Autumn, Nineteen-Eighty-Something
Bring, bring.
The sound penetrated into Stan's dream, but he did not realize for a moment that it was coming from the outside world. Instead, he wondered vaguely how a slot machine had gotten out here with him, all alone in a sky full of stars while the icy void of space slowly crushed his lungs. Then -
Bring, bring.
He woke up.
The phone kept ringing, and on the third repetition, Stan sat bolt upright with a gasp. Phone. Business. He had a business now. Mostly legit, even, for a given value of that term. He had to answer the phone.
Bring!
He snatched up the receiver with moments to spare.
"Hello, you've reached the Murder Hut!" His voice rang too loud in his own ears, making him wince. "Stan Pines speaking."
There was a long silence and he was about to hang up when a small voice - a young voice - said, "Stanford?"
"That's what I said," said Stan, trying to suppress his irritation and not quite succeeding. It had almost stopped hurting whenever someone called him that, now. He had encouraged people to call him Stan as much as he could, but when someone did say Stanford, he almost never felt his heart leap with wild hope for just one second before he looked over his shoulder and realized the speaker was only talking to him. But only almost. "Who is this?"
"This is Shermie," the boy said. "Shermie Pines. Your, erm, your brother?"
He sounded slightly uncertain about claiming the relation. Stan might have found that funny, had he not suddenly felt every muscle in his body tense up with dread.
Oh, no. Oh, no. This can't be happening.
"Oh, right," he said, trying to pitch his voice slightly up and his accent significantly down, trying to sound more like Ford. What if the boy had already realized the voice had been wrong? "Shermie. Of course, of course. Sorry, you - just…woke me up. I stay up late sometimes. Doing science...stuff." Inspired, Stan. Just inspired. Why did the sarcastic voice of his inner monologue sound so much like the real Stanford? "So. Sleeping. I do that, too, sometimes. After the science...stuff. So - what can I do for you?"
There was another long pause, and Stan felt as though his stomach were trying to flip itself inside-out in order to wrap around the lead weight suddenly in the bottom of it. Was that right? Did Ford and their - what - twelve, thirteen-year-old brother somehow have a relationship? Was there some kind of code word he should have known? It seemed - unlikely, considering the state Ford had been in when Stan had arrived, and how this was the first personal call he'd had since his arrival in Gravity Falls, but...
"I know we're only supposed to call you in emergencies," said Shermie. "I read the note - for emergencies only. But I think there might be one now?"
Stan felt his stomach relax slightly even as he clenched his jaw to keep from snapping at the kid to stop hesitating and say whatever it was he had to say already. "It's okay," he managed. "What's going on?"
"The police were just here."
"What?" Stan felt his brow furrowing with confusion and anxiety. "Did they - did they arrest the old man or something?"
"No. But Ma started crying after they all went in the living room, and she's been crying a lot since they left. And she yelled at Pa when he told her to stop. Somebody's dead or something?"
A chill ran up his spine, and Stan thought a series of words which he had been told children ought not know. "Oh," he said finally, unable to think of anything else, or at least, not anything that he could actually say even apart from swears. The real Ford would have probably told the kid to put one of the adults on the phone, but Stan couldn't do that. It was one thing to fool this kid, who he was pretty sure now didn't really know either of them, into thinking that he was Ford; it would be quite another to even try doing that with their parents, even after all this time -
"Look," he began, with no idea what he was going to say next, but before he could make something up, a second voice became audible in the background.
"Shermie? What are you doing?"
So this, Stan thought, was what it was like to be a cassette tape exposed to a magnet, so that everything inside you went blank without warning. It was just like this - just like sitting in your boxers at the crack of dawn and hearing, for the first time in over a decade, the muffled voice of your mother in the background of a cross-continental phone call.
Distantly, he heard Shermie explaining - distantly, because his throat was swollen shut and his vision remained blurred over even after he reached for the glasses he'd finally had made for himself back in December. Time had slowed to a crawl; he could see the disaster approaching but knew there was nothing he could do to stop it as his mother said something else and then took the phone.
"Stanford - oh, Stanford - "
Stanford. That was him. Stanley was not sitting here and trying to talk to his mother for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. She was talking to Stanford, her good son, who she apparently didn't speak to often, either, but who the family did call in emergencies. Stan swallowed hard and prepared to lie like he had never lied before in his life.
"Mom, what's wrong?"
