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xirine13 · 3 days ago

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(Girl who’s very normal about the Shifty au voice) I’m imagining Ford working in the lab one day, a bit after he comes through the portal, and finding a cardboard box that did not belong to him. He’s curious, and it is his lab, so of course he opens it.

It’s filled with pictures. There are others, in albums and frames up at the Shack, but they show Shawn and Shawn only, because Stan couldn’t have Shifty being found out.

So they are here, hidden, instead. Because he also couldn’t bear there not being anything of Shifty’s real self. Those moments of childhood where Shifty couldn’t quite keep his shape; because he wasn’t able to, because he didn’t want to, or because he was too emotional to. Stan’s already taken Ford away from his “son”, so doing this was the least he could do.

Candid photos of a small Shifty wriggling about, a different shape in each photo. A small child with too many limbs playing in the puddles. A young Shawn with a huge grin on his face at the lake, a fish gripped in a claw. A monster looming over Gompers with a wide open maw with too many teeth; right before a second photo with the exact same scene, this time Shawn smiling sweetly, innocently at the camera. Hikes, snow days, birthdays. Graduation.

Most of them have dates on them, some even notes. This is Shifty’s first day at the… This is him trying to turn into… This is him, 10 years after you’ve been gone…

All moments in time Stan didn’t want Ford to miss (moments Stan wanted to remember too).

There are even quite a few taken by Shawn himself. Of weird birds and fish he found interesting, of aftermaths of pranks, of Stan unaware of the camera, of Stan very aware of the camera shoved in his face, of whatever Shawn thought worth swiping the camera from Stan for.

A whole life lived, documented just for him because his brother thought it was meant to be his.

…

Ford closes the box, and puts it exactly where he found it.

Hello girl who is very normal. We are both. So so normal. So normal, in fact, that I grabbed your idea and ran with it so hard that you can’t see me anymore. I’m gone. All thats left are my tears and however many pages it would take to print THIS-

It's probably two, maybe three in the morning when Shawn hears banging from downstairs.

He's never had to sleep as much as Stan-as his father wanted him to. If that's a trait of his species, Shawn doesn't know. The point is that for the nine and change hours that everyone else in the Shack is asleep, Shawn drifts in and out of light dozes or periods of sleep, occasionally getting up to read or do a quiet activity when he can't stand to have his eyes closed any longer.

He's reading-no need for a lamp or flashlight on when he's got great nightvision- when he hears it. A sound, not exceptionally loud, but enough that Shawn, and probably Shawn alone, can sense the vibrations coming up from the floor.

He slots a bookmark in between the pages. Since Weirdmageddon, he's been sleeping a lot less, and reading the night away a lot more. That is, when he isn't up and down guiding his father back to bed.

Wiping his mind didn't just erase the memories, it erased experiences, things Stan knows, routines he doesn't keep to anymore.

Last night, Stan had gotten up and gone to check on his son, in the attic upstairs. He'd been expecting a little boy, snoring away soundly in the shape of almost human.

He was not expecting to see a pair of perfectly human twins in his place, and Shawn had to reassure his father before he woke the house with his fear.

There is a sort of grief, to watching the sure, steady man who raised him look so uncertain, look so lost. It's frightening.

Still, Shawn is reading at two in the morning, listening for sounds.

He peaks into Stan's bedroom.

His father is still in bed, asleep, the covers half dragged off the bed by gravity and snoring away like a log.

He hasn't moved.

The noise comes through again, this one a little softer.

Before he goes, Shawn pulls the covers back up and tucks Stan back in.

He follows the sound down to the basement.

For humans, creeping around in the dark, searching after sounds in the dead of night when no one else is awake would be a nightmare.

Shawn doesn't care. Dark or light, there are things scarier than something moving stuff around down here. Besides, there are only a few people who know the code to the door.

It's Ford.

Of course it is.

Shawn isn't sure exactly how to feel about Stanford Pines anymore.

The kids, Mabel and Dipper, his cousins, told him what happened that day in Bill's fearamid. The threat. The swap. The memory gun.

Shifty wasn't there for it. Wasn't aware, shucked away between the space of a breath, turned into a tapestry.

He wasn't there. But Shawn was there for the aftermath.

The blank look. The empty eyes, his father, collapsed on his knees and staring like nothing in the world made any sense, like nothing mattered, like-

In the week since Weirdmageddon, Shawn's thoughts on Ford have changed.

It's hard to hate the same face as the one you're trying to bring back.

It's hard to hate a man who hates himself more.

And here he is, shuffling and tossing things aside, digging around in the wreckage of the basement like a rat, like a stray dog after a meal, desperate.

“You're not trying to rebuild the portal already are you?”

Stanford whirls around.

