Work Text:
Some new nets, a few very large waterproof tarps, fishing lures, a packet of fountain pens, and a veritable lifetime’s worth of canned goods. The man at the counter rang up the items with good-natured curiosity.
“Lotsa supplies, huh? What for, if you don’t mind me askin’?”
Always with the questions. Ford may have been getting better at dealing with humans since he’s been back in this dimension, but sometimes he missed Dimension 89’/, where all inhabitants found it rude to speak to each other directly and communicated solely through elaborate snail mail systems. He gave the cashier what hopefully passed as a polite smile. “Just conducting research. My sibling and I will be heading up North soon, to spend a few months by the lake.”
The man whistled. “Fancy. What kinda research?”
Don’t say demonic three-eyed hellfish, don’t say demonic three-eyed hellfish - that tends to scare locals - “There are some unusual fish in the area, actually. We’re looking to study some.” Very good. Nailed it. Come across as strange, not outright bizarre.
“Ha!” The man laughed to himself. “How’d you get the missus to agree to a months-long fishing trip? I can’t even get mine to let me take the weekend!”
“Uh - no missus, would be a start.” Just like always, conversations with everyday people seem to deteriorate after a few sentences. Ford reached out to grab the paper bags full of his purchases, and willed the man to push them into his hands faster. What would Stan do? Somehow shrug the conversation off with charming ease, surely. They also probably wouldn’t have to think too hard about how to make small talk in a fucking supply store.
For what it’s worth, the man seemed a bit sheepish for assuming. “Oh! Well, there ya go, no one to stop ya!” He laughed another customer service laugh and passed the last bag to Ford. “You stay safe up there, now.”
“Uh, definitely. Thank you.”
And, since Ford had 12 PhDs and three decades of survival experience, he absolutely did not scurry out of the store like a beast being hunted.
Well. Maybe there was a little bit of scurrying.
He walked through the late winter chill to the hotel the two of them were staying in for the time being. The second he entered their room, he dropped off the groceries and sighed. “I swear, I’m going to have to make up a spouse.”
Stan, who had been lounging on one of the beds and reading a comic book, peered over the volume at their brother. “Why? This isn’t a Frankenstein situation, is it?”
“Setting aside your implication that Victor Frankenstein made his monster in order to give himself a husband, no, nothing like that.” Ford paused. “Although -”
“Please, Ford, I love ya an’ all, but I have seen enough undead things on our trip so far, and I don’t need to see you making out with one.”
“Wha - why would you ever think I would actually consider making a significant other?” He shrugged off his jacket and finally stopped melting in the heat of the broken hotel heating. “I was only about to suggest that a Frankenstein-esque lab assistant might quicken the pace of our research. No human brain, of course, that’s too ethically questionable.”
“Yeah, because a Franken-beast is much more reasonable,” Stan deadpanned.
“I’m glad you see it my way,” Ford said, attempting seriousness. It only lasted for a moment before they were both laughing.
“Really, though, what happened out there that made you wanna lie about havin’ a wife or somethin’? Thought you weren’t into that sort of stuff.” Stan let the comic fall shut and tossed it onto the bed.
“I’m not. And it’s nothing! Really, it’s nothing. It merely seems that every small-town cashier we meet is part of a super-agglomerative hive-mind beast that wants to know about a fictional wife that I’m apparently supposed to have.” He stopped in the middle of packing away cans of corn and green beans into their luggage. “What is it? Have social cues changed in the past thirty years? Do I somehow seem married? Did that invisible ring we found somehow make it onto my person? What finger would it even go on?”
Stan, now off the bed and in the process of starting up some mediocre coffee with the hotel-provided Keurig, snorted. “Ford, I think we’re just at the age now where people expect ya to be -'' and here they held up their hands and formed air quotes - “‘settled down,’ whatever that means.” They rolled their eyes and directed their attention to the coffee maker. “Y’know,” they muttered, almost to themself, “those garlic sauce cups from the pizza we got last night would fit perfectly in this stupid coffee thing.”
“Stanley?” Ford stared down at the half-packed provisions bag. The cans of food made it in there, atop the tarps. Half of the luggage bag was still empty, waiting for the rest of the supplies, but he stopped putting things away and just stood there listlessly. A creeping thought was making its way to the surface. He was so annoyed at the expectation that he would have a partner that he never stopped to think about if, on the other hand, Stan wanted that life for themself. That someday they wouldn't want to be on a boat with their brother anymore. “Do you want to settle down?”
