#kiran.docx

this is a direct continuation of a previous fic so you should probably read that first!

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By the time the museum guards show up, Ford is already halfway out the door, knapsack stuffed full of spare machinery parts. Dipper is close behind him, carrying nothing, even though Ford swears he had a pile of scraps in his arms just a moment ago. Perhaps he owns one of those personal pocket dimensions he’s seen on sale.

“You’re under arrest for breaking and entering,” snaps one of the guards. The security guards in this dimension wear lab coats, for some reason, and he wonders if lab safety regulations are tighter here or if lab coats are just a popular choice of clothing.

Instead of asking them, he merely says “We aren’t breaking and entering. All that we’re doing is just visiting the science museum after its regular hours.”

“This wing is restricted to employees only,” says another guard.

“Knowledge should never be restricted.”

“Yeah, alright. Put your hands up, you two.”

He sees Dipper nervously raise his hands out of the corner of his eye, but Ford’s sure that he has something up his sleeve. He had been resistant to the idea of him tagging along at first, but he’s proven to be quite the smart and resourceful young man.

Resourceful or not, though, he can’t afford to put his faith in strangers. He raises his blaster, set to the stun setting. “Oh, I’ll put my hands up, all right.”

Then he fires.

-

“Were you really just going to let yourself get turned in?” Ford asks Dipper as they run toward the exit, because it’s not like there’s a better time for it.

“I could’ve— I could’ve got out of there anytime. Just thought there was no point. You’ve always got a plan, you know? Better to let you handle things.”

Ford didn’t know whether to be concerned or touched that Dipper trusted him like that. “That’s extremely inadvisable, my boy, but… thank you anyway.”

“My boy?” Dipper raises his eyebrows questioningly, but he’s grinning. “I’m older than you.”

He hadn’t intended to say the term of endearment at all. He had no idea how it happened or where it came from. Dipper’s response was equally baffling— the man appeared twenty-seven at most. Perhaps humans from different universes age differently, or he had gotten caught in the Do-Over Dimension for some time. There’s too much going on to question it further. Ford glances behind him, spotting the guards catching up, and has an idea.

“Take this,” he says quietly, slipping an object roughly the size of a large coin out of his pocket. “It’s remote activated, I have the control. When I trigger it, it’ll release a thick chemical vapor that, in addition to providing cover, I’m fairly sure has paralytic properties on the residents of this dimension.”

“So it’s a smoke bomb?”

“It’s not a smoke bomb. Or, well, it’s not just a smoke bomb. I just need you to toss it at them when I tell you to.”

He’d do it himself, but he’s the one with the knapsack and he needs to put as much distance between himself and the guards as possible. It’s safer in the long run to give it to Dipper. Either way, he’ll be out of there.

“Of course,” Dipper says, slipping the device between his fingers. For a second, the movement reminds Ford of the summer when he was eleven and his brother tried to teach himself coin tricks. “Why don’t we just drop it and wait for them to catch up? We’re all running anyway, they’ll get here eventually. They probably won’t even see it, it’s so tiny. And it basically blends into the floor.”

Ford had not considered that. “That’s a good idea.”

“Yeah, and we won’t have to separate. It’s better for us to stick together.”

“Are you worried you’ll get into trouble without me there to keep an eye on you?”

Dipper laughs, high and slightly grating. “No, I’m worried about the opposite.”

Ford frowns. It was true that Dipper had gotten him out of a number of scrapes in their few weeks together, but he was sure that he would’ve been able to get out of all those scrapes on his own eventually. “What happened to you’ve always got a plan?”

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Max-Ernest’s head hurts, and his knee is starting to feel sore from his brother’s weight at this point, but he can’t bring himself to mind. His brain is much more focused on watching PC scrunch his nose as he stares at the workbook in front of them.

“Now, what’s six plus seven?”

“Hmm….” PC chews at his pencil, and Max-Ernest moves to snatch it out of his hand because they treat those things with so many chemicals, it’s not safe for him to do that, what if he gets sick— “Sixteen?”

“We— we just went over this, kid,” he says, louder than he’d meant to. He blinks. He digs his nails into his palms and tries to remember that PC is not stupid, that he’s learning, that this is how children learn and unfortunately people are not born from the womb knowing addition or language or anything else, no matter how much he may forget that.

“Remember?” His breathing is shakier than he’d like it to be, but at least his voice is calmer now. “Show me your hands. So if you have six, and I give you seven…” PC holds up six fingers. Max-Ernest holds up seven. There’s still tiny red nail marks in his palms. His nails are too sharp now. He needs to cut them, but it feels like he never has the time for it these days. “How many do we have now?”

PC frowns an adorable little frown as he counts each finger individually. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve… thirteen?”

“Yes! That was good work, kid.” PC is beaming now. “And we’re done with that page! How ‘bout that?”

