Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s the first Yom Kippur since Ford went through the portal, and Stan’s grief spirals.

-

He doesn’t even notice until an hour before sundown, when Rabbi Vole shows up at his door to ask him, personally, if he’ll be joining them the next day. She stands in the doorway of Ford’s house, and Stan realizes that she has asked Ford this question every year since he arrived, and that Ford has always answered no.

He’s getting better at seeing the ripples of Ford’s presence in the sleepy little town, working out how to act just enough like him not to arouse suspicion, but now he’s frozen. Does he turn her away, yet again? He hasn’t been to a service, much less one on a high holy day, in years. Not since he was a teenager. Not since—

He shuts the door in her face and locks it. Yom Kippur is for forgiveness, and what Stan has done cannot be forgiven, not yet. Not until he’s figured out this fucking portal. If g-d wants him to rest, He can show him where the other journals are. If not, there are more important things than the day of atonement, than the new year. Time should not be moving forward. Not since…

He thinks all these things and pushes back the vending machine he had installed over the door to the basement and makes his way down into the dark, where the broken remnants of Ford’s horrific device stare back at him like a dead eye. He would drink. He should drink. Instead, he labors on one third of a schematic. There’s nothing else for him to do.

-

Stan is pretty sure fasting doesn’t count if you’re not doing it on purpose, if you’re not eating because you can’t get out of bed because this bedroom is Ford’s, not his. It’s full of his books: journals (not the journals, of course, never those, it’s not like Stan hasn’t already ripped this house to pieces hunting, convinced that somewhere he’ll find the other parts, despite Ford’s insistence that he hid them away), and science fiction pulps and textbooks and Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons rulebooks and it’s like sharing a bedroom when they were children, again, except Ford is gone and Stan is here , alone, looking at, of all things, a pair of gloves custom-made for a six-fingered hand.

He'd missed Ford from the moment he left home, always not-quite sending him letters, postcards, gleaning his news from Shermie. How Ford had even found him, Stan doesn’t know, but maybe he should have stayed gone. If he’d just kept his head on straight and not freaked out at Ford, like he always does, then Ford would be here , and Stan would be—

Stan would be somewhere. It doesn’t matter.

-

He can hear the shofar from the Shack. Goyish tourists have been passing through, but for once he keeps the house completely locked.

“I guess that means it’s sundown,” he tells no one. He could make himself something to eat, but he doesn’t move from where he’s seated in Ford’s weird office, pouring over the journal again like it’ll reveal something new. Maybe he’ll try ultraviolet light, next, or one of the dozens of other weirdly labeled flashlights in a neat row under the sink.

This is the early days, where he hasn’t made half the first floor a storefront, and he cannot bring himself to let others into Ford’s— his —home. Not when his head is full of memories of being dragged along by their parents to temple, of sneaking sweets back and forth when neither of them totally got what the whole fasting thing was about.

If he can just figure out why everything in this place is a fucking triangle, then maybe that’ll get him somewhere.

-

He’s surprised to see Susan, knocking at his front door about an hour after sunset. She doesn’t seem to have quite remembered that it was Stan who’d shocked her eyes blue, and he can’t bring himself to tell her. It fits with Ford’s eccentric inventor image, probably, but returning the interest she’s shown in him just feels wrong . That’s one of those things that would feel a bit too much like he’s taking his brother’s corpse along for a ride.

“Hey,” he says, not slamming the door in her face despite his best wishes. She has diner food with her in a Tupperware. He’s already slammed a door on a rabbi on Yom Kippur, tossing Susan out would feel like kicking a puppy on top of screaming in the face of a child.

“Rabbi Vole sent me,” she says. “She’s worried about you, Stanford.”

It’s only years of carnival hucksterism that keeps Stan from flinching at the wrong name. Instead he plasters on a smile and says, “Whaaat? I’m fine, just not one for public worship, is all. Tell her I’ve been fasting and I did my prayers—I think I even remembered all the right words.” He falls into patter, easily, hoping it doesn’t sound as hollow as it feels to say.

“We heard about your brother,” Susan says. Her sympathetic expression is made a little odd by the wonky eye, but it’s fine. It takes Stan a beat too long to realize she’s talking about the death he faked to make stepping into Ford’s life just a little bit more plausible. “She says opening up the Shack is a good first step, but that she understands if you don’t want to go out on the town much, yet.”

