#forduary 2019 week 3

[gosecretscribbles]

Forduary 2019 Week 3 - Forgiveness

Summary:

Stan and Ford get framed for a crime using Ford's invention, they get thrown in jail, and Filbrick decides to make Ford stop inventing...

This year's Forduary fics are linked like the chapters in a book! It'll definitely help if you read the first two works first, but here's a quick recap: Ford was bullied by Crampelter, Stan rescued him, but both brothers got hurt. The next day was Saturday, and they went to go work on the Stan O' War, where Ford ends up inventing an aerial bucket lift so they could help a decapitated ghost. This story picks up on the same day, right where the previous story left off.

Trigger warning: Threatening situation in a jail cell, parent bullying, some dissociation at the end.

HERE COMES THE AAAAANGST!

First fic AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17957654

Second fic AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18000998

This fic AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18001061

The rest of the day should've gone perfectly.

They'd recovered the coin from the seagull, which Stan was sure laughed maniacally at them the whole they'd chased it. Stan wanted to hawk it immediately and do some major impulse buying, but Ford pointed out that it would price higher if it looked clean, and anyway he still wanted to test it for ectoplasmic residue.

They stopped by the drugstore, the hardware store, and then the Juke Joint, so Stan could feast on hamburgers while Ford put together the equipment he'd need to run the tests. By then the electromagnetic sensor he'd put together didn't pick up anything from the coin, but Stan just shrugged and suggested they head back to the ship.

“You can just attach your gizmo-thing to the top of your crane, right?” Stan had asked. “I mean the guy's head sat on top of the mast for like an hour, that's bound to have left some juices in the wood.”

“Of course, that's perfect!”

“Yeah! I get half-credit if you discover anything though, right?”

They paid quickly and Ford all but dragged Stan out of the diner and down the street, talking a hundred miles an hour about potential discoveries and walking so quickly Stan winced at his bruised ribs as he tried to keep up. Ford could feel it in his ankle, too, but he was so excited he found it almost impossible to slow down.

So he was first to round the corner on Ashwood Boulevard – and immediately stopped short.

There was a Thrift Store across the street, and the side of it had been covered in bright blue graffiti. The words “STAN PINES AND THE FREAK” were written over the blue in bright yellow paint, complete with caricatures of their faces. Ford's crane was sitting to one side, spray cans littered around it, a red can still pinched in its grip. The store owner and several tourists had stopped by to stare at it.

Stan came up behind him. “What're you – oh, come on! Seriously? Are you frigging kidding me?!”

“But we left the crane at the beach!” Ford protested. “It was inside the Stan O' War! How did – who was watching –”

“GOTCHA!”

Something hard slammed into Ford's back and he hit the ground, hard, a knee pressed sharply into his spine. He heard shouting and a scuffle; he craned his neck to see Crampelter's thugs pinning Stan against the nearest wall.

“HEY OFFICER!” Crampelter's voice shouted gleefully. “WE GOT 'EM, THEY'RE OVER HERE!”

A police car pulled up to the curb and two solid-looking men stepped out, their badges glinting.

“Oh this jokester,” one of them grumbled, narrowing his eyes at Stan.

“Hey, I didn't do anything!”

“Said that last time, too, and this time the writing is literally on the wall. Alright kids, step aside.”

The first officer went over to Stan, pulling out his handcuffs. The second offer did the same, approaching Ford and grabbing his arm. Crampelter rolled off him, grinning as Ford was pulled to his feet.

“Wait, wait a second!” Ford gasped, his lungs still struggling to inflate. The cop's vicelike grip was making him sweat. “We've been at the Juke Joint for the last hour, you can ask the waitress, she'll remember my hands!”

“Your – geez!” The cop caught sight of his fingers and reflexively shoved him away. The sensor fell out of Ford's vest. Before he could grab it, the officer scooped it up. “The heck is this thing, some kinda nuclear weapon? You a mad scientist, kid?”

“No, just a scientist! I build equipment to test hypotheses, not to deface buildings!”

“So you didn't build that?” He pointed to Ford's crane, which had a visual design very similar to the sensor.

“I – well I did, but –”

“Turn around, kid.”

“Wait, they stole it from the beach, I built it because our ship –”

“Turn around.”

