Author's note: Whew. This one took a really long time to write too. Anyways a kind of new character gets introduced in this chapter. I honestly debated with myself for a long time whether or not they should get a speaking role, but there were some things I wanted to clear up, and while this character can be a bit... obtuse in their delivery, they do manage to get the job done. Hope you enjoy.
Chapter 11
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air. - John Quincy Adams
"Hosta la vista, Stanley Pines. Get it. You know, from the movie. Actually hang on a second, am I in the right decade for that joke to work?" The yellow-eyed, human-shaped creature shrugged its shoulders, and its disturbingly casual tone was quickly followed by a sloppy two-fingered salute and a jaw-unhingingly wide grin. The footsteps of the retreating figure began to scrape harshly across the gritty desert ground, becoming fainter and fainter as they faded away into the white noise that hung about thickly in the dry air.
For a few bone-chilling moments, every thought in Stan's head was sent careening into a terrified overdrive, splattering in a frenzy against the sides of his skull like raindrops in a hurricane as he was forced to imagine how his head was going to look when it was crushed under the rubber sole of the car tire. His death clock now seemed to be incrementally counting down, each second ticking by in time to the increasing tempo of his shallowly beating heart and the hammering of the awkwardly staggering footsteps coming from the direction of his assailant. His arms, thighs, and shoulders feebly tensed and twitched as he tried to convince them to lift themselves up and pull him into relative safety, but he couldn't even manage to get any of them more than a few centimeters off the ground before they failed him with an exhausted shudder and flopped back down into the dust. A silent cry of frustrated helplessness raced its way up from the bottom of his heaving chest, and out over his stiff, cracking tongue.
It was alright. It's alright. Its… its… Stan choked down a rising tide of lightheaded hysteria as he forced himself to reign in his franticly racing thoughts. Whatever was happening to him now, however hopeless and horrifying his situation may have seemed, it was all nothing more than an elaborate hallucination, right? T-that was right wasn't it? In fact, he was….
Stan had to clamp down on the neurotic laughter that was trying to bubble its way out of his shuddering lungs. No, no, no, it was fine. He was fine. H-he… he was… was, was, was, sure that everything since he had gotten out of the trunk must have just been an illusion of some sort. There was just no other explanation that made any sense. None of it, none of it, none of it could possibly be real. It wasn't real. That thing was just a product of his own imagination. It couldn't touch him, couldn't possibly hurt him, couldn't run him over with the car. It was just bluffing. Bluffing.
The wave of fortifying calm brought by these thoughts didn't even get the chance to tumble halfway across the forefront of his mind, before it was swept away by the steadily throbbing mess of pulverized agony that was his left wrist and right hand.
The owner of the yellow eyes had been determined to make a point with that pain, and the message of the lesson had stuck.
This was real. Somehow, this was all very, very real.
Stan gave croaking groan of bitter desperation as his cotton-clouded mind hazily stumbled across all of the ways that his current predicament might not end up sending him straight into a shallow grave. The list of options didn't take him long to go through, even with his fatigued brain struggling around at the speed of tree sap in the cold of the early morning, and none of the choices that were offered seemed particularly appealing. Even the best was going to require a good deal more humility and cleverness than Stan felt capable of producing at the moment, but it wasn't like he had much else to work with. If the owner of those eerily golden glowing slits really was going to make good on its threat to try and run him over, then Stan knew that he was far too injured, fevered, and utterly spent to successfully pull himself out of the way of the oncoming car. This was his best, and really only, bet.
As much as it made him sick to his stomach to even consider this, as much as it boiled the blood in the back of his throat to even think about bargaining with the thing that had so openly insulted and menaced both Stanford and himself, for the right price Stanley was willing to sell out a little. The promise he had made to himself of bridging the rift that now separated him from his brother was surging out from the hand still tightly gripping the compass, and it moved through his veins like curling waves of melted air from a wildfire. He could feel the heat of it coming up to rest itself behind the backs of his eyes and singeing into his retinas in a sparking of furious determination. Even the fierce white swelter of the sunlight pressing down unrelentingly upon him like a glowing-hot, heavy metal slab against his skin, couldn't compare to the intensity of the scouring and scorching pressure inside of him. It was unbearable, uncontainable, and even if it wasn't quite enough to bring life back into his uncooperative limbs, it could at least push him to endure the cost that this submission would have on his pride.
The hurt, misunderstanding, and bitterness that divided the brothers currently was capable of getting better one day, Stanley had to believe that, he did believe it. But it couldn't come to pass if he died here. No. He wasn't going to let things end on that lonely, heartbreakingly somber note for either of them. If that meant that he had to shave a bit off from his ego, or get his hands a little dirty, then so be it. In his line of work, it wasn't as though he'd never done anything vile, or reprehensible, or that had compromised his already minimal moral standards before. No one who'd known Stan for more than a day would ever accuse him of being a selfless altruist, and he wasn't some wide-eyed idealist by any stretch of the imagination either.
"Ugh… I… w-wait!" Stan's wheezing, muted voice struggled to pipe itself to maximum volume so that the retreating figure would be able to hear him. The creature stiffly halted its progress for a second, seemed to tilt its head as if debating something with itself, and then turned around to stare sharply back at Stan in a mixture of curiosity and impatience.
