#i would have genuine worries that in the tiny realm of canon buddie possibility that it would be like ls where their entire main mlm couple

[amerie-wadia]

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[sigurdjarlson]

More Virgin Greg head canons pls 🙏

Oh man I’m a sucker for virgin Greg and I’m surprised I haven’t seen one fic with that premise actually? I’ve seen ones where he hasn’t been with guys but never one where he’s never really been with anyone

I don’t think it’s out of the realms of a possibility. We don’t know for sure what Greg and Andrew did when they hung out

Given he is at least no older than 25 according to Nicholas B and early twenties according to the first draft of the pilot..it’s really not too out there.

Especially if he’s spent a good chunk of his life struggling with and repressing his sexuality.

And Greg reacts very anxiously to the mere idea that someone might try to have sex with him at Tom’s Bachelor Party. Hell, Comfrey kissed him on the cheek and he lost interest like then and there aosjdjdkd.

Maybe he’s done some heavy petting while drunk or high with someone but nothing more.

And I feel the older he gets the more embarrassed he is about it and the more worried and insecure he gets about being noticeably inexperienced.

Of course he’s holding this secret as close to his chest as one can because he knows damn well the Roy siblings would never let him live it down. Hell, Tom would never let him live it down either.

And it’s not so much the fact that he is a virgin that bothers him as much as how he’d be the butt of everyone’s jokes even more than he already is.

He’s not really actively seeking out sexual partners or anything. In fact at the first hint of affection he retreated.

Like most things he probably feels pretty ambivalent about it on a personal level despite some residual embarrassment because it’s not what he’s supposed to be at this time in his life.

Tbh Tom would tease him at first but he’d also fucking obsess over it.

Because Ghengis Tom is a possessive freak he loves the idea of being his first (and only) it’s also a bit (very) romantic to him in a way.

So that’s going into his fantasies about Greg he pretends he never had until he jerks off again folder.

And poor Greg honestly because Tom doesn’t know how to be normal about anything when it comes to Greg brings it up randomly and says weird shit like “Greggg..looking for someone to pop your sweet cherry?”

Which confuses, annoys and arouses Greg all at once lmao

But he’s also more possessive than normal because the idea of someone else taking his virginity makes him seethe. Greg is just confused honestly but mostly annoyed at the teasing because he’s not realizing why Tom is so fixated on it

And it’s just getting a little harder to hide the lust flr Tom when he can’t stop thinking about it.

Shiv is slightly alarmed about the uptick in Tom’s masturbation habits (kidding)

Greg eventually snaps at him because there’s really no reason to bring it up so much.

And then things get really weird.

“I’m sorry, buddy. I’m just fucking with you. You know..you should wait till you find someone you care about. Someone you trust, make it mean something.”

He sounds so genuine and Greg is like ????? Emotional whiplash much (he should be used to it by now honestly but Tom still catches him off guard)

Its a sort of romantic thought Greg thinks. Surprising coming from another guy. Most guys aren’t particularly sentimental about things like that but he supposes if any guy would be it would be Tom. Tom is a romantic at heart l.

It’s not an entirely selfless sentiment tho bc he knows Greg doesn’t have anyone like that right now (or so he thinks oho) so he’s like being weird and prolonging it even though he doesn’t really think he has a chance himself (although there is they tiny spark of hope in there he can’t quit squash)

And he starts adjusting Greg’s tie absentmindedly to avoid meeting his eyes when he says. “Find someone who will take good care of you.”

He doesn’t think about what he just implied when not long after they met he told Greg “I’ll take care of you.”

But Greg’s mind zeroes in on it

(Thinking about that quote where Matthew says Greg just wants someone to take care of him and Tom just wants to care for someone)

And in a moment of boldness he blurts out, “Like you?”

And Tom just goes completely still, trying to process what he just said.

And he totally wants to expand on that. He wants to say yes, no one could take care of him like he could. No one else cares about Greg like he does, loves him, wants to give him the world like he does. His Sporus, his empress of Rome.

He’d make it perfect for him, he’d make it unforgettable, he’d ruin him for anyone else, carve out a spot in his life that only can fill.

He doesn’t say those things. (Yet) Instead he just swallows hard and says, “yeah, like me, Greg.”