The cop spun him around and grabbed Ford's wrists. Ford heard him suck in his breath at the sight of both six-fingered hands. Crampelter snickered and his face burned. He glanced over and saw the other cop already dragging a handcuffed Stan back to the car. The struggle must have aggravated his ribs, because Stan was hardly fighting back at all. Nausea rose in Ford's gut. He looked down and saw –

“Wait, officer, wait! His shoes, look at Crampelter's shoes! There's blue spray paint!”

“'Scuze me?”

“It's not spray paint!” Crampelter said quickly. “It's – uh – dye! From clothing! I was dying towels for orphans!”

Stan snarled at him. “You think anybody'd fall for –”

“That's enough out of you,” snapped the cop holding Stan, and he shoved him into the backseat. “You know how long I've been waiting to catch you in the act? Now shut up. I don't want to hear another word out of either of you or I'll let you keep those shiny new bracelets when I put you in your cell.”

The second cop shoved Ford in next to Stan and slammed the door.

  Ford knew Stan had gotten himself thrown in jail cells a couple of times before. Once for putting poorly-made cardboard parking meters along the sidewalk on Main Street, and once for impersonating a dentist. It hadn't gone on his record, since Stan had been so young, but each time he'd come home bragging about how he was the toughest guy in the whole place, how he'd spent his time carving cigarettes out of the soap just so he could see the look on an officer's face when Stan pretended to smoke it. It made jail sound rather dull, a bit like the adult version of high school detention.

It wasn't.

The jail cell was well-lit and cold, with cement walls and floors, a stretched steel toilet with mysterious stains in one corner, metal bunks drilled into the wall opposite the door. There was a man in the cell, a hulk of a man in a bloody jacket sitting on the bottom bunk. His nails were thick and dirty and jagged.

The cop shoved Stan and Ford inside. The door clanged shut. Ford broke out in a cold sweat.

“D-don't we get a phone call?”

“Yeah you do. I'm gonna call your parents right now. Got your number memorized, thanks to him.” The cop nodded at Stan. “So sit tight and don't bother your babysitter.”

Ford swallowed hard. Ma was on the phone all the time. Which meant the police wouldn't get through for hours.

Thick Nails glanced up at them with eyes as ruthless as a cobra's. Ford shoved his hands behind his back.

Too late.

“'Srong with you, toothpick? You a freak?”

Ford pressed back against the wall and tried very hard to turn invisible. Stan crossed his arms and leaned back casually, like he was just waiting at the bus stop to pick up a hot girl. His arm pressed against Ford's.

Thick Nails narrowed his eyes and glanced at Stan. “What, he don't talk?”

“Sometimes. But I'm the one with the sultry voice.”

The man's lip curled. “You act cute with me again, you little punk, I'll beat the living daylights outta you.” He reached for his back pocket, took out a piece of a broken plastic knife, and began slowly cleaning his nails with it. Occasionally the broken edge of the plastic drew a thin line of blood.

“Stan,” Ford whispered. His brother's arm pressed slightly harder against his, just for a moment. Ford didn't say anything else.

  They waited for hours. There was a window at the top of the cell, and Ford marked time, watching the small bars of light inch across the scratched-up floor. Eventually twilight fell, then utter darkness. Extra lights turned on in the hallway. No one came to bring them any dinner, not that Ford was hungry. Eight, nine, ten o' clock – and still their parents hadn't come. Ford tried to work on Fermat's Last Theorem, but the broken knife kept flashing in his eyes like a sliver of death.

It was four in the morning when an officer finally came to the door and opened it. Stan had slid down to the floor and fallen asleep, head tilted back; the clang of the door startled him awake.

“Whazzat?”

The officer jerked his head at them. “Moved it, Pines. Your ride's here.”

Ford glanced at Thick Nails on the way out. The broken knife had disappeared. He waved almost cheerfully as they left, but the look in Ford's eyes turned his stomach to ice. He was glad when the door locked tight behind them.

The officer led them back to the lobby. Filbrick was sitting in one of the chairs, his arms crossed.

“Took you long enough,” Stan grumbled.

“Told you to shut up,” the officer said, without heat. “Mr. Pines, your two boys here –”

“We didn't do anything!” Ford burst out. “Pops, listen, I invented a crane for the Stan O' War and Crampelter stole it there was evidence on his shoes when they arrested us Stan and I weren't anywhere near the wall when it was –”

“I know that.” Filbrick grunted.

“You – what?”

