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Mabel Pines might end the world.
It’s a three-way showdown between you and Soos, Doctor Pines and Dipper, and the twelve-year-old girl death-gripping the on-switch for the giant, fuckoff interdimensional portal that your boss never bothered to disassemble. Doctor Pines is laser-focused on his niece, putting every bit of that terrible brainpower into trying to talk her down from… whatever she’s got planned.
Thankfully, that’s not one of your boss’ strong suits.
“...Mabel, honey?” Doctor Pines’s voice is pitched low, calm and careful only in tone. It’s the same tone he uses to tell children to keep their fingers away from the Tesla coils, just with a terribly uncertain tremble — the same one you catch wherever he’s cornered by a tourist or caught unaware in a social situation he couldn’t anticipate. “Take your hands off the activation lever. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
You nudge Soos, and he nods. You both step when Doctor Pines steps, inching closer as your boss approaches his niece like a scared animal.
It’s painful, seeing Mabel’s cheerful, cherubic face contorted in frustration and anger, glaring at her uncle with tears beading in the corners of her eyes. She’s mad. She’s been mad for a while now, ever since her brother stopped sleeping.
“M’not stupid, Great Uncle Ford.”
“No, of course you aren’t, but-”
“You can’t turn that on, Mabel!” Dipper cries, leaning out from behind his uncle. The poor kid’s hands are buried in his hair, neurotically tugging at his scalp. “It could end the world!”
Doctor Pines desperately nods in agreement, gesturing down at Dipper without taking his eyes off his niece.
“Listen to your brother,” He tries. “Restarting the portal could rewrite local laws of physics, or open rifts into Dimension Zero, or even threaten the stability of the multiverse, depending on-”
“It could let him in!” Dipper cuts in, voice shrill in desperation.
You glance down — and you can see Mabel’s eyes dip too — to the four-pronged scars on Dipper’s forearm. She sniffs, but her mouth hardens into a firm line.
“Honey, don’t.” Doctor Pines is just feet away now, solely focused on his niece – completely oblivious to you and Soos closing the distance. Mabel’s knuckles whiten as she tightens her grip. “Dipper’s right. Re-activating the portal would risk letting Bill gain access to our dimension. Your brother and I are so, so close to a breakthrough! Why take the risk!?”
“Because,” She sniffs again, and resolutely wipes her nose on the sleeve of her sweater. “You need your brother back, Great Uncle Ford.”
Doctor Pines instantly chokes and freezes. Dipper draws a harsh breath, and you distantly Soos mutter “Dude.”
“How’d you-” He tries, and the words die in his throat. “When- I never mentioned, not once-”
“ M’not stupid, Great Uncle Ford!” Mabel cries, tears starting to fall for real. Something catches in your throat. “The boat in the back yard, the car the shed with the vanity plate — Dipper isn’t the only one who’s read the journal! I dunno Great Uncle S’ name, but- you need him! You’re driving yourself insane, and you’re gonna drive Dipper insane, too!”
Your boss is vibrating on the spot, too caught-out to respond other than a pained squeak.
Dipper glances between his uncle, drowning in grief, and his sister, standing strong despite her tears. You can see him shifting, jaw tensing, fists clenched.
(Here’s something you’ve noticed about Dipper, something Mabel confided in you about, something you’re not sure Dipper’s realized about himself. When push comes to shove, when he’s out of quick tricks and clever options?
Dipper’s brash, impulsive, and terribly, terribly brave.)
He lunges.
In the same second he moves, you move — catching him at the elbow, fisting the back of the Junior Scientist Lab Coat, the extra-extra small that Doctor Pines had you buy just a week beforehand.
Dipper had been so excited to join his uncle in the lab, so excited to kickstart his trial period as Doctor Pines’ apprentice; so, so excited to be even partially recognized at the same intellectual level as his hero. You’d done your best to be excited for him — even as you’d exchanged glances with Soos, even as you’d done your best to reassure Mabel, promising her you wouldn’t let him disappear into the basement lab for the rest of the summer.
It took two days before Dipper started skipping meals. Three for the eye-bags to appear. Five before Dipper didn’t emerge from the lab for a full twenty-four hours and by the time he did, he’d been carried out by Doctor Pines to sleep on the sofa living room.
Seven before Mabel decided enough was enough, and decided to intervene.
Doctor Pines shouts and starts, but Soos throws himself at your mutual boss, dragging him to the floor. He’s yelling and threatening write ups and demotions and Dipper’s yelling and struggling but he’s got a week’s worth of sleep deprivation and you’ve got a summer’s experience in wrangling preteens and in all honesty?
