Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Postmarked: April 21, 2007

Dear Doctor Pines,

You’re an exceptionally difficult man to track down! You’ll have to pardon the unsolicited letter; I couldn’t find any kind of email attached to your name. Either you’ve scrubbed your existence from the net or you have paid someone an exceptional sum to do it for you.

By way of quick and dirty introduction, I’m currently getting my doctorate in something roughly boiled down to marine-inspired bioprospecting around bioactive peptides primarily derived from venomous animalia (try saying that three times fast). I was recently hitting my head against a wall when someone unearthed an old (and I mean old) paper of yours.

Gotta be honest, dude: your theories are simultaneously well-worn, far-fetched, but somehow still deeply intriguing. I mean, everyone and their mom has floated the ‘deep sea creatures are extraterrestrial in origin’ theory since Cthulhu sunk its prodigious claws into our world.

Still, I am less interested in your extant Einstein-Rosen bridge and more interested in this weird thing you apparently found? I know your last published paper on anything even remotely bio- related was back in ’81 (unscientific aside: the last paper I found from you is actually from ’82, on small-scale energy fluctuations in space-time turbulence at the subatomic level — seriously, what’s with the hard pivot into quantum physics? Did biochemistry hurt you in some way?) but surely you must have kept some records on whatever ‘probably-jellyfish’ (1981, S. Pines) you were seeing out in eastern Oregon (‘cause all scientists keep deliriously meticulous records, present company included) (and seriously, what kind of bodies of water are you dealing with out there to house a Great Old One?).

Long story short, I’d love to link up and chat about it. Happy to work around your schedule! Gimme an email back at [email protected]. As charming as postal mail is, I am in the middle of relocating for a new position (at, you guessed it, the PPDC) and can’t give you a physical address. Unless, of course, you’d rather do an equal amount of research to find my newfound location — I’d be flattered over creeped out, I promise :)

Cheers, man! Looking forward to hearing from you.

-(soon to be) Doctor…

“Stanley,” Ford complains when his brother unceremoniously drops a large cardboard box onto his desk with a muted thump. Sitting at his desk, the thing now takes up most of his field of vision. “What the hell is this?”

Stan pushes some papers aside to clear a space for him to level a hand on Ford’s desk, leaning his weight heavy against it, hip cocked. “Thirty years’ worth of mail,” he informs him, vaguely smug in demeanor.

After a year’s worth of construction, the new cabin stands almost complete – with a few errant holes left to patch, some by magical means (which Ford will get to, thank you very much). Thusly, he and Stan had decided to return to land earlier than planned to finally move all their belongings out of the Mystery Shack and into their new non-seafaring residence.

The place is mostly hospitable by his standards, which means it needs some work by just about anyone else’s: the goal is to make the place habitable before the summer, and the kids, arrive. And while most people would have used the process of packing to actually sort through thirty-odd years’ worth of accumulation (Stan had not thrown out any of Ford’s belongings, either disturbingly sentimental or fearing his brother’s wrath) they had just shoved everything in boxes and hauled it away. Ford had been more than a little desperate to finally, truly, leave the old place behind, with all its bittersweet memories. Now, he has the privilege of making new ones, in a home finally theirs.

However, all this means that they are going through items as they unpack.

And, it’s slow going. Both of them are stained by their parents, including their propensity for hoarding. Stan has a truly obnoxious number of vinyls he just can’t part with, and Ford can’t bear the thought of throwing away even a spare screw if it might come in handy later.

If anything, it is convincing him that he should enlist Dipper to help him digitize everything, so he can finally burn all dangerous evidence of past work for good. That should thin the piles of papers somewhat. A summer bonfire is always in order, especially when its kindling is so cathartic.

For what it is worth, Ford has been trying to go about this spring cleaning effort with some kind of structure, but Stan bullishly tore through any of that and keeps ambushing him with random things. For example…

“Thirty years!” Ford repeats incredulously, swiveling in his chair to face his brother. He had been in the middle of unpacking boxes of things that may-or-may-not end up in Ford’s study; a comfortable room of deep mahogany walls, lit with a handful of lamps and with a single, large window at its back, with a stunning view of the forest that circumvents the cabin. “Why did you bother keeping all of it?”

Stan shrugs. “Thought you’d get on my case if I didn’t.”

The sentiment behind that is unintentionally touching and, admittedly, also perspicacious. “Did you at least try sorting it?”

Now, Stan is overtly smug. Shooting Ford a toothy grin, he says, “Don’t you know opening other people’s mail is a federal crime, Sixer?”

Ford scowls and reaches blindly into the box, the lid just above eye level. “And when has that ever mattered to you?” he mutters, with full intent of being heard. By the snort he hears afterwards, he assumes it was successful. He rifles through the pile like he is trying to pick a prize from a hat, the smooth paper of each envelope indistinguishable under his fingertips, until he snags one at random by the corner.

The envelope is slightly grimy from the years, paper thin, with its edges bent and crumpled. There is a slightly frayed and faded stamp of the humuhumunukunukuāpua’a in the right corner, but no return address in the left. In upright but wobbly-scrawled handwriting is his name, Doctor Stanford Pines, and the Gopher Road address.

When he sees how recent the postmark date is, he asks, “I thought everyone emailed now?” He had even recently made his own email address, after Stan threatened bodily harm since Ford had been using it to, troll the forums (unquote Mabel), and Stan’s inbox had become a war zone of various and uncreative diatribes.

“Usually, yeah,” Stan says. “It’s probably just junk.”

Ford breaks the seal with his thumb — it feels a little tacky. Gross.

After only a few seconds of reading, he looks up and asks curiously, “You scrubbed my name from the internet?”

Stan shrugs, determined to look anywhere except Ford. He lifts a hand and inspects his nails, faux-casual. “My name, too. If it matters.”

The whole identity theft thing, while settled interpersonally, had yet to be addressed bureaucratically. For now, they get by passing off the same driver’s (and boater’s) license, and try not to get pulled over. A temporary and convoluted solution to a problem that, hopefully, would never rear its head.

“Probably prudent,” Ford replies with his own shrug, going back to the letter. When he reaches the end, his mood has gone from productively content to absolutely acerbic. “You should have done quality control,” he complains.

“What, did you win a trip to Maui?” Stan chortles. “‘Cause let me tell you, if I had a nickel…”

“It’s just useless posturing.” Ford thrusts the letter out, and his brother takes it to read. It’s short, barely a page and a half on a single sheet of paper, front to back, in some of the most illegible handwriting imaginable. Only decades of decoding their grandmother’s looping scrawl had trained him to decode almost any handwriting — and maybe even jumpstarted his interest in cryptology. “By some hippie academic, probably looking to steal my ideas.”

“I don’t know,” Stan says idly, bushy eyebrows raising. “Sounds like your theories are…” He clears his throat, and quotes, “Well-worn?”

“My theories are not well-worn,” Ford replies snidely. “Nor are they far-fetched.” Especially after having proven most of them correct by traveling the multiverse.

Stan actually does a full-belly laugh at that. “Isn’t this some kind of nerd compliment? Sounds like whoever it was wanted to meet up.” He holds the letter closer to one of the desk lamps, the neck bent to shine the light upwards, and examines the signature inelegantly scrawled on the back page. “Be damned if I can’t read the name, though.”

“It if was meant to be a compliment, the adjectives would be more accurate,” he sniffs. “Like striking. And distinguished.” He drops the envelope into the wastepaper basket at his feet; it flutters to the bottom of the bin. “Nor would I be called dude.”

“Yuh-huh.” Stan sounds entirely unconvinced, lips still quirked in a smile, and gives up on his decoding effort. He hands the letter back.

“There are probably a million others like it,” Ford continues, tossing it into the bin with its packaging.

Stan reaches into the box and pulls out a fistful of mail. “Junk,” he says, as he sorts through it. “Junk. Taxes. Car insurance. Car insurance. Home insurance.”

Ford frowns, narrowing his eyes.

“…Car insurance, car insurance, jeez, you sure get a lot of car insurance offers for a guy who no longer has a valid driver’s license…”

“I have half of a valid driver’s license,” he argues, although there is a slow, sinking feeling in his gut. Maybe his professional opinion was less sought out than he thought…

“Maybe there are a few Christmas cards in here…”

“There aren’t,” Ford says shortly, knowing this to be fact. The only person who would have ever sent him a Christmas card is Fiddleford and, well, Ford had thoroughly and spectacularly blown that bridge up decades ago. It is being rebuilt… slowly, with extreme care. A work in progress. He had even commissioned Fiddleford for the security system in the house and his lab.

“Well.” Stan tosses his stack — unhelpfully — back into the box. He must then catch the melancholic look on Ford’s face, because he draws in on himself and rubs the back of his neck, again not meeting Ford’s eye. “You want me to go ahead and burn ‘em?”

Does he? The idea of thirty years’ worth of mail is bothersome, and now also feels like an overcast reminder of just how many bridges he has let disintegrate. But it feels obtusely preemptive to just be rid of all of them on the spot. Maybe there are genuine pieces of correspondence in there. Peers. Professors. Professionals. People who had reached out, wanting to engage in dialogue with him — surely not all of them would be so egregiously casual as the first one.

Ford can’t even remember the last time he was called dude.

“No,” he concludes, correcting his posture. “I’ll handle them.”

When he is alone again, Ford reaches down, pulls the letter from the bin, and rereads it.

It takes him several months to even bother to respond.

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: September 27, 2014, 21:35 PST 

Subject: (no subject) 


Dear (hopefully) Doctor (by now),

This is in response to your letter from seven years ago; apologies for the delay.

Please find enclosed all observational notes and data amassed on the Luxaella fleckeri (or, as you so brusquely put it, the ‘probably-jellyfish’) from several decades ago. I hope you find it useful to your (presumably post-doc) endeavors.

Let the record show I resent any of my theories being labelled as ‘well-worn’ or ‘far-fetched.’

Sincerely,

Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds.

P.S. The deepest lake in the United States is located in Oregon. I would assume a marine bioprospector would not underestimate lake depth.

And then, he washes his hands of it. The matter is well and forgotten, and he goes about his time at sea unbothered and unburdened. 

…Until the reply pops up in his inbox a few weeks later.

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 15, 2014, 00:14 PST 

Subject: RE: (no subject) 


Doctor Pines,

Apologies for the delay. It took me time to go through your notes and also convince myself I didn’t hallucinate your name in my inbox.

To address some lingering points (not diminishing in importance):

        1) I know what and where Crater Lake is.

        2) Accept in your heart that not all your theories can be bangers, or entirely original. You’ll sleep better at night if you accept you are not the genesis, man. Everything is a copy of a copy or whatever the hell they said in Fight Club.

        3) YOU were the one to call it a ‘probably-jellyfish’ and you have so erroneously GIVEN me the proof of this in the form of barely legible scans. Please see page 4, line 12, hyphenated word 8.

Insincerely,

Definitely A Doctor By Now

P.S. So, it’s in the genus luxaella? Did you invent that one? I can’t find reference to it in any other literature, and fleckeri exists in chrionex anyway. You can’t just mix-and-match your taxonomy. You got any other classifications?

P.P.S. If it’s an email, it’s an ‘attachment.’ Only in letters are things ‘enclosures.’

“Stanley!” Ford calls, half-turned over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off the laptop screen.

A moment later, from the deck, his brother gruffs back, “What?”

“What’s Fight Club?”

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 16, 2014, 21:35 PST 

Subject: RE: RE: (no subject) 


Doctor,

Writing back to clear up some important points (diminishing in importance):

        1) If not the genesis, then I aim to innovate. Have you seen the drivel they publish in Science Letters these days? A toddler could manage better dialogue.

        2) If you want to settle for terrestrial classifications, you will have to go broader than genus. Something in Cnidaria, maybe. Still Medusozoa in nature. I believe my notes should address such things: the bell gives it away, although it was much more tentacle-y than anything in that clade I have ever seen.

        3) I resent the Fight Club reference in that I had to learn with Fight Club was.

In Sincerest Finality,

Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 17, 2014, 13:55 PST 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: (no subject) 


What do you mean, “tentacle-y”?????

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 17, 2014, 21:35 PST 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: (no subject) 


I mean with excess of tentacle.

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 18, 2014, 08:45 PST 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: (no subject) 


Like are we talking in numbers or in bulk?

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 18, 2014, 18:05 PST 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: (no subject) 


Both.

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 19, 2014, 12:55 PST 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: (no subject) 


Dude. Elucidate. Please. Pictures. Anything. Whatever it is you’re withholding out of spite. I’ll even apologize for introducing you to Fight Club if you give me SOMETHING.

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 20, 2014, 00:04 PST 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: (no subject) 


I resent the idea that I would withhold any kind of knowledge out of spite. There are no pictures to share.

I will, however, sketch some diagrams for you and fax them over next time I am on land.

-Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 20, 2014, 16:34 PST 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: (no subject) 


Fax? Who even faxes anymore. I don’t even think we have a fax machine. What?

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 20, 2014, 17:18 PST 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: (no subject) 


Also, out of a show of goodwill (and because of some serious flack I got from my supervisor over my, quote, ‘appalling’ email etiquette since this is my work email) (he’s even reading this over my shoulder now — hi, Geiszler!), I apologize for introducing you to Fight Club, preemptive of whether or not you get the sketches to me.

- … 

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 20, 2014, 20:08 AKST 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: (no subject) 


Apology accepted.

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: October 29, 2014, 21:34 AKST 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: (no subject) 


And fax sent.

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: November 1, 2014, 15:33 PST 

Subject: found the fax machine lol 


Dr. Pines,

Let the record show, we do have a fax machine — I’ll assume you did some savvy internet searching to even find the PPDC’s fax number. Consider me flattered.

Let the record also show, okay, I see what you mean about the tentacles. Those look like something off an octopus, or maybe a really messed up jelly blubber? Actually your drawing makes the whole thing look like if a box jellyfish (I assume that’s why you stole from chironex) and something from rhizostomeae had a really weird baby. Yeesh. Lovecraft would’ve adored this thing.

Double also, re: the measurements, did you mean to write 2.4cm instead? Because 2.4m is an insane size and I question the validity of how you even got that accurate of a measurement without, oh, idk, getting close and personal. Don’t tell me it just washed up on shore.

Triple also, what kind of bioluminescence are we talking? You said it was reflective — of what? What color? What hue? Gimme a hex code, man!

I’m running under the probably errant assumption that you did not get stung by one of these because, from all the descriptors (chironex stealer hellooooooo), it seems like it packs a punch. So, I also unfortunately must question the validity of your claim that it is venomous, atop the bioluminescence, atop the gargantuan size, atop the locale. Respectfully, it looks like something you made up whole cloth on a particularly riveting shrooms trip — my colleagues certainly think so. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, though.

Circling back about eight years… I’ll admit your Medusozoa could be poetically described as rather alien seeming. But I still have no inkling what makes you think it is alien extraterrestrial. How would it have gotten here? Saucer? Wormhole? When? Recently? Long enough ago for convergent evolution? Is that why it’s so jellyfish-y? (Kinda?)

To make a long email even longer, it is not lost on me that you didn’t even have to respond to my letter in the first place, however delayed, or even get these notes and diagrams to me. Thanks :)

Luminous with Sincerity,

- …, aka, Skeptical But Intrigued

P.S. What did you mean ‘fax it over next time [you’re] on land’? Do you live on a houseboat? (Is it one with a hot tub?) Do you have wifi? I have so many questions. Answer as you see fit. But consider my curiosity well and thoroughly ‘piqued.’

P.P.S. Did you actually draw this??? Did you hard pivot out of art somewhere in your career, too? What the hell does your CV even look like? Answers, seeing fit, etc.

To:  [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: November 2, 2014, 23:02 HST 

Subject: RE: found the fax machine lol 


Doctor,

Subsequent to tracking one down, I have been informed fax machines are deeply out of date. Apologies, as I thought finding a scanner would be more difficult (and my brother was rather horrified when I brought up the idea; apparently, he has had bad experiences with copiers and their ilk).

Addressing your points in order…

        1) Admittedly, the measurement is pure estimation, but I tend to have an eye for those kinds of things. Ergo, 2.4m is accurate within a quarter-meter allowance.

        2) I believe the bioluminescence aspect should be addressed in my notes (see: pages 9 - 11). To put plainly, I distinctly remember it looking reflective of the clear night’s sky. If photographed, I’m curious if any particular constellations could be identified; for now, it is (very original) theory.

        3) ‘Stung’ is not the word I would use, but I did come into contact with its zootoxins (or, by my theory, xenotoxins). I observed it in a remote lake just outside of Gravity Falls, Oregon, where I spent most of my time (the town, not the lake).

        4) I appreciate your willingness to believe in its general existence, let alone my say on the matter. Thank you.

Finally, since you are so blatantly curious about the extraterrestrial origin, I will try to condense decades’ worth of research down into a few broad statements. In novel theory, the Luxaella fleckeri may have traveled (accidentally or otherwise) in a breach between dimensions: a local apposition of two branes of the multiverse, allowing either unidirectional or bidirectional travel for an unknown period of time between two separate, but closely apposed, universes. Generally speaking, within the quantum foam, there exist certain regions of space with negative energy density (the Casimir Effect) that might allow for a transient spontaneous bridge. Or, if advanced enough, it may have even created the bridge itself.

Unless further studied, I cannot answer the rest of your Medusozoa-related questions (“when?” “why?” “what?” etc.).

Bioluminescently Yours,

Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds

P.S. I can, however, answer the rest of your non-Medusozoa questions, although the answers are much less interesting than the above. I am currently on a prolonged sailing trip with my brother. My wifi methods were so kindly and skillfully set up by an old colleague of mine. Our vessel does not have a hot tub. Is that common nowadays? My brother would be insufferable if so.

P.P.S. Original drawing. Copyrighted.

P.P.P.S. CV attached

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: November 3, 2014, 06:22 PST 

Subject: RE: RE: found the fax machine lol 


You madman. Don’t tell me you’re one of those multiverse apologists!

Okay, fine, I’ll play ball. Actually I stayed up for a solid twenty-six hours trying to learn how to play this particular kind of ball so, you’ll have to excuse my newfound kindergarten-level understanding of quantum topology.

Say your bridge/breach/rift/whatever theory is correct:

        1a) Do you think these kinds of rifts open spontaneously?

        1b) What is even the probability of this kind of event happening spontaneously?

        2a) It may work for quarks, but how is this quantum mechanical phenomenon manifesting on a macro scale? Remember: 2.4m (give/take .25m). 2.4m!!!

        3a) Not that you are saying this happens with frequency, but what is the probability that this is just a singularity? Or do the D-Branes regularly have their own guitar solos and go crazy on the strings?

        3b) Because if you’re saying this can happen on the macro, then the next logical conclusion is that we should have metric tons of xenocarnage polluting our waters. 

        3c) Unless, of course, there is some kind of alien fuckery happening, and these bridges are entirely intentional.

        3d) Pardon my French.

Quantumly Yours,

Extremely Invested In the D-Branes

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: November 3, 2014, 06:27 PST 

Subject: forgot about your CV lol

Got so jazzed about my newfound interest in quantum mechanics that I forgot to address your crazy CV. Truthfully I had thought your signature just contained a copy-pasted typo. I didn’t realize Ph.Ds was literal. Seriously, twelve? You know that just makes you look indecisive and dubiously employable, right? Also, I recently learned I have a distant cousin who went to Backupsmore; small worlds (or, Casimir Effect-ed worlds) (am I understanding that correctly?).

Hot-tub boats are common in Seattle btw. I’ve never had the pleasure (“pleasure”) of partaking. Looks excessive. Why would you need more water if you’re already in water? Then again, it feels so quintessentially American in luxury. Idk. Is your brother also a string theory whiz? Tell him I say hi. Is he also a doctor? Is it Doctor Pines’s or Doctors Pines?

“Our epistoler says hi.”

Stan gives him a flat look over the cramped table in the captain’s cabin. “Our what says what?”

“The person I’ve been exchanging emails with,” Ford elaborates, pushing the lukewarm gruel around his plate and watching it with disinterest. “I’m passing along the greeting.”

Stan arches an eyebrow. “You’re still emailing that person?” he asks, sounding ever-so-slightly taken aback.

Ford frowns, glancing up. The look on his brother’s face is not shocked per se; maybe something closer to disbelief, with his mouth hanging open a bit and lightly pinched brows. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because after we tracked down that fax machine — waste of time, by the way — you said, and I quote, ‘Well that’s over and done with.’”

Had he said that? Probably. Ford never expected you to reply; not to his initial email, nor any subsequent ones. Sending you the notes had been mere courtesy, something to check off on a never-ending to-do list. But something in your letter had prompted him to put you on that to-do list in the first place — maybe the Lovecraft reference, maybe the zeal, maybe the fact you seemed to put in a not insignificant amount of effort into getting that letter to him in the first place.

Truthfully, he had anticipated you not remembering the letter at all.

Whether or not you did, you were remarkably persistent, a kind of haunting in his inbox amidst emails from the kids, newsletters from dubiously-knowledgeable organizations, and the occasional update that someone else had disputed him in the comments of some errant website. You kept knocking on the proverbial door until you got what you went after all those years ago: some kind of confirmation of one of the many oddities he had stumbled upon in his initial stay in Gravity Falls. Why you wanted proof of this particular one… he could only guess.

Maybe he should ask.

But now, you have readily dropped the subject to try and understand string theory instead. Your vernacular could use some polishing (D-branes regularly having their own guitar solos? Really?), but you seemed to grasp the basics well enough. A sharp turn from the eye-rolling he did when another response popped up, he even finds himself looking forward to it now.

Again, remarkably persistent.

“Well,” Ford says awkwardly, then does not elaborate further.

Now, Stan raises both eyebrows at him, demeanor shifting from casual to calculating; his posture gets better, his eyes barely perceptibly narrow, and his shoulders hunch a little. No matter how hard he tries, Ford always feels frustratingly transparent when it comes to his brother; a sense of unease comes over him.

“So, that’s why you’re sneakin’ around with the laptop all the time,” Stan says.

“I — I do not sneak,” he argues, putting down his fork, sitting up. “I just value my privacy.”

“Obviously.” Stan leans back in his chair and crosses his arms; it creaks under his weight. “That’s why you’ve mentioned you have a brother.”

“That’s hardly relevant,” he replies. “Our correspondence is strictly professional.”

“Right,” Stan says, clearly unconvinced. “Professional.”

After a beat of silence, Ford concedes begrudgingly, “Mostly professional.” Then, “It’s — it’s been a while since I’ve gotten to talk with a fellow scientist. It’s completely normal that some things bleed into the personal.”

“Keep it cool, Poindexter,” Stan says placatingly. His expression is completely neutral, schooled-over, holding his cards close to his chest. Ford tries to do the same, but fears his rising embarrassment may be obvious. He wonders if his face is as red as it feels. “So, what’s their name?” he asks.

Ford coughs, and looks away. He spots a pile of tangled nets in the corner of the room; he should really sort those. “I don’t know.”

Stan stares at him. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean…” He feels the flush spread from his face down his neck. Every atom in his body is rejecting this situation in some form or another. “Their name doesn’t seem to be attached to their email,” he explains. “I don’t even know if it’s a ‘they.””

“No email signature?”

Ford shakes his head.

“Really?”

“They’ve signed off with their initials before,” he says, as if that will help.

At least, he thinks so. He understands Stan’s incredulity; it sounds patently preposterous on paper. That you have managed a month without ever mentioning your name feels like it should be subject to suspicion, but from the tenor of your messages, Ford understands your communication style is… unique, to say the least. You have signed off with, what he assumes is, your initials a handful of times, but you have also been getting increasing creative with your signatures — and if you want to remain anonymous, that’s your prerogative.

Still, he has to admit, half of this problem is: “And it’s too late to ask now.”

“So, let me get this straight.” Stan shifts in his seat, legs widening. He begins counting off on his fingers. “You’re sneakin’ around, trading emails with a literal stranger, who you know nothing about, but who knows who you are —”

“I don’t know nothing,” Ford interrupts. “I know where they work.”

Stan gives him a flat look, still physically mid-count.

“It’s not like the place has a directory,” he defends. “I’ve checked.” Multiple times. “And…” He struggles to come up with something else of substance — somehow, he thinks saying really likes making lists doesn’t cut it. “They have a cousin who went to Backupsmore?” he offers.

“Let me be frank,” Stan says, with a tone that brokers no room for bush-beating. “What exactly are you getting out of this, Sixer?”

“Scintillating conversation,” he responds instantly.

“Scintillating conversation, huh?”

“Meaning engaging, illuminating dialogue that —”

“I know what scintillating means,” Stan snaps.

But Ford continues as if not interrupted. “Not to mention they are extremely well-studied, open-minded, innovative in their understandings, remarkably curious and —”

“Okay, okay,” Stan grumbles, holding up both palms. “Jeez.”

They glare at each other for a few moments, before Ford asks, trying not to sound so snide, “Is it a crime to want to talk to someone who actually understands half of what I say?”

That gets him an extremely rude gesture in return. “Usually, you know the ‘someone’s name.”

He huffs. “It’s hardly relevant, in the scheme of it.”

Stan gives him another calculating look, one that makes his skin crawl under its scrutiny. Whereas Ford feels remarkably transparent at times, the insight works as a mirror, and he knows what his brother is thinking.

Because it is all things he has thought, too. Whether he is being scammed, hoaxed, or hoodwinked. Whether the lack of identifying information should be throwing up warning sirens that something is amiss. Whether you are worth the trouble of taking time out of his days to respond, usually cycling through several drafts before hitting reply.

Still, he somehow thinks someone who uses the term alien fuckery probably has little interest in scamming, hoaxing, or hoodwinking, or has any real malicious intent. And if you are any of those, well, you’re a remarkable actor and he might as well give you credit.

“Fine,” Stan finally decides. “I’ll allow it.”

“I didn’t realize I needed to get a permission slip signed,” Ford grumbles, but still feels something in him relax.

“I think your little crush is harmless —”

“Crush?” he repeats incredulously, eyes widening.

“It’s fine, you’ve developed a little nerd crush, it’s…”

“I have not,” Ford says through his teeth, “developed a nerd crush.”

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, bro.”

A kind of fizzling goes up his spine, the longer the idea of the nerd crush hangs in the air. “There is no denial.”

“Yuh-huh.”

“There is not.”

“Is to.”

“Is not!”

“Is —”

“We’re just peers,” Ford says, perhaps just a bit too loudly to pass it off as disinterested, as he tries to rein in… whatever feelings just arose in him at the idea. His rationality hogties his emotions with ease, and he continues in a more level tone, “Just professionals.”

“Right, professionals.” Stan taps his fork on the plate idly, but he is grinning like the cat who got the cream. Silence fills the air between them, where the only noise is waves whispering against the side of the boat, and its gentle sway. He gives Stan his Most Disapproving Look.

“What else do you talk about?” Stan asks, immune to the Most Disapproving Look. “Professionally.”

Fine, two can play at this game. “My work on quantum topology,” he replies matter-of-factly, puffing out his chest, and he goes back to his gruel. “Probabilities of spontaneous bridges between dimensions. Using cosmic background radiation to detect D-brane collisions —”

“All right,” Stan gripes, scowling down at his plate at having been outplayed. “Forget it.”

“But I thought you wanted to hear about —”

“I really don’t,” he interrupts, and Ford grins triumphantly. “Save it for your nerdy-ass emails.

To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: November 4, 2014 23:45 NZDT 

Subject: In Efforts to Condense Emails 


Doctor:

Instead of taking the time to write out another excessive email (which I will admit to drafting… multiple times), please see instead the attached unpublished paper. I wrote it in my early days of quantum topology study, but I believe it should answer most of your questions. I am more than willing to fill in any gaps you may have.

(“‘Fill in any gaps?’” Stan reads over his shoulder, so close that he startles Ford. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re more than willing to ‘fill’ any ‘gaps’ —”

“Would you stop being so crass,” Ford snaps, not turning around, trying to hide how much his face is suddenly burning. His shoulders reach up to his ears as he tries to make himself smaller.

“I’m just sayin’, is this how nerds flirt? ‘Cause you’re really bridging into…”

“I’m not bridging into anything, Stanley,” he gripes. “There is no bridging.” Which is true, objectively. When has Ford ever successfully flirted before in his life? And he certainly isn’t managing it over your correspondence — not that he would want to. This is, again, strictly professional.)

Please do not disappoint by letting this become water-cooler talk. I’d rather it debut on my own terms.

(“Oh, I’m sure you’ll ‘debut’ alright —”

“Will you leave me alone —”)

Regarding all other non-metaphysical topics, I’ll have you know my employment prospects remain bright and boundless. My brother is a… unique case and impossible to describe. He does not hold any official titles, as far as I am aware.

(“Tell your penpal I said hi.”

“Leave. Now.”)

He also returns your greetings (and a few other things I will not leave in a paper trail). It’s Doctors Pines (in the hypothetical).

(Ford casts a furtive glance over his shoulder, checking that Stan has actually stopped snooping. When he turns back, he hesitates, but begins to type out…)

On the topic of hypothetical names, what exactly is yours, hypothetically…

(Then, quickly erases the entire sentence. The last thing he wants to do is ruin a good thing by offending you that he hasn’t picked it up yet. It has to appear eventually. Right?)

(He should start this email over…)

 To: [email protected] 

From: [email protected] 

Date: November 5, 2014 00:01 NZDT 

Subject: In Efforts to Condense Emails 


Doctor:

Instead of taking the time to write out another excessive email, please see instead the attached unpublished paper. I wrote it in my early days of quantum topology study, but I believe it should answer most of your questions. I am more than willing to answer any questions you may have. However, please do not disappoint by letting this become water-cooler talk. I’d rather publish it on my own terms.

Although I object to the term “alien fuckery,” you are on the right track of understanding the basics. I would consider your knowledge level at least at the second grade level, now.

Regarding all other non-metaphysical topics, I’ll have you know my employment prospects remain bright and boundless. My brother is a… unique case and impossible to describe. He does not hold any official titles, as far as I am aware. He also returns your greetings (and a few other things I will not leave in a paper trail). It’s Doctors Pines (in the hypothetical).

Credulously Yours,

Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds

Chapter Text

The last thing you had expected out of Gravity Falls is the sheer number of animal shrubbery.

Well, maybe your current location is an outlier, and should not be counted.

“You’ve got one helluva groundskeeper,” you say, admiring a lion pruned with the fine hand of Michelangelo. It is… awfully lifelike. So much so that it is starting to activate your fight-or-flight. With its bushy mane (pun intended), finely-pointed snarling teeth, and the deep curve of its spine as it is poised to pounce — you just can’t quite bring yourself to look it in the eye. Something in you is afraid of what you might see.

“Groundskeeper? P’shaw — I got robits for this!” Fiddleford says.

“Robots, huh?” You tilt your head up as you try to estimate the height of the rearing, snorting horse to the right. With all its detail work, it would put that in-tact beast at the Denver airport to shame. You size up the rest of the lineup: a gargantuan bear on its hind legs, paws raised and ready to strike; a majestic dragon with its head tilted to the air, spouting fire, and… something akin to the Loch Ness Monster?

Everything, regardless of inspiration, is cut with a surgical kind of precision, but with enough intent that it can’t be anything but human. Only a human would put in the time and effort to make hedge animals so realistic.

So, when you imagine the robots used for this kind of work, you imagine simple, something to reach tall heights and keep a steady hand. “Like, you control the robots to cut them?”

“Cut ‘em? They fight ‘em!”

You take an immediate, very purposeful step back from the shrubbery.

“No need to worry, ‘cuz,” Fiddleford promises, chest puffed out with pride, as he steps forward and puts a hand on the lion’s man, petting it. “These fellas are perfectly harmless in the daytime.”

You check your watch for the time. A little too close to comfort to the evening for your liking — you’ll have to move this tour along.

The last thing you had expected out of Gravity Falls was being introduced to haunted (and evil?) lawn fauna, but you did have a heads up that Fiddleford McGucket was… a rather zealous individual.

Either sheer coincidence, or zeal must run in the family.

Coincidence may not have brought you to Gravity Falls, but coincidence did bring your rather fortuitous lodging setup into existence, in the form of a long-lost cousin who happened to be a self-made, and possibly mad, multimillionaire engineer.

At a family gathering a few months ago, clutching a plastic cup of the worst tasting punch you ever had, someone you were somehow related to had been making small talk with you and asked, got any big plans coming up? In that moment, with no way to predict the sharp left turn your life would take in the coming months, you had mentioned wanting to go visit a place up north, called Gravity Falls, hard to find on any map.

Another cousin had overheard and stepped in, saying something along the lines of, “Didn’t we have a cousin out there?”

So, when the left turn happened a few months later and you were told ever-so harshly to take a break from your job, there seemed no better place to spend your time.

Get really into fishing, your boss had said, when you asked what the hell you were supposed to do with your time. Find the mothman. Go do a wacky road trip, see the world’s largest ball of twine. I don’t care, dude, as long as you’re not here.

You had nothing to lose, you reasoned a few weeks ago as you had punched in the phone number someone had dug up for you. At the best, this mystery cousin existed; at the worst, they had passed; at the mundane, no one would pick up.

You would have to change the metric for best, all factors considered.

In the true platonic ideal of southern hospitality, when you had hesitantly introduced yourself by name, saying, “…I think we are cousins?” Fiddleford had literally hooted and hollered and insisted you stay with him while in town.

When you had rolled in about two hours ago in your beat-up truck, with a suitcase of haphazardly folded clothes, another with meticulously packed equipment (anything your boss would let you smuggle out — it was mostly specimen jars and safety gear, the man knew you a little too well), you had held zero expectations.

Well, maybe some expectations. But none of them had involved animal shrubbery, or your cousin, or his mansion. You would have to readjust your taking a break plans to account for the haunted (evil?) shrubbery in the vicinity.

After the animals, Fiddleford shows you the dizzying hedge maze, the robot playground, the lavish and unused-looking kitchen, the parlor, the rooftop terrace, his work room, his secret-er work room, the bath house, the solarium, the observatory, the apiary, the dovecote, the hangar, the giant robots that live in the hangar…

And, finally, your suite.

Wow, you get your own whole-ass suite.

The entire thing is swirling patterns stamped into crushed red velvet walls.There are several sheepskin rugs across the floor, a monumentally-large four poster bed befit with a canopy, and the bathroom doesn’t look half bad either. There’s even a little nook by a large window with a desk tucked into it.

A quick glance out the window shows you the sunset-swathed view of the robot playground. The robots are, in fact, playing. It looks like a game of tag. And, the shrubbery all seems to be in the same place as you left it.

“Any questions?” Fiddleford asks, patiently standing in the doorway while you get your bearings, and take in your home for the next… however long you’re here. Beneath his muddy boots is a rug probably worth more than your monthly rent back home.

Thoroughly charmed, you say, “Yeah. Is this a no-shoes-indoors household?”

You give yourself a few days to get settled, going into the larger parts of town, doing some exploring along the main road. You do all the touristy things one does when going somewhere so quaint: you try a coffee shop or two, check out the library, go to the arcade, go thrifting, confirm there are no other haunted animal plant sculptures in town, etc. You get breakfast at that diner in the log and give yourself an upset stomach with local greasy fast food. You make a note to try that Mystery Shack place when you have the attention span for it.

When you feel like you have fulfilled your obligations under the normal definition of taking a break, you unearth your field notebook, shove a few specimen jars into a backpack, grab your coat, lace up your boots, and take to the forest trail.

You have to cut through the robot playground to get there — unlike times you have watched out your window, the robots are not currently playing. Instead, they are sulked and slouched over in various positions while turned off (or, maybe just in sleep mode?). You recognize one or two from your introduction down in the hangar, vaguely remember talk of a nuclear vortex turbine, and give all of them a wide berth.

Oregon can’t seem to decide if it’s winter or spring. The sky is a flat blanket of murky gray that, if any colder, might signal snow, but you didn’t see any of that in the forecast. Although, your phone is next to useless out here — blessedly, the wifi at your cousin’s place is decent enough to load your weather app and check your email, but not much else. Especially in the forest, when you check for the time, a SOS takes up the top corner…

Did you forget to charge your phone last night?

The forest is equally dull with its lack of life, the absence made apparent by the silence, and you hear every crunch of your boots on the hard and dry ground. Whenever the breeze picks up, it becomes just nippy enough that you wish you had brought a hat; you burrow a little further into your jacket each time.

Still, you persevere, through the towering douglas firs, until the crunching becomes less deafening as the ground softens. Finally, you reach your destination: a small, remote lake you had spotted on a map while you were printing out the directions to your cousin’s place.

You don’t expect to get lucky; you don’t expect to spot anything particularly riveting. But you justify this excursion as familiarizing yourself with the area if you are going to be here for an undetermined amount of time. Plus, you have a whole list of lakes to be visiting across Road Kill County. Might as well cross one off your list.

You like Fiddleford, you decide as you start to walk along the bank and try to peer past the sky reflected in rippling mirrors. There is definitely something more than a little off about the man, but his intentions — er… well his intentions seem tilted towards evil robots, but his character seems good. At least when it comes to you, his heart is in the right place.

Truthfully, once you had learned his son still lived elsewhere, you had begun making a point of eating dinner with him every night — if you were living alone in a house that large, you would get awfully lonely awfully quick. It is almost becoming ritualistic; apparently, the place keeps a piecemeal staffing, primarily for cooking and cleaning, and they seem thoroughly pleased with the change of pace that having a guest brings.

Although, you can’t quite shake the manners instilled in you, and you still wash your own dishes after a meal despite any insistence otherwise. You ask to help where you can, try to tidy up after yourself, and importantly, resist the urge to go snooping. If novels have taught you anything, it’s that poking around a mystery manner like that is bound to end in trouble — which is to say nothing of the terror you feel when you catch the faint rustling of branches outside your window every night.

Despite that, you feel yourself… actually relaxing, the longer you are here.

This is good, you remind yourself. This is supposed to be good. This is exactly what the doctor ordered: a quiet, peaceful place to convalesce.

Admittedly, Gravity Falls isn’t exactly a premiere location for convalescing, but you had spun your reasoning well enough that no one seemed suspicious why you would single out a nowhere town like it. Not even Fiddleford had pried.

So what if you were hoping to find something? Or someone? 

Something colorful appears, under the water.

You take slow steps, careful not to disturb the surface too much lest you send whatever it is scurrying, and crouch down. In the shallows is a bright vermilion shell, whorled smoothly into a spire in the way nature always manages. It sticks out like a sore thumb against the dullness of the bank, which makes the tuft coming out of the cone even more stark: it looks like someone stuck a tightly-packed dandelion into the open aperture at the top.

It is, all in all, one of the most curious things you have ever seen.

You step away from the water and let your backpack slip from your shoulders, digging through it to find an appropriately sized jar. With a careful hand, you dip it into the water, dig the lip into the grit, and then slowly slide until your curiosity is nestled at the bottom. The water is icier than you were expecting, sending goosebumps up your arm and a shiver through your chest, and you quickly scoop the jar back out.

After you stand back up and take the time to screw the lid on tightly, you wipe your hands on your jeans and blow into your cupped hands a few times, trying to get some warmth back in them. Ultimately a futile effort; you already have poor circulation. Your hands and feet are always cold.

You hold the jar up to the light to try and get a better look at the thing, which seems entirely undisturbed by its new abode. But the sun is too muted behind the clouds to see much of anything through the still-swirling sediment — but you think you see eye stalks in the soft-looking mass at the top, and there is definitely a sharp radula at the pointed end of the cone.

A fuzzy satisfaction blooms in your chest. A much more successful first endeavor than you had anticipated.

You show it to Fiddleford over dinner.

“I mean, that’s definitely a kind of tooth, right?” you admire. While the water is still vaguely cloudy, much of the sediment has settled to the bottom by now. Your friend is now plastered to the curved wall of the jar, waggling the spiky tooth at the end of its shell menacingly. Or, you think menacingly. Maybe better not to anthropomorphize. “I didn’t know you had anything like this out here.”

Because it is, by your account, almost definitely some kind of cone snail, with the most saturated shell you have ever seen. You are already spinning all sorts of hypotheses, about how it could have gotten out here and so far from the ocean where it belonged. Perhaps some kind of invasive species? Or a careless tourist? Or an unfortunate bout of prey-and-predator?

“Oh, we got all sorts of stuff out here,” Fiddleford says around a mouthful. Realizing your generously-provided meal has gone mostly untouched while you ogle, you delicately set the jar back onto the table between you two. You are tucked into the back corner of the kitchen, where you usually eat, at a small table. “Better be careful out there, ‘cuz. Or you’ll be swallowed up by who knows what!”

Despite how ominous that should sound, you just laugh. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be careful.” Those kinds of warnings aren’t anything you haven’t heard before, with your specialty being venomous marine life. Although, with the haunted (evil?) shrubbery, something in the back of your mind tells you that you should heed the warning a little more seriously.

Quickly, you eat a few forkfuls. Politely covering your mouth with a hand while you chew, you ask, “What’d you get up to today?”

“Attached the magnetorheological dampers to the Achilles shock absorbers on the Cataphract,” he answers plainly.

You blink, fork paused halfway to your open mouth. The only word you recognize out of that babble is Cataphract: the retro-futuristic mech he had introduced as his current pet project. You had seen it out on the playground, once or twice — it is easy to spot, as it has a retrofuturistic fin for a head and three arms. “Right. Of course. Which does…?”

“Gives it better balance on any terrain,” he says succinctly.

You nod. “Duh. I was just about to say that.”

Fiddleford gives you a toothy grin that you find yourself immediately returning. “So,” he says, “what’re ya’ gonna do with yer new friend here?” He nods towards the jar.

“Oh… I don’t know.” You take a bite to give yourself time to think of an answer. “Usually I’d take it back to the lab, run some tests, put it under observation…” You shrug, although something in your chest feels just a little bit heavier as you think about standard protocol at work. “But, unless you’re hiding a secret lab somewhere, I’ll probably just release it after a day or so.”

“What kind o’ lab d’ya need?”

Impolitely, you play with your food a little. “Not anything I think you’d have — damnit, Jim, you’re an engineer, not a marine researcher!”

“Who’s Jim?” he asks back, head tilted in confusion.

“Forget it,” you say quickly, face burning. “It’s just a reference to something.”

“Well,” he continues, as if your joke hadn’t just fallen extremely flat, “I certainly ain’t got the lab space for you to do any of yer ‘tests.’” He does air quotes around the word, and you wonder what kind of tests he thinks you are wanting to do. “But a buddy o’ mine definitely does!”

“Wait, what?” You sit up straighter. “They do?”

“He’s out o’ town right now,” Fiddleford explains, which causes you to deflate. “But, I got the access code.”

That gives you pause. You level an elbow on the table and drop your chin into your palm, giving him a skeptical look. “You’d let a stranger into your friend’s lab?” you ask curiously, feeling self-conscious about the idea. Messing around in someone else’s lab space without their permission is practically taboo — not that you would be messing around. You’d be the picture of professional and polite. It isn’t like you’d be trashing the place — in fact, you’d endeavor not to leave a single fingerprint.

“You ain’t no stranger,” he says, with another warm smile. “Yer family.”

You think your heart might just balloon right out of your chest.

So, maybe you had singled out Gravity Falls as your taking a break destination for a few particular reasons.

Ever since the incident with the fax machine and the endless teasing you had endured afterwards, you have been decidedly tight-lipped about your ongoing correspondence with one Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds. Half your cohort seemed to write him off as legend and thought you were being scammed by an imposter; the other half wrote him off as a madman wasting your time.

If he is either, he is keeping up a damn good façade.

And, your time never feels wasted, nor do you ever feel like you are being scammed. His knowledge base is frankly baffling and, even though he is an ardent multiverse apologist, you enjoy the challenge of trying to keep up. It isn’t unusual for you to get so lost into your own little bubble that you forget other disciplines exist, and that they weave together to create tapestries the likes of which you have never seen. Getting to discuss this stuff feels like flexing the muscles of your brain, leaving you intellectually dizzy but ultimately satisfied.

