so sorry I didn't consult you before I got knocked up, it was real rude of me!”

“Stop it!” Ford reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Could you just – just stop and listen to me for five seconds? This is important.”

“Yeah, I can tell. More important than anything I've got going on, right? 'Course it is, because nothing is as important as Stanford's plans ! You care more about your dumb mysteries than your family? Then you can have 'em!” He punctuated each sentence with a shove. Ford gave ground steadily, opting to protect his journal rather than fight back, until finally he tripped over the lever.

The portal flickered to life behind him, filling the room with an eerie blue light. Ford looked over his shoulder, eyes wide, and tried to scramble forwards, back across the yellow-black safety line. He floated off the ground, hands scrabbling at nothing but air.

A spasm of terror went through Stan, mirrored perfectly on his twin's face. He rushed forward to grab at Ford and pull him back. “Whoa, whoa, hey, what's going on?” His reaching hand caught briefly at Ford's pant leg, but whatever gravity was pulling him was stronger, and he slipped away. “Hey, Stanford -”

“Stanley, help me!” Ford twisted in the air, kicking and clawing like he could swim through it, drawn inexorably back towards the glowing portal. “Stanley!”

“What do I do?” Never, not as a child facing down a group of playground bullies or his father's anger, not when he'd been thrown out on his ass on the sidewalk, not even during the hours he'd spent locked in that car trunk, had Stan ever felt so helpless. He stood rooted in place, full of dumb uncomprehending fear.

“Stanley! Do something!” What he was supposed to do, Ford either didn't know or couldn't say. He just called for his brother, increasingly frantic as more of his body disappeared into the blue light. Just before it sucked him in completely, he hurled the journal – the fucking journal – down into Stan's hands.

And then he was gone. A burst of light and force exploded outwards, knocking Stan onto his back and blinding him. When it died down, he sat up and said his brother's name, dull and quiet and shocked. The only sound that answered him was a clink as Ford's glasses fell to the ground in front of him.

He stared at them for a long moment, then surged to his feet and ran at the portal. “Stanford! Come back, I didn't mean it!” He beat frantically on the metal, heedless of the pain, but the portal stayed stubbornly inert. “I just got him back, I can't lose him again!” He threw himself at the lever, yanked with all his strength and then, as a final effort, hung all of his not inconsiderable weight off of it. “Come on!” It refused to budge an inch. He cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed his brother's name, as if that could somehow summon him back. Only the echo answered him.

He turned to look back at the control room, now as dark and dead as the portal itself. A sick, shaky kind of determination filled him. He'd fix the machine. He had his brother's notes and more than a little working knowledge of mechanics – he'd fix the damn machine, pull Stanford back out of it with his own bare hands if need be, and finish telling him off properly. He would . He had to.

Chapter Text

It only took a few minutes for him to realize he was in completely over his head. He could hot-wire anything with an engine, disable most kinds of security systems, and had kept the El Diablo alive on his own through all these rough years, but he barely even knew what the portal was . It was science fiction mystery bullshit of the highest degree, was what it was, and that had always been his brother's area of expertise. Ford had gone to college and gotten a doctorate for it; Stan hadn't even graduated high school.

Most of the control room wasn't even labeled. Evidently the function of the various dials, levers, switches, and monitors had just been that self-apparent to Ford. What few labels there were might as well have been written in Greek. Quite possibly they were.

Neither was Ford's precious journal any help. Once he'd made certain the control room was beyond even his ability to learn by doing, he sat down and flipped through it, but he practically needed a doctorate just to decipher the damn thing. The two-page spread devoted to the portal was written entirely in code that hurt Stan's head just to look at.

Still, Stanley Pines was not a man to let mere facts or reality discourage him. He spent hours down there that first night. He flipped switches, turned dials, pulled levers, pressed buttons, and pulled open every panel he could find just on the off-chance that somehow the machines would make more sense with their innards laid bare. As a last ditch effort, he even resorted to hitting the machines and swearing at them, which didn't work but did make him feel slightly better.

Exhaustion – and the pressure in his bladder - finally drove him upstairs into the cold, dark house. He gave himself an impromptu tour of the first floor, creeping through the place like he was a kid again and trying not to wake Pops up when he went for a midnight snack. When he caught himself doing it he started stomping, driving his booted heels into the creaking wooden floorboards, but the sound of his footsteps echoing through the emptiness was worse than the silence.

He explored the perimeter of the room the secret door opened up into, then went through the door into the cluttered, filthy front room he'd first come into. To one side of the front door was a staircase leading up, but he wasn't going to chance the stairs unless he had to. To the other side was a kitchen.

It was a marvel. Debris and papers covered the counters and table, but the cupboards and fridge were stocked full of more food than he'd seen in one place anytime for the last ten years. He'd meant to keep going until he found somewhere else to sleep, but the sight of food woke his hunger. He pulled two cans of soup out, ate them cold with a spoon, and washed them down with half a jug of cider from the fridge.

Still hungry even after that, he eyed the cupboard speculatively and tried to stand up. Halfway out of his seat, his body rebelled and sat heavily back down. The room tilted dizzily around him, blood rushing in his ears. For one long trembling moment he thought he might pass out right there at the table.

The only surprising thing about it was that he hadn't already, really. He'd been running on fumes for days, fueled by nothing but adrenaline, coffee, and a single overcooked truck stop omelette. His body had carried him faithfully all the way up here, through that fight with Ford - and he knew exhaustion was numbing the edges off the pain, could only imagine how much worse it would be tomorrow - and the desperate futile hours trying to turn that damn machine back on afterwards on credit. Now that he'd stopped moving, it presented the bill.

Okay. Sleep. Not sitting up at the table, though. He was going to be sore enough tomorrow as it was.

Once the room had stopped spinning, he gathered up his brother's glasses and journal, rose slowly, and tottered on rubbery legs down the hallway that passed by the stairs. The first room he poked his head into looked like some sort of study, kitted out with a desk, a couch that looked more comfortable than most beds Stan had slept on in the past few months, and a truly hideous shag carpet.

It had a bathroom as well. He took the most relieving piss he'd ever had in his life, probably, then went to go lower himself stiffly onto the couch. The journal might've made a passable pillow, but he cradled it and the glasses to his chest like the world's saddest teddy bear, and draped his jacket over himself as a makeshift blanket.

The thought of removing his shoes swam sluggishly across his mind. He looked at them, grunted, and fell over onto his side. It was all he could do to pull his legs up onto the couch and drag the sheet over himself.

His mind moved like a frozen river, the occasional incoherent thought fragment bobbing up like an icefloe and then disappearing. Every muscle in his body was wrung out and utterly limp. He couldn't have moved if someone had held a gun to his head. Never in his life - not during the long nights in prison, not even when he'd spent a day crammed into a car trunk and another day chewing through to the back seat and two more days running up across the border - had he been so tired.

Still, somehow, he couldn't sleep. He lay there on his side, journal and glasses clutched to his chest like some kind of bizarre teddy bear, stared out across the dark room long enough his eyes adjusted to the meager light and he could make out the fuzzy shapes of the furniture, and didn't sleep. When he closed his eyes he saw Ford's face twisted in horror as he was sucked into the portal - Ford's hand reaching desperately for him as he stood there helplessly - heard Ford's voice screaming his name, desperate and hoarse.

Every time one of those visions came his eyes flew back open, and then he'd spend another endless stretch of time watching the shadows in the room shift and listening to the wind rattle the window, until they grew too heavy to keep open.

His father throws him onto the sidewalk and he hits the pavement and looks up in time to watch the house begin to disappear brick by brick and beam by beam into the glowing blue sky and the last thing he sees is Ford's hand reaching out the window -

His father grabs him off the couch only the hand twisted in his shirt has six fingers and when the old man speaks it's Ford's voice ringing in his ears, "I'm giving you a chance to do the first worthwhile thing in your life and you won't even listen -"

His father throws him onto the sidewalk and when he hits the pavement red hot pain rips through him and it's worse than anything he's ever felt and he looks down and sees that he's sitting in a puddle of his own blood and it's soaking hot through his pants and sticky coating his palms and the door slams in his face and upstairs Ford turns and draws the curtains -

He's wrestling with Ford over the journal except it isn't Ford, it's his father and he's a child again and he can't let go of the book no matter how hard his father yanks or what awful things he yells and his father pushes him and he lifts off the ground and he's floating and still holding onto the book and the last thing he hears is, "All you ever do is lie and cheat and ride on your brother's coattails -"

He's wrestling with Ford over the journal and it is Ford and he pushes Ford and watches as Ford floats away and Ford is screaming his name and trying to swim through the air but he's just pulled back and up and through the glowing portal but then it closes around his outstretched hand and the severed hand falls to the ground leaking blood and he knows his brother is dead, that he killed him -

He bolted upright with a scream echoing in his ears and no idea where he was. Pale weak winter sunlight filtered in through the window above the couch, turning the room a lighter shade of grey, but it was all unfamiliar. Waking up somewhere he didn't recognize was hardly unusual for him, but the choking terror of his dreams made it impossible to calm down and take stock of his surroundings.

Slowly, the memories of last night began trickling back in. What Ford had said, what Stan had done , his frantic and useless attempts at putting it right - exhaustion wound like fog through the memories, turning them vague and wavery, but it was enough. Stan put his hands over his face, groaned, and laid carefully back down. He'd stopped drinking months ago, as soon as he'd found out about his freeloading little guest, but right then he would have gladly sold his own mother for a bottle of whiskey.

"You've really done it now, you fuckin' knucklehead," he whispered viciously to himself.

With the fear ebbing out of him, pain rushed in to fill the empty space. Every inch of him hurt, from the sore bruised spots where he'd slammed into the ground or the doorframe or the hard metal consoles to his torn and bloodied fingers to his aching muscles, a symphony of little pains drowned out by the raw shrieking burn of his shoulder.

Probably should have done something about that last night. With his luck it would be infected. The idea of lying there until he died of sepsis had a certain appeal to it, he had to admit. Granted, that was mostly because he wouldn't have to move, but still. Appeal it did. And considering what he'd done to his brother, it was only fair. Guess you got me back, huh, Sixer?

Self-pity felt good. He wallowed in it for a time, until his dry mouth and dangerously full bladder forced him off the couch. Dying of blood poisoning was one thing, but he'd be damned if he laid there soaked in his own piss while he did it. That was a rock bottom he hadn't hit quite yet, at least.

He rifled blearily through the bathroom cabinets until he found a first aid kit. A curiously well-stocked one, in fact. Ford had always been fussy about things like that, but seeing all the painkillers and disinfectants and dressings – and seeing how much of them had obviously already been used – made something twist uneasily in his gut. What had Ford been getting into up here?

He turned and peeled his shirt off, hissing as it scraped over the burn, and twisted to inspect it in the mirror over his own shoulder. The mark itself was seared deep into his skin, raised and angry-looking, while the skin around it was tight and inflamed, redness creeping up over the edge of his shoulder and down towards his ribs. Cautiously, he reached back to touch it, unsurprised to find that it was hot.

“Yeah,” he said glumly, “that's infected.”

He rinsed it with cold water, then with disinfectant, and then rubbed an antibiotic cream over it and taped a gauze pad on. By the time he was finished he was shaking from the pain, sweat rolling in big beads down the side of his face. Everything went swimmy and distant around him, and then his legs buckled. Only through sheer luck did he manage to fall back onto the toilet instead of crumpling onto the floor.

He didn't quite pass out. Greyed out, maybe, but he remained aware of the pain and the roiling nausea and the fast uneven rasp of his own breathing even when the rest of the bathroom faded away. Eventually the pain subsided enough that he could open his eyes and snag his shirt off the floor, though he didn't quite dare put it on yet.

Instead he levered himself up by the edge of the sink to swallow a handful of painkillers along with a cupped handful of water. He splashed another handful on his face, thankful for the bracing chill of it, and looked at himself in the mirror.

Despite having gotten his first full night of sleep in days, the bags under his eyes were worse than ever. His eyes themselves squinted suspicious and bloodshot back out of the mirror at him, unpleasantly like Ford's had been. Pain had carved lines into his face that hadn't been there yesterday, as if he'd aged years in that single night. His filthy hair was disheveled from being slept on in a way that might have been funny if he didn't hurt so badly.

His gaze moved slowly down the reflection of his own bare body. All those months ago when he'd first found out, he hadn't been able to stop examining himself at every possible opportunity, looking for any hint of a change, equal parts fascinated and horrified. Back then they'd been subtle. Once it had become obvious he'd stopped looking, started trying not to look, but now he couldn't help himself.

Alone with his reflection was the only way he could look at himself and just be . He cataloged the facts of his bare body – full breasts, fuller stomach, silvery old stretchmarks from his pubescent growth and the rawer redder ones from this recent rapid swelling, multitude of old and older scars, bruises blooming blotchy and blue from the fight with his brother, carpet of dark hair curling over his chest and belly and arms – expecting it to feel wrong, but it didn't. It was just him.

A quick, reflexive shiver of disgust came over him at the thought of someone else seeing him like this. That was always how it came, when he remembered the way people looked at him, when he imagined the weight of their gazes. The feeling and thought passed as quickly as they'd come, though. There was nothing there but silence between him and himself.

The man in the mirror lifted his hands and cupped them over his chest, pushing the flesh down there as flat as it would go. Stan felt the tender ache of it, then watched those hands fall away. The man in the mirror trailed one hand down his tight, swollen drum of a belly. Stan felt the warmth of the skin and tickle of hair against his palm and the jerky fluttering movement of the thing living in him, but the hand and the movement and the body still weren't his.

The man in the mirror touched the largest of his bruises, the oblong one between his breasts that spread down the top of his stomach. He pressed on it, fingertips sinking deep into his own soft skin. The sharp, insistent pain of it dragged Stan back into his own body. He stayed there looking at himself over the rim of the sink a moment longer, then turned and pulled his shirt on.

Wrapped in a pleasant painkiller fog, he had no real urge to eat, but made himself have a can of cold soup anyway. Later, he told himself, he would actually cook something. Maybe that evening there would be time.

He shoved the half-eaten soup into the refrigerator, an uneasy sort of guilt tingling in his fingers. He'd felt that way as a young man sneaking sips of Pop's liquor, wary of getting caught and well aware that it was wrong but excited at the thought of getting away with it. Not even for a second could he forget whose house this actually was, whose kitchen he was sitting in, whose soup he was eating. He was even more of an invader in the light of day, a big hot-blooded thing blundering around through a chill grey tomb.

Going back downstairs was hard. Staying was harder. Last night his head had rung with Ford's screams and all the hateful words they'd exchanged during their fight and his own sheer unreasoning panic, but now only cold silence awaited him.

Despite the vastness of the space, the roof of the cavern and all the tons of stone and soil above it pressed right down on his shoulders as he worked. At the far end of the cavern the portal loomed and leered with its single empty eye, mocking his pitiful progress. He tried to hum and sing to himself as he worked, but the shadows drank up his voice and made its echoes come back to him flat and faded, so he stopped that soon enough.

Once he was down there, staying was easy. Time was a vague idea he'd left upstairs with the sun. Downstairs there was only darkness and quiet and the changeless, ageless machine. The only clue he had that time was passing was when his pain returned, so gradually that he didn't notice until it was screaming at him. That was what drove him upstairs, where he was surprised to discover it was full dark.

Flipping light switches as he went and leaving them defiantly on, he went to change his gauze and take more pills. Then he ate the rest of the soup cold out of the can and promised himself that he'd eat something hot tomorrow.

He couldn't go back downstairs, couldn't bear to look at that damn machine for one more minute, but after last night he was in no hurry to try sleeping. He sat at the table, rattling his spoon in the empty can and listening to the wind howl through the trees outside. His thoughts rattled around in his empty head.

He hadn't had any more idea what he was doing the second day than the first. He wasn't going to know any better on the third and he didn't hold out much hope for the fourth. Something had to change. That he would fix the portal and get his brother back wasn't in question, would never be in question – could not be in question - but even he wasn't stupid enough to think he could brute-force such a complex piece of machinery into working without even a lick of knowledge of how it actually worked. If he kept on the way he'd been going he was just going to break the thing.

Never before had he been so frustratingly aware of his own ignorance. He'd built a life for himself faking it 'til he'd convinced everyone around he'd made it, but there was no faking the portal. There was no one around to convince. There was only the cold, hard fact of the inert machine and his inability to operate or even understand it.

Weariness washed over him and settled in his bones, heavy and hopeless. He dropped his head to the table, took two tight handfuls of his own hair, and groaned. He might batter himself to death against the portal and be no closer to figuring it out. Right then that seemed the most likely option.

“Shoulda been me,” he muttered dully into the tabletop. No doubt Ford could have gotten the thing working again lickety-split. But no, Ford had to be the one trapped who only knew where, while Stan – dropout, conman, and all-around professional fuck-up – racked his underfilled and underused brain for a solution.

Before he could stop it, the thought came, Would he even turn it back on?

A shiver went through him that had nothing to do with the temperature. Ford had said the portal was dangerous. Stan didn't need to recall his words to know that; the thing radiated menace. 'Terrible destruction', Ford had said, and looking at it Stan couldn't doubt that even a little bit. Surely, if Stan had been the one to go through, Ford could have gotten the portal working again in short order – but would he have? Would he have taken that risk for Stan's sake?

And then, an even worse thought, Should I?

He shook his head to banish it. Whatever the portal might do when he turned it back on – whether it would give him a good hearty dose of cancer or tear the town apart or tear the whole state apart or let some kind of unspeakable horror from beyond the stars through – didn't matter. Whatever Ford would do in his place didn't matter. He was the one stuck here with the task, and he could no more put it down than he could stop his own heart beating. All their lives together he'd protected Ford, pulled him up so he could keep propelling himself brilliantly forward, and he couldn't stop now just because it was hard .

If that meant he had to teach himself physics and rocket engineering or what the fuck ever, well, that was just what he'd do. And if it took the rest of his life, well, that was just fair, given what he'd taken from Ford.

Steely with a new determination, he rose from the table and went to root through Ford's belongings. Somewhere in the house there had to be schematics or notes or – or something. Everything he needed to know was in the books and papers scattered around. It was just a matter of finding a place to dive in, which was just a matter of organization, which was something he could do.

He spent hours that night sorting through Ford's books, trying to find anything he could even understand the title of. Most of them proved too advanced, but by the time his drooping eyelids and sticky heavy thoughts sent him into the study to sleep he'd gathered a small pile of introductory volumes.

And so went the rhythm of his days. He woke up, checked his burn and took his pills, ate a cold and lackluster breakfast, then spent the day toiling to understand the machine in the basement. At night he ascended, ate a cold and lackluster supper, and sorted through the house or read the books he'd found until his skull felt like it had been emptied out and filled with cotton.

Then he went to sleep, swimming through endless repetitious nightmares until he finally woke up and did it all over again. Day followed day until the days turned into weeks, all sliding by like sand through his fingers.

He's in a motel and it isn't any particular motel but a moldering combination of every miserable shithole he's ever had to live in and the mattress sags and the ceiling sags and the stained wallpaper hangs off the wall in ragged strips and even the door slouches in the frame like it would rather be on the floor. Red light pours in from the single dirty window and bathes every corner of the room.

Someone pounds against the door and it bows inwards and sheds paint flakes. He gropes behind the bed for the baseball bat that's always there and opens his mouth to spit out excuses but his hand finds nothing but empty space and no words come and then the door bursts open.

The man in the door is a silhouette without feature or face but he knows that it's Rico and his throat is frozen and his tongue is stone and he still can't find the bat. He risks looking away from the door to look and finds nothing but more nothing and when he looks back Rico is inches in front of him and lit up all red around the edges but still a featureless shadow otherwise save for two poisonously yellow eyes.

He tries to go over the bed and out the door. His own ponderous body betrays him and sends him crashing helplessly onto the floor and he's stuck there on his back like a turtle in the road and the snake-eyed shadowy thing he still somehow knows is Rico stands over him and its eyes grin and all he can do is raise a hand and choke out, “Wait, no, I can explain -” and it comes out in the same high scared voice he had when he was seventeen.

Rico raises one booted foot and drives it down into his stomach. Rico raises one booted foot and drives it down into his stomach. Rico raises one booted foot and stomps on him over and over again like a cockroach and stares dispassionately and doesn't make a sound while he thrashes and screams and splits open like he's been rotting in the sun for hours and all his soft stinking insides spill out in a rush of black blood and his bones twist and crack and he looks down to see the jagged ribs rising from the pulped crater of his middle -

- and woke up on the floor tangled in the sheets and screaming. When his breath ran out he took in a big shuddering gasp of air and screamed some more. He jerked upright, frantically patting at his own body, digging his nails into his skin just to convince himself it was all there and whole, unable to shake the visceral memory of the dream pain.

“Not real,” he whispered, voice shaking. “Just a dream. Not real.”

Slowly, he took inventory of the facts. He was on the floor of Stanford's study in Stanford's house in Oregon, wrapped in grey-tinged winter darkness rather than red neon, far from Rico's reach. He was unharmed, if achy and clammy with fear-sweat. His boxers and sheet and the couch beneath him were soaked through with more fluid than sweat could account for, sticking unpleasantly to his legs. At first he thought he must have pissed himself, and shame rose hot and sour up the back of his throat, along with an old and well-ingrained fear that he'd be found out.