Even from a distance, Shawn is almost taken aback by how wild his eyes are, how bloodshot. Ford looks crazed, tired and paranoid and fearful.

Shawn immediately regrets his joke. Ford looks like he's going to scream, or cry, or both and also start waving around a torch and go hunting for hogs in the woods.

“Sh-” he starts, stops, starts over. “Shawn.” It sounds like there's relief, and apprehension, and a total pressing exhaustion.

“It's just you.”

Shawn is…uncomfortable. The basement doesn't scare him, not by a mile when he spent so much of his childhood down here, but this man, the scientist he once knew, makes him just the smallest but uneasy still.

They have a truce going, of sorts. An unspoken agreement fathered by unacknowledged or quiet attachment to the same person, for different reasons. A brother and son.

Shawn steps closer, despite himself. Despite the fact that Ford is looking a little further from “eccentric" and closer to Captain Ahab.

“It's just..me.” he echos, approaching like one might approach a wild, possibly rabid animal. “What are you doing down here?”

Ford swallows, and Shawn's not sure if it's his elevated hearing or the fact that sound echoes so strongly down here.

“I'm looking,” Ford starts, stops, starts over. “There is something down here that may help Stan's memories. I'm trying to find it.”

Between the two of them, impossibly, Shawn thinks that maybe Ford took it harder when Stan looked him in the eye and asked his name.

It's a little unfair. It's almost expected.

“What is it?” Shawn asks quietly. “I'll help you.”

The look Ford shoots him is desperation, acceptance, and the sort of jaw clenching grief that he's been carrying for days.

“It's a box,” Ford says, and he resumes his digging.

Shawn represses the need to roll his eyes. He does. He manages to shove it all the way down until he crosses the basement entirely and starts picking through the remains of the old desk, broken and damaged by any number of the occurrences that happened this past summer.

The gravity fluctuations, the Portal's activation and subsequent shut down, the rift, Weirdmageddon, everything being put back to normal, anything. Every consecutive problem has condensed itself down into debris that litters the basement floor in shattered pieces.

Ford seems to realize how broad his singular bit of description was a bit later.

“It's a box,” he says, and he pushes an old toolbox aside. “A, uh, a cardboard box. It's old.” He pauses for a moment. “It's not mine.”

That doesn't narrow it down all that much further, but it is a little helpful, and humans do need sleep, something Ford doesn't look like he's been getting.

Shawn wonders how long he's been looking for this box, before he heard something down here. What improbable, tiny piece of hope Ford has been clinging close to his chest.

He doesn't ask, he keeps looking.

Eventually, they meet in the sort of middle of the room. There's a beam, a remnant of the Portal's supports, that's fallen over onto a shelf, and silently, side by side, the two of them start sifting through it.

Shawn moves one cardboard box aside, and peers in to find old broken welding tools Stan couldn't have disposed of without suspicion, and moves another. There's one more box made from cardboard, but it's pinned under the beam itself, half squished into the floor.

“Is that it?” Shifty asks, pointing.

Ford looks. Ford looks utterly distraught. He shuffles closer, grazes his fingers over the edge of the crumpled thing and then hardens. “Probably.” He says grimly, and then he hooks his fingers on the side of the fallen beam, and starts to heave upwards.

He's straining. He's actually. He's actually trying to lift the beam. By himself.

“Ford.” Shawn says, a little dumbfounded.

Ford doesn't answer, he heaves again to no avail, even with a grunt of effort, and then, like a dying flower, gives up.

“Maybe we could, we could cut through the box without damaging the-we could-”

It's. It's a little sad, and it's a little pathetic, and Shawn is genuinely surprised as the sight of Ford's defeat pangs something in his chest.

“Move,” he says, a little more gently than he'd intended. “Get ready to pull it out.”

“What?” Ford asks, and then he gasps.

Shawn hooks a hand, then a claw, under the beam, and very simply lifts.

They'd never tested Shawn's real strength before. Shawn knew, from a very young age, that he was stronger that Stan was, than Stan ever would be. Shawn knew he would grow differently, that he’d be able to do things humans could not.

But they’d never tested it. They’d never sat down and measured and took notes or what have you. Stan always cited the same excuse.

You are not some experiment. You’re a kid.

How funny that excuse became, how ironic, when faced with what truly went on in the bunker.

The beam comes up easily. It is heavy, Shawn knows that, but he does not feel the same need to grunt and strain like Ford had a moment ago.

It is still heavy though, he won’t be able to hold it forever.

Ford reaches forward and very quickly, like he’s afraid Shawn is about to drop the beam, snatches the box away from its path and backs away.

Shawn lets go of the beam without thinking. The sound of it crashing back to the floor is unbearably loud, metal against concrete and debris, amplified in the space and by the fact that it is two in the goddamn morning.

