Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The drive from Piedmont to Gravity Falls was seven hours if traffic was good.

Shermie lived in Sacramento, closer to Piedmont than to Gravity Falls.

“I’m just saying that we’ll have to backtrack in order to get back to the Stan O’ War anyway. There’s no reason to inflict him on our little brother,” Ford was saying.

And, sure, Stan got that. Stan even agreed.

“There’s no way that he’s going to believe us, though,” Stan argued. “At least this isosceles bastard can serve as proof.”

“Hey!” Bill protested, through the rudimentary cloth-and-tape gag that Stan had stuffed into his mouth after the first ten minutes of him yelling.

“I’m not sure how well he proves our story in this form. Rather, it might appear that we have kidnapped a man who belongs in a mental hospital.”

Something about that sentence must have struck Bill as being extra funny, because he started cackling derangedly.

Stan winced at the noise, reaching up to adjust his hearing aid. Ford gave him a dry look once he was done.

“Okay, yeah, this jerk isn’t helping at all. We can see Shermie on the way back.”

“Thank you for seeing sense, Stanley,” Ford said.

“But don’t think I don’t recognize this avoidance technique, Poindexter. We both have things to own up to. We owe it to Shermie.”

Ford sighed heavily. “Can we hash out the details after we’ve dropped off Bill? I don’t exactly want him to be privy to more family drama than he already has been.”

Stan thought that was fair.

It was a long, boring seven hours to the Mystery Shack. Stan swore that his whole body had locked up into driving position by the time they arrived.

Bill had not shut up the whole ride. The gag muffled him, and most of the time they couldn’t tell what he was trying to say, but he. Did. Not. Shut. Up.

Stan parked in his normal spot around the side of the building, next to Soos’s pickup truck and a car he didn’t recognize, a smaller Sedan than must have belonged to that Melody chick.

It was around 1:30 PM now, and they wanted to find Soos fast, so Stan and Ford went ahead and dragged Bill right through the gift shop entrance.

Now, two old men dragging a man who is tied up in bright red yarn and gagged with duct tape make a pretty startling sight when they barge into a crowded gift shop (well, over five people present). Luckily, Melody was at the register, and she exclaimed, “Mr. Pineses?” so loud that the crowd clearly thought she was exaggerating for effect and that this was part of some kind of show.

Stan knew that Ford wouldn’t pick up on that, though. That was okay—Ford could wrangle their captive, and Stan would sell it as just another Mystery Shack Experience. A quick glance around the room reassured him that the only guests present were tourists, nobody who would have any reason to think that the Pines twins had any experience with the real supernatural.

“Heya, Melody,” Stan greeted her, also a little extra loud and performative. “Sorry to barge in like this, we just found this demon in the forest and need to get him to the containment zone.”

He winked when he said demon, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at Bill Cipher.

“Oooh,” said the crowd, clearly down to believe that this tied-up guy was a demon. True or not, suckers didn’t care.

“Sorry, we just need to get through to the lab,” Ford said. “Once we have him secure, we can explain everything.”

“Yeah, we just need access to the secret door,” Stan said, loudly. He took a step towards the vending machine and gestured for the tourists to clear a path. Ford shot him a look for revealing the lab door (not really much of a secret after Weirdmageddon), but Stan just gave him a look that said trust me.

The crazy thing nowadays was that Ford did.

Obligingly, the tourists cleared a path, and then oooh’ed and aaah’ed as Stanley entered the code (carefully shielded from prying eyes) and the vending machine swung open to reveal the secret passage behind it.

Stan held it open as Ford pushed their struggling captive through.

“That’s all for now, folks!” he said, giving a perfunctory little bow, and then shut the door on all of them.

“Wait, did you just turn that into a show?” Ford asked, finally catching on. “Nobody was even paying you!”

“Ha, no, but it kept the crowd calm instead of making them freak out and call the police on us,” Stan explained.

“Brilliant,” Ford said, with that air he got when admiring an idea that had never occurred to him. Stan preened, just a little. He never got tired of impressing his twin, even in the most mundane ways.

Bill gagged obnoxiously.

Ford rolled his eyes, and they all piled into the elevator. They rode down to level 3, where Ford passed Bill to Stan to hold and then used his newly-free hands to pull out a large metal box that looked a lot like what animal control uses to trap raccoons.

“Woah, what is that?” Stan asked.

“It’s an old cage I used to examine larger, non-sentient subjects,” Ford explained.

Kindly, they removed Bill’s restraints and gag before shoving him into the cage. He immediately started banging on the walls. No screaming, though; he had probably worn out his throat over the course of their seven hour car ride.

The twins went back up the elevator.

“He won’t be able to escape,” Ford said, reading the anxiety on Stanley’s face. “It’s a reinforced metal meant to hold up to supernatural animals. Bill is completely human now. It’s a little inhumane, but we can work out a better solution after talking to Soos and Melody.”

Stan let the tension seep out of him. “Thanks, Sixer.”

They reached the top, and Ford pressed the button that made the outside of the vending machine emit a high-pitched beeping sound. They installed it to warn anyone in the gift shop that the lab door was opening after one too many incidents where it swung out and hit a customer after Weirdmageddon.

Various tourists gasped and gawked and pointed as they emerged from the secret door. Ford, of course, went straight through the door labeled “Employees Only” without talking to anybody. Stan considered it for a second, but he had other things to check on, as long as he was back in the Mystery Shack.

He quickly situated himself behind the checkout counter.

“Hey, Melody,” he said.

“Hi, Mr. Pines,” she replied politely, blushing a little.

“As long as we’re here anyway, I just wanted to check up on the state of things. I see you’ve moved to town to help out. I’m glad. You make Soos happy.”

Melody’s faint blush exploded, turning her whole face bright red.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Well, I’m, uh, I’m glad you think so!”

“Well, he thinks so, according to what he’s been saying over the phone,” Stan said dryly. For some reason, this made her blush fade, and instead she leveled Stan with a look that was way too fond to be coming from somebody he had talked to like, three times max.

“Those phone calls make Soos really happy,” she said. “I’m glad you two keep in touch. You mean a lot to him.”

“Hey, did you guys really just trap a demon in a secret laboratory?” a twenty-something tourist interrupted. Thank fuck. That conversation was getting emotional fast.

“Ha!” Stan barked. “Yeah, we did! I’m the original Mr. Mystery, y’know, and my brother is a bonafide mad scientist! Most of what we do is fight crazy monsters!”

It was insane that he could say that and not even be lying, these days. Wow. Stan Pines, living the dream. Sometimes he marveled at just how far he had come.

“Woah!” the tourist exclaimed. “Can we see the lab?”

“Sorry, but the lab is strictly off-limits,” Stan said.

That would make it more tantalizing, but none of these suckers would be able to get in, anyway. Maybe it would encourage them to hang around the gift shop more and buy more merch!

“Aw,” multiple tourists pouted. Whatever. The lab was strictly off-limits, especially as long as Bill was locked up inside.

“Hey, Melody,” Stan said, putting a hand on her shoulder to indicate to all the nosy tourists that he was talking only to her. “When does the Shack close these days?”

Melody laughed. “I’m sure as soon as he sees you, Mr. Mystery will have us closing up early. Then he’s probably going to want to show you all the new exhibits we’ve put together! Remind me to show you the train out back.”

“Yeah, I saw a sign about something like that driving in,” Stan nodded. “Thanks, Melody.”

Soos would figure out he was here soon. If not from the Stanleymobile parked out front, then from whatever strange Soos-senses he had. Stan would swear that kid was able to identify him by scent, or something.

Stan ducked through the Employees Only door and into the living room. His typical armchair had been pushed to the side to accommodate a couch that he recognized from Mrs. Ramirez’s living room. The television itself hadn’t changed, but now it had a little angel statuette sitting on top of it. The card table and fold-out chairs hadn’t changed, but the sad clown painting (which had come onto the Stan O’ War II) that had hung on the wall between them and the fish tank had been replaced with a small collection of Soos-things, including two framed baby photos, his first pair of shoes hung on a nail by their laces, and a handprint impression.

Mrs. Ramirez had definitely sunk her claws into the decor, but it was nice to see that his old armchair and dino skull coffee table remained untouched. It was a strange blend of Stan’s own decorating tastes and those of Mrs. Ramirez. There were even a few pictures on the wall he didn’t recognize at all, which must have been Melody-things. Overall, somehow, it just felt like a place Soos would definitely call home.

Well, good, because this was Soos’ home now.

Ford was nowhere to be found, though. Maybe he had gone up to his old study, even though they had emptied it of any leftover research and inventions before leaving on the Stan O’ War.

“¡No! ¿No haz cocinado en toda la vida? Fuera de mi cocina,” Mrs. Ramirez ordered.

Yikes. Guess that answered where Ford was: not in the kitchen anymore.

Stan found him standing in the hallway outside the kitchen, looking more ruffled and bewildered than he did after some of their adventures. He was splattered liberally across the front with some kind of sauce which shimmered between orange and red in the light.

“That woman… is a force of nature…” he said, upon seeing Stan.

“Ha!” Stan said, having been in a similar place before. “A smart guy like you should know better than to get between a latin woman and her kitchen, Poindexter.”

“I hear Stan Pines?” Mrs. Ramirez asked, from inside the kitchen.

Stan stuck his head in and waved at her.

“Hey there, Mrs. Ramirez,” he said. She graced him with a nod, then turned back to her pot on the stove.

“Good. Soos will be happy to see you,” she said. Stan tried not to let on how warm inside that made him feel.

“Aw, I’ll be happy to see him too,” Stan replied. “I know better than to get between a fierce lady like you and her stove, though, so me and my brother here will just be in the living room.”

“I see you both at dinner,” Mrs. Ramirez said.

“Oh, of course! It already smells delicious,” Stan promised, and then immediately retreated back into the hall.

Ford was half stripped out of his clothes. Geez! Living on a boat in close quarters didn’t leave much room for little things like modesty, especially between brothers, but come on! They were on land now!

