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maine-writes · 3 years

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Ugly Sweater Holiday

That harsh, irritating, itchy feeling of a handmade sweater, Dipper would never get used to it. But, Mabel made it, so he had to.

The pair walked through the gentle snowfall, passing the usual comings and goings of that strange town called Gravity Falls. Gnomes were raiding the trashcans; a tall, thin, faceless man was discreetly passing out chocolates; and Toby, The Artist Formerly Known As Bodacious T, was living out his other other dream of being "The Spirit of Christmas", meaning that he was prancing around in green spandex, studded with mistletoe and holly, reminding the townsfolk of the meaning of Christmas.

"You think Pacifica will like our present?" Mabel wondered aloud, a carefully, lovingly wrapped present in her hands.

"What makes you think 'our'?" Dipper said, "You won't even tell me what you got her."

"What we got her."

The Northwest family, formerly one of the most prominent families in Gravity Falls. They used to live in Northwest Manor, a grand mansion overlooking the town. A few years ago, the family relocated out-of-state to pursue a better situation. Preston Northwest, the family patriarch, already ruined the family reputation when Bill Cipher almost took over the world. So he and his wife took everything they could to West Philadelphia. Their daughter, Pacifica, remained in Gravity Falls.

Now she lives in a house left by Susan Wentworth. She didn't die, mind you, she just went home.

Although this simple, two story house, was a far cry from the extravagant mansion of her youth, it did have its charms. Since she moved in a couple years ago, Pacifica has done her best to make it feel like home. The once cat-scratched white walls were given a new coat of lavender paint, the white molding was redone, the wooden floors were restored, and she has some potted plants hanging around.

The twins were greeted warmly with hugs and laughter. Mabel, as expected, couldn't help but be jumpy and giddy with Pacifica. With Dipper, on the other hand, the young hostess was awkwardly cordial.

The trio sat in the livingroom; a nicely furnished place, decorated with whatever Pacifica could bear to show off. The twins sat on a very comfy red couch, its frame was made of fine, dark wood. Pacifica sat on its accompanying chair. Mounted on the wall was a collection of paintings, and over the fireplace was a very menacing and old woodcutter's axe.

"So, what's new with you guys?"

"College, usual drama, boring stuff." Mabel groaned, setting her hot cocoa on the coffee table. "Oh, Dipper dumped his last girlfriend."

"Mabel!" Her brother protested, which only entertained her.

"D-, I mean, go on." Pacifica said, curiously.

"Well, he met this cute girl in his physics class," Mabel continued, much to Dipper's embarrassment, "They went out on a few dates, then he dumped her."

"W-why?"

"Becau-" Mabel began just as Dipper hit her with his baseball cap.

"That's enough Mabel." He pleaded.

"Oh fine, just because you asked nicely."

Then Mabel's eyes lit up, a sure sign of either her remembering something or coming up with something mischievous.

"Oh, Pacifica," she began as she produced her wrapped box grom under the table, "We got you a gift! Well, two!"

"Two?" Dipper asked.

"Two." She replied with a wink. "Anyways, I'm gonna do stuff in the bathroom. You know, bathroom stuff."

"Bathroom's down the hall, on the left."

But just before she got up, Mabel gave her brother a nudge to the side and a knowing wink. This only worried him.

Curious, Pacifica began to tear open her present. What appeared to be one box was actually two, carefully wrapped with two different kinds of paper. The first, wrapped up in red and green and images of pink elephants, had a card reading, "From Mabel".

Inside, was a fuzzy purple sweater with a beige llama on it. The llama wore a pair of black shades, a red sweater with red trim, and a Santa hat. Below it were the bedazzled words, "Christmas Party Queen".

"T-that's nice..." She commented. "Let me guess, she made it herself?"

"Sorry." Dipper said. "You know Mabel."

"Guess I'll slip this on since she got it for me." She said, throwing it over her head. As expected, it was itchy, but it fit.

Then she turned her attention to the other present, wrapped in blue and white paper. Inside, she discovered a holly red outfit with mistletoe white, fuzzy trim. A typical Santa outfit, except for a few modifications. Instead of a pair of black work boots, she had knee-high boots. The sleeves were cut, which were repurposed as long gloves. And it had a rather short skirt instead of pants.

