"You're gonna hear some bad things about me, and some of them are true. But trust me, everything I've worked for—everything I care about—it's all for this family."
His limbs are leaden, but the clock reads only 3:17 PM. His stomach, which has been growling all day, has settled down for the time being. He knows he ought to go out and get some food and supplies soon anyway.
'Cause that's something I can actually do now, he thinks as he stares at the grimy old box filled with tens and fives sitting on the coffee table in front of him. No one seemed to notice or care that he just grabbed the first container he found to hold their entrance fees. He was honestly shocked at how easily they handed over their money, but since they've left, all he's been able to do is stare at the box, numb, nearly uncomprehending. Some kind of positive sensation, maybe something similar to accomplishment, has settled inside of him, and he finds that terrifying.
Ninety dollars. Somehow, in less than two hours and with little effort exerted on his own part, ninety bucks have fallen into his lap. In the last couple months he's been trying out the idea of praying, and… well, after this he might even start going to church.
How much food could he buy with ninety dollars? Definitely enough to last him several weeks at least, if he's smart about how he spends it. But… is there anything else he should be spending on? Clothes, probably—all he has of his own is a couple of old T-shirts, one pair of jeans, and a coat with a gigantic hole burned through the back.
Well… assuming Stanford is about his size still, he could always borrow some of his clothes…
Stan leans back in the recliner to stare at the wooden ceiling. Maybe he'll just get a new coat, the cheapest one he can find—no. Ninety dollars, he knows, isn't as much as it sounds. Food needs to be his priority. His old coat isn't exactly in the best shape, but with the old yellow patch he sloppily sewed onto it—maybe some kind of medicine for that burn wouldn't be a bad idea either—it's serviceable. Unless he finds some reliable source of revenue, everything he buys needs to be necessary to getting the portal up and running again. And him not starving to death is kind of a prerequisite for that.
Where the heck is he even supposed to go to find a source of revenue? He's got no credentials or special skills that any professional establishment would want to know about, and exactly ninety bucks to his name. Any paperwork he'd have to turn in would be entirely filled with fake information, and even if that weren't the case, it's impossible to find well-paying jobs nowadays, particularly ones that will give him enough to live off of while also leaving enough time in the day to sleep and devote several hours to endless frustration in the basement with little hope of success.
He's already spent too much time just staring at the cash, really. He needs to get something to eat, even if it's just enough to make sure he doesn't pass out.
When Stan returns to the Dusk 2 Dawn, the two owners are telling their current patrons about the "mysterious science guy from the woods." So naturally, they point him out as soon as he walks in, and he heads back to his brother's house with a loaf of bread, a block of cheese, and a group of nine strangers for whom he upped the price of admission to $17.50.
Word travels fast through the small town. Pretty much everyone has heard about the quirks of his tours inside a week, and after that the flood of eager guests slows to a trickle. He expected this to happen, and always knew it was dangerous to hope that this could become a long-term deal. But he does start trying a little harder, putting together exhibits and oddities using spare parts lying around Stanford's workstation and what he can afford from the taxidermy shop around the corner. Soon enough, people start hearing that he's regularly incorporating new stuff, and there's another spike in local interest.
He's making more money under Stanford's name than he ever did as Stanley—and it's all so poetic, really. Sure, he may be utilizing the tricks he learned on the street over the past decade to con the crap out of these suckers, but it's as close to honest success as he's ever come, and all he had to do was become someone else.
Or, more accurately… take someone else's place.
He doesn't know if this is gonna last, but when at the two-week mark someone comments on how she never would have known about this place had she not heard about it from a friend, Stan figures he should start trying to advertise. If this crazy scheme is going to have any hope of long-term success, he's gotta start letting people know about it himself, rather than relying on the news being spread by word of mouth.
The first thing he needs to come up with is a name. Based on how well people respond to that dumb skeleton, he quickly decides on "Murder Hut" and starts hanging signs around town with his—Stanford's—address. Things are still slower than they were the first week, but they're steady. He's able to get himself a coat that isn't falling apart, his exhibits get more and more elaborate, and he even starts considering paying Stanford's bills. The next step, Stan figures, is decorating the house itself.
Part of him wants to run with the whole "murder" element, but a lot of the people who have stopped by have brought young kids along with them, and he doesn't want to discourage that. So he figures it's best to just stick to the mystery side of things. What lies inside? Dead bodies, weird science experiments, or something altogether unexpected? Who knows?