The bravest little girl you’ve ever met sniffs one final time, meets your eyes, gives a resolute nod, and throws the switch.
Mabel Pines might end the world, and you’re going to let her. Because, frankly?
Stanford Pines really needs his brother.
The lights flicker.
Once.
Twice.
And Doctor Pines’ greatest regret whirs to life.
The symbols etched into the rim of the portal light up one at a time in a bright, burning white. The panel starts to rotate, a slow grind that ramps up to a screaming whine. A forgone lecture from Doctor Pines about chromatography flickers through your mind as the symbols float into the air, flickering in some ancient, archaic energy.
You stop breathing as the open mouth of the universe yawns to life.
A pebble floats up past your vision. Grit and gravel, the cables float up off the floor. Dipper’s scrambling midair, and then you feel it — your feet leave the ground, the entire room lurches and you’re floating up and up and up.
Gravity’s checked out of the situation. Point to Doctor Pines. Your boss yells incoherently from the arms of Soos as you cling to Dipper.
It’s a little like watching a car crash, a lot like watching the car in front of you crash as you bear down the highway at a hundred miles an hour without enough time to stop. You’re too far away to do anything about it other than watch in horror as it screams to life, too hypnotized to do anything other than watch.
The open mouth of the universe screams.
A burst of concussive force slams you out of the air. You hit the far wall as gravity reasserts itself, dragging you back down to the ground. You struggle to breath as you raise your head.
You can’t risk taking your eyes off the portal.
Something’s happening in the dead-center of that miniaturized galaxy. First a spark, then a flicker, and blue-white bloom as the portal connects to something beyond the impossible.
Something in the shape of the man bursts through, hitting the ground running. You catch a glimpse of a red, speckled nose and wide, disbelieving eye.
Over the abysmal wail of machinery, you hear Mabel scream-laugh in victory
It’s just —
Some thing follows him.
It’s a nightmare made reality. A scream from the bottom of the bottomless pit, a cacophony of razor-edged teeth and spaghettified whipcord limbs with clawed hands, centered around — well. It’s a hand, but a hand twice the size of the man it was chasing with an eyeball where its palm should be, and a furious yell like the chorus of a hundred-thousand kindergartners denied recess, all run through a woodchipper:
STAAANLEYYY!
You didn’t even hear it, you feel it, in the deep-down animal part of you that always looks for eyes in the dark. A fear so deep and so pure it pulls at you like the portal’s gravity — a gaping wound in reality, so ugly and horrific you couldn’t tear yourself away for the fear of what’ll happen when you blink. You know like a rule of nature that it wants to hurt you. Not kill, hurt, like a cat playing with its food, a petulant toddler bashing dolls together before they break, and —
You know it’s useless, fruitless, but you scramble to your feet, desperately trying to juxtapose yourself between Dipper and the portal, and —
Doctor Pines is watching with wide eyes, mouth open, not in disbelief or fear, you see the smile starting to creep up in the corners of his mouth, but —
Mabel screams.
One of the hundreds of whipcord-claw hands catches her ankle. Starts to pull.
It’s reeling her in.
Soos shouts, Dipper’s scream matches the pitch of his twin, Doctor Pines yells something incomprehensible. You can’t move fast enough to close the distance but this so-called Stanley can.
He pivots so fast it kicks up dust, grappling the noodle-arm gripping Mabel’s ankle, wrenching her upside-down in the process. A dull bronze flashes between his fingers in the off-blue light of the portal as he grips, strains —
The oversized eyeball blinks, squints —
And Stanley rips the monstrosity’s limb clean in two, sending Mabel tumbling to the ground.
Liquid static splatters everywhere as the entity from beyond the portal screams, an aztec death-whistle of a noise . Mabel kicks backwards with the dead alien’s hand still clamped onto her ankle, scrambling for the relative safety of her brother’s arms.
Stanley shifts his bulk between her and the monstrosity. With a roar you swear shakes the rafters he rushes the core of the thing, reaching around to pull something off his back. There’s a dull thud, the reverberation of meat-on-metal, a deer’s body hitting a car at a hundred miles-an-hour. The aztec death-whistle goes up an octave as the bulk of the nightmare-made-reality flinches back by a foot.