Plus, his patience for answering your questions knows no bounds, even if he can be a little uppity about it sometimes. That’s not nothing when it comes to showcasing his character. 

After dinner, with your probable-snail placed on the desk next to the window, you climb into bed and log into your work email. There hasn't been any correspondence from him the past few days, which isn’t highly unusual but is slightly disheartening, and — aha! There, at the top of your inbox.

To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: RE: D-branes getting contiguous within the bulk

Doctor,

Apologies for the delay. We hit some rough waters and thus, getting the boat back to friendly shores ended up being an all-hands-on-deck scenario. The amount of damage we took to the hull is past duct-tape-level repairs and our rudder now boasts a ninety degree angle. Sad to say, we may need professional help on this one.

Vis-à-vis what we have been discussing, don’t lose sight of the finale: we know what the end goal of this hypothetical would be. The interaction is captured by the one loop annulus amplitude of strings between the two branes. Which means it yields singularities that correspond to the on-shell production of open strings stretched between the two branes – which, for reference, is true irrespective of the charge of the brane. As a result, the two scattering branes will be trapped.

Singularly Yours,

Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds

After rereading it thrice, you start on your reply.

To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: RE: RE: D-Branes getting contiguous within the bulk

Are you implying there is waveform continuity between two D-branes on the level of quantum-scale spacetime turbulence at a great state energy in a vacuum? This just keeps circling the drain of the problem I keep pointing out: valid tests to detect the multiverse have yet to be empirically demonstrated. Get outta here with your theoretical conceptual underpinnings and get back to me when you have hard data to back up your brane trapping!

Also, no apologies necessary on the delay — I waited eight years for your first reply, remember? Lol. Anyway, sorry to hear about the damage your boat took, dude. Despite being nautically-inclined, I’ll admit to knowing jack shit about boat anatomy, so I’ll just take you at your word that the damage is bad enough to drop anchor for extensive repairs.

Does that mean you’ll be back on land soon? Because funnily enough, I’m actually in Gravity Falls right now, if you are planning to…

Backspace, backspace, backspace.

Sad to report I’ve hit my own metaphorical shipwreck: I’ve been forced into a sabbatical for unjust reasons, so I’m actually…

Backspace forever. He does not need to know about why you suddenly have a plethora of free time.

Let me know where you end up dropping anchor. I might take a day or two to come say hi, if that’s…

What the hell is wrong with you? Just because your correspondence has become startlingly frequent doesn’t mean that he actually wants to meet up in person. If he was determined enough to track down the PPDC’s fax number (seriously, who does that?) he would be determined enough to suggest linking up while on land.

And just because the tenor of your emails has faulted to casual doesn’t automatically make you friends. He hardly ever asks about your life, past the mundane, although you are exceptionally nosy and ask about his constantly. Not to mention, he only ever addresses you by your title — Doctor, and nothing else. There is a nag in the back of your mind that this is just business for him, that he just likes the opportunity to keep his theory sharp and rebuttals ready.

Better to keep your expectations low. You’re luckier that way.

And, okay, fine, maybe you’re overthinking this, because maybe you’ve developed a bit of an academic crush on him — is that a crime? He’s witty! He humors your dumb questions! It’s hardly a crime to become endeared to a penpal. And it hardly means anything when you have not met in person, or when you can’t find a single photo past the year 1982.

(Although, he did look pretty good in 1982.)

(Cut that shit out!)

To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: RE: RE: D-Branes getting contiguous within the bulk.

Are you implying there is waveform continuity between two D-branes on the level of quantum-scale spacetime turbulence at a great state energy in a vacuum? This just keeps circling the drain of the problem I keep pointing out: valid tests to detect the multiverse have yet to be demonstrated with any real evidence. Get outta here with your theoretical conceptual underpinnings and get back to me when you have hard data to back up your brane trapping!

Also, no apologies necessary on the delay — I waited eight years for your first reply, remember? Lol. Anyway, sorry to hear about the damage your boat took, dude. Despite being nautically-inclined, I’ll admit to knowing jack shit about boat anatomy, so I’ll take you at your word that the damage is bad enough to return to land for extensive repairs. Does that mean you’ll be dropping anchor soon?

Double also, I stumbled upon something weird and interesting today — seems right up your alley of odd creatures. Would your spirits be lifted at all if I send along a pic or two? I’d love a second opinion on the thing.

Evidentially Yours,

- …, aka Skeptical About the Waveforms

Fiddleford leads you through some back roads the next day — you in your truck, him giving the Cataphract’s shock absorbers a test run — all the way to the other side of town, finally landing at a literal cabin in the woods.

It is, admittedly, a very nice and non-creepy cabin in the woods. Nothing about it makes you feel like you are about to get murdered in creative and possibly schlocky ways. It’s a two-story A-frame done up of stacked logs that looks like it boasts plenty of square footage; there is a wrap-around porch with a bench swing out front, large bay windows protruding from one side, and a small balcony outside an upstairs room. When you get out of your truck, shouldering your backpack (containing your snail and a field notebook), you can hear the twinkling of wind chimes.

“Charming,” you say, once Fiddleford drops from the access hatch on the underside of the Cataphract.

“Modeled after their old place,” he informs you, “with some useful upgrades.” And then proceeds to say nothing else on the matter.

Instead of leading you up the porch and using a key on the front door like you had expected, you round the back to a large, padlocked shed. Without a word, he removes a false panel next to the door and… puts his hand on a biometric scanner?

“Dude,” you say. “What?”

The padlock opens with a click! When he pushes one of the doors open to slip through, you expect the proffered lab space. But when you step inside, the entire place is pitch black, and only through the sliver of light through the cracked door do you see Fiddleford to the right, next to another metal door, unmistakably doing a retinal scan.

“What kind of top secret place is this?” you half-joke, feeling even more nervous about being in someone else’s lab space now.

“Th’ kind the gover’ment shouldn’t know ‘bout.”

This is quickly becoming the polar opposite of taking a break.

Once past the ocular obstacle, the door swishes open like something out of a Star Trek episode, revealing a set of stairs. Top secret basement lab? Oh, you are so in over your fucking head.

It is a dark walk down the stairs; Fiddleford seems fine forgoing any light, but you get your phone out and turn on the flashlight to be able to see where your steps are landing. It’s a short walk, and once at the bottom, he stops at another door. Briefly, you wonder what biometric test this one will have — blood sample, maybe? — but he just turns the knob and enters, slapping a light switch. You follow him into…

“Oh, fuck me,” you breathe.

It is something plucked right from your science fiction fantasies — something even evil scientists would be jealous of. Fluorescent bars hum overhead, casting a clinical light over the large space.

It’s impossible to decide what to focus on first. There is a series of frosted glass doors across the room from you, all in a row; several large work tables stretch out, some running parallel, others perpendicular, to create a small maze to get anywhere. Everything is befit with beakers and autoclaves and vats. Carts are strewn around with even more pieces of small equipment, and the wall to your left is lined floor-to-ceiling with various sized monitors, all dark.

“Dude,” you say again. “What?”

Fiddleford ends up leaving you there, which you think is awfully bold and very trusting of him, and you promise to be back in time for dinner in recompense. Truthfully, if the positions were reversed, you also wouldn’t want to sit around and babysit someone while they poked and prodded at a newfound specimen.

Still, being alone in the space makes you antsy. You immediately pull your phone to get some music going — but, of course, no signal. Even if your phone worked out here, the place must be a faraday cage, especially if it is somewhere the government shouldn’t know about. That, coupled with the fact it is fucking freezing in here, means you resolve to be all business and get out of there as swift as possible.

The next thing you do is track down a box of latex gloves, afraid of leaving your fingerprints on anything. You find some on an errant cart and snap a pair on… which also ends up being an obstacle, because you get your fingers mixed up in the wrong sleeves. By the time you actually, properly, correctly get them on, the pinky hangs lamely off the end, and you stuff it back into itself so you don’t have to worry about something dangling around. You chalk it up to another patented Gravity Falls oddity and move on.

You delicately clear some space for yourself on a random work table amidst the chaos, surrounded by more oddities: a piece of green crystal duct taped to the front of a flashlight, a half-disassembled pogo stick, a sphere almost as wide as your wingspan with thick prongs sticking out. When you are satisfied with your work space, you pull the jar and a fresh notebook from your bag, grab a nearby wheeled chair, and plop down.

“I think I’ll name you Herbert,” you decide aloud, as if Herbert can hear you, and breaking rule numero uno of studying any kind of animal. Naming it means you’ll get attached, naming it means you won’t be able to look at it objectively.

Pah. Like that’s gonna be a problem. It’s just a snail.

But a very cool looking snail.

It takes some time riffling through random drawers and cabinets, but eventually you find some pH strips to test the water out of the jar. When you confirm it is nothing extreme on either end of the scale, you tell Herbert, “Stay there,” and go in search of some kind of tank to transfer it into.

What you end up finding is a cylindrical vat, about as tall as your forearm and roughly a foot in width. You hoist it into one of the deep sinks against a wall, turn the water on, and let it fill.

You wonder what Herbert eats. Cone snails are carnivorous; should you invest in some worms? Maybe you should find the local bait shop. Not to mention, actually returning to the lake to check for other cone snails; observing in a natural (“natural”) habitat will probably elucidate a great deal many things — you did, admittedly, kind of jump the gun by scooping up Herbert. Until then, you will have to make do with educated guesswork.

When the tank is almost full, you shut off the water, get a good grip under it, and carefully walk it back to your borrowed workspace. You are exceptionally careful not to let any water slosh over the top, and keep your eyes on the ground as much as possible. Your muddy shoes squeak against the linoleum as you shuffle.

Waywardly, you make a mental note to find a mop.

Carefully, you lower the vat onto the table with a grunt of effort.

It is often said that in the critical moments before disaster, one’s perception of time slows down.  A kind of bullet time. This is something you have always written off as a conjecture of dramatics, since you have done plenty of stupid things in your lifetime and never once has it felt like you saw every detail in action. Oftentimes, you were just left amongst the rubble afterwards, wondering, what the hell just happened?

What happens next only serves as evidence towards your experience.

Pushing the vat away from the edge of the table, you grab your pen, flip open your notebook, and begin jotting down notes — vibrant shell, fuzzy-looking head, has sharp radula — and reach for the jar with Herbert with your unoccupied hand. Only half-looking, you thoroughly knock it with the back of your hand.

Knock is probably a weak term; you hit it with enough force to send it sliding off the table, where it shatters on the ground. Surprised by the sharp noise, you make a sound like, “Gwah,” and stumble back, instinctually trying to get out of the vicinity of the broken glass.

The back of your knees catch onto the chair you had pulled up, and momentum continues to take you backwards. The chair topples, smacking your head on the floor, and your leg flails and kicks your work table over. Which crashes onto its side and sends everything sliding off it, and the large sphere hits another cart, which disturbs something else, which disturbs something else, which disturbs…

It’s like you’ve triggered the world’s worst Rube Goldberg machine.

Sore, knocking on your ass, surrounded by destruction, possibly with a concussion, you say aloud, directly to the overhead lights, “What the hell just happened?”

It takes a while before you even move.

You do all the things one should do after a fall: you wiggle your fingers and toes, make sure all extremities work, and then try to gauge if you have a concussion. It seems unlikely, or if you do, it is hardly severe: you remember your name, where you are, and what just happened a little too well.

Then you just lie on the floor and wallow for a bit.

There is no way around it: this shit sucks. Past the fact you are going to have bruising in creative places tomorrow and may have a burgeoning concussion, you just caused an untold amount of damage to someone else’s lab space. A someone else who is trying to keep it top secret from the government. A someone with the personal means to even build a space like this, let alone the beautifully constructed cabin above you.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme and there is a little too much consonance for your liking. At least before, it was your own (shared) space, with your own specimens, although the outcome had been —

Wait —

You sit upright with a melodramatic gasp. Herbert.

Instantly, your head swims; you groan and press the heel of your palm to your forehead. Once the lightheadedness fades, you slowly get to your feet and ignore the carnage you have just wrought, and step delicately towards where the original jar has shattered into a million pieces.

You tamp down your expectations, ready to see the vermilion shell cracked amongst the rubble, but all that is there is a sprayed pile of lake sediment mixed with glittering glass shards.

Quickly, you try to tiptoe around the broken glass to look around, and you wince when you hear some of it crunch under your boots. Maybe he (is it a he? They? It? Fuck, now is not the time) skidded across the floor… But no, there is no sign of your cool mystery snail. The only thing for you to find is just how much stuff you have toppled over — the crystal flashlight is definitely cracked, the pogo stick parts have rolled away, and the giant sphere is just… upside-down, on the floor, prongs bent under its weight.

All of it evidence of how much you have fucked up. Again.

Angrily, you wipe the tears from your eyes, sniffling. Now is not the time.

Unsure what else to do, you stand in the middle of the mess, arms crossed over your midsection, staring blankly ahead at the wall of dark monitors. A bleakness starts to settle over your mind, heavy and overcast, feeling hopeless.

Until your mind points out, you should probably clean this up.

Aimlessly, you try to find a broom and dustpan.

After a few fruitless minutes, sniffling and continuing to try and not cry, you do not find a broom and dustpan. Which just frustrates you even more, how is this place even organized, it took you five goddamn minutes to even find those pHs strips but you’d think clean up equipment would be somewhere obvious, and —

Reining it in, you take a deep breath and close your eyes. Okay, this is bad. This is gargantuan levels of bad. But, not impossible to fix, or at least make somewhat better. There is a broom and dustpan at Fiddleford’s; you’ve seen it hung on the back of one of the kitchen doors. There is probably a whole host of other tidying supplies there. You can clean this up and troubleshoot from there.

Tomorrow. You can fix this tomorrow.

So, you unceremoniously grab your things and sulk back to your truck. On the drive back, you gloomily try to figure out if you have the time to try and find another cool snail specimen.

Chapter Text

To: <[email protected]>
Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: D-branes getting contiguous within the bulk

Doctor,

I am not implying; I strive never to leave anything up to interpretation, let alone something so evidentiary. The waveform continuity is apparent: please review pages 34 - 38 of the last paper I sent you. Remember, the probability density is constant everywhere, but the probability current is nonzero. We see that a particle may be in motion even if its spatial probability density has no explicit time dependence.

Equally, there is evidence showing the validity of detecting D-brane collisions using temperature variations in cosmic background radiation — you biologists are too caught up in needing empirical proof of every little thing.

To move from probability currents to maritime waves, alas, these things do happen. Maybe it is just fate telling us to head back home; my brother was certainly getting restless about it, although he would never admit to it. Truthfully, I am, too. There is almost a gravitational pull to Gravity Falls — I suppose it’s in the name — and one that is impossible to ignore once you’re caught in its orbit. Ergo, I am landlocked for the foreseeable future.

On that note: is there any chance you would like to confer further about this in person? It may expedite the process of understanding. To sweeten the pot, I can show you several specimens that boast a biochemical makeup incongruous with our terrestrial biochemistry — or, as you put it, “something different than our organized carbon collection of primordial ooze,” (see email chain subjected: “why is it always silicone-based nucleotides in sci fi?”).

Please, let me know. Last I checked, the PPDC was headquartered in San Francisco (assuming you are there, I suppose). That is nearby enough to justify the travel by my standards, but, perhaps you feel differently.

Empirically Yours,

Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds

P.S. Yes, my spirits would be lifted by pictures of your odd creature. Where did you find it?

What would you even name the new snail? Herbert Jr.? Herbert the Second? Herbert Superior?

You cling to this train of thought as you lay spread-eagle in your bed, staring up at the ceiling of the four poster the next morning. Dreading the day ahead of you, and definitely sore. The thoughts buoy you above mental waters, trying not to get too transfixed by the downward spiral of yesterday’s events.

The universe must still be somewhat on your side, because you did not encounter Fiddleford when you returned yesterday; you imagine if he had asked you about your day, you might have just burst into tears. By then, it had been late afternoon, awkwardly situated between lunch and dinner. So, you had just grabbed a handful of granola bars from the pantry and trudged back to your suite, locked the door behind you, and fallen face-first onto your bed.

Too busy wallowing and restlessly drifting between sleep cycles, you had even foregone your nightly ritual of checking your email one last time, for any Stanford Pines correspondence left unseen. But in the immediate aftermath of yesterday, you just didn’t have it in you to critically engage in dialogue. The waveforms could wait.

Despite the leftover crumbs being evidence of your intermittent midnight snacking, you are absolutely starved right now. Still, you take the time to shower, thoroughly washing your hair, scrubbing all traces of shattered lab from you. If you only you could scrub away the shame.

It’s pure melodrama but, you cannot believe this kind of thing has happened to you again. Some omniscient being must be sitting haughtily on its throne right now, causing your life to take sharp left turns into lab accidents, jeering down at you. Nyeh! Nyeh!

It’s fine. This is fine. No one has to know. You can fix this.

When you get out of the shower, you assess for any bruises from yesterday; thankfully, they all feel tame in terms of possible damage. After two ibuprofen last night, the fog of your headache had even lifted. Small blessings.

Leaving your bed unmade, in a fresh set of clothes, and hair toweled to an acceptable level of dry, you head downstairs. You try to think pleasant thoughts.

To your surprise, Fiddleford is in the kitchen when you get there.

“There you are,” he says, not unlike how a parent might scold their child after catching them sneak back in late at night. He is even sitting at the small table tucked into the corner, like he had been waiting for you in the same scolding manner, both hands around a steaming mug.

However, you are a fully grown adult, and are not affected by  his tone. “Good morning to you too, ‘cuz,” you greet around a yawn. Your eyes still feel a little heavy, and you try to rub the sleep from them.

“Where th’hell were you last night? You never showed up for dinner.”

Okay, now you feel bad. But it does warm your heart more than slightly to hear that he cares this much, after knowing you for such a small amount of time. Even over the course of the past week, having dinner together has become some kind of routine between you two. “Sorry,” you tell him sincerely. “I was, um, really tired when I got back. Went straight to bed.”

He accepts this with a shrug and a soft noise. “So, y’get your lil’ friend all tested?”

A pang goes through your heart at the thought of Herbert Prime. “Yeah,” you say as level as possible, heading for the cabinet next to the fridge to grab a bowl. The cold tile under your feet serves to wake you up a little more. “I named him Herbert.” Rest in peace, little dude.

As you pour yourself a bowl of cereal, you make the point to pivot from your yesterday to Fiddleford’s yesterday. He brightens considerably as he talks about his (evil?) robots; it blissfully distracted you from everything else that has happened around you in the past twenty-four hours. Still, in your peripheries, the broom and dustpan hang off the wall, forebodingly.

You are crunching on some Honey-O’s and leaning back against the counter, nodding along as he says, “Advanced photochromic displays — that’s four planes of situational awareness!” when…

“Fiddleford!” a deep voice bellows, startling you enough that you almost drop your bowl. “Someone broke into the lab!”

Oh no.

As if he had been expecting this to be part of his day, Fiddleford just sighs wearily and gives you an apologetic look. You can only imagine what kind of wide-eyed one you must be giving him back, a proverbial deer caught in proverbial headlights. “No one’s broke in anywhere!” he hollers back. Then, at a conversational volume, “Now, as I was sayin’…”

Loud footfalls approach, and the door to the kitchen swings open to reveal a large, borderline menacing figure in the entryway, in a dirty, wrinkled jacket and muddy jeans. “Yes,” the man insists, stomping farther in, letting the door slam behind him. Already spooked, you jump at the noise. “Someone has. The lab is wrecked.”

Uh-oh.

Fiddleford looks from the man to you, and you immediately feel like the child getting caught sneaking back in. His tone is the purest concentrate of I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed when he says, “You trashed the lab?”

“Um,” you say, extremely verbose, extremely thrown by this turn in your morning. You get a head rush as the pieces snap into place and you realize, oh, of course, this is the owner of the lab you had fumbled in yesterday. And you’ve been caught as close to red-handed as you can get. The reality of the situation shatters around you; broken shards of your rationality and sensibility lie everywhere. Everywhere. “Uh.”

The man whose lab you (accidentally) trashed (a little), towering and so, so full of ire (admittedly, rightful), points an accusatory finger at you and takes a few swift steps forward. “You.”

“Accidentally!” you rush to defend, stumbling back to keep the distance. You barely clatter your bowl onto the counter, so haphazard that some milk spills over the edge. You flick your wrist a few times, to get the drops off your hand, and continue, panicked, “Totally accidentally!”

He stops equidistant between you and Fiddleford, blocking any hope of you escaping, and then turns the accusatory finger to Fiddleford. Something in your stomach plummets and goes subterranean. Having the outrage bear down on you is one thing — you are no stranger to this category of reprimand — but having it bore down on Fiddleford, who only wanted to help you, is another thing entirely. “I can’t believe you would let some — some stranger into the house,” he spits. “Into my laboratory!”

His demeaning tone makes your hackles immediately rise. “Hey!” you snap, before anyone else can get a word in edgewise. “Get off his case.”

He looks startled, like in the seconds between he had forgotten your presence entirely. That quickly melts in the wake of the murderous glare he gives you next. If bottled, it might serve as a very effective poison. “Your opinion as the culprit holds very little sway,” he tells you in a tone you can only describe as haughty.

“The culprit?” you repeat, filled with incredulity at what you are hearing. What the hell is this guy’s problem? You just said it was an accident! “It’s not a crime scene, man. And for the record,” you barrel on, as he opens his mouth with a sharp inhale, “the area of effect is pretty small in comparison to the bulk.”

His jaw visibly goes slack. Then wires itself shut. Through his teeth, he asks, “What?”

“Definitionally, I made a bit of a mess,” you reiterate. “I did not wreck, nor did I trash; at least not how you are implying. This hardly makes me a culprit of anything, except maybe an unfortunate set of circumstances that…”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” he mutters, faint enough you think it is probably to himself. He turns back to Fiddleford — who, frankly, looks entirely unaffected by this argument. “Who the hell is this?” he asks, jamming a thumb in your direction.

You say, “We’re cousins,” as Fiddleford says, “We’re family.”

Unfortunately, Fiddleford follows up with, “Why didn’ you say anythin’?” in the disapproving parental tone and, belatedly, you realize he’s talking to you.

Shame crests over you, threatening to drag you under. You desperately claw at any kind of rationality for that buoyancy again — what were you supposed to do, leave a note? Lab trashed; details later? Maybe it had been foolish of you to try and fix it yourself, but it was, demonstrably, your problem. Ergo your thing to fix.

But when you don’t answer quick enough, the other guy lets himself back into the conversation. “Is that supposed to mean anything?” he guffaws.

“Oh, my god,” you mutter, the shame washed away by incredulity all over again.

“Did you even fact-check?” he continues, as if you haven’t said anything. “Consult a family tree? Cousin is an awfully loose term to…”

“Dude,” you say. “Get your head out of your ass.”

He glares at you again. “My head is perfectly situated on my shoulders.”

“It’s a figure of —”

“Yes, I know, and I’m telling you it is not even figuratively up my —”

“Stanferd Filbrick Pines,” Fiddleford reprimands in a stern tone. “Hold yer damn horses and calm down.”

It serves to placate both of you: Stanford draws up on himself with a sharp, deep inhale, clearing reining in his emotional horses, while you feel the name ring in your ears.

Pines?

More pieces you hadn’t even known existed snap into place, and nothing could have prepared you for the fact that the puzzle actually amounts to this. Maybe there is something to that time dilation theory after all, because it feels like your synapses are firing at an incredible pace while the two men have some kind of overlapping conversation. A Pines, named Stanford, with an impressive lab, in Gravity Falls.

A tang hits the back of your tongue, as a kind of awe and horror overtakes you. This is Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds.

Not only have you touched down in his lab like a compact cyclone, but you are mere seconds away from calling him an asshole.

When you tune back into the conversation, Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds is saying, in a tone much more deprecating than it is concerned, “I’m just worried you’ve had a lapse in judgement.”

So, your first words after becoming conscious to the fact this is who you have been spending countless hours of your last few months on, are: “You are such an asshole. You know that, right?”

Vaguely, through the borderline indiscernible haze of emotion, you are aware just how much you are botching this. You are botching this in maybe the most spectacular way you have ever botched anything before in your life, and that includes the sea urchin incident. Not even forty-eight hours ago, you had been trying to reason with yourself about asking him to meet up. Now, not only are you utterly horrified that you have, but you want to tear his hair out.

Also through the haze, you realize Fiddleford is saying your name. You bring yourself back to reality to hear him go, “Darlin’, what actually happened?”

Both men look at you expectantly, although with wildly different intents.

“… I tripped,” you admit, quieter, as the shame returns in full force.

After a beat, Doctor Pines intones, “You tripped.”

“Yeah,” you say shortly. “Accidentally.”

In the tense silence that follows, neither of you cede any ground. You keep his glare, until Fiddleford sighs heavily. He levels both hands on the table to stand and says, resigned, “I’ll go check th’ tapes.”

There are tapes?

The idea of tapes should probably serve more as a balm, but mostly you just feel horrified that there is video proof of your blunder. Fiddleford trundles out of the room, and you swear you distantly hear that omnipotent being again. Nyeh! Nyeh!

Left alone, neither you nor Doctor Pines say anything to move the conversation along, finally looking away from each other. Frankly, you had said the last thing of substance, so you consider the ball thoroughly in his court. Maybe he is using this brief reprieve to concoct his next diatribe. He’s awfully good at them via email; you wonder if that really comes naturally, or if he ponders. Maybe he keeps some kind of journal full of them.

Truthfully, you aren’t sure what you had been expecting out of him. Sure, you had seen the photos from the early eighties — you had seen them a couple times (or, okay, maybe more than a couple) — but the resemblance… Well, the resemblance is there, for grainy and poorly scanned paper clippings. At least his sideburns are gone.

Whomever you had been imagining on the other end of your email chains, it was not someone quite as barrel-chested, or tall, or some kind of Indiana Jones knock-off in a turtleneck. There is a shine of a honest-to-god silver streak at his temples, stark against the rest of the dark gray hair. Besides the fact that he has been snarking at you, he looks extremely rumpled, with a messy heap of curls, a heavy five o’clock shadow, and visibly cracked glasses.

In their individual parts, none of it should work: the almost-cauliflowered ears, the slightly off-set and proud nose, the cleft of his chin, the heavy brow. But in the aggregate…

It works almost startlingly well.

For you.

Desperate to distract yourself from that thought, you move onto the next one: you are experiencing this situation with an unfair advantage. Or, more accurately, an unfair disadvantage. You know exactly who he is; he is still in the dark vis-à-vis your identity.

Like most things, you leap before you look. Before you can put a critical eye to the vindictive instinct, you step forward — Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds looks incredibly trepidatious as you do this — and thrust out your hand. You introduce yourself by name and title, strongly. See how it feels, asshole.

The look he continues to give you is disapproving and skeptical, but not one of even the vaguest hint of recognition, as his eyes never leave your face, although never quite making eye contact. You feel a flush bloom across your chest, running up your neck, under his scrutiny. He lets your hand hang in the air for just a few seconds too long to be anything but awkward, but before you can pointedly pull it back, he reaches out and shakes it brusquely. Then snaps both hands behind his back.

His hand is — was — very warm.

“Doctor Stanford Pines,” he introduces shortly, unknowingly redundant. “So, Doctor…”

“Please,” you interrupt, trying for levity. “Only my mother calls me ‘doctor.’”

The joke falls as flat as his expression; his mouth remains in a tight line as he continues to attempt to break you down to the peptide bond with his intent gaze. “So, you’re the one who snuck into my lab and caused that wreckage,” he continues, voice steady and impartial despite his phrasing.

You wince. Now that the lid has been put over this mismanaged pot, all the irritation and pride begins to drain from you. And now that you know he is the man who has been extremely patient explaining quantum mechanics to you, Stanford Pines is much less threatening. It makes it hard to maintain the anger when you get your feet back on the ground and remember, you undeniably did cause a mess.

Even if he is exaggerating by calling it a wreckage.

“There wasn’t any sneaking,” you respond, unsure what else you can say that won’t send you two back into an angry spat. “Fiddleford let me in. And, I was going to clean up — he said I had the lab to myself for at least a few weeks. I thought I had a little more time, or else I would have…” You trail off, rocking back on your heels, not quite sure what you would have.

“Probably for the best that we returned early, then,” he says, back to being matter-of-fact. “Before you broke anything else in your… endeavor.”

Ouch.

That rude dig aside, it is becoming startlingly clear that either 1) the man does not care who you are, and you have vastly misjudged the tone of his emails (which hurts deeply), or 2) he still has no idea that you are the one he has been corresponding with for the past few months (which hurts less but still stings).

Your name appears on your emails, right? That’s built into every inbox UI. Never mind the fact that you default to your initials for any kind of signature anyway, or that you have been getting increasingly cheeky in your sign offs.

Is your email signature on?

You must not hide the hurt expression that crosses your face well enough — you do suffer from heart-on-your-sleeve syndrome — because something in Doctor Pines’s voice is gentler when he adds, a moment later, “Well… it’s the thought that counts?”

You snort lightly, crossing your arms in an undeniably petulant manner and suddenly finding the pattern of the tile beneath your feet very interesting. “Um. Listen. Bad timing, I know, but I actually left something there, if I could…”

“What?” he says, bewildered. “Why would you leave behind any evidence?”

“Oh, my god,” you huff, rubbing at your brow and closing your eyes against the fresh onslaught of annoyance. “It’s not a crime scene, man.”

“It certainly looks enough like one.”

“Accident,” you reiterate. “It was an accident.”

“Which still would not change the fact that…”

“Okay, first of all,” you interrupt, looking back up at him and defiantly holding up a finger. It halts his tirade before it can even really begin. “You should really have cleanup and safety equipment readily available. Would it kill you to hang up a broom, or a mop, or something?”

Surprisingly, he has no snarky response to this. Mostly, he looks taken aback by your insistence.

“And two,” another finger, “I knocked over a sample jar. The specimen is probably still there.”

The expression shifts to one you can only describe as gobsmacked. “You let something loose in my lab?” His voice is close to a growl.

“Accident!” you reiterate for the bajillionth time. Somehow, you don’t think explaining how you are hardly the active subject here will help; that the universe acted upon you to fuck up spectacularly. Or, that negging higher being. Nyeh! Nyeh! “And, it’s not even that dangerous of a — and, for the record, it’s probably dead now, so…” Oh, poor Herbert. Struck down in its prime…

“‘Not even that dangerous?’” he quotes back, slowly, like one would explain a concept to a toddler.

You sigh, frustrated at yourself, at him, at the universe, at the higher being. “I found a cool looking snail,” you explain.

That clearly throws him; an awkward beat passes where he just blinks at you behind those thick glasses.

You raise an eyebrow at him, expectant.

Slowly, he repeats, “A cool… looking… snail?”

What is this guy, a parrot? He’s supposed to be one of the greatest minds of the last century and he’s currently showcasing as your echo. “Yeah, I study marine — you know, it doesn’t matter,” you decide in real time. “I found a cone snail in a lake out back. Probably a cone snail. I wanted to put it under observation, test some samples, to see…”

“Cone snails don’t reside in lakes,” Doctor Pines interrupts, oh-so helpful. “They’re primarily oceans- and tropics-based.”

“I know that,” you say shortly, hoping he hears the asshole implied at the end of that statement. “That’s why I wanted to study it.” Asshole.

If he hears the implication, he doesn’t let it affect him. He rubs his chin with a large hand, looking much more curious than piqued now, as his gaze slides past you, unfocused on the middle distance over your shoulder. The tension trickles away as he thinks, but you never take your eyes off him. Being contemplative makes him much… softer looking. Not normal, per se — the dark shadows under his eyes spell out just how little sleep he’s gotten — but more… approachable, maybe?

Fuck, just cut to the chase here. It makes him look cuter.

What the hell is happening to you?

“Cone snails in Gravity Falls,” he murmurs, likely to himself. “I wonder if…”

“I got the tapes here!” Fiddleford suddenly hollers from down the hall.

Both of you jump about a foot in the air.

This serves to remind Doctor Pines that he is here on a mission, and that mission is proving your absolute guilt and humiliating you in the process, so the curious glean in his eyes melts into something much more smug and satisfied. He pivots on a heel and stalks out of the room with a smirk.

As you are left standing alone in the kitchen, the silence deafening, you slowly begin to pick up the pieces of your sensibility and rationality. When you finally put enough of them back together, something in your stomach drops. Immediately, you bolt and make for your suite, taking the stairs two at a time. You don’t need to see what’s on those tapes; you already lived the mortification and you don’t need to experience it again in the third person.

You burst into your room, grab your laptop, and collapse at the end of your luxurious bed. It is still unmade from less than an hour ago, when the problems of yesterday had felt overcast but bearable. Now, it is all chump change in comparison to the now.

You bounce your leg impatiently as you wait for the laptop to connect to the wi-fi, then to your work-sanctioned VPN, then wait while your work inbox loads… it feels like eons, but once loaded, you immediately shoot yourself an email — from your work account to your personal one. And then, because a good scientist always gathers as much evidence as possible, you hastily type out another email; this one, to your boss, never minding the fact there is technically a no contact rule in place while you are meant to be taking a break.

hey, dude, does our VPN redact our names when emailing outside our directory? or something? what’s up with that? i didn’t even know VPNs could do that.

Briefly, you see Stanford Pines’s name in your inbox — well, actually, you see his email address, with no name preceding it. Instinctually, you open it and begin reading: Doctor, I am not implying; I strive never to leave anything up to interpretation — and then scowl and click away. Not now.

You unlock your phone and refresh your personal email maybe fifteen times in the span of three seconds, before the email pops up. From one <[email protected]> and no other identifying information. No name, nothing. When you open the email, heart hammering and no longer breathing, you remember disliking the PPDC’s new logo so much that you turned off your email signature in protest a year or so ago.

Oh. My god.

You slam your laptop shut, throwing it onto the bed behind you, and stare, wide-eyed, at the molding where the wall meets the floor. Has Stanford Pines really been emailing you this entire time without knowing your name? That’s — that’s pure insanity. That’s impossible. Surely it came up somewhere. Things have progressed past the heyday of the anonymous, AOL chat room. Everyone’s metadata is intricately linked. The odds are — are infinitesimal. You believe in the multiverse more than you believe in these odds.

But, these odds are staring you in the face. In the form of a thoroughly anonymous email that, at most, links you to your place of work. Maybe your initials, when you aren’t trying to get cheeky with the email sign-offs. Does your work have a public directory? It almost doesn’t matter: you have been dodging getting a headshot for several years now. Partially out of spite, mostly because of a bet with a coworker to see how long you could get away with it.

Why has he never asked? Surely, he would have asked at some point. You had signed that letter, right? But your handwriting is notoriously illegible on its best days. You would have asked, by now. After several, literal months of near daily correspondence. You also would not have been blindly emailing a complete stranger for, again, literal months — unless, of course, that stranger expressed a zealous interest in your exact field of study. If someone had asked you, say, how you isolate jellyfish venom using size exclusion chromatography and cation exchange chromatography, then you might handwave the no name’s thing for a bit.

And, maybe you would have felt too awkward to admit to not knowing this hypothetical person’s name after enough time.

Plus, you aren’t strangers. Not really; you must have exchanged, what, a hundred? Hundred fifty? Emails over the past several months — sometimes several within the same day, if the time zones lined up. Even if you weren’t friends, you were definitionally acquaintances. Colleagues? Peers?

Well, you definitely aren’t strangers now, because you have officially met. You even shook hands, like polite adults. Well. Polite-ish.

Two possibilities stretch before you.

            1) You tell him exactly who you are, which either:

                A) softens the blow about you causing a small-scale accident in the lab; or

                B) shatters whatever relationship the two of you had oh-so carefully cultivated over email; and/or

                C) he never wants to hear from you again; or

            2) You keep your trap shut.

The tangibility of this entire thing leaves you lightheaded, as you close your eyes and put your head in your hands, elbows digging into your knees. First your career, now your personal life? How many more things can you blow up in quick succession? Maybe you should pivot to being a demolitions expert.

It’s just too risky, you decide. Maybe this is the equivalent of taking the blue pill, but you’d rather feign ignorance until the situation smooths out. Then you can couch the new introduction. Softly. Gently. In so much verbal down.

That assumes he will ever want to talk to you again.

Someone raps on your door, and you full-body flinch. Jesus.

Stalking across the room, you throw open the door and snap, “What?”

Doctor Pines looks startled at the level of your vehemence, but quickly recovers to a more neutral expression. He is standing right at the door, so you are forced to crane your neck to look up at him. “Okay,” he says simply. “It was an accident.”

You sigh frustratedly, taking a step back and looking away. “The tapes are that bad, huh?”

“I don’t think anyone would intentionally hurt themselves so spectacularly.”

Oh, yeah, the injuries. In the rush of everything else, you had completely forgotten about them. But now reminded, you still feel sore in most of the collision spots, and your headache is returning with a vengeance. But that might have more to do with your situation than your possible concussion.

You pinch the bridge of your nose and close your eyes, trying to keep your breathing even as irritation and humiliation spike in you again. Reining in your own emotional horses, you ask in a wavering tone, “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Do you have a concussion?” he asks in turn, entirely clinical. “It looked like you hit your head pretty hard.”

“Who cares?” you gripe, dropping your hand and composing yourself with a few deep breaths. When life feels marginally more manageable, you finally look back at him.

He is giving you an odd sort of look, head held high, chin jutting out. There is an uncertainty to his expression, but with traces of the same curiosity from earlier. It is certainly much less harsh than any of the ones he had been giving you before; the man must pity you after seeing the footage of your less-than-spectacular fall.

You hate being pitied.

When he continues not to say anything, a horse of emotion gets loose and you end up snapping, “Did you come here just to pity me?”

“No,” he tells you, and then does not elaborate further.

“Then, why are you wasting your…”

“I came here for an apology.”

He’s apologizing to you? You draw yourself up, surprised and skeptical. “What, you’re sorry you acted like a humongous ass? Don’t ask me for forgiveness, go plead with Fiddleford. He’s the one you insulted.”

“No,” he tells you again, an undercurrent of irritation in his tone. “I’m waiting for — and, for the record, I did apologize to Fiddleford. I’m waiting for your apology. He said you would be reasonable about it.”

“My apology,” you scoff. “My? Mine? We’ve been through this, dude, it was clearly an accident, I didn’t mean to —”

“That doesn’t change the outcome,” he interrupts. “Or the mess I have to deal with now. Whether it was an accident or not is negligible: you have yet to actually say, I’m sorry.”

Your mouth snaps shut. While another emotional horse threatens to run free, you tighten the reins. What a generous offer, you think sardonically. For me to apologize to you.

But, unfortunately, he has a point. You can’t recall if you actually apologized for the damage you caused, or just expressed remorse. Truthfully, you may have skirted around the issue out of desperately not wanting to face it. It would not be the first time you hadn’t looked beyond yourself.

You run a hand through your hair with a sigh, then down your face. “Okay.” You hold up both palms in a surrender gesture. “Okay, I’m sorry. For the mess I caused. I’ll replace whatever — I mean, I’ll probably need to get the funds together first, maybe we can work out, like, a payment plan…”

“There is no payment plan,” Doctor Pines says, a satisfied smile creeping onto his face, just a hint too smug. Actually, it may be closer to sheer glee that he managed to get the words out of you — but, again, you really should have apologized upfront, rather than take the defense (and then the offense). Typical leaping before you look behavior; this whole situation might have been avoided if you had just swallowed your pride for a handful of seconds to get those measly words out.

Perhaps best not to dwell on that.

“Okay. Well… sorry. Again. Genuinely.” You tack on that last bit in case your tone gives away just how pissy you still are at having been caught in this whole thing.

“Apology accepted,” he says, folding his hands behind his back and puffing out his chest. Again, no longer sniping, he looks leagues more approachable… and leagues more discombobulated. “You can come search for your snail, if you’d like.”

The lack of any kind of noticeable malice in his tone means it takes more than a few seconds for the words to register in your brain. He even sounds serious about the proposal. “I told you,” you say shortly, chest tight at the reminder. “Herbert is probably dead by now. Cone snails are aquatic.”

“…Herbert?” he asks, perplexed. “You named it?”

A flush spreads across your face.

He quirks an eyebrow at you.

“Accident and apology aside,” you say, with a not insignificant amount of haughtiness, “I assumed you wouldn’t want me within a mile radius of you.”

“Well, you seem awfully attached,” he responds, matching your general haught. “To Herbert.”

You narrow your eyes at him, eyebrows furrowing. Is he making fun of you? And here you had thought you were actually moving into a more cordial stage of your burgeoning relationship.

“And, I think you’ll find the creatures of Gravity Falls to be resilient little things,” he continues, unaffected by your expression.

“You don’t have to make fun of me,” you say, still flat.

He sighs, but the line of his shoulders tighten into a straight line. “I’m —”

“I already feel bad enough,” you continue without pause. Your already thin patience is reaching its very end. “And I already apologized. So, just. Shoo.”

That throws him. He gapes at you. Then parrots back, “Shoo?”

“Yeah. Scram.” You wave your hand in the universal gesture for, get lost.

“You’re shooing me?” he asks incredulously.

“Yup.” You pop the ‘p’ for emphasis.

His nostrils flare as he puffs out a sharp exhale, like a bull. “Do you know just how many scientists would kill to have access to my laboratory, let alone be offered a second chance, after…”

He keeps going, but you tune him out as your thoughts wander. You do know, unfortunately. You were, until recently, and maybe still are, one of those scientists. But you are also phenomenally stubborn, and are both emotionally and physically bruised. Not to mention, all Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds has done since meeting you in person is ridicule and scold you. The superiority complex was pretty plain in subtext over email, but in the flesh, he practically exudes it.

Your feelings on this matter, and on him in general, clash so violently that, mostly, you just need him to leave before you say something stupid. Stupid…er.

“I don’t need some holier-than-thou asshole staring down his nose at me while I crawl on all fours looking for a snail carcass,” you interrupt without knowing where he is in his tirade. Then you wonder if that sentence can be classified as stupider.

Regardless of its stupidity status, it is a colorful descriptor; Doctor Pines guffaws. “I do not stare down my nose.” But he tilts his chin down, so he has a much more level gaze while looking at you, rather than peering down with that haughty superiority. Seems like he has no issue with the holier-than-thou portion of the comment, though.

He’s just so much… more than you ever anticipated. More self-important. Taller. Broader. More… silver fox-y.

Ugh, really, brain?

These thoughts do, however, serve to make whatever fight is left in you leave in one fell swoop. “It’s fine, Doctor Pines,” you sigh, deflating. “Thanks for the offer, but it’s fine. I won’t darken your door again.”

Rather than the pity you anticipate, or maybe the indignation at the fact you keep denying his generous offer, he gives you an extremely calculating once-over, back to trying to find the peptide bonds. You stand your ground against it, keeping eye contact — he immediately averts his eyes to just over your shoulder.

The sooner he leaves you be, the sooner you can lick your wounds, pack your shit, and sulk home. Because that’s the only true course of action, right? Live with the fact that the universe, or that Nyeh’ing omnipotent being, has led you down the path to get fucked over, again?

You never should have come to Gravity Falls without permission in the first place. You jumped the proverbial shark — something you do nigh constantly. It’s just, ever since you had done your research on this place all those months ago, there has been something… pulling you here. A tugging in your gut. A nagging in the back of your mind. Like the place has its own gravitational pull.

A ridiculous notion, in reality. You were just being selfish about it.

Doctor Pines nods once, sharply. “All right, then. Thank you for your time, Doctor.”

Somehow, you deflate even more. Some errant part of you had been hoping he would put up more of a fight, double down that you are still being rude — but, no. You just aren’t worth the trouble, apparently.

You almost say, it was nice to meet you, but that would ultimately be a lie. It was baffling to meet you, would be more appropriate. So, you just say, “Thanks, Doctor Pines. And, sorry again.”

He nods once more, and does not linger as he leaves.

You sulk in your room for a while thereafter, tangled amongst your sheets, undeniably moping. You scroll miserably on your phone for a bit, until you are refreshing the same feeds over and over. You consider breaking out the handheld console you brought with you, but that would require you to leave the comforts of your moping bed.

