The King, the Paladin, and the Ranger

Glass Shard

"A sharp broken piece of glass, full of potential."

The young adult population of South Park was quickly disappearing, and Stan didn't even notice. To be fair, he hadn't left the house in five days. And that last trip had just been to the gas station for a sandwich and a six pack. How was he supposed to know that people—specifically the ones that he'd spent hours each day playing with as a kid—were vanishing? It's not like anyone was talking about it or anything.

Stan slumped up the stairs of his childhood home. He didn't look up at the framed photos along the way, knowing each one by heart. There were the old family ones that'd been on the wall since his sister was in elementary school. Those were the ones that always gave him the hardest stares when he accidentally looked up at them, caught in one of his down states. Even after six years, it was hard to see his mom's face. He couldn't not compare it to the way it looked the last time he saw her in the flesh, sunken cheeks, yellowed skin. Stan had to pause halfway up his ascent to shake himself free of the images. Not looking at the pictures could actually be worse.

The other photos, the ones put up in more recent years, weren't all that bad. They still made him feel kind of funny, but at least he could smile at them too. They all featured Butters' sunny face, some with Stan by his side. Pictures of themselves as awkward teens at prom, the one of Butters holding their first cat (this was Stan's favorite, Butters wearing an oversized mint sweater and a tender smile), and, most recently, their engagement photo. He hadn't wanted to do something as silly as going to the mall to get photographed in celebration of finally proposing, but Butter's eyes got misty just mentioning it. The guy was a sucker for anything resembling a traditional life.

When he reached the second floor, his bare feet shuffled to the room he'd had his entire life. It was overcrowded now. Their queen-sized bed ate up the majority of the floor space, and the closet couldn't contain both the men's clothes without some, mostly Stan's, spilling out. At least it smelled nice though. Butters was a candle addict. He constantly came home a few and shoved them on top of any free surface that he could find. Even when they weren't burning, Stan could still smell them. In the bedroom, they were mostly lilac with a few vanilla ones thrown into the mix. Unruly tufts of yellow hair came to his mind as he crawled under their heavy comforter. With a groan, he settled onto his left side. The digital clock on Butter's makeshift TV dinner tray-turned-nightstand said that it was only four in the afternoon. He had hours left to go.

It wasn't a peaceful sleep, but when was it ever anymore? Stan's consciousness flickered in and out throughout his six hour long nap, if it could even be called that. Everything was silhouetted in the room when he finally willed himself awake. Usually, he'd be able to see lights from downstairs, but that evening it was as dark as the rest of the house. Stan winced as he got to his feet. His whole body felt sore, like he'd been running drills all afternoon instead of lazily moving from one dozing place to the next.

There wasn't any light seeping from under the door to the room that once belonged to his parents. He couldn't remember the last time he crossed paths with their roommate. That wasn't much of a surprise. Craig was sort of a cokehead and could be gone for days at a time.

What was strange to Stan was the fact that Butters wasn't downstairs playing in the kitchen. And he wasn't outside in his puffy pastel coat shoveling out the driveway. Stan flipped up every light switch he passed on his fuzzy mission to find the blonde man. Butters didn't like the dark. When he'd walked through the entire house and still couldn't find him, Stan lowered onto the couch. He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to fight against the dull headache that was with him more often than not. "What the hell, dude?" he muttered to himself. Usually Butters left a message when he was working late or something, but Stan didn't see the inbox light flickering on the landline's base.

He stared at the television to pass time. After about twenty minutes, he decided to turn it on to appear less pathetic. All he could find was news and infomercials. He stopped it on an ad for some British vacuum.

Stan spent the rest of his evening lost inside his head. His body ran on autopilot, only getting up to take a piss once or to grab a fresh can of cheap beer whenever his went empty. He accidentally knocked an empty bottle of Korbel off the counter on one of his trips. He only slightly registered it as the one that he and Butters had polished off the other day to celebrate some anniversary. Stan tried to remember what it was for and how long it'd been, not realizing that he'd stepped on a piece of the shattered green glass. It'd found a home in the bottom of his foot, leaving spots of blood trailing back to the couch. Had it been for their first kiss? That would have made it what, nine or ten years? Stan didn't know. Butters would know. He'd ask him whenever he came home.

