Chapter Text
“A punched hole within a weak spot in our dimension.”
The words echoed in Stan’s mind like the sound of shattering glass in a near empty house. He was shaking. His eyes had gone blurry the moment the power had drained from the portal, stumbling over himself to flip that fucking lever— it had taken Ford away when flipped forwards— wouldn’t it spit him out if it was reversed?
It had to.
It had to.
Eventually he’d fallen to his knees, his voice hoarse from screaming like a lost child, crying his brother’s name like the first night he’d been without him.
Stanford-
Oh, Stanford I’m sorry.
I’ve failed you again.
He had no more tears left to shed, his eyes glued open and unfocused on the raw dirt floor of this fucking cave his brother had somehow bored into the ground beneath his stupid house. His stupid house in this stupid state with all this stupid fucking snow— his eyes burned from the cold air that had sunk all the way to the bottom of the subbasement, but he hadn’t the will nor the energy or care to even blink.
He’d let his eyes dry out to raisins if he could have his brother back.
He would voluntarily go deaf, blind, and mute for the rest of his life, he would give up taste and touch and smell if it meant he was assured that Ford would be safe and happy again.
He’d looked like hell.
He’d looked worse than Stan, and Stanley had been living out of a car for at least three days, making the journey up to Oregon and sacrificing the heat his gas could give him for the mileage on spare change.
Everything was a blur, but not Ford. His face, his voice— his eyes— everything would forever remain crystal clear in the man’s memory. They hadn’t seen each other in a very long time, but gone was the clean, pressed boy he’d remembered. Ford’s clean shaven cheeks, his fluffy hair, his ironed clothes were all gone. His brother looked like a completely different person.
The dark circles that sunk his eyes into his skull, the sallow cheeks of a man desperately in need of a meal, the crusted marks of dried blood that had remained on his eyelashes no matter how many times he compulsively rubbed it away, none of it would ever fade from Stan’s memory, not until he was able to retrieve the only one of the two of them worth a damn from the pit of fucking hell he’d seemingly sent him to.
“A punched hole within a weak spot in our dimension,” Ford had confidently said, his arm pointing toward the big hunk of triangular bullshit that had taken him away. “I created it to unlock the mysteries of the universe. But it could just as easily be harnessed for terrible destruction. That’s why I shut it down and hid my journals, which explain how to operate it.”
It was all fucking Greek to him— which being an Italian Jew from New Jersey, while he could struggle through a little bit of Yiddish for his mother and he understood when Nona Pines was calling him an idiot, Greek was very far off the menu.
He was so tired, he had been trying so hard not to zone out as his brother spoke, not because he didn’t find it important but because he had skipped lunch for the last two days for one last tank of gas, there had been too many cops around his last stop to siphon off someone else. His gut burned and his head swam, but everything that came out of Ford’s mouth was gospel, even if he had no hope of understanding it. There was nothing more important, nothing more worthy of his struggle for attention than whatever it was his brother needed him for.
What else would would make him reach out so urgently after almost 10 years?
What else but divine intervention?
Stan had stopped believing in God when the only good things in his life had turned his back on him. He’d stopped going to temple, he’d never really eaten kosher— but his life had definitely become something much much colder as he turned himself away from the holidays of togetherness he’d grown up with.
“There’s only one journal left. And you are the only person I can trust to take it.” Ford’s voice had nearly broken in stress as he’d handed a book over to his twin, Stan taking it in his hands and looking over the cover. It was— sweet Moses what had happened to his perfect, straight laced twin brother?
This fucking thing looked like it had been mauled by a bear, the book cloth that covered the binding was torn in several places, worn thin enough to feel less like canvas and more like paper than it should for a book of this quality. The top right corner of the front cover was torn clean off, leaving the hard cardboard base of the front flap bare and leaving the first page open to the elements, missing one of four gilded corner presses. On the cover, Ford had traced a perfect replica of his own six fingered hand onto foil and carefully laid it on the maroon cloth to signify it as his own.
This was his life’s work.
It looked like garbage.
For never mistreated his things. The man was a robot, a little too obsessive about it as they got older. They’d both been goofballs as kids, shoving things into Ford’s rucksack and being kids about the things they owned, but as they’d gotten older Stanford had been anal about his things, his journals and books specifically.
What had happened to him that so much could change? In the near decade it had been since they’d seen each other last, what could have possibly happened to make his brother change so drastically? He’d stopped taking care of himself, he’d stopped taking care of his things; the paranoia that followed him like a shadow loomed larger and larger with every passing moment that Stan had witnessed him. What could have possibly made him extend the olive branch after all this time, after years of his mother trying so hard to reconnect them?