Then a handful of facts asserted themselves. First: there was so much of it, more than he'd expect given how little he'd been drinking lately. Second: there was a smell, sure, but it was an almost sweet one, nothing like the sharp ammonia reek of piss.

He sat up, peeling the soaked sheet away from his legs. There weren't many options here. There was really only the one, in fact, but his mind shied away from that thought. It couldn't have been – it couldn't be now, not when he still had so much to do.

Stan lumbered to his feet and mechanically stripped off his soiled underwear, then bundled it up in the sheet. Goosebumps rippled up and down his bare legs, the cold made that much worse by the fact that he was wet. He wiped himself off with the dry part of the sheet, after a moment's thought. It was all going right in the wash anyway, so what could it hurt?

“One problem at a time,” he muttered to himself. Even the barely audible murmur of his voice felt out of place in the silent tomb of a house. Laundry room , he thought as he went through the house, leaving all the lights off. Wash the shit. New sheet. If he just focused on that, he wouldn't have to think about anything else.

The pain came on him in Ford's room. It began as a dull ache low in his gut, then climbed up and wrapped around his back, squeezing. He froze over the bed, sheet clenched in his suddenly clammy hands. Only once it passed did he let out the breath he was holding and straighten up. Panic clawed at the edges of his thoughts, but he pushed it firmly back.

It's nothing, he told himself with every step back to the study. By the time he got there he could almost believe it. He'd successfully drowned out the panic, anyway, along with every other thought, including what he was supposed to do next. For one blank moment he just stood in the doorway and stared into the dark room, mind stuttering like an engine that didn't want to turn over.

Fix the couch , he thought finally. Take a shower.

He dropped the sheet in a wadded up ball on the floor, then considered the couch. What it needed was a good scrubbing down with hot water and vinegar so the smell didn't set in. What it got, after some deliberation, was the wet cushion turned over and filed under To Be Taken Care Of Later. Realistically, that meant never, but he could always pretend he'd find an unoccupied moment to spend on cleaning.

Couch done with, he was sorely tempted to flop down onto it and just go back to sleep. The burst of terror that had woken him was gone and in its absence he was heavy with weariness. Shower now. Then sleep.

Unpleasant though the circumstances were, he couldn't say he didn't look forward to it. The shower in his last motel room had barely qualified as such; he'd tried once to clean himself up under the lukewarm stream of fetid water it dribbled out. It'd been like being pissed on by a swamp monster. He'd come out of that 'shower' vaguely sticky and smelling like a drainage ditch. Since he'd left for Oregon he hadn't even bothered with his usual pits-crotch-and-ass wet wipe clean-up routine, and he kept catching whiffs of his own ripe, sour smell as he worked.

The bathroom floor was brutally cold beneath his bare feet. He minced across the room to the island of relative warmth that was the bath mat, bending awkwardly to turn the taps while keeping his feet firmly planted on it.

The pipes groaned and rattled ominously for thirty seconds, then began spitting frigid water. Stan stuck a hand under the flow to test it and snatched it back, hissing a curse under his breath. He spent what felt like an eternity shivering there on the bath mat, sticking his fingers into the water until they were stiff and numb, although probably it was only a couple of minutes. When the water felt lukewarm to his other, unfrozen hand he called that good enough, stripped his shirt off, and climbed in.

The bottom of the tub was worse than the floor had been, covered as it was in half an inch of glacial run-off. His feet went rapidly numb while the rest of him unknotted slowly under the warming spray, then burned as the water sloshing in the bottom of the tub heated up to match the water coming out of the showerhead. Rolling clouds of steam rose up around him, condensing on the plastic shower curtain and dripping down. He stood there and let the water beat down on his head and back and shoulders until it chased the cold out of his bones.

Eyes closed, wrapped in the warm bubble of white noise, he began to drift. Little stretches of time blinked away – a few seconds here, a minute there – while his chin drooped slowly onto his chest. It was a bad idea, he knew it was a bad idea, but he hadn't felt so relaxed or warm for days – weeks – months, maybe – and surely just a few moments couldn't hurt. His eyes were so heavy.

He wobbled against the edge of the tub and jolted awake, heart in his throat. An awful unsteady moment passed during which he was sure he'd caught himself too late and all he could picture was his own crumpled body on the cold floor, head split open and bleeding, brains and blood sinking into the wood and staining – and then he found his equilibrium. His heart thumped hard against his breastbone.

“Get it together, Stan.” He ran a shaking hand through his wet hair. It was time to take care of business and get himself back to sleep.

He hadn't thought to bring soap or a washcloth, but there was a loofah looped over the bath faucet and a shower caddy sitting in the far end of the tub. When they'd been younger, Ford had always gotten mad at him for using his bath supplies. That hadn't ever stopped Stan, though now the memory of it gave him pause. There was a whole list of things Ford would want to yell at him for once he was back.

I should write it down , he thought as he lathered up. Pin it to the fridge . He scrubbed at himself furiously, weeks' worth of ground-in dirt and grime giving up under the onslaught. When he was done his skin was raw and pink and the water swirling down the drain distinctly brownish, but he felt cleaner than he had in longer than he cared to remember.

The bottle of shampoo turned out to be empty. Stan turned it upside down and shook it a few times, then dropped it into the tub with a grunt and picked the bar of soap back up. Sure, it wasn't good for his hair, but he'd take dry over stiff with grease any day. Besides, it wasn't like he had anyone around to impress.

Pain wrapped around his middle and squeezed. He froze, hands buried in his hair, breath caught in his throat. It rose and peaked while he stood there, eyes squeezed shut against the soap dripping down his face. With his eyes closed there was nothing to focus on but the pain, and it took an eternity to finally subside. The fear crawling up his throat stayed behind, though.

“It's nothing,” he said, voice echoing too loud in the closed-in space. He scrubbed the soap from his hair with haste, yanking his fingers through the tangles. “It's fine.” It would stop eventually, just like all the other times. He knew this drill by now. Panicking about it would just be stupid.

You know it's not nothing , came a thought in a voice that sounded unpleasantly like his brother's. Not this time.

“Not now,” he said out loud. A denial, a plea – to who? It wasn't like he believed himself. He dropped a hand down to his belly, alarmed all over again at how tense the muscles there were. “C'mon, just a little longer.” He still had so much to do. He had to fix the machine, had to get his brother back, had to have someone there .

Just go back to sleep. All the pleasure had gone out of showering, anyway. He'd go back to the study and go to sleep and in the morning everything would be fine. He was only on edge because of that damn dream, that was all.

He twisted the taps off with unsteady hands and then, like ripping off a band-aid, pulled the shower curtain and stepped out of the tub. Immediately he began shivering, entire body breaking out in goosebumps under the onslaught of cold air. Wrapping his arms around himself in a futile attempt to conserve some warmth, he cursed himself for not thinking to bring a towel in earlier. He hadn't done much thinking at all since he woke up, but that was an especially grievous oversight.

Luckily, there was a towel already in the room. Unluckily, it was hung up next to the sink, across a wide expanse of floor. He took a deep breath, steeling himself, and stepped out onto the bare floor.

The towel was stiff and discolored, splattered with old brown stains. What they were or when it had last been laundered didn't bear thinking about, so Stan didn't. He held his breath while he dried his hair and tried to use the cleanest part of it for the rest of his body. As soon as he'd achieved being merely damp rather than dripping, he pushed the foul old thing back through the loop it'd been hung up on and trotted back to the bathmat to pick up and shrug on his shirt.

A single shirt was flimsy protection against the chill, but better than being naked. Still hugging himself tightly, he hurried out of the room. At least walking wet and pantsless through the house offered a bracing distraction from his thoughts.

By the time he got back to the study, his teeth were chattering. He sat down heavily on the couch and grabbed his discarded pants off the floor, dragging them over his damp legs. Then he bundled himself into his jacket, zipping it all the way up to his chin, and then he wrapped himself in the sheet he'd taken.

He curled into as tight a ball as he could manage and closed his eyes. Gradually, the heat of his body warmed his cold clothing, and his shivering began to ease. The knotted muscles in his back relaxed. Drowsiness crept over him, warm and soft, taking him even further from the dark and chilled study.

Pain dragged him back. He hadn't quite fallen asleep, but come close enough that at first the faint aching cramp felt like a dream, but then the vise closed around him and squeezed and he knew it wasn't.

He could taste panic in the back of his mouth, coppery and bright. He made himself breath through it, in and slowly out. It's not real , he tried to tell himself. It's not happening. It's not now. It's just like what you've felt before.

Another one came, and then another. After the third, Stan gave up on the pretense that he would get back to sleep and sat up, then stood to pace off the rush of nervous energy. After the fourth, he gave up on the pretense that it didn't feel different. Before the pain had come and gone erratically, unpredictably, but these came in and went out regular as the tide, to say nothing of how much more they hurt. It was the difference between stubbing your toe and breaking it.

There was no clock in the study. He'd been glad for that, because it meant he didn't have to be any more aware than he already was of time slipping by, of how much of it he was wasting. Now it meant he didn't know how far apart the – contractions , okay, no use pussy-footing around it anymore – were. Even with the few library books he'd thought to flip through and what Deanna had told him, his pool of knowledge about the whole process was woefully small, but he did know they'd get closer together the closer he got to – his mind balked – to the end of it.

Too many years ago, when Shermie had been born, his mother had insisted on dragging him along. Ford had gotten to stay home, lucky bastard, and Pop had been out in the waiting room, while Stan had been forced to sit at his mother's side and witness the miracle of life. Or, as his mother had put it, 'the messy shit no one else is gonna tell you happens'. By the end of it he'd been about ready to swear a vow of celibacy, and he'd spent most of it staring fixedly at the wall, floor, and ceiling.

Here and now, he wished he'd paid more attention.

He wished that he could call her. The thought hit him hard and stuck, blooming into an almost irresistible impulse. He told himself it was ridiculous, that it was stupid-o-clock in the morning and she was asleep and wouldn't take kindly to being woken up, but in the end what really convinced him not to was realizing he had no idea what he'd even say.

Hey, Ma, good evening to you too, I know I haven't called in months, but, hey, listen – I'm about to have a baby in this cabin in the middle of the fucking woods and there's no one else here and I don't have any idea what I'm doing, think you could talk me through it?

He shook the thought out of his head, ignoring the little voice that said he'd have to tell her sometime, and went to go find a clock. This time he did turn the lights on as he passed, and he felt a little less alone with the darkness driven into the corners. Like he'd thought, there was a clock in Ford's room, half-buried under a pile of papers on his nightstand. He sat on the bed, wrapped himself in the single remaining blanket, and pulled the clock onto his lap.

The next contraction was worse than the previous couple had been. Back when Shermie's arrival had been imminent, he'd been astonished at the way his mother puttered around cooking and tidying and eventually just flat-out pacing through her contractions – and more than a little resentful of the way Pop just sat there, not even offering to help – but he was beginning to think she'd been onto something.

Five minutes later by the clock, the next one came. The clock didn't count seconds, but by using the esteemed one-mississippi-two-mississippi method of his childhood hide-n-seek games he estimated it lasted a little over forty seconds. Just to be sure, he sat through another one. Five minutes later, smooth as clockwork, and it lasted forty-three mississippis. That was confirmation enough, and he pushed himself up to his feet to resume pacing in the hopes that it would help the pain.

When had Ma gone to the hospital? She'd spent the whole morning and afternoon huffing and swearing her way around the house, he remembered that much, but he hadn't paid enough attention to know –

- a splinter of memory surfaced, sitting in his room pretending not to be worried while Ford pretended just as badly to read a book, hearing her call, “Fil, go start the car, my water just broke -”

- and what else could that have been earlier? He hadn't exactly stopped to ask his Ma how it felt or smelled, despite all of her attempts to keep him updated throughout the whole process, but he was sure enough.

That was when Ma had gone to the hospital. It'd been a couple of hours since he'd woken abruptly up, wet and aching – from another contraction, more likely than not – which meant he had to be close to – close. How much longer was it going to be? Shermie had taken some hours, longer than movies and TV had led him to believe it would be but surely not as long as it felt in memory. He'd been her third baby, too, and he remembered her saying it would be a breeze after him and his brother.

What if it was twins? The thought stopped him in his tracks and blew on the banked coals of his panic until they began to glow nice and hot. Twins ran in families, didn't they? Ma had always said so, she'd had twin sisters herself and her mother had been a twin and her mother's grandmother had been– she'd sat him and Ford down once and showed them the whole family tree – fuck, he couldn't have twins . He couldn't have one, he couldn't do this, people died in childbirth all the time even in hospitals and he didn't have a hospital, he didn't have a doctor or a midwife or even an old working girl who'd been around the block a time or twelve, he didn't have anyone -

Maybe, the thought came, it would be for the best. Hell, how many times should he have died by now? It was only pure dumb luck that he'd managed to get this far. It was only pure dumb luck that he'd been born at all, and what had he ever done with his life but ruin everything he touched?

He'd been a mistake even from the start. Ford had gotten everything that made a person worth the air they breathed and Stan had been cobbled together from the leftovers, the unexpected and unwanted extra, just a byproduct of his brother's existence. All he'd ever done was drag Ford down. That Ford was gone and he was left behind couldn't be anything but some sick cosmic joke. Maybe the universe had finally realized its mistake.

Stan had never really understood suicide before.

The motivation for it, the urge to just not be alive anymore, that he could get. There were more times in his life than he cared to count that he'd been so hungry, so cold, so lonely that the thought of spending one more single day that way was unbearable. He'd wanted it all to stop before. He'd thought about it before, plenty of times. He'd faced down plenty of opportunities to die and every time there had been that little voice in his head suggesting he just let it happen, not fight, not struggle, just let it be over with.

What he couldn't understand was how that feeling could overpower the body's unthinking, animal drive to keep living. Even at his very lowest he'd never been able to give in completely. At some point some ancient and primitive part of him would take over and do absolutely anything it had to in order to stay alive, with or without his approval. That was the part that had chewed him out of a car trunk, the part that opened his mouth and made it say things like Just a few more days or Sure, buddy, whatever you want or I didn't see anything even when he knew lying was pointless, the part that made him choke down food out of the trash because he hadn't eaten in two weeks.

Sometimes – most of the time – he hated that part of himself. It was his basest, most self-serving part. It had no sense of dignity or civility or honor. It had driven him to do things that kept him up at night to remember, but it had also kept him alive. He had never, before, been able to imagine the kind of despair that could overpower that part.

Now he knew, and it wasn't despair at all. It was just exhaustion. It was the exhaustion that came with knowing, really knowing, that he would never be able to try hard enough. That an entire lifetime of trying hadn't been enough and ten more wouldn't be either. It was a numb weariness that settled into him, so vast there wasn't room for anything else, not even the pain.

He was tired down through his bones. Over ten years of trying and he'd only gone from bad to worse. Over ten years – hadn't he tried for long enough? Certainly it was more than anyone had ever expected of him.

That thought, at last, set a spark off in him. It was his father's face on the night he'd been thrown out, and it was Ford's voice saying the first worthwhile thing in your life , and it was even goddamn Crampelter saying just a dumber, sweatier version of him . It was pure selfish, indignant fury. It was the thought that he couldn't die here and now, because if he did then he wouldn't be able to rescue his brother – who he would not allow to be dead – and rub in his face how wrong he'd been.

He thumped his head hard against the wall once, twice, three times just for good measure. He wanted to be ashamed of himself for falling so deeply and quickly into self-pity – could feel it bubbling up from his gut – but he knew that if he gave into that he'd end up right back down the rabbit hole. Right now he needed to figure out what he needed to do while he could still do it.

The thought of later , when he wouldn't be able to, almost sent him back into a panic. He clenched his teeth and made himself take deep, slow breaths. Panic, like self-pity, could wait. It had to wait. He needed to think .

He started walking again. What would he need? Towels, probably, it was definitely going to get messy – he should probably eat something, but the thought sent a nauseous twinge through him – something for the pain would be good – he wondered, briefly, if painkillers could hurt the kid, then decided that ship had already sailed -

While he'd been thinking, his feet had carried him through the house and to the front door. He frowned at it, wondering why and hoping he didn't have to go outside for anything. The chill bleeding in around the doorframe pricked at him even through his clothes.

He'd just decided he didn't when he remembered the bag. Over the past few months he'd picked up whatever odds and ends it occurred to him might come in handy for a kid – packs of diapers here, cheap but serviceable clothes there, a variety of easily pocketable toys, even a couple of books with the blocky print and cardboard pages – and stuffed them all into the very same battered duffel his father had once thrown into his lap. Since he'd arrived he'd been too focused on the portal to even remember the car sitting out there with all his worldly belongings in it, but he'd want that bag, for the diapers if nothing else.

Going outside was exactly as bad as he thought it would be. He comforted himself with the thought that it was, at least, better than trying to do it afterwards.

The frigid air hurt to breathe. He floundered through snow piled up as high as his shins, cursing himself for having parked so far from the house, for not having thought to keep a path clear to his car. Halfway across the yard a contraction hit and his legs went weak. Without a wall to lean against, he bent double and braced his palms on his thighs, trying to distract himself by counting through it. Forty-eight mississippis this time.

By the time he reached the car his pants were heavily crusted with snow and his socks thoroughly wet. The wind had piled snow up against the side of the car high enough that he couldn't even see it. Balling his bare hand up in his sleeve, he brushed away inches of snow until he finally uncovered a door handle, which proved to be stuck shut. He threw all of his weight into yanking on it, making the car rock and groan, and nearly went ass over teakettle when the door finally popped open. Expelling clouds of foggy breath with every muttered swear, he crawled into the icy interior of the car and pawed through the junk until he unearthed the bag.

He grabbed it, started to back his way out of the car, then stopped and grabbed the comforter from the motel and wrapped it around his shoulders, just in case.

When he finally got back inside his ears, nose, and fingers had all gone numb and his feet were well on their way. He stomped into the kitchen, shedding snow, dropped the duffel on the table, and sat down to pull his boots and wet socks off. After a moment's thought his pants followed. Not like he'd be needing them.

He allowed himself a few minutes to defrost. Then, once the worst of the pins and needles had passed, he dragged himself up by the edge of the table. An armful of towels from the laundry room went into the duffel bag, ambiguously clean but not stained or stinking and therefore good enough. While he was in there he changed the laundry over, then leaned against the dryer and wondered where he should settle in.

The bedroom occurred to him as an obvious choice, with its comfortable bed and wood furnace in the corner. Stan may have been used to the perpetual chill of the house, but he couldn't expect a baby to deal with it. Was there even firewood? He hadn't seen any, but he hadn't exactly looked. Well, it wasn't like he'd be able to go chop any now if there wasn't, so he put that thought out of his mind.

He'd definitely have to replace Ford's mattress if he gave birth on it. Of more immediate concern was the fact that he'd have to sleep in the mess until he could clean it up, and he doubted he'd be up to doing laundry right after.

Didn't people usually do home births in a kiddie pool or something? Something about doing it in water was supposed to make the whole thing easier, or something along those lines. He was sure he'd seen that in a movie at some point. So far he hadn't turned anything like that up in Ford's house, but the tub was nice and deep and would, as a bonus, be much easier to clean up than anywhere else. Bathroom it was.

The bathmat was still damp from when he'd dripped on it after his shower earlier. It was hard to believe that had only been some hours ago. He dropped the duffel next to the tub and, preparations completed, sat down on the toilet to wait.

Giving birth was turning out to involve a lot more waiting than he'd expected. On TV babies came sliding right on out after a few minutes of grunting and swearing, fast enough it seemed like a damn miracle anyone ever managed to be born in a hospital. Thanks to Ma he knew that was bull, and he'd expected the pain and was braced for all sorts of mess, but he hadn't expected to be bored .

He passed a restless span of time alternately sitting and pacing around the room and trying not to think about what was about to happen - difficult as that was when every few minutes he got another painful reminder - before he gave up and left to get a book. In the back of his mind he could just hear Ford teasing him about it. During their shared youth he'd only read under the most extreme duress, unless it was a comic book or girly mag. The activity wasn't any easier or more enjoyable now that he was struggling through physics textbooks, either, but if he was going to have downtime he might as well put it to good use.

The contractions were definitely getting worse. He hugged the wall on his way into the kitchen, sagging against it to keep upright whenever one came on and swearing breathlessly through it. Probably he ought to be doing breathing exercises – a dim recollection floated up from his subconscious of a nurse coaching his mother to focus on her breathing, which she'd responded to in a truly Jerseyan fashion – but swearing was more therapeutic.

Back in the bathroom, he decided it was time for painkillers. The first-aid kit was sadly depleted from his slapdash attempts to treat his burn, but there were still a handful of pills rattling around in what he'd taken to thinking of as the good-shit bottle. He washed two of them down with a cupped handful of tapwater and sat down with his book.

With a pang, he recalled how Ford had used to read on the toilet – or more accurately, how Ford had used to always get in trouble for reading on the toilet, because he'd sit in there for forty-five minutes off in la-la land until someone pounded on the door and yelled at him because they were about to piss themselves. For his part, Stan had loudly and frequently proclaimed that he didn't understand how you could get that bored taking a shit, and helpfully suggested Ford try getting more fiber in his diet.

He shook his head, as if he could shake out thoughts of his brother. Thinking about Ford just made him more keenly aware of how alone he was, and that thought was just a thin and fraying net stretched over a yawning pit of panic.