Sometime in what you guestimate is the early afternoon, someone knocks on your door.

“Ugh,” you groan, hauling yourself to your feet. Quickly running your fingers through your hair for some semblance of put togetherness, you trudge to the door.

“Hi, ‘cuz,” you greet once you open the door.

There is motor oil and grease streaked across Fiddleford’s face, and a new part of his beard is singed. “Got a message for ya’.” He thrusts out a piece of paper.

Puzzled, you take it.

Whatever you had been expecting, it is certainly not this. Smack in the middle of the page are three neatly drawn symbols, each the same height, each with a central line. Other, smaller lines and boxes are attached to the main lines, with variance in angle and placement. The pen strokes are sure and solid; you see a smattering of ink near the edge of the page. Underneath it, in neat scrawl:

RM XZHV BLF XSZMTV BLFI NRMW ZYLFG WZIPVMRMT WLLIH.

But it is, undoubtedly, for you. Your full title is written at the top.

You blink at it a few more times, wondering if you are having a stroke. “What?”

“Just found it on the ol’ fax machine,” Fiddleford continues. Your tongue feels like lead in your mouth at the mere mention of faxes. “Which means it’s gotta be from Stanferd — he’s the only damn person still usin’ one.”

“Stanford,” you repeat, glancing up. “Pines?”

“Are there any others?”

“No,” you say faintly, looking back down at the page. Another mystery fax from Stanford Pines that will drudge up more questions than it probably ever will answers. “There aren’t.”

Chapter Text

Much like the first fax, you spend longer than anticipated on whatever gibberish Stanford Pines has given you.

You dive into it immediately, setting up shop at the desk in your room and basking in the midday sun as you work. At first, you think about going to Fiddleford as some kind of interpreter — the two of them seem rather close — but you nix the idea as quickly as it comes around. This riddle feels pointedly personal, and the last thing you want is to get your cousin mixed up with… whatever this is. Better to handle it yourself.

However, before you can really get into The Zone and buckle down, you are rudely interrupted: your phone goes off.

It is downright absurd how much fear grips you when you see your boss’s name on the caller ID.

“Heyyyyyy, Geiszler,” you greet, trying to sound casual, leaning back in your chair. You groan quietly in satisfaction as your spine thanks you for inverting its curve.

“What the hell? ”

You wince, and in a split second decision, take the blue pill. “What the hell, what?”

“You’re not supposed to be on your work email, genius!”

“I’m — I’m not!” you lie.

“Really? ‘Cause if not, we’ve got a much bigger problem on our hands, ‘cause it loos like someone hacked your email just to send me a mundane question about our VPN, of all things.” Oh, he has the disapproving parent tone down to a science. Between him and Fiddleford, you haven’t felt this thoroughly reprimanded in decades.

“Er…” You then go on to say, “Uh…”

“You’ve left me — okay, first of all, you have my cell number, so emailing was phenomenally stupid, and two, I have no fucking clue what our VPN does. It scrubs all kinds of metadata. That’s IT’s dominion. Maybe it also does names.”

“Okay, see,” you rush to say, “that’s good to know. Learn something new every day, right?”

“But, you’ve left me no choice, kid: I’m cutting you off.”

“What!” you cry. “You can’t do that!” Even though he absolutely, totally, one hundred percent, can.

“Listen, we cut your mobile access to it when you left, and I should’ve cut your browser access too. No contact was part of the terms of you stepping away.” He sounds sterner than you have ever heard him — except for when he sat you down and told you, gentle in his harshness, to take a break. “I was doing you a personal favor, I know you use it to communicate with whoever-the-hell…”

Now reminded, you should go read that email from whoever-the-hell, since you have calmed down. Discretely, as if he can see you through the phone, you pull your laptop towards you — it’s pushed off to the edge of the desk to make room for the various sheets of paper you had redrawn and broken the symbols up onto — while the lecture continues in your ear.

“But you clearly can’t be trusted. With great power comes great responsibility, dude.”

“You don’t have to Uncle Ben me,” you gripe, balancing your phone between your shoulder and ear, pulling up your work email. “I know — aw, man…”

“You just tried to get in, didn’t you? ” He sounds exceedingly smug.

“No,” you say petulantly, frowning at the red ACCESS DENIED plastered across your screen.

“But, hey, I’m a generous soul, I’ll set up an auto-responder saying you’re out for the next few months. Since I know you didn’t do that.”

“Thanks," you say flatly, in response to the cheap dig. "I don’t understand why this is such a big deal,” you complain. “It’s just an email address, and I’m perfectly capable of…”

“You’re supposed to be taking a break, kid,” he reminds you in a much gentler tone, something cut between pity and sympathy. It makes your stomach churn. “Remember? ”

“As if I could forget,” you grumble, taking your phone in hand again and balancing an elbow on the desk. You sigh, closing your eyes. It is undeniable: you are moping.

“And it seems pretty hard to take a break if you’re trawling through your work emails every day.”

“I don’t know why it matters,” you complain, dejected. “Or why I’m even ‘taking a break.’ The board loves me, I should have been able to plead my…”

“They do love you,” Geiszler confirms, “and that’s why it’s a sabbatical, and not a dismissal. It was easy to get it knocked down to that.”

Well. There’s a fact you had not been aware of. You knew Geiszler went to bat for you, when the board had been deliberating the incident — it was an unspoken bond in your department that, no matter how much you disliked someone, you always went to bat for them. Because even if the clash of personalities made it frustrating sometimes, you were all dedicated to the same work at the end of the day, and the team worked well together, goddamnit. A well-oiled machine. You helped each other in small ways, where possible. Like lending an extra hand, or tidying up after a long day. Or tracking down a fax machine.

Still, you hadn’t been aware dismissal had ever been on the table.

Maybe you did need to take a break.

You wonder how the team is doing without you.

“…Okay,” you finally acquiesce. You hear him breathe a sigh of relief on the other end. “Okay, fine.”

“You are taking a break, aren’t you?”

“Trying to,” you mutter, sitting up straight again, eyeing the pages and pages of deconstructed lines and boxes. It’s unconventional, but so far has served to relax you after the whirlwind of a morning.

“Where’d you end up landing? I know you left San Fran."

“Gravity Falls,” you tell him. “Up in eastern Oregon. Small town, weird place. You’d like it.”

“Gravity Falls, huh? ” You can hear the smugness creeping back into his voice when he continues, “Isn’t that where your multiverse friend is from? ”

“We aren’t friends,” you reply instantly, feeling put out now that this is an actual fact and not half-humble speculation.

“You ever get an answer about the waveform continuity? ”

“No.” You can’t help but laugh a little, chuckling. “You locked me out, remember? I never got to — hey, how’d you know about that?”

“Um.”

Consider the tables well and thoroughly turned . “Did you snoop in my inbox again?”

You should probably be more offended at the notion of your boss reading your emails, but frankly, he is just as invested in this multiverse crap as you are. And he is one of the few in your department who actually took your dedication to the correspondence seriously, and didn’t write it all off as some elaborate hoax. He had even helped you bug the research department into tracking down all those quantum physics texts in the very beginning, when you read and read until your eyes crossed and even an open textbook became an enticing pillow.

It had been just like post-grad all over again, just with more pay.

“Don’t worry ‘bout it.” Confirmed. Guilty as fucking charged.

“I am so worrying,” you say, with emphasis. “I am worrying for real.”

“You know, you could always just, oh, I dunno, email him from your personal account? ”

A lump forms in your throat. Obviously, you could, and obviously it has crossed your mind more than a few times. But now that you have the shroud of anonymity, you can’t help but blanket yourself in it. The world’s most impossibly constructed invisibility cloak — frankly, you’ll take what you can get right now, if it means he still respects some caricature of you.

“Yeah,” you say thickly, then clear your throat. “I guess I could.”

“Anyways, you find anything fun up in Gravity Falls? ”

It is an entirely transparent kind of pivot, but you are still endeared to the guy. Hell, you’re even more endeared now that you know he stopped you from getting outright fired. Plus, it’s nice to talk to someone familiar, rather than blunder through social situations around town.

So, you decide to take the bait. “Yeah, actually, I found this snail…”

The two of you hang up after fifteen minutes more of idle chatter, where he makes you promise to only reach out if it is a real emergency (which includes finding out anything interesting about your weird snail species) and to, quote, take it easy… but take it . With a fresh wind, you get back to the problem of symbols with a newfound determination.

It’s refreshing to throw yourself into something so completely; the fact it is from your penpal-who-has-no-idea-he’s-your-penpal is glossed over in your mind the longer you go. Unlike most of your work, the end goal is tangible and within reach, and working on it makes your brain hurt, in all the good ways.

Or, maybe that’s just the concussion.

Plus, it has the benefit of serving as a wonderful distraction from the open suitcase next to your bed, where the clothes spill over the sides like a mismanaged pot. The longer you spend on this, the longer you can ignore the facts: reasonably, you should pack your things and hit the road. You are not about to hang around Gravity Falls with Stanford Pines haunting your peripheries — you aren’t that masochistic.

It takes you roughly seven more solid hours of redrawing them in all different ways, plus some savvy internet searching, before you find something even remotely close to what it looks like, and another hour after that to crack the coded words. The cipher is simple, which surprises you. You had assumed it would be more obscure.

Finally, after it is already dark out and the telltale rustling of branches is just beginning, you have your solved puzzle in front of you.

Each of the three symbols translates into a series of numbers. Ten numbers total, to be precise: two groups of three and one of four. And it does not take a genius to figure it out any further, especially with the decoded sentence under it.

Ignoring the time and how heavy your eyes feel, you punch the numbers into your phone, eyeing the sentence at the bottom.

IN CASE YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND ABOUT DARKENING DOORS.

He picks up on the fourth ring. “Go for Ford.”

“Why the hell do you know thirteenth century number notation off the top of your head?” you ask instantly.

There is a pause, and then he says, “Hello, Doctor.”

You huff. “Hi, Doctor Pines.”

“To what do I owe the… pleasure?” He sounds reluctant to be labeling it as such.

You scoff. “I just spent an ungodly number of hours solving your weird riddle.” You lean back in your chair and kick your feet onto the desk. “By far the weirdest way anyone has ever given me their number, by the way. Is this a successful tactic at bars?”

“I don’t go to bars,” he replies instantly, and you strain to try and hear any kind of amusement in his voice. Impossible to tell. “How many hours constitutes ‘ungodly?’”

You hesitate, casting a look to the darkness outside your window. “Seven or eight. Roughly. I didn’t time it.”

After a beat of indiscernible silence, he says, “Color me impressed.”

“So, it doesn’t work at bars?” You can’t help but tease.

“Again: I do not go to bars.” Now, he does sound annoyed.

Although you enjoy bush beating every now and again, now is hardly the time. There is a burning million dollar question to get to. “Why give me your number?”

“In case you changed your mind about searching for your… Herbert.”

“That was a genuine offer?” you have to ask, confused. “After I trashed your lab?”

“I thought you didn’t trash,” he says, and this time you do hear the amusement in his voice — it is faint, but traceable. “Or wreck.”

Well, he seems to be in a much better mood about it than he did this morning. You wonder just what has changed to facilitate this — or why he is bothering with you at all, frankly. “I didn’t,” you grumble, tilting your head to look up at the ceiling. “Is this your way of telling me all is forgiven?”

Because that’s the ideal situation now, right? That he admits you got off on the wrong foot, that your actions are forgivable because they were so clearly accidental, and then you can introduce yourself properly. And then you can both laugh it off and actually discuss that pesky waveform continuity in person, and…

“No,” he says swiftly, interrupting the daydream. “It isn’t.”

Your eyebrows furrow as you frown, still perplexed. “Then, what changed?”

Again, there is silence on the other end; you even bring your phone away from your ear to make sure the call hasn’t dropped. You put it back just in time to hear him say, stunted, “Well. Fiddleford may have given me a stern talking to about my… behavior, this morning.”

A smug satisfaction fills your chest upon hearing you weren’t the only one getting chastised.

“And he vouches for your character,” he continues. “Although I remain skeptical about you, I trust in his judgment.”

It’s — well, it isn’t really a nice sentiment, just an explanation. A very weak explanation, in your opinion. “That’s it?” you ask, trying not to sound so incredulous against your own case. “That can’t be it. That’s hardly a reason to fax me your number.” You bite your tongue against adding, and really, faxing? Who does that?

“Fine,” Stanford snaps, embarrassment palpable through his tone. “I may have found a mucus trail leading out of the effected area when I returned this morning.”

Your feet drop to the floor with a loud thud as you go ramrod straight. “Shut up. You’re yanking my chain.”

“I assure, I…”

“You are doing so much chain yanking, and for what?” Then, the thought occurs to you. “If you want me to come over and clean up, just ask. I already offered.”

“There are no chains being yanked,” he huffs. “After I quarantined the area, I distinctly saw a mucus trail.”

“That’s — did you follow it?” you ask eagerly.

“As if I have the time,” he sniffs. God, is this guy annoying or what? A sense of deja vu sweeps over you; you remember thinking the exact same thing when you had seen his name in your inbox the first few times. “Searching is your prerogative.”

Even though your brain is trying to tell you better, all factors are leading you to believe him. Past the fact you default trust his opinion on most matters after months of communique, he has no reason to lie. In fact, he has every reason to keep you out of his lab, but is instead extending… well, maybe not an olive branch per se, but some kind of branch. What kind of trees did they have out here. Firs? Extending a cordial and indifferent fir branch.

There is, of course, the possibility he is setting up some kind of elaborate prank to get back at you, but considering his general air of austerity, this seems in the single digit odds. Although, not entirely impossible… and you have been playing with impossible odds recently.

“Okay,” you concede, running a hand over your face. Now that you are emerging from your deep concentration zone, you are becoming aware of just how hungry you are — shit, did you miss dinner? Did you miss another dinner with Fiddleford?

So, you chalk up your easy acquiescence to being starved. “I’ll… I’ll go snail searching. When?”

“I’ll be out tomorrow morning,” he replies instantly. “But should be back by the afternoon. How does noon sound? ”

“Yeah,” you breathe, heart hammering. Get a hold of yourself, your brain tells your heart sternly. Cut that shit out. This isn’t some poetic second chance; you’ll get in, hopefully find Herbert (maybe even alive), and then probably be promptly kicked back out.

But, you’ll take anything to stay in Gravity Falls just a little while longer.

“Yeah, that sounds great,” you say in a much stronger voice. “I’ll darken your door then, Doctor Pines.”

“Please, don’t be late.”

Heeding those words, you arrive disastrously on time.

In fact, you are fifteen minutes early. And then, unsure if you should knock on the front door or go straight back to the shed, you shoot him a text.

> Meeting at front door, or shed?

And then proceed to not get an answer for another fifteen minutes.

You bide your time sitting in the driver’s seat of your truck, hunkering down inside it to avoid the chill outside. You idly scroll through (personal) emails, various feeds, news articles…

Now that you have had some time, the two images of Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds have finally congealed together into something more coherent, rather than dissonant. Maybe not the most pleasant chord to the ear, but at least something more bearable than the cognitive dissonance you were having before; for a bit there, it had been like trying to watch a 3D movie without the glasses, echoes across your mind. The ruffled look from yesterday makes sense now, knowing the greater context: Stanford must have been fresh off organizing boat repairs, only to return to an unexplained mess in his lab. As mortifying as it had been to get caught so quickly, let alone on a video medium, you understand why he had been so… self-righteous.

You remind yourself sternly to keep your cool this time around. No sniping. No snapping. No calling him an asshole, or any other creative insults. At least one version of this man has earned your respect and admiration; the other… well, the other is yet to be determined.

After you had hung up, you had tracked down Fiddleford to both apologize for missing another dinner, and to thank him profusely for vouching for your character… and to apologize profusely for the events of that morning. That man, at least, was an endless font of forgiveness, although not without getting in a few you should have told me’s in there.

And, now that you have the distance, it is probably for the best you are barred from your work email. Besides the obvious of trying to delineate the hauntings of your professional life from your personal taking a break one, you also know just how you can be. If this were a movie, you might be trying the ruse of a double life, being talked down to in one while being anonymously treated as an equal in another. If this were a specific kind of movie, you might even be rereading past emails, trying to hear them in the deep timbre of his voice. The very pleasant deep timbre. The very sexy deep timbre.

Now is hardly the time to be developing crushes; past the fact that the man clearly finds you some degree of insufferable, you are supposed to be taking a break and getting your life back on track. You should be focusing on finding safe shores and steady land before jumping any sharks — be they romantic or otherwise. Even if he knew exactly who you were, the idea still feels preposterous. Why would he ever look at you in that way?

Maybe, in the movie, you would go from begrudging respect to a kind of reluctant attraction, and then…

Groaning, you rest your head against the wheel — and accidentally trigger the horn, startling yourself.

But, this isn’t a movie. This is, somehow, the turn your life has taken. That’s, what, two abrupt left turns in your life in the past month? A third one would make a right… right?

You can fix this. It’s tomorrow and you can fix this.

A deep crimson car clamors up the road in front of you, turning into the front yard and ambling to a stop on the dirt. It’s parked far enough away that you can’t quite make out the license plate, but with the two bulking figures in the front, you figure it’s Stanford and… his brother, probably. Whose name you have never actually gotten.

More names foregone.

Again, what are the fucking odds?

You wave at them through the windshield. Both of them clearly see you, but neither wave back. Jerks.

The two of them exchange a few words as they climb out of the car, and even from here you can sense the tense shoulders and clenched jaws. The brother shoulders a few full bags from the back (groceries?) and then nods towards your truck with a jerk of his chin. He heads inside without acknowledging you further; Stanford watches him walk away with the air of a scowl, then approaches you.

Undoubtedly, he looks much more put together than he did yesterday: his curls seem to have been somewhat tamed, his threadbare coat is replaced by a neat turtleneck, and he’s even shaved. He has one-eightied from discombobulated mariner to academic professional in the span of twenty-four hours. 

It only serves to make him look better. Damn him.

You roll down the window, reluctantly letting in the chilly air. “Hey, Doctor Pines.”

“Doctor,” he greets in turn, blatantly and skeptically eyeing your vehicle.

“You like it?” you ask cheekily, petting the console lovingly. “Took me a while to track one down.”

“Frankly, it looks brachycephalic.”

You snort. A creative way to describe the humble Honda Acty. “How were your morning errands?”

“Productive,” he says succinctly. “If you’ll please follow me.”

He leads you around back, to the shed; so much for getting to see the inside of the house, or meeting his brother. The silence between you is filled with the faint wind through the pines, gravel crunching under your boots, and a ratcheting tension.

As he holds his palm to the biometric scanner, hunched around it like he is trying to hide it from you, you ask, “So, what’s with the high-tech security set up?”

His shoulders leave the vicinity of his ears with a resigned sigh. “Certain parties tend to be interested in what I do,” he says cryptically, and the padlock springs open. He opens the heavy door, passes over the threshold, then stops abruptly; you bump into his back with a startled noise. While you are still flustered, he rounds on you with a harsh look in his eyes as he towers over you. “Do you work for the federal government?”

“Er, no,” you tell him. “But we’ve been known to use a government grant or two.” When he ponders this for a few seconds too long, back to scrutinizing you, you add, “I’ll sign an NDA, if it makes you feel better.”

“I’d have to draft one.” He sounds flippant about the idea. But your answer must satisfy some arbitrary requirement in his mind, because he turns back around and heads inside; you take this as permission to follow. You keep your distance as he does the retinal scan, not bothering to hide this one from you. “Although, not a terrible idea.”

Again, you descend in total darkness. You expect him to ask further questions, about your place of employment, your specific work… but, much like over emails, he doesn’t inquire any further. Although, you are surprised he has taken your word for it. Maybe he looked you up on the internet?

Waywardly, you wonder what that search result might look like.

The lab is how you remember it, which is to say, one of the coolest fucking things you have ever set foot in — and that includes the jellyfish room in the Maui ocean center. Most of the mess has been cleaned up; the large device you knocked over is upright again, although the prongs are still bent as evidence of its time inverted. Stanford had not been lying about the crime scene thing, either: he’s taped up around where the jar still lays, shattered amongst now-dry sediment. With literal caution tape.

At the most, it simply looks more lived in. There are already two coffee mugs at the desk at the back of the room, placed almost perfectly on either side of the bulky monitor that looks like it was ripped straight from the nineties, wires and all. An empty plate accompanies them, and you catch a few errant pairs of discarded gloves scattered across several work tables, forgotten around the room.

“So, what kind of work do you do, anyway?” you ask, gently placing your backpack on the floor. Uncharacteristically optimistic, you’ve brought a sample jar, just in case you find Herbert alive.

“Personal research,” he explains, immediately stepping to the side and pulling a lab coat off a hook, shrugging it on over his navy turtleneck. It looks like there is something gold embroidered on the front, but the way the lapels fall end up covering it, and you would rather not be caught staring. Instead, you busy yourself by looking around again. Even though you know the scene of the crime was marginally larger than what the tape has cautioned off, it was still relatively small in comparison to the bulk. The place is huge. “Mostly personal,” he continues, “although I have been known to utilize a few government grants myself.”

“Finicky things, aren’t they?” Wanting to be polite, you reluctantly shed your thicker jacket, appropriate for the winter-spring cusp but not exactly indoor appropriate. Despite this, you regret taking it off almost immediately, as goosebumps break out over your exposed skin. You shiver; you had forgotten how arctic this place was. “What have you been working on recently?”

Stanford smooths down the front of the lab coat, then folds his hands behind his back. “I’ve actually been traveling. I had anticipated doing some spring cleaning of some cryogenically stored samples upon return, but that has been… unfortunately sidetracked.”

You wince, and rub a hand over your upper arm: one part embarrassment, one part trying to stave off the chill. It goes unspoken that this sidetrack is standing here awkwardly and trying not to visibly shiver. “Right.”

As if drawn magnetically away from the maladroit conversation, you immediately begin to wander to the nearest microscope; an impressively bulky thing with a glass slide already pressed under its lens. When you look into the magnifier, you puzzle at what you see for a moment… but then startle as Stanford clears his throat. Guiltily, you put some space between you and the equipment; he is giving you a look you can only describe as peeved .

“Sorry,” you apologize quickly. “Was just curious. I’ve, uh, never seen anything like that. Is that an animal-based sample?”

His chest puffs out a little, a proud gleam in his eye. “By technicality. It has siloxane-based monomers.”

You snort with a small roll of your eyes. “Sounds ripped from a novel. Why is it always silicone-based nucleotides?”

“Carbon-based forms are actually the rarity in… in theory.” He stumbles near the end there, and if he had not already (unknowingly) presented this theory to you in the past, you might step up much more readily to challenge it — you had, the first time. But, face-to-face, you’d rather not show your entire hand and recount your own arguments. “By my theory,” he adds, awkwardly.

“Some theory,” you say, with a small smile.

As he is wont, he lets the conversation drop entirely to study you. You chew on your bottom lip and let him stare, as you fiddle with your hands behind your back, avoiding eye contact. After a moment, he asks, “You believe me?”

“I didn’t say that,” you joke. “I’ve just heard it before.” Realizing what you have just said, you resist the urge to clamp your hand over your mouth. Instead, you pivot. “Anyways. Slime trail?”

He takes another second to just stare at you, before clearing his throat and shifting his gaze to just over your shoulder. “Right. Slime trail.”

That sure as hell is a slime trail.

“Why is it so… gooey?” you ask warily. The area around the slime trail has not been taped off, but you are still keeping your distance from the mysterious substance. Even from this far, you can still see the vaguely pink shine of it across the table. From your vantage point, you can’t tell if it continues onto the floor — maybe Herbert is hiding under the table? That feels like an obvious starting place, and you have no idea why Stanford couldn’t have taken the thirty seconds out of his day to invert and check. Surely his time can’t be that precious.

“That’s often a major component of mucus,” Stanford says, back to being completely unhelpful. He is standing at your side, also studying the slime trail.

You roll your eyes. “Thanks. I mean, there seems to be a lot.” Like Herbert had done the same track several times purposefully, rather than circling mindlessly. “Did you test any of it?”

Surprisingly, he shakes his head. Does he know something you don’t?

“Right, well, could I use a pair of gloves?” As an afterthought, you glance at him and add, “Please?”

It feels like a mundane, and even reasonable, request, but you still catch the imperceptible wrinkle of his nose as he steps away. While he finds some, you lean forward, bent at the waist, tilting your head back and forth to watch the shine of the mucus on the fine sheen of the metal table.

Stanford clears his throat, and when you turn around, is holding out an open box of latex gloves.

It’s the same six-fingered pair from before, but you are too busy working through this snail disappearing act to give the oddity too much thought. Like before, you struggle to get them on, and just accept letting the pinky do its own thing this time.

Cutting right to the chase, you step forward and crouch down, peaking on the underside of the table.

Surprisingly, there is no snail.

Stumped, you run two fingers over the underside, back and forth a few times. It is harder to tell without the reflection of the fluorescents and through a layer of latex, but your fingers come back slimier than before, tinged red. Interesting that the mucus has a color to it. You try to follow the trail, as it continues under the table, down a leg, then seems to peter out as it continues across the floor towards the nearest wall, one lined with a set of drawers.

Little dude must have booked it.

“Well?” Stanford speaks up, startling you. In your pondering, you had completely forgotten he was there.

“No snail,” you tell him with a click of your tongue. “But could you get me something to take a sample of this stuff?” And, as an afterthought, “Please?”

A minute later, you are scraping your fingers on the rim of a petri dish that he is holding for you, as you try to get as much slime off as possible. “I can’t believe you didn’t test this stuff,” you say, twisting your fingers around to get the sides. “That would’ve been the first thing I’d done.”

“Even with a possibly deadly, venomous creature on the loose?” he inquires lightly.

“You are so convinced Herbert is going to ambush you,” you tut. Only when you glance up and almost bump into his nose do you realize just how close you are standing, and you shuffle backwards. Satisfied with the size of the sample, you say, “He’s a snail.”

“I’m more afraid I’ll accidentally sit on him,” Stanford admits, capping the petri dish.

You smile; it’s an amusing image. “That unobservant, huh?”

You mean it as a friendly jape; he scowls slightly and puts his back to you to set the petri dish down on a nearby table… next to the large microscope, with the silicone-based nucleotides.

You wonder what species he got that sample from.

“What do you think you’d find, if you studied the mucus?” he asks, turning back but keeping his distance as he folds his hands behind his back, entirely clinical.

“Man, I don’t know,” you say, somewhat incredulous at the question. “Snails aren’t my specialty.”

“And, what is?”

“Jellyfish,” you answer truthfully. “And sea urchins.”

The look he gives you in response is one of those curious ones again, like he is trying to catalogue every movement you make. Feeling awkward and disliking the scrutiny, you turn and crouch low on the ground again to get close to the trail. It reaches the wall of drawers, and you sit back on your heels to start opening the lower ones at random.

After a few drawers, Stanford asks, sounding bewildered, “What are you doing?” He has also materialized right above you, completely silent in his movements, spooking you.

“I don’t know,” you complain, moving onto another row. The drawers have all manners of things, some of which you have never seen before, but none of them are a snail shell. “Maybe he got himself locked in one of these.”

“How in the world would a snail get into a closed drawer?” he asks.

With a frustrated huff, you slam a final drawer and glare up at him. He is giving you an intent look right back, expectant and irked. Like he has caught you in some impossible question. “I thought you weren’t going to stare down your nose?” you say, unable to keep the snideness from your tone.

“I’m —” He huffs right back at you. “It is physically impossible for me not to.”

“Then get on the goddamn floor with me,” you snark, balancing up on your knees to get back to the third row of drawers. “Or go do whatever important work you have backlogged.”

Undoubtedly, you say it to prove a point (or, partially, to vent some frustration) but you far from expect him to actually do it. Instead, his dark jeans appear in your peripheries, and then Stanford is clamoring onto the floor a few feet from you. For reasons you hardly want to admit, a flush runs up your neck at the continued proximity.

What exactly is this guy’s deal? He has every right to be angry with you — he clearly was yesterday, up to and including him giving you his phone number in the most convoluted way possible. Like even that was meant to serve as a test to gauge your worthiness of his time. Now, though, he’s… well, friendly is far from the correct term. Cordial is probably more accurate, but in an odd way. It makes you feel like you are a spectator to your own interactions.

Like he knows something you don’t.

You try not to linger on that thought for too long.

“…Right,” you say awkwardly, trying not to stare, and you sit as well. He has perfect posture, legs criss-crossed, hands folded neatly in his lap. “The, um, the trail ends here,” you explain to him, while he looks at you expectantly. “As far as I can tell.”

Idly, he reaches out and opens a random drawer to his right, peering inside it. “And you think the snail is dead?” he asks.

“It almost has to be,” you say, tapping your chin with a finger. “Even if cone snails weren’t aquatic, the mucus trail goes dry. Literally. And the shell should be easy to spot, it’s the brightest red I’ve ever seen.”

“Hmm.” He opens another drawer, still not looking at you. “Ending here?”

“Ye…ah…” You frown, thinking. Peer around. Behind you is his desk, with the computer and the forgotten mugs, and — there, you see it, just barely. A slight shine to one of the desk legs, almost indiscernible against the deep color of the mahogany.

You scramble to your feet without word, and approach the desk.

Lo, in a half-empty, cold cup of what looks to be tea is your bright vermilion shell, with the exact same tuft sticking out of the top as you remember.

“Aha!” you exclaim.

“What?” Stanford asks, startled by your sudden exclamation.

“Found him!”

When you glance back, he is getting to his feet, with much less groaning than you would expect of a man his age. His long strides cover the distance in three whole steps, and you hear an inhale of breath — and nothing else. The hum of fluorescents fills the air, and you puzzle at his silence. Sure, Herbert looks cool, but surely not that cool to inspire such —

“I thought my tea tasted odd yesterday,” Stanford says.

— introspection. What? “What?”

He delicately picks up the mug and cradles it in both large palms. He also, perhaps wisely, does not repeat himself.

As if you are going to let the matter go. “You drank tea contaminated with cone snail mucus?”

“Not a cone snail,” he corrects. “A snowcone snail.”

Your mouth snaps shut. When he does not elaborate further, you glance up at him without moving your head; he is staring down into the mug with a look once could only describe as affectionate. You prompt, “I’m sorry?”

“A snowcone snail,” he repeats, and turns to face you. You try to back up to give him space, but find yourself caught between the solidness of his frame and the wall of drawers behind you. “See, the tuft at the top? It makes it look like a snowcone.”

You furrow your brows at Herbert, swallowing away a kind of giddiness that is rising in you. “That is hardly a real thing.” Although, your statement is ultimately half-hearted; it is hard to rebuke when the evidence is in front of you. He really does look like a snowcone, now that it’s been pointed out to you. The spire shape of the shell even gives the illusion of the cone.

You even catch the radula moving a bit. And, he’s alive, you think to yourself. What are the odds?

Hesitantly, you ask, “What… did it taste like?”

“Hmm.” Neither of you take your eyes off the oddity in his hands. “Strawberry?”

“Shut up,” you laugh.

Maybe if you had not come to Gravity Falls in search of something approximating a jellyfish, you would be much more resistant to the idea of snowcone snails. Or, maybe if you hadn’t been introduced to haunted (evil?) lawn animals. Or, if you hadn’t just looked at siloxane-based cells.

So, your brain folds to the idea of snowcone snails pretty quickly.

You resist the urge to take off a glove to pet the fuzzy looking mass at the top, while Stanford says curiously, “I wonder if the slime sample you took tastes like strawberry.”

A beat passes, and once you realize the implications, you look up and say, “Do not. Taste test the slime sample.”

He looks up as well, with a cheeky grin.

Struck and unable to help yourself, you grin back. “So, does the name pre-date snowcones?” you ask, leaning back against the wall. A drawer handle digs uncomfortably into your lower back, but it is better than practically bumping heads with the guy while staring into his mug of snail.

Stanford puffs his chest out a little, in a recognizable move you are starting to think is entirely involuntary. “I discovered them back in the late seventies, when I was… I was just starting my research in Gravity Falls,” he tells you. “Although, I haven’t seen one around in…”

“Decades,” you finish for him.

“…Right.” He nods slowly.

The air between you is actually cordial, maybe even comfortable, as you continue to smile at each other.

The moment passes quickly though, and you come to your senses just as you realize how cold you are, standing stock still in the lab. He must feel the shift, too, because his eyes dart away from your face.

“Let me, um.” You stammer a bit, remembering yourself. “Let me get my jar.”

Transferring Herbert into his transit jar only takes a few minutes, as you delicately fish him from the mug and plop him into cleaner waters; it had been impossible to tell while he was in the mug, but the tuft seems to have been stained by the soft brown residue of the tea. Stanford, reluctant in his movements, dumps the rest of the tea down the sink drain as well.

While he returns to his desk, you stand by the sink and struggle to get the latex gloves off — and then remember, there is one last mystery to solve. “So,” you start, wrinkling your nose at the sensation of peeling latex from your flesh. “Did you get some kind of mis-manufactured discount on these?”

Stanford turns back to you. “Excuse me?”

“On the gloves,” you elaborate, finally getting one off. “’Cause of the six fingers.”

Because you are battling with the second one, you fail to realize he has not answered you until the silence perceptibly thickens. When you finally look at him upon realization, second glove finally off, he has an entirely blank expression on his face, severe in its lack of emotion.

Startled by the shift, you ask, “What?”

“They’re a custom order,” he says, tone clipped.

“I… okay.” Feeling rooted to the spot, you ball up the gloves and, unsanitarily, shove them into your back pocket. “Why?”

In lieu of a verbal answer, Stanford holds up a hand and wiggles his fingers. The distance makes it difficult to see what he is trying to convey — he’s standing at least ten feet from you — so it takes you a long moment to realize, oh, he’s got six of those. Fingers.

Even while your first thought is you should really work on your casual observational skills, the truth is they hardly look much different from a quintuple hand. Functional polydactyly in humans is cool to see, too. You are able to extrapolate from incomplete data, though, and it feels like there is some kind of… personal hang up here, if the austerity of his demeanor has anything to say about it.

He purses his lips and stares intently at a cabinet behind you, entirely neutral — but, imperceptibly, you catch a kind of keenness in his eyes. An anticipation. Like he is avidly waiting for your response. It makes you realize, your face is probably entirely blank, all the while you stare impolitely.

So, you say the first thing that comes to your mind. You blurt, “You ever learn to play Clair de Lune? ”

The tension fizzles between you as you continue to stare at him, and he continues to avoid looking at you. Until his eyes dart back to you, and he says, absolutely bewildered, “What?”

That breaks it. With the shards of tension scattered around you, all that is left is awkwardness, and needing to expound on your non-sequitur. “Um.” You can save this, you can totally save this…

Unfortunately, you end up asking the next immediate thought on your mind. “Are you even a pianist?”

He scowls instantly at the comment and snaps both hands behind his back, chest puffing out in defensive maneuvers.

“Because it’s a total waste if you aren’t,” you rush to explain. “Debussy had massive hands, Clair de Lune would be a breeze for you. I’m jealous, it’s like, one of my life goals to learn.”

In for a penny, in for a pound with your botched interactions with this guy, you suppose. It’s not like you exactly mean to double down on the pianist comment, but walking it back somehow feels even worse. It’s just… for lack of a better term, very cool to think about. Before you stands a man who could compose some of the most complex pieces if he was ever inclined, with a twelve finger requirement, and you just know pianists would eat that shit up.

Stanford then says, plainly, “I prefer Bach.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” you joke, half-heartedly trying to resuscitate whatever cordiality you briefly had going, brought together by the humble snowcone snail. “Don’t tell me you’re in it for the mathematical proficiency.”

“Actually, I’m a classicist at heart,” he says, and you think maybe, maybe you catch the corners of his mouth twitch. But the austerity remains steadfast over it all, and he asks, almost demeaning, “I take it you’re an impressionist?”

“I follow Debussy’s lead and reject the term entirely,” you reply. Then ask, “Are you? A pianist?”

“Amateurly,” he answers, somehow sounding sour about this fact.

“Oh, I find it hard to believe you do anything at an amateur level,” you half-mutter, with a slight roll of your eyes.

… And the conversation stops there, petering out in a frankly pathetic way when neither of you try to continue it. You have to look away, feeling awkward, occupying yourself with the still taped off crime scene to your left. That’s right; you’re the whole reason for this mess in the first place. You doubt the man wants you sticking around any longer.

“Right,” you finally say, voice noticeably strained, which is absolutely appalling. You clear your throat. “I’ll just… take Herbert and get out of your hair?”

“Yes.” Stanford is quick in his response, catching on the heels of your sentence. “Yes, if you’re all done. I… should return to my work.”

So, your prediction for how this would go ended up a solid fifty-fifty on accuracy. Herbert is, blissfully, still alive, but you are still promptly being kicked out. You think about vying for more time in the lab, maybe to test the slime sample, but you beat those thoughts back with a broom. There is no reason to prolong the inevitable.

Maybe you should take a slime sample for the road. 

“Okay,” you say, carefully taking Herbert’s jar, heading for the exit. As you shoulder your bag, you look back and say, with the most professionalism you can muster, “Thank you, Doctor Pines.”

He nods curtly. “Thank you, Doctor.”

As you amble away in your truck, heart full of misplaced disappointment, you just barely stop yourself from glancing back at the cabin in your rear view mirror.

Chapter Text

You spend the next week so mopey that you don’t even realize what has happened until it’s flashing like a neon sign.

Almost literally.

“Why,” you ask Herbert through your teeth, staring down into the tank, “are you green? ”

You aren’t quite sure if the change had been gradual or all at once, but Herbert’s shell has gone from its vibrant vermilion to a frankly highlighter-style green. Or, maybe a more accurate descriptor is the color of a glow stick, cracked open to serve as ominous fluid inside a syringe in an eighties horror film. It’s niche, but it’s the only comparison that really comes to mind as you stare at the snail. The color is bright and still just as saturated as its predicator — except now… It’s green.

“Why are you green?! ” you whisper, crouching down to get eye-level with Herbert.

By all other accounts, nothing else has changed. The ‘snow’ portion of the head is still there, looking as fluffy as ever, although you have not deigned to try and touch it without gloves yet (you still have that discarded pair you had stuffed in the back pocket of your jeans; a gloomy reminder of your blunders every time you put them on). If you squint, you can still see the eye stalks that are there; and there is no squinting required to see that the tooth is just as sharp and menacing as ever. 

Except, now he’s perturbingly green. 

“What did I do?” you bemoan, not to anyone or anything in particular. Well, maybe to that omnipotent higher being that keeps driving your life around like it’s in last place on a final lap of Mario Kart. This turn of events has to be that fucker’s fault, right? 

“Please,” you plead, “just tell me what I’ve done wrong.”

Whether or not you actually believe in any metaphysical higher ups is entirely besides the point when the truth is staring you in the face. You’ve done something and now your snowcone snail has reacted in turn. 

The most confounding part of it all is that you have hardly been doing anything with this snail: each morning, you drop a worm in, watch delightedly as the hunt takes place, then leave Herbert to his own devices with a view of the robot playground in your window and to get some sunshine. You had even trekked out to the nearest pet store and obtained a cheap tank and tacky-looking gravel to keep him in, although you have yet to invest in a filter. There is a nag in the back of your mind that you should be returning Herbert to where you found him, and you don’t want to shell out too much money if that ends up being your course of action. An empty aquarium is a sad enough prospect.

When you haven’t been traipsing around town, you have been spending time trying to teach yourself robotics so you can justify staying to help Fiddleford around his laboratory… But you chose biology as your discipline for a reason and that reason is you’re hopeless at anything inorganic. The man insists you don’t need to pay your way but you feel bad taking up his hospitality without reason. Math, physics, engineering — you’ve gotten better at it these past few months, and though your conceptual understanding of quantum physics is at least at a fifth grade level now, it’s still all Greek to you (yet another class you weren’t very good at). 

Said conceptual understanding of quantum physics will never make it past a fifth grade level at this rate; you have zero drive to study it when you aren’t able to bounce your questions off the local genius. Maybe in some alternate scenario you would be more gung ho about proving your knowledge, to show that you aren’t some bumbling idiot and are, in fact, highly respected in your field — but you are so caught up in the depression since losing that connection, however meager, with Stanford that you don’t even have spite to fuel you to do any of this. All you are left with now is an acute awareness that the highlight of your past few months is over now. 

Obviously, you’ve run ragged the scenario of what to do once you return to work, whether you would just go back to emailing him like nothing had happened, but the thoughts always manage to spiral. You are just concocting hypotheticals: it hinges on a return that feels less like a when and more like an if.  And those thoughts Fibonacci themselves fast. 

And even if you did go back, this sabbatical is meant to be months long; what would you even say? Hey, sorry for disappearing for several months. Turns out when you upend years of research with a poorly-timed acquaintance with a peditoxin, you end up in a bit of professional hot water – but now I’m back! By the way, just for your records, my name is…

Which is to say nothing of the fear that grips you when you think about shooting him an email from your personal account instead. For fuck’s sake, you’ve hardly managed to get through the first month of this hiatus without tripping over yourself.

Quite literally.

Anyway, because you are so hopeless in Fiddleford’s own lab, more often than not sitting off to the side while he solders and installs radiation shielding, you are given quite a lot of time to think, which is a direct path to mope, but you are starting to learn just about everything is a direct path to mope right now. Going into town? Thinking about how you should pack your things (mope). Idling in any given room in the manor? Thinking about how you are taking advantage of Fiddleford’s hospitality (mope). Trudging out to a lake looking for that jellyfish? Thinking about snowcone snails and how badly you fucked it up with your penpal (mope).

Still, having only been here for two weeks, just the thought of leaving tugs at something in your heart an absurd amount. Spending time to track down the bait shop, the pet shop, returning to that diner… None of it serves as the right distraction and it has only endeared you to the town more — you can easily see why Stanford has used this place as a home base for decades. The people, the flora, the fauna, all of them have such a unique frequency to them that it’s impossible to stay away.

But you’ll have to. Because there’s no reason for you to be here. 

So, although it is unbecoming, there is a small part of you that is excited to see Herbert’s shell suddenly take a verdidic hue.

You push the tank out of the sunbeam it has been luxuriating in and selfishly stick your own frigid hands in the warm light thereafter while you think. Herbert’s form dances while the water settles, and you put your brain to work.

Okay, brain. Think.

Snails grow their shells, and that includes the aquatic ones. The logical conclusion is that this pigmentation change is a biological response to some stimuli. All signs point to the diet, but you have yet to return to the lake to look for anything that may be a unique food source. And Herbert is definitely carnivorous; he devours a worm a day. 

And it’s not like he’s turning his metaphorical nose up at the worm, either; in fact, he seems positively ravenous with how quickly that thing disappears. But you’re hesitant to give more than this, admittedly arbitrary, dietary allowance, because snails and worms are roughly the same size and it already feels like a diet that is excessive.

So, maybe overfeeding is on the table… Or maybe underfeeding?

Maybe he’s, like, bored… And displaying his displeasure at such a lackluster home that way? That’s why you’ve been giving him a view of the robot playground.

You step away from your desk and plop on the end of your bed; your morning has been thoroughly derailed by this. Bringing the conundrum up to Fiddleford isn’t a bad idea per se, but he’s versed in the inorganic and frankly, you worry about what his potential suggestions might be. Unless he can construct a literal deus ex machina — the thought of putting your snail in a tiny mech suit is admittedly entertaining, but it is probably overkill and would probably just turn the shell even more green with the subsequent distress.

Maybe it’s stress? That’s why you’ve been giving him a view of the robot playground.

Frustrated, you abruptly decide to give it a day to think over and do some savvy internet searching in the meantime. Someone else must have encountered this problem before, right?

…No one else has encountered this problem before.

Truthfully, you had forgotten snowcone snails are rarities, and they seem to only be localized to Gravity Falls atop that.

