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Stan Pines knows fear well.
Fear is playground bullies. Fear is watching his brother get mocked— for his hands, his glasses, his brain— and knowing that it’s gonna sting when Stan steps in to give these jerks a piece of his mind. He never caves to the panic that builds in his chest when he sees Ford get cornered by the dumpster. The drive to protect his brother has always been stronger than fear. He wears his black eyes like badges of honour.
Any amount of honour, courage, and self-preservation fades in the face of his other childhood fear. He’s pretty sure he’s a coward for it, but he always gives into it. Always lets it wash over him like a wave— Pa’s voice, yelling thunderously about his broken glasses or his poor grades or his bad attitude or whatever Stan has done wrong this time. He’s used to doing things wrong. He’s used to having this figure of a giant looming over him, calling him worthless, and yeah— he takes it.
For seventeen years, he takes the hits. Takes the blood in his mouth and bruising on his cheekbone and the broken collarbone, one time. He cowers on the floor as Ma comes in like a whirlwind, insisting that Stan go to the emergency room despite Pa’s protests that he’s not worth the cost.
(Ma only steps in every so often, when things get hospital-level bad, or when Pa starts going after Ford. Stan doesn’t blame her. He knows she’s scared too.)
Then he’s seventeen, and he’s facing a whole new fear. Ford is distant. He’s always gotten caught up in schoolwork and research and science, always cared so deeply about his grades in a way Stan doesn’t understand, but this is different. A million little things converge into a too-strong hand gripping Stan’s heart, squeezing until he can hardly breathe anymore.
Stan is bored of playing paddle-pong, laying on the floor staring up at the ceiling, and he stretches an arm out to tap Ford’s ankle. Ford jumps from where he’s sitting at his desk and hisses, “Will you please let me work?”
It only takes few seconds for Ford to take a breath, Stan watching his shoulders rise, and say, frustration still clear in his tone: “I’m sorry. This test is just… really important.”
All the tests are important, Stan wants to retort. Every homework assignment is the end of the world and there’s no time for anything else, no time for the Stan-O-War or your brother, just science and equations and understanding shit Stan is too stupid to get.
He wants to snap with rage and howl at his brother to just talk to him, just come work on the ship with him for the first time in a month, but the tension in Ford’s shoulders still hasn’t evaporated and Stan doesn’t want to make his brother mad, doesn’t want to make things worse, so instead, he says:
“Yeah, okay, Sixer. You keep being a genius or whatever. We’ll work on it another time.”
Ford doesn’t answer, still scribbling away at his schoolwork, and that makes the hand around Stan’s heart clutch even tighter.
That night, he dreams of betrayal. He dreams of his brother, desperate and stricken, screaming at him for his misdeeds. He dreams of an all-consuming blue-white glow that brings more dread than awe. He dreams of arguments, of consequences, of being found out.
When he wakes, he stifles his quickened breathing with a hand over his mouth and doesn’t remove it until he’s sure that Ford is still fast asleep.
In that moment, Stan realizes he’s absolutely terrified that his brother will leave him.
And then the principal is calling Ford a genius and saying Stan will be scraping barnacles off a dock forever — and there’s no surprise there, he’s always known he won’t be worth anything, that doesn’t hurt. What hurts is the fact that Ford could abandon him.
What hurts even more is the fact that Ford would consider it.
They’re sitting on that rusty swing-set on the beach and Ford is saying “if the college college board isn't impressed with my experiment tomorrow, then okay, I'll do the treasure-hunting thing” like it’s a goddamn back-up option, like it wasn’t supposed to be Stan and Ford against the world together.
Stan doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to voice it, but he does. “And if they are?”
“Well then, I guess you better come visit me on the other side of the country,” Ford says with a laugh, as if that was always part of their plan, and he leaves.
Stan doesn’t mean to break the project, he’s just frustrated, and horror blooms quickly in his chest when he realizes what he’s done. He tries to fix it, he does, he convinces himself it’ll be fine, and when he gets home, he chats with Ford like normal. He can’t bring himself to present his mistake, afraid of every way things could go wrong, afraid of Ford hating him. His fears come true anyway.
He gets kicked out weeks before graduation. A month before their birthday.
As he drives away with no destination in sight, he’s not afraid. He’s devastated. He sobs so hard he can’t see the road and has to pull over, pressing his head against the steering wheel and trying to calm his miserable sobs.
