Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the center of a woods that existed far before the first spark of humanity was thought of, and would continue to exist far after its final thought was burned out, was a house. Its door was naturally locked, held shut by the bolt it was born with, and under it, six additional deadbolts grafted on. Each progressively more haphazardly, all within the past three months. The final deadbolt was attached more by pure desperation than by physics. In the center of the house, like a sentinel or perhaps a beating heart, sat Stanford Pines. At that point, he felt himself less alive than the building he was trapped in. 

The first day Fiddleford McGucket arrived at the house was also the first real sunny day the entire month. The previous weeks had been shunned by alternating clouds and rain, rolling over the sky like monochrome meadows in the day, and then clearing for the stars in the night. The two hadn’t spoken in years when Ford contacted him. Nothing bad had happened, of course. He was just… prone to drifting. They both were. The call was a hail Mary really. Fiddleford was married, with a kid and a house and a life, but Ford Needed an assistant for his research, and a mechanic, and maybe a friend. The only person he knew to do all three competently was his old college roommate. Fiddleford was a genius. Distinctly different from Ford's genius, but genius all the same. So he naturally agreed to help, leaving his marriage and son and house behind. 

Fiddleford was a spindly man in college, and in his thirties, hadn’t grown out of it. His eyes wrinkled crookedly as he glanced up at the sky. “Well ain’t God smiling on us today, huh?” 

Ford smiled, and nodded politely. He wasn’t a religious man. His parents didn’t put much effort into convincing him, and he never found an interest to seek it out. However, he couldn’t help but agree. He felt watched by God as they loaded Fiddlefords belongings into the building. They were going to make miracles. He just knew it. 

The last day Fiddleford McGucket left the house, yelling about a monster only he could see, the proceeding four days were rendered null by a horrid storm. Ford was none the wiser. They had fought. It was the worst one they’d ever had—out of all their progressively more frequent arguments—and Ford had locked himself in the basement to cool down. He had work to do. Work that McGucket didn’t understand. Not in the way he did, though he knew nobody would understand anything the way he did. Ford rolled his sleeves up to his 

Ford thought of those brief weeks often in the coming month. Between his ever shifting moments of lucidity. McGucket really didn’t understand in the way he did, and he was a fool for it. The messy scrawl across the downstairs bathroom mirror, written in what he could only hope was his own blood, told him this. As did the Polaroids of his grinning face, pale and waxy and staring, eyes too wide, and the moments when he woke up alone, not in his bed. Sometimes the street, sometimes the woods, and once and only once, outside on his roof, balanced precariously on the edge.

That was the event that pushed him to do it. One week previous, he’d sent the letter. An important letter. Possibly the most important letter he’d ever send. It’d taken him three tries to write it. Hands shaking too hard it all came out illegible the first time, and losing his bravery and trashing the note the second. Third was the charm. It was his final act of desperation. It had all spun so rapidly out of control, he needed somebody on the outside. Somebody not connected, somebody he could trust. 

Stanley was not a good man. He was a thief, a liar, and worst of all, he’d ruined Ford's life. The past thirteen years had been dedicated to undoing his brother's complete and utter dismantling of his life. If he had it his way, he would never have to even think about the man ever again. Ford didn’t have the luxury of choice here though, so it was sent. The letter was simple, ambiguous. Stanley, Please come. And an address to the house he was living in written at the bottom. If he was bolder, he might have written more. Something to convey the urgency; the desperation. It wouldn’t be unlike Stanley, to see the note and then throw it right into the trash. Ford hadn’t been kind to him. He wasn’t sure if he’d blame the man if he did trash it. But Ford couldn’t afford to be so blasé about details. He didn’t know who was watching, who might see the card. He needed to spend as little time thinking about the actual card itself as possible. So it was concise and short and Ford halted an instinctual prayer to a God he knew hated him, that Stanley would heed it. 

The plan upon Stanley’s arrival was equally simple. When he arrived, Ford would give him his first journal–the first testament to his research, his life achievement, his everything –and then the man would sail across the world to hide it. Preventing anyone from making the same mistake Ford had. His brother was hardly the smartest, but a plan this simple could not fail. Would not fail. 