"Hang on a minute. Look, maybe we did kinda… um, you know, get off on the wrong foot before…" The screeching pain of his hand, wrist, and side protested in a burning outrage at this, but Stan did his best to grit his teeth and ignore them. It was either this or die. He had to try at least.
"B-but even though I'm not going to budge on the whole Stanford thing…" Stan's mind scrambled around through a blank fog for a moment. "… maybe… maybe there's somethin' else I can do for ya?"
"Not really." The smug reply resounded simply across the barren, sagebrush-littered space between the two, but despite the dismissiveness of the creature's answer its odd, inhuman shuffling didn't start up again. Instead, its arms folded together as its shoulders relaxed slightly, and it watched Stan with the disquieting, hungry condescension of a cat gleefully observing a mouse squirming under its claw. "But what can I say, I'm an easily entertained guy, so lets hear what you have to offer anyways."
"I…uh… y-you…" Stan couldn't hide the surprise that filtered into his voice between his shallow pants. He hadn't expected that to work as well as it did. "I… right. Heh, come on now. The-there's, um… I… there's gotta be somethin' else you want. I'd offer you a Stan vac, but I'm not sure if you'd use somethin' like that… I, uh… I'm not even quite sure who, or what you are to be honest. Ya… wanna maybe… give me a name to work with?"
The figure put its hand up to a lightly bearded narrow chin, as though considering this. Its yellow eyes flickered with conceited pleasure. "Hmmm, let me think about that for a moment… Nah."
"I could, uh d-do you want cash or… I-I don't know. Uh… maybe you want me to get rid of someone for you?"
"Yeah, yourself."
"I…look, whatever you are, I… I…" Stan closed his eyes and winced slightly. His consciousness was fading away from him again into the transfixing swirl of warm, dark shadows that crept along the outer edges of his vision. The top and bottom of his dry lips chafed against each other. He didn't feel as though he could hang on much longer. His time was running out, he needed to hurry up.
Stan opened his eyes and started up once more in a strained, croaking whisper, ignoring the way that the image of the thinly built man standing by the car in the desert landscape seemed to tilt and swim dizzyingly before him. "I… I don't think you're human, right? Tha-… I mean…that guy that you're wearin' around, I-I can't really remember who he is right now, but I think I might know him from… I … it do-doesn't matter. Sorry, sorry. Getting distracted. So… i-if you're supposed to be some kinda ghoul, or demon, or… w-what about a few years off from my life then, or… maybe I'll owe you some kind of open-ended favor in the future? Jus'… just so long as it doesn't involve hurting my brother in any way, shape, or form… I… There has to be somethin' else that you want." He blinked sluggishly as he finished weakly, "I-I'll do anything you want…"
"Ohhhhh. Nice try, but honestly you've already annoyed me so much with your bull headed stubbornness at this point, I'd be willing to kill you just out of pure spite even if I didn't have an agenda to fulfill. Anything else you can offer?"
Stan tore through his scattered thoughts to try and produce an answer, but he couldn't come up with anything before the grating voice of his adversary jarringly interrupted his efforts.
"Heh. Yeah, that's what I thought. Just give up and accept your death gracefully already. You don't have anything that I want, and you're not capable of accomplishing anything all that useful to me either. In fact, you don't seem capable of accomplishing things period, even when your heart is fully set on the task." A tight, crooked grin ripped itself across the figure's features as it threw its arms out wildly and released a cruel, spiteful scoff.
"I…y-you… You were never even considering it, were ya." Stan glared in a half-lidded, exhausted anger at the hand that was now flung out just a few inches away from the drivers side of the car, his breath coming out heavy, gasping pants that swept the ground underneath it completely clear of dust. Of course. Of course the presence behind those ruthless yellow eyes hadn't really meant to hear him out. It had just been looking for another opportunity to mock him, to make him suffer. Given its behavior thus far, he really should've seen that one coming.
"I mean…." The creature continued as though Stan hadn't spoken at all, "just take a look at your life's accomplishments right now! Worthless. Absolutely meaningless. You've been at this for, how long has it been again, more than seven years, and what exactly do you have to show for it? Nothing, that's what. You're no closer to getting all that money you promised to earn for your family than you were the very day you got sent out to complete this task in the first place. If anything, you're even further back. Face it Stanley, the reason you're so eager to cling to your poor brother like the leech that you are, the reason why you're so willing to forgive him and place such a high value on his life even when he obviously doesn't reciprocate the feelings, is because deep, deep down, you know that even the worst parts of him are worth a thousand times more than the best parts of you. And you're not the only one who knows it either. Stanford, he's just as aware of it as you are, and that's why it doesn't matter if you spend seven years barely scraping by as a wandering, homeless, grifter, or seven thousand, he's still not going to find enough value in your life to bother searching you out. At least, not until it becomes convenient for himself to do so. Almost any other way that he could possibly spend his time, even just stacking grains of sand in a pile, would still be less of a waste of his attention than giving it to you."
