Chapter Text
After that first night not another word was spoken about Stan moving out one way or the other. Ford had been okay with asking Stan to leave when he thought it was just him, because he was sure Stan would somehow manage to land on his feet. However, Stan was the guardian of their great-niece and -nephew – and probably doing a reasonably decent job at it too, given how clearly the three of them adored each other – and the idea of forcing him out of the house with two eight-year-olds in tow was unconscionable. But at the same time Stan was still the man who had ruined Ford’s life twice over and then stole his name, his house, and his life. And Ford was supposed to what, tell this man he was welcome in Ford’s home? Well he wasn’t; he was, at best, a tolerated presence for the sake of the children.
So things dragged on, with Stan and the kids showing no signs of leaving or looking for some other place to live, and Ford letting them. They stayed upstairs in the main house and Ford stayed in the basement, only venturing up when he had to and doing his best to avoid Stanley when he did, while everyone avoided Ford. It was a tenuous situation and one that couldn’t go on indefinitely, but Stan and Ford both seemed bound and determined to see how long they could make it last for.
There was a stranger in Ford’s kitchen making snacks: a gawky girl with vibrant red hair up in high pigtails and slightly protruding lips that spoke of heavy orthodontia. Well, not a total stranger considering her familiarity with the kitchen. Probably she was one of Dipper and Mabel’s friends, most likely the previously mentioned Wendy given her complete lack of reaction to Ford. And he did mean complete lack. Ford had come up to the kitchen to give himself a brief respite from sorting through the broken remains of the portal to see what might be salvaged and to get himself something to eat. Upon discovering the stranger already in there, Ford had stood in the doorway for a minute in confusion, greeted her, and then spent the past five minutes moving around the kitchen making himself a sandwich, and she had yet to give any indication that she was aware she wasn’t alone in the room. The alternative, Ford supposed, was that she was angry at Stan for whatever reason and had confused Ford for him.
“Hey Wendy, are the…” Ford turned to see Dipper standing in the doorway to the living room, and the boy’s words stuttered to a halt when their eyes briefly met. Dipper swallowed, then continued “are the snacks ready yet?”
“Hello Dipper,” Ford said, doing his best to sound friendly.
“Hi, Great Uncle Ford,” Dipper replied, his gaze skittering past Ford as though he knew the polite thing to do was to look at Ford when talking to him, but he couldn’t quite make himself do it. “Wendy?”
“The popcorn is alllmoosst” – the microwave dinged – “done. I just need to put it in a bowl and then movie night is good to go. Why don’t you grab the nachos and the sodas off the table and I’ll be out there in a second,” Wendy said.
Dipper agreed, darted in, grabbed the food, and darted back out again as quickly as he could.
Ford happened to be standing next to the cabinet where the large bowls were held, so he reached up and grabbed one to hand to Wendy. She didn’t snatch it out of his hand like he was half-expecting her to, but neither did she thank him or in any way show that she realized that the bowl had been given to her by a person and not a helpful piece of furniture.
Just when Ford thought she was going to leave the room without ever having acknowledged his presence, she turned around and glared at him. “Look dude, I don’t know what your deal is, if Stan really did something horrible to you, or if he saved you and you’re just being a butt and refusing to thank him, or whatever. But Dipper and Mabel are my friends and they’re sad and scared and hurt because of you, so you need to get your act together or I’m going to come down to your secret basement and kick your butt.”
Likely she meant to come off as intimidating, but Ford had seen far too many horrible things to be frightened by a child. Instead he found her self-righteous fury to be very humbling. “Things between my brother and I aren’t quite as simple to sort out as all that. But I am, I mean I will try to get there. And I certainly never meant to hurt Dipper or Mabel; thank you for looking out for them.”
Wendy’s glare went down a number of degrees in intensity, dropping from fury to exasperation. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt them; if I thought you had done it on purpose, I’d already be kicking your butt right now. Just, figure it out, you know?"
She didn’t wait for a reply, exiting to the living room and calling out to the other kids gleefully, as if the whole previous interlude had never happened.
Ford approached the house, feeling a bit the worse for wear but satisfied. Celestabellebethabelle’s friends had not taken it well when they saw Ford standing over their unconscious friend with her mane in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. But Ford had gotten the hair in the end and learned a valuable lesson: in addition to being frustrating, unicorns were also a bunch of lying jerks.