Ford tried not to think about what would happen to him after Stanley was long gone, far into his next scam, and the world was safe. Occasionally he indulged himself in daydreams… walking into one of the progressively more frequent and violent blizzards. Letting the wind scrape at his skin until it sanded him down to bones and he was no more. Or mixing up something that would allow him to pass peacefully in his sleep, slowing his heart until it whispered out its last beat and he was free. He knew couldn’t though. The beast that haunted him had an unfathomable power. He’d seen it once, strung up through the rotted nervous system of a corpse, its light filling in the missing links in veins and sinew, muscle and bone. Everytime Ford thought of slipping away, he was haunted by a vision of his own body, drenched in the gilded light of his old god, bringing about the end of times. He couldn’t. 

The decay was ungraceful and quick. Ford lost more and more time to a dark unconscious. His body wandered the world without him in it, and he spent his waking moments trying and failing to find a way to restrain himself in his sleep. His one saving grace was that the demon was clumsy. It struggled with human fingers in general, so needlessly complicated it had once complained, and Ford possessed an extra one on each hand. The first lock kept his body trapped in the house for an hour before it figured out how to arrange his fine motor muscles into unlatching it. The next day Ford bought and installed another. It bought him an hour and a half. It also led to their deadbolt based game of cat and mouse. Ford would install deadbolts, and the beast would fiddle with them until it either got them all open, or Ford woke up. 

The demon switched wildly between rage and adoration. It painstakingly hammered a nail through his right hand one day, and then scrawled I love you across the walls in its thick janky and writing with a pen the next. The hell progressed. Stanford lost weight. Ford lost composure. The beast swallowed a claimed 38 spiders in one night. 

He was shaking, watching the ceiling spin woozily—he had not slept in two days. He ran out of coffee four days ago. He was too afraid to leave the house—when the sound of a fist against a door knocked him from his spell. In the time between his pleading message, and the beast's escalation, he’d forgotten about the letter he’d sent. Ford didn’t even know if Stanley was alive to receive it. Previously he’d tracked his brother's life by the sleazy commercials he’d catch on TV of the man. A different name and product each time, but always the same face. He could never forget Stanley’s face. When the beast had caught him going out of his way to watch for Stanley’s ads one too many times though, he woke up one morning with glass in his hands, a smashed apart TV and the words ONLY ME scratched into water soaked floorboards. Ford could’ve checked. Left his fortress, found a public TV, or something , but he had more important things to think about. Like the way the flooring now dipped under feet in certain areas when he walked. Or the way his cupboards were getting dangerously empty. 

His feet scrambled against the once snug fitting floorboards, catching on the door frame as he hurried to the front of the house. The knock wrang out again, more confident, and he could hear the muffled voice of somebody calling out. Who? Who? His beast had connections everywhere. Had once threatened to send somebody to scoop his eyes out and feed them to him, leave him blind, crawling, an invalid forced to bend to its will. 

There was a crossbow sat against the foyer wall, his personal Athena. The only protection against something human he had on hand. Ford grabbed it on his way to the door, fingers weakly gripping it in a way that definitely wasn’t safe. He flicked through the locks, and then pushed the door out, and as it swung dangerously forwards, wiggling on its hinges, he briefly met the twin eyes he could never forget. Stanley . 

The crossbow was between his brother's eyes before he could even think of what he was doing. It was instinct. It was habit. He was going to kill his brother. It was all going to be for nothing. The last thing Ford processed beyond that, was Stanley’s shocked yell, and a sharp pain from his temple. 

It went dark.