It honestly hadn't taken much for Stan to begin his descent into a life filled with up periods and down periods. It actually probably started when he was a child, living with his parents' unhappy marriage. But there was no certain event, no fight or idiot ploy of his father's prominent enough for Stan to mark as his tipping point.

As embarrassing as it was for him to admit, even to himself—no especially to himself—the event that started him down his road of slight alcoholism and social isolation was his best friend moving away when they were twelve. Stan hadn't even talked to Kyle in nearly that many years and he still automatically referred to him as his best friend. Pathetic. He took a large gulp, downing half a can. He couldn't bring himself to reimagine their parting conversation. He hated himself, but not enough for that torture. Not that night at least.

Stan wasn't enough of a loser to allow his life to become utterly wrecked over just the loss of a friend—not even Kyle. That'd simply been the start of him turning to the occasional bottle of beer or shot of whiskey to combat sadness or apathy instead of boredom. No, what really got him going waited a few years later. He was fourteen when his mom came home and sat him down to tell him she had cancer.

She was diagnosed with a late stage colon cancer when she was only forty-one years old. She died before she was forty-three. Stan clenched a fist with the hand that wasn't holding a drink. He hated the doctors that diagnosed her more than anyone else in the world. If he knew who exactly it was, he could totally see himself showing up at their fancy mansion and kicking their ass. His mom had been perfectly fine. And then that jackass tells her she has some pretty bad disease. Her health had deteriorated so quickly… she was an invalid in less than a year. And they just kept on piling the bad news, never giving much hope. It went to her kidneys. It went to her stomach. Her liver.

He'd heard talk of people theorizing that she'd been living sick and just keeping it a secret for years. They never had the balls to suggest this to his face.

His mom wasn't supposed to be the one who died young. If anything, he figured Randy to be the one to kick the bucket. He would have gone down kicking and screaming, demanding all sorts of radical treatments that no insurance would cover. He wouldn't have left with the heartbreaking grace of his mom. She'd taken a mercy dose of lethal medication, perfectly legal in their state. It was okay for her to gather everyone around to watch her sputtering last breaths, but he'd been picked up by the cops when he was found out after dark three nights later, too plastered to even remember his dad's name, let alone his cell phone number.

If he wasn't setting his burning hate towards the nameless faceless doctor or himself, then it was aimed for Randy. The bastard had quit drinking after his mom died. He stopped coming up with ridiculous ideas and he even worked out. Fucking tool. Randy remarried to a lithe little blonde with two young kids when Stan was seventeen.

To be fair, his dad wasn't a complete douche. Although he no longer touched a drop of booze, he wasn't all judgey towards Stan when he sometimes went overboard. And he didn't sell the house or move his new family into it. Instead, he let Stan and Butters rent it. They didn't pay that much, especially with Craig's sporadic rent payments. His dad probably lost money with the mortgage each month. Still, that didn't excuse the fucker for being a shit husband to his mom and then a great guy to some other woman.

Stan woke up when the midmorning sun poured in through the window and smacked him in the face. Like most days in recent weeks, his first thoughts revolved around feeling like he was going to die. A sour taste coated his mouth and his headache was now pounding louder than a kindergartener given a drum set. Usually this was it, aside from the general aches he seemed to always be feeling lately. But that morning also gifted him a sharp pain in his foot. It radiated up his leg. With a grunt, he pulled his leg onto his lap and investigated the bottom of his foot. The curved nickel-sized piece of glass had remained jammed just below the front pad. He pried it out with a clumsy hand, looking away when two spots of fresh blood mixed with the dark crusting surrounding the double cut. "Gross," he sighed to himself.

As an engaged man, his first instinct should have been to track down his missing partner, to at least make sure he was safe. Stan did not do this. He dully wondered where Butters could be as he got to work cleaning the mess he'd made the previous night. It wasn't until several hours later that he pulled the list of phone numbers off the corkboard in the kitchen. The elegant looping style of Butters' penmanship made him grin the slightest bit.