He slowed as he reached the house and saw Dipper sitting on the steps to the porch looking morose. Dipper glanced up when he saw Ford approaching, but for the first time since that very first evening he didn’t immediately leave. Ford decided that the barrier he had been planning on making – which was really just a precaution at this point, as he had yet to see any sign of Bill since returning to his home dimension – could wait a bit longer.
Ford sat down on the step next to Dipper, being careful to leave as much space between the two of them as he could manage; he didn’t want to make Dipper feel uncomfortable enough that he did decide to leave after all. “Thinking big thoughts?” Ford asked after sitting in silence for a minute failed to get any kind of reaction from Dipper or inspire Ford with anything particularly clever or insightful to say.
“I guess,” Dipper replied succinctly, a far cry from the clever boy brimming with questions Ford had briefly met before he had ruined everything.
Dipper’s fingers drummed a nervous tattoo against the book in his lap, and Ford smiled when he recognized what the boy was holding. The distinctive golden handprint was covered by a folded up piece of paper sitting on top of the book, but the familiar red leather and metal fastenings were unmistakable. “Which one of my journals is that?”
“It’s mine. I mean, it’s the third one.” Tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap. “Did you want it back?”
Truthfully, Ford had been meaning to ask for his journals back from the kids, he just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. It had seemed more convenient to use the photocopies Stan had made and left down in Ford’s lab rather than trying to hunt down two children who wanted nothing to do with him and demanding his things back. True, the copies hadn’t preserved anything that Ford had written in invisible ink, but from what little he had seen of those notes in his first journal, he had come to two conclusions: firstly, that the scientific soundness of anything he had written after he had gotten to that point was dubious at best, and second, he really did not want to revisit the frame of mind he had been in at that time. Still, he had been meaning to ask for them back if for no other reason than the comforting familiarity of holding the books in his hands. And here was Dipper, with Ford’s journal in his possession at this very moment and offering to give it back to Ford, and yet…
And yet, Dipper had identified this particular journal by calling it “his,” and he sounded so resigned when he had offered to return it. “You know, I haven’t been in this dimension in a long time, but I think I remember a saying from my youth that would apply to this situation. It went, if I recall, ‘finders keepers, losers weepers.’”
Dipper looked up at him with a surprised and amused half-smile, only for the expression to wipe of his face a moment later as Dipper abruptly looked away again. Ah, well, it was a start.
“What else do you have there?” Ford asked, reaching toward the paper sitting on top of the journal without thinking.
Dipper jerked away, partially rotating his body so that his upper half blocked Ford’s access to the items in his lap. The action seemed to be an unconscious one on Dipper’s part as a second later he turned back to his former position, blushing slightly.
“That was extremely rude of me,” Ford said, before Dipper could try to offer any apologies for his behavior. “Would you mind if I had a look at your paper?” Dipper didn’t answer right away, and continued to look anxious, so after a minute Ford added, “It’s alright if you don’t want to show me; I won’t be upset.” In fact, he would be upset, but not at Dipper.
“I…” Dipper chewed on his lip. “I have to remind Mabel sometimes: you look with your eyes, not your hands.”
“Of course. I actually used to say the very same thing to my own twin when I was your age,” Ford said with a smile. He saw a lot of himself in Dipper, or at least he was fairly certain he did from what he had observed that first evening and during their very brief and rare encounters since, and he thought there was a lot he could teach the boy, provided he found a way to mend their relationship.
“I know,” Dipper said. “Grunkle Stan told us.” Right, his ‘Sixer and Lee’ stories. What an odd, and oddly discomfiting, thought: that Dipper could learn from Ford without needing Ford to be there to teach him.
“Well then,” Ford said, pointedly lacing his hands together and placing them in his lap, “may I see what it is you have there?”
“Okay,” Dipper said. He picked up the paper and, very carefully and gently, unfolded it. It was clear that he had had it for a long time, and likely carried it around with him a lot, as the edges had started to get worn and tattered, and the ink had begun to fade away as well. That was probably why Ford’s eye was immediately drawn not to the large and somewhat ornate title on the page, but to a spot roughly in the center where someone had scratched out the ‘ford’ in ‘Stanford’ so violently it had ripped a small hole in the page and written above it ‘ley.’
