Chapter Text
The day that Fiddleford Hadron McGucket felt things start to unravel, it was raining on and off. He liked Gravity Falls a whole lot. Well, he didn’t like the things that Stanford took him to observe in the woods. The more benign anomalies weren’t too bad, they ranged from weirdly adorable, like the plaidypus, to inconsiderate and obnoxious, like the gnomes and unicorns. But he always felt so uneasy in the woods. The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up. If they went deep enough, he started to shake a bit, sure that there was somethin’ terrifying that they were about to stumble upon and awaken, some specific creature that he couldn’t quite put name to, but that filled him with dread all the same. He liked the location, though. It reminded him of the best parts of Hickory Springs; the clearness of the sky at night, the callin’ of birds in the morning, folk greeting you in the street or at the market. Small town stuff. But there were things about Gravity Falls that were even better than home. The smell of the pine trees, for one. The fact that unlike Hickory Springs, he was by no means the weirdest person in town, for another.
The people of Gravity Falls were odd in a way that Fiddleford really enjoyed. They were real friendly, but not terribly polite. A little blunt, a little awkward, a little overbearing. They tended to overshare about themselves and there wasn’t much subtlety to be had. Fiddleford remembered asking the waitress what was good the first time he’d eaten at the dinner, to which she’d cheerfully replied that none of it was very good, but the tuna melt was a safe bet if he didn’t want salmonella from undercooked meat. They had decided apparently amongst themselves that the science he and Stanford were doing in the cabin had something to do with chemistry, or perhaps alchemy, and no matter how many times Fiddleford said he was doing mechanical engineering, they refused to be persuaded. Every time he went to get groceries for the house the old couple behind the register or some other shopper would say something like “those test tubes still treating you well?” or “how’re all the potions and elixirs going for you two up there?”
They, like the older folk in Hickory, like the long-established folk of anywhere rural, also knew about where things beyond the human world dwelt and how to steer well clear. Forests were wild spaces where the rules of daylight and paved pathways no longer applied and you walked among older, darker things. Sometimes a person in town would just casually mention that a certain place was haunted. Corduroy family cabin? Yep, that’s haunted. Boyish Dan had once reassured a nervously fidgeting Fiddleford that he was pretty sure the land that he had helped build Stanford’s house on wasn’t haunted, it was just bad luck and maybe cursed. Which, shockingly enough, was not a comfort to him. But the people of Gravity Falls were glad to see him, happy to talk his ear off whenever he went into town. It wasn’t terribly often, but it was more than Ford went. The townsfolk seemed to know Fiddleford better than Stanford even though Stanford had been living there for a few years now.
That wasn’t so much a surprise, because it wasn’t new. At Backupsmore, Fiddleford had been the one with other, more casual friends; kids who would let him know where parties were happening or would ask him to join hacky sack on the main green or who took him out to a bar on his twenty-first birthday for his first legal drink. Ford never bothered with any of that. He hated small talk or wasting time on inane nonsense, which was what he felt most social niceties to be. He didn’t want to bother doing things or talking about things that he felt didn’t matter, and that was most of the romance and gossip and recreation that other college students were interested in. Also, Stanford Pines didn’t suffer fools gladly, and Backupsmore University was chock full of ‘em. Fiddleford was more used to being semi-friendly acquaintances with idiots who he didn’t really enjoy being around all that much, so he did far better with the BMU social scene.
It wasn’t surprising, exactly, but it was a little worrying just how much of a recluse Stanford was. He could spend all day working, sometimes alongside Fiddleford in the basement, crunching equations while Fiddleford welded away at the metal skeleton of an inverted triangle that was beginning to take shape, but often alone in his study. Fiddleford would leave a plate outside the door in the afternoon and come back with dinner in the evening to find the first meal utterly untouched. After the time that Fiddleford dragged him upstairs to eat in the kitchen for once and Stanford had blinked in surprise at the darkness blanketing the cabin, exclaiming, “Oh, it’s night”, he made it his mission to prevent the other scientist from completely becoming a hermit. He tried, and very occasionally succeeded, convincing Stanford to join him in town for grocery shopping or at Greasy’s Diner, but what really was a shoe-in was getting him to come to the hardware store. Fiddleford would claim that he wasn’t sure which coils would be the safest conductor or how to balance their budget constraints with the need for circuit board shielding that could withstand the radiation the portal would produce, and Stanford was already halfway to the passenger seat of Fiddleford’s truck. He would stand behind Fiddleford, watching intently as he looked through shelves of copper wiring and magnets, humming thoughtfully at each item Fiddleford touched, as if he knew enough about the differences between them to have an opinion.
