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It doesn’t all come back at once, but he’s fine with that. They trickle and they taper, but they come back, with time.
He would’ve made the most of the last sunset if he’d known what was to follow. He would’ve savored the evening air had he known it’d be poisoned an hour later, with smoke and ash, with the gut-wrenching feeling that there was more he could’ve done to prevent this.
He would’ve paid closer attention to his niece and her fears, had he known that the end of her world meant the end of theirs too.
But it is what it is — and what it is isn’t terrible. He’s a couple memories short of who he’s supposed to be, but this town is alive. His brother, his kids are alive. It’s hardly a sacrifice compared to what this all could’ve been, and even then, they say there’s a way to fix this.
There’s a lot to remember.
But the more he tries, the less he recalls.
His name is Stanley Pines, and maybe only that.
There’s a lot more missing than he realizes.
They stick to the basics. New Jersey-native. A twin. For a moment, he thinks they’re doing him a lousy job just to humor him, but no, “nineteen-sixty-something” really is all he’s ever spoken about his age. It already clues him into who he used to be.
He’s old, but his brother is older. Fifteen minutes to be exact, but apparently he’s fought for fourteen and forty eight seconds on more than one occasion.
His brother Stanford is a genius — and with twelve doctorates, that’s an understatement. He changed history. He birthed contraptions beyond this world’s understanding.
He’s made mistakes, but they all have.
Ford’s lived a thousand lifetimes through the portal he’s somehow built himself, yet his twin insists that it’s him who’s lived thousands more. He’s gone through aliases as quickly as he’s gone through motels, and for some reason, that amounts to more in Ford’s eyes than it does in his.
You grow up a little faster on the streets, he supposes.
His calloused hands remember a lot of things that his brain can’t — wads of cash and match sticks. Bullet casings and tourniquets. Early adulthood is a blurred mess of crimes he can’t put names or dates to, but the remnant sensations they’ve left behind are the only evidence that they happened at all.
If this is all he remembers of those years, so be it.
In between sections, Ford leaves him a speck of their childhood to help jog his memory further. And it does, briefly — golden rays of a beach from their youth. Sand that took hours just to beat free from their clothes. It’s all as nostalgic as it is melancholy, because with every warm sensation that returns to him, it’s undermined by two more absences of something else he feels like he should be remembering.
Were they important? To him, to someone else?
They’re thorny, whatever they are — a little sharper than the shards of glass that jabbed their feet, and maybe even a little deeper than the cuts they left behind. He’s exhausting every corner of his mind just to search, to find something, but he just can’t.
“There’s…a little more to it than that,” Ford interjects at some point, flipping to an arbitrary page of the scrapbook in his lap, “—but there are more pressing matters right now.”
He doesn’t question it, but he doesn’t forget.
He remembers the kids as the rays of light that they are, the kind that rivaled even the most summery of their days with him.
It’s ironically their first day in town that comes back to him the quickest, the clearest. In three months’ time, they’ve made a handful of memories together, but apparently first impressions never fade.
He can still remember it like it was yesterday.
Waiting in late afternoon, the last breath of spring changing into summer. He’d leaned against the outside wall of the station, watching with a raised eyebrow at the sight of the two kids unloading from the bus.
He gets a read on them from looks alone: one carrying a backpack three sizes too big for him, the other…well his eyes burned just trying to make her out through the blinding rays of all those sequins on her sweater.
They’re small things, the both of them. He mistakes them for younger than they actually are, and maybe as someone else’s kids entirely. But their eyes are brown like his, hair brownish with a tint of red, like his used to be. They share noses and cheekbones, and there’s something vaguely comforting about knowing there’s more that binds them than just a surname.
Everything that comes to him, comes rose-tinted and complete.
Mabel is as sweet as she is loud, but she only fills his ears with kind reassurances and kinder sentiments. It’s in his hour of need that it becomes all too apparent. With her scrapbook in hand, she stations herself at his side in the chair, talking long into the night until her voice is hoarse.
She’s a lifeline to his old self if a physical manifestation were to ever exist, and she clings to that like it’s her own lifeline to moving on from this.
She livens his shell of a being with promises and treasured times when everything else was too eerily quiet. She’s something else.