He read his book. The small, dense text swam in front of his eyes, only half of the words made sense, and he had to reread every sentence at least three times to figure out what the hell it was saying. A familiar tension settled between his eyebrows within a page, one that he knew from past experience would wrap itself around his temples and bloom into a splitting headache soon enough. Still, puzzling his way through the basics of quantum physics did drive every thought other than how needlessly complicated quantum physics was out of his mind.

Almost, anyway. Even with the pills taking the edge off the pain, he couldn't ignore the signals his body was sending. As they progressed, he stopped being able to even keep reading through the contractions. He counted instead, eyes squeezed shut and teeth gritted and fingers clenching the book hard enough to wrinkle the pages. Sixty seconds – seventy – seventy-five and it felt like he had barely caught his breath from the last one before the next one was building and god, it had to be over soon, didn't it?

The bathroom echoed with the sound of his ragged breathing and low, pained noises. He dropped the book onto the floor, unable to focus on it any longer, and curled around his swollen belly, now rock-hard under the soft layer of skin and fat. The weight inside of him shifted low into the cradle of his pelvis, creating a whole new kind of internal pressure. Time and thought both stopped during contractions. In the increasingly short span between them he repeated to himself that it had to be soon, had to be soon, had to be soon -

When the urge to push came over him, he knew it was now . He stumbled over to the tub and fell to his knees on the bathmat, hands trembling as he wrenched the taps on. “Come on,” he groaned breathlessly, “warm up, faster, fuck -” He was shaking apart, pulled under an endless tide of pain and unbearable pressure, barely able to think further than the next minute, barely able to keep from bearing down the way his body wanted to. It took a torturous eternity to fill the bathtub.

Lowering himself into the warm water was heavenly. Every muscle in his body had drawn itself up twisted and tight and all of that tension bled out of him, along with a chill he hadn't even realized was there until it wasn't anymore. His trembling lessened. For one single and all too brief moment, nothing hurt.

Then the next contraction came, and along with it the almost irresistible urge to push. He didn't bother trying to resist, just bore down, wringing a deep grunt from himself with the exertion. It felt good to. The pain retreated when he did, not gone but less. Bearable. He had spent a lifetime hating, ignoring, and abusing his body, but right then he trusted it more completely than he'd ever trusted anyone. It knew what it was doing. All he had to do was listen and follow along and he would get through this.

He shifted in the tub, water sloshing around him and over the sides, trying to find the best position. On his back was the worst, as tired as he was of holding himself upright. It made him feel like a beached whale, unwieldy and helpless and horribly exposed, and made the contractions hurt even worse than sitting did. Kneeling was better. Kneeling with his upper half leaning out over the edge was best, and let him bear down with his whole core without worrying about falling over.

Gradually, the contractions slowed down – or maybe time itself did, stretching out under the weight of his singular focus – though they became no less intense. He couldn't even swear, could only pant and moan through each one, fingers curled painfully tight around the lip of the tub while the weight moved through him, lower and lower with each spasm.

One more , he told himself with each push. One more. One more. One more. It felt like being split in half, like someone had reached up and was pulling his pelvis apart from the inside. He was too full to think, too full to breathe, unable to even wonder if it was supposed to hurt this much around the pain and awful pressure. The rest of the world fell away. The rest of his body fell away, until nothing of him existed but the stretch between his thighs and solar plexus, the flex and release of his screaming abdominal muscles, the spasming of even deeper parts than that.

He wanted it out of him. He wanted Ford, he wanted Ma , he wanted to be himself a day from now when this was over with – it was too much, too big , forcing him open too wide and too fast -

He felt himself tear when it crowned, a hot, sharp pain in contrast to the bruising pressure of the contractions. Too exhausted to scream, all he could manage was a ragged, shaking moan.

I can't , he thought, or maybe said, and bore down again. I can't. And again. I can't. And again.

Then the head was out and the relief was so huge and so immediate that he started to cry. He barely felt the rest of the body come slithering out. It took hardly any effort at all.

He slumped back against the other edge of the tub, and scooped the baby up to cradle against his chest. It was such a tiny thing, all wrinkled and slick and squirming. What was he supposed to do next? Clean it off, probably, or at least wrap it up against the cold – he was starting to shiver himself, submerged as he was in tepid water.

He cupped the newborn against his chest with one hand and, groaning, shifted around until he could flop an arm over the side of the tub and grab a towel. It started squalling while he rubbed it down, and he was too tired to do anything but murmur vague soothing noises.

Fear shot through him when he felt another contraction. Was it twins? Was he going to have to go through the whole miserable business all over again, this time with a newborn screaming in his ear the entire time?

Thankfully, all that came out of him was a bloody mass of tissue. Placenta , his mind sluggishly suggested. Not twins.

He sat there in the water for a very long time before he could make himself get up. Levering himself up to his feet and stepping over the edge of the tub was the most difficult thing he'd ever done in his life. The muscles of his legs were all slack and baggy, barely able to hold him up. He tried not to think about what would happen if he fell.

The next half hour passed in a haze of pain and exhaustion. He took the rest of the good pills, then used the surgical thread and tiny scissors in the first-aid kit to tie off and cut the umbilical cord. The placenta he left in the tub to be dealt with later. Clumsily, he swaddled the baby into a diaper – it was a girl, apparently, though he had to wonder if she might turn out like him. Maybe it ran in families. He'd make sure she knew it was an option.

Last, he stripped his soaked shirt off and rubbed himself down with a towel. He wrapped himself in a second one, bundled the baby back into hers, and heroically staggered into Ford's bedroom. She had stopped screaming and instead stared glassily out of her fluffy cocoon. He set her down on the bed long enough to crawl under the blanket and collapse into the embrace of the mattress, then picked her back up and set her on his chest.

She gurgled faintly and groped at him – he was woozily impressed with the strength in those tiny fingers – wet mouth working against his skin.

“Huh,” he murmured. “Hungry?” Piggybacking off his metabolism for the past nine months couldn't have been satisfying.

At first he felt pitifully lost. Probably this was another thing his Ma had tried to show him that he'd tried just as hard not to pay any attention to – but, hell, how hard could it be? You had a tit, you had a kid, nature did the rest, right?

It took a little shifting to get her into a good position, head cradled in his hand, which she protested with a variety of fussy little noises. Once he'd gotten her settled, though, she got the idea, and latched her toothless little mouth right onto his nipple. He'd worried that it would be awkward. Maybe it was just exhaustion, but all he felt as she suckled was profoundly relaxed, like he might melt into the bed.

Something nagged at him, though. He looked her sleepily over, trying to figure out what it was. She seemed perfectly fine, at least by the standards of newborns. A little red and squashed, but otherwise normal. One downy head with all the proper features, two arms, two legs, two feet, two tight-clenched little fists, each with five little fingers -

Shock hit him like a bucket of icewater to the face. He reached down and delicately took hold of one of her hands, spreading the fingers out to count them. Six. She had six fingers crowded onto each hand, all curling and moving together.

His breath hitched. The room swam into a blur of colors as tears slid hot and wet down his face. He lay back and held her and let them come, too tired to even try to hold them back. Eventually, finally, his eyes drooped shut and he fell into a deep and thankfully dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

Not nearly enough hours later, he woke up to the baby crying.

Crying was a wholly inadequate word for the earsplitting wail coming out of her. It drilled right into his head and flipped some deep-buried lever marked DO SOMETHING. His body jolted upright like a puppet whose strings had just been yanked on while his brain struggled blearily into consciousness. For a moment he had no idea where he was or where the sound was coming from, just that he had to DO SOMETHING about it.

Then the squirming, shrieking weight in his lap kicked him and he realized she was what he needed to do something about. “What?” he mumbled to her, tongue thick in his mouth. He lifted her up to his face, trying to blink the blurriness of sleep out of his eyes. “S'wrong?”

She just kept screaming. He tucked her against his chest and tried to think around the noise rattling against the inside of his skull. Something was wrong and he would have to figure it out because she couldn't tell him. Just like fixing his car when it started making a funny noise. Baby diagnostic – what problems did a newborn have?

Tired – she sure seemed active, squalling and squirming, and none of his rocking or shushing was having much of an effect. Hungry – maybe, he had no idea how long he'd actually been asleep for, but she wasn't grabbing at him the way she had earlier. Dirty – ah.

He hooked a finger between the waist of the diaper and her skin, pulled it open, and yeah, that was it. Which meant – he groped for the connection he'd just made, tried to think – which meant he'd have to get up, because the diapers and wipes were in the bag and the bag was still in the bathroom. Which was going to hurt like a bitch, if the way he hurt just sitting there was any indication.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “You can do this. Just down the hall. No big deal.”

He shifted slowly, kid cradled in one arm while he leaned his weight on the other, and eased his legs over the edge of the bed. The pain curled like a sleeping beast inside of him, jostled closer to waking with every small movement. Feet on the floor, he paused and took a deep, steadying breath. Then another one. Then another, just for good measure, and okay, yes, he was stalling and that wasn't going to make it any easier -

He stood up. His legs trembled under him but, after a moment of dangerous swaying, held. Emboldened by this success, he took a step.

The pain roared to life. He sucked in a sharp, startled gasp and froze, digging the nails of his free hand into his palm until it died down to a more tolerable ache. Making himself take the next step was one of the hardest things he'd ever done in his life. The next one was, if possible, even worse. He had to pause between every step, breath whistling out high and pained between his clenched teeth, and by the time he made it to the bathroom he was shaking all over.

The kid kept up her squalling the entire time. As exhausting as it was to listen to, he had to admire her lung capacity. No one complained like a Pines.

He shushed her absently, more for the sake of doing something than because he had any hope it would work. Once again his brain had stalled. He stood there in the doorway and stared into the bathroom and tried to prod himself into figuring out what to do next.

For a brief few months during their childhood, Ford had been interested in three-dimensional logic puzzles, the kind that were just a bunch of objects all jammed into and wrapped around each other in a way that looked impossible to pull apart. Most of his brother's nerd toys had been beyond Stan's interest – except for the ones that could make things melt or blow up – but he'd liked those. He'd been better at them than Ford, in fact, which may have been a contributing factor in how quickly Ford's interest in them waned. Ford would sit and stare at one forever, trying to work out how it came apart before he ever touched it, while Stan would just take it in his hands and fiddle with it and have it apart in a few minutes, though he couldn't ever describe what he'd done when Ford asked.

Right then, he felt like he was trying to solve one of those one-handed, in the dark, with a concussion. All the components were there – kid: in his arms; bag: on the floor next to the tub; diapers and wipes: in the bag – but the steps to combine them in order to get what he needed done escaped him.

“I'm startin' to get why people shake their kids,” he muttered darkly to the screaming bundle in his arms.

Eventually he overcame his brainless paralysis enough to shuffle across the floor to the bag. Which also brought him close enough to look into the tub and realize he hadn't drained it. The water was a nauseating soup of old blood and god only knew what else. His first thought was that that was going to leave a hell of a ring. His second was to be fervently glad it was winter in Oregon and he hadn't figured out how to turn the heat on. His third was that this was definitely, definitely a problem for future Stan to deal with. Getting the damn bag off the floor was problem enough for present Stan.

He spared a moment to curse himself for not thinking to put the stupid thing on the toilet or something, where he could reach it without bending down. Then he toed experimentally at it to see how much that motion hurt.

The answer was: some, but probably not as much as bending to get it would. He pushed the bag across the floor like the world's slowest and most pathetic game of soccer, stopping in front of the sink.

Another foggy moment passed. Hands, right, okay, he would need those. Had to get the bag, open the bag – he'd have to put the kid down. Luckily, the old towel he'd used to dry himself off after his shower – a hundred years ago, it felt like he'd taken that – was still hung up by the sink. He dragged it down, spread it in the sink, and put the kid down on it. She protested the separation, kicking with her chubby little legs and somehow managing to wail even louder.

“Hush now,” he told her, “I gotta put you down some time.”

He took a breath, gritted his teeth, and bent to grab the bag, one hand tight on the edge of the sink for support. The pain raced up into his belly and back, abused muscles screaming at the effort, but then he stood and it slowly died back down. He put the bag on the toilet tank, within easy reach, and dug shakily through it for what he needed.

The kid didn't let up with her complaining while he cleaned her. He started to wonder if she was just screaming for the sake of screaming. Not that he could blame her, really. He'd want to scream too if he'd been ejected from his warm, cozy home into this huge, cold, empty world – a fit of giggling overtook him when he realized just how apt a comparison that was.

“I'm losin' it,” he informed the baby as he gathered her back up against his chest. Being held against his skin improved her mood somewhat. He hooked the strap of the bag over his other shoulder and shuffled the both of them back into the room. The hallway seemed to have grown several feet while he was in the bathroom. He was woozy by the time he got back into the room, everything swimming dizzily around him.

He dropped the bag onto the bed and was about to drop his body after it when he noticed the spot. Splotch, maybe, or possibly puddle . He'd bled onto the bed – was probably, if the wet and tacky feeling between his thighs was any indication, still bleeding – and fuck, he didn't want to deal with that, but he wasn't tired enough to lay down in it.

Towel. In the bag. He fumbled one out and spread it over the offending stain, then another just for good measure. Then he crawled gratefully into bed, dragging the blanket awkwardly over himself with his one free hand.

Another thought rolled sluggishly through his mind. Groaning, he leaned forward enough to snag the strap of the bag and drag it close. He rifled through it for the warmest-looking clothes he'd managed to acquire, which turned out to be a fuzzy red number with a hood that had pointy ears on it – or one ear and a ragged stump bleeding stuffing where the other had been – and a pair of purple pants decorated with colorful blobs which might, possibly, have been dinosaurs. Neither item entirely fit and the combination of the two was decidedly jarring, but, hell, it wasn't like the kid could care.

“There,” he said, “now you probably won't freeze to death. You're welcome.”

She fussed even more at this new indignity. He settled back, tugged the blanket around to drape it over both of them without covering her face, and experimentally offered her a nipple. That quieted her right up. Drowsy fondness washed over him. He drifted pleasantly somewhere between fully asleep and fully awake, rousing every so often to check on her, until he noticed she'd fallen asleep herself. Chuckling, he shifted her to lay over his chest, head up on his shoulder, and let himself slip into sleep.

The next stretch of time he spent learning.

He learned that a newborn didn't do much more than sleep, eat, and shit, but that he himself would be lucky to get two solid hours of sleep before she needed to be fed or changed again. He learned that when your entire life was nothing but desperately snatching what little sleep you could get while the tiny, helpless little human you'd brought into the world didn't need you, time was meaningless. While working on the portal, he'd lost weeks; on this newer and more primal clock, night and day ceased to exist entirely.

He slept, he woke, he changed and fed her, he dragged himself out of bed to piss – almost as often as he had when he'd still been pregnant, it felt like, with the added fun that it burned like hell when it trickled down over the place where she'd torn him open coming out, and even dabbing at himself as gingerly as he could felt like he was wiping with fiberglass – and eat. Any pretense of cooking ended as soon as she was born.

He learned how to operate on automatic without ever waking all the way up. He learned that if he was tired enough anything would make him start crying, and that him crying would make her start crying, and then they'd both sit there sobbing like a couple of jackasses until one of them got themselves under control. More often than he liked to admit, it was the baby. He learned that he hadn't ever been tired before in his life, not really.

She cried all the time. Mostly it all sounded the same, but he started to figure out how she acted when she was bored or tired or just feeling fussy. He learned how to tell when she was hungry before she started screaming and that she'd usually fall asleep after he fed her. He also learned that even if he could tell the difference, his body couldn't, and that at the first sign of a crying fit his tits would start to leak like spigots. That sure as hell had never made it into any TV show or movie he'd ever seen.

Neither had the fact that after a couple weeks of frequent and enthusiastic suckling, his nipples would look and feel like the world's best PSA about the dangers of shirtless motorbiking.

Hygiene – his, at least – mattered about as much as time did. Between the leaking and the spit-up, any shirt he wore would be more stain than shirt in short order. He didn't switch them out until it was absolutely necessary.

(In a more lucid moment, he added Ruined his entire wardrobe with baby fluids to the list of things Ford would want to yell at him about when he came back. Then he thought about the portal downstairs, and how long it had been since he'd touched it or even thought of it. Then the baby started crying and drove every other thought out of his head.)

She fussed whenever he put her down. He felt like fussing whenever he put her down himself, so he jury-rigged a harness out of another couple of Ford's shirts and figured out how to carry her under his jacket, tucked up against his chest, so he could actually use his arms. Against all logic she liked it when he sang to her, too, so he did it all the time, snatches of songs he liked and half-remembered childhood lullabies and, most often, pointless little ditties about whatever he happened to be doing at the time. Sometimes that was the only thing that would quiet her down when she got in a mood.

He learned that loving someone could hurt, not like the pain of loss or being snubbed but like a lit coal where his heart had once been, burning him out hollow until there wasn't anything else left, and that when it hurt like that it felt better than just about anything else.

Eventually, inevitably, he had to leave.

One day he opened the pantry only to find it empty, and then the fridge only to find it empty as well, and then went rifling with increasing desperation through all the cabinets. All his searching turned up was a loaf of bread so moldy not even he would eat it and a bag of rotten potatoes shoved into the very back of a cabinet. The house had been stocked like a paranoid survivalist's wet dream, so some part of Stan had just assumed the food would never run out and happily pushed the issue of what to do when that happened off for later.

Leaving the kid crossed his mind, albeit briefly. The last thing he wanted was for anyone in town to wonder what he was doing with a baby out in his spooky cabin in the woods, but the very last thing he wanted was for her to hurt herself. She couldn't exactly move around much, but she could wriggle and roll around and, with great effort, put things in her mouth. And if she was anything like her dad, she'd have an unparalleled talent for getting herself into trouble.

So he bundled her up into a couple of layers of good warm clothes, tucked her into his improvised harness, zipped his jacket up to her chin, and took them both into town. In deference to the fact that he didn't have a car-seat, he drove at a speed that would've put his grandmother to sleep, heart jumping up into his throat every time the car even thought about sliding.

The snow, at least, was mostly gone. An inch or so remained on the dim and infrequently traveled road between the town and Ford's house, but once he got onto an actual paved street it was smooth sailing. He chattered to her as they drove, talking up the scenery and the road and asking how she liked her first drive. Her side of the conversation was mostly cooing and gurgling, but he could work with that.

He'd hoped there wouldn't be anyone else at the convenience store. He'd hoped that it would be late, actually, but once he'd turned the car on the clock told him it was one in the afternoon. There were people out walking when he got into town proper. They looked at him as he drove past, and not for the first time he wished he'd bought a less distinctive car. At sixteen, though, he'd wanted flashy. At sixteen he couldn't have imagined not wanting people to notice him. (At sixteen he'd felt like he was disappearing slowly out of his own life.)

There were three other cars in the convenience store parking lot. Hardly a crowd, but once he'd pulled in and parked he found himself reluctant to leave the car. It was the last and least of his barriers against the wide open outside pressing in.

“Your dad's a joke, you know that?” he told the kid, settling a hand on her head. The warm curve of her skull under his palm grounded him somewhat. “Scared of goin' to the store. Fuckin' shameful. Thought Ford was supposed to be the crazy one.”

Stan took a deep breath and turned the car off. He took another deep breath, pocketed the keys, and then opened the door and stepped out in one motion before he could reconsider. His foot caught on the edge of a pothole and he went stumbling forward, clutching at the kid with one arm to keep from jostling her too much and windmilling the other one. Thankfully, he managed to regain his balance.

The sky stretched out above him, heavy and grey, too big and too empty. He hunched his shoulders against it and hurried inside.

Being in the store, though, wasn't any better. The handful of people in there felt like a crowd, and the shelves hemmed him in as much as they offered cover. The hum of the freezers and florescent overhead lights combined at a frequency that drilled its way into his head and made his teeth itch. He felt like a cockroach caught in the middle of a kitchen when the light came on. Every time the cash register dinged, he jumped.

The kid picked up on it and started squirming in her makeshift harness, spilling out all kinds of fussy little sounds he knew by now preceded a good hard squalling fit.

“Hush,” he murmured under his breath to her. “Everything's fine. Don't fuss, you ain't allowed to flip your shit while I'm flippin' mine. We got a one shit-flip at a time system in this house, alright? Wait 'til we get home and you can flip it to the moon and back.” He stroked her downy head, then rubbed his fingers down over her cheek.

She turned her head and gummed at his knuckles. He decided to take that for an agreement.

It all went fine until he got up to the register. The matronly woman behind the counter – whose nametag simply read Ma - made googly eyes at the kid and reached out for a cheek pinch, which Stan stepped out of range of without even thinking about it.

“What a cute little thing!” the woman cooed, undeterred. “What's your name, sweetie?”

Oh, fuck. Stan stared at the woman, mind empty except for the static roar of growing panic. He hadn't named her, how could he not have named her yet, what kind of parent didn't give their kid a goddamn name? It wasn't like he hadn't thought of it from time to time, but nothing had felt right and it hadn't seemed urgent. In the house it was just the two of them and she was just The Kid and he was barely anyone at all and shit, he'd been quiet for too long and the woman was frowning at him and what was he going to say, he had to say something -

“Toiba,” he blurted. “Her name's Toiba.” He'd had an elderly aunt named Toiba, who he remembered chiefly from the funeral service. Mostly what he remembered was that he and Ford had snuck off and gone wandering around the graveyard, looking for ghosts.

