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The cryo chamber opened. The pseudo-Dipper thawed from ice, to wood, to flesh or something a lot like it. It dropped to its knees, shuddering from the cold.
"Careful." Ford knelt next to the shapeshifter, nearly took its shoulder, drew back; and then tentatively touched it anyway. "Are you alright?"
"I'm..." Its voice was rough and guttural; it feigned clearing its throat and said in Dipper's voice, "I'm—fine now. Thanks for letting me out, man. I guess I must've fallen in and got stuck."
For a moment, Ford wasn't sure what it was talking about. But of course—it was trying to sound like Dipper. Pretending to be an innocent human boy—someone a kindly human rescuer wouldn't think twice about helping get outside.
"You can drop the act," Ford said, then forced himself to soften his voice; he was trying to give the shapeshifter permission, not a command. "I know you're Shifty."
Shifty jerked its head up. It gave Ford a nervous smile. "What? Shifty who? I don't know what you're talking about."
Ford sighed. "You insist you're a normal teenage human boy?" he asked. At Shifty's emphatic nod, he said, "Well, that's unfortunate, because I came down here to set a shapeshifter free, not a human boy. Would you happen to know where it is?" Ford raised his brows expectantly.
Shifty didn't move for a moment; then slowly stood and backed away from Ford. It didn't shed Dipper's form; but when it spoke, at least it was in its own voice. "Who are you?"
It didn't recognize him?
Of course it didn't. He'd worn a mask the whole time he'd known it to prevent it from learning to copy his face. A security precaution, he'd told himself at the time; in truth, he'd thought he wouldn't be able to handle seeing another person walking around wearing his face and knowing it wasn't Stan. But in the end, he supposed he was the closest thing to a parent Shifty had ever had, and it didn't even know what he looked like. All it had ever seen of him was brown hair—which was gray now. His hair, and his hands.
"I'm—Ford," he said. "Stanford Pines."
And sure enough, Shifty's gaze immediately shot to Ford's hands, verifying for itself. He raised one hand and waved weakly.
"You—" Shifty lunged forward, changing forms as it came; but when it latched onto Ford's shoulders, it had only changed into him. Searching his face with identical eyes, face pulled into a look of rage and disbelief. (Did Ford really look that old? Did he really look that haunted—or did the haunted look come from Shifty?) "What are you doing here? After all these years! All these years, locked in the cold and the dark! Why are you back!"
Ford stiffened, but fought the urge to flinch or pull back. He took a deep breath and kept his voice even and low. "To offer you a long overdue apology."
"An apology?!" (It really did sound just like Ford—not just the same voice, but the same inflection, the same outraged tone. It had learned to speak from Ford. It hadn't even picked up Fiddleford's accent.) "Now?! You think an apology can make up for—!"
Ford held out a book.
Shifty fell silent, its gaze immediately pulled to the shiny handprint on the faux leather cover. "What—is this?"
"Something I should have let you see a long time ago," Ford said, before realizing that Shifty was probably looking for him to literally confirm that that was what it thought it was. "My fifth journal. "
Shifty reached for the book, then pulled its hands back without touching it. "You said I couldn't see them," it said accusatorily. "That it would be too dangerous."
"All knowledge is dangerous," Ford said. "I had no right nor cause to decide that you couldn't be trusted with that risk." And why had he? Because Fiddleford had treated it like a monster as soon as it hatched? Because for months Bill had been whispering warnings to Ford not to trust anyone? Those both might have been contributing factors, it was true—but Ford knew that ultimately, he couldn't blame either of them for the fact that he'd listened. "Frankly, I did far worse things with these journals than you ever could."
Still Shifty didn't reach out. "You can take it," Ford reassured it. "This isn't a trick. I know I've mistreated you—but did I ever lie to you?"
At last, it hesitantly reached out and took the journal. "I've already read the third journal," Shifty admitted.
Ford nodded. "Dipper and Mabel told me."
"Where are the first, second, and fourth?"
It hadn't even read the one in its hands and it was already eager to get its hands on the last one? The corner of Ford's mouth tugged up in a smile. Perhaps it got that curiosity from its pseudo-father.
Or perhaps it craved books only because Ford had starved it of knowledge for so long. His smile faded. "Gone. The first three are in another dimension. And a gnome stole the fourth one," he said. "I've started a sixth, though. It doesn't have much yet, but you might be interested in it."
"With you?" Shifty asked, its gaze immediately darting down to look for the telltale rectangular lump in his coat.
"No—outside. I left it back in the shack."
"Outside?" Shifty's eyes rolled up—and up and up, until its pupils disappeared into its skull, as though it could stare through its bone and brain and the dirt ceiling to the sky. Some of its grip on Ford's facial features slackened, giving it a look like a wax figure that was either melting or mutating. It was a grotesque sight, like something out of a horror movie, all white eyes and drooping uncanny facial features, some mindless predatory monster that had lost control over its disguise and begun to reveal its true form in front of the terrified protagonist.