First he tried the clinic, where Butters worked as a receptionist most mornings. Stan had been furious when he learned that he'd taken his mother's previous job a few years ago. His anger washed away when he came home with a nostalgic scent. Purell and rose air freshener. He braced himself as the phone rang. Every day, Stan hated the idea of interacting with anyone other than the few people who managed to hang onto the edges of his comfort zone, just a little bit more. "Good Morning, Tom's Rhinoplasty, how may I direct your call?" a woman's voice asked with a crack. Definitely not Butters. Even if it had been a man, Stan would have been able to tell immediately. Butters would have been more enthusiastic and asked how his day was going.

"Uh yeah, I was just calling to see if Stotch showed up today?"

"Who?" they asked. Stan imagined they were sneering at him.

"Leopold Stotch." He hated saying that name. Other people could call him that, but whenever Stan said his full name, Butters flinched. The clinic wouldn't allow him to go by his lifelong nickname, stating that it wasn't professional or some bull like that. "He works the reception counter." The lady on the other end of the phone must have been new; it wasn't like there were a whole lot of employees there.

"I think you must have the wrong phone number. Nobody by that name works here."

Annoyed, Stan pushed the button to hang up the phone without saying anything else.

The next place to try was at the chain pet store in the next town over. Butters had been pulling late afternoon and evening shifts there for a year or so. He'd gotten a second job when Stan had proved himself incapable of handling a steady one for more than four or five months. He promised Butters that he would try again at that new Pizza Hut in town, but it still wasn't open yet. Stan was transferred twice before receiving a line about nobody with the name of Butters working at the store. He rubbed the back of his head hard enough to snag out a few hairs. Somebody had to have been playing a sick joke on him.

He really didn't want to resort to this, but Stan found himself digging through the closet in a search to find his winter coat and gloves. He was one arm into the patched coat when he realized that he was in the same checkered pajama pants and baggy shirt he'd been wearing for at least three days. There was no need to give them any more reason to hate him.

Stan ran through a quick shower, rinsing the grease out of his shaggy hair with just a touch of soap. He left the fogged bathroom and walked down the hall in just a towel. Along the way, he dared to knock at Craig's door. No answer.

The longer he took to leave—rubbing his hair dry, finding socks that didn't reek, even shaving his thick stubble—the stronger a panic rising in him began. Finally, he was starting to feel what he knew he should have as soon as he hung up the phone a second time.

Stan elected to walk to his destination, rather than shovel his truck out of the blanket of snow they must have gotten overnight. He sucked in a breath, burning his throat with the cold air and making his eyes water. Butters' tiny yellow sedan was parked at the curb. It was covered in just about as much snow as his truck. Stan approached it, his sneakers quickly becoming soaked as he rounded through the yard. There was a conspicuous clean patch on the windshield. Something sat against the cold wet glass. Stan pulled a soggy white square of paper off. Though the ink was smeared, he could make out that it was a parking ticket issued at the time of half past two in the morning. "What the hell?" He wiped away snow from the driver's side window and pressed his hand and face to the glass, searching for any sign of Butters. There wasn't any, nor were there any shoe prints to indicate where he might have gone after he parked. The flakes that were still floating down must have taken care of that.

Stan set back to his walk, taking a brisk pace. He was breathless by the time he was pounding on the door to Linda and Stephen's house. They weren't answering. He knocked at a constant rate, gaining force. By the time he could finally hear the lock moving from the other side, he thought he might break his hand.

"Yes?" Linda asked, her pinched face staring at him, lips curled down like the leaf of a wilting plant.

"Is Butters here?" He took a shallow gasp for air after pushing his question out. Hadn't he been an athletic kid? What the hell happened to him?

The slender middle-aged woman rolled her eyes and scoffed. "Who is it?" Stephen faintly called from somewhere in the house.

"It's no one," Mrs. Stotch answered her husband. She turned back to Stan. "You really need to keep your antics at home."

"Is he here?"

She sighed. "I feel sorry for you, I really do. What kind of a chance did you ever have with that father of yours?"

Stan growled and punched an open hand against the door frame. "Just answer my question! Do you know where he is?"

Linda jumped back a bit. Her eyes went wide before narrowing again. "Stanley Marsh, I have no clue as to who you are asking about. I suggest you move along now and bother someone else."

"What are you talking about?" he asked, a pleading tone mixing its way into his anger. "Can't you just tell me if you've seen him? I'm getting worried."

