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callipraxia · 1 year

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New Concoctions and Old Scrapbooks

Summary: While the rest of the family is out on one of its missions to help Stan recall the events of the past thirty years via interviews with people he's scammed, Ford tries Mabel Juice and discusses the secrets of Pineses past with its creator.

“You look like you could use some Mabel Juice.”

For several seconds after Mabel made that announcement, Ford had no idea how to respond to it. It didn’t immediately make sense, and on examination, it only got more confusing. Finally, adjusting his glasses anxiously, he said, “some…what?”

It was a peculiar situation they found themselves in. At the moment – and for the first time ever that Ford could recall – he and Mabel were the only occupants of the house. Dipper and Soos were out with Stanley, going to interview yet another person he’d conned at some point in the past thirty years. Ford had thought Mabel had gone with them, but apparently (unless he was hallucinating, which he didn’t…think he was. He might not have slept in days, but he was sure he wasn’t that far gone) she had not. And she thought he should consume….

“Mabel Juice,” she said brightly. “Grunkle Stan says it’s like coffee and nightmares had a baby!” She shoved a glass with an alarming number of paper umbrellas sticking out of it into his hand without further ado. “Go on, try it!”

Ford supposed he should have had reservations about the wisdom of this course of action. The juxtaposition of the words ‘coffee’ and ‘nightmares’ brought back bad memories. He was about sixty percent sure the purple concoction in the glass could, under the right circumstances, go fluorescent. The number of paper umbrellas alone meant it could not be safe for human consumption. Instead of acknowledging any of these points, though, he shrugged and did as ordered.

“So?” asked Mabel. “What do you think?”

That this substance may actually taste stranger than whatever it was I drank with those octopus-armed warrior piglets, and…oh. Oh my.

Mabel laughed, and he realized he’d said the last three words out loud. Or at least, he hoped it had only been the last three words. Mabel did not need to know about the octopus-armed warrior piglets. Though, at the moment, it seemed like it might not be nearly as bad as he suspected it normally would seem….

“Are you supposed to think you can feel an uptick in the amount of electrical activity in various parts of your brain?” he asked. “And find yourself in an unusually…optimistic mood?”

“Sounds about right,” said Mabel with satisfaction. “I’m pretty sure that being gloomy just means you’ve got too much blood in your caffeine-and-sugar system.” Her face turned down, though, even as she began drinking her own glass of the Substance through a straw. “Most of the time, anyway.”

“Hm. Wouldn’t Dipper disprove your hypothesis, though?” If Dipper ever switched from soda to anything remotely alcoholic, he’d be an extreme sort of drunk within the week. Ford chose not to even think about what would happen if the kid ever stumbled across various other substances the multiverse had to offer.

“Yeah, except Dipper’s always…just so…Dipper, isn’t he?” She laughed at her own remark and Ford did as well, though it was objectively lacking in the elements of Humor. “Plus, he doesn’t drink Mabel Juice, and Mabel Juice…sometimes it might have Pitt Cola in it, but all just drinking that will do is make you jittery and stupid eventually. That’s why he ended up being Bipper that time.”

“If this doesn’t eventually make you jittery and stupid, then I may need to form another rift in the fabric of space and time,” said Ford. “From the feel of it, this stuff would make you a killing in the interdimensional trucker market. You and Dipper could both go to college without any scholarships and still not need to work afterward. Well. After you figured out how to convert the currency, if you chose to stay in this dimension.” 46\’ was, he had learned over the decades, considered something of a backroads dimension, barely contacted, certainly not part of any of the major treaty groups. Interdimensional currency would be difficult to explain to banks around here at present.

“Ha, ha,” said Mabel. “If I ever decide to sell it, I might just stick with PopsiCo, though. I don’t know if I like the multiverse all that much. It made you disappear, and then it made Bill show up, and now….” Her face turned down again, and she forsook the straw in favor of gulping from her glass. “Now Stan barely remembers us and the world almost ended and…yeah.”

“Well, those aren’t really…things the multiverse did,” said Ford. “More consequences of my stupidity.” He sighed and looked at the scrapbook in front of him – one of the stash of them they’d found hidden around the place. It seemed Stan must have laid claim to almost all of the old collection after their parents had died. This was a very good thing as far as helping Stanley get his memory back, but it didn’t help at all with the times when Stan was so blandly pleasant that it was quite obvious they weren’t quite working as quickly as might have been hoped. Stan had – much to Ford’s horror, though he hoped the kids were optimistic enough to have not noticed - seemingly picked up that overt reminders of the absence of his memory pained the rest of them, but seemingly had not picked up that him being mild-mannered and agreeable just hammered home the degree to which he still wasn’t quite himself. A lot of terms had been used over the years to describe Stanley Pines, but ‘blandly pleasant’ was not, Ford was quite sure, among them….

Ford decided to have more of the Substance. It didn’t quite sparkle as much this time, but that was, sadly, a common feature of uppers in every place he’d been – well, either of the stimulants themselves or simply of how the human nervous system processed them. To his surprise, Mabel scooted her chair over closer to his and looked at the scrapbook, too.