Night has long since fallen and you are still at the exact same square you were at this morning: number one. The lack of direction of niche forum-related help has only served to make you more anxious and, fuck, you might as well go green with how much stress this is now causing you.

And you can’t even confirm the green is stress-related.

Of course, you have come across a great deal of resources about shell color in normal snails, although none of them are cone snails because no sane person keeps one as a pet. Calcium, algae, sunlight, potassium; it has all crossed your mind for what has caused this change and you are reluctant to try any of the subsequent solutions. All of which leave you with a clear path forward. 

Unfortunately.

You are pulling up your recent calls list before you even realize what you are doing.

It rings, and rings, and rings… “Go for Ford.”

“Herbert’s green,” you say succinctly.

“…What?”

“Herbert’s shell turned green,” you elaborate, a franticness already creeping into your voice. “I didn’t even know cone snails could do that — can snowcone snails? Do you know if people keep snowcone snails as pets? The only resources I could find are for the common aquarium snail and truthfully, none of it is helpful. For all I know, snowcone snails are silicone based!”

“Well —”

“The worst part is, I’m not even sure what I’m doing wrong,” you steamroll as a week’s worth of wanting to talk to this guy spills out of you like toxic waste. “I mean, obviously I don’t know or else I would change it, but I’ve been doing the exact same thing for a week! Eat, sleep, put him in a window to give him a view of the — did you know Fiddleford has autonomous giant robots? Oh, you probably did. Anyway, in my mind, I’m thinking, if I was a snowcone snail, I’d enjoy the view of the robots playing. But maybe, I mean, maybe it’s upsetting him? Or maybe I’m feeding him the wrong stuff? What if it’s stress? Or maybe it is a calcium deficiency but I don’t know what kind of worms are particularly rich in calcium.”

“I think —”

“I know — I know , okay, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I thought you could help,” you lie mindlessly through your ranting. You have no real idea why you say it in the first place –  you had thought so because you are acutely aware he is the expert on odd life, in general, in Gravity Falls. But now the floodgates have opened and the man must see you as some kind of bumbling idiot, so your brain pivots to any kind of self-preservation. “I just — do you know anything about snowcone snail care? Am I doing something wrong? Or is it just a natural part of the life cycle, going green? This is the first time I’ve gotten up close and personal with something this rare and- and- I don’t want to lose it because of my incompetence, okay, the last thing I want to do is cause this thing harm. Maybe I should — you’re right, I should just release Herbert back to his natural — or, where I found him, fine, you win, I don’t know why I — sorry for wasting your time, Doctor Pines, I’ll lose your number now.”

You lower your phone and jam the end call button. Then you throw it onto the bed next to you and lose all will to sit upright, falling back onto the sheets with a groan. What a stupid thing to do — both trying to keep Herbert as a pet and calling up Stanford. After that frankly pathetic performance, the latter probably never wants to hear from you again, and the former also probably hates your guts for capturing him… Maybe that’s causing the stress that’s turning him green…

It takes a few seconds, but you belatedly realize your phone is vibrating next to your hip.

Throwing an arm over your eyes and not looking, you answer it glumly. “Hello?”

“When did I say to release it? ”

You frown when you recognize the deep timbre. “What?”

“Why do you think I want you to release… Herbert, back into the wild? ” he asks, tone halfway between curiosity and lecturing.

“I dunno,” you respond instead, bleakly. “I thought you wanted me to lose your number.

“I didn’t say that, either.”

With some effort, you sit upright and lay your eyes on the tank still in the middle of your desk. “It’s the logical conclusion,” you answer with a frown. Herbert still sits in the water, oblivious (maybe? hopefully ?) to this embarrassing interaction, and still neon green. Why are you green? “Because I’ve clearly done something that caused a decline in health, and he’d be better off in his natural environment than in my inept hands…”

“How do you know it… he… was healthy before? ”

You hesitate, eyebrows furrowing. “Why wouldn’t he have been?”

“Green can be a healthy color, as well.” Unexpectedly, Ford doesn’t sound smug about this statement. In fact, this entire conversation has been extremely cordial so far.

“Aw, c’mon, don’t be stupid,” you complain. “It’s a bad look on you. You’re ascribing value where there is none. And — and green is primarily a good color in plants, not animals.”

“That’s hardly true,” he scoffs. “Plenty of reptiles, birds, and even fish boast a wide variety of green in their palette.”

“Oh, my god,” you mutter to yourself. Louder, you say, “If you don’t know, just say so.”

“Fine, I don’t know why your snail is green now.”

… Really ? “Really?” Your confusion is more at the admission than it is the lack of knowledge. It’s a far cry from the man you had initially met, who could turn heel-digging into an Olympic sport and would make it onto the podium. 

“Like I said, it’s been decades since I last saw any.”

“Yeah, but…” You run a hand over your face. “But you have seen them before. I’m a novice, comparatively.”

“Well, admittedly I never tried to keep any as pets.” If you had the energy, you might even delude yourself into thinking he sounds a little amused. But like most times nowadays, you are busy on the well-trodden mope path right now. “Listen,” Stanford says. “Why don’t you bring your… Herbert back to my lab and we can brainstorm together. Two heads are better than one, hmm? ”

You gape. Then catch yourself gaping in the vanity mirror and snap your jaw shut. “What? Really?”

“Yes,” he huffs. “Really.”

“I thought I was banned from your lab?” I thought you hated my guts.

There is a long pause, and then he says: “You make an awful lot of assumptions.”

“They aren’t unfounded,” you defend, then gently thwap yourself over the head when you realize you are arguing against your own case here. The man is actually generously offering you a second (third?) chance and you should take your wins where you can get them. “I’ll… Okay, if you’re offering. Really, actually offering.”

“Really, actually offering,” he affirms. “Excellent. I’ll see you in… half an hour? ”

You check the time. “Doctor Pines, it’s half past ten. PM.”

“Well , I- ” he stammers, and your eyebrows raise at the sudden inability to articulate. “We’re clearly both awake and- and you called me so, if you really think the hour is that absurd, then I suppose we can- I mean, if you’re willing to wait and…”

“It’s fine,” you cut him off to save him the trouble of going through his excuses. You don’t want to jeopardize this chance further by letting him talk himself out of it. Tamping down the emotions bubbling up in you, you say, “Let me transfer Herbert to his transit jar and we’ll be on our way. See you in forty-five?”

“Yes,” Stanford says, and if you had the energy, you might even delude yourself into thinking he sounds a little flustered, but it is probably just the stress getting to you. “See you in forty-five.”

He must be desperate, you rationalize as you drive over, brights on the entire way. That’s the only thing that makes sense to you vis-à-vis extending another invite. You know his brother isn’t any kind of STEM scholar, and can sometimes be a real thorn in his side at the worst of times. So he’s probably just desperate to have someone to talk science babble with — although, with his impressive CV, you would just think he’d have people busting down his door to pick his brain.

Maybe that’s another reason for the secret lab. Certain parties tend to be interested in what I do.

This time, after you pull up in front of the house, you forego the front door entirely and go straight back to the shed. The night air is chillier than anticipated and you wrap your jacket around yourself even tighter.

Unsure exactly what to do once you reach the door, you just… knock.

A moment later, the padlock springs open.

“Wow, remote access,” you mutter to yourself, heaving one of the heavy doors open. “Fancy.”

You expect the second door to open itself as well, but it remains lifeless. You raise your fist to knock — but someone pulls it open first.

“Doctor,” Stanford greets.

“Hi, Doctor Pines,” you reply, lowering your fist awkwardly.

“Please,” he says, stepping aside to let you enter. “Follow me.”

This time, there are lights on in the stairwell down and you think, damn, why did no one extend this courtesy before? A handful of steps behind him, the first thing you notice is that he is in another turtleneck-lab coat combo. The second thing is that his gray hair looks to be in much greater disarray since you last saw him, upright and fluffed like he had been running his hand through it frequently.

Once in the lab, you go through what is becoming somewhat of a routine; you gently drop your bag to the ground and shed your jacket — are immediately wracked by how cold it is down here — and pull Herbert out.

“Oh,” Stanford says, when he sees the jar in your hands. “He really is green.”

You cast him a dry look.

He just shrugs and aimlessly leads you farther in. He stops at a cleared part of a work space, with its various other equipment and items pushed aside to create an area for you to set Herbert down. 

Did he clean? No, this was probably the only clear area before you got here. After a week, the already-cramped lab has only succumbed to more chaos, in spite of its size.

You set Herbert on the table and then very, very carefully, lean back against a close by table that runs parallel, crossing your arms. You only relax when you make sure it remains sturdy under your weight. 

Then, neither of you say anything. Stanford stares at Herbert and you unabashedly stare at Stanford, standing on the other side of the table. Watch as he tilts his head to the side slightly, his eyebrows furrowing. Analyzing. Calculating. You’d kill to be inside his brain right now.

“So,” you interrupt his reverie. “What now?”

“Well.” He finally draws his gaze up to look at you, and only then are you struck by how dark the circles under his eyes are. When was the last time this man slept? He already has a deep five o’clock shadow going. “I’ll admit. I didn’t realize just how green green was.”

“Yes,” you say, blandly.

“I see your cause for concern now.”

“Yes,” you repeat for lack of anything else to say. “I think I went through most of my thoughts over the phone.”

“Yes, well. Repeat them for me, would you? And maybe… slower this time?” He gives you a small smile.

It feels like your heart stops in your chest. What the hell is happening here? Did you accidentally step into a bizarro universe? Some branch of the probably-nonexistent multiverse where this guy actually likes you? 

“Right. Well, when I woke up this morning, Herbert was… green,” you begin to explain. “I’m at a complete loss. Obviously. I mean, snail shell color changes for all kinds of reasons: calcium deficiency, lack of sunlight, bad diet, aging…”

“And here I thought snails weren’t your expertise,” he says lightly, rearing up to his full height and folding his hands behind his back.

… Was that a compliment? You wave the very thought away. “Except this feels, like, a very stark change,” you continue. “Almost… almost a little pointed.” You draw in on yourself and admit softly, “Like he’s mad at me.”

You preemptively wince against the mockery you expect back after such a confession. Instead, Stanford gives you a peculiar look, the beginnings of a smile on his face. You can’t quite tell if it’s deprecating or not.

“I know,” you sigh, folding under the scrutiny and rubbing at your brow. “I know, it sounds ridiculous. I just, I dunno, do you see why I think I should be returning him to-”

“I don’t think it’s ridiculous,” he interrupts.

Your movements freeze, then your hand drops away from your face. While you try to give him a befuddled look, it is interrupted by a violent shiver. “You don’t?” you say.

“Well, we currently don’t know the intelligence level of a snowcone snail.” He shrugs. “I certainly never figured it out. If you think the change is pointed then I’m inclined to agree with you.”

“What?” You say it automatically, so completely bewildered by what you are hearing. “You’re inclined to agree with me,” you repeat, slowly. “Why?”

He huffs, and to your shock, even rolls his eyes a little. “Because you’re very clearly — I’m sorry, are you cold?”

You had violently shivered again in the middle of his sentence, and despite your best efforts to hide it, you failed utterly and miserably. “Maybe,” you mutter, rubbing your hands over your upper arms in hopes of utilizing some friction. “It’s fucking arctic down here, dude.”

“It’s — it’s the perfect temperature for keeping samples from denaturing too quickly,” Ford argues, sounding offended, and for a moment you finally feel like you are back on familiar ground. If he continued to compliment, you would have to pinch yourself out of the dream — Though this is an awfully nice dream, all things considered. 

Then, he slips off his lab coat one arm at a time and, without word, steps forward and holds it out to you expectantly.

You speak with poise and grace: “Whuh?”

“Here —” Ford waggles the coat on the end of his fingers. “The rest are in the laundry. And I run hot, anyway.”

If you had the energy, you could chalk up your ready acquiescence to the cold or to the late hour, or that you still consider some version of this man to be a good friend of yours and perhaps even a trustworthy source (and definitely not because his frazzled state is not helping your burgeoning crush). The laundry thing feels like a poor excuse on his end, as well, which you would usually examine with a more critical eye… But you don’t have it in you right now, so you just snatch the lab coat from his grasp and throw it over your shoulders.

It is undeniably comically oversized on you. The bottom dusts the linoleum and each of your arms are swallowed whole by the sleeves. You probably look ridiculous, but you banish the thought as unproductive to the current moment, and instead imitate the Jedi pose, stuffing your hands in the opposite sleeve.

You’ll be damned if it isn’t warm though.

“Thanks, Doctor Pines,” you say simply, but not ungratefully.  You don’t want to linger on the feel of it too much, wrapped in a pseudo-embrace: the rich, earthy smell, the weight of it on your shoulders… for the sake of trying to keep your crush buried alive.

“Just Ford is fine,” he replies.

Pinch me , you think dizzily. Or — don’t. Nice dream. Don’t ruin it, brain. “Okay.” You smile, feeling warm in a whole new way. “Just Ford.”

You consider it a win when he smiles at that as well. Happiness is a good look on him, you decide.

Your crush thrusts its hand up out of the dirt, Carrie-style.

“So,” Ford re-rails the hypotheses train. “Remind me again of your daily schedule. Er, Herbert’s daily schedule.”

“Feeding, hunting, watching the robots play in the sun,” you count off. “Seriously. That’s it.”

“If it was malnutrition, then we would’ve seen a change after his overnight stay here,” he offers. 

You nod slowly; the thought hadn’t crossed your mind. Herbert had been identical from one day to the next, even if he had seemed to run around the lab as though it were his personal racetrack. “More evidence in the ‘pissed at me’ column, then?”

“Not necessarily.” He rubs his chin with a hand; unable to help yourself (blame it on the hour, or the trust, or whatever ) you stare at his hand while he does so, practically enraptured by how large it is, how delicately it moves, how the veins on the back of it – dear lord what is wrong with you? Are you some kind of depraved Victorian woman? 

Trying to work on your casual observation skills just gets you in more mental trouble, as you take in how form fitting the turtleneck he’s wearing is, how nicely it shows off the bulk of his frame, the clean rows of the weave, the color of his eyes as he continues to stare at the jar of snail on the table between you with unbridled curiosity.

You shiver for reasons that are not temperature related.

“It just means some factor has changed between here and there,” he finally says, which you take to mean he’s just as stumped as you are.

“Or factors,” you add. “Could be multiple.”

“Let’s focus on one thing at a time, shall we?” 

So, you put your heads together and work. Whereas interactions before felt like a square peg in a round hole, now that you have a common goal, it feels much more like two puzzle pieces clicking neatly together. He entertains your ideas more than you have ever entertained them yourself and you spend a lot of time looking over his shoulder as he sits at his desk and searches through sources online — most of which he labels dubious but effective.

Truthfully, it’s almost a dream come true — assuming this is still not some kind of phantasmagoria. It is exactly what you had daydreamed when contemplating meeting up with the guy: undeniable synergy. Something in him has smoothed over between a week ago and now, and you are too afraid to ask what exactly has changed in his mind about you.

It comes to a close around 1am, when you can hardly get through a single sentence without yawning and are actively swaying on your feet.

“Sorry,” you say around the bajillionth yawn of the night, trying to hide it behind the textbook you are currently reading out of. “I think my brain is shutting itself down.”

Ford, who looks as fatigued as you currently feel, says: “Ah, of course.”

“I should,” you check the time,  “... shit. I should get back and catch some Z’s. Trust me, I’ll be useless to you otherwise.” Although you are no stranger to late nights in the lab, lately they seem to cut off at the 1am mark; it looks like your body is still running on the same internal clock, down to the minute, even without work deadlines looming.

Then, he confounds you by saying, “Are you sure?”

You blink at him. “What?”

“I — I mean,” he backpedals hard, “are you safe to drive?”

You close the textbook, setting it aside on the work table you are perched atop. “Huh? Yeah, of course I am.”

“Because, sleep deprivation is just as dangerous as drunk driving,” Ford explains. “If not more. Your reaction times slow considerably, atop your judgment and attention being impaired, and…”

You hold up a hand; he stops talking. “I get it.” You hop off the table. “But I’m lacking alternatives, unfortunately.”

He looks conflicted, and in an inane moment of exhaustion, you think he might just offer you a couch to stay on. After a moment, though, he says in a stilted voice: “I guess so.”

“I’ll be fine,” you reassure, walking across the lab and picking up your bag. “I’ll be careful. Although… would it be a huge imposition to leave Herbert here? He seems to like it better, anyway.”

“No imposition at all,” Ford says, the awkwardness of the moment melting away a little.

“Awesome. Thanks. I’ll, um, stop by in the morning with his daily meal, if that’s okay?”

“Yes,’ he replies, perceptibly hoarse. “That’s okay.”

You don’t know if the echo you are getting back is because of some kind of social blunder, or because of his own levels of exhaustion. So, you tell him emphatically, “You should get some sleep, too.”

Ford waves a dismissive hand. “I run on a thirty-five hour circadian rhythm.”

You blink, thrown by the statement. “That doesn’t reassure me at all, dude.”

“Both Herbert and myself will be fine,” he reassures.

“Right.” Unsure what else to say, you begin to shoulder your bag, but then — “Oh, shit. Sorry. Almost forgot.” You slip the lab coat from your shoulders, vulnerable to the elements again, and hold it out. Ford walks a few steps forward and takes it, holding it gently in both hands as you rush to get your original jacket on. “Thanks for that,” you tell him as you struggle with getting your arm through a sleeve. “Although, I still don’t think it’ll kill you to raise the temperature, like, even two degrees.”

“File a complaint,” he says flippantly, but not without a hint of a smile. “Or wear a long-sleeved shirt.” But then, much more sincerely, “You are sure you’re good to drive?”

Finally zipped up, bag re-shouldered, you look back at him. He looks so… Earnest. Shy and concerned all at once. Although, the exhaustion hangs over him like a dark cloud; you see it in the slouch of his shoulders, the wideness of his eyes.

“I’m sure,” you say, for lack of anything else. “But I’ll text you when I get back. You try to get some rest too, okay?” 

He waves another dismissive hand and turns away without another word; you take it as your cue to leave.

Hyperconscious, you drive back to Fiddleford’s slowly and with intent. No one else is even on the roads at this time, so you hit zero traffic and still make it back in record time. You are so focused on driving safely that you do not linger on any of the past few hours.

Knowing you will be out like a light the second your head hits the pillow, you stand next to your bed before plugging your phone in and text, while yawning, >Home safe. Goodnight!

A few minutes later, after you have coerced yourself into brushing your teeth and changing into actual sleepwear, you see a notification light up your phone. Ford’s text back is short, but it makes your heart leap into your throat anyway when you read it. Just a simple two words. Goodnight, the first word reads. The second is your name.

You wake up a few hours later to the sunlight streaming through your window. Still horizontal, you stretch and blearily blink at the canopy above you, trying to will yourself not to roll over and go back to sleep. Your memory of your dream from last night is hazy but has still left a pleasant feeling in your chest. Something about going to Stanford Pines with the Herbert Problem, being on a first name basis, and wearing his lab coat…

When you sit up, you immediately check if Herbert is still green — only to find the tank completely empty.

A tang hits the back of your tongue: bitter panic. Hastily, you check your phone for any evidence or explanation of Herbert’s whereabouts, and see the text notification from Ford.

Please call.<

Your heart leaps into your throat, as you dial up Ford’s number. Oh, my god, you tell yourself. Not a dream? 

Reality solidifies itself as you wait, and you put together the fragments as the line continues to ring: the invitation, the camaraderie, the lab coat. It had all been baffling real.

“Go for Ford. ”

“What’s happened?” you demand, fisting the sheets with your free hand. “Oh, my god, don’t tell me — Herbert’s dead, I killed him, the green was an indicator of bad things and now he’s-!”

“Good morning to you, too,” Ford interrupts pointedly.

You huff, annoyed, but still involuntarily smile. “Good morning, Ford.”

“Herbert is still alive ,” he tells you.

It’s ridiculous, but you still breathe a sigh of relief. “Good. Good.”

“He is, however, marginally less green. ”

“Marginally?” you repeat, confused. You run a hand through your hair. “What do you mean, marginally? How can you even tell?”

“Perhaps it’s best to show you in person, ” Ford says.

“Yeeaahh…” You roll your shoulders to get the general ache from them. Now that the initial adrenaline has worn off, the heaviness of getting less than the doctor-recommended eight hours is catching up with you. “Um. Let me get dressed and grab breakfast. I’ll be over in, what, an hour? Tops?”

“I’ll leave the shed unlocked ,” he tells you. “For whenever you arrive.”

To your surprise, Fiddleford isn’t in the kitchen when you make it down, so you pop into the hangar to tell him where you are headed, and that you’ll text if you think you will be late for dinner.

Ten feet above you in a robot’s open chest cavity, he stops making colorful sparks fly with a blowtorch to tell you matter-of-factly, “I knew you two’d get along.”

Face burning, you head to Ford’s.

The first-name-basis thing feels odd, but not in an uncomfortable way. Never had you considered Stanford would amount to Ford , in that he doesn’t seem like a nickname kind of guy, nor one to let his proper title drop. While twelve Ph.Ds remains excessive and certainly inflates the ego, it also does deserve some degree of respect. You had struggled enough just getting the one.

It is, undeniably, progress in the right direction, by your standards. You wonder if now is the time to fess up to your identity, or if you should wait and see how it continues to unfold.

You kick the can down the road. Metaphorically speaking.

As he had said, the shed is unlocked when you get there; still unsure, you slide the large, heavy doors closed behind you… and then puzzle at the second door being open, as well. It feels like a complete lapse in security protocol and you wonder just how much sleep deprivation has impaired Ford’s judgment.

Maybe that’s also the explanation for his abrupt friendliness.

“Knock knock,” you call, as you enter the lab.

Currently with his back to you and halfway across the room, Ford peers over his shoulder. He’s in the same lab coat as before… and the same outfit. Troubling signs. “Hello, again,” he greets, voice a little thin.

As routine, you shed your bag, then your jacket; anticipatory, you actually wore long sleeves this time. It actually serves to stave off the chill of the lab. “How is he?” you ask instantly, making a beeline for the table Ford is standing at.

When you look into the tank Ford has transferred him into, Herbert looks… Green. Still green. Whether or not the hue has changed is, frankly, debatable. Above the tank is a large, black box on the end of a series of bent arms, to angle it over the water. You puzzle at it; it doesn’t seem hooked up to anything. Maybe he is just utilizing vertical space in his lab now?

“Still alive, as far as I can tell,” Ford responds.

“Marginally less green?” You repeat the words from over the phone, crouching down to eye level with Herbert.

“I set up a camera,” he explains, and in your peripherals you catch him motion to the contraption above the tank. “It takes pictures at roughly fifteen minute intervals, and from there, breaks the color of the shell down to a hex code.”

Huh. You stand, turning to face him. “A hex code?”

“A six-digit code, broken into the red, green and blue values. The hexadecimal system is based in the number sixteen, which you use to divide from a value taken anywhere between zero and two hundred and fifty five; double digit numbers convert into specific letters, that…”

“I get it,” you interject quickly, before he gets too carried away.

“Right. Well, the code auto-populates into a spreadsheet, marked with its time stamp,” he continues, head tilted down to look into the tank, avoiding your curious gaze. “I’ve seen an increase in red hexadecimal notation, from zero-zero to seventy-one…” Finally, he glances at you, and then nervously asks, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Did you get any sleep?” you ask. “Like. At all?”

Ford grumbles something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like, “ Sound just like…” To you, he says, “Does it matter?”

You shrug. It does and it doesn’t. It should and it shouldn’t. It’s a personal nitpick; you’ve been the recent victim of not getting enough sleep, and you know just the kinds of catastrophe it can yield. “You just look like you’re about to keel over any second.”

He scoffs, crossing his arms. “I closed my eyes for an extended period of time.”

Your eyebrows raise. “Did you hit a REM cycle?”

“This is… hardly relevant,” he says stiffly.

“Okay, fine,” you acquiesce, holding up your hands in a surrender gesture. “The red values are increasing, you said?” You use a hand to lean on the table casually. “Then it looks like this is just a waiting game.”

“I don’t disagree,” Ford says, sounding skeptical at your change in conversational topics.

“So, can you wire up your fancy program to send me the results as they come in?” you continue. “And I’ll check the data at the end of the day.”

He nods, less skeptical. “Certainly doable.”

“In the interim… maybe catch a few Z’s?” you suggest as gently as you can.

Ford frowns at you, palpably disappointed at the return of the subject.

“What else are you going to do with your time?” you press. “Seriously. A day off won’t kill you. Herbert’s certainly not going anywhere and it’s not even a full twenty-four hours. Seriously, Ford, work with me here.”

He makes a face like he’s trying to hide having eaten a rather sour candy. After a beat, he concedes. “All right.” He sounds tangibly displeased at this turn.

You hold out your hand. “We’ve got a deal?”

A kind of critical sharpness returns to his expression when you say that, as he stares down at your hand. It also seems like he has stopped breathing entirely, his eyes darting back and forth, not focusing on anything in particular. Like before, he lets it hang in the air for an uncomfortable amount of time.

You are about to pull it away when his hand shoots out and shakes it, much less brusque than before. It leaves you the time for your senses to report back to your brain that his hand is very warm and it engulfs yours entirely. 

“So,” Ford asks conversationally, as your hands part. “What’s your email address?”

Despite the deal you strike, you putter around in the lab for longer than necessary after spelling out your personal email with your heart trying to flee from your ribcage. Since you are locked out, there is no reason to give over your work email, so you… simply don’t bring it up. If Ford notices anything amiss about your behavior, he does not mention it. Instead, he takes his damn sweet time rigging the program to automatically email you the updated spreadsheet and pictures as they roll in. 

The two of you chat idly as he does it: he tells you about the paper boats sealed with paraffin he used to make as a child, and you tell him about the time you tried to steal the hands off a clocktower in college on a dare. How either of the topics arise is beyond you, but while the conversation definitely hits its bumps, it still manages to flow and smooth over any blocks.

You are, admittedly, still thinking about this that night, as you chew your bottom lip and scrub through the day’s photos.

Even with the conversation going so well, you hadn’t lingered much longer, aware that you had nigh cornered him into actually trying to hit a REM cycle… and because being in the lab still, inherently, makes you a little jumpy. So, you had just dropped the worm into Herbert’s tank and hit the road. Still, Ford seems like he is trying to be… post cordial. Maybe even friendly. 

Amicable, maybe.

If this snail problem continues and requires your attention back at his lab, you consider keeping some covert data to find the correlation between his mood and number of hours awake. Although, you doubt you are sneaky enough — physically and conversationally — to get any information about his sleeping patterns out of him. Maybe you should enlist his mysterious brother.

Seeing the email address <[email protected]> in your personal inbox spears your emotions in ways you had thought you’d moved past. Even though the emails are autogenerated, it makes you consider harassing your boss to ask what Ford’s last real email to you had said. You even come up with a byzantine series of excuses as to why you need to know.

He mentioned his boat taking damage, I just want to make sure he’s okay.

I’m gonna email him from my personal account but don’t want to sound like an idiot, I need to know what he said about the waveform continuity.

I’ve ended up in the most convoluted situation possible and think you, Newton Geiszler, would get a real kick out of it.

In the end, you just accept personal defeat, and spend the hours after dinner clicking between the photos that had piled up over the course of the day.

Ford had not been lying, there is a marginal difference. From the camera’s latest image, Herbert has taken on more of a yellow tint than a green one, and after playing around with a color wheel, you understand how hex codes work: It’s a shift towards higher red values, which seems to indicate that the change happens gradually in response to… whatever.

So, had you been merely unobservant, or did the change really happen overnight?

Shivering a little, you cross your arms and lean back in your chair, thinking.

What else has changed between here and there? Sunlight exposure, probably some fluctuation in water quality — maybe Herbert prefers tea to still water? You had found him in Ford’s mug. But that makes no sense in relation to where you originally found him, in the lake out back, on that cold day.

Something in your thoughts trips on itself.

You frown at the screen, scrub through the photos again, and pay attention to the time stamps.

You remember being so confused about the water temperature because cone snails existed in the tropics, but it would make sense for snowcone snails to require cooler temperatures, as the name implies; you would hardly want Herbert to melt.

But you had been keeping him in the sun…

Ignoring the time, you ring up Ford.

… Who proceeds not to answer.

“Damn,” you curse under your breath, even as you smile to yourself. Is the man still asleep? Probably best you don’t disturb him then, no matter how many scientific breakthroughs you crush. By all accounts, Herbert is in a safe and stable environment, and maybe your hypotheses will hold water once you review the overnight values.

So, you decide to call it a night. Everything, you reason, can wait until morning.

Chapter Text

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Touching Base

Doctor,

At the risk of the digital faux-pas of sending two emails in a row, I am reaching out to quickly check in. A week is a much longer period than any usual pauses in our communication and, perhaps mistakenly, I do worry.

If I somehow offended by suggesting to meet up in person, please accept my humblest apologies on the matter. It was never my intent but my niece and nephew have since told me that meeting up with ‘internet strangers’ is not good online safety. I would hardly classify us as ‘strangers’ but I suppose the point still stands.

On that topic, I realize that we have spent months discussing my research in depth, while I’m sure you have your own long list of accomplishments. What was the last paper you published? Any articles recently printed? Do you have your dissertation on hand? Perhaps I should have asked this much earlier — another faux pas on my part, clearly.

Apologetically Yours,

Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds

P.S. I am still curious about the strange creature you’ve found — I stumbled upon my own recently. I fear I may have accidentally begun co-parenting the thing with another scientist I have been conferring with on its physiology.

“It’s his version of melting,” you explain the next day, while sitting in a wheelie chair next to Herbert’s tank.

The night had come and gone, and you had woken up that morning with an uncharacteristic (but quickly becoming regular) optimism for the day. While eating a hearty breakfast, you had texted Ford to just holler when would be a good time to return to the lab; his response of ‘Whenever’ meant you booked it there immediately, finishing your meal in your truck while en route.

Like your snail, Ford looks marginally better, in imperceptible ways that add up to exhibit improvement. There are fewer visible lines under his eyes, the shadows are a lighter shade (although far from completely gone), and he’s returned to usual perfect posture, moving about the room with purpose. He’s even shaved; the lack of five o’clock shadow showcasing his expressions better. It makes you want to feel around the smoothness of his jaw, to see if you can feel any stubble coming in.

That inappropriate thought aside, it all gives you a perverse sense of satisfaction, that you actually managed to get him to sleep. 

His sleeping habits really shouldn’t concern you so much, especially if you’re promulgating having just met a week ago, but all you seem to do nowadays is worry in some way or another. Lab safety protocol is just the latest outlet of a long line of anxious nitpicks: there is a whole assortment of dangerous pieces of equipment scattered around that could easily lead to disaster.

Safety third! had been a mostly-joking rule in your lab space, until it wasn’t, and now you can’t help but harp on the matter, even if it’s just internally. You justify it as trying to prevent him from making the same mistakes you had in an errant lapse of judgment.

As for the mollusk of the hour, he is definitely more yellow than green today. 

I know why you’re yellow, you think smugly.

“A temperature difference?” Ford repeats curiously. He is standing a few feet from you, leaning a hip against the table housing the tank. It is perhaps the most casual you have ever seen him, even if all the factors superficially look the same. The same turtleneck, the same lab coat, the same unruly mop of hair.

Although, it looks like the sideburns are coming back in.

“I guess it’s still just a hypothesis,” you admit. “But, think about it. I found him in the cold; he was still red when we found him here, a place that you keep practically at subzero temperatures; he turned green only after I started putting him in the sun, and now that he’s back here, it looks like he’s shifting back to a redder state.”

Ford thinks for a moment, absently rubbing his jaw in a familiar gesture. You try not to stare too eagerly while you wait for his response. Like most times when he becomes contemplative, it softens him around the edges; your heart tries to make a break for it via your esophagus and you actively swallow it back.

“You make a compelling argument,” he finally says, glancing down into the tank. “Regardless of your subzero exaggeration.”

Even with the caveat, a sense of undiluted pride overtakes you. The grin stretching your face actually hurts for how wide it is. 

“I’ve been wondering if it goes in the other direction,” you continue. “Like, if we put him in an even colder environment, would he turn, I dunno. Mauve?”

Both of you stare into the tank for a moment, considering it. Herbert smoothly crawls his way around the inside of the glass, unaware that you are fantasizing about putting him in an environment as close to zero kelvin as you can reasonably manage.

“… But that probably constitutes animal cruelty,” you finish with a shrug, grin falling into just a pleased smile.

“Well, the mucus contains some traces of living cells in it,” Ford tells you, turning his attention away from the tank and back on you. You try not to preen under it. “Which most likely accounts for its slight tint, as well. You could always test that.”

You gasp, with much more melodrama than necessary. “Shut up.” Nudging him with the toe of your boot, you ask, “You tested the slime sample?”

His face goes a noticeable shade of pink as he clears his throat and glances away from you beaming at him. “Well. I found the time.”

“Are any of the cells silicone-based?” you inquire eagerly.

He gives you a puzzled look. “What?”

“What?” You fire that what back too quickly, and shake your head to clear all fantasies of alien monomers from your mind. “Never mind. Forget that. Can I see?”

The cells from the initial batch are long since dead, but knowing Herbert can survive out of the water, Ford dons a pair of six-fingered gloves and carefully scoops him out of the tank. While letting him glide around a sterile space to collect another viable sample, you and Ford manage a thoroughly non-awkward chat while you wait. Nothing in the conversational topics skirt even close to dangerous, vis-à-vis anything that could give up the gambit of you avoiding your digital relationship. It’s a relief: the last thing you want to do is ruin this newfound camaraderie.

Once you get a large enough glob of slime, you smear it on a glass slide and set up at the fuck-off large microscope near the back entrance to the lab that you have been using. It is so large you have to stand to use it, bent at the waist and face glued to the rubber eye piece as you twist the knobs to focus the lens.

After a few minutes of getting lost in what you are looking at, you say in awe: “Dude. This is so cool.”

“The coolest thing you’ve ever seen?” Ford asks, mostly amused but not without an undercurrent of pride.

“No, but, it ranks in the top ten.” You peel yourself from the microscope with a grin, turning your head to look at him, standing patiently at your side with hands folded behind his back. “Seriously, do you just, like, deal with this kind of stuff all the time?”

“Gravity Falls is full of unique creatures,” he tells you, which is an answer therein itself. Ford steps away and begins crossing the lab. 

Stretching the ache from your back, you follow like a dutiful duckling to his desk. Grabbing a chair along the way, you put the desk between you as he sits on the other side. 

“Although,” Ford goes on, “I admittedly work more in the macro than I ever do in the micro.”

You shake your head. “Can’t relate. I’m doing things with pipettes you could only dream of.”

He chuckles under his breath. Waywardly, your mind catalogues the sound.

“This just raises so many questions.” You lean forward in your chair, balancing your elbows on your knees as you clasp your hands in front of you. 

Ford looks at you expectantly and openly, relaxed. 

“Are all snowcone snails the same color, or is there variance? Can they cycle through the full spectrum of color? What about colors the human eye can’t see? Why do they leave behind living cells in the mucus?” Once the floodgates open, there is no stopping your spillage of thought. “How do they reproduce? Are they hermaphrodites? What makes up the fuzzy head? Why doesn’t that change color, along with the rest of it? Is it not biologically wired in?”

“Does the color affect the flavor profile,” Ford inputs.

“The flavor profile!” you cry, launching yourself back in the chair and putting both hands to your forehead in sheer dramatics. When you do this, you actually hear him laugh. Aloud. A deep and rich sound. “I didn’t even remember the flavor profile.” Trying to regain composure, you right yourself in the chair. “Do you think they’re venomous, like their tropical cousins?”

“Maybe in larger quantities.” He shrugs, still smiling, which threatens to strangle your heart right out of your chest. There is no use fighting the crush now: you are in deep and you will just have to live with it. Worse things to live with, by far. “Smaller samples seem to be fine, though.”

“Unless you’re secretly an assassin who has built up immunity to poisons and toxins,” you laugh. 

Ford gives a strained chuckle in return — that’s fine, not every punchline can be a banger. 

“Oh, my god. We — we cannot do a flight of snowcone snail mucus.” Even as you say it, the idea is both absurd and enticing in equal measure. Briefly, you imagine several clear shot glasses’ worth of colorful slime, arranged on a neat wooden platter, being brought over by waitstaff. You giggle, which is mortifying, and slap your hand over your mouth to try and hide it. 

After a few errant squeaks, wherein Ford patiently waits with clear amusement, you take a deep breath and finally manage to calm down. “Sorry,” say, returning back to Earth. “I haven’t been this excited about something since some rando said box jellyfish might be iteroparous. Totally unproven, by the way.” With a sigh and a smile, you settle back into your chair in a normal manner.

Some of the jubilation drains from you as reality begins to set in again. It has been an exciting forty-eight hours but now you need to be realistic, one of your least favorite things to be. “So,” you say awkwardly. “Now what?”

He gives you a curious look. “Now what, what?”

“We have this whole heap of questions,” you explain. “Or, I have the heap. I assume you don’t have the time to research the heap. It would require getting more specimens, setting up multiple tanks, finding ways to subject the mucus to extreme temperature fluctuations, creating a safe way to identify and measure the taste…” You shrug. “I’m under the impression you’ve got better things to do with your time than go down this snail spiral.”

Ford adjusts his glasses, pushing them farther up his nose, magnifying his eyes more to show off the rich brown they are. “That’s all very true,” he says.

Even though you aren’t quite sure what you expected the outcome of this adventure to be, disappointment still bubbles up in you. Of course he doesn’t want to pursue this, it’s exceptionally niche and the man is, by your account, mostly a quantum physicist nowadays. Maybe you could collect some additional Herberts to keep as pets, then bring them back to your lab once you return to work… If you return…

“I don’t have the time,” he continues, “but, it sounds like you do…?”

“Yeah,” you admit, rubbing the back of your neck and not elaborating further. “But that doesn’t do anyone any good.”

“What if I shared the lab with you for a little while?”

Your jaw goes slack, and then you snap it shut, embarrassed by the obvious reaction. “Sorry,” you say quickly, “I think I just experienced an auditory hallucination?”

The only acknowledgement he gives that comment is a roll of his eyes. “Not the whole lab, obviously. But I think I can carve out a space.”

You skeptically glance over your shoulder, blatantly surveying the cramped expanse of this room alone, which is to say nothing about what might be behind the few doors of tinted glass you haven’t explored yet. “You really don’t have to,” you finally say, returning your attention to him. “I didn’t mean to passive aggressively corner you into that.”

“I rarely succumb to cornering,” he says pompously.

“Ford,” you huff, for once amused by his haught. “I’m grateful. Really. But, I think I’ve imposed on you enough for the past few days, not to mention…” You trail off with a sheepish gesture of your hand and hope he fills in the blanks. The lab may not show any evidence of your blunder now but you are still acutely aware of it every time you are here.

He waves a dismissive hand. “I’m offering,” he tells you.

“… Really?” You have to ask. It’s hardwired in you to give escape routes when it comes to working with you.

“Really really,” he confirms.

“You should know,” you say. “I’ve been told I’m not the… easiest lab partner to have.”

Ford smiles ruefully and you wonder what scenarios he is now imagining, born from that statement. Whatever they are, from everything he knows about this version of you, they are probably not far off from reality. “I think I can manage,” he says eventually.

Out of escape routes, you cover your mouth with your hand to hide the smile that is growing there. “Okay,” you say, muffled.

“Okay?” he prompts, leaning forward a little.

You drop your hand. “Okay,” you affirm, sitting up straighter. “Offer accepted.”

You’re grinning again; it must be some level of contagious, because Ford is smiling back as well. This is cloud fucking nine, baby. Everything is finally coming up you. Maybe Herbert’s abrupt color change was the final left turn you needed to make it a right. Mentally, you jeer back at that omnipotent being. Nyeh! Nyeh!

“And,” he continues, righting himself in his chair and focusing on the computer in front of him, “I think I have most of the equipment you’d need for a majority of your questions. Let me check my inventory.”

“Your inventory?” you repeat brightly, delighted by the concept.

“My grandnephew set it up last summer,” he explains distractedly, eyes darting across the screen as he works. “A pain in the ass to organize and an even bigger pain to stick to, but ultimately very helpful. This summer, he wants to break the forest down into quadrants — I had to talk him out of an entire census for the various wildlife.”

“A census!” The idea is endearing. “How would you even account for migratory patterns?”

“Exactly what I said.”

“As long as that’s his idea of fun,” you say, completely earnest. Zeal must also run in the Pines family; no wonder he and Fiddleford seem to get on so well. You’d have to ask where they met.

“Very meticulous,” Ford responds idly, as he clicks around. “His sister, on the other…” His sentence loses steam, then he frowns at the screen.

After a beat of silence where he fails to continue or elaborate, you ask nervously, “What? What’s wrong?”

Ford’s eyes flicker to you. He blinks. Blinks again. Then looks back to the screen. “Nothing,” he claims in a neutral tone. “I was just checking my email.”

The next morning, you hike back to the lake you found Herbert in and spend a few hours digging around in the icy water. Part of you expects Ford to make the trek out with you but it seems that is where your luck ends; when you offer, he gives a very clipped, “I’m fine, thank you.”

You arrive back at the lab in the late afternoon, frigid and pleased and leaving a track of muddy boot prints that Ford keeps glancing at disapprovingly.

“So, that one’s Otachi,” you tell him, pointing to the jar with a turquoise-shelled snail, answering your initial question about color variation right off the bat. “That’s Yamarashi,” who is a darker, more emerald green. “And, that’s Dan,” who is bubblegum pink.

Ford blinks, taking in the new tenants of this sliver of the left side of his laboratory, back near the wall of monitors. “What, exactly, is your naming convention?” he asks hesitantly, clearly trying to find the through line.

You shrug. “I’ll be swinging by the pet shop in a bit to get tanks,” you tell him instead. “How late are you gonna be up?”

He glances at you, eyebrow quirked. “You have to ask?”

“It’s courtesy,” you argue.

“It’s redundant,” he counters.

“You know what they say when you assume.”

Ford rolls his eyes, mouth twitching against a smile. “Should I draw up a time table for you? Set a schedule?”

You suck your teeth, even as you smile yourself. “You’re laughing now…” Reaching out, you fiddle with the jars until they sit in a straight line, with Herbert’s larger tank at the end of the row.

“I’ll let you know,” he assures you, watching you meddle with a soft expression. “When you aren’t welcome.”

Each snail gets its own tank — you add a note in the margin of your field notebook that says like beta fish? — set with filters and aquarium gravel. It’s banal compared to the tech you had expected to be using, but you spend that evening meticulously measuring out the gravel into equal amounts, checking water levels, temperatures, pH balances.

It is a dreadful and probably appalling measure of you as a person, but with Ford puttering about the other side of the lab, righting things on various tables, putting equipment back in their various drawers and shelves… It's your ideal evening. Borderline romantic.

So, of course, you have to go and ruin it.

The ruining doesn’t begin until the next day, when you arrive after breakfast and declare: “I’ve got the classification system.”

It is needlessly complex, involving assigning physical characteristics their own numbers and representing everything in a series of matrices that are borderline untranslatable. The idea came to you on the cusp of sleep and you had stayed up longer than necessary trying to jot it all down, meaning the sleep deprivation does not help your efforts at all.

Reluctant to bring your laptop in, with its giant PPDC sticker on the lid, you do everything freehand on a borrowed whiteboard.

The process drives Ford, who you determine stayed up the entire previous night, crazy.

“If I hear the term endomorphism ring one more time, I’m kicking you out,” he threatens.

You have been muttering to yourself for hours, trying to make everything look neat. None of it is particularly polite lab etiquette but you are dispositioned for a casual workspace in ways he is… clearly not. The chatter needles him in ways you had not expected.

“Pah.” You hardly take him seriously, as he has been claiming similar sentiments for the past half hour. Back still turned to him, marker in hand, you ask, “Hey, you’re a math guy, right? You think the Liebniz formula would work here?”