Chapter Text

A centrifuge was a machine built to separate a substance into its various parts. This was achieved via the extreme force of its rotation being applied evenly to the independent particles of said substance. The denser particles would be forced out to the radial, while the less dense would be collected in the center. If you had put them in a centrifuge, Ford would be forced into the radial. He was real in a way Bill never was; life lines stretched across his ill formed hands, tender bruises, growing nails. He was objective. Bill however, shifted in and out of reality. He never quite looked the same between his appearances to Ford. The ideas were all there, but some part of Ford knew instinctively that something had changed every single time. Bill was more than happy to stretch himself across the holes and tears in Ford's world, filling in the gaps in a way only something as abstract as Bill could. Some part of Ford also knew no matter how fast he was spun, he’d never be able to fully remove Bill from himself. 

When Ford was eight years old, he spent a considerable amount of time playing on the docs and surrounding beach with a kid whose face and name time had erased. One of those days, they had left their homes in the early morning. It was high tide at the local beach and they spent the next half hour looking at starfish. Ford remembered clearly, the other kid picking one up and hurling it at his face, with a delighted yell. He’d panicked, stumbled back, and woke up in a hospital two hours later. He was warm, and on a soft bed. The room overwhelmingly smelled both sweet and bitter; the expensive perfume his Ma had a habit of shoplifting anytime they were out in the fancier parts of town. Ford was diagnosed with a minor concussion, and must’ve been banned from seeing the kid he was hanging out with, as he didn’t remember ever seeing him again. That was his first time being knocked unconscious. 

Waking up this time was nothing like the first. Fords head pounded, his attempt to sooth it by scrubbing over his right eye with his palm did nothing. As he curled into himself to get up, he noticed two things. Nothing new—beyond the headache—hurt, and he was on the ugly green couch Fiddleford had insisted on getting. The floor didn’t creek under him when he stood up on it, oddly silent. In fact, the entire house was silent. Out the window Ford could see snow, so thick it obscured the surrounding woods. He might as well have been in a void of sorts. Just him and the house in a universe of nothing. 

Judging from the sticky wetness around his eye, there had been an incident with the beast. Ford didn’t fully understand the side effects of its possessive abilities, but his running theory was that the eye being the window to the soul was a bit more than an old folk saying. The demon had one single eye. When it wore Stanford the pressure of having the soul of such a creature in the body of something so puny comparatively, concentrated in the human eye it peered out of. The strain of this made his eye bleed. That was his theory anyway. 

When he turned to face the door—to check his locks—he instead made eye contact with the body on the floor. Ford froze. He took a single shuddering breath, and felt the entire house shake in a breath of its own. The man’s face was ghostly, what little he could see of the skin was white, most of it was covered in the drying red-brown of his blood. Centered on his forehead, bisecting his face there was a lodged arrow. Ford couldn’t see the tip, and the rod was so filthy in blood it rendered any identifying details null, but he knew it was his. 

Ford's knees hit the ground before he became aware he was falling. He crawled horribly to the downed man. It was Stanley. It was Stanley. It was Stanley. With shaking hands he cupped his face. The blood flaked and globbed to his hand. Ford tried to memorize how this felt. An outside part of him observed that he would have to bury his brother. Stanford was fifteen minutes older than Stanley, they always joked that he would die fifteen minutes before Stanley. It’s only fair Stanley would complain with a smile. This wasn’t fair. Gently, because he was illogically afraid that if he was too rough Stanley’s head would pop off, Ford pulled his body onto his lap. 

“Okay,” he breathed. This was fine. This would be fine. Stanley’s eyes stared glassily up at him. “Okay.” Ford repeated. 

He curled into Stanley’s body. Cradled him gently, and let out a horrible sob. After the first choked out noise, it was like he’d suddenly been swept away in a storm. The noise that came out of his mouth next was a mix of a dying animal, and Stanley’s name. A sudden grip on his sleeve broke the spell. Slowly, Ford turned his head. His brother's arm looped oddly in on itself, and clasped around Ford's wrist. Frantically Ford turned back to Stanley’s face. Stanley’s eyes were clear, shaking and staring him down. Ford screamed. 

There was a sudden noise behind him, Ford swung his head around, and behind him standing in the doorway that led out of the entrance and into the kitchen was Stanley. 

“What?” Ford's voice clicked as it came out. He whipped his head back around to the body he was cradling with mounting horror, and found nothing there at all. 