“Dipper says we shouldn’t ask you guys about all this stuff,” she said. “At least not now. Did you or Stan make this?”

“Not this one, I don’t think. At least not the majority of it. Where we are now, I think our mother was still the…main contributor. I don’t know where she got it from, but she was the first Pines to start putting everything in albums like this.”

“Is that her?” asked Mabel, pointing to a picture of Caryn, who looked – in the snapshot, anyway, which had treated her fake finery more kindly than any eye ever had – resplendent in her full psychic getup. She’d still had palm-reading clients come to the house or worked the odd public event when they were young, before phones had become prevalent enough for the phone psychic line to bring in a respectable income alone, and someone – probably Stanley – must have convinced her to pose sometime in that era.

“Yes. Or rather – Princess Grand Mistress Coranina Romanoff, I think that’s what she called herself when she still did that kind of thing.”

“Romanoff? Like Anastasia or something?”

“Well, I think that’s why she threw the ‘princess’ bit in, but it was her real maiden name. Just means that one of her distant ancestors was a Roman citizen, so you got your famous ones…and then you got her family. They kept a bit better track of things than Dad’s family did, so we heard all sorts of garbled half-remembered stories that had been passed down since before anyone left Belarus…I suppose that’s how she and Stanley learned to spin yarns so well. I’m pretty sure you and Stanley didn’t get any of the creativity from Dad’s side, anyway.”

“And that’s him?”

Ford looked at the black and white photograph of a somber-looking young man in uniform, who bore an unmistakable resemblance to Mabel’s grandfather and both great-uncles for very simple reasons. “Oh, yes. It’s always odd seeing that picture…that was taken when he joined the army, I suppose. That was before we were born. I don’t know where Ma got it from, though. He didn’t meet her until after the War, and I can’t imagine he was any happier about talking about it than he was ten, fifteen years later.” He turned over a page and found another image of Filbrick, still young but beginning to look more like he had by the time Ford had been extant and old enough to form memories about him, standing outside of Pines’ Pawns with his face as close to a smile as it generally had ever gotten and with a small child, so heavily bundled up in winter attire as to be rendered almost featureless, beside him. “I bet Ma took this one, though. Let’s see…”

As carefully as possible, Ford lifted the image from the page and turned it over. Sure enough, the handwriting on the back was his mother’s: Filbrick w/his one true love, and also Sherman, Jan. 1946.

“Wow,” said Mabel, reading it, too. “1946. That was, like, practically when there were dinosaurs, wasn’t it?”

“Remind me to prepare you some lessons on geology sometime,” said Ford, wincing in something like pain at this remark. Mabel shook her head and he said, “what?”

“That was a joke, Grunkle Ford.”

“Oh. Sorry. Yes, it was a long time ago. This must have been when Pa first got the pawn shop – G.I. Bill, you know. Government loans. Cheap mortgages.”

“What did Great-Grandma mean about his one true love, though?”

“I think it was a joke,” said Ford, after a slight pause to adjust to the idea of his mother being called ‘Great-Grandma.’ “About how proud he was of the shop. At least, I’m pretty sure Pa liked the shop better than anything else in the family….” Not that that meant much. From what Ford recalled, his father had been growing gradually more disillusioned with the shop, too, by the time he’d left home for good.

“That’s so sad,” exclaimed Mabel. “I need more Mabel Juice just thinking about it.” She picked up a pitcher and refilled both of their glasses. There was an alarming noise of something hard striking glass. Ford frowned, though not because of the noise.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Sad?”

“If he really liked a stupid pawn shop – “ Ford winced again just imagining the magnitude of the storm of temper which might have broken over Mabel’s head had Filbrick heard that remark – “more than his family. I mean, Grunkle Stan doesn’t even like the Mystery Shack more than us! Most of the time. But that’s how I got my grappling hook, and how Dipper got his hat. He just gave them to us because we were sad one day.”

Ford blinked. “If Pa’s dead, he must have rolled over in his grave,” he remarked. He had, since his return, assumed that the old man had died in his absence, but he had never actually gotten confirmation of the fact, and of course, at the moment, Stanley didn’t remember one way or the other. The failure of an outraged ghost to appear and curse out its great-granddaughter, though, made him wonder for a moment if Filbrick might still be alive after all. “I imagine he’d be nearly as angry about that as he was whenever Stan got caught stealing things around the neighborhood.”

“Hmm.” Mabel stared into her drink and stirred it with the straw still in the glass. “Grunkle Ford? Can I ask you something?”

This sounded ominous. Like the kind of thing that should prompt him to be somewhere else as fast as possible. People didn’t ask permission to ask questions about matters that weren’t going to be painful, awkward, or generally unpleasant in some way. “Ah – yes?” he said, and even he noticed it sounded more like a question than an answer. “I suppose so?”

“What did everyone do after…you know. After Grunkle Stan…wasn’t at home anymore?”