Oh. That was… “I hadn’t realized that Stan adopted you as his son. And your sister as his daughter I assume.” He’d known that Stan was their guardian, of course, but he hadn’t known that Stan had gone as far as to adopt the children.
Dipper shook his head. ”No, Grunkle Stan is still our great uncle. He adopted us so he could make sure he was going to be the one taking care of us, but he says our real dad was a good person who loved us a lot, and you don’t replace family.” Dipper paused and chewed on his lip some more. Ford waited, thinking that perhaps the boy needed a minute to get his thoughts in order. After a few moments Dipper continued. “But Grunkle Stan took us instead of letting Aunt Karen do it like it was originally going to be, because Aunt Karen is the worst and she wouldn’t have taken good care of us. And Soos’s dad left him with Abuelita when Soos was really little and he never visits or calls or anything. So I was thinking that maybe it’s okay to replace family sometimes, if they don’t treat you like family.”
Ford’s throat closed up, and he had to swallow a few times before he could speak again. “Big thoughts indeed. Is… Do you think that I warrant replacing?”
Dipper shrugged one shoulder, which perhaps wasn’t the response Ford had hoped for, but it was better than the unequivocal yes he had feared. “Grunkle Stan worked really hard for a really long time to save you, and you never even thanked him for it, and you were going to kick him out. I don’t understand why you would do something like that.”
Somehow Ford didn’t think ‘I was only going to kick him out because at the time I didn’t realize he was your permanent guardian and that you and your sister were living here too’ would go over all that well. Which left the question of how to explain things in a way that an eight year old, albeit a very intelligent one, would be able to grasp. “The first thing you should know is that Stan and I have reached an understanding,” – granted, it was an unspoken understanding full of avoidance and anger and glares, but it was an understanding – “and no one is getting kicked out. As to why… I bet your sister Mabel has a knack for making big messes.”
“Yeah. She gets stuff all over the place when she’s crafting,” Dipper said with a smile of fond amusement that Ford found familiar in a way he couldn’t place.
“And does she sometimes make a mess of your things too while she’s at it?”
“Sometimes,” Dipper conceded with a shrug.
“And has she ever made such a big mess of your things that you wanted to make her leave so you could get everything back in order again?”
Dipper scrunched his nose and frowned. “Maybe, I guess. But even if she did, I wouldn’t want to make her leave forever. Just until I could get it all cleaned up.”
“Unfortunately Stanley’s messes aren’t that easy to clean up. This house was one I designed and had built to serve as my lab while I studied the anomalies here in Gravity Falls, and Stan turned it into a tourist trap that mocks those very same anomalies. And he stole my name, which is a very serious… thing to do,” Ford said, skirting around the word ‘crime.’
“But he only did all of that to save you,” Dipper protested.
“I’m afraid it’s not as simple as all that; one of the consequences of growing up is that things tend to become more complicated,” Ford told him. Dipper scowled, which Ford could sympathize with. When he had been Dipper’s age, he hated the explanation ‘you’ll understand it when you’re older.’ Of course, he did understand why adults had felt the need use that answer so frequently, now that he was older. Still, that was hardly going to make Dipper feel better now, so Ford cast about for another, safer topic.
“Did you know I made all those journals myself? I mean, obviously I wrote them, but I also made the physical journals.”
Dipper blinked in surprise at the abrupt shift in subject a few times, then glanced down at the book in his lap with interest. “Really? That’s pretty cool.”
“Thank you. I was trying to make something a bit sturdier than the average book one might buy at the store. Though not sturdy enough, it appears,” Ford said, frowning at the visible tears in the cover.
“The pages inside are still good. Well, there are some that got ripped out, but other than that.”
“Ah, well those missing pages are not exactly related to the quality of the journal’s construction.” Ford having ripped them out himself when at one of his lower points. “But yes, the paper inside is of a special, high-quality make. It’s still paper, so there are limits to how durable it can be, but it’s resistant to tears, weather, and the ink fading or running. And, incidentally, I actually have some more of that very same paper left down in my study.”
“Can I have a piece of it?” Dipper asked, the words practically bursting out of him.
