The Twin Hypothesis

by Desdemona Kakalose

"We were in the same profession," Rick told him, "for a while anyway." Stanchez.

It seemed that Rick Sanchez was destined to meet them both at the beginning of their various journeys.

Stanford Pines was a man prone to narrow but voracious focus, a bone deep candle burner and a reckless completionist. When the crackling well of the portal in his basement swallowed him whole, even then, he had always halfway expected it to end this way. He never knew when to leave well enough alone. The last thing he saw of that Earth for thirty years (he would find out much later that it had been thirty years) was his brother's expression fizzling and fading under the discharge of the portal's ionic field, his tattered red jacket and his helpless open hands. He caught the book. He must have caught the book, because in the dim swirling reality where Stanford Pines abruptly found himself, he was the only unchanging solid object in existence.

He knew, of course, where the portal would lead. He had designed it with his typical laser focus, not stopping to fiddle with the extra settings for a cable package of neighboring dimensions. He had only been interested in one place, and throughout the process of construction Bill had seemed perfectly satisfied with his narrow focus. This was a nightmare dimension. The realm itself isn't evil - honestly, even nightmares aren't evil. Unpleasant and terrifying? Yes, absolutely. But dreams don't know how to be evil any more than a facet of spacetime understands how to be cruel. It simply is what it is, grotesque amalgams of distorted imagery and all. Knowing this takes exactly zero percent of the horror out of experiencing them.

The first thing that Stanford Pines saw out of the entire multiverse in which he was to spend his next thirty years (he would find out much later that it was thirty years) was his brother's expression, and the deep terrible pit of his skull through one empty eye socket. Some voiceless, reaching apparition. Stanford threw himself backwards from the thing, scrambling through half-solid earth that flowed between his fingers like cool magma, and sank-down, through a depth like nothing he had ever experienced. The press of matter as it passed up and around him was a dim and burning chaos of reds and yellows and greens like nothing seen outside of a nuclear reactor. Where was the color coming from, if there was no light source, if he was buried and sliding ever deeper down to the core of some impossibly malleable planet? Was the matter itself casting light? But then there should be heat, and all he could feel was a gradual cooling with each passing second.

God, okay, think Stanford, use your enormous brain for something useful. What tools do you have?

He jammed his hands in his pockets, digging up the carapace of a malevolent beetle, one pen, two prototype batteries, a few screws and an energy bar. Useless, useless. Cool glowing magma slithered over his fingers and into his pockets as he scrambled to find anything of use. Nothing. Of course he still had his - yes, he squeezed the reassuring weight of the holster under his arm, that was still there. He was still armed. If anything in this dimension responded to charged phasic plasma anyways.

Stanford fell like that for a long time, in a murky plunge towards apparently nothing. Where was the gravitational pull coming from? Was this gravity at all? The descent scraped on for long enough that even the terror of living burial began to dim. Wherever he was headed, it couldn't be much worse than what had awaited him on the surface. He'd be seeing that in his... nightmares...

Stanford gave his oozing mutable surroundings a second, more serious look. This was what he had meant to study, after all. Ideally with a probe or at least some very secure rigging, but still, this was what he had spent the last five years trying to achieve. Perhaps he could still satisfy his curiosity, at least until the exposure killed him. It was a surprisingly comforting thought. Knowledge existed to be catalogued. Data must be researched.

When he was found, an eon or maybe a few days later, Ford was not pleased to admit that he had entered a kind of mental breakdown nirvana, rabidly scratching observations in blue ink across himself. His left arm was an intricate jigsaw of letters and crude sketches already, and as he painstakingly outlined the form of the amorphous many-eyed creature hovering above him, something shuffled up beside him.

It whistled. "Guh-god damn, Stan, jeeze, thought you didn't believe in tattoos."

"Of course I don't," Ford snapped, scraping at the skin of his inner elbow with a nib that refused to produce ink. Half the monster was outlined in swollen red skin, loose blots of blue. "This isn't permanent."

"Keep- keep scraping that line and it wuh, it will be."

"Please," Ford snorted, "do you think I of all people don't understand the retentive properties of human - wait."

The tip of the pen punched right through the outer layer of his dermis. Ford spun, too stiff to do more than push the pen in deeper, and looked into the face of another human figure.

"You can talk?" he said, fingers tightening on the pen.

The figure aggressively swished a flask at him. "Yeah, chains for brains, I can talk."