It honestly irked Fiddleford a little bit, how easy it was to get Stanford out of the house just by implying any incompetence about the portal. Stanford’s expertise lay in theory, he could build things, certainly, but he didn’t prefer it. And that was the whole reason he had called Fiddleford in the first place, because he recognized that Fiddleford’s abilities on the mechanical side outpaced his own. So his backseat construction really felt like…well, a lack of faith. It was hard to believe it was a lack of faith in his mechanical ability. Stanford had always been free-handed in his compliments on Fiddleford’s machines, which stood stark against how sparing he generally was with praise, a characteristic Fiddleford was fairly sure found its root in how difficult his father was to please. To Stanford, if it wasn’t the very best of the best, then it wasn’t worth a mention, and this was doubly so for his own work. Fiddleford had always taken Ford’s regard for his skill as gospel; he was the most brilliant person Fiddleford knew, and he didn’t give compliments that he didn’t mean, so if Stanford said he was a talented mechanic, well, then it must be the truth.
But if it wasn’t a lack of faith in his construction skill, was it something about Fiddleford himself that brought about this over-supervising? He felt that he’d been handling himself a lot better since inventing the memory gun, but perhaps the image of how shaken and incompetent Fiddleford had been before its creation was still fresh in Stanford’s mind. So much room in his brain was dedicated to wondering and worrying what Ford thought about him. Do you respect me? Do you think I’m a genius, like you are? Do you take my work with personal computers seriously? Do you take me seriously? Do you value my opinion the way I value yours? Do you ask yourself these questions about me, or am I alone in this?
Maybe Stanford thought that he was losing conviction in the project. Which was totally unfair and insulting and true. Sorta. Not really, but…well. Fiddleford understood what a big deal an interdimensional portal was, he did. Sweet sarsaparilla, if it worked they would prove multidimensional theory. If some of the equations they were churning out were solid, the portal gave evidence to the idea of infinite dimensions, way more than measly string theory or M theory. And that was before you even started on traveling between dimensions; this project would make Neil Armstrong’s giant leap look like a jump into a kiddie pool. So yes, Fiddleford knew that the portal was important. But honestly, he really didn’t understand the Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness.
Gravity Falls was definitely a hotbed for anomalies and the supernatural. But Fiddleford didn’t buy into the idea that all of the critters and spooks leaked in from some “weirdness” dimension. First off, why would this dimension specifically contain things that were anomalous to their world, unless it was some sort of anti-dimension formed in direct contrast to theirs? “Weirdness” was so unspecific a category, and if there was this other dimension that the portal would be opening a tear into, why wouldn’t there be infinite more? Surely plenty of what was strange in their dimension was entirely average and unremarkable in countless more dimensions. One singular “weirdness” dimension didn’t make no sense when there was no way that the definition of “normal” was consistent in every dimension but that one.
And also, the anomalies were so different from each other. Some of them were just animals with interesting twists that maybe could’ve developed as evolutionary adaptations. Stanford had mentioned his encounters with ghosts before; those were regular ol’ humans before they died, weren’t they? How could they have come from another dimension? Same with the zombies. It didn’t add up, and for bein’ the most exacting person Fiddleford had ever encountered on God’s green earth, Stanford didn’t seem to be able to fully explain it himself. Ford would bring out the most complicated equations sometimes, the original blueprints for the portal were honestly baffling, like somethin’ outta Asimov. The math checked out and the pieces all fit together, but it was just so far ahead from anything else being done that Fiddleford had no idea what the basis of the science was, the foundation. He could look at the end result and understand it, but he couldn’t understand the process of gettin’ to it in the first place.