"It's Stanley," she burst out, her voice cracking. "Stanford - Stanley's dead! And they think - they think he might have been m - murdered - "
How did she know? Why did she know? Why had someone - the police, apparently - told his parents about his 'death'? It had never occurred to him, not once, that anyone would bother to track down a washed-up grifter's family in order to inform them of what had happened to him. It had never occurred to him that even someone who didn't know about his past would assume that any family he had would want to know him or anything about him. "Oh," he said again.
"Oh?" she repeated incredulously. "Oh? That's all you can say? Your brother is dead!"
No. No, no, no, no, no!
It was one thing to hear her say that Stanley was dead, but hearing 'dead' put beside 'your brother - '
He forced his thoughts away from the pictures trying to form in his head. This, too, was a lie. His brother was not dead. That wasn't possible. Ford was still alive. Somewhere - somehow - Ford was alive, and Stan was going to get him back.
"It's a little late for us to worry about that now, isn't it?" he asked, unable to suppress the bitter edge to his voice. "Or have you forgotten? We've been pretending Stanley was dead for a long time. We lost him when Shermie was in diapers. I'm surprised it took this long for him to die for real, out on his own. You should be, too."
"How can you say that?" she wailed. "You know how worried I was when he didn't come back! I was worried before you were - and don't tell me you weren't, Stanford Pines! You know...you know I thought, a few days and all three of ya would calm down, and then..." Her voice faded, but only for a moment. "You have to come home, Stanford." She was still talking. Why was she still talking? What could he do to make her stop? "I don't know what we're going to do for his funeral, but we have to do something, and you have to come home."
Stan closed his eyes. "I don't see what good that could do," he said, hating her for making him say it and hating himself both for creating the situation that made it necessary to say it and for saying it as coldly as he managed to. I'm sorry, Ma. Promise I'll tell you so as soon as I can. "And I have work to do. I'm sure you can think of something without me - "
"You can't just act like nothing's happened!"
"Nothing has happened," he said, bile burning the back of his throat as he forced himself to continue lying. "Nothing that matters. What happened to Stanley stopped mattering the minute h - my project broke back in high school. I have work to do - my research." Imitating Ford's voice had suddenly become much easier. He could feel his face twisting with contempt as he added, "the work I could do in the time it would take me to come home is worth more than anything Stanley ever did in his life. Do whatever you think you need to do, but don't ask me to do it with you."
Winter, Sometime In The Later Eighties
Stan's hand was a millimeter above the last key of the sequence to open the newly-installed vending machine in front of the basement passage when the phone began to ring. He turned to answer it, prepared to teach the kids of Gravity Falls all the swears he'd ever learned if this was some kind of joke. Teenagers, he thought, were the banes of his existence; he wished they would all just leave Gravity Falls as soon as they turned thirteen and not come back until they had brats as impressionable as they had once been to buy merch for, or at least were ready to buy themselves merch out of nostalgia.
"Hello," he said shortly into the phone.
"Stanford?"
The voice on the other end of the line - now just about settled into an adult register but not quite, especially when, as now, it was on the brink of panic - boded nothing good, at least not at this time of night. What time was it even in New Jersey? "Shermie?" he asked. "What's wrong?"
"I'm in trouble, man," said Shermie. "Big trouble."
Stan leaned against the edge of the checkout counter and braced himself for everything he could think of - short though that list of things was, especially when he narrowed it down to reasonable conjectures. Surely Shermie wouldn't call him, from the other side of the country, to bail him out of his first trip to jail? Unless Dad had thrown him out, too...
"Explain," he ordered his brother.
"It's - I didn't mean for - "
This all sounded way, way too familiar for comfort. He felt a cold knot of nausea forming in his throat. "Kid, get to the point," he advised. "I don't care why you did it, or what you meant to do instead - not yet, anyway. What did you do?"
"You remember, uh, back in the summer, I mentioned I had a girlfriend?" asked Shermie. "Rhonda?"
Shermie, he had discovered in the past couple of years, had the habit of talking a lot; Stan tended to filter out most of it. He thought he did remember something about someone named Rhonda, though - they had had an argument when Stan had gotten irritated with the worshipful tone used whenever Rhonda came up. Even without acknowledging his catastrophic attempt at marriage, he still had more than enough experience to know how unlikely a high school romance was to mean anything in the long run. Plus, relationships in general weren't worth it; they just gave you more people to lose down the road, and while the other parties to 'em were around, they always had the potential to introduce serious complications to your life. What if he'd still been married when he'd come to Oregon? Taking on a new identity had been hard enough without all that to deal with. It would have ruined everything if he'd had a woman who'd stuck with him that long.
