A Cat Named Nikola Tesla

by Inkyglob (starfreak23)

Summary:

When Stan and Ford meet face to face for the first time in nearly a decade, Ford tells his brother that he is the only person in the world he can trust... to never see him ever again. After his brother is sucked into another dimension with Lord knows what kind of time or odds to get back, Stanley takes it upon himself to try and fix the machine and see if he can possibly get his brother back. He is alone in his brother's shack in the woods with no help, no resources, and no one to turn to-- except possibly an unexpected friend to help him begin a journey that will take thirty years to reach the end.

This piece follows Stanley in the days after Ford's disappearance, alone in the shack with nothing but his thoughts, a new friend, and a slowly festering burn on his right shoulder. Memories of childhood, flashbacks, and self deprecation take him on a journey that only he can go on.

Notes:

For Meg: Everyone deserves a little fluff, even if its after swimming through an ocean of Angst

 

Content Warning: This man HATES himself, and the narration is VERY much swayed by that fact.

Chapter 1: Lost and Found

“A punched hole within a weak spot in our dimension.”

The words echoed in Stan’s mind like the sound of shattering glass in a near empty house. He was shaking. His eyes had gone blurry the moment the power had drained from the portal, stumbling over himself to flip that fucking lever— it had taken Ford away when flipped forwards— wouldn’t it spit him out if it was reversed?

It had to.

It had to.

Eventually he’d fallen to his knees, his voice hoarse from screaming like a lost child, crying his brother’s name like the first night he’d been without him.

Stanford-

Oh, Stanford I’m sorry.

I’ve failed you again.

He had no more tears left to shed, his eyes glued open and unfocused on the raw dirt floor of this fucking cave his brother had somehow bored into the ground beneath his stupid house. His stupid house in this stupid state with all this stupid fucking snow— his eyes burned from the cold air that had sunk all the way to the bottom of the subbasement, but he hadn’t the will nor the energy or care to even blink.

He’d let his eyes dry out to raisins if he could have his brother back.

He would voluntarily go deaf, blind, and mute for the rest of his life, he would give up taste and touch and smell if it meant he was assured that Ford would be safe and happy again.

He’d looked like hell.

He’d looked worse than Stan, and Stanley had been living out of a car for at least three days, making the journey up to Oregon and sacrificing the heat his gas could give him for the mileage on spare change.

Everything was a blur, but not Ford. His face, his voice— his eyes— everything would forever remain crystal clear in the man’s memory. They hadn’t seen each other in a very long time, but gone was the clean, pressed boy he’d remembered. Ford’s clean shaven cheeks, his fluffy hair, his ironed clothes were all gone. His brother looked like a completely different person.

The dark circles that sunk his eyes into his skull, the sallow cheeks of a man desperately in need of a meal, the crusted marks of dried blood that had remained on his eyelashes no matter how many times he compulsively rubbed it away, none of it would ever fade from Stan’s memory, not until he was able to retrieve the only one of the two of them worth a damn from the pit of fucking hell he’d seemingly sent him to.

“A punched hole within a weak spot in our dimension,” Ford had confidently said, his arm pointing toward the big hunk of triangular bullshit that had taken him away. “I created it to unlock the mysteries of the universe. But it could just as easily be harnessed for terrible destruction. That’s why I shut it down and hid my journals, which explain how to operate it.”

It was all fucking Greek to him— which being an Italian Jew from New Jersey, while he could struggle through a little bit of Yiddish for his mother and he understood when Nona Pines was calling him an idiot, Greek was very far off the menu.

He was so tired, he had been trying so hard not to zone out as his brother spoke, not because he didn’t find it important but because he had skipped lunch for the last two days for one last tank of gas, there had been too many cops around his last stop to siphon off someone else. His gut burned and his head swam, but everything that came out of Ford’s mouth was gospel, even if he had no hope of understanding it. There was nothing more important, nothing more worthy of his struggle for attention than whatever it was his brother needed him for.

What else would would make him reach out so urgently after almost 10 years?

What else but divine intervention?

Stan had stopped believing in God when the only good things in his life had turned his back on him. He’d stopped going to temple, he’d never really eaten kosher— but his life had definitely become something much much colder as he turned himself away from the holidays of togetherness he’d grown up with.

“There’s only one journal left. And you are the only person I can trust to take it.” Ford’s voice had nearly broken in stress as he’d handed a book over to his twin, Stan taking it in his hands and looking over the cover. It was— sweet Moses what had happened to his perfect, straight laced twin brother?

This fucking thing looked like it had been mauled by a bear, the book cloth that covered the binding was torn in several places, worn thin enough to feel less like canvas and more like paper than it should for a book of this quality. The top right corner of the front cover was torn clean off, leaving the hard cardboard base of the front flap bare and leaving the first page open to the elements, missing one of four gilded corner presses. On the cover, Ford had traced a perfect replica of his own six fingered hand onto foil and carefully laid it on the maroon cloth to signify it as his own.

This was his life’s work.

It looked like garbage.

For never mistreated his things. The man was a robot, a little too obsessive about it as they got older. They’d both been goofballs as kids, shoving things into Ford’s rucksack and being kids about the things they owned, but as they’d gotten older Stanford had been anal about his things, his journals and books specifically.

What had happened to him that so much could change? In the near decade it had been since they’d seen each other last, what could have possibly happened to make his brother change so drastically? He’d stopped taking care of himself, he’d stopped taking care of his things; the paranoia that followed him like a shadow loomed larger and larger with every passing moment that Stan had witnessed him. What could have possibly made him extend the olive branch after all this time, after years of his mother trying so hard to reconnect them?

His brother had said the word trust. The only person he could trust. Even after all this time. He’d traveled on a moment’s notice to stand in front of him, listening to him talk about his project, to be the guy that Stanford depended on. One more time.

Stan’s eyes came up to meet his brother’s, the same honeyed brown that stared back at him in gas station mirrors, Ford’s brows furrowed in deep concern as he spoke. “I have something to ask of you: remember our plans to sail around the world on a boat?”

Fuck. He remembered. It was time.

Maybe he had struggled enough. Maybe this was the universe, or God, or something had decided he had suffered enough. Maybe whatever deadbeat scam artist in the sky that controlled his life had finally pulled a good hand from the card deck of life— sacrificed that one last ace up his sleeve for a chance to finally cash out.

He smiled.

Ford didn’t. “Take this book, get on a boat, and sail as far away as ya can! To the edge of the Earth!” He turned his back on his twin, his hands behind his back, staring up at the glowing blue sigils like a man who was afraid he’d found something bigger than himself. “Bury it where no one can find it!”

So that had been it, huh? He’d been summoned as a garbage man. He’d been knocked down from twin, to trouble, to trash collector.

He had done a lot in his life, he’d stolen, lied, cheated, gambled, but he had never been disposal. He had also wronged his brother, he’d known that more intimately than anyone— who could possibly understand being forcibly ripped from the other half of their own soul? But, he had never once been reduced to a garbage man.

He felt his blood begin to boil, his brother’s back to him, his lip curling into a snarl as Ford asked the trash to take itself out.

The rest had been a blur.

His shoulder burned but it was far away, floaty, distant. His vision was blurry from pain, but it was nothing new from when he’d stopped wearing glasses at 14.

How long could he lay there? Hours? Days? Weeks?

How long would it take him to die?

Fratricidal maniac that he was, he would deserve it.

Finally there was water in his eyes again, but only welling to leak into the dirt and smear his face with mud, bringing the filth of his soul to the surface.

This wasn’t divine intervention, it was divine punishment.

He was nothing but the extra Stan, named only for his father’s failure of imagination, worth one dollar for each family member that came before him. He was the most painful 15 minutes of his mother’s life, the bane of his father’s existence, and the scourge of 48 out of 50 states.

Now he was a brother killer too.

He rolled onto his back finally, his arm and leg having gone numb long ago, gritting his teeth to stifle a scream of pain as singed flesh mixed blood and dirt into an open wound. Ford’s last scream of his name felt deafening, echoing in the empty fucking cavern of his skull until he couldn’t even hear the sound of his own breathing in the silence.

His head turned and he caught the shimmer of something catching the dim light on the ground, angled just at the position where it would bother the blurriness of his eyes. He blinked fast, three times in succession to clear the tears, as if it would make the light go away, but all it did was make it worse.

With a groan he reached out to touch the object, his fingertips the only thing close enough to make contact with something cold and painfully familiar.

He brought Ford’s glasses to his face, close enough to see it even with the pain and strain he suffered through. Horn rim, gilded accents, gold metal wire— the same color of his father’s chain, the same color of the crown he had pulled in Columbia to pay for cigarettes in jail.

His hand fell to his chest, letting the glasses rest against his heart, feeling the thrum of his heart and the raise and fall of his chest against cold, dead metal.

“A punched hole within a weak spot in our dimension.” Ford had said, the words whispered just above the scream now in his mind. Over and over playing that phrase in his mind. A hole. A portal. A doorway.

Stan blinked again, trying to focus his eyes on the chiseled stone ceiling, the weight of his brother’s spectacles like an anvil. If a portal was a doorway, then he knew what it was. A doorway was a hole that connected two places. A connection— a-

A connection that went both ways.

He shot upwards, clutching the glasses to his chest and staring at the door he had come from, the glowing sigil that had burned his shoulder an orange beacon into the dim of the room ahead. The portal, shut off, was a closed door; the broken lever was a jammed door handle. He needed to find a new way to open the door, that way Ford could walk back through.

If Stanley Caryn Pines died trying, he would open that door.

If Ford never spoke to him again, it would simply be a blessing to know he was alive to make the decision.

He scrambled to his feet and grabbed that shitty, tattered book. He’d said the other books were hidden, right? First thing needed to be going to hunt for them.

 

---

 

Almost $200. It had literally taken his blood, sweat, and tears to pack all of his shit into his car in the middle of bum-fuck New Mexico to drive up to where he’d been summoned to in Oregon.

He’d never been the strongest at math, but if there was one calculation he could always do off the top of his head was anything concerning money, and that included approximately how many times he’d have to fill his tank to get somewhere. For nearly the last decade of his life, his car had been the only thing he knew he could trust in and he had made sure that he knew exactly how to give back to her. He’d learned how to repair and clean her engine, how to use random household items to maintain her when she needed a tune up or a dent fixed, and he made sure that even if money was tight, she never ran on fumes.

There had been a few places where he had needed to stop on the way up the West Coast, knowing that he had to choose between a tank of gas and an actual meal— and a meal wouldn’t move him closer to his brother’s call. He’d been able to get around that in a few cases by siphoning gas out of the tank of some bum, pulling up to a bar in the early hours of the morning to sneak a tube into the gas tank of some poor schmuck who probably should not have been driving in the first place.

He’d done the same at a motel and had taken the last few ounces of fuel out of some cheating husband’s getaway car, washing the taste of gasoline out of his mouth with the end of a stale beer as he watched the aftermath of the crime. The poor asshole has crawled into his parked car through a broken window and listened to his engine turn over and sputter— but he didn’t feel as bad as he could have because he’d left his date half naked herself to run in the opposite direction as his wife chased him. He’d ended up with a free tank of gas and a night’s worth of entertainment.

He’d planned on pulling the same trick around Salt Lake city so that he could convince himself that the burger he’d stopped to scarf down hadn’t been a superfluous purchase, but he’d pulled into the gas station on empty and there had been some random cop that was mad dogging him the entire time he’d been there. Fuck Utah. He’d had to pay $1.50 a gallon on gas. Brought his average tank from about twenty-six bucks to nearly thirty-two.

Fuck Utah.

Fuck Salt Lake City.

He’d also frozen his ass off sleeping in his car for two days crawling his sorry ass North because Ford had asked for his help. Twenty-two hours of driving, almost seven full tanks of gas, one near arrest, and an empty stomach later had not been what he should have probably met his brother on.

That incident was bound to go wrong anyways even under the best of conditions.

It had taken him another day to manage to eat at all after Ford had been sucked away from him, too nauseous from malnutrition to focus on his tears, but also too dizzy from the tears to focus on his stomach.

Ford had almost nothing in the way of food in the first place. He’d wandered from the basement lab and had stared at the barely stocked, minuscule kitchen, and had initially walked right back out again when his stomach reached up to his throat and squeezed. It didn’t feel fair of him to eat his brother’s food, he hadn’t shown up and helped, or saved the day— he’d come and made his presence known and had made the whole situation worse. He’d broken the thing that Ford had wanted to keep away from the world, sure, but he’d broken it with Ford on the wrong side.

He’d barely found anything normal in the house either, finding lab space upon lab space instead of useful rooms like a living room. The house only had one bathroom on the ground floor and it was so far embedded into the depths of the house, that it was easier to walk down the stairs to where he’d found a room to bunk in.

It felt like it was missing basic necessities overall, but Stan had felt too guilty about using anything in the house to try and pay attention long enough to catalog what might have been missing. The only thing he did have the forethought to scan was the kitchen when he finally couldn’t fight his stomach anymore. It felt barren, like his brother hadn’t cared enough about himself to do a proper grocery shopping after he’d eaten his way out of his fresh items. That, or he was so focused on whatever that science doohickey from hell was in the basement that he had stopped caring about his quality of life, and Stan wasn’t sure which thought made him more sad.

He’d stared at the collection of miscellaneous cans, counting their number and knowing their supply was limited and probably had been saved for this exact emergency, and he struggled at the thought of eating. He didn’t deserve to eat his brother’s food, even the stuff he’d left for last.

Stanley sighed and felt his already tight stomach shrink and roil, protesting it’s own emptiness. He could survive on eating only every other day, right? He needed to make the food last after all, and if he could get Ford back soon, then he wanted to make as little of a dent in his supplies as possible.

He grabbed something random, which turned out to be chicken— thank goodness it was protein but canned chicken? Really Ford? No matter. He’d scarfed it down half warmed with a fork straight out of the can, pushing down the thoughts in his head screaming at him to spit it all up.

He didn’t have time to focus on his emotions. He needed to find the books his brother had mentioned hiding so that he had all the information he needed to get the man back. There was at least one page revealing their locations in halfhearted clues scribbled in the back like an afterthought. The journal he’d been given was shredded half to shit and mostly illegible towards the end if it’s pages, but he’d gotten what he could assume was a clue from the chicken scratch Ford had left him.

He’d come home defeated, found that downstairs room with the couch in it, curled up and cried himself into unconsciousness, not wanting to even postulate a dream. The next morning had been the same, wearing the same clothes, eyeing a can of chicken but deciding against it until his body really needed it again, and set off in several inches of snow to search and find some sort of inkling of where these stupid books could be.

The same the next day.

And the next.

On the fourth day he’d rummaged around and found a shovel— half broken thing that seemed to have some sort of green goo on it that glowed if he walked under the right kind of shadow. He’d assumed it was radioactive, or maybe some sort of… Frankenstein goop? But he’d had shit to do, he wasn’t invested in figuring out what corpses his brother had raised and fucking danced with while using this shovel—

Though that uh- Evil Dead movie with the Campbell guy that came out a year or so prior wasn’t half bad, maybe he could catch it again on the tube when all of this bullshit was over. Good thing he hadn’t found the shovel in a work shed, right?

After about a week of digging various holes in the forest any time he felt like a tree looked weird enough to be a sign he was starting to loose hope, dragging the shovel behind him as he dragged his feet back to his brother’s shack, shivering and wet from falling into some half melted snow. What was it about this place, anyways? Its cold, and its hot, and its cold, and its hot, then theirs fucking birds falling out of the sky like fucking flying doesn’t work, so you dodge and end up in the half melted still cold snow because it was warmer this morning which makes no fucking sense—

Whatever. Whatever he was cold and sniffling and miserable as he dragged his feet in the snow, the shit on his shoulder burning and spreading pain like an infection from dirt and grime and the fact that he was actively ignoring it. At least if it got infected either it would keep him warm, or he’d die, right?

A win-win? Yes? No?

Tough crowd, the inside of his head. Not a damn bastard laughed.

This place was going to drive him nuts— just white with trees as far as the eye could see, walking further and further away from the town itself knowing his brother wouldn’t have risked hiding his stupid powerful books anywhere near where the populace could run into it.

Every step crunched beneath his feet and sank him up to his knees, the effort to walk becoming more and more with every sliding crunch of ice crystals. He hated it more with every slight movement, feeling weighed down and pulled backwards.

Fwumph

Now that was a familiar sound. He smiled softly to himself and closed his eyes just for a moment. Snow in New Jersey didn’t get like this. Not high banks and tripping hazards and “Oh shit, I could drown in powder puff” snow, but when it did there was always someone who fell in. Caryn loved her sons, sometimes too much for the swashbuckling, element weathering twins— two boys who imagined themselves as pirates or arctic adventurers were not incredibly keen on being so wrapped up they looked like bubble-wrapped balloons hobbling down the street.

They’d hated it.

