Author's Note: my second writing up on here! gasp. i, uh, wrote this on a whim. i don't know where i'm going with this story, if anywhere. i just finished reading great gatsby &i'm reading catcher in the rye &i just wanted to experiment with more imagery &personality. frankly, i'm a nervous fuck &publishing things is terrifying, so suggestions welcome/collabs etc., just, uh, message me. i don't own south park, blah blah blah.


It was all so pointless. He felt his mind struggling with the thick confusion of the pills. He sipped at his coffee spastically yet monotonously and felt his stomach's instantaneous desire to reject it. The medication, they said, would help. But past the thick, he felt his muted anxiety, tirelessly churning.

The drugs were a distractor, nothing more. His thoughts "cycled", they called it. Death, coffee, obsessive, compulsive, worry... He was afraid. At times he thought it was everything else. But in the dark of night, he knew it was himself. Back in the dark crevices of his brain leaked doubt.

The popular opinion was that love is beautiful and innocent. But to Tweek, it made his stomach churn and his bones hurt. More than anything, his mind cycled Craig , Craig, Craig. It was exhausting, and his eyelids hurt as he found himself stuck on the subject. Shaking from head to toe, Tweek stood up and trembled towards his open window. Somehow, he managed to light a cigarette. Clenching the filter hard between his lips, he gasped the taste in.

It was Craig who had introduced him to the habit. Tweek remembered the blue-hat clad boy at a snide thirteen, laughing at Tweek's sputtering as he took his first drag. They'd known each other for as long as they could remember, but they didn't reallyknow each other until middle school. Craig, monotonous and uncaring, had skulked into the office during his first week of middle school and seated himself in the childish plastic seat next to the frail blonde. Tweek was waiting for counseling; the school was initially frightened by his nervous habits, acted politely concerned for a while, then simply gave up. Craig, again, had met trouble by overuse of the middle finger. The coffee-addled boy had been more of a nervous wreck than usual. The office was pressuring for Tweek. Craig raised an eyebrow at the sickly pale preteen as he rattled the pair of chairs due to his shaking. A large tremor ran through the blonde and he choked out repeatedly "idon'tknowidon'tknowidon'tknow". Tweek suddenly seemed to notice the boy next to him and his eyes widened. His lips parted as if he had something to say, but the administrator shouted his name and he jerked out of his seat without another word.

As lunch rolled around the same day, Tweek had arrived at his usually abandoned table to find Craig seated across from Tweak's usual spot, eyes glazed over. Tweek hesitantly sat down and sipped coffee from his endless thermos. He silently noticed Craig's stubbornly set jaw. Tweek stared blankly at his bruised, bony knuckles for a few moments before allowing himself to steal another glance at the other boy. Eyebrows knotted in frustration and mouth in a hard line, he was staring intently at something unknown. Suddenly he locked eyes with the blonde, and for a moment, something unreadable flickered across Craig's eyes and as Tweek's lips nervously twitched out curse words, he noted the ghost of an odd smile on the hat-clad boy's face.

Chuckling emptily, Tweek smiled, chewing his cigarette. Following that day, he had found Craig waiting for him every lunch. Initially, Craig had been afraid he would murder him, and he had sat silently at the table, turning over his prospective murder plans. He hadn't trusted him then. He still didn't trust much. He didn't trust most "facts", let alone people. He didn't even trust himself. Tweek's world was unsteady, a stack of cards, a glass house. The dust of turmoil never settled in his mind. He had many fears. His therapist asked recently if he was afraid to die, but it wasn't that. It was the fact that you never know. Anything. The world was unpredictable. He would never know how he would die or when, or what would happen in the future, and how was he supposed to prepare? Nothing was certain. Everytime he thought he was getting better, improving somehow mentally, that thought collapsed him. He feared the unknown, and that was everything. Smoking was his way of coping, of perhaps knowing something, a way out of this life, an expected twist.

He snatched the cigarette from his teeth and rubbed it out furiously against the bottom of his trash can. As he glanced at the clock (4:00 AM), his lip twitched. The only sad, sure thing, he noted, was that his best friend (and strictly nothing else,) was the only thing he had ever desired.