As Stan watched, Ford wrestled the door to the closet under the stairs open. It was a tricky door that always stuck, like it had drawn all the short straws when the house’s foundation had first settled. Unfortunately, everyone was forced to deal with it, because that closet was where the washer and dryer were hidden. Ford threw his sauce-covered clothes in with a handful of detergent powder and started the load.

Stan leaned against the wall next to the closet.

“Nice going, genius,” he teased. “Need me to go grab your suitcase from the Stanleymobile?”

Ford, finally realizing that he was standing around in his underwear in a house which no longer had his name on the deed, flushed red all the way down to his chest.

“Ah, yes, Stanley,” he said, doing that thing where he held his fist in front of his mouth and cleared his throat to try and hide how embarrassed he was. “If you would be so kind.”

“Hmm, I don’t know,” Stanley said. “Soos might be interested in that tattoo on your neck.”

Ford clapped a hand over it and turned a deeper shade of red. “Stanley!”

Stan put his hands up in surrender. “All right, all right! I’ll go grab your suitcase, you big idiot. Go hide in your study or something.”

“Thank you,” Ford said, and then rushed up the stairs to do exactly that.

Stanley brought Ford’s suitcase up to his old study, which had been repainted and given entirely new furniture. Apparently this was Melody’s room now. Whoops.

Oh, well. They just needed to borrow it for long enough that Ford could get a new turtleneck on.

They spent the rest of the waiting period in the living room, burning time with Gravity Falls’ unique brand of public access television. Nowhere else in the world were the TV shows this weird.

At around 2:45, Soos came barrelling into the room, tears in his eyes, and Stan just barely managed to stand up before getting completely crushed in a hug.

“Mr. Pines!” Soos cried.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s good to see you, too, kid,” Stan said, definitely not crying, no matter what Ford claimed.

Soos let go after a minute, and he seemed to have a handle on the waterworks, too.

“I’m so happy to see you, Mr. Pines!” he said, beaming. “I thought you guys would be sailing for way longer! Oh! And I totally gotta show you all the stuff I’ve added to the Mystery Shack! Don’t worry, though, I still make sure to make a few exhibits in the Classic Mr. Mystery style!”

“I’m sure it’s all great, Soos,” Stan replied, completely sincere. The Mystery Shack had been his pet project, his beautiful moneymaker, sure, but what had really mattered to Stan for all those years was the secret beneath the Shack and the people inside it. But clearly, the Mystery Shack itself meant a lot to this kid. He would do it proud no matter what.

“Okay, gift shop is closed,” Melody announced, entering the living room. She dropped her hat onto the rack by the door, then came to stand next to Soos and wrapped an arm around his waist casually.

“Melody!” Soos yelled, turning and crushing her in a hug.

“Oh, happy hugs!” Melody cheered. Soos laughed and released her with a peck on the cheek.

“And hello to you, Other Mr. Pines!” Soos greeted Ford.

“Hello, Soos,” Ford sighed, slowly becoming resigned over time to always being called “Other Mr. Pines”. Ha, loser.

“So what brings you guys here? I thought you were supposed to be out at sea until next summer,” Melody asked.

“Oh, shoot, did you guys, like, get in a boat crash?” Soos asked. “Because, like, I can totally fix your boat for you.”

Ford made a face but didn’t directly contradict Soos. Stan knew Soos was completely serious and probably completely capable, too, though the repair would probably include some weird additions. Luckily, they didn’t have to test that, because the Stan O’ War II was fine.

“No, our baby has been sailing beautifully. It’s just, uh…” Stan lost his nerve. “Have you heard from the kids recently?”

Soos and Melody exchanged a look.

“Uh, they called on Wednesday? They always call every other Wednesday, though. I love hearing from the little dudes,” Soos answered.

“I see,” Ford said, his lips drawing into a thin line. “Well, I’m afraid this visit isn’t entirely for pleasure.”

“Does this have to do something with that guy you said was a demon and then locked in the lab?” Melody asked.

“Dude, a demon? Oh, yikes,” Soos exclaimed.

“Yes, unfortunately. The news just gets worse from there,” Ford announced. “It’s Bill.”

There was a beat of silence as Soos and Melody absorbed that.

“Wait, but, I’m pretty sure Bill was all, like, yellow and triangular?” Soos said nervously. “Also, isn’t he supposed to be super dead?”

“Isn’t Bill the demon that caused all sorts of crazy badness last summer?” Melody asked. “I wasn’t here for that, but Soos and Abuelita told me all about it… it sounded horrible!”

“Yes,” Ford answered both of them. “Apparently, he begged salvation from a higher power before he could die in entirety, and his plea was answered. However, the higher power he reached out to is a benevolent one that I am actually familiar with. A being known simply as the Axolotl, who wants Bill Cipher to make amends with those he has wronged. I have a theory that he is trying to rehabilitate Bill in much the same way that prisons try to rehabilitate murderers.”

“Dude, but Bill is like, super-evil,” Soos pointed out, still nervous.

“The Axolotl has trapped Bill in a powerless body. The only indication that he is not a normal human is that his eyes are both yellow with slit pupils,” Ford explained.

“Why bring him here?” Melody asked, leaning into Soos a little more.

“Well,” Ford adjusted his glasses. A nervous tic. “If the Axolotl wants Bill Cipher to make amends with those he has wronged, then Gravity Falls is where he needs to be.”

“Me and Ford discussed it,” Stan said.

“Ford and I, Stanley,” Ford corrected.

Stan rolled his eyes. “Sorry, Ford and I discussed it, and we think the safest place for him to be is here at the Mystery Shack. He doesn’t have any powers, but if he does try to get some hands on some kind of magic, or whatever, then between Ford’s old tech, McGucket, and the magic in the house and forest, this is probably the easiest place to counter him from or trap him in.”

Soos thought it over for a second. “That makes sense,” he agreed.

“We’re not asking you to be nice to him, or anything like that,” Ford said. “Just keep an eye on him.”

“Are you two going to stay as well?” Melody asked gently.

Stan and Ford shared a look. Then Stan sighed, heavily.

“Sorry, you two. But I just spent seven hours in a car with Bill and even I have to admit that he’s mostly harmless right now. Obviously he can do as much harm as any other human, but only as much harm as any other human. And there are so many other anomalies on the seas that need sciencing or defeating or something,” Stan explained. “We’ll still come back in the summer, but as it is, I trust you two to be able to handle the bastard by yourselves.”

Soos and Melody exchanged another look. Geez, having silent conversations already. They grow up so fast. At this rate, it was only a matter of time before Gravity Falls would be ringing wedding bells for these two.

Soos nodded resolutely, and Melody nodded back.

“If he doesn’t have any of his magic stuff, then we should be fine. He’s just a really mean guy without all that, right?” Soos decided. “Besides, Abuelita got tired of being a chair after the third weird monster tried to eat her. If Bill steps out of line, I’m sure she has a chancla with his name on it!”

Ford blinked, squinted, and tilted his head. “Chancla? I’m afraid I’m not familiar with—”

“WELL,” Stan said, too loud, cutting off Ford. On his way south, in the journey that would ultimately end in Colombian prison, he had kissed a pretty Mexican boy behind his family’s taqueria, and that pretty boy’s madre had not been happy about Stan “corrupting” her kid. He had no desire to explain the fury of la chancla to Ford. “I’m glad you two are so understanding! Let’s go get the guy out of that cage in the lab, huh?”

Bill’s throat was apparently still pretty sore, which made it almost funny to listen to him hoarsely threaten to kill them in various grisly ways as they all stood around him in the living room.

“So!” Soos announced, clapping his hands together and cutting off Bill’s latest half-assed threat. “The Mr. Pineses explained your situation to me. I think I have a solution here!”

“What?” Bill asked incredulously, squinting and tilting his head in an exaggerated manner.

Soos pulled out a green question mark shirt that read STAFF across the back.

“Ever since I became Mr. Mystery, the Mystery Shack has been short a handyman! I’ve been trying to give tours, perform as Questiony the Question Mark, put together new exhibits, deal with the turf war between the gnomes and the scampfires that keeps lighting the backyard on fire, help take care of goats, and fix all the things that keep breaking around this place!” Soos listed enthusiastically. “So since Other Mr. Pines said you’re here to make amends, I’ve decided you can do that by working as the new handyman here at the Mystery Shack!”

“What!?” Bill asked, now appalled. His scratchy, hoarse voice took all of his attempted shrieking out of his yell, at least.

“Yeah!” Soos cheered.

“Soos… are you sure this is the right decision?” Ford prodded.

“Hey, you guys are the ones trusting me with this guy, right?” Soos pointed out, spreading his hands and shrugging. “So then trust me, dude.”

“You know I’m just going to break everything, right?” Bill sneered. Soos turned back to him and sent a very disappointed frown his way.

“But, like, the Axolotl must have told you to make amends for a reason, right? And you’re wearing some kind of prison jumpsuit, or something. So if you don’t fix stuff then it’s taking longer to make amends, yeah? Isn’t that kind of counterintuitive for you?” Soos asked, genuinely.

Bill gaped at him.

Melody smirked, holding up a tool box.

“Well, if you’re going to be our new handyman, then you’ll need this!” she said, shoving the tool box into Bill’s hands. He took it numbly. Melody clapped him on the back so hard he stumbled forward a step, and Bill didn’t even say anything. He just looked lost.

“Wow, Soos, I think you broke him,” Stan joked, raising one eyebrow.

Bill snapped back into his angry face. “I’m not broken, you colossal imbecile of a waste of space conman!” he hissed.

“Huh? Sorry, it’s just hard to take you seriously when your voice is all quiet and scratchy like that.”

“I’ll show you a scratchy voice!” Bill shouted (but not really, because he was still so hoarse). He placed the toolbox on the card table and then bared his fingernails like talons as he lunged towards Stan’s neck.

Ford caught him around the waist and dumped him back on his feet, about a yard further away from Stan than he had been before.

Bill flushed an angry red, but didn’t lunge for Stan again. Huh. Maybe this human thing was getting to him, after all.

“Hmm. Dude is gonna need a room,” Soos remarked. “If I put up another wall in the attic, there’s probably enough room for another bed and dresser. Would that work for you?”