Crampelter had had a field day, chasing the two of them down the road, the scarf that covered all the way up to Ford’s pink, dripping nose fogging up his glasses and making it even harder for them to escape, their little legs only able to go so far when wearing two or three pairs of pants, the shitty patchwork gloves they wore linked together so Stan could drag his twin away from their bullies, away from the cold. They moved in the closest thing they had to synchronicity until-

Fwumph

One or the other of them would fall face or ass first into a snow drift, probably carrying the other one with them. One time Ford fell and instead of falling into a snow drift, he’d fallen onto the road and skidded forward faster than Stan, Crampelter, or the rest of his goons could follow. All of them had frozen and watched Ford, glasses askew, mouth open in shock yet half hidden by his scarf, slide on the half frozen sidewalk about 20 feet and spin into a fire hydrant.

Thus their penguin sledding game had been born, a Fwumph and a Skkkkt as they would fall forward and propel themselves across any mostly frozen surface, sacrificing a little of their dignity for fast travel, using their imaginations to picture racing penguins on the ice in a frozen tundra skirting around glaciers and icebergs instead of cabbage stall in front of Greenburg’s. They’d been two intrepid adventurers, escaping bullies and their responsibilities by losing themselves in hypothetical adventures… adventures that should have come true.

They’d had a shot. They were on track to becoming the greatest adventurers the world had ever seen— just a pair of brothers uncovering the uncharted and bringing fortune and glory home to their shit little town on the beach. They would unearth terra incognita, turn myth into truth and legend into fact, nothing was going to stand in their way.

It could have been them against the world. They had been so fucking close but if it hadn’t been for that stupid—

No.

No, it was his fault, wasn’t it?

He’d been… so afraid. Afraid of losing his brother, afraid of being stuck in Glass Shard, afraid of having to stay alone with Da-

Fwumph

The sound brought him back into the real world, his head sliding back into the present moment as he finally turned around. This was the 3rd time he’d heard the same noise, a thing falling into a snow drift, and he couldn’t be reckless enough not to think about whether or not he was being followed.

You stupid, reckless sonova bitch, Stanley. God forbid Rico send his goons to follow you and it took a few days for them to cope with the snow. God forbid they kill you and your brother gets stuck in purgatory or wherever Star Trek alternate universe he found himself in.

Stanley-with-a-goatee was probably gloating over the body of his Stanford in whatever alternate universe his brother had ended up in as he himself stood frozen, scanning the horizon for any sort of movement or any other colors among the ashen trunks of trees and the pure powder-puff snow.

He took two tentative steps to gauge the sound of his footsteps, two very distinct crunch crunch sounds, very different to the fwumph that he’d noticed.

He spun around again, looking specifically for men.

Two men.

Sanchez and Barnaby, Rico’s two watchdogs. They followed him around like goons in a cartoon, the short and fat henchmen that was always with the tall and thin henchman. He’d made his deal and breached it, he’d screwed his own priorities, and now he knew they would be out to get him.

When you told a drug lord you had a plan to turn three thousand into thirty thousand in the span of a few months, after the end of that estimated time most people expected to see at least some results— rather than having the subject of their loaning digging random holes in the snow several states away.

He wouldn’t see Barnaby’s blonde hair in the snow, but he wouldn’t be able to hide behind a tree, being so stout. He would defiantly be able to see Sanchez’s caramel skin, but the shade might blend in with a tree and get lost— they would only be identifiable together.

Fwumph

This time, it was far too close for comfort. He let his hand shoot backwards, slipping under his red jacket and hissing lowly as the fabric irritated the already inflamed skin of whatever burn he’d earned and neglected. He let his hand tuck in to the back of the jacket, reaching for a nonexistent gun hidden in the waistband of his jeans.

“Alright, boys. You show me you ain’t got nothin’ n’ I’ll pretend I don’t either.” He threatened, listening as the sound echoed off the snow and into the canopy of dormant deciduous trees.

Suddenly a memory that he hadn’t thought of in years slid right between his eyes and settled on his tongue. It had been much easier for both of them when they’d been really young, especially before Stan had started his cigarette habit towards the end of high school— but when the boys were so young that all it took was a moment to make them identical, they’d decided to learn to mimic each other’s voices. It got them out of so much trouble, if they could hide their hands, they could swap voices and defend themselves or the other until they could be reunited and figure out the situation with two brains rather than one.

They’d nearly gotten their asses whooped for it on more than one occasion too.

The voice slid from his mouth before his heart could react, his vocal chords still able to do a perfect imitation of his brother’s voice “Stanley, who’s there?” to which he responded in his own “Pro’lly nothin’, Sixer, you go back to the house.”

Even in his fantasies, in his desperate attempts to save his own skin, he took on the protectorate role. Years of sleeping in seedy motels and in the back of his fucking car, he still dreamt of coming to his brother’s rescue. He was the brawn to Ford’s brain, the fighter who stood in front of the strategist, and now he had been the one to put his brother in this mess.

His eyes welled up with tears, the hand pretending to hold a pistol fisting behind his back and digging nails into the meat of his hand.

Fwumph

He spun around with a growl, tears flying off his face only to notice a hole in the snow. A hole in the snow with a series of holes of approximately the same size trailing before it, sometimes overlapping with the places his feet had disturbed the calf deep snowdrifts he was walking through. The trail ended about two feet behind him with no real source, no person to cause it, and nothing he could have done to make something fall behind him so uniformly.

Something was following him and it wasn’t a person.

He made a face, distracted now from his self pity and loathing, all focus honing in on this series of holes and what might have caused it. He approached carefully with a soft crunching of snow as his feet sunk back into the divots he had created to approach the creator, stopping about halfway and leaning forward to peer down his nose in case he needed to dive backwards.

“Hello?”

The thing in the snowdrift was… orange. Orange and covered with soot. It was mottled and nasty and- Stanley’s brows furrowed in thought. Mottled? That- was fur.

“Rroow-” Came the weakest mewl muffled from the snow.

“Holy shit, you’re a cat.” He whispered, taking another step forward and leaning into the snowdrift to see what it was.

From what he could see it was a tortoiseshell cat, fur wet and matted, shivering like a leaf in the wind in November, buried over it’s head in snow. It hadn’t made any noises until he’d asked it to, and it had answered him weakly from where it’s face was buried in snow. He could see it was trying to stand back up, but the cat in the cat shaped hole was losing strength, struggling to stand, shaking not only lie it was cold, but like it’s muscles were giving out. It must have been traversing the large banks of snow by mustering the strength to jump forward over and over again, explaining the sound of a body falling into snow.

Stan stood frozen, looking down at the pathetic creature with panic, less scared for himself and more because he had no idea what to do. Would it try to maul him if he picked it up? If he picked it up would it like— I dunno, immediately die?

His thoughts were racing, his heart pounding for a moment as if he had actually found Rico’s goons hiding among the trees.

“Mrrp?” The cat’s call was quiet, ending upwards in a question as if it was also calling ‘Hello?’ into the hole.

Munch.

He had to do it for Munch.

When Stanley and Stanford had been around 6, Caryn Pines had fallen victim to the Universal Cat Distribution System. A large white cat— probably a Maine Coon mix, had followed her home after climbing itself out of a dumpster. The thing smelled rank, long pale fur matted down in patches eyes that never quite focused, one bum leg that always caused it to stumble or limp. They never figured out how old it has been, but he had never been young even though he lived far longer than he was supposed to have. Caryn came home with what looked like a pile of garbage and had disappeared into their bathroom with an electric razor from the pawn shop downstairs.

Dad had been completely against it, banging on the door and growling at her that she was not going to force this thing on him— but he always quieted when she opened the door and stood up to her full height, looking down her regal, Russian-royalty nose at him. Even though he was at least half a foot taller than her, even when she was in heels, he could never say no to her when she hardened or softened with him. Filbrick Pines was a stoic, sometimes unreasonable man, but Caryn had the power to tame him into putty…. at least sometimes.

She’d come back out of the bathroom with a fat blob of flesh with a fluffy white head, opened a can of tuna and dumped it on a plate. This thing was a Pines now, and when mother decreed it, so it became.

Ford, who even very young had been a voracious reader, had giggled at the fat blob of naked flesh and had called him a homunculus, waving his copy of “The Modern Prometheus” in his hand as he explained to his mother what the association had been.

Stan knew Frankenstein from the movies, Boris Karloff stumbling around in makeup, moaning and groaning and scaring the shit out of everyone in the theater but the two twins who had eagerly snuck into the rerun. He hadn’t really understood what a homunculus was, and even then he’d always seen ol’ Frankie as a golem like he’d learned about from the Rabbi in temple.

In the same vein of thought, he’d suggested Golem for the cat’s name, but dad had shot that down quickly. Ford had won out with Homonculous, probably because it didn’t sound too close to the story from the Talmud, and Stan had agreed so long a he could shorten the name to Munch. Homonculous became his full name, the name screamed through the house when Munch knocked something over, but Munch stuck.

He was really Caryn’s cat, sitting with her at her table and helping her draw tarot, keeping her husband away from things she brought into the house unless she explicitly gave him the go ahead, and acting as a pseudo-babysitter for the boys. Literally. Munch laid across their laps so they couldn’t get up and move because he’d been a fat fuck from minute one.

He’d loved that stupid cat. So had Ford. He had been their baby as much as they had been his, and he’d survived for much much longer than he probably should have. Ma had adored her lil’ Munchy Munchkin up until he’d passed a year or so after he and Ford had moved away.

Munch had stayed alive long enough to see his twins safely out of the house.

Maybe—

Stan reached into the hole with his own half frozen hands and pulled the thing from it’s trap in the embankment, unzipping his jacket and stuffing it inside, zipping it back up again. He hissed as the frozen thing made contact with his skin, pressing it’s belly to his torso for skin-to-skin heat transference, wrapping his arms around his middle to keep it secure as he began to march home faster than he had before.

“Shit— you’re frozen solid.” He whispered, worry creeping into his voice and coloring his already scratchy tone with concern.

It took a minute or so for the thing to begin to thaw, but once it did the motor in it’s chest started up. He remembered hearing from a vet once that sometimes cats purred less out of happiness and more to self soothe, and he assumed that’s what this one was doing. It was scared, it felt sick, it was so cold, it needed that little extra push off comfort.

And, it felt far too thin. It hadn’t looked it from above, but feeling it against his chest, he could tell this animal had been without for a while, which spurred him closer to home. Ford would have known what to do, he just had to guess.

He closed the door behind him but didn’t drop the animal, making a beeline thought he cold log cabin to the basement where he’d made his camp, sleeping on the couch he had come to realize Ford had made his bed. When he’d first allowed himself to explore, he’d found a bedroom upstairs and had decided to avoid it, wanting to respect his brother’s privacy and leave his stuff alone— he’d ended up in the basement because it was the only other room with a seat big enough for him to use as a bed. After a few days, he’d realized that he’d screwed up, that he’d been sleeping in Ford’s room anyways, and he took it as a sign not to leave just yet.

There was still some logs left next to the fireplace, he’d refused to use it in case the whole portal thing had been some sort of malnutrition hallucination and Ford walked in through the front door demanding to know how Stanley had seemingly broken in to his house. He had wanted to make as little of a ripple in his twin’s life as he could, now that he knew his presence was not actually welcome. Why make things worse than they already were? But, given the circumstance, the guy couldn’t be mad.

Maybe this guy was sent by Munch, who knows.

After the fire was stoked, starting to spread and warm the room, Stanley had slowly unwrapped the cat, stripped himself of his jacket to lay it a few feet away from the fire, and let the cat curl up on the fabric so that it could warm better, sitting close himself so he could also de-thaw from where he’d begun to shiver.

The cat wasn’t a tortie after all, more like a calico with tortie spots? A— Tortico? There had to be a name for it, but he decided he wasn’t smart enough to really think about it. He had a white triangle around a little pink nose and a little thin line of white guiding up his snout as if splitting his face in half. His back was the mottled tortoiseshell pattern, but his stomach was white, as well as four matching tube socks on each leg and a tube of white in the middle off his tail. He’d obviously been in a fight too, his ear was missing a chunk that was definitely not to tell that he’d been neutered, and one of his eyes seemed cloudy from an injury.

He couldn’t even tell if the thing was going to make it, his eyes stared back so… lifelessly as he rolled onto his side, half lidded and exhausted. His fur was really patchy, like he was in the early stages of mange or something, but his ears hadn’t gotten bumpy and his face wasn’t patchy yet, so there was a chance it was malnutrition, or possibly irritation from fleas.

And he could see the fleas. He could feel the fleas. He now had fleas. Maybe they were dead, though— it had been super cold. He would have to bathe it before he could let it run around the house, but first it needed to eat.

Stanley marched up the stars, scratching at the psychosomatic feeling of fleas on his chest, and made his way into the kitchen sneakily as if someone was going to catch him. He peeked around the corner into the kitchen and swallowed, feeling his own near empty stomach screech up at him in desperation. He’d avoided his brother’s food as much as he could. He wouldn’t steal from Ford, he would only eat what he needed to survive, but now survival was for himself and another.

He sighed, finding a can of tuna in the pantry and looking at it hungerly. If Ford… if he couldn’t find the other journals, or get that thing in the basement to spit him out in the next day or so, he would have to start taking advantage of the food and the firewood it just— it felt too much like giving up for now.

With his half frozen hands, it took a minute or so for him to undo the twisting little tie that held the bread closed, and he picked off some little bits of green off two pieces so that he could make his half a can more filling, since he felt guilty grabbing two in one go. He smeared half of the tuna can between the slices of bread and scarfed it down while looking for a spoon to scoop the rest of the can onto a plate, carrying it down stairs and into the now warm bedroom.

Couchroom? Whatever.

He hadn’t even entered the room yet when the cat was wobbling upright, head sniffing the air and crying out “Mmrrrrp! M-rroww” Over and over, like the two sounds were equivalent to words.

“Hey woah-” Stanley smiled softly, sadness blossoming in his chest as he recognized that same desperation for food. “Alright alright, calm down. You’re getting dinner in bed.”

He walked over to his jacket on the ground and set the plate beside it, the cat looking up with one milky eye and one pale yellow eye, shaking like he could call at any moment. There was a second of consideration— this large two legged creature had plucked it from its journey to wherever and SEEMED benevolent, but could anyone ever be so sure?

It seemed to weigh its options, but the need for food outweighed the need for caution and it dug into the plate.

Stan laughed genuinely “Hot Belgian Waffles! Slow down, kiddo, you’ll barf!”

The cat didn’t understand him, nor did he expect it too. He sat cross legged on the floor beside it, using side of the chair beside the mantle as a backrest rather than a chair. His burn hissed with pain as it rubbed up against the fabric, and the cry he let out scared the crap out of the little thing in front of him, to which he weakly apologized as he re-positioned.

Damn, this thing was just like him, wasn’t it?

Had he had a home? Head he once had owners who loved him and a bed in front of a roaring fire just like this? The way he was scarfing up the tuna without a care to taste it, Stan could assume that it had either been far too long since it had tasted the milk of human kindness, or it had never happened before and the thing was that desperate to survive.

He’d been desperate to survive too, stealing where he needed to, finding the little ways that he could get money without labor and milking his opportunities for all he was worth. His father had taught him that sometimes you had to spend money to make money sure, but he’d also learned how to barter the lowest price for his products to be able to sell them with a larger profit margin.

Stanley chuckled to himself, imagining this unfortunate feline in positions he had ended up in during his life alone. He imagined the cat escaping out of the back of a moving car, sitting cross legged at a poker table with an ace in it’s fur and the coolest mustache that the kitties all swoon over. He caught a glimpse of it trading catnip for extra rations of sardines in a Colombian prison, using it’s claws to mark the days on the wall that he’d been behind bars. Every day closer to freedom again.

Did one of his litter mates leave him behind too?

Did his owners kick him out when the money got rough?

Did he also cry at night remembering what it was like to be loved?

He felt his eyes beginning to close, losing the fight between himself and the sandman to stay awake. His body ached and he was still so cold even with the fire roaring and the sweat forming on his skin.

“What am I gonna call you, anyways? Y’ain’t got a name or a collar,” he mused, trying so hard to stay awake as he felt his consciousness being dragged from him. His eyes shot around the room, trying to find something to focus on.

His brother had stocked this room with a couch, a woven blanket balled up in the corner of the bed that he’d only allowed himself to touch after a few nights, the large mirror that he’d covered mostly with a white sheet, and two end tables around the door. One of the tables had a collection of glasses with a decanter on top, something nice that looked like it had probably come out of the pawnshop as a gift to break in the house once his father had stopped thinking about what a gift actually was other than an item that had a price tag.

What he remembered about his brother, the man probably wasn’t a drinker. He probably had a very nice bottle of whiskey decanted into that crystal that he touched only when the mood was right and the stars aligned. He didn’t feel like the gift was wasted on the man, but he did feel like his father could have probably chosen something that fit him more.

He was shocked that the room was so… barren.

