Chapter Text
Mabel leaves to go back to her own time on August 10th, 1975.
On June 4th, 1976 the Mystery Shack has its grand opening. There are three key differences between this Mystery Shack and the canon one, aside from the earlier opening.
One: Stan was able to use the money from his and Mabel’s crazy road trip and the unicorn treasure as start-up capital, so he has a good collection of exhibits right from the get-go.
Two: though the place is still very much inspired by Stan’s natural theatrical flair and has the feel of a tourist trap, all the exhibits are 100% factual. Mostly. This is due to a couple of factors. With Ford not getting swallowed up by a mysterious portal, Stan no longer blames the supernatural for his brother’s disappearance and is therefore far last hostile toward it. Ford’s presence also means Stan has to deal with Ford getting prickly whenever he thinks the Mystery Shack is verging into mocking the supernatural. Ford doesn’t try to tell Stan how to run his business, but as real or fake doesn’t make a huge difference to Stan, it’s easier to do the real stuff and not upset his brother. Luckily, Stan has a couple advantages over Dipper preventing a repeat of the gremloblin fiasco. Stan doesn’t actually care if people believe the exhibits are real or not, so long as they’re willing to pay to see them, and he doesn’t keep live specimens of highly dangerous creatures. In fact he doesn’t keep live specimens at all anymore, not after the fairies got too annoying and the gnomes kept breaking out of their cages. He sticks to replicas and pictures.
Three: the Mystery Shack isn’t located in Ford’s house, at least not to start. Stan rents out a commercial building in town.
For a while, things go pretty well. Stan and Ford live together in Ford’s house. Ford has his research, which he happily shares with Stan, who uses it for inspiration for the Mystery Shack. Occasionally Ford will ask for Stan’s help with some project or other, or Stan will drag Ford into town to interact with other human beings for a change.
By 1980, Ford is getting frustrated with his lack of progress toward the Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness. Stan tries pointing out that a person’s life’s work should theoretically take their whole life, and Ford’s only in his 20’s, but it doesn’t help. Ford gets increasingly frustrated, and finally decides to recite an incantation he found in an old cave. Enter Bill.
Bill’s smart enough to realize that Stan isn’t going to buy into the whole “benevolent muse” shtick, so he tells Ford that part of the whole muse deal is that no one else but Ford can know about him. Ford’s a little suspicious of this, but he decides to go with it at first on the grounds that he can always tell someone else later, but he can’t untell them if he tells them now. Eventually Bill earns his trust, and Ford keeps his silence about Bill out of respect for his wishes. Stan can sense his brother is keeping something from him, but Ford brushes it off as nothing, so Stan tries to brush it off too.
Circa July 1981, Bill gives Ford the idea for the portal, Ford calls Fiddleford up, and Fiddleford arrives in Gravity Falls. Stan and Fiddleford become friends, and we get a little Mystery Trio for a while.
As work on the portal continues, Fiddleford gets more and more spooked about the whole thing, which triggers Stan’s earlier concerns about Ford keeping something from him. Ford continues to deny all allegations and insists on keeping up work on the portal. Tensions rise.
January 18th, 1982 Ford and Fiddleford perform the first test of the portal. Fiddleford falls in briefly, then panics and quits the project. Stan is home at the time – the Mystery Shack is closed Monday-Thursday in the off-season – and Fiddleford runs into him on his way out. He gives Stan some vague, very disturbing warnings and leaves. Stan goes down to the basement to confront his brother, but Ford continues to refuse to say anything about Bill and insists that everything is fine and Ford can handle everything by himself if he has to. Stan leaves.
Ford confronts Bill, and Bill reveals the truth about the portal and that he’d been tricking Ford all along. He torments Ford, and Ford sinks deep into desperation and paranoia, all the while futilely trying to convince himself that Stan will be back any day now. Meanwhile, Stan has been living in the Mystery Shack, futilely trying to convince himself that Ford will be coming after him any day now. They are both idiots.