“What are you doing?” Stan was alive. He looked rough, Ford noticed with a guilty feeling in his stomach. His hair was long, draped in a messy mullet around his neck, and the maroon jacket and blue jeans he wore were frayed thin, and spotted with stains he couldn’t identify. “Ford?” Stan prompted again when his brother remained silent. 

“Stanley,” Ford stood swiftly, gripping the opening of his trench coat with his right hand. “You’re alive.”

“Yeah. No thanks to you—hey! What are you doing?” While he was speaking, Ford approached. He had a tiny handheld flashlight in his hand. Ford grabbed his shoulder and shone the light first into his left eye, until Stan’s pupil constricted and burned, then into the right, same routine. 

“Listen—“

“You’re really not going to tell me what that was about?” Stan interrupted. In their time appart he’d forgotten just how difficult his brother was. “First you nearly kill me, then you’re on the ground freaking out, now this fucking—“

“I don’t have much ti—“

“You don’t have much time? Do you have any idea how long it took me to drive here? I dropped everything for you!” Stan was shouting now, he threw his hands in the air. “That letter you sent! You said you wanted to reconnect!”

“What?”

Stanley let out a shout of rage, and reached into a pocket on the inside of his jacket. He pulled out a crumpled letter from it, and shoved it into Ford's chest. Stanley, please come. It read, but under it, in what Ford easily could see was a crude imitation of his own handwriting, the message continued. I miss you. I’ve made mistakes. I want to reconnect. Meet me on February 20th, here . And then the address Ford had written. Could he not tell? Could Stan truly not see the obvious way the handwriting changed? The way his smooth cursive turned more jutting, the unconfident way the lines shook. It had been years since they last spoke, had they really grown that distant?

“I didn’t write this,” Ford looked up at his brother pleadingly. “Well, not all of it.”

“So you couldn’t even bother to write your own letter to me? Had to get a fucking—what? Ghostwriter?” 

“No! You aren’t listening! Look. Let’s just sit down. I need to explain. Please.” Stanley looked like he wanted to argue, but kept his mouth shut and let Ford guide him through the entrance and into the kitchen. 

The kitchen was equally as rough. There was a disgusting rotting smell coming from somewhere in the room, though Stan couldn’t immediately identify from where. In the corner there was a mouse trap, and caught in its metal wire was a single severed human finger. He paled, and discretely checked his brother's hands. Still six on each. When he looked back to the finger, it twitched ominously at him. Stan decided to ignore it. Ford pulled out a chair for him, it scraped wetly against the floor, and caught on one of the boards until Ford tugged it out. 

“Sit, sit” Ford gestured, and then pulled out and sat in the other chair opposite to Stan’s. His brother's back was to the finger, and with deep fascination and horror Stan watched as it mimicked—to the best of its abilities—the exact movements of Ford's own second ring finger on his right hand. Ford had always talked with his hands, and the writhing way the disembodied finger moved emphasized that. He’d ask about it later, Stan decided. 

“I’ve made a horrible mistake.” Stan choked back at laugh, and Ford frowned angrily. “And I don't know who I can trust, there’s—um, look.” Ford appeared suddenly nervous. The expression was alien on his face. Nothing like the confident kid, and obnoxiously smug teen Stan had grown up with. “Do you believe in the supernatural?” Ford's voice entered a conspiratorial tone.

“Uh, sure.” Stan lied easily. He did not believe in the supernatural even a little bit. Sure as a kid he did, but their fantastical adventures were just kids playing pretend. Ford looked relieved at his answer though, and Stan knew he chose the correct response. 

“I made a deal. With a being I thought I could trust. I was wrong”

“Who are you and what have you done with my brother?” Stan tried to joke. The haunting look Ford gave him shut him up quickly though. 

“He promised me infinite knowledge. The secrets to the universe. Told me I was his chosen one. Made me think I was special . In return he could move between our world and his own. Possess my body when I was asleep so we could work together.” There was a desperate look in Ford's eyes. “I thought he was my muse . My everything! We were working on a portal. It would connect our dimensions, I was going to win a Nobel prize. I thought he understood me!”

