Chapter Text
There was snow in Oregon.
Stan first started to notice it coming up past the border. Just a light dusting in the ditches turned to drifts against the trees, turned to a slick of grey-white dirty ice over the asphalt. By the time he found the turnoff for Gravity Falls, the snow was howling and battering itself against his windshield. The Stanleymobile slewed and slithered against the highway, her bare tires no match for the ice, the unnerving clonking from her poor overworked heater growing in frequency with each gust that threatened to blow him off the road.
Stan swore quietly at the sight of the sign for the turnoff, braking as gently as he could with feet he could barely feel. The cold had settled in before the first glimpse of snow, burrowing its way down to his dead marrow and refusing to budge. Not for the first time, he cursed his own stupidity. What had made him think it was a good idea to throw everything he owned (which admittedly wasn’t much) into the back of the Stanleymobile and drive a few thousand miles nonstop into the kind of country where it snowed?
He glanced down at the postcard propped up in front of the stick shift, and then cursed his own stupidity again, as the Stanleymobile drifted around the corner and onto - gravel, thank fuck. So he hadn’t just dropped everything and come running halfway across the country, he’d dropped everything and come running halfway across the country because his brother - who hadn’t so much as acknowledged Stan’s existence for the past ten years - had said ‘jump’.
Then again, Stan had to grudgingly admit, there hadn’t been much of an everything for him to drop.
Ford’s cabin was (of course, dammit) out of town, up a series of winding, narrow, treacherous roads. Stan took the corners at thirty, fingers clenched white-knuckled on the steering wheel and back teeth grinding against each other. He hoped he wouldn’t meet a logging truck - his reflexes might be good, but the Stanleymobile’s brakes sure weren’t.
Ford’s place was nestled up in the shadow of the cliffs, surrounded by dark pine woods on all sides. Stan killed the Stanleymobile’s engine and the headlights, and suddenly everything was softly dark and silent, broken only by the quiet sounds of the engine cooling in the snow that still tumbled and swirled in graceful cotton puffs from the grey overhead.
There was one good thing about living in winter country, Stan decided, with one last nervous glance at the postcard before he pulled his hood up and yanked the key out of the ignition. The dark fell early.
He grabbed the postcard, stuffing it into his pocket without another glance as he pushed the door open. The wind caught it and banged it open the rest of the way, sweeping an icy blast into Stan’s face. He had to grit his teeth and force himself up out of the relative warmth of the car and into the snow. He slammed the door behind him, jamming both hands as deep as they would go into his pockets, huddling into his jacket as the wind plucked at it. He’d known the cheapest used piece-of-shit winter coat he could buy wasn’t going to offer much protection from the elements, but it had been a bad month, and if he hadn’t filled his tank he wouldn’t have even been able to think about making it up here.
The air might have been clear and fresh and pine-scented, but the wind and the snow smothered it all with the aluminum tang of cold. The woods stood dark and forbidding, a castle wall rising in jagged turrets behind the peaked roof of the little wooden house with its weird antenna and…boarded up windows? It didn’t look like anyone lived there. It looked like maybe someone had died there.
Stan realised he was staring, and then that he was almost numb from cold. The wind knifed through the thin fabric of his jacket, and he could already feel snow starting to seep into his boots.
“Dammit, Ford, what did you get yourself into,” Stan muttered into the privacy of his hood, and started to trudge through the drifts between him and the cabin.
He paused a moment on the porch to shake the snow off his shoulders, and then another moment for no reason in particular, studying the small window in the door and the fresh board that someone - Ford? - had clumsily nailed over it. The thought struck Stan that not much sunlight would be able to work its way into his brother’s house with all the windows covered like this, but he brushed it aside like he had the snow. Ford was too busy bringing wonderful things out of the realm of possibility and turning them into reality to get himself involved with half-truths and campfire stories.
Stan squared his shoulders, shuffled some snow off his boots. “It’s okay. He’s family,” he told himself, even though saying the words aloud made them feel even more fragile, even less real than when they’d been nothing but a vague reassurance in the back of his mind. He couldn’t help but crack a smile when he added under his breath, as he raised his hand to knock, “He won’t bite.”