His brother had said the word trust. The only person he could trust. Even after all this time. He’d traveled on a moment’s notice to stand in front of him, listening to him talk about his project, to be the guy that Stanford depended on. One more time.
Stan’s eyes came up to meet his brother’s, the same honeyed brown that stared back at him in gas station mirrors, Ford’s brows furrowed in deep concern as he spoke. “I have something to ask of you: remember our plans to sail around the world on a boat?”
Fuck. He remembered. It was time.
Maybe he had struggled enough. Maybe this was the universe, or God, or something had decided he had suffered enough. Maybe whatever deadbeat scam artist in the sky that controlled his life had finally pulled a good hand from the card deck of life— sacrificed that one last ace up his sleeve for a chance to finally cash out.
He smiled.
Ford didn’t. “Take this book, get on a boat, and sail as far away as ya can! To the edge of the Earth!” He turned his back on his twin, his hands behind his back, staring up at the glowing blue sigils like a man who was afraid he’d found something bigger than himself. “Bury it where no one can find it!”
So that had been it, huh? He’d been summoned as a garbage man. He’d been knocked down from twin, to trouble, to trash collector.
He had done a lot in his life, he’d stolen, lied, cheated, gambled, but he had never been disposal. He had also wronged his brother, he’d known that more intimately than anyone— who could possibly understand being forcibly ripped from the other half of their own soul? But, he had never once been reduced to a garbage man.
He felt his blood begin to boil, his brother’s back to him, his lip curling into a snarl as Ford asked the trash to take itself out.
The rest had been a blur.
His shoulder burned but it was far away, floaty, distant. His vision was blurry from pain, but it was nothing new from when he’d stopped wearing glasses at 14.
How long could he lay there? Hours? Days? Weeks?
How long would it take him to die?
Fratricidal maniac that he was, he would deserve it.
Finally there was water in his eyes again, but only welling to leak into the dirt and smear his face with mud, bringing the filth of his soul to the surface.
This wasn’t divine intervention, it was divine punishment.
He was nothing but the extra Stan, named only for his father’s failure of imagination, worth one dollar for each family member that came before him. He was the most painful 15 minutes of his mother’s life, the bane of his father’s existence, and the scourge of 48 out of 50 states.
Now he was a brother killer too.
He rolled onto his back finally, his arm and leg having gone numb long ago, gritting his teeth to stifle a scream of pain as singed flesh mixed blood and dirt into an open wound. Ford’s last scream of his name felt deafening, echoing in the empty fucking cavern of his skull until he couldn’t even hear the sound of his own breathing in the silence.
His head turned and he caught the shimmer of something catching the dim light on the ground, angled just at the position where it would bother the blurriness of his eyes. He blinked fast, three times in succession to clear the tears, as if it would make the light go away, but all it did was make it worse.
With a groan he reached out to touch the object, his fingertips the only thing close enough to make contact with something cold and painfully familiar.
He brought Ford’s glasses to his face, close enough to see it even with the pain and strain he suffered through. Horn rim, gilded accents, gold metal wire— the same color of his father’s chain, the same color of the crown he had pulled in Columbia to pay for cigarettes in jail.
His hand fell to his chest, letting the glasses rest against his heart, feeling the thrum of his heart and the raise and fall of his chest against cold, dead metal.
“A punched hole within a weak spot in our dimension.” Ford had said, the words whispered just above the scream now in his mind. Over and over playing that phrase in his mind. A hole. A portal. A doorway.
Stan blinked again, trying to focus his eyes on the chiseled stone ceiling, the weight of his brother’s spectacles like an anvil. If a portal was a doorway, then he knew what it was. A doorway was a hole that connected two places. A connection— a-
A connection that went both ways.
He shot upwards, clutching the glasses to his chest and staring at the door he had come from, the glowing sigil that had burned his shoulder an orange beacon into the dim of the room ahead. The portal, shut off, was a closed door; the broken lever was a jammed door handle. He needed to find a new way to open the door, that way Ford could walk back through.
If Stanley Caryn Pines died trying, he would open that door.
If Ford never spoke to him again, it would simply be a blessing to know he was alive to make the decision.
He scrambled to his feet and grabbed that shitty, tattered book. He’d said the other books were hidden, right? First thing needed to be going to hunt for them.