Ford was the kind of guy to fill a room and he saw that upstairs with all the lab equipment and pieces of miscellaneous trinkets. In their childhood room, there had been toys, papers, homework long forgotten, photos, random rocks, a feather that had landed in his hair on a weird day to see feathers— there was so much in the room that had ended up crowding them together like baby bird chicks in a largely formed nest. This was… not it.

Ford used to have so many books too… just- so many. He had seen a lot of them downstairs, but he was shocked that he hadn’t kept any up here. Or rather, there were a few but not as many as there could have been, as there should have been.

Stanley swallowed thickly, imagining the room that Ford had always described to him, covered in books and papers with places for him to do his activities— maybe it was because this was his entire house, he seemed to have lab space all over but… where were the books? The non-fiction was in the lab, but what about the fiction? Asimov and Shelly? Michael Creighton had released a book called Eaters of the Dead a few years before, and every time he had passed a book store, he wondered how quickly Ford had found out about it and ran to pick it up, but the state of his house suggested that he never had.

There were two books in the room that caught his eye— one textbook cross the room, open to a page, something the man had probably been working with and left behind in a hurry. The other book was bookmarked, it was laid gently on the nightstand beside the man’s couch-bed, the one piece of evidence his brother still read for pleasure sometimes.

He felt so sick, having to blink several times before he could read the title on the spine from where he was on the floor. The Problem of Increasing Human Energy by a name that sounded vaguely familiar: Nikola Tesla. No— not vaguely. This was one of Ford’s huge idols, did his research papers in high school on the man, hell he had a poster of him. Once, Ford had dressed up as the man for Halloween, then had gotten upset when not a single person could identify his costume. He’d been walking with Stan (who was dressed as Batman) and slowly getting more and more intense about the fact that Edison’s tyranny was the reason Tesla was not recognizable.

As if anyone would have understood he was Edison either.

But, the name stood out.

He watched the cat with soft eyes as his consciousness was finally pulled away from him, lulling him into a sweat filled sleep “Nikola. Yeah- Yeah I’ll call you Nicky.”

Chapter 2: Visions

Summary:

Stanley's shoulder begins to fester, having gone untreated for far too long. Its always easier for him to care for another than to care for himself, so he does. He pays the price for his neglect as night begins to fall.

Notes:

Content Warning for those with possible triggers:
Mentions of drug usage, overdose, hallucinations, self loathing, starvation

Trigger Warnings for Cats: Bathtime.

Waking was a pain in the ass, but wasn’t it always for shit like this?

He groaned as he opened one eye and then the other, realizing that his dumb ass had fallen asleep on the floor with his back to a perfectly good chair, which meant his legs, his ass, and his left nut sack were now numb and the moment he moved himself up from where he had fallen on the floor, he was in for a world of hurt.

One eye was able to break through the crust of sleep to open before the other, already annoyed by the sound of the gentle breeze outside and the chirping birds and all that wonderful good shit that was the woods at 10 o’clock in the morning. It was the dead of winter, there wasn’t supposed to be chirping birds or the sound of a gentle breeze, or the tapping of a woodpecker in the distance, the whole world was supposed to be dark and blustery like a blizzard.

Nicky seemed to feel the same, the matted ball of fluff opening one eye to look back at him, rolling over onto its back, then reaching out as far as it could with it’s arm and spread paw-beans to gently swat at his nose with the tips of his claws. He reached once then relaxed, arm still out, head now completely upside down, belly in the air and back legs curled up like a rabbit.

“You know that’s my nose, right?” Stan groused, one eye still closed as he watched the cat reposition itself lazily. It reached out and bapped at his nose again, taking a deep breath and sighing as if Stan had no chance at understanding what it actually meant.

The human sighed, forcing his other eye open and reaching up with a hiss to rub the crust from his eyes, the sound causing the relaxed cat to jolt in agitation, on all fours again and ready to pounce. “Wh-”

These baps were harder three whack, whack, whack in succession hitting his nose for the offensive sound he had made.

“Wh-HEY-!” He growled, sitting up and reaching for the offensive thing, watching it skitter away with it’s entire body fluffed up (or as much as could fluff up with how gross his fur was) hissing with the same kind of intensity as a human being with road rage.

Stan rubbed his nose, grumbling under his breath about a miss-translation in cat land before struggling to his feet. “I should put you right back outside for that one! Idiot cat.”

The thing had the indigence to huff at him— the kind of huffing that usually came from an old lady who had been bumped into at the supermarket or a guy getting told to go fuck himself at a club, not 10 pounds of fluff’n’stuff sittin’ here like the missing cast member of the hundred acre woods. It huffed again, a sharp sound through its no se, looking up at him with one yellow and one milky eye with every hair on it’s body only now settling down.

“Yeah, well- fffff to you too!” He mimicked, blowing out of his nose and then having to shoot his hand up to make sure he didn’t release a whole stream of snot with the action.

Nikola Tesla, newly named and newly rested, seemed to be pleased with this development of his most recent care taker being embarrassed, and calmly trotted to the door of Ford’s little bedroom to await release. It sat down, repositioning it’s front paws politely as if to say “Well, now that that’s over with-” And looked over at him to use his magical opposable thumbs on the doorknob.

Stan used the base of his thumb and wrist to wipe his nose with a sarcastic snarl, rolling his eyes at this very presumptuous house guest as he walked over to the door and opened it.

The cat took three steps out of the door and turned to look at him, it’s neck extending in a worried reach when Stanley did not in fact follow, but instead walked back into the room and towards the bathroom his brother had built into the “master” bedroom.

Stan ignored the animal, even though he could see worried eyes in the little gap in the cloth on the mirror, reflecting the crack in the door and those two eyes following him on the hilariously craned neck, but he rolled his own eyes in mild annoyance and walked into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror.

He jumped seeing himself in the mirror, all grey and pink with sunken eyes— when had his script gotten bad up close, the mirror should be mostly clear at least…

He reached forward with his right arm to open the mirror and look into the medicine cabinet and hissed again, the swollen skin on the back of his shoulder pulling forward with the movement and understandably punishing him for his transgression. He let his head fall forwards with a sigh. He knew the— cut? Burn? Most likely a burn if he let himself remember the sensation— the burn was infected, he’d done it to himself by refusing to shower and then going outside for several days without a change of clothes. To be honest, it was a wonder how shit like this didn’t happen more often— it wasn’t that he didn’t LIKE to shower, it just wasn’t on the top of his list when his brother could be having a lengthy conversation with his grandmother about Italian cuisine.

It would go away eventually. He didn’t want to even look at it. He closed the medicine cabinet without really taking into account what might have been inside, even if he needed it, he would rather pretend he didn’t know so the temptation to steal from his brother was not even greater. The food was more than enough.

He forced himself to take off his shirt, having to grip the porcelain of the sink to keep himself from crying out, especially in the silence of the woods around him.

“M-Mrrrreew?” Nick managed from the bathroom door, using his little head to push a gap open that he could squeeze into. The cat slithered around his legs and hopped up on the toilet lid and then the tank to look at him in the eyes. It was obvious he could still see from the milky eye, maybe not perfectly, but it mostly reacted to light and stimulus the same way the other one did, and as he stood on the toilet tank and craned his neck, it was like he was demanding Stanley to look at him.

The man in question’s head was hung low as he gripped the sink with both hands, panting softly and watching the greasy strands of long hair fall past his neck and into his line of sight as he shook off the pain of removing the cloth that had probably been stuck into his skin by blood or ooze or something. He turned his head to look at the cat, sitting with wide, worried eyes at the human who was very much not okay, and made the same stuttered question meow once again.

“Heh-” he tried to laugh off his pain, but he also knew full well he had broken into a sweat from just taking off his shirt. He reached out with his left hand to touch the worried creature “Hey, kiddo-”

Bap bap bap!

Another series of swift smacks from the feline featherweight himself, this time paired with a wide mouthed hiss that sounded almost more like a gator’s hiss rather than a cat. It jumped from the toilet, down to the floor and out the bathroom door before Stan could even react.

“What the-”

He let his own head pop out of the door, just as curious as he was outraged, in time to watch the little idiot scurry out of the room towards the staircase… then innocently poke it’s own head into the room again in the exact same way Stanley was looking out of the bathroom. Stan rolled his eyes, kicking his shirt to the side and following it up the staircase as it scrambled up to beat him into the kitchen

The moment he made the mistake of crossing the threshold of the basement to the rest of the house, the screaming began. This cat, for a ball of fuzz that had nearly died in the snow not 12 hours before, had a set of lungs on it. “Rrroooowwww” Over and over and over again , weaving around Stanley’s feet like it was trying to trip him up on purpose as he tried to walk to the kitchen.

“Jes- I- Sweet Moses, Kid, do you want me to punt you by accident?” He growled, trying as hard as he could not to accidentally kick the cat across the house with the big brown boots he kept forgetting to take off. In response all he got was another meow, so his retaliation was going to make the damn thing wait.

He carefully limped into the kitchen, but instead of moving towards where Ford kept his cans, he sat on one of the chairs to finally take off his shoes, careful to use his left hand so he wouldn’t wrench the right side of his body.

The freedom to move his slightly swollen toes was such a relief, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d remembered to shed his boots and socks, but now that they were off it felt like his feet were taking the first deep breath of their lives.

They felt so swollen, as if they’d decided to grow and mold into the shape of the inside of his boot. He also knew that he reeked, and peeling off his socks was not a pleasant experience, but the ability to curl his toes properly and feel the rough, textured wood of the floorboards felt like heaven on the bottoms of his neglected feet. He took a moment to ball up his socks and stuff them into one of his boots before sitting up in the chair again with a sigh, now in just his trousers since his shirt, shoes, and socks had been shed.

He came nose to nose with Nikola, eyes wide like he was trying to imitate an owl, and making a closed mouth “Mrrrp” noise as he paced on the table.

“Hey- Hey you can’t be on the table, that’s where people eat,” he huffed, but was subsequently ignored by the feline that stumbled over itself to try and rub it’s tail— but nothing more than it’s tail— under the man’s nose. He would skitter away whenever Stan reached up, but then come right back, left paw raised and pulling at the air like he had something he wanted to hand the man.

Stan tried the phrase in Spanish as an instinct, then in Italian as if part of his childhood was bubbling up from his gut, then huffed and started to lean back in the chair before he remembered what a world of hurt he would be in if the mark on his right shoulder made contact with anything again. “Yeah, well, I’m not gonna try Yiddish. I could tell you weren’t raised with a Jewish mother, your filthy paws wouldn’t be up on my dining table.”

My?

His.

Ford’s.

Nothing in this house was his, it was Ford’s. Don’t get it all twisted.

He took a deep breath and sighed, again, left hand reaching up to scrub his face, trying not to let the thought, the realization as the sun shone though the stained glass of the windows, that everything that had happened in the last few days really had happened. In the shimmering light of day, with the sound of the birds chirping and flitting through the trees, the truth was there with them.

The cat couldn’t give a rat’s ass about any of it.

“Mrrp? R-Rew?” It had changed it’s sound to be smaller, less round sounds that made it sound bigger and more small E sounds to sound younger, needier, like it needed to be liked by the sweaty, stinky man in the ruined black trousers. The kind of kitten-like meow that tried to establish pity.

It worked.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m going.” He muttered, pushing himself up and rubbing absently at his chest as he walked to the shelves and plucked a can of tuna from the stocks. There were a few, same with some odd cans of beans, brown meat, and other canned necessities, but it really looked like maybe only a month’s worth of provisions, if he rationed. He needed to prioritize the tuna for the cat, it didn’t look like anything else here was something cats could eat— he decided he would go without for a day or so, if for no other reason than to stretch out the provisions.

Fuck, why was it so warm in this house? It was so cold outside-

When he cracked open the can, growling at how weak his arms felt, the cat smelled the tuna immediately and began to wail, coming up on it’s back paws and feeling along the edge of the counter like it could steal the can. It was surprisingly long for how thin it was, easily reaching his elbow as he worked on the can, tapping gently as if to say, very politely “Excuse me, sir, is that for me?”

Stanley didn’t realize he had given a high pitched rendition of the assumed phrase until it echoed back at him. It was the Mister Tummy voice— He groaned, chastising himself for bringing something back that he obviously should have grown out of. What the hell, lots of things were about to change, might as well bring that back too.

“Now Nikola, you have to be a gentleman and wait for your plate.” He chastised softly, losing his control and letting himself just… talk. “Please?” Came his own high pitched reply as he portioned half the can onto the plate and then wrapped it in a plastic bag so that he could stick it in the fridge. “Oh, alright.” again in his true voice, setting the plate down on the floor.

Nikola Tesla really was a beast starved, because he took to the plate like he hadn’t been fed in weeks. He tried to ignore it, grabbing a glass of water and chugging one, and then a second one to try and fill his empty stomach with something that could at least be infinitely replaced rather than finite, like the food. The animal munched away happily beneath him and the sound of it’s chewing turned his stomach into desperate knots.

Stan gazed at the creature sadly before meandering though the house and through the door on the way down to the lab he’d been guided to. If finding the journals was going to be futile, which after a few days of hunting around the area, he had come no closer to them than before, then he had to fill in the blanks himself. He would have to go down and read the journal he had, sift the useless from the useful, and start to reverse engineer any notes he found while hunting through the room.

He hissed as bare feet hit the wooden stairs, swollen and sensitive from neglect and overuse, the soft slapping of flesh on the floor echoing down the little staircase as he lazily walked down to the elevator.

“Mmrroow?”

He paused halfway down the stairs and looked back. The cat seemed to be in the house, but not aware of where he had gone because he couldn’t see the long necked stretch through the door like usual. “Nick-”

“RROOOWW-” The terror in the cry made him feel ill, his feet carrying him back up the stairs before he realized what he was doing. “ROOOOOWW-” Back to those rounded, sounds, the meow breaking like it had been left.

It was the anguish of abandonment.

It was the realization that he’d always be alone.

Something cracked in the man’s chest, something that was all too familiar with the sound and probably projecting a bit, his feet picking up pace and running up the stairs like he’d heard the cry of a lost child.

He remembered what it was like to feel like that.

He remembered the realization that his family had cut him out.

He’d driven away so angry that night, hurt of course, but so angry. It was the kind of anger a teenage felt toward their parents all the time, the burning fire that fizzled out in a few hours or a few days, usually leading up to the kid needing something— including help. He’d spent hours in his car on the beach, laying, sitting, parked and pacing behind the vehicle, talking to a Ford that hadn’t been there and going through the 4 of the 5 stages of grief.

Denial.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, and you know that, Ford. It was your stupid project, own up to the fact that it busted!”

Anger.

“I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. I can make it on my own, and I’ll be better than a science millionaire— I’m gonna be a gazillionare, then all of you are gonna come crawling back to me because you’re nothing.”

Bargaining.

“Okay— Okay Maybe, maybe if I work harder… I-I can pay for Stanford’s school, Dad… I-I’ll work more-” Leaking through the tears, sniffling and entering that final state of depression as he sobbed all the way home, watching the sun rise over the New Jersey skyline, shaking behind the steering wheel.

He had school in an hour or two, he had to get upstairs and grab his books, drive Sixer to their high school campus, give Ma a kiss before he left—

He’d pulled up to a locked door.

To the sound of his mother sobbing from behind her softly buzzing neon sign.

He watched Stanford anxiously board the bus from down the road, having woken up early so that he didn’t miss it, rather than sleeping in an extra 30 minutes because Stan was going to drive them across town. Ford had looked up, recognized his car, then shoved his head down and hurried onto the bus.

He wasn’t even going to risk finding out about how Dad felt about all this. He’d driven off to find a place to stay, hadn’t even bothered with un-enrolling from their high school, giving up on the rest of his senior year.

The tears he’d sobbed against his steering wheel that morning sounded so similar, so heart-wrenchingly alone that there had been no one left to hear him, no warm arms to come home to, no one left to say his name like it meant something.

The cat stopped screaming the moment he was visible again, looking up at him with those wide, owl eyes, blinking twice, and dipping it’s head to finish it’s half can of food. It made eager, wet smacking sounds with it’s mouth as it scarfed down the wet fish, leaving one bite left then looking up at Stanley again and sitting down.

He sighed, soft and pitying “I can’t give you any more right now, kid— we don’t have much. Finish up.”

Instead, the cat pawed the plate towards Stan, “Mrrp?”

The man chuckled and knelt beside him, reaching out to pet the animal and being subsequently avoided, drawling a scowl onto his face. “Yeah well, that’s all I can give you so finish it, eh?”

He got up and decided to continue his task, hearing a huff from behind him, a few more smacking sounds, and a meow as Nikola decided to follow him, trotting down the stairs to wait for the elevator with him. Stanley looked down a the cat with a grumble “So you want my food, you want my company, but you won’t let me touch you.”

Another sigh, this time paired with an ear flick. What was this, a human being trapped in a cat body? Sheesh.

