My first South Park fic! Sorry it's so short.
It's a fucked up thing, Death.
Kenny's experienced it more times than any one person on the planet, gone to Hell and Heaven and in-between, and he's never really gotten over it. He's never been able to forget, because it isn't something he can just move past. The pain is still there, the phantom agony of a million different wounds, and nothing can make it better, no matter how hard he tries.
He wakes up in the night sometimes with his hands covered with blood that isn't actually there, his eyes seeing specters and visions of the in-between, the limbo with its monsters and its pain and its emptiness, and he sits on his too-small bed and panics and gasps in between breaths, prayers he only half remembers from his childhood.
He suffers in silence, doesn't tell anyone; he hides behind his hoodie and keeps his mouth shut and laughs at Kyle's jokes and holds his hand and tries to ignore the pain that wells up in his chest from deaths fifteen years before. He tries to be normal, despite knowing that he will never be, and this, above all, is the slowest death a human can face.
It isn't one of body, but of mind, and he knows that the day will come when he won't be able to bear it anymore, and the torture of previous wounds will tear him apart from the inside out and leave him a broken, bloody mess in the dirt. For now, though, he's content with pretending.