"Yeah, and...?" he asked. If Shermie was calling him over a kids' break-up, he swore to himself, he was going to ring the kid's bell the next chance he got.
"She's kind of...uh...she says she's...you know?"
"I don't," said Stan.
Shermie muttered something. It was hard to hear him, and Stan was sure he missed some of it, but it had definitely involved the word 'baby.' Stan stood perfectly still for a moment, at a loss for what to say. Finally, he managed, "so it is an emergency."
"Yeah," said Shermie. "I don't know what to do."
"What are you calling me for?" Stan asked in alarm. "I can't tell you what to do. There is nothing about this I know anything about." Probably, anyway. As far as he knew...
"You can give me advice about how to tell Dad and survive?"
Stan felt himself blanch at the very idea of telling Filbrick Pines that he'd knocked some girl up at age - what, fifteen? He thought he would have blanched at that thought even if he had been the real Stanford. He thought he might blanch at the thought of telling Dad that kind of thing now, when he was an adult of independent means who was approaching forty and had several thousand miles between himself and the old man, even. Moral stuff wasn't Dad's strong point any more than it was Stan's, but a son of his incurring the responsibility of child support would offend the old man's sensibilities. People they interacted with were supposed to help them make money, not take it from them. This was bad.
"Make a fortune, buy him a house somewhere full of rich blond people, and then tell him?" suggested Stan, thinking of the things the old man had yelled at him after bodily throwing him out of the back door of Pines' Pawns all those years ago. "Otherwise, you're probably doomed, kid."
"He's just like you," Stan fumed out loud, glaring at Ford's journal. It had been an hour since he'd gotten off the phone with Shermie, promising to call the kid back in the morning to strategize, and so far he had been neither able to strategize nor focus on his work in the basement. "Both of you just had to go meddle with things you should have left alone, and then, when it all blew up in your faces, you both had to go, 'let's call good ol' Stan, he'll help me...'"
Stanley, do something! Help me! Stanley!
He picked up a rag to wipe his forehead and then sighed. "All right, all right," he grumbled. "So that was my fault. But you built this - thing - in the first place. So we're in this one together - whether you like it or not," he added fiercely, glaring at the book again for a moment. It made no response, but he nodded as though it had conceded the point.
He didn't remember exactly when he had started talking to the journal, but it wasn't a recent development. He hated that stupid book, hated every page of it, hated every word and drawing and, most of all, code about every creature and scientific whatsit inside it, hated all these things that represented the world that had taken his brother away from him - but he loved it, too, because the journal was also part of Ford. It had his brother's handwriting, his drawing style, his sense of humor - more than once, Stan had been on the brink of throwing the thing across the room when he'd run across some strand of puns and ended up laughing instead. And it proved that he wasn't insane - that Ford had existed, and that he had known how to work this machine that haunted Stan's dreams, and that meant there was a way to turn it back on and make it give his brother back. Ford had meant to use it for something, which meant he had to have been able to survive going into it. On the worst nights, Stan occasionally slept down here, or took the book up to his room, just to remind himself: I have a mission, and there's a point to it. I can get him back. I just need to figure out a little more, work a little harder, and look a little harder for those other two books...
"And I can't leave Shermie hanging, either," he concluded glumly. "I know how that feels, when your family leaves you hanging. I just hope Dad lets him stay in the house. I do not want to live with some snot-nosed kid under my feet."
Spring, Indeterminate Point In The 1990s
You really can't come home, just for a little while? But...Yes, of course, I understand, Stanford. It's just...we haven't seen you for so long...
Stan tried to avoid talking to his parents on the telephone, but it wasn't possible to avoid it completely, especially in the past few years, as they'd gotten undeniably old. The last conversation he'd reluctantly had with his mother played again in his head as clearly as if it had been recorded on one of those fancy home answering machines they tried to sell him every time he went to Radio Cabin as he stood stock-still and tried to process what Shermie had just told him.
"Stan?" Shermie was shouting to be heard over the noises around him - ambulances in the far background, a voice on an intercom closer by. "Stan, did you hear me?"
Stan started slightly, shaking his head in unconscious negation even as he said, "yeah, yeah, I heard you. Mom. Dad. Car accident. They're both hurt pretty bad. I got it. But they'll be all right, right?"