"W-will you… stop it. J-just shut up!" Stan's trembling voice cracked as his cheeks flushed in a fevered, ashamed anger. It was obvious by the taunting glint in the that swam in the cold glow of the golden eyes that the… demon, or whatever it was, had finally figured out that trying to verbally attack Stanford's character, or Stanley's unwavering loyalty to him, was nothing but a waste of time. No. There was a far easier, far more vulnerable target for it to unleash the full weight of its sadistic callousness upon, one in which Stan lacked the sturdy foundation he needed to truly defend against doubt. It was now striking, of course, upon the delicate nerves of Stan's abysmal self worth and core insecurities, pulling on a single fraying thread from the cloth of his ego, and watching all of his confidence and resolve unravel away into nothing.
The yellowed eyed creature put a mocking hand up next to its ear at Stan's retort, its malicious smile growing so impossibly wide across its face that it looked as though the jaw was going to fall off at any moment." Excuse me? What was that? I thought you were begging for your life. And here I was just thinking of sparing you too. If only you had managed to swallow your pride for a little longer. Oh well." It gave a chorus of bellowing laughter that shook every part of the body it was inhabiting and rang with a deafening, nauseating intensity in-between Stan's ears.
"Come on and just admit it Stanley! You're useless; a pathetic, squandered ruin of human potential. Unlike your far superior twin brother, you'll never do anything great or world changing with your life. You'll never decipher the mysteries of the universe, or accomplish anything that will earn you the respect or praise of others, or make your own parents proud of your existence. You can't even manage to avoid being a complete and utter detriment to the people that you supposedly care about, a crooked, incompetent burden that the rest of your family is embarrassed to be related to. Ha, it kinda hilarious actually. You're like the negative twelve-dollar bill, less than worthless."
With that, the figure turned towards the car again, and in a small cloud of stumbling feet and dust, eliminated the small distance between itself and the door. Its fingers settled upon the handle and lifted it up with a soft click. "By killing you, I'll actually be doing the world, and your brother, and even you, a huge favor in the long run. So maybe you can take some comfort in that, huh? See, I really am a Good Samaritan."
Stan's eyes widened and the blood from his cheeks drained away in a tense, despondent dread. This was it, he thought to himself. The end. This was where the sum of all his efforts had landed him. After everything he'd been through to get out of the trunk, after he'd injured himself and spilled his own blood to keep from giving in to despair, after he'd pushed himself to endure past his limits, after he'd escaped from his earlier hallucinations, after he'd renewed his resolve to patch things up between himself and his brother… it wasn't enough. It just wasn't enough. He was now going to die via vehicular manslaughter, by the hand of some creature possessing a man who's name he couldn't remember, in the middle of the desert, while his bruised and broken body was also slowly succumbing to heatstroke.
He had failed. He had failed himself. He had failed Stanford. He was going to die here.
There was nothing he could do to stop this, and no one was going to come to his rescue.
Stan bit his cheek and released a shuddering breath out through his nose. He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead into the dirt, unwilling to be a spectator to his own death. If this was to be the time and place of his end, then he at least wanted to spend his final moments focused upon the people and places that were most important to him, not whatever preparations that monster was going through in order to seal his doom.
But the mounting of panicked sorrow swirling around in Stanley's heart didn't have long to persist, as it was jarringly interrupted by the sound of his soon to be murder choking on its own foul breath. Luck, as fickle as it was in the way that it seemed to govern Stan's life, had apparently decided to now shift the winds of fortune in his favor once more, and it filled the sails of his ship just enough to bring him out of his immediate danger.
"Ugh. Grauh. W-what's happening to this….?" There was series of muted thumps and coughs as the figure suddenly, and violently, crashed against the side of the door. It shakily struggled to regain its standing position, only to collapse back down again in a twisted, uncoordinated heap.
The muscles in Stan's neck weakly quivered for a moment as he sluggishly toiled to turn his head and get a better view the origin of what now sounded like a pelican trying to force down its lunch. His eyes traced along the path that the unsteady footsteps had made in the direction of the car, eventually coming upon the body belonging to the yellow eyes. It was stiffly doubled over now, its form kneeling into the ground and heaving as it was wracked by a fit of raspy dry hacking.
Stan couldn't help but give a small, half relived, half hysterical smirk at this. He had no idea what had halted its progress, but that wasn't going to stop him from taking pleasure in the fact that the thing which had previously stood so aloof and arrogantly over him in its cruel torment, was now curled and crumpled up like an impatient five year old's half-hearted origami project.
"Gah! Oh come on! Right now, really? Really. We're going to do this now?" The high-pitched, grating voice somehow managed to shout this without becoming any louder, and its owner made a couple more awkward attempts to right itself before giving up and trailing off into an exasperated groan. "Ah yeesh. I wonder if it's too late to get a refund on the, errk, deal I made to use this stupid thing. It hasn't even been dead for a day yet and it's already falling apart at the seams, talk about poor mileage. Humans, feh! Even when they've expired you can't rely on these meat-sacs to do anything right. Made me used up all my-urg… energy just fighting off the rigor mortis." The whole body gave another quaking shudder as though it were a house of cards about to crumble in upon itself. The arm that had been pulling on the handle of the car door went completely limp.
