The dozens of plastic cards in the worn cardboard box clicked together as Stan ran his fingers through them, catching glimpses of names he didn't remember using and hairstyles he thought he was lucky to not remember wearing.
"You might have done me a favor by shooting me in the face with your nerdy science gun," he informed his brother. "Now I have an excuse for why I don't remember what I did with half of these!"
He'd meant it as a joke, but immediately, Stanford's face started sliding into the expression which usually immediately preceded yet more apologies - a pronounced slump of every feature. Somehow he even seemed to manage to get the ends of his eyebrows in on the deal, which impressed Stan almost as much as his own inability to ever get his eyebrows all the way under the fez people appeared to regard as an extension of his head.
"Because I'm old," he added. That expression was his second-to-least-favorite of all the ones he had learned or remembered were characteristic of each member of his family; he never felt sure that any response he could think of was the correct one to make when Stanford looked like that. Ford's extra-guilt-ridden moods could be even more awkward for Stan than the situation of a few days earlier, immediately after he'd lost his memory; he had been placidly minding his own business (never mind that even he hadn't known what it was) in the forest when he'd suddenly been approached by a very emotional kid and then just as abruptly hugged, for no reason he'd been able to think of at the time, by a weird old man with sideburns and a suit who had been in tears over the heroism of this 'Stan' everyone around had kept talking about... "That's the joke. Sometimes it's good having old man powers - " he winked at Mabel, who brightened the way everyone did when he got something right before she winked back - "but it's got its downsides, too. When I heard these knuckleheads were coming to stay with me for the summer, I thought, 'what if I confuse one of them from the other, and their parents try to put me in a home?'"
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure we'd be easy to tell apart even if we were identical," said Dipper. He picked up one of the IDs and examined it. "Wow, this one is almost as bad as those IDs you made us when we were investigating Manly Dan, Mabel," he joked, passing the card to his sister for examination. "1972...that's the earliest date I've seen yet."
"That's because it was probably one of the first ones I made," protested Stan. "And back in my day, we didn't have all these computer things making it easy to turn professional name-changer, either - forgery was an art back then, and art takes practice!"
"Yeah, every artist has to begin somewhere, Dipper," said Mabel, who pulled off tones of dignity amazingly well for someone who was now sitting backward on and hanging upside down off the seat of her chair, her thick hair tumbling to the floor. "I know you draw better than you used to, and I knit better than I used to. I bet Grunkle Ford couldn't have drawn all those monster thingies in his journals when he was our age, either, could you, Grunkle Ford?"
Ford chuckled at that. "It's certainly possible," he acknowledged. "I don't feel I really understood perspective fully until I finished my first class in integral calculus - "
"And when did you do that, Sixer?" asked Stan with a grin, noticing his brother getting excessively starry-eyed, the way he always did when he talked about math. "Did you wait until junior high, or did you have it down by the end of second grade?"
Ford's response was a non-committal shrug. Dipper and Mabel laughed, and even the corner of Ford's mouth twitched in slight amusement as Stan looked back down at the box of IDs again.
"The thing I want to know is, why did I even keep all this?" he wondered out loud. "This is evidence. Evidence goes in the Bottomless Pit!" Nods, bright looks - they knew that was right. He'd let a couple of kids act as witnesses to evidence disposal before? He knew he was supposed to be the dumb twin between him and Ford, but that had still been very unprofessional of Old Stan. What had he been thinking? "Plus I'm pretty sure just owning a fake ID is illegal in several states," he added, vague images of jail cells floating through his head for a moment. That happened often enough that he'd stopped trying to place them most of the time.
"Maybe you wanted to write a memoir someday," suggested Mabel. "Or maybe you were going to make a scrapbook to show Grunkle Ford when he got back, like I showed you mine! Scrapbook memoir!"
"I'm not sure confessing to multiple crimes in a scrapbook is really something anyone but you would think was a good idea, Mabel," said Dipper dryly, and Stan laughed.
"Your brother's got a point," he agreed. "Plus, nobody wants to look at those hairstyles too close together, eugh," he added with an exaggerated shudder.
"You do look like you had some...interesting...times, Stanley," said Ford, picking up and looking at the grinning visage of Andrew "8-Ball" Alcatraz with what looked like confusion, amusement, and disapproval all at the same time.
