Chapter Text
Stan had always been a sucker for bad decisions. Not just the dumb ones, like how he had spent his last dollar yesterday on a whole stale diner pie. Or even plain old miscalculations, like the way he had dented his bumper an hour ago on an ill-advised parallel park.
If he had stopped himself there, Stanley Pines might have been able to live a long, if somewhat anticlimactic life. Longer, at least.
Instead, he had made his brother hate him. Bad decisions came as easy as breathing after that. He had gotten himself disowned and left with nothing in the world but his car and a duffel he didn’t even get to pack himself. In trying to make the million dollars that was his ticket home, he had landed himself in prison for a solid two weeks and subsequently got banned from his home state. Then not long after - because Stan truly could not learn a lesson until it gave him a really good walloping - so did all of its neighboring states.
That was around when he had started running out of money. He began to have hungry days, and before long, more of them than not. Stan got desperate. So desperate that he got involved with some people who he really shouldn't have had.
So here he was now - ringing in his twentieth birthday in a secluded part of town, kneeling with his eyes clenched shut and hands shaking above his head, a gun trained at his back.
He hadn’t gotten to eat his pie. Or even, to really let the significance of his birthday sink in. Because it wasn’t just his, even if it didn't feel like it right now. Because Stan had officially entered the second decade of his life, and he had done it without his brother.
He was here instead, begging for his life from someone he couldn't even see.
It really was unfair. If he had been edging in on someone’s territory, he certainly hadn’t been doing it on purpose. Weren’t they supposed to give a guy a heads up? Wasn’t that the whole point of organized crime.
…Somehow, he figured that the guy about to shoot him didn’t care much about any of that.
Stan felt a wetness at his eyes, and with it, a rush of shame. He comforted himself with the knowledge that the people who find his body will notice his blown out brains more than the tears on his face.
"You really don't have to do this.”
There wasn’t a star in the sky, the darkness in front of him so infinite that staring into it felt like he still had his eyes clenched shut. There was something off about that. The town was on the smaller side, sure, but there were still people living here. Where had all the lights gone?
No reply. Not a sign this guy cared about a single thing he had said.
“Tell Johnny I get it, alright?" He fumbled through his mind for possible names. "Or Willy. Ben. Whoever you work for. Let me go and I'll - I'll be outta town in fifteen minutes, just watch. I won’t even stop to piss until I hit the state border.”
Still nothing.
“I've never done anything to you.” It sounded stupid even as he says it, but he has to try. "You won't see me ever again. Please."
The guy laughed. It was a shriek of a sound, one that shouldn’t come out of a human throat.
“Oh, Stanley Pines. You really are hilarious!"
Stan whipped around. He didn’t get halfway before he heard the click of the gun's safety being switched off. Slowly, deliberately, and telegraphing every move, he turned his head back around.
No one called him that anymore. No one knew to call him that, not since he had been told in no uncertain terms that one more strike would send Stanley Pines on a one-way trip to the pits of federal prison.
“…You know me.”
Stan had meant it as a question, but it was such a stupid one that it couldn’t help but come out as a statement. He hadn’t experienced a whole lot of goodwill these past few years, but the contempt in this guy’s voice, the barely restrained rage - this was new.
Somehow, this was personal. But who in the world still cared about him enough to hate him?
He had a thought, and tried very hard to forget he ever had it. It was then that something moved behind the dumpster to the left. The irritated 'miaow' of some stray cat roused from its sleep.
The man behind him shot at it, as casually as anything. Whatever it was, went quiet.
For a long moment, Stan didn’t know how to react. He had figured this guy had no issues with offing a person, given his job. But there was something unnecessarily sadistic about gunning down an animal for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Not to mention, a single gunshot would have been easy for people to explain away - a lone firework, maybe. Two gunshots got people calling the cops.
“Why the fuck did you do that?" Either this guy was as dumb as bricks, or he wanted to kill that cat more than he cared about getting caught.
"That language is entirely uncalled for, pal! What if a kid was listening?” The maniac was grinning. Stan could hear it in his voice. "Or two?"
…He had no idea what this guy’s deal was, but his numb fear began to give way to a deep, searing anger.
"You didn't have to do that. That cat didn't do anything to you.”
There was no real logic to it. After all, it wasn’t like he should expect any type of decency from the guy about to gun him down in a dark alleyway and probably dump his body somewhere deep in the woods outside of town. But there was just something about the unnecessary cruelty of shooting that stray that really, really pissed him off.
“It wasn't gonna do anything to you, you sonuvabitch."