Ford finally marshaled some control back into his limbs. He dropped the hand that was now smeared with beads of blood and circled the man. "I've never seen an apparition here that could talk," Ford murmured, dragging his thumb down over his lip. "And you're the most accurate to species model yet, except for the hair. But why the flask? I'm certain I haven't seen any other apparitions with accessories."

Ford grabbed the figure's chin, tipping it up to get a good look at the dips and curves of his neck. This was the most difficult part of a human to replicate, aside from the hands. He'd save those for last. Quickly, before the apparition could dissolve on him, he grabbed one of its shoulders and turned it, running a hand down its side. Lab coat, pulled from his subconscious no doubt, thin shirt underneath, the body under that skinny but remarkably well formed. He thought he could feel the delicate ripple of ribs. Was it breathing?

"Sh-shit, Stan," the man said, sounding bemused, "you could buh-buy a guy a f-fffuckin' drink first, huh?"

"And you know my name," Ford mused, "although I'm not sure why my own projection would call me by the wrong appellation..."

"Holy shit," the man said, "are you from some fuckin', nerd dimension, where everyone's a, a fuckin' nerd?"

Stan reached down and grabbed the figure's hand, prying the palm open. The figure didn't seem too keen on that, but Ford had been hunting monsters for nearly ten years and while he'd never be as buff as - while he'd never be stronger than so, he could still keep hold of some skinny nightmare-ghost's wrist even on absolutely zero hours of sleep and one energy bar. He peeled back the fingers. They were perfect, right down to the bitten nails, the white residue of peeled keratin. That was... that was too perfect.

"Huh," the figure said, "six fingers. So does, uh, does everybody have six fingers in your dimension?"

"No," Ford replied, without thinking, "just me. Even my twin doesn't have... it..."

He looked up. The man was giving him an appraising look, something fast and mechanically hot whirling in his incongruously dark eyes. The part of Ford that was always running data process and categorization informed him that the man was attractive in a way that did not by even a percentage overlap with handsome.

"You called me Stan," Ford said. "Do you know my brother?"

"Define your," the man said, "and define know."

Ford grabbed both shoulders, giving the total package a hard once over. "You're from outside of this universe," Stan said, "like me. You're real."

"Well no f-fuckin' shit Einstein," the man said, shaking him off.

"What are you doing here?"

Shrug. "Time cops won't touch-" he belched, "-this place, Stanley. Stan? The fuck's your name, buddy?"

"Oh, uh," Ford held out a hand, "Stanford Pines, doctor of quantum biology. Lately of Gravity Falls, Oregon. And you are?"

The man stared down at his hand like a child contemplating a bowl of boiled vegetables. "Rick Stanch - Sanchez," he said at last, pointedly stuffing his hands in his pockets. "Fucked your brother."

"I'm," Stanford said, "I'm sorry, beg your pardon?"

Rick leaned back in a drunken slump against a rocklike protrusion in the gently seeping floor that had not been their a moment before, absolutely confident in its existence. His flask sloshed. "You asked if I knew your brother," Rick said. "Sure, fuckin' right I did. In the biblical sense."

"My brother," Stanford said, "Stanley Pines."

"You got a third twin hangin' around somewhere?" Rick asked, disinterestedly. "Yeah, some version of your brother anyway. Red convertible? Speaks some Spanish? Brutal looking scar on his hip?"

Ford's mouth went dry. "Er, yes. That sounds like him."

Possibilities whirled around Ford's head like so much chalk dust - actually, he was probably hallucinating, he hadn't slept since the portal had swallowed him whole. There had been all kinds of things happening in '68 and '69, had Stan gotten swept up in that? He had tried not to think about his brother these last ten years, hadn't looked into it until Fiddleford's resignation had left him in dire enough straits to uncover that particular wound. He had never forgiven. He had never forgot. When he allowed himself to think of Stanley out there in the world he had imagined in equal turns an eternity of taffy-scraping karmic revenge and an infuriatingly successful life of skimming the livelihoods off innocent people just like himself. Leaving a trail of broken dreams in his wake. The existence of Rick dragged both of those daydreams off their proverbial rails.

"What," Rick said, "heh, you didn't think he had it in him? Me neither, least till he did have it in him. Hey-oh!" He held up one hand, palm open. "Up top."

