Chapter Text
Ford awoke in his darkened study, alone. The notes he’d scribbled out earlier in his frustrated late night exasperation stuck to his face. They were getting nowhere fast.
Fidds must have gone home by now, Ford thought.The house was quiet, except for creaking beams and pine needles brushing against the windows in the wind.
Fidds had draped a blanket over Ford’s sleeping frame and it fell to the ground when he sat upright. His assistant was far too good to him.
“You’re awake.” Said a woman’s voice. It was the small hours of the morning. He wasn’t expecting anyone else to be there. Dr Stanford Pines jumped a mile and squawked in surprise.
“Whossat? Mi-Michelle is that you?” Michelle McGucket had only dared to visit her husband's place of work once before and Stanford was so not looking forward to a repeat of that incident.
“Breathe, Stanford it’s just me.” The speaker appeared out of thin air; a demure looking young woman with dark hair and eyes. In dated 1940s clothing: tarnished black heels, stockings and a full-skirted cornflower blue day dress.
Everything about her, her face, her clothes her accent. It was all gratingly familiar. A soft whispering familiar like a half-remembered face from a dream.
He knew what that wispy, insubstantial feeling meant.
“I know you. You’re not real. You’re a hallucination.”
The woman was inspecting her long painted blue fingernails, completely unfazed.
“Correct." She said. "Well, regarding the hallucination part anyway, reality is relative and I take umbrage at the implication that mine is any less valid than yours.”
“Do you have a name?” He asked because well he at least had some semblance of good manners. “Why are you here?”
“You tell me, smart guy. I’m only what you make of me.” She sat down on the stool Fiddleford had bought in that afternoon, to reach the top of the bookshelves.
She crossed her legs so that her heels clicked together and smoothed down her petticoats, her armed folded stern across her chest. Ford observed this with a tired detachment.
“Is this some kind of awkward Freudian nonsense, because I so do not have time to be parsing the usual embarrassments my subconscious dishes out.”
“I'm not some kind of fantasy woman if that's what you’re asking”, and she laughed to herself, she had a harsh laugh, very nasal, very familiar. “What would even be the point? Remember what happened with the Sirens?
He felt his cheeks turn crimson, if there had been any doubt this woman was a hallucination that had cemented it.
“Stanford please. If your subconscious wanted me to be alluring I'd no doubt appear as some rare cryptid, maybe a keeper of ancient lore-“
She paused to pick up the graduation photo on his desk, in it, younger Ford stood beaming with his arm around Fidds’ shoulder and his undergraduate diploma in his fist. He was elated, staring at the other man with a stupid soppy look on his face.
Ford’s heart skipped a beat every time he looked at it. He was so stupid, so embarrassingly obvious.
Now his own subconscious was going to roast him for being so damned pathetic.
The woman’s lips curled up like runner vine and she gave him a smug sidelong glance. Ford groaned aloud.
“-Or maybe I'd appear as something closer to home.” she added with a wink.
“Not funny.” said Ford, his voice cold, his cheeks glowing radioactive. She set the photo down, smirking.
Well then, as a figment of your imagination, I ask you to at least respect that I know how you work”.
“Glad to know someone understands how I feel.” He smiled dryly, glasses hanging sideways down his face from where he’d been sleeping, he pushed them back up his nose.
“Even if I am just talking to old photos in an empty house”
The hallucination beamed, face lighting up like white phosphorous. “You recognise me.”
Stanford nodded. “I don't know how I didn't notice it before.”he said.
“Where am I from Stanford? Who am I?
Ford sighed, disparaging himself for not getting it earlier. “You're my mother. From an engagement photo of my parents that hung on the landing of the house I grew up in.”
He could see the photo in his mind’s eye, above the second to last step on the second story.
His father, dark haired without his signature shades, his arm around the waist of the woman who sat in front of Ford.
“Am I your mother? Tell me then: what's my name?” She was staring, unblinking at him with keen dark eyes.
Ford shrugged, made even more uncomfortable by her stare that wasn’t quite human.
“My mother’s name is Opal, but that's not the answer you want is it? He said.
“I’m not your mother Stanford, I’m a projection, and you don’t have to give me her name if it makes you uncomfortable.
Everything in his journals needed a name for documentation reasons. It was getting to the point where unlabelled things made him upset, she needed a name.
He looked around the study for inspiration but there instead were a lot of old books, cobwebs and a clock reminding him it was 2:27am.
“What about June?” He pointed out the calendar hung on the wall to her, he didn’t know why.
She had no awareness of her own. Politeness he reassured himself, he didn’t believe June was really happening, did he?
She ducked her head in a polite little curtsey. “I'll take whatever I can get, thank you.”
Ford stretched, cracking his knuckles. “What do you want from me, June?
The woman laughed. “I just want you to look after yourself Ford. Drink some water, take your medication and get some sleep now. That's all.
He quirked an eyebrow, disbelieving. “Oh joy of joys, has my self-care really got so shoddy my own brain has to generate someone new just to get me to sleep more?”
“Maybe? I honestly don’t know. I’m a Cartesian response, Stanford. Plato’s flickering reflections on the cave walls. Or the brain in a vat if you like that argument better.” June’s voice didn’t belong to his mother, he noted.Her clipped consonants and rounded vowels were far too British in annunciation, likely borrowed from someone else Stanford had met.
Not even his hallucinations were composed of original thought. “I’m a simulation, you see?”