“You’re asking me?” Bill asked, squinting.

“Yeah, triangle-guy, it’s your room.”

“That should be… fine,” Bill agreed. Then he fell silent, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

Suspicious. However, preferable to trying to kill everybody. Stan decided not to question it.

“We’ll need to go furniture shopping, then,” Melody said. “We might not be able to get the wall up tonight, but there’s still time to purchase a bed and dresser and get those upstairs. Oh, and you’ll probably need a lamp… you definitely need clothes. Hmm. I’ll make a list, then let you look it over, and then I’ll go into town and grab it all, okay?”

“Okay,” Bill agreed.

“You seem suspiciously amenable to this arrangement,” Ford said.

“Well, gee, Sixer! Sorry for resigning myself to a life I clearly can’t get out of, anyway! Now that I’m just a gross bundle of meat and nerves like you, would you prefer I keep trying to kill you?” Bill screamed. “Because that’s getting me nowhere! At least I can take what little dignity I can get!”

“You’ve never been one to care about dignity before,” Ford grumbled.

“Well, not anybody else’s dignity! Mine was doing pretty fine! Now I don’t even have—”

Bill cut himself off, but a wave of—crap, was that sympathy?—passed over Ford’s face.

“Your hat and tie,” he said quietly, like a secret.

“The Axolotl has them, I’m sure,” Bill grumbled. “It’s fine. What’s a few years as a human compared to the trillions of years I’ve already existed? I’ll make amends, or whatever, and then it’ll be back to business as usual!”

By the end, he seemed to be trying to convince himself, but he had at least reached his normal cadence of annoying, malicious optimism.

“I’m sure that the Axolotl wouldn’t let anything happen to them,” Ford said, like he was trying to comfort the evil demon, or something.

“Woah, are we trying to comfort the evil demon, here?” Stan asked. “I’m sure his weird triangle-demon clothes are the least of our worries right now.”

“Yes, of course,” Ford agreed, straightening up and fixing his glasses. “Let’s get to work on that list. Many hands make light work, after all.”

“Oh, was that the idea that got you banned from the kitchen?” Stan teased.

“Come on then, everybody,” Melody said, waving her hands in a herding sort of gesture.

“Upstairs we go!” she and Soos said in tandem. Then, “Jinx!”

They got a list of things worked out, and approved by both Bill as things he wanted and Ford as things that wouldn’t do any harm, and then Melody and Ford went to town to get all the things before stores started closing.

Stan sat himself in his armchair in front of the TV. Duck-tective was on!

And then, of course, since he ruined everything, Bill sat down on the couch.

“Ugh, is this what you dumb humans do for entertainment? Where’s the fun stuff? The guts and gore!”

Stan squinted at him, and in the spirit of not getting into a physical fight and wrecking the living room, switched the channel over to Baby Fights.

A baby slapped another baby in the face, and they both started crying with little scowls creasing their chubby cheeks.

“Oh, wow! That’s more like it!” Bill cheered.

“No blood in this one,” Stan warned. It was somewhere between highly disturbing and funny that Bill liked one of the same shows he did. For his own peace of mind, Stan chose to find it funny.

“Eh, I expected that from a bunch of dull primates. But forcing your young to fight for entertainment! Ha! Now that’s twisted!” Bill exclaimed. He was sucked into the show quickly.

Stan took the chance to study Bill. He hadn’t really, before, more content to ignore him.

Bill was wearing an orange jumpsuit with a white name tag that read “William Cipher” affixed to the left side of his chest. It reminded Stan heavily of the prison garb he had worn at various points in his life. Bill’s human body was all angles. Barely a lick of muscle or fat on the guy, just all skin and bones. Not emaciated, though. More like lean. Built for running, maybe, or maybe built to be one of those artistic types that lived behind a desk. The handyman job would probably have him building up some muscle quickly. Bill’s skin sagged in places, and his face was scored with deep lines. His eyes had the kind of wrinkles that showed that someone squinted a lot. Around his mouth, he had frown lines, but no laugh lines. That didn’t match up with how Stan remembered the jerk laughing all the time, but maybe Bill hadn’t had any actual input on the body. If he had, he probably wouldn’t be complaining about it at much. The guy had a wide mouth and a big, hooked nose. By rights, his eyes should be small and beady, the way books described the eyes of evil men, but they were normal instead. Normal sized, anyway. Nothing about those yellow cat eyes could be considered normal. When they had all been standing earlier, Stan had noticed that Bill was just about an inch shorter than himself and Ford.

Why was the body seemingly the same age as him and Ford? Neither of them could exactly be considered a spring chicken, though their travels around the world had shown that Ford, at least, was one silver fox welcome in the henhouse, even if the idiot himself was too dense to realize it. But Bill was here to “make amends”, which could take forever. Why trap him in a dying body?

Maybe in case it did take forever. Maybe that was the backup plan from the Axolotl. If Bill wasn’t able to make amends, he would just die eventually.

Stan didn’t know enough about the Axolotl to be sure.

He turned back to the TV.

They helped set up Bill’s room, had some wonderful tamales for dinner courtesy of Mrs. Ramirez, stayed the night in sleeping bags on the fold-out couch in the living room, and bid their goodbyes before the Mystery Shack opened the next morning.

“I’m gonna miss you guys!” Soos said, trapping both Stan and Ford in a hug.

“I’m gonna miss you too, pal,” Stan promised. “I’ll call every Thursday night, like normal, okay?”

“Okay,” Soos agreed, releasing them.

“Sorry for leaving before you could show me your train, Melody,” Stan said.

“That’s okay. Just stay safe out there,” Melody said.

“We will,” Ford replied, nodding seriously. “Stay safe here, as well.”

“Si tú olvidas a llamar que te destruya,” Mrs. Ramirez told Stan. “I hope you both have a good trip.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Ramirez,” Stan replied. “I hope things go well here, too.”

After another round of hugging from Soos, they were out the door, and then they were off.

Time to visit Shermie.

Chapter Text

Ford had very few memories with Shermie in them, admittedly.

If the summer had taught him anything, it was the value of family. He had underestimated and undervalued Stanley for years. He had allowed his bad experiences with Bill to convince himself not to trust anyone. Rather, he should have kept his mind open to trusting those who valued him for more than just what he could do for them. Looking back, he had done some of that even as he traveled through the multiverse, with the Oracle especially being a standout example in his recollections. Though, in his travels through the multiverse, he tended to find allies either out of necessity (and the trustworthiness of these types of allies fluctuated quite a bit) or due to a uniting animosity against Bill Cipher.

He had been remiss in not contacting Shermie as soon as Weirdmageddon was over. He should have contacted all his family, but he was so swept up in the sheer glee of survival and the relief that Stanley had gotten his memories back, as well as the long-overdue culmination of their childhood dream, that any family not in Gravity Falls slipped his mind.

It rankled him, and probably always would, to admit to his own failings. It especially rankled him to admit when he didn’t know something that he should, either due to his intelligence or because circumstances seemed to conspire against him. He should know Shermie. He should have known Andrew. He should have been there when Dipper and Mabel were born. Instead, he had been fighting for his life, more than a universe away.

However, Stanley had seen Ford at his very worst and his very best. It no longer caused pain to admit a flaw to him. Stanley may poke fun, sometimes, but he never truly degraded or condescended to Ford. He simply met him where he was, as an equal.

“Stanley,” Ford asked, tentatively. No matter how scared of the answer he may be, he had to ask. “Will you tell me about what’s happened with our family, since I’ve been gone?”

Stanley sighed. He looked tired. He looked his age. Onboard the Stan O’ War, Stanley always shone with such vitality and vigor, it was sometimes hard to remember that they were both sixty-two now.

“That’s a lot of ground to cover,” Stanley said.

“We have seven hours in the car ahead of us,” Ford pointed out.

“Touche, Poindexter. Ah, where to start?” Stanley groaned.

“The beginning usually works,” Ford joked.

“Heh. Yeah, yeah. Alright. I guess the beginning would be when Shermie was born. I don’t know how much you kept in touch with our folks, but once Shermie could walk and talk on his own, they didn’t care to pay him much attention. Same way they raised us, I guess, except Shermie didn’t have a twin to suffer with him.

Hell, it was the eighties. Everyone was letting their kids run around back then. No big deal. But I guess nobody bothered to tell Shermie about the birds and the bees, because a few months after we had our big fight in 1983, Shermie made a mistake of his own. Uh. Don’t tell Andrew I said that.

Anyway, Shermie knocked up a girl. Her name’s Elizabeth. They got married, they’re still together, actually. Anyway, big year for the Pines family. I faked my death, Shermie got a girl pregnant at age fourteen, they got married. Elizabeth’s family was a buncha bastards, disowned her completely. Pa gave her a job down in the pawn shop. Shermie and Liz lived with our folks for a while, till Andrew was about four, if I remember right. Most of this I was hearing secondhand from Ma, of course. She would call about once a month. Then, around when Andrew turned ten, Shermie ran into a buncha luck, all at once. See, he’d been working at a car garage, bringing in a pretty decent paycheck. Then he made friends with this guy whose car had broke down, and it turned out that guy was some bigshot back in California who owned a whole chain of garages. So Shermie moved out to California when the guy offered him a job with more zeroes attached, and obviously Liz and Andrew went with him.”

“Shermie’s a mechanic?” Ford asked, trying to picture it.

“Not anymore. Moved up to management. But he was back then, and a pretty dang good one, too,” Stan answered.

“I’m glad he did well for himself.”

“Yeah, he did, didn’t he? Anyway, Shermie moved his little family out to California, and that was a lot closer to me than to Ma and Pa back in Jersey, so I got called on to babysit a few times. Not super often, and not for too long, because before too long Andrew hit twelve and they decided he’d probably be fine watching himself if they wanted a date night. I visited for the holidays a few times, too, and of course I went to Andrew’s bar mitzvah. Mostly, though, I didn’t visit, because I didn’t want to get too far from the portal.”

“And yet, I still find myself jealous that you were able to share those moments.”

