The Art of the Matter

Any AU I like enough to want a quick reference for, I'm putting here in this pinned post.

THE CONTENDERS:

A Better Stanley

Bloodsucker Brother

GF Madoka AU

Moon Guardian: Guardian of the Moon

Splodin' Stan! [co-authored with @dark-lord-of-awesomeness and @artistredfox!]

The Odysstaney

Maybe more...? Who knows!

And then this one's not an AU as much as it is a fanfiction, BUT it's going here anyway:

The "Precious Moments" Incident

If you're looking for my commissions page, check my bio!

If that prompt stinks here's an option two, perfect Stanley somehow convinces Ford to get lunch/dinner with him at a restaurant. To try and talk things out, y'know. Maybe Ford agrees to like, gather information on stan or something, or to try to prove to him that he's not actually his brother. Stan unintentionally is just so good at pissing Ford off. In public. And Ford has a reputation to maintain and must control himself. But Ford is trying so so so hard to be underhandedly vindictive back at Stan, but it all just rolls right off him. Which pisses Ford off more.

Anyways I love everything u do (chews on your art chews on your writing) I hope you have a good day yay.

Inspiration struck, and I must answer its call!

--

Stan blinked. He was standing in a run-down closet. Specifically, he was standing right up against the mustiest fur coat known to man, its old hairs tickling his nose and making his eyes water. He backed up into a closed door behind him and tried to figure out how he'd gotten here. Just a moment ago, he'd been standing in the kitchen, trying to get the old wood stove going so that he could make breakfast- the stove that was plugged into the wall was inoperable without electricity, which the extremely run-down house that he apparently lived in did not have. He'd been frustrated, because he'd woken up entirely too early in the morning and had spent all that time struggling with starting a fire, and it was starting to make his blood boil.

And then one of the kids- Maple or Mavis or something- had burst into the room with an excitable crow, and he'd been so startled that-

Well, that something happened. Stan wasn't sure what. The ire he'd felt and the sudden shock had drained completely out of him. He felt worn-out in the way a good cry would wear you out; there was a bone-deep tiredness and relief in place of his earlier, spikier feelings. He scuffed his bare feet on the old wood floors, then looked down and squinted. He'd been wearing slippers before. That was odd.

Stan turned and left the closet. He squinted in the light, leaving the coat- or, actually, just an oversized and unprocessed wolf pelt- in the room behind him and trying to get his bearings. He could see the kitchen right across from him, in the foyer the kids had brought him through the first time he'd come to this house.

The girl was gone, but the first thing he noticed was the blood on the floor, spattered in a wide arc all over the wood and dripping from the ceiling. Stan felt his stomach drop and rushed forward, stopping his momentum by slapping his hands on either side of the frame that led, doorless, to the kitchen. It was all over the stove, and the walls, radiating from a central point at which his slippers (of all things) sat.

"Kid?" He choked out, then swallowed thick and tried again. "Kid! Where'd you go?"

A shout from another room deeper into the house. The stamping of little feet. Two kids burst in from the living room, wide smiles of relief on their faces. The boy (Dylan? Dick?) and the girl (probably Mavis)

"Grunkle Stan!" the boy exclaimed. "You're still in the house. Where did you end up?"

Stan didn't hesitate when he saw them. He leaned down and scooped them both into a tight hold, holding them to his chest. They hugged him back immediately, squeezing just as tight.

"I- there was a closet," he started, then he pulled back and glanced into the kitchen. "I dunno what happened. I think there's something dangerous in here. Where's that other old guy? The one who looks like me? He seems smart, do you think we can convince him to figure out what the heck died in there?"

They both blinked at him stupidly.

"Grunkle Stan…" Mavis started, "Do you not remember?"

"You have C4," said Dylan (who had to be Dylan, because no parent could be cruel enough to make people call their kid Dick), "Like me and Mabel?"

Stan blinked stupidly back at them.

"You said you called it 'seashacks', because the old name for it was different," Mavis- or Mabel, now- added, and that clicked something in his mind. Oh. Right.

"I exploded," he said. "I exploded? I can do that?"

He looked behind him at the fresh mess on the wood, then ahead of him and around the corner, into the living room with its bleach-stained carpet. Bleach-stained from regular cleaning, because leaving blood in carpeting stank to high heaven and the stress of his day-to-day meant he'd have at least one of his outbursts every week--

Stan squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced at the flood of memories. "Right. That's normal. Chronic Spontaneous Human Combustion Syndrome."

"Actually, it's called Chronic Compulsive Cytological Combustion Syndrome, now-" Dick corrected him.

"-and honestly, I have no idea what you were thinking," Ford groused as he rolled his brother's limp body over and stuck his folded coat under Stan's head to cushion it, "This dimensional variant of you has a strain of vampirism explicitly designed to neutralize and prey upon vampires exactly like you! What did you think was going to happen?"

Stan, who had recovered just enough to move his mouth and look around, licked a little dried blood off his lips and made a noncommittal sound. "Listen, we got curious! And we knew whatever you and his Ford would do to us would be way weirder, so we figured we'd get all your questions answered before you got the chance to do any tests on your own."

"And you thought you'd accomplish that by drinking his blood?"

