Psychic Pines AU (formerly Psychic Ma AU) Masterpost:
Ma Pines is actually psychic, specifically on people’s lives. She still runs the psychic hotline, but her predictions are spot on. She can’t see births or deaths, though. People come to her for lottery numbers the most often.
But the thing is that the future’s always changing, so sometimes she’ll look at Stan and Ford and she’ll have a vision about the future, about monsters and demons and prison and scams and she’ll just seize up, start crying, but sometimes she’ll look at them and see paranormal research and nieces and nephews and happy endings and hillbillies and a light smile plays across her face. Out of her and her sons, she’s got the most powerful psychic abilities and gets visions almost constantly. She manages though, and she only gets them about people she’s communicating with, so she’ll hole herself up in her room alone when she needs a break.
Filbrick doesn’t have any psychic abilities, and he regards Ma, Shermie, Stanford, and Stanley as freaks when he finds out that not only does Ma (who for naming purposes is Martha in this AU) have psychic abilities but passed them on to their children as well. He p much only married Martha for her looks anyways, and he doesn’t treat his sons very well once their psychic abilities become apparent.
Shermie’s psychic abilities are the most similar to his mother’s, but they’re so slight everyone just thinks he has good instincts, he can read a situation particularly well. He doesn’t know why he ought to walk his classmate home after school one day, he just knows that he needs to. Filbrick treats him the best out of the three until Ma starts getting visions of Ford’s more prosperous research endeavors.
Stanley and Ford’s abilities are much more apparent.
Stanley can see births. Female classmates eventually start coming to him so they can avoid pregnancies altogether, new wives run into him on the beach or in the supermarket or wherever and Stan can tell each and every one of them where they’ll have a child and when, and with whom. He keeps silent when he notices a vision about a man giving birth, or when a woman pressured into asking him when she’ll have a child by her friends and Stan finds he has no vision for her. He quietly takes him aside and discreetly informs him about the situation, usually makes something up for her so her friends will be satisfied, refusing to out anybody as trans. Ford is extremely jealous of Stan’s ability to see births, but as Stan gets older he winds up hating it.
It’s when he’s around 15 that he starts seeing birth visions for himself, and it terrifies him. He sees the birth of Hal Forester, Steve Pinington, Stenson Pinefield, Andrew “8-Ball” Alcatraz. He can’t see the circumstances behind these births, just the moment he introduces himself under a fake name, but not knowing why he’s using them terrifies him. He doesn’t tell anyone about those, though. Ma doesn’t say anything so it must not be important, he thinks.
Ma can’t see the births though, doesn’t know her son as Hal or Steve or Stenson or Andrew, the ten year blind spot in Stanley’s future scares her but she doesn’t say anything. The psychic hotline brings in good money, if word got out that she was losing her abilities then what would become of her and her family?
Ford, on the other hand… Ford can only see deaths. He always knew how he would die: heart attack, 92, near a harbor, on an old research vessel. He knew before he could comprehend it. When he was two, he ran to his mother screaming, having seen Stanley at 92 in a log cabin, going to sleep and never waking up. When Shermie was born, and Ford was allowed into the tiny hospital room to see his new baby brother, Ford saw a 95 year old man, surrounded by children and grandchildren in a hospital room just like the one he was sleeping in now, as a heart monitor flatlined. Before he was 10, Ford saw Filbrick have a stroke at 75, he saw Martha at 80 going quietly, cancer in her throat and in her lungs. After he told his mother to stop smoking, he saw her at 81 walking into the ocean for a swim and never coming back. He hates meeting new people, before he knows their names he knows how they’ll die, he knows the second he shakes their hand. No one comes to him for predictions unless there’s another scare in the news, another string of violent crimes and a father wants to know if his daughter will make it home safely that night. Ford tells him that she’ll die at 22 of a cocaine overdose and he leaves out the part about the father dying two years prior in a car crash. During the height of the Civil Rights Movement Ford sneaks out to protests and picks people out from the crowd, tells them not to go down certain streets, and breathes a sigh of relief when their cause death changes to old age rather than at the hands of some white supremacist. When the draft starts, Ford sees so many of his classmates dying in a pointless war in a far away country in a jungle somewhere, some being tortured to death others being blown to pieces, he thinks he’ll go mad. He sees people dying of colds and the flu and minor illnesses in the 80s and he doesn’t know why there’s so many and he tries calling hospitals and doctors about it but they scoff and tell him he’s crazy and by the time he’s 16 he’s beginning to think he is.