Almost $200. It had literally taken his blood, sweat, and tears to pack all of his shit into his car in the middle of bum-fuck New Mexico to drive up to where he’d been summoned to in Oregon.
He’d never been the strongest at math, but if there was one calculation he could always do off the top of his head was anything concerning money, and that included approximately how many times he’d have to fill his tank to get somewhere. For nearly the last decade of his life, his car had been the only thing he knew he could trust in and he had made sure that he knew exactly how to give back to her. He’d learned how to repair and clean her engine, how to use random household items to maintain her when she needed a tune up or a dent fixed, and he made sure that even if money was tight, she never ran on fumes.
There had been a few places where he had needed to stop on the way up the West Coast, knowing that he had to choose between a tank of gas and an actual meal— and a meal wouldn’t move him closer to his brother’s call. He’d been able to get around that in a few cases by siphoning gas out of the tank of some bum, pulling up to a bar in the early hours of the morning to sneak a tube into the gas tank of some poor schmuck who probably should not have been driving in the first place.
He’d done the same at a motel and had taken the last few ounces of fuel out of some cheating husband’s getaway car, washing the taste of gasoline out of his mouth with the end of a stale beer as he watched the aftermath of the crime. The poor asshole has crawled into his parked car through a broken window and listened to his engine turn over and sputter— but he didn’t feel as bad as he could have because he’d left his date half naked herself to run in the opposite direction as his wife chased him. He’d ended up with a free tank of gas and a night’s worth of entertainment.
He’d planned on pulling the same trick around Salt Lake city so that he could convince himself that the burger he’d stopped to scarf down hadn’t been a superfluous purchase, but he’d pulled into the gas station on empty and there had been some random cop that was mad dogging him the entire time he’d been there. Fuck Utah. He’d had to pay $1.50 a gallon on gas. Brought his average tank from about twenty-six bucks to nearly thirty-two.
Fuck Utah.
Fuck Salt Lake City.
He’d also frozen his ass off sleeping in his car for two days crawling his sorry ass North because Ford had asked for his help. Twenty-two hours of driving, almost seven full tanks of gas, one near arrest, and an empty stomach later had not been what he should have probably met his brother on.
That incident was bound to go wrong anyways even under the best of conditions.
It had taken him another day to manage to eat at all after Ford had been sucked away from him, too nauseous from malnutrition to focus on his tears, but also too dizzy from the tears to focus on his stomach.
Ford had almost nothing in the way of food in the first place. He’d wandered from the basement lab and had stared at the barely stocked, minuscule kitchen, and had initially walked right back out again when his stomach reached up to his throat and squeezed. It didn’t feel fair of him to eat his brother’s food, he hadn’t shown up and helped, or saved the day— he’d come and made his presence known and had made the whole situation worse. He’d broken the thing that Ford had wanted to keep away from the world, sure, but he’d broken it with Ford on the wrong side.
He’d barely found anything normal in the house either, finding lab space upon lab space instead of useful rooms like a living room. The house only had one bathroom on the ground floor and it was so far embedded into the depths of the house, that it was easier to walk down the stairs to where he’d found a room to bunk in.
It felt like it was missing basic necessities overall, but Stan had felt too guilty about using anything in the house to try and pay attention long enough to catalog what might have been missing. The only thing he did have the forethought to scan was the kitchen when he finally couldn’t fight his stomach anymore. It felt barren, like his brother hadn’t cared enough about himself to do a proper grocery shopping after he’d eaten his way out of his fresh items. That, or he was so focused on whatever that science doohickey from hell was in the basement that he had stopped caring about his quality of life, and Stan wasn’t sure which thought made him more sad.
He’d stared at the collection of miscellaneous cans, counting their number and knowing their supply was limited and probably had been saved for this exact emergency, and he struggled at the thought of eating. He didn’t deserve to eat his brother’s food, even the stuff he’d left for last.
Stanley sighed and felt his already tight stomach shrink and roil, protesting it’s own emptiness. He could survive on eating only every other day, right? He needed to make the food last after all, and if he could get Ford back soon, then he wanted to make as little of a dent in his supplies as possible.
He grabbed something random, which turned out to be chicken— thank goodness it was protein but canned chicken? Really Ford? No matter. He’d scarfed it down half warmed with a fork straight out of the can, pushing down the thoughts in his head screaming at him to spit it all up.