He's standing on a rickety stepladder, nailing a sign reading "What's this? What's inside?" to the front of a building he doesn't own, wearing his old coat for what he intends to be the last time, when a voice from behind him calls "You!" And God help him, he jumps and so does his stupid heart, because the last time he heard that same shout was across a prison yard, and that day did not go well for him, and maybe it's been almost two years since then but all the same he ends up on the floorboards of his brother's porch, splintery pieces of broken stepladder stabbing into his back. He just lies there for a moment, staring up at the sky and breathing raggedly as he assesses his body for damage. Bruises, definitely, but he ought to be fine.
A face appears above him, and the sun is too bright for him to really make out any details, but a hoarse voice reaches him clearly: "Sweet sarsaparilla, I'm sorry, mister!"
Stan grasps the hand offered to him at the same moment he gathers his wits enough to see it, and he's pulled shakily to his feet. As soon as he's up he can see that the perpetrator of this minor misfortune has one arm in a sling, and Stan wonders if it's his dominant hand—that would explain the unsteadiness of his ascent, anyway.
The guy's face is unfamiliar. He looks terrible—his spectacles are cracked, there are huge dark shadows under his eyes, he's got at least one tooth missing, his chin is unshaven, and his hair's sporting several thick grey streaks despite his looking fairly young. He's not dressed too well either—his jacket isn't in any better shape than Stan's coat.
Stan doesn't respond directly to his apology, and only asks, "Did you want something?"
The man blinks, looking terribly confused already, and Stan feels a stab of pity. He rubs his chin, where an adhesive bandage sits atop his stubble, looking like it's been there for far longer than necessary. "I was just a-thinkin'… do I know you from somewhere?"
Crap. Well, he's come across a couple of people who more or less "recognized" him, like that lady at the convenience store, but it seems Stanford was pretty much a recluse; some people know what he looks like, but none of them really know him. Hopefully this guy's the same. "I mean, I've lived here for… a few years. I might have seen you around."
The man steps up close. Uncomfortably close. Stan tenses up and tries not to look directly into the guy's eyes, which he realizes are not quite in agreement with each other direction-wise. "Maybe," the man says, squinting, and Stan clenches a fist, resisting the urge to hold his nose. When was the last time this guy brushed his teeth? "Maybe ya just look like someone I know real well…"
"Probably," Stan says nasally, trying to take a step back and nearly falling off the porch. "What are you doing all the way out here anyway?" he asks, trying to change the subject and maybe get the guy to back the heck off.
It works, to some degree. The guy shrugs and turns towards the front door, surveying it closely. "I dunno, I just was a-walkin' and thought the area looked fameeler… familiar." Something dark passes over his eyes as he says, "It took some doing to figger it was good to come this way after I realized that… but I got nowhere else to go. So whatcha doing here then?"
"Just… working on my new business," Stan answers, frowning. "You have nowhere else to go, like… you… Do you have anywhere to sleep?"
"I got lots of places to sleep!" the man returns brightly.
Stan's not convinced. He casts his eyes about, searching for something to say. "Hey, uh… could you hand me that hammer?" he finally asks, gesturing towards the tool he dropped on his little tumble a moment ago, which now lies at the man's feet.
The guy bends down and scoops it up, holding it out. "Thisee here?"
"Yeah. Thanks." He places it in the large pocket of his coat, out of harm's way. "So… you think you've been here before?"
"Think so! Somethin' about… I dunno, a bright light? Someone else was there, maybe it was you! But… that's where it gets all foggy."
"Seems like most of it's foggy," Stan mutters.
"Anyhoo! I been wrong before, in fact it happens all the time—why just yesterday I tried to eat a watermelon that turned out to be a small dog! Boy was that little girl unhappy!"
Stan scratches his head, starting to wonder if this guy's putting on an act for some bizarre reason. "You… you usually try to eat watermelons you just find lying around?"
"Naw, I got me plenty o' munchins at home, I just… don't usually feel well enough to eat. Get peckish at unpredictable times, see?"
Plenty o' munchins at home. He has food, he's not homeless, so Stan doesn't need to deal with him right now. He's got his own problems. He relaxes his shoulders, allowing any guilt at the idea of just letting this guy walk away emptyhanded to fade away. He'll be fine. Stan doesn't have the resources to spare.
Stanford is counting on him.
