Chapter Text
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
I.
They’d almost killed each other in the womb.
Mono-mono twins. One placenta; one amniotic sac. One zygote, originally, that had split just in time. Another day—another few hours—and they would’ve been conjoined. Identical twins who split as late as they did were at risk for endless adverse effects. Preterm birth, increased chance of birth defects, cord entanglement, developmental problems due to unequal blood flow to each twin.
Stan and Ford had hit every mark.
Stanford had taken a summer course in embryology before his sophomore year, because… well—because he had. He’d tested out of all his gen-ed classes and landed right in the 3000-level courses, but even his three simultaneous physics majors required at least one biological science elective. He’d finished the coursework in nine days instead of eight weeks. Probably would’ve finished it sooner, if he hadn’t wasted as much time as he had in the library, reading up on folklore about twins.
When that hadn’t been satisfactory, he’d spent hours in the professor’s office, drilling her—and then the professors and guest lecturers who she knew but would never have deigned to speak at Backupsmore, and nearly harassing the skeleton staff that ran the library in summer, requesting books from better-equipped universities.
Stanford and Stanley had been born at 34 weeks. Not terribly early for twins, but they’d still been small; underdeveloped. Stanford had been smaller—exaclty 3.75 pounds. Stanley had been just over half a pound heavier at 4.28. Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. Their placenta hadn’t split blood flow evenly between them. Monochorionic—their blood vessels had been connected, shared, and it hadn’t been shared evenly. Stanford was the donor twin. He was born smaller, weaker, with respiratory and circulatory problems that he wouldn’t shake for years. He would , but he’d spent much of his infancy sickly.
It must’ve been a comparatively mild case of TTTS, his professor had concluded. Like that was a revelation. If it’d been extreme, they would’ve both been dead.
They’d been born at 34 weeks. (Thereabouts. Their mother hadn’t realized she was pregnant until well into the second trimester, and hadn’t been tracking her menstrual cycle, so 34 weeks was the doctors’ best guess.) They probably developed TTTS late, between 25 and 27 weeks, so the damage done to either of them hadn’t been deadly. Only nearly.
At different points in their first week of life, they’d both had to be resuscitated.
Their parents hadn’t been expecting twins. Ultrasound technology in ‘54 wasn’t what it was today. Fiddleford had mailed Ford the ultrasound of his son, and had kept one of the images in his wallet even years later. But in their case, Baby B, as the doctors would’ve said, was positioned behind the first; they hadn’t felt the second head. Two sets of jostling feet and elbows were dismissed as one particularly rambunctious boy, sure to be a star athlete. And they had been active, their mother had assured them, and complained of her months of back pain.
Later, his professor had pushed her glasses up her nose, and said, “Twins do interact in the womb, we believe. The ultrasounds we’ve been able to take have showed that they kick each other, reach for each other…”
Later, alone in his dormitory room with Fiddleford gone home for the summer, he’d read in one of Backupsmore’s digests, “As published in the October PLoS ONE, the scientists found that fetuses begin reaching toward their neighbors by the 14th week of gestation. Over the following weeks they reduced the number of movements toward themselves and instead reached more frequently toward their counterparts. By the 18th week they spent more time contacting their partners than themselves or the walls of the uterus. Almost 30 percent of their movements were directed toward their prenatal companions. These movements, such as stroking the head or back, lasted longer and were more accurate than self-directed actions, such as touching their own eyes or mouth. The results suggest that twin fetuses are aware of their counterparts in the womb, that they prefer to interact with them, and that they respond to them in special ways. Contact between them appeared to be planned—not an accidental outcome of spatial proximity, says study co-author Cristina Becchio of Turin.”
Twins are an anomaly too, aren’t they?
The statistics aren’t quite reliable, and aren’t uniform. In some places in the world, as many as one in seventy pregnancies results in twins. In New Jersey, 1954, it was approximately one out of 83.4. Dizygotic twins made up most of that—some sixty-six percent, give or take. Identical twins are rarer. Of monozygotic twins, most split within the first seven days of conception and have their own placentas. Even those who split later tend to have their own discrete amniotic sacs. Monochorionic monoamniotic twins, like Stan and Ford, make up about 0.8% of twin births. 0.008% of total births. One in 12,500. Rarer still that they were male. Rarer still that they both survived. As many as half of mono-mono twins die before the third trimester. Fewer still survive birth and infancy.