"Stan was...occasionally the name, poor choices were the game," Stan agreed, trying to sound upbeat about it. "I don't even know if I want to remember half of it, even if there has to be a story - like this thing on my shoulder," he added, remembering what he had observed on his own back in the shower recently and slapping the relevant shoulder. "I'm pretty sure it's a scar, but it looks like some kind of crop circle."
"I thought that was a tattoo!" said Dipper, sounding almost indignant.
"You're never gonna see it," he said automatically, and then wondered for a second where that had come from before Mabel started giggling.
"Remember when you wrote on Dipper's head in his sleep because he wouldn't stop trying to see it?" she asked as she flipped herself back upright.
The twins were the ones it was easiest to remember things around. He had seen Dipper and Mabel a few times before they had stepped off the bus in June, but this summer had contained the vast majority of their interactions, and so he didn't have the - echoes - shadows - reverberations - whatever they were - of years and years of other memories, layered and entangled, that could make his memories of Ford and Soos more complicated to contextualize and grasp the implications of. He grinned as an almost intact image floated up from the ashes of his mind.
"You're still a goober, kid," he said, and Dipper looked somewhere between pleased and discomfited. Typical Dipper, with all the emotional issues. Kind of like typical Stan that way... "Sorry about the forehead thing, though," he added, remembering the birthmark which kept the kid in a hat during his every waking moment.
"Eh, I've been called worse when people have seen me with my hat off before," said Dipper, heartbreakingly matter-of-factly. "Or after they yanked it off my head when the teacher's back was turned. But - thanks, Grunkle Stan."
"Remind me to definitely not slip my second - eh - third-best brass knuckles into your luggage before you leave," said Stan. "We do have a lot of birthmarks in this family, though, don't we? Six fingers, constellations on people's heads - I wondered for a minute if my crop circle was something like that. Pretty sure it's just a scar, though."
"It is," said Ford.
All three of them looked at him at once, but Stanford was now utterly impassive. This was a new expression; Stan didn't like it. Ford didn't seem to like them all looking at him, either, because he reluctantly elaborated with his eyes closed. "I was there when you got that scar," he explained. "It was my fault, actually."
Stan didn't know what to say to that. Part of him was curious - it was a strange scar - but it was obvious that it was not something his brother wanted to talk about. Considering how almost eager Ford was sometimes to admit to things he'd done wrong, or imagined that he'd done wrong, or imagined that Stan thought he'd done wrong, it seemed more than probable that something Ford didn't want to talk about would be something Stan would rather not even hear about, much less be forced to remember.
"Water under the bridge," he said. "I'm pretty sure I got you banged up a time or two, too. I was looking at my - uh, your - uh, our old yearbook - " the places where the real Stanford's life overlapped with the thirty years, still hazy or blank in so many places, which Stan had spent using that name were still tricky to think straight about, much less articulate anything about - "let's go with that, our old yearbook, and I remembered..."
Soon, they were all laughing again, and Stan almost forgot about the matter as they stashed away the day's set of mementoes and he sent the kids off to bed. Now, he thought, came both the best and worst of times - when he and his brother watched the home movies of their childhood, when he looked at events from his own life and family in grainy black and white and tried to remember them, rather than remembering what he had been told about them, or had only seen in the tapes.
"So, what's on the memory menu tonight?" he asked. "After we finish our tenth birthday, anyway - I think I remember why the whole cake was never on camera! Ma wouldn't have it, because the bakery spelled both our names wrong, and Dad was too cheap to get another one, right?"
"Yes," said Ford, though he looked less pleased than he usually did when Stan remembered something on his own. "You were - Stan Lee, I think, two words, like the comics man, and I was 'Stafford'. I'm still half-convinced that baker must have done that on purpose..." He trailed off, looking troubled. Stan frowned slightly at his twin. Ford was standing still in the middle of the floor, his hands folded behind his back to conceal his extra fingers, looking as though he wished he had his long coat and multiple weapons back on over his red sweater again.
"Everything okay?" asked Stan cautiously.
"What? Oh, yes, of course," said Ford, but he still wouldn't meet Stan's eye. "It's just - well - there's one part of the house I haven't shown you yet, Stanley, and after this afternoon, I suppose I really should."
He sounded as though he would rather go look at a dead rat in a bucket, though, and Stan had a feeling - almost a premonition, he might have said, had he not spent much of the past two days remembering more and more about his mother - that it was one of those things, more even than how poorly suited he had been to seventies hair, which he would be happier not knowing about. He shoved the feeling aside, though. Every day now involved going over as many stories ranging from unpleasant to painful as it did over stories that were pleasant, so what was one more on the pile?
