Though I've been watching the show for about two years, this is my first foray into GF fanfic. Hopefully you like it enough to leave a review! (nudge wink)
Note on language: I always try to keep my fics just as clean as the source material they're based on, but for some reason when I write Ford he likes to curse. Only two instances of it here, but you were warned.
That first night, they can't sleep in the Shack.
Stanley has already re-familiarized himself with everyone's names and seems to recall how to act with each of them, and every once in a while he'll drop a reference to some experience he didn't realize he remembered up until that exact moment. It hasn't gone farther than that, and they're not about to push it. Their efforts to bring him back to himself have already been far more successful than Ford would have dreamed possible.
He's glad, beyond glad, but there's an uneasiness in him that he can't shake.
Of course, he refuses to give voice to it. Everyone's both physically and emotionally spent, and he's the only one of them who might be able to do anything about it anyway. And even he has no intention of looking into it until he's gotten a good night's sleep.
For which the Shack is certainly not currently equipped. It's almost more hole than wall at this point, shards of glass lie everywhere, and nature has already begun trying to reclaim it. So they all gathered the essentials they could find (for Mabel, that included three sweaters, though they all tried to tell her they would be back tomorrow) and headed to Soos's grandmother's house, waving goodbye to the beaten up old building they had come to call home (though Ford had only just gotten back and Stan didn't really remember), promising they'd return soon to start repairs.
Light was only just starting to fade from the sky, but by the time they walked through Abuelita's front door they could read the exhaustion in one another's dragging steps and sagging shoulders. As Soos greeted his grandmother with an enormous hug and the words "Abuelita! You're not a chair anymore!" the rest of them began to descend to the basement, led by Dipper and Mabel.
Ford lies staring at the ceiling with his hands folded over his stomach, thinking of how Mabel pulled Stan along by the hand, how his brother was so easy to read as he looked at the girl with a fondness even he was confused by. He turns over on the couch and his gaze falls on the children on the air mattress in the middle of the floor. He knows they started out on opposite ends of it, but they've since both rolled to the middle. Mabel's head rests in the nook between Dipper's shoulder and cheek, and she snuggles close to him, murmuring something in her sleep. Originally she was using an extra sweater as a blanket, but it's currently wadded up at her feet. Dipper's hat, bearing the symbol that Ford once thought would be so important, hangs from the arm of the couch on which Stan currently sleeps.
Ford stares at his brother, at that face so like his own. His mouth hangs open, a trail of drool escaping the corner of it and ending up on his undershirt. His fez and glasses rest on the end table less than a foot from his head.
Ford remembers spending a fair amount of time in his thirty years on the other side of the portal just wondering if Stan was growing the same as he was. Which of them was getting more sun, which of them had better posture, which of them took better care of his teeth, how Stan was styling his hair, whether he was losing it faster than Ford, whether he was eating well, at what age his eyesight would start failing him. Ford always assumed at least that Stan would go gray after he did, and develop fewer early wrinkles; the… stresses of his living conditions were not exactly conducive to maintaining a youthful appearance.
And then, after wondering about these things, he'd always continue on to picturing how Stan was doing financially, socially, et cetera et cetera. He'd ask himself questions like Has he gotten married yet? Kids? How many? What's she like? What does he do for a living? Can he feed himself? Does he ever talk to Mom and Dad? And every time he'd realize that he had no room to be surprised at any potential answer to any of these questions. The last time he'd seen his brother was for less than an hour, after a ten-year silence. And by the time he emerged from that portal… It had been forty years since he'd known Stan. As a teenager, he was a lazy, unambitious troublemaker mooching off Ford's success, but also the most loyal and protective brother anyone could ask for. But nobody stays exactly the same person as they were in high school. Stan could have become anyone.
And who he became, as Ford can see now clear as day, is a con artist who was willing to sacrifice everything to keep this crazy, cruel, unpredictable, beautiful world turning for one more day. An old man who made a mistake once and spent thirty years building his entire life around trying to fix it. A great uncle who is loved unconditionally by the two most wonderful kids Ford has ever met.