“Of course; you can have all of it, if you like,” Ford said. In fact, he had been leading up to offering to create Dipper a journal of his own, but Dipper’s request for a single piece had him intrigued. “Was there something in specific you wanted it for?”
“My certificate is kind of torn up and stuff from me carrying it around, so I thought I could ask Grunkle Stan to make me a new copy on your special paper,” Dipper said.
Oh. Ford hadn’t thought… But of course that’s what Dipper wanted the paper for. Of course. “You know, I think I could help you out with that.”
Dipper looked at him skeptically. “But Grunkle Stan keeps the original copies in his safe.”
“You might not be aware of this, but your Great Uncle Ford is actually a wanted man across a number of different dimensions; I think I can handle getting into a basic safe. Besides, I can probably guess Stanley’s combination: thirteen, forty-four… well, I’m sure it will only take me two or three tries.”
In fact, it wound up taking him four tries, but Ford did manage to get into the safe and retrieve Dipper’s adoption certificate. He was thrown for a minute by the fact that the certificate said ‘Mason Pines’ on it, before realizing that Dipper could hardly be the boy’s legal name. Making a copy of it was a slightly more fraught experience, more due to Ford’s worries about what might happen than anything that actually did – honestly, Stan had no business sticking this particular copier in his study like it was common office appliance.
When the, mercifully not alive, copy came out, Ford grabbed it quickly before Dipper could, earning him a slightly hurt look from the boy. “Just one quick adjustment,” Ford told him. He pulled a pen out of his pocket and quickly crossed out the name ‘Stanford’ and replaced it with ‘Stanley.’ “Here you are.”
Dipper took the paper from him. As he inspected the change Ford had made, Ford could almost swear he saw the boy going a bit misty-eyed. “Thanks, Great Uncle Ford,” Dipper said. For a second, Ford almost, almost thought Dipper was going to hug him, but after throwing a smile Ford’s way, he scampered off instead. It was progress, at least.
(It occurred to Ford much later that, legally, it was his name on the children’s adoption certificates, which meant, legally, he could kick Stan out of his house and keep the kids himself. Legally, he had every right to take the children away from Stan.
Even just thinking it left Ford fighting the urge to throw up.)
Ford stared resolutely at the campfire, trying to banish the tricklings of fear and the near certainty that he was being watched from the back of his mind. It wasn’t a remotely rational feeling; he hadn’t seen any shadows moving beyond the ring of firelight or heard any strange sounds or even smelt the odor of any of Gravity Falls’ more pungent anomalies. It was only his paranoia-fueled imagination making him think there was any danger here. Well, any physical danger.
The morning of the day before yesterday Ford had finally left on his extremely belated trip to the caves where he’d first discovered the information on Bill. He didn’t have particularly high hopes of there being anything there that he hadn’t already discovered elsewhere in his travels through the multiverse, but it was worth a look. And certainly it was worth destroying the inscriptions on summoning Bill. Unfortunately, while he had accurately recalled that it was roughly a three day hike to reach the caves, he hadn’t thought to take into account that his memories of how to get there had become somewhat eroded over the intervening years. So despite his steady and relatively quick pace and taking full advantage of the long hours of summer daylight, by the time he had reached his destination today it had been too late to do anything but settle in for the night. If he would have known how disturbing he was going to find sleeping right outside the caves, he would have backtracked a bit before setting up camp, but there was nothing to be done about that now either.
Ford pulled his bag over, thinking that he might be able to distract himself by flipping through one of his journals. He had brought all three with him – well, technically he had brought the first one and his copies of the other two, the originals still being with Dipper and Mabel – just in case. He started to reach for the first one as it was the only one of them to not have any reference to Bill, but then decided on the third one instead; he rather liked the idea of reading about some of his and Fiddleford’s adventures. (He was really going to have to put his foot down and make someone tell him what had happened to Fiddleford sometime soon.) But the packet of papers that Ford closed his hand around couldn’t possibly be either of his copies of the journals, being both noticeably thinner and held together by a staple rather than the simple binding that Ford had used. Intrigued, Ford pulled the packet out and set it on his lap, where he stared at it in total bafflement for several long seconds.
