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The Narrator couldn’t sleep.
Increasingly, he would find himself lying beside Stanley in their bed, in their room, in the ‘fancy’ apartment that they shared more and more often nowadays. He would’ve usually considered his lack of need for sleep a blessing, but tonight it left him in contemplative silence as Stanley slept peacefully just next to him, snoring lightly.
Stanley. The man was a major anomaly in his eyes. He had been created to be so incredibly normal , and yet he’d managed to make the Narrator’s reality collapse inwards, the man and his story his sole focus, his sole purpose.
The two’s relationship had been rocky, at first. Stanley had fought against the Narrator’s story at every turn, adding in his own snark and ignoring his instructions. In turn, the Narrator had the capacity to be downright nasty sometimes, taking sick joy in blowing the man up, or documenting his descent into madness, or having him fend for himself in a game not at all designed for him. Stanley would bite back, too: jumping from the staircase, or running into the defunct original mod of the game and abandoning him, or taking the painful opportunity to greet the metal jaws at the end of that long, long hallway.
Eventually, they’d reached a begrudging truce. Both had realised that there was no real way out of the Parable, no getting back to whatever there was before, so there wasn’t really any point to making each other’s life there a misery. Of course, they still had their moments - the Countdown Ending and the Zending were forbidden fruit, after all. One of them got their fleeting moment of hope, the other got the catharsis of control.
The truce had given way to friendship. The Narrator was fairly sure he’d first realised his positive feelings towards Stanley when they had been making their way through the Confusion Ending for the fifth time. It was one of the only endings where they actually worked together, and Stanley had seemed genuinely happy with creating his own adventure alongside the Narrator. It was the first time he’d seen the man actually smile.
Now that had opened a whole can of worms.
Stanley’s smile had shaken the Narrator to his core in the best way possible, a sharp, aching, panicked pull in his chest that made him feel dizzy. He’d begun to notice it when they went through the other games together too; Stanley would give a thumbs-up to his dirt house, and proudly completed the first puzzle of Portal with him, chest puffing up as if to say ‘look at me go!’.
It was when Stanley started looking a mix of shocked and pleased at the Narrator’s positive feedback when the being had fallen down the rabbit hole, so to speak.
He hadn’t dared to mention it to the Curator - he was sure she’d only laugh, chiding him for having taken so long to figure it out. He wasn’t that omniscient, damn it! How was he supposed to know that he’d fall utterly head over heels for the only other person he ever really talked to, who had actually offered him something other than mindless agreement, who had fought tooth and nail to actually prove that his choices meant something to this empty world–
Okay, in hindsight, it had been obvious. No wonder the Curator had known before him.
The Ultra Deluxe content had been a turning point. Or rather, the whole Memory Zone debacle had been. The Narrator had complained to Stanley about all the lazy additions, the lazy cash-grabbing nature of it all. Then, he’d thrown caution to the wind and taken the man to his own little quiet corner, all cabins and gardens and calm piano music that still vaguely echoed in his mind if he concentrated hard enough. It had all been so long ago, after all.
The Narrator regretted looking at the reviews. Any of them, really, not just those God-awful Steam ones. If he hadn’t been so focused on how wonderful the past had been (a horrendous case of rose-tinted glasses, he now understood), maybe he wouldn’t have come across that awful reality check. Maybe the negative reviews would’ve stayed forgotten. Maybe he never would’ve given Cookie9’s review even half a glance, and maybe he never would’ve created that accursed Skip Button.
That thing had been his most horrific creation. Made in a single moment of petulant upset, he hadn’t even had the foresight to playtest it, nor really consider if its inclusion was actually a good idea. No, instead he had invited Stanley into the room, pestering and pestering him until he pressed it, and by then it was far too late.
He remembered the horror on Stanley’s face when the door had disappeared completely. The colour had drained from his face, and he had kept looking up worriedly at the voice, though the Narrator hadn’t dared to come down in his physical form. He instead became dead-set on finding a way to make it all stop before it got any worse.
That had gone about as well as reading the reviews in the first place.
At first the skips had been bearable. A few minutes, then a few hours. Nothing fun, but also nothing horrific. He could live with it.
But then they’d gotten longer.
A day.
A week.
A year.
Ten.
Hundreds.
Eventually, the Narrator gave up incessantly screeching at Stanley, or begging him not to press the button. Once the door had disappeared they both knew that little yellow button was their only way out of here, no matter how excruciating the process.
He often wondered how Stanley had felt during the whole experience. After all, the whole ordeal had played out in half an hour for him. Then again, he had to come to terms with his only companion losing his mind, and the only way forward making everything so much worse each time. How long had each skip felt for him? Like a blink? A second, and nothing more?
Not to mention after the being had given up. The room had looked pretty dark by then. How many skips was it until the whole thing was over? The most specific answer he’d gotten from the office worker was that it was less than twenty in total, and even that had taken a good while to pry out of him.