"C-can't hold on to it anymore. Wasted too much time trying to talk sense to Stanford's half-wit of a twin brother when I should have just gone along and killed him right off the bat. It's what I get for thinking that I could reason with someone so pathetically naïve that he believes he can still win his brother over with an apology or, gah, some measly amount of pocket change. What a complete-"
"Up yours, ya jaundice-eyed bastard!" Stan's faint, scratching voice interrupted, brimming with overconfidence despite the fact that his own situation wasn't much better off than the thing's. "You, wha-whatever you are, ya don't know the first thing about my brother, and ya know the first thing about me neither. So just shut the hell up and leave us both alone, will ya!"
"Heh. Oh that's right. Sorry, I almost forgot that you were still there for a moment" Slowly, and with all the ominous energy of a splintering wooden bridge groaning while suspended over a yawning chasm, the head belonging to the overwhelmingly inhuman presence began to turn around to face Stan. It's opaque, practically bulging amber eyes brightened in a sudden surge of controlled, calculated poison.
"Yeah, I bet you really did seein' as we're the only two idiots out here." Stan shot back testily. His mind felt as though it were floating nauseatingly high up above him, perched upon a mountaintop wreathed by foamy wisps of clouds that were blocking out the sensation of the rest of his body below him. As such, he wasn't quite able to fully register the dizzying whirl of alarm bells that were screaming at him from far down below as the figure locked eyes with him. But he did at least take note of the swell of ice-incrusted water that seemed to gush into his blood stream shortly afterward. He lay there in a slack heap, his body too utterly exhausted, sore, and spent to become tense with fear. Every muscle in every limb was lifeless and wilted in the heat, save for his eyes staring in a half lidded boldness at the creature waltzing around in a human's skin, and his aching hand still tightly gripping onto the warm, brass compass.
"Well, well ,well, I guess you should consider this your lucky day then, or… maybe not." Its voice began croaking in a low, layered reverberation, one that seemed to make the very light of the pale blue the sky dim and waver. "It looks like you're not going to get into a car accident after all, but I guess it doesn't really make that big of a difference anyways. In the state you're in, there's absolutely no way you're going to walk out of this desert alive."
The bright yellow eyes then tilted slightly and seemed to glare at something behind Stan. A strained grin grew like a tangle of needle-thin thorns across its face. "Even you won't be able to help him out this time. Don't think I don't know what your limitations are, they're written all over you. Something like you can't truly manifest itself physically in this plane like I can. You can't give him the aid he needs and you know it, so don't even bother trying."
Stan was tempted to try and look over his shoulder to figure out what, or whom, the creature was addressing, but a brief glimpse didn't reveal anything, and he felt too tired to want to fully flip himself around. It just didn't seem worth the effort at this point. "W-wha… who 're you talkin' to?"
"Hmm. Nothing you'll need to worry about." Its voice tightly murmured as its smile morphed into a threatening grimace. The inhuman presence held its malice filled gaze for a few more moments before the black slits within the toxic gold once again curved sharply downward to land upon Stanley.
"You know, when you think about it, this is actually a much bigger bummer for you than it is for me." It continued on, a sneering mixture of distain and mockery slowly settling upon its features like muck settling to the bottom of a muddy brown river. "I mean, I at least could have given you a quick and merciful death. But nope. You just weren't interested in taking the easy way out. Now it looks like you're going to spend the next few hours slowly and painfully frying till the life has been completely cooked out of you. Heh. What a wonderful victory you've earned for yourself there, and a fitting one too considering what a resilient irritation you've been to me for our brief time together. And even if you do manage to survive this somehow…"
Its eyes flitted over to the compass still grasped in his hand before turning back to him and stiffly shrugging. "Well, it's not like I've really backed myself into a corner here. My plans tend to be pretty flexible. I have eyes in many places. I have friends with many faces. I keep the Pines in proper places... and that isn't going to change even if you do interfere with my current intentions for you brother. His place is wandering hopelessly lost among the stars, and yours is trapped deep under the ground. The only wiggle room you ever had was to decide whether this meant taking a nice peaceful dirt nap for the rest of eternity, or toiling, sacrificing, and tearing yourself apart for thirty years in a secret subterranean basement. And I can guarantee you, before the end, you'll have wished that you'd made the opposite choice a thousand times over, that you'd just left your brother well enough alone while you still had the chance. Because this is what you've just signed yourself up for. Three decades of loneliness and despair, half of your life flushed away for the sake of someone who would leave you to rot if your positions were reversed, who has already left you to rot as we speak. This is your fate, and once again you have no one to blame for it but yourself!"
Stan wanted to make some kind of snappy, defiant comeback at this, but the warmth within his sun flushed face suddenly spiked to an unbearable and smothering temperature. He only managed a half-aware grunt of acknowledgment before his consciousness chose to start dimming and fading in and out again in tempo to the gentle waves of heat twisting on he horizon. For a moment, the image of the small framed man leaning in a heap against the side of the car a few yards away, its glowing eyes staring menacingly at him from within its deeply shadowed face, disappeared completely behind the dark curtain of his eyelids. Stan was wholly blind to the world around him for a very long stretch, only released from the consuming blackness after a length of time too elusive for him to measure by something that made his stomach flip, and his skin crawl. He heard a loud, raspy exhale hiss from somewhere just above him as though it were only a few centimeters away. A dry breath eerily swept across the red, cracking flesh of his ear and tickled it slightly.
