AN: Unadulterated emo to follow!
Craig realized that his dream was not real with sleepy, miserable, muted relief, as his cell phone screeched a pixilated rendition of the Red Racer theme, illuminating his blanket cave, his forearms, and shocking his retinas into pinpricks. If arms can stumble, his did so to reach the phone, flip it open, and gaze through slitted eyelids at the small, candid picture of his best friend above a timer marking off the seconds since he'd opened himself to communication.
"Wha." He was attempting to remember the exact plot of the dream—he remembered the general fear, of anxiety, a diminishing time limit or something, but not exactly what had happened to make him feel that way.
"Hihihi. Hi Craig! Gah!"
Drunk Tweek.
"Hey Tweek." He pushed at the hollow of his eye with the butt of his wrist, exploding one half of his vision into spirals and contrails and rushing checkerboards. "Where ya at, buddy?"
"Bebeeee's…dad's?" He let out a spiel of xylophone giggles. "There's like. Clyde's here. Token was but he left. Cuzza. Something. Kevin was. And. Uh."
"Tweek I don't care. Do you guys need a ride? Do I need to come get you?"
"Urrr. Gah. I mean. Um."
"Okay, I'll be there in just a little while, okay? Stay up, okay?"
"I'm sorry."
"It's alright." He'd punch him when he wasn't stranded and inebriated and most likely alone. He clapped the phone shut to cease the tide of apologies likely to follow, groped blindly for his hat, his pants, and his jacket, and set out.
--
It had taken some deciding to choose between stealing his mom's car and his dad's. While his mom's stout compact had such benefits as a CD player and heating, it also had the handicap of cloth seats. In the end, he supposed a fucking freezing drive with a choice between a Billy Joel cassette or an Enya cassette would be the best steed for this mission—wet-and-wipe cleaning on the plastic seats would likely prove invaluable.
When Bebe's parents split in fifth grade, her dad moved forty five minutes north, to an area with old, well-spaced houses and wildlife wandering between yards. It seemed to Craig to be the kind of place he was always driving through at night, craning his neck for suicidal deer, trying to x-ray the scrubby woods that lined the highway for hitchhikers eating questionable shish kebabs. Why anyone would choose to live in this area with even the vaguest knowledge that the sun ever went away was beyond him—
"Jesusshitchrist." His heart exploded as his headlights saturated a hopping figure on the side of the road, which proved to be Tweek after brief, secondary glance—although he had guaranteed himself palpitations for the next half an hour or so. He pulled up as gently as he could, the tertiary gaze showing Clyde, sitting Indian-style in the gravel, dozing with his chin in his hands.
He heard the tonal portion of Tweek attempting to get Clyde to stand up, as well as a silent act—lilting, kicking at his hip, physically opening his eyelid with his thumb, Clyde starting back and smacking Tweek in the face, but blinking awake. Tweek beamed and tittered around to the passenger side of the antique truck.
"Thank you so much I'm so sorry. Clyde's really really fargon. Wah! Far. Gone." Emitting these final syllables required a certain screwing up of his face, as if painful.
"Why weren't you guys inside?" Clyde was crawling into the tiny back seat on his hands and knees. He slumped face-first onto a tool box and ceased movement.
"Um! I didn't think you'd be able to find the driveway too easy. It is super dark." He laughed. "I don't know why I'm laughing. Gah." Craig smiled, because it was sort of funny, and he didn't know why either.
"But, dude, it's like negative everything outside. You didn't have to do that."
Clyde mumbled wetly and did a quarter barrel roll, burying his face in the frozen metal of his pillow.
"Hey." He just noticed a black parabola of a cut just obscured under Tweek's bangs. He gestured to it with one mitten, bottom lip sagged in concern. "How'd you get that?"
Tweek flattened his hair down with the cup of his palm, biting his lip. "Oh. Ah. I fell. I hit the coffee table. Or something. It was dark. Guh. Ha." He laughed again. And then wailed. Craig jerked hard at the sound, turning to see Tweek, forearms pressed side-by-side, face buried into the sleeves of his jacket, crying with childish hysteria, leaning his forehead onto his wrists and rocking back and forth so fervently he nearly threw himself out of the seat.
"Jesus, Tweek! What!?" He started to pull over to the shoulder, but Tweek released one arm to flap him onward—go, go. "Well what?"
Without a response but further terrified little half-screams, Craig could do nothing but drive, flicking his eyes over occasionally, as Tweek cried, rocked, dragged his knees up, buried himself in his own curled-up torso, and cried.
It took ten minutes or so for his to dissolve into little knife-like breaths. This seemed to Craig like the appropriate time to try again.
"What're you crying about?" He tried to be gentle, and most likely failed. It was hard to tell.
"I don't know. I don't even know. I'm tired. Gah. Ahhhah." Inhaleinhaleinhale, exhaaaale.
"You okay?"
"No. Probably."
"How'd you get that cut?"
"I fell. I—uhh—I wasn't lying." He jerked so severely he surprised himself, straightening out his skeleton with wide eyes and a tiny mouth. "I'm sad over stupid teenager stuff. Jesus. Maybe. God. Do you--I don't know."
