Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Stanley idled on Gopher Road, staring at what had to be his brother’s house. The driveway was hidden beneath two feet of snow, but that was the least of Stan’s concerns. As much as he liked the thought of Ford wanting to reconnect, he had already known that the two words on the post card meant something had gone wrong. He hadn’t been sure what could have happened to make Ford actually reach out to him, but the outside of the house was painting a pretty thorough picture.

“What t’hell have ya gotten yourself into, Stanford?” Stan muttered to himself. 

There was barbed wire strewn in seemingly random patterns around the yard and on the front porch. The occasional keep out sign appeared in the yard, but there were way more on the porch itself. The snow around the house was untouched, a clear indication that no one had tried to get in or out of the house in a while.

Back in New Jersey, Stan had often acted as the brawn to his brother’s brains. It hadn’t been entirely necessary, but he had enjoyed it, and Ford had seemed to appreciate his efforts. Probably. Stan wondered for a moment if the too tight smiles had been from annoyance now and not concern, and if maybe he had—it didn’t matter, he scolded himself. Ford obviously needed him right now. 

Stan had no idea what trouble his brother could have gotten into in the middle of bumfuck-nowhere, Oregon, but it was unlikely that Ford had managed to get anyone as bad as Rico after him, so he was pretty confident he could handle them. A few broken fingers usually helped get any message across. 

After a moment of debate, Stan carefully pulled over just a teensy bit more and then turned off his car. He grabbed his duffel bag, locked his baby, and then trudged through the snow to his brother’s front door and knocked. Nothing. He hunched up his shoulders and stuck his left hand in his pocket, trying to fight the chill that was already nipping at him. A shiver ran down his back and his senses screamed at him that someone was watching, but when he looked around there wasn't anyone in sight. He ignored the feeling and let a little more time pass, then knocked louder. Then he gave another couple of knocks, this time hard enough that he was practically banging on the door.

“Oy!” Stan took a couple of steps back, cupping his hands around his mouth to help the sound carry. “FORD! I’M HERE!”

Still nothing. Stan held his breath, straining for even the littlest bit of noise, but he couldn’t hear anything. Not even any birds, and that was a little—no, he had probably just scared them with his yell. He picked his way around the barbed wire on the porch and peered into the nearest window. The closed curtains didn’t provide him the best look, but he couldn’t see any movement after a minute of staring inside. 

“I’m freezin’ my nuts off out here!” Stan moved back to the door and gave it a small kick. “If ya don’t respond I’m gonna pick the lock!”

He counted to a minute in his head, but when there was no response, he pulled out a bobby pin and went to work. He picked the lock in under thirty seconds and was feeling pretty proud of himself until he actually tried to open the door; it barely opened a centimeter before it hit up against something on the other side and became stuck. He gave it a jiggle, listening as it scraped against metal on the other side. There had to be another lock.

“You better not be dead…” He sighed, then raised his voice again. “I’m gonna break your window! Better speak up if ya don’t want me to do it in the next thirty seconds!”

He gave Ford longer than thirty seconds to respond, but there was still nothing. He moved around the barbed wire again and stood in front of the window. He braced himself for the cold and took off his jacket so he could wrap it around his left hand, punching through the glass. He used the jacket to help break the pieces of glass away from the window so he wouldn’t cut himself climbing in, then shoved open the curtains. 

This had to be Ford’s storage room. There was stuff everywhere. Jars of things that Stan couldn’t and didn’t want to identify lined the far wall, and stacks of books took up a good portion of the floor space. There were a number of loose papers littered around and boxes of odd crap shoved against the walls. Every spare inch seemed to be taken up; there was barely any room to walk. 

Stan hiked one leg over the windowsill and tried to put his foot down in between the scant amount of space between a box and a pile of books. He managed it with only a small number of tries and hoisted himself up and into the room—but he had to shift his stance as he did so, and his foot bumped into the stack of books. The stack fell over into the one next to it, and that stack into the one next to it, and Stan watched in muted horror as a terrible domino effect started up. Within just a few seconds, there wasn’t any walking space at all.

“I’ll clean it all up!” Stan called out. Then he thought about it, “Uh… in a bit… when I make sure you’re not dying or dead somewhere?”

Despite his words, Stan was careful as he made his way across the room. He took his time to pick up the books in his path so he could try to at least make sure he didn’t damage them any further, carefully ignoring the way his hands were beginning to shake. He couldn’t let himself think that Ford was actually dead. He was just—out of the house, or incapacitated somehow. There was no way that Stan was just a little too late. Not even his luck could be that bad, right?