Stanford was the donor sibling. But twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome impacted both fetuses; it was just as risky for the recipient. Too much blood, too much pressure on the developing heart. A higher prenatal urinary output as well; Ford’s would have been lower—in this case, their shared amniotic sac might’ve saved them.
They’d survived. They’d thrived. Grown faster than anyone would have expected of them. They were a success story, and the hospital didn’t charge their parents for their comparatively brief NICU stay in exchange for being able to publish the story in medical journals. They conquered their premature birth, the uneven start that had nearly killed them both, the weak lungs and strained hearts. They were born small but fighting, fifteen minutes apart, and alive…
And Stanford’s cord had been wrapped around Stanley’s neck.
Their mother didn’t tell them this. Stanford had learned it from eavesdropping on their mother, drunk late one night on the phone with her cousin, and he hadn’t told Stanley. Unequal blood flow had been an issue with the placenta, something they could tease each other about easily. Both had suffered for it (allegedly, so long ago their brains hadn’t had the capacity for remembering it), and it was no one’s fault… and it was easier to make jokes at Stanley’s expense, gently ribbing him for being greedy enough to almost kill them both.
But Ford had nearly strangled his brother to death by being born.
Stanley hadn’t cried. Hadn’t been able to. His mother’s husky voice was strained even ten years after the fact, as she recounted the story.
His umbilical cord, he’d pieced together, eventually, had been looped around Stan’s neck loosely enough that it hadn’t caused any problems until the actual birth. But when Stanford was being delivered, it had pulled tight. Tight enough that even once it was cut, during the fifteen minutes before Stanley joined him in the world, it had still been so fast around Stanley’s throat that he’d been born blue. Silent. It took long minutes to make him cry, Ma had said. And that, in all that time, Ford hadn’t stopped shrieking.
They were lucky they’d been born so early. So small. The cord hadn’t been tight enough to cause brain damage. All the harm was reversible, all their systems new enough to accept the jump-starts and treatments, and eventually function without them. They’d survived. Couldn’t remember or even conceive of the rocky start to their lives. It had been a joke, in their childhood—that they’d nearly killed each other in the womb. It had been ridiculous to think that they ever might hurt each other.
But Stanford had almost killed his brother before he was ever born. When they were still so close they were almost one creature; babies who looked for each other more than for their mother or their own bodies, cheek-to-cheek, reaching for each other with tiny, underdeveloped limbs. He’d almost killed his twin then. Ischemia, kidney failure, heart failure, strangulation—not even touching the results of being born six weeks premature. He’d nearly killed his brother.
It took twenty-seven years and a crossbow bolt to the heart to finish the job.
II.
All that in an instant, as the bolt releases.
Wait—
But he’d pulled the trigger before the door was all the way open, before he’d looked—
Wait—
Before he’d used the goddamn eyes that Bill said he’d steal, and seen his own face blinking back at him—
Wait—
His own brown eyes going wide, wide as the sky, swallowed up in white—
Wait—
His own red blood, bursting out as the bolt the bolt the bolt the bolt the bolt the bolt the bolt the bolt the —
Wait —
His own red blood, splattering across his face. A slap of heat. Shockingly warm.
Wait.
Wait.
He didn’t mean it.
III.
“No,” he gasps, before Stanley even staggers. “No no no no no no no no—”
Stanley staggers. His knees buckle.
“No,” Stanford gasps, and drops the crossbow, and lunges forwards to catch Stan. “No, no, no, Stanley —”
He is in his twin brother’s arms for the first time in ten years. The last time this happened—anything like this, and there’s never been anything like this —had been the day he’d won first place at the school science fair, and Stanley had wrapped his arm around him proudly for the photo. Ford had been so proud, proud of himself, proud of earning his brother’s pride—he’d felt so warm.