But, he couldn’t keep himself mean. He had never been able to, even having to take a ‘mean’ alias, like Andrew ‘8-Ball’ Alcatraz he hadn’t been able to be mean for anything longer than short, sustained spurts. He’d found one chair in the area with the big doohickey, rolled it over to the desk or control panel-y looking area, then left again to find the journal that he had stashed away in a cabinet only to come back and find Nikola happily snoozing where his butt should be.

He growled, rolled his eyes, took a breath to banish the cat to the floor, then had a flash of his father doing the same thing to Munch and feeling a pang of sympathy. He decided to check the floor above him for another chair and subsequently found one, wheeling it back to the spot and sitting down before the little thing could wake and panic again.

This— was fucking gibberish.

His brother was probably the smartest man he’d ever known: which was saying quite a lot for a man as well traveled as Stan Pines, and the fact that he hadn’t talked to Ford since they were 17, but now he was looking at the information in his journal— the first chunk of it being research about—what is this? A Pair of pants with eyes walking on a street? Wasn’t Fresno in California? Whatever, his brother had always been left of center. But the notes on the portal, the part of the book that dealt with exactly what he was planning to deal with, was covered in code. Triangles and squares and little constellations.

Left facing triangle with circles at the vertices, a V with circles at the vertices, a little pair of pants with a triangle crotch, and a half circle with an upside down T inside of it.

That was a word.

What the hell, Ford?

It reminded him of the cipher they had created as kids, but where was the key?

The adrenaline of hearing Nikola scream had faded a while before, exhaustion flooding his body as he felt is shoulder throb and his temperature spike. He was growing feverish again, there was no doubt about it now that whatever had happened to his shoulder had become infected.

He winced as he imagined the pale white flesh of the infection, wondering if it would ooze or just…. fester. He was going to have to do something about it, hope that his luck held out and he didn’t die or something.

Stan let his head fall back, groaning as it shifted his shoulder and stung like a bitch, then rolled his head to look at Nick. Poor guy, his fur was nasty and grimy, he could see the dead flea carcasses in the small patches of white, his injured eye tearing and crusting on his nose. They were both filthy, sitting there with nothing to lose but their lives, trying to make the most of garbage situations.

He didn’t want to treat his shoulder.

But maybe-

“Hey,” He started, which obviously startled the animal who had gotten used to complete silence. He couldn’t risk using too much of the food, he would rather feed the cat than feed himself, but this was about to be kinda hellish for this cat, and compensation was necessary “You want more of that Tuna?”

Obviously Nikola had never heard the word for the tasty white fish he’d been given from the weird metal thing earlier in the day, the cat lazily opening his eyes and then sighing like a single father of four.

Stan rolled his eyes, thought for a moment, then smacked his mouth twice to mimic the sound of chewing. That did the trick, the cat was upright with a “Mmrrp?” Before he could make the sound a third time.

If he couldn’t bring himself to take care of himself, at least he could care for something smaller and weaker than himself right?

Stanley walked across the lab, leaving the book open on the table, and turned to watch his little tag-along rush over to his ankle. “You’re not gonna like me much after this,” He sighed “But if it makes you feel any better, after I do it to you, I’m gonna have to do it to me too.”

There was no getting around it, he was going to have to raid Ford’s closet to try and fit into at least one of his shirts if not his trousers as well. It was when he was facing the possibility of a shower that he realized just how… frankly disgusting he was.

He hadn’t showered since his hotel room nearly a week prior. He had a festering, possibly infected injury on his back that was making him sweat even in the cold at night, covered in the grime from the floor of the laboratory and the filth he’d accumulated digging in the snow… He was gross. He hadn’t even bothered to take care of himself at a basic level, there was no doubt that he was sullying this house with every step. Ford would be disgusted with him.

The elevator dinged and the two stepped across the threshold.

He missed this, he missed having a roof over his head and the possibility of food, a place to sleep that wasn’t his car, a shower… he felt so guilty that he was using ANY of it, but Ford would forgive him if it was to stay alive, right? If it was just enough to bring him back? Nothing else, no getting ahead of himself, no schemes, no grand plans…

The kitchen was so barren and seemed to sigh at the thought. He’d have to find a way to get money and get them food, the world could do what it wanted to him, but he wasn’t going to let the lil’ cheeper at his feet suffer because he was a loser.

He took a breath and grabbed his supplies: two large cups, a jar of honey, a first aid kit that looked like his brother had desperately needed it recently, the can of tuna, a spoon, and the bottle of Dawn dish soap— he’d seen an article a few years ago that they were doing something about cleaning animals and he assumed that penguins and cats weren’t too different in that sense. He looked down at the cat, took a soft breath and whispered an apology in advance before waving the can of tuna round his nose.

The poor creature was desperate, chirping and meowing all the way down the stairs and into the bathroom in Ford’s room where he was going to set up. He dropped everything except for the tuna into the sink, found two towels, in a cupboard, and an extra change of clothes that looked like something Ford wouldn’t really miss before coming back and finally setting down the can of tuna, letting one scoop fall onto the floor. Nick took to it like he was possessed, lapping it up while Stan started the tub and grabbed his coat off the floor to wear as armor.

He only looked up when the door clicked closed and the lock slid into place.

Nikola tensed, already hissing at Stan, who whined under his breath as he stopped the water so it ended at his ankle “Listen… listen, If I don’t do this, you’re going to be in hell when the weather warms up. And when you’re done, I have to have a go.”

The cat hissed, a cougar in the body of a house cat, and damn did it fight like one too. It puffed up to be about twice it’s own size, fangs exposed, starting a cry from deep in it’s gut that sounded like betrayal and he sighed.

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

Attack.

Stanley lunged for the cat, but the animal sprang first, getting his hand and hoisting itself up to curl into his arm and kick with both back legs furiously. Had he not been wearing his coat, which thank goodness he had had the forethought of having some sort of animal defense on his person, his arm would have been absolutely shredded. Munch had never really been a fighter, damn cat could have been held upside down with out much of a complaint, he’d torn up a good chunk of his toys this way as well. This creature, probably an experienced hunter in his own right, would have completely eviscerated him.

He cried out in pain, causing Nick to double down, growling against the heel of his palm and shaking his head as if he could kill Stan from there. Stan grabbed the creature from the scruff of it’s neck expecting it to stop, but to no avail, only managing to peel him off and toss him to the floor with a growl of frustration. He made the mistake of turning to the sink to grab the soap and one of the large plastic cups, tossing them into the tub with a shallow layer of warm water in the bottom, but the movement startled the little one, who attacked once again,

Suddenly Nikola was on his ankle, his jaws chomping down on sensitive flesh, his back paws already coming up to shred the side of his shin, but Stan was quicker, especially faced with the threat of pain. He grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck, nearly dropping him when he wriggled his body around, trying to bite the man.

“Aren’t-- aren’t you supposed to freeze when I do this? Sweet Moses!” The man cried, dropping the squirming creature but managing to catch him with his other hand.

He was quick enough to get a-hold of the animal around his rib cage with both hands positioning his arms in a way that meant he couldn’t turn his head and latch onto him again with larger than necessary fangs.

Stanley sighed in relief, letting his shoulders sag and walking into the tub even with his trousers on to make sure his legs remained safe, even if it made them wet. “Now… You’re going to hate me for this, but its something you desperately need. And I do too.”

The cat screeched when it’s back paws touched the warm water, a meow that sounded more like a human child screaming “WHY?” Rather than a meow.

“Ohhh I know,” He murmured, trying to keep his voice low and calm like he used to when calming baby Shermie. “I’m so sorry”

The cat cried again, struggling against his grip as he rubbed a ring of soap around his collar like his mother had taught him. Fleas didn’t like soap, the ring of soap kept the fleas, if there were any still alive, from hoping up onto the poor guy’s face.

Stanley risked letting go of the animal, propping him up on the back of the tub with his back paws in the water and its front paws on the porcelain. “Rrrooooaaaaaaa”

“Sweet Moses-” he muttered with a chuckle “The neighbors would think I was killing you.”

For a moment, this was super normal. For a moment, he was just… home, his cat had gotten into something it shouldn’t have, and he was fine.

He used the cup to scoop up some of the warm water and pour it gently over the cat, keeping it in place as it cried by putting his hand on it’s back between it’s shoulder blades, hand cupping it so it couldn’t skirt left or right, then let go long enough to pour soap on him and begin to rub it into his fur.

It was disgusting, the soap turned grey and the little carcasses of dead fleas floated in the water around his ankles and swirled around among the suds.

Munch hadn’t gotten many baths, his mother had instructed her boys that cats did not need as much care in that aspect as an animal like a dog might. Cats groomed themselves meticulously, their tongue and teeth acting like a little comb to rake all the bad stuff off them.

However, when he did get a bath, all hell broke loose.

Munch had long white fur which not only shed a lot, but also got into everything. He and Ford had once “totally lawfully borrowed” some hockey protection gear, knowing that since it had been their fault the cat was covered in Oobleck, it would be their responsibility to wash and comb every bit of it out of the cat’s fur, if not shave him completely.

It had been a battle for the ages, if it hadn’t been for the masks the poor feline would have taken out eyes if it meant getting out of that water, but in the end Stan had held him still while Ford had combed all the clumps of the non-Newtonian substance out of the cat’s long white fur.

There had still been clumps for quite a while.

This was similar to bathing Munch, but at least Nicky was a lot smaller than the Maine Coon mix they had grown up with. He yeowled pathetically as he was washed, crying every time Stan had to pour water over him.

After a while, when he knew he was as clean as he could possibly get, Stanley held the rat-cat aloft to wring the water from it’s coat: letting his hand squeeze just enough to let the water spill from his undercoat and down his legs, back into the grossly colored water in the tub.

He was so thankful for his coat, the sopping wet feline latching up onto his wrist and having his desperate claws crawl up his left arm and pull himself up his shoulder, down his back, and straight for the door, screaming like Stan had been waterboarding him.

The man chuckled tiredly, the cold sweats back again, stumbling to the door with a towel and wrapping the shivering creature in plush grey terrycloth. It growled and he rubbed it with the cloth before setting it on the chair and feeling it scramble for the bedroom door, stopping at the closed wooden structure and meowing weakly, shivering in the cold.

“Oh shit- shoulda started the fire-” but he got to work on remedying that, piling the wood and stoking it for warmth as Nick kept a good distance “Yeah I know, I’m evil.”

The bedroom door was closed, so he didn’t have to worry about it, so he scooped the last part of the tuna onto a plate for Nick, and walked back into the bathroom to shower. This is where the second cup came in, using it to gently wash clean water over his shoulder as he finally took a shower for the first time in probably a week or so— he’d tried to use a truck stop bathroom at one point, but he hadn’t been able to commit to the act before he’d needed to leave. In this case, he used the clean cup to wash his shoulder, with gentle suds and a gentle rinse, while he finally washed the rest of his body down.

He felt so achy. He hadn’t realized just how bad it was until he was scrubbing himself clean and the water beneath him was just as filthy as it had been for Nick. When the water hit his scalp, he physically whimpered, shaking for a moment and placing his hand on the wall to just revel in the feeling of the warm water and relief that he had been deprived of for so long. His eyes welled with tears, feeling so weak that such a simple thing had reduced him to nothing, but water had always been at the core of his being. He was a man of the sea who had sworn to stay away from it until he had the other half of his soul back, a piece of sea glass forced to be a stone. But, like sea glass, he knew that water eroded away sharp edges, it smoothed things over, even if it bullied you in the process, and he felt his edges rubbing smooth as he rinsed lord knows how much grime from his skin and scalp.

Ford’s soap was a bar of Irish Spring— whatever he could get for cheap in bulk it seemed, and a bottle of Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific (only shampoo, no conditioner, which seemed out of character), but he was able to make do.

He patted himself dry and rubbed the excess water out of his hair before wrapping the towel around his waist, thanking Ford’s forethought for buying grey towels rather than white. If they had been white, they would have shown how filthy he still probably was even after all that. He made room in the sink by putting the things he had already used on the lid of the toilet, opening a packet of gauze and tape and the jar of honey.

He’d found out years before that not only was honey an anti-inflammatory, something his mother had given him for throaty coughs and head colds, but also an antibacterial and anti-fungal aid. If it wasn’t too late for him, the honey could very well jump start the healing process where he normally wouldn’t be able to see a doctor.

He grabbed Ford’s toothbrush, whispered a soft apology to him wherever he was, and dug the handle of it into the jar to use as a spreading agent. It stung like a bitch, not the honey specifically but any sort of contact at all, his gut wrenching nauseously at the pain. He had to get through this, the fever had already started on and off and would probably get worse before it got better, but if he kept it clean and treated from now on, he would have a much higher rate of survival of not healing.

An infection that close to his vital organs, even if it was only skin deep, was not something he necessarily wanted to risk.

It took a second of struggling to get the gauze in place, and he had defiantly given up by the time he needed to tape it down, just wildly wrapping the thin roll around his torso and up hos shoulder and across his neck—it wasn’t going to stick well but at least it might stay on.

Next came slipping into the clothes he’d chosen, a navy blue pair of sweatpants and a plain black t shirt, both items that could be easily replaced if he accidentally ruined them. Standing in the mirror with clean clothes and clean hair he could have wept, but he was so physically exhausted. He could barely feel. He could barely stand upright.

He stumbled out into the bedroom on bare feet, his eyes already mostly closing both from the pain in his shoulder and what felt like weeks of exhaustion catching up to him. He stumbled to the couch and sat down, eyes mostly hooded, focusing only on the tortico rat that was cleaning all of that dirty filthy wetness from his fur.

Nikola looked up at him and huffed, flicking the ear with the chunk taken out of it in announce, laying back on himself to lick at his stomach and hopefully purge himself of the human’s incompetence.

It was so nice to have another being in the house, so nice to feel like he wasn’t alone. The fire was so warm, and he laid back into the couch, pulling Ford’s blankets up to his chin as his body started to shake from chills. It was so warm but he was so… so cold.

His mind drifted away from him before his body shut down properly.

 

---

 

“We know you’re in there, Pines!” The words echoed through the room from the muffled wood of the door.

Stanley woke with a start, sweat beading from his forehead even though he felt like his body was going to freeze to death. He’d finally caved and slept not only on the couch, but he hd found the linen closet upstairs to get some extra blankets for when the fire finally died in the fireplace as the night drew on. Why did he feel so… cold and clammy?

He physically winced as he heard the banging again, curling himself tight into the back of the couch, trying not to make a sound or cough when he caught a whiff of his brother’s body odor— that was weird, Ford used to have immaculate hygiene? Whatever, the stink was far more pleasant than the alternative.

“You can’t run forever.”

They came at the door again with a bang, bang, bang and it echoed in Stanley’s ears as he curled tighter, feeling the shittily taped gauze on his shoulders constrict as he tried to stretch his back and curl into a little ball on the couch.

Sanchez and Barnaby… how had they found him? It had been days and he hadn’t left— had he not covered his tracks well enough? Had he left something in a gas station on his way up from New Mexico? Had he just been that unlucky once again? He could see them in his mind’s eye tracking him like two fucking dogs, two men who looked like a hairless Xolo and a blonde Saint Bernard, sniffing around gas stations and one lane highways in the middle of the desert, passing unmarked graves and stashes of edible flour until they’d seen his tracks in the snow.

He was fucked. He was fucked and that meant Ford was fucked because Stanley was the only person he trusted to fix the problem. He had said it, “You are the only person I can trust-”, Ignore the fact that he had been talking about those stupid books that no one could find in this Godforsaken snow. It had been the first time in almost 10 years that Stanley had heard his voice speaking directly to him, knowing it was him on the other end of the line, looking him in the eyes, understanding they were together again-

Ford had trusted him to fix his problem

He would fix it even if it took the rest of his short, miserable, good-for-nothing life.

“You can’t even pay up on a measly 3 grand, Pines?” Sanchez’s voice was like a weasel, all nasal and putting on a thick accent that made him sound like he was from New Jersey even though Stan could tell he really wasn’t. “You couldn’t pay your stupid fucking rent, so you came to us?”

This time he heard Barnaby’s voice, a low, slightly Mexican accent that rumbled deep from his chest like the terrifying echo of the wind in a chasm “Pathetic.”

How had they gotten into the house? He had no idea where the keys were, maybe even on his Brother’s person as he flew through the blue pond of nothingness on the wall and tumbled into purgatory, but Ford had installed rolling garage doors on every exit, something that only locked from the inside and that Stan had started to engage at night so that he wouldn’t have to worry about unwanted visitors. Had they broken open the door? Cut through the slatted metal of the garage door and hunted for the first locked door they had found?

They had probably fucking trashed the place screaming for him

All of Ford’s stuff- all that expensive science equipment, all of his notes-

The few books he had left-

Ripped. Torn. Shattered. Busted.

It was all Stanley’s fault again, every time Ford’s life went to shit it seemed like Stan was right at the center of it all, the idiot who falls into the lever.

