Chapter Text
While Ford had definitely experienced worse weather, there was no denying that the storm outside was pretty severe.
The kids seemed pretty heartbroken; they had put so much thought and planning into his and Stan's birthday party, and most of the activities could only happen outdoors. But Mabel put on a determined face and insisted that the party was still salvageable, and that it was still going to be the best birthday the grunkles had ever had.
Ford was certain that would be the case. Not because of anything the kids did, although the effort they were going through to try to make the day special was heartwarming, but because it was the first birthday in over 40 years he was celebrating with Stan.
He hadn't had much reason to keep track of his birthday when he was traveling the dimensions. In fact, time on the whole, relative to his personal chronology, was a fickle thing in the multiverse. He had no idea what year it was in Gravity Falls until he had asked Dipper, and he was both shocked and numbly unsurprised to learn he had spent just as many years of his life outside of his home dimension as he had in it.
The decade between Stan getting kicked out and Ford going through the portal had been a different story when it came to birthdays. There were a handful of dates on the calendar that Ford always dreaded, that always came with feelings of anger and bitterness and longing and loneliness. Their birthday tended to be the worst one, even on the years where Fiddleford insisted on dragging him away from his homework or his research for a night of relaxation.
Today was neither of those extremes. It was not a day that passed by unnoticed, and it was not a day that ached with the weight of the distance between him and Stan, a distance measured in more than miles. No, today was a celebration. Not just of the new decade he and Stan were entering (60 years was old, huh), but of their reunion, almost a year long now. It was about family, him and Stan and the kids and Fiddleford and Soos and Melody and Wendy. Maybe the group was small to an outsider, but to Ford it was all he could ever want and more. And they were all together again, him and Stan docking their boat on the Oregon shore and moving back in to the Mystery Shack for the summer, arriving a couple days before Mabel and Dipper.
There was a storm outside, wind blowing and rain pouring and air chilling uncharacteristically for mid June, but inside this house-slash-tourist-trap-slash-lab, Ford could feel nothing but warmth.
The festivities were typical of a birthday party of their dimension. They were both familiar and foreign to Ford, something he had never truly forgotten but strange from how long it had been since he partook in them, whether for his birthday or another's. Presents were not something he expected, yet there were two piles all the same, one for him and one for Stan.
In the middle, a small box about the size of a cubic's cube, wrapped in plain red paper, sat perfectly situated in a way that didn't belong to either side.
Soos, who had insisted on distributing the presents, picked up the box and turned it over, frowning. "It's not marked, Mr. Pineses. There's no name."
He handed it to Ford, who was sitting closer to Soos. Ford turned the box over and gave it a light shake, feeling something rattle inside. He looked up at the kids and Fiddleford. "Which one of you is it from?"
Nobody piped up to claim it, which was peculiar. Ford looked at Stan, who just shrugged. "Open it up and see what's in there, we might be able to figure it out."
Needing no further prompting, Ford curled his fingers under the taped-down fold in the paper and tugged it up, tearing into it. The box underneath was plain white cardboard, nothing fancy. He lifted the lid and found... a tape measure?
"Well that's not what I expected," Ford remarked, confusion growing. He had plenty of tape measures lying around the basement back when the Mystery Shack had been his lab, and when Stan had been trying to fix the portal. When they were moving onto the Stan O' War II, a couple of them had been put in with what they packed, along with other tools that could be useful on a boat. Unless Soos and Melody had gotten rid of them, there was sure to be one or two still tucked away somewhere. It wasn't a tool he was particularly in need of, and everyone in this room should be aware of that.
He picked up the object, mildly shocked at its weight, and pulled out the end casually, frowning. "Why would somebody-?"
"GRUNKLE FORD, DON'T!" Mabel suddenly called out, looking panicked and reaching a hand out towards him.
He furrowed his brows, looking up at her—and away from the tape measure. "What's wrong?" he asked as he let the end of the tape slip through his fingers.
He didn't hear Mabel's response, or anyone else's in the room. In fact, the room itself appeared to vanish in a flash, along with Ford's family. Gravity felt like it shifted sharply off balance, and Ford stumbled, vision going dark.
---
When his senses started to reorient themselves, he found himself taking a knee involuntarily as he failed to catch his balance. He gasped when icy wetness immediately soaked through his pants, coupled with a freezing cold biting through the air, far too low a temperature for even an unseasonal Oregon July.
He blinked as the darkness in his vision faded, squinting in the light and taking in his surroundings, struggling to understand how he could be seeing what he was seeing.