“Well, I don’t blame you! This is all stuff you should have been there for,” Stanley yelled. “Instead they just got me pretending to be you! That’s fucked up!”

“We should have both been there,” Ford said sternly. “And the only person who’s to blame for the fact that I couldn’t be there is Bill.”

“I know, I know. Still.”

“It’s not your fault, Stanley.”

“Okay! I know. Ahem. So the next big thing that happens is Andrew making the same screw-up as his old man.”

“Stanley!”

“What! I don’t care if it’s crude, it’s true. He was a year older, and that’s about it for differences. Oh, Kim’s family was much better about it than Elizabeth’s, but Kim had a younger sister, so they couldn’t offer as much support, y’know, money-wise. Andrew and Kim got married the spring after the twins were born. Early 2001. That was the first time I had seen Pa since he threw me out, so I spent most of the wedding avoiding him.”

“Seeing as I hadn’t exactly been on the best of terms with him either, I can’t imagine this was a hardship.”

“Nah, he pretty much avoided me right back. Ma was thrilled to see me, though. And I think I danced with three different cousins of Kim’s. That was a good day. Then, the next year, Pa died.”

“Pa’s dead?”

“Oh, shit, you really didn’t know? Yeah, Ford, Pa and Ma. Pa had a heart attack in ‘02 and Ma died in 2009 of a cough that turned out to be lung cancer. Turns out, uh, turns out cancer doesn’t hurt most people, just the treatment does, or something? My point is that none of us had any idea she had it until after she died. She didn’t, uh, suffer.”

“Cancer…” Ford sighed, turning it over in his head. He wasn’t exactly close to either of his parents, but his mother had always been more affectionate. She called and checked up on him, after all, even despite his blustering and attempts at distance. Maybe it was callous of him not to mourn his father beyond an initial, instinctive pang, but the loss of his mother felt much worse, like someone had scraped out and then sandpapered his insides. “At least she didn’t suffer.”

“I saw Shermie again at that funeral,” Stanley said. “First time I’d been back to New Jersey in decades, and it was to sit shiva for our Ma. Damn, but she was a firecracker of a woman. I learned a lot from her.”

“Do we even count as Jewish, anymore?” Ford wondered, thinking of the myriad worlds he had seen and all the strangeness therein which was never mentioned in the Torah.

“Shit, I don’t know. I certainly don’t go to synagogue. Hell, last time I prayed, I prayed to Paul Bunyan,” Stanley remarked glibly.

“Paul Bunyan?” Ford echoed, incredulous. “Paul—Well, actually,” he faltered. “I’ve just realized that I’ve been referring to a being known only as the Axolotl as a kind of deity, so I suppose I hardly have room to talk.”

“Can’t believe you kept God in a tank on your desk.”

“Oh, shut up. Go back to telling me about our family.”

“Ah, where was I? Okay. When the twins were around seven, Andrew and Kim finally found a place to live that wasn’t Shermie’s house. That’s when they moved out to that place in Piedmont. Obviously, you’ve met the twins. Shermie still works as a branch manager or something for that garage company. Elizabeth does, uh, something with sales. She works in an office. Andrew does computer stuff, and Kim does some kind of desk job at the local museum. Tracking artifacts, I think?”

“Shermie and his wife aren’t retired?” Ford asked, surprised.

Stanley looked away from the road for a second to level Ford with an unimpressed look. “Sixer. The retirement age these days is sixty-five. We shouldn’t even be retired yet.”

“How old is Shermie?” Ford asked, brow furrowing.

Stanley just shook his head and looked back towards the road.

“I know you can do that math.”

Shermie was forty-four.

Ford had memories of his brother seeming to suddenly jump between stages of life, back when he went home for the brief breaks between semesters at Backupsmore. Shermie had jumped from infancy to toddlerhood that second summer, but of course Ford went back for the shorter summer semester, as well. He had witnessed perhaps two or so months of Shermie’s toddlerhood, cumulatively. His brother had been six when Ford had graduated from Backupsmore and last seen him face-to-face. Ford had abandoned Glass Shard Beach for Gravity Falls immediately, drawn in by the allure of studying its multitudinous abnormalities.

Ford had missed most of his life. What kind of brother was he, anyway? He had abandoned Stanley when they were teenagers and then done nearly the same thing to Shermie, except that by that point Ford was undoubtedly an adult, and Shermie was a very young child. Viewed through that lens, Ford was the only possible party who could be in the wrong.

To his youngest brother, would he be anything more than a stranger? An old man looking for a connection where there was none?

“Hey, Poindexter,” Stanley called. “You’ve got a weird look on your face. What are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking about how the last time I saw Shermie, he was six. Does he even remember me? Does he want to? Should he want to?” Ford confessed.

“Oh, yikes,” Stanley replied. “Look, Ford, I’m pretty sure that Shermie knows he would have a way harder life if our parents hadn’t given him a hand after Andrew was born. I know for a fact he still keeps in touch with the guy who got him that first head mechanic job in California. The point I’m trying to make here, I guess, is that Shermie already knew how important family is. Me and you, yeah, maybe we screwed up and it took us until this summer to realize what we were missing out on—”

“It took me until this summer,” Ford interrupted. “You spent thirty years trying to save me from something you didn’t even fully understand. You always knew the value of family, Stanley.”

“Okay, well, I was doing this thing called ‘being considerate’ where I don’t make you out to be a complete jackass,” Stan said, rolling his eyes and nudging Ford with his elbow to indicate that he was mostly teasing. “Besides, you’re wrong. I cared about you, because you were my twin, and I cared about those kids, because Dipper and Mabel are worth anything, but I barely visited Shermie, or Andrew and Kim, because I was so wrapped up in having to fix the mistakes I made thirty or forty years ago. I wouldn’t exactly call that ‘valuing family’. I mean, come on! I lied to them about something as simple as my name for thirty years! Me lying to our whole family is why we have to go talk to Shermie now!”

“And you wouldn’t have felt the need to do any of that if I had never gotten involved with Bill,” Ford countered. “Or even, perhaps, if I had called you for help earlier.”

“I was a mess back then, Ford. We would have just fought for a different reason.”

“Then I should have trusted you when you said you broke my perpetual motion machine by accident.”

Stanley groaned, long and loud. “I thought we already talked that whole incident out,” he complained.

“That’s exactly why I bring it up now! You said that you felt as if I was abandoning you. If I had simply handled that with a more rational mind—”

“Bup! Bup bup bup,” Stan interrupted. “We are not blaming ourselves for actions we took at age fucking seventeen, okay? And I refuse to play the what-if game. Things ended up pretty great, so I’m going to take what I’ve got and not borrow misery, okay?”

“Okay, Stanley,” Ford agreed.

They lapsed into a comfortable silence, the kind that had been becoming more and more common as they cohabitated in the close quarters of the Stan O’ War II. Ford leaned back in his seat and watched the forest rush by outside the car window.

“We should plan out how we’re going to explain ourselves to Shermie,” he decided, after a few minutes.

Stanley grimaced. “Yeah, we probably should. Andrew and Kim seemed to accept it mostly because there were bigger issues to tackle.”

They spent the next few hours slowly building their plan.

Shermie and his wife lived in a house in Sacramento, California. Ford and Stanley arrived at approximately 4:00 PM, which was apparently too early for either Shermie or his wife to be home from work on a Tuesday, so they decided to burn time at some of the local attractions and come back around 6:00 PM.

Stanley would get a chance to heckle the various gimmicks for being worse than the Mystery Shack; Ford would be able to see if any of them had stumbled upon any real anomalies. It was a win-win.

Shermie and his wife (who Stanley alternately called “Liz” or “Elizabeth”) lived in a squat one-story house with what Ford considered to be a decently sized yard, though it was in need of some landscaping. Stanley parked in their driveway, joining an SUV which had not been present during their initial arrival at 4:00 PM.

The brothers climbed out of the car, with Stanley approaching the door to knock, and Stanford waiting just out of sight, as according to the plan they had devised.

Stanley knocked.

Shermie opened the door. Ford couldn’t see him, but he could hear the door open and the voice that greeted them.

“Stan!” Shermie said, happily. It wasn’t a voice that Ford recognized, but it must be Shermie. Of course his voice had changed since he was six. Though, admittedly, Ford would probably not be able to recognize Shermie’s voice even if it had been identical to when he was six years old. “You’re not one for surprise visits, normally. Is it a special occasion?”

Ford might not be able to see Shermie’s face, but he could see Stan’s, and he definitely recognized Stan’s aptly dubbed “oh-shit” expression.

“Surprise! I’m not the real Stanford!” Stan shouted, grabbing Ford’s arm and dragging him out to stand in front of their baby brother. “This guy’s been missing for thirty years! Smoke bomb!”

Stan threw a smoke bomb to the ground, which immediately started billowing black smoke, and fled back to the Stanleymobile, crouching against the far side of the car. Ford could see him do that despite the smoke bomb which was causing him to cough his lungs out because smoke bombs work best as cover in limited areas, not outdoors.

“What?” Shermie asked, once the smoke had dissipated enough to talk instead of cough.

“This was not the plan, Stanley!” Ford shouted. What was he thinking, abandoning the plan, abandoning Ford with Shermie, and then making such a half-assed escape?

“I panicked!” Stan shouted, still crouched on the far side of the Stanleymobile.

“How about we all go inside so my neighbors don’t see anything else to gossip about, and then we can talk about… whatever this is,” Shermie suggested, but actually ordered.

“Ah,” Ford said, straightening his glasses self-consciously. “Yes, that would probably be best. I’m sorry about… this.”

“I panicked! Sorry!” Stanley said, finally coming out from his poor hiding place and joining them on the slab of concrete that served as Shermie’s front porch.

Ford sighed. “You’re forgiven. One of us was bound to panic.”

“Right now, actually! Everybody inside,” Shermie ordered.

They trooped inside, and Shermie shut the door behind them. They were now standing in Shermie’s living room, a pale green place with a television, a plush brown couch flanked by a couple armchairs, and decorated liberally with a variety of family photos.

A woman’s voice called out from further inside the house.

“Shermie? Who was at the door?”