Ford was getting progressively more worked up; his chest heaved, he waved his hands wildly, his words came out faster and faster, until they merged into a single cacophony of noise.  

“Listen. Ford. Calm down.” Stan reached for his brother's hands, and held them on the table. Ford breathed in a single deep breath. 

“He lied. The portal wouldn’t just connect our world. It would let his leak out into ours! He was going to destroy our world. Fiddleford—my partner—saw before me. I should’ve listened. I should’ve—“ Ford breathed in deeply again. “I saw. I began to dismantle the portal, but I need your help. My research notes, I have three journals that I keep them in. I’ve hidden the second and third, but the first I need somewhere else. Somewhere this demon will never be able to find it. Far, far away from here.”

When they were children, and still spoke to each other, they’d found an old ship wreck in a boarded up cave on the beach. That had been their boat. The Stan o’ War. Whenever they had free time they worked on it. Prying off the rotted boards and replacing them with fresh ones, hanging a sail, painting it. By the time they were teenagers it was floating in a nearby dock, collecting algae and salt, waiting for them to set sail. Together. That of course never happened. There was the fight, and Stan was kicked out, and he hadn’t seen his brother since. But now? Ford wanted to talk about it now?

“The Stan o’ War?” Stan asked, a hopeful glint in his eye. His brother, serious as ever, hid his surprised look with a silent nod. 

“I don’t care what ship, really. Just find one, sail as far away as possible, and bury the book. Somewhere nobody will find it.”

“And you’ll come with me?”

“ What?” Ford pulled his hands back out from under Stan’s. “No. I need to stay here. I need to dismantle the portal. It’s not safe.”

“You called me here, said you wanted to reunite—“ Ford tried to interrupt with a I didn’t write that, but Stan plowed on. “Decided that actually no! I don’t wanna reunite!” Stan threw his hands up mockingly. “I just want to drag my brother from his life! Have him drive hours! Just to tell him to fuck off from me! Did you even think about how I’d feel? Did it even occur to you?”

“Stanley!” 

“Oh don’t Stanley me, Pointdexter. I’ll take your stupid book. On one condition.”

“I’m not making any more deals!” Ford yelped, his back hitting the backrest of the chair. 

“I'm not—listen. I will stay with you for one week. I’ll help you take down your magic portal thingy—”

“It’s not magic,” Ford interrupted. 

Stan ignored him and continued on “—because you look like you can barely lift a couch, left alone metal or whatever. Then I’ll take your stupid book, and be out of your hair. Okay?” Truthfully, Stan missed his brother. There was a horrible ache in his chest since the day he left home, and it hadn’t gone away. Seeing Ford again felt like a breath of fresh air. Even if he was an asshole, and pretentious, and possibly insane. 

Ford was silent. His eyes were piercing, calculating. Stan could tell he wasn’t happy about this, but he was also his brother’s only contact. Ford stood suddenly, and placed his journal on the table. it was red with a golden six fingered hand stencil glued onto it. On the hands palm 1 was written delicately in a black ink. It was so painfully Ford, Stan’s chest hurt a bit. 

“Fine. You must hide this somewhere for now then, somewhere only you know. Somewhere I will never find it, and no matter what I say, do not tell me where it is.”

“Uh. Okay. Sure.”

Ford crept to the doorway, “It's getting late. I have a spare room you can stay in for now.”

“Bringing home lots of ladies and don’t want them to see your nerd room?” Stan joked, and it was so worth the genuinely baffled look Ford gave him. It almost felt like when they were younger. 

“No. I have work to do now. You’ve driven a long way. Get some rest.” With that Ford exited the room. 

“You didn’t even tell me where this guest room is!” Stan called after him, but Ford was either ignoring him or long gone, as there was no response. 

