The follow-up, where Ford decides to be a scientist (and an annoying little shit). @aroace-get-out-of-my-face thank you once again for blessing us with this au.
Stan’s working on pancakes, Ford’s attempting bacon. Except, that’s not really why they’re both in the kitchen, and Ford didn’t really just want them to cook together “for fun”. No, this is about to be a test.
Stan turns, then yelps when he sees the whoosh of flame from the pan on the stove.
“What the hell, Ford?! Put it out!”
Incredulous isn’t profound enough to describe the look Stan gives his brother.
“Are you kidding me? You’re the magic one!”
“You can do magic too, you’ve proven that! You’re perfectly capable of putting this out!”
“Are you seriously arguing with me while there’s a fire next to you?! Either put it out or get away from it!”
Ford looks his brother in the eyes and takes one large step back. Stan growls.
“You want it out?” Stan grabs a potholder, grabs the pan by the handle, and places it in the empty side of the sink. Now it’s on fire in a different, slightly safer location. “Fine. You got a damn fire extinguisher?”
“What, you want me to pour water on it? It’s a goddamn grease fire!”
“I want you to put it out with magic, Stanley!”
When the edge of the curtain catches fire, the house promptly opens the window, sending in a gust of wind that puts out the curtain and dims the fire down to a pathetic smolder. Stan picks up the pan again and, glaring at his brother, blows it out like a candle. Ford huffs.
“Alright, Sixer; get outta the kitchen.”
Maybe, Ford decides, it needs to be more imminent, more immediate, more reflexive.
That’s his justification when his brother is sitting innocently in the armchair and Ford, entering the room sneakily from behind, hovers a book directly over his head. He drops it.
Stan’s hand flies to his head as he whips around,
Ford winces a bit, but doesn’t back down,
“I wanted to see if you’d deflect it.”
“How could I ‘deflect it’ if I didn’t even know you were doin’ it?”
Stan scoffs and sits right back down in his chair, arm over his head like an umbrella.
“Asshole.” He mutters. Ford scowls and raises another one. Drops it. It bounces off of Stan’s arm.
“Ow.” Stan’s voice is much more deadpan, this time. Simply unamused.
With a frustrated sound that might as well be a snarl, Ford storms around into his brother’s line of sight and raises yet a third book into his hand,
“You’re not even trying!”
“Yea, I never said I would!”
Ford hurls the book at him. It goes wide. Stanley jumps to his feet, angry and amused,
Another book. This time, Ford mumbles himself an incantation for guided aim. He sees and feels the spark of it working as he throws the book, this one harder than the last, aimed directly for Stan’s forehead— wait, maybe he shouldn’t have done that, that’s probably going to hurt—
In a redirection of motion that you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it, the book turns in the air and flies right by Stan’s head. Stan grins wide,
Ford makes a triumphant noise and points,
“What?” Stan snorts, “No, ya just missed.”
“No, you deflected it, I saw.”
“I used a spell to guide my aim, Stanley; that was going to hit you and you deflected it!”
“You used a spell and still missed?” Stan crosses his arms annoyingly, “Wow, I knew you had bad aim, but that’s impressive.”
“I didn’t miss! You deflected it!”
They argue like children for nearly an hour.
Ford grabs his arm and shoves at the space around the fun new gemstone artifact he found— a ruby carved into a knickknack of a donkey. It slides a few feet away across the floor under his command. The sizzling slash on his arm starts bleeding anyways. He clamps his hand over it.
Right. Where are the healing bandages?
On his search, he passes through the living area and pauses. Stanley’s sitting on the armchair, looking up at him with a quirked eyebrow,
“Uh… you good, there, Sixer?”
An opportunity. Ford chuckles, then winces at another throb of pain from his arm,
“A magical investigation of mine hasn’t quite gone as planned.” He takes a few steps closer to Stan, who sits up as he seems to spot the blood dripping down Ford’s forearm. Stan then flinches and blinks when Ford’s arm is suddenly held out in front of him, injury brandished almost teasingly,
“Would you mind attempting some healing magic?”
Stan blinks a few more times, looking between Ford’s injury and his face like Ford’s going insane,
“Seriously? Me? Can’t you do it yourself?”
“Healing is notoriously difficult to perform on the self. Come on— if you’d like, I can find you the appropriate spell in my journal.”
