A/N: Here we go again. Plotless story galore. And a whole slew of not!humor thrown in for good measure. Fun.
Oh, and I've always loved wandering into caves.
NOTE.
Every '--' is a change in time. The first one would be six years ago, and the next would be present day, and so on. Have fun.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything except for the mess that is named my imagination.
--
Prompt: "Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin."
Roughly translated, it means "Straight ahead, one cannot go very far."
Prompt was taken in a very loose fashion.
--
Venus.
--
The sun beat down on their backs as if it were the whip of a plantation overseer, drenching the boys in a wave of unbearable heat that made their skin glisten like jewels. There was no soft breeze, no sign of clouds and rain overhead to relieve them of their burden; still they trudged on, wearily but steadily. In light of day, there was no other alternative than to keep walking.
Or so they thought.
Kenny could, just barely, make out the dim curve of the hill off to the distance, still somewhat far away from where they were. It was not in the direction they were heading, but whoever said that the right way was always the straight way should have inspected his statement a little more. A slight twitch on his lips—the blonde's mind was still as dirty as ever. He wondered what his companion was thinking, now; both of them had long since discarded the clothes on their backs and the backpacks that had contained most of what was to be their daily goods. Christophe was carrying a shovel. The shovel. Asking him to throw that away would be analogous to asking Kenny to throw away his beloved porno magazines, and that would result in a catastrophe nobody wanted to see. Not that there was anyone to see them in the middle of a humongous fucking desert, but Kenny had decided that the shovel had started annoying him greatly ever since the Mole had somehow convinced the blonde to come along on 'a little adventure' that by some way or another ended up as The Long Trek to Somewhere in the Middle of Colorado. Not exactly a trippy name, but he did not know what else to call it as most of his brains were being sapped by the sun's burning rays.
"You never exactly told me where we're heading, you know."
Clack. He grunted, shifting the weight of the shovel to his other hand. "Zis is not the time to ask, mon ami. 'Ave you forgotten zat day? When we get there, you will know."
Kenny shrugged. He never did expect any other kind of response.
They trudged on.
--
"Hey, you wanna come up to Stark's Pond with us?" The blonde smiled, a trace uncertainly, but with good intention nonetheless. Up ahead, Stan and Kyle were already impatiently waiting for him at the bend of the road; regardless, Kenny had still felt an inexplicable urge to stay behind and ask. Even though, as he noticed now, that weird French kid did not seem at all happy to be bothered. "Like, if you want to, you know—"
Christophe glanced at him warily, then went back to polishing his shovel. "Pour quoi? I am quite content to be 'ere."
Figures, Kenny thought, but he kept the smile. Just barely. "Dude, you never do anything with any of the guys. Or anyone else for that matter. Cartman's gonna start calling you the French Fag again, y'know."
"Was zat not Pip's old nickname?" A dry chuckle escaped his lips; the blonde could tell that, indeed, Christophe had no affection for the poor British boy whatsoever. "Ze British 'ave always been such idiots. And so would your Cartman be, if he confuses me with zat British piece of sheet."
"Uh, okay." A pause. "You sure you don't wanna come? Kyle's bringing his chemistry set and we're going to make cherry bombs and blow up some stuff—"
The French boy gave him a very strange look. "Ah, no. Ze whole fuckin' town will blow up if ze fatboy is there. Bad thing to be doing, unless zat's what you 'ave planned in mind."
"Well, we can't exactly throw him out—"
"I have a better idea. Follow me, mon ami." Kenny looked back a tad hesitantly at his friends, but they had all but disappeared; exasperated, probably, at the surplus attention he was paying to someone whom they seldom corresponded with. He shrugged. It was liable to be something different, what Mole wanted him to do, from the everyday shit he always did—stealing food, reading porn, jerking off in unmentionable places. Why not?
"Sure. Where we going?"
Christophe's lips twitched into a half-smile. "When we get zere, Kenny, you will know."
--
What had been gently sloping hills the last moment was now a steep, resistant climb that the boys were already well-prepared for, having been set loose in the mountains for most of their lives. Kenny felt strangely dizzy in spite of this, but they continued on in a silence that seemed to stretch on forever in an unbroken line. Sparse vegetation could be seen on the dusty ground below for miles and miles around; he felt as if they were in the middle of some vast wasteland, two trekkers too far away from home to ever get back again. It was actually comforting, in a sense.
Almost there.
When they reached the top of the jagged hilltop, Christophe suddenly stopped and laid down his shovel. The blonde glanced at him inquisitively. "Too much for ze trip. From here, we use our hands."
"What?" He did not remember this part at all; or maybe he did not want to remember. It had been too long. "I'm not climbing down a fucking hole. It wasn't even there the last time we came!"
The Frenchman eyed him exasperatedly. "Zat was six years ago. Things change."
So Kenny watched him as he kicked away most of the dirt clogging the entrance, wondering if there was anything wrong with his mind. He did not much like the thought of the deep, dark hole looming before him, even with all his past experiences of Hell and whatnot. It was disturbing.
"Bitch, are you coming down or not? Zere's no other way down."
"Shut up, I'm coming." He lowered his head and peered uncertainly into the gloom beneath, as if some ghostly entity were looking back hungrily at him. Christophe was already climbing down, and the blonde mentally slapped himself again. Don't be such a pussy, man. You've been through much worse. What can possibly happen?
He took a deep breath and started lowering himself into the dark.