Stanford only blinked. "You want me to high five you," he said, "to celebrate your fornicating with my twin?"

"Sheesh man, you're a real wet blanket. Looks like Stan got all the party genes in your family. Ya - yannow there's supposed to be a fifty percent you're a, you're a massive queer too? Huh, Mr. Biology?"

Stanford drew back. "There's no need to be insulting about it," he said. "Actually there's no need to be discussing any of this at all, especially not with a stranger. Or with his family member."

"Ppfffshhh," Rick said, for a given value of 'said'. It was a very complicated expression for the nonexistent number of vowels in it. The belch that followed it was equally complex.

"You're disgusting," Stanford observed, interested despite himself. He had spent the better part of a decade up to his elbows in disgusting things. "How on Earth you convinced Stan to-"

"Oh, oh shit," Rick said, swinging up to his feet, "you want a reenactment?"

Both Ford's hands came up in front of his chest. "No, definitely not."

Rick appeared to be ignoring him, but instead of throwing himself physically at Ford, who had been half expecting it, he simply shoved his flask into the open hands. He stumbled past and held his fingers up in a rough approximating on a square, like an interior designer imagining the position of a yet-unpurchased painting. The flow of green and orange magma about five feet from where he stood gently wobbling began to drift upwards.

"You, you know normally I drink fuh, to forget but, drinking to remember is, can, drinking is great, why did I ever st-stop."

The impossible upwards flow coalesced into something almost person shaped, about Ford's height.

"How are you doing that?" Stanford asked, halfway between disturbed and fascinated, clicking the top of his pen reflexively.

"Duh? Nightmare dimension? Get with the pruh-program, asshole."

The shape that Rick was creating was definitely Stanley, there could be no doubt about it. The stains on the jacket were even in the right places - by god, had he really been wearing the same jacket for all this time? He'd forgotten what a slob his brother was, apparently.

"Nnnnooooooo," Rick said, eyeing the construction suspiciously, "wh, what were you wearing the first time?"

It shifted, his brother's face losing some of the battered tightness it had held before - there was a wardrobe change but Ford could not have cared less, mesmerized by the shifting lines of the face. They had both gotten older, he supposed. And yet, the absence of those lines made him uneasy in a way that their simple presence had not. The fact of them was one thing, but the past in which they had not yet formed held a depth of implication that Ford recoiled from. Rick stumbled forward again, catching himself on the shoulders of the construct and hung there, patting the shape's cheek fondly.

"Clo-" he burped again, "close enough."

The construct, animate now down to the slight uncertain shifting of the feet, hovered a hand over Rick's side and then settled it there. Ford's stomach churned. He wasn't sure which thing was worse to be reminded of, the awful mutilated specter that had greeted him at the portal's edge or the helpless empty-handed brother on the floor of the lab one dimensional rift away. Rick pinched the tip of the construct's ear and yanked. "Christ," he said, "the, the ears on you guys."

Ford chewed his lip for a moment before stepping closer. How did the phenomenon work, precisely? It also had a body that appeared to breathe, and eyes that did precisely what eyes ought to do. He reached out and took the unoccupied hand into his own, examining the broad palms. The skin wasn't quite right, too smooth to be perfectly real, but the lines and joints were all spectacularly articulated.

"You're very good at this," he remarked.

Rick made another scornful sound. "You just gotta know what you want," Rick said. "I always know what I want. I'm Rick fuckin' Sanchez."

"That's an uncommon skill," Ford said offhandedly, preoccupied with feeling out the bones beneath the improbably smooth skin.

Rick said nothing. Ford found that fact disconcerting enough to glance up from his examination, and for a split second he noted the disconcerting sadness that seemed sketched into the man's very shape, a depth of regret. No doubt Rick Sanchez did know what he wanted, whatever those things might be. Ford suspected that certainty had made his life no easier. And then Rick smiled a horrible smile and grabbed the butt of the construct, as if absolutely nothing of importance had transpired here or anywhere else. Ford quickly dropped the thing's hand.

"S-so lets see," Rick said, "we were on a street in, mmmph, in, in New York? Fu-fuckin, was it Boston?"

Ford rubbed reflexively at his sixth finger, feeling a little nauseous from the mood whiplash. As he watched the construct began to shift, the uneasy expression spreading across its face a perfect twin to his own. He seemed—maybe twenty, the last of his lingering acne gone and a dull purpling around his eyes that even the present Stan hadn't had. It looked away, dodging the full brunt of Rick's leering attention.