The Totally Epic Saga of Sixer and Lee, the Best Twins in the World Except for Maybe Dipper and Mabel, Actually It’s Probably a Tie, Part Four: The Long-Awaited Reunion Which Goes Really Great Except Then It Doesn’t and Everyone Is Super Sad Until the Really Awesome Reconciliation, by Soos Ramirez.
This must be the fanfiction thing that Soos mentioned, snuck into Ford’s bag for some unknown reason, he finally decided. He stared at the front page a little longer before taking out his pen and beginning to liberally cross out words. When he was done, the new title read: The Saga of Sixer and Lee, Part Four: Reunion and Reconciliation. A bit on the nose and not particularly eloquent, but it was decent enough. That taken care of, Ford flipped the page and began reading. If nothing else, it would probably serve as a fairly thorough distraction.
He found himself making frequent use of his pen throughout the story, both to fix the numerous grammar mistakes and to point out some of the issues with the story structure as well: the occasional abrupt scene transition, the constant inexplicably shifting point of view, and the weak grasp the story had on the Sixer character, especially in comparison to the others, to start. But in spite of that, there was something to the story, possibly in the phrasing or the descriptions or maybe just in the fact that Ford was intimately familiar with the subject matter, that communicated the emotions it wanted to clear and strong. Like the conclusion: no matter how ridiculous and unrealistic Ford thought it was that Sixer would thank Lee for saving his life and that would, almost instantly it seemed, solve their all problems, in the moment Ford could feel it and wanted it to be true more than anything. It was a little jarring to reach the end of the story and find himself back in reality.
Ford flipped back through the pages again and found himself feeling a bit guilty at how many corrections he had made. Soos might be the oldest of the children that had attached themselves to Stan, but he was still a child – or, at least, Ford thought he was a child based on his behavior. He was relatively young, at any rate. And children should be encouraged in their interests. Ford couldn’t take back the corrections he had made, and even if he could he wouldn’t, because how else would the boy learn, but he could and did leave additional notes throughout pointing out his favorite parts and other well-excuted bits and left an additional note at the end thanking Soos for sharing the story with him.
Three days later, after Ford had returned home with nothing to show for his journey except a lingering smoky smell from burning all the paintings off the cave walls with his ray gun, he placed the edited story behind the counter in the gift shop where he thought Soos was most likely to find it, and then more or less forgot about it.
At least, he forgot until another three days later, when Ford was up in the main house to take a shower – he knew he should have had one installed down in the basement when the house was being built – and ended up being the victim of what he could only describe as a walk-by hugging. He’d been headed down the hallway toward the bathroom when he saw Soos coming down the same hallway in the opposite direction. Ford gave a brief nod in greeting and then went back to considering more important matters, like what he was going to do if that really had been a crack in the glass in the Rift’s containment dome and what he could possibly get Dipper and Mabel for their upcoming birthday to make up for eight missed ones. So he was taken completely unawares when, as Soos passed Ford, he turned, grabbed Ford around the middle, gave a quick squeeze, and then let go and continued on his way as though it had never happened. It was bizarre, but Soos himself was rather bizarre, so Ford decided not to worry about it.
When he had finished showering, he opened the bathroom door to be confronted with a pile of papers sitting on the ground directly in front of him. Picking them up and shuffling through revealed them to be The Saga of Sixer and Lee, parts one through three, plus a new draft of part four. He looked around, but there was no immediate sign of Soos hanging about, and the placement seemed too deliberate for them to have been dropped on accident. So Ford shrugged, tucked the papers under one arm, and took them back down to the basement with him. You never knew when you might be in need of a distraction.
“Hi Great Uncle Ford!”
Ford stopped dead in his tracks. No one greeted him in that chipper and excited of a tone. Dipper had gotten close to that level twice since he’d started talking to Ford again, once when Ford had been teaching him how to play Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons, which the boy was proving to be quite adept at, and another time when Dipper was telling Ford that since Ford had been sucked into the portal, they had made nine more movies and four spin-off TV series of one of Ford’s favorite shows when he was a kid: Wagon Train to the Stars. But he still greeted Ford hesitantly, as though half-expecting Ford to suddenly turn into a monster of some kind. Wendy’s greetings, when she deigned to greet Ford at all, were limited to a nod or a laconic “’Sup?” and Soos still wasn’t actually talking to Ford, presumably as a show of loyalty to Stan, despite the numerous story drafts that kept conveniently finding themselves in Ford’s path. As for Stan… well, the two of them were managing civility when they had to talk, but they were still avoiding doing so whenever possible.