“Whaddya mean?”
Ford looked back - Stan was standing beside the counter, watching the Keurig brew. One styrofoam cup was beneath the drip, and another one was waiting for its turn beside the machine. Was that - what was Stan holding a cup of garlic sauce for?
“What do you mean, what do I mean?”
“I mean, well, to me, this is it.” Stan gestured around them - the hotel room, the bags of luggage, his brother. “This is settling down.”
Ford tried not to let his face fall. Was his sibling compromising their own wishes? Did they actually want to do something else with their life eventually? “That sounds… sad.”
“Wha - how does that sound sad?”
“I mean - settling down traditionally comes with marriage. A stable income. A spouse.” Ford, frustrated, gathered the packaged netting up and started arranging it in the luggage bag. “I don’t know, maybe some pets or something.”
“Hey, I’ve had all of that and felt a lot less ‘settled’ than I do now.” Stan laughed. “Trust me. Raking in the dough at the Shack didn’t make life not feel like a shaky tightrope.”
“But - you don’t want to do more? To get married someday, or…?”
“No.” Stan swapped out the styrofoam coffee cups with more fervor than necessary. They gestured widely with the hand that held the garlic cup. “Do you?”
“No! I - I can’t imagine doing anything else with my time other than this, really.”
They pinched the bridge of their nose. “Then what are we arguing about, Ford?”
“I don’t know!” Ford threw up his hands. “I’ll finish putting these supplies away.”
“Fine, do that.”
He started to do what he said he would, but then his hands stopped, and he rubbed his face. That was stupid. Well, not stupid - no self-deprecating language, Ford, or Mabel would send another glitter bomb full of threatening compliments, as ae promised - but certainly not how his therapist would prefer him to handle things. What went wrong? A miscommunication, surely. “Wait, Stanley.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw his sibling pause in the middle of - oh - putting the garlic sauce in the Keurig. Well. Okay. “Yeah?” Stan said, cautiously.
Where did that conversation go wrong? Ford played it back.
Oh.
He chose his words carefully - something he was working on - and started slowly. “I didn’t mean to say that the way we live our lives is sad. It just… seemed like how the average person would consider it.” That wasn’t perfect, but he pushed forward. “As - I mean - people our age on this planet do typically have a long-term partner by now, or are actively seeking one. And I said what I did because I’m just worried that you possibly would rather be finding someone to make a home with, instead of continuing to do this. With me.”
When Mabel first told him what “aromantic” meant, it didn’t necessarily shake his worldview apart. He knew that human (and non-human) experiences were vast and extremely varied between each individual. “Aromantic” fit him in a way opposite his lifelong otherness, and made him feel a little less broken beyond the whole “spending life feeling like a freak and falling into a portal and having estranged relationships” part, and that was that, for a while. But he never stopped to consider the practical implications. He had been too busy with everything else to consider that the way he pictured his life unfolding before him was vastly different than most, and a bit less compatible with other people in his life. What was going to happen to Ford when eventually his sparse group of friends and family dispersed with families of their own? Moved on?
His parents were dead and couldn’t pester him about a wife and kids anymore, but that didn’t mean that the pressure was completely gone.
It was… incredible, being back home. But sometimes he felt out-of-place.
Across the room, standing in front of the counter, Stan… Stan laughed. It wasn’t directed at Ford, but that just made it all the more confusing.
“...Stanley?”
“Sorry, I’m not laughin’ at ya, I just -” Stan put a third styrofoam cup under the Keurig dispenser. “I dunno why you decided to finally do the travelin’ thing with me either.”
“We’ve talked about this -”
“Yeah, I know, ‘you value me,’ ‘listen to your therapist,’ yada yada. And I do! But it’s just funny to me, because I also wonder how you aren’t running off doing literally anything else. And if that fear sounds stupid to you comin’ from me, then clearly your fear doesn’t make sense either.”
“But you’re…” Ford waved his hand, trying desperately not to say you’re normal and I’m not. Because I’m aromantic, and you’re not.
“Ford, if you say I’m normal, I swear to god.”
Ford’s mouth flattened into a line. He shrugged. “But you are! You go on dates and had a wife once and have a normal conception of how one’s life should progress!”