"Rick," it said, in a strange dragging tone, "I'm tryin' to work here."

"That's very good," Ford said again, this time barely above a whisper.

The voice was perfect pitch and gravel, as familiar as his own. More familiar, maybe. Stan had always been the talker of the two of them. The meticulous precision only made the unfamiliar tone more eerie. It was subdued. It was… nervous.

Rick seemed to have forgotten all about his audience—seemed to. Ford had a nagging suspicion that he had not actually, not at all. The man grabbed Stan by the cheek and forced his attention back front and center. "Stan," Rick said, "baby, b-babe, have some fun."

Ford clapped his hands together loudly, desperate to dispel the thickness gathering in the air around them. "That's quite enough don't you think?"

Rick gave him the most scorchingly unimpressed eyebrow lift he'd ever been subjected to. Faintly, Ford wondered if it was an advantage to having a unified eyebrow.

"Ooh, look who's squeamish," Rick said, slouching in the grasp of the Stan construct. He looked so breakable compared to the broad shoulders and the large hands of his creation, fragile even, that Ford found himself a little dizzied by the sneering aggression the man was practically oozing. "You don't wanna see me get na-nasty with your twin?"

Ford ducked his head down, pressed the heel of his palm over the gradually-heating skin of his cheek. "You're awfully keen to make me some kind of voyeur," he snapped, "I think that says a bit more about you than me."

"Uhhh, yeah?" Rick said. "It says I got a thing for twins."

The construct had remained paused where Rick left it, but now under the return of his gaze it began to shift again, losing the smoothness of youth and the heaviness of Stan's shape. When Rick drew back, grinning his awful grin, the figure that held him was unmistakably and unerringly Ford's.

"Granted I don't know what your junk looks like," Rick said, without shifting his attention, "but huh - how different can you actually be?"

"That—" Ford dropped his pen, "—that's sexual harassment!"

"Uhuh," Rick said, throwing one leg around the construct's hip like a graceless imitation of the tango.

"Stop that right now!"

Rick made unblinking eye contact as he ground his hips down with what looked like nearly painful force. His spine arched by a few striking degrees, his chin lifting. Ford took a step backwards. It was—it was mesmerizing, and awful, and Ford unfortunately was starting to get an idea of how exactly Rick had convinced his brother years ago, damn his stupid mouth for asking in the first place.

Rick pressed the figure closer with the knee locked behind it, grinding down again, and then—almost too much for Ford to watch—Rick's eyes shuttered closed for a fraction of a second. In that fraction the construct rippled, like an echo reverberating out from Rick's stuttering focus, and reformed as Stan circa ten years ago. Rick regarded the results with one eye still shut.

"Heh," he said, "oops."

Rick didn't seem terribly bothered by the change, accidental or not. The memory of Stan had taken on an expression of childlike awe, bewilderment, and Ford remembered abruptly what an awful liar his brother had always been, an improbably mix of crooked and honest. You could read him like a book, if you cared too. And he remembered the last lie his brother had tried to tell him, the last night in New Jersey, the last time he'd seen him for ten years, and the feeling soured.

"Ugh," Ford said, digging his palms into his face, "the human brain wasn't meant to sustain this many contradictory emotions."

"You're di-disrupting the landscape," Rick pointed out, lazily directing a finger towards the ground at Ford's feet. Ford cursed breathlessly and scooted away from the roiling magma, ending up closer to Rick and his pet memory than he would have liked.

"You do realize you're trying to get off on a mindless phantasm that you made," Ford pointed out.

"Ehhhhg," Rick replied. He traced a finger up the side of the construct's neck, ending with his hand wrapped around the back of its head. "Done weirder. You don't see me criticizing your boner though, do ya?"

Ford hunched his shoulders forward, hands in pockets, willing his coat to hide the necessary problem.

"Last call for gettin' weird," Rick said, smug. "You're trapped in, it's a nightmare dimension, you might as well get freaky."

"You're beyond strange," Ford replied. What kind of person responded to the unending horror of a chaotic pocket dimension by trying to get laid? The man must have been coming up on forty years old, what had he been like in college? The simple existence of this person seemed less and less likely with each passing minute. "How did you even meet my brother?" he asked, after a moment of fruitless speculation.

"We were in the same profession," Rick said, "for a while anyway."