He didn’t have time to focus on his emotions. He needed to find the books his brother had mentioned hiding so that he had all the information he needed to get the man back. There was at least one page revealing their locations in halfhearted clues scribbled in the back like an afterthought. The journal he’d been given was shredded half to shit and mostly illegible towards the end if it’s pages, but he’d gotten what he could assume was a clue from the chicken scratch Ford had left him.
He’d come home defeated, found that downstairs room with the couch in it, curled up and cried himself into unconsciousness, not wanting to even postulate a dream. The next morning had been the same, wearing the same clothes, eyeing a can of chicken but deciding against it until his body really needed it again, and set off in several inches of snow to search and find some sort of inkling of where these stupid books could be.
The same the next day.
And the next.
On the fourth day he’d rummaged around and found a shovel— half broken thing that seemed to have some sort of green goo on it that glowed if he walked under the right kind of shadow. He’d assumed it was radioactive, or maybe some sort of… Frankenstein goop? But he’d had shit to do, he wasn’t invested in figuring out what corpses his brother had raised and fucking danced with while using this shovel—
Though that uh- Evil Dead movie with the Campbell guy that came out a year or so prior wasn’t half bad, maybe he could catch it again on the tube when all of this bullshit was over. Good thing he hadn’t found the shovel in a work shed, right?
After about a week of digging various holes in the forest any time he felt like a tree looked weird enough to be a sign he was starting to loose hope, dragging the shovel behind him as he dragged his feet back to his brother’s shack, shivering and wet from falling into some half melted snow. What was it about this place, anyways? Its cold, and its hot, and its cold, and its hot, then theirs fucking birds falling out of the sky like fucking flying doesn’t work, so you dodge and end up in the half melted still cold snow because it was warmer this morning which makes no fucking sense—
Whatever. Whatever he was cold and sniffling and miserable as he dragged his feet in the snow, the shit on his shoulder burning and spreading pain like an infection from dirt and grime and the fact that he was actively ignoring it. At least if it got infected either it would keep him warm, or he’d die, right?
A win-win? Yes? No?
Tough crowd, the inside of his head. Not a damn bastard laughed.
This place was going to drive him nuts— just white with trees as far as the eye could see, walking further and further away from the town itself knowing his brother wouldn’t have risked hiding his stupid powerful books anywhere near where the populace could run into it.
Every step crunched beneath his feet and sank him up to his knees, the effort to walk becoming more and more with every sliding crunch of ice crystals. He hated it more with every slight movement, feeling weighed down and pulled backwards.
Fwumph
Now that was a familiar sound. He smiled softly to himself and closed his eyes just for a moment. Snow in New Jersey didn’t get like this. Not high banks and tripping hazards and “Oh shit, I could drown in powder puff” snow, but when it did there was always someone who fell in. Caryn loved her sons, sometimes too much for the swashbuckling, element weathering twins— two boys who imagined themselves as pirates or arctic adventurers were not incredibly keen on being so wrapped up they looked like bubble-wrapped balloons hobbling down the street.
They’d hated it.
Crampelter had had a field day, chasing the two of them down the road, the scarf that covered all the way up to Ford’s pink, dripping nose fogging up his glasses and making it even harder for them to escape, their little legs only able to go so far when wearing two or three pairs of pants, the shitty patchwork gloves they wore linked together so Stan could drag his twin away from their bullies, away from the cold. They moved in the closest thing they had to synchronicity until-
Fwumph
One or the other of them would fall face or ass first into a snow drift, probably carrying the other one with them. One time Ford fell and instead of falling into a snow drift, he’d fallen onto the road and skidded forward faster than Stan, Crampelter, or the rest of his goons could follow. All of them had frozen and watched Ford, glasses askew, mouth open in shock yet half hidden by his scarf, slide on the half frozen sidewalk about 20 feet and spin into a fire hydrant.
Thus their penguin sledding game had been born, a Fwumph and a Skkkkt as they would fall forward and propel themselves across any mostly frozen surface, sacrificing a little of their dignity for fast travel, using their imaginations to picture racing penguins on the ice in a frozen tundra skirting around glaciers and icebergs instead of cabbage stall in front of Greenburg’s. They’d been two intrepid adventurers, escaping bullies and their responsibilities by losing themselves in hypothetical adventures… adventures that should have come true.
They’d had a shot. They were on track to becoming the greatest adventurers the world had ever seen— just a pair of brothers uncovering the uncharted and bringing fortune and glory home to their shit little town on the beach. They would unearth terra incognita, turn myth into truth and legend into fact, nothing was going to stand in their way.
