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The roar of the powerful energies emanating from the Universe Portal is enough to send Stanley Pines tumbling forward.
Stumbling and losing his footing, Stan barely makes contact with the sandy desert ground before a strong arm pulls him up by the cuff of his Man of Mystery suit.
"Hey, watch it!" Stan gruffly says, swatting with his cane at the fingers.
All six of 'em.
His eyes flickers up to make contact with Ford's grim stare.
"I finally did it," Stan grins. "I found you!"
Ford's eyes narrows. God, would it kill to emote for once--
His twin's fist makes contact with Stan's stubbled jaw, sending him flying to his back in front of the swirling, thundering vortex.
"You reckless--!" Ford yells before being cut off by the increasingly loud crackling noises of electricity. "We've got to turn this thing off!"
"What?"
A blinding flash is the only other warning given before the ground visibly shakes and splits open under the older men. Stan's stomach flips in a heartstopping moment of airborne stillness before gravity pulls them down into the craggy ravine.
When Stan next opens his eyes there's a rain of pebbles still trickling down over his chest and the dust kicked up by the landing is lazily settling in his disheveled hair. He feels a sharp pang of pain make its way down his spine like a lightning strike the moment he begins to push himself up to maybe yell at Ford or deck him one back.
He's much too old for this crap, Stan thinks, and settles for staring blankly upwards until his ears have stopped ringing.
The sky is a swirling vortex of crackling electricity and dark magenta clouds, so far up that the noises drown into a continuous dull mumur. The lights fluctuate and sputter like a broken lightbulb with a frayed cord. The air is stale and overwhelmingly hot, muggy, and thick with white ash.
Groaning, Stan finally pulls himself to his knees, very intent on socking Ford one and then maybe start negotiating how they're getting out of what is obviously the dusty asscrack of the universe.
"Ford? Where are ya, ya nerdy fuck?" he calls out, voice rough.
"Keep your voice down, for Tesla's sake!"
Stan ambles towards the irritated sound of his brother, finding that Ford is busy dusting himself down after digging out of a small hill of sand and detritus left over from the portal's explosion.
His twin glares angrily at Stan who simply stops in his tracks taken back with the sheer animosity in the look.
"What's the deal with you?"
"I cannot believe you!" Ford starts in what is unmistakenly his berating, shrill tone of you-fucked-up-so-bad-let-me-count-the-ways. "How many times did I write in my notes that the portal was under no circumstances to be reactivated!"
Stan shoves his fist onto his hips, donning an utterly frustrated look of his own.
"You really think I wasn't even going to try get you back? And people call me the ignorant one."
"That's because you are!" Ford seethes, now stomping towards Stan, arms shaking. "You never have any idea of just how terribly you mess up, do you?"
"I had to get you back, jackass!"
"Not at the expense of the safety of the universe!" Ford yells, aggressively jabbing Stan's chest with his index finger.
"Who cares about the universe?! If I left my own brother alone to rot in some ass-backwards crusty hole, what kinda guy would that make me, huh?" Stan says, flailing his arms right back at Ford and making some rude hands gestures of his own.
"I'd have to go with: not a disaster of a human being!" Ford shouts, getting right up into Stan's face.
Stan shoves Ford back, hard, and grits his teeth. It's right back to this argument then. Right back to the seething resentment and barely veiled feelings of disappointment and betrayal.
"Shoulda known even after thirty years you're still keeping a grudge," he says, suddenly going col with realisation that his brother isn't just ungrateful because of the inherent dangers in activating the Universe Portal.
"You ruined my life. And after asking you one thing, trusting you one last time, you continued to ruin my life--!"
This time, Stan anticipates the swing coming for his jaw, and sidesteps it. What he doesn't expect, however, is Ford whirling around on his heel and coming back at him and tackling him to the ground, pinning his face into the sand and debris.
"Hey, HEY--!" Stan coughs. When the hell did his droopy ass of a brother learn to fight back?!
Ford places a knee on the small of his brother's back and with little remorse leans over him with the full of his weight. "Isn't it enough that you had to mess up your own future by failing school? Did you have to ruin mine too?"
"Thirty years, Ford!" Stan sputters, spittle and dirt mixing as he tries to speak with his face squashed into the earth. "Thirty years and you're still hung up on this! Does the fact I rebuilt the portal to get you back count for nothing? I wanted to fix my mistake you motherf--"
Ford grinds his leg into Stan's back. "For all that we know, that portal has completely upturned the fabric of reality back home and ruined Gravity Falls. Is that what you call 'fixing your mistake'? Creating new ones?"
