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Ford had imagined reuniting with his brother hundreds, even thousands, of times over the past twenty-odd, or more, years. It was a fantasy that some small part of him clung to even after he accepted the impossibility of it ever actually happening. And yet with all his imagining he never pictured it happening like this, though who knows why; the whole thing just screamed Stanley. Ford thought that if Stan had seemed apologetic or worried, then Ford probably could have looked past the insanely risky stunt Stan had just pulled, and the fact that Stan had been the one to push Ford into the portal in the first place. The latter had been an accident, after all, not a deliberate betrayal like the last time Stan had ruined his life – and Ford was past that last time because they had both been stupid kids when it happened and now he was a full grown man in his fifties (sixties?) and petty childhood grudges were beneath him. They were.
But Stan didn’t look apologetic or worried, he looked, well happy to see Ford for one, which was nice, but also proud of himself. Proud, as though he didn’t care that all he’d done was fix his own mistake by making a catastrophically larger one. Ford felt his fingers curl into a fist, but before he could deliver the punch that Stan richly deserved, Ford himself was attacked: grabbed around the middle by two small beings calling him… Grunkle Sixer?
“Hey there kids,” – children, of course they were normal human children. They were much too large to be gnomes, and too small to be a collection of gnomes standing on top of each other, and not nearly hairy enough to be dwarfs. The little girl in particular was lacking the full and elaborately braided beard favored by dwarf women. And that other being over there next to Stan probably wasn’t one of the hairless gopher people of the dimension Rodentus 7, but an ordinary large young man, or possibly a very large and hairless regular gopher – “maybe we should start calling my brother by his real name now.”
“You never told us his real name,” the little boy objected, apparently seeing no need to let go of Ford to say it.
“Oh right,” Stan said. “Kids, this is my brother, Stanford Pines. Though we mostly just called him Ford.”
“But I thought your name was Stanford,” the little girl said.
Before Ford could say anything about Stanley having taken his name, the little boy interjected, “No, remember? Grunkle Stan, or Lee, had to pretend to be Sixer so he could stay at his house while he was trying to save him.”
“Oh, right,” the girl agreed. “Wait a second, Grunkle Stan, Lee… Grunkle Stan your real name is Stanley!”
“It sure is, pumpkin,” Stan said, regarding the little girl with a fond look that seemed to Ford to be bizarre and out of place and familiar and nostalgic all at once. “I’m telling you Ford, these two kids, sharp as tacks, the pair of them. You’re going to be proud.”
Ford could see how, hypothetically, a person could be proud of these two children. They were a bit overly rambunctious, but they were also affectionate. They still hadn’t stopped hugging Ford, and he was starting to feel awkward holding his arms out of the way, so he placed one hand on either of their shoulders. The little boy beamed up at him and the little girl squealed – in delight, he assumed – and rubbed her face into his shirt. Very affectionate. And while Ford wasn’t sure whether Stan could be considered a great authority on recognizing intelligence, there was a reasonable possibility that these two were fairly smart. What Ford didn’t know, was why he in particular should be proud. (And he was also getting fed up with the fact that he had finally made it home after well over two decades and he had yet to get a word in edgewise.)
“Stanley, what the heck is going on here? And who are these children?”
“They’re your family, Poindexter. Shermie’s grandkids,” Stan said, clarifying the point before Ford could get too thrown by the notion of Stan procreating. Somehow it was easier to wrap his head around the idea of his nephew, who may well have been younger than these two were now the last time Ford had seen him, having children than Stan.
“I have a niece and nephew?” he asked, his tone softening as he looked at the children with new eyes.
“You sure do!” the little girl chirped. “I’m Mabel, and that’s my twin brother Dipper, and that guy over there is our big brother Soos.” She pointed first toward the little boy next to her, and then over to the almost certainly not a gopher who looked nothing like anyone in their family as far as Ford could recall.
“Unofficially,” Stan added.
“Yes too officially,” Mabel objected. “I made him an adoption certificate for his birthday last year and everything.”
“That’s right. Sorry sweetie, your Grunkle Stan has old man brain and he forgets things sometimes,” Stan said, giving Ford a look like he was inviting him to share in on some joke.
Ford snapped at him. “Then let me remind you, you still haven’t answered my other question: just what is going on here?”
“That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I just saved you from what appears to be, I dunno, some kind of sci-fi sideburn dimension.”
“And we helped,” Soos said.
“Yeah, Grunkle Si-Ford,” Mabel agreed, excited. “Soos and Dipper found Journal #3 in the woods, and I used my feminine wiles to get Journal #2 from Gideon.”
“And Grunkle Stan and me got rid of the government agents that were trying to find this place,” Dipper added.
“Government… are you telling me that the US Government knows about my portal?!”
“Geez, calm down Sixer, the kid just told you we got rid of them, didn’t he?” Stan said dismissively. “Some agents did come sniffing around the other day, but I told them that all the stories about weird stuff in this town were just stories, and they left. No one knows about this portal but us.”
“I may have also told Wendy,” Soos chimed in.
“Fantastic. That’s just…” Ford trailed off, at a loss for words.
“Hey, Wendy’s a good kid” – great, more children – “she won’t tell nobody. It’s going to be fine.”
Ford reached beneath his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. Fine, he says, it’s going to be fine. Stanley had just ignored the countless warnings that Ford had left and reactivated the portal managing only by what must have been sheer dumb luck to lock on to Ford in the Dimension Without Shrimp, rather than Bill in the Nightmare Realm, and destroyed the portal in the process. And while, aside from the part of him that was internally shrieking about his life’s work, Ford could acknowledge that getting rid of the portal was probably the right thing to do, there were better ways to dismantle machinery that ran on radioactive materials than all but blowing it up. Then, on top of all that, Stan had apparently decided that the appropriate confederates for this extremely dangerous venture of his was a pack of children. And he says it was going to be fine. “Stanley, can I talk to you in private for a minute?”
