AN: The title is from two songs in The Prince of Egypt soundtrack, 'All I Ever Wanted' and 'The Plagues.'
"But Rameses is the bad guy!" Dipper protested. He and Mabel and Grunkle Stan had just finished their bi-weekly family movie night, and it had been a lot of fun until Stan had started getting some really wrong ideas about the movie.
"Look, I'm not saying the guy was perfect or anything, but Moses wasn't perfect either. I mean, he just up and left his brother behind with a dad that was never impressed, in a place where nobody thought he'd ever make anything of himself."
"He was next in line to be pharaoh of one of the greatest civilizations in all of history," Dipper said. That wasn't exactly 'not making anything of himself.'
"Right, that's what I said," Stan agreed dismissively, even though that was totally not what he'd said at all. "The point is once they finally reunite 10 years… or, you know, whatever unspecified amount of time it was later, Moses didn't even care about what Rameses had been up to or trying to reconnect with his brother. He just wanted to talk about his thing, and then leave again forever."
"His thing? Rameses was keeping his people as slaves. The Hebrew people. We're Jewish, Grunkle Stan."
"So the guy screwed-up, maybe he owes some people some apologies. At the end of the day he and Moses are still brothers, and family is the most important people you can have," Stan said.
"I would forgive you if you kept slaves, Dipdop," Mabel added.
"See? Mabel gets it," Stan said, gesturing toward Dipper's sister, who was currently wedged in the recliner next to Stan. "You gotta put your family first, Dipper. You remember that."
"But I wouldn't want anyone to forgive me if I was keeping slaves." Not unless he freed them first or there were some weird extenuating circumstances or something. "Ugh, you know what, never mind."
Dipper flopped back onto the floor and pushed his hat over his face. It's not like Stan cared what he thought or had to say anyways.
Late that night found Dipper making his way to the kitchen for a drink of water. His walk down the stairs was accompanied by faint noises and flashing light from the next room, a sure sign that Stan was either up late watching TV or, more likely, had fallen asleep watching TV. Dipper wasn't all that worried about it either way, not until he heard a sound that definitely wasn't the TV, or Grunkle Stan's snoring.
On full alert now, Dipper carefully creeped the rest of the way down the stairs and up to the doorway, expecting a monster, or something worse. But when he peered around the door frame all he saw was Stan watching the same movie from earlier, just at the part where Rameses and Moses were being reunited when Moses came back from the desert. And that weird noise was… Stan crying? And not just watery eyes and a single glistening tear, full on crying. Dipper had started to think earlier that maybe Stan's reaction to the movie had to do with something besides the movie itself, but he hadn't realized that it was upsetting him that much.
"This is just like my life… in a way," Stan said in between sniffs, as on the screen Rameses was realizing that Moses had come back for the Hebrew people and not him.
Slowly, and being careful not to make any noise, Dipper backed away and headed back up the stairs. He could just drink straight from the faucet in the bathroom, and let Stan do his thing in private.
And maybe tomorrow he would call Grandpa Shermie and tell him he needed to talk to his brother.
Stan groaned at the sound of the phone ringing. He sure wasn't getting up for that. He went to call out for Dipper to answer it, kid was closer to it anyway, but before he could, Stan heard the sound of a door slamming. Sure enough, when he leaned over to look into the kitchen, Dipper had vanished. That seemed like a pretty extreme reaction to the telephone ringing for anyone not on the run from the law or debt collectors, but eh, whatever. Course, now that meant Stan was going to have to get up after all.
"Pines residence."
"That's my line."
Stan held the receiver away from his head for a second and stared at it, like that might let him see the person on the other side. "Shermie?"
"Hey look, he remembers me."
"Of course, I remember you," Stan protested. "I was just surprised, is all."
"Yeah, well it's good to talk to you again too, Ford. Though I hear you're going by Stan these days?"
Crap. "Yeah, uh, it's just easier sometimes. People are more used to the name Stan, and if you introduce yourself as Stanford, a lot of them end up calling you Stan anyways." Seemed like Stan's nerves were out in full force today. But then Shermie, more than Ma, and even more than Pa, had always been able to make Stan feel like he was a kid again, just seven years old and hoping for his big brother, the cool high school senior's approval. Course, back in those days, Stan hadn't needed anyone's approval 'cept Ford's, but still… it had always been nice to have Shermie's too.
