Know how sometimes, when you’re under stress, you call someone you look up to or care about ‘mom’ or ‘dad’? Yeah…
Stan needs to take better care of himself.
Inspired by this prompt.
I’ve been working on this one off and on for awhile now, and, well…yeah I’m calling it done.
Ever since the kids, now teenagers, had moved in with him, Stan had been trying to pull back on the dangerous crap. A little, at least. The kids needed him right now, so he didn’t have time or room to be risky.
He’d been being risky ever since the Transcendence. Trying to drown out the memory of Mabel’s screams, Dipper’s mangled hat lying in a puddle of blood, those first few days…
Well, now Ford was off traveling the world, and Stan had been doing stupidly risky things again despite being the town’s hero in his own name. But that had to stop, and fast, now that the twins were here. He couldn’t…ironically enough, he couldn’t risk being risky anymore.
Not when both twins were both still so fragile. Not physically, at least, physically they were doing…well, he couldn’t say great, not with Dipper’s…condition, but he supposed they could be called physically fit. Emotionally, though…they’d never admit to being fragile, but Stan understood their position right now a bit too well for his own comfort. The reasons might be different, and they might still have had contact and know that they were loved, loved so much that their parents were willing to let them go, but, well…
But, risky or not, this trip would set them up for the next few months at the least, until he could figure out some new way to make a living for them now that folks weren’t coming by to see his homemade mysteries, what with the real things being everywhere and part of the everyday.
Well, he knew more about the supernatural than just about anyone, save his great-niece and nephew, thanks to his brainiac of a brother’s journals and thirty years of living in Gravity Falls, but he didn’t have the clout and reputation to back it up yet.
It was happening, but too slow to make a steady living. As to his brother…well, he had no clue where Poindexter was right now. He’d run off soon after the whole Transcendence happened, just stopping in now and then to drop off old journals or samples, lock himself in the basement for a week, and disappear again.
…at least Ford was talking to them again. Awful as everything was, actually forcing him and Ford to talk was one of the few decent things to come out of the whole mess. Didn’t make up for any of the things that happened that day, but Stan had learned to appreciate the little things a long time ago. They’d had a good couple years on that boat before Stan needed to return to Gravity Falls permanently. And Ford’d left some kind of mirror-portal thing that they could use to talk to him, and, well…they were talking more often then the twins’ parents were talking to the kids.
Acceptable Risks
Published
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