"...Di-D-...umm..." Pacifica sputtered, but only just. Like Dipper, her face was flushed with red.

It was either embarrassment or horror, and they were both speechless. As Pacifica lifted up the tight-fitting dress, she noticed a large hole in the upper chest area.

"I-...I'm...a...I-" Dipper began, his heart and mind racing.

"W-well...gues-...guess I'll sli...since you..."

Dipper couldn't believe what he was hearing, or at least what Pacifica was trying to say. The two didn't notice the mistletoe Mabel carefully hung over them with a fishing pole.

"Oooooh" she howled mischievously, "Is that mistletoe?!"

But the two were sheepishly twiddling their thumbs instead of following the rule of the mistletoe. Mabel, annoyed by their lack of initiative, groaned and whined. Months of planning and hard work, going to waste all because of two idiots.

"Kiss, fuckers!"

@artsycooky13

#christmasprompt2020 #todays theme; mistletoe #gravity falls #dipifica

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apathetic-revenant · 7 years

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by the skin of your teeth: part ten

AO3

right that’s enough action for a while, time for more NERD TALK

this one’s pretty short for the stupid amount of time it took me to write it; it was originally just going to be part of the next chapter but I figured, y’know, screw it. no content warnings I can think of except for general dealing with the aftermath of everything that happened in the previous nine parts.

Ford woke up.

This surprised him. He hadn't really been expecting it.

For a while he just lay there, floating gently towards consciousness. There didn't seem to be any rush. For once there was nothing urgent he had to force himself to attend to, no predator pacing in the back of his thoughts and driving him forward.

It was...nice. Peaceful. The only problem was that he felt completely awful.

Everything hurt, either with a sharp, stabbing pain or a deep and heavy ache. Someone seemed to have scoured his insides with sandpaper from his throat to his stomach, and then dropped a fifty-pound weight on his chest for good measure. And he was tired, so tired he didn't think he could so much as lift his head up. He felt all used up, drained out and slowly drifting away.

This must be dying, he supposed.

It could have been worse.

There were quiet voices somewhere nearby. He stirred slightly, feeling an unfamiliar, papery rustle. The voices stopped suddenly.

“...Stanford?” one of them said.

Ford reluctantly opened one eye. The other one hurt too much to bother with.

Wherever he was was very white, or at least it seemed like it at first. White floors, white ceiling, white walls, all lit with a tingling white light. He squinted ahead of him and saw the slightly fuzzy shapes of Stan and Fiddleford sitting on cheap folding chairs.

Stan grinned at him, a mix of relief and worry creasing his face. “Hey bro.”

Ford frowned and glanced around, trying to see as much of the room as possible without having to actually move his aching head. He was laying on a bed in a small room, surrounded with various machines. On second pass, the walls were actually light blue and the floor a somewhat worn gray; it was just all washed out by the fluorescent lighting on his tired eye.

Hospital. He was in a hospital. That...made sense. He hated it-he'd always hated hospitals-but it made sense.

“How you doing?” Fiddleford asked quietly.

Ford considered this question, then quickly decided it didn't bear considering.

“We...did it, didn't we?” he said. It came out as a hoarse whisper. “It worked...”

“It sure did,” Stan said triumphantly. “Yellow sonuvabitch is history.”

“Good,” Ford said, and closed his eye again. “Good. That's alright then...”

It was more than he'd expected, more than he'd dared hope for. He'd been prepared to die just to delay Cipher's plans for a while. Dying to defeat the demon forever seemed almost an unfair bargain.

“Uh,” he heard Stan say after a moment. “Ford?”

“S'okay,” Ford mumbled into the pillow. “I knew this might kill me...”

There was a sound rather like someone spitting out a drink in shock, except without an actual drink being involved. Ford opened his eye again in surprise.

“It's alright-” he began, trying to be comforting. This was difficult, as Fiddleford was coughing frantically and Stan was making a sort of garbled incoherent noise of general outraged disbelief. “We defeated Bill. That's all I-”

“Oh my god, Ford, you're not dying, you drama queen,” Stan said.

“Though I wouldn't blame you for feelin' like you were,” Fiddleford added, finally catching his breath. He sounded faintly amused, but not unsympathetic.

