Ford quietly seethed as Stan described the day of their fateful fight in 1982, as Stan spoke of the thick snow that carpeted the landscape, of the blustering winds that blew fat snowflakes to and fro, of the bitter cold that sank deep into his bones.
Because once again, his brother was telling a lie for no one's benefit but his own.
It had been a sweltering summer afternoon when Ford fell into- no, was pushed into the portal. Stan had arrived with that filthy hoodie of his half-drenched in sweat, and Ford had had to use one hand to shield his eyes from the sun's bright rays while his other pointed a crossbow at what he had then initially assumed was Bill in disguise. There hadn't been a snowflake in sight.
Ford knew that. Stan knew that. So why, then, was Stan so adamantly claiming otherwise?
There was, perhaps, some grand metaphor to be found in setting the scene in winter, in a time where warmth and light were rare finds indeed- but Stan was presenting his version of events as the unvarnished truth, not some overwrought work of fiction. But what did he have to gain? Some small modicum of added pity for traversing the icy roads of Oregon in February, for braving wind and snow in his brother's name? That had to be it- and yet, for a lie of that magnitude, one that could so easily be uncovered, the payoff seemed awfully low.
Ford could easily have called his brother's bluff, could easily have exposed his fraud, but he chose to stay silent for the time being. Perhaps he could speak up later, use this as ammunition when it was needed most, proof that Stan was a liar through and through.
Because that's all it was, wasn't it?
At least, that's what Ford had assumed at first, but one conversation with his great-nephew deepened the mystery.
Once Dipper started talking to Ford, the boy never seemed to stop; when they weren't holding DDnMD sessions or working to close the rift that Stan had so carelessly created, they spent hours just making conversation, whether comparing their studies of Gravity Falls' anomalies or their respective pasts. This time, Dipper was talking about how he'd become so interested in Ford's third journal in the first place, and his search for "the author", never knowing that the search would end so close to home.
"-and for a bit I thought Old- I mean, I thought Fiddleford was the author- see, we'd found this laptop in the bunker, and when it, uh, got smashed I saw the name McGucket Labs on it-"
"McGucket Labs, you say?"
"Yeah- it was from his computer company."
Ford had heard the name McGucket Labs before. Ford had said the name McGucket Labs before, said it many times over in his attempts to convince his associate to give his company a more professional name. But Fiddleford had stubbornly insisted on the company going by Fiddleford Computermajigs, despite Ford's arguments that such a name would ensure his work never got the respect it deserved, saying that he didn't "want the respect of a bunch of humorless old codgers in business suits anyhow".
"R-right, of course…" Ford spoke as if on autopilot, spitting out words while his brain was racing away on another track altogether.
It was, he supposed, theoretically possible that Fiddleford had finally taken his advice, renamed his company something sensible, and made a new computer with a label to match. But after long decades of dimension-hopping, after spending years upon years discerning the differences between nigh-identical versions of reality… another possibility came to mind all too easily.
"Grunkle Ford, are you okay? You look kind of pale…"
Ford forced himself to put on a smile as his mind reeled. "Actually, now that you mention it, I think I could use some time alone."
The moment the elevator door closed as Dipper retreated upstairs, Ford ran to the journals, newly returned to him but only briefly perused in the interim, to confirm his suspicions.
The journals were all wrong.
No, that wasn't quite right. The journals weren't all wrong. Some bits seemed right- pages that he recognized at a glance, snippets that he felt sure had been written by his own hand (and, in a way, they had been)- but interspersed were segments that were entirely unfamiliar to him, words that he knew he'd never written, tales of creatures he'd never encountered. Ford's lengthy discussion of vampires- how to find them, how to fight them, how to cure them, information all hard-won through experiences he'd much rather not relive- was nowhere to be found, and in its place was a detailed description of different types of ghosts, knowledge far beyond that he himself had gathered through his own handful of brief encounters with such creatures.
Ford felt sick to his stomach as the truth behind his suspicions sank in.
He had thought that, after thirty long years jumping between unfamiliar dimensions, he was finally back home, albeit under less than favorable circumstances.
He had thought wrong.