Where There’s Smoke, There’s a Scampfire (Stanuary Week 1 - Burn)
Summary: The closest Stan ever came to revealing he knew about the supernatural prior to the zombie incident.
Word Count: 1200
Warnings: none
AO3: archiveofourown.org/works/22077019
For @stanuary Week 1: Burn!
When I first saw this prompt, I was so ready to write angst. This fic is… quite the opposite of that. (You can probably still read into it in an angsty way if you really try, though — it is a Stan-centric fic, after all.)
Set in early Season 1, specifically the day after Double Dipper.
***
“Kids, how do you want your eggs? Fried or scrambled?” Stan called from the foot of the stairs.
“I wanna go back to sleep!” Mabel shouted back. Dipper’s only reply was a muffled groan.
“Well, I’m only making breakfast once, so you’re just gonna have to eat cold eggs then!” Stan warned them, but he heard no sign of the kids getting out of their beds. “Suit yourself!”
He headed for the kitchen and cracked two eggs into the frying pan, then reached for the knob of the stovetop burner. He probably should’ve suspected something when it was already warm to the touch — if not even before, when he’d smelled the scent of burning wood wafting through the room — but as he turned the knob, the burner erupted into a giant column of orange flames that sent the frying pan flying and splattered crispy-around-the-edges eggs all over the wall.
“Fuck!” Stan shouted, narrowly avoiding a faceful of flames — but before he could even make a mad dash for the attic and carry the kids out of what he was sure would soon become a burning and crumbling house, the fire spluttered out, leaving only a few char marks on the ceiling. One degree at a time, Stan turned the knob back into the off position, and though it still felt warmer than it should, there were no explosions this time.
“Okay, that’s fucking weird. How the hell —” Stan muttered to himself while slowly backing away, only to be interrupted by the stove making a sound that could almost be mistaken for a burp.
“And that’s even weirder!” Pulling an oven mitt onto one hand and wielding a bowl of water in the other, Stan approached the stove once again, this time resting a hand on the handle to the oven door. “Let’s see what’s going on in there…”
A ball of sizzling orange flame sprung out, nearly stomping on Stan’s toes with its limbs made of lumber. It shook its head back and forth like a wet dog, sending ash and kindling spraying across the kitchen floor, then bounded towards Stan, who’d backed up so quickly that he’d ran into the opposite wall of the room.
“Hey, watch it!” Without meaning to, Stan spilled some of the water from the bowl he’d filled at the sink, and the fire recoiled. With streams of ash falling from its flickering eyes, it looked genuinely betrayed, and Stan couldn’t help but feel guilty.
“Look, I don’t want to hurt you,” he explained, putting on his calmest ‘talking to animals’ voice. “I’m guessing the smell of those chocolate cupcakes I baked in there yesterday drew you in or something and you got trapped there all night, ‘cause I’ve ran into little guys like you out in the woods before and you’re usually not so high-strung. You just gave me a scare, that’s all.”
The fire made a noise somewhere in between a hiss and gurgle, and the ash stopped falling from its eyes.
Stan lowered his voice to a whisper. “But I can’t keep you here because you’ll either burn this place to the ground or smoke me out of house and home, and I also can’t let the kids see you with me ‘cause then I’ll have to admit to them that the supernatural is real —”
As if on cue, he heard Dipper yell from the attic: “What’s going on down there, Grunkle Stan?! That sounds like a lot of explosions for just making breakfast!”
Cupping his hands around his mouth, Stan yelled back: “I blew up your eggs in the microwave! Your fault for not telling me how you wanted them cooked!”
He turned back to his combusting companion. “See? Now that I’m making a racket, they’ll be out of bed and down here any minute, so if you’d just… lumber on out of here, pun totally intended, that would really be a big help to me.”
The fire showed no sign of understanding English, much less doing what Stan had asked of it, not even as a series of thuds from upstairs indicated that Dipper and Mabel were getting out of bed and soon to be on their way to the kitchen.
“You’re really not leaving me a lot of options here, punk,” Stan muttered, but he set the bowl of water down on the table. He’d always had a soft spot for the sentient campfires that roamed the woods of Gravity Falls, at least compared to the other local fauna — and most importantly, he was beginning to form a plan that didn’t involve extinguishing the little scamp.
“Even if little Brainiac Junior doesn’t try and use you as proof cryptids are real, then Mabel will probably adopt you as a pet and you’ll end up getting me framed for arson and insurance fraud,” he rambled on as he rummaged through the cabinets and fridge. “Not that I actually have insurance for the Shack. Or for anything else, really. You know, I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
Going off the his earlier hunch that the fire had a chocolate addiction, he opened a bag of chocolate chips and began to pour them onto the floor, creating a path out of the kitchen and onto the porch. The fire immediately proved his guess right, absorbing the morsels with a series of satisfied crackles until reaching the lawn, where Stan ran out of chocolate. He switched to a half-empty bag of marshmallows left over from last night’s party, which the fire slurped up at a downright unfair speed as it scurried after him towards the woods.
“Okay, buddy, I’ve got one last treat for you.” Stan ripped open a package of frozen hot dogs and held them just close enough to the fire to get its attention, then pulled out the hot dogs one by one and lobbed them into the forest in a variety of different directions. “Scavenger hunt for you! Try and find ‘em all before the gnomes do!”
The fire scampered into the woods, and Stan breathed a sigh of relief. “See ya, little spitfire.”
He stuffed the various pieces of junk food packaging into the trash can as he headed back to the Shack to do damage control, finding Dipper and Mabel standing in the kitchen.
“It smells good in here!” Mabel commented, still wearing her nightgown. “Kinda charred, but also kinda chocolatey!”
Dipper’s hair was uncombed and his eyes were weighed down with bags, but he’d still brought a magnifying glass to inspect the scene. “You said you blew up the microwave, but the exploded eggs are everywhere but there. What’s going on?”
Stan put on his best ‘hopeless incompetent old man’ face.
“That was actually a lie so you wouldn’t worry,” he told the kids. “I actually kinda blew up the whole stove. And on that note, would you rather order pizza or tacos for breakfast?”
***
End notes:
I like to imagine that fire-related creatures and particularly Scampfires always take a liking to Stan for reasons he doesn’t entirely understand. Maybe it’s for some deep and symbolic reason involving his eventual fate and rise from the ashes, or maybe it’s because they just mistake this extremely huggable old man for a giant marshmallow.