"I don't know," said Shermie. "Nobody seems to know - wait a minute, here's - "
Stan could hear voices talking a little distance away from the receiver, could even discern which one belonged to his kid brother, but could not make out the words anyone was saying. There was a steady, odd sort of buzz of static or something over the line which stood between him and whatever the words were, obscuring them. He had no idea how long it was before Shermie came back to his receiver.
"Stan?"
"I'm here."
"Mom's out of surgery. They think she's - she's going to live, but...they were saying there's probably brain damage."
Stan exhaled slowly. "Ah, you know our ma," he said. "She's tough, but she likes being dramatic." He knew this made no sense, knew it wasn't true, but he couldn't seem to stop himself from saying it. "She's probably just putting on a show for them, you know, it'll be - "
"Stan?"
"Yeah?"
"Dad's dead."
"Hello?"
Shermie's voice sounded hollow with exhaustion, even over the long-distance line. Stan closed his eyes before he said, "It's me. Stan. Just got back home. You...you doing okay?" he asked awkwardly.
Shermie didn't say anything for a long moment, and then instead of answering, he said, "I'm sorry I punched you."
"Eh, it's okay," said Stan, sitting down in his favorite chair but not turning on any of the lights or turning on the TV. "Made me look even more mysterious on the plane, helped with picking up stewardesses," he lied. In reality, even with his Mr. Mystery eyepatch partially concealing it, his black eye had earned some disturbed looks from other passengers, and he hadn't really been in the mood to pick up stewardesses after coming to blows with Shermie at their father's funeral anyway. "Is Ma doing any better?"
"Not really. She just keeps repeating what she was saying when you were here."
Stan nodded to the empty room before him. Ironic, he couldn't help but think - Caryn Pines, the professional liar herself, the one who'd taught him most of what he knew, had been reduced to telling the truth at last...and not one person besides Stan had believed her for a even a single moment as she'd lain there in bed, looking strangely shrunken and twisted in some kind of over-frilled dressing gown and making the considerable effort to keep saying it's not Stanford. It's not Stanford.
"I'll wire you a coupla thousand in the morning for...whatever needs it most," said Stan. He steeled himself to say the other thing he knew he needed to say, panicky though he felt at the very thought of letting go of any substantial sum of money. "If you need more - eh, when you need more - just call whenever," he added firmly.
"Thanks," said Shermie listlessly - and then it came. "I just don't understand you, Stan," he burst out in exasperation. "For years and years after you went to college, we hardly ever heard from you at all - but ever since then, you've found some excuse almost every time we've ever talked to tell me about how there's nothing more important than family. You're the greediest person I've ever met - and now you're offering me money, no questions asked." Stan grimaced, wishing that Shermie could have refrained from underlining that part. He wasn't going to take it back, not under the circumstances, but that didn't mean he enjoyed being reminded of it, especially so soon after he'd originally said it. "You told me I could come live with you if Dad had thrown me out when Nathan was born, until I could figure out something - but Mom and Dad have been asking you to visit just once for years, now, and you would never do that for them, and then after the funeral, you wouldn't even go through the motions for Dad - "
"Nothing I do or don't do will do anything for Dad now," said Stan. "Nothing. Much less pretending I see any point in all that stuff."
"It might have done something for Mom."
Stan grimaced into the dark. "She isn't there anymore, kid," he said, trying not to think of how enough of her was still there that she knew he wasn't Ford and only didn't seem able to figure out how she knew that, or at least was unable to figure out how to express it. Or of how unlikely it was, now, that she would ever live to see him finally make up for it all. She was still alive, but Stan didn't think anyone could see her for even the brief amount of time he had and think that she'd stay that way very long. Certainly not as long as it would take him to make even the slightest progress with the portal, based on past experience. "You might as well have lit your candles and sat on the floor for her, too. Nothing we can do will do anything for her, either, except keep her comfortable."
"You don't know that," Shermie snapped. "And you didn't even have that excuse when your brother died - "
"Our brother," Stan growled, his stomach churning at the low blow. Maybe he had made everything worse in his brief visit to New Jersey, maybe he had deserved a punch in the face for refusing to sit shiva for his own father, but he still felt that having Ford thrown in his face, wildly inaccurately or not, was crossing a line, especially when it was Shermie doing the throwing.
"You know what I mean," said Shermie impatiently. "I didn't even know we had another brother until the day I found out the guy was dead. He's hardly even a real person to me - but it wasn't like that for you or Mom or Dad."