Stan is not a crier. He learned at a young age that crying is weakness, and weakness is something his father won’t tolerate. Still, there have been moments over the years— tearing up when Ford sets his broken nose, being so sick with the flu that all he can do is sob in his brother’s arms, staring at the top bunk at 3am and confessing “I think I’m broken” with a hitch in his voice that makes Ford climb down to comfort him. (He can’t bring himself to explain the mess behind what he’d said, can’t find the words to talk about the boy with the devilish smile in the downtown alley, and Ford doesn’t make him. Ford just holds him.)
There’s a sad, sorry part of him that wants to picture his brother in the passenger seat, owlish eyes filled with concern, trying to help him feel better.
All he can see, though, is Ford closing the curtains. Ford setting his jaw like Pa and shutting him out.
Anger rises in him. That night, he drives down to the Stan-O-War and sets it on fire. He cries again seeing his childhood dream disintegrate into nothing— just dust, ashes, and memories— but he doesn’t want Ford to have it, and he probably can’t stick around, and it’s not like he’d go sailing on it without him. It was supposed to be the two of them together.
The fear doesn’t kick in until he wakes up after a poor sleep in the back of his car, blinking blearily at the sunlight streaming through the windows. It takes a second for reality to kick in, and then his entire brain goes: oh fuck, I’m homeless.
From there, fear is all he knows.
It’s how many days can I go without food before this catches up to me? and if I park my car here will the cops knock on my window? and how many cracker packets can I shove underneath my jacket without being suspicious?
It’s trying to peddle broken products and being run out of town with his own faulty pitchforks. It’s changing his name half a dozen times to evade the law. It’s tearing down a ‘do not allow entry’ poster with his face on it from the front of some podunk grocery store, because it’s the closest place around to steal from and his stomach hurts so bad from hunger that he’s been throwing up bile all morning. It’s the coldest New York winter on record and curling his frost-bitten fingers in his sweater as he shakes in the backseat of his broken-down car.
It’s being twenty-one and looking for work, for anything to do. He ends up washing dirty dishes at a restaurant that is definitely a cover for the mob, and when Sal sees him deck some asshole who tried to dine-and-dash, he thinks, yeah, it’s over for him. He had a good run with this job. Now he needs to keep running.
Instead of firing him as a dishwasher, Sal hires him as muscle.
And okay, it’s kind of cool to be a bodyguard for the mob. Stan won’t admit it to any of them because it’s sure to get him laughed at, but it’s like he’s living in those gritty novels Ford would bring him from the library in the hopes that he would actually read a book for once. But the sheer awesomeness of the situation doesn’t deny the reality of it.
The reality of it is fear, at a much larger scale than anything he’s ever known before. There are guns and drugs and serious fucking conversations and Stan doesn’t know he’s about to watch one of the higher-ups shoot some guy in the head until he does.
Eventually, he fucks up and skips town, running from Sal with the money he stole the minute he found out they were out for his blood. A few weeks later in Illinois, he falls into another gang. This time, they see his quick wits and his strong demeanour, and they give him a different task. He’s the one having those serious fucking conversations, holding guns and trading drugs. (He never shoots until he has to, and when he does, it’s never fatal.)
By the time he’s twenty-three and stuck doing favours for some power-tripping crime boss in Texas, eight names removed from Stanley Pines, he’s become comfortable with fear. The hand around his heart doesn’t leave, constantly pulling and squeezing and aching, and he gets used to it. It gets worse, of course, in certain moments— like when he’s bleeding out in a dingy gas station bathroom in Phoenix, hyperventilating and shoving paper towels against the bullet wound in his side and thinking yeah, this is the end— until the gas station attendant knocks on the door and tiredly informs him that if he isn’t out soon, they’re gonna call the cops. The fear of ending up in jail spikes enough of a response in him that he stumbles out the door and into the Stanleymobile, leaving Arizona and a lot of his blood behind.
When he does finally land in prison — it’s a fuck of a lot more scary than he expects it to be. Not just the first time, though that’s the worst. The second, the third, and especially the fourth, in Colombia, because fuck he’s in a foreign country surrounded by strangers who want him dead, and he doesn’t know how much longer he can pretend he doesn’t speak fluent Spanish, pretend he doesn’t hear the ways they’re planning to kill him—
And then one day he’s twenty-eight in a shitty motel room in Ohio and someone is banging at his door and he can’t help but sound desperate when he says, “I’ll get you your money, Rico, I promise!” — but it’s just the mailman. It’s just a postcard from his brother.
The fact that Ford is reaching out for his help, after all this time, makes him even more afraid. What mess could Ford possibly be in that he could resort to asking Stan for help? What if Stan goes to help him and Ford pushes him away again? What if everything goes horribly wrong for the second time?