His fist made contact with the door with a hollow boom. From somewhere that sounded much farther away than the apparent depth of the house should allow, Stan heard a faint crash, and the sound of running footsteps.
“Ford?” he called, giving a few more light, quick raps on the door for good measure.
There was the thick, too-still silence of someone holding their breath.
Stan stuffed his hands under his arms, even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good, and stamped his feet in a vain attempt to generate some warmth. “Hey, poindexter! You gonna leave your baby brother out here on the porch all night?”
The silence dragged on for what felt like a few more hours, before it was broken at last by a soft shuffling and scraping from somewhere inside the house. Stan heard footsteps again, something that sounded like indecisive pacing, and resisted the urge to pound on the door again.
Finally, there was a drawn out, scraping squeal from directly on the other side of the door, and Stan’s eyebrows shot towards his hairline. Ford had barricaded himself in? Why?
Stan didn’t have time to wonder any further. The door flew open, and he found himself eye-to-eye with the wicked point of a crossbow bolt.
“Whoa, hey, no need for that,” Stan said, slowly raising both hands, palms out, as he took a cautious step backwards. “Would you put that down? I don’t do sharp pointy things aimed at me. Or in my general direction.”
The crossbow lowered, just enough that it was now pointed directly at Stan’s throat instead of his eye. Ford looked back at him over the medieval weapon, and Stan couldn’t help a wince. His twin looked like h- no. Ford looked like he’dseen hell, and hadn’t been able to sleep since. “Fuck. Ford, what happened up here?”
The crossbow shook in Ford’s hands, before he lunged forward and grabbed the collar of Stan’s coat, digging the crossbow bolt up under Stan’s chin. “Are you yourself?”
“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Stan was forced to take a stumbling step forward when Ford tugged on the collar of his coat, and froze again at the sharp jab of the crossbow bolt under his chin. Ford didn’t blink, peering intently into Stan’s eyes with an expression Stan had seen on a few street-corner psychics and schizophrenics. “Have you come to steal my eyes?”
“What the hell? No!” Stan fumbled at his pocket with fingers like frozen sausages, managed to pull the postcard free. “You called me, remember? Asked me to come?”
Ford’s wild, red-rimmed eyes flicked to the postcard, and for a brief eternity, neither of them moved.
“Oh,” Ford said at last. “So I did.”
He slowly lowered the crossbow, and Stan breathed out.
“I hope you understand, I can’t be too careful,” Ford said, looking over Stan’s shoulder, his voice almost eerily calm and level compared to the mania of a moment before, his fist tightening around the handful of Stan’s coat he still held. “Did anyone see you come up here? Were you followed? By anyone at all?”
“Don’t think so,” Stan said, and despite himself, glanced back towards the road he’d taken to get here. Ford’s fear was so thick on the air that he could almost taste it, and the worry was contagious. “I mean, there’s a couple people who want me dead - okay, maybe more like a couple thousand - but they’re all back in -”
“Good,” Ford said shortly, releasing Stan’s coat only to grab his arm, dragging him towards the open door.
“Uh, Ford,” Stan started, but Ford had already stepped inside and Stan couldn’t shake off his grip before Ford tugged him in after him -
There was a searing flash of agony all along Stan’s front, like he’d been yanked up against a grill instead of the threshold of a moldering wooden cabin, and he let out an involuntary howl of pain as he stumbled backwards. His eyes stung, his whole front felt as raw as a fresh burn, and the wind throwing ice crystals against his back was anything but soothing. The familiar weight in his mouth told him his fangs had come down, but he didn’t have an ounce of concentration to spare to retract them. If Ford had a problem with that, he’d just have to -
Ford.
Stan’s head snapped up, the momentary haze that the pain had cast over his thoughts clearing abruptly. His twin was standing just inside the shadows of his hall, his eyes fixed on Stan and wide with horror.
His voice was little more than a whisper when he said, “He got to you first.”
It felt like Stan had just swallowed a knife.