Shermie made a noncommittal noise, like he didn't quite believe Stan, but couldn't put his finger on anything to call out as a lie. "So, Dipper called me this morning."
"That kid," Stan swore (or, at least, that's as close as he would get to swearing when he had a couple of preteens running around). No wonder he had scrammed so quickly earlier. "What was he trying to rat me out for?"
"Nothing," Shermie said, then changed it to, "well, maybe something? It depends on your perspective really. The point is, he called because he was worried about you. Don't tell him I told you he said this, but I guess he was going to get himself some water last night and he saw you watching a movie and crying over it."
"Me, crying? Kid's imagining things. He must have been half-asleep, sleepwalking even, and dreamed the whole thing up. I was not crying," Stan denied at a rapid clip.
Shermie completely ignored everything Stan had just said, which honestly was probably a smart move on his part, and continued on his same thread of conversation. "Dipper wouldn't tell me which movie it was that you were watching, which makes me a bit suspicious about what exactly you've been showing my grandkids-"
"It was a children's movie," Stan protested. Well, it had been a cartoon at any rate. All cartoons were kid's movies, right? "Besides, don't think I don't know where Dipper got his love of B horror movies from."
"Hey, in those movies the promiscuous teens always killed off by the monster; that's a good lesson for kids."
"Yeah, if you want to scar them for life," Stan said.
"Agree to disagree. And also, you are trying to distract me," Shermie accused.
"Is it working?"
"Not as much now that you admitted it," Shermie said, which was fair. Stan was getting a little too used to the general gullibility of the citizens of Gravity Falls. "But back to my point, Dipper wouldn't tell me which movie it was, because he seemed to think it would distract me from the main issue, but he did tell me a bit about the plot. Specifically that it was about two brothers and then one of them screwed-up pretty badly and the other never forgave him for it, so by the end of the movie they had gone their separate ways and never saw each other again. He also said that whatever you had done to screw-up, he was pretty sure you were really sorry for it and just wanted us to be brothers again, because family was the most important thing to you."
"That kid," Stan repeated, though this time it came out more as a sigh with a hint of fondness around the edges.
"He's something else," Shermie said, the proud grin audible in his voice.
"They both are. I don't know what a messed-up family like ours did to deserve the pair of them."
"Must've done something right," Shermie said. "Hey, Ford? You never told them about Stanley, did you?"
Stan's grip on the phone tightened. "I don't see as how that was my responsibility."
Stan had snapped a little bit saying that, but Shermie replied back agreeably enough. "It's not. It could be your place if you wanted to, but it's not your responsibility by any means." That was the problem with Shermie: you could not pick a fight with the guy. Not that Stan was trying to pick a fight right now, but he liked having the option. "I only meant that if I haven't told them, and you haven't told them, and I don't think their dad ever told him because I don't think he remembers Stanley at all, then they probably don't even know that he existed."
"They'd be better off without a bum like that in their lives anyway," Stan said bitterly. Course now that Stan had met them, anyone who thought they could pry him away from these kids had another thing coming, but that didn't mean they wouldn't be better off without him.
Shermie's sigh in response to that was one he lifted straight from Ma, the one that said, 'I guess I honestly didn't expect any different, but I was hoping.' "We both know you don't mean that. Acting like you don't care isn't going to make it hurt less."
"Shows what you know," Stan said, though his heart wasn't in it. Acting like he didn't care didn't make it hurt less, nothing made it hurt less, but he didn't know how else to handle it.
"Look Ford, maybe this is stupid and cliché, but I want you to know that what happened to Stanley wasn't your fault, okay?"
"I know that." Of course it wasn't Ford's fault; Stan was the screw-up. He just kept screwing up over and over again, and making everyone else pay for his mistakes, making Ford pay for them.
"I just, I was so hacked off at him," Stan said, the need to confess, even if he knew Shermie wouldn't get it because he was picturing completely the wrong moment, overwhelming him. "And I had a right to be mad." Ford calling him up after ten years and dangling their old dream in front of Stan's face, just to dash it again and banish Stan for good; you don't treat family like that. "We were fighting, and then all the sudden everything was happening so fast." The acrid smell of burning flesh and the sharp pain in his shoulder. Pushing Ford and then watching him float up in the air. Stanford screaming for help and Stanley not able to do anything because he was the dumb twin, the screw-up who had never done anything worthwhile in his whole rotten life. And then… "And then he was gone. And I just wanted him back."