Ford frowned. He didn't really know what else this could be. He certainly felt like he hurt too much to be alive.

“Doctor said it looks like you've got a real nasty bit of flu,” Stan said, still rolling his eyes. “Which was, uh...what was it?”

Fiddleford started ticking things off on his fingers. “Exacerbated by sleep deprivation, dehydration, blood loss, uh, possibly some mild malnutrition...”

“Just generally being all jacked up,” Stan put in.

“Er...yes,” Fiddleford said. “He didn't put it quite like that, but, um, yes. Essentially. They gave you a couple shots and an IV to get some fluid in ya. Said you should be alright but they're worried about it turning into pneumonia so they want you to stay the night just to be sure.”

“They were real concerned about all the uh, you know, bruises and cuts and stuff,” Stan said, looking away, with a tone suggesting that the doctors weren't the only ones concerned.

“We told them you got in a fight with a raccoon,” Fiddleford said.

“I still can't believe they bought that.”

“Spoken like a man who's never lost a fight with a raccoon.”

Ford took a moment to process all this. Dying still felt like the preferable option.

“Didn't...feel this bad before,” he muttered.

“You didn't notice before,” Fiddleford said. “You were runnin' on...well, I'm not sure quite what you were running on, but it was a hell of a drug, whatever it was. But you had to come crashin' down eventually.”

Ford narrowed his good eye at Fiddleford. “There's no need to be quite so smug about it.”

“There may be a little need to be smug about it.”

Ford groaned and flopped his head to the side. There was, sure enough, an IV needle sticking into his arm. He stared at it moodily.

There was something else, too.

“What happened to my finger?”

Silence.

He tilted his head back towards the other two. Stan was looking uncertain. Fiddleford was looking down and chewing on his lip. The trace of quiet amusement had entirely fallen from his face.

“It was my fault,” he said. “I wasn't...I didn't stop it.”

All of a sudden, Ford understood.

“Bill?” he said.

Fiddleford swallowed. “You fell asleep,” he said. “And it...it wanted me to tell it what we were doing, and when I didn't...I could have stopped it, but I didn't. I was too damn scared.”

“You did though,” Stan said, glancing at him in confusion. “You had him pinned to the floor when I got there.”

“Not soon enough,” Fiddleford said bitterly.

Ford's stomach felt cold. The idea of Fiddleford alone with Bill had been too terrible for him to want to even think about.

And it had happened.

“Are you alright?” he said. “Did...what did he...”

“...It talked,” Fiddleford said. “But it couldn't...uh, you were too weak, I think. It couldn't do much. So it hurt you instead, tryin' to make me fess up.”

“But you didn't.”

Fiddleford shrugged one shoulder. “No. Guess not.”

Stan glanced between the two of them, looking uncomfortable and out of place. Fiddleford twisted his hands around each other and stared at his battered shoes.

Ford looked at the splint on his finger.

“Fidds,” he said. “You...without what you did, we...Cipher is dead and gone because you fixed the gun in time. Compared to that...I don't care about one finger.”

Fiddleford glanced up slightly. “...I'm still sorry it happened.”

Ford shook his head. “I'm sorry you had to...go through that at all. I shouldn't have fallen asleep. I shouldn't have let him...”

He trailed off into a painful silence. His throat grated horribly.

“Cool, we're all sorry,” Stan said, breaking the taut atmosphere. “But you know what? He's dead and we aren't.”

Ford had to smile slightly. “That's true. He's...”

He's gone.

Bill Cipher was dead. Gone. Forever.

He was free. He could live.

It was the absolute last thing he had ever expected.

“Ford?”

He should have been happy but he didn't even know how to feel, he couldn't, the realization didn't fit inside him-

“Ford, you alright?”

He was shaking. He couldn't stop. He couldn't breathe, his chest was aching-maybe this was it, maybe he was going to die after all-everything hurt-

There was a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey. Hey, it's okay,” Stan said. “It's okay.”

Ford leaned his head against his brother's arm, and felt Fiddleford steadying him and telling him to breathe, and he shook and shook and maybe he was crying, or maybe he wasn't, he couldn't tell. Nothing was real and everything was real and it was all too much.

He didn't remember falling asleep again, afterwards, just a sense of relief as his thoughts blurred out again and left him in quiet darkness.