“How ‘bout that?” his brother parrots, giggling.

Max-Ernest takes the workbook and puts it back on the shelf, the plastic cover cool in his hands. He can’t help but feel, yet again, like he’s not doing something right. Like he can’t do this right, no matter how many mommy blogs and child psychology books he reads, because he is for some reason completely incapable of understanding his brother’s tiny little baby brain.

(He’d once asked both of his parents, separately, if they had any advice on raising children. They’d raised him, after all, they had to be at least better at… all of this than he was.

They’d both said the same thing. That it was better that they not involve themselves too heavily in his brother’s life, that anything they might propose would only harm him, that we made so many mistakes with you, we couldn’t bear to repeat them. He’d given up after that.)

Well, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that, right or not, capable or not, he was all that his brother had. PC needed him.

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Ford comes to with a gun pointed at his head. His memory is still sluggish, but he can vaguely remember running from some space cops (the specifics were irrelevant, after long enough all the space cops started blurring together. Why did they all wear the same clothes?) and then being restrained. He must have gotten knocked out sometime during the fight.

He eyes the human— at least they certainly look human— pointing the gun at him. They certainly aren’t dressed like a space cop, unless the space cops of this dimension actually wore dress shirts, tailcoats, and stringy little bow ties, but that certainly doesn’t mean they’re trustworthy. Ford doesn’t trust snappy dressers on principle.

They’re both alone in a back alley, he notes. He’s sitting on the ground, no longer restrained.

“Follow me if you want to live,” the person says. They’re seemingly trying to be intimidating. If it wasn’t for the gun still pointed to his temple, it wouldn’t have worked.

The barrel of the gun in their hand burns a familiar blue, and it takes all of Ford’s strength not to bolt. It’s not him. It’s a perfectly normal gun that happens to be pointed at him. Half of the blasters he’s seen are the same color. And in any case, the person in the suit would surely shoot him as soon as he moved to leave.

“You don’t seem too concerned with my life either way,” he says instead. “Judging by…” He gestures toward the gun pointed at him.

“I’m literally the one who saved you from those government guys. And I was never going to kill you. I just didn’t feel like arguing with you, and I know you’d never listen otherwise.”

They finally lower the gun and pull him up so he’s standing. “I really didn’t think I’d get to see you here, Stanford Pines.”

“How do you know my name?”

They gesture to a WANTED poster on a wall next to them. His own face scowls back from it. “You’re a bit of a celebrity, you know.”

“And what if I don’t go with you?”

“If you wanna get captured by those guys again then be my guest.”

Ford considers his options. He’s half-tempted to tell them thank you very much but he knows how to take care of himself, but then he figures that the risk of them betraying him was much lower than that of going out on his own. It was simple logic.

It wasn’t because he was lonely. It wasn’t.

“Alright, I’ll come with. On one condition. Tell me your name.”

“Should I… it won’t mean anything to him, it’s gotta be fine,” the human mutters under their breath. Then their face cracks into a wide grin, just on the edge of familiar. “Call me Dipper.”

“After the asterism?”

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It starts with a headache, small but always present, pressing behind Phoebe’s forehead like there’s something trying to burst out. After the first couple weeks with it, she asks Dipper to check her brain in case there actually is something trying to burst out— hey, you never know. But he says there’s nothing, so she decides to just ignore it in the hopes that it’ll fade.

It doesn’t fade.

It gets worse, to the point that she can’t sleep, to the point that she’s squinting and covering her eyes every time she goes out because the light sends a searing pain straight to her skull. Mel’s starting to get worried by the amount of times per day Phoebe asks her for Tylenol.

Phoebe’s starting to get worried too, so one day she asks Dipper if she’s having migraines and if there’s any way to fix it.

“I’m not a doctor,” Dipper tells her. Then he snaps his fingers and suddenly he’s wearing a stupid little lab coat and stethoscope. “Now I am! Hang on, lemme take a look…”

“You’re not funny,” she says, laughing anyway. The laugh only makes her head hurt worse. “What’s the diagnosis, Doctor Dreambender?”

“Shush, I’m thinking.” Dipper puts his hand to his chin and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, a few seconds later, he looks almost scared.

“What is it?” Phoebe pauses, noticing his expression. “Oh stars, is it bad?”

Dipper takes a deep, slow breath. When he speaks again, it’s measured, stilted. “Good news. You’re not dying yet.”

“… okay. What’s the bad— wait, what do you mean yet?”

“I can’t just say you’re not gonna die! It’s not true! I just mean this isn’t gonna kill you.”

That is a concerningly small amount of information. “Okay,” she repeats. “Cool. So what is it?”