There was entirely too much blood in his caffeine-and-sugar system at the moment. He considered trying to rummage through the cabinets in search of more sugar, but with an effort, he restrained himself. For one thing, he had not kept himself in relatively good condition this long just to let himself go now. For another, it might offend Mabel, which he did not wish to do. He was still half-surprised she had remained on speaking terms with him after…everything, and he didn’t want to push his luck in any respect there. How, though, to answer her question….

“Nothing,” he said finally, unable to think of a better answer after several attempts.

“Nothing?”

“That’s correct. We did…absolutely nothing.” He had another drink of the Substance – it did seem to taste better the more one drank of it, which made him worry more about what was in it, but never mind – and cleared his throat. “I mean, of course we did things. Ma took calls on the psychic line. Pa ran the shop. I went to school. What I mean is…as far as we could, we just…kept going as though nothing had happened.”

Mabel’s eyes were huge as she looked at him, clearly struggling to get her mind around the idea that had just been presented to her. “But…how?” she asked, twisting pieces of her hair around her fingers.

Ford shrugged. “Ma answered the phone. Pa ran the shop. I went to school. We…almost never talked about it. It came up with Pa once – some of the others at school didn’t realize Stan had had a sparring partner at home, so I, er, had to correct their impression that Stan’s absence meant they could behave the same way they had when we were in elementary school….”

“Huh?”

“One of the football players tried to push me over into a trash can, so I very happily took my feelings about…everything out on his face,” Ford translated. “Pa…wasn’t very happy with me about that incident.”

To put it mildly. It had been more than forty years and Ford could still hear the old man’s voice in his head as clearly as he had when Filbrick had been speaking. Comments about how Ford should have known that he’d need to keep Stanley in line, that he should have known Stanley would do something stupid if Ford didn’t watch him at every moment. How his failure to divine this meant that everything that had happened was entirely Ford’s fault, and how everything that happened going forward would also be his fault, up to and including whenever word got back to them that his brother had either died in a ditch or in prison, as there weren’t really any other ways the story could end….

He also remembered the remarks he’d made in reply. How much worse it had gotten from there. How Ma had reacted. It was all like a video tape, though, as if he had watched it happen from the outside. That was only part of why he didn’t think he cared to elaborate any more on it to Mabel.

“As for Ma….” He sighed. “I don’t think any of us really thought that Stanley would stay gone. I think we all thought he’d sleep a night or two in his car and decide that Pa was the lesser of two evils. But he didn’t.”

He glanced at the stack of unopened albums. He had yet to go through them to make sure they were all in chronological order, or who had compiled each one. He hadn’t even counted them. If he did, he might figure out if any had been made at any point between 1978 and the beginning of Mabel’s summer scrapbook. Well, unless he counted Stan’s box of road memorabilia that Dipper had remembered; it was almost possible to arrange those scraps of life into a neat timeline, even without a book to hold it all that way.

Maybe, he thought, it made sense that Ma and Stan had been the types to hoard little pieces of reality. Neither of them had ever wanted much to do with the real world, that was true…but maybe there was something to be said, after all, for at least having the ability to look at something and discern what was real from what one had made up once one was self-aware enough to know how much would invariably be made up. He wondered what it said about him that he couldn’t, so far as he could recall, ever entertained such an impulse himself in all his long years of exile. Maybe he was the real coward between the three of them, in that he didn’t even want to entertain the possibility of learning what parts of his memories were real and which ones he had redone in more flattering shades over the years.

“Right now, of course, the key thing is helping Stanley remember…most things,” he said. “But you and Dipper should look at these someday. Learn what you can from all of our errors, so you don’t repeat them.” He looked at Mabel and was surprised – not to mention a little alarmed – to realize that her lip was trembling. “Mabel?”

“I don’t think Mabel Juice is going to cut it for this one,” she said, and then she stood up and hugged him.

This was so surprising that he had no idea how to respond, beyond awkwardly patting her on the shoulder in reply. Before he could think of a better answer, the front door opened.

“Ah – thank you, Mabel,” he said, and then – smoothly enough that he surprised himself – switched back to the hopefully-cheerful (he could never tell if he was moving his face right when he tried to make it assume given expressions, but so far, nobody had said anything about this one being inappropriate or bizarre-looking, so maybe it was within the realm of done right) expression he sometimes had to force but rarely dropped during the day lately.

“Productive expedition?” he asked as the rest of the family entered the kitchen.

Stan shook his head slowly. “The people in this town have got to literally be the dumbest humans on Earth,” he said, and almost sounded like himself.

“They should try this…beverage Mabel’s invented,” said Ford. “I think I may have started thinking in higher dimensions for a few minutes there.”

“This….” Stan frowned at the glasses, looking as though he was thinking very hard about something. “Oh, yeah. Make sure you don’t choke on the parts that aren't supposed to be there. It’s…you who does that, isn’t it?” he asked Mabel. “You put toys in…whatever that is.”

“That’s how the magic gets in,” said Mabel, beaming. "And it's the magic that makes it work."

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