"Well," he says, not sure how to get this guy off his property and deciding he's due for a short break anyway, "I hope you remember whatever it is you're trying to remember. Have a good one."
He doesn't leave the guy enough time to reply before he steps swiftly inside and closes the door, but he does catch the look of puzzlement and fear that crosses his face, as if Stan has just suggested something terrible.
Less than a month later business has slowed down drastically and he's already having withdrawal symptoms from the extra funds. Every time he thinks about the pros and cons of his situation, how he may not have to worry about finding places to sleep but now he has to pay mortgage on a regular basis, he just has to lie down for at least five minutes. And while he does, the bills pile up.
He's at the local supermarket, considering the billboards he passed on the drive over here and wondering how much he'd have to save to be able to get a billboard for the Murder Hut on the nearest highway. At this point it does seem he has enough popularity among the locals to keep making what he'd term a "fair" amount of money—about as much as he made from the one summer job he had before being kicked out of the house, but not enough to live on.
He pushes his cart along the produce aisle, eyeing the outrageously overpriced pears in particular. They don't even look that good. But he'd still buy them, if he didn't already have a full cart and only a $20 bill in his wallet. Paying for everything in cash is starting to become something of an inconvenience. All the money he's made is back at the house, stashed in various hollow spots in the walls and in the backs of drawers.
Sooner or later he's going to have to see about getting into Stanford's bank accounts.
But how's Stanford going to take that when he comes back? It's gonna get messy, to be sure, but… surely the benefits outweigh the disadvantages of this whole setup. There might be other ways he can make a more or less honest living under the current circumstances, ways that don't rely on him taking his brother's name, but for all his efforts, he can't see them. This is what's fallen to him, and he's going to run with it. That makes far more sense to him than letting this completely improbable opportunity slip through his fingers and trusting a world that's never been particularly good to him before to facilitate a search for something else.
Stanford needs him, and to be of any use to Stanford, he needs to be Stanford. They'll work through the legal messiness later. It'll pale in comparison to getting his brother back anyway.
Here's the problem, though: he is very much not Stanford. Stanley hadn't heard from his brother in ten years up till he received that postcard, but he knows his brother, and he's found plenty of evidence of what he's been doing around this house. Stanford is the one who picked himself up out of the ashes of the destruction his brother left in his wake, who went to school even though he wouldn't have the opportunities he deserved, who worked himself half to death and—based on what Stan saw—half to insanity in the pursuit of his goals. Stanford's the one who applied his talents to something productive and consistent, kept to himself, and probably never strayed outside the law.
And then there's Stanley. The one who never finished high school, hasn't managed to go two years without seeing the inside of a prison cell since he was nineteen, and has committed countless other crimes he was never caught for. The one who can't count on both hands the number of people who would kill him on sight. The one who has never managed to assimilate into civilized society on his own or lived in the same place for more than a year. The one who's come to think of legality as one of the lesser factors to consider when making a decision.
It's been a very long time since he's been able to live comfortably for this long while staying inside the law. He's gotta admit, it's been… nice.
But it's never felt like something that could last.
Stan realizes he's been standing in this aisle staring at those stupid pears for a good two minutes and the grandma behind him is starting to get impatient. He pulls his hands out of his pockets and hurriedly pushes the cart out of the way.
His hands are perfectly steady as he places the lunch meat, noodles, crackers, and milk on the counter and pays with his twenty. They stay that way as he accepts his change and bags from the cashier, returns the cart to its proper place, and gets into his trusty old car. And they don't even twitch when, at the halfway point to Stanford's house, he removes a pear from his large pocket and takes a bite.
Stan makes the billboard a real goal that day. If he has to shoplift every once in a while to make it happen, so be it. It's no worse than some of the things he's done before. He'll need to save a bit longer to be able to afford a good design, but the only real hindrance is the name, which needs to be solidified before he spends big bucks on advertising like this. He's not so sold on "Murder Hut" anymore. It isn't really in line with the theme he keeps finding himself slipping back to—weird science. It's easy to use the stuff Stanford left lying all over the place to tell stories of UFOs and ghost hunts. He just needs to think of a new name to go with it.