"Well, what are we waiting for?" he asked, getting to his feet. When Ford still hesitated, Stan added, "Look, I've spent days learning about every lousy thing we ever did to each other. Whatever it is you still have stashed, I'll understand."
* * * * * * * *
Five minutes later, Stan stared blankly around the ruins of a basement room hidden behind a series of passages behind the gift shop vending machine, a device which looked about as sophisticated as a stone wheel compared to the massive, smashed, jumbled mass of computers behind it. "There is nothing about this that I understand," he announced.
It was true - and not true. He did not understand what he was looking at. And yet, persistently, there was the thought: I've been here before.
Ford forced a chuckle; it didn't sound very amused. "That's what you said the first time I ever showed you this place, too," he said. "It's safe, this time, though, if you decide you want to take any swings at me while we're down here tonight."
"Take a swing at you? Why - " Stan put a hand up to his face, remembering emotions more than events: Terror - was it going wrong? Were the kids okay? Shock. Joy. And then there had been pain. Not the emotional kind, the just-got-punched-in-the-jaw kind. The emotional kind had come later. "I'm guessing you hit back some other time?" he speculated, rubbing his jaw even though it didn't hurt at the moment.
"I think you might be remembering the last time you were down here," said Ford. He pointed across the room to the ruins of a collapsed structure, which looked like it had been an upside-down, freestanding metal triangle. "I was...in another world," he explained, "to - simplify it a bit, and you brought me back to this one. Through that." Stan blinked, looking between Ford and the ruin. He'd put together that the pyramid demon who'd been erased along with his brain had done - something - to Ford, thirty years ago, and Ford had had to be - somewhere else - as a result, which was how Stan had come to take his twin's identity - to hold down the fort and make reassuring noises over the phone to Ma occasionally, he guessed. Then, after trying for thirty years, he'd successfully rescued Ford from the demon, only to have the demon then get a body and try to kill everyone, so there had been no choice but for Stan to pretend to be Ford to get the demon out of its body and into his body so it could be mind-wiped along with him while it thought he was Ford, or...something like that. That was the story they'd told him; he hadn't bothered asking too many questions about the details before. Details had been a luxury when he'd still been reminding himself of his own name three times a day, among other things. "I wondered for thirty years what I would say to you if I ever did make it home," Ford continued ruefully, "and then, instead of saying anything, I - ahem - punched you in the face."
Thirty years.
That was the number that kept coming up. The thirty years where Stan had lived here under Ford's name, teaching himself physics, teaching himself code-breaking, trying to make as much money as he possibly could, all for a chance to...
"Of course you did," he blurted out, his eyes widening in horror as neurons fired and images came flooding back to him. "I pushed you. I pushed you into that thing!" It was his turn to point at the remains of the portal. "And the last thing you said before you disappeared - and I just stood there - " He shook his head, not wanting to remember any more, but not able to stop now that he had started. Burning pain in his shoulder - duller pain where his head had hit the concrete floor - his brother's glasses dropping from the air - the sickening noise the fuel gauge had made as it had died...
"No wonder you wanted to punch me," he said. "I'd have wanted to punch me, too."
"Well," said Ford. "I did start the fight. And - you didn't really push me into it, as such, Stanley - we had accidentally activated the portal, and it was right after I'd kicked you into a console and burned your shoulder - " Ford flinched at his version of the memory, or possibly at the sight of Stan's hand automatically rising to the shoulder in question. "I knew it had gone too far, that I had gone too far - but it was too late to stop it. You didn't really push me, you just - very - forcefully pushed one of my journals at me, and I stumbled over the safety line - It was as much an accident as what happened when I burned you. And just as much my fault - if I had had the sense to put more safety measures around the portal, or hadn't driven everyone away, or...there's so many things I could have done differently, and if I had, none of it would have ever happened. But all I cared about was my research," he concluded bitterly, turning away and clasping his hands behind his back again. All twelve knuckles were white with tension.
"Yeah, but...you didn't mean to, though, right?" said Stan. "Just like I didn't mean to break your machine back in high school. We just...both were the screwup twin sometimes, yeah?"
"Even if we grant that's true, I think I still have to be the worse of the two of us, all things considered. Half your screwups only happened because of mine."