“Yeah, I’m talking to you,” Mabel continued brightly. “Get in here a minute.”
A very small part of Ford wanted to brush off her summons, or at least request that she wait for the five minutes it would take to safely sequester the rift in his study. But Ford squashed that urge down. Honestly, now that the Rift’s containment dome had been slathered in the alien adhesive, it could be used as a baseball without any real danger of the Rift being opened. Putting it away would only be for Ford’s own peace of mind, and if his niece wanted to see him, then that was more important.
“Hello,” he said, coming into the kitchen to sit down at the table, where it appeared that a small explosion of arts and craft supplies had gone off. At the epicenter of the explosion was Mabel, who currently had a pair of knitted red ribbons in one hand, and a hot glue gun in the other, which she was using to affix the ribbons to a many-pointed cardboard star.
“How did your mission go today?” she asked him, while making slight adjustments to the positioning of the ribbons.
“My mission?” Ford echoed. He hadn’t told anyone what he had been planning on doing today. He had considered telling Dipper and inviting the boy along, but he thought it unlikely that Dipper would agree to go without seeking permission from Stan first, and there was no chance that Stan would agree to it, either out of spite or because he arbitrarily decided it was too dangerous. Though, on second thought Ford had to admit that worries about the dangers Crash Site Omega might pose for an eight year old might not be entirely unfounded, and it would probably be prudent to put off bringing the children along on such adventures until they were a bit older.
“Yeah, you left the house this morning looking all serious like this,” Mabel contorted her features in a way that was likely supposed to appear serious, but mainly came off comical, “so I thought you must’ve been going on a mission.”
“That’s very astute of you. Yes, I was going on a mission this morning, one to help contain the damage Stan caused when he started up the portal again.”
Mabel’s expression briefly flashed a moue of displeasure, but she shook it off and smiled at him again. “And…? How’d it go?”
“Well. I haven’t completely solved the problem, but I was able to apply a stop-gap measure to buy more time, which was my primary purpose in going out today.”
“Good job!” Mabel said, setting aside what she was working on to sort through the pile of stickers to her right. Eventually she found what she was looking for and slapped a sticker on his lapel: a garish yellow-green cat with purple stripes, an uncomfortably large grin, and a caption that read, ‘Purrrrrfect!!!’ “Plus if you scratch it, it smells like peaches,” Mabel informed him. With a sense of morbid curiosity, Ford scratched the sticker and held it up to his nose; it did indeed smell like peaches.
“Thank you,” Ford said. There was a long moment of silence following that, which seemed awkward to Ford, though Mabel, who was busy adding a pin clasp to what Ford now assumed was the back of her cardboard star, didn’t seem to notice. “And what have you been working on today?” Ford asked when the silence got to be too much.
“I’m making an award,” Mabel told him.
“What kind of award?”
“An award for you, silly. That’s why I called you over here.”
Ford felt a warn sensation in his chest. He had been trying to do right by the children ever since he’d messed up big time that first evening, and it was nice to know that he was making, apparently significant, progress. He reached out for the award, then stopped himself, remembering that first real conversation he had had with Dipper. “May I see it?”
Mabel frown thoughtfully and gave a few pokes, first gently, then firmer, to the ribbons and the pin clasp. Satisfied, she nodded and held it up for Ford, “Here you go; try it on.”
One look at the front made it immediately apparent what the roll of gold foil circular stickers that Mabel had was for. She had covered the front of her cardboard star with a series of overlapping rings until the entire thing was gold in appearance. Then she had taken a combination of black pen and silver glitter glue and written ‘NOT AS MUCH OF A JERK AS YOU COULD HAVE BEEN.’ The whole thing was finished off by a sticker of an apple that was both crying and giving a thumbs up.
“Thank you, Mabel. It’s very… direct,” Ford said uncertainly, taking the creation and pining it on his jacket beneath the cat sticker.
“Sure is!” Mabel said.