“Oh, that's pretty! Very unique.” She gave him an expectant tell-me-more look.

Thinking about Ford made his chest ache. There were people up front here and they were looking at him and he could feel them looking at him, like a hundred little needles prickling on his skin, and all he wanted to do was leave. “It's a family name,” he said flatly. “Here, this is all I have.” He pushed the loaf of bread he'd picked up forward, hoping she'd get the hint.

From the faintly sulky twist of her lips, she did. “Just the bread then, stranger? That'll be ninety-nine cents.”

A few seconds of industrious digging in his pockets turned up a handful of lint, a paper clip, a sugar packet, and one lone peso. Coming up short was hardly a new experience for him, but standing at the checkout with an infant, an empty kitchen at home, and nothing but a peso to his name felt like a new low. Humiliation washed over him, followed as it always was by hot helpless fury. He turned to go, jaw clenched and fists shoved into his pockets.

“Hey,” came a nasal voice from the left, “that's no stranger. That must be the mysterious science guy that lives in the woods!” The speaker, a plump young woman with red hair teased into an artful pile atop her head, pointed at him, her voice echoing through the small store. At her words, everyone within earshot – which amounted to maybe five people but felt like half the damn town – stopped and turned to look at Stan.

He backed up as far as he could, hands raised, feeling very much like a fox at bay in a ring of hounds. “No, no, you got the wrong guy.” He hunched in on himself, pulling his hood tighter around his face to shield himself. There were so many of them, all crowding in close to stare at him, and he was suddenly and intensely aware of every stain on his jacket, the patch he'd hastily sewn over the hole, just how long it'd been since he'd taken a shower, what a ragged and dirty figure he cut – for a moment all he could think of was pushing past them and bolting, straight out the door and down the street back to his calm quiet house in the woods, food be damned -

“I've heard strange stories about that old shack,” one of the men in the crowd piped up.

“Yeah,” another one added, clearly relishing the moment, “mysterious lights and spooky experiments...”

An old man – wearing a nametag that said Pa , so, probably the other owner – shuffled up next to the woman at the register and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “Gosh, I'd pay anything to see what kinda shenanigans you get up to in there!”

“Oh, me too!” the red-haired woman said, coming up between Stan and the counter. “D'you ever give tours?” She beamed an expectant grin at him.

“No,” he started, “really, I -” Then he stopped and looked down at the handful of nothing he had to buy groceries with. It wasn't even really a choice. He needed food, the kid was going to need more diapers soon, and, hell, it wouldn't be nearly the worst thing he'd ever done for money. At least he'd be able to keep his clothes on. He heaved out a sigh, then turned around, threw his shoulders back, and pasted on his best salesman's grin. “Yes, I do give tours! Ten – no, no – fifteen bucks a person!”

Silence. The assembled crowd stared at him, and for a moment he worried he'd started too high – was already preparing justifications, excuses, apologies in his head – and then everyone burst out cheering and started waving fistfuls of bills at him.

He stared, jaw slack. He hadn't seen that much money in one place in a long damn time. Never before had people given over their hard-earned cash so willingly, either, not without some manner of felony taking place. The noise started the baby fussing, and he shushed her almost absently, reaching up one hand to stroke her cheek and not taking his eyes off the crowd. It felt so much like a dream, he was half afraid they'd all just disappear if he looked away.

“So!” the first woman who'd spoken up said brightly, sidling up beside him. “What did you say your name was, you man of mystery?”

“Oh, uh, Stan -” he stopped, then went on slowly - “ford. Stanford Pines.” None of them even questioned it. Ford must really have never come into town for them to accept the lie so easily. A small and distant part of him found it funny – ironic or something, Ford would have known the right word – that Ford had become a local legend in his own right. Another small part was horrified at the implications of what he'd just done. Most of him was busy whirring away trying to figure out the best way to present the bullshit in Ford's house like it was worth fifteen bucks a pop to see.

Twenty minutes later, he was headed home with a trunk full of groceries and a line of suckers following behind him like ducklings.

“Your dad's a genius , kid!” he crowed in the privacy of his car. “Guess, uh, guess you're Toiba now? Not a bad name. Auntie Toiba's funeral was the first one I went to, you know that? Me 'n' my brother – that's your uncle Ford, not your uncle Shermy, he hadn't been born yet – we went ghost-huntin' and he, ha, he slipped and fell in a grave. No coffin in it or nothin', just a hole. You never heard so much carryin' on! Got his foot caught on a root or somethin' when I tried to pull him out and thought a zombie had him. 'Course, then we had to explain to Pop why we'd got our nice suits all muddy...” His good mood dimmed at the memory. “One of the only times he ever got it as bad as me, that was.”

Toiba gurgled at him, and a surge of fierce protectiveness swept through him, all mixed up with the shadow of that old remembered hurt. He ducked his head down to bump his chin against the crown of her head. “I may be a shit dad, but you're never gonna get a whippin' like that no matter what you do, kid. Promise.”

The first tour was not a rousing success. Stan was a big enough man to admit when a con needed work, and this one needed a lot of it. He'd been caught off-guard, and nothing killed a con like not having any props ready beforehand. On the way home he'd made all kinds of plans, worked up all kinds of speeches, but then he'd led those people up the stairs onto Ford's porch and opened the door to Ford's house and it'd been like the first time he came there, dusty and empty and cold, the air all thick and musty. He'd felt like he was leading them into a tomb, and all his scripted words had died on his tongue.

Still, after those disastrous first few minutes – he really hoped that eyelid thing wasn't permanent – it had gone okay. He'd made them laugh. He'd always had a knack for making people laugh, sometimes even on purpose, and once he'd gotten them laughing he'd been able to keep up a good patter. Not the best he'd ever done, but solid enough for a first try.

(Eyelid lady had slipped him another ten after the tour. For the kid, she'd said, and blinked at him in a way that was probably supposed to be a wink. He actually felt kind of bad.)

The science shit, he decided, wasn't suitable for showing to the public unless he knew what it did. Since he had approximately zero idea what any of it even was, that swept all of it right off the table. There was plenty of other crap strewn around the house, though, crap that was unlikely to cause anyone permanent injury or deformity, and he was nothing if not resourceful.

A few busy days of cleaning, sorting, organizing, and madcap taxidermy later, he had a workable, showable house of...mysterious...stuff. And thus the Murder Hut was born!

The name needed work. He could admit that. Something would come to him later, he was sure. That was how he had all his best ideas.

And Toiba, bless her chubby little cheeks, turned out to be just as good for business as he'd figured a baby might be all those months ago. He didn't always keep her with him for the tours – the noise would inevitably wake her up, and a screaming baby didn't make anyone happy – but when she was awake she was a perfect little mascot, and the tips flowed freely.

And when someone in the fourth group he took through asked about her, he opened his mouth up and out came a story about hearing a knock at his door – he rapped on the wooden wall for emphasis – and opening it to find the kid all swaddled up on his doorstep, a foot of snow on the ground and – he lowered his voice and relished the way they all leaned in to hear – not a footprint in sight. After that, she became as much exhibit as mascot.

A month and a half after the Murder Hut officially opened for business, he decided that Stanley Pines needed to go away.

Technically speaking, Stanley Pines didn't exist in the first place. He'd named himself that as a child, back when all he'd known was that he wanted to be Stan like his brother was, before he'd realized just how much like his brother he really wanted to be. The name his mother gave him hadn't felt wrong back then. It had just felt like someone other than who he was. It had just been a mask he put on for his parents and teachers and everyone else but Ford.

He'd never made a fake ID for Stanley Pines. It was just who he told people he was on the rare occasion he met someone who he wanted to know his actual name. There hadn't been anyone like that in years. Apparently Ford had remembered, though – or called him by that name on purpose to make him more likely to come. Five months ago he wouldn't have expected that kind of manipulation from his brother, but he hadn't expected any of the shit he was currently neck-deep in either, so that showed what his expectations were worth.

Point was, the man known to an occasional few as Stanley Pines needed to not be around anymore. He was inconvenient. He was a loose thread that, if pulled, could unravel the entire flimsy cover Stan had woven around himself.

Figuring out how to do it was easy enough. He'd arranged disappearances before, though usually the person being disappeared had the courtesy to actually be dead. Still, he figured he was close enough. The only person who'd known who he was born as and seen him in the last ten years was God only knew where, and he'd slid seamlessly into his brother's abandoned life.

To get the car, all he had to do was shave and dress up a little bit and present a license that was, technically speaking, fake in the sense that it had been made by him, but real in the sense that the name and information on it was all legally his. Just to avoid suspicion from anyone who might've seen him out and about, he bought himself a bus ticket a couple counties over. Practically a vacation, that was.

The hardest part was getting a cadaver. He ended up driving over into Idaho and breaking into a morgue, which was a first and hopefully a last. The Jane Doe he picked up barely resembled him except for being about the right height and weight. Good enough; everyone looked the same with most of their skin burnt off.

The worst part was pulling her teeth.

“Sorry,” he kept whispering down to her round dead face with its sunken, cloudy eyes. The soft, slack way her skin gave under his fingers – the ugly wet tearing sound as the teeth came out of her gums – he'd be feeling those sensations again in his nightmares for a long time to come, he knew. When it was done he put the teeth in a jar and buried it half a mile out in the woods, feeling distinctly like a serial killer.

After that it was just a matter of putting together the components. He dressed the corpse up in his clothes, bought a wallet to put the fake license and his actual social security card in, cut the car's brakes, and drove her into a ditch a mile outside of town. Then he set the whole mess on fire. It wouldn't look natural, but it didn't need to. It just needed to look like it was plausibly him in that burned-out wreck.

He tracked the news through town gossip, from the initial discovery to the suspicions of foul play all the way up through – weeks later – the police figuring out that the car had been a rental checked out under the name of one Shayna Pines. Possibly he'd done too good a job burning it. No doubt the process would've gone much smoother if they'd actually been able to read that license.

Getting called into the morgue to identify his own body was a jarring experience, to say the least. He did it on automatic, watching himself from somewhere in the back of his own skull. Yes, he told the coroner, that was his sister's name, and yes, he'd seen her recently – she'd dropped her kid off on his doorstep and left – and yes, she'd been driving that car.

The coroner shuffled him over to the police. Did his sister have any enemies? Well, he'd hardly spoken to her since she left home, but she hadn't seemed to be doing well when she'd showed up. She'd sure as hell never been good at making friends. No, he didn't know anything else, she hadn't told him anything, could he go? Only the kid hadn't slept in a few hours and she got really cranky when she was tired and he had tours to run, yes, hadn't they heard of the Murder Hut? He'd just opened it up, and hey, he might be persuaded to give a hefty discount to any members of Gravity Falls' finest who happened to come through -

By the end of it he was babbling. The police ushered him out with no small amount of eye-rolling. He barely held it together long enough to get into his car. Twenty feet down the road the laughter burst out of him, high and wild and with an ugly hysterical edge.

He got drunk before he called home. Thankfully it was Ma who picked up; he didn't know what he'd do if he had to hear his father's voice right then. Ma was hard enough. She cried when he told her, the kind of heaving, gulping sobs that he could just picture shaking her entire slender body. It made him want to take it back and confess everything, but then, that wouldn't be any better, would it? Probably worse, in fact. Sure, she'd always been fond of him – fond of her little girl, the child he wasn't whose skin he'd lived uneasily in for seventeen years – but it was Stanford who was worth being proud of, worth admitting to having birthed.

Wriggling out of going to the funeral service was surprisingly easy. Ma barely even seemed to expect him to. He had to wonder just how long it had been since Ford had been home, that she was so resigned to him staying.

He almost told her about Toiba. It was right on the tip of his tongue. What better excuse for not traveling than a baby who was – who was probably not more than six months old? Some subconscious urge killed the words before they came out of his mouth, though. Some part of him had realized before the rest of him that if he told his Ma she had a grandkid, he was probably going to wake up one day to the woman on his porch, and there was no way he'd fool her face-to-face.

So he made soothing noises while Ma cried, and flimsy excuses about why he couldn't come to his own funeral, and then he hung up. And then he finished up the bottle he'd started.

The floor tilted under his feet as he staggered up to bed. He dragged himself up the stairs like a mountaineer on a rope. Somewhere near the top the thought came to him that if he fell and broke his neck he'd be able to come to the funeral after all, and wouldn't that be convenient?

He flopped clumsily enough into bed to bounce Toiba awake, which she protested vocally.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, crawling over to her. “Sorry, shh, s'fine.” He gathered her up and sat up, rocking her in the crook of his arm. Gradually she quieted down, snuggling in all warm and drowsy against his chest. “Sorry, kid, dad's just – just makin' bad choices. Bein' irresponsible. Shouldn' be this fuckin' drunk around you...”

He dropped his head back against the wall. Thoughts lurched through his mind, jumbled and loopy.

The kid wasn't even old enough to understand what a fuck-up he was. How long was that going to last? One day she'd be old enough to care if he was drunk. One day she'd be old enough to wonder why he used a different voice on the phone – was it going to take him that long to get his brother back? That thought had been hovering at the back of his mind for days, and he'd done his best to avoid it, but now it painted itself across the inside of his skull in huge letters.

Faking his own death was a long-haul kind of decision. He was settling into Ford's life. It was going to take years, if he ever managed it at all. How – fuck, how was he going to explain that to Toiba when he got Ford back? Hey kid, so, turns out I've been lying to you for your whole life, sorry?

Unpleasant laughter bubbled out between his teeth. He'd burn that bridge when he came to it. If he stopped to think about what the fuck he was doing he might come to his senses and give the whole thing up, and that was – that was unthinkable.

He didn't want to tell his parents about Toiba. He wanted to tell everyone about her, because she was perfect as much as she was an enormous and constant pain in the ass, but he didn't want to tell his parents. They hadn't ever thought anything good would come of him. They hadn't wanted him.

He remembered being thrown out, Pop's hand twisted so tight in the collar of his shirt the fabric had dug angry red lines into his neck – his feet leaving the ground, the moment of weightlessness as he was thrown and then the moment of realization as gravity dragged him down onto the pavement, the split second understanding that he was about to be in pain before the pain came. The utter shock of it – he hadn't even understood what happened, not really, not for days, and then one morning he'd woken up curled in the back seat of his car and stared up at the roof of it and just started crying because he couldn't go home –

Ma had just stood there and watched it happen. She'd always acted like she cared about him but she'd just watched . He'd been her favorite like Stanford was Pop's favorite but – she'd always talked to him when he called and she'd kept track of where he was and sometimes she'd written to him, she'd sent him birthday cards and asked him how he was doing – and she'd always just believed him when he said fine , like it could possibly be true. How could she have believed that?

They hadn't wanted him. They'd thrown him out to sink or swim and he'd nearly drowned but here he was, still treading. Running his own business, raising his own kid – and okay, yeah, he'd probably killed his brother, he was probably going to spend the rest of his life failing to fix his very worst mistake, but – Toiba was maybe the one good thing he'd ever done with his life. She was something they'd want. She was his and he'd be damned if either of them ever laid eyes on her in their lives.

He sunk down into a heavy sleep, full of dreams as uneasy and unpleasant as his thoughts. The next morning he woke up still sitting against the wall, back and neck stiff, head throbbing. He shut the Hut down for the day and spent most of it in bed alternately cursing himself for a fool and feeling sorry for himself.

Watching her grow was endlessly fascinating. He had always figured that a baby was a baby was a baby, and that it took a couple years for the personality to come in. Within a matter of months, though, she was so apparently herself .

She'd been born with a head of downy brown hair. All of it fell out by the time she was a year old, and then grew back in thick and black and curly. And then he found out that something about a cute baby just made people lose their goddamn minds, because every single tour group that came through had at least one person who wanted to reach out and grab it. The first time it happened he'd been caught too off-guard to stop the man in question, and she'd promptly burst out wailing. After that he got good at swatting away hands before they got close enough, but the sheer volume of people who tried was staggering.

She had a still, solemn face, which lent an air of truth to the changeling stories he told the tourists. She'd stare unsmiling at them from his arms, all wide dark eyes and wild hair, and hardly make a sound unless it got too loud or someone tried to touch her. He was the only person she'd let touch her, and was not shy about letting her displeasure be known if anyone else made an attempt.

There was a blissfully easy period between her first couple of months and when she learned to crawl. He carried her everywhere with him, nestled in the crook of his arm or tucked into her harness – he'd bought a real one once he'd gotten regular money coming in, and a car-seat too, though spending the money had hurt him physically – or set her down next to him when he was making a new exhibit or working on the portal, and she just stayed there. He'd read Ford's nerd books to her, because saying it out loud helped him figure out what the hell it meant, and she was the perfect audience, since she couldn't make fun of the way he stumbled over words or switched around sounds.

Then she figured out how to move on her own, and no force on earth could keep her still. He made a spirited attempt, but she was every bit as stubborn as he was and wildly curious. The best he could do was make sure the floor was clean and empty of things she might want to put in her mouth – which was basically everything, at that point. It was a pain, but it did motivate him to sweep more often.

He did consider making a onesie that doubled as a dust-cloth. No way there wouldn't be a market for that.

Just when he'd gotten a handle on crawling, she figured out how to stand up. At first she could only pull herself onto her feet with the aid of a steadier object, like a handy piece of furniture or – more frequently – his leg, and stand there swaying. Her first attempts to walk under her own power all ended the same way: she'd let go of whatever she was holding onto, wobble forwards a step or two, and then topple over onto the floor.

Every time she fell, Stan's heart lodged itself up into her throat. Toiba dealt with it more gracefully. She'd just get up onto her hands and knees, crawl back over to where she'd started from, and drag herself back up onto her feet. He had to admire her sheer determination.

Then she actually got it, and every day became a losing battle to keep her within his sight. Worse, at about the same time as she got walking down she figured out how to climb , too, and took to scaling every piece of furniture she could find with gusto.

Plagued with visions of her cracking her fluffy little head open on the hard wooden floor, he tried to dissuade her. Any time he told her to get down, though, she just looked at him with her big dark eyes and expressed with perfect wordless eloquence that yes, she understood what he was saying, and no, she wasn't going to listen. Picking her up and putting her back on the floor just meant she got to start all over again, as far as she was concerned. She only ever fussed at him over it if she'd gotten somewhere particularly difficult before he swooped in.

Eventually he gave in and got used to walking into a room to find her perched on top of the furniture, all folded up and staring down at him like a tiny gargoyle. He bought a lot of thick rugs, too, to soften up the floor for when she inevitably fell.

She only rarely fell. She never cried when she did, just like she hadn't when she'd been learning how to walk. She'd cry if strangers tried to touch her, or if people raised their voices too loud, or if he tried to put anything made of wool or denim on her, but she hardly seemed to notice when she hurt herself.

She didn't talk for a long time, but it didn't worry him. According to his Ma, Ford hadn't talked until they were nearly three, and he'd started right in on whole sentences once he did. Stan, on the other hand, had talked enough for the both of them. Anything much before adolescence was a blur of unattached memory fragments, for the most part, but he could remember holding his brother's hand, his five fingers slotted neatly between Ford's six, Ford whispering in his ear because he had more and better words but they all dried up whenever he tried to talk to anyone but Stan or Ma, while Stan wasn't afraid to talk to anyone.

Even without words, he understood her easily enough. The trick to it was in the rest of her body. She'd flutter and clap her chubby little hands when she was happy, and touch her thumbs to her fingers in sequence to calm herself down when she felt anxious. There was a particular way she'd cock her head and hunch her shoulders up when he told her to do something she didn't want to do, and another way she'd curl her hands in against her chest and peer up at him when she wanted something.

Over the course of his life, Stan had painstakingly taught himself how to read faces and tones. How to read the mood of a room, how to pull meaning out of the complicated dance of eyebrows and lips and voices – it was all second nature now, but his first and most native language had been the one her body spoke. He found himself mirroring her back the way he'd done his brother, once upon a time.

Watching her kept jarring old memories loose from where they'd been buried in the back of his mind. He watched her hands flutter up like birds into the air and remembered his own hands being held down against the kitchen table until he could keep them still on his own. He remembered his father's fingers on the back of his neck, squeezing just shy of hard enough to bruise, whenever he'd start to bob his head or tap his feet out in public, a silent warning to be good .

He remembered the way the need to move had built up in him, pressure with no outlet, until inevitably he started to feel like he was drowning in all the light and noise, the touch of his clothes against his skin like being rubbed with steel wool, and a scream would start in his gut and work its way up and out his mouth and nothing – not bribes or threats or the sure knowledge of punishment to come – would make him stop until he'd gotten it all out.

He remembered that and swore she'd never feel that way, at least not because of him. All the grief he and Ford had gotten had been to try and make them more normal , and how had that turned out? Even when they'd been able to fidget acceptably, even when they'd learned how to look at people's eyes, even when Ford had learned to talk back to people and even when Stan had learned to use his own words instead of his brother's, everyone had just known .

Normal, he figured, was not a target Toiba was ever going to hit. She already unsettled people with the way she just stared at them, her face all serious and still, with the way she never spoke, with the way she moved and held herself when she wasn't moving. Easier just to let her be herself and teach her how to push back when the world inevitably came down on her for it.