How hadn’t he heard the noise going on upstairs? The house was not incredibly insulated, the chink in the house felt seemingly useless, the cold still seeped through all of the gaps and cracks as if no one had insulated the house in the first place, there was no way it was insulated against sound. He could hear Nick’s claws scratching on the stairs as he went up and down if the room was quiet enough.

“Wait- Fucker went to his ol’ drug buddies to pay his rent?” Sanchez sneered through the door, banging on it again, the sound of the wood beginning to splinter making Stan curl up tighter.

If they shot him, he didn’t want to see the gun.

“I’m sorry, Sixer-” he laughed though the choked beginnings of tears “I’d offer to buy you a new bed once this is all over but- I couldn’t even pay my dues…”

Barnaby seemed to hum, the same kinda ‘mhm’ that one Filbrick Pines used to give from behind his newspaper. Bored. Detached.

Unimpressed.

“Poor fucker couldn’t handle livin’ in his car anymore, Sanchez” Barnaby condemned with a dark chuckle “Got too fat to sit behind the steering wheel.”

“Shoulda used that money we gave him with us,” The thinner of the two jeered through the door, probably looking down at Barnaby with that drug-decayed smile. “At least he woulda lost some weight, am I right?”

Bang

Bang

Bang

“C’mon Stanley. Why don’t you come out here and make this easier?”

Stanley took a deep breath, his whole body shaking now as tears slid from his eyes and across the bridge of his nose, a nose grown slightly crooked from too many breaks, tears that wouldn’t have even tasted salty anymore because of his physical neglect. He let his hands ball into fists, the cool sweat on his palms probably coming from much more than fear, no strength behind the grip from utter and complete bodily exhaustion.

He was dying anyways.

He took a deep breath in and used the last of his will to call out, his voice breaking “If I come out there, you gotta promise not to hurt the cat.” Probably too muffled by the couch cushions to be heard, as there was no response from the two goons outside.

He furrowed his brows when he only heard silence in return, then heard the banging again followed by the two voices laughing cruelly like he hadn’t responded in the first place. Or, more likely, that they had decided they’d hurt Nick first.

He smiled more of a pained grimace than anything, but trying to look cheeky. It was a look he knew would probably have looked pathetic in a mirror, but his humor was genuine; he knew Nick would put up more of a fight than he would have been able to.

They were kindred spirits, he and the feline, scrappy til the end. Maybe at least one of them would make it out of here alive.

Stan lifted himself on shaky limbs to turn around, letting the blankets he’d been curled under pool around his ankles as he slid himself into a seated position on the large, L-shaped couch.

Nikola Tesla had not budged an inch, still sound asleep on the floor in front of the fireplace, curled up on Stanley’s half-rotted jacket, curling into a tighter ball as the embers faded into soot.

Stanley furrowed his brows and cocked his head slightly like a puppy, a look both he and Ford had done throughout their lives without realizing that made their mother giggle like crazy when they’d done it in sync. The cat hadn’t moved. He could still hear the banging and the shouting outside, jeered insults and sneered taunts to draw him towards the bedroom door, but the cat had not reacted to any of it.

The cat couldn’t hear it.

Sanchez and Barnaby…. weren’t real.

As quickly as it had all started, as suddenly as he’d been jolted awake, all the noise stopped. It stopped so quickly that Stan heard his ears ring even though he knew consciously that there had been no noise to stimulate his ear drums to begin with. A hallucination— that would explain why it came and went so suddenly, why Nick never heard or reacted to anything… how they knew he’d borrowed the money to pay rent on his motel room when his latest Stan Co. scam had gone nowhere.

Stanley was no stranger to hallucinations, those brought on by fever and those brought on by drugs or stress. His life had taken him to places he never wished upon another human being, whether that was shattering his own morals to dance for tips and pay for his— vices, or having to think quickly to get out of sticky situations.

It was a bit odd though, he thought for a moment. Every time he hallucinated it was always—

“D-do you think t-they’re gone?” A familiar voice came from the other side of the couch, teeth chattering between stuttered words, sounding just as sick as Stan if not more so.

Stanley shut his eyes under furrowed brows, willing the tears to stop before they started, recognizing the voice like it came from his own soul. He finally turned his head and let his burning eyes flutter open to see Stanford, aged— what were they now? 28? 29? 30? He’d stopped keeping score a long time ago.

Stanford, at the last age that he had seen him, was sitting on the other side of the couch, curled up small on the inside of that nasty trench coat like it was the only thing he had to keep him warm, looking up with terrified eyes behind smeared glasses, unable to meet Stan’s eyes.

This… was the wrong Ford.

This wasn’t the Ford he typically saw, but he supposed it was the Ford he deserved to see, broken, beaten, emotionally scarred… betrayed.

Now was when Stan got to see his own powers of observation at work, what he had seen and noticed but not necessarily processed consciously. His brother had looked like SHIT. Behind his glasses, his eyes were so sunken and tired, framed not only by the red irritation of exhaustion, nor by the bloodshot cracks of red veins on the milky pink whites of his eyes, but by the tell tale flecks of dried blood on the lashes of his eye. He had seen blood on Ford’s eye before, the one time the kid had gotten a sty and had worn Stan’s play eye patch to school underneath his glasses to keep people from noticing that he periodically cried blood. It had happened to Stan eventually too, but the memory stuck out to him, helping his twin peel the gauze from his eye in the bathroom during lunch and swapping it out for a new one as the little thing healed over the course of a few days. But— there had been no sty. Only Blood. And Ford was much too clean of a person to have left blood anywhere let alone— what did he call it? Something like conjunction membranes near the eye?

No.. no conjunction was words, he remembered that from getting knocked over the head in grammar lessons, but it sounded like that— like— like pink eye.

Conjunctivitis. Conjunctive. Conjunctive membranes in the eye.

He smiled to himself remembering SOMETHING Ford had taught him so long after he’d learned it, but his face fell when his brother shivered and looked at him earnestly from across the couch.

The man also reeked. He’d teased Stanley about it their entire lives, that Stan was the smelly twin because Ford almost compulsively showered after they did any sort of activity. Stan had been his gauge— if Stan smelled, then so did he, and he needed to shower. This Ford was… this Ford was fucking disgusting. He smelled, his hair was greasy and had lost all of it’s volume due to the weight of it’s own oils, the skin on his necks had marks of grease from where he had rubbed it anxiously in the middle of doing some craft or another.

This wasn’t his Ford. This Ford was undisciplined, sloppy, sickly— this Ford was scared.

He was shaking too, sweating and feeling his body reject his own flesh as the infection on his shoulder festered under the gauze.

“They’re gone, Six. I promise.” He reassured, and the shivering man nodded, still not meeting his eyes, trembling like a leaf in the wind as he looked down at the carpet with eyes that didn’t see.

Stan looked away, looking up to the mirror that was half covered in a white sheet and only obscured his half of the couch— revealing the side Ford was sitting on to be empty. He knew this. But he couldn’t bring himself to make it go away. It was as comforting as it was scary.

“Why did they want you, Stanley?” This— this was the Ford he usually saw. The voice was exactly as he remembered it around a decade past, the twin that he held so close to his heart.

He’d leaned forward now, pulling at the gauze as his body curled up once more to a climate the fact that his elbows rested on his knees, his hands clasped together where he could see Nick snoozing contentedly from across the room. Cats could sleep trough conversation, maybe he could let himself believe this was real for a few moments.

“C’mon, you goof, don’t ignore me.” Ford at 16 laughed, sitting upright on the couch like he had someone watching him, until the moment that Stan looked over at him with a tired half grin and he scooted back to curl his legs in, relaxing on the back of the couch. “Who were those guys?”

This is the Ford he usually saw, the Ford that had anxiously talked him through chewing out part of the carpet of the trunk of a car, kicking out a tail light and scraping the shit out of his arm to reach the trunk release so he didn’t die of heatstroke in the middle of the desert.

This was Stanford Pines at 16, in that yellow long sleeved polo he wore over the white t shirt they both had to wear to gym class, light wash jeans and matching grey tipped white tube socks— he would have never curled his shoes up on the couch, not at this age. He was smiling at Stan with that fond “You knucklehead” smile, eyes kind and calm. This was the Ford that he had protected, the Ford that still needed him—

This was the Ford that still loved him.

“They were nobody, Poindexter, can it.”

He rolled his eyes behind his glasses “You can lie to Mom and Dad, but you know you can’t lie to me, Stanley.”

He was right, Stan had never been able to lie to Ford, not for long at least. They had always been partners in crime, he’d confided in Ford for everything, both because he had to and because he just fucking wanted to. Ford was the other half of his brain and the other half of his heart, he could sniff a lie off Stan from a mile away and covered for him without even having to be asked. He broke something? Munch. He got into a fight? Someone else started it. Something went missing? Maybe Ford had grabbed it by accident and he was so sorry—

His shoulders sagged and he let his head hang low “I uh— I have some shit friends, Sixer. Real bad guys. Got me hoo—” he swallowed before he could say the word ‘Hooked’ “Lets just say, it took me a long time to stop buyin’ what they were sellin’. Cut ‘em off a bit ago, y’know-”

“Like Ma would’a told you.”

“Like Ma did tell me!”

In perfect unison they muttered “Damn psychic-” And laughed at the other for their moment of synchronicity.

Stan sighed as the laughter trickled into silence. “Yeah, well… I was havin’ trouble makin’ rent. I wanted to go clean. I took out a…. loan from a guy I thought was a buddy a’ mine— didn’t tell him it was for a few months of back rent, I told ‘em it was an eh…. investment.”

Ford rose an incredulous brow “An investment.”

“What do you want me to say, Stanford? That it was drug money?” He snapped, letting his teeth snarl and catching the slight movement of Nick waking and lazily looking up from the corner of his eye.

There was a beat of tension, none of which showed in return on Teen Ford’s face, his brown eyes were almost black in the dimness of the room, barely lit by the moonlight creeping through the boards over the stained glass. “The truth, Stanley. If you can’t be honest with anyone else, at least be honest with yourself.” His voice was so level, uncharacteristic for either Pines brother, two firecrackers in a match factory. He crossed his arms over his chest, but kept his relaxed posture, as if he was asking Stan to admit to kissing Karla McCorkle in the wrong bunk of their bed, rather than asking him to admit illicit activities with a semi-Mexican drug cartel.

He took another deep breath and sighed “Cocaine is easy to get into when you’re trying to stay up and watch your own back.”

Ford’s face began to crumble “You’re not-”

“Not anymore.” He reassured, but it was heartless. “Stopped smoking, picked up coke, stopped coke, picked up food” he chuckled and patted his stomach, which was not as round as it had been about year ago when the money had dried up again.

He kept trying to go legit.

He did! He wanted to earn his living honestly. He had been told that he wasn’t worth dirt, and after his last stint in jail, he’d realized the only way to really be worth his salt was to do it at least mostly legally. Taxes were fraud anyways because the American government hates the poor, why pay ‘em? No, he’s spent so long trying to be Ford, trying to be the family inventor, trying to sell new products to the world, he’d lost sight of who it was to be Stanley.

One half of a matching set, for better or for worse, right?

“So you borrowed money for drugs-”

“No- I borrowed money from a drug dealer so I didn’t have to sleep in my car,” He hissed before he could control himself, and watched teen Ford’s face wince away from him in fear just— just like when Dad raised his voice. He buried his face in his hands in shame, elbows still on his knees, as curled up as he could be in a sitting position. “I just- I wanted to feel human again-”

“Maybe it should have been for drugs.” The voice came again, colder this time, older, angrier. This was a voice that sounded like hot, simmering water, ready to boil over in an instant, ready to scald. “Maybe then I wouldn’t be dead.”

“You’re not-” He choked, but looked up to see the most recent Ford again, all grimy and sunken eyed, but this time there was not an ounce of fear on his face. “Ford?”

Current Ford was sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes locked onto Stanley like a police dog on a bite sleeve, like he was holding himself back from physically attacking the man. His eyes had a gilded hue to them behind his glasses, demonic and simmering, and it made the infection on his shoulder burn brighter, hotter, deeper.

“Maybe it should have been for drugs, because if you were too fucking high to come see me, I’d still be alive.” This Ford wasn’t Ford.

It wasn’t Ford.

It couldn’t be Ford.

Ford wouldn’t— He’d never— but a lot had changed over the course of a decade, hadn’t it?

Stanley struggled to speak as he watched what he consciously knew to be a hallucination of his brother get up and begin to pace. He knew that this wasn’t real, but he was shaking like his life was in danger. It was the fever— it had to be, but was he this far gone? “Ford-”

“No, Stanley,” The thing with Ford’s face hissed, spinning around from across the room to slash at him with those burning eyes, his lips curled into a canine snarl. “Maybe if you’d just fucking OD-ed none of this would have happened-”

His whole body winced, flinching hard like his father had lost his temper and he was only three feet tall again. He felt the tears prickle his eyes as the memory hit him— it had been just like this hadn’t it? Just like all of this stupid fucking snow.

He’d been somewhere in Colorado, caught in a snow storm on the road, pulled over so he didn’t cause some sort of an accident and slowly freezing to death as the gas in his tank turned to fumes and the snow began to pile up on his windshield. There hadn’t been any streetlights on the road he’d been driving on, and there was nothing to really gauge how bad the snow was until the car got darker and darker as the snow suffocated the moonlight.

He was freezing, wrapping himself in blankets and using a lighter for any sort of heat source as he ran out of gas, knowing his battery would fizzle out soon afterwards. He was going to freeze. He was going to freeze in the back of the Stanley Mobile and not a damn soul would find him until the spring. He’d been rubbing some shit grade stuff on his gums to stay awake for the drive, but when he’d realized he would freeze to death if he didn’t do something, he’d done the only thing that he could think to do.

He’d forced himself to take it all, groaning and crying out as he forced nearly everything he had up his nose, his brain lighting itself on fire before he could really finish the action, holding his fist to his face above the bridge of his nose to force himself to stop. The high only lasted about half an hour, but he knew his body heated up, it got his blood pumping and his heart rate up and if it would keep him from freezing to death for a little bit longer, than so be it.

That had been another time Ford had visited him, sitting in the passenger seat of the car and looking back at him nervously as he coached Stanley through keeping as warm as he possibly could, staying still, preserving heat— but Ford had been the first symptom of an overdose. Hallucinations, sweating, overheating, nausea, his heart felt like it was trying to samba inside of his chest and he wasn’t really in the mood to dance. It was agony. It was agony and his brother was sitting in the passenger seat watching helplessly as he tried to keep himself from throwing up in the back.

After a while he had blacked out, he remembered crawling on top of Ford’s lap int he passenger seat, rolling down the window, and beginning to dig like a fucking mole to find the outside.

He’d woken up in a hospital, broken out, stolen his car out of the impound, and got the fuck out of Colorado, adding the little X to his map of states he could never go back to.

His eyes prickled with tears “You don’t mean that—”

“I do, Stan. You ignoramus. You no good sack of garbage— I would still be ALIVE if it wasn’t for you-” The thing with Ford’s face hissed, grabbing a bottle that Stan hadn’t seen before from the area where Ford had that nice decanter.

“You’re not dead-” He responded shakily, tears beginning to stream down his face, leaning backwards but unable to find the power to scramble away as the shadow slid closer and closer.

If you were killed by a hallucination, was that like getting killed by a dream? Did you die in real life? Would his heart just give out? Would his brain explode? He couldn’t feel anything. His hands and feet where numb, he felt like he was asleep even though he was sitting up right, the only feeling in his entire body was the feeling of his heart inching closer and closer into tachycardia, the nausea building in his stomach.

“I wish you’d never been born, Stanley-” The shadow Ford was barely even human now, growling and running at him with the bottle until-

Paws.

One yellow eye and one milky eye looked up at Stanley calmly from his lap, Nick had jumped up from the floor onto he open area of his lap as he had leaned away from his attacker, the tri-colored kitty shoving it’s head between the arm he had risen in self defense and his face to sniff his cheeks and his nose. Stanley froze as the cat that had wanted nothing to do with him after he’d given it a bath now licked the tears from his face, long clawed paws slowly kneading into his shirt and his chest leaving little pinpricks of blood as it did so.

He could feel this.

He blinked and the shadow was gone, nothing left but the at in his arms purring low and steady as it kept him anchored to this world and not the next.

Stan’s lip quivered as feeling came back into his limbs and he began to cry, a shaking hand falling onto the cat’s back to pet his freshly clean fur. He let himself relax onto the back of the couch, his breath shaking as he started to sob softly, letting Nick do the work of sewing his soul back into his body.

Even the cat looked exhausted, eyes hooded, his entire body working now to knead Stan’s soft chest into the perfect dough for his biscuits, all maybe 10lbs of his weight focused on his two back paws which were bruising the shit out of his thigh, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way. His hand stroked down his back and felt the defined muscles moving with his shoulder blades, left then right, left then right, grounding him into the present moment.