“We’ve got visitors, Liz!” Shermie called back.

Soon, a woman who looked about Shermie’s age joined them in the living room, coming through a doorway on the left. Standing next to her husband, you could tell that they had been married for a long time. Elizabeth had blonde hair, in contrast to Shermie’s mild brown, but husband and wife had very similar fashion senses, both wearing sensible slacks and simple, monochrome button-ups in pastel colors. They even wore similar simple wireframe glasses.

“There’s two of Stan?” Elizabeth asked, obviously taken off-guard. Then she blushed. “I’m so sorry, that was rude of me.”

“No, it’s, uh… well, you’re right,” Stanley said, fidgeting with his fingers nervously.

“You said something outside about not being Stanford?” Shermie asked.

“Maybe we should all sit down,” Elizabeth suggested.

They sat down on the couch, and Shermie and Elizabeth took the armchairs. There was an armchair on either side of the couch, so this had the double effect of boxing in the twins.

“I suppose we should start with introductions,” Ford started. “My name is Stanford Pines, though you can all feel free to call me Ford.”

“And I’m Stanley Pines, but almost everyone just calls me Stan,” Stanley said.

“I’m Sherman Pines, but I think you both know that,” Shermie said, crossing his arms.

“I’m Elizabeth Pines. Can someone explain what’s going on here, now?”

Stanley cleared his throat. “So, uh, we had this whole plan, but I, uh, already screwed it up. Anyway. I’m the Stan you know, who used to babysit Andrew and everything. For some reasons that are really complicated, but that I promise to explain, I stole Stanford’s identity and faked my own death thirty years ago.”

“You faked your own death?” Shermie and Elizabeth exclaimed in unison.

Stanley winced. “Yeah. I needed to stay in Stanford’s house for, uh, the same complicated reasons, and so I stole his identity to do that. Thing is, I had gotten into some deep shit over the years, and I couldn’t risk anyone coming to look for me,” Stanley explained. “I hate to say it, but it was kind of a win-win for me. I got to stay in Stanford’s house and take his clean criminal record.”

Ford huffed and crossed his arms. “Not that you kept it clean,” he grumbled.

“Oh, like you’ve never committed any crime,” Stanley retorted, rolling his eyes. This was a familiar and well-worn argument, a frequent teasing topic of discussion on the Stan O’ War II. The truth was that Ford had committed plenty of crime himself during his travels through the multiverse, and in truth likely had a longer rap-sheet than his conman twin. He had definitely escaped from more prisons. Stanley may have been to prison six different times, twice in countries outside the United States, but Ford had been to prison in seventeen different dimensions, and escaped from sixteen of them.

Shermie and Elizabeth were staring at them with wide eyes.

“The truth is, Shermie—Sherman, I haven’t actually seen you in person since my graduation from Backupsmore, when you were six years old,” Ford admitted.

Sherman paled. “That long?”

Ford was too ashamed to speak. If he had only heeded the warnings in that cursed cave! He kept his gaze fixed on his lap and nodded silently.

“But everything else is my fault,” Stanley said. “It was my fault, what happened to Ford, and it was my choice to lie to my family about my identity for thirty years. So don’t blame Ford, okay?”

Ford stared at Stanley for a second.

“Did we not literally just establish, during the car ride here, that what happened was not your fault?” he asked.

Stanley frowned. “Take the out, Sixer,” he whispered.

“Okay, hang on. I need a minute,” Shermie requested. He leaned forward and buried his face in his hands, propping his elbows on his knees.

“Let me get this straight,” Elizabeth said. “You two are Shermie’s older brothers? The twins?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Stanley said.

“Okay. Caryn used to talk about the two of you, but Filbrick was… reluctant at best. I thought one of you was a scientist, and the other had died just before Shermie and I got married? But now you’re saying that you faked your death?”

“Yeah,” Stanley sighed.

“And the way you keep, sort of, talking around it—I’m guessing some kind of accident happened that you were both involved in, but it made Stanford, what, run away?”

“Something like that,” Ford grimaced.

“Okay,” Shermie said, sitting back up. “You said the circumstances were complicated, but that you would explain. I’d like that explanation now.”

Stanley and Ford shared a look. They had made a plan about how to address this in the car, which had mostly gone out the window now, but Ford still wanted to explain his own mistakes. He needed to be accountable for his own life. He nodded at Stanley, and Stanley nodded back, understanding.

“After graduating college, I moved out to Oregon. There’s a little town there, a place called Gravity Falls,” Ford began. “Gravity Falls has the highest concentration of anomalies in the world. I set up a lab to study them.”

“This part I mostly knew, but Ma wasn’t ever super clear on what you were studying,” Shermie chimed in.

“What do you mean? I was studying anomalies.”

“Anomalies in what?”

“Ah, no. I’m not referring to anomalous or extreme data points. I study the weird and unusual in this world. Creatures and phenomena that defy typical scientific explanation. Documentation is the first step to understanding, and I intended to document the anomalies of Gravity Falls the same way that Darwin documented the birds of the Galapagos,” Ford explained.

Sherman still looked confused.

“He means he was studying stuff like gnomes, fairies, and ghosts. Everywhere else thinks they’re fake, but in Gravity Falls it’s all real,” Stanley added.

Understanding dawned across Sherman’s face.

“That’s all real?” Elizabeth exclaimed.

“What, you believe us that easily?” Stanley asked.

“I worked in one pawn shop or another for ten years,” Elizabeth asserted. “I still work in sales. I know a lie when I hear one.”

“What? Liz, they’re talking about the supernatural. This is—this is ridiculous!” Sherman yelled. “What really happened?”

“Much of what I study could be considered supernatural,” Ford stated. “Though I prefer to use weird or anomalous as umbrella terms, considering that some creatures or events could be considered completely natural, but would seem to be weird to most people.”

“You’re serious,” Sherman said, face blank.

“Of course! I take my studies very seriously!”

Sherman turned so it was very obvious that he was looking at Stanley only.

“Stanford, I don’t know where you found such a good look-alike, or what you’re hoping to accomplish here, but this isn’t funny.”

“This isn’t a joke!” Stanley yelled, rising abruptly to his feet. “This has been the last thirty years of my life! Something weird happened to my twin brother, and I knew I couldn’t explain it, not when it first happened! I just didn’t know enough! But I knew nobody would believe me!”

“Stanley, calm down!” Ford shouted, standing up to put his hands on his brother’s shoulders. “You need to calm down.”

“No! I lived in that weird fucking town for thirty years, and spent all that time teaching myself theoretical physics so I could hope to get you back one day, and I still can’t talk to anyone about it because they’ll throw me back in the loony bin!”

“Theoretical physics?” Elizabeth parroted, shocked.

“Stan, wait. Wait,” Sherman said, placing his hand on Stanley’s back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to call you crazy, or anything, but… you understand how this sounds, right?”

“I couldn’t make up something like this if I tried, Shermie,” Stanley said, his expression defeated. “There were days I thought I had killed him.”

The ambient temperature seemed to drop ten degrees.

“You never told me that,” Ford managed through numb lips.

“Well, it’s true.”

Ford sunk back down to the couch, pulling Stanley with him. They were sitting much closer together now; Sherman sat down on Stanley’s other side, instead of back in his armchair.

“I never should have built that thing,” Ford spat.

“It’s not your fault,” Stanley said.

“I know,” Ford agreed. They had talked it out in the aftermath of Weirdmageddon, as Stanley recovered his memories. They had talked it out on the Stan O’ War multiple times. They had talked it out during the seven hour car ride here. Yet still, Ford felt trapped in this cycle of guilt and blame.

“I’ll listen, okay? I’ll believe you,” Sherman promised. “Clearly whatever happened was bad. I want to know why I apparently had a brother go missing in such a weird way that the other decided the most rational reaction was stealing his identity. Okay?”

“You definitely deserve an explanation,” Stanley agreed. “If this past summer taught me anything, it’s that I need to trust my family.”

“This summer taught us both how important trusting our family is, and yet I failed to reach out to the family we had outside of Gravity Falls,” Ford added. “Stanley and I agreed to share the blame for that.”

“You’re here now,” Sherman said. “So please, tell me what happened. I’ll listen.”

“Like I said, I moved to Gravity Falls to study the weirdness that congregated there. However, I wasn’t content with simply documenting the anomalies I came across. I wanted to understand why there were so many weird things in Gravity Falls. I wanted to discover the Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness. I started by forming a hypothesis about the Natural Law of Weirdness Magnetism, but it was difficult to test. I got desperate. I found a painting in a cave of a strange wheel of symbols, and an image that the people depicted in the cave painting seemed to be bowing to, as if worshiping it. I managed to decipher the language used in the paintings, and discovered an incantation to summon the being depicted, as well as a warning against summoning it,” Ford explained. “Like I said, I was desperate. I allowed my own curiosity and ego to take over and ignored the warnings. I read the incantation on the cave wall aloud. At first, nothing happened, and I assumed it was a dud. That afternoon, however, I had the strangest dream.”

“You don’t have to talk about him, if you don’t want to. I can do this part,” Stanley offered.

“No, no. This is something I have to own up to,” Ford said. “Anyway. The being I had summoned was only able to appear in dreams. His name is Bill Cipher. He told me that he was a muse—that he chose one great mind a century to inspire. He told me that he would guide me towards the greatest scientific achievement of them all: a functioning portal between dimensions.

I called up my old college roommate to help me build the thing, following instructions that Bill gave me at night, through my dreams. Fiddleford was much more mechanically inclined than I was, and we began making some real progress, though of course we still went out into the woods to document the anomalies there. But Bill was… manipulative, and abusive. He would build me up with flattery and then place high expectations on me in regards to the completion of the portal, urging me to work faster and harder. Eventually I struck a deal with him that allowed him unlimited access to my mind, which also let him possess my body and keep working on the portal as I slept. That deal was another big mistake on my part.