When she got old enough to toddle reliably around, he took her out into the woods. He'd avoided them himself, as much as was possible considering he lived a mile out of town right in the middle of them, not quite deliberately but more as a result of being too damn busy to go on nature walks.

Not to mention that he had read his brother's journal. Whether or not even a fraction of the fantastical things Ford had apparently found out there were real, he had less than zero desire to encounter any of them. Regular old forest creatures were bad enough. He was a city boy born and bred, and a decade of vagrancy had not left him with any love of empty, wild places. It had taken him ages to get used to the howling and hooting that went on all through the night.

Also, once a gnome had bitten him while he was chasing them away from his trash. He still had the scar, a perfect half-moon of pointy little teeth in the flesh of his right calf, and he had to believe in something real enough to bite him. So he'd been happy enough to admire the woods from a distance, sitting on his porch at the end of a long day with Toiba propped up on his knee or through the windows of his car as he drove into town.

After two and a half years, though, he was going more than a little stir-crazy. He'd woken up one day and wandered through the house all full of restless energy humming underneath his skin, and paced and paced and not felt one bit less restless. He'd given tours with a manic flair until midway through the afternoon when, all at once, he ran out of the ability to talk to tourists.

He flipped the sign in the door over to CLOSED, changed his work clothes for a t-shirt and a pair of his brother's old jeans, and went to round Toiba up. The idea of going out excited her until she found out she'd have to put on shoes. That made her get all hunched up and mulish, shoulders around her ears, and only by applying all of his extensive skills in cajolery – and, eventually, outright bribery in the form of cookies when they got back – did she agree to do it.

She sulked about the shoes all the way out of the house, barely holding onto the very tips of his fingers and refusing to actually look at him. Once they got into the woods, though, she forgot to be mad at him.

He didn't take her far at all, but it was farther than she'd ever been. At first she kept close by, tucked in against his side with her fingers clenched in his pant leg, gazing up with naked awe at the enormous trees that loomed over them. Her head whipped around at every distant rustle and creak, eyes wide, mouth a slack open O.

Somewhere in the distance, a bird called out. Toiba gave his pant leg a sharp tug and, once she'd glanced up to ensure she had his attention, parroted the noise back to him, head cocked curiously.

“Nice one, sweetie,” he said, giving her mop of hair a ruffle. “That was, uh -” It definitely hadn't been a goose, duck, crow, or seagull, and was therefore beyond Stan's limited ornithological knowledge. Not that he was going to let a little something like having no idea what he was talking about stop him. “ That was the territorial call of the, uh, the rare north Pacific yellow-crested owl-hawk! They got a wingspan of eight – twelve feet, and five inch talons, and they eat, uh – they eat whatever they can carry away! Smaller birds, uh, baby deer, house pets...and little kids who get lost in the woods!”

She tilted her head slowly to the other side, eyes fixed on some distant point in mid-air, and raised a hand to tap her own chest.

“Oh, yeah, you're definitely little enough.” He fluffed her hair again, then dropped his hand to her narrow little shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze. “So stay where I can see you, alright? Anything tries to come snatch you, I'll scare it off.”

Even with that assurance, she stay glued tight to his side for another few minutes. Eventually, though, the lure of the unknown became too much for her to resist. She wandered away from him in gradually widening circles, alternately looking back to make sure he was in sight and peering up at the canopy – to make sure there weren't any giant birds waiting to snatch her, presumably.

Stan settled onto a handily nearby rock and watched her. She toed through the drifts of fallen leaves and needles, gently at first and then with more gusto when she realized she could kick them up into the air. At every tree she'd stop, put one hand flat to the bark, and walk a slow circuit all the way around it, other hand curled up tight against her shoulder and eyes closed. Periodically she'd spy something on the ground and pick it up to put in her pockets.

The summer afternoon wrapped around them, hot and drowsy and punctuated by distant forest sounds and Toiba's tuneless humming but otherwise quiet. Sunlight crept in between the treetops, dappling the ground with shifting patterns of light and shadow. A fitful breeze rustled through the trees, heavy with the dusty smell of heat and growing greenery. Stan stretched and shifted against his makeshift seat, and felt as close to content as he had in a long, long time.

Of course, it couldn't last. There was always that one part of him that counted every passing second and weighed whether or not he had wasted it when he could have used it to work on getting Ford back. Sometimes it screamed so loudly in his head that he couldn't ignore it, and on days like that he'd shut himself downstairs as soon as the kid was asleep and stay there until the sun came up. Sometimes – like right then – it was just a whisper, a barely-there suggestion that he didn't have forever, his brother didn't have forever, and he'd already taken so long, who knew if Ford was even still alive, and what was he doing, fucking around out here in the woods? When was the last time he'd actually spent more than an hour on the portal at a time?

Groaning, he pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes, as if he could squeeze the thoughts out of his head.

When he lowered his hands and looked up, Toiba was nowhere to be seen. A hot bubble of panic rose up into his throat, and for one split second all he could think was that if he lost her too he'd have nothing -

(and then an ugly little voice in the back of his mind said, well, he'd have more time to work on getting Ford back, wouldn't he, and the thought was gone as soon as it came but he'd never be able to forget that he'd had it)

- and then the moment passed and he could think again. He'd only closed his eyes for a moment and she couldn't get that far on her own. Most likely she was just behind him, or on the other side of a tree.

“Toiba!” he barked, voice echoing through the air. For a long moment there was no response, and then her head popped up out of a shrub three feet to his left. “Get over here, kid!”

It was usually even odds whether or not she'd listen to anything he said. Most of the time it didn't much matter. If she was touching something she shouldn't be or climbing on something that he didn't want her climbing he could just go over and take it out of her hands or pick her up and move her, no harm done.

Right then she was looking at him like she was trying to figure out if he meant it or not, and he could still taste the panic of that one single moment where she'd just been gone – like Ford had been gone, there in front of his eyes one second and not the next – in the back of his throat and he was about ready to march over there and grab her up and go right the fuck back home when she decided he apparently did and came trotting over.

“I said to stay where I can see you,” he told her as she climbed into his lap. “That means no crawling into bushes.” He plucked at some of the debris caught in her hair, pine needles and bits of shrubbery and two entire twigs as long as his pinky finger.

“See you,” she said, a hint of sulk in her voice, head tilted to look up at him sidelong.

“I don't care if you could see me , I need to be able to see you . Got it?”

She didn't say if she'd got it or not. She just dug into her pockets to pull out the day's finds, holding out her cupped hands expectantly until he reached out to take what she wanted to give him.

It was junk, mostly. She had a habit of collecting bits and bobs from off the ground and bringing them to him like a cat with a half-dead mouse. At some point it had become something of a daily ritual, going through her collection at the end of the day and telling her what everything was.

Mostly she had rocks or little sticks. One of the rocks had a hole through the middle, which he told her was lucky. That one went back into her pocket, while most of the other detritus was plucked up from his palm and dropped back onto the forest floor. She kept a little pine cone as well, and two blue feathers, and tried to keep a piece of green glass that he guessed probably came from a beer bottle. He took it and stuck it in his own pocket to throw in the trash later, when she wasn't looking and couldn't go digging for it.

Once they were done, he propped her up on his hip and carried her home. She protested that until he reminded her about the cookies he'd promised. She sat on the counter to watch him make them, and to make up for having taken one of her prizes he let her eat three spoonfuls of dough before he put the bowl in the sink to soak.

After that, she loved the forest like she'd been born to it, like she really was the changeling he told tourists she was. Whenever he had a spare moment she'd try to pull him out there. Their walks became nearly a daily occurrence, and he slowly began to learn the layout of his brother's land. How much of it actually belonged to him, Stan didn't exactly know, but he kept finding Private Property and No Trespassing signs nailed up out deeper in the forest than he would have thought.

It was, he had to admit, a beautiful place. There was a sense of stillness out underneath the towering trees that sank into him the longer he spent out there, a quiet much more soothing than the tomb-like emptiness of the house at night, when Toiba was asleep and the tourists away. Aside from the gnomes, none of the forest's oddities seemed keen on coming near the house, either.

He learned to tell the difference between what he came to think of as his part of the forest – Ford's part, he always tried to remind himself – and the more magical parts. There was no visible difference, no marker, nothing tangible, but nonetheless he could feel it. The silence was deeper and somehow older, the air heavier, the shadows darker. He felt not only watched but scrutinized. After half a lifetime spent on the run from one group or another, he was willing to chalk that up to inherent paranoia, but Toiba felt it too. Past a certain point in the forest she'd go quiet and stay close, slipping her hand into his, her body language all still and solemn.

By mutual agreement, they stayed away from that part. There was plenty to explore around the house.

He went to the library one day and got a couple of books on the local plant and wildlife, too. Bullshitting the kid was fun, but once it became a routine he figured he might as well actually be able to tell her what the plants she kept bringing him were. Not to mention it helped to know what would and would not kill her if she stuck it in her mouth.

There was one place near the house that they found a couple weeks into their regular leisurely explorations. The land rose up and then dipped down into a little round clearing, cupped between two hills, where one of the innumerable finger-thin creeks widened out into a pond – more of a puddle, really – maybe three feet across. Some accident of geology had deposited a long, flat stone beside the water that was perfect for sitting on. On Saturdays, he'd shut the Shack down early in the afternoon and pack them up a picnic dinner and come out there to eat it, and sit with a book or his notes or just the thoughts in his head while Toiba splashed in the crystal-clear little pool and picked up polished rocks off the bottom of it.

After a couple of their exploratory sessions it occurred to him to bring pencil and paper and record landmarks, so he could search for his brother's hidden journals. Ford could've hidden them anywhere in the town, but his own property was as good a place to start as any. Anyway, given how protective he'd been of the one Stan did have, it was hard to imagine him putting them somewhere he couldn't check up on them.

His first attempts at mapping were crude enough to be embarrassing. Drawing had always been Ford's thing. Back when they'd been kids – sometimes he looked at Toiba and he wondered if he'd ever actually been that young, that small, that happy – doodling all over his notes was about the only thing he'd ever gotten in trouble at school over, and he'd always drawn the treasure maps for their adventures. Putting pencil to paper to sketch out the lay of the land around the house felt like yet another thing he was taking from Ford and calling his own.

When Toiba noticed what he was doing, she decided to help. He gladly let her deface his first few tries. Watching her painstakingly trace the shape of the trees, tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, pencil clutched in her chubby six-fingered hand, was far and away better than sitting there thinking about his missing brother.

After that he brought paper for her too, and a little while after that he went out and bought her a set of colored pencils, and then it just became a thing. She took to art with gusto and the sort of disregard for rules only a child could muster. They'd sit together, her scratching away at her paper and him trying to map out the area well enough he'd be able to find it in the dark with a flashlight, and every so often he'd glance over and see her looking over at him and the thought that she wanted to be like him squeezed his chest so tight he could hardly breathe. He wanted to tell her not to be, but, hell, she'd figure that out in time.

He put his amateur cartography in a binder, and the kid's art on the fridge. Mostly she drew a lot of trees and rocks, the occasional bird, and some impressively impressionist depictions of the pool in the clearing. All the trees had knots in them that looked like eyes, and about half the papers had little yellow triangles floating around the edges like a border.

When she got a little older, she started going out on her own. He worried some about her running around on her own, but then, he and his brother had run just as wild when they'd been her age, hadn't they? He'd made sure she knew what parts of the forest were safe and that she shouldn't eat strange plants, and she was always back for meals. She'd come running in, clothes and feet muddy, knees and arms bruised and scraped and scabby, twigs and needles and flowers in her mass of curly hair, smelling like the dirt and trees and open air. Sometimes she brought him things, flowers or rocks or pieces of human debris.

Once she brought him the corpse of a brilliantly purple little bird, which he stuffed and put up by the register. She'd crouch up there and talk to it. She'd talk to the trees outside, too, and the larger rocks, and talk to him about them like they were friends. Alone with him, she could be chatty as anything when the mood struck her, but she'd only ever make animal sounds at the tourists and townsfolk who came through, if she didn't just stare silently.

With every year that passed she grew weirder and wilder and more perfect. He couldn't help but think that she was meant for this place, so well did she fit into it.

The first time he got really, seriously angry at her, she was somewhere between four and five. He'd had a hard day of dealing with dumbshit tourists, and by the end of it his face hurt from smiling and his chest hurt from the effort of being pleasant when all he really wanted to do was swear and maybe throw things. Once the last group was gone, he flipped the sign in the door over to CLOSED with a heavy sigh of relief, and went into the house.

Toiba was nowhere to be found. That was hardly unusual. When she wasn't being a prop in his tours she was either out making friends with trees in the forest or entertaining herself in the parts of the house that weren't open to the public, and when she wasn't intentionally making noise she was quiet as a cat.

He ambled through the house looking for her, shedding work clothes as he did. She wasn't in the living room, or the old study of Ford's he'd made into her bedroom, or the parlor across the hall from it. His office – with its sturdy desk, filing cabinets, and haphazardly stacked piles of boxes to climb – was a favorite haunt of hers, but she wasn't in there either.

He called her name up the stairs and waited. Only silence answered him, completely empty of either her voice or the shuffling of her little feet down the hall. Sighing, he climbed up and began poking into those rooms. Bathroom – no Toiba. Bedroom – no Toiba. Attic room, where he'd stuffed some of Ford's less dangerous but still not child-safe experiments, forbidden her from exploring, and then padlocked shut just to be sure – no Toiba.

A cold little finger of dread scraped up his spine. He stumped back downstairs, resolutely ignoring it, and went to go look outside. The sun had sunk behind the trees and the sky was stained a pale dusky plum, not dark enough for stars but dark enough it was hard to see. Dark enough she shouldn't be outside, and she knew that, she was always home before it got this late -

He shook the worry out of his head. He shook the thought that he shouldn't have let her outside on her own out of his head, because what was he supposed to do, lock her in a room while he was working? He shook the thought of all the terrible things that could happen to a little girl alone out in the forest out of his head.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed her name, scaring up a flock of birds. All around the perimeter of the house he went, calling for her, and then out deeper into the woods. He went to all the places he knew she liked best – the place where a fallen tree made a moss-covered bridge over a creek, and the thicket of blackberry bushes, and the place where three worn old rocks leaned together to make a cave of sorts, and the clearing with the pool where they came to eat – and found her in none of them.

By the time he'd made this circuit the sun had gone fully down. He blundered back to the house in darkness and turned into the kitchen to grab the flashlight out of the tool drawer and keep looking.

Instead, he froze in the doorway, because there she was, folded up on top of the fridge and looking beyond pleased with herself. Pure relief swept through him.

In its wake, an ugly fury boiled up. She had to have heard him looking. If she'd been up here the entire time, she'd probably heard him inside as well as out, and she'd just sat and let him look and worry. He breathed in deep, lungs filling up full of anger, and in two strides crossed the room and dragged her down, gripping her arm tight when she tried to pull away.

“ What do you think you were doing?” he demanded, giving the arm he was holding onto a shake.

She yanked at her arm, and he yanked back and then froze, the rest of his words dying on his tongue. Slowly, slowly, the details of the scene filtered into his brain: her eyes, wide and wet and frightened; the way she hung at the end of her own arm as far from him as she could get; his huge fingers sunk into her soft skin, the fragile birdlike bones of her wrist grinding against each other in his grasp -

- and he could still feel the anger burning in his chest and down his arms and in his hands, could still feel the urge to hurt her, because he'd been so scared and he wanted her to know even a little bit how it had felt so she'd never make him feel that way again -

- and he could remember being grabbed and pulled like that himself, the bones of his wrist grinding together under his father's palm, the socket of his shoulder straining as he leaned his weight futilely against the man -

- he uncurled his fingers. He dropped his hand to his side. Her skin was red where he'd squeezed her in a way that he knew meant it was going to bruise.

For one long still moment they stood there, facing each other in silence, her hunched and small and clutching her arm to her chest, him with a head buzzing full of horror. Slowly, she edged to the side, eyes fixed on him like she was afraid he'd try to grab her again, and then when he didn't move she darted around him and out the door. It banged against the frame behind her.

He wanted badly to go after her, but his feet were rooted to the floor. All he could think of was how easily he had hurt her, how much worse he'd wanted to, how quickly the anger had burned out every tender feeling he'd ever had towards her. All he could think of was the image of her white-knuckled fist sticking out of his clenched hand, how completely helpless she'd been to pull herself away from him.

He stood there for a long time before, finally, he could move. There were any number of places she could have gone, but just on a hunch, he stopped and stuffed his keys into his pockets before he went out the door.

The car sat dark and quiet in its usual place. He raised his hand, hesitated, then rapped gently on the window.

Her hand flashed up out of the darkness of the wheel well and hit a button on the inside of the door. All the locks thunked shut.

That was more or less what he had expected. He circled around to the passenger side, unlocked the door, and slid sideways into the seat, legs hanging out.

“Kid,” he said, and swallowed hard. A minute crawled by, and then two, and she didn't speak or move. The only indication he had she was even in there was the wet, snuffly sound of her breathing. “I'm sorry,” he managed finally, knowing it was pitifully inadequate, knowing he couldn't possibly say anything else. “I didn't mean – I was just – I'm sorry. Shouldn't have grabbed you like. Shouldn't – shouldn't have gotten mad like that.” I didn't mean to hurt you , he wanted to say, but that was a lie he didn't think he could tell her.

Time passed. How much of it he didn't know. Crickets sang out in the syrupy summer darkness. Somewhere in the forest an owl hooted, and somewhere else something else howled. He looked out into the dark and shapeless treeline, resisting the urge to turn around and see if she'd come up from the wheel well, if she'd maybe forgiven him. He wanted to ask if she did but couldn't, because either way he knew she'd let him know, and if he didn't ask then he wouldn't have to know. He didn't know whether he wanted her to or not.

Eventually the shuffling sounds of movement came from the inside of the car behind him. She touched his arm, so glancingly he barely felt it. Then she climbed around him and into his lap, knees tucked in against his stomach and her hands twisted in the front of his shirt. He wrapped his arms around her and put his face in her hair and rocked her, murmuring sorry, sorry, sorry like a prayer.

She said nothing, but she let him pick her up and carry her back into the house. He made her pancakes for dinner, by way of an apology. They ate in silence, and then she went and put herself to bed without speaking to him.

The next morning the bruise on her arm had come in, the shape of his fingers traced out in blue and sickly green. Within a day she was talking to him again, and after a week the bruise was nothing more than a shadow smudged across her arm, and within two it was gone, like it had never happened at all. He hoped that he'd never forget what it looked like or how sick he'd felt to see it.

Stan sat at the table, chin propped in his hand, and stared out the window while he waited for Toiba to come in. It was a rare sunny late winter day, the sky hard and blue and cloudless, the sun glittering brilliantly off the ice coating the trees and the snow blanketing the ground, but he didn't see any of that. His mind was a million miles away – or, more accurately, about eight miles away, somewhere in the vicinity of the elementary school out in town.

The fingers of his free hand began drumming anxiously on the table. He didn't hear her come in, but he did hear when she knocked on the table in the same rhythm his fingers had been tapping out. He jumped, startled, and turned to her, pasting the biggest showman's grin across his face that he could manage.

“Hey there, kid, uh – take a seat, yeah? We gotta talk.”

She climbed up into the chair and then onto the tabletop, where she crouched with her arms wrapped around her pointy little knees, head tilted, looking at him sideways. Today she was wearing one of the mystery shirts, which even in the smallest adult size still came halfway down her shins.

“So, uh -” he fumbled, words deserting him for a moment, and managed to come out with, “you're five now.” Her birthday was sort of a moving target. The past few years the best he'd been able to pin it down was 'sometime in February', whenever he managed to remember. This year it had been the sixth, but he'd put it down as the first on the birth certificate he'd forged for her last week just for the sake of convenience.

“Five now,” she echoed solemnly.

“Right, yeah. So – so – so you gotta go to school. Next year, I mean. After the summer. I got you enrolled in the elementary school downtown – or, well, I'm working on it, but – anyway, school. You're goin' there.” Not his smoothest delivery, not by a longshot, but, well -

She tilted her head the other way and said school under her breath. Outside the window a bird trilled, and without turning her head she made the same noise back. The fingers of her hands were all curled up tight against her legs, her bare toes wiggling against the table's wooden surface, and all Stan could think was, They're going to eat her alive.

Well into his thirties, he still remembered how hellish school had been for him and Ford, even after they'd learned how to act normal. And at first – he'd said everything for Ford at first, because Ford was afraid to talk to the teacher, and they'd thought he was smart and Ford was dumb, at first, just because Ford didn't talk and he talked with Ford's words. They'd made them both take tests when they were little. He sat blinking under the sudden return of that memory, something he'd forgotten up until that very moment. The tests had said that Ford was a genius, just like Stan had always known he was, but they'd also been the first thing that said that Stan not only wasn't but was below average .

“So!” he said with false brightness, pulling himself back to the present moment and the task at hand. “There's some stuff you gotta know before you go. Rules and stuff like that. How to act so you don't get in trouble.”

“School,” she said again, tone flat and unimpressed, clearly not warming to the idea.

He'd thought, long and hard and seriously, about not sending her to public school. The only reason he and Ford had made it through was because they had each other, but Toiba didn't have a twin. She didn't legally exist any more than he did, either, and if there was one thing he loved about this bizarre little hick town it was the way no one ever asked questions about anything . He'd spent days in the library looking up the laws on homeschooling and trying to figure out which ones he could stretch and which ones he could ignore outright.