The world had turned grayscale in the way it did when covered in snow. The light of the sun glinted harshly off of the powder-covered ground, large clumped snowflakes falling from the sky. Buildings were covered in snow and icicles, and the road (road? Where was he?) had tire tracks through the inch-deep coating.
This was not Gravity Falls, and it especially was not Gravity Falls during the winter.
Ford's first thought was that he had fallen through a rift again, an unfortunately common experience when traveling through less-stable dimensions. One moment you'd be walking through a bustling market in dimension 3^!4, next you'd be in an active volcano in an unnamed dimension on the far side of reality. But 46’\ was stable, so stable that not even regulation portals, like the one Ford had built, are capable of operating without side effects. To easily navigate between dimensions, those dimensions both have to be just unstable enough that cracks can form to escape their bounds, but not too unstable that the cracks were out of control and unnavigable.
Ford inhaled deeply, testing the air. The element concentration did not seem to have changed, but he was hit with the familiar smell of salt, telling him he was near the ocean. It was a scent he had grown used to over nine months on the sea with Stan, but it was also the smell of his childhood, growing up in Glass Shard.
The memory of his childhood in New Jersey came back to him with the force of a ton of bricks slamming into his chest, and Ford glanced around his surroundings with the realization that he knew where he was. It may have been 4 decades since he’d stepped foot in Glass Shard, but this was undeniably the place where Ford grew up, a block and a half from where their apartment had been.
He saw the little convenience store that always kicked him and Stan out of they tried to go in, because Stan had nicked sweets off the shelf without paying one too many times. Next door there was the laundromat where they sometimes accompanied their Ma if she had more baskets than she could carry to clean. Ford's favorite pizza place, where they ground up the sausage into small bits rather than serving it in large chunks, looked just as it did in his memories.
Except... that pizza place had closed when he and Stan were 16, when the owner passed away and none of his children were willing to inherit it.
The entire street was the same, buildings housing companies that should have long since been closed still operating like the 60s had never ended... and maybe they hadn't.
Time travel was something Ford understood the theory behind. In practice it would be impossible, because even if someone could control the flow of time, they would end up floating in the void of space. The planet was constantly moving, so true time travel that was capable of accomplishing anything would have to involve both time travel and teleportation at faster-than-light speeds.
Ford had seen more impossible things than that.
He could accept that, somehow, he time traveled. It probably had to do with the tape measure he was still holding. And whatever the device was, if it truly had sent him back in time, it certainly had the capability of solving the teleportation problem as well. What he couldn't understand was why the device would bring him across the country, rather than just keeping him in Gravity Falls?
He looked down at the tape measure, noticing some strange buttons and symbols on it that he hadn't seen before. He had no way of knowing how the device worked. If he wanted to get back... he needed to figure out a way to safely test it. There was no way he was going to start messing with it without proper scientific procedure; the threat of being stranded in the wrong time, or in the right time but floating in space, was too daunting.
He shivered harshly, the presumably winter air cutting through him. He tended to dress warm no matter the season, since it offered more protection and more pockets, but his family had been trying to break him of that habit. Today he was wearing a button up short sleeve shirt with a striped pattern, nice enough for a party but not especially formal. Unfortunately, it also wasn't especially warm.
There was a secondhand clothing store down the street, if Ford was remembering correctly. He pushed himself to his feet, grateful that the cold weather meant no pedestrians had seen his bizarre display as he marveled over the street from where he knelt—or his sudden appearance out of nowhere. As he walked he took out his wallet and was relieved to find two $20s, not a huge amount of money but far better than nothing.
Or it wouldn’t be a huge amount of money if he was still in 2014. Here, in the past, after searching the store for only a few minutes, $5 alone managed to buy him a patched brown coat, not the prettiest thing in the world but warm enough that he wouldn't freeze, as well as a pair of gloves. Five fingered, of course, but he'd squeezed his sixth fingers into the pinky slots in plenty of gloves before. It was uncomfortable but he had no time to get custom ones. He had a brief thought as he handed over the bills that he was likely paying with money that hadn’t been printed yet, and was therefore not legal tender, but it wasn’t his problem. The man running the store would be fine to miss out on profiting on a coat and some gloves.
There were newspapers piled by the register for sale. Ford didn’t bother buying one, but it did tell him that it was February 5, 1970.