And the sight filled Ford with a deep sorrow. Because his knee-jerk reaction, his programmed-in-his-DNA instinct, was to judge Shifty's shifting features based on how badly they mimicked a human, rather than based on how normal this fluidity between forms must be for Shifty's species.
Why had he let himself treat Shifty like a monster from the moment it hatched, just for being its natural alien self? When the whole reason he had started researching anomalies was because he knew what it was like to be one? To this day, sometimes Ford saw children holding hands and could remember how the first girl he'd tried to hold hands with had shrieked in terror, over fifty years ago. Shifty had never deserved to be treated like that.
And from now on, it wouldn't be. Not by Ford.
He put his hand on Shifty's shoulder, causing it to form new pupils so it could see him. "Have you been outside since..." God, had they ever taken it outside? "Since you hatched?"
"No." Its skin was turning corpse-pallid and translucent as it slowly dropped Ford's form and returned to its own. Ford thought about the uncanny valley response, and the evolutionary advantage of instinctive revulsion to things that imperfectly mimicked human forms and motions, and humans unthinkingly judging an alien based on their own disgust response that had nothing to do with the alien itself. "I could not get through the doors."
"You can now," he said. "Come on."
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By the time they reached the stairs out of the bunker, Shifty had totally shed Ford's form and returned to its own. It was so much taller than the last time Ford had seen it. And more lopsided. Was that natural for its species, like crabs that grew one claw much larger than the other? Or had Ford stunted its growth—from the cryonics, the dark, malnutrition, the months of its childhood spent locked in kennels and cages, perhaps even the social isolation?
Ford had to consciously suppress the impulse to tell Shifty to take another form before they stepped outside—human, animal, object, anything—so that no one would see what it was. What was he hiding it from? They were in the woods. In Gravity Falls, of all places. Were there not already enough strange things running around? The gnomes and unicorns would get used to an alien in their forest.
Instead, he decided to warn it—as they climbed the stairs, he told it about how most humans reacted to things they saw as monstrous (essentially: like Fiddleford), and the places it could go and forms it could take and things it could do to minimize the odds of panicked local humans hunting it down or sticking it in a zoo. But if it wanted to take the chance anyway—if it wanted to visit human towns, see what it thought of them and what they thought of it—that was its prerogative. Ford had no right to tell it it couldn't. He realized now that he never had.
Shifty turned over its options; and then, contemplatively, said, "I think I'll see the town next week." Like it had a schedule. "First I want to see the gnomes."
"The gnomes?" Ford asked, turning to give Shifty a surprised look. "Why them?"
"I learned their shape from your third journal, but they were drawings. They wore clothing, though," Shifty said. "I had to guess at the colors. And whether they have tails."
Of course—what was another researcher's notes compared to doing your own field research? "Like Plato stepping out of the cave to see the forms that cast the shadows."
"Who?"
"I have some more books you might like to read," Ford said. "Gnomes don't have tails, though."
"Oh." Shifty sound disappointed.
The closer they got to the top of the stairs, the more sunlight streamed down into the pit around the tree. Shifty automatically raised an arm to shield its eyes; but it didn't flinch back from the light. It stared around, taking in the sight of the forest for the first time in over thirty years. Even as alien as Shifty's true form was, Ford was sure he could see the wonder in its face.
Black overlapping plates, like a pangolin's scales, formed across its head, shoulders, and raised forearm in the direction of the sun, like a shield from the light. Ford blinked at them in amazement. "Huh," he said. He didn't think he'd ever shown Shifty any creatures with scales like those; which probably meant they were a form it knew instinctively. "Fascinating. I didn't know you do that."
"Neither did I," Shifty said, studying its own arm. It formed the plates across its body in a wave, then returned them to the places they'd best shield it from the sun. It must have been an ability its species didn't develop in infancy, since that was the last time it had been in such bright light.
"Well." Ford stuffed his hands in his pockets, unsure what to say now. How do you say farewell to an alien you raised from infancy but were never quite a father to? How do you apologize for robbing a creature who was never quite a son to you of its first thirty years of life?
He jerked his chin toward the west. "The magical part of the forest is that way. If you want gnomes, that's where you'll find them. Along with fairies, manotaurs, and unfortunately unicorns," he said. "If they ask what you are, tell them you're a changeling from space. I think that's the closest comparison to what they're familiar with." He nodded eastward. "And the Mystery Shack's that way—my house. You've seen it in my journal. If you want to see my new journal, or—or talk..." He wasn't good at this. None of the Pines men were good at this. "Don't be a stranger."
Shifty turned that over as it scanned the woods. "If I visit, I will come wearing a familiar face."
Before Ford could explain what the idiom meant, Shifty had formed what looked like a translucent kangaroo pouch to tuck the journal away, morphed one of its leg pairs into two extra arms, and galloped away into the woods on its hands, like the exact opposite of a not-deer—familiar cervine grace in a cryptid's body.
Ford watched until it was out of sight.