Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Stan would be on his way to Oregon right now, but by some twist of fate, he’s managed to earn himself a flat tire. He swears and grumbles and kicks the damn thing, but there’s nothing for it – he’ll have to stop and change it. It puts more time on his journey. It delays his ETA.

He has no way of knowing just how disastrous a delay it will be.

When he finally gets back on the road, wallet distressingly light and car still running like an asthmatic geriatric, he’s lost precious time. Ford’s postcard was – well. Stan likes to pretend that he ran out of fear a long time ago, that he lost his ability to be afraid somewhere in the streets of Tijuana or in a Colombian prison cell, but in truth his heart has been beating faster ever since he got Ford’s postcard. His brother is the most stubborn person he knows. That he’s actually asking Stan for help…

It worries him, is all. And now he’s had to stop – instead of a breakneck sprint across the country, pushing the Stanmobile as fast as it would go, pedal to the metal and flat-out driving, he’s been delayed. It was bad enough having to stop because of the tire, but he had to source the money to replace it, and that was a detour as well, and by that time the sun was setting. He’s on the road now, but with a sinking feeling, he realises that he’s not going to make it to Oregon before nightfall. He’s driven through the night on his journey already. He’s a danger to himself and others if he tries to do it again.

But every hour he takes for himself is an hour Ford might be in danger. It’s an impossible choice.

The choice is made for him when, still a few hours away from the Oregon border, Stan blinks and suddenly the car is swerving off the road. He manages to get the wheel to obey him before he ends up wrapped around a tree, but even when he’s stopped the car, one wheel still sitting inside the hard shoulder, he can’t do anything but sit and shiver. His heart is going a million miles per hour. His chest, he’s fairly sure, is bruised underneath the seat belt, and he’s suddenly viciously glad he was wearing it.

Stan understands then, quite suddenly and coldly, that if he tries to push forwards and drive in his state, he will die. He fights the feeling as best he can, pulling the car properly onto the roadside with shaking hands, but in the end Stan has to succumb to sleep.

He has no way of knowing it, but in the depths of a basement in Gravity Falls, his brother is losing the fight against sleep too. If he had been interrupted by the sudden arrival of his twin, things might have turned out differently.

As it is, Stan sleeps soundly for a good six hours, before the noise of the road and the first watery rays of sunlight wake him. There’s a crick in his neck, he’s freezing cold, and when he checks under his shirt he can see that there’s a line of livid purple bruising across his chest – but the car starts without too much trouble, and he’s back on the road in no time. He rushes north, cursing the limits of his car the whole way, and keeps on driving until he reaches the Oregon state border.

Stan’s never heard of Gravity Falls, and he spends more precious minutes fumbling with a map and cursing the tiny town. He’s hoping that when he gets into the town, he’ll be able to find Ford’s house easily enough – Gopher Road can’t be too small or obscure, if Ford’s house is number 618, surely?

As it turns out, he needn’t have worried. He sees Ford’s house before he even gets into the town proper. It’s isolated, rising out of the snow like a malignant growth, looking for all the world like a rotten tooth or a crag of rock. It’s out of place. So, in fact, is Stan.

The snow has settled over the forest, bringing with it an eerie silence. The world is muffled and too bright all at once, and every step out of the safety of Stan’s car is more scary than the next. No sounds reach his ears, and Stan wonders why it seems so much more like the forest is dead, than simply asleep.

His heart is in his throat as Stan steps up to the door. He searches in vain for a doorbell – notices in an absent-minded sort of way that Ford doesn’t have a mezuzah – and finally, his stomach in knots, raises his hand to knock.

The wood of the door is hard under his knuckles. For a long moment – long enough for bile to start rising up Stan’s throat – nothing happens.

Then all of a sudden the door flies open, revealing the darkened interior, and no-one standing in the doorway. Still, Stan’s chin is yanked up with a bruising grip, and he feels fingers tugging at his eyelids. He flails and yells and strikes at the air in front of him – nothing connects with his fist and he overbalances – he catches himself on the doorframe, fingers in a bruising grip around the post, and heaves out frantic breaths.

The death grip on his face lessens, and something crosses his field of vision in a blur, disappearing inside the house. Stan takes an instinctive step back, beyond the threshold again, foot sliding in the snow. He falls with a yell, and lands hard, his tailbone jarring and sending shooting pain up his spine.

Stan sits on the snowy ground, body aching, eyes watering, and looks around. Ford is nowhere in sight. Unbidden, Stan feels his body revolt at last, and he twists around to retch. He hasn’t eaten in days. The bile that comes up is tinged only with the dark stain of old coffee.

He can’t be too late.

“Ford?” Stan yells, as he struggles up to his feet. His bones protest, his bruises crying out, even as he thinks bitterly to himself that he’s not an old man yet. He wobbles dangerously, a hand shooting out to stabilise himself against the cabin wall, and he steps quickly through the doorway. His jeans are cold and wet, sending a chill seeping deep into his body. The house offers no respite from the cold. “Ford!”

It’s just him, his own rasping voice echoing into the beckoning gloom of the unlit house. Something flits through the air in front of him, and Stan recoils on instinct, throwing his hands up to protect his face. Though he’s braced for impact, nothing touches him. The house is still and cold as the grave.

“Ford, you gotta stop messing with me,” Stan calls out, trying to summon bright anger to burn away his roiling fear. “It’s not funny, okay?”