Rabbi Vole is so much more understanding than old Rebbe Kohen back in Jersey, may his memory be a blessing. In Stan’s memories, which are admittedly biased by him having been much younger, the man had been both impossibly ancient and as tall as an oak, always on the verge of perpetual disappointment with the newest crop of young Jews for one reason or another. That would have hurt less than this unending understanding, Stan thinks. Stan’s done a lot of disappointing things, most of them in the last eight months.

“Thank you,” Stan finally grits out. “It’s been… hard.” He takes the Tupperware out of Susan’s hands. Better this than having to cook for himself in a kitchen with a freezer with a dead squid-squirrel thing in it, one of Ford’s experiments he wrote down in one of the journals Stan does not have.

“You’re always welcome at the diner,” Susan says. “Bye, Stanford.”

She shuts the door. Stan stares at the unpainted wood and opens the lid of the Tupperware.

Pancakes with blueberries in them. Those had been Ford’s favorite. They are Stan’s favorite.

He goes to the kitchen and does not cry.

Chapter Text

Sukkot was never a big deal in the Pines family, so it passes by almost completely unnoticed.

Stan thinks of setting up a Sukkot but doing so right next to the Mystery Shack feels even crasser than renaming his brother’s house. Instead he admits to Rabbi Vole that he has not done this in a long time and endures her continued sympathy and understanding as he murmurs something about having to get back to the Shack post-haste, it’s not like tourists are going to milk themselves of money.

-

Being money-grubbing and heartless is much easier than thinking about how much money Stanford must have spent in the decade and change they didn’t see each other, given how far in the red all his accounts are. Unlike Ford, Stan has no marketable skills whatsoever, which is why the hucksterism.

The eyepatch is part of all that.

The Fez is the closest Stan can wear to a yarmulke without the constant fear that he’s going to get glassed in a bar or worse.

Yes, Outer Gravity Falls is a majority Jewish neighborhood of a plurality non-Christian town, but the founding family, the Northwests, and their cadre of summertime elite are part of that kind of dour Christianity that worships money and success, and there are habits you pick up that are hard to shake after a lifetime of keeping the faith half in secret.

It’s one of the oddest hats he’s warn over the years, but not the oddest. It makes him look the part of Mr. Mystery, and it keeps his head covered, and for him, right now, that’s a win-win.

-

It’s nice to celebrate something with no real memories of Ford attached, even if doing it feels like a betrayal.  

-

Hannukah when it arrives fucks Stan right up. He puts up a chanukiah he found in Ford’s office in his bedroom window, the part of his house that he hasn’t turned into an engine for parting stupid tourists from their money, and thinks about Shermie, in those brief moments where their lives overlapped, ranting about how it was just a way of giving Jews a capitalistic equivalent to Christmas, but it had been the highlight of otherwise chilly, dark winters, an excuse for them to see the parts of their family that weren’t constantly fighting with each other.

In his memories, those the only eight days a year that are perfect.

-

He's been selling spooky Christmas bullshit in the gift shop since November, because the moment something is red and green, or has a tree on it, or any of the other hundred little signifiers of the season, it’s worth about a hundred bucks more in peoples’ minds. It’s like the worst kind of magic.

There’s a young couple he vaguely recognizes from around town hanging out just shy of the register right now, doing that thing customers do when the Shack is empty where they orbit the floor, checking out goods they’ve already looked at, never quite paying for their goods or heading out the door.

He’s startled out of his daze when the girl grins at him and asks, “Chag sameach, do you have anything that isn’t covered in Christmas crap? I need a gift for my mother on short notice.”

The guy looks like he’s about to say something awful. Stan glares at him preemptively.

“What’s your mother like, sweetheart?” Stan asks. The eyepatch, the hat, the… the grief, honestly, they’ve all aged him. He can get away with that kind of thing now, even though he’s barely pushing forty, an old man no one has any reason to take seriously, or fear. Good.

“Odd,” the woman admits. “Likes soap operas, good food. Her brothers run Hermanos Brothers.”

Stan avoids Hermanos Brothers like the plague, not because he hates Mexican food—he adores it, along with all the other kinds of cuisine he’s picked up in his travels—but because a restaurant called Brothers Brothers is a stab in the gut he does not need right now.

“I have this novelty… Grampton St. Rumpterfrabble? Did I say that right? Mug. Look at his face. You can only hate that face.” He’s seen him in things he’s hurriedly changed the channel away from, though he has no idea how old any of them are supposed to be.