Stan pushed the last few books to the side and opened the door. The storage room opened up into the foyer; the front door was to his left, and some stairs were on his right. Across the hall from him was an open doorway which looked like it led into another storage room. Wait, no, that was a recliner next to that ridiculously huge skull—was that the living room?

“Ford?” Stan called, walking towards the living room.

An awful yowl made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Stan turned his head to look up the stairs just in time for a blur to come straight at him. He let out a shout of surprise, hands coming up so he could catch whatever it was before it hit him in the face.

That was how Stan wound up holding an absolutely furious black cat. The thing let out a loud hiss and proceeded to claw the shit out of his hands and whatever else it could reach. Stan yelped and adjusted his grip some, scruffing the thing with his left hand and holding it further away from him. The cat squirmed and kicked, ears almost flat against its skull. 

“Ouch, fuck, ya little bastard…” Stan had half a mind to shake the damn thing, but just dropped it on the stairs instead. “Ford! Your cat just tried to kill me! Can you just-”

“Mrrp?”

Stan blinked down at the cat. For some reason, the thing seemed to have switched from hostile to friendly, coming down the last couple of steps to rub against his leg. Its ears had even lifted, and its tail was twitching high in the air. He wouldn’t claim to be an expert on cat body language, but he didn’t think it wanted to murder him anymore. 

“Good kitty?” Stan leaned down enough so he could offer his least damaged hand to the thing so it could sniff at him.

The cat did not sniff him, instead opting to rub against his hand and blink up at him with its green eyes. Now that he was looking at it more, he realized the front paws were bigger than they should’ve been. The cat was a polydactyl.

Of course Ford had a cat with the same genetic thing he had. The absolute nerd. 

“Okay, well…” Stan felt a little silly talking to a cat, but he knew it was a thing pet owners did. They’d had birds once, when they were like five, and his Ma had talked to them all the time. “Thank you for being chill? I’m going to try and find your owner now.”

“Mah!” The cat squeaked at him.

“Mah to you, too.” Stan patted the cat on the back and then turned back to his original destination. 

When he went to take a step, the cat was in his way. The thing made some kind of weird chirruping noise at him. 

“What, did Timmy fall down a well?” The question came out before Stan could even think about, a grin forming soon after. “Gonna lead me to him, Lassie?”

The cat very deliberately nodded its head up and down. Stan’s grin disappeared as his mouth fell open. The cat turned its back on him and went down the hall a little and through another doorway. Dimly, in his shock, Stan’s mind helpfully pointed out that the cat was male. Had the cat actually nodded? Stan wasn’t sure what to believe. The cat was a cat, and while he knew they had some amount of intelligence, he didn’t think they could understand English enough to respond to sentences.

But the thought of Ford lying in a room, bleeding out somewhere, was too terrifying to not follow the animal. The cat was probably just mimicking what he had seen Ford do, and was trying to get Stan to go to his owner. That was a thing that animals did, right? That was what Lassie had done... so Stan followed the cat. He ignored the fact that the thing seemed to be waiting for him in a doorway in favor of walking past it, only to screech to a halt when he saw what was in the room.

The room was clearly a kitchen, but the table had been shoved to the side so it was pressed up against one of the counters. The sink was overfilled with dirty dishes and the counters were littered with papers, books, a few tools, and various other random bits and bobs. Some of the cabinets hung off of their hinges, and one of the drawers had been yanked out entirely and was on top of the refrigerator for some reason. There was a faint odor to the room, old food stuff that had been left to long with an odd underlying layer of peppermint. In the middle of the room was some kind of weird magic circle. There were four weirdly grey candles on the edge of the circle with what looked like—no, that was definitely not blood on them, no sir. 

Perhaps the most damning was the pile of clothes in the middle of the circle. The cat went right up to them and pawed at the pants, looking up at Stan with wide eyes and a tail that tucked between his legs.

What had Ford gotten himself into out here?

Chapter Text

Stan stared down at the weird magic circle and the weird cat that nodded and reevaluated his life choices for the first time in a long time. Was Ford worth whatever this was? Because those were probably Ford's clothes in the weird magic circle, which meant… Well, Stan didn't actually know what it meant. Had Ford evaporated? Was he a ghost? Did he teleport somewhere, but left his clothes behind? Was he terrorizing some far off place completely starkers? 

Ford had asked him to come, and he had, because he had expected his brother to be in trouble. The issue was, he had expected Ford to be in trouble in a way he understood. Bullies laughing at him, owing people money, or getting a little too into drugs after being curious—these were the possibilities he had imagined on the drive up. He had never thought that he would be walking into a hoarder’s dream house and dealing with witchcraft. 