“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but do you think there’s any way I might be able to graduate up to something a little better, like ‘much less of a jerk than you could have been,’ or even ‘not a jerk?’”
“Look, if it were entirely up to me, you’d already be at ‘a pretty okay guy.’ Cause you helped Dipper out with his certificate and you do all that nerdy stuff with him, and you helped Soos with his fanfiction, and you’re going to take me to meet a unicorn.”
“I am?” Ford said. That was news to him.
“C’mon Great Uncle Ford, did you think I wouldn’t recognize the unicorn hair around the outside of the shack. I’m obsessed with unicorns! You have to take me to meet one!”
“I’m not sure that’s such a great idea,” Ford said hesitantly – unicorns were jerks that Mabel didn’t need to be exposed to, not to mention that Ford wasn’t exactly in their good books – and Mabel’s face fell. She looked absolutely devastated. “I’ll see what I can arrange.”
Mabel screamed with delight. “I can’t wait to tell Candy and Grenda and Wendy and Pacifica that we get to meet a unicorn!”
“Maybe we shouldn’t tell your friends about this,” Ford started and Mabel’s face fell again. “At least, not until I get a chance to clear it with the unicorns first.” Mabel let out another cry of glee, and in spite of the thought of the onerous task Ford had just signed himself up for, he couldn’t help but smile at her. “So what do you say; you think that’ll move me up a few levels?”
“It’s definitely helping,” Mabel said. “But if you really want to get a better award, then what you have to do is tell Grunkle Stan thank you for saving you and the two of you need to hug it out.”
Ford supposed he shouldn’t be surprised by that response, but it was… disappointing, to be reminded that he was the outsider here. “It’s not as simple as all that,” he told her.
“Course it is,” Mabel insisted. “Hugs fix everything.”
Ford sighed. He hated to spoil her innocence, even a little bit, but the truth was hugs did not fix everything, certainly not what was between him and Stan. “How much do you know about why the two of us are fighting?”
“Dipper says that you said that you’re mad at Grunkle Stan because he borrowed your name and because he changed your house all around. But really the two of you were already fighting before that because Grunkle Stan said in the story about how Sixer fell into the portal that the two of you were fighting and not paying attention and that’s how it happened. And you were fighting then because Grunkle Stan was mad that you didn’t want to see him even though you hadn’t seen him in ten years because your poophead dad kicked him out of the house when you were in high school. And that happened because Grunkle Stan accidentally broke your cool science fair project and was too scared to tell you, so it was his fault that you didn’t get into your super cool nerd school. And I think that’s it,” Mabel said, tapping on the side of her chin thoughtfully.
Ford found himself taken aback. Most of what Mabel had said wasn’t that strange for her to know, when Ford thought about it, but her abbreviated version of the events of the science fair had caught him by surprise. Not that Stan had claimed that his part in the affair was an accident – Ford vaguely recalled him saying as much on the night that it happened – but that he still laid the blame for it on himself. Ford would have assumed Stan would try to lie and write it off as an accident so as to minimize his culpability in the matter and to make himself look better, but if he was going to accept fault regardless, then why lie about it? Unless he wasn’t lying at all, and what happened that night hadn’t been a deliberate, planned act of betrayal, but just a stupid kid making a stupid mistake.
Not that any of that really mattered, because Ford was an adult and he was supposed to be past what happened over 35 years ago. No, what he was angry about now was more immediate and pressing concerns, like identity theft and Stan potentially bringing about the apocalypse. “I suppose that is the gist of it. But all of that can’t be fixed with just a thank you and a hug, especially since I have no intention of thanking Stanley for what he did. I know this might be hard to understand, because from what you’ve seen, he was just trying to save me, and he succeeded in that. But what he did also could have brought about the end of the universe” – and still might, though no need to worry her about that right now – “which means it was wrong for him to do. And you shouldn’t thank someone for doing the wrong thing,” Ford informed her gently.
Mabel grinned at him. “Grunkle Ford I think being stuck on the other side of the portal has made your brain all mushy,” she said, standing in her chair and reaching over to knock him on the head a few times to underscore her point.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s like you said, Grunkle Stan was just trying to save you. And the most important thing isn’t what you do or even whether or not you succeed. The most important thing is that you try your best.”