So much harm had been caused to the two of them in less than twenty touches of a button.
At one point during the whole ordeal, some point between the twenty-year and the one-hundred-and-fifty year mark, the Narrator had tried his damndest to reverse the damage, and when that hadn’t worked, he tried to work out how long was left on the whole sequence.
There had been a maximum value error. Stanley had refused to tell him how long it was in total.
Stanley had refused to tell him a lot of things about that ending.
The Narrator didn’t blame him.
He had given up on the whole thing after what he assumed was a couple of tens of millenia. He went silent, turning his metaphysical back away, just praying for his consciousness to go into some sort of sleep mode until the whole ordeal was over. If he was honest, he remembered nothing after the roof began to cave in. But he knew he’d been awake for it all.
He had given up hope, and then the reset had finally, finally kicked in. Better late than fucking never.
Oh, he could have sobbed when he saw Stanley in his office again.
And by the looks of it, Stanley had been the same.
For the sake of normalcy, the two had ignored everything they had just been through, but the Narrator couldn’t help but implement a little surprise, and a large, gaudy neon sign to guide his protagonist to it.
He remembered his spiel about wanting to make a bigger, better Stanley Parable. Everything had been red. Red, red, red, not that sickly golden hue. And when Stanley had begun pressing the yellow-orangey Jim button with wild abandon, it had admittedly frightened the Narrator.
He wasn’t exactly proud of how quickly he took that button away.
The best part of that entire expo for the Narrator hadn’t been the figurines. It hadn’t been the mostly-infinite hole (in fact, Stanley’s soulless staring had freaked him out a little). It hadn’t even been the pure, unadulterated joy on the worker’s face as he picked up the bucket for the first time - that thing was a loaded topic all by itself.
The best part had been taking himself down there, actually there, in his physical form.
It had taken a lot of effort - he was still struggling to hold himself together after what the two of them had just been through - but by God had it been worth it. A nod, and speaking (signing, in Stanley’s case) each other’s name had been all it took for the two of them to break down and cling to one another, terrified of letting go.
It was then when the Narrator had finally admitted how he felt for the man.
He chuckled to himself as he sat up in bed and gently petted Stanley’s hair.
Now that little confession had been one messy affair. He had barely ever been so shaken up in his life, all tears, bleary-faced, sobbing out about how much he knew he needed the man. He’d hardly even meant to mention his romantic feelings.
It had simply spilled out of him, a desperate “please, I’ll never let that happen again, I need you here, I love you, Stanley!” before Stanley had stared up at him with those big brown eyes.
The Narrator had been terrified when his brain finally caught up with his mouth. He’d shut up quickly before spewing a torrent of apologies for everything and anything, but especially for letting that one loose until Stanley had shoved himself against him.
It had been rather an interesting first kiss, certainly, but he cherished it in a bittersweet, soft blue light.
After the expo, and the Narrator’s decided failure at making a proper sequel, he had clung to Stanley’s side as if he were the bucket itself, and (to be fair to the man) Stanley had obliged him. He became clingy for a good few resets, more so than he was willing to admit.
The bucket. He’d made that thing to make Stanley feel better, but the more the man took it around with him, the more weirded out he felt about that lump of metal. He pushed it aside mostly, detailing Stanley’s affection for the bucket, having fun creating new endings for the man - that was what had led him to creating the apartment he now sat in - before the whole ‘out-of-bounds nightmare’, as Stanley called it. He hadn’t really touched the bucket since then, having become marginally freaked out by the thing.
The figurines had become fun, too. The Narrator had genuinely enjoyed cheering the office worker on as he found each one, and then…
Well, he found them all. Case closed, goodnight everybody.
Life had gotten comfortably odd since then. The Parable had its quirks that even the Narrator couldn’t control, but the being had become dead set on including little bits of extra content here and there to keep Stanley happy. He’d even learned sign language properly, so that Stanley didn’t have to resort to over-exaggerated body language and hastily-written notes anymore. That was a better freedom than any blue skies, he was sure of it.
He’d gotten a better understanding about the game’s code by now, too. He could program in a little sunset here, a cloudy day there, a can of soda from that vending machine Stanley was so obsessed with. It wasn’t loads, sure, but he had a better grasp on it than he used to.
Stanley shifted in his sleep and sighed. The Narrator hoped he was having a nice dream, whatever it was about.
It still surprised him, how much he relied on that man. That man, laying beside him in bed. That man, all fluffy hair and mischievous grins. That man, who was so ordinary but so incredibly extraordinary. That man, the Narrator’s other half, his partner, his lover.
That man. His Stanley.
And he was Stanley’s Narrator.
And they would be linked forever.
And he would give the universe to keep them that way.
Stanley unconsciously shuffled closer to the Narrator, the being gently kissing him on the head.
And the Narrator was happy.
Really, genuinely happy.