They hit a wall with the project at the tail end of the summer; construction couldn’t go any further unless they figured out how much force they were going to have to absorb, and they wouldn’t know that until they could calculate exactly how much force it was gonna take to tear the dimensional fabric at its weak point. So they were stalled out, crunching numbers while missing a crucial variable that they didn't know how to obtain. It was frustrating, for sure, and the thick humidity that clung like a second skin didn’t help none. Fiddleford remembered how his mama would call it “waiting weather”, that prickling anticipation that came before rain, how she said it made people snap. It had rained that morning, sporadic drizzling ‘till midday, and now the whole world seemed to be holding its breath for the next bout.
Fiddleford’s knee was bouncing away under the table, but at least that was a silent habit, unlike Stanford’s pen-chewing; the clack of teeth against cheap plastic started up again for the fifth time in as many minutes told Fiddleford that there was no more progress on Ford’s end than his.
“Ya still ain’t found nothing?” Fiddleford asked, pushing his palms against his eyes.
“Double negative,” Stanford replied immediately. “And ‘ain’t’ is a contraction of ‘is not’, so it’s incorrect in that sentence.”
Fiddleford resisted groaning aloud. Stanford was the most pedantic bastard and constantly corrected Fiddleford’s grammar. Even people who smirked when he spoke, who he was sure made fun of his accent behind his back, didn’t correct the grammar that was clearly a feature of that accent to his face the way that Stanford did, and it was infuriating how Fiddleford could only muster up a fond exasperation over it, because he was so gone over Ford and found just about everything he did endearing.
“It’s a di-a-lect, ya fuckin’ Yank,” he said, intentionally elongating his drawl. “S’got different rules of grammaticality. An’ ‘ain’t’ can mean ‘have not’ too, sometimes.”
“This is going nowhere,” Stanford huffed, gathering up his pen and papers and rising to his feet. “I need to take some time to meditate.”
He did that a lot these days, went off to his study to meditate. It was new and it was strange. Back in college, Ford had developed a strict exercise regimen. Fiddleford would often come back to the apartment after class and see him running through crunches shirtless, which was extremely distracting. But he’d never bought into the New Age movement, even when they’d occasionally hung around anti-war activists and hippies and potheads. No, Stanford Pines did not want to join your fucking drum circle, thank you very much Rob. He thought that stuff was esoteric hand-waving too noncommittal to bite the bullet and call itself a religion. And now he was merrily skipping off to trance himself into communicating with the Ocean of Oneness every other day? Fiddleford didn’t buy that shit.
Fiddleford sat there in the kitchen, his leg starting to ache from the bouncing and waited. He knew he should be doing something. He should turn back to plugging in random variables for this equation again. Or, he could work on his personal computer, the project that was actually relevant to his career path and was his deepest passion, instead of unscientifically throwing things at a wall and hoping something stuck on Ford’s ridiculous Star Trek machine. He should call Emma-May. He told himself this, thought to himself as he often did, you should call your wife.
He stared at the door and waited for Stanford to return from his study.
When he finally did appear, a half hour later, his hair and clothes were mussed, but he was grinnin’, thrilled and triumphant, holding a sheet of paper in his hand.
“That’s it!” he announced, slamming the paper down onto the table in front of Fiddleford. “That’s our number. That’s how much force we’ll need to generate in order to punch the hole.”
Fiddleford looked on in bafflement at the thin, neatly printed equation and the final result, circled three times.
“How-what…how could you even…” He read through it again, trying to reverse-engineer the logic of how to even get the other variables of the equation from the little-to-nothing they’d been working with for days. “How did you figure this? How’d you get the equation all set right?”
Stanford paused, and Fiddleford saw something flash on his face, in his eyes, a brief moment of panic. Then his face closed up like a poppy flower’s petals folding inwards, his expression going carefully blank. He snatched the paper away so fast that Fiddleford heard it whoosh through the air past him.
“If you don’t already understand it, then I can’t afford to waste the time it would take to explain it to you.” His voice was scornful, but there was an edge to it, something a little too sharp and frantic. “Let’s figure out the practicalities of force generation.”
Well, Fiddleford certainly had his answer to at least one of his constant questions. Stanford didn’t think he was a genius. In fact, Stanford thought he was dumb as a bucket of rocks. Because it sure sounded like he expected Fiddleford to believe that he’d just so happened to crack the equation they’d been working on for almost a week all by himself in thirty minutes of mediation. You don’t jus’ wander off and miraculously find the answer to an impossible question the minute you decide to, that wasn’t how science worked. So either Ford genuinely thought he was stupid enough to buy the story, or he just didn’t care if Fiddleford knew that he was lying to him. Fiddleford wasn’t sure which option hurt his feelings worse.
