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The morning rolled over Gravity Falls with self-assured slowness, bringing a suffocating heat with it. Bugs darted over the grass, humming. No wind stirred the trees; they were still as sleepers. A fox nosed along a secret path, following the scent of voles; she glanced at the nearby clearing, inscrutable, and flicked her tail.
Someone screamed.
The fox darted away, but inside of the Mystery Shack, there was nowhere to run. By the time everyone in the house thundered into the living room, the screaming had stopped, but that didn’t temper Ford’s harried shouting or Dipper’s brave bluster. It was, of all people, Mabel who made the room go quiet when she exclaimed, “He’s so cute!”
A small boy, ten or so, with an unruly mop of brown hair and a long, dirty nightgown hanging from his shoulders, stood alone in the middle of the room with his fists up. When he realized that the screaming didn’t mean he was about to get into a fight, he lowered them.
“Where’d you come from, lil guy?” Soos—the original screamer—said, still clutching his chest. “Was Mr. Pines working on another ethically dubious experiment?”
But Ford didn’t answer. He just kept gazing at the boy, his mouth open.
Mabel sauntered up, closing the dead man’s land around him, and stuck her hand out. “Hi! I’m Mabel! This is our living room! Oh—um, yeah, you need some pants.”
The boy went a color that would be more accurately described as purple than red and tugged his shirt further down his thighs. “Shut up! I—I’m makin’ a fashion statement!”
“And I am loving it!” Mabel said.
“Who are you?” Dipper still hadn’t lowered his makeshift weapon—a sizable book that would actually probably do quite a bit of damage, if it came down to it.
It wasn’t the kid who spoke next. “What,” Ford said, “on the seven stars did you do?”
Ford’s voice wasn’t altogether severe, but the boy’s reaction was almost immediate. His posture drew in; his shoulders squared, and his head lowered. “Um,” he said. He began to edge away, a sign that Ford seemed to understand. “I got one very good answer to th—HEY!”
Ford had grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. “Don’t even think about it,” he said.
It was like he’d grabbed a nervous cat: The boy immediately struggled fiercely against his grip. “I wasn’t doin’ nothing! Let go!”
“Grunkle Ford!”
“Whoa, hey, Mr. Pines, easy!”
“Let go of me!”
“It’s me, you idiot, it’s Stanford! Calm down!”
The boy hit him across the face, and in that moment, several things fell into place for Ford. The boy was still struggling against Ford’s grip, and the others had converged on the two to separate them, but Ford himself had gone very still. The boy was still snarling: “Let me go, let me go, c’mon it isn’t fair, let me go!”
And Ford did.
The boy darted around the skull and hunkered down, glowering at Ford. “Stanley,” Ford said, “I…”
What was there to say? It was so easy, as a child, to not understand the full depth and context of a moment—easy to not realize why one’s brother was always on edge, always ready to fight; easy, too, to believe that what one had grown up with was typical. Ford had grabbed Stan without thinking. That wasn’t the only thing that troubled him; Ford had seen Stan grabbed so many times—and been grabbed himself—that it was now second-nature. It was also the inexplicable knot of fear that had formed in Ford’s stomach the moment Stan struggled, and his sudden, overwhelming desire to disappear.
Even now, as he watched Stan recover by the skull, he wanted to take his brother’s hand and lead him out to the beach. It was an instinct as powerful as the need to eat. It was, in truth, only the impracticality of the urge that kept Ford from doing just that.
“Hold up,” Soos said, sweeping the fez off his head. “That’s Mr. Pines?”
Ford ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”
“Oh,” Soos said. “I guess that’d explain why he didn’t run down here. ‘Cause he was already here.”
“It would,” Ford said. Dipper and Mabel edged closer to Stan, staring curiously at him; Ford took the chance to touch Dipper’s shoulder. “He can probably fit into something of yours well enough,” he said. “Go on.”
“But—I want to—fine.” Dipper darted upstairs; for a moment, the only noise in the room was the pattering of his feet above them and the dripping of the kitchen sink.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” Stan said. “I’ll kick your ass.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mabel said, hands on her hips. “I’ll kick your ass!”
“Whoa,” Soos said, “language. Wait, can I tell Mr. Pines not to do stuff if he’s a kid?”
“No!” Stan said, at the same time Mabel said, “Yes!”
Ford stood and held his hands out to silence the room. “Look, we have bigger issues than whose ass is going to be kicked.” Soos and Mabel snickered. “Stanley, I am your twin brother, Stanford. Something’s happened and I—”
“Yeah, right,” Stan said.
Ford frowned. “Let me fin—“
“Prove it!”
Ford worried at his wrist, a nervous tic that no one in the room but Stan had seen before. Before he could answer, Dipper hurried back downstairs with a spare set of clothes. Again the room ebbed into silence as the party watched Stan turn over Dipper’s clothes curiously, checking the pockets and seams, sniffing them, and holding them up to the light.
Ford sighed. “Something’s happened to you,” he said, “and you’ve reverted back to—what, how old are you? Ten? Eleven?”
“Thirteen, for your in-for-may-tion,” Stan said, dragging out each syllable.
Ford covered his face with a hand for a moment. He bit his tongue to keep from replying, Well, for your in-for-may-tion, I know that….He had forgotten about that old in-joke, which had started sometime in elementary school when Ford had corrected Stan—and everyone he came in contact with—with that very phrase. It had annoyed Stan so much that he started throwing it back at Ford, to show him how annoying it was; from there, it was just a matter of time before they threw it back and forth.
They’d stopped doing it in high school when Crampelter started repeating it that way, too.
Mabel said, “You’re thirteen? No way. You’re a shrimp! Shrimpier than Dipper! I always thought Grunkle Stan was a muscleman until he got all old and fat.”
“I’m not a shrimp!”
“A little bit,” Soos said as Mabel dragged Dipper closer to Stan by the elbow to begin comparing the two.
“You drank from Mom’s perfume on a dare,” Ford said, flatly, to end the speculation and doubt.
“He what?”
“Oohh, I always wanted to do that, too! How was it?”
“Hold on,” Stan said, staring at Ford. “It’s — you’re really Stanford?” Ford nodded; he didn’t seem pleased, exactly, by Stan’s realization, but his shoulders eased up. He extended his hands, palm-up, so that Stan could count the fingers. “Huh,” Stan said, slowly. “Man, you got ugly.”
Ford smiled.
There was work to be done—without his memories, Stan couldn’t help Ford find the source of this change. Ford would have to do experiments and do legwork, and even finding the source of the change didn’t guarantee an easy reversal from there. Stan would, of course, need looking after. But it could wait.
Ford crouched down. “Let’s be weird, Stan.”
“Huh? Ew! No! Why?”
“Just come here.” He opened his arms. “Be weird with me.”
“In front of people? No!”
Ford’s smile didn’t waver; indeed, it only grew as Stan screwed up his face and he crossed his arms. “I’ll tell them about the other dare you did that Tracy found out about.”
Stan paled.
“What dare?” Mabel asked.
“Oh, it was hilarious,” Ford said. “He—“
Stan launched over the skull and sprinted for Ford; his hug was so forceful that it knocked Ford back on his butt. “Fine! Here’s your weirdo hug, you weirdo.”
Ford enveloped Stan in his arms; Stan burrowed his face in Ford’s shoulder. He rubbed Stan’s back slowly, hoping every ounce of peace and happiness Stan had given Ford was flowing through Ford now, into Stan. Wishing, despite every scrap of logic telling him otherwise, that it could go through time and soothe his brother’s wild heart.
By the time he let go, they were both beaming. Ready to take on the world.