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Ford had lost so many things in the Portal. Innumerable pieces of equipment. Three spaceships. More companions than he dared remember. Cumulatively, a deeply alarming amount of blood.
He’d thought that one of the first things he’d lost had been hope.
Hope was a childish crutch for people who were waiting for the world to fix their mistakes instead of putting in the work to do it themselves. Hope had never saved him. He wasn’t going to twiddle his thumbs and wait for a miracle. He was too intelligent for that.
He had no hope that Stan would save him. He had no hope that he’d survive his showdown with Bill. (He knew that he’d take the demon out, but that wasn’t hope, it was just logical assurance in his abilities.) When he awoke in the Fearamid, he’d had no hope that anyone was coming for him.
And yet.
And yet Ford is beginning to realize that, like the tattered photograph hidden away in the deep secret pocket of his coat, there must be at least one spark of hope hidden away in the depths of his heart. He can tell, because it feels like it’s killing him.
*
“You’re our hero, Stanley.”
The words come thick and heavy, like stones caught in his throat. He’d pulled Mabel away because he knows that they shouldn’t overwhelm Stan, should wait and not saddle this glassy-eyed man with words and feelings that he can’t understand. He shouldn’t even think of the man in front of him as his brother, not really. It isn’t Stan. It’s just a shell.
But something inside him breaks and he lunges forward, flings his arms around his twin and holds on with all his might. It’s the first time he’s hugged Stan in over forty years.
The first time Stan hugged him was in the Fearamid, after they’d switched clothes and were waiting for Bill to return. It was sudden and tight and only lasted a second or two before Stan backed away, looking at Ford nervously like he was expecting another punch.
Ford hadn’t hugged back. He’d been too startled, and then they’d heard the drumlike boom of footsteps in the distance and there wasn’t time.
They hadn’t hugged each other since . . . Ford can’t remember. He doesn’t know which was the last time because it wasn’t supposed to be a last time. It was supposed to be unremarkable, the type of memory that faded without the need for any outside meddling just because it didn’t matter. It would be replaced by other occurrences. And then Stan had been thrown out and Ford hadn’t wanted to remember, and now . . .
Hugs were never an integral part of their family. Dad disapproved of them. He thought that a man should have a firm handshake and a firmer fist, and physical affection was something that should only happen between adults behind closed doors. Ma thumbed her nose at him and scooped her boys up for hugs and sloppy forehead kisses every chance she could get, but there were fewer and fewer chances as they got older.
The twins usually wrestled instead of hugging, or punched each other’s shoulders. Putting their arms around each other was okay, but only because it was so easy for that to turn into a noogie war or yet another wrestling hold.
The only time they hugged properly was when one of them was crying.
Ford doesn’t even know how long it’s been since he hugged his brother, and Stan doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t know why this stranger is clinging to him. They’ve both lost the memory of their last hug: Stan out of force, Ford out of neglect.
His breath hitches in his throat and before he knows it he’s sobbing openly into Stan’s shoulder.
Stan doesn’t move—of course he doesn’t. There’s nothing left. He doesn’t even tense like a normal man would at an embrace from a stranger. But it hurts. Every second it hurts more. He tells himself he knows that Stan’s gone and he won’t get a response but there’s that part of him—that tiny treacherous spark of hope—that doesn’t believe it.
Ford tightens his hold and clutches at the back of Stan’s coat. All he wants, more than anything in the world, is to feel Stan raise his arms and hug him back. He knows it’s impossible but his heart doesn’t seem to care. His head’s a jumble of grief and pleading and he’s crying harder than he can ever remember crying before. Please, he thinks, Please let me be wrong. Let me be wrong about all of it. Please just hug me back.
Stan does nothing. Ford’s last spark of hope dies.
*
They’re safe. The world didn’t end. And Ford hates it.
He’s alive and the children are alive and even Stan, cruel mockery that it is, is still alive. And the world will keep spinning and the sun will rise tomorrow and no one will notice, no one will know that as far as Ford’s concerned the sky came crashing down at the very moment that, in reality, it restored itself.