Ford whips out his journal. It hovers in the air between them, flipping through pages until Ford finds the right one and turns it to face Stanley. A healing spell, complete with rune and incantation, is displayed in front of him. Stan’s nose scrunches up as he squints at it,
“Sixer, I, uh… I mean, I agree you should teach me this shit at some point, but right now? I don’t know how to do this, and you’re bleeding. Like, a lot.”
Ah, so he is. Well, that’s fine, he can stand it for another few minutes.
“Come on, Stanley— it’s not as though you’ve never performed healing magic before.” He ignores Stan’s uncomfortable grimace at the reminder, “At least try.”
“Alright, alright, fine.”
With a roll of his eyes, Stan squints at the page again,
“Fuck your rune, that never does shit for me. Uh… Cone-acker on a sandy, uh—“
“Coniuna-caro nodsanguis proplendiqum, Stanley.”
“Proplendiqum.” Ford seethes.
Stan rolls his eyes and, not thinking or trying half as hard on the next try, pronounces almost everything correctly. His hand hovers over the wound and creates a few gold sparkles. For a moment, the decrease in pain makes Ford think Stan’s actually done it, but no; when he looks at his arm, the wound looks pretty much the same.
“Doesn’t look like it worked.”
“It helped with the pain, at least. That’s something. Go on, try again.”
“Ford. It ain’t gonna happen. Quit wasting time and go use your magic stuff on it.”
With a defeated sigh, Ford sets his journal on the side table and turns around. If it weren’t for the concerning rate of this blood loss, he’d be much more insistent, but… he really ought to fix this.
He fetches his medical kit from a kitchen cabinet. Opens it.
The roll of healing bandages is all but empty. The a tattered strip left could heal, at best, a bad paper cut.
How had he managed to forget that?
He grabs the roll of regular bandages and returns to Stan somewhat sheepishly, not quite thinking straight anymore— yep, he’s getting a bit lightheaded now. It doesn’t help that he’s been performing magical investigations all afternoon.
“Got your magic healing stuff now?” Stan asks without looking.
“We’re out of healing bandages.”
Ford’s voice is so blunt, so deadpan that Stan’s head whips towards him on a swivel,
“What, seriously? Buddy, that’s gonna need stitches, then.”
Ford scowls and rolls his eyes,
“Absolutely not. No, I just need to stop the bleeding—“
“You mean like stitches do?”
Stan’s interruption is bored and unamused and Ford doesn’t even pause,
“—or at least slow it down enough that I can heal it myself. Unless you’d like to try again?”
Stan rises out of the armchair and practically drags his brother into it, seeing the man’s face get pale and watching his weight wobble back and forth unsteadily,
“Not really. I thought you said healing yourself is too hard?”
“It’s extremely difficult and inefficient, but possible, and I really just need to heal it enough that I won’t bleed out.”
“Well, tell me when and I’ll bandage it up.” Stan sighs, pulling the second, far less comfortable chair nearer so he can fret over his brother properly. “Or I can stitch it, if ya want; that’ll hurt like hell, though.”
He looks at the journal, draws the rune in the air over his injured arm,
…and immediately gets tunnel vision so bad he almost passes out. He releases the rune with a deep gasp for air, and Stan tenses his grip on the arm of the chair,
“Fine, just…” Deep breath. “If you’re not willing to try healing again, go get my glucose tablets from the kitchen. This will take more magical energy than I have available to me at the moment.”
Stan mutters and grumbles and Ford closes his eyes to focus on breathing. He’s so focused he doesn’t even hear Stan get up.
Or, he doesn’t hear it because Stan doesn’t get up. With some very dissatisfied grumbling, Stan grabs Ford’s arm and twists the journal to face him.
“Coniunacaro nodsanguis proplendiqum.“
Ford pries his eyes open just in time to see the golden glow around his arm, Stan’s eyes screwed shut with focus, one hand with a firm grip just below the injury and the other hovering over it. Ford watches the skin knit itself back together— not completely, not perfectly, but more than enough. More than he would’ve been able to do for himself right now, even with his glucose tablets.
When Stan’s eyes open again to look over the semi-healed wound, he humphs with what sounds like amusement, then looks at the roll of regular bandages and rises from his seat,
“Ya didn’t even grab disinfectant, dipshit.”
Ford’s too impressed, confused, and lightheaded to comment the entire time that Stan’s cleaning and bandaging his arm. He eventually passes out watching something meaningless on the TV. He doesn’t even remember to say “thank you.”
annaxmalina
2087
izzy806