Stanford was keeping secrets from him. That was fine. He was entitled to do that. And Fiddleford had secrets too. He hadn’t told Stanford about the memory gun that sat snugly in a lockbox beneath his bed. Unless, of course, he had told him and he’d just chosen to forget it. Which was…certainly a possibility. So it wasn’t really fair of him to feel so tore up about Stanford not trusting him with whatever other source he was clearly using for the theoretical work of the portal. It was Stanford’s project. Fiddleford was not his partner, he was his assistant. Stanford had called him there to build the machine, and he didn’t need to divulge every aspect of the process for Fiddleford to do that. It was fine.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, low and long.
When Fiddleford suggested building a bunker, he was certainly truthful about some of the reasons why he wanted to take on a new construction project. It would be good to have a space to contain more dangerous anomalies away from the town. And he was able to voice, just a little bit, one of the fears that had begun to gnaw away at his mind; what if they let something dangerous through the portal? It quickly became clear that this was something Stanford hadn’t considered, which was honestly a little bit panic-inducing. Fiddleford was finding it harder and harder to assuage his nerves about the project with the comfort that Stanford was smarter than he was and knew what he was doing. And that was the deeper reason he brought up the idea of a new underground lab that would probably take a while to build: he wanted to slow down. Not stop, he didn’t want to quit the project! He just wanted to build something where he understood every step of the creation and knew for certain the result. He wanted to rerun some numbers on the force and radiation equations. He wanted to get out of the cabin, to give himself a break from watching the giant of steel and titanium in the basement loom larger each day.
He was confident that suggesting this underground lab would work in a way his other attempts to get Ford breaks wouldn’t, because there was nothing Stanford Pines loved more than a sidequest. Whenever Fiddleford acted as Dungeon Master for their D & D & More D games, Ford would talk to every shopkeep and barmaid, every distressed merchant and lost child. No stone left unturned, because it might be important! Nothing was allowed to go undiscovered. Fiddleford was supposed to believe that the man who had once made him quit a board game in fury by insisting on investigation-checking every single individual wall in a room that Fiddleford was describing for secret passageways even though his 32 had already got him the information that the chalice he was looking for was down the hall didn’t want to build an underground lair? Yeah, not a chance.
Maybe the security room with the moving metal boxes to crush intruders was a tad overkill, but designing death-traps was excellent stress relief. It was fun to dream up an elaborate contraption just for the joy of testing his skill, just cause he could. It was enjoyable to build somethin’ where he wasn’t thinking either why am I wasting my time with this, nobody cares about personal computers or what are we doin’, why are there only two of us doin’ it, are we reaching into places beyond where man was meant to tread the whole time he was building it. He’d almost forgotten that the reason he was an inventor was because he liked inventing things.
It was an absolute delight in terms of spending time with Stanford, too. They hauled in liquid nitrogen in huge gallon tanks for the cooling chambers and argued about inane things like the best popsicle flavor and it was just like their silly back and forths during late nights in the dorm or the library. It was just like debating about leg-warmers and Jane Fonda when he had first come to Gravity Falls. It was back to how it was supposed to be, and Fiddleford was so happy he could hardly stand it.
There was, of course, the problem of the overnight bunker. Specifically, there being only one bed in the bunker, which Fiddleford had quickly realized was a fatal oversight on his part. He had offered to sleep on the floor, but Stanford wouldn’t hear a word of it, so every night for the week that they were working down there, they’d lain side by side, Fiddleford’s body so tense and motionless it was painful, listening to the sound of Stanford’s deep, even breathing. They weren’t cuddled right up next to each other, but it was a small bed, small enough that Fiddleford could feel each exhale released by the man behind him warm the back of his neck and send his skin prickling all over. The ache of knowing he was a scant few inches away, the ache of fondness and hurt and loneliness, was like hunger-pangs in his stomach. Fiddleford wondered if this weren’t some kind of divine punishment for lust, or maybe desire itself was a punishment, if it felt like this. It felt like he would die of longing.