The next time he woke up, he didn't initially know where he was. The room was dark and his first thought was I fell asleep oh God oh God I fell asleep-

He struggled upright, gasping, and everything was wrong, he didn't remember this place, he hurt, what had Bill been doing-

“Hey-hey, whoa! It's okay! Easy there, bro-”

There was a firm hand on his wrist, and a voice in the dark. Stan.

He remembered, suddenly-he was in the hospital. He was safe. Stan was safe. Fiddleford was safe. And it didn't matter that he'd fallen asleep because Bill Cipher would never again steal into his mind when his guard was down, would never again hurt anyone else using his hands.

He took in a few shaky breaths, as well as he could-his usual deep breathing techniques weren't working so well right now.

“It's okay,” Stan said.

“Right,” Ford said slowly. “...Right.”

He settled back against the pillow. There was just enough light coming from under the door and from the various machines around the bed for him to make out Stan sitting nearby, and to give depth to the shadows. He swallowed at that thought and gripped the sheet with his good hand. Nothing there, there's nothing there, it's all in your head-

“Where's Fidds?” he mumbled. His mouth was painfully dry and tasted horrible.

“He had to leave,” Stan said. “Visiting hours, ya know.”

Ford squinted at him. “But-”

“Well, I thought...maybe you wouldn't want to be here alone all night,” Stan said, bumping his fingers together awkwardly.

“But if Fidds-”

“Ya know,” Stan said, “security in this hospital is really lousy.”

“Oh,” Ford said. “Right.”

He stared at the light under the door, shifting gently as someone walked past. His arm itched; someone had taken out the IV at some point.

“Is there...water or something?” he said.

“Oh, um, yeah. Here.” Stan handed him a half-full plastic water bottle that had been sitting on the bedside table. Ford gulped from it greedily, which he instantly regretted as soon as he realized how much it hurt to swallow.

“Easy there, bro,” Stan said, watching him with concern. Ford almost laughed. There was something funny about Stan looking so...motherly, almost.

Maybe he was just tired.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Uhhhhhh...” Stan shrugged. “I dunno. Late.”

“Mm.” Ford sighed and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again. He'd gone so long not being able to sleep no matter how desperately he wanted it, and now that there was nothing stopping him, he was wide awake and the night was stretching out ahead of him, infinite and grueling.

Dammit.

He glanced over at Stan, who was silhouetted against the window. He couldn't make out much of Stan's face-especially without his glasses-but he could see the shape of his head, odd-seeming now without all the hair. Which reminded him.

“You never told me how you managed to get a haircut,” he said.

Stan coughed. “Oh. Um. It's...a long story.”

“No, go on, tell me,” Ford said, eager for something, anything to break the lurking silence.

“We-ellll...” Stan ruffled the awkward haircut in question. “So, I went to go see the unicorns, right? And I...kind of got in an argument with one.”

Ford frowned, suddenly concerned. He hadn't put much thought into how exactly Stan had gotten the unicorn hair. A great deal of less than pleasant ideas were suddenly filling his head.

“They didn't attack you, did they?” he said, not sure if he was more disturbed by the idea of Stan being attacked by a unicorn, or Stan attacking a unicorn.

“Um, no,” Stan said. “Not as such. But she was being very rude, so I uh. May have cut off some of my hair and thrown it at her.”

“You what?”

“She was goin' all, 'how would you like it if someone came to your house and asked for some of your hair' so, y'know,” Stan mumbled. “...it made sense at the time.”

Ford frowned. “And...that convinced her your heart was pure? Was this some kind of a test?”

“Noooo,” Stan muttered with increasing awkwardness. “One of the other unicorns just thought it was real funny, so he kinda...just let me have some of his...I may also have threatened a bit. I mean, I wasn't in a real great mood, y'know, my boots were full of snow...”

“But...” This wasn't making any sense. Whatever standard the unicorns used to judge humans must truly be beyond mortal comprehension. “I don't understand. He just gave it to you? Did he say you were pure of heart?”

“Not exactly.” Stan sighed. “See...the thing is, uh, I didn't really want to tell you this, but...the whole thing was kind of a sham.”

Ford's brow furrowed in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“The 'pure of heart' business. It was all made up. They just didn't want to have to give their hair away.”