"I guess this is my cue to take off. Until next time, Stan Pines."
Stan gasped. An almost painful, prickling chill ran up his spine. When he managed to force his lids open again in the next moment, the body of the man was exactly where he had last seen it, a fair distance away, but now crumpled fully onto the ground. It was unmoving and absolutely lifeless, its face pressed down carelessly into the dirt.
Save for the soft sound of his own labored wheezing, the wasteland around Stan was silent and empty; as tense and forcefully quiet as though it were one of those old, half-forgotten, unexplained graveyards that people often stumble upon when they've been wandering around aimlessly for far too long. Even the natural buzz of the life within the desert seemed to be under some kind of spell, afraid of shattering the muted hush that now cupped the world uncannily within its long, twitching fingers.
He was completely alone.
'What now?'
The question rang through Stan's mind with an almost unwelcome foreboding and clarity, and he couldn't help but release a low shuddering breath as the weight it carried with it settled upon the back of his shoulders. He absentmindedly tried to shake it off, and then shifted his cheek a little on the searing hot dirt so that one of the small rocks beneath wouldn't continue to poke uncomfortably into his jaw.
The presence behind those haunting yellow eyes had been wrong about many, many things, but it had spoken correctly when it said that Stan was in no state to get out of this desert on his own. He didn't even have the strength to manage bringing himself to his hands and knees, much less into a standing position. Every part of his body was hurting, or broken, or bleeding, or too dry, or unbearably hot, or ominously unfeeling and uncooperative. And to make matters worse, his previous trials had done far more than just worn him physically.
The stress of all these strange dreams and hallucinations he was dealing with had eroded his mental soundness away to the point where he was nearly incapable of reining in his dazed, wandering thoughts; of keeping them within the confines of what was productive or helpful. Emotionally he was even worse off, constantly having his heart being yanked and torn between grief, and hope, and love, and hatred like it was an old threadbare blanket meant for one, being shared by four. In all three areas, he had long past the point of running on fumes and was now moving forward purely through the momentum of his own desperation.
It was almost as though he was just rolling, tripping, stumbling, and falling down an infinitely descending slope of this current chain of events, moving far too quickly to catch his breath or find his balance. And every time he thought he saw the base of the incline, every time that his spirits would raise in relief at an end being within his sights, every time he would think to himself 'Yes, finally! I'm almost there. I couldn't possibly go a step further. In just a moment I'll be able to rest', the bottom would suddenly drop out from beneath the cramping muscles in his feet like a trap door, only to reveal another bottom, miles and miles below, which would drop out as soon as he touched upon it as well, and so on. He had been pushed to his absolute brink, too fatigued to keep on going, but unable and, to some degree, unwilling to stop.
In a slightly less extreme and sudden way, it was what the past seven years of exile had felt like as well. The biggest difference between the two being that with the latter, he hadn't been trying to run downwards. No, it was just the opposite. He'd been frantically racing upwards instead, attempting to claw his way to higher ground without anything like a high school diploma, or even family he could call upon, to help hold him steady on the slippery, constantly shifting slope. And despite all his efforts, despite all his small victories, and numerous attempts, and self-assurances, he still found himself sliding down lower and lower anyways.
Continually facing towards his goals only to fail and sink further away from them instead, or to turn around and look for reprieve at the bottom only to find that the bottom didn't exist, and that there was no release from his torment aside from the unthinkable. He didn't know which was worse.
The rays of the sun seared down mercilessly upon him, wave after wave of heat crashing into his hapless form with all the swelling rage and might of a bright, golden ocean. It pressed on him, melted him even more deeply into the dirt. Some part of him was dancing, frolicking, and spinning around on the sandy shore of a blindingly white beach. The cloudless sky above him flipped and began twirling itself around like a bottomless blue whirlpool. It somehow managed to be mesmerizing and nauseating at the same time.
He was so tired. He just wanted this to end, and the distinction between achieving this by walking out of this desert with his life, or just giving up and laying down to die in the dirt, was seeming less and less important with every achingly slow second that this agony dragged on.
But he couldn't… he… fo-for some reason. Something was stopping him, an oddly cool, and steady pulsing beneath his left hand.
Stanford… his brother. A young boy with bright and sensitive eyes. Eyes that had always averted down to his six fingered hands in a somber wistfulness. Except… except when he smiled. When he looked at Stanley and smiled, his eyes had always seemed to be overflowing with hope. A terrified, unsure hope perhaps, but it was there nonetheless. The eyes of the much older Stanford, the ones that had looked back at Stanley as they reflected the glowing scarlet light of the beach in his dream, they had been empty of that. They were still bright and burning with curiosity, and a love of discovery that so perfectly suited his brother, but they'd also been despondent and blank. Drained. Lacking something vital. It wasn't how they should have been. It wasn't right. He needed to… What did-what did he need to do again? He had been trying to do something, hadn't he? No…wait. Yes. That was right. Stanford, he needed to… to get himself up so he could make it back to his brother. His brother. His brother might need him, and he had to be there for when that happened.