Stanford got snippy with him on day three in the bunker for callin’ the unholy shapeshifting maggot thing in their bunker lab “it” instead of “him”, which was so ridiculous that Fiddleford couldn’t even find it in himself to be irritated. He was not gonna call that thing “Shifty”, absolutely not. First off, it was a silly name. Ford took himself and his work so seriously and expressed occasional annoyance at the more outlandish cryptids of Gravity Falls, but he was the one naming them shit like “Shifty” and “Steve”. And secondly, Stanford was way too comfortable around the creatures here. Fiddleford wasn’t sure if it was cockiness and ego, or a lack of self preservation instincts, or that his curiosity just outweighed his common sense. Maybe it was that he was a city boy, because one thing Fiddleford knew for sure in his bones from bein’ a country kid was that you did not let your guard down around wild animals, even those that bordered on domesticated. They’d turn on you in an instant. Stanford was like those folks that raised chimpanzees as pets and then got their faces mauled off outta nowhere one day.
But for all his stoicism and aloof demeanor, Stanford really did have a soft spot for “cute” animals, his indulgence of the creepy little shifter just the latest example. Fiddleford had watched him cuddle a plaidypus for an hour and press a gentle kiss to its forehead. One of the first lighthearted arguments they’d had as roommates had been about the whole pig farming thing; Stanford didn’t understand how Fiddleford could raise ‘em and then eat ‘em.
“They’d eat me,” Fiddleford had replied hotly. “That’s the omnivore’s omnivore. ‘Least I’ve got the politeness to wait ‘till they’re fully dead to do my eating. I would only have to be unconscious or asleep before they started chowing down.”
Fiddleford could put up with a lot for Stanford’s enjoyment, but the baby skinwalker in their basement developing existential awareness was not included. The moment it started quotin’ Descartes, Fiddleford was pulling the plug. Stanford’s lack of caution was gonna be the death of them both.
Fiddleford was beginning to feel that the DMV should have some sort of anonymous whistleblowing system for suspending driver's licenses, because Stanford Pines behind the wheel was a danger to the general populace of Gravity Falls at this point. Granted, he had never been a particularly good driver; that classic Jersey stereotype certainly held true in Ford. On the few occasions in college that Fiddleford had ended up on a highway with Stanford driving, he had legitimately feared for his life as the other boy stayed at least 15 over the speed limit or cut across four lanes of traffic without his blinker on to take an exit. But with the level of sleep deprivation Ford was running on these days, there should be some legal impediment to his operating a motor vehicle. He was working as soon as Fiddleford came down in the mornings, always bright and early mind you, and deep into the night. His bad all-nighter habit was one that Fiddleford was quite familiar with, but to wake up near three A.M. multiple nights a week to the sound of movement and muttering and ominous crashing and thumping noises? He actually could not fathom how Stanford was even getting enough rest for his body to continue functioning. He was sunken and filthy and beyond rumpled, deep bruise-like splotches of wine-dark purple taking up permanent residence underneath his eyes. His right eye had developed a persistent twitch. Fiddleford occasionally spotted streaks of blood on his shirt collar or sleeve.
He was clearly falling apart, this project eating away at him like a corrosive acid. It wrang Fiddleford’s heart out like a wet dishrag to see his friend that way, so he did what he could, what Stanford would allow him to do, which was little to nothing. He left Stanford food he didn’t eat and water he didn’t drink. He called him Icarus, felt like Cassandra. And he made sure that he was always the one to grab the keys on the very rare occasions they were heading somewhere together.
Occasions like this, driving back from town with a trunk full of groceries and electrical wires for rerouting the fuel gauge. At least it wasn’t barrels of radioactive waste stolen from a government facility this time. They were taking the little side roads of Gravity Falls in relative silence, wind swirling fallen leaves ahead of them in a flurry of red and yellow. Fiddleford squinted against the dappled sunlight streaming through the front windshield and exhaled deeply. Driving little country roads was as familiar to him as his own name, and for a moment he felt the knot in his chest loosen.
“We should be ready to start testing in mid November,” Stanford said, and just like that the moment ended.
“We most certainly will not be ready to start testing in mid November, are you outta yer mind?” Fiddleford anxiously darted his eyes back and forth, torn between more fully expressing his incredulousness with a glare and looking at the road ahead. “We ain’t anywhere close to a testing phase, Stanford. We’d have to bypass a whole heap of peer review on the theoretical side, and we still haven’t worked out any strategy for mitigating radiation and we gotta go to some form of local government here to get a permit or some kinda approval.”
