ough. this took ages. as i said on ao3 - i decided to split the final chapter up into lots of little ones to make it easier for me to find the time to write it, since im a college student 'n all now. so here's chapter 12, the newly not last chapter
<< | < | this is part twelve ! | > | >>
heres the table of contents
Ford snapped his lighter off, carelessly tossing it aside before rising, looming over the circle drawn in the dirt. Shadows flickered with the candlelight, dancing through the sigils and patterns scratched into the ground.
"Are you sure about this?" Fiddleford asked.
"I don't need to be," Ford huffed.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a slip of paper, small and blotched with ink, the incantation written in the quick, jagged handwriting of someone running out of time.
Ford lifted the paper up, and when he met Fiddleford's eyes from across the circle, he could see his own intensity reflected back at him through the lenses of the other man's glass, orange-hued and harsh in the candle light. "Now repeat after me."
It wasn't until the very last possible second that Ford remembered to close his eyes.
One minute, he could hear the soft ambience of the forest around him, fluttering and chirping birds, wind and branches rustling in the background, almost forgettable in their banality, and the next moment-
-A rush of air, a sudden burst of vertigo that had him stumbling on abruptly uncertain legs, and all of that quiet noise fell dreadfully still, and utterly silent.
Cautiously peeling his eyes open, Ford blinked into awareness of his surroundings.
What greeted him then was the same forest of Gravity Falls he'd just stood in, had always known, but… off, somehow. Trees that didn't seem to grow in quite the right ways, with uneven branches that were all too still, too lifeless, like hard plastic. It was all awash in grayscale, like an old, sputtering film reel, ans it flickered and blurred at the edges, hazy and dim.
Beside him, he heard a soft intake of breath.
"I'll be damned," Fiddleford murmured, voice gone quiet with awe, "I almost didn't think you'd be able to actually do it."
Ford frowned, but found no words to summon up. His throat felt leaden, voice caught. He breathed in shakily.
"Right," he said, quickly and stiffly trying to gather his wits about him, "Let's progress. I haven't done much research into this, but if my theory is correct then the deeper we delve into Remus's mind, the older the memories will be."
Chest feeling tight, heart pittering with the quiet, ambient sort of nerves, he forced himself to start walking forward, legs unsure, half worried he'd slip right through the erratic atoms of the ground. When the earth didn't bow or bend under his weight, he gained more confidence, walking a little faster.
"His more recent memories should be at the forefront of his mind," he said to Fiddleford without looking back at him. "We'll need to navigate through those in order to find the information we seek."
Now moving forward and orientating himself to his new surrondings, Ford could see even more of the little details that didn't quite fit with the real forest of Gravity Falls.
The ground was damp, and patches of snow melted into flickering grass. The trees moved without wind, everything appearing blurry, hard to focus on. It felt like Ford was walking around without his glasses on, the world hazy and smudgy.
Yet everything else was, oddly, much clearer. Every other sense heightened - Ford could smell the sharp scent of pines, could taste the sap and the freshness of the air. The dirt crunched and ground underfoot, and he could almost hear and feel the way the sediments shifted.
So this is how he experiences the world, Ford thought, casting his eyes about. If this is really how he sees everything, then he may need some glasses. This may give me a headache after a while.
"Keep an eye out for any landmarks," Ford called over his shoulder. "If we can follow them, they should help us to navigate through his mind."
He didn't really expect an answer, so one could have forgiven him for being surprised when he got one. "What, like this road?" Fiddleford said.
Ford turned around, and lo and behold, Fiddleford had kicked away some of the thick plant growth to reveal the cracked, crumbling tar of a road in disrepair. It was falling back into the clutches of the nature with every chip of paint eroded away, and yet it was still there nonetheless, a mark of mankind still clinging to its identity.
"Excellent finding, Fiddleford," Ford said quickly. "No doubt following this will lead us further into his mind!"
He bounded ahead, and Fiddleford made his reluctant follower.
They navigated the road, which seemed to be of a rural sort of construction, shunted to a quiet, lonesome part of the forest and overtaken by plants and wildlife. There were road signs, but they were all in hazy, blurring and unintelligible letters and symbols, and Ford quickly found that looking at them for too long would make his head spin.
Vines and moss climbed every available surface, tangling in the still branches, twining around the signs and their posts. Looking up, Ford found the sky somehow both dark and also blinding bright - he winced, and decided to keep his eyes firmly on the road ahead.
The path it made didn't bend or err, only marched on, inexorably forwards. Ford and Fiddleford followed, the silence hanging taut between them only adding to the crackling tension that seemed to buzz in the air.
One of them could have spoken, but neither did. The words caught in Ford's throat; he didn't even know what he wanted to say. And Fiddleford, well - Ford didn't know what was going on his head. When he chanced a glance backward, only once, he found the man's mouth in a thin line, his eyes stoically forward and expression completely unreadable - and Ford had quickly looked away again.