Some time passes and eventually Ford comes into town to get coffee and runs into Stan at the diner. He begs Stan to come home, and Stan agrees. Unfortunately for Ford, right before he arrived Stan had been talking to a sympathetic stranger who had really riled Stan’s ire up about Ford not trusting him, so while Stan has agreed to go home with Ford, he’s still on edge. The stranger was, of course, an undercover time cop.
When Ford leads Stan down to the basement, Stan is hopeful that Ford’s finally going to tell Stan what’s been going on. Instead Ford leaves it at the portal is actually very dangerous – something Stan had already figured out – and asks Stan to take Journal 1 somewhere very far away. Stan snaps. He screams at Ford for trying to make him leave when clearly Ford is in trouble, and why can’t Ford just trust him. Ford snaps back that he doesn’t understand why Stan would be so upset at Ford asking him to leave, since he had already abandoned Ford. A fight ensues, a scuffle breaks out, Stan gets burned, and Ford falls through the portal.
Stan spends three days trying to fix the portal. Finally he gets the idea to go into town to get Fiddleford’s help. He manages to find Fiddleford and explains the situation, but Fiddleford refuses to help. He’s certain that if it’s been three days since Ford fell through, then Ford is already dead and opening the portal now would only spell disaster. They fight about it. Fiddleford continues to refuse to help, though he concedes that he won’t actively try to stop Stan, and doesn’t entirely blame Stan for wanting to try.
Stan goes to the police and reports Ford missing. He says that he woke up two days ago and Ford was gone, leaving no indication of where he went. Stan claims that at first he assumed Ford had go on some kind of research expedition in the woods, but all the camping gear is still at the house, so if that were the case then Ford should have returned by now. There are search parties, but obviously nothing turns up.
Stan continues to live in Ford’s house, which nobody questions because he’s been living there for years. In fact, most people aren’t even aware that Ford is the sole owner of the property. Stan also gives up his lease and relocates the Mystery Shack to Ford’s house. Some people do raise some eyebrows over that, but the general assumption is that without his brother helping to pay the bills, Stan can’t afford to upkeep the house and rent the commercial space. This is partially true, but only because Stan is funneling so much money into fixing the portal. The other reason he moves the Mystery Shack is because he doesn’t like being away all day every work day – he wants to be close so he can keep an eye on the portal.
Stan and Fiddleford remain friends, despite getting into a fight about the portal pretty much every time they see each other. Because of this, Stan notices when Fiddleford’s condition begins to deteriorate. Finally, after Fiddleford breaks his arm hitting yet another car in town, Stan confronts him and Fiddleford confesses to the whole memory gun thing. Stan helps him kick the habit and Fiddleford is left in a position where he’s not totally all there, but he can still mostly take care of himself.
The Society of the Blind Eye is not pleased by Fiddleford’s sudden disavowal of memory erasure, and they erase themselves from his memory. Stan notices that Fiddleford has gotten worse again. At first he thinks that Fiddleford must have had a back-up gun after they broke his original and has started to erase this own memory again, but he follows the trail back and eventually discovers the Society. He breaks their gun too and threatens them if they ever go near Fiddleford again.
Fiddleford does okay after that, especially as Stan looks in on him on a regular basis, though Fiddleford refuses to go anywhere near the shack. Eventually when Tate grows up he moves to Gravity Falls and Fiddleford moves in with him. Between Stan’s support and bullying, Tate never abandons his dad, and helps take care of him.
Five years after Ford “goes missing” Filbrick tries to get him legally declared dead so that he can sell all Ford’s stuff and at least get a little money off of his “disappointment of a son” that way. However, it is illegal to declare someone dead in Gravity Falls without a body or credible witness to their death, and it has been ever since a time cop planted a bug in Quentin Trembley’s ear right before Trembley squirreled himself away and encased his body in peanut brittle in an attempt to make himself immortal. As such, all of Ford’s stuff remains in his name, and Stan continues to look after it for him.
After that things are mostly according to canon until the twins show up. More on that later, possibly.