“Fiddleford, that stuff is useless red tape and academic bureaucracy that only exists to place roadblocks in front of people like us,” Stanford said, waving a hand in a dismissive gesture.
“Who’re people like us?” Fiddleford wondered. He was pretty sure there wasn’t nobody like Ford, or at least the number was vanishingly few and didn’t include him.
“Visionaries!” Ford exclaimed, stars in his eyes. “Brilliant minds who scare the old men in ivory towers because we’re too forward-thinking and it’ll shake the whole system to its bones. If it gets out to the broader scientific world that we’re shaping history out here, they’ll try and stop us. They’ll say we’re too inexperienced, and we need supervision and then they sweep in and take the credit, put their names on it instead of ours, patent it for themselves. We’ll never see our share. Of the money or the recognition.”
“And you call me paranoid.”
Stanford leaned towards Fiddleford, his elbow resting against the shoulder of the driver’s seat.
“C’mon,” he said, his voice cajoling. “Wouldn’t you like to be home in California in time for Thanksgiving?”
It was a dirty move, no doubt. Fiddleford hadn’t seen his son in over three months. Tate had started school in September, heading off to kindergarten with his diagonally-sliced sandwich and his ironed plaid button-up and a kiss from only one parent. Talking to Tate on the phone tended to go something like How’s school goin’? Good. Do you like your teacher? Yep. Have you made any friends? Nope. Getting more than a one syllable response from that kid was like pullin’ teeth.
But he also felt like being out here in Gravity Falls with Stanford was a form of stasis, an out-of-time kinda place. And he wouldn’t know what to do when that was over, how to go back again.
“If we rush through this, we’re bound to make mistakes and overlook things. Someone’s gonna get hurt.”
Stanford rolled his eyes as Fiddleford came to a stop sign and turned left onto a different side street. “I think you’re underestimating our proficiency—Fidds, the car!”
There was another car coming down the narrow street in the opposite direction. Fiddleford yanked the wheel to the side, riding up the curb and narrowly avoiding a head-on collision.
“Fuckin’ hell!” Fiddleford exclaimed, his heart pounding away at his chest. The other driver laid on the horn, as was well deserved, and flipped them off as he slowed to squeeze past them. “Lord Almighty, that was close. Since when is this a one-way?”
“Since always.” Stanford said, staring at Fiddleford with something like bafflement etched into his face. “Since all six years I’ve lived here and definitely since you arrived. You drive more than I do, and we drive this way all the time.”
Fiddleford pinched the bridge of his nose, a headache forming behind his eyes. He swam in the sensation of disorientation for a long moment. “Sorry. ‘M just distracted. Stressed. I dunno why you have to put so much pressure on yourself, it’s not like there’s a time limit.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Stanford said wryly. “The grant money isn’t going to last forever.”
“The grant is for the study of anomalies, not interdimensional travel. Backupsmore sure as shit don’t know about that portal. You could publish a thesis on what yer actually gettin’ paid to be doing out here, and then apply for funding from a different program for the portal.”
“Fiddleford, do you seriously not understand?” Stanford’s voice was taking on that tone of frustration that meant he was doing calculations in his head to figure out if it was even worth it to keep explaining or if the person he was talking to was just a lost cause. Fiddleford had heard it a million times before at school, Stanford going over the hypothesis in a group lab to a less intelligent classmate or correcting a professor’s equation on the board while Fiddleford struggled not to laugh. But he’d never heard it directed at him before. “The anomalies and the portal are connected, they’re part of the same discovery. And to only publish anomaly research would be like if Einstein had only published special relativity and not general relativity.”
Oh right, Fiddleford had forgotten that the dimension they were seeking with the portal was the source of all the anomalies. Probably because that didn’t make no fuckin’ sense.
“Einstein published the second one a decade after the first,” Fiddleford muttered, knowing better than to question the entire foundation of the project they’d spent the last three months on right at that exact moment. “You can publish related work at different times.”
“And chance someone else swooping in and claiming the Grand Unified Theory first?” Stanford scoffed. “No way in hell.”