Inappropriate as it was, Stan had to bite the inside of his mouth to suppress the urge to laugh. Shermie had no idea, he thought, how right he was. Nothing for him was anything like it had been for Stan, or for their mom and dad.
"That's your problem, Shermie," said Stan. "You weren't there. You didn't even really grow up in the same family we did. You didn't grow up with Dad calling us both by the same name, or both of us ending up in trouble over what one of us did, or - " He stopped and sucked in his breath, pushing back the good memories that threatened to come up with the bad. There were some things, he thought, that he couldn't tell Shermie. Things that didn't belong to him. He took out his wallet and allowed it to fall open to a picture he'd found among all the clutter in the shack after Ford had disappeared, a worn, bent picture of what looked for all the world like a happy, loving family of four.
He had tried so hard, all these years - mostly to save Ford for the sake of saving Ford, but also, if he was honest with himself, for some chance of maybe making that picture real again. If he could just pull it off, he'd thought, maybe he could earn everyone's forgiveness. And now, with one of their parents dead and the other the next thing to it, he had to accept that he'd never get that chance.
That didn't mean it was over, he told himself. He was still alive, and Ford was still alive - surely he would know somehow, time and space be damned, if Ford was dead - and Ma was still alive enough to tell her kids apart. Maybe it couldn't be perfect, now, maybe that picture Stan had kept in his head to motivate himself for all these years would need some adjustments to account for circumstances, but that was...that didn't mean this thing was over. If - when - he got Ford back, then they and their mother, at least, could be a sort of family again, along with Shermie and Nathan. If, of course, Stan kept trying. It was hard, though, sitting in the dark with a black eye he'd gotten not long after his father's burial, not to feel as though he were sitting in a bargain theater and watching a preview for a film dedicated entirely to the idea of crushing defeat.
"If you'd a been there - if you'd known our brother - if you'd seen how it all went wrong for all of us - then maybe you'd understand," he said, rubbing his thumb against the edge of the picture. "But you weren't."
Summer, 2012
In the ruins of his parlor, Stan sat on one of the remaining unbroken chairs and stared into an empty coffin.
From the next room, Dipper's voice was clearly audible as he argued with his sister. "Mabel, Wax Stan was made out of cursed wax. What if being headless was the only thing that prevented him from attacking us, too?"
"'What if that's the only thing that prevented him from attacking us, too?'" Mabel did not do a particularly good impression of her twin's voice, but then, Stan seriously doubted that she'd really intended to. "I don't know how this curse thingie worked, but I think now it's just wax. Besides, it'll make Grunkle Stan so happy."
"That's another reason to burn it, if you ask me," said Dipper dryly. "Listening to him talk to that thing was getting really creepy even before he ran out of the room crying over it."
It was tempting to shout out that he could, in fact, hear them, but with an effort, Stan bit his tongue. He was lucky that the kids had been so easily distracted from how very thin his 'imagination' excuse had been after they'd told him what had happened. If they had thought about it for one more second…That was the good thing about kids, he guessed; there so many areas where they didn't know any better yet and could be distracted any time they got close to learning. It was the terrifying thing about kids, too - he didn't even want to think about what could have happened - but sometimes it had its advantages.
"There's nothing wrong with having feelings, Dipper."
"About a wax statue of himself?! What's next, are we going to walk in and find him kissing one of the Fiji Mermaids one day?!"
"Ew! Dipper!"
Dipper thought too much, Stan reflected, staring moodily at the satin lining on which Wax Stan had lain just an hour earlier. He had to pick at things, peel away the layers, stick his nose where it didn't belong. He couldn't stop asking all the wrong questions, usually at the least convenient times imaginable. Between those tendencies and that weird mark on Dipper's face, Stan reckoned that Ford would either despise the kid on sight or bond with him like hydrogen with oxygen.
If, of course, Ford ever got to meet him.
Wax Stan wasn't Ford. He didn't even resemble Ford that much – he had Stan's chin and hands, Stan's suit, and a lot of glitter, plus it was somehow impossible to imagine Ford wearing Dad's old fez on any occasion, much less on a regular basis. For just one second, though – less, even – when Stan had caught sight of the thing, he had focused first on its face and had thought Ford had somehow come back on his own, and the shock had put him flat on his butt on the floor. And then he'd lost Wax Stan, too.