They were so near to each other, and yet they'd never felt farther apart. Ford swallowed, and reminded himself to focus on his goal.
Examining Remus's mindscape as they moved through it, a prickling sensation of being watched seemed to follow at their heels throughout. Out of the corner of his vision, Ford kept catching glimpses of pale eyes watching them through the staticky dark shadows between the trees. The landscape was wreathed in black. It was like an old, poorly developed photo, a darkness that pressed impossibly close, yet skittered just out of reach. Ford couldn't even see past the first blurry line of trees, so thick was the oppressive dark that loomed all around them.
Was this how Remus saw the world? Or was it the work of the mind itself, bending itself to perception and fear both? Ford couldn't be certain. Nonetheless, nothing about this put him at ease. Remus's mind was a hunted thing, and Ford was quickly beginning to feel like an animal creeping through the shadows on trembling haunches, fearful of unseen predators. And all of it, completely devoid of color.
It was a jagged thing, and not altogether any more remarkable than the numerous signs that were scattered along the roadside in improbable and unlikely positions and angles. No, it was just like all the others, blurry along the edges and indistinct in its symbols - except that it, unlike anything else, had color.
It was a simple sign, cherry-red in hue. Somehow, it seemed to exude a sort of uninvasive calm. Friendly. It veered off the road, but Ford found himself drawn towards the color nonetheless.
"Stanford?" Fiddleford called, trepidation clear in his tone.
But Ford could see a narrow and faint footpath where the sign stood, leading into the woods - he even thought he could see a faint light in the distance, a pinprick shining somewhere in the dark shadows amidst the trees. "There's something over here," Ford said to Fiddleford without turning around.
"And yer just gonna follow it in 'ta the dark?" Fiddleford called exasperatedly, but Ford paid him no heed, already blazing ahead.
The footpath was narrow, and it twisted and plunged through the dark forest like a knife between the ribs. Predictably, there didn't seem to be any logic to its direction, nor sense - it curved and writhed between the trees with no warning, no pattern, even seemed, somehow, to loop back around on itself at times.
For a while it seemed that it would never end - a warped labyrinth bending between the trees with no exit.
But just as abruptly as it began, so too did it conclude.
The path veered suddenly towards the left, and when Ford walked around the trees, there it was - the impossible exit, one that he was certain hadn't been there before, simply appeared between two blinks of the eye.
It led into a clearing, and there it sat. Ford's laboratory home, gray and fuzzy around the edges with the blurriness of Remus's memories, but there nonetheless.
"Fascinating," Ford mumbled to himself. The laboratory had seemed to have won its own, dedicated space in Remus's mind, carefully set apart from everything else. Was that a good thing, he wondered, or a bad one?
He turned his head, to where Fiddleford was lagging behind.
"If I had to theorize, I'd imagine this is where he stores his memories of me. Oh, and you too, I suppose."
Fiddleford hummed, fixing his glasses on his face. "No need to go in then, if all we're looking for is proof whether or not he's yer Stanley."
"I wouldn't say that," Ford said, maybe a little quicker than he should have. "Perhaps we'll find something of note in there."
Fiddleford fixed him with a frustrated expression. "I thought we weren't just in here to pick through his brains." He huffed, looking away. "I ain't got no interest in foolin' around in here for any longer than we gotta."
Ford shook his head. "We have no idea the order of things, Fiddleford. It'd be best to look through as much as possible, explore all avenues. It's the scientific thing to do," Ford said, telling himself that this was indeed a very scientific decision, and not at all one motivated by his insatiable curiostity and, dare he say it, nosiness. No, certainly not that.
There was a pause for a moment. Fiddleford's eyes roved over Ford's face, before he finally sighed, his shoulders dropping. "Fine. You lead the way."
And lead Ford did - through the last stretch of the path, and out into the clearing, where he walked them to the cabin and up the steps. Fiddleford trudged behind the whole way, letting Ford blaze forward with all the gumption of a burning fire.
He reached for the doorknob - but the door creaked open on its own, offering a sliver of space, not enough to see through, but enough to be an invitation. This was not a place Remus's mind had any intention of hiding, it seemed.
For a moment, he thought about glancing back to Fiddleford, to search for that unsaid agreement in his eyes - but he resisted the urge. Without turning back, he caught the door by its edge, and tentatively pried it open.
When Ford opened the door, the interior of the house didn't so much reveal itself as it did rise from nothing to meet them.
It seemed to unfurl itself when the door opened, halls opening up with their own waking breath, floorboards rising to meet them from nothing. The inside of the shack was brightly illuminated - somehow, impossibly, there was not a single shadow, everything was picture-light, practically perfect.