Fiddleford shifted the car into reverse and eased his foot off the brake, beginning the painstaking process of turning around by inches on a narrow backroad. He sighed, weight settling in on his shoulders and chest. He felt a million years old. He didn’t feel like a man in his prime. He’d turned thirty the day before he’d arrived in Gravity Falls. Stanford had gotten him those gifts and had shared a glass of whiskey with him out on the front porch, toasting to his health. Funny, but he wasn’t sure that would happen now. He wasn’t sure they were the same people as the ones that sat on wooden chairs and watched the lightning bugs illuminate the warm July evening.
“Look, Fidds, maybe we won’t do a full test in November,” Stanford said, running a hand through his hair and letting his head fall back against the car seat headrest with a soft thunk. “Maybe just a partial test of the hyperdrive and power source in conjunction, opperating outside of the actual portal frame.”
Fiddleford knew that was as close a thing to an olive branch as he’d ever get from Stanford Pines. He wondered when it had stopped feeling like enough.
The few weeks after the day where Fiddleford forgot about the one way street were a blur, and Fiddleford wasn’t sure if it was his doing or not. Well, he knew it was his doing, but he wasn’t sure if it was his doing in the more active mechanichal sense that he was removing the parts of it he didn’t want to have in his head, or if it was just his brain doin’ what it sometimes did to get by.
He’d had a…well, not quite a fight, but a spat with Emma-May a year or so back, when they’d been trying for more kids than just Tate. It had actually been about Fiddleford’s performance in that process, somethin’ he was desperately uncomfortable talking about or even putting name to, no doubt because of Pastor Elwood shoutin’ burning tar pits and flayed skin, spittle flying from his lips and frothing rage in his eyes, an image that still loitered ‘round Fiddleford’s brain so many years removed from that little white church.
Emma-May clearly wasn’t the most at ease with it neither, only ever callin’ it the deed, which just about conveyed the sense of heavy obligation that Fiddleford associated it with. This disagreement had been about Fiddleford apparently not being spontaneous enough during it, just doing the same thrusting over and over.
I mean, it’s like with music, there’s supposed to be a rhythm he had said, defending his showing out of the vaguest muffled sense of masculine pride.
Emma-May had shaken her head and insisted, It’s like you ain’t even present, like you’re just goin’ through a set of programmed motions. You don’t do it like a musician, you do it like a machine.
The only reply Fiddleford had mustered was I love machines, his voice a distant sort of fond, and she’d stormed off, muttering under her breath about how useless it was to even try to have this discussion with him. They’d stopped trying for another kid soon after that.
He hadn’t told her the truth, which was that he couldn’t be fully present while doin’ the deed, he had to put part of his mind somewhere far off and muted and warm. If he was all the way there in his body during the act, he wouldn’t be able to do it, like physically. Like their first time together, he’d start to think himself into circles, start to trip over his own fears and guilt and then he couldn’t keep it up. So he’d gotten good at locking away a fraction of his mind and opperating on autopilot and goin’ through what he was supposed to do without thinking too hard about what he actually was doing. And for more than just those specific marital duties. For a lot of things he couldn’t handle fully aware. The stagnation and unstimulating endless trudge at his company nine to five. Sittin’ in church with Emma-May and Tate on Sundays. After-work drinks with bosses and colleagues and software developers who made jokes about his accent and that stupid fucking “Deliverance” movie that wasn’t even about Tennesse, it was about Georgia. He knew how to step outside himself to get through those things. Fiddleford thought of it like shark rules; if you stop moving, you die. He also thought of it like the proto-memory gun, cause whoo-wee, that sort of disconnecting his mind and body didn’t have nothing on the unadulterated bliss that was wiping it all clean.
But he’d never had to separate part of his brain when he was with Stanford before. That had always been one of Fiddleford’s favorite things about him; that it never felt dulled out and underwater with him, that it was always so vibrant and engaging and bright. Fiddleford had always felt fully within himself when he was with Stanford. Every part of his mind and his body felt present. He was whole. And now, as fall bled into winter and their time slipped by like sand in a sieve? Now he had to stow away the part of himself that screamed until its throat was bloody and clawed its hands in the dirt as it was dragged towards disaster. Now he had to keep moving, to not think.