"Don't stand there and act like you weren't gonna do the same thing!" Stan grumbled a little lower, "Besides, I gave as good as I got. Apparently, when other vampires drink from him, he barely feels anything. I knocked him flat to the floor."

"And now you're paralyzed."

"Only for an hour or two, max!" Stan argued. "Neither of us died a second time, so I consider that a win."

Ford sighed and crouched to sit on the ground with his legs crossed. With a world-weary, beleaguered expression, he pulled out a pen and a small, leather-bound notebook. "So what did you learn, then?"

Breakfast was a strange affair. Pa was at his usual spot, his newspaper still folded in front of him, coffee untouched. Ma was refusing to sit down, flitting around in the kitchen between her own cups of caffeine like she could materialize more things to do if she looked hard enough. Shermie's kid babbled happily, stuffing fistfuls of dry cereal into its mouth from its high-chair at the spot where Ma was supposed to be sitting. Ford was next to Pa, as usual, and the last spot at the table was taken up by his brother's presence.

Nobody was talking.

Two plates were set down on the table by thin, shaking hands. Fresh flapjacks with a melting pat of butter on top. Ford pulled his plate towards him, nodding once. "Thank you, ma," he said. He tucked into them slowly, stomach still overturned from the excitement of last night. Stanley was here. Really, truly here. After months of isolation, his spirit had returned- with a physical form, no less! The leftover grief that had been bubbling murkily in the back of Ford's mind all that time was nearly overshadowed with elation. Still, it helped temper it enough that he could still eat.

The flapjack was warm and fluffy on his tongue, suffused with salty butter and cloyingly sweet syrup. Every bite went down like a brick, but Ford had to do something with his hands and he was used to eating without an appetite.

He glanced over again at his brother, his disbelief still not entirely gone, needing to be assuaged with visual proof at every moment. Stanley had not taken his own breakfast. He sat at the table, hands in his lap, still and unmoving as stone. Two dark eyes stared dead across the table at Pa.

"Stanley?" he asked, "Aren't you going to eat?" He was physical, after all. Ford's arm still stung red from the pinch he'd been given. It made sense he'd have to fuel that somehow. Could spirits eat? Some needed offerings, but did pancakes count?

His brother blinked as if startled, then turned to Ford. Something in his posture loosened, and something in his expression warmed, until he less resembled a statue and moreso himself. Across the table, Pa let out a shaking breath and curled his fists tight. The man snatched up the paper and unfolded it, burying his nose inside with white-knuckled hands.

First off: what the fuck.

Second:

"-so they're sending him to space on account of how the guys they were *going* to send blew up in some kind of freak lab accident," Mabel chattered on as her fingers worked the needles between them. Her eyes never wandered from her work, even as she tilted her head and nodded towards the laptop screen. "Which means I won't get to give him this fox cardigan I was planning to give him for his birthday."

"Fascinating," her Grunkle Ford said. "I've been trying to get into contact with the head of the taskforce regarding my own plans for utilizing the ancient alien technology residing beneath the valley of Gravity Falls to warp straight to Tau Ceti instead of flying there through real spacetime, but this 'Eva Stratt' keeps rejecting my calls on the basis that the Project needs 'reliable equipment' with 'thousands of man-hours of testing' put into them and I tried to tell her that if you're sending your astronauts to their deaths you might as well have a little fun with it and experiment with wormholes, but-" he made a noncommittal sound; there was the dual slap of hands hitting a table in defeat.

"I mean, she has a point," Dipper called out, working on some kind of model project involving the Petrova Line. "It's already a long shot- why risk anything more than you have to?"

"She wouldn't have to risk anything if she just looked at my designs for a mono-dimensional worm hole generator-" the old man started again, clearly incensed.

"Question," came a forth voice from Grunkle Ford's side. Stan's head and shoulders popped into the background, an apron decorated with some witty catchphrase or another on his front, "Did you tell her how you know you can prove it?"

"I, well-" Ford stammered, "What do you expect me to tell them, exactly?"

"Definitely not that you got the idea from a space demon," Grunkle Stan said, "But probably something that'll convince 'em you're not a nut. Maybe some pictures, I dunno. I'm not a nerd."

"You literally rebuilt the inter-dimensional portal in my basement with a third of the notes," Grunkle Ford scoffed.

"You did do that," Mabel agreed.

"Sounds like a pretty big nerd thing to do," Dipper nodded along.

"I'm disowning all of you," Grunkle Stan turned back to what he'd been doing, black smoke drifting lazily into the air behind Ford.

"Regardless, I'm planning on doing some research and potential refurbishment myself with Fiddleford when we reach town," the old man folded his fingers together and leaned forward with an excited smile. "Obviously I'm not going to sit on the sidelines while the Earth freezes over, but would you two like to accompany Stanley and myself when we make the trip? It should only take a week. Maybe a month, tops, if the reason for Tau Ceti's lack of dimming is complex in nature."

The pain of only realizing how much you love someone, flaws and all, after they’re gone. Of having thought you wanted them to change only to realize after they’ve changed that you loved who they were all along. Of realizing you lost someone years ago and you never even knew when it happened

Ford just wants his brother back,, his REAL brother, not this sanded down version.

STOOOOOOOOP LOOKIN AT ME LIKE THAAAAAAAAT