So I’ve been reading @gravity-what‘s “What’s Mine AU” (where Stan feels sympathy for McGucket and starts helping him out shortly after moving to Gravity Falls, eventually theyy become a couple but it all goes to hell when Fidds finds out about the portal.)
I like this idea a lot, and I’m stuck on thinking about what happens after Fidds starts recovering his memories.
How about this: before the events of SotBE, he doesn’t remember Ford at all beyond some deep-buried trauma. After he starts recovering his memories, he begins to remember who Stanford Pines is and “realizes” that the man he’s been living with for about fifteen years is the same man he remembers having a serious falling out with (he doesn’t remember the portal yet, only that something gave him a terrible scare and that it had been the last straw.)
In his mind, he figures Stanford felt guilty, sought him out out and has been trying to make things right ever since. And he’s angry, but also kind of touched.
So he confronts Stan. He takes him to task for everything he remembers Ford doing...meanwhile, Stan is shocked by everything he’s saying. He’d started to get hints from some of the things Fidds had said that he might have known Ford, but he had no idea that they were close. Now he finds out that not only were they lovers, things ended TERRIBLY between them. Stan starts to learn a little more about what his brother was up to before he called Stan for help.
Stan has no idea how to react to any of this, and so he does what he typically does when he’s panicked--he lies. He starts apologizing to Fidds, as Ford. Tells him he was pigheaded and self-centered and didn’t appreciate all he had in Fiddleford (maybe subtly venting some of his own feelings towards his brother.) It ends with Fidds in his arms, crying and forgiving him, feeling at peace with something that--on some level he could never quite reach--had been bothering him for a long time.
But that peace doesn’t last...other doubts start sneaking in as more of Fidds’s memories of Ford come back. Didn’t Stanford have a birthmark on the left side of his chest? What happened to those creepy tattoos he used to have? When he asked Stan about his fingers, Stan said he’d gotten the extra ones removed because he was tired of being hassled about them...but somehow that didn’t seem like something Stanford would do....A lot about this man doesn’t seem like Stanford, in fact.
Then Fidds remembers something else...remembers Ford talking about his family. Mentioning his twin brother, Stanley. His injured mind starts to piece things together.
And one day while the twins are out Stan closes up the gift shop and walks back into the house to find Fidds sitting at the card table in the living room, looking at him seriously.
“I was thinkin’,” he says, a strange sobriety in his tone “now that I’m rememberin’ things again, we can get back to what we were workin’ on.”
And Stan’s like “uh....okay...” a little unsettled by how intense Fidds is acting. He sits down and Fidds starts asking him questions. Spouting off streams of highly technical engineering jargon and asking his opinion on them. And maybe Stan’s picked up enough from teaching himself to operate the portal that he can fake it for a little while, but he’s quickly overwhelmed. Fidds knows what he’s talking about, (engineering is one thing he never forgot,) and Stan just doesn’t.
After a while, Stan just stops answering and sits there, silently, as Fidds’s questions take on a more and more accusing tone. Finally Fidds stops and stares at Stan.
He knows. He’s figured it out, but he wants Stan to admit it himself.