Something pulls the door shut behind him, but when he whirls around, there’s nobody standing there. When his eyes flick down to the doorknob a moment later, it gleams accusingly in the low light. Stan feels his hackles raising. He’s not trapped, he reminds himself, even though it feels like the walls are closing in around him. He’s not locked in. He can leave at any time.

His teeth ache.

“Look, you’re the one who asked me to come here,” he spits out, tugging his hat off his head and running a hand through the sweaty, greasy mess of his hair. He scowls at the way it gets stuck in the tangles of his mullet, shakes his head like a dog to try and clear away the itching feeling. It’s not just his head – it feels like everywhere, his skin is crawling. Inside the house, the air is flat and lifeless. “I’m doing what you asked! I’m – I came, alright? I came when you asked. Why d’you have to make everything so hard?”

The silence that answers him feels – accusing. Oppressive. Stan winces at the way his words came out, wishes he could take it back. If Ford really is in danger – if he really does need his help – well. It’d be a bad start to be throwing accusations around.

“I’m sorry,” he says, the words sticking like glass in his throat. “I didn’t mean it.” Even now, he doesn’t know what he’s apologising for. Is he telling an absent Ford that he’s sorry for insulting him when he could be in danger, or for cursing his name for the ten-odd years they’ve been apart? Apologising to Ford in any capacity feels loaded with the crimes of his past. He’s not sorry for breaking Ford’s stupid machine. Only for the outcome it led to. “C’mon, Sixer, you gotta know I didn’t mean it.”

As he says that, something crashes. Stan yelps and jumps back, his spine slamming into the door and sending pain jolting again up his tailbone. He squints, used to compensating for his terrible eyesight, and manages to make out the remains of some kind of nerdy machine thing on the ground. An antenna of some sort lies crooked, sticking out at a funny angle, like a badly broken bone.

“That wasn’t me,” he says. There’s a thrill of panic in his voice that he can’t quite suppress, and it makes his voice thready and wavering. “You know that wasn’t me, right? It was an accident. It was – it was only an accident.”

If anything, that should have summoned Ford. Stan can picture him clearly – taking off his glasses to scrub at his face in frustration, gesticulating wildly at Stan as he goes on a techno-babble tangent about his latest creation – although the Ford in his head is still seventeen, not twenty-eight. It’s been too long. Maybe the Ford he remembers is just as lost and forgotten as the Stan he was ten years ago.

There’s still no response, and Stan peels himself off the door, willing his hope not to fail him as he edges closer into the house. “I’m comin’ in, Ford, okay? Gonna find you and make sure everything’s alright.”

Unbidden, a door Stan hadn’t noticed swings open with a creak. It’s the first sign of light in the house – beyond the door he can make out a staircase leading down, and a strange blue light spilling upwards from below. There are other doors in the room that he can see, two of them in addition to the one he entered through, but –

This door opened for him. Ford may not be here, but still, it feels like tacit permission, like he’s actually being allowed in. And so he goes.

Descending the stairs is a deeply disturbing experience. Never let it be said that Stanley Pines isn’t self-aware – in fact, he’s all too aware of how much the fear rises as he descends. There are marks on the walls, and Stan really, desperately, does not want to linger on what could have made them, if it was something trying to get up, or something trying to get down. He’s not sure what would be worse.

There are other levels, other doors, but nothing seems to open for him, and Stan is aware of how much he’s breaking Sixer’s trust already. Exploring the other areas of the sub-basement without permission feels even more like breaching an invisible barrier, like crossing a line he can’t gauge or judge. He can’t shake the feeling that Ford wouldn’t want him here.

The house must have been constructed at significant cost, Stan decides, as he discovers an elevator to take him ever deeper. It’s either a desperate desire for privacy – hiding away at the bottom of the world, sheltered and cut off from everything that lies above – or maybe it’s a mark of something so dangerous that it needed to be buried underground and hidden from the light of day to be kept safe. Ford is in danger, Stan is sure of it. He wills the elevator to go faster.

There’s something on the floor of the elevator, Stan sees, as the rickety thing takes him further down. It’s a six-fingered glove. It looks hand-made, but there’s something else quite strange about it. Despite the fact that it’s on the floor, seemingly discarded, it looks disturbingly as if the glove has something still inside it.

Stan’s about to lean down and pick it up when the elevator jolts to a stop with a cheery sort of clanking noise. All thoughts of gloves are forgotten as he turns around, watching the doors of the elevator open onto a thick metal door.

It looks as though it wouldn’t be out of place guarding a vault, and Stan considers again the money that must have gone into the construction of this place. The door is covered in desperate bloody scratches, clawed into the steel as if by an animal. Stan can even make out broken shards of something white stuck in the crimson smears, and he clenches his own fists in sympathy.

He tried everything he could in that car trunk before resorting to chewing his way out. He knows exactly how long it takes for nails to grow back after you’ve ripped them out with scratching.

Something possesses him, though he’s not quite sure what, to lift his hand to the door. He splays his palm flat and presses it against the cold metal, his fingertips lining up with each bloody gouge. Beside his hand, in parallel with his little finger, trails an extra scratch. “Ford,” Stan murmurs, feeling sick to his stomach. “Fuck, Ford, what have you done?”

He bows his head to line his eye up with the retinal scanner. There’s a moment of heart-stopping delay as he worries – are his eyes too bloodshot? Is he too tired, too worn out, will Ford’s system not recognise him? Are they not really identical enough after all? But the scanner beeps coldly, and the metal door swings open.

