bren-the-chicken - Tumblr blog

bren-the-chicken · 9 hours ago

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@aroace-get-out-of-my-face i once again originally wrote this intending it to be an ask but then it grew legs? and sprinted down the roads with wild abandon??? it's two in the fucking morning, what the hell happened. enjoy????

I’ve had a good stretch of no pain days and started thinking about Ford and his sketch ass undercover doctoring, and the window of time he has before Stan realizes something is up is so much shorter than he realizes.

Replacing Stan’s teeth last? Duh, there’s no way that’ll pass and he’ll need to fess up by then before Stan makes Ford need to regrow new teeth. Organ function is a safe bet, reinforce the endocrine and cardiovascular systems (alter Stan’s medications so he doesn’t create new problems...), that’ll fly under the radar. But one of the first things Ford tackles is Stan’s joint and nerve pain, because he hates the thought of his brother being in pain, especially when he can fix it :]!

Stan clocks it fucking immediately.

The thing about even mild/moderate chronic pain is that when you live with it long enough you will notice the absence. It is a thing that lives with you. Pain free days are defined by a genuinely wonderful sense of contentment and also an odd foggy headedness, like you could so easily lie back down and go to sleep. Being in pain long term gets you used to carrying an invisible weight and once you drop it you get a chance to recognize how tired you actually are. And then sometimes the pain comes back and fuck everything forever (physical therapy is a godsend do no ever stop the physical therapy. Ask me how I know :])

Ford starts his shenanigans and Stan experiences that contentment, that weight off his shoulders. Then the next day, and the next, and the next. What Stan was first chocking up to the relief of having his twin back and the kids safe is. Hmm. Stanley Pines is a suspicious, shady bastard and he knows good and goddamn well the way he just twinged his knee should have twinged his knee. The other thing about chronic pain is you begin the identify different flavors of it, the distinctions between sharp and hot, dull, aching, tingling, the fine pierce of “you shouldn’t have done that,” to the steady throb of “are you regretting it yet?”

Stan begins to tread familiar patterns. Stretching crooked, busted fingers should be like digging his hands through gravel. Isn’t. Pivoting on his foot like this should have his hip catch like cold brittle rubber. Doesn’t. Bending this knee should send a live wire into his calf and thigh. Doesn’t. Straightening his spine doesn’t make his neck and skull flood with weight, pressing on his ribs there doesn’t give his torso pinpricks, moving his shoulder-.

He stops, takes a good couple of belly breaths, tries to relax. This is going to hurt. He raises his arm up, and up, and up, and-.

A cold wash of dread floods his back. He pulls his right arms across his chest then as far behind him as he can. Does a full rotation and then another, puts his arm behind his back and then reaches with his other hand to pull the right one up as far as it’ll go and that should’ve hurt! All of that should have felt fucking awful but none of it does. He should be in pain right now. He hasn’t been in not-pain since he was seventeen fucking years old and something is wrong.

He covers his mouth with his hand and takes some very deliberate breaths. Current problem: he should be groaning like the old beat up man he is but he isn’t, and it’s effecting old well worn hurts. How far does it go? His nails are too short, so he grabs at the skin on the underside of his forearm with his teeth and bites down. Check. The scab from scratching too hard at a soothsquito bite still bleeds. Check. Bruise from running into the corner of the kitchen counter like an idiot still sore. Check. Not isolated to broken bones, else his shoulder would be giving him hell. A quick scrape of a pencil lead against the scar gives a check for nerve damage too. He can still experience pain, still feels physical, so either there’s nothing effecting him, or it’s effecting everything. A couple dozen coin flips show that probability still works, and even letting it hit the floor doesn’t have it landing on edge. He’d need to drop it from higher up to check the gravity, so that can wait. There’s not a whole hell of a lot that can do something this big, and the last time the fae tried to get fresh with him a butane torch and an aerosol canned solved that problem.

What else, what else… his photocopied journal pages are still in the basement, potentially with Ford, and he doesn’t want to open up that can of worms just yet. Ford himself was griping about banging his head against the inside of a cabinet and giving himself a colossal headache so he’s… probably…

Pain that has been haunting him since his twenties is gone. The twins spent an entire summer with him and didn’t run for the hills. He fixed the portal and brought his brother home and they’re going sailing. Everything he’s ever dared to dream of is in his hands. Stanley Pines has a happy ending.

Son of a bitch, none of this is real.

About two hours later Ford comes back from a brief excursion in the woods and gets a taste of what it was like for Stanley when he arrived thirty years ago. Only a taste, because instead being menaced with a weapon and the shack being a horrorshow, it mostly looks like someone tore through in a hurry. Doors and cabinets have been left ajar, clutter litters every available surface, and Ford feels a knot of worry zing beneath his sternum. He eventually finds Stan in the basement, whiteboards rolled out and chalk marks on the floor, loose papers everywhere he looks. Stan himself has a thick book open in one hand and a marker in the other, with another pen in his mouth apparently just for chewing. Upon closer inspection the papers appear to be… copies of his journals. Journals that were burnt weeks ago. That, is just, going to have to wait. At least none of the portal diagrams are visible? Yet???

Stanley, when Ford works up the nerve to get his attention, looks a hairs breadth from manic. He immediately asks if Ford remembers whether he wrote anything in invisible ink about how the silver toadstools and manfish scales synergize because they ought to boost the perception of his quartz hag stone, but only if they don’t explode first. He fucked up that photocopier to high heaven but it apparently couldn’t copy invisible ink, Sixer.