And everything here too, like the sign, had a shock of color. The halls, the floors, everything was right there, in the colors right colors - if not washed-out and dulled somewhat. The grayscale had been left outside, among the trees and the unseen eyes - here, there was brightness.
The most startling of all, though, was the size of things. Or rather, everything was the same width it had been in reality, but now a towering height - the walls stretched up into nothing with no ceiling in sight, end tables leaned up on impossibly tall legs, blurry and out-of-focus pictures crowded so far up the walls one could not even see their contents properly.
The perspective of one who does not walk through life, but crawled on all fours, Ford supposed.
He stepped tentatively forward. Like the damp, snow-soaked ground outside, the floor stayed perfectly sturdy under foot.
This new, pantomime arrangement of Ford's house should have made it feel unnerving, but it didn't. In fact, Ford could feel a sense of uneasy slide off of him as he stepped through the door. That feeling of being an animal, hunted by some unseen predator almost dissolved into nothing - the house was warm and bright, and Ford could smell something ambiguously pleasant in the air. It felt safe, in some intrinsic, implacable way.
After briefly checking to make sure Fiddleford still followed behind (he did, though he dragged his feet about it), Ford continued into the warm, hazy mimic of his home.
The walls were so blurry, smeared and strange compared to the floor - Ford could see pockmarks and knots in the wood of the floorboards that he himself rarely paid more than half a mind to in the waking world, but Remus seemed to remember so clearly. And yet at the same time, Ford was pretty sure Remus has gotten the pattern of the wallpaper wrong - though it was hard to see through the blur.
Most notably, though, were the doorways that lined the halls, each a little different, each a slightly different shape. They had frames inset into the walls, but no actual door. Instead, over all of the doorways was a curtain of shadow, inky black that separated and sectioned them off from the rest of the hall.
These were the pockets in which Remus stored his memories, no doubt. There were too many to pick through all of them, so Ford stopped in front of the one to catch his eye first. It looked, to him, to be the doorframe that lead into his bathroom in the real cabin - he could faintly smell the fragrance of the shampoo that he used coming from the room.
The black veils were the barriers to the memories, surely - but how to proceed?
Very easily, as it turned out. When Ford reached out a hand to pull the shadow aside, it went easily as any real fabric, swishing to the side and allowing him to peer in the memory.
The smell of soap and shampoo was much stronger within. This was indeed a memory of Ford's bathroom. And there was Remus - or someone he thought was Remus. They were blurry, smudged like a charcoal drawing, details blinking in and out like light from faulty bulbs - and beside Remus… was a hazy figure that Ford, for a moment, could not parse.
The figure bathed Remus, hands in his hair, picking out the gnarled tangles. It was speaking, Ford noticed - garbled and meaningless noises, but the voice- Ford realized, with a jolt, that it was his voice.
This was Remus's memory of that so fateful bath Ford had given him. It seemed true to life - other than the blur around the edges, there was no memory-like strangeness, no clearly misremembered or imagined portions. It startled Ford a little, to see how… real it was. He hadn't know what to expect, but for some reason, this hadn't been it. This felt too simple and honest, just a replay of a past event.
Ford didn't know he was leaning too far forward until he stumbled, foot catching on Remus's memory of his own linoleum floor. With one gust of motion, he tripped into the memory, through the inky curtain and into the blurry bathroom.
Yelping, Ford attempted to catch himself, and out of the corner of his eye, he could see the memory of Remus, sudsy and damp, jolt to attention, head whipping to the real-Ford currently stumbling into his memory.
In his fumbling, Ford's hand went out, and Remus was sitting up and starting to climb out of the bathtub towards him, and Ford wasn't looking where he was putting his hand.
He had only a moment to realize he'd unthinkingly grabbed Remus in his puttering, like a fool, and then-
-smelled nice. He exhaled, sinking further into the hands massaging his scalp, the warm water, the voice rumbling above his head. He could fall asleep like this, it was so warm and nice, nothing at all like the icy plunges in the lake he occasionally took when the itchy feeling started to get too much for him.
He wouldn't mind staying here, actually. Not just in this warm water, but with this Guy, his New Pal. He knew how People could be, that they were dangerous - but surely this Guy couldn't be so bad, not when he fed him and put that weird goop on his neck to make him feel better and then gave him the best washing of his life. Definitely better than the tongue baths back with the guys in the woods- though that was nice in its own ways, he supposed.
But this? This was pure relaxation. He had to fight hard not to pass out right here and now, his eyelids were starting to feel that heavy. Even so he let himself glide into the feeling, let this Guy keep scrubbing those funny frothing bubbles into his fur with his paws. Funny paws this Guy had, though with his bad eyes he couldn't quite see what it was about them that set them apart. Still it, reminded him a bit of his old-
-a hand on Ford's shoulder tugged him back, pulling him out of the bathroom.