He’s furious—stupidly, irrationally furious, that there are billions of people out there in the world and billions upon billions more of them scattered throughout the universe and only a handful, a scarce hundred, will even be aware that anything happened. Only the town will know.
And then they’ll forget. They’ll move on, the way people are supposed to. The way people always do. They’ll move on, and it will turn into a legend, and then to the sort of folklore that the younger generation rolls their eyes at and then—they’ll forget. They’ll forget the way that Ford forgot their last hug.
It didn’t matter when he was supposed to be the one giving himself up for the world. The work was the important thing. The redemption. The Oracle would remember him, know that he’d atoned for his mistake and fulfilled his destiny and that would be enough.
But now his gut twists and the whole thing feels like a joke, the kind that Bill used to tell, with only misery as the punchline.
The children are so young—too young. They’d walked ahead of him when they entered the house, each clasping one of Stan’s hands, and tip-toing into the ruins like they were walking on eggshells.
Mabel’s heart is soft as one of her sweaters, and Ford wonders suddenly if this is the first time she’s really felt loss. It’s so drilled into him by now that it feels inevitable as a heartbeat, and he forgets that there was a time when he was very young, before he knew what it felt like.
Before he grew up.
That’s how Stan acts, now, all the pain and loss and fear stripped away from him. Like a blank slate. Like a blown eggshell. He smiles, childlike, at the ruins of the house, and when he says, “Pretty nice place you got here!” Ford hears the same wonder that suffused a child’s voice a lifetime ago at the sight of a wrecked sailboat.
It cracks him open, this old man with a child’s face and a crooked fez. He looks like he’s playing dress-up. Ford had hoped that switching clothes back would help—not help him remember but at least make him not look so terribly, terribly wrong. But it only made things worse.
The shoulder of Ford’s coat is stained with his own tears. He clutches at it, hangs back in the corner and tries to assure Mabel so that the hope won’t destroy her the way it did him.
*
She doesn’t listen.
Mabel has gained so many things this summer. New family. New friends. New sweaters. Cumulatively, a deeply alarming amount of craft supplies.
She’s lost things too, but that’s not what the summer is about. That’s not what growing up is about. That was just a trick.
She won’t let the summer end with them losing Grunkle Stan.
Hope burns in Mabel like a star. Like a forge. The beginning of Weirdmageddon dimmed it, but ever since Dipper came for her it’s been burning bright enough for her to shape the world around it.
When she sees the scrapbook, it feels like a spark.
*
She doesn’t listen.
And the universe, which has just proved itself to be cold and uncaring and refused to acknowledge Ford’s plea, listens to her.
He’ll rationalize it later. They all will. That’s what happens with a false hypothesis—you change your view of the world when you’re presented with new data. You say, “This was supposed to be impossible, but it happened, so how?” And soon you forget that whatever it was had been impossible in the first place.
He’ll rationalize it later, but the rational explanation never really sticks. Every time he remembers the moment it feels like a miracle.
*
Things return in fits and starts. Talking helps. Seeing people helps. The scrapbook helps most of all, and Stan falls asleep with it open on his lap or lying under his head like a pillow.
The children come first. Ford doesn’t begrudge them the honor. He can’t begrudge them anything after what they’ve done. He waits, but now he doesn't try to squash the hope that's beginning to blossom in his heart.
And then the day after Weirdmageddon, Stan turns to him with a light in his eyes and just says, “Ford!” and Ford doesn’t even wait to hear what it is that he’s remembered before he opens his arms and Stan steps into them, laughing.
It’s the first hug they’ve really shared in over forty years. Ford isn’t crying at the beginning, but he is at the end.
*
It’s the morning of the twins’ birthday party when Stan finds Ford in the kitchen. Ford’s doing his best to de-glitter the coffee maker after Mabel used it for one of her projects.