She gave him one last hateful look before slamming the door in his face. Stan turned around, but didn't have a clue as to where to go. He slumped against the door, sliding until his ass was sitting in the snowy front stoop.

He was a shitty fiancé. It was his fault that they'd forgone their cellphone plan. After their phones were cutoff due to lack of payment, he hadn't wanted to go out and try for another. Even after their income went back up again, he didn't want that commitment. That monthly financial burden. If he'd been a fucking man and kept a fucking job like everyone else in the world, then Butters would have a stupid fucking phone number that he could call.

He couldn't feel his legs by the time a squad car showed up, its silent lights appearing particularly aggressive against all whiteness of the snow. Stan had seen the officer a few times down at Skeeter's, but couldn't remember her name. Still, the burly woman treated him alright, even helping him walk with his numb legs to her car. She opened the back door and let him sit sideways in the seat, his feet on the ground. "What're ya doin' here, Marsh?" she asked. She wasn't wearing a brimmed hat, and her carroty hair was in a frizzy bun. He compared it to Kyle's, just as he did every other red head he encountered in life. As always, it didn't even come close.

"I'm just looking for Butters. He never came home, and they wouldn't even tell me if they've seen him." Stan figured if she knew his name, then she'd probably know who Butters was. There weren't many dudes who were into banging other dudes living in the quiet mountain town. At least, not openly.

"Who?" she asked. The question cut him.

He had to take a breath so that he wouldn't shout at the policewoman. "Butters? Their son?"

"Hm." She put her hands on her hips and distinctively looked away from him. "I'm not gonna pretend to know the Stotches well, but I know they've don't got a son. They don't have any kids."

All Stan could do was gape.

"Did ya want me to take ya home? If not, I've gotta bring ya in until ya sober up."

Stan didn't argue with her. His stomach churned queasily on the ride home. He had a feeling that he was being fed into another craziness of South Park.

People from his town knew better than to speak to outsiders about the events that took place there on a weekly basis. They'd be considered liars at best and locked up for being bat-shit insane at worst. Everyone from South Park knew this rule, and they followed it to the point where they barely mentioned past situations to each other.

At some point though, things began to change. Alien invasions and celebrity sightings became less of an occurrence. The town didn't need to be rebuilt every month or so. As his class grew older, they stopped being charged with insane situations, like internet shortages, Canadian wars, and keeping religious holiday secrets. Their problems became about mundane things like blemishes and having crushes. Stan couldn't think of a single person who was upset over this, and they all let the past be the past. After some years, he began to think that all their crazy hijinks were just their imaginations at work.

But now, he was starting to doubt that.

As soon as he was home, he raced upstairs. His feet began to warm and he was painfully reminded of the cuts in his foot. Stan ignored this though, grabbing the scrap of paper that contained his father's number out of one of his dresser drawers. He got Randy on the line after three failed attempts. His father impatiently told him that he had no idea what he was talking about when he asked about Butters.

The phonebook came out next. It'd been stored on the floor of the closet, at times being under wet boots. This showed in its wrinkled edges. Still, it was mostly readable.

First he called Token's family's house. Both he and Wendy lived there with their daughter, Sierra. The rich family of South Park had graciously taken in the pregnant teen, allowing their granddaughter to be raised with both parents in the same home. They'd yet to be in a place where they could move out. Sometimes Wendy made an effort to get in touch with Stan, usually bringing the pretty little girl with her.

Token's father answered and demanded to know who was calling after he asked if Token was around. Stan said that he was a friend of Wendy's, and was then told that he had a wrong number. He shakily set the phone down on the kitchen table in front of him. He hadn't seemed to know who Token or Wendy were, although he was pretty sure he'd heard Sierra giggling in the background.

Next Stan spoke with Liane Cartman. She sweetly told him that she had no idea who the Eric person he asked for was. Craig's younger sister answered her cell phone, a number that was jotted down in Butter's penned contact list for the house. He breathed a sigh of relief that she was still around. However, all hope from this was dashed when she said she didn't have a brother.