Stan gives the elevator one last look. The glove is missing.

Heart thudding, Stan turns unwillingly to the space that the metal door reveals. It opens onto a dim room, lit only by the blinking of a hundred control panels and electric lights. There are massive, clunky electrical towers, slots and plugs Stan can’t wrap his head around, and he can just about make out through a wide observation window that there’s a darkly glowing ring of light.

Everything has been dark and dim, and Stan is still squinting through the gloom, but this is the first time he’s seen any kind of real life in Ford’s house. The electrics are buzzing and blinking, a tiny symphony of flashing lights, and right at the end of the room, to the right of the wide window, there’s a door with a porthole, and a light behind it glowing red. The door, just as the one in the real house above, swings open for him.

The thought crosses Stan’s mind that he’s beginning to get a very bad feeling about all of this, but in truth, he’s had a bad feeling about it from the very first moment he saw Ford’s postcard. The lingering sense of malaise has turned his stomach more than he cares to admit, sick fear cloying in his throat, and the worst part of all, the simple truth, is that he can’t imagine a good ending to all this. He’s hoping, sure… but he knows, deep down.

There’s no way all this ends well.

Stan walks past the blank screens and feeble electric lights, walks past the mess of cables and wires on the floor, walks past the desk piled and laden with books of all kinds, and approaches the open door. He thinks he can trace the unearthly humming to the red light glowing in this little antechamber, and he gives it a squinting scowl. There are dark stains on the floor and walls, almost black in the wash of crimson light. They could be machine oil, or paint, Stan tries to justify. It’s possible.

The threshold of the door beyond feels, more strongly than any other point on his awful journey downwards, like a point of no return. There’s no part of Stan that wants to step through and see what Ford has been doing in his underground lair. Every sensible part of him, every cowardly inch born of years of self-serving and learning how to save his own skin, is screaming at him to turn back, to admit that there’s nothing for him here but misery and pain. He doesn’t want to know, he’s never had that burning curiosity. He could live happily with never seeing what lies behind that wide observation window. But he couldn’t live happily – scratch that, he simply couldn’t live – without Ford. Without knowing that Ford is okay.

And so, hating himself with every step he takes, Stan pushes through the doorway into a vast room with a high, vaulted ceiling. He takes in slowly the rough, unfinished walls, the scraps of machinery and twisted bars of metal abandoned and scattered across the floor, the thick frames of the window and the door he’s just walked past.

As if pulled by some strange gravity, his eye falls upon the upended triangle and its flickering ring of light.

“There is nothing about this that I understand,” Stan says plainly, his gaze roving over the monolithic structure. Each glowing bulb seems to be fixed on him like an accusing eye, and he cringes away from the aching, cavernous emptiness of the hole in the centre. It feels wrong. It makes the world feel – thin, somehow, and like there’s something dangerous just outside Stan’s field of vision. He spins around, to check that there’s nothing behind him, and flinches at the sight of his own shadow.

Movement catches his eye, and Stan’s head whips around again. There’s something scuttling around the base of a lever, and Stan dives forward, bringing his hand down on it with a force that surprises even him. Under his palm, he feels woven wool, and he recoils a little, easing off on the pressure.

It’s the six-fingered glove. To his disgust, the glove twitches in his grip, disturbingly full and alive for something that has no arm or body or living owner attached. The fingers feel frantic, squirming as if to escape his grasp, and Stan peels the wrist cuff up with his thumb, getting to his knees to peer inside.

He’s not sure whether to be relieved or further horrified that the glove is empty. Part of him – well, the absence of bones and blood is reassuring. But there’s no mistaking the sickening twitching of the glove, fingers clawing at the floor with as much bend and give as Stan’s grip will allow.

“I swear to–” Stan cuts himself off, running his free hand over his face in exhaustion. “He asked me to come, and now he’s setting traps and leaving out his magic bullshit?”

The glove goes limp, and Stan uneasily pulls away, releasing the glove from being pinned down and holding up his hands in surrender. There’s a detente between him and it, a moment of stillness, before the glove – props itself up, almost, six fingers holding up the body of the glove, bent at the knuckles.

“Magic bullshit,” Stan says again. The glove jumps into the air and starts floating, folding up into a fist. The index finger wags at Stan like it’s telling him off. “Oh, you’re saying no to that? Yeah, the freaky floating glove isn’t magic. Real convincing.”

The glove surges towards Stan, and he can’t control the way he flinches away. But all it does is give him a light flick on the forehead, the impact landing with only a light force. There’s something strangely human in the gesture, and Stan is reminded uncomfortably of the times when his mother would flick him and Ford on the forehead after they’d been arguing, telling them to knock it off.

Stan scowls, getting to his feet. The glove follows him up, hovering in front of his face, and points decisively at something off to the side. He turns to look, and sure enough, lying abandoned on the floor near a strange circular cavity, is a dark red book. “That book? That’s what you’re pointin’ at?”

The glove gives him a thumbs up. Stan’s not sure when the thing shifted in his mind from creepy to dorky, but the thumbs up really takes the cake. It’s very hard to find something scary when it looks so enthusiastic.

He’s loath to take his eyes off the glove, even if it seems mostly harmless, but it starts pointing more insistently. If this thing has been left by Ford, then he probably ought to do what it wants, seeing as there’s still no sign of Ford at all. And so he goes, crossing over in front of the triangle – it sends a shiver down his spine as he walks through its light – to retrieve the book from the floor.