[eregyrn-falls]

In the Reverse Portal AU, How long do you think it would take for Ford to get Stan back on earth, realistically? While Ford doesn't have to teach himself physics and the other necessary information, Ford does have to worry about Bill driving him insane, The Society of the Blind Eye, and possibly re-designing the portal so that a rift will NOT form at all.

(First, apologies for the delay on answering this!  I had this huge long answer written out – because of course I did – and I lost it all, which is always disheartening.  Second, in the interim, @stanfordpines-phd posted meta on a related question, here.  I’ve only read the first paragraph of their post so far, but once I’ve got this rewritten I’ll go back and read over it, and see how close we both were to the same thoughts. :)

Let me say, too, that I’ve read a few story takes on this idea already, and the variations are always interesting!  But what I’m getting here is, what if there was a variation in which Ford really does start immediately to try to get his brother back?  I’m not sure I’ve seen that done, and yeah, I’m into that.

To get there, I’m proceeding from the assumption that the act of losing Stan through the portal would shock Ford out of his guilt / anger / paranoia spiral.  This almost happened in canon, after all – even considering the stakes, and the way they pushed each other’s buttons, and Ford’s state of mind, the moment Stan was seriously hurt (by being branded by the symbol on the console), Ford *stopped*, and was basically jolted into the most genuine response I think we’d seen from him in those scenes.  If Stan hadn’t come up swinging, I almost think the fight could have ended right there, with Ford’s concern for his brother defusing the situation long enough for them to talk.  So I feel like it’s reasonable to say that an even bigger shock – losing Stan entirely – is enough to set Ford on an entirely different track than the one he’d been on.

Obviously, this is SUPER LONG, so let’s put the rest under a cut…

(Which, to review: he had decided to hide the instructions to working the portal, and once that was accomplished, figure out how to destroy Bill; or, die trying.  What Ford wrote in Journal 3 indicates he was going to hike back up to the cave to see whether there were more clues about how to destroy Bill there.  A lot of people have asked: why did Ford not disassemble the portal FIRST?  I’ve thought about this a lot, and I usually came down on the side of thinking that he considered the instructions in the Journals equally dangerous and decided to prioritize them.  He was already afraid, at that point, that Bill would possess others in Gravity Falls – see his experience at the truck stop.  Not only was he afraid of Bill possessing him again, if he slept; but, probably,  of Bill possessing someone else, and using their body to come stop him from destroying the Portal; kill him; and/or, use the existing instructions in the Journals to get the portal working again.  However… I also had a new thought, having now really absorbed what Ford wrote about going back to the cave to look for a way to destroy Bill.  What if he thought that he might *need* the portal in order to do that?  For example, what if he found out that Bill would be vulnerable to destruction while in the act of coming through the portal?  That sort of thing.  If Ford destroyed the portal, he would keep Bill away from the physical world… temporarily.  But, what if Bill found another pawn to guide through the process of rebuilding the portal?  Separating the instructions was a step towards preventing that.  And it would have sucked to destroy the portal, only to find out that he needed it.  Note: I’m not saying that the whole “my life’s work!” thing didn’t also factor in; but by the time Ford is actively thinking of trying to stop / destroy Bill, that can’t have been the only reason he hesitated to disassemble the portal.)

Okay, so next, in order to figure out how long it would take, we need to figure out some other variables.  

Ford has to worry about Bill possessing him.  That’s definitely a big problem.  To be honest, I’m not really sure how Ford expected to keep that problem at bay, should Stan have actually left with J1.  There’s really only so long Ford could go without sleep.  And you’d think that the more Ford worked against Bill, the more Bill would try to overpower him.  But okay, let’s say that Ford’s plan immediately changes from “finding a way to destroy Bill / destroying the portal”, to “figuring out how to get Stan back”.  What could protect Ford from being possessed by Bill?  Bill-proofing the Shack.  Ford would need to get some unicorn hair.  And he has to do it fairly quickly, before Bill gets some natural opportunity to possess him again.

(Actually… if Ford is working on the portal again, I think Bill would leave him alone.  After all, isn’t that Ford doing what Bill wants?  Bill is arrogant enough to think that things will go his way if that portal is just turned on again, even if Ford is trying to thwart him.  However, while Ford might reason this out, I don’t think he would trust his safety to that reasoning.  Even if Bill is leaving Ford alone, Ford would try to find a way to protect himself.)