“We knew you didn't graffiti the wall,” the officer clarified. “Meathead here mostly commits crimes for profit or petty vengeance, not to improve the local aesthetics. Plus we checked Crampelter's story. There were holes in it the size of Texas. We told all this to your father over the phone.”

“When?”

“Oh...” He glanced at the clock. “'Round 5 PM?”

“Around what?!” Stan shouted, just as Ford demanded, “Why didn't you let us out of jail?!”

The officer shrugged. “We were going to. Mr. Pines asked that we hold you a little longer to teach you boys a lesson, and frankly, with Mr. Pyramid Scheme pulling pranks left and right, I thought it was a good idea. 'Sides, it wasn't a real arrest.”

“We. Were. In. Handcuffs!”

“We took 'em off.”

“Let's go,” Filbrick said, and before they could say another word he'd grabbed an arm on each of them and was dragging them out the door.

  They drove home in silence. Ma was standing on the front porch, waiting for them, holding a mug of coffee in her hands.

“You boys alright?” she asked, as they walked up.

“Fine,” Stan snapped.

Ford didn't bother answering. He just stalked right past her and into the house. He heard her whispering furiously at Filbrick behind him, but he couldn't bring himself to care. They'd still been left in that cell for hours. For no reason!

Whatever. It didn't matter. He'd read some of Sagan's early works, or maybe Tesla's published papers, that always helped him calm down.

He reached his room, stepped inside – and stopped short.

The bookshelf, the one that held all his research, the science journals, everything, was completely and totally empty.

The world turned white. His ears roared. Then suddenly he was standing in the kitchen yelling at his father.

“Give me my books back! Where did you put them?! I'm asking you where you put them!”

Filbrick's dark glasses flashed. “Watch your tone, boy.”

“I paid for every single one of those books with my own pocket money! You don't have any right to take them! Do you have any idea what those books mean to me? What it's like to be stuck in a place where people devalue and humiliate me at the slightest whim and the only shred of proof that I'm worth something is taken away while you left us to rot in jail!?”

Filbrick grabbed the front of his shirt and shoved him. Ford didn't even realize Stan was in the room until he caught him, kept him from falling. Filbrick's bulk loomed in front of them like wall.

“Your stupid brain is what got you into this mess in the first place. I told you to get your head outta those books and man up. It's past time you started acting like a real Pines man. If you can't do that, then I'll do it for you.”

Ford wasn't sure what happened immediately after that. Only that his skin was cold and clammy, and there was something hard and metallic digging into his fingers. At some point he realized he'd left the house and was outside, checking through trash cans, his own, his neighbors', anything, working his way down the street. He must've been running at some point because his ankle was throbbing again.

Something touched his shoulder and he jumped, dropping the metal lid he was holding. It hit the ground with a clang.

“Easy,” Stan said.

Ford looked around. Nothing felt real. He wasn't even sure what street they were on. At least dropping the lid hadn't disturbed anyone; all the houses remained dark. He heard waves and turned. The beach – this was Main Street, close to the Boardwalk, still along the beach. Of course he'd stay along the beach.

Stan was calling him. Ford looked without seeing at his brother's face.

“C'mon, Sixer talk to me.”

“What is there to say.” Ford's voice sounded funny, sort of rubbery. “He destroyed my books, didn't he? He wouldn't just throw them away. They're gone.”

“We can get more, alright? Grab a winter jacket, hit the bookstore, bet I could fit ten books under each arm. Alright?”

Ford didn't bother explaining that some of those texts had taken years to find, that some of the journals he'd collected were out of print. That in a town where he was devalued, ridiculed, humiliated for the very things that made him himself, those texts had been the one shred of hope he'd had that there was a community where he would one day be acknowledged. That there was a future he could envision, where likeminded people would not only recognize him, but accept him. In one night, his trust in his father and, symbolically, his own future had been ruthlessly destroyed.

“...scaring me. Say something, please.”

“I can't forgive him for this.”

Ford didn't feel like he was talking. He couldn't really feel his mouth moving. Stanley's face came in and out of focus. He couldn't feel his hands.

Stan squeezed his shoulders, looking worried. “Listen, Sixer –”

“I mean it, Stanley. I will never, ever forgive him.”