Ford's nose prickles, and he rubs at his eyes roughly and turns onto his back again. An hour ago he was so tired he didn't even take his shoes off before shutting his eyes; what happened to that exhaustion? Why is he still awake?
Maybe being a statue for however many days that was left some long-term physiological effects.
Eeny, meeny, miney…
He squeezes his eyes shut, grimacing. Cipher's gone, you old fool. The kids are safe. Stan's on the mend. This is the first night you don't have to worry about the potential trigger for the end of the universe sitting in the basement. Relax.
He counts to one hundred, refusing to open his eyes. He strategically tenses up every single one of his muscles, one by one, and then lets them rest, one by one. He turns on his side and regulates his breathing. Tries about six different positions.
This isn't working.
Making a split-second decision he wasn't previously aware he was considering, he sits up and crosses the room carefully to retrieve his glasses from the table next to his sleeping brother.
It's a thirty minute walk back to the Mystery Shack. Maybe Ford shouldn't be making it alone after dark, but nothing's really scared him since his first few weeks away from this dimension, and after the madness of the last several days, he refuses to be put off by the prospect of a little walk in a comparatively mundane world. Especially when he's got his trusty old gun strapped to his belt.
He's spent most of his time since returning in the basement of the Shack, but the town doesn't really look all that different than it did thirty years ago. A few buildings are gone, there are numerous new ones, many have been remodeled, and he spots a fairly recently-made road, but the framework is the same. It's the same Gravity Falls he studied all those years ago.
He stands at the perimeter of his—Stan's—their property, surveying the wrecked building, taking in the broken windows, the collapsed walls, the toppled totem pole. Something in the back of his mind offers a warning that the building probably isn't structurally sound enough to be considered safe to enter, but it's that part of his brain he hasn't listened to in a very long time. He approaches the Shack, and steps through the front door without hesitation.
He finds himself in the living room first, and eyes the recliner where Stan was sitting when they started to regain hope that he might be himself again. Mabel's scrapbook is gone, of course—currently sitting in Soos's grandmother's basement next to her Mary Janes, Ford is pretty sure.
Approaching the chair, he lays a careful hand on its back. He wonders when Stan bought it—well, whether he bought it might be a better question. Ford casts his eyes around the room. Living in this house, that had once been so familiar to him but that his brother had made a home out of over the course of thirty years, had been strange enough. Now that it's also falling apart in the wake of being used as a weapon against a powerful demon bent on destroying life as they knew it… it's almost unrecognizable. Really, at this point it's probably more familiar to the kids and Soos than either of the men who have actually been the property owners (well, Stan was never actually the owner, he just took the owner's name, but that's all semantics).
Something sounds behind him, and he whirls around, gun already in hand. He points it into the general darkness, scanning the tree line attentively as he tries to figure out what it was. It sounded big enough to be human.
A large raccoon emerges briefly from the trees, lumbering idly through the undergrowth for a few moments before it disappears again into the darkness.
Ford sighs and lowers his gun, muscles relaxing. He doesn't know what he was so afraid of. Or rather… he does, but he knows a gun wouldn't be any use against it.
He pulls the door shut and turns around again, and his eyes fall on the vending machine. It's on its side on the floor, and the door it used to cover is wide open. The staircase to the lab is shrouded in total darkness.
There were dangerous things contained in the basement of this house even without the rift, and that was before it was torn up from its foundations and turned into a giant robot.
Ford stands frozen, staring into the shadows, hosting a heated internal debate on whether he really has to go back down there. This debate lasts only a few seconds, though. He knew what the outcome would be before it began.
It takes twenty minutes to find a flashlight. The contents of nearly all the cabinets in the Shack are currently strewn about the floor or hopelessly lost somewhere in the forest area where the battle took place. By the time he locates one, his back hurts from bending over and his eyes are beginning to ache from straining to see in the dark. He's tried every light switch, but only one has worked. This place is going to be quite the fixer upper.