In the end, though, it had all come down – like so many other things had – to the fact that he just wasn't smart enough to do it. Maybe if he had been he would be able to find a way to juggle everything around and teach her himself, but he wasn't and he couldn't. Between fixing the portal and running the Shack and trying to keep her alive and in one piece and out of as much trouble as he could, his plate was fuller than he knew what to do with.

And she deserved a chance at a real future. Grifting through life was all well and good for him, he'd been doing it long enough he doubted he'd ever be able to do anything else, but she deserved better. Making sure she got better was his job , it was what he'd signed up for when he'd decided to have her, and he wasn't going to take that from her just to spare himself some inconvenience and her some grief.

Hopefully she'd be able to thank him for it later.

“Yeah,” he said, “I know, but you gotta. So, first lesson, you can't sit on the tables in school. You gotta sit on the chairs.” He stared pointedly at her until she sulkily climbed down and crouched in the center of the chair, shoulders up around her ears. “Alright, almost, except you gotta put your feet on the – you gotta sit the way I am. Like this.” With a conscious effort, he straightened up from his habitual slouch to demonstrate good chair posture for her.

She looked at him for a long, silent moment, unmoving. Then she stretched her legs out with exaggerated slowness, hooked her knees around the edge of the chair seat, and slid out of it onto the floor. Then she walked out of the room.

Stan could not find it in him to blame her.

The second attempt did not go much better.

He ambushed her over dinner. She was crouched in the chair, as was her wont, eating green beans with her fingers, one single bean at a time.

Stan cleared his throat and opened with, “So I know you aren't crazy about the whole thing, but -”

Toiba's posture became immediately mulish, shoulders rising up around her ears. She fixed her eyes on her plate and continued eating with methodical precision, pointedly not even glancing at him or cocking an ear in his direction.

“It's really not that hard.” He'd told her a lot of lies during her short life, but that one was enough of a whopper even he felt vaguely ashamed of it. “It's just some rules. The sooner we get it over with the sooner it'll be done. Okay?”

Toiba said nothing.

He gave her a couple of minutes to visibly respond in any way, then repeated himself. When that got nothing, he leaned over and tapped on her plate. “Kid. Toiba. I know you hear me.”

She looked at his hand, gazed briefly at his face, then climbed down off her chair and announced, “I'm done.”

Stan took a slow breath in through his nose. “You're not done. Sit back down and finish your dinner and listen to me.”

She was already halfway to the sink, plate in her hands. “No, I'm done. Not hungry.”

He circled around the table to intercept her. “Bull. You ate six green beans. Sit down.”

She tried to go around him. He stuck an arm out to keep her in place, then took the plate out of her hands and set it on the counter. They stood facing off that way, him staring stonily down with his fists on his hips and her furiously eyeballing his navel. Then she dropped onto the ground, like a puppet with its strings cut, arms crossed tight over her chest.

“Sit at the table ,” he said. “On your chair. So you can eat.”

“Sit down. You said.”

“And now I'm saying to sit at the table.” When she didn't move, he reached down and took her under the arms, pulling her to her feet. She tried to wriggle out of his grasp, but he just hefted her up into the chair, turned to grab the plate, pivoted, and set it down in front of her. “Eat your food.”

She ate exactly half of everything, every movement stiff and precise. Having grown up as a picky eater with an inflexible father, Stan had decided early on he wasn't ever going to make her clean her plate before she was allowed to leave, so he'd instituted a minimum amount of food eaten. Usually it wasn't a problem – Toiba ate basically anything he put in front of her – but just right then she clearly begrudged every bite.

As soon as she'd eaten enough he'd let her leave, she got up and marched away. Stan let her go. He dropped his head into his hand and poked morosely at his own plate, appetite vanished. There had to be a way to get her to listen to him without turning their house into a miniature recreation of the Cold War, but damned if he knew what it was.

The third time was the charm. Stan took a couple of days to regroup, then over breakfast said to her, trying to sound casual, “You know how we pretend like you're a fairy from the woods for the tourists?”

She methodically ate the entire crust off of her toast, eyes on the table, then put the remaining square of bread down and nodded. Not much, but it was as much direct attention as she'd paid him since his last attempt to badger her, so he'd take it.

“The whole school thing is like that. You get it?” He watched her for signs of disengagement – subtle ones, like leaving the room and ignoring him for the next forty-eight hours – and was met only by still, expectant silence. “It's not like – you just gotta act a certain way while you're there, okay? Not at home or anything. It's just pretending. You like doing that, right?”

Initially, the concept of lying had confused her. Once he'd explained to her – with a pang, remembering how genuinely baffled his brother had always been, as a child, at the idea that people might say things that weren't true – that it was just making up a story, though, she'd taken to it with gusto. And maybe as a parent he shouldn't have been proud of that, but she had an undeniable flair for creative embellishment that he couldn't help but appreciate.

Her gaze flicked briefly upwards, then dropped back to the tabletop. Slowly, she nodded.

Triumph swelled within him. He took a breath and tried to push the feeling down. Getting her to listen was going to be the easy part. He couldn't afford to fall into complacency so soon. “Right! So it's just – you're just pretending to be different for a while. You know -” Vaguely, he waved a hand in the air, reaching for a word that wasn't normal , except, well, that was the entire thing, wasn't it? If she were normal he wouldn't be having this discussion with her in the first place.

Toiba picked her toast up and began eating it again, nibbling each side precisely down and then rotating it clockwise onto the next one. Once it was a third the size it had been, she put it down again and said, “Know what?”

“Well, uh -” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look, you know you're weird, right? I mean, there's nothing wrong with being weird, I sure as hell ain't exactly Mr. Normal myself -”

“You're Mr. Mystery,” she piped up.

“Exactly,” he said, face relaxing into a genuine smile. “We're both weird. But you gotta – there's just some times and some places you don't wanna be weird. I had to act like I wasn't weird in school too.” And she didn't need to know how abjectly he'd failed at it. “So you need to listen to me when I tell you how you gotta act, okay?”

She didn't say okay, but she didn't leave either, and he figured that was about as good as he was going to get.

Some of it was easy.

Etiquette – that was easy. She didn't understand it any more than he had, but she'd never had trouble learning how to parrot a phrase back. He taught her that when someone said hello you said it back, and that when someone asked how are you you said fine, how are you? even if you weren't fine and didn't care, because they didn't want to know how you actually were any more than you wanted to know how they were. He couldn't teach her exactly why people did that when everyone knew no one involved cared, but he did make sure she knew that people would think she was an asshole if she didn't do it.

He wondered, sometimes, how much easier it might have been if his parents had just admitted how stupid the whole thing was. They'd acted like he and Ford were the weird ones for not getting it, like they were being difficult on purpose. Maybe if Ma had taught him smalltalk was just a way of bullshitting your way through the day to day instead of telling him he had to be polite , he would have gotten it faster.

Some of it was harder.

Eye contact was a lost cause right off the bat. She looked at people sideways when she did it at all, like a cat. The best he could manage was teaching her to look at people's noses.

Clothes were a thorny issue as well. At home she mostly wore t-shirts, either his or Ford's or extra stock pilfered from the shop, and had to be coaxed into putting boxers on under them. Socks were right out, as were pants. The day he told her she'd have to wear pants to school was an ugly one, even when he pointed out that could mean a skirt if she wanted, just not nothing but a shirt.

Worse was when he told her she'd have to wear shoes. He'd fought long and valiantly for years to get her to stop leaving the house barefoot, but as soon as she'd gotten old enough to get the shoes off her own feet it had been a losing battle.

He'd tried not letting her outside without them, and she'd just taken them off as soon as she was out of sight. He'd tried threatening not to let her outside at all if that was how she was going to be, but that just made her angry and miserable and was not actually a threat he could enforce, which she damn well knew. She'd spent a day pointedly sulking and then called his bluff by leaving the moment he turned his back to give a tour and scaling a tree just on the edge of the property, where she'd sat and waved at him, bare feet dangling.

That was another time he'd lost his temper. Once the tourists had gone he'd stood at the base of her tree and shouted at her, belly burning sick with humiliation and anger. She'd thrown a pinecone at him and for one breathless ugly moment he'd been glad she was out of his reach, and then it had passed and he'd just turned and gone back into the house without another word, and maybe half an hour later she'd come creeping back in and let him send her to her room for the rest of the day. After that they'd had an understanding about the topic.

So when he told her that she'd have to wear them to school, he'd fully expected the fit she threw about it. That didn't make it any easier to weather. She was every bit as stubborn as he was, without any of the reason or inhibitions of adulthood which he'd so painstakingly taught himself. For days the air in the house was thick with tension, like the still humid minutes before a storm, except the storm never broke.

Eventually she accepted, with ill grace, that she would have to at the very least wear sandals. Stan gave the both of them a long break after that.

The rest of it was just a matter of redirecting her natural impulses. He taught her all the little ways to fidget with her hands and feet and hair that he and Ford had learned in lieu of rocking and spinning and clapping and flapping. He never grabbed her or held her hands down or told her she wasn't allowed to do anything, just showed her ways to do it that wouldn't be disruptive , but while doing it he could still feel the shadow of his father's hand on the back of his neck, could still hear the echo of that gruff voice hissing at him to stop acting like a retard in public .

He never said that word to Toiba. Still, it felt unpleasantly reminiscent. Worst of all, the longer he spent trying to teach her everything she'd need to know, the more he understood how his parents must have felt. Faced with two children as bizarre as he and Ford had been – the one an idiot, the other deformed, both utterly abnormal – they had to have seen what he was seeing now. They'd tried to help, and sure, he still hated the way they'd done it, but he knew why .

He saved the hardest part for last.

They were in their clearing. The forest hummed around them, lushly green and bathed in golden sunlight and full of life, while Toiba lay on her back beside him, face dappled with shadow. He was loathe to interrupt the moment, but they had to have the conversation sometime.

“Hey, kid. I got a new word for you.” He reached out and took one of her hands, folded across her belly, rubbing his thumb slowly over the bumps of her knuckles, all five of them. “Can you say polydactyly?”

She frowned and mouthed it silently to herself a couple of times, then ventured a slow, fumbling attempt. He gently corrected her, and waited patiently while she got used to the shape of the word in her mouth.

“That means, uh – it's what happens when you're born with more than five fingers. Five is the normal – it's how many people usually have. Having six just happens sometimes. Kinda runs in the family, in fact.” Immediately, he cursed himself for saying that. She'd remember it even if she didn't ask right away. “Anyway, uh, it's just – the other people, the other kids in your school and maybe even the teachers, they might be kind of shitty to you about it.”

“Shitty?”

“Yeah, uh – okay, here's another thing, you can't cuss in school, you'll get in trouble and then I'll get in trouble.”

Toiba considered that, forehead wrinkling as she thought, and then said again, with confidence this time, “Shitty.”

Stan cracked a smile in spite of himself. “Yeah, it is. And yeah, people – I don't know, people get weird about it. I don't know why. It's just fingers.” He kept rubbing his thumb across the back of her hand, so small in his. “I just want you to be ready for that if it happens, okay? And if anyone tries to say it makes you a – a freak or anything, just – they're wrong and they're an asshole. And you can tell them so, that's the exception to the no-cussing rule.”

Eventually, she pulled her hand away. Eventually, the light took on a reddish cast and the shadows started growing long, and they had to head home. Toiba said nothing for the rest of the night, and he kept looking over to catch her looking at her hands – putting each finger down one by one, touching her thumbs to her fingertips, turning them this way and that, dark brows furrowed – and every time he did he wished he'd never had to say anything.

Two months passed by, largely without incident. Accustomed as he was – even after years of soft living – to everything going wrong whenever it possibly could, Stan couldn't wholly accept that things would be alright. In the back of his mind a counter ticked down every day that passed without anything going all pear-shaped, until when it finally did he was almost relieved.

One day at the very tail end of autumn, the phone rang. At first Stan thought it was the gift shop phone. He'd shelled out for the separate line once the Shack started getting popular, and these days no one called the house phone. He made it all the way out halfway across the gift shop floor before he realized, no, the ringing was coming from the house.

Then he had to scramble back into the house to grab the phone off the hook. He sucked in a deep breath and said, “Hello?” trying not to sound like he'd just jogged halfway across the house. Meanwhile, he tried to figure out who would even be calling. As far as he knew, only Ma and Pop and Shermie had this number, and none of them had spoken to him in – well, in long enough he didn't expect them to now. Unless something had gone wrong. Last time he'd talked to Ma she'd tried to wheedle him into coming back home for Passover by saying his Pop wasn't doing too good, high blood pressure and all that.

“Stanford Pines?” asked a completely unfamiliar voice on the other end of the line.

“Speaking. Who is this?” Cradling the phone between his shoulder and ear, he sidled around to sit down, frowning. The voice was brisk, professional, and male, ringing with undertones of polished marble floor and spotless squeaky black shoes. He'd paid the mortgage this month, he was sure of it, so it couldn't be the bank coming after him, right?

“This is Stephen Dickerson,” the man said. After a slight pause, during which Stan gave no hint of knowing who the hell this guy was, he went on, “The principal at Gravity Falls Elementary...?”

“Oh! Right, right, of course.” He put on his most charming voice, flashing a snake-oil salesman's smile to the empty room, and asked, “What can I do for you, Mis ter Dickerson?” An unpleasant suspicion was already taking form.

“You can come up here and collect your daughter,” Mister Dickerson said, sounding wholly uncharmed.

“What – sure, is she alright? Something happen?” If she'd gotten hurt it'd be the nurse calling him, like as not, which meant the kid was probably in trouble. Stan couldn't dredge up the sort of parental disappointment the principal probably expected of him, mostly since he hadn't even made it a week into kindergarten before he'd behaved badly enough to warrant a call home.

“You could say that. We can talk about it in more detail in my office.”

“Yeah, sure thing. On my way. Just let me close up the place.” With that, he dropped the phone back into its cradle and went about hustling the last customers out of the shop.

Briefly, he considered changing out of the suit. The rest of his clothing was an eclectic assortment of casual wear and whatever clothes of Ford's he could still fit into, though, and it couldn't hurt to make it clear he'd been pulled away from work for whatever this was.

On the ride up to the school, he practiced his responsible parent voice. She's usually so well-behaved – I'm very sorry for the trouble – I'm sure it won't happen again – Of course I'll talk to her about it. What kind of talking to she got would, of course, depend on what had happened – Stan wasn't stupid enough to think the administration would have the whole story, he remembered being a kid – but it never hurt to grease the wheels a little bit.

The school was silent as he pulled into the circle drive and eased the El Diablo between two parked minivans. He gave himself a once-over in the driver side visor mirror, smoothed his hair back behind his ears, adjusted his tie, and stepped out of the car.

Walking into the school felt as surreal as it had the very first time he'd done it. An entire continent and more than thirty years lay between this school and the one he'd gone to back in Glass Shard Beach, but somehow it felt exactly the same. There were the cinderblock walls with their bumpy patterned paint, and there were the faded and scuffed blue and green tiles under his feet, and there were the ubiquitous posters and corkboards full of announcements and student art projects, and there was the smell of the place, paint and paper and the faint lemony undertone of the floor cleaner. Approaching the office made him feel five years old again.

Stan drew himself up as tall as he could, squared his shoulders, and stepped into the office with all the authority he could muster. He was a grown man, here to talk with another adult about his kid. He would not be cowed by the old woman sitting behind the reception desk, nor the little golden placard on the dark wooden door to her left which said DICKERSON. He would not listen to the deeply programmed part of his brain that only knew he was going to see the principal and that that meant he'd be in trouble from the moment he stepped foot into the office until well after he got home.

“Hey there,” he said, leaning his elbow on the desk. “Stanford Pines. I'm here to see Mister Dickerson?”

The woman behind the desk nodded at him in recognition, then reached over and tapped one brilliantly blue fingernail against the clipboard sitting beside his elbow. “Sign in, please.”

He signed in, waited for a moment, and then decided to just go for it. He eased the principal's door open and stuck his head in, then eased the rest of his body through and let it swing back closed behind him.

Dickerson was a slight, dark-haired man of indeterminate age. He sat behind his desk – mahogany, probably, worth a pretty penny – ramrod straight, and radiated an aura of disapproval. Upon stepping into the office, Stan felt the overpowering urge to shuffle his feet and apologize to the carpet. Instead he took a seat next to his daughter, who was hunched up in the chair in a way that did not bode well for this conversation.

“Hey, kid,” he said, and got only a faint grunt in response. “So, what's going on?”

“She's been fighting,” Dickerson said, in a voice like a ruler to the knuckles.

“Yeah?” Stan craned to get a look at Toiba's face, sucking in a breath through his nose when he did. One cheek was bright red in a way he knew meant a bruise was coming later, and her lower lip was split and swollen. A constellation of blood droplets had splattered onto the front of her dress, a buttery yellow number she liked because it reminded her, apparently, of one of her imaginary friends.

Anger rushed through him, hot and instant, prickling all over his skin. He ground his teeth together and swallowed it back, forced his fists to uncurl, forced his voice steady as he turned back to the principal and asked, “What happened?”

“She attacked another student, is what happened,” Dickerson said. “At lunch today. She gave him a black eye and bit another boy who tried to separate the two of them. This kind of behavior, of course, is completely unacceptable, and -”

“Why?” Stan cut in.

That seemed to throw the man for a loop. “Excuse me?”

“ Why ? What'd the other kid do?”

“Well, that's hardly important -”

“The hell it isn't!” Before he entirely realized what he was doing, he'd stood out of his seat and planted his hands on Dickerson's desk, leaning in towards him. To the man's credit, he didn't lean back, merely looked at Stan's hands, then up at him, mouth pursed in a flat line. “Sorry,” Stan muttered gracelessly, and dropped back into his seat. “You're just – you make it sound like she just snapped and started hitting people. That's b – that's obviously not what happened.”

“Well,” he said again, voice frosty, “according to the other students involved, he did nothing to provoke her -” beside him, Toiba made a choked-off sound of outrage - “ and , regardless of who may or may not have started it, we do have a zero tolerance policy on fighting at this school. Since this is a first offense, and she's been well-behaved up until now, I suggest you simply take her home for the rest of the day and try again tomorrow. And, of course, have a talk with her about the unacceptability of hurting other children.”

There really wasn't any point to protesting. Stan had made a living pushing the envelope as far as he could, and he knew when it couldn't be pushed any further. Still, he couldn't resist asking, “So is this other kid getting sent home? You know, for busting up her face?”

“That is a matter between myself and his parents,” Dickerson said, which Stan reckoned probably meant no .

“Sure, sure. Well, if that's all -” He stood, rolling his shoulders back, and held a hand out to Toiba. “C'mon, kid, let's go home. I gotta talk to you about fighting.”

Toiba regarded his hand sullenly and slid off her chair without taking it. She walked beside him out to the car, her own hands stuffed deep into her pockets, and only removed them to buckle herself in. Then she folded them up in her lap, clasped around each other and pressed against her belly.

Stan was reminded, painfully, of the way Ford had used to hide his hands behind his back. He kept glancing over at her as they drove back home, trying to figure out what to say, how to ask so that she'd talk. Her body was all closed off, shoulders up, still and stiff.

“So,” he tried, when they were out in the woods, on the winding dirt road up to the Shack. “What happened, huh?”

Toiba said nothing.

He gave it another minute or so, and then tried again. “Was that kid messing with you? I know you wouldn't just haul off and hit someone for no reason. What happened?”

“Messing with me,” she muttered.

“Yeah? What'd he do?” He tried to keep his tone light, to not sound as angry as he felt. Some snot-nosed little twerp had hurt her, had hit her, had made her bleed , and he couldn't even do anything about it.

“Messing with me,” she said again, and shifted in her seat to draw her knees up as best as she could. “Freak,” she said after a moment, in a hard jeering tone. “Mutant. Retard.”

Stan's knuckles went white on the steering wheel. He took a slow breath in and breathed out, counting to ten. Then he did it again, and again, until he trusted himself to speak without yelling. “He called you that?” His voice still came out tight. From the corner of his eye, he saw Toiba nod. “And then you hit him.”

Another nod. Then, her voice small, she asked, “'M I in trouble?”

“Absolutely not.” Finally, the peaked roof of the Shack came into view. Stan swung the car around into an approximation of a parking spot, then killed the engine and slumped back in his seat. “Anyone who ever says any of that to you deserves to get hit. I don't care what your damn principal says.”

“'Kay,” she said, still barely above a whisper, still all folded in on herself.

Stan unbuckled himself, stepped out of the car, and went around to her side to pull the door open, then went down on one knee. “Look. Look at me, alright? No one gets to talk to you like that. Someone wants to get nasty like that, they're askin' for a knuckle sandwich. So, hey – come on in, okay, and I'm gonna fix up your face.”

Toiba regarded him warily, but unbuckled and slid out of the car. This time, when he held his hand out, she reached up and took it, and let him walk her into the house.

She let him dab the blood away from her face and swab disinfectant on her lip, too, stoic as always.

“Bandaid?” she asked when he was done cleaning her face off.

“It's on your lip, kid, I can't really put a bandaid there. But I guess if you really want one -” He grabbed the box of bandaids from the cabinet. There was only one left rattling around in there, a neon green one. With great care, he opened it up and laid it diagonally across her bruised cheek, then gave the other cheek a brisk pat. “There you go. Now let's go have that talk about fighting.”