Ford's house was decidedly creepy. Beyond the living human finger, wet specimens, dry specimens, and machines— Stan couldn’t even begin to imagine the purpose of, the building was a mess. He opened the fridge to see if there was anything of substance he could eat, and frowned at the depressing state of the thing. Most of the shelves were empty, a few had opaque white containers ominously labeled Do Not Eat in Fords cursive, along with blocky text in a language Stan didn’t recognize. One equally opaque white container was labeled DO Eat, the phrase underlined three times for emphasis. 

Curiosity got the best of him, and he pulled the DO Eat container from the shelf. It had a weight to it, and the bottom was coated in a watery pink liquid that left a ring where it was once sitting. When he finally prided the plastic lid off of it, he was met with a writhing fleshy mess. Upon closer inspection, Stan realized it was more fingers. Wriggling against each other like worms, grabbing at the smooth edges of the plastic, and each other like crabs in a bucket. Wordlessly Stan closed the container and did his best to put it back where it was, using the liquid ring as his guide. He didn’t want to know what was in the Do Not Eat containers. 

In the veggie tray at the bottom of the fridge was a plastic bag with a half liquified, rotting cucumber, a never opened tray of breakfast sausages that advertised themself as 100% Real Meat!, and a leftover container of what looked like soup, it bulged ominously outward, warping the name Fiddleford that had been written on its lid. Stan was not eating any of this. The only non-rotted food was the sausages, and he wasn't comforted by the package's claim, nor their non-rotted state. 

“Jesus, Ford” Stan mumbled. 

The cupboards weren’t much better. There was a half empty container of saltine crackers he claimed after a brief inspection—they were stale, but food was food—and a jumbo box of jelly beans. In the back was a handful of various canned foods. Beans, pineapple, soup. Stan thought back to his brother's claim of his portal. If he was preparing for the apocalypse, he was incredibly bad at it. If Stan was going to stay here for a week, he wasn’t living off of dubious meat and canned pineapple. 

“Ford!” Stan called into the house. “I’m going shopping for food, and I’m using your money! If you don’t want me to, say something right now!” There was silence of course, and Stan grinned to himself. 

Fords wallet was easy enough to find again, he had seen it left by the door in a small dusty hand carved wooden bowl. He flipped through it briefly, there was probably enough for a week's worth of food. Though he wasn’t sure what prices looked like in such a tiny middle of nowhere town like Gravity Falls. He’d figure it out, if there was one thing Stan was good for, it was figuring things out.

When he returned to the house an hour later with two bags of food, he found Ford waiting for him in the kitchen. His brother spun around, eyes wide. 

“You were supposed to get here yesterday.” Stanford said. 

“Uh-huh and hi to you too. I got you food.” Stan held up one of the bags, and then moved deeper into the room to place them on a decently clean part of the counters. He noticed with mild alarm that the finger in the mousetrap was completely gone, and the trap's wire had been pried back and reset. “I told you I was going, before you get mad.” 

“My letter said for you to come on the 20th. It’s the 21st.” 

“You ever heard of traffic, Ford? Sleep?” Stan began to put the groceries away, since Ford didn’t seem at all interested in helping, just standing in the middle of the room. Bread, jam, pasta, and various snacks he found, in the cupboard. Lunch salami meat, hotdogs, and a fresh cucumber to replace the rotted one, in the fridge. 

“You should’ve called.”

“I don’t have your phone number, in case you forgot.” Stan reached to throw out the rotted food with a cringe. He prayed the containers didn’t break on him. 

“Don’t touch those.” Stanford said suddenly. 

“They’re rotting, Sixer.” Stanford smiled crookedly at the nickname, and Stan tried not to feel unnerved. 

“I’m saving them. For later.” 

“For what?”

Stanford paused, “Science.” He answered lamely. 

Stan rolled his eyes and carefully put the food back. He closed the fridge and turned to face his brother. Ford was still in the center of the room, standing awkwardly. “So,” Stan tried to sound casual. “Fingers huh? What’s with that?” 

“The concept, Stanley?”

“No, genius. The ones in your fridge.”

“There aren’t any fingers in my fridge, other than yours digging through my food.”

