I've been rewatching the show (sixth time, I think) and wanted to finish this story I started a while ago. I'm pretty proud of it.

He wrung his hands as he attended his own funeral, dressed as Ford, fumbling to keep up the lie. Why were his parents so ignorant? Why did his entire family fail to see he was two fingers short of a Ford? He fooled them pretty well in every other aspect. Perhaps it was the fact that they were grieving- if they were grieving- or perhaps it was that they just forgot what their son looked like.

He didn't actually know if they were sad. If they were grieving Stanley. He wouldn't have grieved if he were them. What was there to grieve? A deadbeat? A know-nothing? An absolutely pathetic excuse for a son who had never amounted to anything? Stanford though... They didn't know they should mourn Stanford. They didn't know that Ford was gone. And what if Ford was gone forever? What if they never got Ford back, but lived the rest of their lives believing he was alive? What if they lived the rest of their lives thinking that they still had a successful son?

They didn't talk to him at the funeral. They didn't talk to him as Stanley or as Stanford. They didn't say anything about Stanley, didn't act like they were mourning. His mom might have been sniffling. His younger brother, well, they'd never known each other very well. No one cared. No one cared about Stanley, so Stanley was dead.

But Stanford mattered. Stanford had always mattered to people. He'd always impressed people. He was the better twin. Stanley had always known that Ford was the one that would amount to something. That's why he'd always tried to piggyback off of his brother's accomplishments. That's one of the reasons he still dreamed of adventures with his brother. Because alone, Stanley was a screwup, a forgotten corpse. But with Ford, he could be something, do something, make people care about him.

He had to get Ford back. He wasn't just going to let Ford be forgotten or neglected. No one was mourning for Ford. He was going to make sure that no one had to.

He'd tried to kill Stanley, though. He'd tried to become Ford. Tried to be smart and tough and incredible. But he wasn't. He was the kind of guy that no one mourned, that no one missed. The kind of guy whose funeral was a poorly attended afterthought. Maybe as Stanford, he could be cared about. And when he got the real Stanford back...

Well, if that happened, maybe he'd have the real Stanford back. Maybe he'd have a brother and a best friend again. Or maybe he wouldn't. And if that happened, he would disappear. Who would miss him? Who missed him now? No one. That was clear. So he'd assume another identity and find another scam. He'd find those other two journals and free his brother. He'd done a lot of things with his life since he'd left New Jersey. He wasn't Ford, but he was tougher and just a bit smarter than he had been. He could do this, easy. He could crack the codes his brother had left him. He'd have his brother back before he'd even have time to kill all of his alter egos.

That was the plan.

And then, with all his alibis torched, thirty years had passed. Thirty years and he was standing in front of another coffin, at another funeral he'd made up. Except for this time, instead of mourning himself, he was mourning himself. Well, wax himself.

But he'd never really been mourning himself, had he? He didn't mourn Stanley Pines or Wax Stan Pines. He only ever mourned Ford.

How had thirty years passed?

How had thirty years passed and he was here, at another funeral, mourning his brother? How did the fictitious funerals hurt so much more than funerals he attended for real people he had come to know in his thirty years here?

People knew him. He'd seen people grow up here. Had seen Soos become an adult (sort of), had made friends and enemies (plenty of enemies) and had pretended that none of the weird stuff in Gravity Falls was real, all the while poking at a bigger mystery. One he was so close to unraveling. He had to be so close to unraveling it...

Gravity Falls felt like home now, but it never really would be until he brought his brother back. He no longer thought about disappearing if his brother couldn't forgive him. He lived here, he had become a part of the town and the town was a part of him. Every twist and turn of the Falls felt familiar. Of course, there were things he didn't know still, like where those other two journals were, or how to get his brother back. But once he did get Stanford back, maybe things could be normal. Maybe he could stay in this town that he loved, where things made sense, despite being a tad strange. He'd found a community here that, though sometimes loathed and jailed him, accepted him as one of their own.

And, though he was once again wearing the name of another man, he felt more like himself than he had since New Jersey, when he had a brother. He was doing something he loved, something he could actually imagine his family being proud of if they knew he was alive. His father would admire his ability to bleed tourists dry with overpriced memorabilia, his mom would appreciate his fake supernatural gimmicks.

Ford would probably be disappointed that Stan wasn't making use of the real supernatural beings around the town. Dipper had expressed the same disappointment, and Stan saw a lot of Ford in that boy. He only hoped that Dipper's mistrust didn't grow into the paranoia and bitterness that had destroyed his brother.

Well, he wanted to blame the paranoia and the bitterness. But with every funeral he just blamed himself.