"My brother? Work?" Ford snorted. "And you don't seem like the type for it either."

"Wha-what, you think portal guns grow on trees?"

"Honestly I think you would be surprised at the things I've seen growing on—" Ford paused. "I'm sorry, portal guns?"

Rick popped free from the aggressively sloppy kiss he'd initiated on the memory of Stan, apparently not perturbed by the shining layer of spit coating his lips now. "Yeah sure," he said, "it's theoretical now, but I'm get—I'm gettin' the prototype worked up when I get home."

Ford took a deep breath. Data was locking into place rapidly now, a torrent of ideas pouring down from it now. Rick Sanchez, whoever he was, knew something Ford didn't. Had something Ford didn't. And regardless of his uninspiring introduction, Rick Sanchez was not an idiot. Ford took a long hard look at the man currently making out with an artificial construction of his brother. He needed to get out of here, asap, before starvation or sleep deprivation or Bill Cypher finished him off for good. It was painfully obvious how he could get Rick to take him out of here. The man was literally still sucking a face identical to his. Ford glanced down at the slow insidious roil of the dimensional floor, then at his blue-stained hands, and then again at Rick who was moaning—not entirely in an off-putting way, if Ford were completely honest.

"Hey, uh, Rick."

Rick paused, mouth open. "What?"

Ford withdrew the gun from the holster underneath his coat and smiled his most ingratiating smile. "I'd like you to take me to your ship," he said, clicking off the safety. "Presuming, of course, that you have one."

-0-

Ten years ago, Stanley Pines was standing at the bottom of a set of steps that led up to an ancient apartment building, in a city that was neither New York nor Boston. Winter was swiftly circling in for a landing but had not yet touched down its wheels on the runway of the city streets. In this city the hustlers didn't hang around on street corners. He was lucky enough to have rented an apartment—that made this his small, fiercely guarded turf.

This time last year he'd been banned from New Jersey. This time last year, he had only had his car. Things were looking up, he was sure.

When Rick came strolling down the sidewalk it came as a surprise to Stan, who had rarely ever heard of Rick leaving the theater two blocks down during hours of business. He didn't work for the theater, of course. Stan had made that mistake briefly, but it hadn't taken long to get that straightened out. He had known Rick for the better part of a year, circling each other in opposing orbits like the planets in that model Ford had made for the sixth grade science fair. It had been Rick who had said to him, listen Stan, the trouble with salesmen is they're always trying to sell something people don't want. Sell something the people want, Rick had gone on with a wink, and they'll come to you. Stan remembered the way he'd said it, one finger tugging the leather string of his long necklace. It was good advice, he was pretty sure, but the leap between theoretical and practical application left him as stumped as ever. There was one thing, at least, that he'd been able to get right about it.

He lifted a tentative hand. "Hey," he called, "you're off early."

Rick snorted. There was a blue bruise around his neck like a collar, but he didn't seem terribly bothered by it. "Some shitlord thought he could get a freebie off old Rick," he said, lifting a wallet from his pocket with a careless little flick. "Not today, motherfucker."

Stan blinked. "You robbed him? That's bad for business."

Stan had learned this the hard way, which was why he did not live in New York anymore. It had not been a pretty lesson to learn.

Rick shoved the thing back in his pocket. "Business can suck my dick," he said. "I made a breakthrough last night and I'm getting out of this dump."

"The city?"

"The planet, jackass. Come on, we're getting drinks. I'll buy."

Stan bit his lip, scanning the empty street. "Nobody's biting tonight," he said. "I can't go yet."

Rick stepped up closer, hands in pockets, and said, "That's the perfect reason to call it a night."

"Widow Johnson is breathin' down my neck, Sanchez. She ain't gonna wait much longer. I need a sale."

Rick shrugged, looking as if he might have lost interest in the whole encounter, only to throw himself at Stan like a fainting damsel. Stan froze, heart beating so quickly that he was certain Rick could feel it through the chest pressed against his own. Rick's arms locked behind his neck. Stan glanced nervously down the street—there was a limit to what the city would tolerate, and Rick pressed up all along the length of him was well over that line. His hand, which had come up in his surprise as if to ward off a blow, hovered uselessly for a second. He swallowed. He settled it on the sharp edge of Rick's hip, a pulse pounding even in his fingertips.

"Rick," he said, "I'm tryin' to work here."