“That’s a cute kitty-” He heard a smaller voice say this time, gentle, calmer, two thickly lensed eyes peering around the cat to him innocently from in front of him. This was another face he was all too familiar with, the Ford that he’d been happiest with, Ford at 11 or 12.

Stan smiled sadly, sniffling his tears away— even knowing that this kid wasn’t real, he refused to cry in front of him. What if Ford did come back, he couldn’t see him crying, he was the strong brother— “You never used that word.”

“Yeah, but you did.” Little Ford smiled with a soft attempt at hope. Stan didn’t answer the hallucination this time, exhausted, trying so hard to focus on the cat on his chest that grounded him sleepily, purring like a well tuned motor. He was shaking, but the cat didn’t seem to mind. Little Ford spoke again, his body far more translucent than the others as Stan’s fever began to break. “Are you going to die, Stanley?”

His voice was so…. weak. He was afraid for his brother, a hand reaching out but refusing to touch him as Stan hadn’t let himself look up and acknowledge him just yet. But the voice, paired with the words, the kindness behind them, it coaxed his eyes upwards to the chubby cheeked goofus in front of him.

He’d been so small… they both had been, hadn’t they? Thick lensed glasses, braces at a young age, Ma had done her best to dress them well so the other kids wouldn’t bully them for the same kind of things their parents had been bullied for. They’d been picked on for their size, for Ford’s fingers, for the fact that some of the older boys had seen them walking in and out of the synagogue across town— they’d been the perfect targets to continue the cycle of abuse. They were different, that’s all bullies needed in reality. That’s why their father had forced them into boxing lessons, why he hadn’t come out to defend them after a while when Crampelter and his posse of idiots came chasing them down the road, to toughen them up.

But this face was still so soft, and it was so scared.

Even translucent, Stanley could see the tears welling up in Ford’s eyes.

“Hey-” he began, keeping his hands petting the cat to keep himself grounded. The cat was real and Ford was not, he knew that. If anything happened he just needed to focus on the cat— but at least while he was hear… “I’m not gonna die, kiddo. I can’t die.”

Little Ford sniffled, using the back of his hand and the sleeve of his jacket to sloppily wipe his nose as little kids did. “How do you know?”

“Because we’re part of a matched set. We’re connected, you and I.” Nikola mewed and Stan rolled his eyes “Not you, tuna fish, the kid.” As if the cat could also see his brother’s half transparent form.

“What do you mean?”

Stan took a steadying breath, the cat taking that as a signal to stop what it was doing on his chest and focusing on his thigh, spinning once and then making the same kneading motion into the meat of his left thigh, the pain of sharp claws making the same slow repetitive motion helpful to bring him forward, even if the exhaustion was finally beginning to catch up with him. “When you went through that portal, nothing happened to me.” The kid cocked his head slightly and sniffled again, so Stan continued “When you hurt, I hurt. When you’re happy, I’m happy. We’re two sides of the same soul.”

Did he believe any of this? Probably not. He barely even believed in God anymore, let alone the concept of the human soul, but if convincing himself that he would know if Ford was dead because part of himself would have died kept him working and fighting? Then, fuck yeah. Fuck yeah, he believed it.

“Is that how you know I’m not dead?”

He managed a bit of a smile, still focused on the cat rather than his brother’s face. He knew he didn’t have the strength. “Exactly right, smart stuff.”

“So— So because I’m okay, you’ll be okay, right?”

He nodded, watching Nikola finally end his shift at the bakery and curl up softly on his lap, taking a deep breath as he settled his nose into the warmth of Stan’s hip, the kind of sigh that usually came from someone who paid taxes, or worked a 9 to 5— fucking feline. “No doubt about it, kiddo. Sorry you’re probably feelin’ sick somewhere out there.”

Little Ford giggled “Um— I think you’re more sorry that you’re sick.”

Finally Stan found it in himself to look up, and though Ford was still there, he was still mostly gone. He swallowed the lump in his throat “I’ve always been the selfish one, huh?”

The child ignored his self deprecating comment, soft brown eyes on the steadily breathing life in his lap “What’s his name?”

“His name-” He words almost shattered him again “His name is Nikola. Would you like to pet him?”

Ford was no longer standing in front of him, but his voice was as vivid as ever. Still 11 years old, still eager and excited, with Stanley’s heart int he palm of his six fingered hands. “Like Nikola Tesla?” The boy exclaimed excitedly “That’s my hero!”

Stan’s eyes screwed shut and he let the tears fall freely now, responding “I know, Sixer… I know.” Before letting his body wrack with horrible sobs.

Nick opened his eyes and began to purr again as the human beneath him began to crumble, lulling him into a much needed sleep before his grief could completely take over.

Notes:

This was supposed to be so fluffy, but the hallucination scene and the portal scene turned this fic into what it's become.

Please excuse any spelling errors, I'm a little stupid and I'm always tired lmao

Find me on Twitter also @inkyglob!

EDIT: THANK YOU KALECHIP247 (twt an tumblr) FOR PUTTING THE IMAGE FROM THE SCENE ONTO THE PAGE! I was so happy when I got this comm back, I want to cry.

Chapter 3: Beginning of the End

Summary:

The morning leads to safety, but not for incredibly long. Things have to break before they get better. This is the beginning of the end of the world.

Safety.

When the sun crests up over the horizon, and the beams of gentle light crawl into the house like little critters through the slats of the boards his brother had placed up against the window, when the sounds of the first were again nothing but gentle chirps and tweets: that was safety.

Nikola was not on his lap anymore, some time in the night he had migrated to the back of the couch, his ears flicking every once in a while with the sensation of growing warmth from the sunbeam that skittered down the wall, taking a deep breath and rolling onto his back with one paw stretched up and out lazily into Stan’s immediate view.

When was the last time he felt safe like this? Had it been that long since a roof over his head felt like it belonged there? When was the last time he’d woken up with the sun, under a warm blanket that wasn’t moth eaten in a bed that wasn’t roach infested? The fever had broken in the night, he no longer felt sweaty, his stomach no longer roiled, his shoulder ached but most of the burning had stopped. It wasn’t over by a long shot, he knew the infection needed to be fully treated before it ever had a chance to going away, and he needed to be alive to find his twin, so diligence it was.

He sat up and brought his eyes to the level of the cat, who was lazily upside down on the back of the couch and purring loud and smooth like the engine of his car on a full take of gas. Stan rested his chin right next to the cat’s head “Mornin’ kiddo.”

Nikola Tesla responded by pressing the lazily hanging paw to his lips as if to say “Shh. It is not morning. I am still asleep.”

He didn’t try to move the paw, simply speaking with his lips around the offending limb “Thanks for last ni-” The paw flexed claws into his lips Nick started to do air biscuits, but he took it as a sign to stop taking rather than outright malice. He relaxed as the paw relaxed, watching this gorgeous animal relax lazily in the sun, resting his head a little ways away just to watch. Nick was lean, thinner and smaller than he probably should have been at any age, but if he’d been the runt of a litter it would make sense. He didn’t seem weak in any sense of the word, a scrappy little guy, but he was exactly that: little.

Which incidentally is what made Stan reach up and slowly place his hand on the cat’s stomach, feeling that rumbling purr through the delicate, downy fur of it’s sensitive stomach, threading thick, rough fingers into the plush softness breathing beneath them. His shoulders relaxed, eyes fluttering closed in relaxation, stroking from sternum to stomach over and over again as the animal purred. What he was not expecting was for Nikola to suddenly realize that his most sensitive, top-secret area was being stroked by the large strange man that had kidnapped him out of the snow.

He froze, all four paws extended their weaponry, and descended up on his wrist with claws and teeth in tandem, making a little voiceless snarl as he latched onto Stan’s arm without mercy, like he was fully trying to maul him. Unlike when he was being given a bath, Stanley was not wearing the coat to protect himself, and hissed and flinging his arm back from the animal on instinct, effectively tossing it across the room.

Nick landed on the floor upright and hissed, diving for Stan’s ankles as he got up.

“OW! You damn ca- OUCH! WATCH IT!” The conman growled, dancing from one foot to the other as his minute friend turned against him and latched onto each leg as he placed it on the ground.

Stan reached down to shove him back, using his hand against the animal’s snout as a gentle defense, but found himself dancing towards the door with growled cries of pain, the animal only letting go when he all but fell into the door and opened it for him. Nick took off like a speeding bullet, using the human’s stomach as a springboard before Stanley could even fully hit the ground, forcing him down even harder onto his injured shoulder.

He gasped as he saw stars invade his vision, blinding white searing pain spreading throughout his body and into his skull like the sensation of succumbing to drowning. He rolled onto his left side to attempt to lessen the pain, but to no avail, laying in the doorway with nothing to do but to curl up into the fetal position and groan like he’d been kicked in the nads.

It took a few minutes for him to get up, but up he got, stretching his stiff body and trying to avoid the thought of the cat possibly being rabid that slid into the back of his mind without real cause. “That’s the last thing I need” He muttered to himself as he walked back into the room, found a clean change of underwear and another non-sweaty t-shirt, before he walked into the bathroom.

He made quick work of a shower, gently washing his new injuries as well as the older ones, scrubbing his face and even taking a moment to consider running out to his car to get his razor before deciding he could go another day or so with his current stubble. The long haired brunette patted himself dry, replaced the honey and the bandage that covered it, and slipped on the new shirt and boxers with the same sweatpants from the night before.

It was a little bit funny, the cat that had been so terrified of losing sight of him the day before had gotten so quickly acclimated to his presence, already taking the house for his own. He made a face as he realized that the poor thing needed certain necessities sooner, rather than later. A proper bed if for nowhere else than the lab downstairs while he was working on getting his brother back, a litter box— sweet Moses the damn thing had probably pissed or shat somewhere where he hadn’t noticed yet, or had he been so starving and thirsty that even the day and a half he’d been here, he hadn’t yet started up those processes again? He defiantly needed a litter box, even if it was a cardboard box with a garbage bag liner and dirt from the backyard until he could afford something more substantial.

He couldn’t go without certain necessities anymore, not with another life depending on him.

He would need to find another way to make money too, he knew the few Stan Co. products in his car wouldn’t sell- if they hadn’t sold yet, they wouldn’t sell now, and he groaned at the thought of having to complete a background check for any sort of standard employment.

Stanley wandered up the stairs as thunder rolled and he paused with furrowed brows. “That was… loud.” He murmured, taking a breath as he felt the sky churn in the vibrations beneath his feet. “Maybe this ol’ house needs some extra chink—” he whispered, marching up on feet that had thanked him for remaining bare since he’d taken off his boots, and made his way into the kitchen to reach for a can of tuna for his companion.

The lonely man smiled softly, wondering if the little guy would respond to his name even if he hadn’t really used it. What was it that made animals understand their names in the first place? “Nikola!” Stan cried across the house, finding it in himself to smile a little more genuinely as he imagined a little jingle of a collar as the feline ran down the stairs. “C’mon buddy, it’s food time!” He let his finger find the pull tab for the can and paused, listening for the scratch of claws on wooden floorboards, but nothing. He banged the can on the table so the cat would hear the sound “Nicky!”

Why was the rain so loud? It had just started, like a white noise machine had started up right behind him, or like a window was open letting it all in. He could still see snow on the ground outside from the past few days, but the atmosphere must have warmed up enough for the clouds to let down rain— it would be ice by tomorrow and he was not looking forward to scraping the windshield of the Stanmobile.

There was the sound of a door creaking, and slamming open against the wall as the wind blew.

Stanley jumped, grabbing a knife and exiting the kitchen in a rush, only to see the door had swung open and the rain was beginning to blow into the house. He’d passed the door on the way to the kitchen but— had it just opened? Or had he been too preoccupied to notice?

He closed the door quietly and began to sweep the house, listening for any sign of forced entry as the thunder rolled above him again. This…. no, that was much quieter than it had been downstairs, but the storm was closer now than it had been a moment ago… He- Had he walked past a door that had been open? Perhaps cracked?

His heart dropped into his stomach, lip quivering like it had the night before, whimpering “Nikola?” To what he knew would be an empty house.

The mrrp he was hoping for never came.

Stan didn’t bother to find an umbrella or a coat, he walked out into the snow and the rain in his bare feet and t-shirt, whistling and snapping, calling it’s name as if in the 2 days they’d known each other he was already Stan’s cat.

But nothing belonged to Stanley, did it?

Nothing good ever happened to Stanley Pines.

The second Stan:

Worth three bucks,

Should have been “Free to Good Home.”

Nobody wants you, you stupid little shit, not your parents, not your brother, not the cat.

He couldn’t breathe. Everything was freezing cold, the thunder vibrating him to his core, the wind pushing him in 6 different directions, whipping thin strands of hair around his face and stealing the tears from his eyes. He didn’t have the energy to fall to his knees, let alone cry with any sort of force, simply letting the wind and the rain do the work for him as he slowly began to freeze.

When the chill reached his bones, the fire in his gut lit brighter. There was one thing about pine, a strong sturdy tree, it was sappy as ever on the inside. The Pines family loved with a love that was more than love, devotion to their sappy cores, standing tall in the wind and shading their loved ones with thick fuzzy branches that kept them dry. But, pine sap ignites quick. It burns fast and hot, leaving smoke buildup that could ignite again over and over and over again. The sappier the tree, the quicker it lit. The sappier the man, the hotter he burned.

And Stanley burned hotter than the sun.

His lips twitched upwards into a snarl, bearing teeth like fangs that felt false in his mouth. “I don’t know why I even picked your sorry mess of fuzz out of the snow!” Stan screamed, the hollow feeling in his chest echoing among the trees like rage. “I should have let you freeze, fur-ball! I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone!” The tears were stolen before they could roll down his face, lightning striking somewhere behind him and cracking the sky like a whip. “I’ll find him on my own! You’ll see!”

Stan didn’t feel himself turn and walk into the house, nor did he remember slamming the door, shivering like a leaf, dripping cold and wet like a kicked pup in a film through the house and downstairs to the laboratory where he knew he needed to work. He’d make it work. He’d force all of his strength and focus into decoding all the stupid squares and triangles, figuring out how to fix what was broken— His brother’s journals spoke of a friend, someone who had come up with the idea, could he find them?

The storm was no quieter three floors down, or was it? Did rain storms ring now like glass about to shatter? Did they burn dully like embers in the wind, fed by the breeze but unable to burn from it’s force? Something was eating at him from the inside out and it wasn’t heartbreak: the tears were numbing the pain he had already begun to feel, his vision beginning to tunnel and wane.

Water wouldn’t help anymore, the hunger was all consuming. He could fill his gut with dirt and it would give him more nutrients to feed his body than the metallic shit he was getting from his brother’s stupid pipes.

His elbow hit the desk from where he had sat and he rubbed his face into the clammy flesh, knowing he was shaking, feeling his body eating itself away and not caring any more than he had the day before.

Eyes looked through the glass at the large hunk of machinery, listening to thunder crack and pound around him even so far under ground, the ringing in his ears paired with the imagined sound of acid sizzling through his gut.

“None of this would have happened if you hadn’t called me!” He finally snarled, standing so quickly that the chair was blasted back by the force of his knees, the clattering echoing in the room but barely reaching his ears over the rushing of hot blood in his ears.

At this point, Stan Pines was being kept alive by sheer fire— fuck force of will, fuck determination, he was burning from the inside out, a starving, hollow, dry husk of a man lit ablaze with rage, resentment, regret— and the burning was slowly but surely turning him to dust.

He couldn’t feel the sobs pouring out of him as he stumbled past the empty door frame and into the large, cavernous room that housed the horrific mechanism of steel and loathing. He picked up a hunk of something metallic and flung it as hard as he could at the machine, barely making it across the room. “If you hadn’t called me, you’d still be here!” He snarled, full of malice. “You stupid fuck, you should have known better than to trust me!”

Another hunk of metal flung, another and another as he screamed, his voice harsh, his core full of nothing but air and burning sap. “If you hadn’t called me, maybe we both could have died with some peace!” But the words were barley more than a stolen whisper from empty lungs. Stanley finally hit his knees and let his forehead press into the dirt, his voice nothing but a hoarse whisper “If you hadn’t called me, I could have let myself get killed thinking you were fine.”

He knew at his core that he just felt sorry for himself. He was Stanley Caryn Pines, selfish, stupid— a sorry sack of shit. He was curled up on the floor again as he had been a few days earlier, sobbing loud enough to down out the wrath of the sky above him. “You should have never let me see your sorry face again,” he sobbed to the void left behind by the screaming form of his twin.

As if he didn’t see that sorry mug every single time he saw his own reflection.

So cold, soaking wet, shaking like a leaf in the wind, his vision tunneling as he curled up on the ground, longing for the way family used to feel. He missed his brother, he missed his mother, he missed home.

“Stanley!” His mother’s voice called from up the stairs, and he knew he was losing himself. “Stanley, you need to eat!” Her voice was so kind to him, almost laughing. She’d always sounded like the happy bells from a wedding in an old movie, at least she had to him.