“Hey, if that’s normal, I don’t wanna be ‘normal’. Who decides what settling down means to someone anyways?” Stan left the garlic abomination to pour into the cup and walked over to Ford. They put a hand on Ford’s shoulder. “To me, this is what my life is supposed to look like. I’m not settling and I’m not secretly wishing that we weren’t doin’ this anymore. Heck, if I die on an expedition -”
“Stanley!”
“ - if I die on an expedition, it would probably be the way I wanna go. Y’know. Second to dying comfortably around family.” They looked Ford in the eye. “So don’t go around thinkin’ you’re holding me back, or that you should be anything you’re not. I travel around with you ‘cause I want to. I’m happy and safe, and you’re happy and safe. So there.”
Ford must not have looked like he quite believed them.
“Just think on it, okay?” Stan drew back and returned to the Keurig. “Wanna try this disgusting garlicky liquid that just came out of the coffee machine?”
They both took a sip, because Ford was a strong believer of learning through experience. Stanley gagged, and then looked pensive. “Hey, this ain’t that bad.”
“Stanley. This is absolutely terrible.” He took another sip, for science, and then dry-heaved into the trash can.
In the middle of desperately chugging a small paper cup of water, Ford absently thought, maybe I should talk to my therapist.
His therapist was actually being extremely weird about this.
It was interesting, because she did seem to have a proper idea of the meaning of aromantic, but she was more hung up on the why than on Ford’s subsequent insecurities about his life and fears about holding his sibling back or losing them once they found something better to do with their time. She was asking a lot of questions that seemed irrelevant, but she was the therapist here, so Ford would put up with it, at least for a bit. After all, he was no shining pillar of coping mechanisms or mental health. And she had previously provided great advice on how to work on his insecurities and on developing feelings of control and safety.
“Could it possibly have something to do with the thirty years you spent in other dimensions?” She finally said, after asking a few questions about his aromanticism as if it were the core to some issue he had.
“I…” Could it be? Ford sat and wondered, peering at his therapist through the laptop screen, his hands digging slightly into the arms of his chair. He tried to remember if he ever related to a single romance movie, or felt the telltale signs of a crush - not only physical attraction - towards anyone in his high school or college career. But… he couldn't. It wasn’t just that he didn’t feel those things, it’s that he actually did not remember.
He purposefully let go of so many of his older memories, or never held onto them very well to begin with - remembering his youth was like sidestepping landmines, with Stan and their father and the inherent shame of being such an outsider. And after entering the portal, a memory would remind him of Stan or of Fiddleford - of his own mistakes and those of others - and he would push it away, unwilling to feel his anger or despair too intensely, intent on hunting Bill down and surviving another day. If he made himself remember, it would hurt too much. Ford had always been seeking, pushing forward, desperately grasping, away and afar from memories to be made.
The details of many events in his life, especially before college and during the portal, had been simplified down in memory. Spikes of despair or anger or hope, but a lack of structure. And no romance.
“Let me put it like this: did you ever feel anything akin to romantic feelings prior to the portal incident? For thirty years you were in a very insecure position. Emotion at that time was often dangerous, I remember you saying.”
A numbing thing, a survival mechanism. That… no, that didn’t sound right, in this situation. It sounded like something had been torn from him, which simply was not the case.
He relayed this to his therapist. She hummed, and wrote something down, and directed their attention to something else. Somehow, he left the session feeling like he missed a step on the stairs. Perhaps he said something wrong. Perhaps he was wrong.
Turned out that Stanley did not agree.
“It’s a valid concern! She was just trying to help,” Ford argued as he hefted a bag across the cabin threshold, finding himself defending his therapist. She had actually done a lot of good for him in the past, and it had been hard finding someone to whom he could even abstractly mention portals and demons and alternate dimensions in the first place.
As the two of them argued, they were carrying their luggage and supplies into the cabin that they would be inhabiting for a couple of months. Along with the demonic three-eyed hellfish that were said to populate the lake, there also seemed to be some anomalies that made the surrounding forest their home. However, Ford’s mind was not on the anomalies at the moment.
“No it’s not!” Stanley retorted. They tugged a similar luggage bag into the cabin and pulled the door shut. “When someone opens up to me about something they’re nervous about sharing, like, I dunno, being some flavor of queer and feeling really bad about it, I don’t immediately say, ‘Hmm, could this have anything to do with being sealed away from home and forced to survive with nothing but your wits for thirty years?’” They dropped off a knapsack beside their luggage bag with a sigh of exertion. “I think that would numb all of your emotions, not just your lovey-dovey ones.”
