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“Oh, and Shermie,” his ma said just as Shermie was about to hang up. “I reconnected with some of my family—a cousin of mine had kids, they reached out to say hello. I gave them your number, they might call.”
“Sure, Ma,” Shermie said, and they went through their goodbyes.
He then discarded that statement from his ma almost immediately. Because really, he loved her, but it wouldn’t be the first time she lied to him for kicks. There were no hard feelings about it. She went and lied to everyone. Lying about secret family members was new, but not that new.
Shermie had forgotten about the supposed cousins by next week when he picked up the phone for an unknown number. He pressed the phone to his ear, ready to tell some telemarketer off and get back to the TV.
“Uh,” said the person on the other line. “Hello, Shermie.”
He nearly dropped the phone.
“Stanford?” he choked. It couldn’t be Stanford, seeing as his brother was presumed dead from a house fire, but that voice was pretty damn unmistakable.
“My name is Harvey Romanoff, actually,” what-was-absolutely-Stanford said. “We’re cousins on your mother’s side.”
“No you fucking aren’t.”
A pause.
Stanford sighed. “No, I’m not. But if anyone asks you, I’m Harvey Romanoff. There was a bit of…trouble.”
“Oh, really?” Shermie said acerbically. “You mean you didn’t just fake your death for the hell of it?”
“No. There was—well, just know that I was part of a project that could be described as a ‘second Manhattan’. A worse one. And—and—” Stanford hurried to keep talking as Shermie felt himself make a horrifying sound at that news. “—and the project is no longer in the works, and the results are destroyed, and the means to figure it out are destroyed, and it will not be happening. Alright? It’s not something the government or any other country’s government is really aware of and they won’t be.”
Shermie worked his jaw for a few seconds, finally managing, “That is not comforting.”
“I know, but it’s true. I took every step available to make sure the project is buried,” Stanford insisted.
“...and it included faking your own death?”
“Yes,” Stanford said. Blunt bastard. “Stanley helped me out.”
“Wait, you’re talking to Stan again?” Shermie said.
That was somehow less believable than Ford helping create a Fat Boy 2.0. Shermie loved his brother, but he had never gotten a very ethical air from him. He’d been pretty glad that Stanford declined to work with the government after his first degree.
“Nearly ending the world puts things into perspective.”
What a damn Stanford thing to say. Shermie pressed his free hand against his temple, massaging it, and stared at the wallpaper pattern in the kitchen. He had never appreciated how lovely and calming a blue it was before. There was a delicate daisy pattern to it.
If he hadn’t already bought the voice, he’d have been convinced by the utter Stanford-ish-ness on display.
“Fucking… fine. I’m not dealing with that. Put your brother on.”
There was a shuffling sound on the other end, and then Stan’s equally unmistakable voice rang through. “Hey, Sherm. How’s it going?”
“How it’s going is that I haven’t heard from you in a year, knucklehead,” Shermie snapped back.
“Whaaat?” Stan drew out. “Don’t see how you could’ve heard from me a year ago. Seeing as I’m your distant cousin Gabriel Romanoff, only just now reconnecting with the Pines side of the family.”
“Shut the hell up.”
Stan snickered. “Alright, I’ll drop it. But yeah—Ford and I hashed it out. We’ve hit the road and found something for ourselves to do. Don’t worry all your hair away.”
“And how legal is what you’re doing?” Shermie stopped massaging his temple to pinch the bridge of his nose instead.
A pause. “Not very.”
That was exactly what Shermie expected to hear. He was pissed off about it anyway. Did every single relative of his have to contrive more and more ways to up his blood pressure? Had they no respect for their heroes?
“How the hell am I the normal one in this family?” He demanded, mostly rhetorically. He hated dwelling on it, but… “I went to fucking ‘Nam! I should be the crazy one!”
“Maybe whatever blows you took to your head straightened out the crooked bit the rest of us got,” Stan said.
He barked out a laugh. “Fuck, I’d buy it.”