He sees Stanley Pines in 1982 and he knows there’s a car crash but he can’t see the specifics, and he knows it’s a death because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to see it. (Like his mother, he does not know Stenson or Hal or Andrew, but he is more used to blind spots than she is). But Ford knows that Stanley dies at 92, quietly, in his sleep, a few weeks after Ford’s own death (after everyone’s affairs are taken care of, but Ford can’t see that part. And he and Stanley remain in the Mystery Shack as ghosts, watching over their niece and nephew until it’s their time, but Ford can’t see that part either). And the fact that Stanley dies twice terrifies Ford to no end. He longs for his brother’s gift of seeing births instead.
Stanley is kicked out at 17, and a few months later, when he becomes Steve Pinington, he knows what his own birth’s mean.
Ma’s visions about Stanley cease once he becomes Steve Pinington, and she keeps this information to herself, telling Ford that Stanley is fine whenever he calls, whether he asked or not. He believes her and his resentment grows.
Ford meets Fiddleford, and sees him having a stroke at 99 in a big mansion, and decides that this is a pleasant enough death that he won’t let it loom over their friendship. Not when the older man speaks in a kind, southern accent and doesn’t bat an eye at either Ford’s fingers or his psychic ability. Ford informs his new friend of his eventual cause of death, and Fiddleford proclaims that his idea for a computermajig must really take off for him to have such a big house.
Stanley wracks his brain for a vision of the birth of himself as a millionaire but comes up empty every time. He meets a man named Rick and tells him that Beth will be born on a summer’s day, but the blue haired stuttering man just says “Y-EUGH-eah, S-Stan-Stanley, no shit.” and Stan doesn’t recall giving the alcoholic his name but decides to spend the weekend with him anyways. He figures Ford would know if he was going to die, would warn him somehow. That thought is what plays in Stan’s head whenever he does something wreckless. He can’t decide if the other world they visited was real or the byproduct of a drug trip. He has a sneaking suspicion it was real, but then again it is the seventies.
Ford meets Bill and resolves to befriend the first being in the world who never gave him a death vision.
Soon after, Stan gets a vision of himself born as Stanford Pines and it chills him to his core. He doesn’t want to think about what happened to him to make him desperate to steal his brother’s identity.
Bill betrays Ford and the image in Ford’s head, of himself aiming an odd looking gun at an old man’s head (an old man who looks suspiciously like his brother) both haunts him and keeps him going.
Ford calls Stan and hopes that he can help him out of the hole, but Ford is thrust into a strange new world and suddenly he wonders if his heart attack at 92 was in his home dimension or a far off galaxy. He can still see Stan dying in a car crash but at least he’s not dying from his wound. Hunting prey and picking fights is easier when you can see how your target is going to die.
Stanley is reborn as Stanford and he feels sick for a week. Stan fakes his death and wonders if Ford saw it when they were younger. He thinks of his brother entering into this world and decides that’s as good a birth of any, and he sees it happen. It’s thirty years down the line and he doesn’t know how the encounter ends (with a hug or a punch in the face? All he can see is Ford stepping towards him) but he holds the vision at the forefront of his mind.