Like in every other situation in his life, his fears are proven right.
Ford is a mess. Telling him he looks like Ma after her tenth cup of coffee is generous at best. There’s no scrap of that bright, brave kid in Ford’s eyes anymore — just the ghost of a haunted, trembling, paranoid man. There are faulty circuits sparking in the corner of the living room. Scorch marks on the wall of the hallway. Droplets of blood trailing from the kitchen.
Dread settles in beside fear as Stan follows his brother down into a basement too big for the house they’re in, an ominous whirring sound scoring the way.
Ford explains the portal. Ford shakes while doing so. Ford says you’re the only one I can trust.
Stan thinks, for a moment, that this is his chance. He can fix things. He can help Ford out of this paranoid, raving state. He can be his brother again.
And then Ford is shoving the journal at him, begging him to leave , throwing their childhood dreams in his face and Stan can’t help it— he gets mad.
The anger is replaced, for one burning moment, by the worst pain he’s ever felt in his life and the smell of burning flesh. It comes back in an instant when his vision clears and he sees his traitorous brother’s face.
In an action he’ll regret for the rest of his life, he shoves the journal into Ford.
The anger vanishes for good this time when Ford lifts off the ground, face twisting in panic, howling for him to do something! Stanley! and he’s fucking paralyzed with fear as he watches his brother fall somewhere he can’t follow. Somewhere he can’t protect him.
The portal powers off and Stan shakes violently on the cold basement floor, clutching the journal Ford had thrown like a lifeline, terrified he’ll never see his brother again. Terrified that he caused this .
He cleans up the blood and scrubs at the scorch marks and puts away the faulty circuits. The more he cleans, the more afraid he grows of whatever Ford had gotten caught up in— the bathroom is covered in blood, so much blood, and if it weren’t for the empty first aid kit Stan would think Ford had killed someone.
He fakes his death and reads physics textbooks and ends up taking advantage of the hauntedess of his brother’s house. His time is split between running the tourist trap, working on the portal, and having horrible nightmares. It’s a pretty good routine he falls into. The fear that he might never get his brother back remains with him, a constant thrum under his skin, a reminder of all the time Ford likely doesn’t have on the other side.
Suddenly, it’s been thirty years. Suddenly, Shermie’s kid is trying to offload his kids on him for the summer, and Stan would say no if it weren’t for the fact that they’re twins. He attended their birth; he remembers how small they were, how innocent, how they always started crying at the exact same time. He tries to say no over the phone, and he should — the town is dangerous, not to mention the goddamn portal he’s building in the basement — but his mouth won’t obey him.
All of a sudden he’s getting phone calls for the entire month of May about “we’ll drop them off on May 29th” and “you don’t still smoke, do you?” and “the girls are very excited for this summer!”
And when the kids arrive, one wearing bright clothes and yammering way too loudly and the other with a nerdy disposition that’s so Ford that it hurts — well, they’re not even both girls, so Stan kind of resents having to take all those phone calls when he wasn’t even getting accurate information, but whatever.
The twins’ arrival brings a whole new set of fears. Ones that are bigger than Stan likes to admit. Like what if a summer without smoking will actually kill me and what if I can’t take care of them properly and what if they hate me and what if I’m just like Pa.
And those fears inch close to the truth, because yeah, maybe he’s a little hard on Dipper, maybe the kid’s a little resentful for it— but there’s no big explosion. There’s no horrific moment where the twins get hurt and it’s his fault. He never has to cave and find his secret stash of cigars. The kids get themselves into trouble and then get themselves out of it, and Stan is pretty content with patching up the odd skinned-knee without questioning it.
That’s how it goes — long nights on the portal as always, long days at the Shack, taking care of these kids that are worming their way into his heart — until that awful kid Gideon steals the Shack. His hearing-aids prove to be good for something, and he gets it back, but he’s walking around in a fucking daze the entire time. He can’t access the portal. He can’t get his brother back. He has to send the kids home. He can’t take care of them. He failed.
(He’s always known he was a failure, but it still hurts.)
But he gets the deed back, and in the process, he finds the second fucking journal. For the first time in his life, he thinks he’s finally lucky. Of course Gideon had it, though he doesn’t know how the brat found it. Of course something so sinister that drove his brother into a paranoid mess of an existence ended up in the hands of some terrible kid. The sleight of hand required to swipe the journal is easy, and he immediately delivers it to the basement, checking to ensure the page with the portal instructions is intact.