He's doing some cleaning for the first time in the four months he's been living here when he unearths what amounts to be a colossal pile of gadgets and gizmos he doesn't know the first thing about. He finds wrenches under couches, remote controls for who knows what in drawers, and batteries in the back of the fridge. He even discovers some previously unaccounted for objects hidden away in the corners of the area he's set aside for guests. By the end of the first hour of cleaning he's got a sizeable box full of electronic parts that he's a little afraid to touch more than was necessary to get them into the box, let alone show them to tourists. Then again… the people in this town have thus far proven themselves not to be exceptionally bright. He's already talked his way out of at least three potential lawsuits. Still probably best to err on the side of caution though. He cannot afford to get sued right now.
He's been doing a lot of bending over, so he deems it a decent time for a respite. He sits down on the couch with a can of Pitt Cola that he acquired the old way, and sets the box on the coffee table in front of him, ready to go through it. As a precaution, he's wearing the pair of safety goggles he found in a kitchen cabinet. They're huge, and would definitely fit comfortably over a pair of glasses.
Stan starts sorting the objects that seem safest to touch according to their probable usability in tours. Anything he can get to throw off sparks goes in the "maybe" pile—definitely entertaining enough, but also dangerous enough that further precautions will have to be taken. The scraps that clearly aren't serving any purpose on their own go into the reject pile, but soon enough it occurs to him that he might be able to use them to build non-science-y attractions, so they become their own sub-pile. Everything that looks like it probably does something but that he has no idea how to use gets sorted together too. He's not sure he'll be able to do anything with those; there are probably explanations for all of them somewhere in this house—Ford has some really impressive towers of charts and blueprints down in the basement, and there are plenty more pinned to the walls in various rooms throughout the building—but he has little faith in his own ability to match up those explanations with the right scientific gizmos.
The "yes" pile ends up being pretty abysmal. There's not enough overlap from what he knows how to safely operate to what he suspects will be received well by tourists.
"Why d'ya have to be so smart, Poindexter?" he mutters to the kinda-sorta organized electronics strewn in front of him.
If he weren't so smart, none of this mess would have happened in the first place.
Nope. Enough of that. He has more productive things to think about. Like the most effective ways to get people to give him their money.
As he surveys the haphazard piles he's made, a thought occurs to him. It's become clear that for however long he'll be keeping this up, creating new attractions is going to be necessary. He's gotten a few repeat customers and he knows that's only going to continue if he's regularly coming out with new stuff. And… he doesn't know how long he's going to be able to do that if he has to stick to the whole science thing. Not to mention the possibility of someone who actually knows what they're doing with equipment like this stumbling in over time and exposing him for the fraud he is—
Stan puts his face in his hands. He's worrying too much. And yet… he knows that something's gotta change. This science stuff is Stanford's; the business it gave birth to is Stanley's. Out of necessity, if not legally or morally. It's Stan's, and he has to remember that. He has to make it his own. And Stanley Pines knows next to nothing about science.
Fine, so if he removes the science aspect of things… well, there's still plenty of paranormal lore to draw from, right? Maybe he could even base some of it around the stuff Stanford wrote in that spooky journal—
He's not going to do that. Never in a million years. He can't risk anyone finding out about that book. He doesn't know why Stanford was so hell-bent on keeping it hidden but intact, but he's sure there's a good reason, and even without that whole… exchange, it's better to be safe than sorry. No one can know. Besides… based on what he's read in that thing, there is some truly dangerous stuff in and around this town, much more dangerous than some tiny whirring box throwing off sparks.
He'll use the book to stay safe and to figure out the portal, and go no farther than that.
So, paranormal lore. Unscientific stuff like Sasquatch and jackalopes and Nessie. He can do that. That'll sell.
Definitely, definitely going to need to rename the place.
The Mystery Shack has been up and running for almost half a year and business has never been better. Recently he decided that things were going well enough that he should take some steps to secure his place as Stanford Pines, founder and owner of the Mystery Shack.
He doesn't have many resources, but he has just enough to kill Stanley Pines in a fatal car crash.
He hangs the newspaper clipping by his mirror, which has the strange and kind of unpleasant effect of inducing a daily minor existential crisis. He stands there, staring himself in the face, knowing who he is, but also knowing that the entire world—or whatever tiny portion of it would care either way—believes him to be dead.
It's an odd feeling, but he almost likes it. It's a chance to start fresh.
Or at least it would be if he weren't working day and night to bring back the man he's pretending to be.
Invariably after he goes through this thought process, he adjusts his new fez, reminds himself of all his short-term goals for the day—take advantage of every opportunity to make an extra buck is always at the top of the list—and heads downstairs to open up shop.