--
"Hey, dude—I mean, hey, Christ, can't you slow down for a sec?" The other boy seemed to have lost all sense of hearing; he had not responded to any of Kenny's complaints—several dozen of them had been uttered already—in the past hour. "Seriously, dude. Where the fuck are we heading?"
"We're almost zere, Kenny. 'Ave some patience."
"Fuck patience. We've been walking for at least two hours already, damnit." Exasperation had slowly started to replace the excitement in the blond's voice. "We're like, miles and miles from anywhere…are you even sure we're in the right direction?"
"I do zis for a living, asshole. I know. And you'll see why, mon ami, when we get zere."
Kenny had a sudden vision of ze Mole leading him to some dark, secluded place in the middle of nowhere and, in a flurry, slitting his throat. It was very disturbing, but not unlike what the French boy would really do...if he had a reason, that was. And since Kenny could think of none, he contented himself with the idea of their little adventure being just a random whim on Christophe's part. After all, who'd hire a mercenary to kill him anyways? He'd just come back again. No duh.
…Which brought him back again to the conclusion that this should have not been happening. At all.
"Christophe, why did you—oh, holy shit!"
Here he abruptly stopped, gaping in amazement and, with good measure, a tingling feeling of what-the-hell-just-happened-here?! The boys were standing in front of a large cave, one that had been largely hidden from view before Christophe took him towards the leeside of the hill on a—thankfully—shaded path. It looked both creepy and awesome at the same time, Kenny supposed at last, reminding him slightly of the time they went chasing after ManBearPig. No flood was happening this time, but he could sense that there was something else down there. It was not exactly sinister, or in any way frightening, even—it was just the feeling of something, of the calm before a storm that was not really a storm at all. The blond could not quite place the ideas jumbling around his head; before they settled, however, the other boy suddenly spoke.
"Let's go in."
--
"Dude, where's the fucking flashlight?"
"Dropped."
"…"
"I still remember ze way. No worries."
"Yeah, that's very reassuring." There was no way the French asshole would appreciate his concerns. Kenny sighed. "Okay, which way? Left? Right? I haven't been down here since dinosaurs were chomping around on huge-ass ferns."
Ze Mole pointed. "Up ahead. Très près."
"Mmph." They rounded the corner. "Still the same?"
"Oui, I would think so." He paused. "I…had only came down here once, after zat day. Nobody knows. You 'ave not told any of zem, I can tell."
The blond shrugged. "They wouldn't care even if I did. But that's 'sides the point, anyhow. Got no need to tell, so I didn't."
The silence overtook them again until they reached the end of the road, and only after several gripped pauses did either of them unlock their tongues.
"Oh, dude—"
--
"—how did you ever find this place?" And even those words nearly did not come out of his mouth, for what was in front of him took all his breath away. After so many turns and twists of the endless corridors the cave seemed to hold, he had not been expecting much apart from more stalagmites and pools of dank water, more of the same kind of mundane features he'd seen infrequently on his crippled television set. But what was in front of him was something that, he thought, no kind of show had ever filmed before.
In the heart of the system was a sprawling, strangely lit cavern, its ceiling too high for either of them to perceive. There were still stalagmites cluttered here and there—their hanging counterparts out of sight. Somewhere there was water trickling ever so cheerfully in the darkest depths, but Kenny could not see where the sound was coming from. He did not know, either, where the dim lighting had come from, but upon closer inspection he could just about make out that the organisms growing along the edges of rock were full of some bioluminescent chemical. It felt stranger than anything he had ever experienced before, be it aliens giving anal probes or anything else. Christophe was silent beside him, looking up at the seemingly endless ceiling.
Drip.
"You are asking zat, pour quoi? What's found is found, and now…you know zis place, as I do. It takes me away from ze fucked up-ness. Zat is all."
"And why…" The blond could not manage more than a whisper now; it felt to him as if one decibel too loud would shatter the illusion and tug him back into the place he'd left behind. "Why did you bring me? Because I was the first person you saw off the street? Why?"
"Fuck 'why'. I just said it. What's done is done. You think I took you all zis way for not'ing?"
And suddenly it made all the sense in the world to Kenny.
--
"Hey, I still see the path we took last time. Right over there. I remember those rocks, almost poked my eye out that time."
Silence.
"We went another way this time, didn't we?" Kenny asked this quietly, his breath haggard and his head still slightly disoriented. He could tell, even in the dim light, the slight curve of ze Mole's lips in an—for him, anyways—approving semi-smile. "Yeah, okay. I get it."
"You do?"
Kenny shrugged. "Well, it's you. How am I supposed to know whatever the fuck you're thinking? I was thinking maybe you wanted to completely tire me out so you can drag me off into the cave and give me a good fuck, but I guessed wrong, didn't I?"
"Always ze perverted one, mon ami. I never said anything about zat." They were hushed again, as the dripping of the water became clearer and clearer in the stillness between. To wash away those words, and what they had left behind. There was a strange clarity in those drops, and Kenny felt certain that, even if it was all still very bizarre, that everything had become sharper. More in focus. And that was something nobody could explain, not him, not Christophe, not anyone else who would walk into the very same cave maybe a thousand years later. Everything was still. Everything was good. And he wanted it to stay.
"So why is it?" It came out barely a whisper, but Christophe had heard, all right.
"Straight ahead, one cannot go very far." He paused. "I think we learned somet'ing today, 'ave we not?"
This time he really smiled.
Fin.