A/N: I was in a dark place when I wrote this, bet ya can’t tell ahahahaaaaaaa *dies*

[jackyjackdraws]

@forduary week 3: comfort/forgiveness

i just wanted to draw Ford’s fluff with the kids and his brother

being a good uncle and a good twin

i kinda like it actually

[forduary]

Forduary 2019 Week 3 - Forgiveness

Summary:

Stan and Ford get framed for a crime using Ford’s invention, they get thrown in jail, and Filbrick decides to make Ford stop inventing…

This year’s Forduary fics are linked like the chapters in a book! It’ll definitely help if you read the first two works first, but here’s a quick recap: Ford was bullied by Crampelter, Stan rescued him, but both brothers got hurt. The next day was Saturday, and they went to go work on the Stan O’ War, where Ford ends up inventing an aerial bucket lift so they could help a decapitated ghost. This story picks up on the same day, right where the previous story left off.

Trigger warning: Threatening situation in a jail cell, parent bullying, some dissociation at the end.

HERE COMES THE AAAAANGST!

First fic AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17957654

Second fic AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18000998

This fic AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18001061

The rest of the day should’ve gone perfectly.

They’d recovered the coin from the seagull, which Stan was sure laughed maniacally at them the whole they’d chased it. Stan wanted to hawk it immediately and do some major impulse buying, but Ford pointed out that it would price higher if it looked clean, and anyway he still wanted to test it for ectoplasmic residue.

They stopped by the drugstore, the hardware store, and then the Juke Joint, so Stan could feast on hamburgers while Ford put together the equipment he’d need to run the tests. By then the electromagnetic sensor he’d put together didn’t pick up anything from the coin, but Stan just shrugged and suggested they head back to the ship.

“You can just attach your gizmo-thing to the top of your crane, right?” Stan had asked. “I mean the guy’s head sat on top of the mast for like an hour, that’s bound to have left some juices in the wood.”

“Of course, that’s perfect!”

“Yeah! I get half-credit if you discover anything though, right?”

They paid quickly and Ford all but dragged Stan out of the diner and down the street, talking a hundred miles an hour about potential discoveries and walking so quickly Stan winced at his bruised ribs as he tried to keep up. Ford could feel it in his ankle, too, but he was so excited he found it almost impossible to slow down.

So he was first to round the corner on Ashwood Boulevard – and immediately stopped short.

There was a Thrift Store across the street, and the side of it had been covered in bright blue graffiti. The words “STAN PINES AND THE FREAK” were written over the blue in bright yellow paint, complete with caricatures of their faces. Ford’s crane was sitting to one side, spray cans littered around it, a red can still pinched in its grip. The store owner and several tourists had stopped by to stare at it.

Stan came up behind him. “What’re you – oh, come on! Seriously? Are you frigging kidding me?!”

“But we left the crane at the beach!” Ford protested. “It was inside the Stan O’ War! How did – who was watching –”

“GOTCHA!”

Something hard slammed into Ford’s back and he hit the ground, hard, a knee pressed sharply into his spine. He heard shouting and a scuffle; he craned his neck to see Crampelter’s thugs pinning Stan against the nearest wall.

“HEY OFFICER!” Crampelter’s voice shouted gleefully. “WE GOT ‘EM, THEY’RE OVER HERE!”

A police car pulled up to the curb and two solid-looking men stepped out, their badges glinting.

“Oh this jokester,” one of them grumbled, narrowing his eyes at Stan.

“Hey, I didn’t do anything!”

“Said that last time, too, and this time the writing is literally on the wall. Alright kids, step aside.”

The first officer went over to Stan, pulling out his handcuffs. The second offer did the same, approaching Ford and grabbing his arm. Crampelter rolled off him, grinning as Ford was pulled to his feet.

“Wait, wait a second!” Ford gasped, his lungs still struggling to inflate. The cop’s vicelike grip was making him sweat. “We’ve been at the Juke Joint for the last hour, you can ask the waitress, she’ll remember my hands!”

“Your – geez!” The cop caught sight of his fingers and reflexively shoved him away. The sensor fell out of Ford’s vest. Before he could grab it, the officer scooped it up. “The heck is this thing, some kinda nuclear weapon? You a mad scientist, kid?”

“No, just a scientist! I build equipment to test hypotheses, not to deface buildings!”

“So you didn’t build that?” He pointed to Ford’s crane, which had a visual design very similar to the sensor.

“I – well I did, but –”

“Turn around, kid.”

“Wait, they stole it from the beach, I built it because our ship –”

“Turn around.”