Now that he was properly prepared for the freezing weather, Ford had… no idea what to do. He exited the store and let himself walk on autopilot, not really paying attention to the path he took through the once-familiar neighborhood as he considered his options. In 1970, he would have been… 15? Even if there were concerns about whether or not meeting his younger self would create problems of the paradoxical kind, he knew that his 15 year old self had yet to start learning theoretical physics, and wouldn’t for three more years when he started at Backupsmore. For that matter, Fiddleford wouldn’t have studied theoretical physics that young either.
There were his old professors at Backupsmore, he thought as he turned the corner, but he was nowhere near his alma mater, and he also didn’t exactly trust the quality of the professors hired by his old school with something as delicate as time travel. There was no chance he was trusting this with some random idiot who only managed to land a teaching job at Backupsmore.
The problem came from Ford’s lack of supplies. All that he had to work with was what he had on him, and while $35 would get him a lot further in 1970 than in 2014, it was nowhere near enough for the supplies he wanted to get, to be able to test the device properly to ensure he could actually get himself back to the right time and place.
As he tried to figure out what to do to solve that issue, he focused on his surroundings and realized he had unintentionally walked towards home. He was only a few shops down from Pines Pawns.
The sight of his childhood home would probably be filling him with more dread if he wasn’t focused on the figure standing in front of the shop, holding a sign.
Ford’s heart sank as he froze in place, because he immediately realized what he was seeing.
No. Anything but this.
It was a moment that he had tried not to remember (had tried to not let Stan remember) but was never fully forgotten, as it was one of the worst punishments Filbrick Pines had ever given Stan.
Ford wasn’t close enough to see the sign yet, but he knew what it said. Extra Stan, 3 dollars or better offer.
Anger was a dangerous emotion. Acting out of rage or fury tended to overwrite logic and reasoning, and it could get you killed. Anger was not an emotion Ford let himself act out of very often at all, with his years spent dimension hopping and facing untold threats training it out of him… but he wasn’t perfect. And like every human, he had moments when his emotions got the better of him, and he acted without thinking.
This was one of those moments.
Before he could really process what he was doing, he marched up to a young Stan, shivering in the freezing weather, and pulled him inside the shop, ignoring the (young, so young) startled squeak of protest as he did so.
The bell on the door rang and there he was, Filbrick Pines, looking up from the counter. The salesman smile automatically began forming before he looked down to see his son being dragged inside, causing his expression to freeze in place.
Ford didn’t give him time to process what was happening. Instead, he took out his remaining $20 and practically threw it at the man, not wanting to spend a single second longer in his father’s presence than he had to.
“I believe that’s enough for me to take… the kid with me?” Ford asked icily, hoping that Filbrick would change his mind, that he would realize how insane the idea of selling his son is.
But Filbrick Pines was not a good man.
He stood gaping at the bill in his hand, before taking a moment to clear his throat and looking up at Ford. If he recognized Ford as the old man he now was, he didn’t show it. “Well! If you really want him, he’s yours. I must warn you though, he’s not good for much.”
“I’m sure he’s good for plenty,” Ford insisted, barely able to contain his rage. Without a second thought, he turned his back on Filbrick, grabbing Stan’s arm again and dragging him out of the shop at a swift pace, not slowing once they were on the street. He wanted to put as much distance between them and Filbrick as possible as quickly as he could.
It didn’t even occur to him that he was given a chance to talk to his father one last time. One thing he hadn’t regretted about losing 30 years of time in this dimension was the fact that Filbrick had died while he had been gone, and his opinion had not changed in the slightest.
Filbrick Pines was a monster, and Ford was getting his brother far away from that man.
Stanley had no idea what was going on.
He’d been standing outside for hours and his entire body hurt from the cold. He was lucky enough that Pa had let him wear his hat, gloves and coat, but they had only done so much to help. He was dreading the sun going down, hoping he would be allowed inside before nightfall. If it got much colder, he thought he might actually die.
His biggest regret about the whole situation, though, was that Stanford had tried to intervene to help. Pa had hit him for it.
Stanley was always arguing with Ford about doing stuff like that. “There’s no point in us both getting punished,” he insisted. And most of the time, when Pa actually got mad, Ford would listen and keep himself from interfering. But sometimes when the punishments got particularly bad, he couldn’t help himself.
This… was definitely the worst punishment Pa had ever given. And it was made worse by the fact that Ford got hurt because of him too.
(Never mind the fact that, if the roles had been reversed, Stan would be putting up one hell of a fight for Ford’s sake. But that was how it was meant to be; Stan was the protector, and he kept Ford safe from anyone who tried to hurt him. Including their Pa, if he had to.)