When he turns it over, Stan has to admit he isn’t exactly surprised to see a golden, six-fingered hand shining out on the cover. “So this is Sixer’s.” Obviously everything in the house must be Ford’s, but this seems more personal somehow. It’s heavy, and thick, bookmarks and inserted pages spilling out of the sides. Stan begins to crack it open.

He hasn’t managed to lift the cover more than an inch before the glove soars through the air to land on the book, holding it shut.

“Hey,” Stan says, trying to nudge the fingers off the book. The grip is a lot tighter than he was expecting, and it’s vice-like, as if the book is something very precious or important to the glove, or to whatever magic is animating it. “It’s okay, I’m Ford’s brother. He sent me here. I’ve been tryin’ to find him, but I ended up down here instead.” He’s about to say you can trust me, but the words catch in his throat.

There’s no give in the glove’s grip, just a sort of tugging, and Stan allows himself to be led by the glove’s insistent pulls back through the door and the wash of red light and into the strange room lined with blinking machines. He casts about for a light switch, but his attention is brought back to his erstwhile companion by a particularly violent tug towards the desk.

Stan sits down heavily on the chair, and lets the glove guide his hand to set the book on the desktop. No sooner is it free of its quarry than the glove is reaching out for something else – a pen, the real ink kind that Sixer likes to use, and a scrap of paper with scribbled equations. The glove scrabbles for a moment trying to flip it over, with the evidently lacking dexterity of its woollen fingertips, and succeeds in the end, albeit by creasing the paper quite violently.

And Stan watches with rising dread and horror as the glove begins to tell him what happened to Ford.

Stanley, it begins, the soft scratch of wool on paper lulling him into a false sense of calm, I know this will be difficult for you to understand, but this is not a magical trap or defence or even some kind of pet or experiment. I am Stanford Filbrick Pines, your twin brother, and I regret to inform you that I am dead.

Back when they were little, fresh-faced and gap-toothed and still hopeful about the world, there had been one evening where their Pa had sat them down at the dining table and read to them from a piece of thick, official-looking paper.

“I, Filbrick Elmer Pines, being of sound mind and body, do declare this to be my last will and testament.”

Neither twin had wanted to hear it, but they had been young enough still to sit there in slack-jawed amazement and discomfort as their father reminded them of his own mortality. Stan can’t remember the contents of the will, has no way of recalling how their father had thought to split the Pines family’s meagre estate between three sons, but even decades later he can remember the deep discomfort of hearing his father talk as though he was already a dead man.

Now, reading the words the glove is writing, still shiny and wet with Ford’s favourite ink, Stan feels the same way.

“No,” Stan says, staring unseeing at the paper and the words and the stupid glove. “Ford isn’t dead. You’re not Ford. You’re a piece of clothing. You’re nothing. You’re lying. I…” his head swings around wildly, as Stan stares around at the room he’s in, desperate for any sign of life. All he’s met with are cold and harsh lights, flickering without humanity. “I want my brother,” he gasps, breath all of a sudden difficult to find. “I want my brother. Please, I want–”

His mullet is yanked and his whole head is thrown backwards with the force. Words die in his throat, though he cries out, hand flying automatically to his hair. The glove has already let go of him, and returned to the desk. It picks up the pen. The paper, besides the words already written, is splattered with ink.

I doubt the explanation will mean much to you – “Stop it, stop it, please –” but my body was being possessed by a dream demon at the time of its decease – “you can’t say that, you can’t say things like that –” and unfortunately, though I have never experienced this astral state before, I am now awake – “give me back Ford, I want my brother, I came here for my brother –” and I believe myself to be damned to exist only on this plane henceforth – “give me my brother back, stop writing, give Ford back –” and unfortunately my best attempts at locating some kind of puppet to occupy have resulted only in my ability to operate the glove that F made for me – “I said stop!”

With a hiccoughing sob and a burst of despair, Stan sweeps his hand across the desk. Books – including the red book from the other room that was apparently so precious to the glove – go flying in every direction. Ink spatters the desk, the papers, and Stan, staining his hands with what he’s done. The glove goes skidding across the desk and catches itself on the edge, fingertips peeping over.

Stan throws his head onto his arms and gives in to sobbing.

Chapter Text

Ford is dead.

Stan drove halfway across the country at the drop of a hat to try and help his brother, and now he finds out from a remnant – a ghost – he finds out from a puppet that he’s too late. That Ford is dead.

It’s worse than a part of himself being ripped away. He is torn apart, as if his very soul is fracturing. It’s hard to think. It’s harder to breathe. His face is buried in his arms, and he’s quickly staining his already-stained sleeve with tears and snot, and he can’t stop the gasping breaths and sobs that are wracking his body.

He can’t even think. His whole being is consumed with the memory of Ford, with the impossibility that Ford could be gone. Stan can’t tell if he’s lightheaded from his general state of exhaustion, or from the way he can’t seem to suck in a decent breath, or just from grief. It’s like there’s an iron band across his chest, tightening every time he attempts to breathe.

Ford is dead.

How can there be a Stan without Ford? How can he still be here, blood pumping, undoubtedly alive, when his brother is dead? It seems impossible that his heart is still beating when his brother’s has stopped. There should be nothing of him left. There is nothing of him left without Ford, he’s a twin without his twin, and yet he’s here, gasping for breath and feeling the vice around his heart.