“Oh, perfect!” the lady says. “She loves the Boring Old Black-and-White TV Show Channel and it’s three affiliates, she’ll be thrilled. Thank you.”

They’re locals, so he charges them a reasonable price, and does not contemplate hitting the woman’s husband over the head with a shovel. He has no idea what their relationship is like, and does not want to intrude, but he’d been the source of most the weird delay and she’d kept looking at him, like she was worried how he’d react to whatever she was saying.

-

Susan comes over with latkes and once again Stan has no idea what he’s done to deserve any kindness at all.

“Stanford!” she greets. The wound has started to scab over. He’s used to going by aliases. This is just another alias. He’s fine.

“Lazy Suzan!” The nickname wasn’t his idea, it almost seems like she came up with it herself. “Come in, come in, I have a gift for you somewhere.” There’re only a few people in town he recognizes enough to think of buying gifts for, and she’s one of them. He still hasn’t gone to temple—probably won’t, if he’s honest with himself, not until his work is finished—but he likes talking to people. Likes that Vole, Susan, and the rest of them seem to get that.

Vole knows he’s atoning for something; she just doesn’t know what . No one would believe Stan if he told them, and, more importantly, they might try to take the portal away from him. Stan can never let that happen, and so he’s as mysterious as his half-serious public moniker.

He lets Susan inside and she finds out that he hasn’t lit the first candle yet, and that somehow turns into him hunting around for a lighter.

“I don’t remember the tune that well,” he warns, and she snorts.

“You’ll be fine,” she says. “That’s the kind of thing that never leaves.”

She’s right.

“Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, asher kid'shanu b-mitzvotav, v-tzivanu l'hadlik ner shel Hanukkah.” It’s the first day, so there aren’t enough candles for him to worry about burning himself as he replaces the shamash in the center, but he still lets wax drip onto his fingers.

They stand in the half light, watching the candles flicker.

“You have a nice voice,” she says. “I can come back tomorrow, if you want.”

He should tell her to get lost. Every kindness makes the masquerade more difficult, makes the eventual payoff where Ford comes back and Stanley high tails it out of Gravity Falls all the more painful.

Instead, he nods, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “I’d like that.”

She visits every night, sometimes with food, sometimes with gifts from other members of the congregation. Stan doesn’t quite feel like a charity case.

That week, for the first time in a while, Stan keeps the Shack closed on a Saturday. It’s not something he’ll do often, he thinks, but he can always do with a moment of quiet.

Chapter Text

It’s Toby Determined who comes to the Shack to invite Stan to the Purim spiel.

“Rabbi Vole wants you to witness her solo,” the weedy, somewhat off-putting twenty-something says with accompanying jazz-hands. “It’s superhero themed this year.”

Purim spiels are an excuse to get very drunk, and if Stan is drunk, that means he doesn’t have to think about his emotions.

“Cool,” Stan says, and puts on his jacket and shuts the shack down for the day. “Does she need help setting up?”

“Yes,” Toby says. “Have you been to Temple Shtaim V’Chatzi?”

“Nope,” Stan says. “Spent the last ten years as a recluse, spent the last few months grieving my brother.” Spent the last ten years in and out of prison, more like, but Toby doesn’t need to know that. “Sort of practice on my own time.”

Toby nods. “I’ll give you a ride.” The people of Gravity Falls are so odd they don’t even question anyone else’s oddity. It’s like a forcefield of mutual secret keeping.

Toby drives a VW Beatle with one of the dogs from Dogs painted on the side, and it smells uncomfortably of cat litter. Stan knows he helps with musical productions at the temple. Stan has seen none of those, because any day he takes off from the Shack is lost money and any nights he takes off from working on the portal is another day Ford spends trapped in the nightmare dimension between dimensions.

Every scrap of research Stan does just confirms more and more that he’s doomed his brother. Notes from an old lab partner of Ford’s give a brief description of a hellish, uncategorizable world between worlds that does not follow any conventional rules of physics or causality. Ford could be dead. This could all be worthless.

They arrive at Shtaim V’Chatzi and Stan lets nostalgia drag him back thirty years. Ford’s engineering skills had turned some of their Purim spiels into veritable temporary animatronic showcases, rigging various evil characters with booming voices.