He took her to the living room and sat down on the dinosaur skull. “Okay, so. Show me how you make a fist.” She did, and he inspected the result solemnly. “Not bad, but here – try this -” Gently, he adjusted her fingers, until she had something she could work with. “Okay, now I want you to hit me.” He held up his hand, broad palm facing her. “Right here in the middle of my hand, as hard as you can.”

Toiba barely hesitated before sending her fist smacking into his palm. For a five year old with skinny arms, there was a surprising amount of force behind it, enough to make his hand sting. Predictably, though, she threw it like an amateur, windmilling her arm at him without any consideration for balance or momentum. But he could definitely work with that.

“Not bad! But you can make it better. First thing, a lotta people don't know this, but a good punch starts with your stance – you wanna get nice and balanced – get your feet apart and bend your knees a little -” He stood to show her how to put her feet. “Little wider with the feet – yeah, there you go. Okay, now you get your hands up like this -”

He could almost smell the sweat-and-rubber scent of the gym as he showed her. Of course, he hadn't gotten boxing lessons. He'd just sat on the bleachers and watched Ford, or stayed home and helped Ma around the house, and then made Ford show him the moves later, alone in their room. Ford had hated it, but he'd remembered all the forms well enough to show Stan, and practicing with Stan had gotten him better at it than getting his ass handed to him at the gym did. Stan could still remember the fierce surge of satisfaction that came from breaking Crampelter's ugly nose with a textbook left hook, even though he'd broken two of his fingers on the jerk's face.

“So when you do this by instinct, you just wanna throw your fist around, right? Like this.” He threw a demonstrative punch, all show and no substance. “That's just a waste of energy though, and it leaves you wide open. You gotta push with your legs and kinda turn into it and swing, like this.” The next one was a truly vicious punch, one that would have – and had – laid a man out flat had it connected. “And try not to hit people in the face, 'cause you'll break your fingers that way. Go for a body shot. Here's a few good places to aim for, make whoever's hasslin' you really regret it -”

Toiba was a quick study. She got the stance down right away, and though he knew it'd take hours of practice to really get the right form for throwing a punch down, her first attempts were plenty respectable. She hung on his words, all solemn and studious, all the closed-off sullen hurt from earlier gone.

By the time dinner came around, she was sweaty and exhausted, and he barely had to try to get her into bed. Once she'd fallen asleep, he sat beside her, trying to assure himself that she'd be fine, trying to convince himself out of the urge to pull her out of school and keep her in the house for the rest of her life.

He would, he decided, have to get his hands on a punching bag and some gloves, so she could really practice. Locking her up until she was thirty wouldn't work. Teaching her to stick up for herself would have to do.

“Cathy has a mom,” Toiba announced to him over dinner one night. Cathy was the one friend she'd managed to make, a girl who lived on Main Street and who, from what Stan had seen, was every bit as bizarre as Toiba, albeit in a somewhat different direction.

“Good for Cathy,” he said mildly, as if he didn't know exactly where this conversation was heading. That he'd managed to go six years without having it was a minor miracle in and of itself, but he'd been hoping to put it off for even longer. Forever, ideally.

“ Cathy has a mom,” she said again, and when he looked up she was eyeballing him with evident frustration, one hand curled up tight against her chest.

He sighed and held his hands up, making a show of surrender. “Right, I get it. You wanna know why you don't. Well, that's, uh, that's a good question, kid, and I definitely have an answer for you.” A smarter man than he was would have already had a lie ready to slide off his tongue, all smooth and easy like the truth. All Stan had was a messy handful of outright lies and half-truths he'd fed to various townsfolk over the years, which now needed to be woven together into something halfway convincing.

“Okay,” he started, then stopped. “Well. I – okay. So, I haven't told you this, but I used to have a sister.”

Toiba cocked her head. “Where'd she go?”

“Aha. Well, that's the thing, uh – she died.” The pale round face of the corpse he'd used as a stand-in for his own swam before his mind's eye, toothless mouth gaping open. “She was in a car crash and she died. But before that, uh – before that, she had you. So you do have a mom, or, uh, you used to have a mom, and your mom is – was – my sister, which makes me, uh, technically your uncle and not...not your dad.” The words fell like rocks off his tongue, clattering onto the table in front of him. It shouldn't have mattered, not when he was the one who'd raised her anyway, but telling her that felt like tearing out some vital part of himself.

Toiba frowned and lifted a hand to her mouth to chew her knuckles while she thought that over. Stan sat as still as he could, fingers tapping out his nervous energy on the table, wondering if he should try to say something else, wondering how much of it she could even understand. It was hard to remember what the world had felt like when he'd been a child. He could barely remember being her age.

“I have a mom,” she said slowly, around her fingers.

“ Had ,” he corrected her, gently. “She's dead now. That's – jeez, have we talked about that? That's like – when someone dies they stop working, you know? Like, uh – you know the animals we have in the Shack? They're dead, kind of like that.”

“Okay,” she said, and then, after a thoughtful pause, “Do you make stuff out of them?”

“Um,” Stan said. Probably he should have used a different example. “Out of people? You – I mean, I guess you can? That's kind of, uh -” she probably didn't know what a serial killer was, or need to, so he caught the phrase serial killer shit and swallowed it down and went cautiously on - “that's sort of a weird thing to do. Kind of wigs people out, usually. When people die, you usually just bury them.” A jar of teeth in a hole in the middle of the woods – he pushed the thought away.

“How come?”

“Because – I don't know, that's just what you do. So they can go back into the ground. It's, you know, it's like that whole – the cycle of decomposition thing you were just reading in your book about, you know?” He seized gladly on that explanation. Just lately she'd gotten into, of all things, mushrooms – fungi , he could hear her dryly correcting him, so much like Ford it hurt to hear – and had worked her way steadily through a variety of educational books. “You put 'em in the ground and they get all broken down and stuff eats 'em and grows out of 'em.”

Toiba nodded. She lowered her hand from her mouth to tap her curled fingers against her collarbone, eyes distant. “In the ground.”

“Yeah, that's – yep. And that's where your mom is.” He matched the tapping of his fingers on the table to the rhythm of hers against her own skin.

She changed the rhythm of her tapping, held it for a couple of repetitions when he matched it, then changed it again. A span of time passed like that, silent save for the drumming of his fingers on the table. Eventually, she said, “So I can't meet her.”

“Nope. Uh. Sorry.” How upset she could be about a mother she hadn't even realized she was supposed to have until just recently, he didn't know, but better safe than sorry.

“Oh. Okay.” She curled her hand into the crook of her neck, then raised it back up to her mouth to start chewing on again. Indistinctly, she said, “You're not my dad?”

Stan swallowed. “I – not – not technically. Not biologically speaking, no. But, I mean – I've raised you since you were just a couple months old.” He'd held her in his hands while she took the very first breath she'd ever taken. He'd grown her inside of himself. He wanted so badly to tell her, more than he'd ever wanted anything, but if he told her then she'd tell someone else and the whole flimsy house of cards he'd built would come tumbling down around them both. He had to be Stanford, and Stanford couldn't have borne a child. Stanford was raising his dead deadbeat sister's kid, and that was the story Toiba had to hear. “I'm your legal guardian. I can still be – I'm your dad in the ways it actually matters, even if I'm not the guy who got your mom pregnant.”

“Okay...” She didn't look like she entirely got it. Stan predicted a conversation about how pregnancy happened to occur shortly, which could not possibly be worse than the one he was currently having. “Can I meet him?”

“Your, uh, your d – your biological dad? Well, that's – that's kinda tricky.”

“Is he dead?”

“No -” as soon as he'd said it, the thought occurred that saying yes probably would have been easier, but he was committed, so he soldiered on - “well, I don't know, honestly. I don't know who he is. I never – uh, your mom never told me.”

Truth be told, he hadn't given it much thought. From time to time he'd wondered, of course, and as she'd grown up he'd taken note of the way she looked, the features that were and weren't his.

She had the Pines nose – not, he knew from his own experience, an easy burden for a little girl to bear, but like as not she'd grow into it – and, unfortunately, the Pines ears, and the Pines hair as well, thick and curly and an absolute menace to hairbrushes. She was ganglier than he could recall ever being, though, her limbs long and sharp and skinny, her hands broad to accommodate the extra finger but still spidery. Her face was pointed where his had been round at her age, and her mouth was a long thin slash. Her hair was inky black, darker than even his mother's had been, and her skin was the pale, delicate brown of old dry dust.

So he had some ideas who it might have been. Exactly when he'd gotten pregnant he couldn't say, but counting back from February gave him a rough idea, and he knew who he'd slept with in that timeframe. Who it had been for certain he'd likely never know, but he did know that she was better off without any of them in her life anyway.

Though his appetite had deserted him, Stan forced himself to keep eating. Toiba did not. She just frowned down at her plate, one knuckle in her mouth, and slowly touched the thumb of her other hand to each fingertip. Three times she did it, and then she said, “Why didn't I die?”

“Uh.” Stan put his fork down again. “I – I'm not sure what you're askin', hon.” Most of the time, figuring out what she was thinking was about as easy as reading his own mind. From time to time, though, she'd come out with something like that.

In the exact same cadence he'd used earlier, Toiba said, “She was in a car crash and she died.” She kept touching her thumb to her fingertips, faster with each repetition. “Why didn't I die?”

“Wh – oh! Oh, well, you – you weren't in the car with her. Uh. She, well – we hadn't talked in a long time, me and your mom. She -” his mind whirred along, trying to remember what he'd told who, what the timeline here was supposed to be, who might be able to contradict whatever he might say - “she called me up and said she needed help, and she came up here and gave you to me. Then she left. Then she, uh, you know. Car crash.”

“Gave you to me,” she echoed. “Why?”

“Because...” Because she was a good-for-nothing two-bit con artist living out of her car , a voice suggested in the back of his mind, the hateful one that always sounded either like his brother or his father. “She wasn't – she was havin' a pretty bad time, just, in her life. She wasn't in a good place to have a kid. But she wanted you to be with family, so she asked me to look after you. Probably,” he couldn't help adding, because he was supposed to be Stanford and it was something Stanford would say, “the best thing she coulda done for you.”

“Oh,” Toiba said. Then, after a moment, “Okay.”

Stan tried to keep eating, but his stomach rebelled nauseously against the idea. He picked his fork up, pushed his food around the plate like a sulky kid being told to eat his vegetables, then put it down. Fuck it, he thought. “You want ice cream?”

He piled their plates in the sink and took the entire box of ice cream, plus two spoons, out into the living room. He left it in Toiba's care and left, coming back with an armful of blankets to drape the two of them in. They spent the rest of the night watching Disney movies, Toiba in his lap, and thankfully she didn't ask any more questions.

Chapter Text

It took eight years for it to all go completely wrong.

It was a still, warm night right on the cusp between June and July. Stan had eaten a rushed dinner and then spent most of the evening in his office, catching up on inventory and bookkeeping – and book cooking too. He kept two sets, both as meticulous as could be, because he may not have been a particularly meticulous sort of person but he knew he couldn't afford to screw this up. Committing tax fraud took more effort than people thought.

One day, it would all be worth it.

He unfolded himself out from behind the office desk, creaking and groaning, well after the sun had gone down, and went to figure out where his daughter had gone to. The lights in the living room were on, the television turned to one of the three public access channels Gravity Falls could boast of, but the sound was off and there was no sign of Toiba. He called her name up the stairs, not particularly hopeful of hearing back. During the summer she stayed up nearly as late as he did, some nights, and wouldn't willingly put herself to bed before he insisted.

He considered that she might have gone out into the woods. She'd been doing that lately, slipping out of the house while he wasn't looking and coming back long after she was supposed to, scraped and bruised and filthy. They'd had a handful of ugly fights about it already this summer. Whenever he asked what she was thinking, why she'd stayed out when she knew she wasn't supposed to – why she had to break that one rule, when he had so few of them, when he let her do whatever she wanted most of the rest of the time – she would just sullenly shrug and say she didn't know.

He found her, instead, in the gift shop. She was stretched up on the very tips of her toes, punching a sequence into the vending machine numberpad that looked very much like an attempt at the access code, and nothing at all like an attempt to sneak a late-night snack.

Stan crossed the room in three huge strides and grabbed her around the middle, swinging her around. “ What do you think you're doing?”

He tried to keep the worry out of his voice, but he couldn't. How did she even know about the door? He'd put the vending machine in when she was two, and he'd stopped taking her downstairs with him to work on the portal as soon as she could eat solid food and sleep for more than two hours at a time. She couldn't possibly remember that.

The only explanation was that she'd seen him going down there. Of course, he'd tried to be careful, to only do it once he knew she was asleep – but she was a nosy, sneaky little kid, a real chip off the old block in that respect. With perfect clarity he could imagine her getting up one night, padding silently into his room and finding it empty, poking through the house to find him, maybe finding the vending machine ajar or just seeing the light spilling from behind it, or actually seeing him disappear behind it – of course she'd want to know what was back there. He'd been careless about it lately.

It was just that two weeks ago, it had been his birthday. He'd thought about Ford all day, and thinking about Ford always made him think about the portal, which started up the little voice in the back of his mind that keep count of every wasted second and weighed them all up against the likelihood that his brother was even still alive, and so he'd rushed through dinner and rushed Toiba into the bath and then out of it and into bed and went down into the basement to bash his head against the portal until he passed out at the console down there.

And that was how he'd spent the entire rest of the month. Before that, he couldn't even remember how long it'd been since he'd touched the portal. The tourist season was just so busy , and Toiba had school during the off season, and – well.

It wasn't that she was more important than Ford. It was just that she was – she was his kid. She needed him. Less and less as she grew up, true, but she still needed him. And maybe being around her eased up the desperate clutching loneliness some, and maybe he'd decided time and time again over the past eight years that he wouldn't take time away from her to give to the portal, but that didn't mean he wasn't still trying. He was sure Ford would understand.

Toiba wriggled out of his grasp and turned to look up at him, head cocked, eyes wide and dark. “What's down there? I wanna see!”

Well, if there was one thing Stan knew how to do right, it was lie. “There's nothing down there, ya little gremlin. It's just a vending machine, and you should be in bed.”

A grin slid across her face. “You're lying!”

“Hey, now, when have I ever lied to you, huh?” Stan crossed his arms and tried to ignore the way the hair was standing up on the back of his neck. Something about the fixed, unblinking way she looked at him was unsettling in a primal way, ridiculous as it felt to admit that, even to himself.

The grin widened. It was a thoroughly unpleasant expression, the kind he expected to see leering at him over the top of a weapon, not on the face of his little girl. “All the time, St – Daddy! I saw you open it up and go down there! Why can't I see?”

She still hadn't blinked. He couldn't remember her ever looking someone in the face for so long, and she never called him Daddy. He wanted to look away. For God's sake, he told himself, she's eight. He hardened his face and, in a warning tone, said, “Because it's your dad's private space, and there's nothing down there a kid needs to be getting into. Just a bunch of rusty old machines, alright?”

There was a split-second flash of something across her face, a twisting of her expression, gone too fast to process. The vague sense of unease filling him intensified. “Let me see! Maybe I can help you fix 'em!”

“Who said anything about fixing, huh? They're just old junk.” True enough, if eight years of tinkering had gotten him only barely further than the first few desperate weeks.

“Come ooon ,” she whined, and something in him snapped.

“ No ,” he barked, as much from annoyance as from the sourceless fear crawling under his skin. “You're not goin' down there, and if I see you messin' around over here again, I'm brickin' the whole thing up. Hell, shoulda probably done it years ago anyway.” She opened her mouth to say something, but he cut her off. “And no buts , except for yours in bed. Now! ”

She didn't move. She just stood there, staring at him, little fists clenched at her sides, still grinning that wide shark grin even though her eyes were flat and dull and angry above it. There was another flash, that same ugly alien expression coming over her face, there and gone almost too fast to see. “Okay,” she said, syrupy sweet, and went back into the house.

Stan followed her in and oversaw her getting into bed, then sat outside her door and waited to make sure she wasn't about to try to sneak out. Once he was satisfied she was actually asleep, he went back to his own room, though he left his door cracked open enough that he'd hear if she left her room.

For a long time, he didn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he just saw the way she'd been looking at him, that awful grin and those angry eyes that had no business on his child's face. The whole conversation kept running on a loop through his head, and the more he thought about it the more wrong it felt.

Maybe he would close the basement up. Even thinking that felt like a betrayal. How could he give up when Ford might still be alive somewhere out there?

But, then – he'd been trying for so long. He'd sunk eight years of blood, sweat, and tears into that damn machine. He'd crammed every book on engineering and physics he could get his hands on into his brain, until he could just about understand the ones on Ford's shelves, and what did he have to show for all that effort?

Not his brother back. Not any measurable progress. Thinking he could fix the portal Ford had built was probably the stupidest thing he'd ever done in a long life full of stupid choices.

Maybe if Stan had gone through, it would be different. But as it was, the wrong twin had been lost. Stan was no genius. Stan hadn't even graduated high school. For nearly a decade he'd hoped that sheer, stubborn perseverance might make up for everything else he lacked, but it was clearer and clearer that it wouldn't.

Finally, sometime near dawn, he dropped into a restless sleep.

He's in the forest although it's so dark he can't see the trees until they're right in front of him and he has to veer desperately around and between them and the branches are whipping by scratching at his face and arms and legs and his feet are bare and bloody and his chest is burning but he can't stop because he's being chased by something and he doesn't know what it is but he can feel it behind him -

- and he runs and he runs until finally his legs just give out underneath him and then he tries to crawl because it's going to catch up to him and he doesn't know what will happen when it does but he knows he's never been so scared in his life but he's pushed himself too far and he can't move and he can't breathe and it's here -

- and he turns over to see it and it's Toiba except where her face should be is just a single enormous yellow eye with a slit black pupil -

It seemed he had no sooner closed his eyes than his alarm went off, blaring him back into consciousness. Groaning, he rolled over and slapped at it until it stopped making noise. He gave himself a moment to lay in bed, then sat up, stretched, and stood.

Weariness weighed his eyelids down. He shuffled down the stairs and along the hallway to Toiba's room on autopilot, eyes barely open.

“Wakey-wakey!” he called, pushing her door open. “Get on up if you want breakfast!”

Recently, he'd come to give in to the fact that he needed to wear glasses. Not having done so for most of his life meant the habit wasn't well-engrained, though, so he usually forgot them in the morning. So he stood there in the doorway squinting at the rumpled bed for a good thirty seconds before he realized there wasn't a child in it.

Unease squirmed in his gut, vague and soft. She didn't usually get up before he did, but it had been known to happen. More likely was that she'd gotten out of bed in the middle of the night and gone somewhere – out to the car, maybe. It was a favorite place of hers to sulk after they'd had an argument.

His keys, though, were right on his nightstand, just where he'd last left them. He took them and went out to check anyway, squinting against the bright morning sun, grimacing at the way the wet ground squished under his bare feet.

She wasn't in the car. He checked the gift shop next, but the vending machine looked undisturbed, so he decided to try the rest of the house first. Living room – kitchen – attic, even though she was supposed to stay out of it – bathroom – the parlor he used mostly as storage – there were no signs of her in any of those rooms. He checked her bedroom again, peeking under the bed and into the attached bathroom just to make sure, but she still wasn't there.

Finally, he went to check the basement. He called her name down the stairs, but the only response was the echo of his own voice.

There was no way she could have known the elevator code. He punched it in anyway and stood, foot tapping impatiently at the ground, trying to quash his growing fear. That dream had just unsettled him, that was all, and he hadn't slept well – there was no need for panic. He'd find her and everything would be fine.

She wasn't in the basement either. He tore the room apart, pushing cabinets around and pulling open every panel that could possibly be opened, poking into every hidden nook and cranny. There wasn't a single sign of her down there.

The elevator ride back upstairs felt like it took twice as long as it should have. He ground his teeth together and told himself not to lose control, that they'd been through this before. She wasn't inside, okay – then she had to be outside . Probably he'd find her up a tree somewhere, safe and sound and completely unaware she'd worried him.

He didn't let himself think of all the other ways he could find her, out in the forest. She'd grown up in it. She knew how to keep herself safe.

He didn't even stop long enough to put on a pair of shoes before he barreled out of the giftshop door and down the steps. Right outside he stopped and put his cupped hands to his mouth. “Toiba! Kid, you better come back here! I don't see you in the next couple minutes, I'll -” whip your ass make you sorry give you something to hide from – he swallowed all those ugly words along with the fear that made them rise up into his throat - “ you don't want me to have to come find you, okay?”

There was no response, or at least no human response. Out in the woods a bird took off from its perch, rattling the branches of the tree, and jeered at him as it flew further away. Stan paced back and forth in front of the gift shop steps, squinting into the woods to see if he could spot her, trying to listen for something other than the pounding rush of his own pulse.

Eventually he accepted that she was likely deep enough in the woods not to hear him shouting from the yard. He racked his brain, trying to think of where she might go – there was that clearing of theirs, and the place with all the blackberry bushes, and -

Purely by chance, he looked down and saw the footprints. It had rained the night before, evidently, and the ground was soft enough the marks of her bare feet were still sunk into it. For just a second he hoped they'd lead to his car, even though he'd already checked, but they didn't. They led out into the woods.