He’s never going to see his brother’s smile again, never going to get to slap him on the back in congratulations after he’s yet again pulled off something incredible. He’s never going to fall asleep to Ford’s frantic scientific mutterings. He’s never going to feel his brother’s pointy chin on his shoulder as he leans over to read comics alongside Stan. He’s never going to give another high six, or wrap his five fingers around Ford’s six.

He’s never going to get to apologise to Ford for ruining his life with the science fair project. He’s never going to get to apologise to Ford for ruining his life by arriving here too late to save it.

A distant part of Stan becomes aware that he’s filling the room with not only the noise of his sobs, but a keening scream, one that tears its way out of his throat in an unwilling manifestation of his misery. He can no more stop it than he can react to the woollen grip of the glove on his wrist.

He wishes he were dead instead. He screams with the force of that wish, hands turning to fists tight enough that he’s clawing at his own skin. There’s no part of him that doesn’t believe that the world would be a better place if he were six feet under and Ford were in his place. Even if killing himself won’t bring Ford back, he has a sudden desperate desire to do it anyway.

It feels like his heart is being squeezed, like he’s been wounded so deep inside him that it will never truly heal. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to exist in a world without Ford. Such a world should never exist in the first place. His gun is in his glove compartment, worlds away in a place above the surface where light still shines and where he walked blithely without knowing that his brother was dead. It’s a world he can’t return to, and so even his best chance at taking away his pain is kept from him.

There’s no end to this grief. There never will be. Stan knows with perfect certainty that if he lives, he will wake up every morning with this same crushing agony, with the knowledge that he has to go on in a world where his soul has been stolen from him.

Ford is dead.

Stan is slowly becoming more aware of his own body beyond the tightness in his chest. His throat feels raw and swallowing feels like gulping down sandpaper. The space behind his eyes and nose is prickling with hot pain. As he uncurls his fists, he sees that beyond ink, his hands are stained now with blood, his palms etched with half moons under the smeared mess. There’s a glove attached to his wrist.

The pressure of the grip on his wrist feels painfully gentle. Stan can hardly bear it. He can hardly see – the world is blurry enough on a normal day, and his eyes are fogged with tears – but the woollen glove is clear enough, its tight black stitches rippling where the fingers bend over Stan’s wrist.

“I want my brother,” Stan heaves, and the glove flies up to press its palm, six fingers splayed out, over Stan’s heart.

There’s no comfort to be found from a detached glove, but Stan wraps his hand over it anyway, curling his fingers in between the soft wool fingers of the glove. He can almost pretend it really is Ford, and he finds himself crying harder through his hiccoughs, face awash with his misery.

The ink has made a dark puddle on the desk, but Ford picks up the inkbottle and sets it upright, glove darting down to pick up the pen from the floor. Stan has to shuffle the chair back so he’s not hit by a drawer as Ford goes rifling through for more paper, waving his quarry triumphantly when he finds it. Stan ignores the state of his sleeve and uses it to scrub at his face.

By the time he’s done, his sleeve is dripping wet, and he shrugs his way out of his jacket awkwardly. Ford has been writing diligently, his flowing cursive unmistakable, and Stan buries his head in his hands one last time before rubbing at his eyes and preparing to read whatever heart-wrenching babble Ford has written for him now.

It has occurred to me now that the dream demon I had trusted – Bill Cipher – is indeed more dangerous and callous with regards to human life than I had anticipated.

“No shit, poindexter,” Stan rasps. He has to shut his eyes tight against the flood of dark thoughts and imaginings rushing into his mind. He’s done more than his fair share of trusting the wrong people, and that’s brought with it a sixth sense for spotting a con. Why, oh why hadn’t he been here earlier? Why hadn’t he been able to help Ford when it actually mattered?

Keeping this regrettable fact in mind, I have come to decide that I must therefore dismantle the work he had encouraged me to carry out for him. It causes me great distress to know that mine and F’s labours will have come to nothing, but I cannot condone the continued threat to our existence by allowing the portal to remain operational. In that vein, I ask that you will assist me in destroying the portal and safeguarding the journals in which I have written the notes and explanations for the portal’s construction. Before my death, I had the foresight to conceal the second and third journals where they would hopefully not be discovered, but if I can count on your assistance a little while longer, I would appreciate it if you would retrieve the journals for me and keep them safe with you.

Ford puts the pen down, and the glove flips over, open palm facing Stan. It almost looks hopeful, or beckoning, and Stan has to reach up to massage his temples. The whole world has gone topsy turvy. He can hardly think straight, let alone answer his brother’s posthumous requests in any kind of sane way. Still, he reaches down to retrieve the journal from the floor, and strains to shove it into his pocket.

Oh, and if you could move my body somewhere it won’t be discovered, I would appreciate it.

Stan turns from the desk and hurls again. His throat is scraped raw and the bile stings at him, and he’s dry retching in his dead brother’s secret basement. Tears prick the corners of Stan’s eyes, and he tries to get his breathing under control, his stomach still spasming uncomfortably.

He can’t stop himself from imagining Ford’s body. He said he was – possessed? Stan can’t even begin to imagine what that means. He doesn’t know how Ford can have died, what could have happened. Somewhere it won’t be discovered – does Ford mean that his body is out in the open somewhere?

Stan could have passed it on his way in without knowing. The snow was a blanket over Oregon, icing powder on pine trees and a duvet cover over the sleepy town, and apparently a death shroud for his brother.