Dipper is his own brand of pleasant, but it’s through sarcasm and a snark that reminds him too much of himself. Charming like his sister, but a touch more rebellious. Stan’s starting to remember him, too — they’d butt heads and their personalities clashed, but it was only ever that.
When his sister’s voice starts to run dry, he takes the initiative of prying the scrapbook from her hands and into his, clearing his throat to recite his own memories of the summer. Where Mabel’s was a fervent rambling without structure, his stories take on a tone of their own. Somewhat softer, more organized, but just as sincere. Just as desperate.
He’s as quiet as he is thoughtful when everything else was too loud. He’s something else, too.
They’re good kids, the both of them. Full of love. Full of laughter, full of life—
—and mere seconds away from being ripped from this world forever.
“Grunkle Stan?”
Something unhinges in him, and all at once, he remembers.
Bill’s game of roulette comes darting from out of the shadows, and in a sea of foggy recollections, it comes like a sucker punch. If it could ever hurt more than in the moment, it’s right now as an afterthought without the adrenaline to numb the panic.
He stood there. He watched. He held his tongue for the tantalizing moment to put an end to this, fully knowing how close the world sat on the brink of extinction. Because losing the kids is only a breath short of dying himself.
Having it be their lives flash through his eyes may be the only testament he ever needs of that.
When the distant echo of “you” rattles him, it rattles everything else free. A moment of re-lived terror is all it takes for everything to flood out, memories so deeply embedded in his bones that it feels like finding himself again.
Fishing. Diners. Mini-golf. Karaoke and laser tag, linking hours to days to weeks.
The silhouette of a monster’s fingers ready to snap is the only one that could break him right in two.
For the snippets of less-than-perfect that do return, they don’t leave him feeling hollow the way his gaps do. They’ve had disagreements, and perhaps even more misunderstandings, but they don’t leave marks the way his empty spaces are starting to.
If there are truly ugly moments they shared, he doesn’t remember them. He doesn’t care to, either.
He doesn’t want them any other way.
He remembers the apocalypse as some dream within a dream, but perhaps the darkest he’s ever had the misfortune of living.
It comes in perfect clarity when everything else doesn’t — and maybe he should be angry about that. An empty vessel looking to feel whole again, and the only things to fill it with are pain and terror he wishes had stayed lost.
He remembers being in the Shack, brandishing a sash he felt less than deserving of, but armed with a determination to prove himself otherwise. The haziest of all his recollections, Stan digs and he digs, for details, for dialogue, and what he unearths is only the first of things better left forgotten.
Without any of it documented in Mabel’s pages, three days return — and pass — in a blink.
How he wishes he’d had this luxury in the thick of it.
Bruises come easy. Guilt comes easier. For all the years he’s ransacked just to survive on his own, it’s a hollow thrill this time, looting familiar areas just for the bare essentials. But it gives him reason to press on — because there are people to take care of even if they aren’t the kids. Every soul he saved was another chance at closure. Someone had to know something about where they were and how to get to them.
And when they didn’t, the paranoia festered.
In a house full of refugees, Stan remembers the oppressive emptiness of the attic most.
He remembers it better than anything.
On a whim, he paid their room a visit one late night, his hand hovering (trembling) above the door’s handle for longer than it should. There was a pair of twin beds behind it that pricked at his heart, messy sheets awaiting two sleepy bodies that haven’t come home yet. It takes everything just to keep his mind from wandering in directions he’s barred it from going. The if’s. The why’s.
It leaves him fragile in a way that Stanley Pines simply isn’t, because giving reason meant giving up. And his kids are still out there.
Missing.
Hurt.
Dead.
He hasn’t lit a smoke in years, but Dipper and Mabel’s disappearance is the closest he ever comes to a relapse.
But at the end of their hell, he finds them. Of course he does. He finds them in a twist of irony — in that they’re the ones finding him, bursting through the front door with a battle cry he reflexively echoes right back to them. Splintered wood and weapons blazing are the only way they take back the house, and really, he shouldn’t have expected them any other way.
His nightmare ends with a hug long, long overdue, and the resolve to never let go of them ever again.
He remembers Bill Cipher the only way he should: as a million fragments that won’t hurt his family ever again.