He's started ordering shipments of common gift shop items like snow globes, hats, and geodes to bring in a little income beyond the price of admission. He doesn't make much of a profit off of them, but they sell pretty easily, and it's little extra effort that he has to expend. He pretty much just writes "Mystery Shack" in sharpie on the snow globes and draws big question marks on the hats. With the way things are going, he's pretty sure that soon he'll be able to get some higher-quality products and mark up the prices.
It is not lost on him that with the extra time he's been spending on the business lately, he's had less time to devote to searching for the other journals and working on the portal. He's gotten to the point where he's just delaying the inevitable—he's hit a roadblock with the portal, and until he can find the rest of the blueprints for it, he's got to work on understanding what he's got.
Basically, he's going to have to teach himself theoretical physics.
It's not that he doesn't have the motivation; he's got that and more. It's that he doesn't have the means. The only material currently at his fingertips is stuff written by a guy who already had an impressive background in the area, and his handwriting isn't even that legible all the time. Stanford is brilliant, and he's been prolific. Stanley's a high school dropout. It's a huge task and every time he considers it the practical impossibility of the situation nearly overwhelms him.
Step one is acquiring some textbooks. Hopefully Stanford's got something near a beginner's level around this place. If Stan can't find any, he'll just have to order some. It'll cost a pretty penny, but this is why he's been amassing pretty pennies anyway. This is what it's all been for.
Just last year, if he'd found himself making this kind of money, he'd have been hoarding it like a miser. It would all be in the name of going back home to New Jersey, of proving he could make something of himself. Now? He knows the latter part of that is out of the cards completely. And forget going home—Stanford is currently further away from home than Stanley could ever dream.
If he's even alive.
Nope. Don't think about that. Think about how much progress you're making. Think about how much more successful you are than you ever thought you could be.
It's safest just to think about the money.
It hurts less.
Stanley has been Mr. Mystery for a full two years when he finally makes a breakthrough with his understanding of his brother's portal.
He's in the basement and the last time he looked at the clock it was 2:36 AM. He resolutely refuses to check the time again between now and whenever he finally goes to bed. Tonight's a planned late one. He slept in far too late this morning, so he figures he owes this to Stanford. As long as he gets at least four hours and opens up the Shack before 10 AM, he'll be fine.
He's poring over a textbook entitled A Beginner's Guide to Multidimensional Paradigm Theory, which he's been struggling through for over a year now and is still less than halfway through, when suddenly something just connects in his head and he reads that sentence a second time, a third, a fourth, and yep, it still makes sense, and he moves on and finishes the paragraph, and one tiny aspect of the dangers of repeated travel between two points in two different dimensions is crystal clear to him, and he hasn't felt this good in a long time.
After getting up and dancing a brief jig, he returns to his desk and adds a couple bullet points to his notes, just to be sure he'll still understand this later on. Next on the docket is an inspection of a piece of Stanford's equipment.
As far as he's seen, anything that travels through a transuniversal metavortex must pass through an area between dimensions, and there is matter in that non-space with properties not fully understood. But based on what he's read, it has been known to trigger strange phenomena when it occurs within a dimension, and hypothesized to cause instability across the multiverse. It clings to anything that passes from one dimension to another, and Stanford built a regulator that prevents its entrance through his portal.
Sure enough, when Stanley locates that regulator, he quickly concludes that it's busted. Whatever it is that went wrong when Stanford was sucked through the portal, it left the interdimensional matter regulator inoperable. He'll need to repair it before the portal's up and running again.
Within two hours of searching, Stan manages to find the blueprints labeled "IDMR," and within two minutes of inspecting it, he draws two conclusions. One, he only understands about ten percent of it, but it might be reasonable to hope that that will be enough to fix whatever's wrong with the thing. And two, he's going to need some new parts. Fortunately everything in the diagram is clearly labeled, so he ought to be able to figure out where he needs to go to find all the replacement parts he'll need. Unfortunately, he's reasonably sure that it's going to cost more than he makes in a month.
He sits on the cold floor, staring at the diagram with a hand on his face frozen mid-rub, brain working furiously trying to decide on the best way to acquire those parts. He could always steal them, he supposes… but Stanford's probably on some list of people likely to need equipment like that, and he cannot get caught. No, he'll need to steal the money he'll need and use that to buy the necessary materials. Credit card fraud? Or he could straight up scam someone. Probably a lot of someones.