“Well, it’s not migraines. It’s this genetic thing, there’s this small mutation in your DNA— it’s actually really interesting, I knew mutations like this could happen, with the way magic’s become so commonplace these days, but I’ve never seen anything like it up close—”

She sighs and tries to tune out Dipper’s rambling. “Genetic, huh?”

“… yes. Your mother had it too. It was never a problem for her, but still...”

Phoebe thought she was past wishing she knew her parents. The idea that she could’ve had someone who understood, though, who had gone through everything she was going through, who might know how to fix it, was so nice that she couldn’t help it. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Is there like, a cure or something?”

“Nope,” Dipper says, popping the P.

“Really?”

“I’m sorry.” He looks like he means it. “All you can do is wait for the headaches to pass.”

Phoebe sinks further into her chair. “Well, how long will that take?”

”Hopefully, at least a few more months.”

“Months?”

“And then even after that, things are gonna be different for the rest of your life.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know.” She knows that Dipper doesn’t know a lot of things— I’m only omniscient-ish is a frequent refrain of his— but this time it doesn’t sound sincere. It sounds like he does know and he’s lying. Or like he does know and it scares him.

She collapses even further into her chair, letting herself groan. Mel always says a good groan makes everything feel a little better.

“You okay?”

Phoebe levels the best glare she can at him given her condition. “You just told me I have a rare incurable mutation that’s going to ruin my life. No, I’m not okay, genius.”

“I didn’t say it’s going to ruin your life.”

“Would you be able to, you know…” She does a little poof with her hands. “Fix it?”

“I… theoretically, yeah, but it’s not a good idea. It’d cost a lot.”

“Like a soul a lot?”

“I already have that, Bee.”

“Right, yeah.”

“I could try to get you something a bit stronger than Tylenol, though. Not too strong, but…”

“Yeah, that’d be nice.”

-

It doesn’t pass. It keeps getting worse. The pain seeps from her head down into her fingers, her toes. Her bones feel like they’ve been replaced with time bombs, like any second now they’ll explode and she’ll shatter. If she closes her eyes, she can almost hear them tick.

After a particularly bad day where she’s barely able to get out of bed, Mel carts her off to the ER and the doctors poke and prod at her before asking for a blood test. She complies, and after an hour, they tell her she has a genetic mutation, that it’s such a rare case they can’t tell what might happen to her, but it’s probably not terminal so it’s okay. She never thought Dipper would be lying, but it still feels strange to hear it from someone else.

They tell her, then, that this reaction could only be caused by prolonged exposure to a powerful source of magical energy, and ask if she’s had any exposure that she can think of. She says no.

-

Phoebe doesn’t know how to explain it. She’s just sitting on her bed a few months later, attempting her pre-algebra homework. One moment she is not burning. The next moment she is.

The next moment she’s squeezing her eyes shut, digging her fingers into the blanket, trying to feel something other than pain, pain, pain. She can’t. She can’t see anything other than red-golden at the backs of her eyelids, like when you close your eyes in the sun. She can’t even scream.

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Mabel’s dreaming of the ocean when he finds her, gallivanting around an undersea city with a sparkly mermaid tail and a blue sweater that is somehow completely dry. She sees him and swims over. In ten years, she’s gotten good at lucid dreaming. “Dipper! Hi! You need a tail too!”

Dipper frowns. “I really don’t.”

“Well, you can’t just go swimming around in your sad little suit.”

“Ugh, fine,” he groans, because this is Mabel’s mind and she’s in control here and if he doesn’t do it she’ll just do it for him. With a snap of his fingers, his legs turn into a tail, dark and spiny like an eel’s. “How’s that?”

“Definitely not shiny enough,” Mabel says, regarding the tail with her chin resting on her hand. “But I guess it’s okay.” She swims off, towards the city, beckoning him to come.

As they swim, she tells him that this is Atlantis, and Dipper doesn’t tell her that Atlantis actually collapsed centuries ago and is now only home to tiny corals, undersea octopi, and the occasional sea serpent. He’s too busy chewing at his cheek until it bleeds. The calm ocean is more conducive to self-reflection than he’d like, and today is the worst possible day for self-reflection.

Mabel must notice his silence, because she pauses in the middle of her explanation of her dream Atlantis’s diplomatic ties to the Manatee Kingdom. “You good there, Dip-dop?”

No matter how different it may look, his blood still tastes the same in his mouth. He doesn’t know whether to be thankful for that or not.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” he mutters, trying to spit out the blood. It coalesces into a little blob in front of him, honey-gold and flickering like TV static, like he’s in zero gravity. Dipper doesn’t think that’s how liquids are supposed to behave in water. But hey. Dream logic!

“Don’t even try to tell me that, man. I know you better than that. You’ve been staring into the middle distance for the past five minutes.” Then Mabel sees the little blob in front of him. “Are you bleeding?”

“What– no!” The blob disappears with a wave of his hand. “It’s whatever.”