Stan started simply. He tried moving one of the fingers on his distressingly benumbed right hand, but it didn't respond. His chest swelled and deflated grudgingly. He made a few other attempts with similarly easy movements, and still nothing seemed to want to respond. Well, nothing save for his eyelids. Odd, he didn't actually remember closing them.
Stan miserably pulled back the darkness that encompassed his vision to peer out in front of him. His left arm, cut, bruised, and bright red under the harsh light of the sun, seemed to be stretching on for miles, and miles, before him. The bright, faultless shining of the compass flickered at him from across the distance, steadily peeking through the narrow gaps in his firmly curled fingers.
The first thing Stan noticed about it was that the needle was still unfailingly pointing to the fancy crimson lettering NNW. The second thing that he noticed, once he managed to blearily blink away the hazy, lethargic gloom that was creeping its tendrils soothingly into the space between his thoughts, was that there was a large, unnaturally dark shape sitting in front of him, and just behind the compass.
It was black. As unnervingly black as the space between the stars, or a deep, inky underground cave. An utter, light-consuming void. A warped, punched hole in visual reality with no clear outline or end. Though, it somehow still appeared to be vaguely human-like in form, and perhaps kneeling down in front of him if Stan was reading the strange shape correctly. He recognized it as the same shade that had interrupted the foul intentions of the demonic, yellow-eyed creature earlier while it had been hanging up above Stan, the body it used and abused still tangled up in the sharply angled branches of the Joshua tree. It was the shadow that had appeared to him and pointed with a silent and yet somehow compelling energy, to the compass that had transitioned him from the searing landscape of the desert into the warm, ruby streaked, setting sky above the gently thundering ocean shore. It seemed more solid and real at this moment than it had even back then. And now that it was practically right next to him, Stan could make out the oddly shifting pattern of its slightly transparent edges; obscure, moving and dissolving as though its whole form was nothing more than a barely contained collection of dense, midnight smoke.
"…Stanford?" The quietly whispered name was inaudible, soundless compared to the muted ringing in Stan's own ears, but the figure before him still responded with a slow shake of its head.
"No, I am not him." It was the first time the shadow had ever spoken that Stan was aware of, and its voice was as surreal and unearthly as the rest of it. It was a breathless, raspy mummer overlaid upon something that was distant, low, and echoing; like the sound of a gentle breeze threading its way through the waving shimmer of long golden grass, layered atop the deafening, overpowering roar of a pine forest swaying in an icy winter gale.
"Though, I do not fault you for your confusion. I did deceive you earlier." The dark silhouette continued on, it's head tilting down slightly towards Stan as though it were offering an apology.
"In his heart, he knew that he was about to lose something very important to him, and the weight of that awareness plagued him ceaselessly. He looked to me, and his heart told me the direction I was to point in, and I did so. But I was unable to identify for him what it was that he was searching for, as such is not my function. He couldn't see clearly and refused to be moved until his vision was unclouded, so I did what I could to grant him more time. I traversed between one of the memories that the two of you share, the day that I passed into your brother's possession and you both first read the inscriptions upon my back. I used this to gain a foothold within your mind, and from there, took your brother's shape within the dream I sparked in order to awaken you from a slumber that would have otherwise marked your death. It seems I am becoming more proficient in my imitations since you roused almost immediately."
"You mean…the…whe-when…when we were kids. You're talkin' about that dream when I was… still…" Stan blinked slowly for a moment. "Still in the trunk…" He trailed off.
His stuttering train of thought was doing a remarkable job of keeping up with the surrealness of the situation, not to bother mentioning the utter nonsense that was being said. The hardest part by far was trying to figure out what the strange voice was trying to communicate in the first place. Its voice was so absolutely foreign and undecipherable that he probably would've had a difficult time understanding it even if he'd had his full wit at his disposal.
But… there was also a crystal clear implication that he was able to grasp onto, even if he didn't fully comprehend everything that the shadow was saying. It was a breathless ache of truth in the center of his chest that made itself apparent long before his brain had sluggishly caught up.
"Heh. Yeah, I should've figured that. Course Ford wasn't really trying to look for me in…" Stan closed his eyes briefly and tried not to wince. "Don't know why I bothered gettin' my hopes up. I… I-I knew that it was just a dream anyways. Course he wasn't tryin' to find me. Just a-…just another one of these stupid hallucinations I keep havin'. D-didn't even, heh. Didn't even recognize me in that other dream either. He'll never… even if he does it unconsciously, he'll never really… Doesn't even think about me. I…I don't even occur to him. Never. Never. H-he's never going to forgive me…" His heart started pounding painfully, throbbing viciously against his sternum one beat, and then squeezing the breath out of his lungs in the next. He looked back into the compass unsteadily. Something drained out of his face leaving it hollow, and his eyes stung dryly in their sockets. "Why do I keep foolin' myself anyways?"
A soft click echoed loudly throughout the quiet of the empty desert and snapped Stan out of his dreary listlessness. The glass of the compass had shattered slightly upon its outer edge, a small lightning-like crack reaching its thin fingers hungrily towards the center of the sheer surface. Stan slacked his grip around the brass antique slightly, as though he were trying to be careful not to exacerbate the problem.
"It…it broke." He said dumbly.