It could have been them against the world. They had been so fucking close but if it hadn’t been for that stupid—
No.
No, it was his fault, wasn’t it?
He’d been… so afraid. Afraid of losing his brother, afraid of being stuck in Glass Shard, afraid of having to stay alone with Da-
Fwumph
The sound brought him back into the real world, his head sliding back into the present moment as he finally turned around. This was the 3rd time he’d heard the same noise, a thing falling into a snow drift, and he couldn’t be reckless enough not to think about whether or not he was being followed.
You stupid, reckless sonova bitch, Stanley. God forbid Rico send his goons to follow you and it took a few days for them to cope with the snow. God forbid they kill you and your brother gets stuck in purgatory or wherever Star Trek alternate universe he found himself in.
Stanley-with-a-goatee was probably gloating over the body of his Stanford in whatever alternate universe his brother had ended up in as he himself stood frozen, scanning the horizon for any sort of movement or any other colors among the ashen trunks of trees and the pure powder-puff snow.
He took two tentative steps to gauge the sound of his footsteps, two very distinct crunch crunch sounds, very different to the fwumph that he’d noticed.
He spun around again, looking specifically for men.
Two men.
Sanchez and Barnaby, Rico’s two watchdogs. They followed him around like goons in a cartoon, the short and fat henchmen that was always with the tall and thin henchman. He’d made his deal and breached it, he’d screwed his own priorities, and now he knew they would be out to get him.
When you told a drug lord you had a plan to turn three thousand into thirty thousand in the span of a few months, after the end of that estimated time most people expected to see at least some results— rather than having the subject of their loaning digging random holes in the snow several states away.
He wouldn’t see Barnaby’s blonde hair in the snow, but he wouldn’t be able to hide behind a tree, being so stout. He would defiantly be able to see Sanchez’s caramel skin, but the shade might blend in with a tree and get lost— they would only be identifiable together.
Fwumph
This time, it was far too close for comfort. He let his hand shoot backwards, slipping under his red jacket and hissing lowly as the fabric irritated the already inflamed skin of whatever burn he’d earned and neglected. He let his hand tuck in to the back of the jacket, reaching for a nonexistent gun hidden in the waistband of his jeans.
“Alright, boys. You show me you ain’t got nothin’ n’ I’ll pretend I don’t either.” He threatened, listening as the sound echoed off the snow and into the canopy of dormant deciduous trees.
Suddenly a memory that he hadn’t thought of in years slid right between his eyes and settled on his tongue. It had been much easier for both of them when they’d been really young, especially before Stan had started his cigarette habit towards the end of high school— but when the boys were so young that all it took was a moment to make them identical, they’d decided to learn to mimic each other’s voices. It got them out of so much trouble, if they could hide their hands, they could swap voices and defend themselves or the other until they could be reunited and figure out the situation with two brains rather than one.
They’d nearly gotten their asses whooped for it on more than one occasion too.
The voice slid from his mouth before his heart could react, his vocal chords still able to do a perfect imitation of his brother’s voice “Stanley, who’s there?” to which he responded in his own “Pro’lly nothin’, Sixer, you go back to the house.”
Even in his fantasies, in his desperate attempts to save his own skin, he took on the protectorate role. Years of sleeping in seedy motels and in the back of his fucking car, he still dreamt of coming to his brother’s rescue. He was the brawn to Ford’s brain, the fighter who stood in front of the strategist, and now he had been the one to put his brother in this mess.
His eyes welled up with tears, the hand pretending to hold a pistol fisting behind his back and digging nails into the meat of his hand.
Fwumph
He spun around with a growl, tears flying off his face only to notice a hole in the snow. A hole in the snow with a series of holes of approximately the same size trailing before it, sometimes overlapping with the places his feet had disturbed the calf deep snowdrifts he was walking through. The trail ended about two feet behind him with no real source, no person to cause it, and nothing he could have done to make something fall behind him so uniformly.
Something was following him and it wasn’t a person.
He made a face, distracted now from his self pity and loathing, all focus honing in on this series of holes and what might have caused it. He approached carefully with a soft crunching of snow as his feet sunk back into the divots he had created to approach the creator, stopping about halfway and leaning forward to peer down his nose in case he needed to dive backwards.
“Hello?”
The thing in the snowdrift was… orange. Orange and covered with soot. It was mottled and nasty and- Stanley’s brows furrowed in thought. Mottled? That- was fur.
“Rroow-” Came the weakest mewl muffled from the snow.