“I see, and I’m fine thank you. I don’t discuss methodological scepticism with hallucinations.”
“Well it’s hardly my fault you cut yourself off from the one person whose entire existence was to keep you safe from harm.”
“Don’t.” He wanted the word to sound powerful and angry, but it came out as more of a whimper. ”Don’t go there, don’t even look at him. I know you’re from my mind but, he’s off limits.”
The woman harrumphed to herself, picking at her nails. “Just go to bed, sixer.”
“Don’t call me that.” Ford hissed, through thin lips.
“Oh I’m sorry, what would you prefer? Poindexter? Freak? Four-eyes? Nerd? Ley’s little shadow?”
“Stop it. Stop it right now. I- I command you”
“You don’t command jack shit, Fordy.” She laughed again haughty and nasal, the laugh that she’d stolen from his mother.
“You don’t even have command over yourself, I mean really now?”
she shook her neatly-coiffed 40’s pompadour with a berry-lipped smirk and waved a hand to his reflection in the window.
“Look in the mirror, kid. If you go another day without shaving you’re going to be indiscernible from your brother.”
Ford made a noise of exhausted disgust, he rested his stubbly face in his hands.
“If you’re not going to sleep, at least take your medication and get another cup of coffee.”
“I’m fine, I don’t need it.” He sounded like a child, even in his own ears. You’re twenty-six, man, snap out of it.
“Oy, it’s like tryin’ to talk to a brick wall.” June’s accent distorted and morphed in her frustration from her impassive, upper-class British accent to Opal Pines’ permanently exhausted, Yiddish-smattered New Jersey drawl. “Ya know Pines for a certified genius you can sure be dense.”
“I’m aware, June.” He chuckled, the words rolling bitter off his tongue like chicory. “I’m well aware.”
“D’you wanna talk about it?” she asked leaning back on her stool.
The scientist scoffed. “Yes, real smooth, Ford, have a heart to heart with a projection of your mother. No offense to you, June, but Freud must be doing a barrel roll in his grave right now.
June sighed. “You won’t talk to anyone real, you haven’t contacted home in months. What about your parents, your sister?”
That at least struck a chord, Ford looked sufficiently guilty. “I’ve been busy. I’ll give ‘em a call.” he murmured.
“No you won’t. Don’t lie to me. That little girl thinks the world of you. Don’t let her down like you did her brother.”
“Which brother‘s that, then?” he snapped, hadn’t he told her to leave the subject Stanley alone.
“You can extrapolate, Ford.” June smacked her lips, uncrossing then re-crossing her arms across her chest. “You’re a smart guy.”
The sound sent shudders of trepidation down his spine like a Pavlovian response: when Opal Pines smacked her lips together like that it meant imminent shit going down for one or both twins.
“What do I hafta do to get you ta leave me alone?” His eyelids felt like sandpaper, he was losing his articulation quickly but, an almost childish tendril of pride whispered to him to not give in to the hallucination’s demands.
“Take your meds, go to bed, and promise me you’ll talk to another human being tomorrow. That’s it. Those are my demands.”
“What about Fidds? I talk to him all the time!” Even Ford had to admit he sounded kind of pathetic, fighting with a shadow. But what else had he been doing since he moved to Oregon if not chasing shadows?
June groaned, and made his mother’s specific Yiddish noise of disproval, which was a cross between a snort and a sigh.
“I don’t think we agree on what counts as talking. Standin’ around all awkward like making a schmuck of yourself, only discussing work when you have to, is not talkin’ Fordy.”
He shrugged. “Yeah well, I didn’t ask for all this unnecessary…complications, June.” He said, gesturing back at Fidds’ photo. “This doesn’t happen all that often for me.”
“I dunno, you were pretty gay for Nikola Tesla in freshman year.” Said the hallucination, deadpanning.
His cheeks were scarlet again. “I was not.”
“Stanford honey, I’m from your subconscious. I was there.”
“I was not gay for Tesla!” he spat.
June just giggled, which quickly broke into a full-throated guffaw of mocking laughter.
“Do you ever hear yourself talk sometimes, Stanford?” she asked, covering her berry-coloured mouth with the back of her hand.
He tried to ignore her, then thought better if it.
“Fine, I’m packing it in. You win or whatever. Wait, surely that means I win?” He shook his head, pushing his glasses up his nose again. He moved about the room collecting the previous day’s notes into a neat pile on his desk. June didn't answer.
“Fuck it, don’t care at this point. I’m going to bed.” He said, yawning. The clock read 2:43.
“Take your meds, first.” Stars above, this woman sounded more like his mother than his mother did.
“On it.” His lids were closing, he needed to get to his bedroom, but the meds were in the kitchen.
He rose from his desk chair sluggishly and headed for the door, turning the study lights off. He looked back into the room.
The woman, June, stood up from her stool when he did, and stepped into the light of the doorway.
“Then, my work here is done.” She said, smiling. Her skin slowly fading in opacity.
“Hey, June.” Ford held up a hand to stop her.
June returned to solid colour. “Yes?”
“I recognise ya not real an’ all but still…” he paused, his train of thought lost in the mist of his brain, his accent drawling from his sleep-deprived lips.
“Um…thanks and everythin’.” He rubbed the back of his neck, he really was as awkward as she said, wasn’t he?
“Take care of yourself, Ford.” She whispered back, and her body sublimed into the air in a blue smoke.
Ford closed his study door behind him, and headed like a dead man to the kitchen.