His heart is thudding harder than he feels it should be as he descends the stairs. He closes his eyes as he turns the corner, and stands there with his feet on two different steps, taking deep breaths as he prepares himself for what he might see.
He opens one eye just a crack, and then both of them all the way.
Nothing leaps out at him. He doesn't know what he expected. Some old fear of the dark seems to have found its home inside him again, he supposes.
The foundation of the portal isn't even standing anymore. It's all in enormous jagged pieces strewn across the floor. The shattered remains of test tubes and crucibles and flasks litter a good half of the area. At first glance, Ford is pretty sure he sees at least two sizeable acid stains, three blinking lights that need to be investigated, and eight or nine now-empty containers and cabinets whose contents need to be located and contained if possible.
His boots are tough; he trusts them to protect his feet as he crunches across a sea of glass shards. The gloves he was wearing earlier are fortunately still in his pocket, and he pulls them on as he walks.
Stanley placing his six-fingered-gloved hand into Bill's outstretched one, the handshake coming alive with blue flame, Bill shrieking with laughter as he splits from his brand new physical form and plunges into his brother's brain—
Ford bends over, holding his head in his hands with his eyes screwed shut. For a few seconds, that familiar laugh and sky-colored fire surround him, crowding out his senses completely. He wasn't at an angle to be able to see Stan's expression as the demon entered his mind, and he's glad, because if he had been, he is sure he'd be seeing his brother's face now too.
It passes after a short span of time, though still much longer than he'd like, and he straightens up and keeps walking, a little slower now. He wishes it were feasible to hope that this would stop soon; he knows from experience it won't.
At least Stanley might not have this problem.
He spends the next hour trying to shut down all the still-functioning pieces of technology he can find. It's fortunate that it doesn't take much longer than that, because it involves tapping into knowledge of complex circuitry and engineering that his brain is just too tired for. Only one small explosion occurs for the duration, and he even manages to dodge it, and though the impact with the floor leaves a bruise on his elbow, he's happy to say he avoids burning off his eyebrows (again).
His next job is finding all the dangerous chemicals and powerful weapons that are yet unaccounted for. Fortunately there are no living creatures loose in town because of this; the shapeshifter was his last such experiment, and he has no reason to think it isn't still cryogenically frozen underground.
When he finds a long crack burned into the floor—a smiley face, a goddamn smiley face seared into the landscape of North America, oh how he loves his destruction—following a more or less straight path along the wall, he quickly forms a tentative guess as to what could have made it. He follows the line, bending low to the ground as he examines the varying depth of the tiny chasm it leaves, and locates the punctured cylindrical container of acid (his own creation, specially made using a substance he extracted from a particular pond in the forest) lying on its side in a corner. Ford smiles, scooping it carefully from the floor and straightening up.
He freezes.
When gravity falls and earth becomes sky, fear the beast with just one eye—
Ford closes his eyes as tight as he can manage, trying not to remember. Trying to think of anything but the first time he sacrificed control of his body and came back with a better understanding of interdimensional matter but a lessened ability to sleep at night—or the time he came back to himself in front of a mirror and caught a fleeting glimpse of his own two eyes glowing yellow with slitted pupils, all the nightmares he had after, only even those weren't safe—or the time he described his brother at length to the being he thought was his friend and was told, "Family's the worst; don't worry Sixer, you've got me now!"—or when Fiddleford came to him worried and afraid, demanding to know where he was getting his new ideas and whether he was working with anyone else, and delivered his first threat to quit the project—or the day a yellow one-eyed triangle appeared in one of his typical, nonsensical dreams and he realized he couldn't trust what was in his own head anymore—or when he first encountered Bill after Fiddleford voiced his doubts and couldn't even bring himself to ask the questions he'd planned through Bill's constant flattery—or when Bill so easily and casually admitted his deep-set betrayal and hatred of peace and order—or when Bill appeared in his dream field just to disrupt any sense of security Ford may have been building—or when Bill sent out a ray of blue light from his eye that enveloped him and left him cold and frozen solid, when Bill came this close to killing Ford's great niece, when Bill backed them so far into a corner that Ford had to pull the trigger on his brother's entire past, when Bill was so slippery and Stan's memories came back so easily that Ford couldn't sleep knowing Bill might too, when Bill… when Bill…
What can he think about?