“Holy shit, you’re a cat.” He whispered, taking another step forward and leaning into the snowdrift to see what it was.
From what he could see it was a tortoiseshell cat, fur wet and matted, shivering like a leaf in the wind in November, buried over it’s head in snow. It hadn’t made any noises until he’d asked it to, and it had answered him weakly from where it’s face was buried in snow. He could see it was trying to stand back up, but the cat in the cat shaped hole was losing strength, struggling to stand, shaking not only lie it was cold, but like it’s muscles were giving out. It must have been traversing the large banks of snow by mustering the strength to jump forward over and over again, explaining the sound of a body falling into snow.
Stan stood frozen, looking down at the pathetic creature with panic, less scared for himself and more because he had no idea what to do. Would it try to maul him if he picked it up? If he picked it up would it like— I dunno, immediately die?
His thoughts were racing, his heart pounding for a moment as if he had actually found Rico’s goons hiding among the trees.
“Mrrp?” The cat’s call was quiet, ending upwards in a question as if it was also calling ‘Hello?’ into the hole.
Munch.
He had to do it for Munch.
When Stanley and Stanford had been around 6, Caryn Pines had fallen victim to the Universal Cat Distribution System. A large white cat— probably a Maine Coon mix, had followed her home after climbing itself out of a dumpster. The thing smelled rank, long pale fur matted down in patches eyes that never quite focused, one bum leg that always caused it to stumble or limp. They never figured out how old it has been, but he had never been young even though he lived far longer than he was supposed to have. Caryn came home with what looked like a pile of garbage and had disappeared into their bathroom with an electric razor from the pawn shop downstairs.
Dad had been completely against it, banging on the door and growling at her that she was not going to force this thing on him— but he always quieted when she opened the door and stood up to her full height, looking down her regal, Russian-royalty nose at him. Even though he was at least half a foot taller than her, even when she was in heels, he could never say no to her when she hardened or softened with him. Filbrick Pines was a stoic, sometimes unreasonable man, but Caryn had the power to tame him into putty…. at least sometimes.
She’d come back out of the bathroom with a fat blob of flesh with a fluffy white head, opened a can of tuna and dumped it on a plate. This thing was a Pines now, and when mother decreed it, so it became.
Ford, who even very young had been a voracious reader, had giggled at the fat blob of naked flesh and had called him a homunculus, waving his copy of “The Modern Prometheus” in his hand as he explained to his mother what the association had been.
Stan knew Frankenstein from the movies, Boris Karloff stumbling around in makeup, moaning and groaning and scaring the shit out of everyone in the theater but the two twins who had eagerly snuck into the rerun. He hadn’t really understood what a homunculus was, and even then he’d always seen ol’ Frankie as a golem like he’d learned about from the Rabbi in temple.
In the same vein of thought, he’d suggested Golem for the cat’s name, but dad had shot that down quickly. Ford had won out with Homonculous, probably because it didn’t sound too close to the story from the Talmud, and Stan had agreed so long a he could shorten the name to Munch. Homonculous became his full name, the name screamed through the house when Munch knocked something over, but Munch stuck.
He was really Caryn’s cat, sitting with her at her table and helping her draw tarot, keeping her husband away from things she brought into the house unless she explicitly gave him the go ahead, and acting as a pseudo-babysitter for the boys. Literally. Munch laid across their laps so they couldn’t get up and move because he’d been a fat fuck from minute one.
He’d loved that stupid cat. So had Ford. He had been their baby as much as they had been his, and he’d survived for much much longer than he probably should have. Ma had adored her lil’ Munchy Munchkin up until he’d passed a year or so after he and Ford had moved away.
Munch had stayed alive long enough to see his twins safely out of the house.
Maybe—
Stan reached into the hole with his own half frozen hands and pulled the thing from it’s trap in the embankment, unzipping his jacket and stuffing it inside, zipping it back up again. He hissed as the frozen thing made contact with his skin, pressing it’s belly to his torso for skin-to-skin heat transference, wrapping his arms around his middle to keep it secure as he began to march home faster than he had before.
“Shit— you’re frozen solid.” He whispered, worry creeping into his voice and coloring his already scratchy tone with concern.
It took a minute or so for the thing to begin to thaw, but once it did the motor in it’s chest started up. He remembered hearing from a vet once that sometimes cats purred less out of happiness and more to self soothe, and he assumed that’s what this one was doing. It was scared, it felt sick, it was so cold, it needed that little extra push off comfort.