So Stan had stood outside for hours, holding the sign and watching the snowflakes fall, trying to make his mind travel anywhere but there. He imagined him and Stanford taking the Stan o’ War and sailing south, to somewhere tropical. They could find a rain forest and run through the trees, discovering all the wildlife there and uncovering any mysteries hiding in the thick vegetation, enjoying the warmth.
As hard as he tried to get lost in a fantasy of future adventures, he couldn’t fully get into his own head, the biting cold forcing his senses to be focused on his present situation. That awareness meant that when a strange old man started approaching him quickly, he’d seen him coming.
What he hadn’t expected was to be suddenly grabbed by the arm and pulled into the shop, only to be pulled back out less than a minute later.
Oh, shit.
Shit, shit, shit, this was bad. Sure, he knew what the sign said, but Stan had never expected someone to actually buy him! And now this creepy old guy is dragging him down the street, away from everything he’s ever known, away from his life, away from Ford, and Stan couldn’t do anything about it.
“Hey!” he shouted, tugging his arm away from the man and grunting when he couldn’t free himself from the grip. “Let me go! Let me go!”
The man looked down and blinked a few times before loosening his grip. As soon as he did so, Stan yanked his arm away and pulled it close to his chest, backing away from the stranger warily.
He could run back to the shop, right? Surely Pa didn’t mean to actually let some creep take him. He’d go back home and hide inside and Pa would have to apologize to the old man and give his money back. Pa would be furious and Stan was going to suffer for it, but at least he’d be safe.
“Did I hurt you?” the man asked, having the audacity to look concerned. “I’m sorry, I just… wanted to get you away from him as fast as possible.”
Stan felt a laugh bubble up, fueled by his nerves and the sheer absurdity of the situation he found himself in, that he was struggling to believe was real. “Yeah, I noticed that! You’re real eager to take me to wherever the hell you’re taking me!”
“Well, yes,” the man said, frowning. “You’ve been out in the cold too long. I wanted to get you… somewhere. Quickly.”
“Oh yeah?” Stan asked. He couldn’t believe this guy was actually pretending like he cared about him… although it would probably be annoying for him if Stan got frostbite. “Where are you taking me, then?”
The old man didn’t answer immediately, taking a moment to think of an answer. “I mean… a motel, I suppose?”
Stan laughed again, feeling hysterical. “Right. Okay.”
He wasn’t doing this. He wasn’t.
He turned around and booked it for the shop.
The sad part is, he didn’t even get very far before the old man caught him, grabbing his arm tightly again and yanking him back, forcing a yelp out of Stan that was more shocked than pained. He didn’t even know old people could move that fast.
“No!” the creep shouted. “I’m not letting you go back to that place, Stan!”
Oh, fuck.
Okay, this was serious. Really serious.
Stan had been nervous before, but now his entire body locked up in terror. He couldn’t think of a way to get out of this, not in that moment. Which meant all he could do is go along with the old man for now and hope that another chance to escape arose before anything too terrible happened to him.
“...How do you know my name?” he asked, hating how his voice trembled.
The man blinked a few times before something seemed to occur to him. “Oh! Um, ah… oh, the sign you were holding,” he explained. “It said ‘Extra Stan’… I assumed that was your name?”
The end of his sentence pitched up, like he wasn’t sure of his own explanation, but Stan didn’t think much of it. He was too focused on trying to push down the overwhelming terror he felt so that he could think of what to do.
He let the man start leading him down the street again, the grip on his arm firm but not painful. There was a motel just a couple blocks away in the direction they were heading, so Stan figured that much must have been the truth.
“...Uh, is it your name?” the creepy man asked after a moment.
Figuring no harm could come from it, Stan shrugged. “Yeah. I’m Stanley. My brother’s named Stanford. ‘s why I’m the ‘Extra Stan’.”
“You’re not the extra,” the man insisted sharply, startling Stan. He looked up and was surprised to see what looked like anger in the man’s eyes. Eyes that, somehow, looked familiar… Did he know this guy somehow?
“Um… what’s, uh, your name…?” Stan asked hesitantly, unsure if it was something he was allowed to do.
The anger faded from the old man’s face and he looked startled again, but only for a brief moment. It was quickly replaced by a carefully neutral expression. “I’m… uh, you can call me… Dipper.”
Stan was pretty sure no normal person was named Dipper, and would have assumed that the man was lying about his name even if he hadn’t hesitated and winced slightly as he said it. Oh well, it was the only name Stan had for him, so Dipper it was.