Some voice in the back of his mind admonishes him, and it sounds suspiciously like Stanford's.
Can it, Poindexter. This is all for you.
It's about a month after he fixes the regulator that Stanley Pines first realizes he might have a problem.
He's got two employees now—a handywoman and a local twentysomething who works the cash register most days after his classes. (He commutes; it's a forty-five minute drive to the nearest university. Stanley can't for the life of him imagine what's keeping the guy from just moving out of this hick town for the school year.) Between those two, Stan has managed to find more free time to work through his growing pile of textbooks and conduct searches for the other two journals—though he's pretty much exhausted all his strategies with that latter effort, but he refuses to stop trying.
It's a warm spring morning and there are a lot of families and groups of college age people coming by on spring break road trips. There's been a steady flood of tourists, to the point where his voice was starting to get hoarse from giving tours and he had his usual cashier swap places with him. He's averaging a sale every ten minutes or so, which is pretty good.
He usually spends the first half of those ten-minute lulls just holding the cash from the last purchase made, and the latter half counting up the contents of the register.
And he realizes a couple minutes before noon that the warm weight of coins in his palm and the soft touch of bills to his fingertips is almost what he would call… comforting. And every time he counts up the grand total of all the cash in the register, it provides him with more satisfaction than he feels with every chapter he finishes in A Beginner's Guide to Multidimensional Paradigm Theory. It's something with value that he can hold in his hand, and it's something of his own.
That's the reason why holding the cash makes him feel a bit better, and Stan doesn't see a problem with it. But unfortunately, there's a little more to it—he'd find it hard to deny that lately he's been thinking about finances more than he ever has before, and not necessarily in a constructive way. When he thinks back on it, he realizes that in the ten years he spent on his own, all that time between being kicked out of the house and being summoned to Gravity Falls, all that time he was trying to make his fortune… he never really thought all that much about money. What was on his mind instead was either his next product or gimmick, or the first things he'd spend money on when he got it—depending on how bad his condition was at the time. Money was involved in either scenario, but money's involved everywhere you look. It was never about the money before. The time he'd been living in his car for a solid three weeks and would have done anything to make enough to sleep in a motel bed for one night, it was about comfort. The time right after he got jumped in San Antonio and decided he was overdue for owning some kind of handgun, it was about safety. The time he got out of his three-month incarceration for petty theft and public intoxication because he couldn't make bail, it was about freedom. And every time he found himself in a peaceful area and a more or less secure job, when he had a bed to sleep in every night and a reliable source of meals, it was about saving up enough to impress his father and finally go back home.
Those were the days when money was a means to an end. Now… now he doesn't know what it is. But he's finding himself thinking about it more than he ever did before. Now that he doesn't have to concern himself with it so much, he is doing so more and more.
That doesn't make any sense, Pines, he tells himself fiercely.
Needless to say, this scolding doesn't change the level of comfort afforded to him by the crisp bills he holds in his hand.
Stanley is nearly fifty-one years old when he can first say with reasonable confidence that the portal is operational—or would be, if he had the other two journals.
All necessary parts have been purchased or otherwise acquired, all necessary repairs and installations have been made, and all necessary protocols have been learned. Stan knows how to conduct emergency procedures, read all cryptograms the machine spits at him, and input the data that will connect him to the right dimension. He will never understand how his brother built this thing from scratch, but he's become intimately familiar with how to work it.
All that remains is finding the other two thirds of the puzzle.
He's decoded almost every single one of the ciphers his brother has scattered throughout Journal 1. Not one has proven at all helpful in determining the location of the book's two sequels, and he's frankly rather put out that the nerd would make him go through the trouble for useless tidbits like "Their necks taste like your favorite flavor!"
Journal 1 can't help him any more than it has.
He's done the reading, punched the numbers, calculated the risks. He's spent countless nights teaching himself material he was never meant to understand. He's committed tax fraud as many times as it took to be able to buy the equipment and resources he's needed. He's scoured every nook and cranny of this house for the other journals or any hint of where they might be. He's come up completely dry.
It's not until about half a year after it happens that he realizes he's crossed the threshold.
This is it.
There's nothing else he can do.
Years pass in lethargy.
Years of unproductivity.
Stanley just about loses his mind.