“But...but...”

He was sure, he was sure there was something that could prove that the unicorn he'd met hadn't been lying, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that there wasn't.

He groaned and flopped his head against the pillow. “Why am I such an idiot?”

Stan stared at him. “What are you talking about? You're like the smartest person in the world.”

“No, I'm not, I'm a damn idiot who keeps getting tricked!” Ford found himself smacking his head into the pillow with the words, his voice rising angrily. “Why am I so fucking gullible-”

“Whoa, whoa...Stanford.” Stan put a hesitant hand on Ford's shoulder. “Look, it's...it's not like that-”

“Yes it is!” His voice had gone up almost to a yell now, every word hurt, and he couldn't care. “I fell for Bill, I fell for the unicorns-I trust all the people I shouldn't, and none of the people I should! I didn't trust Fidds, I...I didn't trust you...”

Stan sighed. “Well, maybe...but it's not like you're the only person who didn't trust who he should have.” He let one shoulder rise and fall in a heavy shrug. “Anyway, from what I, um, saw...Bill seemed to me to be a really, really good liar. It's not your fault.”

“Yes it is.”

“No, it isn't. Take it from someone who's spent the past ten years lyin' to people, okay? It's not your fault for being conned. It's the fault of the conman who came along sellin' to you.”

Ford stared at the ceiling and said nothing.

“Look,” Stan said, a little desperately. “You're not all bad at this. You pulled one over on Bill there at the end, didn't you? All 'you want a fight, come and get one'-that was a good one.”

Ford laughed into his pillow. It came out as a kind of choking noise.

“That, uh, that was a bluff, wasn't it?” Stan asked worriedly.

“Do you know where I got that?” Ford said, still making muffled hysterical noises.

“Um. No?”

Ford lifted his head up slightly. “The Lord of the Rings.”

“What?”

“The Lord of the Rings. That's what they do. At the end. When it comes down to it and they know all they can do is try to give Frodo and Sam enough time to destroy the Ring, all the armies of men attack the Black Gate and Aragon says to Sauron, come out and fight. They know they don't have a chance against him, but they also know that he'll fall for it because it would never occur to him that it was a bluff. That they were really trying to destroy the Ring.”

He fumbled for the water bottle and took another careful sip. “I thought...that would work on Bill too. What we were really doing...it'd be easy to lie to him about that because he wouldn't think of it. He was far too narcissistic to think he could ever be destroyed like that. But if I was so angry and desperate I challenged him to a fight...one I had no chance of winning...he'd never be able to resist that. It'd be far too amusing to him to watch me fail.”

“Oh,” Stan said.

“You,” Ford said. “You made me think of that. You brought up Tolkien-”

Stan covered his face with a hand and groaned. “Oh, jeez...”

“You did,” Ford said gleefully. “All on your own.”

“You're never gonna let me live that down, are you.”

“Nope.”

Stan groaned inarticulately. Ford smiled.

“You never told me about that, either,” he said.

“About what?” Stan muttered.

“How you wound up reading The Lord of the Rings.”

Stan dropped his hand and glowered. “Is it so unbelievable that I just happen to read a book once in a while?”

“Yes,” Ford said bluntly.

“...Fair enough,” Stan said after a minute. “It's...really not that interesting, though.”

“I still want to know.”

Stan sighed and looked down at the floor.

“It was that first winter,” he said eventually. “After Dad kicked me out.”

Ford's smile froze. “Oh-”

“I had to leave New Jersey,” Stan went on, apparently not hearing him. “For...uh...reasons we don't need to get into. And I wound up in this little town...hell, I don't even remember the name anymore. I wouldn't have stayed there at all except the car broke down and I couldn't afford to fix it. So I was stuck for a while.”

He sighed heavily. “It, um. It wasn't the best time of my life, ya know? Things...weren't looking so good. I didn't know what to do or where to go, every other plan I'd had so far had gone down like a lead balloon...I was starting to feel like I'd already hit the end of the line.”

Ford caught himself wondering where he had been at the time. Pulling all-nighters in a crummy dorm at Backupsmore? At home on break struggling through long, thickly silent dinners with his parents? Either way, at least he'd had a roof over his head, he thought bitterly.

