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Stan doesn’t expect the pig to become a companion on his quest to get the portal working again, but when was the last time he’s expected any of the things to happen in his life anyways?
It starts when he’s scanning the third journal, because he knows Dipper will get nosy if he holds on to it for more than a day or two. He hears a noise right next to him, and for a moment he’s afraid one of the kids got up early and finally caught him after all this time, but it’s just Waddles. He can’t decide if the pig is looking at him innocently, or disapprovingly.
“You didn’t see nothing! Got it?”
Waddles oinks again, and now Stan’s sure of it — the pig’s giving him a disapproving stare. This isn’t the innocent, oblivious look of when he was about to be eaten by a pterodactyl, but something more self-aware, more accusatory.
But either way, it once again makes Stan feel guiltier than he’d like to admit, just like in that abandoned mine.
“Oh, quit glaring at me like I’m committing a felony or something!”
He knows he’s just being paranoid — it must run in the family even stronger than he thought — and that Waddles can’t tell anyone what he’s up to. But that doesn’t make the guilt go away.
“I know I’m lying to the kids, but I can’t explain it to them yet!” he tells the pig. “Not when there’s still so much left to fix! If the secret gets out, it could ruin everything!”
It’s not the worst excuse he’s ever come up with, not by a long shot, but he knows in his heart that it isn’t the real reason. He’s not really worried about getting caught, and now he’s not worried about how long it’ll take to get the portal fully charged and ready, either — with all three journals, the rest of the work will pass in the blink of an eye compared to the past thirty years.
No, he’s worried about how the kids will react to the truth. He doesn’t want to tell them how his brother ended up in the portal in the first place, doesn’t want to admit that he’s been lying to them all summer about everything from the supernatural to his own name.
He doesn’t want to explain about the radioactive waste he’s probably going to have to steal for fuel, doesn’t want to tell them how much danger he’s putting the entire world in — all to save a brother, true, but a brother that wouldn’t need saving if it wasn’t for him.
But he doesn’t say any of that to Waddles, doesn’t even admit a lot of that to himself on most days. He’s found in his long, long life as a con man that it’s easier to lie if you’re consistent about it — you want to hide the truth from someone? Hide it from everyone — even yourself. If the lie is all you let yourself think, you’ll never let the truth slip out.
Stan finishes copying the journal, and goes to check if the kids are awake yet — not a single sound is coming from the attic, but he knows to check the kitchen too. He could have avoided a lot of close calls if he’d learned that lesson earlier in the summer.
As he makes his rounds, Waddles follows him.
Of course, he’ll have to tell the kids eventually, before the portal activates. But he can put it off for a while yet, convince himself that it’s a secret best kept until the last minute. He has at least a week, probably closer to two, before he has to own up to all his lies and mistakes.
“Tell you what, pig,” he mutters, “I gotta hide these copies, so while I’m at it I’ll show you the lab. That’s what you want from me, right? To see all the cool shit down there?”
It’s probably a horrible idea, because who knows how destruction Waddles could cause in the basement, but Stan feels like he owes the pig something.
He doesn’t, of course, but he’s desperate to get rid of the guilt weighing down on him, and coming clean to the kids isn’t an option yet. So he’ll just do a little practice run with the pig.
Waddles turns out to be surprisingly well behaved on the elevator ride down. When he trots out into the lab, Stan can’t help but be relieved to share the space with a living being for the first time in thirty years. It’s as if a bit of the burden has been taken off of him — which is stupid, because what can a pig do to help save Ford from whatever hellscape he’s trapped in? — but Stan has to admit it’s a welcome feeling.
***
“Dipper? Mabel?” Stan calls as he re-enters the gift shop, the repairs to the Shack mostly completed. “Soos? Wendy?”
There’s no response except for an oink from Waddles. Weird, but he’s not going to let this time go to waste. “C’mon, pig, let’s hit the lab.”
Waddles follows him happily, and Stan wonders what Mabel could be doing that she didn’t want to have her pig around for. “Hope those kids haven’t joined a gang or anything.”
Entering the basement, he’s hit with the scent of dirt and oil, but compared to the lingering zombie musk that’s permeated the ground floor and won’t go away, the familiar dirty basement smell is welcome for once. He sets to work double-checking his calculations from last night, and finds himself reading them out loud.
He honestly can’t remember if he ever did that when he was alone, but he doesn’t feel like stopping.
He sighs when he notices a note on the page about the fuel gauge: “If it does not make me famous, the power bills will bankrupt me.”
Of course. Leave it to Ford to find a way to go broke even with all his grant money. Stan briefly wonders if there’s a way to hook up the Shack to someone else’s power lines, rack up charges on their electricity bill instead. Those stuck-up Northwests aren’t too far away, and he’s taught himself a decent amount of electrical engineering over the years…
He’s about to get up and take a look at the fuel tank itself when the pig jumps into his lap.
“Quit it, Waddles, I’m trying to save my twin from another dimension here!”
But he can’t stay mad. Maybe he’d pretend to if the kids were around, but when it’s just him and Waddles… well, it’s getting harder and harder to deny that the portal work feels easier when the pig’s here.
When he goes upstairs to get a screwdriver, he comes back down with a second chair for Waddles, plus some snacks for both of them. The work is definitely easier when he has someone to voice his ideas and frustrations to, even if that someone doesn’t give much feedback besides… well, normal pig noises.
“Yeesh, Sixer wrote down so much useless crap here.What does anyone trying to operate this thing care about how much better he thinks he is than NASA?”
Waddles squeals, as if equally annoyed by Ford’s journaling habits.
“Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness? Ugh. At least I know where Dipper gets it from — that whole obsession about proving that the supernatural’s real.”
The pig snorts in agreement.
“Can’t believe he called the government back. But I’m not gonna let them catch me, not after I’ve kept it all together for this long.”