“Come on, bro-bro, what’s going on?” She pauses. “Oh, is it— yeah, that’s today, right? Isn’t it?”

“Yep.” Dipper sighs, and little bubbles float out of his mouth. “Today.”

They didn’t need to say it out loud. They were too familiar with the date already.

“It’s just,” he starts again, “ten years. That’s a long time to be… this.” He waves at his form, the eyes, the claws, the wings sprouting just above his stupid dream-tail. “In a few years, I’ll have been a demon longer than I wasn’t one, you know?”

Mabel smiles sympathetically. “Yeah. Time marches onward and all that.”

“What if—” His voice cracks in a way it hasn’t for years. “What if I forget what it was like to be anything else? Anything but this?”

“You’re not gonna forget, Dip,” she says, surprisingly forceful. “You’re still breathing, right? I can feel it.”

He is still breathing. He doesn’t need to, but he likes the motion of it, the way he can feel his fake lungs expand and contract inside his fake chest. “But I’m doing it wrong, I know it.”

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As soon as he smelled the smoke, Bertrand had jumped from his seat in the parlor. There were multiple fire extinguishers in every room, but he made sure to take an extra one with him as he followed the smell, just in case. You never knew what could happen in these cases, especially since the smell seemed to be coming from Violet’s room—

Oh, goodness, Violet. Was she alright? How large had the fire gotten? Has it already reached her?

Violet was smart, Bertrand reassured himself, and old enough to take care of herself. If she hadn’t put it out already, she probably would have gotten to safety by now.

He didn’t want to consider what would happen if she hadn’t.

The door to Violet’s room nearly flew off its hinges as Bertrand burst in, fire extinguisher aloft. “Violet? Are you in there?”

There was no fire, at least as far as he could see. The smoke was coming from the toaster sitting in front of Violet, half-deconstructed and looking very angry, or at least as angry as a toaster could be. Violet, for the matter, just looked sheepish. “Well… that worked out great.”

“What on earth were you doing?”

“I was just trying to disassemble the toaster, Father, I’m sorry—”

“Before you touch anything, you need to take the power source out first, Violet. You need to be careful with these things.”

“I know, Father, I did! I don’t understand why it’s still doing that.”

“Let me take a look,” he said, gently taking the toaster out of her hands. The metal was still hot, but Bertrand was used to it. “You really need to be more careful, Violet. What if you had set off one of the smoke alarms? We’d all end up sopping wet.”

He really needed to go in and remove those, they were useless. Half the time they knew there was a fire long before the alarms noticed, not to mention the dangers they posed to books. An old friend had told him about that once.

Bertrand did not want to think about him at the moment. He needed to focus on this damn toaster. “What were you trying to get from the toaster, anyway? We might have it in a place that’s easier to reach and won’t set the house on fire.”

“I thought I might repurpose the heating coils for the incubator I’m building for Mrs. Gershwin’s chickens.”

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Ford twists at his fingers as he regards the book in front of them. It’s leather-bound and battered and still stained with blood and generally looks like something out of a bad horror movie. It is also stubbornly refusing to open. “Well, Stanley, I’m stumped. What do you propose?”

Next to him, Stan mock-gasps dramatically. “Woah, nerd genius over here is stumped? And he’s admittin’ it? I thought I’d never see the day!”

Ford sighs, equally as dramatic. “Stanley…”

“You know, I think we try burnin’ it. Put the fear of death in him, he’ll open up easy peasy. Just like an interrogation!”

“Stanley.”

“You’re sayin’ my name an awful lot, poindexter.”

Ford pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs again, no less dramatically. “No. We are not doing that. Do you want to get this book back to the Library or not?”

Stan crosses his arms. “It’s not like you have any other ideas. And I didn’t mean actually burn it. I just meant wave the lighter kinda near ‘im so he gets scared. I’m not stupid.”

He catches the look of panic that flashes across his brother’s face at that, mouth wide open. “I didn’t mean— of course you’re not— I wasn’t—”

And there it is. God, it’s been so long since they were walking on eggshells around each other, terrified of upsetting the uneasy peace they’d created in the wake of the Transcendence Bill’s defeat Dipper’s death everything, and just when he’s thought they could talk with each other normally again, something happens that makes one of them think they’ve fucked it all up. “... I know, genius. I was jokin’.”

Ford presses his lips together, looking marginally calmer. “Of course. I knew that. Also, what makes you think the book is… well… a him?”

Stan ignores just how obvious his brother’s attempt to change the topic is. “Was I doin’ that? Oh boy, it could be a him or not a him, you can’t assume these things. Now I feel bad. Hey, you think that’s why it’s not opening?”

“Books don’t usually have genders, Stanley,” Ford says, and his voice is almost light now.

“It’s at least kind of alive. You never know.”