“I’m living here too! And—what is this then?” Stan swung the fridge back open, and gestured into it, before pausing. The container was gone. He turned towards Ford. “They were there.” He said lamely. 

“I get you—you don’t believe me but please refrain from mocking me if you’re staying in my home.”

“I said I believed you!”

“As if I could trust a single thing you say.”

Stan turned his head sharply, to hide the hurt in his eyes. He knew Ford wasn’t exactly happy with him, but from what he had gleaned from Shermie, their younger brother, Ford still cared for him deeply. He talked about Stan frequently according to Sherm, when Ma and Pa weren’t around to hear. Stan was sure Ford also complained about him a lot, but Shermie was a kind soul, and wouldn’t tell him anything negative about him his twin said, even if he begged. Maybe the good was wildly outweighed by the bad. 

“Are we going to start on your portal then?” He continued. Stan refused to rise to the bait. Refused. 

“Not tonight.” Stanford balled his left hand into a fist and used the right to crack the joints suddenly. 

“You used to hate it when I did that,” Stan commented. It used to absolutely freak his brother out. He’d once chased him through the house popping his joints, until Ma grounded him for a week. 

“I've changed. Not that you would know.”

He felt his anger hit a boiling point, and threw his hands in the air. “Ugh! I get it! I'm a terrible brother. There! You happy?” Stan had forgotten just how irritating his brother could be sometimes. “Whatever. What are we doing tonight, then?”

“You’re sleeping. I’m working.”

“You were literally just working. Take a break.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.” Stanford said hotly, he turned on the ball of his foot suddenly, and exited the room quickly. 

The guest room was shockingly clean, though covered in a thin layer of dust. It was like a photograph, a room frozen in time. Something that told Stan the rest of the house wasn't always like that. This wasn’t always a guest room, or maybe never was, that much was clear to Stan. The room was too personal. On the dresser were three cubix cubes, all in various states of solved, and on the bedside table was a faded photo of a woman and child. When he pulled open one of the dresser’s drawers, there were still clothes inside. Folded neatly and waiting. Stan wondered if whoever had lived here had something to do with his brother's decline. Maybe he had some abusive girlfriend or something. Ford always was kind of a wimp. There was a woman in the photo. The idea of his brother having a child and him not knowing made Stan swallow. Or maybe whoever lived here was the only thing keeping him sane. He did live in the middle of the woods. 

Stan fluffed the pillows and blankets on the bed, and coughed thickly as a cloud of dust was thrown into the air. It glistened softly in the dusking sunlight, and would've been beautiful, if it wasn’t also so creepy. The bed was cold, and by the time he managed to get comfortable, the sun had long dipped past the horizon. In the quiet of the room he could hear the walls creak and groan as they shifted in the wind. When he closed his eyes, he saw the faded form of his brother standing over him, eyes wide, mouth moving silently, like the afterimage of a cheap camera. Paranoid, Stan opened his eyes. He was still alone, in the room. Though with how dark it was, that brought him little comfort. Beside him on the bedside table with the picture, there was an alarm clock he hadn’t noticed before. It was dark. Unplugged maybe. Stan rolled out of the bed and groaned, his back already stiff from just lying there for an hour. Sure enough the alarm clock was unplugged. He pulled on the black cord until he hit the end of it, and then crouched down next to the bed to look for an outlet. There was one only about a foot away, and the alarm clocks plug slotted perfectly into it, like they were made for eachother. 

The alarm clock buzzed to life, draping the room in an ominous red. Stan turned to survey the now considerably more visible room, and shrieked. Then laughed nervously. There was a coat hanger, with a long dark coat hanging from it. For a horrible moment Stan had thought it had been somebody leering at him, watching him from the darkness. The clock read midnight, and Stan blinked. Surely it wasn’t that late. The thing had been dead for who knows how long. Daylight savings probably messed it up. Stan laid back down in the bed, feeling like a corpse in a coffin. 

