#pyramidstan

Steve watches him through the drawing on the sketchpad, yellowed pages propped up on the gear-stick. Stan’s slumped in the back seat, head cushioned on a stolen hotel pillow, ratty jacket serving as a blanket - the air is summer-hot, no need to pull out the old quilt from storage in the backseat, Steve guesses. 

It was only supposed to be a quick peek to see if Stan had fallen asleep yet before slipping through the familiar entrances to his mind, but Steve can’t pull away from this sight. The sight of Stan’s greasy hair falling in wisps and waves over his sick-pale face, the way his expression twitches as he sleeps. The way his chest rises and falls with the slow and steadiness of Sisyphus, the way his fingers curl around the pillow under his head, the way his cheek is pressed, squished against it. The quiet sounds of him snoring, little mumblings.

Steve’s hypnotized again. He always finds himself hypnotized by Stanley Pines.

He’s so strange looking. Nothing like the simple, clean edges, angles and straight lines of a Euclidean - he’s a million different strange, twisting joints, protruding, gangling limbs, fat and muscle with tendons and sinew and bone. He’s one life wrapped up in a thousand, in thirty or so trillion cells. Just one breath is enough to shake the very air around him. He’s human, and Steve still hasn’t gotten used to humans.

Bill’s ever the adapting one, but Steve just can’t get over it. He can’t help but be stopped in tracks every damn time because god, look at him. 

One flex of his hand and a million Rube-Goldberg-machines of flesh move in tandem to make the most thoughtless of gestures. One movement takes a million micro-actions of flesh, bones shifting to the movement of muscle, from the commands of the nerves that snake underneath the skin. It’s so damn weird and complicated and it's so beautiful. 

Fleshbags, Bill calls them. Weak. Powerless. Thats what he’d told Steve humans were and what Stan would be, so long ago, when Steve first approached Stan with his own deal.

Steve looks at Stan. His living weight presses creases into the back of the car. His breath disturbs the dust that dances with his inhale and exhale. Weak, powerless? 

Stan certainly has some sort of power over Steve. When his eyes move, when his muscle and fat shifts on his face to reveal his teeth, curling upwards, Steve thinks he’d throw anything and everything away for him. Steve thinks he’d do anything Stan asked of him if he could just watch the way his lungs expand and contract beneath a nest of ribs. Steve could spend hours just watching him move. 

But then, if he did that, he’d never get to hear Stan speak. Not just the way chords in his throat and chest vibrate, the way his tongue and lips and teeth move to shape the sounds, but what he says.

Bill told him Stanley Pines was just the dumber, sweatier version of Stanford Pines. Worthless beyond a bargaining chip, or dumb muscle. Steve would never say it to Bill’s face, but he thinks Bill might have been wrong. 

Between the synapses, the firing neurons of electricity within Stan’s head, was a vulgar brilliance equal to that of, in Steve’s opinion, Bill’s ol’ Sixer himself. To tell a secret, Steve thinks he might have actually gotten the better end of the deal after all.

A knock-off, discount Stan. Ha! Stan’s sharper than Steve’s edges, just as genius as that Stanford is, but in a far more sharp-eyed, wit and intuition way. A conniving conman, a quick-silver tongue and quicker hands. He’s brilliance in human skin. 

“What am I,”  Stan had growled when Steve presented him with the first draft of their deal - riddled with fine print, clauses like traps. “Chopped liver?” He’d paused, scrunching his face. “Don’t answer that.”

But even that doesn’t hold a candle to the other parts of Stan, beneath the pressed dress shirt and winning smile, beneath the bones and sinew. The parts Steve would never tell Bill about.

Like that night in Tihuana. 

They hadn’t been so close then. Just business partners walking a tenuous line of alliance. Stan hadn’t quite trusted him yet, and Steve hadn’t quite found his footing between them either.

Stan had been curled up in a dingy motel bathroom, pressing himself so small, bones and muscle bending in awkward shapes, like he was trying to fold into himself. He’d fallen asleep there, shaking on the floor, twitching, writhing.

Even in the grayscale of the astral space between mind and reality, he wouldn’t respond to a thing Steve said to him. Just made thin, gasping noises of distress, mumbling in a voice too quiet to hear, words too fast, too jumbled. Steve had been floored - Stan was supposed to be the salesman, the disarming con, the precise smile, the calculated facade of playing the fool. He wasn’t supposed to shake and heave on the bathroom floor like he couldn’t get enough to breathe. He wasn’t supposed to be vulnerable. 

Steve hadn’t known what to do. He’d tried to be like Bill, because Bill always seemed to be so seamlessly in control of his own surroundings - but Steve had never been good at being anything other than himself, and Stan had just tensed even further and not said a word in response to Steve’s attempts at manipulation. Well then.

Steve wasn’t good at being Bill. So, he’d thought in desperation, why didn’t he try just being Steve?

“Stanley,” he’d said, and Stan had lifted a cautious eye to him from where he’d been holding his head in his hands. Already off to a better start than before. “Care for a show?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. With a hum of an old show tune melody and a tap of his foot, Steve was hesitantly dancing on two blue feet. 

“I've got a little baby, but she's out of sight,” he began, just swaying on his feet at first to the tune, voice rumbling out of him slowly, uncertainly. 

Stan lifted his head a little more, blinking wet, dazed and baffled eyes at him, but he seemed to be coming back to himself nonetheless. Steve had continued, emboldened. 