He also figured he would remember meeting someone named Dipper, so there was no way he knew this guy. Whatever it was that made him feel familiar must be a coincidence.
He shivered when a gust of wind blew past, and Dipper gave him a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry, we’ll get out of the cold soon. The motel isn’t much farther.”
He was right, with them rounding a corner and the motel coming into view. But as good as being out of the cold sounded, Stan was more worried about whatever awaited him once they were actually in the room. At least outside in the snow, he knew what to expect.
He wanted to be brave, to not let this man intimidate him, but he couldn’t keep himself from asking, in a voice much smaller than he was okay with, “What are you going to do to me?”
The lines on Dipper’s face grew deeper out of what had to be feigned confusion. “Do? What do you mean?”
Stanley scoffed. “I might look like an idiot, and maybe I am one,” he said, ignoring the way the old man seemed to take offense to his words, for some reason, “but even I’m not that dumb, and I’m not a little kid either. You’re a strange old guy who just bought me,” he spits out, hoping the venom in his tone disguised some of the terror, “and now you’re taking me to a shitty motel. I can connect the dots.”
The man seemed to take several moments to process his words and realize what Stan was implying. Once it clicked, though, his face drained of color and his mouth fell open as he froze in place, the two of them now standing in front of the motel.
“Wh-what?! No! I’m not—I wouldn’t—I’m… No! That’s not what’s going on!” he insisted, stumbling over his words in a frantic attempt to explain himself. “God, I would never, even if you weren’t—that’s not—I’m not… no!”
Stan had to admit, if it was a lie, it was a pretty convincing performance. Despite himself, he found himself relaxing, tension draining out of his body. The reaction seemed far too genuine, the guy seeming truly distraught by Stanley’s assumptions. And while he could just be a very talented actor, or have other terrible things of another variety planned for Stan… now that his nerves were somewhat settled, his previous thought that the man was familiar only strengthened.
Stan… wanted to trust this guy.
Suddenly, a pair of hands landed on his shoulders, and the man gave him a very serious and intense look. “I need you to know that I’m not going to hurt you. I promise I would never hurt you.” He seemed almost enraged by the idea of hurting Stan, and he took a deep breath to calm himself. “I… know I haven’t explained anything, but I promise you’re safe with me. If you don’t feel comfortable, though… I can take you back home and try to work something out with your father,” he said, something dark flashing in his eyes at the mention of Pa. “Either way, you’ve been out in the cold far too long, and you need to get warmed up.”
The words furthered Stan’s growing belief that he had been wrong and this guy really didn’t want to do anything bad to him, but he couldn’t fully focus on them because something else had caught his attention. The grip on his shoulders made him realize something, something that he should have noticed from the grip on his arm earlier, and probably would have if he hadn’t been so panicked. “You have polydactyly.”
“Huh?”
“Your hands,” Stan explained, shrugging them off his shoulders before grabbing one to take a look at. Sure enough, he found a sight he had seen on many occasions, two fingers stuffed in the last finger of a glove. “You have polydactyly. Just like my brother.”
“...I do. You… know what it’s called?”
“’Course I do.”
“...Oh.”
Looking between the man’s hand and face, which had softened with Stan’s observation, the familiarity hit Stan in full force. Maybe it was just because he was looking for it now, since he’d never met anyone else with polydactyly before, but he couldn’t help but feel like the man, “Dipper”, was similar to Ford. In appearance, yes, with them both sharing the same warm brown eyes and thick-lensed glasses and loose curls and cleft chin, but it was also in his voice and mannerisms and movement. And trusting a stranger based on the fact that he shares a genetic condition and several other traits with Stan’s twin could be a dangerous thing, but he couldn’t help himself.
Realizing he had been staring, and that the man’s polydactyly was perhaps something he felt self conscious about, like Ford, Stan dropped Dipper’s hand and looked away, embarrassed. “Sorry, uh, that was rude.”
“No, no, it’s okay!” The man insisted. “You did nothing wrong!”
They stood there, neither one of them moving or saying anything else for several moments, the cold winter air swirling around them and causing Stan to shiver. “Um… are we getting a room or what?”
Dipper blinked. “Oh, um. Yes. If that’s… fine with you?”
“At this point I’d take anything to get out of this weather.”
“Right. Well, uh, just let me…” the man said awkwardly before walking away to speak to the employee and get a room. Stan trailed behind, gears turning in his brain.
There was something very familiar about “Dipper”, and Stan was going to figure out what.