“That’s for determining permutations between finite-dimensional vector spaces,” he answers, unable not to take the bait; his statement sounds right vis-à-vis your baseline understanding of abstract algebra. “Did you ever think, maybe, matrices are not the best way to go about biophysical classifications?”

He finally sounds supercilious enough that you glance over your shoulder. Ford is standing halfway across the lab, arms crossed and visibly taunt, like a bowstring. You grimace when you realize what you have pushed him to, and turn.

“Obviously,” you say in a level defense, less bothered by the conceitedness than you have previously been. “A sane person would use some kind of topographic classification, or maybe some anatomic and physiological one. But matrices look neat, and I need the challenge.” You cap the marker and tilt your head to him. “You ever get that feeling? Needing some kind of intellectual stimulation?”

He must be very annoyed because he suggests, “Why don’t you try quantum physics?” with an undercurrent of snideness that takes you by surprise. “That seems to be thoroughly outside your biological wheelhouse.”

You shake your head, if only to hide the guilty expression that must come across your face at the mention of the subject being in proximity to you. The conversation turn may look like the perfect opportunity to bring up your familiarity with the topic, but you’re a biologist, and looks are always deceiving. “My understanding of D-branes are like, pre-K at best.” Which is a statement mostly true, seeing as that is what you had been discussing over email before getting locked out of your inbox.

A situation you still consider to be incredibly stupid.

“I think you would pick it up quickly,” he says, peremptorily.

Although it sounds like a compliment, it feels like anything but. You push some hair out of your face, raising an eyebrow at him. “Are you offering to teach?”

You know it is the wrong thing to say, but something in you is unable not to make that kind of dig, even if he doesn’t realize just how mordacious your intention is.

Ford huffs sharply out his nose and spins around with a sweep of his lab coat, stalking back to where he had been working before. You turn back to your whiteboard with a soft scoff, and neither of you speak to each other for the rest of the day.

Once you get your classifications out of the way, it is time to start getting down and dirty with your slime samples. Although you are initially worried about it, Ford is in a much more tolerable mood for this portion, and maybe even an ostentatious one as he shows off the odd equipment at your disposal: Temperature flux chambers, gel electrophoresis apparatuses, separatory funnels of odd shapes and sizes…

It’s overwhelming. You ask for instruction manuals. There are none.

Instead, Ford pulls something out from his inside coat pocket when you make this ask; you can only describe the object as a datapad. Tablet-esque but three times bulkier with a dizzyingly colorful interface. Patterns move incomprehensibly across the screen, as he clicks unbothered through several menus.

He tries to show you some diagrams but you are too busy marveling at the thing to pay attention.

“Where’d you get it?” you ask when he finally takes a breath. You just stop yourself from adding, custom order?

Ford pauses, finger hovering over the screen. “Excuse me?”

“Your datapad.” You go to tap it with your index finger, but he moves it out of range like a child not wanting to share their toy. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s cool.”

“Erm.” When you glance up at him from the corner of your eye, he is frowning down at it. “I… built it.”

“Really?” you marvel, sidling up closer to get a better look, your shoulder bumping his. The symbols are positively Greek to you, which is to say, they even look closer to the Greek alphabet than the Latin one.

Ford jerks away from you so you can no longer see the screen and are no longer touching.

“Sorry,” you apologize automatically, even if you are unsure exactly what you are apologizing for.

“It’s fine,” he says brusquely, and tucks the thing back in his lab coat. “Maybe a hands-on demonstration is better.”

Ford falls into his element while he teaches away, and while the hands-on demonstration is better for his mood, it is much worse for your concentration. You are forced into proximity to learn the smaller details, and that feeling of being a depraved Victorian woman returns full force when his hand brushes yours, or when he reaches around you to point at something, or when he stands close enough to observe over your shoulder.

It’s enough to forget about the datapad altogether.

Once you start getting hang of the equipment, your work spills out of your loosely-designated space quickly. Ford does not comment when you slide two tables together; he scoffs when you get to three; he masters the wayward disapproving glance when you get to four.

It’s not your intent to invade more of his space but it happens, in more ways than one.

Ford keeps a respectful distance whenever you are over now, leaving you to research in hypothetical peace, which is nice in theory but drives you crazier in practice. Even if you weren’t used to colleagues practically climbing over each other to get to various parts of your cramped lab, a kind of cliché magnetism develops between you two. In between bouts of your research, you always seem to wander away from your designated workspace to wherever he is and start asking questions:

What’s this do? Where’d you get this? Did you build it? Is it in compliance? Why does all of your tech look like it’s ripped straight from the eighties but has the functionality past anything I’ve ever seen in even the most high-tech spaces?

You don’t ask that last one. You couch it in ‘nice interactive holograms’ when he starts constructing some kind of quantum model, hands moving elegantly through colorful projected light with practiced purpose.

The magnetism isn’t one-sided, either. It actually kind of becomes the bane of your existence.

Ford starts point blank interrupting your work, and not even with interesting questions. No ‘what’s the water concentration of the mucus?’ or ‘walk me through your processes’ or ‘how’s the classification system holding up?’

No, he inquires about stupid stuff. Personal stuff.

“I never asked,” he says one day, startling you from where you are blankly watching a centrifuge whirl, daydreaming about unscrupulous things. The man moves as silent as an alley cat and it scares you every damn time. “What brought you to Gravity Falls?”

“Uhh.” You take a moment to collect yourself, sitting back in your chair. “I’m… taking a break.” The words are sour on your tongue, but you try to keep the tartness from your tone. “From work and stuff.”

“But, why Gravity Falls in particular? We’re hardly on any maps.”

There is a sharp glint in his eye that makes you nervous, like you have just tripped and are now caught in his snare. The past few days have not exactly ended well, meaning you usually manage to say something mid-way through to muck up whatever amicability there is at any given moment, so now hardly seems the time to fess up about anything. So, you omit some crucial truths and say, “Long lost cousin, remember? Someone tracked down Fiddleford; my grandma is crazy into genealogy. It’s actually kind of insane, someone else was working forwards while she was working backwards and they somehow met in the middle…”

Ford listens to your rambling story patiently, but not without looking a little sour himself.

You are aware just how deep a hole you are digging, shovel in hand, but no time ever feels like the right time. Whether or not there is a quote-unquote ‘right’ time is debatable, of course, and one might even argue that said quote-unquote ‘right’ time has passed you by: you should have slipped it in while you two were still smiling at each other.

Truthfully, that particular concern falls to the wayside as you become more acutely aware that Ford seems to be slipping through your fingers, water in poorly-cupped palms.

For a little bit of time, everything had clicked into place so neatly that you had actually thought the man liked you for you, for all the quirks people considered odious. Not all people, you have a solid group of friends from the years gone by, but they are mostly scattered to the winds and the next best thing is your coworkers, most of whom tolerate your ways with various eye-rolls because your enthusiasm typically leads to promising results, ergo more funding.

There have been a couple of what you would call incidents (separate from The Incident that led to your imposed sabbatical) that only taught you to be more reserved, over the years. An eager Ph.D student is entertaining; keeping that kind of fervor as a seasoned researcher is off-putting. Multiple times now have you conferred with an unfamiliar name in your far-reaching field, only to meet up at conferences and have them find your zeal… disagreeable to their methods.

It’s one of the reasons you send so many damn emails.

So, yeah, maybe the thought of your identities converging is a scary one. It just feels like there is so little room for error; one of the finest needles you’ve ever had to thread. And the more time Ford spends with you, the more he seems to realize you are not the easiest person to share space with — lab or otherwise.

So, even with the growing dread from each day, you keep the needle unthreaded. In fact, you punt the needle so far down the road it almost stops being a possibility.

You pull back. A week in, you shun the magnetism entirely and try, desperately, to keep to yourself. Every molecule of your being hates this, but your rationality rules with an iron fist and you keep your distance.

When Ford realizes you are doing this, his ire becomes more apparent.

The first time you realize it is when you ask to put some music on, now that there isn’t any chatter to fill the silence. Maybe even something like…

“No,” Ford says instantly.

“What?” You are, in truth, surprised by the answer. “Why not?”

“Distracting.” He does not look up from the several notebooks splayed out in front of him, where he takes turns scribbling in each one.

You are standing nearby, by a biohazard waste receptacle, in a pair of six-fingered latex gloves and a borrowed lab coat. You’ve learned each coat has a simplistic six-fingered hand embroidered in gold on the right breast. It’s endearing. It’s stupid that you find it endearing.

“I was going to suggest something classical,” you say, feeling a little hurt at his outright refusal. Usually, he is at least willing to play some kind of verbal ball with you, even if that rarely ends well now, either. “Like the Goldberg Variations.”

When you say this, you assume he will at least acquiesce to that, but he responds in a still-clipped tone: “I don’t want to listen to Bach.”

“Oh…kay.” Never one not to show off your foot-in-mouth syndrome, you ask, “Do you have something else you want to listen to?”

“Silence,” he tells you, “is preferable.”

So, you start bringing in headphones.

But it becomes unavoidable when you arrive one day and see him on his hands and knees by your workspace.

“Dude,” you say, putting down your bag. “What are you doing?”

“I’m delineating your portion of the lab from mine,” he explains, ever succinct. 

By now, you have realized something is up. Although, perhaps you had not realised quite how up it actually is for him. When he stands, he brushes his hands on the front of his lab coat; there is now a dotted line made up of painter’s tape marking off the area you have been working in from the rest of the lab.

He also looks really peeved. Or, maybe that’s just the general air of exhaustion that has been following him around of late. Like a put-out vampire.

“… Why?” you ask. 

“To remind you to keep all your work on your side.”

You bristle. “You couldn’t have just asked?”

“You wouldn’t have listened,” he claims, in a tone that cuts off all possible routes of further discussion.

Throughout all of this, his schedule keeps changing. 

Ford refuses to leave you alone in the lab, point blank. He has from the start. It’s a prudent rule considering your history in the space, but it morphs into something exceptionally frustrating as he starts “doing some field work,” (vague) and “running some errands,” (vaguer still) and “getting in my daily stoutness exercises” (... actually not vague, but certainly odd to imagine).

It means that in a concentrated effort to get as much work done as efficiently as possible and now never quite sure when you will be allowed back in, you start missing meals. Snacks in the lab are, “not encouraged,” but you weasel a few granola bars in. By proxy, you start missing dinners with Fiddleford; since the place is a faraday cage, you can’t exactly text to tell him you’re going to be home late and you are suddenly too fearful to leave the lab lest you be denied reentry.

It’s a poor excuse and you feel bad about it, but leaving your research to flounder feels worse.

Fiddleford seems to take it in stride, bless his heart, but you can see how forlorn he is any time you mention you’ll be back late, with one foot already out the door. But everything becomes so overwhelmingly unbearable — you almost actually ask for Ford to draft an actual schedule for both of you to follow — that you start actually leaving the lab at a reasonable time in the evenings, setting the most obnoxious alarm tones you can find in order to remind yourself to do so.

It feels kindergarten levels of petty but nothing else you do gets a real reaction out of Ford anymore. In fact, he seems determined to forget your presence entirely. 

It hurts.

Even past the whole burgeoning crush thing, for a moment there you had been on the path to friendship. You don’t even need to be good friends, you can work with casual. You would even settle for being respected peers. As long as he actually looks at you.

Instead, he seems to have decided you’re hardly worth the time and you start thinking that the only reason he has not made it explicit that you are no longer allowed in the lab is that he is too proud to rescind his offer to share the space. He has yet to say upfront that you are unwelcome and you refuse to budge until he does.

It also hurts regarding the whole fruitless crush thing, too. Combined, it hurts on levels you had not previously known existed.

Even though you are hardly exchanging anything past forced pleasantries and the occasional clinical question anymore, you are still acutely aware of the signs of his insomnia. The slump of his shoulders, the occasional vacant stare, the growing lethargicness to his actions. You’re sure that being able to recognize the signs after knowing him for such little time means things are dire concerning your level of investment, despite his attitude, but that doesn’t stop you from worrying any less.

Adding worry to the mix actually makes your feelings towards him more confusing, when alloyed.

Unintentionally, your snail notes become interjected with other perfunctory observations, almost entirely against your will.

Ziconotide found in prey blood samples post-injection, including a paralysis-type state. SP’s last confirmed REM cycle = twenty-eight hours ago; seems to have worked through the night.

Toxin also caused a kind of hypoglycaemic shock in subject; crankier today than yesterday and has yet to give more than one-to-three word answers to any of my queries.

By the end of two weeks’ worth of accumulation of your relationship having devolved into… this, you form a hypothesis: because he isn’t getting much sleep again, he has only gotten pricklier over time, exacerbating any kind of mild annoyance into pure intolerance. Maybe he has even figured out your incessant crush and is trying to let you down in the only way he knows how.

This is, in fact, the only hypothesis you will entertain, because any alternatives leave you as the sole cause of his ire, which you don’t want to think about.

You don’t want to think about how good it was for that brief spark of time. You don’t want to think about the warmth of triumph and camaraderie. You don’t want to think about how you haven’t heard his laugh since only ever hearing it the first time. You don’t want to think how much that haunts you.

You don’t want to think about how he shared his lab coat fresh off his shoulders, the earthy smell, the heat that radiated from it. You don’t want to think about how soft his hair looks, dramatically streaked with silver. You don’t want to think about how nice his voice sounds, even while reprimanding you, how it makes something inside you stir. You don’t want to think about how the man somehow has attractive hands. You don’t want to think about how you find even his sideburns attractive, now.

You don’t want to think about any of it.

So, you don’t.

Chapter Text

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: AUTOMATIC RESPONSE: “Touching Base”

Thanks for your message! Unfortch I’m on sabbatical for the next few months and am too busy doing cool science stuff to be able to respond to your last email (sad!). If you need to reach somebody in the marine biology department, go ahead and shoot an email to [email protected]. He’s so cool and will probably even respond.

Your understanding and cooperation is much appreciated!

Sincerely,

Newt Geiszler (on behalf of …)

You feel exactly when it happens. The exact moment you succumb to your relentless and selfish curiosity. It is sharp and jagged, like the splintering of a bone.

Nothing eventful proceeds it, there is no planning, no forethought. Nothing except the steady accumulation of dread from the past two weeks. The pressure bears down on you, heavier and heavier, until the weight is unbearable. You’re suffocating. You’re drowning. You’re flailing against the rush of a tide that leaves you tumbling under the waves.

Five days after he delineates the lab, you snap.

“Okay.” You push away from your workspace, littered with several open notebooks, petri dishes, errant pages of matrices, and random pieces of equipment. You take off your headphones and stop the music you had been listening to, fruitlessly trying to distract yourself from the palpable discomfort that hangs in the air. Things have only deteriorated more over the past few days and you now dread coming here. It’s intolerable to the worst degree and you won’t stand for it. “What gives?”

It takes more than a few seconds but Ford eventually realizes you are talking to him. Across the room, he looks up from being hunched over a slowly bubbling beaker, surrounded by other Erlenmeyer flasks of colored liquid. Even behind the large safety goggles he’s sporting against the fumes, you feel the heat of his stare. “I’m sorry?”

“I said, what gives?” you repeat.

The stare only continues. “What’s giving…?”

You huff, unsure if he is being purposefully abstruse or genuinely clueless. “What’s got you so pissy?”

The change is immediate. He scowls at your words. “I am not pissy.”

“Oh, really?” You step around the other side of your table to show just how much you mean business —  but, notably, still on your side of the lab. “Don’t play dumb. You’ve been ignoring me. Or- or giving me the silent treatment. I just wanna know what’s got you so…” As you struggle for another descriptor, you motion to him with an up-and-down sweep of your hand.

Ford stands upright but otherwise does not respond, head turning away from you to stare at a row of drawers to his right. Silence prevails over it all, harmonized with the slight hum of the fluorescents.

“Christ,” you mutter under your breath, rubbing at your brow, already feeling a headache coming on. “Will you just tell me what’s up?”

At this point, anything could be the hypothetical ‘up.’ Lack of sleep, regretting having ever offered to share the lab space with you, finding you annoying, finding you intolerable, figuring out the secret you have been desperately clutching tight to your chest.

Truthfully, at this point, you aren’t sure if the secret is your digital identity or your incessant besotted feelings. The two feel hopelessly entwined and both feel apocalyptic if known.

Something in your tone must snag Ford’s attention. He lifts his goggles and settles them on his forehead, stepping away from the beaker, leaving it over the open flame. “I don’t want to talk about this,” he claims in a worn-out tone.

It’s the most substantive sentence you’ve gotten out of him in two days. You cross your arms petulantly. “Well, I do.”

“Unfortunately for you, conversations typically involve two parties,” he snipes.

It is indicative of how dire the situation is that you are actually relieved to hear such a snide response from him, rather than pure and concentrated disinterest.

“So, what hour are you on?” you ask, without acknowledging the comment.

He begins to stalk to his desk in long strides, jaw set tightly, not speaking.

“Thirty-five? Thirty-seven?” you continue. “If you’re burning the candle at both ends, you’re gonna crash out eventually.”

He pauses mid-step. Turns to you with an expression you can’t quite parse from the distance, but you think might be something between pure shock and absolute incredulity. You still haven’t left your side of the lab, using it like a safety blanket. For a moment, you think he will just keep walking, going right back to pretending you don’t exist. It’s a bleak prospect: you can yap and yap till the cows come home but conversations do, in fact, require two people.

But then he asks, bewildered, “Are you tracking my sleep cycles?”

Embarrassed at being caught so quickly, you click your tongue and look away, suddenly finding the linoleum beneath your feet very interesting. It’s as much of an answer as you will give.

“That is absolutely,” he begins to seethe, “one-hundred percent, none of your business.”

“Sorry for worrying!” Despite trying to keep a level head about the situation, the words all but explode out of you, coated in a thick sarcasm. “Sorry for being worried about your wellbeing.”

“My being is perfectly well, thank you —”

“You’re gonna get yourself hurt,” you sigh exasperatedly, looking back to him with an expression you hope is far enough away from pleading, even if you think your tone gives you away. “God, will you just take a nap or something — you know, they proved that even closing your eyes is an effective form of…”

“I am not,” Ford says with a hard degree of finality, “ignoring you because of my sleep schedule.”

He says it cooly, in a low enough tone that it comes off as perfectly indifferent, but your ears ring as if he had shouted it. You two stare at each other. He looks like absolute shit: he’s more pallid than you’ve ever seen him, his eyes are far too wide, and there is a newfound slump to his shoulders, like the weight of the world is settling there. It amounts to terrible lab safety.

You experience a brief, heady spike of indignation. You’re the one suffering under this cone of silence and he has the audacity to look worn out? Maybe you should have stayed up for almost forty-eight hours, just to show him how it feels… assuming the concern goes both ways. Which, it probably does not. 

But the spiteful thoughts dissipate quickly, leaving guilt in their wake. It was entirely selfish of you to start this conversation while he is so visibly worn. None of the factors here indicate any kind of positive outcome, and you should walk it back until you are both more in your right minds. But…

“But, you are,” you say, trying not to sound so small. “Ignoring me.”

Ford sighs, defeated.

“What’d I do?” you ask, desperate to seem indifferent on the matter, even if it feels paramount. Knowing the cause means you can craft a solution — although, you are terrified that solution might just be you vacating the premises on a more permanent basis. Something heavy settles in your stomach, something dense. It drags everything else down with its gravitational pull.

He delicately takes the goggles off his face, setting them down on a nearby table. Then proceeds to run a gloved hand through his already messy hair —  an action so gross and entirely unsanitary. “You didn’t do anything,” he claims, sounding exhausted again.

The fact he would so blatantly lie offends you to the core. You scoff, crossing your arms. “That is such a lie.”

“It’s not…”

Emboldened, you start towards him. “You are a lying liar —”

“You did nothing ,” he suddenly snarls, and you freeze like a piece of cornered prey. “Absolutely nothing.”

Simultaneously, the beaker actively bubbles over.

“Shit,” Ford swears, snatching the goggles back off the table and hastily making for the scene.

Meanwhile, you are physically on the back foot, startled by his sudden spike in temper. Forcing yourself to wave away the pungent fear you had felt in that moment, you try and get your rationality about you again. Ford is a lot of things, but he is hardly someone who would cause you physical harm. Your logic clings to that thought.

“Is that the problem?” you ask insistently, but still a little shaky. “That I did nothing?”

“Contrarily, you are constantly doing everything,” he snaps, half his concentration on pouring various colored liquids into the beaker, trying to stem the gross and viscous overflow. “You’re exceptionally nosy, constantly blabbering, remarkably self-involved, consistently convoluted, not to mention not even trying to keep yourself contained to your side of the lab…”

Each new descriptor bites a little more than its predecessor. You throw your hands up. “Sorry my operation got bigger! As if I realized it would grow in scale.”

“And now look at what you’ve done.” The slow eruption has stopped, leftover escaped foam now lazily sliding down the outside of the glass.

“You’re blaming me for your lapse in attention?” you ask incredulously, pointing to yourself. “You left something over an open flame — that’s lab safety one-oh-one!”

He does not acknowledge this. In fact, he doesn’t even look at you when he then snipes, “I didn’t ask for you to turn my lab space into your juvenile science fair experiment.”

Ouch. That one stings. Deeply. Worse than the others. Equal to most jellyfish stings you have gotten. “‘Juvenile science fair experiment?’” you quote back, unable to say anything else as indignation rapidly descends on you. “‘Juvenile?’ I’m an esteemed scholar, asshole!”

Unaffected by the name calling, Ford bustles the beaker to the nearest sink, dumping its contents down the drain. “Clearly,” he says sardonically, his back to you. “Because you have no qualms making yourself quite at home.” Jerkily, he snatches a few paper towels from a roll on the counter, and heads back to where his mistake has pooled on the tabletop. “So while I am trying to keep even a modicum of professionalism here, your intentions are clearly quite the opposite.”

“What the hell?” Your head is spinning trying to keep up with his logical leaps.

“In fact, how am I supposed to know this wasn’t your intent all along, using something innocuous to worm your way into my laboratory, use my equipment…”

“’My intentions?’” You feel like an echo. “What intentions? Do you think I’m a particularly nefarious individual?”

Ford shakes his head and still refuses to even dignify you with a glare, staring down at the mess. “I don’t know what I think anymore.”

The silence stands, weighty, suffocating. You swallow thickly, unclear what you can say to not make this any worse. It is starting to look like you are going to lose no matter your actions or intentions. “Okay. Well.”

Although you should really take the high ground here and prove yourself a competent and emotionally mature adult, you are undeniably and embarrassingly childish when you say: “I’m sorry I’ve been taking up so much room. As if you set any kind of parameters — I told you to write up a schedule — but more fool me for thinking I was actually welcome here.”

He levels both hands on the table, still fisting the paper towels, and lets his head hang between his shoulders.

The depressing sight hardly moves you. “Sorry for causing all the problems in your life, apparently,” you continue. “Which is not my intention, for the record.” Then, you can’t help but rub some salt in the wound: “But maybe get on a regular human sleep schedule and then get back to me about your so-called ‘problems…’”

“This has nothing to do with my sleep schedule,” he complains again, loudly, almost as if he is trying to convince himself as well.

“No, no, and it’s my bad for starting this whole conversation while you’re clearly in a slump…”

His head snaps up. “I am not. In a slump.”

“You are so slumped, dude,” you say. “Seriously.”

“As I told you, my body works on a thirty-five hour circadian rhythm, this is entirely normal for-!”

“It’s not normal, Ford!” you insist. “None of this is normal!”

“Why do you care?” he finally bites out. With a breath that sounds physically taxing, Ford stands upright; even in his mad scientist garb, it still manages to intimidate you. “From the beginning, why do you care about this? We’ve hardly been acquainted a month.” He levels a steely and intense glare at you. It spears you in place as he says: “Right?”

Metaphorically speaking, you experience all the symptoms of anaphylactic shock — sans the hives. Your throat closes on itself, your tongue feels like it swells twice its size, dizziness overtakes you, and above it all is an impending sense of doom. You just stare at him, wide-eyed, not breathing.

Absolute and utter prey.

“Right?” he insists again, bracing both hands and leaning forward over the table.

Oh.

He knows.

Despite the internal windstorm you are experiencing, you try to work up an answer, any answer, but your mind has blue-screened completely. Not answering is somehow even worse than answering, it’s as good as an admission of guilt. So, even though you are obviously and visibly floundering, you open your mouth to at least choke something out…

Bzzzt !

An intercom goes off. “Hey, Sixer.” A gravelly voice crackles over the speaker. “Dinner’s ready.”

With a frustrated, absolutely primal exclamation, Ford stomps over to a nearby wall, dropping the paper towels on the way; you watch them flutter to the floor. This is the first time you have ever heard the intercom ever be used, let alone to announce a meal. Truthfully, you had forgotten that Doctor Stanford Pines, Ph.Ds also has to eat, like a normal human. Or as close to a normal human as he ever lets himself be.

“I’m not hungry, Stanley!” he complains roughly, finger jammed on the speaker button. You hadn’t even noticed an intercom box was over there.

The respite hardly lasts half a minute before he turns back to you, the fire in his eyes indicating just how ready he is to continue this argument, but —

Bzzzt! “Then tell your guest to come up.”

Both of you stand in stunned silence until you point at yourself and mouth, confused, me?

As though this enigmatic Stanley can see your gesture, he replies: “McGucket called and said something about missing dinner, so I whipped up something real quick.”

“… What?” Ford asks into the intercom, clearly confused, but you groan. Another promised dinner missed — and you had been on such a good streak, too. Fiddleford must have called the house; your cell phone would not have intercepted any of his attempts while you were down in the lab.

“Just, get your asses up here.”

Ford looks like this is the last thing he is about to do, but you see this for the escape hatch it is.

So, you ask: “How do we get upstairs?”

You had not realized they were twins.

Stan Pines is shaking your hand and introducing himself with a cheeky, “Charmed, I’m sure,” while you are, frankly, trying not to ogle at seeing Ford’s face transposed onto another being.

Stan drops your hand and turns to pick up the landline where it lays on the countertop behind him. Once the receiver is pressed to his ear, he says, “Yeah, I got ‘em right here. Safe and sound.”

Standing behind you in an arched entryway, Ford scoffs. “‘Safe and sound?’ What the hell do you think we’re doing down there?”

The fact he is still in stained latex gloves, a lab coat that should have been transferred to the laundry yesterday, and large safety goggles perched atop his forehead, does not help his case in the slightest.

The kitchen, while nowhere near as grandiose as Fiddleford’s, would make just about any novice chef jealous: a vaulted ceiling with a large beam running down the middle, boasting plenty of counter space below with shiny new appliances. The sink sits in front of a large bay window, and you are surprised to see a few small potted plants on the windowsill.

It’s almost cloyingly domestic, and is entirely incongruous from what you had imagined Ford’s above-ground life to be.

As Stan passes the phone to you, he flashes a truly mischievous smile, gold tooth glinting in the warm overhead light. “Oh, you know exactly what I think, Sixer.”

Ford huffs, somewhere between annoyed and resigned.

While they bicker, you turn your back to them and step away. The phone is corded to the wall, so you just end up huddled near its mounted receiver, shoulders hunched up like you are trying to hide the fact you are on the phone. “Hi, Fiddleford?”

“There ya’ are!” He doesn’t sound annoyed at all, which is a relief; then again, you aren’t sure you have ever seen him anything more than slightly put-out.

“I am so, so sorry,” you gush. “Time just ran away from me, I wasn’t even doing anything…”

“Well, where’d it run off to?” Fiddleford asks. “Ya’ better go catch it!”

He then proceeds to hang up.

While you frown down at the phone in your hand, eyebrows furrowed and thoroughly puzzled as the dial tone still rings, Stan says, “I hope you’re hungry, toots.”

It takes you a few seconds to realize you are the toots in question. “Huh?” You turn around.

Ford has his arms crossed over his chest, his face locked in a tight expression that gives very little away; Stan is much more relaxed, almost too much so, with his hands planted on his hips and a lopsided smile. It makes you wonder what conversation took place in that short period of time, behind your back.

Stan continues, “I made plenty, might even send you home with some leftovers…”

“Plenty of what?” you ask nervously, notching the phone back in its vertical cradle.

“Pines’ famous spaghetti and meatballs.” He speaks proudly. “Coined by our grandniece.”

Having not budged from the entryway, Ford rubs at his forehead with a sigh.

“… What makes it so famous?” You are unable to keep the trepidation from your voice.

Thankfully not insulted, Stan just winks back at you. This does nothing to reassure you that you won’t have to pick up some antacid on the way home.

However, the prospect of dinner even in mild proximity to Ford after that appallingly embarrassing argument is pretty far down on your current list of things to experience in life, right below getting caught in an EF-5 tornado and right above experiencing the heat death of the universe. It’s a special kind of dread, you’ve learned, that follows you around when it comes to Ford. It always feels like there is so much at stake, and even when you try and walk the line with the most concentration you can muster, you always, consistently, fall.

So, you are in the middle of saying, “I’d hate to impose…” when Ford says flatly, “I’m not hungry.”

“No impositions,” Stan reassures, in a way that does not reassure in the slightest — his smile is too sleazy and pleased with himself. The man is so clearly up to something that it is almost laughably transparent; still, it strikes a bit of fear and awe in your heart. “And.” He points to Ford. “Yes you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you —”

“I’m busy!” Ford claims, throwing his hands in the air exasperatedly. “Extremely busy! Practically up to my ears in it.”

Stan glances at you, as if to confirm.

You shrug.

“Enjoy your meal,” Ford says in a tone that leaves no room for brokering. Then, promptly storms out of the room.

Stan grumbles something under his breath that sounds like, “Jackass Einstein,”  then turns to you with a sort of what-can-you-do expression. “What d’ya want to drink?”

Once, when you were fifteen, you somehow ended up on the other end of one of those you-better-bring-my-kid-back-before-curfew shotgun kinds of conversation. It had been more baffling than intimidating at the time, because 1) you hardly cut a delinquent figure now, let alone back when you had braces; 2) you had only been going to homecoming with that person in a well-established platonic manner; and 3) you really thought those conversations were out of vogue, even if you grew up in the middle of nowhere.

It had kind of scared you off prom a few years later, but that’s entirely beside the point.

Sitting on the other end of a cramped off-white plastic table from Stanley Pines kind of feels like that shotgun conversation.

“So, Doc,” he asks conversationally, taking a swig of his beer. “Where ya’ from?”

You haven’t been cajoled into drinking since undergrad, when the motto of your friend group was do it, you won’t, but you have ended up with your own bottle of beer somewhat against your will. It had felt rude to say no once it was pushed into your hand. Thankfully, Stan seems like a man who understands seasonal drinks because it looks fairly dark. God forbid you drink a summer shandy in the month of March.

When you tell him the name of your hometown, he says what most everyone says, which is: “Never heard of it.”

“Yeah,” you reply. “I get that a lot.”

The food, to your utter relief, tastes almost like any normal spaghetti and meatballs you might make at home. There is a slight salty taste under it, and at least a quarter of the sauce is made up of (hopefully) edible glitter. Having missed lunch and instead having made do on two measly granola bars over the course of the day, you try not to hoover the meal up too quickly.

You hope Stan is the kind of person that considers spaghetti slurping a compliment to the chef.

He asks, “You still live there?”

You shake your head. “I’m based in San Francisco now.”

“Why’d’ya move?”

You actively feel your eye twitch as the twenty questions continue. It’s not like you’re a particularly closed book, but there is something in his expression that makes you inherently nervous. Like somehow, even if you are stating fact, you are still giving the wrong answers.

You can’t possibly imagine what his problem is with you.

“School,” you tell him, truthful but truncated. “Ended up in San Fran for work afterwards.”

“Whatcha do?” He busies himself with a long swig.

Are you going to eat? you think at him; his plate remains mostly untouched, whereas you have been shoveling food into your mouth at alarming speeds. It is, without question, entirely unbecoming, and you actively force yourself to take it slower. Even if that means you will have to bear this conversation for longer.

Distantly, you wonder why you care about making such a good first impression in the first place.

“I work for the PPDC,” you answer.

He grunts, and as if reading your thoughts, consumes a large mouthful. Then he speaks around it. “What’s that stand for?”

As if reacting in turn to his eating, you take a long drink. The beer, to your relief, is perfect for the cool weather outside, something to put real meat on your bones. “The Pan Pacific Development Cooperative.”

“Have I heard of it?”

“I don’t know,” you huff, now focusing hard on twirling some sparkly spaghetti around your fork. “How much do you keep up with exploratory and conservation efforts and their influence on medical technologies?”

“Zilch.”

Yeah, you think snidely. That’s what I thought. Horrified by how mean that thought was, you find yourself elaborating. “It’s a big organization, does lots of stuff. I’m in their marine biology division, working with venomous sea life on various projects. Nervous system evolution, neuroregeneration, biomedical engineering — that sort of stuff.”

Stan sweeps a hand over the top of his head in the universal gesture for ‘ that went over my head’.

“I play with a lot of jellyfish,” you truncate. “And sea urchins.”

“Sounds fancy,” he says.

You shrug.

“Can’t say we have a thriving jellyfish population here, though,” he continues. “So, what brought you all the way out to Gravity Falls?”

Something prickles at the back of your neck, now under the distinct feeling of being scrutinized. Heeding that, you say in as neutral a tone as possible: “I’m on sabbatical. I was put onto some unique marine life from, ah, a colleague. I’d planned to be checking the bodies of water in the surrounding area while I was here but I kinda got sidetracked.”

Stan nods. “Ford mentioned you usin’ the lab. Some kind of snail?”

So, Ford had talked about you with his brother? Or, talked about your impromptu research efforts? Part of you is desperately curious; the other part mildly horrified. “Yeah, it’s, uh, I’d actually been hoping to find something a little larger.” You keep it vague. “I’m actually planning on heading to Lake Nerys this weekend to spend the night and try to catch any nocturnal life.”

This had been a tentative plan at best, but now that you have said it, you lock in and commit. The lake is on the outskirts of the town line and you had picked it off your preliminary lake list at random. The expedition is more about breaking up the monotony of your days than anything else; you doubt you’ll be finding anything riveting, let alone your fabled probably-jellyfish. 

You had initially been planning to ask Ford if he wanted to join, to get some fresh air, to get out of the cramped lab and maybe do some jellyfish searching in a way to naturally lead to non-awkward ways to introduce yourself fully.

This, however, is all moot now.

In the past week, though, the idea of the trek has turned into an escape plan more than anything else. You cling to it like a buoy.

“So, what are you and Ford working on down there?” Stan asks. “Or is that top secret?”

He just keeps asking so. Many. Fucking. Questions.

For all the last statement seemed to be a joke, if Stan is trying to lull you into letting your guard down in this conversation, it is far from working. You feel more keyed up than usual. “Hardly,” you say, splitting a meatball in half. “We’re working on separate projects. Say, what’s your story anyway?”

You hardly expect such a transparent pivot to work, but Stan begins regaling you with a story of mystery, savvy entrepreneurship, and swashbuckling. Even though you know about the brothers’ time at sea, you still interject with all the appropriate questions, as if it is entirely new information to you.

One beer turns into two, and with the spotlight no longer on you, suddenly the conversation feels much less tense.

“Consider it a retirement project,” Stan concludes with a shrug of his large shoulders.

“Retirement?” you repeat. “From what?”

“Ran a tourist attraction for a while. The Mystery Shack. Surely you’ve heard of it?” He gives you a rather expectant, but somehow still slightly vulnerable, look.

So, it’s a relief that you don’t have to lie. “Yeah,” you confirm with a smile. “I saw the bumper stickers.”

“Ha!” Stan slaps his fist into an open palm. “I told Sixer those were a good idea.”

“That’s, uh, you keep calling him that,” you say. “Sixer? That’s what you call Ford? On account of the…” You waggle your fingers in the air.

“Yeah,” he grunts, letting his fork clatter onto his empty plate. “It’s a nickname. What’s it to ya’?”

Like before, the topic feels strangely and acutely serious. Determined not to misstep this time — Stan seems like he knows a good place to hide a body — you explain in a level tone, “It’s nothing to me. I mean, it’s interesting. To me. I wondered if he was a pianist, is all.”

Stan snorts. “Is he ever.” He picks up his bottle of beer by the neck and swirls the dregs of it around. “Been slavin’ away at night learning something new. I can hardly get any shut eye with all his plinking and plonking.”

“Oh?” You perk up. “A new piece? Which one?”

He shrugs. “Goes something like…” And then proceeds to do the world’s worst imitation of… something. Entirely off-key and without a hint of rhythm.

You come up blank, shrug yourself, and end up saying, “Sorry you’re losing sleep over it.”

“Eh, truthfully, I could sleep through the apocalypse if I wanted,” Stan admits. “I’m not actually the one losing sleep, over…” He trails off and works his jaw, looking away from you with a frown down to his plate.

It breaks your heart a bit, seeing the palpable concern, so poorly hidden. “Yeah.” You prod the topic along gently. “I’ve noticed he… doesn’t seem to be sleeping all that much.”

Stan grunts noncommittally, busying himself with a swig of what must be mostly backwash at this point.

You pick up your own mostly-empty bottle. “He seems… uh, very…”

“You can say it, toots,” Stan cuts in. “He’s pissier than usual.”

You snap your fingers, and lean back, getting comfortable in your chair. “Took the words right out of my mouth. Seriously.” You shake your head. “Is there, like, a particular root to the problem?”

“He’s got a lot of ‘em,” Stan answers. “Problems. Part of it is just bein’ a stubborn old man. Part of it is some other stupid sitch he’s gotten himself into.” Stan leans back as well, purposeful in his movements, and levels a lazy stare at you. “Been emailing this, I dunno, person. For months. Goes goo-goo eyes over their emails. Problem is, he ain’t know who they — he, she, whatever — are.” He shrugs, mouth in a flat line. “I told him not to get too invested, but Ford never half-asses anything. Apparently he suggested a meet up, and that asshole hasn’t responded since.”

Your immediate thought is, you are so killing Newton Geiszler the second you are within five hundred feet of him. It will be on sight. You hope, wherever he is right now, he just got a shiver down his spine. Because that fucker absolutely read whatever was in Ford’s last email to you, and elected not to mention the suggested face-to-face meeting, probably for his own dumb, stupid,  vacuous reasons.

But your next thought is, would you have even capitalized on that? Having actually unintentionally and unconventionally met Ford in person, would you have had the gall to say yes to a meet up after that initial disaster of an introduction? An overwhelming part of you says, no, of course not; besides the fact that you are an utter coward at the end of the day, you had made your decision to keep your trap shut, and you had stuck with it, damnit.

Which is obviously much of the reason why you are in such hot water now; you aren’t stupid and famously, neither is Ford. He is one of the greatest minds of the past century. Entirely imbecilic, you had purposefully pulled the wool over your eyes that he would, of course, figure it all out eventually.

You’ll be damned if Stan Pines isn’t actually a skillful schmoozer: he had managed to lull you into conversational complacency. All it took was two beers, some verbal redirecting, and a topic you actually had interest in: his brother. From the calculating look you are getting over the table now, you think he knows just how much he’s won, too — he’s watching for your reaction, hawkishly.

And finally, you realize this is all your fault. In one way or another.

“Sounds like a real piece of work,” you say forcefully, hopefully hiding your self-disgust behind finishing the rest of your beer in one go. “Whoever they are.”

Dinner finishes up soon thereafter — there is not much conversation to be had once plates are empty and drinks are dry. Like any good guest, you insist on doing the dishes in post, which Stan only half-heartedly tries to dissuade you out of by explaining the dishwasher has been broken since last year, and that he doesn’t, quote, “Want to be scammed by some repair man. Or woman. I’m gender inclusive.”

Rinsing plates and cleaning silverware in steaming water doesn’t take very long, but it does give you just enough time to ruminate that you find yourself back on the well-trodden path to mope.

As far as you can tell, the facts currently stand as these:

Ford knows.

You know he knows.

You don’t know if he knows that you know he knows.

His brother, somehow, also knows.

He is angry at you, because he knows.

You aren’t quite sure how far-reaching his knowing is, or if your attraction-related secret is safe from the general know in question.

You have really, spectacularly, prodigiously, felicitously fucked this thing entirely.

And finally, you are definitely causing some kind of minor degree burn to your hands with how hot this water is.

“Ow,” you mutter, snatching your hands back as they sting from the heat. “Fuck.”

It’s inconsiderate to their water bill but, once you have placed the dishes neatly on the drying rack, you let the water run and instead lean heavily against the counter, head hanging between your shoulders. Steam wafts up into your face and you breathe it in, deeply.

You’re not sure you can fix this. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

However, if all the above is true, you have nothing to lose. So you can do the next best thing and fess up before it gets any worse.

Of course, that’s assuming Ford wants to be in the same room with you at all.

Shutting off the water with a sharp jerk of the faucet handles, you wander out of the kitchen. You will have to find your way back into the lab, also because you left your bag down there, and hope the internal entrance does not require some kind of biometric scan, although it probably does, because nothing is ever easy for you —

While retracing your steps, you faintly hear the sound of a piano.

Magnetically, you wander towards it, chasing the music until you are standing outside a fairly normal looking door: a deep mahogany color with a perfect gold sphere of a handle. Unlabeled, obviously, because this is the Pines’s house and home, not some facility. Combined with the family photos lining the hall, of two brown-haired kids in worryingly strange environments, it serves as a stark reminder that these are real people, with real lives and real feelings. Not just some guy you have been playing scientist with over the past few weeks.

Your actions have consequences, the door seems to say to you. Dumbass.

The music continues steadily, winding in and out of tempo rubato, and you recognize it almost instantly. It must have been what Stan imitated over dinner.

Leaning against the doorframe, resting your head there, you sigh heavily and gently steep yourself in the sound of Clair de Lune. It is familiar and soothing; if you close your eyes, you can even see the sheet music in front of you. You stand there and listen fully and with your whole soul. Reliably, the tempo picks up at the start of the second part, shepherding towards the key change, and you can see it in your mind, the impossible stretch of the hands and the smooth sweep of the wrist —

There is an incorrect note, followed by two correct ones, and the music abruptly halts.

Your heart catches, yanked right from your chest. A live performance, then.

Stan had mentioned Ford was learning something new.

You wait for the music to start again, but the reverie is broken and now only the silence remains. Now is your chance, you realize. You may not get another.

Before you can second guess it, you rap your knuckles on the door, gingerly.

“Go away, Stanley,” Ford gripes from the other side. 

A potent unpleasantness washes over you, leaving the metallic taste of disappointment and shame on your tongue. Right. You don’t need a clearer sign than that.

You find Stan waiting around in the kitchen, hands behind his back, showcasing the barrel chest and wide shoulders. Now that you have been in his presence for long enough, you can see the subtle differences between the brothers. You wonder if Ford’s biceps are just as large and he just hides them beneath neat sweaters, rather than showcase them in tacky Hawaiian shirts.

Although, you do really like the tacky Hawaiian shirt.

“Sorry,” you tell him. “I was trying to find the bathroom.”

He nods, giving you a once over. “Well, sorry there’s no dessert. Maybe if Ford had mentioned we’d be having guests, I could’ve whipped something up.”

You shake your head. “I’ll bring the dessert, next time,” you say lightly.

“Next time,” he repeats, skeptical. “So, you’ll be around again?”

It is the apogee of the entire evening; there are a million wrong answers and the right ones elude you entirely as you stand there, like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands.

So, you shrug. “That’s up to your brother.” Not wanting to linger, you stick your hand out. “It was great meeting you, Stan,” you tell him genuinely. “Thanks again for dinner.”

Unlike his brother, there is no hesitation when he takes it, shaking it smoothly. With the lack of bruising grip you had experienced before, you think you just might have said the right thing.

“And — here.” He snags something from the counter behind him, and thrusts a large Tupperware at you. “In case McGucket is hungry.”

“Aww,” you practically coo, taking it; it’s still warm to the touch. “That’s sweet. Thanks.”

Stan nods, sharply, his ears going pink. “Take care, Doc.”

Chapter Text

Shit fucking sucks. It is crass and ineloquent to say so but is so wholly accurate, there is little else that describes the current mood.