Then he let that simmer for a second before adding. “...Still, it’s good to hear from you two. Even if you are the worst pair of knuckleheaded bastards I’ve ever known. Call more.”
“We’re kinda on the run, Sherm.”
Shermie put the full weight of his Dad Voice into it. “Call more.”
“Moses, alright!” Stan yelped, folding like wet cardboard. “We’ll call.”
Honestly. They were lucky he wasn’t demanding they visit too. That could wait until later.
“Just don’t tell anyone we’re alive. Especially not Pa,” Stan added.
“I’m not an idiot like you two,” Shermie said with a snort. “Alright then, Gabe , tell me all about you and your brother and why you started talking to Ma. I should know all about my new cousins, shouldn’t I?”
“Well,” Stan began grandly, and Shermie leaned against the wall with a sigh. He recognized that tone of voice.
His football game was going to have to wait. Stan was in story-telling mode, and he wanted to see exactly what kind of bullshit his brother—sorry, cousin —was about to spit. If it was anything like the tale of the Jersey Devil they used to insist upon, it’d be more interesting than the game anyhow.
It’d been a long decade going without his younger brothers’ voices yammering in his ear while he was doing other things. Maybe he would guilt them into visiting sooner than later.
Alexander Pines wasn’t stupid.
It was his junior year in high school, and he had a genealogy project that had him looking into his family history. He used it as an excuse to rummage through his grandparents attic for all of the weird, interesting stuff that pawn shop owners might come to own and never sell. And he found some of those things, like a stuffed monkey head and a space-themed music box and a lot of joke books, for some reason, but on top of all that he found a photo album.
A Pines family photo album. One that featured his grandpa and grandma and his father and, bizarrely, two twins he had never heard a damn thing about in his life.
Alexander stared at it for a long minute. Those pictures of the twins went up into their teen years, after his father left the house and was no longer included in pictures unless Alexander was there too. Those twins looked a lot like teens that could grow into Harvey and Gabriel, his super weird second cousins.
Even the brief snapshots of personality the photos showed lined up pretty well. His cousin Harvey was a complete nerd through and through. Half the time Alexander saw them he got Harvey to explain the current topic he was struggling with in school, and it always led to the man talking about scientific theories of a level Alexander absolutely could not follow. The nerdy teen in the photos proudly holding up various awards is what he would’ve imagined the man being like back in high school if he had ever bothered to picture it.
The other boy didn’t line up as neatly. Gabriel was boisterous, yeah, and more smiley than his brother, but that wasn’t hard to accomplish. There was a dryness and a cynicism to him that didn’t square with the bright-eyed doofus in the photos. The photos of various boxing bouts matched up pretty well for a guy that had taught Alexander how to throw a punch at thirteen. It was that fact that he had also taught him to pick-pocket that was a little weird.
(He had also taught Alexander to lie to authorities, but that wasn’t a consideration against him being a Pines, really. Lying was a proud Pines family tradition.)
Put together though, it was hard not to draw lines between this random set of twin brothers his dad had apparently had this whole damn time and the twin cousins that his dad was weirdly fond of beyond any of his other extended family. Seriously. The Pines family resemblance was strong. Which was weird considering the Romanoffs were family on his grandmother’s side.
Alexander carefully took out a photo of twins, one where they were sitting on the hood of a red car and grinning widely at the camera. He flipped it over. “Stanley and Stanford and the fixed-up Stanleymobile” the writing on the back said. It was his grandma’s hand-writing, he was pretty sure.
He tucked the photo into his breast pocket—he couldn’t believe that his mother insisting on his awful polo shirt for this family visit was in his favor—and put the album back in the box he had found it in.
Then he went downstairs to dinner. He quizzed his grandparents on their family history. His grandpa gave him one-word answers at best. His grandma told long stories that, by the faces his dad kept making, were definitely huge lies. They were even more obviously lies due to the fact that they never once mentioned a pair of twin boys at any point.
Once Alexander resigned himself to getting a C on this project at best and they beat it from his grandparent’s house and back to their hotel, his mother went to bed as soon as possible. Alexander pounced on the opportunity. He pulled out the photo and handed it to his dad without a word.