He throws up again, his body rebelling against his wild grief and the insurmountable flood of emotion. The weight of Ford’s hand on his shoulder just brings tears to his eyes again, and Stan shudders through a hitching breath, scraping the back of his hand roughly across his face to try and dry his eyes.

“Of course I’ll move your body,” Stan says. It’s like he’s floating out of his body, like he’s lost all connection to reality. The world he’s in is so far from what the world should be, and he can’t quite catch his breath, can’t quite believe that things are really happening. Ford’s hand on his shoulder is an anchor, a solid grip tying him down to his body, and he’s quite sure that he would be lost without it. “But Ford – what the hell happened?”

Ford doesn’t pick up the pen again, just picks up Stan’s ratty jacket by the fluffy edge of the hood, and does his best to shove it at Stan’s hand. It’s an admirable attempt from a glove.

Almost by autopilot, Stan helps, finding the sleeve to shove his hand through. It’s like he’s seven again, and their mom is holding up their jackets for them to slip into before racing out of the door. He tugs his jacket on, hands automatically coming up to fiddle with the drawstrings of the hood, and Ford comes streaking down almost quicker than Stan can register what he’s doing.

He burrows deep into Stan’s pocket, and then wriggles around until the very tops of his fingertips are peeping over the edge of the pocket. There’s a strange and aching stirring in Stan’s heart. He could almost laugh.

Stan is no less miserable on the way up than he was on the way down, although there’s a very different mixture of emotions swirling in his chest. There’s no hope, but equally, no fear left in him. The worst thing that can have possibly happened has already happened. His journey is now up to face the world he now finds himself in, to accept the truth of reality. He takes the time of the journey to breathe slowly and deeply, to leave behind his emotions in the gloom and terror of the basement. The Stan who walks out of the door is a different Stan from the one who entered, but he can still do his best to cling to himself, to the Stan who laughs in the face of danger and death, who is tough and strong and ready for anything.

The light of the sun, when he finally steps back out into the biting Oregon winter, is blinding. Compounded by the brilliant white of the shining snow, Stan feels genuinely as though his vision is gone for a heart-stopping moment, before his eyes adjust to the glare of sunshine on snow and he can parse his surroundings again.

Now he’s looking for it, it doesn’t take long for Stan to find the spot where the snow is heaped up higher. He sinks to his knees, ignoring the way the chill creeps up through his trousers, and sweeps the snow away as best he can. It doesn’t take long, either, before his hand hits something hard and cold.

He returns to digging through the snow with a feverish alacrity, the air misting in front of him as his breath comes hot and fast. The Ford he uncovers is so still, so cold, so inhuman and immovable that it feels to Stan like uncovering a buried statue. The body seems so disconnected from his brother. Where normally looking at Ford is like looking in a mirror, Stan can’t see anything of himself in the body he’s staring at.

The limbs are twisted at odd angles like Ford’s body has marionette joints instead of elbows and knees, and he’s lying on his back like a discarded toy. He’s wearing a trench coat, but Stan notices with a wrench in his chest that Ford isn’t wearing any gloves. His hand flies to his pocket, and he shudders with a mixture of relief and revulsion to find the glove still there. It feels so wrong to hold Ford’s bare hand, and at once to cling on to something much more alive inside the glove, and to know that he’s holding on to his brother twice.

Ford’s skin is ice cold, and Stan pulls his brother into his chest, wishing more than anything that they could trade places. He wants so desperately to give Ford all his heat, all his breath, all his life, and he wraps his arms around his brother even more tightly, muscles straining with the force of pressing Ford against his beating chest.

Stan forces himself to look at his twin’s face, and the face looking out at him is not Ford’s. He drops the body and scrambles back, kicking up powdery snow and fingers freezing as he scrabbles for purchase on the icy ground. The body falls with a thud when he drops it, and more than anything, that hammers it home that Ford isn’t coming back. The body is a thing now, not a person. There’s no life to be found inside it.

His pulse is thrumming with fear, but Stan leans over anyway. The face is – it’s not Ford. The mouth is locked in a rictus grin, lips pulling upwards even in death, although it looks more like a snarl than anything truly mirthful. It tugs the contours of Ford’s face in ways Stan’s never seen before. It truly looks like a stranger staring back at him. The grin is bad enough, but worse –

Worse is the eyes.

Ford’s glasses are smashed all to hell, one lens completely missing and presumably shattered and lost in the snow, one lens so spider-webbed with cracks that it’s impossible to see through it. But one eye – behind the missing lens – is still visible, cutting into Stan’s soul with the force of its lifeless gaze. One yellow eye with an unearthly, slitted pupil.

If Stan had been doubting Ford’s words earlier about a demon, he doesn’t now. There’s nothing human in that yellow stare. He still doesn’t understand what’s been going on in this town, what the portal in the basement is, how and why his brother died – but he can’t fight the truth that the thing that once lived in the body in front of him was not his brother.

“Gimme a hand up,” Stan says, when he can’t bear to look at his brother’s bent and broken body any longer. Ford slips out of his pocket and waits there in the air, fingers outstretched. Stan grabs on to his hand, and Ford can only give him the barest of help, but he pulls himself up and stands there, still holding on to his brother’s hand.

He doesn’t know what he’s meant to do now. There’s only one thing to do, but Stan really doesn’t want to have to do it. Then again –

Then again, there’s no one he would trust with his brother’s body.

And so Stan stoops, gets his arms underneath his brother, and lifts him up with what feels like herculean effort. His arms and back strain with the weight. He would never allow himself to let go. Ford races on ahead – and goes past the shack, hovering at the tree-line.