Ford just barely resists the urge to slam his hands on the piano keys.

Instead, he takes a few deep breaths to steady himself. It is a weak attempt to try and smother the burning annoyance in him, crackling at random like fire on dry kindling. Oxygen has never hindered an open flame.

When he feels much more level-headed, an embarrassingly long amount of time later, he goes back two lines and starts again.

Usually, his extra fingers lend themselves to help with arpeggios, but it is starting to look more and more like this piece was composed solely to spite him. The first two pages had gone over so well, too — a false sense of security. He shouldn’t have trusted it. Nothing in his life ever happens with ease.

His fingers tangle with each other on the cross hand, a few measures later.

Debussy was a sadist, Ford decides abruptly.

He is not so obtuse to not understand his frustration isn’t centered around learning a new piece, no matter how vexing it is to be bested by something people much less sure-fingered than him have been tackling for over a century. A large part of this roiling irritation stems from events as they currently stand, atop your general existence in his life. He just happens to be taking it all out on his innocent piano. It is hardly the piano’s fault that things have gotten so gnarled over the past few weeks.

The leftover energy from that internecine encounter in the lab had to be redirected somewhere, and while he claimed to be exceptionally busy, this had been the most mundane method of blowing off steam he could conjure. If he could just get into the groove of it, his mind would give itself over, synapses focused solely on the movement of his hands, the stretch of his fingers, the sweep of his wrists. But every time he feels like he is getting close to that nirvanic state, he remembers the anguished and alarmed look on your face from an hour ago, and is right back to square one.

He had caused that, Ford reminds himself. He had made you look that way …

Someone raps gingerly on the door.

“Go away, Stanley,” he gripes, loud enough to be heard. It’s perfunctory, as his brother has never been one to heed his words. So, Ford braces for the door to open, already forming the diatribe in his mind…

… But, the air remains still. For once, his brother is heeding.

While Ford considers himself right on a great deal of many matters, within a great deal many things, he will concede that, maybe, calling your dedicated research a juvenile science fair experiment took it a bit too far. He would have reacted much of the same way if someone had called his personal diligence and drive childish. In fact, only calling him an asshole feels like a very tame response in comparison to all the ways he himself might have countered.

However, he thinks his general frustration is still wholly justified. Even if it had been expressed regrettably. 

One could describe Ford’s general state nowadays as tense, as in taunt, as in stretched to his very limit. It means when the thick cord of patience in him finally gives, it always snaps sharply, with a harsh sting and leaving a bruise. Rubber bands come to mind for analogy, but he likes to think of himself as more than something so simple. There has to be something much more dignified to compare his psyche too — although, if he is lacking in examples, perhaps he should be reduced to rubber band status.

Many have claimed over the years that he is too impartial to these kinds of personal matters; contrarily, he often feels too much. It is only with decades of practice that his logic and reason keep the reins most of the time… but sometimes he is known to slip and let his emotions get the better of him.

You have caused a lot more slippage as of late. Like a poorly managed oil spill. Or a comically placed banana peel.

You also deserve to be better analogized.

For a few days there, in the beginning, he had been leaning into an attract more flies with honey than vinegar approach : entertaining your blabbering while you worked, waiting for you to say something he could snag to reel in the truth.

The truth that is currently sitting as an automatic response in his inbox.

Even turning the questions back on you had been part of that strategy — admittedly, a rather transparent one — hoping to seem invested and interested. Which he was . He still is . One thing Ford certainly lacks around you is dis interest and no matter how much he wishes to ignore it, it has only become a more persistent, loudly buzzing bee in his proverbial bonnet.

The more flies with honey approach had been an easy one and more than once did he almost let himself get lost in it, forgetting its end goal. It’s easy to chat with you, easy to banter, easy to argue, easy to be in your presence. Almost too easy.

That realization had startled him.

His fingers tumble again and he huffs sharply out his nose. Take it slow, he reminds himself. Andante.

When his honey approach got him nowhere, where you tiptoed around the truth with an almost admirable kind of precision, Ford turned to vinegar. Even if he had wanted to continue trying to lull actually important information out of you (not that what you shared was un important, but your grandmother’s interest in genealogy or the name of the band you formed in undergrad was not exactly useful tidbits to this particular endeavor), he would have ended up at vinegar, eventually.

It frustrated him. You frustrated him. He could not parse why you wouldn’t just come clean. What did you have to lose?

His inability to hide this frustration only triggered you to also get vinegar-y, which helped neither of you. The little things had been reluctantly endearing at first, more quirks his mind catalogued almost against his will. Only when Ford started feeling less like a peer and more like a means to an end did those little things start becoming annoyances in his day.

All feelings and their subsequent approaches sat under the umbrella of why? Why hadn’t you said anything? Why were you not telling the truth? Why were you hiding your identity from him? Why bother returning every day if his attitude agitated you — which it so clearly did.

The answers he is forced to conjure are not pleasant ones.

Ford’s pinky misses trying to hit a C sharp and he curses Debussy in new and creative ways.

He hates the phrase un pocco mosso. He hates it with a passion. And D-flat minor sucks and he is never learning in it again.

Of course, none of this is helped by you being attractive to an almost infuriating degree. It doesn’t matter what you are doing, he could watch for hours and still find something new to admire. Tres expressif. Talking, pondering, focusing; animated, serene, friendly. Even angry, you are attractive. Maybe even especially when you’re angry. Like the kind of beauty painted into a heartbreaking scene.

There. A much better analogy than a banana peel.

Ford sighs and stops, slouching. Stares at the pages in front of him dejectedly. The last thing he is feeling right now is en animat and it shows. His thoughts have turned more to moping rather than any lingering resentment and it is making everything in the moment harder by proxy. Thank god no one can hear him fumble his way through Clair de Lune’s second part.

In an unfortunate overlapping of moments, the door opens noisily behind him.

“What?” Ford snarls, glaring over his shoulder.

Stan, as always, is unaffected by his brother’s temper. “There’s some leftover spaghetti,” he says plainly, as if Ford is not seconds away from barring his teeth like a vicious animal.

“I am not. Hungry ,” he snaps.

“Your guest is gone,” Stan continues, unperturbed. “Kinda rude not to see ‘em out.”

“Stanley.”

“Yeah?”

“Go away.”

Stan proceeds not to do that and just shrugs. “Had a pretty decent dinner with ‘em.”

“I’m glad,” Ford replies, clearly anything but.

“And I still think your new scientist friend is kinda cute.”

It should be a non-sequitur but with everything on his mind, it hardly is. Like times before, the statement is a transparent ploy to get a rise out of Ford — and although he likes to think he is above this manner of low blows, emotion overtakes his reason in that moment. The ruse works.

“Why does it matter?” he asks through his teeth, swinging one leg over the other side of the piano bench to straddle it so he can give his neck a break from glaring over his shoulder.

Stan shrugs again, arms crossed and leaning against the doorframe, a silhouette against the warm light of the hallway. “Still kinda an asshole though, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask,” Ford says flatly.

Recognizing the tone for the warning sign it is, Stan holds up both hands in a surrender gesture. “In case you haven’t put two-and-two together yet, your mystery penpal has been showin’ up to your lab for the better part of two weeks now.”

“Of course I’ve put the pieces together,” Ford scoffs, sitting upright, honestly a little offended that Stan would think he hadn’t figured it out by now. Even without the automatic response that had been loitering in his inbox for the past two weeks, the coincidences had piled up so high that not even he could wave them off.

But, Stan doesn’t know about any of that. Ford has avoided the topic of you (digital) since the original bout of time without any responses, and he had nixed the topic of you (physical) after a few days too, when he realized that sharing a lab space with you was a dangerous indulgence. Often you were the only thing on his mind and it showed. It was embarrassingly juvenile and unfortunately only lent credence to Stan’s schoolyard crush theory.

Still, he tries to aim for casual disinterest as he asks, “But, what makes you think so?”

Stan’s smirk is noticeable even through the shadows the hall light casts over his face. “Well. Work’s for that fancy organization.” He begins counting off on his fingers. “The PPDC, right? Said it was in their marine biology division, working with venomous marine life.”

If you are attempting any kind of obfuscation by now, it is almost comical.

Regardless, Ford gets a twinge in his chest, a knot tightening itself further. His reason tries to smother the feeling with a pillow. Why haven’t you said anything? That’s more information about your profession than he has ever managed to get out of you the entire time you have been sharing the lab.

“And that profile lines up with our — er, your — mystery penpal, right?” Stan continues, either unaware of Ford’s inner turmoil or being kind enough not to comment on its level of apparentness. “The PPDC email? Marine bioprospecting with venomous marine animalia?”

Unable to help himself, Ford gapes when his brother rattles off the specifics of your discipline, as written in the letter at the bottom of one of his desk drawers. A letter he practically has memorized at this point for how often he finds himself rereading it. “How did you remember all that?”

“Contrary to popular belief, I do sometimes listen when you talk.” He then taps his temple with his index finger. “Steel trap, up here.”

Ford will, begrudgingly, concede to that. “None of that explains why you’re throwing around the term ‘asshole.’”

“Maybe that’s not the right term,” Stan says. “I mean, seems like a perfectly fine person. A little arrogant, a little obtuse, a little spacey. Although I couldn’t quite suss out if you’re just being used to… I dunno. Whatever covert nerds get up to. Steal your super-secret additions to the periodic table.”

At the mention of that particular half-drafted paper that is also sitting at the bottom of a desk drawer, a bit of fear does seize Ford’s heart. He shakes the feeling off quickly, though. Of all the things you have ever talked about, that is not one of them. You’re a biologist, not a chemist. That would be an absurd thing to steal.

Still, it continues to beg the question: why . Why do you keep showing up? Why do you subject yourself to his repugnant attitude if you don’t want to meet up? Why haven’t you said anything?

He finds himself blind to your motivations. It only serves to frustrate him more. “Do you actually think that?” he asks. “The covert intent.”

Ford, hand-in-hand with his general paranoia, has concocted a few hypotheses about this. They all circle around the idea that you have just been using him for the lab space, that you had caught wind of his particular scientific advancements somehow and came all this way just to snag something you could claim as your own. All done with a strange charm and unbearably good looks…

“I don’t know what I think,” Stan admits, shifting his posture. “I’ll tell you what I don’t think, and that’s that you’ve been set up from the start. I think your emails have probably been genuine all along. After talkin’ to ‘em… just seems like a particular brand of weirdo.”

It goes unspoken that Ford is, by proxy, also that particular brand of weirdo.

Stan’s judgment is admittedly sometimes awry and often colored by his own suspicions, born from a lifetime of constantly being on some kind of metaphorical (or, occasionally literal) precipice, in one way or another. Regardless, his opinion is usually rooted in some kind of truth and Ford trusts it implicitly now, at least at the jump. It’s gotten them out of more than a few sticky situations while traveling by sea.

So, it just lends credence to Ford’s original idea: you had accidentally met him and decided he was not worth the trouble. None of it is all that complicated. You just don’t like him.

Stan unknowingly interrupts this spiraling by continuing, “Not to mention, pretty obviously smitten with you.”

“What?” Ford guffaws, successfully drawn back to the moment. “That is hardly true.”

“Can you think of another reason for showing up to the lab like a lost puppy every day? That weird looking truck is practically a staple of our front yard now.”

“Scientific curiosity,” Ford posits. “A vigorous researcher’s spirit.” It feels odd to defend you after the culmination of the events of the past two weeks but without you here to plead your own case against Stan, someone has to. Even hypothetically.

Because, regardless of how betrayed he feels by this situation as a whole, he is still endeared to you. Foolhardily. Inadvisably. Your continued open inquisitiveness on the matter of snowcone snails remained refreshing and even as Ford became more of a vinegar concentrate, you had been dedicated to the research in an unconventional manner. Even he had shunted the little creatures to the wayside when he was still writing the journals in the wake of much larger, boisterous things. In fact, he had forgotten about their existence utterly and completely until you mentioned seeing a cone snail in Gravity Falls.

That curiosity is just another reason he has ascribed to why you keep darkening his door. Even restricted use of his facilities is better than most spaces — and, if your auto-responder has anything to say about it, you’re on sabbatical. You aren’t exactly rich in resources right now.

All in all, none of your comings and goings have to do with him as a person. Just… what he can provide. It is, in fact, almost in spite of him as a person.

He swallows the dread and shame that accompanies that thought and sticks it in an ever-growing file cabinet in his mind labelled unproductive.

“You’re always making excuses,” Stan complains. “Cut the crap. Just accept that it’s rude to leave you digitally high and dry.”

“I’m not disputing that,” Ford tells him. “I just hardly think the intention is… nefarious.”

“Yuh-huh. If not nefarious, then oblivious.” Stan shakes his head. “Almost worse. Doesn’t matter the intent. You’re still left on the back foot.”

“Why does it matter, Stanley?” Ford asks, swinging the other leg around to fully face his brother.

“’Cause… ‘cause…” Stan rubs the back of his neck, a telltale gesture, now finding something on the floor very interesting. “I don’t wanna see you get hurt, is all.”

Something warm blooms in Ford’s chest, a nice change from the other dour emotions he has been grappling with. Such blatant admissions from his brother are rare and deserve to be treasured, which obviously means Ford needs to tease him relentlessly about it. “Aww,” he coos. “You’re worried about me?”

“Shut up,” Stan gripes quickly, rolling his eyes. His regret is palpable.

“That’s so sweet of - ”

“If you’re gonna be weird about it then I take it back,” he interrupts. “Go get your heart broken or whatever. See what I care.”

That sobers Ford up. “I’m — I’m not… There is no risk of- of that ,” he stammers out, feeling his face flush entirely against his will. “Our relationship is purely professional. I am, at the most, disappointed with the conduct of the past two weeks.”

Stan snorts. “Whatever you tell yourself to sleep at night — which, by the way, do that. Sleep. You look like shit.”

With his brother unknowingly echoing your own sentiment on the matter, Ford wonders what he must look like when he hasn’t slept in a while. He’s hardly a vain man, it’s not like he goes about preening in his reflection when given the chance. But maybe he should find a mirror.

“Your concern is touching, Stan,” he says, splitting the difference between sarcastic and genuine. From the apprehensive frown he gets in return, he knows Stan has heard both intents. “But I’ll be fine.”

His brother waves a hand. “Whatever. You’ll be getting a break from ‘em anyway. Probably do you some good.”

Ford’s eyebrows furrow. “Did you run them off?” he asks incredulously, unsure how he feels about the idea.

“No — well, I might’ve pulled the big brother act…”

“I’m the older one!” Ford exclaims.

“Spiritually I’m the older one,” Stan argues.

“That is so far from the truth,” Ford insists, pointing a finger at him. “And you know it.”

“Either way.” Stan uses his considerable verbal strength to wrangle the conversation back to its intended position. “It ain’t just that. Mentioned going up to Lake Nerys this weekend.”

Briefly, Ford wonders if he requires a pacemaker as he physically feels his heart stutter. “What?”

“Yeah, I think lookin’ for that, uh, weird jellyfish you found once.” Stan picks at his nails idly, entirely unassuming. Ford genuinely cannot tell if it’s an act or not. “That’s the place, right?”

“Yes,” Ford replies, although he feels miles away from the moment now, projecting ahead to all possibilities of what might happen if you go there alone. Bad possibilities. Dreadful possibilities. Just, worst cast scenarios of the highest degree. For once, his paranoia feels entirely justifiable. “Right.”

The conversation peters out there as he continues to flip through an ever-growing rolodex of scenarios you are setting yourself up for, going there alone. He forgets where he is until Stan clears his throat.

“What?” Ford asks, returning to the present.

“Eat some food,” Stan says. “Or I’m telling Mabel you don’t like her recipes.”

“Hey!” He ends up trailing behind Stan into the hall. “Unfair.”

After forking down what was, to his credit, a decent amount of a meal, Ford paces about the lab like a tiger in a cage.

He should call.

He really shouldn’t call.

He really should leave you alone.

He really shouldn’t leave you alone.

Ford oscillates wildly between the shoulds and the should nots for a decent amount of time and finds himself none closer to finding a course of action that doesn’t anger you, or him, or both.

The fact you are apparently planning to go up to Lake Nerys in search of the beast there has complicated matters entirely. He is still angry at you — of course he is. You have been lying about your identity for the better part of three weeks and that fact alone makes him nervous. However, the anger is less of a boil and more of a simmer, with many other ingredients diluting themselves in its bubbling base.

The lab feels bizarrely empty without your presence. It feels like a bleak prospect when Ford realizes that he doesn’t almost miss you, he does miss you. Even when you were apparently cataloguing his REM cycles (and, honestly, he still cannot figure out why this matters so much), even when you were furiously snarking at each other in thinly veiled terms, at least you were here.

The problem is, for all your current faults, for all the sidestepping and avoiding and little annoyances, the last thing Ford wants is to see you harmed, incapacitated, helpless, or any mixture of all three. In an ideal world, both of you have the space to cool off before one of you finally addresses the digital elephant in the room. He is not opposed to talking this out like adults, even if the end result is a mutual parting of ways. It’s better than whatever he is doing at the moment.

But, Ford knows you now. You are not just planning an overnight to do some casual searching. You are keen on finding it. You’ll want to get close. You’ll want samples. You’ll want to get in the water for a better look.

The terror he feels at that thought rises above everything else.

He has to call. He has to. Even if it’s just to dissuade you — but you are rarely swayed and will probably just double down —

His cell phone is in his hand.

— Maybe he should offer to come along —

He’s scrolling through his contacts.

— But there is no way you’ll readily agree to that —

He’s pulling up your information.

— Maybe he can get an outline of your plans and follow at a safe distance —

He’s pressing the call button.

— Good lord man, that is appalling behavior even in thought alone, he will come off as a sinister stalker regardless of intent —

The line rings five times and Ford is met with an answering machine before a sixth.

“Fuck,” he swears, jamming the end call button before he leaves an incriminating and regrettable voice message. What would he even say? Ignore everything I said earlier, it is trivial and inconsequential to what I am about to tell you, which is do not under any circumstance go up to Lake Nerys to find —

His phone rings. Ford answers it before the second ring and is saying, on autopilot, “Go for Ford.”

“Um… hey,” you say awkwardly on the other end. “ You rang?”

“I — I did ring,” he confirms, just as awkwardly, then proceeds to add nothing else.

“… Is this about the bag?”

“The bag…” Confused, Ford peers around his lab.

Your bag suddenly materializes near the back entrance, where you always leave it, as you say, “Yeah, listen, I know I left my bag there. I’ll come grab it tomorrow, you can just stick it outside the shed.”

“Oh.” Get it together man! Stop with the monosyllables! He has an agenda to stick to!

“Just, please don’t toss it or anything.”

“I wouldn’t…” He trails off, having only half-heard the sentence. Internally, he is running through all possible scenarios of where this conversation could possibly go. None are particularly promising. You could come clean on the phone right now and it would still pale against his newfound goal to keep you from your lake expedition. “Why don’t, um, why don’t I bring it to you,” he offers clumsily. “Tomorrow. I’m free in the afternoon, I can…”

“Can’t,” you say shortly. “I’m busy in the afternoon.”

“O-oh.” The conversation idles. Ford swallows and fidgets on his feet, rubbing the fabric of his sweater between his fingers. “What… are you doing?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Boring stuff,” you claim, somewhat lofty. “Borderline juvenile.”

He winces at the mere word. Maybe damage control is the best path forward. “I highly doubt that.”

“Uh-huh.” You sound skeptical to the highest degree.

Or, maybe not the best path. Ford swiftly switches tactics. “My brother said you were headed up to Lake Nerys?”

You audibly suck your teeth. “Tattletail. Yeah, I am. Why?”

“I don’t think you should go,” he says, before he can second guess it.

After a moment, you slowly parrot back, “You don’t think I should go,” in a voice not unlike handling a toddler.

“It’s, um, one of the more difficult treks. Hardly the place for camping. But I’m happy to - ”

“With the most respect possible…”  Your tone says otherwise. “… I’m not exactly interested in your opinions right now.”

Irritation spikes but he smothers it quickly. Patience is key. Letting his emotions speak over his rationality, as he had earlier in the evening, has rarely gotten him anywhere good. “Then, I’m coming with you.”

However, the brief confidence behind that statement immediately feels foolhardy, withering away as the crackling silence fills the other end of the line. He slaps a palm to his forehead and closes his eyes, biting back a defeated groan. Stupid. Stupid. That was much too strong of a statement, he should have couched it in…

“You’re what?” you finally ask, bewildered.

“I’m, I mean, I’d like to join your expedition,” he rectifies, a bandage over a gunshot wound. “If that’s… amenable.”

“ … Why do you want to come?”

“Safety precautions,” he answers truthfully. “The woods out there are more dangerous than you’d expect.” Which is to say nothing of what lurks beneath the surface of the lake — but Ford does not add that. The last thing he wants is to give more fuel to your interest.

“You think I’m too stupid to take precautions.” It’s a statement rather than a question.

I think you’re remarkably heedless at the worst of times. “That’s not — not what I meant,” he stammers. “Genuinely. It’s just that…”

“Ford,” you interrupt, and he immediately bows to the strong hand of your tone and goes quiet. “I’ve been insulted in a lot of different ways over the years. But never once has my work been labelled ‘juvenile.’ Maybe take a few days to - ”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” he interjects quickly, before he can overthink it into oblivion. “I let my anger get the best of me.”

“I don’t care. You still said it.”

His heart actively sinks. “That’s hardly…”

“Which is to say nothing of everything else you — I can’t even label it as insinuating, because you outright said I was…”

Even though you are speaking in a strangely sure and steady voice, it does not entirely mask the hurt that is obviously there. Frankly, Ford thought you had much thicker skin than this. It makes him indignant that you are so susceptible to such baseless words — indignant on behalf of yourself, against yourself.

“What do you want me to say?” he asks, perhaps a touch too roughly. “That I’m sorry? Is that what it will take for you to believe me? Fine. I’m sorry. However provoked, those comments were uncalled for. As you said, you’re an esteemed scholar. I didn’t realize my opinion on your research held so much sway. You’re exceptionally accomplished in your own right and you shouldn’t let such obviously false sentiments get to you.”

After a long, long beat, you just say, almost baffled: “Good lord, man.”

“Listen.” He again changes tactics before he can say anything else regrettable or unproductive. “I know the lake and its surroundings like the back of my hand. Whatever you’re searching for, I’m an excellent resource. It’d be foolish , frankly, not to accept my offer.”

Even though you scoff midway through his spiel, you still say after he’s done, “ You are nothing if not disastrously consistent.”

“Thank you,” he responds, even if it is anything but a compliment.

“So, what I’m hearing is, even if I keep saying no, you’re still gonna find your way out there? There is no chance you’re gonna let me research in peace?”

“Probably not,” he admits.

“Fine,” you say curtly. “Tag along. Be my guest, or my forest guide, or whatever. Just, don’t get in my way.”

“I find it hard to believe I could,” he replies.

“I don’t.” Then, “I was planning on leaving tomorrow mid-afternoon and camping out overnight. I’ll pick you up so I can grab my bag, too. Maybe around 1pm. Ish. Sounds good?”

“Yes.” Despite your pococurante manner, he still breathes a sigh of relief at any acquiescence. “Sounds good.”

“Catch ya’ on the flip side, then.”

Relieved, satisfied, and perhaps with misplaced assurance, Ford leaves the lab and heads to his room. 

If he is joining an expedition tomorrow, he should actually try and get some sleep.

Chapter Text

Sitting on the edge of your bed, you stare down at your phone in your hands, not quite sure why you folded so easily into letting Ford join your impromptu expedition. Well… That’s not quite true. You know why. It is because even though he insulted you in new and creative ways, you are still, undeniably, hopelessly enraptured with the man. Even while arguing, being in his presence is like some sort of drug for you. It’s obscene and you haven’t felt this out of control around someone since that whirlwind fling a few summers ago.

Unfortunately for Ford, despite your previous rhapsodic nature, your disposition has only hardened since leaving the Pines residence, which is not helping whatever the hell he is up to now. It sounds like he is trying to dissuade you from going on an insignificant camping trip — although, perhaps not so insignificant? Curiosity stirs in you as you try to parse his reasoning. Maybe he doesn’t want someone else finding that jellyfish and taking the credit… Did you actually roll the dice correctly and pinpoint the thing’s exact location? Improbable odds strike again.

But these quizzical feelings are trodden underfoot by the hurt you are still feeling — and you have been feeling it nigh constantly for the past few hours, like a persistent and foreboding storm cloud hangs over you. Mope has bloomed into chagrined, which has bloomed into bewilderment and sheer frustration. In their entirety, your emotions are a gnarled and unsightly thing.

You feel ashamed. You feel betrayed. You feel compunction. You feel like you want the Earth to swallow you whole. You feel like this entire scenario was plainly predictable and it is only due to your complete and willful ignorance that you are in it now.

Ford knows.

So why won’t he say anything? Is he stringing you along?

Why did he call? Why did you call back?

A million questions and never enough answers to go around.

None of this is helped by the fact you had realized, halfway home, that you had left your bag there and would need to go back, regardless of how you felt. The notebooks, the sample jars, the multitool, you could probably live without. Your wallet, not so much. Your state identification is at the mercy of a man who probably finds you some degree of reprehensible. But… he did still call…

His apology-that-was-not-really-an-apology still echoes in your mind while you worry the silky fabric of the comforter between your fingers. 

I didn’t realize my opinion on your research held so much sway.

Of course it holds sway. It holds so much fucking sway. Any scientist worth their salt would let Stanford Pines’s opinion hold sway. The man has twelve Ph.Ds, for Christ’s sake. And now that he knows, isn’t it painfully obvious just how much you value his opinion? You’ve been valuing it pretty blatantly for the past several months, just in a digital medium. And past that, why would you bother returning again and again if you aren’t, even unintentionally, seeking the man’s approval in some form or another?

Sometimes, you feel painfully transparent. Heart-on-your-sleeve syndrome strikes again.

Although you have tried desperately for most of your life, like any good scientist, to be incisive over melodramatic, your emotions tend to reign haughtily over any kind of clinical reason you may have and now is no exception. It serves you well in impassioned research endeavors but less so in interpersonal dynamics. A rational person would have said no, during that phone call. A rational person would have stood their ground. A rational person would have chalked the entire relationship up to a loss after that first blow out in Fiddleford’s kitchen.

Instead, Ford seems to hold the unique and terrifying ability to get you to jump at the drop of a hat.

You wonder when he will realize this. Maybe he already has. Maybe he just leveraged that to join your camping trip.

This can only go badly, you realize. Duh. It is just a question of how bad, on a sliding scale of awkward but tolerable to trying to drown each other in the lake.

Is he waiting for some opportune moment to unveil his knowledge? Perhaps on the edge of a deceptively deep body of water, before pushing you into said deceptively deep body of water and leaving you at the mercy of a 2.4m ‘jellyfish?’

Again: melodrama.

Is he just waiting for you to say something first? That scenario feels improbable; the man has never had any qualms about making his opinion known before and now should be no exception — see his extensive list of your personal traits he finds abhorrent: exceptionally nosy, constantly blabbering, remarkably self-involved…

Reluctant tears sting your eyes and you wipe them away quickly, sniffling. The last thing you need is to cry over the man. The last thing you want is to still be this attached.

Maybe he is just waiting for you to make an absolute fool of yourself, in some kind of twisted penance for stringing him along for so long. Or at least, more of a fool than you have already shown yourself to be. That, at least, is not a difficult hurdle to clear.

All possibilities are uncharacteristically cruel and it only makes you feel worse that you are being so uncharitable to him, even now.

No, this trip is not going to go well at all…

After you pull yourself together, you aimlessly wander the manor, in various dusty rooms with various dusty furniture until your feet take you down to Fiddleford’s endlessly large hangar. Reliable to a fault, the man is down there, going through the motions. You wonder if it ever gets boring, just building and building away, or if the routine serves as a kind of meditation.

You wonder what kind of troubles he has; selfish to the core, you have never asked.

“How was dinner?” Fiddleford calls down once he spots you idling next to a workbench overflowing with unidentifiable metal parts. He lifts a welding mask from his face, hands protected by thick work gloves while using a blowtorch much larger than any other you have ever seen.

“Weird,” you admit truthfully, the concrete slab of the floor cold under your socks. “I hadn’t met Stan before. He’s… something else.”

Fiddleford hollers wordlessly and slaps his knee. “Ain’t that the truth!”

“I brought home some leftovers,” you offer. “Courtesy of Stan. He said it was the Pines’ famous spaghetti and meatballs.”

He makes a trepidatious noise, tilting his head to the side. “Who cooked?”

“… Stan?” You aren’t sure who else would have; Ford hardly seems the type. Maybe he does baking, at the most — every chemist loves to claim baking is just chemistry! until they’re fifty mediocre cupcakes in while helping with your baby cousin’s bake sale, with fifty more to go. Then, they tend to jump ship.

That summer fling hadn’t ended so great.

“Then, it’s prolly fine,” Fiddleford decides.

“It wasn’t too bad,” you tell him with a shrug. “I’ve made much worse.”

“I’ve had worse!” he claims.

You don’t even want to know.

But when you don’t offer any kind of banter back, too busy returning to your moping, your self-pity, your spiral of shame, Fiddleford takes notice. He takes off the welding helmet completely and sheds the work gloves. “Alright,” he says, resolutely. “What’s got you so down?”

You shrug again, trying to make an active effort to not look so down.

He clicks his tongue. “C’mon up here. Let’s chat.”

Despite how kind the offer is, you hesitate; he must be ten feet in the air in a robot’s half-finished pelvis. “You sure?” you ask, eyeing the structure warily. “You don’t just wanna come down here?”

“Where’s the fun in that!”

Well, that’s one way of putting it.

Once you notch your foot in the large joint at the knee, he reaches down and offers you a hand. His grasp is firm and sure and he hauls you up with one swift and steady motion, surprising you. It hardly looks like he is working with a lot of muscle; not like Ford, who seems deceptively — shut up brain now is not the time to speculate on whether the man could carry you.

The fantasy may have crossed your mind, once or twice.

“You’re stronger than you look,” you tell Fiddleford appreciatively, once he has you securely in the mech.

He raps his left arm, the one in the perpetual cast, with his knuckles; it makes a vaguely metallic noise. “Full titanium,” he informs you. “No alloys!”

“Right.” Learning the man qualifies as a cyborg is hardly the weirdest thing you have encountered while here, and somehow it just feels par for the course. Whatever weird course this trip to Gravity Falls is.

You take a few moments to appreciate what is around you. The space is cramped with two people in it but still roomier than anticipated. Above you stretches a delicate craftwork of metal, and open panels show the intricate braiding of wires weaving in and out to create a tapestry of circuitry. Everything is expertly and seamlessly locked together, and all the individual parts work to make something much greater in the aggregate. It’s impressive.

You tell him such.

Perched atop a large chunk of metal that juts out of the mech, legs dangling off either side, Fiddleford beams.

“So, what exactly are you working on, up here?” you ask politely, clumsily trying to find your own perch. You are hardly the spider monkey he seems to be but you manage to wedge your feet against an upwards slant and lean back against a solid looking section of ridged wall.

“Installin’ the gyro-stabilizers,” he tells you. “Should stabilize the aggressor feud and make the bipedal motion smooth.” He slides one palm across the other, slowly. “Like butter.”

You make a sufficiently appreciative noise, even if you have no idea what was just said.

“But this ain’t about me,” he continues.

“Yeah,” you concede, dejectedly.

“What’s on yer mind, buttercup?”

The nickname makes you smile, while you ponder over possible words. It is unclear how much of an explanation you should give and you weigh the embarrassment of coming clean against the hypothetical load off your shoulders by doing so. You hardly think Fiddleford is one to judge, but you have only known the man for a month and you still want to make an impression you are, in some ways, a functioning adult. Fessing up to a weeks-long lie because you are afraid of someone’s opinion of you is pretty elementary school.

“Ford, er, Doctor Pines is kinda mad about some stuff.” It feels strange and foreign to use his nickname with someone else, almost like a secret spilled. “I’ve only made it worse by, uh… not being entirely forthcoming, I guess.”

“’Bout what?”

“My identity,” you answer, as simply as possible.

“What identity?” Fiddleford asks intently, leaning in with wide eyes. “You some sort of spy?”

“No,” you laugh.

He continues to look at you, completely skeptical.

“Really,” you try to reassure. “Not a spy. I’m the same marine biologist cousin I was when I got here.”

Fiddleford grumbles something about, “Damn government,” but does, to your relief, relax.

“It just all comes down to me having made some stupid choices,” you continue. “I’ve been avoiding the truth. Which was stupid of me but, god, do you ever just double down on a decision endlessly? And the more exponentially you double, the worse it’ll be to finally come clean?”

He makes a contemplative noise, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

“Anyway, he’s… angry. He has the right to be,” you admit. “I just don’t know how to fix it.” You pause, a new worst-case scenario cresting the horizon as you speak. A stone of pure despair drops in your stomach. “Or… if it’s even fixable. Maybe I should just cut my losses.”

“Do y’wanna cut yer loses?” he asks curiously and without judgment.

You shake your head. “Hardly. I think he’s… Well, he’s frustrating at the weirdest of times but I’ve never met anyone like him. I mean, it’s like he has some kind of gravitational pull about him. Even when I don’t want to impress him, I do, y’know?”

“Stanferd’s always been like that,” Fiddleford tells you. “Pullin’ weird folks into his orbit — myself included.”

You nod. “Yeah. I never asked, how do you two know each other?”

Something flashes across his expression, so quick you almost miss it entirely. You are not quite sure what to label it as: fear might be the closest approximation. “We were college roommates,” he says, strangely neutral about it, not particularly fond nor disgruntled.

“Oh? And you kept in touch?” You tap your chin. “That’s cool. I never got along with my freshman year roommate in undergrad, I actually spent most nights on other people’s floors…”

“We had a fallin’ out,” he says, sounding detached from the fact. There is a distant look in his eyes, like he is no longer seeing you in the moment.

Instinctively, you clench your jaw shut against saying anything else stupid. But when Fiddleford doesn’t continue speaking, you prod gently. “But… you’re both cordial now?”

The disassociation passes quickly, thankfully; he shrugs, and a familiar goofy smile settles on his face. “Savin’ someone’s ass usually mends some sort o’ bridges.”

Afraid to trigger any more unpleasant memories, you don’t ask for any kind of elaboration.

“But he was just as frustratin’ back then, too,” he continues. “Even more than now, if you can believe it. Twice as stubborn and half as patient. Got a good heart in him, though.”

“Yeah,” you murmur, looking up, towards the high ceiling of the hangar, where beams run parallel with the occasional intersection. “I noticed.”

“Stanferd’s always gettin’ twisted up,” Fiddleford says. “But he keeps turnin’ down my offer to learn knots! Just leave him to it, he’ll sort himself out eventually, don’t you worry. You just gotta give him time.”

But I don’t have eventually, you think. You’re camping with the man tomorrow, with no indication of his current opinion of you. But, that reminds you — “Hey, do you have any camping equipment I could borrow?”

When you get to the Pines’ residence the next afternoon, you lay on the horn. Hard.

To your surprise, Stan comes tumbling out the front door.

“We get it!” he shouts over the noise.

You ease up and roll down your window, chilly air hitting your face.

“Hey, Stan,” you greet, aiming for cheery but probably ending up more uncanny valley than anything else. “Good to see you.”

He trots down the front porch steps and heads for your vehicle, a bag slung over his shoulder and another in his hands; you recognize one of them to be yours. “Wish I could say the same, toots,” he grumbles at you with no real bite. He deposits both bags in the truck bed, next to the other equipment you have brought, then comes around to the driver’s side window. “Seriously, you couldn’t have knocked?”

“I’m on a tight schedule,” you reply, which is entirely untrue but becomes true in the moment if only to be more annoying to Ford. It’s petty but, whatever. “Where’s your brother?”

“Re-packing for the bajillionth time,” he complains. “Seriously, aren’t you two stayin’ just one night?”

“That’s the plan.” You shrug. Then remember: “Wait, I got something for you, too.” You reach over into the passenger seat and grab the now-clean Tupperware, passing it back over to Stan. “Thanks again for the leftovers.”

Stan holds the container up to the grey early-spring light, the sun currently hiding behind a thin cloud, and squints at the new contents inside. “What the hell is in here?”

“… Chocolate chip cookies?” It is only polite to return borrowed containers with some kind of treat as thanks — at least, that is what was drilled into you as a kid. Cookies had seemed like an exceptionally safe bet, and Fiddleford didn’t say anything about any kind of diets or allergies. The cookies are more than a little lopsided but you think your heart is in the right place. “Why? You aren’t, like, allergic to something in there, are you…?”

“No,” Stan gruffs, sounding reluctant to be saying such. “Just means you’re nice.” He seems, somehow, put out by this.

“Er… thank you?” you say awkwardly, not sure what else to say.

Luckily, or unluckily, Ford bursts out the front door at that moment. “Sorry!” he calls out, fumbling with an armful of camping gear and a large knapsack on his back, clearly stuffed to its limits.

You watch as he visibly stumbles down the steps down the front porch. Frowning a little, you ask Stan, “You’re not gonna help him with that?”

“No,” Stan replies, muffled, and only once you draw your focus away from Ford’s bumbling and back to Stan do you realize he has spoken around a mouthful of cookie.

Your mouth twitches to hide a smile.

Without prompting, Ford throws all his gear and overstuffed bag into the truck bed, alongside everything else, then joins Stan at the driver’s side window. “Hello,” he greets you in a smooth and calm voice, surprising you with its cordiality. But you can also see an inherent anxiety in his expression, a nervous kind of energy thrumming through his body, that you realize you can ascribe to the fact he looks much more well rested than the last time you saw him. His usual mop of hair is much more kempt, patted down into something manageable, and he’s donned a turtleneck and tan duster combo, a strap diagonal across his chest, hiding something beneath the coat. It’s a natural and fitting look on him.

Belatedly, you realize you are staring.

But he’s staring, too. His eyes dart around your face for a few seconds too long before he realizes you are both just looking at each other, and his eyes dart away to something else. He then looks to Stan, puzzled. “What the hell are you eating?”

Stan hides the Tupperware behind his back. “Nothin’,” he claims, still around a mouthful. The cookies might be a little dry…

“Ready to get this show on the road?” you interject, before they can devolve into some kind of bickering.

Ford nods sharply, a keenness reflected in his eyes. “Yes. Now, Stan, you remember the safety protocol while I’m gone?”

Stan rolls his eyes, still actively chewing. Okay, make that a lot dry…

“Emergency radio is in the kitchen pantry, the to-go kit in the panel next to the front door —”

“ — Hazmat suits in the shed and decontamination protocol written up inside the microwave, yeah, I got it,” Stan gripes, having finally managed to swallow. He smacks his tongue a few times. “You’re makin’ it sound like I’m gonna get ambushed while you’re out.”

“Hardly.” Ford rolls his eyes. “You remember the security questions?”

“Oh, my god, get the hell out of here.” Stan takes his brother by the shoulders, spins them both around, and physically shoves him.

Ford scowls but acquiesces, trotting around the truncated front of your vehicle to climb into the passenger seat. Once you have visual confirmation he is inside, you turn back to Stan.

However, Ford leans around you and says, “And remember: feed the snails tomorrow morning if I’m not back by 10:30am.”

Your stomach does somersaults at the reminder of your research.

“Yeah, yeah.” It is clear Stan is only half listening, and even that amount feels generous.

“10:30am sharp, Stan. It’s critical for the data that we keep as many variables as…”

“On the dot, yeah, you watched me set that alarm, Sixer,” Stan gripes, clearly at the end of his rope, and you wonder just how much lecturing he got previous to you arriving. Maybe Ford is just in a constant state of lecture.

Ford scowls.

Stan casts a look up to the sky, where gray clouds are scattered across an even grayer sky. “You got an umbrella in all that junk?” he asks cautiously. “Kinda feels like there’s gonna be rain.”

“There is not going to be any rain.” Ford now sounds extremely impatient. “Goodbye, Stanley.”

“I’m just sayin’…”

“Goodbye, Stanley.”

Stan grumbles something unsavory under his breath that you don’t quite catch, then takes a few steps back, away from your truck. “You kids have fun now!” he calls, as he gets farther.

You turn the keys in the ignition as he speaks again, just barely drowning out him saying, “Use protection!”

As you pull out of their front yard and onto the dirt road, Ford mutters, “Insufferable ass.”

Again, you fight to hide an endeared smile trying to break its way onto your face. You’re supposed to be angry at the man — it would be counterproductive to showcase how endeared you still are when these tiny moments crop up.

As you drive, you make no move to initiate a conversation, instead focusing on the road stretching out in front of you. In principle, you generally hate silence and always try to fill it, but in this moment you hate to make a fool of yourself more. If you raise the obvious topic, then you will have to discuss your reasoning; if you ignore the obvious topic, then you are only avoiding the problem further.

Ford had insisted on joining on this expedition — he can be the one to make conversation, if he wants.

Apparently, he does want.

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asks after a few quiet minutes, somehow unable to keep the haughtiness out of his voice in even such a simple question.

“Yeah,” you respond distractedly, busying yourself by fiddling with the dial for the radio to find a station you both might enjoy. “I printed out directions. You’ll probably need to play navigator when we get to the other side of town, though.”

He nods, eyes forward. When you linger on a classical music station, you catch him staring intently at your hand on the knob in your peripherals, and instinctually switch stations.

You settle on some smooth jazz/hip-hop fusion.

“I didn’t realize you liked jazz,” Ford says, almost conversationally.

You are reminded of Fiddleford’s assertion that Ford would work himself out of the personal knot eventually, and you wonder if this is it. Some kind of olive branch to at least make this trip tolerable. Or, maybe he is just trying to ignore the hurt he caused yesterday, which inadvertently glosses over your foolhardy weeks’ long social blunder.

Again, why won’t he say anything?

Still, you can play along.

“Kinda,” you respond casually, putting both hands back on the wheel. Outside your window, the firs whiz by; you’ve never seen so many trees in your life. “I always wanted to learn it but I’m hopeless without sheet music. I learned some jazz scales once, but…” You shrug, letting the quiet end of the sentence speak for itself.

He hums an acknowledgement. “You’re a musician?”

Unable to help yourself, you reply with a wry smile, “Amateurly.”

“Which instrument?”

“Piano, mostly. I dabbled in clarinet in high school.”

“Were you on the keyboard for your band in undergrad?” Ford asks, actually sounding curious on the matter. “The Cephalic Cephalopods?”

Part of you startles, hearing that name come out of his mouth, in the rich timber of his voice. Had you told him about your brief stint playing house parties? Had he remembered? “Um.” You seem to have lost your voice completely — to buy yourself time, you grab your water bottle from the cupholder next to you and take a generous sip. For all you usually blather on, all you manage to get out is: “Yeah.”

Before he can ask another question, you make a conversational pivot. “Speaking of piano, you learn any new pieces lately?”

He scowls slightly, although it is hard to tell if it is because you asked or because of the subject matter itself. “No,” he claims. “Nothing performance ready.”

Smooth jazz fills the silence. You busy yourself by concentrating more on the road as you roll into town, careful to watch for pedestrians — the people of Gravity Falls tend to play it fast and loose with jaywalking. Plus, the focus gives you the added benefit of proving to Ford that you are an attentive and excellent driver; why you want to prove this in the moment is beyond you.

Ford caves to the silence first. “So. Why the impromptu trip? Lake Nerys is awfully remote.”

That’s why I chose it. You shrug, feeling your heartbeat more than you have in the previous moments. “The snowcone snails inspired me,” you say, not entirely untrue. “Who knows what else I’ll find out there.”

“I suppose.” He thinks for a moment, glancing out his own window; you are rolling to a stop at a traffic light, next to the local bank. “But… are you looking for anything in particular?”

The light turns green; you floor it.

Ford lets out a surprised and annoyed puff of breath, pressed back against his seat with the momentum.

“I don’t know,” you reply, knuckles tightening on the steering wheel, as you actively force yourself to ease off the gas pedal. “I guess I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for ‘till I find it.”