There was a long moment of silence. His dad looked down at the photo, then back up at Alexander. Alexander stared back, daring his dad to try and spin this away somehow.
His dad sat down on the bed next to him.
“You know, I was afraid of this happening,” Dad said ruefully. “Tell me your guess.”
This was a game they used to play when Alexander was younger; he could guess at something his dad knew and he didn’t, and his dad would tell him as much as he could without saying the truth straight. Dad was still a Pines, after all, and not telling the whole truth was family tradition.
“They’re Harvey and Gabriel, aren’t they?”
He sighed. “They might be.”
“Why?”
His dad’s eyes were back on the photo. He looked fond, and maybe something else too. Wistful, sort of. Shermie Pines wasn’t a wistful person, not as Alexander knew him, but as far as he had known his dad was also an only child.
“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” Dad said. “Give me a different one.”
“What happened to your brothers?” Alexander said.
“Legally, they're presumed dead. Stanford—” Dad angled the photo back to Alexander tapped the nerdy twin. “—supposedly died when his house caught fire in ‘82. Whole thing went to ash. All of us figured it was due to something he was experimenting on; he was a scientist, and he did some dangerous things. Stanley was kicked out the house at seventeen and crashed his car out south somewhere in ‘82 as well. The only reason the police identified him was tracing the fake ID to others he used.”
“They never found any actual bodies?” he guessed.
Dad’s eyes flickered up to meet Alexander’s gaze. They were scrunched with a grim sort of amusement. “Nope.”
“What do Harvey and Gabriel do, anyway?”
He hadn’t realized until now that he didn’t really know. Their jobs never seemed to come up when they visited.
“Harvey’s an inventor with some patents that make him good money, and Gabriel…hell if I know. Odd jobs. Lots of things.”
“And that’s not the truth?”
Dad shrugged.
Yeah, alright, Alexander could pick up a few hints here and there. Something had happened in ‘82—or maybe things had happened before ‘82, and ‘82 was just when Stanley and Stanford got loose of whatever necessitated them faking their deaths. And now they had gotten themselves fake identities on their mom’s side of the family and with them did… something.
Alexander couldn’t imagine that a pair of guys that needed to do that were on the up and up legally. That’d give his dad plenty of reason to be cagey.
“They’re not bad people,” Dad said quietly. “Or, well, they’re not that much worse than anyone else in this family. I wouldn’t let them around you if I thought they were.”
He shook the photo at Alexander scoldingly. “Speaking of family, the only one you can bring this up to is Ma. Don’t even bother doing that; she knows no more than me, and will feed you a bunch of nonsense to cover it. And don’t talk about this to anyone else, you hear?”
“Who the hell would I tell?” Alexander said.
He was being genuine. Who would he tell ‘Hey, I think I have a pair of once-removed cousins that are secretly my uncles who faked their identities and might be criminals’? It was a huge thing to reveal to someone, and he wasn’t that close to any of his friends.
“Language,” Dad said on instinct. His eyes glanced to Mom passed out on the other bed. “I don’t know, someone. Just don’t blab. You can talk about Stanley and Stanford if you must, but only as my dead brothers.”
“Alright,” he promised. “I swear, no blabbing.”
Dad smiled. “Good. You want to hear some stupid stuff they did as kids?”
Alexander nodded, and Dad launched into a tale about their old cat, a box of cheese samplers, and a grave misunderstanding of the scientific method. It was weird, hearing about his dad’s newly-existent brothers, but it started explaining some stuff too.
Also, his uncles—cousins? Uncle-cousins?—were menaces as children. It was hilarious.
A crash sounded from somewhere in the direction of the dining room.
“Oh, for the love of—” Dad said, and stopped to rub his eyes. This was the third time he had rubbed them in ten minutes.
Dipper frowned up at his dad, reaching to pat his elbow. On the other side of him on the couch, Mabel shoved her plushie unicorn into Dad’s side, encouraging him to take it. He lightly pushed it back to her with a sigh.