The statue was a small loss compared to most Stan had known. First he had lost his connection to his family. Then he had lost Ford, for all practical purposes, to science. Then it had been Dad, to physics, and after him, Mom, to age and infirmity…and then, earlier this year, by freak chance, he'd lost Shermie, too. Three of the four people he'd told himself this was all for were dead and gone. Some of the books Stan had read over the years talked about the laws of conservation of mass and energy – the idea that those things, besides sort of being the same thing, could be neither created or destroyed. If he looked at the problem through that lens, he supposed it was technically true that all the strands of reality which had once combined together to make up Mom and Dad and Shermie and Ford were still in the universe, but that didn't comfort him much, not when there was no way he knew of to put all that matter and energy back together in a way that would make it become his family again.
Beside those losses, Wax Stan was hardly worth considering a loss at all - and yet, Stan had wept more for the remains of Wax Lincoln, remodeled into his own image, than he had when either of his parents had died. That moment of elation when he'd thought he had Ford back had turned into a knife in his chest while he had imagined, as he'd tried to give a eulogy for himself, that he had been talking to his brother.
What would I do if I found out he's dead?
Had it had all been for nothing? Had he committed his entire life to maintaining a lie just a little while longer - a little while which had kept growing longer and longer until now, when he had almost no-one left to lie to - just to put off dealing with the guilt of knowing that the person he'd cared about most in the world had probably died a horrible death because of what he'd done? Did he have any reason to believe there was the slightest chance Ford was still alive out there somewhere - that even success would get him what he'd been working for all these years? And even if he held on to the conviction that Ford was still alive - did it even matter?
What are the odds I can pull it off with whatever time he's got left, if there is any? What are the odds I can pull it off with whatever time I've got left?
Because another thing he had been unable to keep out of his head for the past day was that at some point, while he'd been distracted by a thousand other things, he'd grown old.
Face it, Stan, he told himself sternly as he tried to flinch back from the thought. There was nothing else he could do: he was an old man, with everything in him falling apart to one degree or another. He had been trying for thirty years to turn the portal back on, but no matter what he'd tried, the most he'd managed to do was mildly electrocute himself a couple of times. He'd gone through every scrap of paper his brother had left behind in an attempt to find any leads about the other two journals Ford had mentioned - he'd even gone to Tennessee once on the basis of a single postcard, one he hadn't even been able to read fully due to the author writing it mostly in numbers instead of letters - but nothing had ever come of any of the things he'd latched onto, unless he counted breaking out of a few county jails as experiences worth mentioning. All his life, Stan had been willing to play on long odds, but even he knew there were times when it was better just to fold 'em, even if that meant walking away with a loss. Had he reached one of those times? Was there anything to gain by spending the rest of his life the way he'd spent the past thirty years?
"There!" Mabel ran into the room. "I fixed him! Wax Stan is as good as new!"
Stan forced a chuckle. "Good job, pumpkin," he said, ruffling her hair. "Now, how's about you two fix up this mess you made in the parlor?"
"What?" yelped Dipper, who had followed his sister into the room.
"I said I liked that you have an imagination, kid," he told his nephew. "Not that I was gonna let you off the hook because of it. You gotta learn to tell more realistic lies if you want that to work."
After the twins went to bed, Stan went down to the basement, but did not take out the journal or anything else. Instead, he just sat in his rolling chair in the control room and stared through the glass at the vast, hollow eye socket at the center of the despised triangle, the symbol of all his failures, the thing that in his dreams was more and more often accompanied by a constant, mocking, high-pitched laughter that made him wake up in cold sweats.
What would happen if I stopped right now?
He could start enjoying his money instead of pouring it all into experiments. He could encourage Soos whenever the kid showed a flash of business sense, could train him up to take the burden off Stan's shoulders when they grew too achy and bent to carry it anymore. He could try to convince Dipper to trust him - which would be easier to do, he imagined, if he wasn't always sneaking around at night and keeping track of lies he'd told about what he knew and didn't know - and have fun with Mabel. He could connect more with Nathan, who was, after all, his family, too - all that was left of the brother who'd never called him by his own name. He could...
...Never forgive himself.
"Damn you, Stanford," he swore, but there was no answer. There never had been, and the reality, as Wax Stan had so abruptly forced him to realize, was that it was possible there never would be.
Except there would be. Someday. Somehow. No matter how long the odds were, he was going to make this work. Their parents were gone, their other brother was gone, but there was still a Pines family here to bring Ford back to, so that was what Stan was going to do. Ignoring the pains he'd put in his back while hauling a casket into the house earlier, he took out his books and got back to work.