He felt like a boy again, a boy who had scraped his knees and was struggling to find his strength to walk again. He’d lost his will to do anything but cry and he couldn’t even feel like it was happening.

He needed to eat. Ma had always been his voice of reason, even when he was living at home it had always been her to tell remind him to eat, to shower, finish his homework, take care of his braces— and now even from half a world away he was hearing her voice kindly calling from the kitchen as it always did, keeping him on track, saving his life.

He struggled to his feet on shaking, exhausted limbs. He felt sick to his stomach, like the organ was going to secede from his body, crawl out of his throat and onto the floor, skittering off like one of those Ridley Scott creatures to wrap his esophagus around someone’s throat. Everything burned, bile rising into his mouth like he could spit it as weaponry, pooling on the back of his tongue and tempting him to gag. Every few steps, the feeling forced him into a fit of dry heaving as he stumbled muddily toward the door. He held the door frame and heaved, tripping over bare feet and heaving again into the elevator as he shakily guided it up the shaft.

“Stanley… oh baby, what have you done to yourself?” Her familiar, caring voice murmured, soft and concerned: his mother worried over him even without being present.

Stanley didn’t answer, he couldn’t bring himself to speak to the voice, already feeling insane. Staggering up the stairs and into the house again, shaky legs leading him across the house and to the kitchen, eyes on the large cans of nondescript brown meat on the higher shelves.

The starving man leaned in the empty doorway of the kitchen, leaving the lights out and taking the two steps to the counter, leaning on his hands more than his wobbly legs and staring at those cans, yet refusing to reach up.

This was Ford’s food. This was food he hadn’t earned, did not deserve, could not touch.

“Stanley-”

“Shut up-” He growled at the voice; it was not his mother, it was just a voice. He reached over to the radio on a lower shelf and turned it onto the last channel his brother had been listening to, but nothing really happened. The storm had killed the signal, giving him nothing but empty-headed static, even though the rain was beginning to wane. He groaned, smacking it once before giving up and sitting at the table with his back to the fridge.

He was so hungry. He couldn’t bring himself to fill a glass of water, he couldn’t fill himself with empty calories again. He couldn’t even find it in him to reach for the can of tuna still on the counter behind him from where he had been prepping to feed the stupid fucking cat. He felt weak, listening to the static and the thunder of a passing storm, his head swimming with malnutrition.

Stan pressed his forehead to the table and whimpered “Mommy, he’s gone-” As if the voice really had been his mother, sobbing emptily and wishing he could feel her thin fingered hands pressing against his shoulder blades, squeezing him softly like she did when he’d been like this back home.

He hadn’t called her mommy since they were small— at least not regularly. He had gown out of it far faster than Ford, who’d only started calling her Ma when he’d been bullied for it. They loved her more than life, they’d sworn as kids to be at her beck and call, to come whenever she felt she would cry, to save her from anything that hurt her. She had, in turn, promised to be with them even when she couldn’t be.

As a child, he had not understood what she meant. How could someone be somewhere where they couldn’t be? Where they weren’t? Now he understood perfectly. She was with him even all the way from New Jersey. Even though she was probably curled up beside his father or asleep on the couch with his younger brother, she was still with him when he needed her the most.

It hurt.

He was too empty to continue to cry, feeling nothing but the empty huffing of the dust of his soul onto the table as his flame died, his embers growing cold. He missed his twin. “He’s gone…. Mommy, I’m so lost-”

His flame finally died out with a breath, escaping his lungs one last time like a final puff of smoke.

 

---

 

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead” Ford’s voice came from the other side of the room, paired with the hound of sizzling like he was cooking something. Stan’s stomach churned as he noticed the smell of bacon, eggs— like smelling breakfast on a hangover.

“No…. No, go back to sleep-” He muttered into the table, his cheek pressed against the wood like it was the closest thing he could have found to a pillow, rather than him having just laid his head down.

“Yeah, no can do, bub” His brother explained with a chuckle, humming to himself as he cooked “A Kraken isn’t going to catch itself! We need protein! Sustenance!”

Stanley opened one eye with a scowl and then the other, his brother standing in front of the galley stove and dancing in place as he listened to the radio— so that’s what he was humming with. He felt this overwhelming sense of… agitation. Not the kind that ever went anywhere, mind you, but the kind that simmered in your chest around annoying activity by a loved one. Ford was a light sleeper, an early riser, and a grumpy bunk-mate— he’d known all of this from sleeping one bunk underneath the man for the entirety of their childhoods, but some mornings on this God-forsaken boat it felt like Ford’s demeanor would be the death of him.

He felt like death warmed over— why did he feel like he was dying? It was like a million hangovers at once and it was not pleasant, watching his brother’s dark brown curls bob to “Sweet Dreams are Made of This”.

Stan decided to take a playful jab at the much too cheery man “Finally got your radio extender working so you could hear your little girlfriend?”

Ford stopped dancing, his back ramrod straight. Target acquired. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Stanley, you know I like music.”

“Yeah, but that little radio host in Oregon-”

“Is none of my concern.” he said simply, his back still to his twin as he plated up what seemed to be an omelet. “Besides— we make home port in New Jersey, why would I put so much effort into finding a radio station from--”

“—Was Sweet Dreams are Made of This, by the Eurythmics! An up and coming group from across the pond with some dreamy hits, some of which are on our top 40 list for today.” Came the smooth, low voice of the DJ crackling across his radio speakers. “We’re coming at you live from the tower here in Gravity Falls! My name is Adagio Hall, and we’ll be back after a word from our spon-”

Ford kicked the leg of the table, which knocked the radio over and turned it off, keeping his face stoic even though his ears were tipped pink.

Busted.

“You know we can stop in that town, you said there’s lots of mysteries around there-” but he was grinning ear to ear, knowing his brother was embarrassed to have his little crush on a voice.

“Maybe one day, right now I’m focused on being here. With you.” Ford explained, but it wasn’t a deflection, it was in earnest.

Stanley paused softly “Yeah?”

“Of course! I mean— this is what we always wanted, isn’t it?” Ford chuckled, handing him a fork and sliding his plate over. An omlette just as he liked it, surprising him with fresh veggies that his brother had probably spent far too much money on.

Fuck, Stan was starving. It was like he hadn’t eaten in days, maybe even a week, his stomach lining chewing itself up to try and appease his body and give nutrients to his brain. He was also… really sweaty, but that might be a normal thing at this point. “I mean yeah-”

Ford’s brows furrowed and he laughed. He looked so… Damn. He looked rested. His eyes were bright behind the thick lenses of his glasses, no sleeplessness or bloody crust to be seen. He was clean shaven, well dressed, washed (which was hilarious on a sailing ship) his hair was fluffy, his hands were unmarred— he looked healthy, not like he had when-

When-

When what, exactly? What was it that he was remembering?

It felt fake... it felt 100 years ago.

“Mmrrrp?” Came a noise from the floor and suddenly there was a ball of fluff in Stan’s lap, Ford admonishing it with a laugh.

“Nikola, that’s not yours!” The man reached across the table with a large hand, but Stan lightly smacked him away, one hand coming to hold the little tortico cat closer to his chest as it pawed for his eggs.

Nikola was here?

Of course he was, where else would he be? He was their cat, they’d gotten him as the ship’s mouser back in Jersey.

Stan waved off his brother “Let him have it, he ain’t no trouble.” And let go of the cat enough for it to reposition, one tiny back paw on each of his thighs, each of his front paws on the table as he tore into the scrambled eggs on the table. Scrambled? Hadn’t they been an omelette?

Stanford playfully gagged “You indulge that cat far too much.”

“You’re only mad because he loves me more than you.”

“Does not!” Ford gasped, appalled.

Stanley grinned wickedly “Does too!”

“If!” Ford cried, getting up to wash his now empty— didn’t he just start eating?— plate in the galley sink. “If he likes you better than me, it’s only because you’ve tempted him with FOOD!”

Stanley leaned back in the wooden chair, closing his eyes and feeling the slight rocking of their ship, the groans of the wood and the ropes as the water lapped up at the hull and the sail pulled taut. He could hear the crying of gulls above them in the early morning, the shuffling of his brother near the sink, the soft tapping as their empty hammocks hit the cabin wall, and the soft munching of a cat scarfing down eggs like he could be removed from the table at any point in time.

This was their lives. This had been their plan.

They’d wanted to take this little thing and explore the whole world— their run in with the Jersey Devil had been only a taste, only a fraction of what their potential had been, and he knew that they had so much more in them. He had his brother, they had their ship, their lil’ useless mouser, and a whole lot of time on their hands.

“If I give him food it’s because he earned it.” He responded, his eyes still closed.

Ford scoffed “Whatever you say, Stanley.”

They lapsed into companionable silence, Stan only opening his eyes when he felt Nick jump onto the table completely, moving to take him off and put him on the ground, but finding no cat to be found.

In fact, his food was gone too, and so was the plate— Had he let the cat eat everything? Damn, he was starving… No matter, he must have eaten, and Ford must have washed the plate because he was putting away the dishes now. Must be his turn for chores.

“Come onto deck, Stan, we’ve got to rig the sail and set course.” Ford reminded him, wiping large hands on a comically small dish towel.

He shrugged and stood, groaning as his stomach and back burned, a hand shooting up to his gut as he took a deep breath.

Ford scrambled over to him “Stanley, are you alright?”

His brows furrowed and as soon as the pain started, it stopped, leaving him blankly empty, like there was a feeling he was expecting but couldn’t identify. “Yeah… yeah Sixer, I’m fine. Just uh— just queasy, that’s all.”

His twin looked at him suspiciously, narrowing big brown eyes eyes behind his glasses and flicking them down his person for a moment, but letting it go. “Come on, we have a Kraken to catch.”

He watched his brother leave the cabin and glanced around the room at the small galley kitchen, the hammocks hanging from the ceiling, the small table, the wardrobe, the chairs— something felt very off. He shook his head and climbed the stairs onto deck, listening to Nikola chirp from between his ankles as he walked, smiling softly at their constant companion.

“There’s no way the Kraken is off the coast of the Pacific northwest.” He hummed, grabbing a rope to get to work rigging the sail in whatever direction his brother pointed him in.

Ford pointed north, using his compass as a guide to guarantee their direction. “You’re absolutely right, that’s why we’re making way towards the Arctic Circle.”

Stan planted his legs and started pulling the ropes, listening to the sound of the pulleys as he changed the direction of their sail, keeping them moving as Ford steered the rudder, then tying it off with a complicated knot he didn’t know he knew how to do. He groaned “The Arctic Circle?”

“Mhm,”

“Shit’s cold.”

“Freezing, actually. I wonder why,” His twin chuckled, dripping with both sarcasm and fondness.

Stanley groaned “And what if we freeze our asses off? C’mon.”

“We’re going to be fine, Stan. You worry too much.” Ford scoffed, tucking his compass into the pocket of his jeans, fixing the collar of his yellow, long sleeved polo.

This time it was Stanley’s turn for suspicion, but less suspicion and more blatant incredulity. Since when had his brother been so calm? Nikola forcibly nosed his head under Stan’s hand “You’re shockingly… erm… calm.” He looked up to watch his brother, who was leaning off the port bow just enough to really get the wind in his hair.

Nikola nipped at his hand and he jumped, looking down for the animal again, but he was gone.

Was he losing his ability to pay attention to things? He’d always considered himself to be slow, but had he slowed down to the point where he was losing things? Losing bits of time where food and plates would disappear? Again Ford scoffed, and Stanley rolled his eyes. He’d forgotten how his twin brother got when asked what he perceived to be a stupid question. But, he caught himself.

Forgot? How could he forget, they’d never been apart, right?

“Hanging out with you more often has done me a lot of good!” He chuckled “I’ve mellowed out since college.” If they had never separated, how would Ford have gone to college? He asked that question, his voice quiet, his tone level as he began to fall into realization. Ford responded with a laugh “College? Stan, you know I skipped that. We had a mission!” Contradicting himself again.

No… No, Ford had gone to college. He hadn’t ended up at that fancy schmancy one in California, but he had been able to leave New Jersey— Ma and Pa hadn’t been able to afford to send him to one of them Ivy league colleges, and the local community college still had one of those stupid quotas for admitting Jews, but that one college down south had jumped for his attendance. Backupsomething. Ma had called to tell him, so proud even if Ford had been ashamed.

He’d been proud. As a guy who’d had to drop out before he graduated high school, to know his brother got a bachelor’s, then a master’s, and on to multiple PhDs? He’d been the happiest man in the world!

Ford wouldn’t have skipped out on college, there was no way. He only-

Only chose him in his dreams.

“Ford,” He looked up and asked “When did we start doing this?”

His brother laughed “About- 4 years ago? Stan O’ War still needed a lot of repairs.. you feelin’ okay?”

Stan nodded “And— when-” he swallowed thickly “When was the last time you talked to Ma?”

Stanford turned around and leaned causally back on the railing, rolling his eyes like a child “I called her on a payphone while you were finishing up the groceries, Dad.” Then he laughed, a genuine and joyful sound “What is this? Mock interrogation?”

Stan was standing now, he was wondering why he hadn’t been feeling the rocking of the ship or the crashing of the waves against the hull. The world was somehow quieter. He’d lost the sound of the gentle creaking, of the gulls in the sky, of the wind and the waves. It was silent.

The world was silent and Ford was laughing but he couldn’t hear that either.

Was he dead?

“You’re not here, are you Ford?” His voice was barely anything above a whisper, his body starting to shake as the sounds and feelings and smells disappeared from him.

Ford’s eyes looked worried, but he continued to smile, pushing himself off the railing and laughing “Stanley, what do you mean? We’re always together.” Stan felt a lump form in his throat, his eyes welling with tears, almost flinching when Ford took a step towards him. “I’m— I’m always with you-” The voice sounded much more hesitant, anxious, like Stan was scaring him, but he didn’t really have a choice in the matter did he?

Hot tears rolled down his face and he felt so vividly when six fingered hands cupped his cheeks to hold him, to force him to look. “You know I’m always with you, right?”

Stanley swallowed and nodded, choking out “I know.” Squeezing his eyes shut. He was terrified. None of this was real, and fuck it hurt like hell. This had to be his hell. He didn’t even believe in hell, but having to live his dream, knowing it was something his brother would have never wanted-- it was a fate worth then death.

“Help me.” It was a terrified whisper, his brother’s voice cracking. Out of instinct, his eyes shot back open, but this time Ford was crying, sobbing in terror and frozen, holding Stanley’s face. “Please God, help me-”

“I- Sixer, I’ll help, what do you need?” The panic in his own voice was so desperate, he felt his brother slipping away, the sea behind him giving way to just a bright blue light, his body being pulled back.

“Stanley- Stanley- help me-”

His brother was being pulled away from him. He was dead and his punishment was to watch Ford die over and over and over. He reached up desperately, stumbling forwards. “Oh- n-no… What do I do?”

His twin’s twelve fingers slid off his face as he was pulled backwards and there was nothing but light and the crackling of electricity. “Stanley— Stanley do something-”

Another recreation. He had no control. “Hey- Hey- STANFORD-” He stumbled forward, chasing him as he was taken, running and never getting any closer than he was, losing distance as Ford was pulled faster than he could manage.

He looked so tired suddenly. His healthy happy brother was haggard and half dead again, looking to him with panicked eyes.

This man had seen hell and knew exactly where he was going.

“STANLEY— STANLEY, DO SOMETHING! STANLE-”

He woke with a gasp to a sharp bite on his nose, his eyes crusted over with tears, his throat tight with the same scream he had choked on as his brother had disappeared.

“Watch how the mad man flies! That was Flight of Icarus by one of my father’s favorites: Iron Maiden! Coming in at number 39, it’s first week on our top 40 countdown and probably another chart climber! We’ve got a quite a few new hits for you coming up today, up next at number 38 is Rock the Boat by Forrest. Spinning these records on, I’m Adagio Hall and this W-GRV, The Falls.” Came the smooth alto from the radio playing in the corner of the kitchen as he wiped the tears from his eyes. The radio was playing. The storm had stopped.

Nikola had jumped down from the table, looking up at him expectantly from where he was now sitting on the floor, half a dead rat’s carcass at his feet.

“I-” He began, trying to swallow the tears and focus on anger. Rage. He’d been abandoned again, made to feel worthless, by a cat of all things. “Why are you back, huh? How’d you even get in?” He sneered “Give me one good reason why I shoul-”

Half a rat.

The words died in his throat. He turned his head to the table to see the head and top half of the rat had been placed in front of where his head had been resting on the table. Of course his brain immediately went to The Godfather, waking up with a horses head in his bed, his nose scrunching up in disgust. But… But, cat’s don’t have a concept of shit like that? I mean— his father would have told anyone who would listen that Munch left mice in their beds because he hated them, but his mother had explained it differently.