The cop spun him around and grabbed Ford’s wrists. Ford heard him suck in his breath at the sight of both six-fingered hands. Crampelter snickered and his face burned. He glanced over and saw the other cop already dragging a handcuffed Stan back to the car. The struggle must have aggravated his ribs, because Stan was hardly fighting back at all. Nausea rose in Ford’s gut. He looked down and saw –

“Wait, officer, wait! His shoes, look at Crampelter’s shoes! There’s blue spray paint!”

“'Scuze me?”

“It’s not spray paint!” Crampelter said quickly. “It’s – uh – dye! From clothing! I was dying towels for orphans!”

Stan snarled at him. “You think anybody’d fall for –”

“That’s enough out of you,” snapped the cop holding Stan, and he shoved him into the backseat. “You know how long I’ve been waiting to catch you in the act? Now shut up. I don’t want to hear another word out of either of you or I’ll let you keep those shiny new bracelets when I put you in your cell.”

The second cop shoved Ford in next to Stan and slammed the door.

Ford knew Stan had gotten himself thrown in jail cells a couple of times before. Once for putting poorly-made cardboard parking meters along the sidewalk on Main Street, and once for impersonating a dentist. It hadn’t gone on his record, since Stan had been so young, but each time he’d come home bragging about how he was the toughest guy in the whole place, how he’d spent his time carving cigarettes out of the soap just so he could see the look on an officer’s face when Stan pretended to smoke it. It made jail sound rather dull, a bit like the adult version of high school detention.

It wasn’t.

The jail cell was well-lit and cold, with cement walls and floors, a stretched steel toilet with mysterious stains in one corner, metal bunks drilled into the wall opposite the door. There was a man in the cell, a hulk of a man in a bloody jacket sitting on the bottom bunk. His nails were thick and dirty and jagged.

The cop shoved Stan and Ford inside. The door clanged shut. Ford broke out in a cold sweat.

“D-don’t we get a phone call?”

“Yeah you do. I’m gonna call your parents right now. Got your number memorized, thanks to him.” The cop nodded at Stan. “So sit tight and don’t bother your babysitter.”

Ford swallowed hard. Ma was on the phone all the time. Which meant the police wouldn’t get through for hours.

Thick Nails glanced up at them with eyes as ruthless as a cobra’s. Ford shoved his hands behind his back.

Too late.

“'Srong with you, toothpick? You a freak?”

Ford pressed back against the wall and tried very hard to turn invisible. Stan crossed his arms and leaned back casually, like he was just waiting at the bus stop to pick up a hot girl. His arm pressed against Ford’s.

Thick Nails narrowed his eyes and glanced at Stan. “What, he don’t talk?”

“Sometimes. But I’m the one with the sultry voice.”

The man’s lip curled. “You act cute with me again, you little punk, I’ll beat the living daylights outta you.” He reached for his back pocket, took out a piece of a broken plastic knife, and began slowly cleaning his nails with it. Occasionally the broken edge of the plastic drew a thin line of blood.

“Stan,” Ford whispered. His brother’s arm pressed slightly harder against his, just for a moment. Ford didn’t say anything else.

They waited for hours. There was a window at the top of the cell, and Ford marked time, watching the small bars of light inch across the scratched-up floor. Eventually twilight fell, then utter darkness. Extra lights turned on in the hallway. No one came to bring them any dinner, not that Ford was hungry. Eight, nine, ten o’ clock – and still their parents hadn’t come. Ford tried to work on Fermat’s Last Theorem, but the broken knife kept flashing in his eyes like a sliver of death.

It was four in the morning when an officer finally came to the door and opened it. Stan had slid down to the floor and fallen asleep, head tilted back; the clang of the door startled him awake.

“Whazzat?”

The officer jerked his head at them. “Moved it, Pines. Your ride’s here.”

Ford glanced at Thick Nails on the way out. The broken knife had disappeared. He waved almost cheerfully as they left, but the look in Ford’s eyes turned his stomach to ice. He was glad when the door locked tight behind them.

The officer led them back to the lobby. Filbrick was sitting in one of the chairs, his arms crossed.

“Took you long enough,” Stan grumbled.

“Told you to shut up,” the officer said, without heat. “Mr. Pines, your two boys here –”

“We didn’t do anything!” Ford burst out. “Pops, listen, I invented a crane for the Stan O’ War and Crampelter stole it there was evidence on his shoes when they arrested us Stan and I weren’t anywhere near the wall when it was –”

“I know that.” Filbrick grunted.

