Sometimes the jump between universes is less clean than either of them would like. Sometimes they come out ten feet off the ground (if there's ground at all). Sometimes they come out in the middle of a crowd of aliens just as hostile as the one they left behind. Sometimes, like now, they come out separate.

Fiddleford pushes himself to his feet. The fact that there isn't a gloved hand helping him up is enough to tell him that Ford isn't anywhere near him. In fact all he can see is a seemingly-endless desert broken only by the occasional scrubby bush. No road. He'd think he was back in California if the sand wasn't purple.

Alright. This is fine. Nothing is currently trying to kill him and that's already a step above where he was five minutes ago. He brushes some sand from the front of his jumpsuit with one hand and pulls a communicator out of his bag with the other. After one-too-many accidental separations he insisted on some means of contact, and then he built the damn things himself before Ford could stop him. Ford Pines may be the protagonist of his own imagined sci-fi epic but Fiddleford has found that's left precious little room for common sense in his head.

It rings once, twice, three times, and he taps his foot impatiently until Ford picks up halfway through the fourth ring.

"Are you okay, buddy?" are the first words out of Ford's mouth. That makes up for how long it took him to answer. Fiddleford's shoulders relax a little.

"I'm just fine, hon. A little dusty, that's all."

"Good, good! Then I believe the next order of business is finding a place to reconvene. If you can find a landmark--"

Fiddleford spins in a slow circle, surveying the landscape. His foot starts tapping again.

"I hate to break it to you, Stanford, but this place is flatter'n that two-dimensional town we visited last week."

"Actually--"

"Figure of speech. Point is there's nothin' to walk toward because everythin' looks the same, unless you're seein' somethin' I'm not."

There's a long few moments of silence and then Ford says,

"Ah. Well. I could send up a flare?"

"It's noon."

"I am not going to wait goodness knows how long for the sun to set! Days on this world could be weeks long, Fiddleford, you don't know!"

Fiddleford, looking down at his still-tapping foot, realizes that (not for the first time) Ford is dead wrong.

"Then how come my shadow's gettin' longer the longer I look at it?"

There's another long silence, presumably because Ford is doing the same thing he is: looking up at the sky, where the sun is making a steady descent toward the horizon. It's not moving quickly, exactly, but its progress is noticeable. Also noticeable is the drop in temperature. By the time the sun is at the horizon the air has chilled considerably, much as it would in a proper desert but at an incredibly accelerated rate. His jumpsuit, which was uncomfortably warm when he first arrived, is now something he's very glad to be wearing.

"Alright. If it took ten minutes from noon to sunset, then we have approximately twenty to find each other before the sun rises again and flares are no longer a viable means of indicating location. How fantastic is this, Fiddleford? A world on a highly-accelerated day-night cycle -- I mean, comparatively. I wonder how the local lifeforms have --"

Fiddleford sandwiches the communicator between his ear and his shoulder and loads his flare gun.

"Later, hon."

"Right, right. Apologies."

The issue with such a flat world is that things are visible from a great distance and it messes with perception of how big that distance is, exactly. An hour in they're no closer to each other, and it doesn't help that Ford wastes an entire thirty minutes on top of that when he finds a native lifeform and has to stop and chase it around trying to get a picture he can sketch from later. It's some sort of furry eyeless burrowing creature, and the hi-res image Ford sends him (along with about fifteen exclamation points) would be cute if Fiddleford weren't so cross with it for distracting his boyfriend.

He's still talking about the thing at two and a half hours in, theorizing on its evolutionary path, its breeding and feeding habits, its lifespan. Fiddleford 'hmms' occasionally but mainly he's concerned with throwing up flares on a regular schedule because otherwise Ford forgets.

Three-and-a-half hours in he spots a speck on the horizon. Four hours in, just as the sun is rising, Ford is close enough for him to hear a dim shout in the distance at the same time as it comes in clear over the communicator. This is also about the time he realizes that Ford is running, and he has just about enough time to turn off the communicator and put it back into his bag before Ford bodily tackles him. He's swung around in a full three-hundred-and-sixty degree loop twice before Ford sets him back down on the ground.

"I missed you!"

"We were talkin' the whole time--"

"It's been almost a week!"

Fiddleford looks at him and at the exceptionally stupid grin plastered across his face and remembers, very suddenly and with great clarity, why he fell in love with Ford Pines in the first place.

"Took you the whole four hours to think of that, didn't it?"

Ford's expression falters just a tad, becomes sheepish. "Ah, well --"

"It was good, Stanford." He leans in and presses a light kiss to Ford's lips, which brings the stupid smile back in full force.

"I missed you too."