The shadow didn't answer at fist. Stan couldn't help but feel as though he'd disappointed it somehow, but given that he'd just about had his fill of hallucinations for one day, he couldn't really bring himself to care all that much. A few seconds passed by before it slowly reached a pitch-black appendage out to cover the compass, along with Stan's hand, with a dark, inky mist. Stan felt something like static electricity race along his arm all the way up to his shoulder.
"There are some who are so blind to what it is they truly want that they are unable to recognize the object of their desires, even when it stands plainly before them. Others know exactly what it is that they want, and desire it so fiercely, that they have a way of seeing it in everything, even in places where they shouldn't. Both kinds of people are very easy to fool under the right set of circumstances." The dark head of the shadow seemed to tilt a little pointedly in his direction at this.
"While there is nothing wrong with caring deeply about something, or someone, I would caution against falling in love with the idea of being in love. At least to the extent where your want for the feeling surpasses whatever it is that you loved in the first place. Because when those feelings fail, when the thing you care about inevitably disappoints, the pain that follows has a way of making one forget what it is that they truly love. In that blind suffering, they are likely to cause damage to that which they previously sought so desperately to protect from harm."
The shadow then removed its limb to reveal the clear, unblemished shining of the glass again, and the needle still pointing plainly towards NNW beneath. The crack was completely gone. "No, it is not broken. You just need to allow it to heal."
Stan stared a little grimly at the now mended compass for a moment before huffing in a tired irritation. "Ya only hurt the ones you love. Right, got it. Next time I want some half-baked guru advice I'll go and get myself a fortune cookie. Look I…"
The edges of Stan's vision began darkening again, and for a few terrifying moments he was unable to untangle himself from the thick, cold wash of starless midnight that was trying to come between him and the rest of his body. He would have screamed, but he couldn't reach his voice. His mind shuddered and struggled wildly to pull itself back into the pain and heat of the desert, which seemed to be moving further and further away from him as the seconds ticked by, crashing forward in a reckless, violent onslaught of absolute panic. He tore away from the mindless flood nothingness that had wrapped its long and clammy tendrils around him, and slammed himself down into the world again. The blinding bright light that returned to his eyes was absolutely stunning and paralyzing. It pounded against his skull with all the force of a sledgehammer behind it, completely knocking the breath out of him sending his body into a spasm of hacking gasps.
"Ford… 'ord. Can't… I can't die. Please, please help me. Please."
The shadow shook its head unsympathetically. "I will tell you what I told your brother. It is beyond my ability to simply give you what you want, nor can reveal what your desire is if you do not know it yourself. My function is to point to where it is, and I can do very little aside from that."
A dark shape that Stan assumed to be a hand then uncurled a bit, and the shadow steadily pointed to the small brass instrument that was still warmly shining under Stan's palm. He almost unconsciously clenched his fingers a little more firmly around it, trying to ground and anchor himself to the only real connection that he seemed to have with his brother at the moment, and was very surprised when the sound that followed his action was that of thin plastic crumpling under a powerful pressure.
"I… I don't understand what you're… The… the compass? I… What are you? Ford… h-he mistook me for something else, mentioned somethin' 'bout a, I don't know, spirit or whatever in the compass. Is that supposed to be you? Or, um… was that Ford jus'… jus' you screwing with me again too."
"No, that was the real Stanford Pines." The otherworldly echoing of the shadow's layered voice almost sounded tired at the admittance. "Challenging as it was, as he is a stubborn man and not easily led, I did manage to direct him to where you were at least a couple of times. He also stood outside of the car trunk while you were making your final efforts to escape, though, it was only within the slightly altered version that reality which existed inside of your half-awake mind at the time. You must pardon him for not aiding you more there as I did not explain the situation to him very well. With you, I can speak simply, but as is my nature I find it difficult to be clear with those who work hard to be dishonest with themselves." Stanley couldn't help but find it a little odd that the silhouette kept continuously pointing to the compass throughout all that it was saying. The instrument itself seemed to be wavering beneath his hand like a mirage, and despite the way its appearance flickered and warped, it strangely never stopped feeling as though he was gripping a perfectly solid and real object within his fingers.
"As for what I am, yes, I am the one that your brother mistook you for. However, he was incorrect in thinking that I am any form of spirit or ghostly apparition. I would tell you plainly what I am, but to you the word would have no meaning. The most accurate comparison I can make is to liken myself to that of a computer program or an instruction manual, though, even these are not entirely correct."
Stan allowed his eyes to slip closed for a few brief seconds and then nodded wearily. "Hmmm…. Yeah, sure. Ya wanna know what I think ya really are, though?"
He raised a defiant eyebrow and set his jaw stubbornly. His eyes were unfocused, and his voice crept out from the stiff and brittle movements of his mouth in a small, breathy whisper. "I…I think you're jus' 'nother hallucination. You're not real, that's why you can't help me. You're not real. That other thing wasn't real. I bet none of this is actually real. I'm… 'm gonna wake up in my car, and all of this will have jus' been a terrible nightmare or something." The lightheaded haze in Stan's mind grew thick enough for his thoughts to choke on, and he forgot where he was for a moment. He didn't float up again thankfully, his hand was now anchoring him firmly down. But still, the temperature-less, drowsy mist was impossible to navigate through. He felt lost.
