A/N: Enjoy :)
The drive down to Piedmont was a quiet one.
He'd turned the radio on as soon as he'd driven past the water tower, but Stan might as well have not done anything but kept his hands on the wheel. He couldn't concentrate on the music between ruminating on current circumstances
He veered onto a highway that must've been remodeled while he stowed away in Gravity Falls for the last 20 years, and checked his watch. Stan sighed, feeling weak while the sky ahead faded into a watery grey as the sun rose. It was 5:15 in the morning.
Stan approached the suburban nightmare of a home with his hat in hand. It felt ridiculous, approaching his niece and nephew's home with the same formality reserved for cops and army recruiters, but he was at odds with the situation at hand.
Alex Pines opened the door after a good, long minute of Stan peering around at the browning lawn and the grade schoolers rattling their tasseled bikes up and down the driveway, racing to the end of the road to see who could get to the stop sign the fastest.
"Uncle Stanford." Alex smiled faintly. It had been two months since they'd seen and spoken to each other last, and Stan didn't blame the young man for his lack of enthusiasm.
"Hey, kid."
"I'm… glad you could make it."
Stan had been invited in politely – something that he was awkwardly unaccustomed to, he realized while wiping his feet on the mat and returning a tight-lipped smile.
The house was quiet, like it had been when Stan had visited once. He'd come down to visit the only relatives that had deigned to live on the West Coast, and not a state over from his own that he hadn't been banned from permanently.
That had been five years ago, when he'd never met his niece Rebecca and her husband before.
Alex's shoulders slumped, and his hands balled into fists. "Was it, uh. Was the traffic bad?"
Stan, in the middle of blatantly observing the house and eyeballing the probable cost of everything that looked brand-spanking new, peered over at his niece's widow. "Nope. Not really, not until Sacamentos –"
"Sacramento, Stanford." Alex snorted. "Lemme go see if the babies are done with their nap."
Stan watched the man walk up the stairs and out of sight, before retiring to the living room with a drawn expression on his face.
Stan held Mabel Pines in his arms, unable to hide a dopey smile on his face as the toddler grabbed at his nose and babbled incoherently in his face. Alex sat rigidly across from them, dwarfed by the couch cushions and growing pale as a ghost as he looked beyond the happy scene in front of him and drowned in his tumultuous assortment of thoughts.
Dipper had still been asleep when Alex had gone up to check on the little boy and his twin sister. But of course, Mabel barely slept at all, day or night.
"I've been thinking about… about the deal we made…"
Mabel reached for the little toy tiger that Stan held out for her, smiling with delight as it jingled. She was completely oblivious to the conversation taking place on her hunt to catch the stuffed animal, but above her, Stan looked at Alex over his glasses.
"I think… maybe we should just call it off. I know that you drove a long, long way to get here, and I'm not ungrateful! Really!" Stan frowned while Alex wiped his forehead, which shown in the low lamplight.
It was a dreary day in Piedmont, for once, but the curtains were mostly drawn and Alex hadn't turned on every light in the house like Rebecca would have during such weather. "But I… I just…"
Alex held a hand to his mouth, brown eyes wide and glassy before he shuddered and tears dripped down from the bridge of his nose and over his lips and cheeks.
Before him, Stan couldn't have felt more out of his element and disturbed if he tried. He'd anticipated this, but he'd also anticipated, and hoped, for a fist-fight as an alternative. Even a 10-hour drive filled with planning and dreading and predicting in the vein of his elderly mother hadn't prepared Stanley for the real deal – that deal being trying to comfort his in-law.
The older Pines inadvertently let his hand drift lower, and Mabel caught the tiger with both hands with a happy squeak of delight. Stan returned his attention to the child and smirked as she waved her catch in his face gloatingly.
"Alex, I know. I know it's hard." Stan rose from his chair, and listened to it crack and pop with a barely audible hiss. He moved to stand beside his nephew, with Mabel in the crook of his other arm, and squeezed the man's shoulder.
"And it's your decision, it'll always be to you. I thought we just agreed that it'd be better this way until you were back on your feet and we could… I could figure the rest along the way." Stan argued carefully.
The conman listened to his nephew's sobbing die out steadily, and he felt Mabel slip her arms around his neck to look at Alex with curious and concerned eyes.
Looking at the little girl, you'd never imagine she was anything but what she appeared to be, and yet Stan had agonized over taking her and her brother – her twin – back to Gravity Falls, Oregon. He wasn't Stanford Pines, the genius, scientist Brainiac with all the answers to a world's supply of freakish anomalies that could crack a case better than Conan Doyle character.
He was just Stan, the screw-up – the one who conned his way into a living under his brother's name, and who didn't know how he could possibly contain two rugrats that were supposedly 10x as difficult to handle as ordinary babies should be.
Still… he'd decided in the car upon crossing state lines. Stan Pines hadn't gotten anywhere by moping and fretting like a goddamn pansy.
"You're right. You're right."
Eventually, Alex was calm. He looked out of it, but he's voice came out clear as bell, and Mabel was distracted by her toy and not his fit anymore. "I just hope… I hope Becky will forgive me."
He cleared his sinuses, and reached for Mabel. He reached for her cautiously, like he was about to pet a wild mongoose, but Stan held in his irritancy for the sake of maintaining peace in the house.
"Mabel looks just like her mother, doesn't she? And so… does Mason. But of course, he would, too."
Stan lay staring up at the ceiling. He had to stop obsessively checking the time, although the guest room in his niece and nephew's home had come with a complimentary digital clock, glowing at his bedside.
The man was restless. After a quiet dinner, and a quick visit with Mason and Mabel after Mason's long-winded nap, Stan had had to do some more convincing to get Alex off to bed without sobbing himself into a stranglehold or doing something extra crazy that would get him carried off in a straightjacket.
The old man rubbed at the corner of his eyes and sighed for the twelfth time that night. He hadn't felt this old since he'd considered a mirror with his full suit on and realized that he'd forgotten to put a girdle on before giving another tour. At the rate that things were changing, Stan was certain that he'd be having these moments more consistently by the time he'd gone back to Oregon – time and Alex permitting, nonetheless.
The sound of a snap drove Stan's thoughts away, as well as the warm, out-of-place sound of what had to be kindling of some kind. Stan's gaze slid away from the ceiling and traveled to the open doorframe, where a faint blue-ish glow hummed just within his line of sight.
Stan left his too-firm bed and didn't bother to redress before he followed the trail of the humming, snapping and hissing and landed in front of the door that led to Mabel and Mason's room. He let the door swing open with a quiet shove and stared at both children, sitting up and face-to-face.
Alex's fancy-shmancy smoke detectors hadn't gone off, and Alex hadn't come running from his room, but there was a fire on the twins' crib.
The fire crackled, gleaming from where it bled out and up from Mason's fingertips to reflect off Stanley's specs.
"Hey, hey. None of that till we get to Gravity Falls, kiddo." He interrupted their awe by waving at them. Mason, despite being far too young, had the decency to look ashamed and fearful.
"Bah!" Mabel flung a chubby hand at Stan, defending her brother with a defiant expression that made the tired old man chuckle a little too loudly.
"Don't worry, sweetie. I'm not gonna hurt you or your brother." He leaned on the shared crib. "You just can't go around doin' that until we get home, alright?"
Mason's head tilted, and with a look to her brother, Mabel followed suit.
"Yep. You guys are gonna like it there much more than here." Stan smiled reassuringly. "I bet you all your animal crackers on it."
A/N: Written because I want to write Grunkle Stan bonding with his niblings.