Stan rolls down the window. A second later - well, maybe, time's been kinda' funny for a while, probably a couple seconds - he opens the door and swings his legs out and sits that way, slumped over himself staring down at the cracks in the pavement. At some point he glances at this car's trunk, and then at some point he looks up toward that window over there and hey, it looks like his personal friendly hallucination is about to jump right out of his hallucinated skin, and the gas station looks normal, like every other gas station he's ever been to, the bright lights and the stupid music and everything else, it looks like every other gas station he's spent about half his life stopping at. It looks too normal, it feels too normal, it feels like his life putting itself back where it should be and his mind trying to put itself back together the way it should be and, hey, that guy he was thinking of a while back, the one who'd had that hallucination for, like, days, it never drove him around, did it? And it never bought shit for him, if that guy callin' himself Stanford Pines walks back here holding stuff and he gives it to Stan and it's real, then, then what-

Just then, because sometimes luck actually is on his side, he forgets about all that blood and spit still trying to run out of his mouth and he forgets to swallow it, and he chokes on it, and when he's sitting there coughing with his arm wrapped around his chest he feels something in one of his pockets, one of the pockets that stayed in one piece even while his skin got ripped all to pieces. He takes what's in there out and holds it up to the gas station lights, and turns the little pill around and around in his fingers.

"Huh," he says, thoughtfully, and then, "Not the best idea you had today, Hal old buddy," to himself, because who's around to hear him? "But not the worst," and then he has to laugh, because nah, not the worst, not today. "And hell, it might even work, wouldn't that be funny?"