Disclaimer: I do not own South Park or its characters, and make no profit from writing this story. South Park & Characters are property of Matt Stone & Trey Parker.
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Silent Musings on a Dead Night
By DragonSapphire
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-Stan's pov-
Kenny wasn't attractive. At least...not in the conventional sense. Sure, he had that undeniable charm and shocking humor and light, non-judgmental air about him that if he was more social he'd draw people to him like flies. Not that flies didn't swarm him anyway, especially when he was laying dead somewhere, his body decomposing for who knew how long.
Kyle must have gotten up sometime during the night to use the bathroom or grab a drink of water, leaving the skinny blonde to seek out the only other source of heat on Stan's bed - Stan himself. Stan looked down at his friend in the dim glow the moonlight slanting through his curtains provided, trying to see what Kyle saw in him...trying to see what he could see in him.
Kenny slept on his side, curled into a fetal position as if regular beatings put him on edge even in his sleep. His face didn't soften unconsciously...there was no softness to be had anywhere on Kenny's body, really. And he didn't breathe. Or at least, it didn't look like he breathed. His skin appeared waxen, sunken in, and pocked with many old and new scars, and bone-deep bruises. Stan's heart suddenly raced at the thought of sleeping next to a corpse.
Feeling goosebumps prickle down his spine, Stan shakily brought his hand to hover very close to Kenny's mouth with a swiftness brought of just getting a deed over with before he freaked out and bolted. He held still for several long moments, not breathing himself, until he felt a warm shiver of breath brush over his fingertips and he finally relaxed. He curled all of his fingers inwards towards his palm except one, and with that one he softly traced Kenny's thin bottom lip, swollen and bruised from their activities that night, with a smudge of dried blood transferred from Kyle's split lip.
Stan allowed himself a moment to take in Kenny, feeling as if a complete stranger were lying next to him, curled up tight and used, and barely breathing. Kenny's cheekbones were sharp and defined from the shadows pooling in the hollows of his cheeks, tired, dark lines beneath eyes so pale when they were open that it felt like the irises had slowly, slowly been bled of color. Perhaps at one point they had been as blue as Stan's own, but now they were closer to the cloudy white-grey of a stormy sky rather than Stan's ocean blue.
His tangled blonde hair was coarse and smelled strongly of cheap soap and sweat, and the curve of Stan's thumb grazed against a tiny cartilage piercing he hadn't noticed before as he lightly touched Kenny's hair. The flesh around the earring looked inflamed and faintly green-tinged, and Stan didn't know if it was from the cheap metal or infection settling in.
Stan let his hand fall in an observant glide down Kenny's thin, bite-mottled neck that he knew to echo the look of his own. Stan couldn't help musing that Cartman's theory that gingers were relatives of zombies or vampires had some basis, because Kyle definitely liked to go for the neck.
Kenny's collarbone looked sharp enough to cut his finger on, and his chest down to his narrow, raggedly defined hips were no better. Stan could count each individual rib, and as Kenny slowly began to intertwine their bodies in his sleep, like he had the first time Kyle had forced them together, Stan could feel the apparent over-largeness of Kenny's joints, because the limbs attached to them were so thin.
Stan was horrified that they'd let Kenny get this bad.
Despite the fact Kenny rarely took off his parka, even when he slept over, with the hood so tightly drawn he never knew if Kenny was looking at him, or dead where he stood, Stan still felt that they should have known. Kenny never complained, never asked, begged, or borrowed anything off his friends that wasn't given without a second thought, quietly accepting cast offs or nothing at all. While he, Kyle, and Cartman felt cheated if they couldn't have the latest, most expensive game system, Kenny would just idle silently, starving and fatigued and broken, and they just accepted his poverty and death-stricken circumstances as the way things were.
It was sickening.
And now...Stan had been so angry that Kyle had wanted to share any of himself with the blonde, as if giving his love, his body, his heart to Stan wasn't enough. Stan had had to steal the tiniest bit of affection the redhead gave Kenny like someone stealing the last pea from a starving man, when they already had a banquet set in front of them. And Kenny would let Stan take all of Kyle for himself without putting up a fight, or voicing what he wanted, what he needed, while Stan would keep on taking and bitching about not having it all while someone he dared called his friend was denied even the most basic gift of human compassion.
Stan had never hated himself more, always letting emotions and senseless passion rule him and never just thinking, blind to someone so close to him dying steadily inch by inch. Maybe he wouldn't ever love Kenny like Kyle seemed to, and logic was useless in the face of irrational jealousy, but he could love Kenny like he should've been loving him from the time they formed a bond in preschool that hadn't severed in the years they stayed together, even through death.
Kenny didn't complete Stan like Kyle did. He didn't finish his sentences, or chastise him for playing Guitar Hero or WoW instead of doing his homework, or sneak off between classes to make out in the janitor's closet. He didn't know what to do with Kenny other than use him as a familiar background prop who didn't speak, didn't do anything, but after this night where the relationship between the three of them had flown past simple friendship, Stan knew he couldn't allow himself to settle with meaningless blow jobs even knowing what Kenny's silent, talented mouth was capable of.
He didn't know if he could fall in love a second time...but he did know it was too late to stop.
~fin