./Breathing for Soap, Chapter 1 – Closer to Home

A/N: Hey, dudes! Chay here :D This is not my first fanfiction – oh, hellz no. Not by a long shot. This IS a Craig x Tweek slash fic, though, and it IS rated M for certain... erm... situations... that shall be discussed in further detail at a later date. It's also the first fic that should probably be taken seriously, herp derp :I

Um. Hot gay action, drug use, and self-harm. Yay!

I'm just gonna say now that I'm a little review whore~ Flamers, idolizers, whoever the hell you are, come on at me, bro. I love you all just the same!

Things have a habit of coming to me when I need them the most. They don't ever think to ask; they just waltz right into my life like they fucking own the place. "Oh, what, this might be disturbing the perfectly stable existence of Craig Tucker? Fuck that shit! That kid's a pussy. He just likes to act like he's all tough and manly because he's scared of showing a little human emotion. Isn't that right, chullo boy?"

...Yeah, sometimes I wanna punch a cunt, too.

Well, this... particular thing decided to occur during the most beautiful time of day, aka the time of day when fucking with me is possibly the worst decision one could ever make. Not quite night, but not quite dawn, either. Somewhere around five, when the sun is just barely trying to struggle through the clouds, to dispel the wispy layers of fog that gathered while it was asleep. When the world is somehow brighter, so crisp and stark that it feels like even one articulate thought will break the spell. Then, the birds haven't even awoken. Your breath catches in your chest, because you don't want to breathe, don't want to risk exhaling too hard and dissolving the illusion yourself, before it's had the chance to really play out...

I was sitting in the rocking chair by my window with my face pressed up against the screen. The wind hadn't decided whether or not it wanted to pick up, and no cars raced down the road to make the decision for it. The only noise was the clack, clack of my phone as I slid the keyboard in and out.

I didn't need my cellphone that morning; it was there of its own accord. No one was ever up at such a tender time, anyway. They would all be asleep, but I was better off for it. It left more of the stoicism for me...

Briefly, the face of an insomniac flashed through my mind. By the time I'd registered the fact that his wild hair was a bright lemon blonde, my subconscious had already locked him safely away. He had been gone for far too long – no point in reopening old wounds.

I shook my head, letting my chin drop to my chest. I stared at my phone, now resting in my lap, half-frustrated that I hadn't been able to enjoy Craig time properly. I was about to give up on getting any sleep at all, for once, when my phone buzzed. Yeah, that's right, it fucking buzzed. Before sunrise. On a school day.

"Wha-? Fuh-?" I grumbled, snatching it up. The screen flashed a notification for a new text message, but didn't show the sender. I opened it regardless.

It took me a full ten minutes to register the meaning of the three little words that glared at me as the sun poked over the mountain.

I came back.

No. No. Nobody pulls shit on Craig Tucker. I am not going to think about this, I am not going to dare to hope that it's him... He's already come to mind once this morning; I don't need this again.

But the longer I looked at it, the more I doubted that this was a hoax. With my heart strangling itself in my throat [little bastard knows it's not allowed to wander, dammit], I clicked through to see who had sent the message.

"It can't fucking be..!"

I found my way to my wreck of a desk without meaning to at all, rifling perhaps angrily through my drawers, unable to process what was happening. My brain was stuck in this ridiculous white haze as I came across my address book at last. I flipped through it with urgency, scanning the pages, finding what I couldn't admit that I wanted, running my eyes over it until they began to water...

The number on the page matched the one from my phone, and yet I still couldn't believe it.

Suddenly, it was all I could to to keep myself from crying out as I launched myself onto my bed, where the traitorous bit of machinery was undoubtedly waiting to laugh in my face when I found out this whole fucking thing was too good to be true.

The fingers that typed out the response surely did not belong to me. I could not feel the lenience of the keys below them any more than I could feel their absurd trembling. My eyes watched anyway, transfixed, as the message was sent. They still hadn't blinked when my phone vibrated a few minutes later.

Tweek.

It's me.

It hadn't been a question, but he'd understood me regardless.