"You're drunk, say whatever you want."
"Everyone keeps telling us to fucking live but I have no idea what that means. I'm wasting my life if I spend all my time studying. Gah. I'm wasting my life if I get shitty grades because I'll get a shitty job and live a shitty life. I'm wasting my life with my stupid relationships and any time I'm alone is wasted. Fnnikkin—Jesus. I don't know that the fucking shit I'm supposed to be doing. I don't even want to do anything. I don't." He gave another morose moan, clapped his hands over his mouth, tentatively released them, and continued his soliloquy. "What is living? God that sounds so retarded, but everyone keeps fucking--fucking telling me I'm not living, so what IS? Oh Jesus. I mean it's all just so stupid and hopeless. I don't even care about anything anymore. I'm just going to die, I might as well do it now so I don't have to suffer through all this not-living-just-eating-and-shitting. What's the point?" He sighed, deeply, and then inhaled painfully.
They drove in silence for a while.
"There's a point."
"What."
"Happiness?"
Tweek snorted. "I'm. Not. Happy." He jerked.
Craig watched Tweek's face for a second, him wiping snot off on his sleeve, shaking violently, glaring and leaking.
"You could be happy. In the future. You can kill yourself any time."
"I'm not gonna kill myself. Oh God. I don't have the balls for that. You know that."
"I didn't know any of this."
The car thudded hard over a bump. Craig shot his eyes back to the road, teeth clenched, and listened in horror as Tweek yelped, "Craig that was a cat!"
He threw the truck over to the shoulder, swearing a long, breathless chain, turned off the car, and leapt out onto the asphalt.
The headlights cast a dull, ugly glow on the stretch of empty space, occupied only by a blurry lump. He didn't hear Tweek get out of the car, but he was suddenly at his elbow, audibly shivering, the air shoving between his gnashed teeth.
"It's dead." Craig stated uselessly.
"Oh God."
He treaded closer, squatted down, and stared, as seemed to be his job tonight. From the shoulder up, it looked like a tableaux, open-eyed heavy grey cat on its side, back feet and tail, the middle section the only disturbance to its resemblance of a perfectly peaceful cat.
"Are there any houses around here? Was this somebody's?" He sighed. He'd never felt like such absolute shit.
"I don't think so. Oh God. Poor kitty. Craig why weren't you looking?"
"I was looking at you." He sort of wanted to pet it. He owed it something.
Tweek stood back by the driver's side door, wiggling, muttering, "Poor kitty, poor kitty," over and over.
Craig leaned close and whispered, "I'm sorry, kitty. I'm so sorry." This act itself was inevitably lame, yet so desolately dismantling, he felt a series of frail strings within him break, and he was crying now, too. Not sobbing, just a few tears dripping down his nose. "Tweek. Shove Clyde aside and get a couple of screw drivers out of the toolbox." Again, he heard no response, but after a few seconds a screw driver was being shoved into his peripheral vision.
He pulled off his jacket and placed it gently over the cat, scooping under, so he soon had a sanitary armful of corpse. Awkwardly, he got to his feet, marched to the side of the road opposite the car, and set it down gently in the grass that grew feebly past the gravel and asphalt.
Tweek followed. They knelt, forehead-to-forehead, working slowly, Tweek swaying, upturning the dry dirt in chunks with their tiny shovels to create a proper grave for the former living thing.
"All cats wanna do is survive." Tweek mumbled. "That is all they want. Breed and survive."
After a while, they both sat back on their haunches, and Craig wordlessly lowered the bundle within his jacket into the bottom of the hole, and they shoved the spare dirt back on, gently compacting it down, and sat, and watched the loose dirt.
"Sorry. I didn't. Agh. I didn't mean to unload on you like that. You woke up to gimme a ride and all. I'm sorry."
Craig shook his head, and shoved his way into a standing position, his knees cracking like fireworks. "Aw my feet are numb. Don't worry about it, man. You and Clyde oughta just stay at my house, you know my parents don't give a shit about anything."
"Gah! I wish I could sleep like Clyde. God. I'm not even drunk anymore. I'm actually hung over, I think. My head hurts." He pressed his fingertips to his temples as he followed Craig back to the car, crawled into the passenger seat, and sat properly. The murder still haunting him, he slowly pulled onto the deserted highway, eyes peeled for any movement whatsoever.
"Craig."
"Hm."
"Thank you for burying the—the cat."
Craig would have liked to look over to see the expression with which Tweek said this, but he had learned his Aesop for the night. "I didn't exactly do it as a favor to you."
"I—I know. But thanks. Eh! You know."
And he didn't press it, because he did know, and it was like a good joke—if you explained it you'd ruin it.
AN: One time me and some friends founds a dead cat by her driveway, and we had to bury it because it coulda been some kid's, and it fell half out of the pillowcase as I was trying to heave it up, and my friend jammed it back in with her bare hands, and I gave her a dollar and she licked her hand. Good times.