Call after call, Stan didn't receive much else other than confusion. The only person from his graduating class that he had any proof existed was Jimmy. He'd gotten stuck on the phone for forty minutes with him, having to hear about how he was potentially getting a spot on that reality show for comedians. "You know, like that pri-pri prick with cerebral pa… cerebral p-p-p… cerebral—" Stan cut him off before he could finish and went on with his search.

Several times throughout the day, Stan thought about getting in a quick drink. He even thought about lighting one of the no-doubt stale cigarettes he had stashed away in the pocket of his flannel shirt. He dismissed these urges though, feeling too overwhelmed to take any sort of break in his frantic search. He pulled back at his hair after every failed attempt to find someone. It was getting dark out by the time he was defeated enough to call it quits.

Stan went out to Butter's car and watched the sunset from the passenger's seat. He hadn't bothered to move the old thing. He never liked driving Butter's car. Stan was a lot taller and always had to adjust the seat before he was comfortable enough to drive. And, now that Butters was caught up in whatever shit storm was plaguing the town, it felt wrong to do so. He sighed and absently hit his fist against the armrest a few times. When he was eight, this sort of thing would have been way easier. He bit back a mad chuckle. "I guess I'm out of practice," he said to the empty car. Stan proceeded to stare at the falling sun, letting the bright colors burn his eyes and give him an excuse as to why they were starting to get wet.

An exhilarated shout startled him. "St-Stan!" He jolted off his side. Stiffness in his back accompanied his usual pains. He wiped his fingers at his cheek and found that they came away covered in dusty dirt. Confused, he looked around at his surroundings, his eyes taking in everything even through his daze. He was outside, but it wasn't winter. There wasn't any snow and he wasn't freezing his balls off. Skyscraper-like trees towered over him, their trunks covered in scratchy bark and a giant poof of branches covered in rounded leaves about two-thirds up.

Someone ran toward him, up the dirt path he'd been laying on. He could place their voice, knew it very well, but he couldn't actually picture their face at first. Thoughts swam in the confusion flooding his head. Features of everyone who he still cared for mixed together, conglomerating in an androgynous red fro'ed, kind smiled, person who still hadn't completely lost the baby weight. He rubbed at his eyes, trying to get rid of the monster he'd created.

Just as Stan got to his feet, Butters collided into him without ever having slowed his speed. He didn't mind though. The pain that shot through his tired body was well worth being able to tightly squeeze Butters' thin frame against him. He rubbed his hands all across the blonde's back in a near frenzy. Butters giggled into his chest. "Aw Stan, I knew you'd show up for me, I just knew it! Even when all the other guys said you wouldn't, I just told them to keep quiet." Stan didn't respond, didn't yet ask any questions about what was going on. For the moment, he was alright just holding Butters, knowing that he was real.

Eventually the reunion hug broke. It was Butters who untangled himself and took a step back. He dabbed at his eyes with the backs of his hands. After a moment to settle down, his shaped eyebrows knitted. "What's wrong with your ears? They look funny."

"What?" Stan reached up to his ears, grabbing at what would normally be the tops of them. They didn't stop there, and his fingers followed them another two inches where they felt like they might have ended in a point. He brought his hands away as if he'd touched fire and gave a short shriek that he immediately prayed no one else heard. "What the hell?"

"They're cute," Butters informed him, as though that had been his primary concern.

"Butters, what's going on? Where are we?"

"Well, uh, I don't really know. I woke up here just like you. I went up that way and some real nice people told me that everyone starts on this path, so I came back here to wait for you."

"Did you know who they were?"

His blue eyes flicked away and then returned. "No, I'd never seen them before. They were dressed kinda weird."

"Great," Stan muttered. "Maybe this is some kind of cult thing."

"I don't think so."

Stan sighed. He did not look forward to whatever the fuck was going on. It was one thing when they were kids and had that false sense of belief that everything would work out. Now that he was a cynical twenty-something year old, well, he wasn't sure things would turn out like they always had before. He held out his hand, which Butters took with a squeal. "Let's just get this over with."

Note: Thank you for giving this a shot and reading it! It's been awhile since I've tried writing fanfiction, so I'm pretty nervous about this. I welcome all feedback. :) I have the next two chapters written, but they still need editing. Hopefully they'll be up in a few days. Thanks again! :D