Winter was upon South Park once again, and it was so cold outside that Kyle couldn't help shivering from his seat on the bleachers. He burrowed his head down deeper into his red plaid scarf and cursed the way his green duffle coat seemed to be neither keeping in the heat nor blocking out the cold. His green hat had become too small for him too, so his head and ears were left bare. He almost wished to be out on the playing field with the football team, getting hot from running around. Stan looked warm doing it. He hoped that Stan's practice would be over soon, so that they could go home and he could be just as warm.

Kyle watched disinterestedly a little longer as Stan ran around after and bashed into other players in his chase for the football, but eventually returned his attention to his lap, with its knees knocked together in the chill, and the book laid open upon it, the pages being stopped from blowing in the breeze by his gloved hand at rest on them. He had almost finished Pride and Prejudice for English, and had decided to keep reading it whilst waiting for Stan to finish after-school practice.

"…his perfect indifference, and your pointed dislike, make it so delightfully absurd!" he read in his head.

"Sup, Jew!"

Kyle jolted, startled out of his reading reverie by the loud arrival of his friend. He looked up from his book to fix Cartman with a displeased glare. Cartman was such a heavy person, Kyle wondered how he had managed to sneak up on him so quietly without his large footfalls being heard.

"Hello, Cartman," he replied warily, on his guard. "What do you want?"

Cartman was stood on his knees on the bench row in front of Kyle. He was so tall that even though he was lower on the bleachers, his head was still in line with Kyle's, so that he grinned right in Kyle's face, looking far too pleased to see him for Kyle not to be on edge. Kyle pressed his knees tighter together, closing himself off, and leant back a little bit, defensively. But Cartman just leant in after him to ask, "What are you reading?"

"Pride and Prejudice," Kyle replied, as coldly as the weather. "What do you want?"

"What a gay book," Cartman complained, but he continued to grin as he did so.

"Don't use gay as a negative adjective," Kyle warned. "It's offensive."

"I'm gay," Cartman stated with a shrug, so casual about letting that fact be known ever since he had came out of the closet a couple of years ago in a hammy declaration during the school assembly that had put the drama department to shame, "so I can use the adjective however I want."

Kyle returned to his book with a huff, although only pretended to keep reading, just to get Cartman to leave him alone. "If you want to belittle your own people, fine. Just don't belittle mine."

"Jew," Cartman said defiantly.

"That's not an insult, Cartman. That's a fact. I'm Jewish and there is nothing wrong with that."

"Kyle, I could write a book about what is wrong with being Jewish. Hell, I could write a lot of books."

"No you couldn't. You can't write for shit, Cartman." Kyle lifted his hand and flicked his wrist in a shooing motion. "If you don't want anything then go away."

Cartman's face fell into a frown. "Wow. Am I not allowed to hang out with my friend or something? Christ!"

Against Kyle's wishes, Cartman got off of the bleacher bench in front of him, in favour of stepping over it and sitting next to Kyle on his. Kyle wasn't exactly ecstatic about having an audience when he was trying to read, but Cartman was his friend, and the bleachers weren't his property to claim or kick people off of, so he dealt with it. Besides, Cartman was radiating some nice body heat that didn't go unappreciated in the winter weather.

"Fine," he grumbled. "Just don't bother me."

"How would I bother you?"

"By existing."

"Ouch," Cartman laughed. "Harsh. Some friend you are." He continued to laugh, and Kyle smirked, finding his amusement contagious.

As laughter subsided, silence descended between them, so that the shouts of the players and scream of the whistle on the playing field were all the more prevalent. A huddle was called, by the looks of it, if the way the players all rushed into a circle in the centre of the field was anything to go by. Stan was amongst them, but before he could reach the huddle he glanced up at the bleachers – in search of his super best friend, no doubt.

Kyle watched as Stan looked up at him – saw them – and tilted his head and sent him an inquisitive look that he, from years of reading Stan's facial expressions, was able to decipher as, "Dude, what's Cartman doing here?"

Kyle shrugged at him in response, a roll of the shoulders that Stan knew meant, "Beats me, dude."

Stan nodded in understanding, obviously still a little befuddled, but quickly shook his head of the matter, and sent the pair of them a friendly wave. Kyle waved back, and watched as Stan retreated back into the huddle of the football team holding some sort of discussion.

"Why are you here instead of Wendy?" Cartman asked out of nowhere.

"They've broken up again," Kyle replied, not at all accusatory towards Cartman for not knowing his own friend's relationship status. It was so hard to keep up with Stan and Wendy's repetitive break-up-make-up sequence, after all. Kyle was only in the loop about it because he was the one Stan went to talk to about it every time it happened. "And I'm going to his place after this. We're going to do our math homework."

"Lame," Cartman declared without missing a beat.

Kyle huffed. "Just because you weren't invited doesn't mean you can diss it. Maybe if we'd known for sure that you'd actually work instead of just playing on Stan's Xbox then you would've been invited."

"Lame," Cartman repeated. "No thanks."

Kyle shrugged. "Fine, fail math. See if I care."

The hard truth was that Kyle did care – did care about the grades of his friends and how their futures would be affected by them. Cartman was uncaring in contrast, but that only made Kyle care all the more, on his behalf. Nonetheless, Cartman probably wouldn't fail anyway, Kyle knew. He was smart, when he tried, and he seemed to be very skilled at last-minute cram sessions the night before tests, able to retain vast amounts of information in one sitting. To Kyle, it was irritating and impressive of him all at once.

Just then, a particularly cold wind passed, and Kyle shivered as it seemed to whip right through him, making him hunch in on himself. "Brr!"

Cartman turned his head at the sound, to look him up and down, his face betraying nothing. "You cold or something?"