During the day, whenever he has a spare hour or so, he goes out into the woods to search for any trace of a hiding spot for a journal, usually thoroughly dedicating his thoughts to whatever financial concern is most relevant so he doesn't have to think about the terrifying but very real possibility that the other two puzzle pieces are not even hidden in Gravity Falls.
Every night, he descends to the basement, and performs his routine check of all the equipment. Finding defects is very rare. Most of those defects are easily solved by dusting off a key piece of metal or adjusting a wire. After his check, he skims the seven notebooks full of notes that he took in the years he spent teaching himself all that he'd need to know to reopen the gateway to whatever hell Stanford had landed in because of him. He has to be sure none of the concepts are fading from his mind during this inescapable period of uselessness. And after that is done, he reads Journal 1 cover to cover, searching, praying for some hint to saving his brother that he knows is not there.
It's an endless cycle that bears no fruit and it becomes overwhelmingly clear that there is nothing new to be garnered from it after the first year or so of nightly checkups and rereads, but the prospect of stepping away for even one twenty-four hour cycle and becoming completely useless is far more frightening than driving himself insane with the hollow repetition.
They are the darkest years of his life thus far.
He wishes he were able to just be happy with what he's managed to accomplish. Not necessarily stop his efforts—certainly not that, but at least feel some sense of achievement, and recognition that he can only do so much. But he refuses to feel any sort of accomplishment as long as Stanford is on the wrong side of the portal. Because until that's rectified, he has achieved nothing.
The money still helps—God forgive him, but whenever he reminds himself of how much he's made so far in the day, whenever he manages to convince a kid to buy just one more piece of crap from his gift shop, whenever he rings up the total of an entire family's purchases, whenever he finds a freaking dime on the sidewalk, he feels better. It may not matter at all compared to the real reason he's stayed in this insane town for so long, but it's all he has to show for himself after these twenty-plus years here. He doesn't spend it if he can help it—and usually that means thievery rather than penny-pinching. A decade of staying just one step ahead of the law left some mark on his psyche all right, and it certainly doesn't help that Gravity Falls has just about the laxest police force he's ever encountered in his life. Whenever he feels guilty enough to have to rationalize his crimes to himself—which is rare—he just tells himself that everyone in this town is practically asking to be robbed.
Besides, he doesn't let himself be limited to simple thievery. In a town where he can get away with pretty much anything, he would be insulting his own honor if he didn't get more creative.
His ever-expanding criminal horizons have their roots, he knows, in his growing need to save as much money as possible. And ironically, he's okay with the crime in general in a way that he isn't okay with the miserliness. Because the miserliness, the money, has become a replacement for his efforts to bring Stanford back.
And he's losing control of it.
If he's honest with himself, he lost control a long time ago. Just because he was eventually able to put some kind of lid on it doesn't mean it didn't swell to greater proportions than he ever intended. The money matters to him in a way he never wanted it to. But there's no changing it now.
And maybe… now would be a good time to accept that. He's never needed a distraction more than he does in these times of utter futility. He'd rather lie awake at night thinking about something he can do something about than something he's been unable to achieve in over twenty years of trying. And why stop there? Every idle moment he spends letting tourists ooh and ahh at some cheap attraction, standing by the cash register while customers count their change, waiting for Soos to tell him what the problem with the heater is, brushing his teeth and getting dressed in the morning, sitting at Gravity Falls' ridiculous traffic lights, he could be mulling over the green stuff rather than Stanford.
Not every idle moment. He'll never be able to stop thinking about his brother and the portal if he tries for… for. For however long it takes to solve it. But if what he's considering does even a fraction of what it could, it'll be far better than continuing to wallow in uselessness.
All right then. He'll switch gears. He'll start filling the emptiness in his life with money rather than misery at being just as useless as he's always been to the people who matter to him. And maybe… just maybe, it'll improve his focus.
Stan can't help but feel he's putting his already fragile and darkened soul on the line with this deal, but he doesn't see any other way out.
When in March of 2012 his nephew contacts him about his two children coming up to stay at the Shack over the summer, Stanley very nearly shoots him down immediately. He's an old man who slipped into greed and made a mindful decision to care too much about money because the alternative was losing his mind over his inability to rescue his brother from a nightmare dimension. No part of him feels ready or able to take care of young kids for any length of time, and if he were in his nephew's position and knew him more closely, he knows he would never be making this request.