“Welcome!” Susan is there with fabric in her arms. Alma Ramirez Shapiro is there with cookies and drinks, her daughter and her daughter’s husband hanging around awkwardly.

“You gave me the silly mug!” Mrs. Shapiro says, pulling Stan into a surprisingly tight hug, given their height difference. They’re actually around the same age, but she’s bearing the years much better than Stan. “Thank you, it was very stupid.”

“You’re welcome,” Stan says, awkwardly. This is not the moment to realize that he’s frantically touch-starved, but he realizes he has not been shown any physical affection in years. It’s fine, though, he doesn’t need anything like that. He just needs to get so drunk tonight that everything he does, everything he is , becomes a haze of alcohol and forgetfulness.

The rabbis command drinking so much you forget the difference between Mordechai and Haman, the Esther’s great ally and the evil advisor. Stan is going to drink until he forgets the difference between Ford and himself.

Stan’s also glad they’re doing this separate from the religious service. He still does not want to be anywhere near the divine, not when he’s such a colossal fuck up. It’s not like the guilt some of his cellmates would express back in Columbia—Heaven has never been something Stan’s thought much about, except in that he was forced to go to a majority Christian public high school—but the sense that he isn’t clean enough. He needs to wipe the dirt off his shoes before he can go to Temple, and there is a lot of dirt caked into the souls. 

These kinds of spiels are rehearsed, Stan knows, so he is confident he won’t be asked to perform. To his relief—and not disappointment—there is no last-minute delay that forces him to don a costume—Esther’s Wonder Woman get-up, perhaps—and heroically fill in for another cast member. Instead, he is given a grogger.

“You know what to do with this?” Rabbi Vole asks. From here, it’s not even that condescending. Both he and the man he’s pretending to be have not been to temple in years, and there are always details that slip away after a long absence.

“Course,” Stan says. “My brother’s and my favorite part used to be making noise.” For once he’s not lying, talking about himself while pretending to have Ford’s point of view on events. Ford might have been the quiet, nerdy type, but he was also an absolute monster and could boo and hiss with the best of them.

Mordechai is played by one of the cops, the short one of the tall and skinny pair of rookies that are married to each other. Stan has been surprised to discover that there are two cops he can stand, but that’s because they are dumb as bricks and seem to view being cops as an excuse to hang out and try to keep kids from doing anything particularly stupid. The other cops also hate them. He’s dressed as Superman.

“Superman’s clearly Jewish,” Stan abruptly remembers Ford saying. “It’s a metaphor.”

Neither of them had said what the metaphor was, exactly. They knew well enough and speaking it out loud would mean thinking about why they don’t have grandparents.

“What’s a metaphor?” Stan had asked, because the only way he ever learned any words at all was from Ford.

“One thing standing in for another,” Ford had said.

Superman Mordechai doesn’t quite make sense—Mordechai isn’t all powerful, and he really isn’t the most important character, Esther is—but it’s fun, and fits with making her Wonder Woman.

The night starts and being in a crowd of drunk yidden reminds Stan that is no longer in his twenties, but also makes him feel more alive than he has since Ford went through the portal. Booing and hissing at Haman is easier than looking at himself and what he has done, and for once he is with people, surrounded by warmth and community and the idea that there is somewhere he could be .

He wakes up with one hell of a hangover. He dimly remembers being helped home by the Hermanos brothers, one of whom had not been drinking due to a medical condition. He remembers the purimspiel slowly falling apart as the performers also drank, the children being shuttled home to their beds before things got too rowdy.

Guilt crashes through him. He should have been working on the portal.

Despite the pain in his head, he chokes down a glass of water and shuffles down into the basement. He’ll need to stay out of town for a bit to make up for lost time.

This is fine.

Chapter Text

Stan disappears from the non-tourist community, Jewish and otherwise, for exactly a month and then he realizes that the Rabbi will not leave him alone on Passover of all days at about the same moment that she knocks on his door.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” she says, gently chastising him.  

Stan shrugs it off. “Mortgage, busy, y’know.” She wouldn’t, she can’t , that’s the whole problem, but he’s Mr. Mystery, he behaves mysteriously.

“We’re having a seder at the Temple.” For people who don’t have anyone, Stan reads into her words. You are of course welcome.”

Stan hesitates. He’s hit a wall—he’s going to have to purchase some very weird material to repair the portal, the surge that took Ford and branded his shoulder ripped the whole catastrophe to shreds—and he wants to stay by the portal, but standing around brooding isn’t going to bring Ford home any faster. 