A solemn oink.
“Just you wait and see, pig. Soon, I’m gonna get this puppy up and running at full power again, and not even those agents are gonna stop me.”
***
It’s taken him thirty years. It’s taken him three decades, about a hundred math and physics textbooks, about a thousand cups of coffee, and too many hours of lost sleep to even think about counting. It’s taken him half his life.
And apparently all that isn’t even worth a thank you.
Just a punch in the face, and a demand to get out of the house he’s come to think of as his own.
(Maybe… that’s what Stan deserves.)
No, it isn’t. It can’t be. He’s made mistakes, he knows that, but he has to have suffered enough for them already. He has to have felt enough guilt, enough desperation, enough uncertainty and fear.
(But could his own personal hell of the past thirty years really compare to whatever Ford had been going through on the other side of the portal? And either way, hadn’t Stan brought it all upon himself with that push? That shove that should have been half a lifetime behind him, but was still haunting his nightmares?)
He rubs his eyes with his sheet before he has a chance to tear up.
He’s just two intrusive thoughts into the night, and already, he’s out of energy to argue against them. Gone is the fiery anger of earlier in the day — because he could never stay constantly angry at Ford for too long, no matter what his brother had done — replaced by the cold, dark, confusing void of shock, of not understanding how things ended up like this and not wanting to see where they’d go next.
Will Ford really kick me out? I can’t make a living in this town without the Shack. Where will I go? Back to living out of the Stanmobile?
And then he asks himself possibly the most difficult question of all: How will I explain all that to Soos?
Before Ford’s return, he’d been fueled by an angry, stubborn determination that drove him to find an answer no matter how intimidating, how undefeatable the problem staring him down was. But now, he’s burnt out, all his energy expended on the quest to save a brother who apparently hadn’t wanted to be saved.
It isn’t until something bumps against the door and he chokes out the words “What do you want?!” that he realizes he’s crying. It’s painfully obvious in his voice, but there’s no response from outside his room.
Shit, now the kids are going to worry about me…
Slowly, he forces himself to get up, to go tell whoever’s waiting outside that he’s not as upset as he sounds. But when he opens the door, it’s just Waddles lying there.
Stan bends down to pick him up, but Waddles licks his face. It’s slimy, and nasty, and completely welcomed, because it gives Stan an excuse for his cheeks to be wet.
“Cut it out,” he grunts, but he’s not serious. When he gets up and walks to the living room, he’s happy to see that Waddles follows him.
He puts a tape of recorded Ducktective reruns in the VCR, and when he sits down in his chair, Waddles jumps up into his lap.
He pats the pig on his head, and they both stare at the ridiculous crime drama playing out on the TV. Just two episodes in, and Stan’s starting to drift off, the argument with Ford the furthest thing from his mind.
Mabel doesn’t comment when she finds him hugging Waddles in his sleep the next morning, but he just knows that there’s photographic evidence hidden somewhere as blackmail material.
He makes no attempt to find and destroy it, though, because he really doesn’t mind too much.
***
He remembers opening his eyes and being met with bright light, blurry images and a faint headache, and before that, he remembers a vague sensation of falling.
But prior to falling, there’s nothing.
He has no clue why the little girl with the shooting star sweater has to be pulled away from him, calling him a name that doesn’t sound familiar. No clue why the older man with six fingers calls him a hero and hugs him for so long that he starts to feel tears soak through his jacket and dampen his shoulder.
He has no clue where they’re leading him now, no clue why the older man insists they switch clothes, why putting on a suit instead of a trench coat might help him feel “more like himself again.”
As they walk, he starts to feel less dizzy, but no less confused.
They’re joined by a chubby, younger man, who won’t even look at him directly for more than a second. They reach a cabin in shambles, and a pig trots up to them.
He’s not sure why there’s a pig, or why it’s the only one that doesn’t look upset.
He does think that he’d be happy to have all these people around if they weren’t so sad about… something. About this “Stanley” person, who he may or may not have been at some point before forgetting everything.
So as they lead him into the house, he smiles to them, tries to crack some jokes, let them know that really, he’s fine, just a little confused, and that they don’t need to worry about him, don’t need to cry.
But it backfires, because the younger man cries more, and the girl jumps into his chair with him, flipping through a scrapbook full of pictures of a man that looks just like the older one who hugged him, but has the normal number of fingers and wears a fez on his head. Apparently that’s Stan. Apparently, that used to be him.
Suddenly, without any sort of warning, there’s a pig in his lap.
That alone, he might have tolerated — it’s happened enough times before — but then it licks his face, and Stan’s pissed, because he wants to remember, if only to cheer these people up, and how’s he supposed to concentrate on doing that when there’s a pig slobbering all over him?
“Quit it, Waddles, I’m trying to remember my life story!”
The words are habit at this point, and they come to him without thought — but with them, they drag up more habits, more names he’s spoken hundreds if not thousands of times.
He realizes how crookedly the fez is sitting on his head and fixes it, he tells Soos not to try and give himself a raise, he puts Waddles back down in his lap and pats him on the head, just like he’s done on plenty of rough days before.
He looks at Mabel’s scrapbook again, and finds that while his memories are still blurry, there isn’t a single picture that doesn’t seem at least vaguely familiar.
His companions — no, his family starts to laugh at Mabel’s description of the summer, and after a moment of hesitation, he starts to laugh with them. He still has no clue what happened to him, why he lost all his memories, or what Ford meant when he said Stan saved the world — probably exaggerating a little — but Stan’s fine with not remembering everything just yet. He can feel things coming back little by little, and now that his family can tell that he’s going to be alright, that they’re going to get their Grunkle back, he doesn’t feel the need to rush things.
In his lap, Waddles looks pretty pleased with himself.