“No, thank you, cupcake. I need to go deal with that. Why don’t you go talk to…”
Dad paused, eyes scanning around the crowded living room. It was a bunch of adults talking to each other and all of it was boring. Dipper liked to listen to some adults talk, because they could know a lot about the things he liked like the stars and ghosts, but most of the adults here right now sucked. He didn’t know why Mom and Dad let them into the house. Mostly Mom, because a lot of them were related to Mom.
The front door opened, letting in two more people. It had been letting in plenty of people, so Dipper didn’t really care to pay attention to who they were this time. They were probably more boring adults from Mom’s side. They all lived in places like Virginia and Ontario and wouldn’t stop trying to touch Mabel’s hair or his notebook.
But Dad looked relieved when he saw the pair coming inside. He pushed at the both of them to hop off of the couch.
“Go talk to those two that came in. They're my cousins, and they’re twins too. You can ask them about it.”
Dipper immediately perked up, gaze swinging to the pair of older men as the pair took off their coats and hung them up. Twins! They were automatically way more interesting than everyone else at the family reunion.
Mabel matched his intrigue, and together they bee-lined for the two men. Behind them, Dad got up and started bee-lining for the dining room with a big frown. Whatever. That was probably an adult problem that Dipper didn’t have to care about.
“Hi!” Mabel squealed, colliding into one of the men’s legs before Dipper could stop her. She glommed onto him from there, beaming up at him. “Dad said you were twins! And his cousins, but you look wayyy old to be his cousins. Are you sure you’re not his uncles? What are your names? Isn’t it cool being a twin? Are your wives not coming? Do you not have wives? Our teacher isn’t married either you could talk to her—”
“Mabel!” Dipper said. Sometimes people didn’t like how loud Mabel got, or how much she talked. Just fifteen minutes ago Aunt Lois lectured them on how being quiet was a virtue. She lectured a lot and for a long time for a woman that said silence was golden.
By the wide-eyed look the cousin Mabel had hit was giving her, Dipper was pretty sure he’d be one of those people.
Before that cousin could start saying that silence was golden, though, the other one with the slightly straighter hair started laughing. Not in a mean way, more like he was pleased. He reached down and ruffled Mabel’s hair with a gloved hand, but didn’t keep doing it when Mabel grimaced and leaned away, so Dipper didn’t have to start hitting him with his notebook.
(Dad said he couldn’t do that anymore, but he’d stop when people stopped touching Mabel’s hair when she didn’t want them to.)
“Watch out, pumpkin, Harvey’s terrible at talking,” the man said. “You better ask me questions instead. I love talking about myself.”
“Gabriel,” Harvey said with the well-worn exasperation of a twin.
Too late. Mabel had already detached herself from Harvey to latch onto Gabriel for questioning. “Awww, you don’t have matching names. We do. Dipper goes by Dipper but his first name was Mason. May-son and May-bel, see?”
At Mabel’s complaint about their non-matching names, Harvey and Gabriel sort of just looked at each other the way Dipper and Mabel could look at each other and know what the other was thinking of. Mabel said it was a twin power, but Dipper was pretty sure anyone who’d been around each other for a long, long time could do it. They were just lucky that they were born with someone they’d spend all their time with right there.
“We could’ve had matching names,” Gabriel said, in one of those tones that Meant Something. Dipper didn’t know what it meant, so it must’ve been a Harvey-and-Gabriel thing. “But lucky us, we’ve got different ones.”
“Why Dipper?” Harvey asked as Mabel started pelting Gabriel with names that could’ve matched.
“Uh,” Dipper said.
His cousin—was Harvey his cousin? One of those something-removed cousins?—had a very serious, intense sort of face. It made Dipper nervous. A lot of things made Dipper nervous.
Gabriel also had the same face, down to the same beard, but he wore it differently. Not intense like Harvey’s.
“Dipper doesn’t have to tell you if he doesn’t want to,” Mabel said loudly.