If he had thought about it even twenty minutes ago, Stan would have laughed at the mere idea of magic. Standing here, staring at the remnants of magic only his brother could have been playing with and a cat that was starting to give him a majorly unimpressed look, Stan realized it had to be a thing. And that, after a childhood spent getting a crash course on literally every single thing Ford had ever been interested in, he wasn’t actually surprised. Ford had talked about the possibility of magic a lot, and sharing a room with him had left Stan with a lot of random bits of knowledge that he couldn’t get rid of, like how the candles were probably set up at the cardinal points even if he had no idea why they would be.

So Ford doing magic wasn’t actually a surprise, but a small, bitter part of Stan couldn’t help wondering why that dream hadn’t been grown out of just like their sailing one. 

Whatever. Whatever. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, because this was Ford, and Stan would never be able to say no to him. It wasn’t about worth, or making up for past mistakes, or guilt—Ford was his brother. His twin. There was nothing on this planet that could stop him from coming once he had been called. 

The real problem was that Stan had absolutely no idea where to start. Ford’s clothes were here, but Ford wasn’t. There was some kind of threat bad enough that his brother was resorting to barbed wire, magic, and actually calling for help, but there wasn’t any clear sign of what it was. 

Okay, so, Stan just had to… look for clues? In his brother's horribly messy house with all sorts of bizarre things that could be clues or could just be things that interested his brother. Right, super easy. 

Stan turned his attention back to the cat, “You can’t talk, can you?”

“Meow,” the cat meowed very clearly. 

“Right, that would have been too easy,” Stan sighed. 

The cat clearly agreed with him. He meowed a couple more times and pawed at Ford’s clothes again. Stan moved closer to the circle and then stepped over the edges carefully, trying to be mindful not to smudge anything because it still looked a little wet in the little patch of sunlight that was coming in through the window. 

Ford’s pants held his wallet, and his trench coat had a book. No, a journal? Stan held the thing up to his face, turning it this way and that in the low light. He couldn’t help the snort he let out—of course Ford would go out of his way to customize his journals with a golden six-fingered hand-print. Knowing him, he might have even done the binding.

Stan opened the journal to a random page and stared at the picture. The helpfully drawn label depicted the creature as an Eyebat, but he had never seen anything like it. He was also pretty sure a giant eyeball with wings was some kind of crime against nature and he had a lot of questions, but he didn't bother reading the rest of Stanford's tiny cursive scrawl. He flipped to another page, then another, and then another, just trying to get some idea of what he was working with. 

“Oh, of course you still write things in code, you pretentious asshole…”

Stan didn't consider his audience when he muttered to himself, but sharp claws digging into his jeans quickly reminded him. He looked away from the journal to see Ford's cat giving him a dirty look, ears half down. 

“I'm allowed t’insult him,” Stan refused to be cowed by a feline of all things. “He's m’brother.”

And he was talking to a cat like it actually understood him. Except it could understand him? A little bit? Maybe? What was that word for animals that helped with magic, or were pets of magical beings? He knew there was one. Ford had wanted to turn Shanklin into one so bad, but Stan had argued that he was their younger brother, and they had compromised by giving him a knife. 

The cat made several low noises at him and then turned his back on him, pointedly leaving the room with his head held high. Yeah, definitely Ford’s cat. 

He turned back to the journal and squinted at some of the text on the page about Weremaid’s. He bet Ford’s code was similar to the one they’d used as kids. It probably wouldn’t be impossible to crack it, but would that actually help him out here? 

“Fuck!” Stan groaned.

There was a creeping feeling down his spine, a sense of wrongness that he couldn't shake. He still felt like he was being watched. He walked over to the table and put Ford’s journal down on it, trying to shake the feeling off. He didn’t know how long he had to figure things out, and he didn’t want to waste time trying to remember something when it wouldn't even help.

He needed to prioritize. His best bet would be looking around the house completely, searching for clues along the way. Given what he'd seen so far, there was a lot to look through, but he could do it. He had to.

Once he figured out what Ford needed protection from, he could then worry about somehow getting him back from his naked vacation.

Ford’s house was a damned maze. Stan had mainly stuck to the first floor and he was still confused. Some rooms had three stairs down into them, but two steps up out of them, and others had multiple entrances. He had run across at least three different fireplaces, but he only remembered one chimney on Ford’s roof, so how did they all connect? The house was big enough for their whole family and then some, so why was Ford completely alone out here?