After the echoing ends, Shawn looks over at Ford sheepishly. “If that woke anybody up, I’m blaming you.”

Ford isn't listening. In fact, he's sort of crumpled there, like a wet paper towel like the strength has gone out of his legs or the box is too heavy for him to carry. Shawn would probably be worried for him, if he wasn't grinning, already opening the box.

Actually, Shawn is still worried for him. Ford looks about an inch from slumping over and sleeping there, right in the middle of the dirty basement floor.

“This is it,” he breathes, excited almost. “Perfect. This will-this might work. It'll help, like Mabel's scrapbook helped.”

Curiosity is getting to him, but Shawn doesn't have to wait for long. With a shaking hand, five fingers and a thumb, Ford hands him a small, square piece of paper.

It's a photograph.

It's of him. It's of him and Stan.

It's actually one of the first photographs, and Shawn can tell because in it, he's barely more than a grub, and Stan still has brown hair.

Shawn-no, it was still Shifty then, Stan hadn't had to come up with a name then- is upright on who, barely formed legs.

There's an extra bend to one of his knees. Being bipedal was difficult at first, Shawn remembers that much. How he'd have to sit on the playmate Stan laid out for him in the dining room, far enough away from the stove for safety but close enough Stan could see. Shifty used to watch Stan walk around, hip, thigh, knee, calf, foot. How each component moved, interlocked with itself. It wasn't until years later that Shifty realized Stan walks with a slight limp, and that Shawn shouldn't.

This picture is. Well it's certainly old. Shawn doesn't remember it being taken, but it's blurry, and real in his hand. Right there in the center is him, walking forward in a frozen stumbling step, knee bent and bent again unnaturally and Stan kneeling right behind, not holding him, but arms out just in case, a steadying presence.

Shawn flips the photo over, and written on the back, in Stan's scratchy handwriting is

May 1983. Shifty's first steps.

It's enough to drive air out of Shawn's lungs.

He looks back down, and Ford is staring up, more photographs in hand and the box in his lap, and he's smiling softly.

Shawn can feel moisture gathering in the corner of his eyes. Water. Or, dust. It's just dust.

There is a box full of photos. Some of them are loose, or barely stacked together in piles. There's a small album that Shawn wants to look through, and all of them, fuzzy camera quality and all, were kept, saved and written with dates and what they were, and they were cherished, hidden away down here for safekeeping.

Shawn looks at the photo again. At Stan's smiling, open mouth incredulous face in the background, at his terrible short haircut that lasted only a few months after the mullet, at the fuzzy carpet on the ground Shawn almost remembers. At the snapshot, what it shows, what it means.

“He'll remember.” Ford says. His voice is steady and strong, but soft. “He'll see this, and he'll remember you. He'll come back.”

Ford is staring up with a look of hope, painful and cracked and torn apart and mended, all at once. He's smiling, and he's crying, and Shawn feels such a sharp pain for him, for the pictures that aren't in this box, for the things that weren't captured by an old Polaroid camera. For what's missing, both in physical form and in memories.

“Do you have any photos?” Shawn asks suddenly, almost desperate. “Your childhood, you and Dad?”

Ford's smile goes a little grey, a little smaller, but he reaches into his coat and slowly, so slowly it looks painful, like he's ripping out a part of himself, pulls out a different photograph and hands it over for Shawn to see.

Shawn hands him the picture of his first steps. He doesn't want to let go of it, but it feels like a solid trade for the moment.

The picture he's handed, in comparison, is in terrible condition. The picture of him may be dusty, but it's unblemished. This one is even older, faded and worn down in places with creases where it was folded. It's stained, but well loved.

There are two boys in this photo, on the bow of a sandy, broken old hull of a ship, with the words Stan O War painted on the side. Both boys are sunburned, but smiling wide.

One boy has glasses, and six fingers.

“I had that picture when I went in through the portal,” Ford says as Shawn looks at it. “It's the only one of us I have, I'm not sure there are any more from when we were kids.”

This time, its Shawn that smiles.

“There is,” he says, with full quiet confidence. Because he knows it. “There’s an old boxing one upstairs. Stan has it pinned on his wall, he's always had that. I've seen it.”

When he looks up, Ford is staring with wide eyes and a sort of wonderment that Shawn can't help but return.

“He'll remember.” He says, nodding, and he hands the photo back.

Ford hands back the picture of Shifty's first steps and then gets up, holding the box of every other picture of Shifty, of Shawn.

“He will.” He says, and he lays a hand on Shawn's shoulder comfortingly. “He'll remember us both.”

Shawn nods.

He's worked to bring Ford back from an unimaginable place before. Now, he'll get Stan back from somewhere just as far.

It'll be easy. He has all the notes this time.

#gravity falls #SCREAMING CRYING AAAWWUHGGGHHHHHH

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