Dipper’s face flushed as Harvey frowned at that. But then Gabriel flicked him on the shoulder and Harvey stopped frowning and said, “If it’s private, that’s fine.”
That was good, because the last time Dipper had shown an extended family member his birthmark because they didn’t already know about it, his Uncle Ernest had smiled really wide and started talking about ‘starseeds’ and ‘indigo children’ and something about the constellation Aquarius and long story short Dipper wasn’t supposed to talk to Uncle Ernest anymore.
“Um. Yeah. It is,” Dipper said.
“Alright,” Harvey said. He looked at Mabel. “For your questions: we’re cousins on your grandfather’s side. Us being older doesn’t mean we aren’t cousins; the English language’s categorization of family is both complex and imprecise, which is very aggravating. Neither of us have wives and we’re not looking to marry anyone right now.”
He paused.
“You forgot one,” Gabriel said pointedly.
Harvey smiled a little. “And yes, being a twin is very cool. I’m sure you didn’t need me to confirm that.”
Mabel grinned. “Nope!”
And then Harvey started urging them to show him and Gabriel around so they didn’t just stand next to the doorway for the rest of forever, and then Dipper caught Gabriel plucking things out of the adults’ pockets and putting them in other people’s pockets and when he saw that Dipper saw he just winked and slipped him a peppermint with as much quietness. Then Mabel dragged them all to her and Dipper’s room to look at her plushies and go on about all of their inner lives as Harvey nodded along seriously.
Gabriel pulled something out of his pockets and fiddled with it and once Mabel’s explanation of the torrid love affair between Miss Deerling and Sir Butterscotch the Bear concluded, he said, “Hey, you two wanna learn how to pick locks?”
“Uh,” said Dipper.
Dad sometimes told stories about the Pines side of the family that involved lots of lying to people and maybe stealing things too, and he always laughed when telling them, so learning to lock-pick sounded pretty fine, but also Mom always made faces at Dad’s stories so maybe not. He wasn’t sure.
“Yeah!” Mabel said without a second’s thought, and if Mabel was going to do it Dipper would too so he quickly added a “Yeah!” as well.
Gabriel grinned and handed them some little metal things that turned out to be what he was messing with before. They had thin, pin bits that curved in a sharp turn like the seven L-wrenches they had in the “random stuff” drawer that Dad always muttered about needing to get rid of, and a flat handle, and then another one with a funny wiggly thing coming off of the handle instead of the pin thing.
“How old are you two?” Harvey said, frowning a little. He was probably gonna take the metal things away.
“Nine!” Mabel said. She held up nine fingers to demonstrate how much nine was. It was almost two whole hands.
“Nine and a half,” Dipper added, because the half was very important.
Harvey seemed to think about that for a second, then he looked at Gabriel and shrugged. “It’s not boxing at eight. At least this won’t wound them.”
“Just what I was thinking,” Gabriel said brightly, and neither of them took the metal things away.
Then he produced several locks and also a loose doorknob from his pockets started explaining how they worked. Within ten minutes he was making them listen for clicking sounds as they inserted the metal things—picks, they were called, and a tension wrench—into their individual locks. Harvey sat on Mabel’s bed and watched them go at it.
After fifteen minutes he said they were both naturals and then they all went downstairs and snuck into the kitchen and Dipper got to pick the lock on the locked box where Mom kept the snack cakes that were supposed to go in their lunches but Mabel kept finding and eating.
Dad caught them in the middle of Mabel handing off cakes to their cousins. All four of them froze guiltily, Dipper still holding his picks and the lock.
He sighed. “You know, I was afraid of this happening.”
And then he just made Mabel give him a snack cake in return for promising to not tell Mom. So really it was fine.
Dipper and Mabel would later huddle together under their blankets after Mom and Dad said goodnight and agree that Harvey and Gabriel were the best out of all their adult family. They weren’t boring, and they taught valuable skills like lock-picking and how to strike a deal to maintain silence from witnesses, which was much better than saying silence was golden.
It had been a much better day than either of them thought it would be.