Against the light, you can see him now. Your savior is a massive man, clad in rough leather. He’s got a mane of silvered hair standing out like a halo, backlit in the otherworldly light of the portal. He’s wielding something resembling a vantablack baseball bat, beating back the nightmare that followed him into this realm foot by flinching foot.
(You’d gone through a paradigm shift when you started working for Stanford Pines. The unimaginable became reality when you were tracking eye-bat migration patterns and routinely shooing gnomes out of the trashcan. You’d thought you’d almost gotten used to it. You could deal with just about anything nowadays. Whether it was the strange things Doctor Pines threw himself into without a second thought to his own safety, or whatever weird-thing-of-the-day the twins tracked home, or even Soos’ cursed video-game girlfriend.
When you think about the impossible, the otherworldly — when you think of things that are still capable of causing you fear on the most fundamental level — the physical manifestation of Bill Cipher in the third dimension stands deadcenter. When you think of what humanity could even bring to bear against a threat like him, you think of the intricate lab network underneath the Institute of Oddology, of Doctor Pines’ gleaming guns and impeccable transworld architecture and genius intellect working overtime, for thirty years, to fruitlessly re-invent safe portal-tech.
What you now know is that a single man can put that all to shame.)
Stanley plants his boot in Bill Cipher’s eye and shoves. Despite the fact every one of Bill’s innumerable hands are clinging to the cracked concrete of the lab floor or swarming Stanley, despite the fact he’s fighting back an arm with more sheer bulk in its thumb that he has in his body, despite the fact he’s fighting back a nightmare with nothing but his bare hands and a scifi baseball bat —
He’s winning.
You can hear Stanley growl from across the room as Bill’s eye is eclipsed by the otherworldly light of the portal, raw bass compared to Bill’s trembling pitch.
“Close the portal!” He roars, voice unlike a lion, and the sheer desperate aggression sends a shock of adrenaline through you.
You move , stumble-running the short distance to the lever, praying that this isn’t when the shoddy electrical will short, slamming your hand down onto the top button before throwing it into the off position —
Stanley grips the outer frame of the portal, hauls himself up, and one-two- kicks the bulk of Bill’s monstrosity back through the portal.
The blue-white light of the portal wavers and flatlines like the dying light of a TV screen. The limbs left in your reality are amputated with an impossible squelch, thrashing like a lizard’s tail as they dissolve into static and shadow.
With the electrical drain on the portal off, the overhead fluorescents flicker. The wreckage of the room is slowly lit with flickering, off-white fluorescent lights
Your hero idly swings from the frame of the portal before dropping back onto the floor. He slowly turns, surveying the room with narrowed eyes. One hand rises to tug off the off-white scarf covering his face, the other pushing cracked goggles up into the wild, curling bangs escaping the bandana holding back the mane.
His eyes flick across the room, carefully evaluating the room people who’d apparently been foolish enough to summon Bill Cipher to the material plane. Soos earns a few bare seconds of regard, and you can hear him shudder and take a step back under the weight of Stanley’s gaze. The sight of Dipper and Mabel — desperately clinging to each other as Mabel sobs, scraping Bill’s dissolving hand off her ankle with her heel — makes him squint, before they flick to you.
You meet his gaze head-on and that’s enough to make him blink as you mutually regard each other. You’re still clinging to the lever, and his eyes flick from you to it, and back again. He huffs, and his mouth twitches to one side so quickly you can only describe that as a shadow of a smile.
His eyes are brown. Or well, one is — he’s wearing glasses, and one lens has been carefully blacked out.
Holy shit.
This stranger from beyond this reality, your savior — he’s a dead ringer for Doctor Pines.
Your jaw drops as you stare, but you only get three seconds of eye contact before he finishes appraising you, and his gaze flicks over your head to where Doctor Pines was thrown against the wall.
You twist to follow his line of sight to where Doctor Pines has stumbled to his feet, smiling wider than you’ve ever seen, near-ecstatic as he throws out his arms.
“Stanley!”
“...Sixer?”
“Finally, after all those long years of work and waiting,” And it’s his turn to stumble-run around the room, beelining for Stanley. “Sweet Moses, brother, you’re home!”
“...Holy shit.” You whisper.
He is a dead ringer for Doctor Pines. Once upon a time, you think they would’ve been identical twins.
Now? If Doctor Pines was significantly cooler in a sexy, space-pirate kinda way, that’s — that’s Stanley.