Amazingly, despite the absurd size of his home, Ford had still managed to find all sorts of crap to shove everywhere. Stan’s pretty sure he saw an actual dinosaur skull, and the sheer number of books was honestly a little worrying. Did Ford do nothing but nerd crap out here? Even the magic seemed to fall under that purview, based off of the few scrolls he’d stumbled across.

Stan had expected to find evidence of a life well lived, not—whatever this was. A life well worked? Ford had always loved his research and learning, but this was overkill. What did he do to relax? Did he relax? Was that the actual problem, had his brother suffered some kind of mental break out here in the woods all on his own?

So far, despite having been wandering around for about an hour now, Stan only had more questions. 

As he searched this newest room—more books, more random artifacts, a row of sparkly flasks that he had to look away from to keep himself from touching—he became aware of a noise. He stopped moving completely as he strained to listen to it. Some kind of alarm, maybe? 

It was the same repetitive tone, over and over again. Stan left the room he was in and wandered back towards the front of the house before stopping at the hall with plaid carpeting on the walls and going down it. As he got closer to the sound, he realized it wasn’t an alarm at all, but the cat.

Crap. Ford’s cat was making some kind of weird noise. That was maybe bad? Stan sped up a bit, getting to the end of the hall and going into the room there. 

Compared to all the other rooms, this was the first one that wasn’t filled to the brim with assorted random crap. There was a large blue carpet on the floor, a sectional under the window, a desk against the opposite side of the wall, and a filing cabinet. There were some boxes pushed against the filing cabinet, and a waste basket near the desk was overflowing with crumpled papers. The desk itself had stacks of various papers and an even larger stack of mail. There was a corkboard above the desk with a bunch of sticky notes on it. 

The cat was right in the middle of the carpet, yelling his tiny little head off now that he saw Stan. 

“What is it?” Stan asked, “You ain’t about t’keel over, are ya? Ya can’t die before Ford gets back, got it?”

The cat flopped down onto his side and stretched out across the blue carpet, rolling this way and that and giving Stan the perfect view of his belly. Stan watched him for a moment. Maybe the cat just wanted attention? Who knew how long Ford had been gone. He felt a little bad for ignoring the thing now.

“Ya want some pets?” Stan walked over to the cat and reached down to pet him.

As soon as his hand connected with the cat’s flank, he got the biggest shock of his life. It was bad enough to be audible, and he could see the electricity sparking between his fingers and the cat’s fur. 

Stan whipped his hand away from the cat and cussed vehemently, shaking it out as his fingers tingled. The cat just watched him for a long moment before flopping its head against the ground and heaving the largest sigh that Stan had ever seen. 

“Sorry,” Stan apologized. “Didn’t mean to shock ya.”

He reached his hand out again, but this time the cat swiped at him before he could get close. 

Stan drew his hand back quickly, “Alright, fuck ya too, buddy.”

The cat turned away from him completely. Figured Ford’s cat would be a cantankerous bastard. Ha, cantankerous! Look at him with all the fancy words. Ford’s nerd aura was rubbing off on him already.

Stan stumbled backwards out of the bathroom he had found, and he just kept going until his back hit the opposite wall and he slid down onto his ass. He stared at the half open bathroom door and all the—

He closed his eyes and reminded himself that Ford was fine. Fine and naked, probably talking some poor man’s ear off. Or maybe he was off fighting a super cool wizard or something. 

Something soft brushed against his hand and Stan almost screamed. He looked down to find Ford’s cat, pressing in close against his side. The cat was staring at the bathroom as well, ears tucked down against his little skull and tail half wrapped around Stan’s arms. 

The bathroom was the worst thing Stan had seen so far. The mirror was broken and there was blood everywhere. It was smeared across the walls, and there were bloody hand-prints on the floor, shower curtain, and even the ceiling somehow. There was a nail lying in the sink coated in flaking dried blood, and the porcelain had red smeared around it like Ford had been trying to hold himself up. The small trashcan next to the toilet had been filled with bandages of all sorts, and there was an upended bottle of hydrogen peroxide on the floor. 

He hadn’t looked in the tub. He’d been too afraid of what he might find. He’d been too afraid that he would see—

“Mrr.”

Stan watched as the cat put a tiny paw on his hand. He held eye contact as he reached over with his other hand and gave the thing a few careful strokes. The cat didn’t swipe at him or try to bite him, instead pressing up against his hand and leaning into his touch.

“Maybe ya ain’t so bad after all,” Stan continued to stroke down the cat’s back.

The cat gave him some serious side eye, but didn’t move away. Poor thing was probably missing Ford just as much as he was.