He couldn’t think about how he kept on waking up from dreams he could never remember in a cold sweat, how he’d toss and turn in the moonlight that streamed in through the large triangle window behind his bed, skin crawling with the sensation of being watched.
He couldn’t think about how he had talked to Tate on the phone last week, gotten more than a few solitary words out of him as his son excitedly explained the container he’d built for an egg drop competition at school, and been rocked with distress and confusion for some reason he couldn’t pinpoint. Fiddleford had listened carefully, trying to place what exactly was off about his boy’s voice, and then realized in a rush he doesn’t have an accent anymore. It was expected, it was perfectly normal, with his son goin’ to public school and hearing a teacher and other children talk all day instead of just Fiddleford and Emma-May. Tate hadn’t had Fiddleford consistently talking to him for months, so it made sense that he didn’t sound like him anymore. It was only logical. Fiddleford had felt, ridiculously, as though he would cry, and his voice had cracked tellingly on his I love you.
He couldn’t think about the way that Stanford meditated cross-legged in a circle of candles in his study, which Fiddleford was finally allowed to enter because they were behind schedule, whose schedule he had no earthy idea. Well, he was starting to have a not-so-earthly one, but he couldn’t think about that either, couldn’t think about the pyramids and tapestries and stained glass fixtures that had come to occupy every inch of the cabin, all of them in one particular shape. The little wooden shack that he had shared with Stanford for months, that held his work and his clothes in its drawers and his bluegrass records on its shelves and his favorite brand of cereal in its pantries, the place about which Stanford had told him on the very first day that he wanted Fiddleford to feel at home here, that place was starting to feel so hostile and forboding he could hardly stand to be in it. But if he wasn’t at home here, with Stanford, and he wasn’t the same Fiddleford who was at home in California, with Emma-May and Tate, well, then where the hell was his home? When he felt small and helpless, like he often did these days, when the child in his heart whimpered I wanna go home, where did he turn to? Not Gravity Falls, not Palo Alto, and certainly not Hickory Springs. Nowhere.
He couldn’t think about Tennesse or California. He couldn’t think about how he was a bad father, doin’ the same damn deadbeat routine to his boy as his own daddy had done to him. He couldn’t think about how he was a bad husband, givin’ every bit of his devotion, of those “for better or worse” vows he’d sworn to his wife to somebody else. He couldn’t think about how he was a bad christian, lettin’ his best friend embrace somethin’ dark and inhumane and occult, checking equations and doing handyman work when he was pretty sure some kinda demonic entity was the foreman. There was a whole lot he couldn’t think about.
Even when he put it out of his mind, Fiddleford still felt that dread in his soul, that bone-deep knowledge that they were on a collision course for tragedy, and Stanford was too blinded by hubris to see what he could. That was the only thing Greek about this whole mess. Fiddleford had long since stopped thinkin’ of him and Stanford as Achilles and Patroclus or Orestes and Pylades or anything so noble and star-crossed. He knew what this was now. Stanford called and he came. Stanford dragged him by the lead ‘round his neck through the woods and into caves and into alien space crafts and all over this damnable mountainside and Fiddleford followed obediently at his heel. Stanford said jump and Fiddleford asked how high and should he do a little spin, too. And he wasn’t even getting rewarded for it, in fact more oft than not he got well kicked by some terrible creature, but he was just that well-trained.
He hated thinking of himself like this, thinking of Stanford like this. Hated the bitterness that was poisoning him from the inside out, hated the resentment that was infecting every one of their interactions, past and present, when before any word or glance from Stanford was enough to make his day. Hated especially that he was too weak to stop, to get in his car and leave, to preserve his dignity and his love for Ford, one-sided and restrained as it had always been, and his fondness for the good memories they’d shared. It would be kinder to the both of them then letting this carry on. But he couldn’t, he didn’t know how. It was pathetic.
It was pathetic on both their parts. It was pathetic that Stanford needed to rip a hole in dimensional spacetime because he was bullied as a kid and it was pathetic that Fiddleford was helping him even though he was starting to believe it might destroy the world because he wanted so badly to be near him.
This cabin was a prison and the machine in the basement was a timebomb, ticking away the days until everything that had built up in their silences and private pain exploded in a brilliant flash of catastrophe and consequence and all festered between them.