Stan’s embrace now is even warmer. Hot blood is seeping fast from Stan’s chest, and after the days and weeks Ford has spent in the cold, it fucking burns. Stanley’s blood feels like acid. It eats away at his skin.
“No,” he’s saying, as he tries to help Stanley stand up again. It’s useless, of course. But Stanford doesn’t have the ability to think about that, right now. The knowledge that it’s useless, useless, useless, presses against the crumbled, eroded walls of his mind, clawing and screeching like a murder of crows, but Stanford’s mind is a powerful thing, and every whit of it is, for these next few seconds, devoted to denial.
“No,” he’s saying. “Stanley? Stanley, it’s okay, it’s—it’s okay?” It’s okay? “Hey, Stanley, Stanley, please, can you—can you—?”
Can he what?
The world blurs. It’s spinning sideways.
It’s ending.
Ford has much cause to think about the end of the world, these past few— weeks?months?weeks? He’s never known what it would feel like until now.
Stanley is slipping backwards. Is it the ice on his porch? Ford should’ve shoveled the driveway, he’d known—he’d hoped—he’d tried to believe—that Stan was coming, coming to save him. But Bill — Bill was sending someone to steal his eyes. To leave him blind. Bill didn’t need his eyes; he could see everything, he was watching, he was always watching—
Ford hauls Stan up. Stan slumps against his chest. His head on his shoulder, Ford feels Stanley’s body moving, twitching, breathing, warm and yielding and living. He’s gasping like a drowning man. It sounds wet. It sounds bloody.
“I’m sorry,” Stanford says. It comes out like a scream. Too loud. He wraps his arms around Stan more tightly. If the eye theif—Bill’s friend — please, call me a friend —is anywhere nearby, he’ll hear, and Stanford and Stanley are outside, not safe behind the locks on his door. Quieter, he says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Stanley? Stanley, I’m so sorry—”
Stan goes fully limp. Dead weight.
“Stan?” he screams. He wails like a frightened child. Once, he’d dropped his glasses on a crowded pier at nighttime, and the world was only dark and shoving shapes. He’d called for Stan, not his mother. He’d called like this. He’d begged the world for Stanley to come and save him.
Stanley is alive; he knows that because the blood pouring out of his chest—and the bolt the bolt the bolt the bolt that Ford had fired is pressing hard and cold against his coat —is leaving him in pulses. Ford can feel each one. His heart is still beating. So fast they’re barely distinct, but he’s plastered against his brother. He can feel his own heart shredding itself down the middle, hammering against his skeleton like an engine firing. Like the portal in his basement revving up, powerful enough to rip a hole in reality.
Stanley is alive. The metal fletching of the bolt is digging into Ford’s shoulder, which means that the arrowhead is digging into Stanley’s insides, which means—
Flapping wings and clacking beaks and claws tearing into your skin, murder murder murder —
Stanley is alive. His pulse is very fast. The blood is not splashing against Ford’s front anymore. The pressure is failing. Blood is hot and sticky all the way down to Ford’s knees; all the way down to his shoes. Ford squeezes his brother as tightly as he can. Shoves his ear against Stanley’s throat. He doesn’t feel breath, but he feels a pulse, which means—
Stanley is alive.
He whimpers, once. It is a small, panicked sound. Stanley is alive—he whimpers once—and then he is not.
They both topple down into the snow.
“Stanley?” Ford asks. He is on his knees. He is clutching his brother’s shoulders. He holds him like a hug, still. It’s been ten years since he last hugged his brother. “Stan, no. Stan, no. Please—please. Please? I’m so—I’m so sorry. Stan? Stan.”
There is laughter.
In his ears. In his mind. Drifting through the air like the steady snowfall. Ringing bell-bright and mean as a knife through the birch trees, which watch from a distance.
Is it his own laugh? Does it matter? Bill’s voice is his voice, because he sold his mind and body to a demon.
But it wasn’t Bill who fired the bolt.
“Stanley…” he pleads. The world has blurred to white snow and white sclera, brown eyes and brown hair fanned out like a halo, and red, and red, and red. Ford’s ankles are freezing, damp with snow, and his hands are red, red, red, and hot, covered in his brother’s blood.