The SOTBE.  This might or might not be a problem.  We know from the Journal that they’re already formed, but they aren’t yet targeting him.  (They run away from him, in the only encounter he reports on in J3.)  If they DO decide to target him, that’s a big problem.  But he only encounters them once he goes in town.  There seems to be an implication that if they’re afraid enough of Ford to run away from him, they’re also afraid of the Shack.  Unless something happens to change that status quo, I’m not sure I see them mounting an attack on the Shack.

Redesigning the portal so that a rift doesn’t form when he reactivates it to retrieve Stan…

On the one hand, to do that, presumably Ford would need to track down Fiddleford.  Partly because that’s what the Better World AU suggests happened  (or does it? I’ll get to that in a moment).  And partly because since Ford needed Fidds’ help to build the portal in the first place, it stands to reason that he’d need an engineer’s help to make any major modifications.  

… But the thing is, Ford isn’t actually worried about a rift forming.  He doesn’t seem to know that that’s a possibility.  His fear of the portal destroying the world is about Bill and his Nightmare Realm friends *coming through* into the real world.  He never mentions instability or the danger of a rift, prior to going through the portal himself.  Even after Ford returns, he doesn’t suspect that danger until he’s actually in the process of dismantling the portal. He thinks that destroying it shuts the interdimensional gateway for good – until he spots the tiny rift just floating there. *Then* he’s horrified.

In the Better World AU, it doesn’t go into specifics at all about how p!Ford managed to keep Bill from possessing him.  It only says that p!Ford and p!Fidds built an addition that allowed them to use the portal while bypassing a connection to the Nightmare Realm. It’s been said before, but there’s so much left out of the account of the Better World AU, that it has to arouse suspicion as to whether p!Fidds actually told real-Ford everything accurately, and Ford just condensed it when writing it; or whether p!Fidds gave him limited or inaccurate information, and Ford filled in the blanks from his own wishful thinking.

The thing I can’t quite figure out yet is this: so, Ford knows that turning on the portal puts the world in danger, because Bill wants to come through with his buddies from the Nightmare Realm.  Okay.  But then, why has Bill not done that already?  The portal has been turned on twice so far.  Once to “test” it, and once when Stan was lost through it.  What about those times wasn’t sufficient for Bill to use it?  Was it length of time?  Was it where it was connected to?

But both of those things seem unlikely.  In the initial portal test with Fiddleford, the portal was active for over a minute.  It’s already on when Ford and Fidds go walking up to it carrying the test dummy; it stays on, with an apparently stable wormhole, through the entirety of the rest of the scene.  It’s still apparently on when the scene ends, 1:06 later.  And it WAS connected to the Nightmare Realm – that’s the whole point, seeing that and seeing Bill in his “true form” is what drove Fidds mad to begin with.   It’s only on for 20 seconds the second time (at least in canon, when Ford goes through), but again we know it was connected to the Nightmare Realm, since that’s where Ford goes.  So what more did Bill actually require, if he couldn’t use either of those opportunities?  I’m not sure we know?  

So anyway, I’m going to say that in the simplest possible scenario – I think that Ford could have gotten the portal back up and running in a couple of weeks.

He has to take time to go out and get some unicorn hair, to protect himself from Bill while he’s working in the Shack.  Given the snowy conditions, that might take a bit more time than it took in canon (which was 1 day); on the other hand, Ford doesn’t have to waste time trying to please the unicorns, the way Mabel did.  I’m going to just assume that Ford showing up with his crossbow and Stan’s brass knuckles would be sufficient to get him some of the unicorn hair.

Possibly, he combined this expedition with a trip to the cave, to see if there WERE any hints for guarding against Bill or defeating Bill.  So that might add another day.  And I suspect he’d go and retrieve the other two Journals; although I don’t think that would take very long.

He doesn’t need to contact Fiddleford, if he doesn’t know that he might need to fix or create an addition to the portal in order to guard against a rift forming. If he doesn’t try to contact Fidds and reconcile with him, that saves time.  (But you could do a variation on this, by saying that he does want to contact Fidds, in order to build what it’s said they built in the Better World AU: a way to use the portal while bypassing the Nightmare Realm.  However, Ford might not even be sure this would be a good plan.  If he thinks / knows the portal connects directly to the Nightmare Realm anyway, then he’d know that’s the first place he’d have to look for Stan.)