Honestly, he’s on top of the world, he can’t stop grinning— and then he goes to check on the kids. They’re talking about how they have to tell him something and for a second he thinks it’s the whole ‘Dipper’s a boy, don’t tell mom and dad’ schtick he’s been expecting all summer, but then—
he’s being handed a burgundy journal with a six-fingered handprint on it, emblazoned with the number 3, and his heart fucking stops.
He flips through it as the kids speak, barely even processing what they’re saying, scanning through pages of gnomes and zombies and muses and the final key to building that damn portal and he’s pretty sure he can’t fucking breathe.
When Dipper’s winding monologue comes to a close, he slaps a smile on his face and puts on a bit. He rambles about spookums and monsters as Dipper insists that the creatures in the journal are real, fuck, and it’s not until he gets down to the basement that night, weathered burgundy journal in his hands, that he lets himself start shaking. How the fuck did the kids find this? Where? After he’s been looking for it, all this time?
He flips the portal on as per the instructions, the pages making sense in a way that’s kind of funny, because thirty years ago he didn’t understand a scrap of inter-dimensional physics. He’s scared it won’t work, scared that what seems to be a stroke of dumb luck will actually be nothing at all— but it powers on. It’s working.
Dipper asks for the journal back a few days later, anxious and jittery, and Stan gives it back with little fanfare. He’s already photocopied it and he knows it’ll beg questions if he holds onto it. From what he’s read of Dipper and Mabel’s entries in the journal, they’ve gotten way too invested in the town’s weirdness for his comfort— but they’ve also been doing a damn good job at using the journal to keep themselves safe, too. And yeah, it’s terrifying to see Dipper following clearly in the footsteps of his brother, the parallels between them becoming so fucking evident that it hurts, but there’s nothing he can do. He can’t protect the kids more than he already is, not without them realizing he knows about the town’s weirdness, not without them potentially catching on to what he’s doing and getting caught up in the danger of restarting that damn portal.
And then there’s zombies attacking the Shack, because of-fucking-course there are, and any pretence of pretending he doesn’t know shit about magic flies out the window. He shelters the kids in the attic, getting a little beat-up along the way, and for the first time in a long time, tells the truth: that yeah, he knows about the weirdness of the town, but he also knows that weirdness is dangerous ( because look what it did to your brother ).
Ford’s journal saves the day— goddamn invisible ink, why is Stan not surprised — and he has half a mind to take the journal back, to scour the hidden messages, but he knows that would prompt questions he isn’t ready to answer. He gives it back to Dipper, making him promise to use it for self-defence only, because the thought of the kids going up against the horrors of the town without any protection is one he doesn’t wanna entertain. Dipper makes him promise, in return, that he’s not keeping any more secrets.
(He knows Dipper’s promise is a lie. He’s only comforted by the fact that Dipper doesn’t know he’s lying too.)
He finally gets the portal working. The countdown starts, and so do the gravitational anomalies, and he really does consider pushing past the guilt in his throat and telling the kids what’s about to happen— and then the government is there, fucking swarming him, locking him up, and he’s so goddamn worried about not being there when his brother gets back.
He’s even more worried about the twins, seeing him get arrested. They’re resilient kids, he knows that, but they shouldn’t be caught up in his shit— and beyond that, he’s terrified that they won’t believe his shouts of being innocent. Because he’s not, they shouldn’t, but he doesn’t want to be some lowlife criminal to them. He wants summer days like the one they just had— setting off fireworks and cleaning it up with water balloons and having the company of two little rugrats who somehow, impossibly seem to care about him.
Stan wants to be a good uncle. He wants them to trust him. (He doesn’t expect to get anything he wants.)
The clock is counting down. The kids are there, and Soos, and they shouldn’t fucking be there, because what if they step over the line, what if they fall into the portal just like Ford did all those years ago? He’s pleading with Dipper not to shut it down. The kid doesn’t trust him, and that fucking stings, and then it’s Mabel he’s begging not to press the button. She’s way too close to the mouth of that thing and he’s fucking terrified, his heart pounding in his chest so loud he can barely hear the words spilling out of his mouth about family and trust. Mabel’s hesitance hurts more than Dipper’s, though both are, objectively, understandable. Dipper’s always been a bit like Ford— cautious, anxious, untrusting— but Mabel’s always been like him. Loyal to a fault. Stan doesn’t want to make her pick between him and her brother, but there’s no other way, not when Dipper is fighting him tooth-and-nail on this.