He woke up to yelling. Arguing really, though he could only hear one side of the conversation. Stan was horribly reminded of being a kid, waking up to his Pa hovering over his bed yelling like he was trying to knock the house down. He’d always panic, throwing out excuses and explanations before he could even process what his Pa was saying. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he glanced to the alarm clock. It was 4am. A time Ford absolutely would be awake at. Stan breathed quietly, as he strained to hear the argument. The ambient sounds of the house seemed deafeningly loud in the silence, the hum of the heating, the groaning of the wood, the settling of the floorboards against each other. He struggled to pick up any specific words, but could tell it was getting more heated. 

Quietly as he could, Stan crept to the other side of the room, and pressed his ear up against the door. It was oddly cold, and groaned against the pressure. There was the sound of somebody—he hoped Ford—storming down the stairs, whoever it was was getting closer. The room Stan was staying in was located just down the hall from the stairs, on the opposite end of the hallway that the entrance was.

“—won’t let you. I won’t let you.” Stan could finally make out words. It was Ford. He breathed a sigh of relief. “He has nothing to do with this!” Ford hissed. 

Stan cracked the door open. It made an excruciating sound, a keening noise like a baby about to cry. He cringed, and sucked in a breath through his teeth. Stan poked his head through the thin gap of the door, his nose sliding against the wood. Down the hall Ford stood, the light behind him illuminated his frizzy hair like a halo. He hadn’t noticed Stan, thankfully. 

“I don’t care. I don’t care. Leave me alone. Leave him alone.”

There wasn’t anybody else in the hall, and Ford was facing the entrance not the stairs, so it wouldn’t make sense if he was talking to somebody up there. Suddenly Ford's entire body shuttered, and he fell to his knees. 

Stan hesitated in the doorway. He didn’t know if he should confront Ford about whatever that was or just pretend he didn’t see it and go back to bed. His decision was made for him when Ford's head slowly turned to face him. They made eye contact. In the dim light Stan could see the delicate reflections of tear stains on his brother's cheeks. 

“What—what are you doing up?”

“What was that?”

“I told you.” Ford didn’t elaborate. 

Stan thought for a moment in the silence. “You’re talking to yourself.”

“You said you believed me.” Ford almost sounded hurt. 

Quickly, Stan thought back to earlier in the day. The supernatural, Ford's deal. “Oh, the… being”

“The demon. Yes.” Ford confirmed. He had to have some sort of mental illness. That much was clear. “You met him. Earlier.”

“I think I would notice if I met a demon.” He snorted. 

“In the kitchen.” Ford added after a moment. 

“Y'know, that’s my face you’re insulting too?” Stan tried to joke. 

Fords eyebrows drew together, and his cheeks puffed up. It was the face he made when he was angry. Stan always found it hilarious, that he’d retained it well into his teens, and apparently adulthood, but it was hard to find it anything other than horrifying in the context. His brother really believed he was haunted by a demon. 

“You don’t believe me.” Ford said after a moment of silence. His voice was dull. 

“I do!” Stan lied, but Ford's expression darkened. His brother was always hyper aware of him. Maybe he was stupid, to think he could keep the con going on long term. Especially now that Ford wasn’t actively panicking. “Okay. I… think you're sick, Ford. Really, really sick. I think it would be good if we maybe found you a doctor. I don’t know how this house was built but I’ve been seeing things too. Had a buddy who worked in construction. Y’know about carbon monoxide?”

“Of course I know about carbon monoxide, Stanley. But that isn't this! Bill is real!”

“Bill?” Stan choked. “You’re haunted by a demon named Bill?” He tried and failed to hold back a laugh. 

“If you aren’t going to believe me, then I don’t need to talk to you. You will help me disassemble the portal, and then take my journal, and we will never speak again.” Ford stormed down the hallway. 

“Wait!” Stan called after him, he tried to move but felt himself frozen. “Come on! I’ll believe you! I’m sorry!” He watched as his brother disappeared around the corner, and back up the stairs. Only after he had long disappeared, Stan found himself able to move again. Talking to Ford truly felt like one step forward, and two steps back.

Fanart by the illustrious tis_but_another_fanboy on Instagram