Stan finally had the decency to look a bit apprehensive. Good, maybe he was at least peripherally aware of how much he had screwed up then. “Look Ford, I know me and you got a lotta junk to sort through, but do we need to do it right now? I mean, the kids have been really excited to meet you, cooked up a special welcome dinner for you and everything.”
“We even made Abuelita’s tamales; they’re the best!” Mabel said.
“Then later maybe you could tell us some stories about the stuff in your journals before we go to bed tonight?” Dipper asked, sounding both excited and nervous.
“And some more about your backstory; I need details so I can finish writing my fanfiction,” Soos added.
“See, we got tamales and stories and fanfiction, whatever that is, to get to. The rest can wait a couple of hours, can’t it?” Stan said.
Just then, Ford’s stomach rumbled.
Mabel giggled. “I think your tummy is deciding for you, Grunkle Ford.” She gave him one last squeeze and then finally released him from her hug, only to immediately grab ahold of his hand instead. Dipper followed suit, and neither of them showed any reaction whatsoever to his extra finger. They both had probably already known about them, of course, but knowing something was very different than experiencing it. And yet, neither of them seemed to care, instead chattering away at him about all the food that was waiting for them as they lead him upstairs.
The rest of the evening, despite some very unpleasant surprises once Ford saw what Stan had done to his house, was actually generally quite pleasant. The dinner they had made for him had been delicious, and his niece and nephew proved to be delightful children, if a bit odd and anxious, respectively. After dinner, Soos – who was frankly rather bizarre, but charming in his own way, Ford supposed – returned to his own home, and Dipper and Mabel asked to go to bed early, which turned out to be a ploy to get three straight hours of bedtime stories out of him. Eventually, Stan declared it to be time for sleep, and Ford helped tuck the kids in with promises of more stories the next night. Then Ford indulged himself in a long hot shower and fresh clean clothes, something that he had gotten on occasion during his days dimension-hopping, but sporadically enough for it to feel like a luxury. Finally, feeling more himself than he had in a long time, Ford went in search of his brother.
He found Stan standing in front of the mirror in the main hallway by the stairs, his gaze focused, but Ford suspected that his thoughts were a million miles away. Not wanting to startle Stan, Ford quietly came and stood alongside him. Stan smiled a little at seeing Ford’s partial reflection in the mirror, and shuffled to the side a bit so they could both fully stand in front of the mirror.
“Look at us; when did we become old men?” Stan said, gazing at their reflections.
Ford looked sideways at the real Stanley, dressed up in their father’s old suit and hat. “You look like Dad.”
Stan made a noise of disgust and cringed away. “Don’t say that,” he objected, and they shared a small laugh.
Ford sighed. Pleasant evening or no, that didn’t change what was between them, or what Stan had done. Stan may have been trying to delay the inevitable with this fun time with the kids, but, well, it was called inevitable for a reason. “Okay Stanley, here’s the deal. You can stay here while you’re watching the kids. I’ll stay down in the basement and try to contain any remaining damage. But once the kids are gone, you give me my house back, you give me my name back, and this Mystery Shack junk is over forever. You got it?”
Stan laughed again, though this time it sounded nervous and forced. “You’re joking right?”
“No, I am not joking Stanley. And I don’t think I’m making an unreasonable request here,” Ford said.
“You really aren’t, are ya?” Stan said, looking at him in disbelief and disappointment. As if Stan had any right at all to be disappointed in him. “Were you not paying any attention tonight? Do you even care about the kids at all?”
“Of course I care about the kids,” Ford said. Admittedly, he may not have been one hundred percent present this evening while talking to them, but that was only because he was worried about the wanton destruction that Stan had caused in the basement; it didn’t mean Ford didn’t care. “That’s why I’m letting you stay here until the end of their visit.”
“Visit? Ford, those kids live here,” Stan snapped at him.
“They live here? But their parents–”
“Got into a car crash when Dipper and Mabel where babies. They’re dead. And, not that you asked, so are Mom and Dad and Shermie. Mom and Dad both got lung cancer – I hope for your sake you don’t smoke, because I’m not having that around the kids and cold turkey is hell, trust me – and Shermie had a heart attack. We’re the only family those kids have left. Well, I’m their family; I’m not so sure about you anymore.”
“I…” But anything Ford might have said, and he didn’t even know where to begin to try to respond to that, was cut off by a very conspicuous sniffle coming from the direction of the stairs.
Stan sighed. “Kids, what have I told you about eavesdropping?”
There was a long moment of absolute stillness, and then the two small children came out from around the corner. Ford braced himself for twin looks of betrayal, but the kids, who not that long ago had been begging him for one last bedtime story, wouldn’t even look at him.
“Don’t get caught,” Mabel said dutifully. Because of course that was what Stan was teaching them.
“No,” Stan corrected, “I said if you have to eavesdrop, don’t get caught.”
Ford didn’t see the distinction, but the kids apparently did, because Dipper immediately protested, “But Grunkle Stan,”
“The only buts I want to see are two butts in bed by the time I get up to your room, got it?” Stan said, and the two obediently raced upstairs. As soon as they had both disappeared back around the corner, Stan slumped in on himself and began rubbing at his forehead. And, despite Stan’s earlier comment about it, it was only then that Ford noticed how old Stanley really looked. Much older than he should have.
“Alright, I’ll go take care of the kids. You can.” The sentence ended abruptly there, Stan turning to head up to the kids’ room rather than finish it, as though he didn’t care what Ford did.
Ford was beginning to suspect he didn’t.