Ford's eyes snap open, and Bill's eye is watching him from every angle, and he flings the container he's holding across the room. He immediately ducks to avoid the stream of acid that goes flying out; instead it hits the walls, searing a dark line across the various images of that thrice-cursed devil.
It's not enough. His image is everywhere, and Ford knows by now that his image has power, and sure he was erased, but Stan was erased too, and if Stan's already finding his way back from oblivion, who's to say—
He's built into the very foundations of this building. When Ford was conducting renovations and making additions, some sort of three-sided figure always made it in. Sometimes he'd find effigies of Bill that he didn't remember planning or making. There are at least three windows he can think of that are basically Bill-shaped. At least five statuettes made in his image. Not to mention the mess in his private study—
Even his lab, which was supposed to be dedicated to science and reason, wasn't safe from it. Ford stares at the carvings in the remote corner of the basement, and can't remember ever seeing them before.
Tears sting his eyes, but he will not cry. He won't.
He has to do something.
He's gone up one floor to his study before he realizes what's happening. The nearly-empty cylinder of acid is back in his hands. The moment the elevator door opens, he charges to the back of the room and starts pouring its remaining contents all over the Bill rug rolled up in the corner, trying to keep his hands steady. Once its flow is reduced to drips, he hurls it at the wall, retrieves the foot-tall Bill figurine from its position on the floor, and thrusts it through the full-sized painting he thinks he may have made himself when Bill was in his mind.
Nothing is in order, most furniture has toppled and broken and paper coats the floor like a blanket, there's a goddamn hole in the ceiling and chunks of wood and plaster everywhere he looks, but this corner, this shrine to the dream demon, on the whole remains infuriatingly intact.
Ford didn't intend to scream, but he does start letting out a series of shouts when he starts overturning furniture. But there's no relief, there's never any relief. Bill could be back, and Ford already anticipates his own madness in the wake of that uncertainty. And even if he couldn't return, even if Ford could be sure he's gone forever, he can never take back the very real danger he put his family, the entire world in, what Stan had to put on the line all because of him and his stupid pride—
"Grunkle Ford?"
His head snaps up, and he automatically tries to quiet his breathing, straining to listen.
"Grunkle Ford, are you okay?" The small, frightened voice is carrying through the hole over his head. And getting closer.
Sweet mercy, what is Mabel doing here?
Before he can begin to collect his thoughts, she appears above him, squinting downward. In a moment of childishness, he holds still, though he knows her eyes will adjust any second.
The sweater she's wearing is the one Ford saw wadded in a ball on the air mattress. In the darkness, for a moment he thinks it's yellow, and actually flinches.
"Grunkle Ford!" Without so much as a moment of preparation she starts attempting to climb through the hole. Naturally she slips almost immediately, and Ford dives across the floor to catch her. The weight of her coming down sends him to the floor again, landing solidly on his rump, holding her close.
She pulls away a bit and is already talking, asking rapid fire questions like what is this place, what's going on, what is he doing here. For a moment, all Ford can feel is relief that her sweater is actually light orange.
When that passes, and he's able to think again, he says, "Mabel, what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be resting?"
"Not any more than you should be," she retorts, climbing out of his lap to stand over him, expression going from cross to concerned. "I actually got plenty of sleep in Mabeland. I'm not that tired. When I woke up and you were gone… I figured if you weren't here, I'd have no idea where else to look."