“No, Honey, he isn’t trying to poison you.” She’d chuckle, peeling the mouse off his pillow and petting Munch gently as she’d walked the thing toward the trash can.

Ford had spoken up while Stan pantomimed getting mauled by a cat behind him “But then why leave mice in our beds? He does it for Dad too, but he doesn’t do it for you.”

Caryn chuckled softly “Because according to him, I’m the best hunter out of all of us.”

Stanley barked a laugh and spoke up from where he’d collapsed on the couch. “A hunter? You, Ma?”

“That’s right.” She’d always been so wonderfully patient. Her two boys, the genius and the goof, thick as thieves. She’d never thought that Stan was worth any less or more than Ford, and the same the other way around. She loved her boys from the bottom of her heart, and damn it, he knew she always would. No matter what happened or how the treated each other. “Who makes dinner every day?”

“You,” He responded thoughtfully.

“And packs everyone lunch?”

“You,” Ford echoed this time, both boys about a foot apart from each other and cocking their heads slightly.

“And who feeds the cat?” She chuckled, watching both boys faces pull back in disgust.

“You.”

“But, what’s that got to do with anything?” Stan had asked, leaning forward to rest his chin on the back of the couch, stood up on the cushion on his knees, Ford to his other side in a mirrored position.

“Well, you, Ford, and your father never bring food, so he thinks you guys must be really bad at hunting! He’s trying to provide you a decent meal so you don’t starve.” She’d been facing away from them when both boys popped up with looks of determination.

Stan had turned to Ford with a look on his face like their lives depended on this. “We can hunt mice too!”

“Yeah! We don’t need Munch to do it for us!” His twin had cried back in determination, and they’d sped off to prove to their big ol’ fluffy cat that they too could provide mice if needed. They hadn’t been able to, but they’d only stopped when Filbrick had caught them trying to get their child-hands broken in industrial grade rat traps.

Nikola had broken out of the house to hunt and bring him food.

He was only feeding Nick, he had avoided eating himself since he’d been given the option and had substituted those missing calories for water and pieces of moldy bread when he’d needed something desperately. The cat had decided it was hit turn to be taken care of.

He turned in his seat and looked up at the shelf, looking at the cans of pre-cooked ‘brown meat’ his brother had probably stocked up for emergencies. His lip quivered as his stomach burned, his eyes closing as he tried to rationalize why he didn’t need to indulge in food.

“Mmrrrp” Nick chirped from his feet, jumping onto the table and pawing the rat’s head towards him, eyes wide and concerned as to why this much larger cat with magic door knob paws was not eating, even when given food he didn’t have to hunt for.

It broke his heart and he finally willed himself to get up, nearly doubling over from the sharp pain of hunger in his gut. He scrounged in the drawer for a clean spoon and snatched a can off the shelf, almost moaning in delight when he realized the can had a pull tab and he didn’t have to scrounge through the house for a can opener.

He didn’t even bother heating it, shoveling a spoonful of cold food into his mouth and nearly swallowing before he could chew, watching the room blur as tears welled in his eyes.

Plain brown meat had never tasted so good, the screaming in his stomach intensifying and begging him to down can after can. He couldn’t stop himself from scarfing down the first, but he knew he would have to pace himself with anything else, letting the spoon clatter to the floor and stumbling back into the chair when he was finished, feeling nauseated and desperate.

His body felt so weak, and it was so eager to consume, why did he feel like he was going to vomit up everything that he ate? Why did he feel like his body was going to shut off in spite of him finally giving in to it’s demands?

His head fell back and his hands moved up to his stomach to cradle it, as if convincing it to keep what it had been so forcefully given, his face still crusted lightly in mud.

He was still so cold, it had been long enough that his body had mostly dried from the rain, but he still felt damp and crusted from laying in the dirt in the basement. Was the fever back? Was he succumbing to it? His stupid, no good, fat, useless body was failing him and it was his fucking fault, wasn’t it? Dad was right, he was nothing more than—

“Mrrp?’ The cat quietly asked, and it brought him back to the forefront of his mind, realizing where he was and why he was there. Stanley let his head fall slightly to the right to look over at the feline, who again pushed the rat’s head towards him, concerned for him like no one had been in a very long time.

He could hear the echo from his dream in his mind, the gulls, the waves— it had all felt so real and so wonderful. He had finally a taste of what was supposed to be, not two men struggling to get by, but brothers thriving on the open seas.

The sound of Stanford’s panicked cries, an echo from when he’d first arrived at this God-forsaken place, had torn little slash marks into the meat of his heart.

He took the chance of raising his hand. The cat that had only given him affection when he was asleep had no concept of allowing himself to be pet. He tended to skitter away, hissing like a human being would curse at someone who had almost hit them with a car. To be touched by human hands was to be violated.

Nikola pressed a worried nose under Stan’s hand and into his palm, wet nose bumping up twice to try and urge the hand to follow a path down his head. His eyes blinked open as Stan listened to silent instructions, petting again from his head down to his tail, listening to the soft engine in the animal’s chest rev and purr. After yesterday’s bath, his coat had lightened slightly in the white bits, the orange mottling showing so much more vividly through the dark of black fur, no longer matted or crusted together but forced smooth by the soap and the attention that Nikola had been able to give it when he’d sat in front of the fire to meticulously re-clean himself.

It was surprising that, even with this… offering on the table, he was not covered in blood in any way, in fact he seemed to be pretty meticulous in general, lapping his chops and stopping to clean long whiskers whenever they were touched. He was so soft, such a delicate little thing underneath Stanley’s large, calloused hands. He felt an ache in his heart for having to manhandle the thing the night before, but seeing him happy and healthy like this made it all worth it. Nikola nosed into his hand and continued to purr, walking the three little steps closer to him to bunt his head against Stan’s strong, stubbled jaw.

This is what was real.

Ford was gone, the cat was here, and he-

His lip quivered and he felt Nick rub against it, the purring loudly and looking for any form of contact.

Ford was gone, Nikola was still here, and he was alone and starving in the snow all over again.

Acceptance.

He closed his eyes to pull himself together. He was a Pines, and God damn-it, Pines boys didn’t cry. Pa had said that over and over again. He got hit? “Don’t cry, get back up and swing back.” He got bullied? “Stop that, you’re giving them a reason, go back and get mean: bully them for a change.” He got smacked? “Yeah well you deserved it, and it hurts me more than it hurts you. Stop crying and go play with your brother.”

Ma had told them it was okay, held Ford to her chest when Crampelter decided to be particularly rough that day, held his own cheeks and kissed his head and whispered little songs to soothe his worried heart after he’d taken one in the eye for his twin, but Pa had always put a stop to it when he had noticed.

“They’re not boys anymore, Care. They’re men. You’ve gotta treat ‘em like men. Ain’t gonna grow up if you treat ‘em like boys.” His father had said, gruff and unimpressed as per usual.

A scratchy tongue started to clean up his face, starting at his nostrils and working up to the bridge of his nose over and over like it was a very specific pattern. Nikola sat on the edge of the table, one paw on Stan’s shoulder for leverage, all 10 lbs of him balancing on that little focal point so that he could reach further up than his little neck would allow. His tongue was so scratchy and his breath— oh God his breath STANK. It was explained away by the fact that the little guy had basically dragged in a rat half his size into the house, he had to have bitten in to something dead, but it was like death took a shit.

That did it. That was the final thing that brought him forwards into the present moment. His breath hitched and he started to cry, hot tears leaking down his face as he tried to hard to hold himself together for the sake of the creature that was trying harder than any human had in years to care for him. When was the last time a human being had coaxed him to eat, to make sure he was clean, to soothe the nightmares when they came?

Nikola had broken out into the rain and the snow to hunt for another incompetent two legged cat. He’d decided that instead of saving himself and leaving to find better shelter or another human, that it was easier to brave the snow, the rain, the barbed wire fence and other starving predators to find this stupid, starving cat some food.

Someone did come back.

Someone thought he was worth a damn.

He sobbed like a babe and let Nikola scratchily wipe his tears with his tongue.

In the end the top 40 countdown had gone from 38 to 28 by the time he found the strength to stand again, Nikola having curled up beside him on the table while he worked out his issues. Stan had peeled open the can of tuna he had been prepared to discard as a thank you, watching the tortico’s head shoot up at the sound and begin screaming greedily like he hadn’t hunted for himself and left a rat carcass half eaten on the floor. He resisted giving the animal the entire can out of gratitude, placing the other half in the fridge for later in the day.

He’d walked to the front door, closed and locked it, then sleepily trudged down back into the basement to hopefully wash off the mud and cat saliva from his person. He hoped his brother had been wealthy enough for an in-unit laundry, otherwise he was going to have to tear up the couch for spare change and go into town, and even then it wasn’t a priority.

He could always go to his car and get his own clothes, but there was something about wearing Ford’s shitty t-shirts that made him feel a little closer than purgatory was.

Showering took everything out of him again, hot water leeching all of his strength and almost making him skip treating and re-bandaging his shoulder. He shoved open the medicine cabinet behind the mirror and scanned the bottles for anything useful, coming on what looked like a very old bottle of anti-biotics and a tube of anti-bacterial ointment. The honey hadn’t been necessary anyways, but he was glad he’d thought of it instead of letting the injury fester til now.

He finished his bandaging and took one of the pills, deciding that he’d take them either for a week or until they made him sick, whichever came first.

Stan went without a shirt or trousers this time, struggling to find boxers if only because laying naked in his brother’s bed was weird when it wasn’t on purpose to bug him and gross him out, stumbling into bed and pulling the blankets up to his throat so that he didn’t feel like he would freeze.

Nikola trotted across the bedroom floor and jumped up on the side of the couch, walking delicately to the spot Stan had seen him in earlier that morning and curling up like it was his new spot to sleep every night.

Maybe he would one day feel safe enough to sleep on Stan’s chest on a regular basis.

For now, at least he knew someone was there when the nightmares got bad, and he drifted off into a blissfully dreamless sleep.

 

---

 

Coexistence became so easy for the feline and the fool.

Stan finally let himself eat, waking up after what felt like 16 hours of straight slumber to down another can of meat— this time pulling out a pan to heat it up and salting it, eating it slowly so that he didn’t feel like he needed to throw it all back up the moment he hit his stomach. It caused cramps, but it was better than starving again.

There was so much work to do, including finally getting through the journal and finding sheets of paper from a stack of dot matrix paper refills to write down the code his brother had used to encrypt half of his words— he knew better than to rush into something before he knew all the information. As bullheaded as he could be, there was no second chance to risk fucking this up— if he broke this more than he could fix it, he was done for.

Nikola initially acted as a book stand, sleeping with the book resting on his side as Stan fiddled and tore at the perforated edges on the dot matrix paper, looking to write down anything that might lead him to the clues he was looking for, jotting down anything cipher or science related that he might be able to ask someone at the library to help him find. Libraries were free, right?

The feline was still standoffish, only wanting to be touched when he asked for it first, but also never straying too far from Stanley’s side. Nikola started as book stand and was eventually promoted to assistant, slowly but surely earning a nest in the extra office chair (so that if Stan moved, he could wheel his sleepy assistant about), an extra plate and bowl of water, and a second litter box in the basement separate from the one he’d created upstairs in the house proper.

They’d have to go into town soon. He’d have to find a way to make money— there was a lot going on here he needed to figure out. His brother had things that couldn’t be paused, right? Couldn’t screw up Ford’s name while he wasn’t here… He had a mortgage, probably. He had a house, that’s the kinda stuff that went with a house, right? He even wanted to clean up, but he was hesitant about screwing with things he knew where his brother’s. “Look at this place, Nicky,” he groaned “I feel like a museum guide in here.”

He shoved a few machines to the side, wincing when they made little clattering noises as they pushed themselves together. It would be incredibly difficult to coexist with his brother’s energy, but he could manage it for the sake of getting him back. He needed to keep going, to figure shit out, to make this happen come hell or high water. He knew he wouldn’t stay forever, but he was staying for now, and that was enough.

Otherwise, Stan began to make himself at home at the shack, albeit begrudgingly. He was letting himself eat food like a normal person, he’d allowed himself to shower every night before bed, he’d even had the audacity do to laundry in the washer and dryer his brother kept in one of the rooms in his basement.

He eventually moved his own things inside, a duffel bag and some photos— a few things he couldn’t have parted with if he’d begged himself. He couldn’t be bothered to really put anything away just yet though, leaving his excess shit on the floor of the front room and looking at what should have been the TV room with a sigh.

“Like,” he called to the cat, gesturing through the house at a dining room table that was just a horizontal bookshelf at this point, a shitty wooden chair where they could have been a nice recliner, the large dot matrix printer having shoved the phone into a corner to the point where he wouldn’t have even known where to look if it rang.“What am I gonna do with this place? I’d wanna make it nice for him to come back to, but I barely wanna touch anything.”

He was talking much more often, his voice still rough but his heart wearing smooth, playing with the cat more than was probably productive. He’d found some sort of ball shaped thing in one of the lab rooms and found himself rolling it across the hardwood floor for the cat to chase.

“What the hell is this?” He gestured to the siren corpse in a mostly empty fish tank, the formaldehyde already half evaporated and letting it begin to rot from the scalp down. “It looks like if the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Fay Wray had an awful alien lovechild.” The cat cocked it’s head as Stanley posed next to a skeleton in the same room “Why does he need these things? Fuckin’ weirdo,” but he was laughing, fondly.

The long haired man picked up a gaudy purple Hawaiian shirt peppered with pineapples “This can NOT be his. He’s always been thinner than me but this? This is stinkbug thin.” Nick sat again and looked up at him, confused. “Him?” He read the cat’s expression— whether he was assuming or projecting at this point, he didn’t care— and smiled softly “Oh— my brother. Name’s Ford. He’s-… he’s weird like all the other stuff in here.” Stan smiled softly “He’s the one we’re gonna get back.”

When he started back down the stairs to the lab, there was no hesitation. Nikola followed him eagerly, sitting beside him in wait for the elevator. They were going to get Ford back. They had no choice in the matter. No matter if it took days, weeks, months, years— he’d give up the rest of his life to know his brother was still breathing.

He looked down at the body of his companion. His lab assistant, HAH! Maybe he could be just as much as a scientist as the dork had been, just needed to remember his buddy here had paws where hands should be.

He couldn’t afford to neglect himself now. He couldn’t afford to starve. He needed all the brainpower he could muster to make sure he learned everything in every book he could find. Stanley was sure of himself, he could make this happen if he put his mind to it. He’d done it before, he could do it again.

He always survived.

“Raa” Nikola announced confidently from his feet, following him at a trot as they got to the third floor again and found their respective chairs “Mrrp?”

“Yeah, you’re right. Library trip is defiantly gonna have to happen… groceries too, but I’m bled dry. You wouldn’t happen to have any ideas, would you?” He spun in his chair to look at his assistant in his own seat.

Nicky was staring at him with two wide eyes, one clouded, one clear, Stan’s red jacket in his mouth as he slowly made biscuits in the fabric. His busted ear flicked as he processed the human’s words, but otherwise he was silent, dedicated in his work like a good assistant should be. Stanley found himself hoping the feline didn’t put any more holes into the damn thing than it already had, but he had decided the cat could use it until he needed to go into town.

“Well, at least one of us has an idea where to start.” Stan chuckled, watching the animal with a relaxed fondness. Dumb cat had taught him a lot more than he bargained for.

He’d have to mention it when Ford got back, that he was saved not only by his twin brother, but by a cat named Nikola Tesla.

Notes:

The story felt complete, but he wanted to include this. I couldn't tell him no.

Stanley's Dream:
In a chair on the deck of an old shitty schooner
sits a man in his 30s logging a cycle lunar
beside him on deck is an old wooden chair
empty always except for a small tuft of hair
the hair would look up, meow, and yawn
as the sun came up cresting to start the dawn
The man would stop writing, look up and around
Notice something was missing and turn with a frown
the cat would make space and go summon the man
A brother named Ford sat there missing his Stan
For in life they were split, but in dream they stayed true
it was nice to feel someone was looking for you
Stanley would watch, stand and wait
hoping his brother would take the bait
because in his heart, there was nowhere better
the twins of pine belonged together
one day they’d sit on the bow of the schooner
something he knew would be later than sooner
he’d fix up the portal something he must relive
And after all this, maybe Ford could forgive

 

I hope that you enjoyed this piece, I loved it as much as it destroyed me to write. Stanley deserves so much and his life is so hard after this, but he deserves a companion to be with him.

Notes:

Hi! I've been super excited to put this out and now that it's supposed to be out, I have so many things that feel wrong. I'm trusting my plan and not my anxiety LMAO

The rest of the story is written and edited and ready to be published! I'm going to wait a few days or so between publishing each chapter since there are only 3, but this fic builds up to a little under 29,000 words.

I hope it hits you the way it hit me to write it! If there's any spelling errors, blame the fact that I'm a bit stupid LMAO