The thirtieth anniversary is this summer. He's already anticipating the long night of binge drinking and probably the two hours or so of complete despair before he picks himself up again, reminds himself that giving up would only be an option if Stanford weren't on the line, and prepares for another decade of attempts to do what he's slowly beginning to suspect is impossible. No child should be within a mile of him while that's going down, and he knows that it will.
Then again… if he makes care of the kids the given rather than the drinking, then the drinking is simply nullified. As completely inexperienced as he is with taking care of children, he knows that he would never allow himself to act that way if he had to be a guardian figure.
And really, that's probably a good thing.
He's standing there in the kitchen, still clutching the phone so tight his knuckles are turning white, and his nephew says, "Uh, Uncle Stan? You still there?"
"I gotta think about it," he hears himself say. The words ring in his head even as his nephew replies, and as he answers back. After a few pleasantries, he hangs up, and stands still for a good three minutes, staring at the wall.
What are you thinking, you idiot?
He tears his gaze away from the faded wallpaper and moves across the room to the fridge. His movements are slow as he gets out the materials to make himself a sandwich. A lot of time passes between bites. He realizes he's staring at the same spot on the wallpaper.
You think you can take care of a couple of twelve-year-olds?
Suddenly remembering something, he heads up to his bedroom and starts rifling through his closet, searching for the box of cards he usually doesn't look at more than once before stuffing them in there. He finds it in the back corner and goes several layers deep before he finds it—Christmas of 2007, from the Pines family. Three pictures are enclosed—the largest is of two bright, happy kids with their arms on each other's shoulders and wide strips of hair missing. The other two are individual pictures of the same kids, with Dipper wearing a blue cap and Mabel with a thick scarf wrapped around her head. The handwritten note in the card reads, "Dipper and Mabel are just as close and just as wild as ever."
You don't know these kids at all.
He's still holding the picture of both of them as he trudges back down the stairs. On reaching the bottom, he sees through the window to the gift shop that Wendy's at the register, explaining to a local family that the next scheduled tour isn't for another half hour. His eyes fall on the vending machine, and something inside him pangs, not nearly for the first time, at the thought that he won't be able to go down and work until the business day's over.
They don't have any idea who you are either, and you don't want them to.
Having children living in this house will mean he'll have to be so much more careful. And even outside of that… his nephew and niece-in-law will be expecting him to spend time with them. He's not exactly a role model, and he doesn't even know how to talk to children. He can already picture how bored they'll be, how disappointed when they see how pathetic he is, how much they'll despise this tiny town by the end of the summer and look forward to going home to Piedmont.
What, just looking to see if there are even more ways for you to fail your family?
He freezes in mid-step.
That's it.
He's a ridiculous man who's lived alone since he was eighteen, who never has enough money, whose family doesn't know him from atom, who's devoted nearly thirty years of his pathetic existence to getting his brother back from wherever he's been trapped all this time.
And he's also incredibly, horribly selfish.
He's completely cut off from his family, almost as much as Stanford. He's met these kids all of two times, at family reunions he didn't even want to attend. This may be the last chance he'll ever have to form a human connection, and with two kids who are related to him, no less.
He's failed his family. His family has failed him.
But these kids might be different.
Stan Pines is not a good man. He knows that. And honestly, he's not about to believe for even a second that these kids could help him become one. But…
But.
He doesn't know what he's hoping for.
He just knows that hope is something he hasn't felt in a long time.
AN: Basically, I felt like in flashbacks, particularly A Tale of Two Stans, Stan never really exhibited any particular desire to be rich. All he ever wanted was to go sailing with his brother, and he must have known that that wouldn't exactly be a lucrative lifestyle. Sure there was talk of "treasure hunting," but I feel like that was never the focus—it was all about adventures with Stanford. He only started giving tours at the Shack because he needed food. But as he is consistently portrayed in season one and the first half of season two, he cares about money beyond what's necessary to make a living. Even after Ford is back, we get scenes like the one at the end of The Last Mabelcorn, with him grabbing piles of gold and screaming "Money!" It seemed that he developed a money addiction at some point in those thirty years, and I wanted to explore how that might have happened.
Part two will focus on the development of this issue while Mabel and Dipper are staying in the Shack, and part three will take place after Ford has returned and the portal is no longer a looming and constant problem in the background of Stan's life.
I'm still not sure if this is the best way to break it up, but it's the best idea I've got. Let me know what you think!