There is laughter.
“Stanley!”
He blinks hard. New warmth cuts trails down his cheeks, and some part of the blur that ate the world clears away. Clears away? Why? — But he can see his brother clearly now, and Stan’s open eyes— their eyes—are wide and frightened and dead. There is no light behind them.
Denial abandons him in one swift, jagged motion. Like an arrow ripped from a wound, doing more damage on the way out. Stanford crumples onto the floor.
Onto his brother’s still-warm corpse.
His forehead is pressed against Stanley’s ratty, faux-fur collar. His shoulder is pressing against the crossbow bolt. He wraps his arms tight around his twin, and he screams.
And there is laughter.
IV.
He doesn’t know if Bill is truly here.
He’s not asleep. He’s almost sure of that. If this was a nightmare, he would’ve woken up. He knows—as surely as he knows that his name is Stanford Pines, which isn’t, really, as sure as it had been, but he still has to work with some kind of baseline—that he did not fall asleep atop his brother’s body, out there in the snow. And if he did, well. Maybe he’d just die there.
He’s almost sure he’s still awake. The horrifying, black-hole-gravity of Stanley’s body is there beneath him, inescapable and growing cold fast. It’s been… it’s been…
He’s ruining Stanley’s coat. He can’t stop sobbing into it. Tears and snot and blood. Blood from Stan’s fatal wound. Blood from Ford’s left eye, whatever is ruined behind it having burst again. Blood from his hands, wounds reopened when he beat the hard, rough wood of his front porch. There are obvious, six-fingered handprints where he’s grabbed the fabric in different places. Trying to—
What?
His knees aren’t numb yet. It hasn’t been long.
Maybe—
Maybe —
—Laughter.
Is it coming from him? He doesn’t think so. He can’t be sure. He should ask Stanley. He tries, tries to say, “Stanley?” but all that comes out is the strangled keen of a dying animal. Toothless and afraid.
Bill would do this. Ford can hear him, gloating, but he doesn’t know if it’s really him, or only the imprint of him that’s been carved into Ford.
Hahaha!
HaHAhaHAhaHAhaHAHA!
AHAhaHAhahaHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Wah-how-WEE. Look at you, IQ! Wasn’t sure you had it in you, but boy, I couldn’t have done it better myself.
“Get out of my head,” he mutters. His voice trembles like an earthquake.
You let me in, Sixer!
He did. He did that. He’d trusted Bill, and Bill had—
But Bill wasn’t the one who shot his brother.
Stone dead! comes that chipper voice. Aw, man, Fordsy. He was only trying to help. Drove up from New Mexico, right? He dropped everything and came running, and you went and k̴̛̞̣͖i̷̮̥̓̈l̵̥̻͇̋͝l̷͙̦͖̂͆ę̴̧̙̆d̴̟̗̲͊ ̶͙͖͖̂̋̄h̴̹̬̪̐͆i̵̞̰̒̏͐ṃ̸͐̕ before even saying hi.
Stanford lurches up onto his knees and roars, “Get out of my head!” loud enough to shake his teeth, to rattle his chest, to startle birds up from their silent forest perches, to echo and echo through the empty winter landscape.
They’d almost killed each other in the—
Stanford reels backwards and vomits onto the snow. All that comes up is bile.
He gags. Retches. Vomits again. Another stinging spurt of bile is all that there is within him, and then Ford just collapses into the snow. He rolls onto his side, grabs ahold of the sleeve of Stan’s jacket, as close to taking his hand as Ford can bear, curls up into the fetal position, and figures he might as well not move. How long will it take him to freeze to death? He should’ve thought of this earlier. If he freezes, surely there’s less of a chance that Bill will be able to puppet his corpse. His hands are bare. By the time he dies, the tissue of his fingers will have completely cryopathied. Unusable. Useless. Bill doesn’t need his eyes to activate the portal, but he does need his fingers. Not all twelve, has he’d pointed out, but if his frozen corpse’s fingers broke off from the cold—his hands are already such wrecks —
Or he could use the crossbow.