The directions you had printed get unearthed from your glove compartment once you fully exit town and Ford, who clearly is much more used to being in the driver’s seat, serves as a cranky but effective navigator. Few casual words are spoken during the rest of the drive; ever since asking the question about what you may or may not be looking for at Lake Nerys, the topic hangs over you like a guillotine. You refuse to cede any conversational ground lest you end up beheaded.

In the meantime, you become very well acquainted with the blend of smooth jazz and hip hop.

Eventually, you roll to a stop in a vacant lot, the closest parking space to Lake Nerys you could find on a map. The lake itself is a mile hike past this, and while you have packed lightly in anticipation, Ford’s packing style can roughly be defined as dense.

He shoulders a large pack, a bed roll hanging from the bottom, and uses the tent poles as walking sticks the entire way. If the man wasn’t so dense himself, you would worry about the weight of the bag toppling him over like an overturned turtle, but his general bulk serves as an effective counterbalance.

The hike is off-trail and winds you considerably, but there must be something to Ford’s ‘stoutness exercises’ because he just silently takes the lead and effortlessly forges ahead. Short but violent gusts of wind buffet against you the entire way, only partially dulled through the surrounding thick knitting of trees. More than once do you find yourself stumbling off-balance, arms flailing, before you manage to save yourself from an embarrassing tumble.

By the time Ford leads you to a suitable clearing next to the lake, dusk has already begun.

If the forest and its thick-trunked skyscrapers weren’t impressive enough, the placid lake itself is a new majesty in itself. It stretches far enough to touch the horizon line, and the crystal clear water reflects the bleak, off-white blanket of clouds above you.

It’s heartbreakingly tranquil.

So of course, Ford has to go and ruin it.

“We should set up camp, before it gets dark,” he says, as he holds a hand over his eyes like a visor, surveying the sun dipping below the tall tree line across the water. The fucker doesn’t even look like he has broken a sweat this entire time, whereas you are disgustingly so, beneath your appropriate winter coat and long-sleeved shirt.

“That was the plan,” you say, clipped, unceremoniously dumping all your belongings into the grass with a complete lack of grace.

He turns to you, standing several feet away, between you and the water’s edge. “Do you want help setting up your tent?”

Still irked by his level of fitness, you shake your head. “I’ve got it.”

Fiddleford had given you a whole swath of items to pick from for your camping adventure. Most seemed like overkill — was a bear trap of that size really necessary? — but one item, of course, was a canned tent: a single-person polyester abode shoved into a canister. He had given you a piecemeal kind of instruction on how to use it — “Twist this here then press this here and give it at least five feet when opening!” — but, you haven’t been seriously camping in decades and you sincerely doubt your abilities to construct a normal, sound tent, so: canned tent it is.

You give it at least ten feet when you uncap it, bolting away like deer through the brush.

“Good lord,” Ford says, once it springs violently into place, bouncing slightly from the force of its unveiling.

Once it settles, you approach and inspect the handiwork appreciatively. “Should do the trick,” you say smugly, kneeling in the grass to drive the spikes into the ground.

As nice as it would be to watch the sunset, you sequester yourself in your tent for a little bit and unpack the non-essentials: your digital camera, your specimen jars (stuffed with socks), your field notebooks. The wind continues to pick up, whistling wildly through the tangle of branches in the trees around you, but every time you stick your head out of the tent to see if it is raining, the sky looks like a normal cloudy dusk.

You assume Ford does something similar during this time, bustling about while constructing his own, slightly larger but still relatively cozy, tent. He clears a space for a fire, unpacks some normal camping equipment, and, to your reluctant chagrin, stays out of your way.

Night falls soon thereafter.

By now, you have emerged and are standing at the edges of your campsite, closer to the water but still a healthy distance from it. The music of the nightlife settles around you, and the air remains nippy, making every breath crisp and refreshing. Even the heavy breeze through your hair is starting to feel nice.

“I like it out here,” you murmur to yourself, surveying the lake.

You crane your head up to look at the stars; living in a city has deprived you of the sheer wonder of even a mostly-cloudy night sky, with the amazing swath of constellations peaking out where they can. It is impossible to search for any particular constellations, but you pretend for a moment you see the blocky makeup of Orion, the fine points of Leo, the long line of Ursa Major.

For just a moment, all your problems feel insignificant.

Unaware Ford had even been in your vicinity, let alone heard you at all, you startle when he replies, just as quietly, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

You are overrun with feeling in that moment and take a deep breath through your nose, exhaling it just as long. “Yeah.” It would be foolish not to agree.

And then the two of you stand, side-by-side, serenely staring up at what you can see of the stars, watching the clouds pass by with the heavy wind. You have the absurd compulsion to take his hand in your own, just as an anchor to this world, just in case you fall up into the sky above you.

Reality returns to you soon; the peaceful moment splinters about a minute later, when you remember what you are out here for.

“I’m gonna get a closer look at the lake,” you tell Ford out of sheer courtesy, reminded that his reasoning for coming out here was, supposedly, safety protocols. You step away to check the stakes of your tent one last time, before making your way towards the water.

Ford stands exactly where he had been prior, watching you with a heavyset frown, bushy eyebrows knit together. When he realizes you have caught him staring, his gaze uncharacteristically hardens, rather than bashfully averting his gaze like usual. His mouth tightens into a flat line. “Don’t get too close,” he warns, with a surprising amount of severity.

It doesn’t particularly pique you, so used to his various attitudes by now.

The smooth glass of the water reflects the stars beautifully, thousands of pinpoints of light cast against an inky canvas, swirling with the ripples of the water. Instead of trying to look too closely for any creatures, you just take in the sight for a good long while, lost in its majesty.

I fucking love nature, you think to yourself.

Then, you realize: it isn’t a clear sky tonight, not by the slightest.

You glance up, confirming that the sky is now completely covered with dark clouds, casting everything in heavy shadow. Frowning to yourself, you glance back down. The lake is, in fact, not entirely made up of stars: there are voids between clusters, when you bother to look closely enough. But the clusters are sizable — you estimate six feet across, maybe seven.

Something stirs in your memory, back to one of Ford’s first few emails to you. To put plainly, I distinctly remember it looking reflective of the clear night’s sky. If photographed, I’m curious if any particular constellations could be identified; for now, it is (very original) theory.

“Holy shit,” you whisper, and instantly bend down to roll up your pant legs to the knee. “Ford!” you stage whisper, not wanting to spook whatever is moving in the water, making the stars spin with it. When you swiftly look over your shoulder, you see him knelt in the middle of the makeshift fire pit. “Ford!”

“What?”

“Grab my camera!” You make towards the shoreline, not wanting to turn away unless whatever is under that water disappears on you. You get busy shedding your boots and socks on the way as well, hopping on one foot, then the other, as you pull them off without bothering to untie the laces.

There is the distinct click of a lighter failing to catch. “Your what?”

“My camera!” you hiss, half over your shoulder, never taking your eyes off the starry lake. Slowly, and with great care, you step into the frigid water, a long shock of cold snapping through every crevice of your body.

The stars sway slowly.

This has to be it. It has to be.

Ford says your name with complete and utter panic. “Wait-!”

But it’s too late: so taken are you at the mere idea of getting to see this mysterious creature you have spent months thinking about, you don’t notice something snaking its way through the sediment towards you. Before you can realize what is even happening, it rapidly twines around one of your exposed legs and snatches you under.

Chapter Text

It is often said that in the critical moments before disaster, one’s perception of time slows down.

It must be mere seconds between something wrapping itself around your calf, your head slamming against the muddy bank as it uses considerable strength to yank you down, and your entire world going dark as you are dragged underneath the lake’s inky surface, all before you have even realized what has happened. 

But as you inhale a lungful of frigid water, every atom in your body alights with sheer sensory overload. You are left frantically clawing through the darkness for what feels like an eternity.

This is where you die, you realize with startling clarity. For all your achievements, all your blunders, all the love and all the petty hatred in your life, this is how it ends: having literally walked right into your demise. All for the promise of a cool-looking probably-jellyfish. If your eyes weren’t stinging from the freezing water, they would be stinging with hot tears of disbelief.

Endless. The darkness goes on forever. Your lungs feel like they are about to burst like irresponsibly inflated helium balloons.

There is a sharp burst of light through the dark, absolutely blinding, immediately followed by a noise that almost seems to eat itself, dulled like you are hearing it through several thick layers of wool. The insistent pull on your leg lessens considerably. A few seconds later, something grips the wrist of your outstretched hand. Tight.

Gravity inverts.

Your head breaks the water with a harsh gasp; you bob precariously as you try to get in air in a truly futile effort. All you manage to do is get more lake water up your nose and down your throat, effectively gagging you, while you flail in a poor attempt to tread water. 

What the hell just happened?

You see shapes and colors more than anything else: indigo and gray and black blobs smeared across your vision, as something solid materializes behind you and wraps itself around your chest. Your mind tells you to fight, but your body doesn’t cooperate. Everything is dead weight as you are pulled jerkily through the water. Only through the heavy haze do you realize that you are heading towards the shore, not farther from it.

Finally, you are dragged onto land and the tight grip lets go abruptly; you collapse onto your back, limp and useless like a fish out of water.

What the hell just happened?

Immediately, you roll onto your side, shaking violently as you hack up the frigid lake water that had pooled itself into your chest. The taste is nothing like what you know freshwater lakes to be; instead of something musty and stale, it is cold and crisp, like you have just gotten a lungful of dry ice. It leaves your chest aching. It is so deeply chilling that you feel it in your marrow, locking up your joints and encasing your muscles in a heavy concrete.

Although you try to stay on your side, momentum takes you the rest of the way and you end up prone on your stomach with a painful oof. The muddy grass tickles your chin as you try to keep your face out of the wet dirt, neck aching with the effort, as your hands refuse to cooperate to lift you up.

The first sensation that returns to you fully is the fact that your nose is running like a well-working faucet, snotty lake water gathering on your upper lip. The next is, even with your eyes squinted shut, something in your inner ear is making it feel like the Earth beneath you is extremely off-kilter, see-sawing heavily from side to side.

It also feels like you are experiencing quite a few more g’s-worth of gravity than usual. But instead of graying out, there are a number of colorful galaxies behind your eyelids, swirling and pulsing and so, so bright. You try to open your eyes to get away from it but it feels like you are fighting against an invisible, persistent force, and you leave your retinas to burn instead, having to focus your energy elsewhere. 

Above all else, something in your blood sings. It is unpleasant; sharp and piercing, like soprano to crystal glass.

Through the disorienting haze, two things register faintly: someone is saying your name and sounding awfully panicked about it, and something is trying to burn your left calf to a crisp.

Without your input, you are rolled onto your back.

The change in orientation makes your stomach roil and you cough harder, more violent than before, your throat absolutely raw. You finally squint your eyes open; through the blurry tunnel vision you see the vague visage of Ford, close enough that his hot breath puffs in short bursts against your face. Well, you think it’s Ford —  his face is pulsing unnaturally and unnervingly, like something is bubbling viscously beneath its surface.

The sight is terrifying, frankly, and you close your eyes again just to avoid it… But that doesn’t help either, because then you are back to the whirling lights that make your sense of balance swing wildly.

From the amount of pain rocketing up your left leg, a coherent thought finally comes to you as you begin to fear losing everything below the knee. You try to say, “My leg,” but it comes out garbled. The synapses between either your mouth or your ears don’t seem to be working properly. Probably both.

Something rough clamps down on your left knee, pinning that leg to the damp, cold ground as you continue to writhe. Unencumbered, your other leg kicks out violently, and then something much heavier settles on that leg, too, pressing down. Not only do you feel discombobulated to the highest degree, coated in mud and chilled to the very bone and being irresponsibly pushed on gravity’s swing set, but now your fight-or-flight kicks in as everything below the waist is pinned.

The person you assume to be, but have yet to actually verify is, Ford says something you don’t catch through the blood pounding in your ears and then — from the feel of it — begins slowly and torturously peeling the skin from your leg.

You scream. Probably. And finally experience the grayout worthy of several g’s.

All at once, the acute jagged nature of the pain stops, leaving a strong throbbing in its wake that times itself with your hummingbird of a heartbeat. Some of the fogginess of your senses clear, too, as the Earth finally stills.

Everything settles into a perverse kind of ambiance in the several seconds after, as you let your eyes fall shut, comforted by the pitch black now there. You are left sucking in ragged and wavering breaths like you are drowning, which… you had been, hadn’t you. You had been drowning and then something had pulled you out. Someone.

Something had pulled you in.

The pressure on your legs releases and you faintly hear the squelch of boots in mud as someone walks past you, leaving you immobile in the grass.

You become acutely aware of every piece of sensory input you are experiencing: your heart trying to jailbreak itself from your chest cavity, the rapid numbing of your skin in harsh and frigid wind, the heaviness of your limbs, and above all, an overwhelming sense of terror.

What the fuck just happened?

Something warm cups your face, rough against your wet cheek. You blearily open your eyes to again see Ford, leaning in close. His face is much less like a fleshy lava lamp this time, but it still looks like something is undulating wetly beneath the surface.

It’s unnerving to the highest degree and scares the bejesus out of you.

“It’s okay,” the person-who-is-probably-Ford reassures you, but his frowning expression betrays the sureness of his tone. “I’ve got you.”

Trying to be polite, you roll away from him as you suddenly heave, the nausea reaching a critical mass. While everything in your body is generally rejecting this experience, the contents of your stomach seem to be the most angry at the moment. At least gravity feels like it is at its normal 9.81 m/s²  again.

Only stomach acid comes up, which is terrible for the current state of your poor esophagus.

While you do that, Ford says, “Stay here.”

Where the fuck would you go?

It becomes noticeable to you that there is no longer the chorus of any kind of night life, as you continue to lay supine in the muddy grass. Some part of your brain tries to tell you to get farther from the water, that whatever snatched you under is still in there, but your body just isn’t cooperating. Instead, it obeys simpler commands, like wiggling your fingers and toes. It feels like all extremities are accounted for but are wrapped in several layers of cellophane. Like the electrical signals are taking much longer to travel from brain to limb.

“Can you walk?”

You blink up at probably-Ford, who is standing with his boots right at your head, peering down at you with an expression that is indistinguishable through the dark. Wearily, you realize he is not bubbling like you had thought, but your occipital lobe must be fucked because the sky behind him pulses as well.

The sky, which has only gotten darker, no longer showcases that spotting of a beautiful array of stars. Ford’s face is the only thing that stands out against the shadowy mass above you.

“What do you think?” you rasp, voice raw from either the screaming, the drowning, the hacking, the vomiting, or all of the above.

“Can you stand?” he amends, voice clipped at the edge.

No. “No. Maybe.” You sound like you’ve just gargled a mouthful of gravel, and for the full sixty seconds, too, just like nine out of ten doctors recommend.

“You are going to catch hypothermia if you stay there,” he responds, as if this will kick you into gear.

“Okay,” you reply, instead resigning yourself to your fate and closing your eyes.

“It’s about to storm.”

Of course it is. “Okay.”

“Will you please, at least, try to stand?” Now, he definitely sounds peeved.

You open your eyes. He looks peeved. “Gonna need help,” you croak as you squirm to at least sit up. It is slow going and very difficult, feeling like you are filled with sand.

Without a word, he holds out both six-fingered hands, an oddity only ever noticeable to you when it is in such proximity. You aren’t stupid, all the evidence you have gathered since meeting him has given you more than an inkling on how he feels about them. Ford may view them as some sort of weird, cursed deformity, but to you they will always be a rare and extraordinary singularity. 

As he uses them to pull you to your feet, his grasp tight to account for the slippery nature of your damp skin, you find yourself thinking the same sentiment from the very first time you ever noticed the difference in digits. Something has loosened your lips considerably, because you then say the thought aloud. “You’re not a half-bad pianist.”

Ford does not grace this with a response.

“You gotta go slow on that second part of Clair de Lune, though,” you continue, now fully vertical. A rush of blood leaves your brain and you sway on shaky legs as you, somehow, manage to keep speaking. “If you cut corners, it’ll only…”

Gravity is back to playing its little trick on you, and your voice decides you are a lost cause.

As you start to slouch towards the ground, his arms wrap around your middle in an almost crushing embrace. It presses you both together with a squelch of heavy wet clothes between you. He’s still in the same turtleneck and the same jacket, just now drenched. You are also in the same jacket and rolled-up pants, just coated in mud from laying in the dirt.

“I’ve got you,” he repeats, gruff but soft in your ear.

It occurs to you rapidly that something has short-circuited your brain-to-mouth filter, because the nanosecond the next thought crosses your synapses, you are saying, appallingly, “You should carry me.”

“I am not — ah, ah.” The noise sounds like a chastise, as his hold on you only tightens while your legs officially become more gelatin than bone. Without the help of his grasp or the sureness of his frame for you to lean heavily against, you definitely would have crumpled into another heap in the mud by now.

You are shaking so hard you practically have a frequency, which also does not help any of your independent upright attempts. From where you are pressed together, you can feel that Ford might be shivering now as well. It feels like your physical form is betraying you on every front as your mind tries to scold, now is not the time, as you make an incredibly pathetic whine of a noise and grasp uselessly at his sides, fisting his jacket. Rivulets of water sluice down your neck, and you dig your bare toes into the dirt, as if that will help anchor you.

“What’s wrong with me?”  you mutter — or, more realistically, whimper — into his shoulder, pressing the bridge of your nose there as you try to stay still.

“It’s the venom,” he explains succinctly, speaking directly into your ear where his head is bowed, cheek pressed against your temple.

The shivering becomes less about external factors and more about internal ones in that second, as the baritone feel of his voice sends some kind of fizzing up your spine. Not now, brain.

“In the tentacle,” he continues. “To paralyze prey.”

You think, that was a tentacle? and I’m not prey functionally simultaneously. What comes out of your mouth is: “I’m not tentacle?”

“No,” Ford confirms without a hint of irony. “You’re not. You are, however, at extreme risk of hypothermia right now.”

Now that it has been reestablished, you feel it more, too. Gone is the ambient and chilly air of the afternoon — it’s been blown away by the current violent gales that only add to the threat of being toppled over. Stiff as a board, your jaw aches from how hard it is forcefully clenching itself. The grayout from before is returning and not from an excess of g’s this time. Your brain is starting to shut down its basic functions.

Although you are ninety-nine percent sure it is an auditory hallucination, you think you hear that stupid fucking omnipotent being. Nyeh! Nyeh! it jeers.

“Nyeh,” you mutter into Ford’s clavicle.

“What?”

You are saved from having to explain your one-sided rivalry with something out of your imagination; a particularly strong throb up your bad leg, timed with a nasty gust of wind, makes your knees give out entirely. Not expecting it, Ford is almost dragged down into the mud with you. He grunts and hauls you back upright, as your weight ragdolls against him.

“Sorry,” you mutter, mortified by your lack of independence in the moment. There is a drowsiness starting to overtake you, a fine and fuzzy later atop everything else you feel.

A few large raindrops plop atop your head.

“You really can’t walk,” Ford mutters, more to himself than anything.

You nod, arms now locked around his middle, forehead back on his shoulder. For lack of anything productive to add, and feeling somewhat infantile, you just repeat, “Sorry.”

“We need to get you inside,” he says, still to himself.

The rain starts to fall a little heavier, more noticeable.

You mumble something that might be, “Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Only because you are fully in his embrace, strong arms wrapped around your back and crushing you against him, do you feel when he starts to loosen his grasp.

“I need you to let go of me,” Ford tells you.

You make an extremely panicked noise, as if separating will be physically painful, and only tighten your own hold on him.

He lets one hand drag up your back to steady a wide palm, fingers splayed, between your shoulder blades, while the other slides to a vice grip at your waist. Then he murmurs your name in such a tender voice that you actively feel tears starting to form — and become very thankful for the increase in rainfall to hide any that might escape.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he reassures, in that same tone.

It takes a few moments for your brain to convince your muscles to get with the program. With a shaky breath, you loosen your grasp in the equivalent of a, quite literal, trust fall.

It happens quick enough that you are barely given the opportunity to actually fall. Ford lets go of you entirely, crouches down, and then you are being literally swept off your feet. He hoists you into his arms with a surprising amount of ease for someone his age, and then you are jostled as he adjusts his grip.

Simultaneously, there is a not-so-distant rumble of thunder, mirroring the feeling in your heart.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” you gasp, eloquently.

He grunts in vague acknowledgement.

Instinctually, you secure your arms as tightly around his neck as your muscles will allow. “Warn a guy next time,” you mumble, turning your face upwards to the rain in hopes of cleaning off any lingering mud.

“Seriously?” he complains, having the decency to sound winded as he slowly starts towards your campsite. “You asked to be carried.”

“I say a lot of things,” you reply blithely, feeling your wits returning to you now that you are no longer focused on trying to stay upright. You become keenly aware of where his hands are on your body: one curling around your ribs, fingers digging into your chest, and the other around the underside of your thigh, solid against the crook of your knee. It even gives you a front row seat to stare at the determined look on his face, jaw set forward and eyebrows pinched as he concentrates.

It’s nice. “This is nice.”

It’s not nice. The rain is only falling heavier now, leaving rivulets down his glasses. How does he still have those on? “How do you still have your glasses on?”

Why did you say that? “Why did I say that?”

“One thing at a time, please,” Ford says, strained.

It thunders again, this time almost right atop you.

Fuck. “I can’t believe neither of us checked the forecast.”

“I had more pressing matters,” he claims though his teeth, eyes locked forward.

The sound of rainfall becomes almost deafening as the heavens truly open up, a cascade from above. You try to concentrate on that over everything else, to distract yourself from the pain still emanating from your leg, each throb so intense your body responds each time, like someone is pulling a string taunt to jackknife you. It is redundant due to how dark it is outside but you still close your eyes and breathe deeply, hoping the accompanying nausea will pass, that you can force yourself to be immobile to the pain.

Then, Ford stops moving, jostling you again. He says something you don’t quite catch in your vaguely meditative-slash-exhausted state.

“What?” you ask, opening your eyes. All you can see is the dark treeline ahead of you, obscured by the downpour.

He presses his lips to your ear. “Can you crawl?”

“… What?” you ask again, more bewildered this time.

“If I put you down,” he clarifies, breath hot against your skin, “can you at least crawl into my tent?”

“Oh. Yeah. Probably.”

“Then, I’m going to put you down,” he says, resolute now that there is a plan. “Get into my tent. I’ll grab your backpack.”

You don’t even question it.

You have streaked mud across the waterproof tarp floor from scooting yourself inside, and, in the minute you have had to yourself, felt more miserable than you have ever have in your entire life. Droplets steadily drip off the ends of your hair, your skin is starting to feel outright numb, and all you can do is just sit there, trying to wade through a healthy amount of brain fog, counting your breaths against the insistent pain.

It ranks in the top three worst sensations of your life, physically and mentally.

To make matters worse, when an extremely drenched Ford emerges into his tent a few moments later, he says, “Take off your clothes.”

“I’m sorry?” you ask in a truly scandalized tone, unable to follow his logic.

He falls to his knees with a grunt, holding your bag in one hand, the canvas soaked from even its brief time in the rain. “You brought a change of clothes, right?”

“Yeah…”

He tosses your backpack across the tent to you — which is not that much space. Maybe six feet, max. You have curled up as close to the back of it as you can, arms wrapped around your legs into a tight ball of a human. He seems determined to stay as far away from you as possible, huddled next to his own pack.

“You need to get out of your wet clothes before you lose any more body heat. Change,” he orders, angling away from you to give you as much privacy can be afforded in such close quarters. “But leave your pants off.”

Avoiding hypothermia seems to be his top priority, so by that metric his logic is sound, even if you dislike it. Still in yap mode, you joke blandly, “At least buy me dinner first,” as you unzip your jacket.

Gone is the sniveling mess you were a few minutes ago, finding a desperate kind of solace in the embrace of a man who had saved your life without hesitation. Equally, being sheltered against the storm, regardless of how paltry said shelter is, has dashed any tenderness Ford had — quite literally — carried you with.  It is clear he is having none of your jabbering and is again focused solely on keeping you both alive. It’s a noble goal and, while you can’t fault him, you do think he could be just a tad gentler about this entire thing. 

“I need to bandage your leg,” he responds in acknowledgement of your comment, as you awkwardly wrestle an arm out of one sleeve.

That logic is frustratingly sound, too.

Lacking a towel, it feels redundant to put an entirely new shirt on if you are only going to get it wet again, but you rifle blindly through your bag to find the rolled up article of clothing anyway. You eventually pull out the shirt you have been sleeping in lately, which proclaims REUNITE PANGEA in large block letters across the chest. The thing is threadbare, hardly offers any protection against the elements, and sticks awkwardly to your body where you are still damp once you manage to get it over your head. The rest of your drenched clothes sit in a pathetic pile that you push as far away from you as possible.

Your effects are not the only thing Ford has brought into the tent; he has also procured a light source. His choice is unique, one which you have hardly had the time to puzzle at while focusing on changing. Only once you painfully begin to squirm out of your pants do you get a good look at it.

Placed in the center of the tent is a large, glowing jar, at least a foot in diameter and almost twice as tall. It casts everything in cerulean shadows; the color shifts and swirls, tinging teal, then cyan, and back again. 

You find the hue vaguely soothing. You find the jar’s actual contents less so.

Coiled tightly and stuffed into the jar is a large tentacle, which is the thing actually emitting the dim light. It writhes jerkily, pressing against its confines with thousands of cilia smearing against the inside of the glass, leaving translucent streaks. It tapers from bottom to top, until it is a dulled tip perhaps the size of your thumb; from its violently torn severance point at the thick base, it is oozing some sort of viscous substance, steadily leaving a small pool of much brighter turquoise liquid at the base of the jar.

The only thing you can manage to ask is: “What the fuck is this thing?”

Ford scoffs, still crouched at a three-fourths turn away from you. “That’s your tentacle.”

“My tentacle?” you repeat incredulously, still studying the thing, awestruck in the original definition of the word.

“Yes, from your jellyfish.”

“My jellyfish?”

“We can discuss the events of the past few minutes once your injuries are properly dealt with,” he says brusquely, pulling you from your tentacle-related reverence. “Now, are you at least decent?” He has to speak louder than before to be heard over the sound of rain splattering against the tarp of the tent above you.

“Yeah,” you tell him, not even having the energy to be embarrassed by his reprimanding or your current state: drenched, down to your underwear, actively shivering, and enervated to the highest degree. You imagine you look something akin to a cat that had unexpectedly found itself in a bubble bath, and just as grumpy, too. “This is as good as it’s gonna get.”

With a deep and steadying breath, Ford finally, actually, looks at you. Ever the gentleman, his eyes do not linger anywhere they shouldn’t, instead immediately falling to your legs, bent out in front of you. He stares at them for a moment before pushing the jar of glowing tentacle to the side and scooting forward on his shins to sit in front of you. He grabs his own backpack and pulls something out of it — a first aid kit. It unfolds like a sewing box to show off, what you assume is, an impressive array of items; it is hard to actually see anything in the low light.

External blood has never bothered you, and you love a good gory horror movie just as much as the rest of ‘em. So, as he gently takes hold of your left ankle, you finally lay eyes on your injured leg. You are fully expecting to see it stripped down to the bloody and taunt muscle of your calf, where you had assumed he peeled the skin off earlier.

“Oh man,” you murmur instead. “So cool.”

Wrapping itself around your leg is a luminescent, glowing, gemlike turquoise imprint of the large tentacle. The cilia have left thousands of tiny pox marks across your skin, an uneven formation of tightly clustered constellations, swirling steadily up your leg from ankle to knee. It glows slightly brighter than the jar, casting a shadow across Ford’s face as he leans in closer to inspect it. 

You look from your bioluminescent injury to the matching tentacle in the jar, and gawk. “That’s what pulled me under?”

Ford uses his hold to straighten your leg out farther, which distracts you from your general astonishment as you hiss against the pain: it is still throbbing violently, and the motion only aggravates the wound. Your body instinctively tries to jerk it away from him.

“Yes,” he says absently, austerity replaced by something much more clinical than it is gentle.

“And, you ripped that off the jellyfish?” Your jellyfish.

“More accurately, I severed it with my laser gun.”

“Right, yes,” you say, absently agreeing as you work to piece together the actual events through the fuzziness still overlaid atop your brain. “Of course. Your laser gun.”

He procures a bottle of isopropyl alcohol out of thin air, something that is probably less an impressive sleight of hand and more that your vision is still vaguely pulsing. The monotony inside the tent has just made it less apparent, but when you focus your eyes on a singular spot, it becomes noticeable again. It, actually, kind of feels like you are on a bad shrooms trip.

As he wets a cotton pad, you ask: “And you kept it?”

“Of course I kept it,” he responds shortly, frowning at whatever his assessment of your injury is. “I thought you would want a sample.” Then: “This is going to hurt.”

It stings, obviously, as he methodically swipes over every inch of the tentacle imprint with the soaked pad, and more than you had anticipated. Ford keeps a tight and slightly warm grip on your bare ankle as he works, keeping you from yanking your leg away from him as the pain rockets through you. Both legs spasm, one part pain, one part still shivering. It makes his next job of wrapping your calf in a cloth bandage more difficult.

Or, it could be how his hands are clearly shaking as well. You frown at his general state as you take it in, in the light of your tentacle; it is the first time you have gotten a proper look at him this entire time. His curls are plastered to his forehead, his glasses reflecting streaks from a hasty and improper cleaning job, and his jaw is clenched tight as he focuses, face set in a severe expression. Somehow, you don’t think the visible trembling of his entire body is from the knockoff shrooms trip you seem to be on.

“You’re gonna catch hypothermia,” you realize aloud.

“One problem at a time, please,” he responds inattentively.

“Seriously, Ford.” You try to channel as much conviction in your voice as possible. Which is… not a lot. Your spine hurts from keeping such a concave position for so long and your ass is starting to go numb from the hard ground beneath it, and this general discomfort is reflected in your tone. But it only feels fair that, if he is going to such lengths to take care of you, you should try and return the favor somehow. “You’re too smart to die of hypothermia.”

Dear god, why did you say that? “Why did I say that?”

“As I said, it’s the side effects,” he tells you simply. “From the venom.”

You frown. The fact of the matter is, you are so thoroughly acquainted with the effects of serious venoms and toxins in your person that you might as well call yourselves best friends. That is a pain like no other; this optical distortion, the brain fog, your suspiciously loose lips, none of those are venom-related symptoms. Those are much more like…

“No, I know venom,” you tell him, with confidence. “This isn’t venom. This is nature’s worst psychedelic.”

He huffs incredulously, like he cannot believe you are arguing with him even now. He is slow and precise in his movements as he continues wrapping, over, under, over, under. “It’s a psychoactive kind of venom. Non-stimulant psychoactive,” he rectifies, before you can call him on it. “A kind of tryptamine alkaloid; an agonist psilocybin binding to the serotonin 5-HR2a receptors and acting as an empathogen. You’re experiencing a lower threshold of neutral activity in the claustrum, and in turn are finding it —”

“This isn’t really answering my —”

“It also has a QNB-type incapacitating agent,” he pivots, unperturbed by your tone. “Thankfully, it seems to only work when in direct contact with its host, though I imagine you are still experiencing some lingering effects.”

Your eyebrows raise at his opaquely comprehensive explanation. When his hands suddenly slow to a halt, only halfway done with the job, you glance up; he is watching you intently. You blink at him. “Yeah,” you confirm, even if you aren’t sure what the exact symptoms of QNB-type incapacitating agents are — can this man never say anything simply? “I feel like shit.”

The intensity subsides; he shrugs. “To be expected.”

“Sounds like you put a lot of study into the stuff.”

Going back to his bandaging work, he tells you, “I’ve come into contact with it before.”

“Oh, reassuring.” You are only slightly sarcastic about this, letting your gaze drop back down. “That means I’ll live to tell the tale.”

He nods. “Most likely.”

Less reassuring.

Even if you weren’t so interested in watching the leftover imprint of your encounter disappear under the bandage, you wouldn’t be able to take your eyes off his movements anyway. Not only do you enjoy watching his hands work with such certainty, but as your glowing disappears, the slight illumination coming off his hands appears more prominently. It is primarily on his palms, but you see a dim wrapping around his wrists as well, disappearing where the arm of his jacket starts.

He must have pulled the tentacle off you bare-handed.

Taping off the bandage just below your knee, Ford runs one hand up and down your calf gently, inspecting his handiwork as he gingerly tilts it from side-to-side.

The sight makes you swallow thickly. Suspecting something is wrong wherever in your brain turns thoughts into speech, which may or may not have to do with your claustrum’s current subterranean threshold, you cover your neutral tracks by admitting, “I never really took to neuroscience.”

Ford leans away from you and rifles through his pack. Without a word, he brusquely thrusts something out to you that he has pulled from it, folded neatly and reflective of the blue light.

It is cool and smooth to the touch, but you understand instantly. Unfolding the mylar blanket, you wrap it around yourself, cinching it tightly with a fist at your front. It is large enough to cover you entirely, to which you are grateful. You wince as you fold your uninjured leg under you, only bending the other at the knee, not wanting to move it around too much.

You understand the general basics of avoiding hypothermia but you are less convinced this is going to help with your already low body temperature, as your still soaked hair leeches warmth away from your scalp. Heat does not generate from nothing and you are hardly going to start doing exercise just to get your blood pumping.

Ford watches you with an unreadable expression until he is satisfied with your conduct, then goes about hastily disinfecting his own hands with much less care than he handled you. The antiseptic hardly makes him wince. “That’s fine,” he responds to your earlier statement. “I can explain by way of example. Tell me: how are you related to Fiddleford?”

“He’s my father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s half-brother,” you reply automatically, in a startling amount of detail. “Why?”

Through the cyan shadows being cast over his face, he looks pleased with your answer, while he moves onto covering his own bioluminescent markings. “And, why are you in Gravity Falls?” He ties off the bandage on his hands haphazardly and closes the first aid kit, folding it back in on squeaky hinges.

“Looking for this dumb, stupid, weird probably-jellyfish that just tried to kill — hang on.” You glare at him, which he ignores as he rifles through his own backpack again. “What’s with the twenty questions? Why can’t I stop answering?” Something about the idea of the effects of psychedelics strikes you, about how they have been weaponized in the past. The horror of the realization dawns on you. “Wait, is this imitating the effects of a truth serum?”

“And,” Ford concludes, without answering your query, “when did we first start talking?”

“Several months ago,” you say, even as a distant part of your brain goes, no!!!!! Stop!!!!! “Via email. You sent me vague insults and — hey.” You scowl at him, and even with his back turned to it, you can see the self-satisfied smile on his face in the faint glow of the tentacle. You know that he knows, and now he knows that you know that he knows. “That’s a low blow, even for you.”

He just shrugs, uncaring just how subterranean that blow was, and pulls out a thick wad of fabric from his overstuffed backpack. “Truth serum isn’t its main function,” he tells you, not quite meeting your hard glare. “Very interesting side effect, though.”

“You planned this,” you accuse, all horrible thoughts of what his ploy could have been rushing back to you and leaving you dizzy — or, maybe that’s just the psychotropic venom. “From the start. From the second you learned I was coming up here and you insisted on joining, you were planning on using this against me to  —”

“What?” he scoffs, finally looks at you with an incredulous expression. The claim has clearly taken him off his venom-provided high horse. “This particular outcome was hardly what I planned for. Now, some privacy, please?”

Dutifully, you squeeze your eyes shut. Still, you continue to talk, needing to convey just how betrayed you are feeling on the most fundamental of levels. “Why the hell should I believe you? You just used my weakened state against me.”

“Your weakened — Why the hell would I want your life endangered?” he asks back, in the exact same accusatory tone, if not harsher. “That was, in fact, the opposite of my goals.” He grunts as he clearly struggles to change into dry clothes in the small space, without bumping into you or your still bared leg. The tent jostles slightly with the effort. The venom may have decimated your brain-to-mouth filter but it has hardly lowered your inhibitions. You are thankful for this because the urge to peek is. So. Strong.

But you refrain. Your crush takes second place to whatever is happening right now. In fact, any kind of affection you held for him hasn’t even made the podium for the top emotions you are feeling right now. Betrayal, shame, and horror have all stepped up to the plate. 

“You had goals?” you ask. “What goals? To make me look like an absolute idiot?” You shake your head. “That’s not hard, man, you didn’t have to dose me with truth serum.”

“I didn’t — I didn’t dose you,” he argues, like the idea is absurd. The idea is absurd — but you are in an awfully absurd situation. “I thought we established this was from your tentacle.”

You still aren’t sure how you feel about him calling it your tentacle. “It’s established,” you confirm, reluctantly. “That doesn’t let you off the hook, though. For all I know, you conspired with this thing to —”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I also got a dose of the venom.” Ford sounds extremely reluctant and extremely annoyed to be admitting this, which means you think it’s the truth. The glowing he just masked from his hands also serves as pretty solid evidence. “A much smaller amount, but an amount nonetheless. Does that give off any impression that I planned this?”

It doesn’t, but you physically bite the inside of your cheek to stop yourself from saying it; mentally, it feels like you are standing your ground against some EF5 winds, for how difficult it is not to say anything.

Instead of continuing down this road, you ask, “Can I open my eyes now?”

“Yes.”

You find your eyes much better adjusted to the low light when you open them. Now, Ford is huddled under his own mylar blanket, fisted tightly at the front in the same way you have. He looks positively miserable, hunched over with a dour expression, looking not unlike a reluctantly-bathed cat himself. You get a perverse sense of satisfaction about that, as rain continues to lash at the nylon of the tent. 

After a moment of just glaring at each other, Ford says, sounding wounded, “I can’t believe you think I would put your life in danger for something as trivial as, as… this.”

“Trivial? You think it’s trivial?” You feel offended all over again, just on a different axis. “I’ve spent weeks trying not to make a fool of myself and you think it’s trivial?”

He huffs. “I hardly see how outright lying equates to avoiding looking foolish, and I still don’t understand why you would ever hide the fact that you are actually…” He trails off, although looks physically uncomfortable to do so, like he is barely managing to stop himself from speaking. Reluctantly, you sympathize: it feels like your mouth has a mind of its own, with a direct connection to your emotional core. A dangerous prospect.

“Well, I am, ‘actually,’” you say flatly, casting your gaze back to the glowing tentacle. “Actually that stupid.”

Ford, almost quite literally, growls. The sound makes you startle and immediately look back to him, your mind assessing for any kind of threat. “I wish you would grow a thicker skin,” he claims in a harsh tone.

The comment, while a non-sequitur, serves to jerk you out of the beginnings of your own personal self-spiraling. “Okay,” you say, “this is clearly getting us nowhere. We’re talking in circles. How about we just, I dunno, stop talking? Entirely. Complete silence. Actually, since it seems we’re trapped here until the storm passes, let’s just sleep this thing out of our system, and —”

“No naps,” he butts in. “Not until your body temperature raises.”

“You’ll be here a while,” you inform him dryly. “I have piss-poor circulation.” You shuffle, trying to get more comfortable with your ass on hard ground barely covered by tarp, your feet so cold they actually hurt. “And I am not, for the record, doing the huddling-together-for-warmth thing, because I am so, so miffed at you right now.”

“You’re miffed at me?” he asks incredulously, rearing back, spine straight. The top of his head brushes the slant of the roof, where his curls are starting to dry in tighter ringlets than you have seen before. “You’re the one who spent the past several weeks masquerading.”

“I was — masquerading is such a dramatic term,” you reply, instinctually trying to verbally side-step any kind of admission, even now. Self-preservation is a helluva thing. “Nor did I ever lie. I was, at most, minorly obfuscating.”

Even through the dim light, you can feel the full force of Ford’s glare at you. It actually feels quite like when he confronted you about the accident in his lab. In fact, it feels almost identical to that, because you are botching this in the same ways. 

“It’s not like you ever asked, by the way, if you already knew about — fine, fine.” You wither under his continued scrutiny, and gingerly try to draw your bandaged leg into the huddle under the blanket. It is back to throbbing in time with your heartbeat and the cool air is doing nothing to help it. “Whatever. I obfuscated. That’s it.”

Silence naturally follows your statement, filled with the chorus of wind and rain and thunder, as you stew and steam. You cannot believe you are in this situation. You cannot believe you are literally trapped with this frustrating, frustrating man, faced down with the bleak prospect of your compounded mistakes. Trapped with a frustrating, frustrating man who just saved your life. Everything is all twisted and turvy and the fact you are drugged in some capacity is not helping you think straight, either.

You weigh whether you hate uncomfortable conversations or pointed silence more; the latter feels almost physically suffocating, making your chest feel like it is concaving. Ford is refusing to look at you, studying the jar of tentacle with a shrewd frown. Then you figure, he knows that you know that he knows, so what is there to really lose by continuing with the foot-in-mouth syndrome, anyway? 

Hatred of silence wins out.

So, you venture to ask, “So… are you rescuing people from eldritch jellyfish on the reg, or am I a special case?”

“Yours continues to be one of the more unique cases,” he replies, and you aren’t sure if this is a compliment or not. “But, thankfully I was prepared.”

“Prepared,” you repeat. “You were expecting this?”

“Well…”

“This does not help your ‘did not plan this in advance’ defense, by the way,” you tell him.

“Actually, I believe this is the part where you say, ‘thank you for saving my life, Doctor Pines.’” He does a poor and frankly insulting imitation of your voice.

Damn him. That would be prudent, wouldn’t it? You hate when he’s right like this. It is a bad tell of character that you haven’t said it already. Even though you are, undoubtedly and a thousand percent, grateful, what comes out of your mouth is a sort of half-flippant, “Thanks, Ford. Without you, I’d be jellyfish dinner.”

“That even sounded almost genuine,” he replies, slipping into familiar and comforting levels of haughty.

“It was genuine, you ass.” There is little bite behind your words, though. “I can be grateful and miffed at the same time. I contain multitudes.”

“Well-documented,” he says, wry. “One might even say multiple identities.”

In truth, you can’t fault him for not letting go of the matter, regardless of how much you don’t want to dissect this particular topic. The entirety of the situation has only been mutually known for roughly eight minutes, which is a terrible ratio against the amount of time he must have spent stewing. And you know the man by now: he gives off the impression that he is an expert level, Olympic medaling stewer. Just, a real palace of interiority for overthinking.

Part of you is still peeved that he has used this psilocybin trip against you — it is such a low blow — when you had been worrying about how to broach this topic for weeks. Instead, you are shoved into the harsh and unforgiving spotlight of truth, wildly unprepared for how to handle any of this.

But, fine. If he wants to talk about it, you’ll talk about it. “So,” you say conversationally. “When’d you realize?”

Ford needs no further elaboration. He keeps the same haughty tone when he says, “Unofficially? When you asked why it was always silicone-based nucleotides.”

“Dude,” you mutter, casting an abashed look away to the jar of tentacle. It continues to twitch intermittently, one part creepy, one part cool, still gradually oozing from its stump. “That was like. Day two.” Are you really that obvious?

“Officially,” he continues, “when I emailed again last week and got the auto-responder that was set up by… someone else. Your full name and title were in the signature line.”

It feels like such a mundane oversight; you had not considered that Ford might actually care enough to investigate your digital disappearance, let alone that your boss would actually set up the auto-responder. A kind of retroactive embarrassment compounds within you, which quickly requires some kind of outlet before you spontaneously combust from shame. Since you are speaking every coherent thought that passes across your claustrum, you end up saying: “I am going to kill my boss. With hammers.”

Ford makes a distressed kind of noise and seems to shuffle farther from you, if possible.

“Not really,” you rectify. “Well. Maybe really.”

“I still don’t understand why you held onto this secret, for so long.” He sounds like he is trying to be casual and indifferent about the manner but you recognize that titter of vulnerability now. “Wasn’t it obvious that I… I mean, that you were…” He trails off, eyes cast down. 

The realization blindsides you. He cares. He’s hurt. You’ve hurt him.