He wondered what he would have done if Stan had called him, then, and said please come.

“Anyway,” Stan said, “One thing I learned that winter was about libraries.”

Ford shook himself slightly at this unexpected detour. “What? What about libraries?”

“That they're really great when you...don't have anywhere else to go,” Stan said. “You can just go in and it's warm and out of the weather and there's bathrooms and comfy chairs and you don't have to pay at all. You don't have to do anything. They just let you.”

Ford blinked. He had long thought of libraries as sanctuaries, but never in quite that sense.

“So I spent a lot of time in the little public library that winter,” Stan went on. “I mean, it was that or my car, and my car was pretty cold most of the time. And I didn't really have much else to do. I got some work, here and there, but it never lasted very long. So I'd go in and take a nap or whatever...try not to think for a while. But I started feelin' really awkward about it. I didn't want them to know I was homeless. I mean, I didn't wanna know I was homeless. I tried to keep tellin' myself that I was just in-between jobs or whatever...didn't work real well. Anyway, point was, I was tryin' to look like I wasn't just in there cause I had nowhere else to go, so I actually tried to find a book to read.”

“Heaven forbid,” Ford muttered.

Stan snorted. “Yeah, I know. It was a real small place, they didn't have much...I guess it shouldn't have mattered since I wasn't really planning to actually read anything, but...I dunno. It all looked so boring I thought I'd fall asleep as soon as I picked any of 'em up. But then I found those books, and they were familiar. I remembered you goin' on and on about them all the time, readin' bits of them to me...”

A memory drifted back to Ford: sitting on his bunk, excitedly describing the Black Riders chasing Frodo to Rivendell. Stan, on the bunk below him, had made only the occasional vague noise to indicate that he was even still awake. Ford had been too wrapped up in the story to notice; later, he'd assumed that Stan had never even been listening.

Because when had Stan ever payed attention to his 'nerd stuff'? To what was important to Ford?

All the time, really. He'd listened to Ford go on about science and cryptozoloogy and aliens and all sorts of things that Ford was passionate about, even if Stan didn't understand a word of it, because no one else cared, no one else would have listened if he hadn't. It had just been easier, later, for Ford to tell himself that Stan hadn't cared either-that Stan blowing off his college dreams that had been the last in a long string of similar crimes, rather than something unusual that Ford should have paid attention to.

“I guess...I missed you,” Stan said. “Or it was something familiar, at least...”

It was easier to think that he was all alone, and always had been.

“I wasn't even plannin' to read it,” Stan said. “I mean, I didn't think I was smart enough to get through one book like that, let alone three of 'em. But I had it open so it looked like I was reading it, and...well...it just kinda happened, I guess.”

The room was quiet for a while.

“I mean, I didn't exactly read the whole thing,” Stan said after a while. “I skimmed some of it. Like the songs...and, uh, some of the descriptions. You know, that guy sure could go on about trees.”

Ford let out a breath of quiet laughter. “True.”

“But...I liked some of it. The hobbits, you know...I mean they just wanted to stay home and eat and smoke, pretty much. I could get behind that.” He hesitated. “I guess I...”

Stan trailed off and didn't finish.

“What?” Ford asked eventually.

“It's stupid,” Stan muttered.

“No, what?”

Stan shrugged and looked down at the floor.

“I guess I liked it 'cause...it was about someone ordinary,” he said eventually. “I mean...there were lots of really special people in that story. Elves, and kings, and, ya know...all that. And I kept waiting for the story to be about one of them instead. There was no way it was gonna follow this little hobbit guy all the way to the end-I mean, what did he have going for him that someone else didn't? He didn't even want to be on an epic quest or anythin'. But...he kept going anyway. And in the end he won. He saved the day. And everyone called him a hero...”

Ordinary.

Ford looked at the hand stretched out in front of him. In the dim light the splint made his sixth finger blocky and awkward, drawing the eye toward it.

He'd never been ordinary, never even close to it. He'd wanted to be, sometimes. Being different had brought him more than enough grief throughout his life. But it had never been an option, so he'd tried to embrace it. He wasn't ordinary, he was extraordinary. He was going to do great things. He had to do great things, because otherwise, what was the point of him?