Where Doctor Pines has a close-cropped head of dark gray curls, Stanley has a silver mane; held back by a red bandanna. There’s a fish-shaped golden symbol embroidered on one side. Compared to his brother’s lab coat and blue button-up, he’s opted for something more travel-worthy: a well-worn leather trencher, a once-white shirt with a dramatic plunge, and —
His boots are thigh-highs. You just noticed that. They’re built for action, shin guards and heavy buckles.
Compared to Doctor Pines, Stanley’s —
Well.
There’s no polite way to say it.
Nevermind a barrel chest, Stanley’s built like the whole brick shithouse. You think his biceps are as thick as your waist, a defined line underneath the taut leather of his coat. The white 5 o’clock shadow is no match for the square line of his jaw as it clenches. He cracks his knuckles, sliding the brass knuckles he used to beat back a god into his sleeves and sweet shit, his hands are huge . You can see all that carefully-restrained power getting dredged to the surface as he clenches his fist, drawing one arm back as he’s preparing to swing —
Wait.
Doctor Pines, blind with joy, rushes in with open arms to hug his brother.
Stanley cocks back one arm and swings.
Fist meets face.
Glass cracks.
The only thing that keeps Doctor Pines from hitting the ground are years of hard-won, oddity-dodging reflexes. He staggers, stumbling back, shaking his head as he tries to regain his footing.
“...What — Stanley!?”
Doctor Pines is reduced to staring again. There’s a new fracture in one lens. His hand comes up to idly rub at his red cheek.
Stanley crosses his arms and raises one eyebrow.
Doctor Pines cracks.
“You spiteful, ungracious, sonuva-!”
Your boss lunges at his long-gone brother with a furious battlecry.
Stanley sidesteps him without looking, catching his brother by the collar as flies by. He pivots Doctor Pines like a sack of flour as the undignified scientists yells in protest, swinging him back around until he catches him in a headlock.
“Careful who you’re tryin’ to call a bitch,” He rumbles — voice fond, accent indecipherable. “She’s your ma too, asshole.”
Doctor Pines squawks again as Stanley rumples the dust from his curls, pointlessly trying to free himself from the iron grip of his brother’s elbow.
“Watch your language, Stanley!” He scolds. You snort, and he glares at you across the room before resuming his rebellious flailing. “There’s children here!”
The mercenary rolls his eyes, glancing at the pile of children on the ground. Mabel’s still sniffling, and the sight makes him frown.
“...Sixer, why are there kids down here?”
“They’re family, you Sasquatch! Sherman’s grandchildren!”
That makes him freeze, dropping his brother mid-noogie to turn in the direction of the twins. They both stare back with wide eyes. From the way Dipper’s shoulders are shaking, he’s about to start hyperventilating, but Mabel, well —
Her eyes are curious and wide, almost gleaming. You’ve seen that look before, when she’s opening a new package of stick-on costume jewelry, or that time Doctor Pines hotwired her gluegun for industrial-grade production.
It’s the same look of awe Stanley has.
“N…”
He tries for a vowel, but can’t seem to manage it. He coughs, clears his throat, and tries again.
“...Niblings?”
“Your niece and nephew, yes.” Doctor Pines assuages, face-down from the floor.
You quietly scoot across the room, grabbing your boss by the elbow to haul his face out of the dirt. Stan shifts down onto one knee, lowering himself to the twelve year-old’s eye level.
There’s a three-second staring contest, before the biggest man you’ve ever seen shyly curls his hand in their direction.
“...Hi.”
His voice is so soft like that.
Dipper still looks like he’s about to explode, but it’s Mabel who manages the first words.
“...Hi, Grunkle Stan.” She answers, wiping her nose on her sweater sleeve. “Thank you for saving me.”
Stanley’s grin is soft and crooked. It hooks at something in your heart then, a painful tug.
You knew Doctor Pines has been running the Institute of Oddology — or as the locals called it, the Science Shack — for 30-odd years now. When his funding got pulled for something he called pushing the boundaries of science and technology ( and what you knew corrected to dangerous scientific overreach), he’d turned his only remaining asset into a means of further funding. The Institute of Oddology was born sometime in the year 1982, and the Science Shack rebrand came along about a year later, much to Doctor Pines’ chagrin.
You never learned what caused Doctor Pines to lose his funding.
Or why you found one of the most brilliant men alive slaving away at a tourist trap in the middle of Roadkill County, Oregan.
But between the ruins of the portal and the interdimensional outlaw of a brother, you could guess.
“...Welcome back,” You quietly offer.
Both brothers shoot you a look of surprise, but your soft smile’s only for one.