“I talk to her across the telephone. I've never seen my honey but she's mine all right, so take my tip and leave this gal alone.” As he continued, Stan uninterrupting, Steve felt himself grow more and more bold, singing a little louder, swinging his feet a little more. “Every single morning you will hear me yell, "Hey Central! Fix me up along the line." He connects me with ma honey, then I rings the bell, and this is what I say to baby mine…”

It was time for the show-stopper. Steve rose up and the balls on his feet, preparing as his voice steadily grew in melody. 

"Hello! Ma baby, hello! ma honey, hello! ma ragtime gal!” 

He spun wildly, swinging with every word in a pantomime of ragtime dancing, feet tapping against the faux-linoleum floor of the dream. And as he did, he could see the world rapidly begin gaining in color again, first the floor where Steve stepped, then the pinks-reds-browns of Stanley’s beautiful map of moles and freckles and skin, the world returning its colors in splashes of vibrancy, like watercolors bleeding back onto the page. 

And Stan, to Steve’s utter delight, uncurled, sitting instead with his legs on the ground instead of at his chest, hands on his lap. The very picture of a rapt audience. 

And his face-

Mouths were not something Steve was familiar with. It took him a long time to be able to read them, the way the teeth flashed and lips pulled into subtle shapes, what those shapes meant. He had not yet known that the face Stan was making with his mouth belied happiness. But eyes?

Steve can read eyes. And Stan’s eyes - two eyes, brown and warm, always shining, glimmering in the light, in a thousand melanins of browns like tilled earth and dunes - were wide and crinkling with clear delight and surprise, pleased and shocked. 

And the noises he was making were laughter, and Steve was entranced by it. The way his whole body shook like it was trying to contain the sound, the quick bursting rises and falls of his chest and his lungs fluttered with it and his vocal chords sang, like his soul was trying to escape his ribcage and oh, Steve had thought, I’m not in control here. 

Stan was laughing, and it was the most heavenly noise, and all 30-trillion-or-so cells moved with it, and suddenly Steve felt like it was Stan, not him, that was the all-powerful one. Steve had never fit that bill (ha), but Stan?

Stan was like a god. Steve was bent to his will and oh, he couldn’t have loved it more. 

“Send me a kiss by wire, baby my heart's on fire!” 

They were nothing to Stanley Pines. Not Bill, not any of the henchmaniacs, not all the power in the world. Not to Steve. Somehow, Stan had slotted himself perfectly in that place where Steve’s chest might have been, should he have been human. 

The heart was the motor, Stan had told him once, when Steve had caved and asked the man himself about the wonderful complexities and intricacies of the human body. It worked steady, pumped blood into every limb, kept ya moving.

Steve wanted to nestle inside his chest, hide in that burning, hearth of warmth in the cradle of his ribs, flexing lungs and muscle as his pillows. He wanted to fold himself into Stan’s flesh, strange and eldritch and abomination of flesh, bleeding and hot and alive and human. Steve had seen so many other humans in his time with Stan, but not one of them compared to him. Stanley Pines. 

Wanted- wants. God, he wants.

How did Bill convince his Sixer to let him in? Surely through slippery words, thin promises, thinly veiled begging - good enough for Stanford, probably, but Stan? Stan is too clever. He’d see through it an instant. Maybe he’d still accept, but it wouldn’t be without trepidation, without mistrust. Steve doesn’t want that. Steve wants him to want it too. 

You’ll never know if you don’t ask, Steve supposes. It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing he’d ever said to Stan - and, well, they could always play it off as a joke. 

Steve huffs quietly. If he had a head, he’d be shaking it now. Bill doesn’t understand it. 

He’d given the pitch, the order, that Stan was dumb. Gullible. Just simple muscle, following his brother blindly, riding off his coattails. But Bill didn’t get it, Steve was starting to understand. He hadn’t taken the time to actually look.

If he’d looked, he’d have seen that Stan was a clever con, a finely tuned, well-worked actor, wordsmith, creative and pragmatic. That he is wonderfully, paradoxically, selfishly selfless. That he is so stubborn, that he is a dreamer and he’d never admit it. That when the sunlight hits his eyes just so, you can see the whole world in them, glinting like gold. 

Bill never looked, so he never saw any of that. But Steve did. Steve does, every day he keeps finding more. He can’t stop being hypnotized by Stanley Pines. 

Steve sighs softly. 

He still wants Bill to get what Bill wants. Bill is his friend, even if he can be short-sighted and- well, a little cruel, sometimes. But he’s starting to think that maybe his axis has been shifted, just a bit, so that now he’s pointing towards Stan instead.

Stan, who laughs in delight when Steve dances and sings for him, asks him to do it, again and again and again. Stan, who listens to his ideas and tricks for cons, spins their collective swindling into something unbeatable. Stan, who draws his portrait into the sketchbook Steve convinced him to buy (for money-scheming, Stanley!). Stan, whose eyes shine in the sunlight, whose chest shakes with his laughter. Stan, who looks at him like he’s actually seeing him, not just what he’s worth. 

Stan’s his business partner and his friend and something else all rolled into one.

Stan sniffs in his sleep, snoring hitching slightly before evening again, his fingers flexing. Steve is roused out of his thoughts. Ah, right. He was supposed to meet him tonight. 

Well, the night was still young. With a sinuous movement, Steve withdraws himself from his sketchbook peephole, and slips instead into the familiar, warm confines of Stan’s mindscape.