Fandom: Gravity Falls || CW: - || Ford is still recovering from the memory gun, but at least Stan has some friendly fire... that did come from his car burning but hey you take the good where you can, right? (A post fic of after the unknownconstants’ blog events, aka thie/uc ford and stan from the wwtd spinoff/oneshot.)
______(~1,100 words) ______
It wasn’t every day that Stan’s life went to hell. More like every few days or something like that. A couple weeks if he was on a real streak! This was not one of those streaks. Turns out meeting up with your brother who’s apparently dealing with getting possessed every now and then by a literal alien ghost demon whatever turned out to have a lot of bad moments! Like him switching back and forth on a dime between needing him and wanting him as far away as possible, then the whole fight about the portal, and then...this.
Stan was leaning onto a clear corner of the same desk that Ford had spread an avalanche of papers and tools in front of his memory encoding machine where he had his hands inside a panel with a pair of wire cutters. Meanwhile the local walking fire, Scraps, was latched around Stan’s leg. Thankfully, not actually burning him, but like Hell he knew why or how that worked since they’d burned Ford before, but then didn’t burn him later. Scraps was probably the best thing to happen to him today, which was kinda funny since Scraps was also a result of the second worst thing that happened today. The first worst thing was in the room with him.
Ford looked the same, at least right now when he was focused on something, but it was jarring how different Ford was acting. How different the look was in his eyes half the time. How it was clear like hell that he didn’t really recognize Stan even if he called him by his name. Ford sent him to try and talk down a maybe murderous shapeshifting alien he had trapped in a bunker, not a good start, and as soon as Stan had gone away it had all gone to shit. Ford’s memory completely wiped, his car... just gone, and when Stan had realized someone had piled the heaviest junk possible to trap him down in the bunker it had still taken him a long time to even get out with the help of the walking fire hazard that was also emotionally his car or his feelings about his car or the emotions he had while in his car - or all of that combined! And if it hadn’t been for damn luck with the interdimensional communicator getting left where Bill hadn’t seen it, their whole world could have gone to a more literal alien demon kind of Hell.
And then- then it had turned out the device had switched to a whole different dimension, he didn’t even want to think about that right now, and they got it switched back again pretty easy. Ford wouldn’t talk to them though, which had left Stan to break all the news. He wanted it to be nice. It should have been nice because it was talking with people that knew him him plus actually recognized him.
It... hadn’t been though. At first, yeah. Then he started catching them up and they got worried, which hell should have been nice, would have been nice. Except it just- it just wasn’t and he didn’t want to think about that either. People on the chopping block or set to leave shouldn’t be making friends, that was all.
Stan rubbed a hand over his face, pushing the communicator onto the desk and looking down at Scraps.
Scraps’ charcoal darkened legs were wrapped securely around his calf, leaving behind sooty black marks where they shifted their short legs, and their coal eyes blinked at him as Stan looked down. They didn’t really ‘have’ a mouth according to Ford until they opened one up to eat something, but all the burnt junk at the bottom of their fire made it look like they did sometimes. Well, it looked like someone had tossed a bunch of trash into fire and it had curled up into indistinguishable shapes, but the shape kinda made a face sometimes! It was like whatever the equivalent of a birthmark was for scampfires. Maybe burnthmarks.
Scraps scittered up Stan’s leg, staying stuck though like at any moment someone was going to try and snatch them off, and settled onto the top of his knee.
Stan sighed, cautiously pushing a hand through the fire that seemingly refused to burn him no matter what. Maybe it really was emotionally his car because he was already feeling the same urge to talk to it like he would when he drove alone.
“Ha, are scampfires always this clingy?” He asked, asking Ford instead of Scraps themself. One of the few good things right now was that Ford at least seemed to have remembered all the weird stuff he studied and when he talked about anomalies he looked like himself.
Ford quietly glanced over to see where Scraps was, but then looked back into the wiring. “In my experience, not unless I had food of some kind, but some of my testing may have warded them off from getting too friendly.”
“What was the testing?” Stan snorted.
Ford paused and there was actually a very brief wary look at Scraps as though they were covertly listening. “Minor amounts of water and snow.”
“Ha,” He laughed. “What’d you think was going to happen when you threw water on a fire?”
“Well, I had wanted-” he hesitated, “I had to check to make sure.”
Stan smiled, talking to the scampfire. “Hear that, Scraps?”
“Don’t do that,” Ford interrupted before Stan could continue, “they already don’t like me!”
“‘They don’t like you,’” Stan rolled his eyes. “What makes you think they don’t like you?”
Ford looked at Scraps, seriously evaluating for a moment, and pulling back towards the panel of wiring again as he talked. “They hiss at me.”
“Only when you leave the room.”
Ford stopped like Stan had said something a lot more important than it was.
Stan continued. “Ford, it’s just like when a dog barks when they get left alone.”
Ford grimaced slightly, trying to hide the expression by looking directly at the wires and pushing at some with his hand.
Stan wanted to press on the weird reaction further, but he didn’t know if he could take one more possibly bad thing tonight. So instead he tried to put a positive spin on it. “Look, don’t worry about it too much, okay. Just means they want you around.” He reassured him. “Heck, it’s not like they’re alone here either.” Stan said, gesturing to himself.
Ford looked between Stan and Scraps, the worry on his face easing away for the most part. “No. No, you’re right.” He agreed, resuming work. “They’re not alone. Not now.”
man i really loved brainstorming and designing these with @fordanoia :'D i didn't realize how much i've missed drawing pokemon until now!
the last two pics were basically combined into the final design. as much as i wanted to keep the wings (that good good icarus symbolism) i just couldn't get them to fit in with the rest of the design without feeling too cluttered, press f for my dreams sfjskfkd