When Stan’s fist collides with him, he breaks more than just his grasp on all of them. In one fell swoop, it shatters the looming doubt of his own worth. For too long, the weight of failure had its own grasp on him. An inner voice that’s followed him for decades, a constant reminder of who was really in control — not anymore. He’s done it, and like so much of his life, he’s done it alone.
Because if he were ever good for something, it’s just his luck that no one else is here to witness it.
But the dying scream of the name he’s reclaimed as his own is enough.
As he’s consumed by the fires of his head, Stan reaches for a dusty photograph of a family he won’t remember. Inching in, the embers lick at the smile on his face, but they don’t burn. They can’t. He was already a ghost of himself the minute he offered up his hand.
When the flames overtake him, it breaks more than just the curse that’s taken this family captive.
Bill Cipher is nothing but a whisper between the trees.
And in more ways than one, he isn’t the only demon they’ve buried out in the forest.
He’s starting to remember life the way he wants to.
Peacefully.
It’s some ungodly hour when their boat rocks him awake. Enough to rouse him from his bunk, but somehow not Ford. His twin’s fixation with the ocean drags him deeper into sleep these days, but for once, he isn’t awake out of fear. It’s a hopeful change of pace. They’re all still fighting a few battles when they close their eyes, but Ford doesn’t sleep with a frown on his face anymore.
Sighing, Stan sits up, back popping as he stands to make his way out onto the deck — it’s as much a telling sign of his age as it is a gracious reminder of it.
A lot’s happened, and he’s old.
But not old enough to forget. Never again.
Breathing in salty air, Stan peers out into the horizon.
Morning paints the ocean with navies and sherbets. It’s becoming a welcome sight, soothing palettes that have stayed the same, greeting them each day without fail. It looks like a color scheme taken clean out of one of Mabel’s pages, and in the same thought, he thinks a view like this one would make for a nice picture to send in their next letter to Piedmont.
They’ve still got a while before they hit shore again. He enjoys the waves, but misses the balance of his feet on land sometimes.
He moves to rest his arms against the handrails, letting his mind wander free.
And sighs.
It’s in these quiet moments on the water that the empty spaces within him feel a little more prominent than they should be. They share a lot, him and the ocean. Stormy nights that come out of nowhere. Desolate calms that make everything else feel trivial. It’s been months since that living room recliner with a scrapbook in his lap, and yet his ocean still has pockets that need explaining.
But crevices…shouldn’t make the difference. They shouldn’t.
Surely if there are memories that haven’t come back by now, then maybe they were never destined to.
“Infinite dimensions exist beyond our own, Stanley,” Ford had said to him one night, looking up to the stars. “Timestreams, parallel universes — however you choose to look at them — are never formed by accident.”
If he closes his eyes, he still can feel the lukewarm coffee mug in his hand. It’s true when they say all your other senses heighten when you lose one — he just didn’t expect memory to be part of the equation.
“If you’re existing in this dimension right now, missing what may, there might be reason for it.”
His hand curls a little tighter around the ship’s railing.
Is what’s missing…all that important, then? Is it so life changing, even more than a complete memory wipe? He feels it all the time now. There’s a gnawing instinct compartmentalized to the back of his head, creeping up in moments where it doesn’t belong. For all the progress they’ve made, it takes more than just willpower to convince himself that the fragments still missing aren’t crucial.
Ford reasons with him, the fate of living this timeline, however screwed up it could ever feel. It’s comforting. It almost gives him the courage to give breath to the questions that have lied dormant at the bottom of his chest all this time.
Even then, he has the inkling that some are better left unspoken.
“Sixer, what was Pa like?”
In some universe of some world that isn’t theirs, he never forgot.
They’ve still got time. Months later, and still, new pieces are returning to him every day. Some are too miniscule to matter, but still, they’re crumbs of an existence that was his.
Maybe they’ll come back...Maybe they won’t. If he’s to take Ford’s theories to any meaning, it’s that this slate was always bound to be wiped clean. Maybe there are some things that were always doomed to a past life, another’s conscience. Another’s ocean, another’s story.
Stan doesn’t know.
But the sun’s starting to rise over the water. There’s a new day waiting. The world around him is still turning, with light and sound that almost wasn’t. A million and one small messages from the universe, they serve to remind him that there’s more to life than dwelling on what’s been lost.
And if there are better things to cherish, he’ll find them.