And, it felt far too thin. It hadn’t looked it from above, but feeling it against his chest, he could tell this animal had been without for a while, which spurred him closer to home. Ford would have known what to do, he just had to guess.
He closed the door behind him but didn’t drop the animal, making a beeline thought he cold log cabin to the basement where he’d made his camp, sleeping on the couch he had come to realize Ford had made his bed. When he’d first allowed himself to explore, he’d found a bedroom upstairs and had decided to avoid it, wanting to respect his brother’s privacy and leave his stuff alone— he’d ended up in the basement because it was the only other room with a seat big enough for him to use as a bed. After a few days, he’d realized that he’d screwed up, that he’d been sleeping in Ford’s room anyways, and he took it as a sign not to leave just yet.
There was still some logs left next to the fireplace, he’d refused to use it in case the whole portal thing had been some sort of malnutrition hallucination and Ford walked in through the front door demanding to know how Stanley had seemingly broken in to his house. He had wanted to make as little of a ripple in his twin’s life as he could, now that he knew his presence was not actually welcome. Why make things worse than they already were? But, given the circumstance, the guy couldn’t be mad.
Maybe this guy was sent by Munch, who knows.
After the fire was stoked, starting to spread and warm the room, Stanley had slowly unwrapped the cat, stripped himself of his jacket to lay it a few feet away from the fire, and let the cat curl up on the fabric so that it could warm better, sitting close himself so he could also de-thaw from where he’d begun to shiver.
The cat wasn’t a tortie after all, more like a calico with tortie spots? A— Tortico? There had to be a name for it, but he decided he wasn’t smart enough to really think about it. He had a white triangle around a little pink nose and a little thin line of white guiding up his snout as if splitting his face in half. His back was the mottled tortoiseshell pattern, but his stomach was white, as well as four matching tube socks on each leg and a tube of white in the middle off his tail. He’d obviously been in a fight too, his ear was missing a chunk that was definitely not to tell that he’d been neutered, and one of his eyes seemed cloudy from an injury.
He couldn’t even tell if the thing was going to make it, his eyes stared back so… lifelessly as he rolled onto his side, half lidded and exhausted. His fur was really patchy, like he was in the early stages of mange or something, but his ears hadn’t gotten bumpy and his face wasn’t patchy yet, so there was a chance it was malnutrition, or possibly irritation from fleas.
And he could see the fleas. He could feel the fleas. He now had fleas. Maybe they were dead, though— it had been super cold. He would have to bathe it before he could let it run around the house, but first it needed to eat.
Stanley marched up the stars, scratching at the psychosomatic feeling of fleas on his chest, and made his way into the kitchen sneakily as if someone was going to catch him. He peeked around the corner into the kitchen and swallowed, feeling his own near empty stomach screech up at him in desperation. He’d avoided his brother’s food as much as he could. He wouldn’t steal from Ford, he would only eat what he needed to survive, but now survival was for himself and another.
He sighed, finding a can of tuna in the pantry and looking at it hungerly. If Ford… if he couldn’t find the other journals, or get that thing in the basement to spit him out in the next day or so, he would have to start taking advantage of the food and the firewood it just— it felt too much like giving up for now.
With his half frozen hands, it took a minute or so for him to undo the twisting little tie that held the bread closed, and he picked off some little bits of green off two pieces so that he could make his half a can more filling, since he felt guilty grabbing two in one go. He smeared half of the tuna can between the slices of bread and scarfed it down while looking for a spoon to scoop the rest of the can onto a plate, carrying it down stairs and into the now warm bedroom.
Couchroom? Whatever.
He hadn’t even entered the room yet when the cat was wobbling upright, head sniffing the air and crying out “Mmrrrrp! M-rroww” Over and over, like the two sounds were equivalent to words.
“Hey woah-” Stanley smiled softly, sadness blossoming in his chest as he recognized that same desperation for food. “Alright alright, calm down. You’re getting dinner in bed.”
He walked over to his jacket on the ground and set the plate beside it, the cat looking up with one milky eye and one pale yellow eye, shaking like he could call at any moment. There was a second of consideration— this large two legged creature had plucked it from its journey to wherever and SEEMED benevolent, but could anyone ever be so sure?
It seemed to weigh its options, but the need for food outweighed the need for caution and it dug into the plate.
Stan laughed genuinely “Hot Belgian Waffles! Slow down, kiddo, you’ll barf!”