If, after getting the unicorn hair and protecting the Shack, Ford is finally able to get some rest, he might also be thinking a bit more clearly.  So he might, on his own, come to the realization that the portal just being on, and connected to the Nightmare Realm, is somehow not enough for Bill to come through.   (Especially since it was turned on for such a long time during the first “test”.)  He may not be able to figure out what it is Bill is waiting for, in order to prevent that. But it may allow him to reason that just turning it back on in order to retrieve Stan is no more dangerous than the past two times it was turned on.  He might also wonder / theorize that the fact that the gateway now opens into the unicorn-hair-spell protected Shack might actually keep Bill from coming through it.

He needs more fuel.  I’m assuming that what happened in canon – with the fuel gauges for the portal hitting zero just as Ford is lost through it – also happened here.  There’s apparently a source of the radioactive waste that’s needed nearby, but Ford still has to go GET it.  (Pro: he has Stan’s car.  Con: deep snow.)  He may have had Fiddleford’s help the first time they got a supply of it.  On the other hand, apparently it only took Stan one night to get what he needed, by himself.

Finally, there’s a scanning function built into the portal – at least, there is when Stan activates it in “Scary-oke”, and it appears to be scanning the sectors; the assumption is that it’s scanning for Ford, so that the portal can form a gateway to where he is.  This part of the portal machinery isn’t mentioned in J3.  It could certainly be something Ford and Fidds built originally – on the theory that, if the portal were really to be used for exploring the multiverse, you’d want a way to lock onto the people who went through it, to get them back.  At any rate, in canon, it seems to take more than 10 days for the scan to complete – if, that is, that’s what Stan is waiting for to activate the portal for real.  (It’s interesting that Stan starts the scanning process, and only much later goes to get fuel to actually start the portal.  The last firm date in J3 is July 29, the date of the confrontation with the SOTBE.  After that, we have Soos’s birthday and Globnar, the Woodstick Festival, and the Northwest Mansion mystery, however long all of those take, before we get to NWHS.)

So, again – simplest possible scenario – Ford would need several days, to a week, to accomplish some of the tasks and errands above, by himself.  Possibly including the scanning so that the portal can lock onto Stan – the extra time tacked onto that week would be for how long that took.  Otherwise, I *think* that once he accomplishes those tasks, he could activate the portal and, hopefully, get Stan back.

Obviously, if you wanted to complicate this for it to take longer, you could certainly add in various problems.  Maybe Ford DOES think he needs Fiddleford’s help, so he has to go through the process of finding him, reconciling with him, and then they have to do whatever it is they are going to do.  Maybe the SOTBE does prove to be more of a problem than they seem to have been in canon, and time has to be taken to deal with them.  That sort of thing.

But if you want “fastest”, that’s my guess.  Couple of weeks.

Also, what happens afterwards could also be interesting.  Once Ford gets Stan back, what happens?  How do they THEN address the problem of the portal, and Bill?  The unicorn hair would have kept Ford safe inside the Shack while he was working on this stuff, but they’d need a more permanent solution in order for Ford to live a normal life, not to mention, to keep the world safe.  Do they actually reconcile and work together, or are there further complications?  Did a Rift form while the portal was on, to retrieve Stan?  ( @stanfordpines-phd makes a good point at the start of their meta post here, about why a rift didn’t form the first 2 times the portal was on; and why it probably did so in 2012 because of the passage of time.  So – maybe not.)

(Final note: having now read through @stanfordpines-phd full meta post – yeah, although they were answering a slightly different question, we DID hit on some of the same ideas. :)  Including both of us thinking of the unicorn hair!  Their answer goes in a different direction, though – another variation on this storyline that I’d LOVE to read!  Though, I don’t entirely agree that for the story to be interesting, Ford would have to fail to get Stan back at first.   I do think that WOULD be interesting!  But I also think you could make an interesting story out of the problems they still have to deal with once Stan is safely back – foremost, how DO they defeat Bill once and for all, in order to keep Ford’s mind, and the world, safe?  And, just the story of Ford and Stan truly reconciling at that point would be interesting; though I’ve also seen some stuff – including @as-be-low‘s “Time Has Changed Me (and Left Me Full of Doubt)” – in which Stan accidentally falling through is such a traumatic experience for him that he is just as angry at Ford, as canon Ford was at Stan when he returned.  That sort of thing.)