Stan shrugged. "Hey, not everything's a competition. Plus, I'm the one who got caught robbing the government." Stan didn't remember that consciously until he said it, but he knew at once that it was true. Maybe this was what being a Seer felt like, if there were real ones. Maybe it was what his ma had felt like when the perfect lie had just flowed out of her mouth at the perfect moment when she was faking a reading... "So if we are competing, I was definitely the one who screwed up fueling this thing more than you did. We'd both be in trouble now if it had taken one more minute than it did to work."
Reluctantly, Ford chuckled. "I'm still amazed that you of all people got caught, Stanley," he admitted. "You! I thought stealing the waste barrels was one of the easiest parts of the whole procedure!"
"Yeah, maybe in 1981," grumbled Stan, reflecting on a swirl of blurry memories. "And you didn't get away completely scot-free, either - they had evidence about when you did it, too. Your extra fingerprints, they couldn't match them to anything." Which had been one of the least surreal things about the evidence he'd seen for the case that...that Government Man Who Looked Like Nixon had built up against him. He remembered now how odd it had been, even in the midst of his near-panic, to look up and see his birth certificate - the real one - stamped FAKE, with an arrow pointing to the headstone the family had put up after they'd found out about his fake death. "I might have been able to get off the hook because of your fingerprints, but still - these days, it was all I could do to get out with the stuff at all! The feds are a lot better at keeping their stuff these days...everyone is. It's a hard world for an honest thief to make a living in."
Ford shook his head slowly. "This decade is so different from - well, I don't really remember 1981 very well at all - from everything I remember that sometimes it feels like I still haven't come home," he confessed. "As if this is just another corner of the multiverse where I don't quite belong."
"It feels that way when you watched it all arrive, too," said Stan. "I don't know what the kids are even talking about half the time. I know more often than I used to let them think I knew, but even considering." He shrugged. "Anyway. You'll be caught up in no time, Poindexter. Learning's what you do best, right?"
"Unless the thing I'm supposed to be learning from is my mistakes. I seem to have finally found the one area where I might always be slow on the uptake."
"You don't have to worry too much about that," said Stan. "You really think I'm going to pass up any chance I get to tell you that you're screwing up? Saying stuff like that makes me think you're the one who lost his mind."
"You and the kids would be entirely justified if you never spoke to me again," said Ford.
Stan felt the limits of his patience approaching. "Look, I worked for thirty years just to speak to you again. I learned physics down here for you, Stanford!" Ford blinked in evident surprise. "That's right, I read all your nerdy math books and hyper-science-weirdo experiment papers and everything," he said grimly. "You think I'm going to throw all that out the window just because of one dumb thing like you and your massive ego almost causing the end of the world? You're gonna have to try harder than that even with me - I don't know if it's even possible to convince Dipper the sun doesn't shine out of your every orifice. So stop feeling sorry for yourself before I punch you."
Ford's smile was strained, but he did allow his hands to go back to his sides. "When you put it that way, you drive a hard bargain."
"Yeah, well, you're not really in a great negotiating position, if we're deciding who gets to feel sorrier for himself," said Stan. He started to punch his brother on the shoulder, but on impulse, decided to push his luck and initiate an awkward sibling hug.
For a moment, as Ford seemingly instinctively stiffened in surprise before reciprocating the gesture, he thoroughly expected something to go wrong - maybe even something on par with the last two times they'd tried this - but this time, after all this time, nothing did. Stan smiled over his brother's shoulder, then rearranged his face, with difficulty, into his usual expression. "Plus, I've got better things to do anyway," he said gruffly, thumping Ford on the back. "Like get out of this basement before the roof caves in," he added in a normal tone, looking up at the ceiling and around at the walls. "Is this all from me using the portal, or did your hillbilly friend wreck some of it when he turned the house into a killer robot?"
"This one's mostly on you," said Ford. "Though...it probably didn't help that the last thing I did before I stepped back into our dimension was throw a concussion grenade over my shoulder," he admitted.
"Grenade?" repeated Stan, raising his eyebrows. "Stanford Pines, Mr. Nerdistry, threw a grenade? Now that sounds like a story I want to hear."
"Haha, well - I realized the portal was opening, just as it happened that I was about to shoot Bill in the face with - you'd probably call it one of my nerdy science guns, and I was surrounded by monsters at the time - that might also be...part of why I lost my temper that night, sorry, eh, about that - and then..."