Based entirely on the last two minutes of "My Future Self n' Me," this story deals with alternate universes, time travel, flashbacks, and het pairings.

--

--

--

One day when Eric Cartman was nine years old, he got bored. Kenny had been exorcised from his body, so he couldn't argue with him, and Stan and Kyle were stuck in New York waiting for their parents to wire them the money for tickets home, so he couldn't argue with them. So Cartman did what he always did when he got bored: he figured out a way to piss people off and get paid while doing it.

He conned a back-alley store from a hooker and started the Parental Revenge Center of Western America, exacting revenge on Craig's and Clyde's parents. He also took the opportunity to pour sugar into the Broflovskis' cars' gas tanks and called in a freebie. Looking to expand his clientele, and thus make more money, he eventually put out a newspaper ad, which Stan and Butters answered.

Cartman made a good twenty-five dollars out of the business, but all that talk about future selves had gotten him to thinking. So when Mrs. Marsh gave him a box of cookies, he went home and didn't eat them.

His new resolve to eat right and study harder was immediately tested when they had to give a report on what the founding fathers would have thought about the war. But he'd buckled down and done it - not that it had mattered in the end, because before they could present it the pro-war people and antiwar people broke into a big fight and burned down the stage. The fire predictably spread to the rest of the town, and they all had to live in shacks until the adults finally Got Over It and rebuilt the town.

He'd studied and put together a good presentation for the Cultural Diversity day they had a few months later, but had gotten beaten by Kyle because the Jew Rat put on a nice sweater. Cartman first took his revenge on him by filling his parents' gas tanks with sugar again, then decided there was real power in nice sweaters and took to wearing them more often, which ended up winning him a trip to Casa Bonita for Kyle's birthday.

Though Kyle's mother's car had broken down on the way there. Apparently, something clogged up the fuel filter. Cartman couldn't imagine how that had happened.

Life continued in this vein. Cartman grew up and slimmed down, until Clyde became the fattest kid in school - though Kyle still stubbornly referred to him as 'Fatass.'

"You're always going to be the Fatass, even if you aren't a fatass," he'd explained irritably in middle school. Cartman had sweetly suggested that he was on crack, or maybe the fuses were shorting out in his Jew-brain because it just didn't have the capacity to comprehend his magnificence.

Of course, Eric Cartman was an asshole. He was a narcissistic, sadistic psychopath, and getting thin and studying didn't change that. He still walked all over his mother, but over the years it evolved from him screaming until he got his way to him simply being smarter than her.

But Cartman came to find that people were much more eager to overlook a person's utter dickery when the person in question was attractive and intelligent. So although his friends-who-really-weren't-friends-in-the-conventional-sense-of-the-word still hated him, with good reason, Cartman found it was suddenly easier to date. He was with Lexus briefly, but he decided her spending habits were counterproductive to his goal to make a million dollars. He hit on Shelly a few times because he thought the look on Stan's face when he did it was hilarious, and then Heidi became his steady girlfriend.

The basis of his attraction was that she was an unapologetic bitch. It worked for him, for a long time. They dated almost entirely through high school. But then, while she slacked off as he filled out college applications, he came to the inevitable conclusion that she just wasn't motivated enough for him. He wanted someone with plans as big as his. He wanted someone who was driven, who knew exactly what they wanted out of life, and were prepared to get it but any means necessary.

In short, Wendy Testaburger.

Wendy had always been on the edge of his radar. She'd had to be, seeing as she was Stan's on-and-off-again girlfriend. And they were in a lot of the same after-school events, like the debate team. And they were competing for valedictorian.

"Forget it, Cartman," Kenny had said, attempting to intervene for Stan's sake. But telling Eric Cartman to forget about something he wanted was about as pointless as telling a politician not to lie. It was when Wendy beat him for valedictorian that cinched his decision. She was just about to be off-again with Stan, and Cartman decided to do something very impressive and very stupid to get her attention.