“Thith -” Stan stopped, clapped a hand over his mouth, concentrated, swallowed. He worked his jaw a few times to make sure everything had settled back into its proper place, wincing at the crackle of bone. “Ford, this isn’t - ah, hell, it’s exactly what it looks like, but it’s not - not what you think.”
Ford adjusted his glasses with his left hand, his eyes still wide and haunted and the crossbow dangling from his right hand as though forgotten. “You can’t cross the threshold.”
“Not without an invitation, yeah - look, what the hell is going on? Why’d you ask me to come here? Who’s 'he’ and what’s he got to do with -” Stan gestured down at himself. “If you got yourself tangled up in some undead underworld shit, maybe I can help, but you have to tell me what’s -”
He took a step forward, and the crossbow snapped up again as Ford took a step further back into his house, aiming shakily at Stan’s chest. Ford’s voice was as steady as his aim wasn’t. “Stay away from me.”
“Okay, first of all, you shoot that thing right now and you got, like, a point-five percent chance of actually staking me and a ninety-nine-point-five percent chance of hitting me in the ribs and pissing both of us off,” Stan said hurriedly. “And second…” He bit his bottom lip. “Ford, it’s me. I know -"
He had to stop and swallow again, the cheap fabric of his coat suddenly too constricting across his chest, and a flare of annoyance at his own sentimentality rose like bile in his throat. "I know we’ve had our problems. And sure, I’m not - not exactly human anymore. But that don’t mean I’m not still your brother, and I’m definitely not gonna let you down again.”
Ford shook his head, and for a moment a frightened little boy looked back at Stan from his twin’s wild eyes. “You can’t help me. I was an idiot to think anyone could.”
“Ford,” Stan said, as gently as he could, and just like that the spell was broken. Ford’s eyes narrowed, his finger tightening on the crossbow trigger.
“Go back and tell him he won’t get at me this easily. I have protection here. I’ve covered them all up. I can wait him out.”
“Ford, what the hell are you talking about?” Stan repeated, for what felt like the hundredth time, and just barely resisted the urge to tear out his own hair. “Just who are you so scared of, anyway?”
“Nice try,” Ford mumbled under his breath, and Stan had a flash of sudden, inexplicable certainty that his brother wasn’t talking to him. “Nice try, nice try, but you won’t fool me…”
“…please,” Stan managed, the word falling from his lips like lead. “Ford, you asked me to come. I came. Just - invite me in, tell me what’s going on, we’ll figure it out. Together. You and me, just like old times -”
“Stop,” Ford barked, clenching the stock of the crossbow like he wanted to throttle it, “talking like you’re still my brother.”
“I am your brother!” Stan protested, but he was starting to get the same sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as he had when the Stanleymobile had first started to slide across the highway.
Ford’s eyes were cold and briefly, shatteringly, sane. “My brother betrayed me over ten years ago. He broke my trust. And now he’s dead.” He finally, finally lowered the crossbow, but Stan didn’t feel an ounce of relief. “And you are not welcome in this dwelling.”
Stan didn’t even have time to move. The pain struck him like a battering ram, throwing him off the porch and flat onto his back in the snow, driving what little air remained in his lungs out in one long gasp. He lay there, unable to move, for he wasn’t sure how long, his back a block of solid ice and his front the slowly fading ache of a deep burn, before he could gather the energy to push himself up again.
The front door was shut. Ford was gone.
Stan flopped back down in the snow and laid there a moment longer, until the cold started to numb the pain and he dared to try to get up again. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, dusting snow from his back as best he could. He took a cautious step forward, nudged the bottom-most porch stair with the toe of his boot, and was meet by a sharp zap of pain. He bit back a curse. Somehow Ford had extended the threshold to include the porch. Stan wasn’t going to have another chance to knock.
He stood a moment longer, with his hands tucked into his pockets, looking up at the house as the wind tore at his exposed hair and the ratty fake fur trim around his hood, cut right through his clothes, through dead flesh, down to the hollowed-out cores of his bones.
Finally, he mumbled, “Well, same to you,” at the house, and turned and began the cold trudge back towards the Stanleymobile.
The postcard that had brought him here, that had made him cross seven state lines in two days and come driving straight into a blizzard, lay where he’d dropped it on the porch behind him.