The thought of seeing that thing ever again—of ever touching it— makes him want to—makes him feel like —he’s downed a beaker of fluoroantimonic acid. Like something hot and horrible is burning and shredding him open from his throat and into his gut, absorbed by his circulatory system and pumped all throughout his body. The unthinkable violence of it feels right. He’d be unmade. All the way. Half of him is gone already.
Violent. In that way, using the crossbow would be fitting. Nothing more than what he deserved.
Ford curls in closer on himself, bringing his head to brush against Stan’s bicep, his nose in the crook of his elbow.
Stan is in the fetal position, too. An approximation of it. When he’d fallen, Ford’s grip had pulled him towards his side; his knees and elbows are bent inwards, hands laying open and empty on the snow. Ford fits himself inside the curved line of his brother’s body, tucking his knees into his chest, his feet touching Stan’s shins, his knees touching Stan’s stomach. They would’ve been like this in the seven months they’d had before they were forced into the world. Sharing space, sharing blood, dying. Ford digs his other hand into his hair and pulls until the stinging in his scalp is what he might once have called unbearable, and then he presses his hand over his eyes.
He’s in so much pain.
His head throbs; he hasn’t slept or eaten in… in… Bill had thrown him down the stairs, a hill, gotten him into a bar fight. His eye, his hands. His nails are torn and raw, his knuckles are bruised and bleeding, and the puncture wound from the nail Bill had driven in is throbbing hot and awful. There’s so much blood on this pure white snow.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “Stanley, I’m so…”
How long has it been?
Fifteen minutes, his brain offers. Offers something for the first time in—in—
There’s no way it’s been fifteen minutes. Stan is still warm. It hasn’t been—can’t possibly have been—
You get fifteen minutes.
It’s his own voice. Unsympathetic and cold.
His thoughts are. Not right. Not joining together right. Unevenly split. Ford feels blocked off from his brain, his ability to think. His subconscious mind is clearing space, pulling memories, making itself useful. An idea is forming, but Ford can’t. Imagine. What he could be thinking. How he could be thinking. Stan is dead. Gone. Ford killed him, and he is all alone in the world. And the world is balanced on a knife’s edge. He. The portal. He has to…
You get fifteen minutes to come up with a plan, or you pick up the crossbow again.
Plan? Plan? Plan for what?
It’s been… five? ten? minutes? Since—since. Stan has stopped bleeding. His heart—it’d been an enemy in the end, hadn’t it? It’d pumped Stan’s blood right out of his body. Why would it —?
Fifteen minutes. His own voice. And then: Tick-tock, Fordsy!
Fifteen minutes. That’s how far apart they were. Stanford hadn’t stopped screaming until his twin was delivered and breathing. Stanley had kept him waiting for fifteen minutes, fighting to be born—so Ford gets fifteen minutes now to. To—
His best plan is still hypothermia. It will render his body quite useless to Bill. He’ll probably die within an hour if he stays right here. It already hurts to move. He hasn’t slept in. A while. Or eaten. His body is falling apart, and once his brain function ceases to produce norepinephrine and adrenaline and whatever the hell else is keeping his eyes open these days, it’s probably not possible for Bill to make any use of his corpse. The safest thing to do, to make sure his body is completely irretrievable would probably be to go drown himself in the lake—
— Bill’s words, his unnatural inflections; his own voice: I’m going to take a swim in the frozen lake tomorrow, and I might not ever come back, so if you don’t hear from me, I just want you to know it’s because I never loved you!—
—but the thought of leaving Stanley here to just go die somewhere else is abhorrent. Nauseating. He can’t— can’t —just leave. No, no. Best to stay here. He’ll stay awake until the cold finally takes him, and maybe he can pretend that this is the same as when they were sleeping, playing, reaching, dying, together in the womb.
Ford uncovers his eyes. He buries his hand—the one with the puncture wound—in the snow. It will help the cryopathy set in faster.
Cryo —
Wait —
Ford scrambles up to his knees, keeping one hand fisted in the fabric by Stanley’s wrist. “Wait,” he tells him. “Wait. I—”
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid MORON wasting TIME —
“Okay,” he says. “Ah, Stan? Stanley. I… I’m going. I’m going to get—something that will help, okay? It’s…” Ford stares down at Stanley’s face. His expression is not peaceful, but Ford chokes down another spasm and does not allow himself to look away.