I made many more mistakes, of course. Fiddleford… there was an incident with a gremloblin we encountered in the forest. As a result, Fiddleford invented a machine which erases memories. When I discovered what he had done, I demanded he destroy it, but in hindsight that was the wrong reaction… I just pushed my friend away, instead of trying to understand him. Later, when the portal was ready for testing, Fiddleford was caught up by accident and went partially through the portal. He quit the project immediately after, extremely shaken by what he had seen on the other side.

That shook my faith in Bill, and when I confronted him, he gleefully admitted his true plans, gloating about his intentions to enter and conquer our dimension. I set myself against him immediately, and he began to use our earlier deal and his access to my body against me. I started avoiding sleep, desperate to defy Bill in any way I could. My research was assembled in three journals. I hid the second and third, and reached out to Stanley in the hopes that he would be able to take the first journal as far from Gravity Falls and the portal as possible.”

“That didn’t really work out,” Stanley interjected smoothly. “I had been more or less homeless for ten years, and when I got Ford’s postcard I rushed up to Gravity Falls from New Mexico. He showed me the portal, and then told me he wanted me to take his journal and get as far away from him as possible. I felt insulted, picked a fight even though I could see that Ford wasn’t well. But we knocked around the lab and managed to turn the portal on as we fought. I shoved Ford too close, and he got caught up in it.”

“I managed to throw my journal to Stanley, still hoping he would keep it safe, but I had been trying to sabotage the portal even as Bill built it up every time I slipped and fell asleep. I knew that it was likely broken after I fell through, due to the energy requirements involved in transporting matter between dimensions,” Ford said.

“Yeah, the portal shut down after it pulled you in. I had a lab full of equipment I didn’t understand, only one-third of the instructions, and no idea what had just happened or if it was even possible to get Ford back,” Stanley added.

“Oh my god,” Elizabeth said.

“You got sucked through a portal?” Shermie asked Ford.

“Yes,” Ford replied, idly straightening his glasses. “I spent the next thirty years wandering the multiverse, assembling a weapon to kill Bill Cipher.”

“And I spent the next thirty years fixing the portal, which showed definite signs of Ford’s sabotage and had all kinds of burnt-out circuits and whatnot to fix. Plus, the rest of the activation codes were in the other two journals, so even once it was fixed, I couldn’t turn it on,” Stanley explained. “I faked my death and took Ford’s identity so I could make sure nobody else would discover the portal in the basement, or try to stop me from working on it.”

“You could have told me,” Sherman said. “I would have helped!”

Stanley sighed and shook his head. “I didn’t trust anybody. I was the dumb, criminal brother. I needed Ford’s credibility to keep doing what I was doing. Plus, I had no idea how close you had been to Ford before everything went down.”

Ford grimaced. “Not close, but that was my fault.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re telling me now,” Sherman said.

Ford leaned forward and looked Sherman in the eyes.

“Sherman, I’ve been a horrible elder brother to you,” he admitted. “But I don’t want to keep being somebody who takes their family for granted. I want to build a real connection with you. Can you ever forgive me?”

Sherman stood from his place on the couch, stepping around Stanley’s legs and then leaning down to wrap Ford into a hug.

“You’re forgiven,” he said, like it was easy. “Just don’t leave me out of the loop like this again, okay?”

“...Oh,” Ford said. “Okay. Okay! Done. I’ll keep in touch, definitely!”

Sherman pulled back from the hug, a wide smile on his face.

“I expect you to phone every Sunday,” he ordered. “And you can call me ‘Shermie’, you know. All my family does.”

Ford flushed. “I wasn’t sure I still had the right.”

“Well, I’m telling you that you do,” Shermie asserted. Then he leaned down and hugged Ford again, this time drawing Stanley into it.

The three brothers melted against each other, despite the awkward angle. Ford felt as if his heart was preparing to burst out of his chest. His whole family knew him, and accepted him.

The distinct click of a camera prompted the brothers to break apart.

Elizabeth held up an old kodak, smiling.

“You three are precious. This is going in the scrapbook,” she announced. Then she looked down at the digital display and frowned. “Ford, you must have moved your hand or something. In the photo it looks like you have six fingers.”

Ford blinked, a little stunned. “I do have six fingers.”

“What!” Shermie exclaimed. “I thought Ma had made that up!”

“You didn’t remember seeing them as a kid?”

“Well, Stan here only had five, so I just thought I was misremembering because of Ma’s silly stories. Wow. Six fingers,” Shermie said. Ford held his hand out so Shermie could see for himself. “You know, that’s really neat!”

Ford broke into a grin. “Thanks, I think so, too.”

“You two should stay for dinner,” Elizabeth said. “It’ll be nice to have some company.”

“Ah, thank you, Elizabeth, but we really should be getting back to our boat—”

“Have you already eaten?”

Stanley and Ford swapped looks.

“Well, no, but we wouldn’t wanna impose,” Stanley said.

“Nonsense! We’ve just discovered that Shermie here has two brothers instead of one. We should celebrate! I’ll whip something up real quick,” Elizabeth decided. She got up from her armchair and swiftly crossed the room to one of the doorways to the right side. “Oh, and Ford? Feel free to call me ‘Liz’, okay?”

Then she disappeared, presumably into the kitchen.

“Hey, she likes you!” Shermie cheered. “That’s good.”

Ford and Stanley stayed for dinner, swapping stories about Shermie’s life, and their lives, and Liz’s life, and childhood stories about Andrew and Kimberly and even stories from when Dipper and Mabel were young and still lived in that house.

Ford and Stan even explained the most recent situation, about the initial fear and lingering uncertainty surrounding a powerless Bill Cipher showing up in Piedmont and now living in Gravity Falls. Shermie and Liz agreed that putting him under the supervision of someone who knew what he was capable of was probably the best move for now, and then Stan launched into one of the more weirdness-heavy stories from Dipper and Mabel’s stay over the summer.

It seemed only fair to tell him about Weirdmageddon, seeing as Stanley had promised a full account to Kimberly soon, but Shermie and Liz agreed that the children had handled themselves admirably, and that it was a difficult situation but that there was nothing to do about it now. When Stanley complained about the ban Kimberly had put on further summer visits, Liz even agreed that anything that dangerous was unlikely to happen again, and Kimberly was probably being just a little overprotective. Shermie said that the kids should have been more supervised, but that that was fixable, and Ford had to concede that he was right.

The stories stretched past dinnertime and on until sunset, at which point Liz insisted they might as well just stay the night, with hearty backup from Shermie.

The next morning, Shermie and Stanley tag-teamed to fix breakfast, which Liz appreciated because apparently they rarely had pancakes, and Ford appreciated because somehow Shermie had kept Stanley from getting any hair into them.

Then Shermie and Liz had to go to their respective workplaces, but they bid Ford and Stanley luck on their ocean voyage and various adventures, and reminded them of their promise to call every Sunday.

They set off back towards the Stan O’ War II with full hearts.

Chapter Text

Stan wasn’t exactly looking forward to this, but it needed to be done. The kids had first called them on Saturday, and it was Tuesday now, and Shermie and Liz had taken the story about as well as could be hoped.

Kim had never liked him, though.

He took a deep breath and pulled up her contact on his phone. He hit the call button.

It rang.

“Hello, Stanley,” Kim answered.

“Hey, Kim,” Stan said. “You asked for me to call and tell you the full story, so that’s what I’m doing now.”

“I’m listening,” Kim said, voice frosty.

Oh, he was in so much trouble.

“Look, Gravity Falls is a really weird town. I mean, it has a lot of weird things in it. Most of ‘em can’t hurt you unless you go looking for ‘em. I thought I would have the kids work in the Mystery Shack a little, let them watch TV and play in the yard and then we’d all go to town sometimes. I wasn’t planning on telling them about any of the weird stuff.

But, listen, they got really good at slipping away while I was working. I only had two employees, Kim, so Dipper and Mabel slipped away a lot. I didn’t think much of it! Moses, I spent half my childhood on a beach literally so full of broken glass that they named the town ‘Glass Shard Beach’. What I didn’t know then that I know now is that Dipper had found one of Ford’s old journals. I’d been searching for them for years, so of course this kid shows up and finds one by accident,” Stan joked.

“Stanley,” Kim said.

“Ahem. Right. Anyway, Ford’s old journals were what he used to document all the weird stuff around town. I thought lying to the kids about it would protect them from it, but Dipper was carrying around an illustrated guide and I had no idea. So they went out and tracked down all sorts of weird stuff, got themselves in and out of trouble on their own and with their friends. I think they had a lot of fun with that part. Then this crazy kid shows up. Gideon. He runs a competing tourist trap, and has this weird, obsessive crush on Mabel, even though he’s like, nine years old. And, well, it turned out he had the second journal, and because of something in there, he thought the ‘key to ultimate power’ or something was on our property. That was what happened when we lost the house.

I decided to send the kids home, you know that part, but what I didn’t tell you when I called afterwards to let you know they were good to stay because I’d gotten the house back was that Gideon tried to kill them with a giant robot.”

“Sorry, he did what?” Kim shrieked.

“I know, I know. I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see that on the news either. Chased after them as fast as I could. Dipper and Mabel managed to handle the situation before I got there, but I had proof that Gideon had been spying on everyone in town and that got him thrown in prison. I stole the journal from Gideon before he went off to prison, and then, that night when we were back in the Mystery Shack, Dipper told me about how he had found the third journal in the woods and had been reading from it all along.”

“Why didn’t you take it from him, then? Clearly that book was dangerous!”

“I did take it from him! I needed it for the portal in the basement. But, well… you didn’t hear the way he talked about it, Kim. It meant so much to him. And, hey, if they were going to keep running around town the way they did, I knew that I would rather have them know what they were getting into than stumbling into danger blindly. So I photocopied it and gave the book back to Dipper.”

“Stanley!”

“I made him promise to only use it for self defense!”

Kim sighed. “And I’m sure he kept that promise,” she said sarcastically.

“Not even for a day. Literally! I threw a party the next day to celebrate the re-opening of the Mystery Shack, but these federal agents showed up, because of, uh, I think they detected the gravity anomalies the activation of the portal was causing? Anyway, Dipper wanted to investigate how weird the town was, and got it in his head that a federal investigation would be just the key. Someone needs to teach that boy not to trust the government.”