"What can I say?" The man with the gun sighed, like they were just having a casual conversation. "I just really don't like when stupid fleshbags blunder into places they shouldn't be."
His tone gets dark and somehow even more pants-shitting terrifying. "I mean, can you blame me after what happened the last time?"
"...What happened last time?" Stan said stupidly.
A sharp crack of sound.
Stan's whole body jolted forward with the impact of the bullet. He stumbled forward, just a few steps. Then he crumpled onto his knees.
The shock drained all the adrenaline and the fear right out of him. He was tired, so tired. Suddenly, all he really wanted was to lay down for a very long time.
Strangely, there was no pain. Just the warm wetness on his hand and the spreading chill in his body.
His murderer to-be groaned, disappointed, like a kid with a magnifying glass who had burned up all his ants too fast. “Thought these things would be easier to use, with how often humans use them to kill each other! Guess they just can't do anything right, huh?”
Without really thinking, Stan turned around and looked at his attacker for the first time.
He didn’t know if it was the shock, or maybe all that blood leaking out of him, but he couldn’t really process what he saw. He just knew that it wasn’t a person. People didn’t move like that, dangling and swinging like a puppet on strings.
Yellow eyes above a grin that showed way too many teeth. Pale, too pale for something alive. Given that, Stan should find its face as strange and inhumane as the rest of it. But he knew the set of that nose, the jut of that jaw.
“Now stay still for me, would ya?” The thing raised its gun, whole body swaying with the motion. “I promise to take my time! I mean, make it quick!”
His legs were too weak for him to stand, let alone run. If he really wanted, maybe he could scramble backwards. A foot or two, even.
But there was no use, was there? Nothing Stan ever did had been of any use. He had swindled a few people who deserved it and a lot more who didn’t. He had bluffed and double-crossed and ran away when things got too complicated. He had held onto dumb dreams for too long - ones that even a teenager should be embarrassed to still believe in, let alone a full-grown twenty-year-old adult like he was now.
He had wasted his time on such pointless things. And now, he was going to die.
In that moment, Stan couldn’t care less about the injustice or unfairness of what his life had become. Just relief.
Then, over the sound of his heart in his ears, he heard a pop.
It came from up high. Somewhere above all of their heads.
Stan looked. His heart skipped a beat at the sight of it.
It burned its way across the sky, glowing shards broke off from the main path, shimmering just briefly before bring swallowed up back up by the night.
Stan had to blink, again and again, against the wetness in his eyes. The light of it was near blinding, but to look away was unthinkable. it was so beautiful.
Was it a shooting star? He had never seen one before. When he was a kid there was always the light pollution. By the time he had left home, he had stopped looking for them.
He had been keeping it pretty together, he had thought. But now he was really tearing up, an embarrassing lump already forming in his throat.
All he wanted was to maybe have a good ol' snot-filled cry, for the first time in years - right here, right now, with a dead cat in the dumpster behind him and a lunatic who wasn’t gonna miss shooting him again. Thinking about everything he had hoped for in the past two years. Everything that he won't ever be getting.
Would the cops be able to figure out who he was, with half a dozen identification cards under different names?
…What would Ford say when he found out he was gone?
A traitorous thought. If he'd ever find out.
Stan staggered forward. One step toward the light, but also to the gun and the monster in human skin. He couldn’t bring himself to care. He was floating in a dream, the world and its consequences distant. All that mattered was the light. He needed to be closer.
The star was gone now, but it had left behind multiple glints of light. One of them was getting bigger. From somewhere far away, Stan heard an high whistling sound, like something was whizzing through the air at impossible speed. And it was getting louder. Deafening, now.
Stan realized too late that it was coming right at him. Not that he would have moved, even if he did.
Two things happened in very quick succession.
A loud shriek of fury. Then words, furious and garbled, inaudible over the roar of his own blood in his ears.
And somewhere, impossibly clear, he could hear hear a soft, plaintive mewing from the dumpster behind him. It sounded like grief.
The stray had left someone behind. It made a pretty horrifying amount of sense, but there was something strange about it too. There wasn’t just one, but neither was there two. The cries came in an eerie kind of stereo, at once together and apart.
The confusion was the last thing he remembered about being alive.
Stan felt a sharp, cutting pain. One that punches deep in his chest, right to the core of him - and not through. He doesn’t know shit about anatomy, or at least he didn’t think so, but somehow he knew that it had got him right in the heart.
He let out a breath he had not realized that he was holding, and fell forward.
Just before everything goes black, Stan figured it out. The cries were echoing each other, again and again. The same and different.
He thinks, oh.
They're twins.