Alright, that about does it.
"You're family, I couldn't just leave you here. Family doesn't just turn their back on each other!"
Ford's jaw tightens. "We haven't been family in decades, Stanley. Perhaps we never really were. You've certainly not acted like it."
It's like he wants Stan to turn around and punch those stupid fucking square glasses straight through his thick poindexter skull.
There's not much time to growl out a response because the crackling whirls of dark clouds above starts to rumble loudly, presumably a warning of poor things to come.
Ford immediately pushes off of Stan who wheezes out a cough before he's grabbed by the neck again.
"We've got to get to shelter," Ford bites out, not looking at Stan.
They take to running, the air hissing with electricity as a nasty wind beings to pick up. Ford leads them to a natural cave formation that seems to tunnel downwards, away from the sticky, hot wind and brewing magnetic storm.
Ford ushers him down like he's some sort of mother duck herding its incompetent offspring over the road, leaving Stan to almost crack his skull open on a couple of stalag-somethings. His overbearing brother then proceeds to pick up what looks like discarded pieces of metal plating to clog the hole to the outside world and shield them from the howling trantrums of the elements.
Stan sits down on a flat rock, putting his grimy fez down and combing thick fingers through his hair. It's dry and dusty down here, but at least he can breathe without digesting a couple ounces of a dirt for every inhale.
Ford seems to have diverting all of his attention to the makeshift barricade--great, maybe he can knock on that instead of Stan's face. The years haven't been kind to him and he doesn't really need a detached retina or a couple loose teeth to add to the disaster that is ripe old age.
Stan pinches the bridge of his nose and tries not to let the overwhelming bitterness of the situation swallow him whole. Truth be told, he doesn't really care that he's probably stuck in a dimension that might as well be Satan's craggy armpit, but the undiluted hatred from his twin brother is a hard fucking pill to swallow after so many sleepless nights full of guilt and self-loathing.
That's when he feels Ford's broad hand on his shoulder, and before he can even tell his brother to knock it off with the unending fits of rage and resentment, there's dry, thin lips shoving against his own and fingers fisting in his graying hair.
"Ford you hormonal fuck--!" Stan spits, attempting to push his brother off. "Can you make up your goddamn mind whether or not you want to punch me or mack on me?"
"Both," Ford forces out against Stan's fingers. "Mostly punch you. Definitely leaning towards violence as a resolution."
"Great," Stan growls, close to losing the wrestling match between his hand and Ford's insistent mouth. "Your head is as fucked as ever."
"If you don't want to make another mistake," Ford grits out, tightening his hold on Stan's scalp with a painful twinge, "now would be a good idea to silence yourself."
Stan's mouth curls into an ugly sneer, but Ford doesn't seem to notice, or more than likely, doesn't give a rat's ass about much of anything Stan thinks anymore. His six-fingered twin continues to use his weight against Stan and pushes him against the curved cave wall.
Ford's mouth comes down on him again, roughened by hot wind and speckled with metallic dust and grime, sucking on Stan's jawbone like there's some sort of chance that the answer to why he's got such a fuckup for a twin brother can somehow be extracted by direct and indiscriminate bodily contact.
"Forty years, Lee," Ford chokes out, voice rough with emotion that, coupled with the first mention of his nickname in as many years makes his lower abdomen grow hot and wild.
He still doesn't reciprocrate when Ford yanks his head back by the hair--when the hell did he get so bossy--and kisses him roughly. It's openmouthed as messy as hell, all teeth and tongue and mostly Ford biting the shit out of Stan's lips. Teeth clack and scrape against each other and glasses dig into cheeks and noses flatten as Ford all but attempts to merge his face with Stan's on a molecular level. Stan's breathless and limp in all this, completely taken back by the fact that that Ford seems to be having an incestuous, emotional meltdown all on his own in his fucking lap in some fucking dead end of the universe and he can't even begin to start to list the number of fucked up things in the equation.
He'd thought all of this--all of the lingering touches and shy not-quite-brotherly looks--was long buried over forty years ago, a thing of their hormonal, confused and lonely childhood. It's enver been so aggressivley brought ot the forefront and Ford's certainly never been the instigator in all of the maddingly sparse moments they ever dared so much as acknowledge that they might be closer than they ought to be.