“You – what?”

“We knew you didn’t graffiti the wall,” the officer clarified. “Meathead here mostly commits crimes for profit or petty vengeance, not to improve the local aesthetics. Plus we checked Crampelter’s story. There were holes in it the size of Texas. We told all this to your father over the phone.”

“When?”

“Oh…” He glanced at the clock. “'Round 5 PM?”

“Around what?!” Stan shouted, just as Ford demanded, “Why didn’t you let us out of jail?!”

The officer shrugged. “We were going to. Mr. Pines asked that we hold you a little longer to teach you boys a lesson, and frankly, with Mr. Pyramid Scheme pulling pranks left and right, I thought it was a good idea. ‘Sides, it wasn’t a real arrest.”

“We. Were. In. Handcuffs!”

“We took 'em off.”

“Let’s go,” Filbrick said, and before they could say another word he’d grabbed an arm on each of them and was dragging them out the door.

They drove home in silence. Ma was standing on the front porch, waiting for them, holding a mug of coffee in her hands.

“You boys alright?” she asked, as they walked up.

“Fine,” Stan snapped.

Ford didn’t bother answering. He just stalked right past her and into the house. He heard her whispering furiously at Filbrick behind him, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. They’d still been left in that cell for hours. For no reason!

Whatever. It didn’t matter. He’d read some of Sagan’s early works, or maybe Tesla’s published papers, that always helped him calm down.

He reached his room, stepped inside – and stopped short.

The bookshelf, the one that held all his research, the science journals, everything, was completely and totally empty.

The world turned white. His ears roared. Then suddenly he was standing in the kitchen yelling at his father.

“Give me my books back! Where did you put them?! I’m asking you where you put them!”

Filbrick’s dark glasses flashed. “Watch your tone, boy.”

“I paid for every single one of those books with my own pocket money! You don’t have any right to take them! Do you have any idea what those books mean to me? What it’s like to be stuck in a place where people devalue and humiliate me at the slightest whim and the only shred of proof that I’m worth something is taken away while you left us to rot in jail!?”

Filbrick grabbed the front of his shirt and shoved him. Ford didn’t even realize Stan was in the room until he caught him, kept him from falling. Filbrick’s bulk loomed in front of them like wall.

“Your stupid brain is what got you into this mess in the first place. I told you to get your head outta those books and man up. It’s past time you started acting like a real Pines man. If you can’t do that, then I’ll do it for you.”

Ford wasn’t sure what happened immediately after that. Only that his skin was cold and clammy, and there was something hard and metallic digging into his fingers. At some point he realized he’d left the house and was outside, checking through trash cans, his own, his neighbors’, anything, working his way down the street. He must’ve been running at some point because his ankle was throbbing again.

Something touched his shoulder and he jumped, dropping the metal lid he was holding. It hit the ground with a clang.

“Easy,” Stan said.

Ford looked around. Nothing felt real. He wasn’t even sure what street they were on. At least dropping the lid hadn’t disturbed anyone; all the houses remained dark. He heard waves and turned. The beach – this was Main Street, close to the Boardwalk, still along the beach. Of course he’d stay along the beach.

Stan was calling him. Ford looked without seeing at his brother’s face.

“C'mon, Sixer talk to me.”

“What is there to say.” Ford’s voice sounded funny, sort of rubbery. “He destroyed my books, didn’t he? He wouldn’t just throw them away. They’re gone.”

“We can get more, alright? Grab a winter jacket, hit the bookstore, bet I could fit ten books under each arm. Alright?”

Ford didn’t bother explaining that some of those texts had taken years to find, that some of the journals he’d collected were out of print. That in a town where he was devalued, ridiculed, humiliated for the very things that made him himself, those texts had been the one shred of hope he’d had that there was a community where he would one day be acknowledged. That there was a future he could envision, where likeminded people would not only recognize him, but accept him. In one night, his trust in his father and, symbolically, his own future had been ruthlessly destroyed.

“…scaring me. Say something, please.”

“I can’t forgive him for this.”

Ford didn’t feel like he was talking. He couldn’t really feel his mouth moving. Stanley’s face came in and out of focus. He couldn’t feel his hands.

Stan squeezed his shoulders, looking worried. “Listen, Sixer –”

“I mean it, Stanley. I will never, ever forgive him.”

A/N: I was in a dark place when I wrote this, bet ya can’t tell ahahahaaaaaaa *dies*