He'd felt like a hero, when Bill had first appeared to him. Like the protagonist of a great story. Destined for glory.

And then when it had turned out to all be a ruse, and Bill's laugh had echoed in his head for days on end, he'd thought that perhaps there might still be a chance to be a hero, if he could only bring Bill down with him.

Now, beyond all reasonable hope, Bill had been defeated once and for all. But he didn't feel like a hero. He wasn't sure what he felt like.

“That's not stupid,” he said slowly, still trying to work out what he was feeling. “That's the whole point.”

Stan looked up. “What?”

“That's...it's what Tolkien was going for. For someone ordinary to be the hero...he thought that was important.” He'd had extensive arguments with Fiddleford about that, sometimes very late into the night. Fidds had always liked the hobbits and argued for their importance; Ford had, for a long time, found them irritatingly prosaic and a distraction from the much grander things going on around them. He'd never understood the point of having an ordinary hero.

“Huh,” Stan said. “Well...look at me. Stan Pines, literary critic.”

Ford had to smile a little at that one.

“So...what did you do after that?” he said.

“Oh...I, uh...found some work, eventually. Got my car fixed, moved on...nothin' really worth talking about.” Stan looked away, and Ford, thinking of the memories he had briefly seen in Stan's mind, realized he did not really want to ask more.

“I called you sometimes, you know,” Stan said, breaking into Ford's morbid recollections. “Or, I mean, I tried to. Always hung up as soon as you answered, though. Guess I just...never had the guts.”

“Wait, that...that was you?” Ford remembered the occasional mystery phone call, but he'd always written it off as a wrong number or some kind of prank. “But you...how did you get my number?”

“Shermie.”

“Sherm-” Ford nearly sat up in surprise. “You've met Shermie? I mean, since-”

“About five years ago,” Stan said. “He saw one of my infomercials and tracked me down. Gave me a right earful...he wanted me to come stay with him, said he'd help me get back on my feet. Dragged me back to his house...his family's real nice, you know. Well, I guess you do know.”

“Uh...yeah.” Ford was still having trouble processing this. He hadn't heard anything about this from Shermie. “So...so how long did you stay with them?”

“Coupla nights,” Stan said. “Made a break for it as soon as I could.”

“What?” Ford spluttered. “Why didn't you stay?!”

“Why, so I could go back to being a burden on the rest of the family?” Stan said, looking nonplussed at Ford's surprise. “Even after all that time after Dad kicked me out, I hadn't gotten any closer to making it up...so why would things be any different that time? Shermie, he's got a wife, a kid, a job, a nice house, hell, a dog...I didn't want to ruin all that. So I left. And I made it a lot harder to track me down after that, in case he got the idea to try again.” He shrugged. “But he told me some about what you were doing before that-he was really wanting us to make up, you know. Gave me your number and told me to call you. But you know how well that went.”

Ford stared up at the tiled ceiling. Come to think of it, he remembered Shermie calling him and asking if Stan had contacted him. He'd assumed, at the time, that it was just another desperate hope on his Shermie's part that the twins might reconcile. Now he realized Shermie must have been hoping Stan had gone to him after he left.

He hadn't heard from Shermie lately. He'd assumed his older brother had eventually given up on him, like everyone else. He'd thought things were better that way; better if there was no one to miss him.

He seemed to be wrong about a lot of things lately.

“Stan,” he said quietly into the thin darkness. “I'm sorry.”

Stan stirred, as if rousing himself. “What? What for?”

Ford hesitated.

“I don't know,” he said at last. “For...a lot of things.”

“Mmm,” Stan said. “Well...I'm sorry too.”

Ford yawned. He could feel sleep circling back around again. For once it didn't seem so bad to let it come to him.

“Do you think...” he mumbled tiredly, “...do you think the two of us are ever going to be alright?”

Stan was silent for a moment.

“I dunno,” he said eventually. “But...I reckon we're both a lot more alright than we were this time last week. So...that's something, yeah?”

Strange to think it hadn't been that long, but it was true: a week ago, no, a few days ago, he'd been all alone in the world, his mind full of monsters and with no hope left for himself at all.

Now...

“...Yeah,” Ford said. “Yeah, it is.”

#by the skin of your teeth #gravity falls #fanfic #gravity falls fanfic #scribulations

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