Hell--it makes sense in some insane, nightmarish way: they're so far from civilisation and anything even remotely connected to the sensibilities and morals of their world and they've already wrecked their familial bond so bad that Ford probably decided to throw caution to the wind and finally destroy the last shreds of brotherhood between the two of them.
This by hostile mouth takeover, apparently.
"Ford--" Stan grunts against his brother's lips. And that's all he says, all he can say, before Ford slaps his hand over his mouth.
Stan can taste the salt of sweat and soot of gunpowder on the warm, calloused palm. Ford's sooty, torn trenchcoat hangs over them both like cloth shield as his twin's fingers deftly undoes his red bolo tie and delves into the neck of his shirt. Ford is goddamn vehement and soon his mouth is kissing-biting-bruising its way down Stan's stubbled jawline and exposed throat. Stan can feel him pulling on his white dress shirt with his--fuck--his teeth and continue to push his hand under the suit, grabbing Stan by the shoulder.
Ford's feeling him out, groping for every bit of muscle and grit that hints to what's Stan's life have been like all these decades, there're sounds of buttons pinging open and muffling swearing, but Stan's too entranced by the mental trainwreck happening in front of him to even think of either stopping or--damn it all--egg Ford on. Even as Ford's hand slips off of his mouth and back into his hair and his other hand makes a rumpled mess of his shirt and jacket, he can't stop to think of anything remotely useful to do, absolutely certain that if he breaks Ford's feverish spell that his twin is going to ride out into the sunset, disgruntled and mortified, and never lay another hand on him again, platonic or otherwise.
The grizzly turtleneck is riding down Ford's neck, and it's all Stan can do to just stare at the lines of exposed tendons in his brother's neck, alluring and barely out of reach while Ford's assaulting him with mouth and hands. The air is heady with magnetic pressure and the smell of sweat, charred earth and sun-burned wool, and there's a tense pressure building between them, most notably of the physical kind. Ford bucks against him once, and it's enough to bring it to a completely unforgiveable no-going-back this-is-definitely-disgusting-depravity as it brings to attention the very real half-mast cock in Stan's black dress pants.
"Fuck--Ford..."
Ford's hand makes its way over Stan's bare chest, fingers trailing through curly, gray hair perviously hidden by the rolled-up undershirt. It disappears under Ford's own turleneck, and there's a both ungodly and heavenly sound of a zipper pulling down.
They're heaving and panting against each other, two older men running hotter than they have in years, in a space too small to contain all the repressed sentiments and issues swirling built up over all the years.
Ford's mouth comes crashing against his again, and this time, Stan's reciprocating with all the impotent anger and worry he's kept under lock as the Man of Mystery, canines digging into Ford's lower lip in an attempt to either pull him closer or rip off his lower lip. He tastes coppery salt and grime, Ford's mashing his mouth to the edge of his own and working all of his six clever fucking fingers into his pants, pulling out his cock and stroking it as the last shards of shame and morality comes tumbling down.
Stan's hands finally, finally, clasp the sides of Ford's face and angles it to kiss him deep enough to strangle him from the inside, hard and aggressive and longing. It's rough and dirty and completely unashamed, and Ford's hitched moan makes Stan's dick stand to full attention quicker than any deepthroating ever did. Ford's hands shakily works his own cock out of his pants and strokes the two of them in tandem, rutting his hips into Stan's in a quick and needy rhytm. The rim of their trousers press against Ford's stroking fingers, everything is irregular and not enough and when they come over Ford's hands in shuddering breaths, it's so fucking unsatisfying and deeply exhausting all at once.
The small compartment is echoing with their pants and Stan's muffled noises of "fuck" and "shit" interchangeably.
Ford's become a dead weight on Stan, and if it wearing for the wet pooling spot still connecting their hips he might've indulged his lunatic of a brother a bit longer before he taps him on the shoulder and ever so kindly asks him to roll the hell off.
Ford's face is flushed, but unreadable as he rolls back onto his heels and quickly tucks himself in.
It's an immensely messed-up situation with a thousand horrible ways it's probably (definitely) going to end in their unnoticed demise, but right now, Ford's barely managing to control his breathing as he's rolling up his nerdy-ass turtleneck to cover the bruising hickeys on his neck, and that's all Stan needs to know right now.