Rick cupped a hand around his cheek, weirdly gentle, and pushed his face back so they were looking at each other. He grinned, charming and rotten. "Stan," Rick said, "babe, have some fun."

Charming and rotten, like peaches with puncture wounds, and much too close to Stan to allow for smart thinking. Honestly, at the end of the day it was a relief to be near Rick. Finally, someone who's life could not be ruined by proximity to the worst Pines brother. Rick had been born at rock bottom, best as Stan could tell, and was content to roller-skate across that bottom on his way to new and exciting disasters.

They ended up in the bar a couple streets down, where the drag queens carried switch blades and Mary sold hustlers drinks for half-price. Stan played cards with a man who had that ratty buckskin look the Woodstock crowd usually wore, cheated outrageously, and won sixty dollars as well as a tab of something that he knew better than to put in his mouth. He pocketed it, glancing across the bar to where Rick was engaged in flirting, half barbs and half threats, spilling drops of his drink. Rick would probably like it. Rick liked anything that had a substantial likelihood of killing him.

"And a beer for the rough trade," Mary said, swinging past with a tray full of drinks. She dropped a bottle with the cap already popped into Stan's hand.

"Mary this thing's half drunk," he said. "What kinda service do you call that?"

"I call it, we're closing in ten and I'm thirsty, sweetheart."

Stan sighed, losing some of the temporary buoyancy of a good night in the right crowd. The streets were waiting for them all, frosted over with the end of autumn and ready to swallow their footsteps. As a rule Stan didn't drink unless someone else was buying, but the bars felt like a kind of home while their window lights were lit. Temporary warmth. At least he managed to pull together a little cash. He could tide Widow Johnson over for another day, try it again tonight. It was only for a little longer anyways. He had a plan in the works.

Stan made his way across the bar and got a hand on Rick's shoulder. "We gotta roll," he said, giving the man a shake. "You know what it's like out there when the bar shuts down. I can't afford to get taken in again."

Rick rolled his neck, a little too bonelessly. Bad sign. Rick could do just about anything drunk, but he had a waspish attitude about it and even less respect for authority than usual.

"Look," Stan said, "you need to come back to my place? I don't mind." He stepped back, grinned. "Ten dollars for the couch. Uh. Twenty."

Rick made a complicated sound indicating that he was less than impressed by the pitch. He grabbed Stan's arm and levered himself up, dragging down the collar of his tshirt in the process. "Come back with me," he said. He must have noticed the uncertainty in Stan's expression because he flapped a hand at him. "Plu-please, I know you don't work when you're off the clock. I'm not lookin' to try anything. Need a, a hand with somethin' tomorrow. Pay ya for it."

The word pay lit up a whole string of buttons in his head. Rick was probably good for it. He'd never known the man to be half as tight on cash as the other boys. Of course, if Rick was willing to pay for it, it probably wasn't easy work.

"Construction," Rick clarified, finally pushing off of him.

Oh. Well. For Rick, Stan figured he could make the time.

They left the bar quietly, ducking through the unlit portions of the streets to avoid anything that might be lying there in wait. Rick's place was reasonable walking distance, as it turned out—Stan had never even seen the outside of it before that night, was sort of surprised to find it triple locked and the hallway strewn with strings of cans.

"You get robbed a lot?" he asked, drawing the hood of his jacket up around his neck.

"Not once," Rick said, fiddling with some unusually complicated locking mechanism. He sounded a little proud, underneath the usual scathing disinterest. The door popped open like it had been sprung, revealing little besides the pale slats of the venetian blinds. Stan trailed after Rick, peering at the doorway as they passed underneath. There was a ceramic crucifix hung above it.

"Huh," Stan said, looking up, "didn't know you were religious."

"God's dead," Rick replied, preoccupied with trying to get his coat onto the hanger, "and if he isn't, I'm gonna kill 'im myself once I get up there."

Stan gave the man's back a dubious look. "Well try to stick with killing the Catholic one," he said. "My folks would be pretty pissed off if your aim got sloppy."

Rick disappeared, muttering, into the kitchen. A faint yellow light flickered on in his wake, and Stan glanced around the edges of the room. At first he thought that Rick had papered over the walls of his apartment in an effort to keep out the cold, the way tenants in the older buildings often did. You could peel away the years in layers of newspaper some places, like dating tree rings. They weren't newspaper, though. Mostly they were sketches in some kind of smeared charcoal, some with a half-finished abandoned look and some meticulously detailed right down to the direction of the moving parts. He pushed his fingers under the loose edge of one and lifted it up, trying to get a better look.