He leans against the wall, closing his eyes. "You didn't wake any of the others?"
"I probably couldn't if I'd tried. I think it was Stan's snoring that woke me up." She pauses, and Ford opens his eyes again. Mabel is staring at the floor, smiling excitedly, playing with her fingers, though they're lost in her sleeves. "I think he was dreaming. I was just lying awake for ten minutes before I realized you were gone, listening to him mutter. I kinda hoped he'd say something to show he was remembering something, but I couldn't understand any of it."
"It's good to hope," Ford says, and stops. Thinks. Starts again. "It's good to hope, but… it can hurt. Don't hope too much. He already has remembered far more than we could have expected him to. He might not remember any more."
She stares at him, biting her lip in serious contemplation for a good long moment. Finally, she says quietly, "Why'd you come here, Grunkle Ford?"
He refuses to break eye contact with her. He doesn't think she's noticed any of the images of Bill painted on the wall, and he will not draw her attention to them. Because if she sees them, she'll ask why he's destroying them, and she doesn't need any more cause for nightmares.
He tells himself that's the reason, anyway.
Deep in his heart, though, he knows he's just an incredibly selfish old man.
She's still waiting. He's gone too long without answering. He opens his mouth, not sure what's going to come out of it, but she speaks before he can: "You need to sleep. Bill's gone. He's not coming back."
She doesn't understand. She's staring at him with wide, innocent eyes full of concern and hope, and she just doesn't understand at all.
"He might," he says quietly.
Mabel frowns, and leans in close. Ford realizes she's still standing. She doesn't seem to have any intention of getting comfortable. "Less than twenty-four hours ago, he was tricked by a wardrobe change, entered the mind of my Grunkle Stan, your brother—who probably beat the heck out of him while he was in there—and then got erased by McGucket's memory gun. That's the kind of bad day you can't come back from."
"He's crafty, Mabel," Ford says, removing a glove to rub his hand down his face. "I know that better than anyone. And the memory gun's flawed. You and Dipper told me about how McGucket started to remember just after seeing the recording, even when he'd used it so many times… it's not just Stan."
"Memories and dream demons are different!" Mabel says in frustration, tears forming in her eyes. Oh, how prone children are to tears. "I know you're not worried about this because of that. You're worried because you've been worried for more than thirty years and you don't know how to stop."
Ford stares at her, speechless.
"You were scared, we were all scared, but you gotta stop being scared now, Grunkle Ford." She rubs her eyes, hand engulfed in her sweater sleeve, and pokes it out to offer it to him, trying to stop sniffling. "Please. Don't be like you were. Don't get all obsessed. Come back."
You care more about your dumb mysteries than your family—
He closes his eyes, breathing out slowly and deliberately. She's right about one thing: memories and dream demons differ in many fundamental respects, though the one that matters most is how close to physicality they can get. On some level, memories have very real storage space. They can be lost via head trauma or botched neurosurgery. And they can be recovered. Demons like Bill can't influence the physical world at all except through a series of carefully plotted deals that allows them to leave the mindscape and gain physical form—which Bill had done, but he temporarily relinquished that form to enter what he thought was the mind of Stanford Pines. With no connection to the material world, not even brain circuitry, he… he really ought to have been destroyed. His short-lived physical body was petrified and dropped somewhere in the forest, where it will remain for eternity, useless, just another oddity of Gravity Falls.
He tries to push down the surge of hope that rises now inside him, telling himself it's irrational, dangerous. But… what if it isn't? He's too tired, his emotions too raw, to give it a clear think over. And either way… there is no denying that the idea of sleeping without fear of what he might see behind his closed eyelids fills him with such a sense of longing that his knees go weak.
Mabel may be right.
She's standing with her little hand still outstretched, like she could really do anything that would assist in bringing his much taller self to a standing position. "Please," she says again, voice steadier this time, and even smiles. "I promise you'll have good dreams."
Ford doesn't believe that for a second.
But he takes her hand.