It’s Stan. His twin brother. Ford has recognized him since before he was capable of recognizing himself.
His heart is drumming fast now. Purpose is taking root. Blood, he thinks, donor sibling. But first—
“It’s.” He swallows. His throat burns and tastes of bile. “It’s going to be okay, alright? I’ve… I can. I can fix this, Stanley, okay?” He’s got the beginnings of an idea. The beginning is all he needs, really, and the first step is easy. “Just… just wait here, Stanley.”
A thought strikes, white-hot, three hundred million volts. He finally takes Stan’s hand—this is the first time he’s held hands with anyone in… seventeen years? His six fingers curled around five, keeping each one of Stanley’s fingers secure—and grasps his face with his other.
“Stanley,” he says. “I need you to stay here, okay? Level one ghosts’ tethers—don’t go, you can’t let go. You have to stay here, okay? Only for a little bit. I promise.”
Please come, he’d written.
“Please don’t go,” he begs.
There is no unusual whisper on the wind. No flicker of light, no creak or crack of sound. Stan gives no indication that he heard him.
It’s alright. If his ghost isn’t here, Ford can get it later. He can—he can.
“Okay,” he says. Ford releases Stan’s jaw and runs his hand down his own face. The tears and the blood have begun to cool, which means his time is nearly up. He has to go—he has to go. He has to go. “It’s just for a moment,” he promises, “I won’t be more than an hour. Then I’ll be back and we can—discuss our next steps.” He nods—then keeps nodding. It’s easier to keep this movement up than it is to begin the next one. He’s also trembling quite badly. Hypothermia. Not yet, but it’s… it’s… Ford doesn’t know what day it is. He’s not sure what month. But he’s spent six winters here; knows that it won’t get above freezing for the rest of the day.
Stanford has to visualize the movement. It’s a deliberate effort to stand up once more. He nearly keels over again when he sees the amount of blood on his slacks, on the fabric of his coat. His legs go weak and he can’t fully catch his balance. His grip on Stan’s hand stops him from falling over in the opposite direction.
“Thank you,” he mumbles. He is breathing very quickly. His stomach is churning with such horrible sickness that Ford thinks of shipping vessels in the Drake Passage, of doing donuts in the empty school parking lot on the day Stanley got his car functioning.
Ford nods at Stan, and then panics and drops to his knees again and begins shoving snow over his body. Much of what surrounds him is stained dark red. Ford piles more and more over his legs and torso, until Stanley is covered in a blanket of pristine white. He pats it down around the edges of Stan’s shape, tucking him in. It will help—it will help. Keep him warm, he thinks, but of course he’s trying to keep him cool, instead. Keep him comfortable, keep him safe.
It’s like a fever, he thinks inanely. An ice bath. Ford’s teeth are chattering.
He smooths Stan’s hair out of his face. Quickly, before he can think too hard about it, he visualizes the motion, forces his arm to move, and slides Stanley’s eyelids closed. He drops his forehead onto his twin’s, cannot feel breath against his skin, and says, “Just, just be careful, Stanley, just stay here and don’t move and don’t go. Please.” He heaves in two, three breaths, and rips himself away. He can’t fix this from here.
He skitters back into the house. Grabs a hat and spends time time too much damn TIME finding the height-altering crystal light. He can’t lug the cryotube back here as it is, and he can’t—disturb Stanley. He’s okay on the porch for now. Fifteen minutes. It’s been maybe—maybe twenty? Twenty-five? Has it only been fifteen? He had the plan before fifteen minutes passed, surely, which means he doesn’t have to use the crossbow.
Ford unlocks his backdoor and climbs the fence to get into the woods. He tells himself it’s because it’s the most direct, and thus the fastest, way to the bunker; the most logical choice. He tells himself that he’s doing it for his brother, and not just to avoid seeing his corpse.
He tells himself that he can fix this. That he will fix this.
He tells himself he isn’t thinking of the crossbow.