“I’m supposed to follow you?”

The gestures Ford makes are ones Stan knows well. Come here. This way. Good job. This way. Stan is helpless to do anything but follow, and he tightens his grip on Ford’s body as he begins whatever madcap, macabre journey through the woods his brother has planned.

The cold is getting colder and the wind bites at Stan’s face, lessened only barely by the tree cover. Ford keeps darting out of sight, and returning to gesture impatiently at Stan. The number of times he’s had to tolerate his brother’s aggressive pointing is getting ridiculous, if he’s being honest. He wishes he could rest a little, lay Ford down and take a moment to breathe – but Stan’s worried that if he stops at all, he won’t be able to get himself going again. It does him no good for the cold to claim them both.

Ford seems to know where they’re going, at least, which is a small blessing. Stan is grimly certain that he would have been going in circles, distinctly lost, if Ford hadn’t been here to guide him. All the damn trees look the same to him. He can’t seem to remember how long Ford has been here, in the depths of Roadkill County, but Ford seems to know the forest as well as the pair of them once knew Glass Shard Beach. They may not be the Kings of New Jersey, but Ford seems to have crafted a new stomping ground for himself.

Whatever trail Ford is following leads them further into the woods. Stan feels chilled to the bone himself, and wonders if he’s even going to be able to lay Ford to rest, or if his arms have frozen like this. Eventually they stop, Ford lifting his hand in the universal gesture for stop, wait – Stan could cry, if he weren’t so worried the tears would freeze before they left his face.

Rather than doing anything sensible, like pointing him towards a building or a shelter or even a cemetery’s gates, Ford starts knocking on trees.

“Please tell me there’s a point to this,” Stan grumbles, just as Ford hits on what’s evidently the branch he’s been looking for. There’s a metallic kind of groaning, like a complex mechanism is shifting, though Stan can’t see anything to that effect anywhere in the forest. He does see, however, when a square of snow falls away, sending powdery white flying up into the air and briefly obscuring Stan’s vision.

Ford shoots down into the hole he’s made and emerges, triumphant and dusted in snow, with another red book clutched in his hand. It takes some finagling for him to manoeuvre with the book – Ford’s pattern of flight keeps dipping as the weight of the book becomes too much for him – but he manages to lean on a different branch, using the edge of the book to push down on it.

Stan yelps and darts out of the way as a section of ground drops away beneath where he was standing a moment ago, staggering and off-balance with Ford still cradled in his arms. The snow makes it hard to see, but Stan can make out some kind of spiraling way down; the corkscrew ramp seems to descend ever deeper.

It’s going to be hell trying to pick his way down a precarious slope, slippery with snow, while he’s trying to hold his brother’s body. “What kinda obsession have you got with secret underground lairs, huh?” he asks bitterly. Ford swoops down on him like a bird of prey and, after unceremoniously shoving the journal in his jacket pocket, lands on his shoulder, grip tight in a way that could be in camaraderie or in warning. Stan tries not to think too hard about it.

The way down is worse than he was imagining. There’s no blood on the walls, true, but neither is there an elevator to ease his descent. Stan takes one shuffling step at a time, and he fears for his life every time he does so. He can’t see past Ford’s body to watch where he’s putting his feet, and with every footstep, the snow gets wetter and slippier. He’s been ice skating before, and he didn’t have then the fear that grips him now.

He longs to be able to put a hand on the hard-packed earth wall to brace himself, but he’s already made a promise to himself that he’s going to lay his brother to rest properly. He’s going to do right by Ford in death the way he couldn’t in life. So he keeps his grip on his brother tight, and together, buoyed by the weight of Ford’s hand on his shoulder, he walks downwards.

It’s creepier in this particular underground lair than it was in the last one, which is something Stan didn’t ever expect himself to have a reason to think. There stench of paranoia and fear seems to permeate the walls themselves, and as Stan walks through shelves stocked with weapons and food, he recognises a desperate kind of terror in the design of the place.

“What the hell’s in this town that got you so scared?” Stan mutters to his brother. Ford doesn’t make any attempt to reply, whether by gesture or writing, so Stan gives up on that line of inquiry. For all he knows, this place isn’t Ford’s at all, just somewhere Ford wants him to go.

That thought is immediately dismissed as soon as Stan triggers the defence mechanism.

“You owe me so damn bad for this!” he yelps as the walls start closing in on him. “I’m just tryna look out for you and you’re gonna lead me into this fucking deathtrap? You’ve gotta be kidding me if you thought this was a good idea, IQ!”

He can’t think for fear. It’s a good thing – he hasn’t been able to think straight for exhaustion in his romp through the woods, and it’s kept his mind off what the weight in his arms actually is – but focusing on putting one foot in front of the other is definitely a more tolerable way to numb his higher thought processes than focusing on how he’s about to die clutching on to his brother’s corpse.

The weight on his shoulder is gone, and Stan watches as Ford darts around the tiny room, throwing all the weight of his little gloved hand into pushing specific tiles. Whatever it is he’s doing, it works, because a door opens into some kind of respite from a crushing and horrifying death. Ford returns to Stan, pushing his back to spur him on, and they tumble out together into a room full of more obscure, blinking electrics.