...Why? Would Stanley? Need to do that???

To see how deep in this damn trap he is, Ford! Every other test he’s run has turned up bupkis! The physics and probability are consistent, gravity is fine because the one kilograms ball he dropped off the roof fell at the correct rate (“You were on the roof?!”). Magical interference, squat; dimensional interference, squat. He can still bleed and feel pain, which rules any kind of perpetual dream, and if he could’ve conjured that mojito he had in ‘78 he would have fucking done so by now, Stanford!

The shout echoes through the lab, and in the ringing silence that follows Ford has to take a moment to collect himself, because what the hell happened while he was gone. Approaching slowly, he asks Stanley why exactly he’s testing reality like this, because that’s what these are, ways to check the validity of your surroundings. Arms length from Stan, he can see the edge of panic in his face as he grits out, “Because, none of this is real.”

Another deep breath, and Ford asks what brought Stanley to this conclusion. If not a single reality check has worked, and Stanley has apparently done many (he makes a mental note to tell Stanley about different mindscape checks because pain should not be the first recourse), then perhaps there’s something wrong with his hypothesis?

(Ford’s current running hypothesis is that such volatile use of the memory gun has made Stan susceptible to delusions and that Ford is a terrible brother.)

Stanley, in a flat voice but with an ache of grief in his eyes, simply says, “Guys like me don’t get happy endings, Ford.”

Ah. That’s what it feels like when your heart breaks. Terrible.

Carefully closing the rest of the distance, Ford says that there’s one more reality check that Stan can do. Stan’s eyes well up in response, and when he doesn’t say anything more Ford carefully folds him into a hug. You use the buddy system, and you ask for help. This is real, every test you did was done correctly, and every one of them says the same thing. This is real, and you get to be happy.

After a couple of minutes and a not insignificant amount of snot, they find themselves on the sofa, living room still a bit of a disaster from Stan hunting for supplies, but something that can wait until they’ve settled. Stan says that he’s still so damn confused. He… understands, for the most part, that this is real, that everything he’s dreamed of is coming true, but why does he feel like this?

Like what, Ford asks, worries about mental health, about Stan’s apparent lack thereof growing clearer. Things he can’t fix, at least not easily.

...Good?? Not like hot garbage? For fuck’s sake even after running around like a dumbass, after climbing onto the damn roof, he feels fine! There’s five joints off the top of his head that would be demanding he pay up by now, but he doesn’t fucking hurt!

...Ford. Is beginning to have the impression that he may have done a colossal fuck up.

Is that. Unusual for you. To be completely pain free? (The entire time before this Stan has been in some kind of pain??)

Yes! And Stanley proceeds to list the exact variety of pain, it’s intensity, and where it’s located with frightful precision. It’s a lot, and he’s very familiar with all of it, enough so that it’s absence was such an enormous red flag that he was fully convinced that the entire summer was a complete fabrication.

...Ford is beginning to think he needs to be studied like some sort of bug, or perhaps a horrendous organic machine that you pour deceivingly innocuous ideas into and it outputs horrific destructive consequences. What the fuck.

Stan, seeing a crash out happening before his very eyes, gets a sneaking suspicion.

Sixer. Buddy. Is there anything you’d like to share with the class.

Ford, hands clasped in front of his mouth and with a thousand yard stare, says yes.

...Are you going to-?

The deluge of words that follow are only mostly incoherent, incredibly sincere, and breathtakingly stupid. Stan is able to get the gist though, that Ford used his scifi medicine to fix Stan’s busted body out of love and concern but absolutely no consent, and that Stan when presented with too many good things at once proceeded to completely lose his shit. They are without a doubt the dumbest people alive, and their competition is Gravity Falls.

Ford’s apologies eventually peter out, and he looks up from where he’s hid his face in his hands, eyes wet, to see Stan’s blank face. He asks if he’s alright, and Stanley stands and leaves without another wood. Before the world has a chance to fully fall out from underneath Ford, his twin comes back with… an orthopedic back pillow? That is apparently quite expensive…? ???

Orthopedic back pillows are, evidently, incredibly fucking dense, and he just gave Stanley full range of motion in both shoulders back. Ford would later like to say he put up a good fight but he very much did not. He would also like to say the lack was because he deserved it, but he’s gotten good enough at eating crow to admit that Stan just beat seven kinds of shit out of Ford with his old man pillow.

Stan sits back in his chair, feet resting on Ford’s sorry carcass, and marvels at all the money he’s about to save on medicine, and the side effects of this one particular one were a fucking nightmare, here let him tell you about them in excruciating detail since you are so incredibly concerned for your poor brother’s health.

Ford, knowing that even this has been forgiven, that Stan understands even better days are on the horizon, listens and smiles as his brother get caught up in genuine excitement about being able to sleep without that stupid pillow, about throwing his dentures out, about all the adventures he’s going to get to have with Ford.

Apropos of nothing, Stan says “We have got to start telling each other shit. This is getting embarrassing.”

A whistling snore is his only response, Ford having conked out on the floor after being horizontal for five minutes straight and listening to his brother yap.

Stan snorts back a laugh and gets comfortable, closing his eyes, and looks forward to waking up with nothing more than a crick in the neck and an obnoxious, well meaning twin by his side.

what the fuck just happened. I was gonna do a joke about stan thinking he’s about to die and needing to tell ford, but instead he fell ass first into a tailspin of epic proportions. Hello?? I wrote 3700 words today????

#he has 12 PhDs but an md is NOT ONE OF THEM #STOP MESSING WITH MEDICINE

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