Stan stood there with one hand resting on the counter for support while the other clenched around the phone so tight the plastic groaned in protest, screwed his eyes shut tight and tried to force himself to breath.
"I know, Ford. I miss Stanley too."
Stan had been handling his emotions, he had, but the wrongness of what Shermie said startled one broken sob out of him. That one sob wanted to open the floodgates to more, but Stan wouldn't let it, so he forced himself to swallow the rest, like shards of glass down his throat to settle heavily in his stomach.
"Dipper was right; we should talk more," Shermie said after a minute or two.
"No it's fine. I'm fine. I guess that movie just got to me more than I realized," Stan said, full of false bravado that didn't even sound convincing to him. But it was hard enough to have a bunch of people who didn't know any better and who at most had only met his brother a handful of times, think he was Stanford. But to deal with Shermie thinking that, and to have him call him Ford… Stan didn't think he could take it.
There was a moment or two of silence, and then, "I think that might be the least believable lie you've ever told, and that's counting all the others from this conversation, and the time when you and Stanley were seven and tried to convince me that it had been the dog that broke my record player, despite the fact that we didn't actually own a dog."
"Heh. Yeah, I told him that was a horrible lie." At least, Ford had told Stan that after the fact. But when the two of them had been facing down an angry Shermie, Ford had backed Stan up a hundred percent, no questions asked. And to repay him, Stan had wrecked Ford's life, and then shoved him into some freaky sci-fi portal.
"Now, because I'm a great older brother, I'll pretend like I believe you. But even if you're totally fine and certainly don't need any emotional support from your family, what about me? Maybe I want to talk to my younger brother more than once every couple of years."
Stan hesitated. Shermie's ploy was pretty obvious, but at the same time, he really did sound like he genuinely wanted to talk to Stan. Sure, he technically thought he was talking to Ford, but Stan was just as much Shermie's younger brother as Ford was. Maybe it would kill Stan a little inside each time Shermie called him Ford, but he wasn't going to let his family down, not again.
"Look, I'm not going to tell you to hold your breath waiting around for me to call you, because I'll probably forget to." Possibly deliberately. Or he might end up calling only to hang up as soon as Shermie answered. "But if you want to ring me up sometime, I'll be here."
"Is that a promise?"
Stan thought of the portal waiting down for him in the basement, and of Ford waiting on the other side. "Yeah. I'm not going anywhere."
The loud sound of an unopened bottle of soda slamming against the table startled Dipper out of the notebook he was writing in, and brought his attention to Stan, who was standing at the other end of the table looking really angry. Dipper had thought when he saw Stan's car drive off a while ago that meant it was safe for him to come out from his hiding spot up on the roof. Apparently, he was wrong. "G-grunkle Stan," Dipper said, stammering a bit. He cleared his throat and tried again. "What's up?"
"You know, I really don't appreciate you going around behind my back like that," Stan practically growled at him.
Oh man, Dipper hadn't seen Stan this mad since the time Dipper had been trying to find out the truth behind his tattoo. "But you seemed so upset after we watched the movie; I just thought…"
"Thought you'd go sticking your nose were it doesn't belong, and messing around with things you don't know anything about," Stan accused.
"I'm sorry. I was only trying to help," Dipper said in a small voice.
Stan sighed heavily. "I know you were." He walked up to Dipper, and Dipper shrank back a little in his chair, still feeling a bit cautious despite the fact that Stan didn't really look angry any more. But Stan just came and stood alongside Dipper's chair. He help is hand up in the air and dropped it on top of Dipper's hat, rubbing it back and forth a few times, almost like he was trying to ruffle Dipper's hair or something. "Thanks for worrying about me. You're a good kid, Dipper."
Then Stan walked out, leaving Dipper lightly touching his hat in confusion. "Oh hey, Grunkle Stan, you forgot your soda," Dipper called, his voice trailing off as he reached over and grabbed the bottle and got a closer look at it. Stan must have picked it up while he was out; they didn't keep the apricot flavor in the Shack, because neither Mabel nor Grunkle Stan liked it. It was Dipper's favorite, though.
Smiling a little to himself, Dipper cracked open the bottle and took a sip.