Ford is pointing again, directing Stan insistently towards a door, but Stan takes the opportunity to half-collapse onto a stool, giving himself a moment off his feet. It’s just going to let his mind focus more on the burning strain in his arms instead, but he takes the chance anyway, letting a heavy breath go. “No more surprises, Ford, please. We’re here because you took me here, to move your body somewhere safe. I don’t – I’m not cut out for this crazy town, for your mad scientist schtick. I just wanna help you.”

One of the electronic devices is some kind of computer, black screen with green text, and Ford flies over to the keyboard, taking his time to peck out a reply. Decontamination room, he types with effort, then a lab. Cryogenic freezers. I will wait here to open the door again.

Typing seems to weary Ford a lot more easily than writing, but Stan appreciates the effort. “And then we can go home?”

Ford makes his hand into a fist and knocks it, as if it’s a nodding head. If he noticed the childish slip of Stan’s voice or the poor choice of phrasing, he doesn’t mention it. Stan’s grateful for it, more than Ford can know.

True to Ford’s word, Stan suffers through decontamination, before striking out into the lab beyond. There’s a strange creature suspended in one of the cryogenic freezers, and he shivers as he passes it. It feels like he’s being glared down, like the creature is staring him right in the eye. It feels sacrilegious to leave Ford here, in this gloomy and unfeeling place – but this place is something Ford created, and it’s filled with the markers of his presence. What better tomb could there be for Ford than a tomb of his own creation?

Stan fumbles his way through leaving Ford in one of the freezers. He manages alright, he’s fairly sure, in that the thing was cold and locked when he left, and Ford was still cold and unseeing inside it. Leaving Ford behind is the hardest thing in the world. Stan steps away from his brother, now cold and unmoving behind a pane of glass, and leaves himself behind. He walks back to the decontamination room. There’s no animation left in him at all. It hurts too much to think or feel, so his mind is blank. It’s safe that way. His thoughts can’t reach him if he never thinks them. Stan has always been the stupid twin, the brainless one – it’s hardly difficult now to fall back on that.

When he knocks on the door, it whizzes open with a soft hissing, and Ford is waiting there for him. He eagerly settles back on Stan’s shoulder, six points of contact doing their best to tether Stan to a reality he doesn’t want to face.

They walk back to the house in silence.

By the time they reach the door, Stan is shaking violently from the cold, though he can’t bring himself to care. He walks systematically through the house, and eventually comes to a room, devoid of lab equipment and mad science, and empty but for a fireplace. Without heating, a fire is his best option, so Stan tosses some logs into the grate, gets some flames going.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, legs slowly going numb underneath him, staring unseeing into the flickering fire. He’s supposed to sit there for seven days, although – Ford’s not buried. He’s still there, floating in a mindless sleep, and here, just a puppet instead of a brother. Stan has a fireplace instead of a candle. He has no-one to share his grief.

Fuck, does he need to call their mom?

When Ford leaves, Stan can’t control the keening whine that escapes him, can’t control the way he sinks even deeper into his fugue of misery. His brother is gone, and he’s sitting in his house, an interloper in his twin’s place. He should be the one frozen in endless sleep. Instead, he’s here, sitting where Ford should sit, living while Ford should live. Even the last shade of his brother has left him.

Not for long, it turns out. Ford comes back into the parlour, pen clutched precariously between his little fingers while the rest of his hand holds on to a sheaf of paper. Stan watches dully as Ford lays his spread down on the floor between Stan and the fireplace, golden flames casting flickers of light over the paper.

You still need to pick up the second journal, Ford writes. Stan reads it with his blank gaze, and nods, emotionless still. Ford is telling him what to do. How to make it okay. He’ll do what Ford says, forever and always.

The thought of going out again into the cold finally pierces the dull haze he’s fallen into, and Stan buries his head in his hands. “Yeah, and get your power back on and your heating running, and pay your goddamn mortgage. There’s a lot I got left to do, Sixer.”

The sound of a pen scratching over paper is unmistakable. Stan lifts his head to see what his brother has written, what’s being asked of him now. To his surprise, it’s not a demand or request, but a question. You’re staying?

“Yeah,” Stan says quietly. “Yeah, I’m staying.” Aside from the fact that he doesn’t have a home or a life of his own to get back to – aside from the fact that he still has to dismantle Ford’s portal or whatever – aside from the fact that this house is a mausoleum, but still a roof over his head – “If things like dream demons and shapeshifters exist in this town, then there’s gotta be a way to get you back,” he says grimly. He will gladly sacrifice a life of his own to preserve Ford’s life. He will work as long as he needs to until he can get his brother back. If Ford is still kicking around as a puppet, he still has a chance. He can use his brother’s science and notes and lab equipment, he can keep Ford’s life and house and identity going, until he figures out a way to bring Ford back and to let him step right back into his life. “You’re stuck with me until I get you back, Ford. I’m gonna take care of you. It’s – I promise, it’s all gonna be okay.”

They’re pretty words, with the force of his conviction behind them and little else. Still – Stan can see a way out of this situation, a way for it all to end in happily ever after. Ford can keep doing his science, with Stan as a helping hand, and Stan can keep Ford’s life going in the public eye. Once he gets Ford back, it’ll be like he’s never been gone. Stan will be able to bow out gracefully once he’s made up for what he’s done to his brother. And until then… until then, the pair of them just need to keep going.

The immensity of keeping going hits Stan hard. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes to ward off the tears, focusing on the physical pain instead of the emotional agony he’s going through. Ford crawls up onto his shoulder and gives him a reassuring squeeze, and Stan lets out a dry sob.

What are they going to do?