Rick's hand slammed down over it.

"Fuck up my plans and I'll fuck you. Up. Fuck you up."

Stan snatched his hand back. "Yeesh," he said, "alright. Sorry." The charcoal under Rick's hand seemed to spell out patterns of symbols that looked maybe half familiar. "You, uh, you workin' on something big?"

Rick gave him a hard look—honestly, probably the most bone-exposing flesh-stripping look Stan had ever been given, bar none—and then withdrew his own hand from the wall. He seemed to be searching for a tell of some kind, like a poker player in the last round of a high stakes game. Stan started to sweat purely on instinct.

Then Rick smiled. "Yeah," he said, "big stuff. The biggest, the—the biggest big. And I don't want the gov, government sticking the-the-the - their noses in my shit. So you keep it quiet, okay, Stan?"

Stan nodded, hands up. Rick relaxed at that, grabbed his shoulder.

"I knew I could, could count on you, Stanley. You got, you have somethin' none of these leeches got."

"Uh," Stan said, "debt?"

"No."

"Scars?"

"No."

"A car?"

"Yeah," Rick said, "also, no."

Stan could admit when he was stumped. He rocked back on his heels in the mess of paper loose across the floor. Rick let out an irritated breath and stumbled closer, ending with the tip of his index finger pressed into the left side of Stan's chest. He dug it in a little harder, grinning at Stan's wince.

"You can trust people," Rick said, "and I can trust you."

Stan bit his lip, for a moment standing not in the paper-strewn apartment of another prostitute but in the yellow warmth of his home, in the living room with his brother, the noise of the pawnshop rising up through the floorboards.

"Maybe that's not so smart," Stan said, grabbing the hand that pressed into his chest. He couldn't quite bring himself to drop it. Rick was apparently going places. Maybe Stan had misjudged how much trouble he could cause here.

Rick looked down at their hands, then up again at Stan. His expression had lost all of its mirth. "So you fucked some shit up back home," he said. "And now you're here."

Stan nodded.

"And now you think you're some kinda, some, black hole for happiness, right?"

Stan tried very hard to remember what a black hole was supposed to be and drew up a blank. "Um," he said.

"Well guess what?" Rick said. "I can trust whoever I, gu-god, goddamn want and I say I'm trusting you, asshole."

Rick's hand was still in his hand, and Stan knew he should let it go. He was about to get weird and come on too strong and oh, yep, there it was, here he went. Stan pulled Rick against him in an echo of the street earlier that night, hand still around hand, and kissed him. It was a relief. He'd been thinking about doing it for months and it had never seemed like a good idea. Now it seemed like an even worse one, but necessary. Necessary bad ideas made up the fabric of his life.

After a moment of stunned pliability, Rick pulled back from the kiss and got his elbow in between them. "Uh, Stan," he said, in the manner of a guy spelling out facts to toddlers, "I said I was paying you for construction. Tomorrow."

"Yeah," Stan said, squinting uncertainly. "I heard you. I'm not deaf."

"Then what's with the, uh—" Rick gestured at the sliver of space between them, "—what's with this?"

Stan abruptly dropped him. "Oh, for, I never get these things right." He buried his forehead in his palm. "I thought maybe you were into me, sorry, sorry, I thought we were… doing a thing…"

Rick—who had fallen to the floor without Stan's support—tilted his head suspiciously. "You're straight."

"I," Stan started, "heh, you know I never actually said that?"

Rick blinked a couple times and then collapsed backwards. "Are you kidding me?" he yelled, apparently at the ceiling, "we could have been fucking this whole time? Are you, are you serious?"

"Well I wasn't sure you—"

"Of course I fucking did!" Rick said, launching to his feet with an admirable steadiness. "What did, what did you think, do I have to stamp it on your thick fucking skull?"

"Um…"

"Christ," Rick said, grabbing his arm with a vicelike strength that was honestly disconcerting. "Bedroom, now. I'm s-sso fuckin', pissed right now."