Somewhere up above him the dark silhouette made a small, almost distressed movement. It answered him a little hesitantly."To you, I suppose that might as well be true."
"Jus' a… just a nightmare is all." He muttered more to himself now than the black shadow before him. "I'm gonna… gonna wake up any minute now. And when I do, I'll look up at Ford's bunk… and he'll be lookin' back down and make faces at me, 'nd… and then he'll tell me somethin' nerdy 'bout the way dreams work or…"
Stan looked out across the bright and barren desert, his eyes dimly taking in his surroundings but not actually seeing any of it. "Ford. Ford I... where are you? Where… where is he? Where's… Ford? Stanford? Sta-Dad, where did-is he… I…"
He waited tensely for a few moments as the spinning tilt of the world sent his stomach rising up next to his lungs and brought his head crashing back down painfully into the brutally hard ground. His strained, hushed voice started cracking and failing him as he became increasingly distressed within his delusion. "Ma. Ma, please I-I've lost him, I can't…can't find Ford, I…. Please, please, I don't know where he is. I…I-I….I don't know where I am."
He looked up, and bright light of the boiling sun reached down through his eyes and stripped him of reason. He released his hold on reality completely to give into full-blown hysteria. The stream of incognizant mummers coming from Stanley started working itself into a frenzied wail as loud as the raw aching of his dry throat would allow. "Stanford! Stanford, please! Please don't leave me behind, don't leave me behind! Please don't leave, please don't let me go. Don't abandon me! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'M SORRY! PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME! I'M SORRY I…"
A gentle hand rested itself lightly upon his shoulder interrupting his delirious ramblings. Stanford was there now, kneeling in front of him. The hard glint in his eyes and cold sternness of his expression were both in stark contrast to the soft, childish shape of his face. It made him look uncanny and almost unfamiliar. "Stanley, you're losing it again. You need to wake up or you're going to die. Your brother truly does love you, and one day he will hopefully remember that, but in the mean time you must endure. If there is one thing you seem undeniably capable of, far better than many I have come across, it is that you persevere where most others would have given up long ago. Do not lose yourself yet, you are closer to the finish line than you realize. You have been so for a long while now. Why else do you think that demon was so steadfastly determined to run you over."
Stanley stared wide-eyed up at his brother, his distressed expression torn between wonder and despair. "Please. Please Ford, help me. Help me. I can-…can't do it on my own. Not-n…'m not strong enough. Not good enough. I'm not like you. 'm j-just a… just a screw up. I'm sorry 'm such a screw up. Sorry I screwed things up for you. I didn't mean to, please, please, I didn't mean to. Help me. Please, help me"
The frown on Stanford's mouth was tight, and he leveled a steely glare at his brother through his glasses before shaking his head. He jerked one of his arms to draw attention to it, the arm that had been unceasingly pointing downwards to something that was being strangled in Stanley's terrified grip. "Tell me what is that you want."
"You. I-I… I want you. I want you to be here with me. P-please don't leave me again."
"What do you want?"
"I… I just said I-"
Stanford forcefully cut his brother off, his voice as unyielding and inflexible as iron. "What do you want?"
"I-I don't-"
"What do you want?"
"If you would just-"
"What do you want?!"
"I don't know! I don't know! I don't know, ok!" Stanley couldn't choke back the exhausted, far too warm sob that racked his entire body. His voice wavered and shook like a small, frightened child's would after earning their parents wrath. "W-why are you doing this, please just help me."
But Stanford didn't answer his question. Instead he drew back his arm and then brought it down vigorously again to point at Stanley's left hand. "Yes, you do know. Look with a heart unclouded by your own preconceptions of what is and isn't, and tell me what it is that you want."
Stanley paused before answering this time. He stared helplessly at his brother for a few seconds longer, and then did his best to gather up the anemic, frenzied thoughts that were racing around in an aimless, crazed speed within his skull. The answer in his head, however, ended up lagging far behind the far quicker reply that sprung up from some strangely burning place just below his sternum.
"I want… I want you to be happy. I want you to be safe. I want to be there for you if you need me. Even if you don't… I, I just want to be there with you. For us to… to be by each others sides."
Stanford's face softened, and the corners of his mouth turned up slightly. He sighed, and looked down at Stanley in a bizarre mixture of pity and pride. "Yes, that's true. But what do you have to want first in order to get that?"
"I… I have to want to work hard, to earn the money that will fix things so you'll accept my apology."
"Even before that, what do you want?"
Stanley ran a dry, cracking tongue over his stiff lips. His hoarse voice poured out in an unregulated stream from his lungs. "Live, I want to live."
"What do you want?"
Stanley stared in a blank daze for a moment. Then the answer became as obviously visible as a match being struck up in absolute, pitch-darkness.
"Water."
Stanford's face broke out into a full grin, and he raised an eyebrow while wiggling his still pointing finger at something. Stanley forced the sporadic and disoriented movement of his field of vision to become steady, and he followed along whatever path it was that his brother had been trying to direct him down. At the end of his twin's fingertip was the compass that, even now, was securely held within Stanley's slightly trembling hand.
Except… it wasn't a compass anymore.
It was a dusty, dented, cheap plastic bottle of clear, warm water.