“I remember something else,” says Stan, which is how most conversations start these days.
Ford turns to him excitedly. “Oh?”
“Yeah! About your science gizmo. The perpetual motion one.”
Ford swallows. They’d gone over that, the full story, the night before. He’d almost decided not to tell Stan, to let him persist in his blissful ignorance, but that wasn’t fair. He deserved to know, even the hard parts. Ford had held his hand while he talked, trying with everything he could to show that whatever had happened it was forgiven now.
“You didn’t sleep for three nights before the science fair,” Stan says. “Not the special one with the college people, the school one.”
“That’s right,” Ford replies. They always do this, checking details as Stan remembers, steering the memories right. It’s easier with the ones from the summer, where the scrapbook can corroborate.
“The night before it was due, I woke up in the middle of the night,” Stan continues. “Thought you were laughing at one of your textbooks—you did that. Honestly everyone should have copped to the whole mad scientist thing sooner.”
Ford smiles. “I did.” The days leading up to the school science fair were little more than a haze of caffeine and equations and sleep deprivation, but Fiddleford would confirm that Ford had a tendency to find the phrasing in his textbooks rib-crackingly hilarious if he’d been awake long enough.
“But you weren’t laughing. You were crying. Thought you’d never get your write-up to make sense. Thought you’d never be good enough.”
Ford stares. Certainly he’d felt that way—he did as he neared the completion of any major project—but he didn’t remember . . .
“I made you eat something. You can’t live on coffee—not for long anyway. And I told you not to worry, you’d be great. And—”
The memory crystalizes out of the gloom. “You hugged me,” says Ford.
Stan’s face breaks into a grin. “Yeah!”
“You hugged me!” says Ford again, and flings his arms around his brother, and Stan takes a bewildered step back but he returns the gesture.
That was it. The blur in Ford’s own mind solidifies because yes, that was the last time they hugged—properly, not a sideways one-armed thing, not an affectionate headlock—before things fell apart. Remembering it hurts, but not half as much as not remembering, as not knowing. The memory that Ford had once thought was lost, was important because it was lost and because it was an ending, emerges back out of the dark, not lost and not the end.
“Is this, like, method acting?” Stan asks. “Not that I’m complaining, just—”
“It was the last one,” says Ford. “But now it isn’t. Now we’ll have so many things to replace it with that it won’t be important anymore.”
*
“Hey! Stan, wait up!”
“Not on your life!”
Stan grins over his shoulder and sprints down the dock, the planks ringing like a drum under his booted feet. He’s laughing, and so is Ford.
Ford’s done a lot of running during his thirty years in exile, but he hasn’t run like this, out of the sheer joy of it, for he doesn’t know how long.
He catches up to Stan, who’s standing at the end of the dock, beaming. Ford laughs again—keeps laughing, doesn’t feel like he’ll ever need to stop, and claps his brother on the shoulder. Stan doesn’t flinch this time, just leans into the touch and swings his own arm around to pat Ford on the back so hard that he half-stumbles forward and has to catch himself.
“This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” says Stan breathlessly, his voice as sincere and filled with wonder as it had been a lifetime ago when they first stumbled upon the wrecked sailboat in the cave.
The Stan O’ War II isn’t a wreck. She’s old and second-hand, and there’s more than a few improvements Ford plans to add before they set out. They could have bought a new boat, but neither of them even suggested it. It doesn’t feel right to set out in anything but an old retired working boat who deserves a second chance. Her name is painted there on her side and she’s afloat and whole and she’s theirs.
Ford swings over the rail, and Stan tries to get there first, and they both nearly end up in the harbor. Anyone watching must think they’re mad, these two old men laughing like boys as they stumble onto the deck, too giddy to care about their footing. The waves are crashing and the seagulls are crying and Stan catches Ford up in an embrace that might turn into a wrestling hold at any moment. But it doesn’t. Ford turns and grins and hugs his brother back so hard that it lifts him off his feet.
It feels like a miracle.