Stan followed obediently, unsure of whether he was about to get laid or the crap beaten out of him or possibly both, honestly he had no idea what was happening. This was normal for him. He guessed, in retrospect, he could see why Rick assumed what everyone else did about him. A lot of the boys had a steady guy on the side, but he'd never been sure how they got hooked up with something like that. Customers came to him. That was business. Boyfriends? Girlfriends? God have mercy on him. He still didn't understand half of what had happened with Carla McCorkle.

Rick's bedroom was as full of papers as anywhere else, and he spent a full minute kicking them off his mattress, still holding Stan by the arm as if he suspected the man would just roll away, otherwise. He was muttering to himself as he went. Stan was about to try and disentangle himself when Rick reached up, grabbed his shoulder, and threw him bodily onto the mattress. It protested faintly under his weight. Rick threw a leg over his hips and straddled him, dipping like a bird of prey over Stanley's rapidly thumping chest.

"So like," Rick said, reaching past him for something at the edge of the mattress, "stop me if you don't want it, but I've been repressing some wicked strong urges for months and I'm about ready to let those bad boys go. You game?"

"Sanchez," Stan said seriously, "right now, you could throw me out the window and I'd still be into it."

Rick drew back, lifted an eyebrow, and flipped something between his hands. "That's what I like to hear," he said.

Afterwards, in the relative silence of the bedroom, Stan lay drifting between sleep and wakefulness. A car passed below the window, and Rick hissed out a breath like someone who had folded a bad hand of cards. He rolled over, threw an arm across Stan's chest, and settled there as if he were waiting to be challenged for the spot. Stan didn't mind it. Honestly.

When no commentary came, the hissing stiffness ebbed out of Rick and he deigned to loop a leg over Stan's. "Hey," Rick said, "you – you know what happens when one black hole swallows another one?"

"Uh," Stan said, searching through memories of his brother muttering to himself in their bedroom, still unable to retrieve anything relevant, "no?"

"Nobody does," Rick said. He sounded smug, the way he had sounded when he broke police custody last month, bloodied and near collapse and showing his reddened teeth. He had a gravity, Stan thought distantly.

"Right," Stan said. He had no idea what any of it meant, but if it worked for Rick then it worked for him.

He was happy enough to follow the lead of somebody smarter than him. Morning came, went—with a hand around his waist Rick showed him the skeleton of something mechanical and strange. The project, he said, gesturing grandly. Stan figured, for Rick, he could spare the time.

Ten years later he would be absurdly grateful to the man, absent these many years, for teaching him the applied side of applied mathematics. Standing beneath the looming, lifeless monolith of the portal that had swallowed his brother a week before, Stan would look up at it with a fresh new jacket on his shoulders and say, "Alright, you son of a bitch, let's see how you work."

[x]

"Y-y'know that was, that was completely unnecessary," Rick informed him, from the driver's seat.

Ford lifted his eyebrows.

"You, you really overreacted," Rick went on, "It's - you can't just pull a gun on everybody who, who has something you want, Stanford."

Ford did not deign to reply to that.

"I'm just," Rick said, "I'm just saying, you could've said please."

"And you would have just given me the ride for free if I had asked nicely."

Rick sat back, blew a puff of air over his lips. "Sure," he said, "yeah, of course."

Ford considered the man beside him, the piles of beer cans across the floor, and the fresh shiny newness of the saucer's outer hull. "Well," he said, "maybe I do have tendency to skip right to violence when negotiation would suffice."

"Yeah," Rick snorted, "no shit, you gonna put that thing away now?"

Ford flicked the safety back on and holstered the weapon. "So, do you think you can get me back to my dimension?"

"Please, like I'm gonna spend the next thirty years looking for some interdimensional hobo's hometown?"

They were over a world of what looked like pure scales, a dragon world floating in a hazy nebula. The readout on the dash informed Ford that they were in dimension ~888, presumably the neighbor of the nightmare realm he had been stranded in. This was about to become increasingly more relevant to Ford's situation, as the floor of the ship opened up beneath him.

He landed hard, breath thumped from his lungs, on something with the unmistakable give of living flesh. The saucer hovered above him.

"Hahah!" Rick peered down through the open floor. "Try ta - try to hostage Rick Fucking Stanchez, Stan, Sanchez, huh?"

The little ship zipped up and blasted away, leaving an empty lavender sky. And then it zipped backwards, along the same flight path, and paused above Ford.

"Seriously, though," Rick said, "call me."

In twenty minutes he would find the saucer crashed between two enormous curling spikes of keratin, but that was an entirely different event.