“Stanley. You can’t teach kids not to trust the government.”

“Well, in his efforts to prove that he was telling the truth about how weird Gravity Falls is, he summoned a zombie army. Moses, that was a disaster. Soos got bit and turned, the feds found a reason to stick around the town, and we all had to sing karaoke. Ugh.”

“What?”

“You can blow up zombie heads with a three-part harmony,” Stan briefly explained. “And then after all that, I had to have Dipper go through that journal to find the cure for zombiefication so we could save Soos. You ever stolen formaldehyde from a morgue before? Not fun.

I guess the next big thing that happened was that Dipper got possessed.”

“He mentioned that,” Kim said. Her voice was tight, pained. Stan felt a lump of guilt clog up his throat.

“Yeah. The kids played that one real close to the chest. I didn’t hear about it until after Ford re-entered our dimension. I thought the kids were fighting more than usual when they wrecked Mabel’s puppet show, but I never could have guessed… anyway. That left Dipper lightly injured and mildly traumatized.”

“See, you say something like that, but you think I should let my kids go back?” Kim laughed, but it was clear that she found none of this funny. Her laugh was the laugh of someone who was trying not to cry or scream. “All of these horrible stories, a demon showing up at my house, and now you tell me that Dipper was traumatized? Stanley, you’re lucky I’m ever letting you talk to my children again. What in the world could you possibly tell me that would let them come back to Gravity Falls?”

“I know, I know. This isn’t even the worst of it, Kimberly. Some of the bad stuff, I knew I should have called you when it happened, but, well, to be completely honest, I didn’t think you would believe me,” Stan said.

“What happened after Dipper got possessed?” Kim asked.

“The kids went and uncovered a cult that had been erasing the weird from the memory of the Gravity Falls residents for the past thirty or so years,” Stan answered.

“There was a cult going around erasing memories?”

“Yeah. The kids got their hand on a memory gun, too. That came in handy later.”

“The demon said something about memory loss when he was talking to your brother…” Kim recalled.

“Yeah, I’ll get to that in a minute,” Stan promised. “Anyway. They dismantled the memory erasing cult and got a memory gun. I guess the next big thing that happened was all my fault.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Yeah, yeah. To be honest, I probably should have waited until the kids had gone home, but… Kim, try to understand! I was desperate. I had been trying to get Ford back through that portal for thirty years, teaching myself all sorts of crazy math and science and engineering just for the chance to see him again. There were years at a time where I was convinced I had killed my twin brother. What if it was your sister, huh?”

“I don’t know,” Kim admitted.

“Well, I finally had all three journals, and all the instructions for turning on the portal. All it needed was fuel. So I stole some toxic waste from a federal site.”

“You did what?” Kim shrieked.

“I stole toxic waste from a federal site.”

“You’re never seeing my kids again,” Kim said, and then hung up the phone.

Stan lowered it from his ear, staring at the CALL ENDED screen in shock. No. No, he couldn’t have screwed it up that badly. Maybe if he called back, or texted or something, and pretended it had been a poorly-timed joke? Maybe he could just kidnap the kids next summer. He couldn’t never see them again, that was—that was the worst case scenario.

He couldn’t lose them too.

The phone rang. The caller ID said it was Kimberly Pines. Stan had never answered a phone so fast in his life.

“I’m sorry!” he wailed down the line. “I’m sorry, it’ll never happen again! Please just—you have to let me see the kids again! Please!”

There was a beat of silence. Stan was tense, on the verge of tears.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Kim said quietly. “The kids love you. I probably couldn’t stop them from seeing you again if I tried. But I want to supervise.”

“Of course,” Stan promised hastily. “Whatever it takes, of course. I just—I love those kids, please don’t ban me from seeing them!”

“You can see them, Stanley. I’m sorry. Are you—are you crying?”

“No,” Stan cried. He wasn’t crying. It was just really dusty on his bunk, that’s all.

“I said I would hear the whole story of what happened this summer, and I will. So you… stole toxic waste. Then what?”

Stan took a second to collect himself, with a completely normal amount of sniffling involved. “Then I got arrested for it. The kids were taken into federal custody… I don’t know exactly what happened, but I had used that toxic waste to turn on the portal. The portal was causing gravitational anomalies at irregular but predictable intervals, which slowly got stronger and closer together, with the strongest anomalies being at the site of the portal. I used one of those gravitational anomalies to escape from holding at the police station, where they had taken me to question me. When I got back to the Mystery Shack, Dipper, Mabel, and Soos had all found their way through the secret passage and into the basement lab. I don’t know how they knew the code to get in, or why exactly they were down there. They must have searched my office or something. Anyway, Dipper was freaking out because of everything that was going on, and I think he must have seen my old stash of fake IDs at one point. The kids were trying to shut down the portal, but I couldn’t let them do that, because, y’know, that was my only chance of getting Ford back. Mabel was the one at the shutdown button, though, and she decided to trust me. She’s a good kid. She has a lot of love in her heart.”

“Yeah, she does,” Kim agreed.

“Anyway. Ford came through the portal, and then it fell apart, probably because of the strain the gravitational anomalies had put it through, and also probably because I am not the best engineer. Me and Ford told the kids all about what happened between us, how he had gotten stuck on the other side of the portal. I mean, we left out all the really dirty details, but we told them enough that they could understand what had just happened and why we were mad at each other.”

“Couldn’t you have just pretended not to be mad at each other?”

“Is that what you and Andrew do in front of the kids? Does that work?” Stan asked. “I mean, it wouldn’t have worked for us either way, because the first thing Ford did when he got back was punch me. He hadn’t even realized there was anybody else in the room, yet.”

“Oh, yikes,” Kim sympathized.

“Yeah. Dipper idolized him, or course. Apparently he’d been trying to uncover the identity of whoever wrote those journals since he found the third one at the start of the summer. He didn’t seem too disappointed that it was just my nerd brother, though. Actually he seemed pretty thrilled,” Stan said. “But it was after Ford arrived that things really started going downhill.”

“What could possibly be worse than Dipper getting possessed?”

Stan heaved a sigh. “Yeah, you’re not going to like this.”

“Tell me anyway. You owe me that much, Stanley Pines.”

“I know. Okay. I wasn’t there for everything that happened, but a lot of it was explained to me later. Where to start…”

“Just tell me what happened!” Kim snapped.

“There’s some context you need to understand it all!” Stan snapped back. “Listen, you already know that Ford has a history with Bill Cipher, that demon who showed up at your house.”

“Yes.”

“Well, before Ford had figured out that Bill was a demon, Bill tricked him into building the portal. It connects our dimension to this place called the Nightmare Realm, which is sort of the empty space between all the different dimensions that exist out there in the multiverse, or at least that’s how Ford explained it to me. That’s where Bill and all his demon friends normally live. But Bill doesn’t, or didn’t, have a physical body. He was a dream demon, so he was just made out of pure energy. I don’t know about the other demons, but Bill could only interact with our dimension either within someone’s mindscape, which is basically dreams, or by possessing a body, which he can’t do unless he makes a deal with the person he’s possessing.

The point of all this is that Bill tricked Sixer—uh, that’s a nickname for Ford—into building the portal so he could cross over into our dimension, which would let him gain a physical body of his own. Somehow this also increased his power, or something? I never understood that part. But Bill fully intended to conquer and destroy our dimension.

When I turned on the portal, it punched a temporary hole from our dimension into the Nightmare Realm. But it also tore open a rift, which could grow into a portal to the Nightmare Realm if properly contained. Ford had the thing contained in this special kind of, I dunno, like a glass container? And that kept it from growing and kept Bill from using it. But then Dipper and Mabel had a fight about something, and Mabel ran out into the forest to get some space, and apparently she grabbed the wrong backpack? I don’t know why Dipper had the rift, but he was doing a lot of weird science stuff with Ford, so maybe Ford gave it to him, or Dipper took it because he was curious. Whatever, that part doesn’t matter.

What matters is that Bill Cipher was possessing someone the kids knew, and thought they could trust, and he kept his eyes covered. The only way you can tell for sure if Bill is possessing someone is their eyes. They turn yellow and have slit pupils. It’s less obvious from a distance than you’d think. But Bill used the body he was possessing to trick Mabel into giving him the rift. He broke the containment unit, and it opened up this huge… I don’t know how to describe it.

A tear in the sky, maybe. Bill Cipher came through and gained a physical body, and then let all his other demon pals through, and then started making our dimension as weird as he wanted. They called it Weirdmageddon.

“Weirdmageddon? Like… Armageddon? Like the end of the world?”

“Yeah. I didn’t know where anyone was when it started. I had no idea that Ford and Dipper had been together, no idea that Mabel was out in the woods… but when I was rebuilding the portal, Ford had written warnings everywhere about what it was capable of. I had ignored them, weighed the odds and decided I wanted my brother back even if it did end the world. I was selfish.”

“You knew that ending the world was a possibility? Are you insane?” Kimberly shouted.

“I knew that ending the world was a possibility, but if I never tried, then losing my brother forever was a certainty! I couldn’t let that happen!”

Kimberly was audibly taking deep breaths. “It’s okay. Everyone survived. It’s okay. Everyone survived,” she chanted. “Everything is good now. Okay. Okay.”

“...You alright?”

“The next time I see you, I am going to punch you in the face. Right in the nose, Stanley Pines.”

“That’s fair,” he conceded. “Anyway. I had known it was a possibility, so I had been preparing. Stocking up on brown meat and other supplies, y’know? And now it had hit, and nobody was even home… Ford, Dipper, and Mabel had set up some kind of magical protection buried around the Mystery Shack, so it wasn’t affected by all the weirdness magic going on outside. My goat had grown to the size of a house. Apparently Soos’s grandma was turned into a chair. These eye-bat things were flying around everywhere, turning people into stone and bringing them to the giant floating black pyramid Bill Cipher had erected as his base. He called it the ‘Fearamid’. Ugh.