He followed the trail, first at a walk, then at a jog, then – as the trail went deeper into the woods than he'd ever taken her, deeper than a barefoot little girl had any business going on her own – at an all-out run, slowing down only occasionally to make sure he was still going the right way.

She'd made no effort to cover her trail. Aside from the footprints, she'd left behind broken branches, kicked up drifts of needles, stripped the leaves off bushes. It looked like she'd been running. At more than one point there was a long divot, like she'd fallen and slid and gotten back up to keep going.

The longer he followed her trail, the greater his fear grew, sprouting like ivy up through his ribs and around his spine and into his throat, squeezing his chest so tight he could barely breathe. He followed it over two streams, up a hill he had to pause halfway to the top of for fear of passing out, and up into the rocky hills that turned into the cliffs which loomed over the town.

Once the ground turned hard and rocky he was sure he'd lose her. There were still footprints, though, rusty brown and blotchy. He tried to tell himself they were just mud, but after a point he had to admit they weren't. Hell, his own feet were battered enough, and he wasn't a little kid.

Her footprints wound a crooked path up along the cliffside, switching back on itself but climbing steadily higher. The air grew thinner and thinner as Stan followed, all the way up to the very top of the cliff. To get there he had to scramble up a tumble of broken rocks, handhold over handhold. His head swam and his guts twisted themselves into knots, and his palms were so slick with sweat he kept slipping, but he made himself do it. He had to. Just at eye height there had been a smeared rusty handprint, right where the trail of her footprints had ended.

He sliced his palms open on the sharp stone edges, and tore his left thumbnail halfway off scrabbling desperately at the rocks when a foothold collapsed beneath him. It was only six or seven vertical feet, not even wholly vertical at that, but it took a lifetime to climb up. When he finally heaved himself over the edge he just collapsed, breath wheezing out of him in jagged bursts while his heart hammered against the cage of his breastbone.

Finally, he'd caught his breath enough to push himself back to his feet. He cast around wildly for the next footprint.

The prints led right up to the edge of the cliff, then stopped.

Stan walked slowly to the very edge. He stood there, looking down. Below him was the lake, spread out all gleaming silver, and beyond it the town, looking like a child's playset. Boats dotted the lake, but this high up he couldn't hear anything. The wind kicked briefly up, pulling at his hair and clothes, and then died down.

Slowly, carefully, he sat down, legs dangling over the edge. Everything felt curiously far away, as if he were merely steering his body from a distance rather than inhabiting it. Even his thoughts came from a far place, behind a pane of glass perhaps.

For a time, he went away. His body stayed where it was, and his mind stayed in his body, but he forgot each minute as it passed. When he came back the sun was directly above him in the middle of the sky, beaming down hard and hot, and it seemed to him it had moved in the space between one blink and another.

A thought drifted across his mind like a wisp of cloud across the baked blue sky: Maybe she climbed down.

There was no way, of course. He only needed to look down to see that. The cliff face was steep and jagged, and at the bottom was a drop into the lake. She could climb and she could swim, but not that well.

He stared over the cliff, gripping onto the edge of it. Empty air stretched beneath his hanging feet, all the way down to the bright water. The inside of his body felt just as empty, like everything vital had been scooped out of him. He should have been afraid – or angry, or grief-stricken, or something – but all he felt was empty.

Another thought: Call the police.

They could canvas the woods, drag the lake. They would find her, if she was out there. At the very least he could have a body. Even that thought wasn't enough to make him feel anything. He dredged up an image of her corpse, tiny and bloated from time in the water, a soft fish-nibbled horror with no eyes or nose or tongue – it disappeared quick as a curl of smoke in the wind, and he felt nothing.

Another thought: Go home.

Hours had crawled past by the time that one came to him. The sun hung low in the sky, huge and orange, and some distant part of him was aware that he was hungry – and thirsty – and dirty – and that every part of him hurt. His limbs felt only loosely attached, though, as if by pins rather than muscles and tendons and joints, and he couldn't work out how to move them.

Another thought: Jump. Follow her.

Dusk crept across the sky, stars twinkling into view above him. It felt like a good idea.

He leaned out, hands clenched tight on the edge of the cliff, and stared down at the distant lake, just a shimmering suggestion in the gathering darkness. It might well be painless, not that he deserved such an easy out. If he went headfirst he'd break his neck when he hit the water, and if he managed to survive, well. What was easier than just sinking?

He'd been sinking all his life, sure he'd hit bottom eventually. Here it was.

Do it. Do it. Do it.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to let go. His fingers stayed stubbornly clamped onto the ground, though.

During his life, he'd been hurt more times and in more ways than he could remember – slapped and punched, pinched and pushed, beaten, shot, stabbed, burned – and he'd pushed through it all. He'd kept on going no matter what. There had been times he'd wanted to give up, when the pain had been so much he'd just wanted it to end, but his body had always overrode him.

And now it was doing it again. It wanted to live, not because he had anything to live for, but simply in the dumb desperate way of all animals.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the drop. His arms shook. He willed himself to let go, to pitch forward, but he couldn't.

An inarticulate noise tore out of his throat, a sob and a scream all in one. He threw himself backwards from the edge of the cliff and lay there, hands over his face. Violent shudders wracked his body, as if he were weeping, but his eyes stayed dry. Finally a feeling rose through him, something awful and unnameable to fill up all the empty space until he felt like he might burst.

It felt like every time he'd ever failed, every time he'd ever let someone down, every time he'd ever come up short. It felt like something a man could die of. He hoped he would.

He didn't sleep so much as eventually pass, blessedly, into unconsciousness. He dreamed of his brother, their disastrous last meeting, of Ford disappearing into the portal and screaming for him to help – and then, just as the portal closed, the dream looped back around to him pulling up in front of the cabin and played from there again, over and over all night.

He bolted upright sometime in the small hours of the morning, screaming his brother's name. His own voice echoed back to him. For one wild and disoriented – and blissful – moment, he didn't know where he was or why he was there. He looked around at the empty stretch of rocky cliff face, then up at the vault of the sky, full of cold bright pinpricks of light.

Then it all came flooding back. He fell back onto the ground and covered his face, and this time he did cry.

He wept like he hadn't since he was a child. Wailing and keening and choking on his own spit, he shook like he was going to come apart, face hot and twisted up so hard it hurt. Tears and snot and spit ran down his face, soaking him from cheeks to chin, running into his hair and down his neck. He beat his heels and head against the ground. He tore at his hair, at his clothes, clawed at his own face and arms until blood flowed. He sat up, threw himself back down hard enough to wind him, and then rolled over onto his side and curled up and screamed until his throat was too raw to make a sound.

The enormity of his pain overwhelmed him. It overflowed the bounds of his body, so that all he could think to do was hurt himself to try to get it out, to try to make it smaller. Had there been a shred of rational thought left in him, he would have thrown himself over the edge of the cliff without a second thought. His awareness didn't extend that far, though. All he knew was his own aching body and the endless well of sharp bewildered agony inside of it.

Eventually he exhausted himself. His body curled itself up and lay still, while he tried to breathe. The knowledge that Toiba was gone made him feel like he'd split open at any moment. It sat in his chest and bowed his ribs out and crushed his lungs and heart against his spine.

He didn't sleep again. He just laid there until the sun came up again, and then he climbed to his feet and went home. It took some hours at the slow, dragging pace he took, but there wasn't any reason to hurry anyway. Distantly, dully, he hoped he might get lost in the woods.

The house stood just as he'd left it. A stab of fury went through him at that. How disrespectful was it, that the house – and the forest, and the world, and everyone else in it – could be just the same as yesterday, as if nothing had happened? As quick as the feeling had come, though, it disappeared, and he was left with only his numb, exhausted grief.

Some stupid hopeful part of him was convinced that he'd walk through the door and she would be there, alive and well, angry with him for having been gone.

The house, of course, was empty. He shuffled through it to the bathroom, turned the shower on, and sat down in the tub. Some time later, he summoned up the strength to stand and strip his torn, filthy clothing off, and then sat back down. Knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped tight around them, he stayed there until the hot water ran out.

He turned it off and got out. He went into his room and got dressed, picking clothes at random off the floor. He went into the kitchen, sat at the table, and picked up the phone. He dialed 911, waited to be put through, and then tonelessly reported his daughter's disappearance.

Thirty minutes later, there was a pair of officers in his house. One of them inspected the place from top to bottom while the other sat with him in the kitchen and asked questions.

When had he last seen her? What had she been wearing? Was anything missing? Were there any signs that someone had broken in, or that a struggle had taken place? Could he describe her? Did he have a recent photograph? Did he know where she might have gone? Did he knew why she might have gone? Why hadn't he called when he'd first noticed she was missing? What had happened to his face and arms?

Midway through the grilling, it occurred to him that they thought he might have done it. He'd been interrogated as a suspect often enough to know how it felt. Briefly, it made him angry, but then the anger disappeared under the same thick fog covering everything else he felt, and he was just tired.

He answered their questions and handed over a photograph he'd taken just last week. Toiba stood on the counter in the gift shop, arms stretched out, bare toes curled around the edge of the counter, her hair spilling in dark curls over his shoulders and down her back, draped in one of his shirts. She looked like a bird about to take flight. Giving it to them felt, somehow, like giving her away.

Then they left, and the house was empty once more. He sat in the kitchen and listened to the ringing silence and wondered if this was what going crazy felt like.

No one would be able to blame him for it. People went crazy after they lost their kids all the time. And anyway, he was supposed to be Stanford, and Stanford had already been crazy. In fact, it would probably be suspicious if he didn't.

He wondered if he'd ever feel normal again. He didn't see how he could. He didn't think he wanted to. It seemed disloyal.

The next three days, he only moved from that spot in the kitchen to use the toilet. He ate nothing and drank his way steadily through the stash of booze he kept in one of the locked cabinets. When he slept – or passed out, rather – he did it with his head in his arms on the table, waiting for the phone.

It rang early on the third day. He was piss drunk, but he got in his car and headed down to the station anyway, hoping all the way that he'd roll the car into a ditch before he got there.

They'd found her in the lake. After nearly a week underwater, the thing they'd fished up had only barely been recognizable as human, but they'd been able to identify her from her dental records. Mercifully, they didn't make him look at the body.

None of them commented on the fact that he reeked of alcohol. One of the officers simply offered, gently but in a way that made it obvious saying no was not an option, to drive him home.

He drank himself to sleep that night. Then he drank himself awake in the morning and made the phone calls he needed to make. The funeral arrangements were easy enough – he didn't want a big service. He didn't want to have to see or speak to anyone.

Calling the school was harder. The principal expressed her condolences to him, her voice going soft and shocked, and he had to hang up before he started bawling. After that he'd picked up the phone and dialed in most of his Ma's number before he remembered he'd never told her about Toiba, and then he did start crying, the phone receiver laying out on the table beside him and blaring a dial tone.

When those tears dried, he called her friend Cathy's mother. That was even worse than the principal. She apologized, and got all choked up, and then said to call her if he needed anything, food or help or anything. She wanted to know when the funeral was.

He buried Toiba out in the woods, in that clearing they'd spent so many drowsy summer Saturdays in, and he didn't tell anyone else when or where. The headstone was a simple thing, a flat stone inscribed with her name and date of birth and death laid into the ground.

After the funeral, he went home and cleaned her room out. All of it went into the attic. Next he went around the house and took down every picture of her, every trace, every thing she'd ever painted or drawn or glued together, and put it all into the lockbox in his office.

Then he went downstairs and worked on the portal until he passed out. The next morning he went upstairs to piss and eat – cold canned soup, because he didn't have time for anything else – and went right back down.

It was stupid. It was pointless. It was impossible. It was all he had. There was no hope of turning that portal back on and getting his brother back, but that nonexistent hope was the only reason he had to keep living. It was the only mistake he could ever possibly fix.

Chapter Text

He opens his eyes and he's in the forest.

The trees tower above him, so high their crowns must breach the clouds. Every brush and shrub looms as big as a regularly-sized tree, heavy with fat round berries he knows will burst on his tongue, perfect and tart and juicy.

Golden sunlight pours down through the canopy. Motes of dust drift through the sunbeams like insects caught in amber. The air is warm and thick with the green smell of growing things, the wet dark undertone of good solid earth. It smells alive. It feels alive, buzzing and shifting and rustling around him, but with none of the menace he is used to from the forest, none of the unsettling feeling of being watched and weighed up.

He walks slowly and aimlessly, in no hurry to get anywhere. At some point he looks down and Toiba is there by his side. She doesn't look at him, but does take his hand, six spindly little fingers curled around his five. They walk together like that in silence, until eventually the trees part and they're in the clearing they'd once spent so much time in.

Impossibly bright little fish swim in the pool, flashing darts of color. Stan can see every single pebble in the bottom of it, clear as crystal. He sits beside it, and she sits next to him.

“I want to go back,” she says eventually.

“Back?” He looks over his shoulder towards the stretch of woods they'd just come from. An awareness is growing in him that this is a dream, or some other unreal sort of place, and that they can be anywhere they want with just a thought.

“ Back ,” she insists, fluttering her hands towards herself, up and down the length of her whole body. “Home. I want to go back.”

Her eyes are dark as midnight, twin holes in her narrow, pointed little face. If he meets them he will fall into them, so he looks at the space between her nose and the frustrated line of her mouth and says, “You can't, honey. You're dead.”

She doesn't understand. He has to explain it to her over and over again, that she's dead, that she's gone, that there's nothing for her to come back to except for a bloated horror rotting slowly in the ground, going back to the earth. She keeps insisting. She starts crying, eventually, and starts screaming, until she can't even speak and she's just making noise at him, yanking at her own hair and sounding like a dying thing.

He pulls her into his lap, and although she doesn't relax into him, she lets him hold her. She lets him rock her and whisper that he's sorry, he's so sorry, into her hair.

He woke up feeling like someone had dropped a stone into his chest where his heart was supposed to be.

Nightmares, he'd expected. He had nightmares, plenty of them. There were the old ones of being thrown out of his home, the assortment of terrifying moments he'd been through ever since, the ones of losing his brother; there were newer ones where it was Toiba who went through the portal, or where he went crashing through the woods chasing after her while the ground sliced his bare feet to ribbons and the brush tore at his arms and legs as if the forest itself were trying to keep him from her, but he managed to keep her in sight, just out of reach, all the way up to the cliff -

But mostly when he dreamed of her, it was the same dream. It was the forest, stuck in a perpetual summer afternoon more perfect than anything real could ever be, and Toiba walking beside him.

For a long time after she died, he had to explain that to her over and over again. She'd ask to come back, and then she'd insist that she wasn't dead, she was right there, and then she'd get too upset to speak and then he'd wake up feeling pummeled. Some nights he tried to ignore her, but he could never keep it up for long.

As painful as those dreams were, he preferred them to the nightmares. And although he had long since given up believing in any sort of god, he'd spent too long in Gravity Falls to discount the existence of the supernatural entirely, and a part of him hoped that maybe it meant that whatever part of her had been her – the fierce brightness behind her dark eyes, the stubborn will that had set her shoulders and her mouth so stiff, the quick darting glee that had made her hands flutter – was there, in that quiet sunlit forest, in the place she'd always loved best.

Twelve years later, he closed up shop and drove down to California to attend the birth of his nephew's children. He was fifty, hair more salt than pepper and face more wrinkled than smooth, but he'd never felt as old as he did sitting there in that room with his thirty year old baby brother, now a grandfather, and his baby brother's baby son.

Isaac was barely sixteen, Rebecca – a fiancee but not yet a wife, because these were modern times – only a year older, only as old as Stan had been when he'd been thrown out. He didn't want to think about that right then, but it was better than the other thing he was trying not to think about, so he let himself really marinate in that thought. It still hurt the way an old broken bone did, a deep ache that could be worked through but never quite ignored.

He managed to keep his composure right up until Isaac put the babies in his arms. They were such tiny little things, and Isaac was fussing trying to tell him how to hold him but his arms remembered the way to hold a newborn, their little downy heads cradled in his huge blunt hands. As he looked down their identical squashed red faces doubled in his vision, then quadrupled, then blurred beyond visibility. He held them close against his chest and ducked his head, trying to keep his breathing steady, trying not to think about her -

Eighteen years and he'd spent most of them shoving her into the back of his mind. He'd had to. Every year he spent most of February drunk and then he got on with his life, because he had his business and he had the portal and he had to do at least one thing right before he died.

Eighteen years since he'd looked at a picture of her, since he'd heard her voice. Try as he might, the dreams – not nightly but regular enough – kept her constantly in his mind, kept picking the scar open.

He could still remember the warm weight of her in his hands just after she'd been born, the slowly dawning understanding that she was real and alive and his that had pulled him up out of the pain and exhaustion, off his knees – he remembered with vivid clarity the hard porcelain bottom of the tub under his knees and the way the lip of it had dug into his palms and the little trail of red he'd dripped across the floor all the way into his brother's room, which had dried and stained by the time he'd thought to clean it up -

A hand settled on his shoulder. “Stanford?” came Shermie's voice from somewhere far away, outside his thoughts.

He drew in a deep shuddering breath. He couldn't tell them. That was the worst part, that none of them knew and he wouldn't ever be able to tell them. When he'd come in and seen Rebecca lying there bedraggled and sweaty and exhausted he'd felt an overwhelming urge to commiserate, the words crawling up his throat even while he pushed them back down because he couldn't .

“Sorry,” he croaked, and then, “'m fine. They're just so – they're perfect.” That was believable enough. People cried about babies. Maybe none of them had thought he was the sort to cry about babies, but he could handle them thinking he was soft about kids.

Neither of the twins had six fingers. That helped. So did teasing Shermie by arguing with him about how long he got to hold them. By the time they were ushered politely out by Isaac at Rebecca's quiet urging, he nearly had ahold of himself again.

He stopped in the doorway and took gentle hold of Isaac's arm. “Hey,” he said quietly. “You two let me know if you need anything, alright? Money or help or – just anything.”

“We will,” Isaac assured him. He didn't believe they would, really, but they couldn't know just how much he meant it. Still, he felt better having said it.

And then twelve years after that the kids stepped off of a bus and into his life and the moment he saw them was like a punch to the gut.

It was, at first, almost too much. They didn't look so much like her – they had their mother's nose, and they were softer and more round than she would have been, and pinker – but Mabel had the same mass of wild curls, and Dipper had the same way of quietly watching everything that happened, his eyes as impenetrable as a moonless midnight lake, and they were both full of such wild energy.

He tried to keep himself apart at first. He had already fallen irretrievably in love with them from the moment he first saw them as ugly wrinkled newborns, but he tried not to act like it.

It didn't work, of course.

He tried to lie to them. He tried to keep them safe, keep them from finding out there was anything to wonder about in the town or the forest. He tried to keep them busy and he tried to keep them away from all the weirdness that was life in Gravity Falls.

It didn't work, of course.

And then Dipper handed him the third and final journal, and the portal worked .

And then he almost lost both of the kids to it, almost lost his last chance at seeing his brother, almost lost everything. The image of Mabel, floating there in front of the thing that had taken Ford from him, so small, was burned into his mind, into his dreams.

Ford asked him about Toiba – the, uh, your child , as he put it, as charming as ever – later, when the children were upstairs. Stan told him, short and brusque, and Ford apologized awkwardly and then told him he'd be leaving at the end of the summer, and Stan couldn't help but wonder, later that night, if maybe he should have just taken his daughter and left his brother's house to rot in the woods. If maybe she wouldn't still be alive if he had.

Weeks later, he found out what had actually happened to her.

Ford put a spell around the house by gluing unicorn hair to it and told him what it was for, presumably so that he wouldn't accidentally break it. That led to an explanation of the creature known as Bill Cipher.

Ford showed him an image of the thing, and explained that it could possess people, that it had taken over Dipper earlier this summer – and Stan's heart lurched in his chest to hear that, and through his mind flashed a series of images, an empty bed and a trail of footprints and a lonely cliff above the water – and how to tell if someone was possessed.

Stan looked at the picture, and he remembered the little things Toiba had always drawn, the yellow triangles in every picture and the knots like eyes on the trees. He remembered the way her eyes had looked the last time he'd ever seen her. The way she'd grinned, the way she'd seemed so unlike herself, like something ancient and terrible wearing the skin of a child.

He didn't tell any of that to Ford. He just grunted, and nodded, and finished up the day in the Shack. That night, after the kids were in bed, he locked himself in his room and got drunker than he had in years, until the room spun and his head spun and he wasn't ashamed of the tears spilling down his cheeks.

The next morning he was more hungover than he'd been in years, too, but also lighter. All those years and he'd never really known, could only suspect what might have driven her to run out of the house and throw herself off a cliff, could only wonder what he might have possibly done wrong. It left a bitter taste in his mouth, to know she'd been murdered – by a thing that had tried to do the same to his nephew, that had gone rifling around in his brain, that had driven his brother into the miserable paranoia he'd witnessed those thirty years ago – but having a place to put the blame was better than having to just hold it all himself.

And then at the end of the summer, he got to face the thing that had killed her, and he got to watch it understand that it was about to die, just before he punched it right in its face. As the flames drew in tighter around him, as the rest of his mind fell to ashes, he was satisfied that at least he'd been able to protect these children. At least his family would finally be safe.