The cat didn’t understand him, nor did he expect it too. He sat cross legged on the floor beside it, using side of the chair beside the mantle as a backrest rather than a chair. His burn hissed with pain as it rubbed up against the fabric, and the cry he let out scared the crap out of the little thing in front of him, to which he weakly apologized as he re-positioned.
Damn, this thing was just like him, wasn’t it?
Had he had a home? Head he once had owners who loved him and a bed in front of a roaring fire just like this? The way he was scarfing up the tuna without a care to taste it, Stan could assume that it had either been far too long since it had tasted the milk of human kindness, or it had never happened before and the thing was that desperate to survive.
He’d been desperate to survive too, stealing where he needed to, finding the little ways that he could get money without labor and milking his opportunities for all he was worth. His father had taught him that sometimes you had to spend money to make money sure, but he’d also learned how to barter the lowest price for his products to be able to sell them with a larger profit margin.
Stanley chuckled to himself, imagining this unfortunate feline in positions he had ended up in during his life alone. He imagined the cat escaping out of the back of a moving car, sitting cross legged at a poker table with an ace in it’s fur and the coolest mustache that the kitties all swoon over. He caught a glimpse of it trading catnip for extra rations of sardines in a Colombian prison, using it’s claws to mark the days on the wall that he’d been behind bars. Every day closer to freedom again.
Did one of his litter mates leave him behind too?
Did his owners kick him out when the money got rough?
Did he also cry at night remembering what it was like to be loved?
He felt his eyes beginning to close, losing the fight between himself and the sandman to stay awake. His body ached and he was still so cold even with the fire roaring and the sweat forming on his skin.
“What am I gonna call you, anyways? Y’ain’t got a name or a collar,” he mused, trying so hard to stay awake as he felt his consciousness being dragged from him. His eyes shot around the room, trying to find something to focus on.
His brother had stocked this room with a couch, a woven blanket balled up in the corner of the bed that he’d only allowed himself to touch after a few nights, the large mirror that he’d covered mostly with a white sheet, and two end tables around the door. One of the tables had a collection of glasses with a decanter on top, something nice that looked like it had probably come out of the pawnshop as a gift to break in the house once his father had stopped thinking about what a gift actually was other than an item that had a price tag.
What he remembered about his brother, the man probably wasn’t a drinker. He probably had a very nice bottle of whiskey decanted into that crystal that he touched only when the mood was right and the stars aligned. He didn’t feel like the gift was wasted on the man, but he did feel like his father could have probably chosen something that fit him more.
He was shocked that the room was so… barren.
Ford was the kind of guy to fill a room and he saw that upstairs with all the lab equipment and pieces of miscellaneous trinkets. In their childhood room, there had been toys, papers, homework long forgotten, photos, random rocks, a feather that had landed in his hair on a weird day to see feathers— there was so much in the room that had ended up crowding them together like baby bird chicks in a largely formed nest. This was… not it.
Ford used to have so many books too… just- so many. He had seen a lot of them downstairs, but he was shocked that he hadn’t kept any up here. Or rather, there were a few but not as many as there could have been, as there should have been.
Stanley swallowed thickly, imagining the room that Ford had always described to him, covered in books and papers with places for him to do his activities— maybe it was because this was his entire house, he seemed to have lab space all over but… where were the books? The non-fiction was in the lab, but what about the fiction? Asimov and Shelly? Michael Creighton had released a book called Eaters of the Dead a few years before, and every time he had passed a book store, he wondered how quickly Ford had found out about it and ran to pick it up, but the state of his house suggested that he never had.
There were two books in the room that caught his eye— one textbook cross the room, open to a page, something the man had probably been working with and left behind in a hurry. The other book was bookmarked, it was laid gently on the nightstand beside the man’s couch-bed, the one piece of evidence his brother still read for pleasure sometimes.
He felt so sick, having to blink several times before he could read the title on the spine from where he was on the floor. The Problem of Increasing Human Energy by a name that sounded vaguely familiar: Nikola Tesla. No— not vaguely. This was one of Ford’s huge idols, did his research papers in high school on the man, hell he had a poster of him. Once, Ford had dressed up as the man for Halloween, then had gotten upset when not a single person could identify his costume. He’d been walking with Stan (who was dressed as Batman) and slowly getting more and more intense about the fact that Edison’s tyranny was the reason Tesla was not recognizable.
As if anyone would have understood he was Edison either.
But, the name stood out.
He watched the cat with soft eyes as his consciousness was finally pulled away from him, lulling him into a sweat filled sleep “Nikola. Yeah- Yeah I’ll call you Nicky.”