Truth is, I spent the first three days or so thinking that my family was all dead.” Stan paused and took a deep breath. “We figured out time had been stopped somehow pretty quickly. None of the clocks moved, and none of us could contact anybody outside of town. McGucket—uh, that’s an old friend of Ford’s, he went insane for a while but he’s better now—he showed up leading a bunch of injured stragglers on that first day. Humans, gnomes, a couple unicorns, all sorts of creatures. Bill was a threat to all of us. But the Mystery Shack was safe, so we learned to get along in the name of survival. The mayor had already been snatched up by an eye-bat, so I elected myself de facto Chief. I admit I may have cracked a little.

I didn’t want to fight. I’m ashamed to say it, but I owe you the truth. I wanted to hunker down and just keep surviving as long as we could. That’s not really a life worth living, but I had done it before, and this time I even had a house and other people with me.”

“How would you even fight something like that? Did you guys have, like, a spell? Some kind of anti-demon magic?” Kim questioned.

“We had the unicorn-hair barrier and that’s pretty much it. But the kids, well, they were determined to fight. And Dipper, it turns out he had been with Ford when it started. He told me that Ford had been turned into a statue. Mabel had been put in a magic prison that granted any wish she had—one of those ‘everything is so nice you don’t want to escape’-type things. Dipper had wandered for three days on his own before he met up with Wendy, and then with Soos, and the three of them rescued Mabel. That was when they made their way back to the Mystery Shack and found me and the other survivors.”

“Okay, let me try to get this straight. You and some other survivors were holed up behind a magic safety spell. Stanford was turned into a statue and captured. Dipper managed to survive the apocalypse on his own, and Mabel was put in a magical wish-fulfillment prison?”

“Yeah, that about sums it up,” Stan confirmed.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.” Another deep breath. “So the kids decided they wanted to fight. They rallied everyone and then had McGucket turn the Mystery Shack into a robot which would be capable of fighting Bill Cipher.”

“What, he just… turned your house into a robot? How? Is that even possible?”

“McGucket’s apparently some kind of robotics genius. Anyway, before getting captured, Ford had told Dipper that he knew a way to defeat Bill. So the plan was, we would form two teams, and one team would use the robot to fight Bill, and the other team would take advantage of the distraction to parachute into the Fearamid and rescue Ford,” Stan explained.

“And my kids stayed on the robot with the magic unicorn safety spell, right?”

“What? No! Have you met Dipper and Mabel? They were bound and determined to rescue Ford. He’s their family, after all.”

“They were twelve.”

“Yeah, things like ‘age’ stop mattering really quickly in the apocalypse. All that counted was how good you were at surviving, and Kim, your kids are the strongest fighters I know.”

Kim sniffled a little, but didn’t shout at him or burst into tears or anything, so after a second Stan kept telling his story.

“So we got into the Fearamid, and we found this throne made out of all the people who had been turned to stone. It was, uh. Well, it was a lot. Ford was made out of gold, for some reason? And I don’t know how the magic worked, but Gideon told us—”

“The creepy kid who stole your house?”

“Yeah, Bill had him in some kind of weird birdcage and was forcing him to dance nonstop for amusement. Anyway, Gideon let us know that the mayor was the ‘load-bearing human’, however that works, and when we pulled him out the spell broke and everybody turned back to normal.

Then Ford told us all about the Zodiac, which was a prophecy meant to defeat Bill. It had all these symbols in it, and each one represented a person. We just had to all stand in a circle and hold hands, and then Bill would be defeated.”

“That sounds like something out of a cartoon,” Kimberly said, skeptically.

“Yeah. But it probably would have worked, which makes everything that happens after this my fault.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was all high-strung, freaking out, focused on all the wrong things. I refused to hold hands with Ford until he thanked me for rescuing him from the portal and then when he corrected my grammar after I made some snarky comment, I snapped and picked a fight with him. The circle fell apart and Bill found us.

He trapped the other members of the Zodiac in tapestries, but I guess our family had pissed him off so much he decided we needed his personal attention. He trapped me and Ford in one cage and your kids in another. Mabel managed to blind Bill with some spraypaint she had. Dipper had this size-changing flashlight that they used to make their cage bigger and then slip through the bars. They ran off, but Bill ran after them.”

“Stanley!”

“Yeah,” Stan agreed. He wasn’t sure if Kim was scolding him or expressing worry or what. From her tone, he wasn’t even sure she knew. But he agreed. “I asked Ford if there was any other possible way to defeat Bill. And, well, there was. Apparently, the natural weirdness of Gravity Falls was keeping Bill trapped. He couldn’t get to the wider world. Ford knew some equation that would free him, and obviously Bill wanted that. But Bill couldn’t take advantage of his and Ford’s earlier deal and just possess Ford and find the equation in his mind, because while Ford was out wandering the multiverse, he put some kind of special metal plate in his head that kept Bill out.

That wasn’t a problem for me.

See, me and Ford are identical twins, if you ignore the extra fingers. And it turns out I can still do a pretty great impression of him. We swapped clothes. When Bill came back into the room, carrying the kids, I bargained for their freedom in exchange for that equation Bill wanted. So Bill came into my head, and… I don’t know how to explain this.”

“Try.”

“I am! Look, remember those guns that can erase memories? The memory guns? Ford had been carrying one. I don’t know why. Feels like there were a ton of them, they got everywhere. But that plate in Ford’s head that kept Bill out? Well, uh, it kept Bill out short of making another deal. Bill knew that. A side-effect was that it also stopped the memory gun from working on Ford. I think Dipper found that out by accident? The point is, Bill was only weak in the mindscape, because going into a mindscape that isn’t your own traps you within a world that is controlled by somebody else. So we tricked Bill into entering my mind by pretending I was Ford, and then Ford shot me with the memory gun and erased all my memories.”

“What? All your memories? Wait, but then… when they talked about your memory loss at my house, and you said you got better…”

“Memories can come back if you have something that reminds you of them, and if you work at remembering. We didn’t, uh, we didn’t know that for sure though. We just knew McGucket had been getting steadily more sane since he found out that his memories had been getting erased over and over for years. I thought… I’m going to be honest with you, Kim. I thought that I would be erased forever. My body would live, but I would be dead. I thought I was gonna die. But I was willing to die if it meant saving your kids. Dipper and Mabel, they’re the best thing to ever happen to me.

Maybe that’s presumptuous to say about my brother’s grandchildren, your children, but it’s true. Those kids were the first people to really make me feel like family since Pa kicked me out. No offense to you or Andrew or Shermie or Liz, I mean, you guys are all great, but you have to admit that we were never really close. Dipper and Mabel, though… they saw me at my absolute worst and decided they still loved me. I can’t ever repay that.”

“You would die for my kids?” Kim asked, voice fragile.

“A thousand times,” Stan replied.

And he would. If he had to be blasted a thousand times in the face by that memory gun, he would. Shot, stabbed, burned, whatever. He would take on any pain necessary to keep those kids safe. This, finally, was something worth staking himself on: protecting his family.

“Then… you have to know where I’m coming from, Stanley. Everything you’ve described is… terrifying. Each incident just got worse and worse. How could I call myself a mother if I willingly let my kids go back to that?” Kim asked.

“Because it makes them happy,” Stan said.

“Doing drugs makes people happy,” Kim deadpanned.

“Listen… Yeah, Gravity Falls is a dangerous place. But the most dangerous thing over the summer was Bill Cipher, and he’s, well, not gone, apparently, but he’s powerless now. There are a lot of things I would have done differently, in hindsight. But it wasn’t all danger, all the time,” Stan explained. “Mabel had her first kiss with a merman. Ford took Dipper to explore an alien spaceship—”

“There are aliens?” Kim interrupted.

“Huh? Uh, not any living ones? But apparently there’s a spaceship that crashed, like, a million years ago buried in the hills—”

“And Dipper got to explore it?”

“...Yes?”

“Oh my god. Oh my god. I’ll have to ask him about that. Oh my god, a real life alien spaceship!” Kim squealed.

How had Stan forgotten that Kim was a crazy alien fan? He could use this!

“Well, you know, I’m sure Ford would love to show it to you sometime. It’s too bad that you’ll never get to see it if you never come to Gravity Falls,” Stan said, careful to keep his voice casual.

“Oh, I see what you’re doing, Stanley Pines!” Kimberly scolded him. “Still, a real alien spaceship…”

“What if you and the kids come up this summer? We could find room for all of you, and this time I wouldn’t be running the Mystery Shack, so me and Ford could keep an eye on the twins twenty-four-seven. You can do your job over the interwebs, right?”

“The internet, Stanley,” Kim corrected him. “And… yes, I believe I could. I would have to get permission from my boss, of course. But maybe—maybe, don’t get too excited—I would be willing to let the kids return if Andrew and I came with them.”

“Hey, you got yourself a deal!” Stan agreed. “I’ll have to make some calls to find a place for us all to sleep, but I’m pretty sure Ford’s old friend would be willing to put us up in that mansion of his.”

“Summer is still so far away. We have time to make arrangements. And Stanley?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for being honest with me.”

“Woah, hey. You don’t have to thank me. You had the right to know. Plus, I totally expected the kids to tell you as soon as they got back to California.”

“Well, I guess they thought it would be too unbelievable. And after all that mess with the demon, I asked them to let me hear the story from you first,” Kim said. “I’m sure they have a lot of stories about the happier adventures that make them want to go back. I didn’t want to give them the chance to sugarcoat what happened.”

Stan sighed. “That’s reasonable. But now that you have heard my side of the story, you should definitely ask your kids about theirs. They got up to all sorts of things this summer, I’m sure they have a bunch of stories they’re dying to tell you now that they know you’ll believe them.”

“Mabel especially, it sounds like. First kiss with a merman? Somehow, that sounds just like her,” Kim laughed.

“Yeah, well. The kids call us every Saturday around seven. Feel free to join in, okay?” Stan offered.

“I may take you up on that,” Kim agreed. “Goodbye for now, Stanley.”

“Bye, Kim,” he said.

She hung up. Stan dropped the phone onto his bed with a sigh of relief.

That could have gone way worse. Now, it sounded like Gravity Falls might have two extra Pineses joining the fun next summer.

A grin grew across Stan’s face. He couldn’t wait.