Mabel trusts him in the end. Him. Stan. It feels like the highest of honours— and then the world explodes into white and he crashes face-first on the ground but none of that fucking matters because it worked. Ford comes through the portal and it’s everything he’s ever dreamed of— metaphorically, of course, because most of his Ford-returning dreams are nightmares in which it doesn’t work or Ford hates him— and he can’t even laugh at Ford’s all-black sci-fi get-up because he’s so fucking overjoyed.
Ford is back. He’s here.
He’s here and he’s punching Stan in the face and yelling at him and yeah, this is much more like his nightmares. Another goddamn fear coming true after thirty years of floating around in his brain.
When Ford kicks him out again— no friendly reunion, just “You look like Dad” which hurts more than the blossoming bruise on his jaw and a demand for his house and his name and his life back — well. Stan honestly never predicted that one. He’d been scared that Ford would be upset with him, yeah, scared that he’d get his brother back and Ford would still be that raving, paranoid mess that he couldn’t possibly begin to help, scared that he’d have to spend the rest of his life trying to make his brother amenable to his presence. He didn’t think he’d have to be scared of being homeless ever again.
So yeah, he’s fucking pissed. He lets his anger show more than anything else; lets it distract from the myriad of little fears cropping up in his ribcage and making his heart fucking pound when he thinks of them. Because what if the kids like Ford more than him, or worse, what if Ford puts them in danger, and what’s gonna happen to Soos and Wendy once he’s forced to close the Mystery Shack? (He’s also afraid of what’s gonna happen to him, but he knows he matters less.)
He has a panic attack in the kitchen one day, after he promises an upset Mabel that her and Dipper will be together forever— and god he fucking hopes he’s right, he hopes they don’t turn out like him and Ford, they can’t. He calms for a second when he hears Dipper and Ford return home, because they’re safe, thank god, but that also means either one of them could see him like this— a trembling mess, shaking hands spilling his water all over the floor— and he forces himself out to the back porch. The fresh air helps him to get a proper breath in, even if he’s still sinking in his thoughts, and he carefully waits for his tremors to subside.
And then the fucking sky splits open. Stuff he doesn’t know how to describe, let alone comprehend, comes spilling out. Fuck prison and the portal and saving a pig from a dinosaur — this is what fear is.
He lurches into the Shack, calling out desperately for the kids with no answer. He calls out for his brother, too, more fear in his voice than he wants Ford to hear, and he’s in a shitty sort of luck— Ford isn’t around either. From the window, he sees weirdness splashing over the forest in fucking waves— and somehow avoiding the house entirely. He vaguely remembers Mabel rambling to him about unicorns and protection spells, and guesses Ford must’ve done some kind of weird, sciencey-magicky mumbo-jumbo to protect the house.
He looks out the window and knows the kids are somewhere out there in this mess, that Soos and Wendy are probably caught up in it too, and even against his anger he thinks about Ford being outside this goddamn barrier he set up— and he tries desperately to convince himself to leave, to brace the horrors swirling out of the sky— but he’s fucking paralyzed where he stands.
Stan has always been a coward. He knows this. He just didn’t expect to hate himself so much for it.
He takes in that kook McGucket when he arrives, a whole host of creatures he’s only seen outlined in Ford’s journals trailing behind him, and it’s kind of hard to get past the fact that a bunch of gnomes are sleeping on his couch. He focuses on rationing supplies. Figuring out how long they can survive holed up in here. Trying not to think about what the world looks like outside the walls of the house he’s being kicked out. Trying not to think about his family, out there, alone.
The kids and Wendy and Soos come home to him, eventually, thank fucking god. He doesn’t know how long it’s been— all his clocks stopped working when this whole apocalypse thing started— but he’s so goddamn relieved to see them that it doesn’t matter. They look a little worse for wear, and he’s furious at himself for not being there to protect him, but they’re alive. They’re here. That’s what matters.
They talk about Ford being captured and Stan shoves all his terror under a mask of indifference, forcing himself to run on his already-fading anger towards his brother. They talk about an insane rescue mission, about making the Shack into some giant robot monster, and he doesn’t take it seriously until the kids are ready to take on the demon that’s causing the apocalypse— to save Ford so Ford can save all of them.
In the end, one fear outweighs another. He can’t let the kids get hurt. He thought that his inaction would deter them; thought that pretending it’s all a matter of pride and being angry at Ford as if he’s not terrified for his brother would work. It doesn’t.
Stan Pines knows fear well, but he knows loyalty better. So when he finally agrees to take the Shack to that demon, to rescue his brother, well— that’s because his love for his family is stronger than his fear. But they don’t need to know all that.