“Okay,” he says. He doesn’t not thank her for reaching out, month after month, holiday after holiday. He hopes that she understands how grateful he is anyway.

-

The seder itself is the same as it always is–the orange, however, is new–and when it’s all done he realizes it’s now time to socialize. 

He sighs. 

“This is stupid,” he continues, and stands up, animated by a weird energy he can’t keep inside his body. “I don’t deserve to be here.” He’s only had the normal amount of wine, but it’s still too much.

He can see Rabbi Vole flip into crisis mode but he doesn’t care. He needs to be out , now. He’s left the machine for too long. 

He’s just the same disappointment he’s always been, fucking around when he should be doing something worthwhile with his life ever. Before he came to Gravity Falls, when he felt like this he’d go out and pick a fight, let his shit get wrecked until he was a bleeding heap, but he likes the people here and so can’t bring himself to do that. 

He’s at the door before he can say anything stupid, but then the Rabbi is there, with the same insistent compassion in her eyes. 

“I killed the first-born son,” he says, because pesach means the stories are swimming in his head. He can’t quite remember if it’s true, if Ford was the one who came out first, but it feels right. Ford was everything good about the Pines family, and Stan destroyed that with one stupid mistake.

“Stanford,” Rabbi Vole says, and well, fuck, that’s Stanford’s cue to start crying like a shitty little baby. “You did not kill your brother, he died in a car accident, remember?” 

“He was coming here to see me,” Stan says, which is just close enough to the truth that it feels like an even bigger lie. “Stanley and I we… we…” and then it all comes pouring out, or at least the carefully edited version does. How guilty he feels, how if they’d never gotten back in contact his brother would still be alive, how their parents are dead and Shermie’s elsewhere and he’s alone and it’s all his fault. 

“Stanley made his own choices,” she says. “You must make your own choices. It is right to grieve, but you do not need to atone by hurting yourself. Please understand that.”

Stan rubs at his face. “I’ve ruined Passover,” he says, a little stupidly. She should be with the rest of the group, not babying him. 

She shakes her head. “How observant was your family?”

He shrugs. 

“Let me guess–you had a few big High Holy Days, and occasionally your mother would bless the children on Fridays, and other than that not much?” 

He nods, amazed that this woman ten years younger than him gets what he’s talking about so well. 

“No wonder you’re a mess of emotions.” She pats him on the shoulder. “If you need to go home, go home, but you are always welcome and never a burden. Remember that.”

The funny thing is, he believes her.

He drives home to the shack and settles down on his recliner, not quite bothering to turn on his television. 

The first-born son comparison made sense in the moment, but thinking about it more, he is not g-d.

If anything, he is Cain. He should have been his brother’s keeper, but instead he is doomed to live forever with the knowledge of what he has done. 

He huffs. It’s a better comparison than he initially thought, if you replace Hashem with perpetually disappointed parents, the sacrifices with the twins’ relative accomplishments. 

It falls apart when he remembers their parents are dead. They’d realize immediately he isn’t Ford–the five fingers on each of Stanley’s hands give it away if nothing else will–but that’s the joke, isn’t it, there’s no one left to know the difference between the Pines twins because the only one left is the normal, boring one. 

He misses Ford so much it’s like pneumonia, the guilt crushing the breath out of his lungs.

Still, if he withers away from grief that doesn’t bring Ford back. He might be cursed to wander the earth with the memory of what he’s done, but unlike Cain, he can bring Abel back, set things right. 

He opens the journal. He’s already lost too much time waiting to find the other pieces, and Ford’s filled these things with other information that is cool, probably, but doesn’t matter , not when the only thing that matters is getting Ford home. 

-

Stan thinks about minyans, about kiddush, about sitting shiva, about ritualized mourning that he thinks about but cannot access because that would require leaving his house, talking to people, being honest. The only person he can be honest with is himself, and maybe g-d, if there even is a g-d to listen, but to try and do anything else would be lying. 

Everyone would think he’s mourning Stanley, after all, not Stanford, not the golden child he sent into hell in a fit of pique. 

Slowly teaching himself interdimensional quantum theory was not how he expected to atone for every sin he has ever committed against his family, but here he is. He has no choice.

Rabbi Vole is wrong, Stan is a bad person. But she has given him the strength to do this one good thing, even if it takes him thirty years.