"The hell was that?" Fiddleford's voice was behind him, and that was Fiddleford's hand on his shoulder, wasn't it? Ford's shoulder. He'd been… but how…?
"Fiddleford," Ford said, strangely breathless even though he'd not even done anything physically exerting, "I- when I made contact with Remus- that memory of Remus- I experienced his experience through his own eyes. I was him - in the memory!"
Fiddleford blinked at him, owl-eyed. "What? Really? Ya looked like you totally spaced out - the whole scene in there froze, it was damn creepy. You looked like a bunch of mannequins."
Ford shook his head. "This is- this changes everything. I'd thought I might be able to look into his memories, but I never expected to be able to get so in-depth. If I can just find the right memory, all I'll need to do is just catch Remus just thinking something that debunks your theory. This could make everything so much faster!"
Fiddleford frowned. "It's a bit more than a theory-"
Whatever foolish rebuttal Fiddleford was about to follow with died between them, as a low rumble from down the hall interrupted his words.
Both Ford and Fiddleford stopped dead, and completely silent. Ford turned his head slowly.
Down the hall, there was an out of place shadow. It was stood out starkly against the cheery, bright walls around them, a solid pitch of black inexplicably clinging to a corner in the bending of the halls. The sound had come from there, and Ford traced the path with his eyes, seeing Fiddleford do the same out of the corner of his vision.
There was that low, creaking sound of something adjusting its weight on the floorboards, leaning forward. Then, two eyes opened in the dark, somehow completely unshadowed, unlike the ink-like black that curtained the rest of it. Two eyes, perfectly visible in the dark.
Those two eyes - they were startling. Mostly black but with a thin rings of brown (like a dog's eyes), they squinted back at them with narrowed suspicion. That familiar growling sound rumbled out of from the creature, eyes flicking between Ford and Fiddleford.
The eyes were low to the ground, Ford noticed. Almost like-
With another soft creak of the floorboards, the creature stepped out of the unnatural shadows. The first part of its body to slide out of the dark was its head. It was, to Ford's surprise, a coyote's head - brown-eyed and brown-furred, muzzle scrunched up in a thunderous, yet small growl.
But as it slunk out of the shadows fully, it revealed more of itself. It had a human body- no, it had Remus's body. Remus's body (sans the clothes Fiddleford and he had fit on him), and a coyote's head, like a strange, crawling dog-minotaur.
"What," Fiddleford said, flatly.
"Fascinating," Ford murmured, because that or feel vaguely and ambiguously horrified at the implications of whatever it was he was looking at right now, and he didn't have time for that.
The dog-headed Remus growled at them, canine lips pulling back to show yellowed but sharp teeth, ears pressing flat to the back of his skull. His brown, half-human, half-dog eyes glittered in the light.
"Remus?" Ford called cautiously. "Do you recognize us?"
Remus's head swiveled towards him. He looked Ford up and down, eyes narrowed and critical. Creeping forward on hands and knees, his gaze moved between Ford and the bathroom memory thoughtfully, sniffing the air.
"He ain't a memory, is he?" Fiddleford asked.
Ford shook his head. "No, I don't believe so. He's… something else. What that something is, that remains to be seen."
After a moment of clear deliberation and intent sniffing, Remus snorted. He shook his head, blinking that narrowed, intense-eyed look away. He leaned back into a half-sitting, half-crawling position, watching them with alert, waiting eyes. He made no move to come closer.
Those brown eyes, now holding only benign curiosity instead of suspicion, looked between both Ford and Fiddleford - but his gaze seemed to linger on Ford. They simply stared at each other quietly for a moment.
The house creaked softly. Fiddleford coughed awkwardly in his fist behind him, as Remus cocked his head to the side, round, black eyes reflecting Ford as he gazed back at him.
They'd come to an understanding, Ford intuited.
Turning to Fiddleford, Ford said, "I believe he's just here to oversee. To make sure we don't get ourselves into trouble, as it were. He's not here to pick a fight."
Fiddleford frowned, sighing long-sufferingly to himself. "Right. Not sure I love the idea of a naked half-dog man followin' us around."
"You should be used to it by now," Ford said, gathering himself. His gaze swept up and down the warm halls, eying all the doorways remaining. "Anyways, we don't have time to deliberate. We have a whole mind to search - and I don't think Remus cares for our opinion on the matter, anyways."
He moved forward, past Remus and further down the hall. Just as he thought, Remus scooted away from him when he passed, but still followed close behind as soon as Ford's back was turned.
"Just 'cause I'm used to it don't mean I like it any," Fiddleford huffed quietly behind him, low enough that Ford could tell he probably wasn't meant to overhear it.
Fiddleford could grumble about it if he wanted, but Ford didn't have time for it. He had a theory to disprove.
I know it's not you, Ford thought, peeking behind another curtained memory at random, quickly writing off all that he knew would be useless to him. Just give me a sign.
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