“I did have a difficult time processing my feelings at first… but I’m much better at it now,” Ford mused. “Perhaps… Perhaps you have a point. Why would I regain all of my other emotional faculties, but not romantic affection?”
“Exactly. And besides, who cares about the ‘why’?”
As a scientist, Ford was immediately affronted, and he had half a mind to say so. The why of anything was extremely important! His indignation apparently showed, though, because Stan immediately spoke before Ford could actually say anything.
“Hey, don’t start that shit with me.” They pointed a finger at him as they walked further into the cabin to stock what little perishables they had in the fridge. “I’m serious. Some stuff, surprisingly, doesn’t need a ‘why’. Wanna know how I know?”
Stan would tell him anyways, Ford knew. He rolled his eyes fondly though Stan couldn’t see it. “Yes, sure, tell me.”
His sibling extricated themself from the bowels of the fridge and shut the door. They turned around to lean against it with arms crossed. “‘Cause I did the same thing about bein’ queer. When I was younger, I tried to make sense of why I’d be bi. All those theories people had when we were kids - gays not having good father figures, good mother figures, good teachers, whatever - I went through them all. Eventually I stopped worrying about that, but it started all over again when I realized I wasn’t a guy.”
Quietly, Ford entered the kitchen space and leaned on the counter across from Stan. He might not be the most emotionally competent, still, but he had the self-awareness to at least be attentive for this conversation.
Stan looked away. “I thought, is this some kinda plea for attention? Am I just confused about my sexuality again? Was I running away from Dad’s strict roles and heading too far in the other direction? An’ I don’t think any of those are true, but I’ve honestly learned that I just need to let that shit go. ‘Cause all that matters is that right now, being seen as a guy makes me unhappy. Dressing a certain way and being seen a certain way makes me happy. D’ya get it?”
Ford slowly nodded. “Yes. I… I think I do.”
“An’ don’t you go thinking that doesn’t apply to you either. It does. What makes you happy, Ford?”
“Um…” He had to think for a second, recall his emotions, which he was getting better at doing over time. “Seeing the kids. Sailing with you. Researching new specimens.”
“So then why would other stuff matter?”
“Because -” Ford sputtered. He threw his hands up. “Because I care about you, Stanley. I don’t want to keep you here if you had a different image for your life. But also because… I worry that once my friends and family find something that makes them happier, they won’t have as much time for me.” It was possibly one of the most vulnerable things he’d ever said. He shut his jaw with a click of his teeth, and watched Stanley tensely. “That - that was ridiculous, forget about it.”
And then Stan was hugging him.
Oh.
He slowly brought his arms around his sibling in return. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry -
Stan squeezed him tight, and said, “Even if I did somehow end up getting with the coolest guy or gal around, I’ll always make time for you, you stupid idiot.” They both stood there for a few moments. Eventually, Stanley pulled away. “Besides, I ain’t lookin’ for romance in my life anymore. I just wanna sail around with my brother and punch stupid monsters in the face.” Then they feigned a look of disgust and said, “Now, no more hugging and being vulnerable, I’m reaching my goddamn limit here.”
“Yes, familial relations, how disgusting,” Ford smiled, and laughed at Stan’s fake gagging. No matter what they said, Stan would never be able to convince anyone that they weren’t a family person at heart.
Stanley then insisted on cooking for the both of them once they got all their supplies indoors - ostensibly because Ford would burn dinner otherwise, but he recognized a kind gesture from Stan when he saw one. They both ate good greasy food and played cards and chatted about how to start research on the lake species tomorrow, and Ford knew that he had nothing at all to worry about.
Stan wasn’t going anywhere. Ford didn’t have to go anywhere. And he would tell himself that until he believed it without a second thought.
They were on their third round of Spades when Ford threw down a card and told Stanley, “Thank you.”
Stan threw their own card on top and winced as they took another bag. “For what? Not cheating at Spades?”
“No, you knucklehead. For reassuring me earlier.” Stan had thrown down another card, and Ford smirked as he placed a lower Hearts card on top, forcing his sibling to take the stack again. “Although it does feel extremely fulfilling to be better than you at something that isn’t DD&MD.”
“Yeah, Spades ain’t my strong suit. Poker’s my element.” They put down a low card this time. “An’ course. No matter what our lives end up looking like in the future, I will visit you so damn often you’ll be beggin’ me to leave ya alone.”
Ford put down a higher card in return, and took the stack. He smiled. “Same to you, Stanley. Same to you.”