Horrified, the thoughts thus come tumbling out of you, unbidden. “It’s just, once I realized, I mean, we had already met, and that didn’t go so well, plus I had just trashed your lab, so I just thought, I mean, I was scared that —” Mortified by where the word vomit is heading, you clap your hand over your mouth, which is productive for the goal of shutting the fuck up but unproductive towards trying to keep the burgeoning body heat you so desperately require trapped under the blanket with you. A little bit of cold air seeps through the sudden gap at your chest. You can’t find it in yourself to care. 

You have to pivot. You have to pivot, hard. “Let’s not forget that you also never brought this secret up while we went about this, this…” You falter when trying to pinpoint the right word. “… Are we friends yet?” you ask. “Do we have a friendship going here?”

It is such a stupid and inconsequential question to the situation writ large. But one of the many reasons you have been so taken with Ford is he always entertains your diversions, however trite. So, he answers with plain honesty: “Currently, I’m not sure we fit the definition.”

“Yeah, I’ll agree to that,” you reply, even if that makes some sadness well up in you. “Maybe, like, a kind of quantum state of friendship?”

His face sours. “By the loosest definition of the word.”

“Schrödinger’s friendship,” you label instead. “Schrödingership?”

“You’re avoiding the question,” Ford says flatly.

“What question? I think I asked the last question —”

“Fine,” he snaps, startling you with the intensity. “Did you ever plan on cluing me in on your little secret identity? Or was I meant to believe you were ignoring my emails for the rest of my life?”

You wince at his churlish tone. “Maybe. I mean, it’s complicated. Lately? Not really. Especially since you decided I was a pest.”

“I never said you were a —”

“You’re right, I think the term you used was self-involved —”

“This is getting us nowhere,” he complains with that tone of finality he sometimes utilizes, that immediately halts any kind of response you could give.  “Especially if you are just going to continue being like this.”

Although you aren’t exactly sure what the this is, you do still want to steer the conversation off the rails before you admit something too personal. “You’re right,” you agree. “We have a fundamental misunderstanding of the scenario at hand. We’re practically speaking different languages. In fact, I’d argue there’s no translation available, so again, I raise the no talking and napping suggestion…”

Ford has the audacity to roll his eyes at you. “How many times do I have to say no sleeping?”

“You’re impossible,” you claim, frustration spiking at his insistence. “Can’t you just accept there are some things I don’t want to discuss? Is that so hard to believe?”

“I think I deserve some —”

“Didn’t you just label this as trivial —”

“In the context of the safety of your literal life, yes, but now that —”

“I was scared, okay?” you finally bite out, fists clenching, wrinkling your blanket. “We met, it went bad, I got scared. It would hardly be the first time someone’s opinion of me has soured because they’ve met me in person. In fact, it would hardly be the second. My coworkers love to remind me I am a quote-unquote ‘acquired taste’ so excuse me for having cultivated a bit of a digital veneer because of it.”

You expect him to think over the words, but Ford surprises you with a swift answer. “Then they’re all fools.”

“They aren’t,” you say, deadpan. “They’re kinda the best and brightest of the biological field.”

He shakes his head. “No. Like most scientific professionals nowadays, they are obtuse and phenomenally short-sighted.”

You wonder if this a compliment towards you, or if you are included in this short-sighted, vague lump of a scientific community. Mostly, you just feel thoroughly reprimanded for having run-of-the-mill self-esteem issues. “What the hell did the scientific community ever do to you?” you ask incredulously.

“Refuse to take my research seriously,” he answers in, what you can only presume is, quite a bit of venom-enhanced honesty. “But that’s besides the —”

“Research?” you repeat, confused and needing to press forward, unwilling to linger. “On what, exactly?”

“You’re changing the —”

“Cartographing the quantum foam isn’t exactly an area of common —”

“It’s not just that,” he complains loudly over you. “Think bigger.”

“Bigger? Bigger how?”

“I am trying to shed some light on fundamental truths of the universe —”

“Oh, we’re back on this again. Okay, multiverse apologist —”

“Will you stop interrupting me?” Ford snaps, with enough vigor that it does, successfully, shut you up. When he realizes you are not going to interrupt him again, he settles down, scooting a little closer to you, towards the center of the tent. “All I am trying to do is help move said scientific community along, but any researcher worth their salt insists on dragging their feet with outdated notions. It’s frustrating and, as you can imagine, has not exactly cultivated positive professional relationships. If you must know, our correspondence was a startling breath of fresh air.”

There, that must be the compliment, buried under everything else. Still, the rest of the implications make you hesitate, so much bigger than you and your professional-or-otherwise Schrödingership. He seems to believe he is lightyears ahead of the current quantum physics field; you don’t doubt his intelligence, it’s obviously quite vast, but this is a different kind of confidence than what you usually see on him. This isn’t self-assured; this is plain fact. 

“You sound like you’re already ahead of our current understanding of the quantum landscape,” you say, unsure, eyebrows knitting.

“Not only am I ahead, I’m —” His eyes go wide, looking startled, then he quickly snaps out: “Veto.”

You stare at him, baffled. “What?”

“I’m vetoing the current conversation topic.”

“That is so unfair!” you gasp, leaning forward, scandalized. “You can veto but I can’t?”

“I never said you couldn’t veto, I just said that I believe I deserved some kind of explanation about your intentions. Which, you have now given.”

“Oh, my god,” you scoff. “And you call me pedantic. Okay, then consider the conversation vetoed. Veto one million. God you are so, so annoying sometimes.” You rub at your brow, utterly exasperated. “I can’t believe I ever defended you to my peers. I can’t believe I still like you, even after all this.”

You only realize the mistake of admission when Ford does not offer some kind of snippy quip back. Instead, the rain-filled silence falls again, while he stares unabashedly at you. All you can possibly do is stare back, waiting with baited breath for his response. 

Well, this is it, you realize. The culmination of foot-in-mouth syndrome. You’ll spare the probably-jellyfish the work of hunting you in the water; you’ll just go ahead and die of shame right here, right now, on land.

Ford then asks, comically plain, “You like me?”

You have to physically bite down on your tongue, hard enough to leave imprints of your teeth, to stop yourself from launching forward and shaking him by the shoulders while shouting, yes, you idiot!  I’ve had a massive crush on you for months!

Instead, you mentally redirect. “Not that your ego needs a boost, but you’re one of the strangest men I’ve ever had the pleasure-slash-displeasure of working with. You’re kind of a rock star, man: you have your own secret laboratory, you work with things beyond the common imagination, you own gadgets even Roddenberry would be jealous of — yes, Ford, I enjoy your presence. Even when I am not enjoying it, I am enjoying it.” You huff frustratedly and shake your head, scattering any lingering thoughts. “There. Happy?”

Surely, there is no coming back from this. If things had not intrinsically changed before, they had now. You had pushed it over the edge. Expert pusher-over off cliffs. Massive cliffs. Just, unending depths beneath cliffs. 

While you try to curl up even tighter in hopes of maybe disappearing from existence entirely, he continues to look at you like you have just spoken in tongues, or perhaps grown a secondary and parasitic head. If you had any spare blood flow right now, you are sure you would be flushed from toe to tip. Actually, the fact your heart is running a marathon right now is probably a positive for your circulation.

Finally, he says, audibly strangled, “I enjoy your presence, too.” Like he is forcing the words out of him.

Realizing that he has probably pushed through his lower dose of the venom to say some kind of lie, something in your stomach plummets; you hate false platitudes and the fact he is trying to make you feel better, even now, after everything, feels shameful. “You don’t have to say that,” you mutter, not able to look at him, eyes cast down to where your toes stick out of the mylar blanket.

“I’m not —”

“Roughly twenty-four hours ago, you were practically hunting me —”

“What?”

“ — so, just, it’s fine,” you barrel on, closing your eyes, heart actively drowning to jellyfish-level depths. “It’s whatever.”

But, he doubles down. “I’m on a xenotoxic truth serum —”

“What? It’s zootoxic.”

“ — I borderline cannot lie,” he finishes, ignoring your interjection.

“Pah.” Still, part of you unravels at his insistence, and you open your eyes if only to roll them at him. “You got a smaller dose than me. I’d even hypothesize it means you can lie easier.”

The assertion irks him. “Fine. You want to know what I really think?” He puffs a sharp breath out of his nose, like a bull, and seems to steel himself. “I think you’re extremely frustrating. I think your empirical methods are unconventional, and that you make just about everything much harder than it ever needs to be, present moment included.”

You blink, taken aback by the sudden candor. “Respectfully, if this is supposed to make me feel —”

“I think your curiosity is boundless and that is a remarkable reflection on your character,” he speaks over you. “I think your innovations are so much more promising than anyone I’ve ever met, not including myself. I think you serve as a paragon of a reminder not every scientist is a closed-minded cad now.”

A hard, impossible to swallow lump notches in your throat.

“I like you,” he finally concludes. “As a person. Is that so hard to believe? I like your methods, I like your blabbering, I like watching you actively solve simple problems with convoluted solutions. Even before we met in person, I liked the idiosyncratic way your mind works. I even like it when you call me on the finer details of something trivial and how your nose scrunches up as if the mere idea of being incorrect is —”

Abruptly, he slaps a hand over his mouth, eyes wide again, clearly startled by just how much he has revealed.

Still trying to process everything that was just said, you don’t press him on it, as your heart continues to hammer a strong beat against your ribs.

Oh. Okay, then.

Your mind tries to take his words to gleefully flounce off with them but you grab the manifestation and chain it to reality. Although, it is hard to keep any dour kind of reality when he has said, point blank, I like you, as a person. This is different from cloud nine; this feels much more tangible, like you could grasp the words out of the air with your bare hands, to cradle them close. 

“Apologies,” he eventually mutters, removing his hand from his face. He proceeds to run it through his hair, making some still-damp patches stick up. “I’m not sure what just came over me.”

“It’s okay,” you tell him, only half in the moment. “I think neither of us are exactly aplomb right now.”

“To say the least.”

However, his admission has made you feel impossibly lighter and you would rather not press on any of it, lest he retracts anything. Despite how you got here, it is somehow one of the best case scenarios you could have imagined, seconded only to some impassioned confessions of attraction, but you’ll take your wins where you can get them.

Maybe there is hope for this Schrödingership after all.

“I’m sorry,” you finally say, slowly and emphatically. “For making such a mess of this. I never meant to. I always wanted to meet you.”

Ford swallows, eyebrows furrowing at you, not quite frowning. He contemplates your words for a few moments, as his expression gradually softens. Finally, he says in a fragile tone: “Apology accepted.”

You try to hide your smile by bringing the blanket up to hide the bottom half of your face. This time, the silence isn’t so bad. Neither of you manage to keep eye contact for that long, each finding something much more interesting in the near-empty tent to look at. 

“Well,” you finally say, composing yourself. “With that out of the way. Maybe a different conversational topic is in order?” you offer, for both your sakes. “To pass the time?”

Ford noticeably relaxes with a sigh of relief. “Yes. Please.” He tilts his head to the side, the previous embarrassment washing away gradually. “I do have some questions that I should have been asking you months ago.”

“Like, say, my name?” you tease.

The bashful look on his face makes you think if he could, he would be blushing right now. “Among others.”

“Okay.” You scoot forward a little, sitting up straighter. “Shoot.”

“Why marine biology?”

The mundanity of the question takes you by surprise. “Oh. Um. Did you ever see The Spy Who Loved Me?”

Ford shakes his head, but has leaned in, listening intently.

“Well, it’s a perfectly serviceable film,” you continue. “I thought the villain’s underwater hideout was really cool, when I was a kid… I guess if I went through some kind of hardcore synaptic rewiring and debuted a villain phase, I’d be that guy, from that movie. Theoretically fine in intent, horrible horrible execution.”

He blinks at you, like he had not quite expected such a hyper-specific answer. Some lingering, uncharitable part of you expects him to rip into you for your less-than-noble reasons behind your career path, but he just asks curiously, “Isn’t the villain always bested in those movies?”

“Oh, yeah.” You laugh freely. “But having billions of dollars and an underwater lair would be cool up until then. Hey, what kind of villain do you think you’d be?”

“I always imagined myself as a Victor Frankenstein.” His answer is quick enough that you just know he has thought about it previously.

It makes you smile. “See, there’s a good villain to aspire to.”

“Or, maybe a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation…”

Your eyebrows raise, surprised by the candor. “Are you Jekyll or Hyde?”

“Jekyll,” he sniffs. “Obviously.”

You chortle. “Does that make Stan your Hyde?”

“Eugh.” He sounds disgusted by the idea. “Veto on sheer principle.”

“You’re hogging all the vetos, man,” you laugh again. It feels nice to laugh. It spiritually warms you.

The corners of his mouth quirk. “I wasn’t aware there was a limited supply. But, I’ll ask the next question, then. Why take a sabbatical?”

Your heart seizes, almost painfully, like you barely manage to keep it from imploding violently within you. “Veto,” you say quickly.

Ford looks at you, baffled. “… Really?”

“Hey, I respected your vetoes,” you argue.

“You did,” he acquiesces with a small, reluctant shrug. He gives you a curious look, like he is trying to deduce your reasoning. “But, that makes me officially out of topics.”

“That’s fine,” you say quickly, snatching the opportunity to change the subject. “I’ve got a few.” You flip through the rolodex of never-ending questions about Stanford Pines to find one that feels appropriate to the moment. “How long have you been in Gravity Falls?”

He stiffens with a sharp inhale, but answers. “I only recently returned; I spent several decades… traveling.”

“Oh?” Your curiosity is piqued; you wonder where a man like him travels to, what kind of research he does abroad. “Where?”

“Veto.”

You broil a little under yet another hard stop but remind yourself, respect the veto. “Okay. How about: what did your last email say?”

He tilts his head towards you, eyebrows raised, clearly perplexed. “You didn’t read it?”

You shake your head. “I got locked out of my work inbox, actually.”

“O-oh.” He seems taken aback by this fact. He pauses, lips pursed. “Just that, well, waveform continuity was apparent, not implied.” Ford sits up a little straighter, falling into his element with ease. “The probability density is constant everywhere, but you’d forgotten the current is nonzero. A participle is in motion even if its spatial probability density has no explicit time dependence.”

You glance away from him, eyes unfocused, as you try to work back what he said. Probability density constant everywhere, but the current is nonzero? But that doesn’t…

Ford then adds: “I may have also asked to meet up.”

Your metaphysical-related thoughts take a sharp left turn. Truthfully, in the wake of everything else, you had forgotten about that part. “Right, Stan mentioned that. I’m sorry, I really had no idea.”

His head rocks slightly, back and forth, as if he is weighing his next words carefully. Finally, he clears his throat. “I’d assumed you had seen my request to meet in person and decided I wasn’t worth the trouble.”

It feels like the final puzzle piece snaps into place, as you finally see the whole of this picture; what all your obfuscation must have been like from his perspective. The clarity makes your throat close up. You try to get out, “That’s… that’s not…”

“I’d also thought you only bothered with me to use my laboratory space,” he adds, quieter and no longer looking at you, head instead turned to the side.

Good lord, that’s — “That’s bleak.”

He shrugs, almost resigned.

“This is, wow, okay, I’m sorry.” You say that again before you forget. “That wasn’t it. That really wasn’t it. I thought, um, I mean the lab space was nice but you as an individual are pretty much the main driver of how I spend my time right now?”

“I’ve learned.” To your immense relief, his profile affords you catching a hint of a smile on his face. “Even when you say you’re not, you’re actually enjoying my presence?”

You snort at hearing your own impassioned words repeated back to you. “Like I said, as if you needed the ego boost.”

“It’s always nice to hear it from a separate party, though.” Now, he turns that warm smile to you fully. “Although, I still don’t understand how you got locked out of your email.”

“Um…” You hesitate, considering a veto, but instead answer carefully. “A convoluted series of events that starts with causing a disastrous lab accident and ends with trying to understand how VPNs work?”

Ford snorts. “That does sound convoluted.”

“I just did some stupid stuff,” you truncate, with a small wince. “On either end of that spectrum.”

He nods, slowly, like he is seeing his own puzzle pieces fall into place. “Disastrous lab accident?” he repeats. “I would hardly call the mess you caused in my lab ‘disastrous.’”

You blanch. “I might’ve, um. That might’ve been my second one in a relatively short span of time.”

“What?” He looks thoroughly puzzled.

Again, you very seriously consider throwing out a veto, but something holds you back. The fact of the matter is, you haven’t been able to talk about this with anyone who wasn’t a biased party; it has been eating you alive from the inside since you stood in front of the board and had the verdict handed down to you, befit with rough reprimands and pitying placations.

There is a high chance the two of you part ways after this endeavor ends in the morning and you might as well give him the full picture before he decides whether or not he still likes your little ‘quirks.’ It feels only fair, after everything else you have kept from him, to at least give him this.

“I might’ve…” Your mouth goes dry, and you have to wet your tongue. “Well, to make a very long story short, I might have bypassed some safety protocols in a fit of exhaustion and had our resident flower urchin stubbornly attach some of its pedicellariae to my hand while I was moving it to another tank. It, uh, causes paralysis…” You shiver, and not because of the temperature; the memory of the debilitating pain is still branded, burning and black, onto your brain. “… Among other unpleasant symptoms. I hit a table on the way down.” Instinctually, you rub at the healed-over scrape on the back of your head. “It was housing a colleagues’ Cre-Lox recombinations — some multi-year project for bioluminescent neural imaging. Years’ worth of work, ruined, because I couldn’t bother with a full night’s sleep, or whatever.”

Ford stares at you, mouth slightly agape. “You got stung by a flower urchin?”

“It’s kind of more like a direct injection than a sting? Pedicellariae are kinda like tiny cups.” You make an outward-facing, concave cup with your palms. “They snap shut onto anything that disturbs it and detach from the stalk. I was actually pretty lucky, someone got them off of me pretty quick, those things can inject venom for several…” You trail off as the look on his face only grows more horrified. “Right. Sorry. Yes, I got stung.”

“And that was grounds for… for…”

“I got a lot of pity points for being the unintentional subject of some deadly sea venom and almost braining myself on the edge of a table,” you explain as patiently as possible, even if you feel like you are filled with barely-sedated wasps. “My boss argued my case to the board. It didn’t hurt that I got some valuable, first-hand data out of it. They landed on a sabbatical, rather than a dismissal.”

“Your boss,” he says, slowly. “The one you’re going to kill with hammers?”

“Yeah. He’s… multifaceted. Actually, he has six Ph.Ds. You might get along.” You consider Doctors Stanford Pines and Newton Geiszler in the same room together. “Or, you might kill each other.”

He scoffs, but does not dispute it.

“It’s a solution and a punishment,” you continue. “The sabbatical. Complete severance from the PPDC while I… take a break.” You say it sourly. “As if I had a life outside of work. Hence coming up to Gravity Falls.”

Ford nods and purses his lips, letting your story hang in the air. This does nothing to help sedate the wasps further, and you try to keep yourself still. It is hardly successful and you almost pull the blanket up over your head to hide yourself entirely. 

“That sounds awful,” he eventually says. “I’m sorry.”

The response is one of the better ones you would have expected, but the pity that is evident in his tone still stings. You shrug dejectedly, looking to the glowing tentacle with heavy eyes.

“Thank you, also, for telling me that,” he adds gently, which does help a little.

“A burden shared is a burden lessened, or whatever they say.” You aren’t quite sure if the burden feels any lessened after this particular admission, though. Mostly, you feel just as foolish as you had when the incident had occurred — maybe even more so, now that you have confessed it to a man whose opinion you value highly. “Pros of being on a zootoxic truth serum, I guess.” Your laugh is thin and forced. “Compulsory emotional vulnerability.”

“Xenotoxic,” Ford responds automatically.

It serves to lighten the mood, as your previous transgressions seem to roll off him like water off a duck’s back. “You still aren’t giving me proof about that,” you joke.

He scoffs, not a particularly harsh sound. “Just trust that I know —”

“Oh, I trust,” you affirm. “But I also verify.”

But, when he does not joke back, the atmosphere growing terse again, you backpedal before all progress can be lost. Scooting forward, you insist, “Right, the veto. Don’t worry about it. Whatever secret you’re keeping. Maybe you’re an alien? It’s fine. Maybe you’re part of a secret cult, Fifth Element-style, and — how many pyramids have you been around in your lifetime, would you say? Is there a monument to this creature somewhere nearby? Is it underwater? Please tell me it’s underwater —”

Ford huffs, and is much more amused than annoyed when he interrupts: “I spent the last thirty years traveling throughout the multiverse.”

He says it so plainly and casually that you immediately scoff and write it off. You start to rib him for such an outlandish statement. “Multiverse apologist to your core, huh? If you aren’t gonna take my suggestions seriously…”

“I’m very serious,” he insists, no longer as amused, which sobers you up in turn.

It startles you to realize that you are now sitting hardly a foot apart from each other, in the center of the tent, curled up under your respective thermal blankets. The proximity is what makes you falter. This close, you can see that keenness in his eyes is back, anticipatory and hesitant and afraid — just barely, but you see it. It is the same expression from when he showed you his hands for the first time.

Like then, he is also still waiting for your response, while you stare blankly at him.

Gravity, metaphorically, inverts.

“Oh, my god,” you mutter, closing your eyes as your entire understanding of the universe (universes?) tilts heavily on its axis. “You’re on a, a xenotoxic truth serum. You can’t lie, can you. Not like that.” Your mouth goes dry, and your eyes snap open. “You’re telling me I spent months arguing against fact? And you didn’t tell me?”

“I tried.” Ford shrugs, oddly cavalier but tangibly relieved, as his entire body relaxes — you hadn’t realized just how tense he had been. “Multiple times.”

“Multiverse apologist…” you murmur. “No. Multiverse truther? Multiverse soothsayer…”

To his infinite credit, he lets you sit and absorb this information at your own pace, not pushing you to discuss further or initiate any new conversations.

This is, by far, the largest curveball that Gravity Falls has thrown you while you have been here — haunted lawn fauna and eldritch jellyfish are small potatoes to the fact that the multiverse exists. Infinite iterations of you exist, an infinite number of them sitting in this tent, just like you are now. How many are getting the same bombshell? How many eschewed emotional vulnerability and are not hearing this now? You can’t imagine remaining ignorant to this.

All your improbable odds suddenly seem a lot more probable.

When you finally settle back into reality, all you can really think to ask is: “Was it. Um. Fun?”

Ford chuckles. “In some ways more than others. I may have had a handful of wanted posters by the time I made it back here.”

The thought of Ford as an interdimensional outlaw makes you smile. You wonder if any of them actually managed to capture his likeness, whether they managed to successfully get the individual parts into the aggregate that makes him so pleasing to look at. Somehow, you don’t think so. It must be impossible to pencil the cupid bow of his lips, the spattering of sun spots across his cheeks, the light of curiosity behind his eyes. All things afforded to you because of your current propinquity.

“Thank you,” you tell him earnestly. “For telling me. Thank you for it all, I mean.” And in a moment of pure feeling, you reach out and grab both his hands from where he has been resting them in his lap. Even through the layer of bandage, they are much warmer than yours are, and he startles at the contact, staring down at your physical connection. “It means a lot, Ford.”

Only belatedly do you realize now you have probably overstepped, to a degree that startles even you — but before you can pull away, he adjusts his hands to grasp yours back, tightly. It makes you stop breathing, and for the first time, your mind goes entirely blank while you stare as well, the image cementing itself in your brain.

Then you two just sit there, holding hands.

But then he says, sounding concerned, “You’re still freezing.”

Oh. Disappointment stirs in you, that this is the thing he wants to keep talking about. “Yeah, I told you it’d take a while.” You shrug, still leaning forward, undeniably indulging in the warmth from his hands seeping into your skin, a blissful feeling, even if the emotional one is not as great. “Sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing?” he scoffs.

That disappointment in you sinks further when he lets go, but then he is unraveling the mylar blanket from around his curled up form and — without asking — throws it over your shoulders.

“You don’t —” But the words fail you, right now. It is the same gesture to when he shared his lab coat previously, an embrace once-removed, but now with a million more reasons not to. “You’ll freeze,” you argue weakly.

“I won’t,” he tells you simply, now on his knees in front of you, fiddling to get the blanket fully over you. “I run hot.”

“At least take mine,” you grumble, squirming to get your original blanket off.

It only serves to get you more tangled together, but soon thereafter, you are sitting across from each other, still barely a foot apart, having swapped blankets. His is, undeniably, much warmer than yours and you are grateful for it.

“… Thanks,” you finally say, meekly, now feeling the blush returning to your cheeks.

He nods, looking just as flustered in the cyan light. “You’re welcome.”

The moment after lingers long enough that it becomes awkward, and unsure what to particularly say next, you just chortle and look away. “See what happens when we just talk it out like adults?”

“Novel idea,” Ford agrees, not without some cheekiness.

“Truth pact?” you propose, glancing back to him with slightly raised brows. “Maybe with a veto clause still attached?”

He nods and shifts around to get more comfortable under his now much cooler blanket. “I’m amenable.”

“Great.” You pause and adjust your own blanket. The warmth is all encompassing now, slowly bleeding into your frigid skin. Heat does always go to where it is lacking. “I like your sideburns.”

Ford blinks at you, bewildered by the statement. “What?”

“What? I thought we were being truthful.”

It must be the wrong thing to say, because he avoids all eye contact, raising his gaze to the slant of the ceiling behind you. “I didn’t think that meant…”

“Ah, whatever,” you say quickly, emotionally and physically blushing. “That was weird. Forget I said anything.”

But instead of letting the conversation fall flat like times past, he says, “I think your handwriting is atrocious?”

“What?” You guffaw.

“We’re being truthful,” he teases. “Aren’t we?”

You scoff, even as you smile. “And that’s what you came up with? Seriously?”

“Fine, fine.” He thinks. “I… think my lab coats look very suitable on you?”

“What?” You laugh. “They hardly fit.”

“We can get a few hemmed,” he tells you casually. “My grandniece is a whiz with a needle and thread.”

You greatly enjoy the implications that you will be wearing one of his lab coats again, in the future. “Okay. Well, I like your handwriting. Very neat. Tell me, just how obsessive over it were you as a child?”

“Barely,” he answers flippantly, which means you know the answer is actually very. “I enjoy your affinity for snowcone snails,” he continues.

“Aw, those little guys? Gotta love ‘em.” You rub your chin in thought. “Maybe I’ll try breeding them next.”

“Really?”

“Don’t you think that’d be cute? Little Herberts. Herbertlings…”

The conversation drifts naturally from there, taking different shapes as you continue to pass the time while the storm blows itself through over the lake. Ford, bless him, entertains just about every question you throw at him about the multiverse, and especially countenances getting in the weeds about its various nomenclature.

You fucking love categorization.

It becomes clear when he has reached his limit with your friendly but persistent interrogation when he abruptly deems your body temperature high enough that you can rest; he reaches across the small space between you to rest the back of his hand on your forehead somewhere around your fifth yawn in ninety seconds and declares: “I think you’re safe from freezing to death. You should get some rest.”

It is not lost on either of you that, as the rain has faded to much more manageable levels, you could probably make a break for your own tent… but Ford looks guiltily relieved when you pull the injury card and ask to stay there. He even offers up some half-apologies for not having a proper sleeping bag, just the bed roll he brought, but since he isn’t kicking you out, you wave it off as hardly a problem.

He also rebukes your insistence that he also get some shut eye.

“It’s fine,” he says. “Go to sleep.” His tone is gentle but insisting, an immovable wall made of soft verbal down, but you still try to fight against it even as your eyes grow heavier. Your particular case is not helped by the fact you have taken to using his thighs as an unconventional and uncomfortable pillow, but you figure it is the better alternative to waking up with a crick in your neck from no pillow.

More flimsy excuses that both of you let pass.

You mumble out something that might be a, “No,” or maybe a, “Wait,” or maybe a, “You should…” but the noise loses its purpose halfway through.

Ford chuckles from deep in his chest, now leaning back on his hands in one of the first shows of genuine relaxation you have ever witnessed from him. “Sleep,” he murmurs again. “I’ll be here.”

The next morning finds you still exhausted, still injured, and with a newfound knot between your shoulders from a few hours of awkward positioning, but it finds you all the same and after the previous night, you can hardly complain about that.

Unfortunately, you also find you are still shaky on your feet; your leg, still tightly wrapped, can hardly hold your weight and it slows your clean up efforts to a real crawl. It means you are left watching, with a not insignificant amount of amusement, as Ford tries to stuff your ultimately perfunctory tent back into its canister grumpily, while you enjoy the mild morning air under a clear blue sky. The borderline-cliché chirp of birds just makes it all the more picturesque, and serves to wipe away the terror from the previous night.

“Do you want help?” you offer for the bajillionth time, not bothering to hide your smile.

“No,” he gripes, jamming the tarp down into the can with two fingers. “I’ve solved Fiddleford’s contraptions before; I can manage a simple tent.”

He manages the simple tent after another half an hour, while you eat half a bag of granola you had forgotten about. Once everything is mostly-reassembled, you leave your campsite with the sun climbing steadily into its afternoon positioning. Ford insists on shouldering all the bags, handing you the tent poles to use as walking sticks, and together you limp and hobble your way back to your truck at an absolute snail’s pace.

It becomes readily apparent that most, if not all, of the venom is out of your system, because this time when you think you should carry me, it does not come out of your mouth unbidden. Never before did you think you would be so ecstatic over the ability for internal thought.

Ford uno-reverse-card’s your injury excuse back at you to insist on driving, which you object to on sheer principle: this is your truck and you really don’t like anyone else driving her — but, as well-established, Ford Pines is an infuriatingly stubborn man. The argument lasts all of three minutes.

You end up dozing in the passenger seat, with your jar of still-faintly glowing tentacle in your lap, most of the way back.

Once back to the Hootenany Hut, he continues his gentlemanly streak by carrying all your stuff back inside, and then you are suddenly left idling just inside the large mahogany doors, trying not to be so obviously keen on his return, while Ford steps back outside and calls his brother.

“Right,” he says, as he steps back in. He leaves the door cracked behind him, letting in a concentrated beam of light. “Stan should be on his way now.”

“Oh, good,” you say, for lack of anything else to say.

Ford eyes the small pile of gear you are standing next to. “Do you need help getting back to your room?” he asks, stepping farther into the foyer, maintaining a reasonable and friendly distance. You are leaning back against the wall that intersects the doorframe, one foot propped against it, to keep your balance. He reaches for your backpack, ready to take it.

“I’ll wait,” you tell him, which aborts his movements. Ford retracts his hand awkwardly and rubs the back of his neck. “‘Till Stan gets here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, it’s —”

“You really don’t have to —”

“Ford,” you huff. “It’s fine. I’m not gonna keel over in the next few minutes.”

He mumbles something that sounds like it might be, “You could,” but otherwise does not object. Instead, he preoccupies himself by turning to look over his shoulder, at a set of paintings on a rich, deep red wall, farther into the entryway. You follow his line of sight; from this distance, it looks to be all oil paintings of cows in hats.

With the two of you being the only two living things in such a vast space, and with so little to say to each other, silence naturally fills the air. Swallowing, you reach for anything to talk about. With tangible relief, you realize you have no idea how to tend to an alien-inflicted wound; you ask: “So, what should I be expecting, out of this tentacle injury?”

Ford answers instantly. “Scabbing.” Then does a kind of apologetic half-shrug, still focused on the oil paintings. With his face mostly turned away from you, it gives you a clear view of the strong lines of his jaw. “It ate away at the finer layers of your epidermis. You might also have to do some physical therapy to rebuild any soleus muscle that got too saturated with the venom, but we can assess that problem at a later date.”

“When will it stop glowing?”

“It might have, already,” he tells you, only sounding half-present. “But I wouldn’t remove any of the bandages for another day or so.”

“Will I get a cool scar out of it?” you ask, now doing nothing to obfuscate your eagerness.

Ford scowls, fully brought back into the conversation. “Whether or not it’s ‘cool’ is subjective,” he says, acerbic.

“Eye of the beholder,” you reply, tilting your chin up with a small smile. “I’m beholding it to be cool.”

“Behold all you like,” he says flippantly, finally turning to fully face you, but remaining in place, far out of arm’s reach.

Even though he is not the physically injured party here, the man looks about as worse for wear as you have ever seen him: dark bruising around the eyes, a slump to his shoulders, a clear lethargy in his movements. His gaze, though, remains clear and sharp; even as you blatantly study him, hoping to catch his attention, his eyes lower to your bandaged leg.

Continuing to grasp, you go on to say: “Um… thanks again. I owe you… Well, I don’t even want to quantify how much I owe you.”

His responding chuckle is thin, and his eyes go vacant the longer he stares at everything but you.

“But, um…” You hate to broach the topic — there is actually a long list of topics you would hate to broach right about now, but this particular subject falls near the top. “How long until I can leave?”

Ford blinks, eyebrows creasing together minutely. “Leave?” he repeats, sounding like the word is lost on him.

“I got what I came here for,” you expound as delicately as possible, unsure where you have lost him between the events of last night and the current moment. He seems to be fully detached and it is making your own mood dour. “I got to see the alien jellyfish, I got to meet you, I even got the added bonus of proof of the multiverse, so…” You trail off, concerned when he continues not to react in the slightest. “… Although I guess I never got empirical proof of that last one.”

God, not even that draws a reaction out of him. Maybe you overestimated the gravity of this situation…

“So…” You hesitate, then say, point blank: “Once I get the clean bill of health, I guess I’ll be going home.”

It takes another endless, absolutely heart-sinking moment, but reality eventually returns to Ford Pines. He visibly startles, inhales sharply, and, finally, looks you in the eye, borderline panicked.

“You can’t — you can’t,” he rushes to say.

“… Can’t what?”

“Go. Leave. You can’t, I mean, you shouldn’t, I mean, you’re injured, I mean, we don’t even really know what any potential sequelae might be, I mean…” He gasps in a breath, and seems to compose himself. “I mean. You don’t have to.”

Watching him stand there stammering, rapidly becoming red in the face in a manner you think might be concerning, is probably one of the cutest things you have ever witnessed. It makes your heart balloon up in your chest, and you bite the inside of your cheek to fight off a large smile that is threatening to break free.

But, Ford seems to be set on continuing to talk himself into a hole. “But, I guess, if you want to leave, then I obviously won’t stop you. I guess you could get that,” he motions to your leg, “checked out by a ‘normal’ doctor.” He says the word with poorly disguised disdain. “Although I have no clue what they could possibly do for you. Really, the best course of action would be for you to stay here, for a while, so I can…”

He suddenly makes a face like he is only just now hearing his own words.

He clears his throat, casting his gaze elsewhere, now abashed and dejected; like he has lost an argument that has not even taken place. “I guess,” he concludes, “after everything you’ve just experienced, I can’t blame you for wanting to leave.”

You like when he’s flustered. You like it way, way more than you should.

Very briefly, you hold a party in your mind for the continued ability for internal thought. Hurrah, internal thoughts!

“Ford,” you interject, in a show of mercy. “I don’t want to leave.”

It takes a few seconds for him to fully register the words; when he does, he draws back on himself, to a fuller height, puffing out his chest and folding his hands behind his back in a familiar stance. “Right,” he says, as if that had been obvious the entire time. “Right.”

You make eye contact again, and he quickly looks elsewhere.

Again, silence follows, heavy and ungainly. It is clear that both of you are waiting for the other to say something, anything of substance. When he makes no more moves to convince you to stay, evidently embarrassed at his previous slew of words, you wonder if you miscalculated here. Maybe all your Schrödingership was ever going to amount to was a friendship — a very good friendship, one that you would want to keep and cherish… but part of you still yearns for something different. Maybe something with more romantic feeling involved. Kissing would be a huge perk.

But, maybe it’s different for Ford. Maybe he is trying to let you down in the only way he knows how; by letting the feelings wither and die on the autopsy table. A wide variety of emotions war within you: fondness, rejection, hope, despondency, yearning, all desperately trying to take the reins so you can force this situation along.

Ford breaks you out of your thoughts when he admits, quietly: “I don’t want you to leave, either.”

You feel like you are about to spontaneously combust.

“Okay,” you say, faintly, unable to look anywhere but him, drawn by that natural gravity. “Then I’ll stay.”

He gives an audible sigh of relief, raising a hand and running it down his face, gradually, pulling some of the skin at his cheeks taunt.

Still, whereas you cannot stop watching him, cataloguing every minuscule movement in hopes of gleaning something from him, the man continues to look anywhere but you. You’d kill to be inside his brain right now. But, it looks like you are going to have to drag this… thing between you along, kicking and screaming. You will have to navigate it the boring, old-fashioned way: like adults. With words. And speech. Verbs and nouns and adjectives and such.

Words are not your forte; empirical fact is.

Grasping at that, you try to break the past twelve hours down into its base elements. You have both just shared an extremely intense and life-threatening experience, in which Ford saved your life without any kind of hesitation, despite your misunderstandings. He had, in his own frustrating way, kept you alive under the threat of hypothermia and, in retrospect, shock. Both of you had navigated, bumpily, through involuntary and reluctant emotional vulnerability, and seemed to have successfully come out the other end.

Ford likes you, as a person. He likes you even knowing that you hold a special level of intensity that keeps pulling others into its destructive orbit. He just stumbled through expression just how much he doesn’t want you to leave while you just, what, stood there basking in it?

The scales are starting to look uneven, when you realize you have hardly said anything of substance this entire time. You have been taking inside thought a little too for granted.

You open your mouth and inhale to say something, unsure what but willing to try your own stumbling, but Ford beats you to the punch.

In a rushed and vaguely breathless statement, he asks: “Did you really come all the way out here to meet me?” 

Officially derailed from your current thoughts, you blink at him, perplexed. “Didn’t we already establish that under the influence of truth venom?”

“Well, I mean,” he blusters, fidgeting and wringing his hands together, “there is no such thing as an actual truth serum, it’s just a lowering of the inhibitions in the claustrum to give the impression of a ‘forced’ truthful-esque state, but we both empirically demonstrated that it didn’t necessarily equate to —”

“Oh, my god,” you huff. “Ford. C’mere.”

He takes the smallest step towards you, eyes wide at your command.

“C’mere closer.”

In anticipation of another minuscule step, you take a very large step forward, momentarily forgetting that you are currently down to only one functional leg. But Ford decides to obey and also closes the gap, and you end up well within each other’s personal space. You wobble, embarrassingly, when you automatically try to balance on both feet.

Both of his hands automatically envelope your elbows to steady you when he sees your teetering. Now, there are only a few inches between you two, practically chest-to-chest; you are close enough to see just how flushed even his ears are, the light dusting of freckles across his face, the curl of his eyelashes.

You don’t need a xenotoxic truth venom to be emotionally vulnerable, you tell yourself sternly. You are an adult. You can use your words. You can and you will and the consequences be damned.

You continue to gaze up at him; Ford swallows thickly, Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Ford,” you start slowly, piecing together the words as the thoughts solidify themselves. “Stanford. Doctor Pines. You are one of the greatest minds of the past century. I dedicated several months to learning quantum physics, a field heavily removed from my own, just so I had an excuse to keep emailing you. Yes, I came all the way out here to see you.”

An uncharacteristic paragon of patience, you let him take the time to absorb your very-adult words. His eyes rove across your face as he does so, and you can only imagine just how discombobulated you look, exhausted and injured and forcing yourself to bare your soul.

Eventually, Ford asks, almost cheekily, “Just to have a reason to email me?”

You nod, continuing to champion patience, even if it feels like your entire body is filled with bees. “Your brain is, like, extremely attractive,” you tell him.

He squints at you skeptically, hands flexing where they still hold you steady by the arms. “My brain is attractive?” he repeats, more curious than dubious.

Shit. You don’t even have the excuse of the venom anymore, you already confirmed that everything metabolized out of your system. Seems like you are still struggling to delineate internal from external thoughts.

“… The rest of you is also attractive?” you offer, as if that will make any of what you just said less bizarre.

Ford hmmm’s quietly and thoughtfully, still never taking his eyes off you, which only increases the presence of the bees.

After a moment, he seems to decide aloud: “Your brain is also attractive.”

His faux-conciliatory tone makes you scoff. “Hey, I’m an esteemed scholar, asshole.” You say it with entirely too much fondness, trying to keep a lid on the bees and not squirm too much, but failing to keep your grin to manageable levels.

But then you are just left staring and smiling at each other, like two complete and utter idiots, because you are, at the end of the day, two complete and utter idiots, who only talk about their feelings under either alien venom or under awkward and bumbling duress. You do, however, take some comfort in the fact that you both seem to be bad at this sort of thing. Just, absolutely and distressingly abysmal.

Ford finally blinks, his gaze noticeably falling to your lips.

Well, fuck.

“Can I kiss you?” you blurt.

That startles him; Ford’s stare turns owlish. “What?” he asks, bewildered.

Ah, shit. Maybe you did misread this entire thing. Maybe he meant your brain is also attractive in an entirely platonic way. Maybe he meant I think my lab coats looks very suitable on you in an entirely professional manner. Maybe he is just the kind of person who stares at people’s lips to help with auditory processing, regardless if he is borderline embracing that person. You do love to jump the shark; in fact, you should add professional shark jumper to your email signature, along with, since it doesn’t seem to be there, your actual name —

“You’re asking permission?” he goes on to ask, only a few seconds later. The man even has the audacity to be cheeky with it, eyes now alight, a mischievous edge to his tone.

“Of course I’m asking.” You slip into an argumentative tone in a kind of auto-response. “Okay, fine, if you’re gonna be like that. I’m gonna read between the lines here, by the —” Quickly, before you can lose your nerve, you stand on your toes and press the swiftest kiss to his mouth, admittedly a little off the mark in your haste. “ — way, but for the record, asking seemed like the best course of action, so sorry if I ruined some sort of quote-unquote ‘mood’ by —”

This time, Ford leans down and cuts you off.

The kiss is extremely chaste and is, in comparison to the rest of your collected data over the years, extremely boring. But you still feel the rush of it, the tide of endearment and, admittedly, the satisfaction of being right washing over you.

Reaching up to grab the crunchy lapels of his poorly-dried trench coat, you tilt your head to try and slot your noses together better. Gently, you coax him to move his lips against yours, which he begins to do hesitantly. His glasses are pressed uncomfortably against the front of your face but you can’t find it in yourself to care. It’s perfect. It’s all perfect.”

One of his large hands leaves your elbow, and maybe you just imagine it, but you think you feel its feather-light touch sweep up your back and hover just behind your head. Ford makes a pleased noise somewhere in the back of his throat, a low and rich sound, which you immediately decide you need to find out how to get him to make it again, so you open your mouth to —

HOOOOOOONK! “Sixer! Get your ass out here!”

Ford snaps his head over his shoulder, breaking the kiss and knocking you a little with the edge of his glasses in the process. He shouts, “In a minute, Stanley!” Then, turns back to you, cradles the back of your head in a sure palm, and enthusiastically goes back to the kissing.

HOOOOOOOOOOOONK! “The hell are you doin’ in there?! I’m gonna leave without you, jackass! C’mon!”

You snort, actually snort, directly into Ford’s face, breaking away with a surprised bark of laughter, and then — mortified by your snorting — snort again. Overwhelmingly yet uncaringly embarrassed, you hide your face against the scratchy knit over his collarbone, grinning like a madman and trying to contain your bright laughter.

Ford huffs an exasperated sound you think might be his approximation of a laugh, then wraps both arms around you, encasing you much in the same way he had before but now with much less life-saving intensity and much more tenderness. He says, “I think I have to go, or else my ride is going to leave without me.”

Concurring, you nod against his sweater, and lift your head enough to be heard as you say, “I think we should both get some rest.”

He hums an agreement. As you start to reluctantly pull away and loosen your grasp on him, he halts you by cupping your cheek with a warm palm and leans in to kiss you again, so soft your entire heart aches with it. When he pulls back a few heartbeats later, his hands still on you and eyes half-lidded, he hesitantly asks, “I’ll… see you later, right?”

You break into a grin and kiss him again — it is quickly becoming addicting. “Yeah,” you mumble against his lips, still smiling. “I’m not going anywhere.”