The heavy steam from the shower did nothing for the shaking. I stood with my arms wrapped around myself in the stream of scalding water, waiting to stop trembling.

All of this shit was so unlike me. I didn't know what to do, didn't know where to turn my thoughts. I couldn't turn them to nothing; the second reality kicked back in, that traitor of a heart decided it was a good time to start flipping again.

"He's just a fucking kid!" I screamed at myself, stomping my feet and slamming my forehead against the wall of the glass stall. "A fucking kid who's been gone for five fucking years, but still a fucking kid!"

think I need to explain.

Tweek Tweak and I were best friends the week after our fight. Inexplicably, I liked him. He squeaked like Stripe, and he was unpredictable, predictably. Sure, he was prone to spastic fits, but there was a pattern – a method to his madness, if you will. After spending a few days in the same hospital room, I was able to understand that pattern. First step: something would spook him.

Even the tiniest little thing was enough to set him off. The passage of footsteps in the hall, the beeping of our life monitors, or even an awry thought [I could tell when his thoughts were becoming worrisome when his noises picked up]. Second step: he'd squeal.

Like, a legit scream. And a jump. And why not throw in a couple good twitches, while we're at it? He'd let out a decent string of Jesus-related crap, too. Depending on what it was that got to him, that could last quite a while. Which leads us to the third step [my favorite]: the calming.

For a long time, the only thing that could get Tweek to settle down was a good long swig of coffee. I swear, that little shit's got coffee stains on his DNA, that's how bad it is. After a while, the coffee lost its title as the one thing good for relaxing Tweeks. It was a few months after we really became friends, I think. A few months of us doing absolutely everything together – eating, sleeping, contemplating getting into trouble but never doing much – and I was his coolant, too. Sometimes, he'd even rush into my arms before going for his thermos, and it was times like those that made me sooo happy.

We didn't even have to be doing anything. Simply being, and being close to each other, was enough to keep us contented. But, of course, spending all that time together meant that we really got to know each other's quirks. The second anything was amiss with him, I'd home in on it. That's why his freak outs fit into my boring life: I knew every aspect of them inside and out, like we were two halves of a fucking whole, or something gay like that.

So when he started acting withdrawn when we were alone, I knew something was up. He would look down, pull on the hem of his shirt and bite his lip... but that was it. No twitching. No gahs or eeks or nnghs [I enjoyed them the most, those nnghs]. Just... silence.

And he knew me well enough that even getting him to see my stern expression caused the spilling of the beans.

"...I'm moving."

I remember that day so well; at least the part that matters, that is. We were sitting on Tweek's brown shag carpet, and I was thinking about how it used to be brown as I watched him. I didn't want to do anything other than find out what had been eating him, but once I knew, I'd have done anything to make him take it back. I couldn't lose him... Not Tweek! Anyone but Tweek!

"You aren't," I wanted to deadpan... It came out as a gasp.

His eyebrows crinkled with pity as he stretched out a tentative hand to me. "Cr-Craig..."

"I said you're not." I didn't want his pity. I didn't want him to know how my ribs were cracking as we spoke... only it wasn't really my ribs. It was my heart.

"I-it's not my f-f-fault!" he wailed, flopping forward to bury his face in my lap. I remember flinching upward, as if initiating contact myself would jinx something and end up making our time shorter.

...I couldn't say anything as he sobbed onto me. There was nothing for Craig Tucker to say. I could only rest my palm on his neck and scrunch up my nose to combat the tears that I could not let show. I knew that, if he saw how broken I was, life would be that much harder for him.

So I let him go. Not knowing who to be mad with, I channeled my anger through a pen as I scrawled out my cell and home numbers. I made him do the same, and as ridiculous as it sounds, that scrap of paper was the last thing I had to remind me of him.

It still has its very own page in my address book, and it's what spurred me to be... self-destructive when I knew that he was not coming back. There are blood spatters on it from the very first time, in fact.

But that was all a long time ago. Sixth grade... we had just barely survived the first month of middle school, and his parents decided to rip my one real human connection from me.

Now, about to start my second month of eleventh grade, I don't know who they expect me to forgive.

I think the first course of action should be to get out of the fucking shower.