A week later they were dating, and Cartman was rubbing it in Stan's face. Stan bitched about it to Kyle like the pussy he was, Kyle showed an amazing amount of patience for his friend's pathetic emo-ness, and eventually Stan got over it.

Cartman went to a university. He'd had to come up with various schemes to make the money to pay for it. After all, his mother was getting on in the years, and could no longer support her son by whoring herself around town and posing for Crack Whore Magazine. He studied business and was, naturally, brilliant at it.

But Cartman's big break came when he returned to South Park one summer to visit his mother and Kenny. Kenny had, quite predictably, not gotten any farther than high school. Instead, he had knocked up Bebe Stevens - who was still attending college regardless - and was serving coffee at Benny's.

The summer pretty much sucked ass. Cartman had to stop bringing Kenny over to his house, because he wouldn't stop hitting on his mother. And his mother wasn't exactly telling him no. When Kenny wasn't checking out his mother's ass, he was shoving baby photos under his nose. Kenny was completely enamored with his daughter, who was under Bebe's mother's care until Bebe finished college.

One morning, when he felt he couldn't deal with his mother or Kenny for another minute without killing them both and grinding them up the garbage disposal, he took a little walk to work off the rage. And it was by complete chance that he ran into those Star Trek nerds that lived next door to Kyle, out working on a time machine similar to the one that had nearly sent them all back to third grade.

If several years of studying business in college had taught Cartman anything, it was how to recognize an idea worth stealing. He dug his old Mission Impossible: Breaking and Entering Playset out of the attic and snuck into their house in the dead of the night, swiping the time machine. The next morning he caught the earliest plane back to his university, the time machine concealed safely in his suitcase. He stayed up late at night with the thing when he should have been studying, figuring out exactly how it worked and modifying it just enough so that he could say it was his own.

Eventually Cartman dropped out of college and started a small time travel company, which took off even faster than he'd expected. He hired Kenny and brought him out to perform the particularly vital role of testing the time machines. He marketed time travel as the ultimate of utilities - it provided every service, from an alternative to abortion to the best vacation money could buy. One small building turned into two, then seven, and before Cartman knew it he'd built an empire. As he got steadily richer he began setting aside a certain amount to send a monthly 'I have more money than you' parade to Kyle's house, complete with clowns, elephants, and a barbershop quartet.

When he and Wendy got married, it was less a matter of him proposing and more a matter of her telling him the time and date and that if he didn't show up at the alter she would have him poached and mounted on the wall as a warning to all men who crossed her. So of course Cartman showed up. They were using his money to pay for the reception, after all. They honeymooned in Paris, because Wendy said it was the most beautiful city in the world. Cartman quite agreed, from what he could see from their hotel window.

As Cartman's company expanded, Wendy climbed the political ladder. She was aiming to become a senator and finally do something about the suffering of bottle nosed dolphins. As they began to get into their thirties, they started discussing children. Wendy had always wanted them, ever since the egg project in fourth grade.

Wendy writhed in envy every time she saw Kenny and Bebe. Kenny had been turned into a sort-of member of the Stevens family; he came over for every holiday, he took them on weekend trips to fairs and amusement parks, and he watched over Bebe's mother when she twisted her ankle after trying to walk in her new, incredibly high heels. Sometimes he and Bebe dated and sometimes they didn't, and when they were twenty-five Bebe had gotten pregnant with another little girl.

Age had not mellowed Kenny in the slightest; he still overwhelmingly adored his daughters. If anything, age had made him more crazy, because now that his older daughter was twelve he'd taken on the rather obsessive task of keeping "perverted bastard boys like me" away from her.

He'd even bought a gun, though Bebe assured them it was entirely in jest. She hoped.

One day when Eric Cartman was thirty-two years old, seated at his desk in his private office, smugly overlooking his time travel company, with Wendy on his side and the possibility of a family on the horizon, he decided it would be a good idea to go back in time and congratulate his nine-year-old self on a job well done.

--

TBC