Ford has to bite back bile in his throat when he meets Dipper, Mabel, and Soos. It’s been so long since he saw a vision for a child, much less two (three counting Soos) and it’s somehow worse when he meets Wendy, Candy, and Grenda. The image of Dipper at 89, another heart attack, this time Ford can see himself and his brother there as ghosts, comforting Dipper in his final moments, plays itself on loop during Ford and Dipper’s first DD&MD session and he nearly cancels Mabel’s unicorn hair mission seconds after he allowed her to go out into the forest, because the image of her at 93 going peacefully in her sleep, like Stanley, suddenly changed to her getting caught in a bear trap, but then Candy (40, car accident, Ford makes a note to change that but decides it can wait until the girl is actually old enough to drive before doing anything) suggested bringing Wendy (65, logging accident) and Grenda (25, assassination in Austria, no wait Marius just texted her, 110 in a beautiful castle, no wait– he decides Grenda’s death may be a blind spot for him) the vision left as quickly as it came.
Ford doesn’t realize who the man in Bill’s death vision is until Stanley puts on Ford’s sweater. The whole time Stan’s mind is being erased, he’s reminding himself that this is not a death, if it was, he would have seen it. He keeps the vision of Stan at 92 falling asleep in his head.
It doesn’t do anything to shake the feeling that he’s killing his brother.
During his last recollections, Stanley searches for Bill’s birth and finds none. When Stan gets his memories back, he finds Bill’s stone physical form and searches for the demon’s birth, but finds nothing. Ford cries when Stan tells him as much, he hugs his brother so tightly Stan jokes that Ford must be getting a vision of him being crushed to death, but all Ford’s thinking is how grateful he is that if he didn’t get the ability to see births, at least Stan did. And Stan sees nothing so there won’t be anything. Stan’s visions are permanent, they rarely change, though he’s not particularly upset when one does (though, once, a pregnant woman approached the two old men in the harbor and said that she was due in three months. Stanley scrunched his eyebrows and told her he couldn’t see anything, but Ford stared at her and told the woman that she needed to go to the hospital immediately if she wanted to survive, there was nothing alive inside of her stomach)
Stan tells Soos and Melody that she won’t give birth to any children, but seven children will be adopted into the Ramirez household and he couldn’t be prouder. As they arrive, Ford assures Soos and Melody that three infants will live long and healthy lives, tells three young children that they’re safe now and will be for a long time, and one teenager that Soos and Melody will be there for them until their time in this life is up.
Stan sees grandchildren and grandniblings and Ford focuses more on their long lives than their deaths, unless it’s serious (he regularly texts Mabel for updates on Grenda, once he figures out how to use a phone, by the time Ford is 90 he’s accepted that he’ll just never know how Grenda dies).
When Ford turns 92, he takes Stan aside and tells him that their time is almost up. For all the death’s he’s seen, Ford is terrified of his own the most, but Stan takes his brother’s hand, and tells him that he decided becoming a ghost was sort of like a birth when he was 80. Stan tells Ford that his birth into the afterlife would be made with his brother at his side, he tells Ford that his own transition into a ghostly form will be smooth, and he says “Wherever we go, we go together.”
Ford smiles, and resolves to call the rest of the family to give them a warning that the Pines twins are reaching the end of their days.
They set sail for a harbor along the coast of Oregon.
Ford has a heart attack near the coastline.
Stan goes quietly in his sleep a few weeks later, in his old bed at the Mystery Shack.
Dipper engraves Ford’s headstone with the words “Ad Astra Per Aspera” and below them, “A hero who fought back even when it seemed impossible. A beloved Uncle, Mentor, Brother, and Friend.” A golden hand with six fingers is plastered near the bottom by Mabel.
Soos carves the words “Beloved Father, Uncle, and Brother” onto Stan’s tombstone. Wendy makes him add the words “Terrible boss” and everyone agrees on “A true hero.” Dipper and Mabel make Shermie take them to Glass Shard Beach so they can spit on Filbrick’s grave because Stanley (and Ford) never got to. Shermie pretends to protest but once everyone’s gone he spits on Filbrick’s grave, too.
Stan and Ford both laugh when Dipper and Mabel make sure Stan gets the bigger tombstone.
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