"Gee, what do you think?" The sarcasm in Kyle's voice was lessened by the way it shook.

Cartman did not reply to that. However, after a short pause, Kyle noticed, out of the corner of his eye, Cartman lifting the arm closest to him, and reaching out with it. He looked to be intent on wrapping it around him, and for some reason that realisation made Kyle's heart thud. Cartman stopped his advance a few inches short of Kyle though, and seemed to think better of it as he withdrew his arm back to his side.

Kyle didn't know how to feel about that. On one hand, a warm hug – even a half-hug with one arm – would have been appreciated. On the other hand, it was Cartman. Then again, Kyle didn't find himself thinking that other hand to be so awful after all, and he really didn't know how to feel about that. So wrought with inner turmoil was he that he didn't hear the papery rustling beside him, and was only pulled from his thoughts when Cartman asked, "Doughnut?" Kyle looked up to see a fried, sugary ring being held out for him. Cartman had another one in between his teeth.

"Uh… Sure?" Kyle said unsurely, a little hesitant in his surprise. He took the doughnut from Cartman's hand, their fingers brushing on the pass-off in a way that Kyle's mind seemed to find important enough to notice and plaster to the forefront of itself.

Cartman removed his own doughnut from his mouth, a quarter bitten out of it, and aggravated Kyle by chewing as he spoke. "I got 'em from some food stand set up near the park."

Kyle raised a brow as he raised the doughnut to his lips. "You were in town? Why did you come all the way back to the school?"

"It's a free country, Jew. I can walk where I want." Cartman took another bite out of his doughnut, and leant forward with his elbows at rest on his knees to eye the practice game down below. "I don't like going straight home after school. It's boring as heck."

Kyle could only imagine. Cartman's mom was always going out to see her "friends" – more often than in the past since Cartman had reached an age where he was capable of looking after himself – so his house was probably empty and quiet most days. Kyle, who had his brother and mother and father, couldn't envision such a house.

"So you walk around a lot then?" he asked, surprising himself with how genuinely curious he sounded.

Cartman shrugged nonchalantly. "Yeah, I suppose." He turned to grin at Kyle, just as Kyle finally bit into his doughnut. "Guess you can't call me lazy anymore, huh?"

"Whatever," Kyle said, muffled behind the doughnut. "Maybe you walk, but you're still too lazy to do school work. Put some of the effort spent walking into your studies instead, and maybe then I'll quit calling you lazy."

"Is that so?" Cartman smirked in a way that Kyle couldn't quite decipher, though it seemed almost scheming, and sat upright once more. "Very well, Jew. You're on. You'd better keep to your word though. It'd be just like a sneaky Jew not to."

"Fuck you," Kyle retorted, muffled again.

Cartman chuckled. "I just gave you a doughnut and this is the thanks I get? What a waste. You're really ungrateful. Then again, I'd-"

"Expect nothing less from a Jew," Kyle finished for him, smiling triumphantly at the way Cartman blinked at him in a show of surprise. "That's what you were going to say, right? You're so predictable."

At first, Cartman just stared at him, his expression full of surprise and bewilderment; but then he smiled, his irises filling up with amusement and a glimpsed glimmer of something else that Kyle couldn't quite place.

"Well played, Jew," Cartman said before shoving the last bite of his doughnut into his mouth. That actually somehow filled Kyle with pride. He had won, in a way – won Cartman's approval. He didn't know why that mattered though. He didn't care what Cartman thought about him…

'But then,' Kyle wondered, turning his flushed face away from Cartman to watch the game, 'if I really don't care, how come I get offended when he calls me stupid or makes out that he can't stand me? How come I'm happy when he praises me and actually seems to like me?' Kyle was very good at answering questions – did it and did it well for all his homework and tests – and yet right then he couldn't answer the questions piling up in his mind, even though they were all about himself, and he should have known about himself, inside and out. Frustrated, he tore a bite out of his doughnut, in a way that probably looked quite savage of him, but God damn it, he was annoyed. Cartman always annoyed him though, one way or another, so no surprises there, all expectations of the brunet were being lived up to.

Since his eyes were elsewhere as he chewed the doughnut Kyle didn't notice the way Cartman was noticing him. He only became aware of it when it was too late.

"Hold still, Jew."

Kyle looked to his side to see Cartman, to be stunned still by the sight of his brown eyes fixed intently on his lips, his hand reaching out to his face. Kyle felt his heart thud again, and his cheeks warm and his breath puff out in a quiet gasp, as Cartman's thumb wiped the corner of his mouth, and came away with sugar on its pad.

"Got it," Cartman announced almost triumphantly, grinning amusedly. Kyle frowned back at him as he profusely wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, adamantly ignoring the strangely pleasant tingling sensation that lingered there.

"I could've gotten it myself, Fatass."

"A thank you would suffice," Cartman chuckled. He brought his thumb to his own mouth, and Kyle's cheeks turned hotter yet as he watched Cartman's tongue dart out from between his lips to lick the sugar off of it. For long seconds, all Kyle could do was look at those lips, thinking as he did about how nice a pair they were, and wondering why he hadn't noticed that about Cartman before. He was pulled out of it though, when he noticed that Cartman had been looking at him expectantly with an amused smile for the past few seconds. Flustered, Kyle quickly shot his head round to look back at his book.

"You didn't do it to help me," he said belatedly. "Your fat ass just wanted the sugar."

"You do realise I'm not fat anymore, right?" Cartman asked, seemingly thinking nothing of Kyle's strange behaviour.

"Not quite," Kyle replied. "But you almost are."

Cartman chuckled. "Harsh. And I am not. Admit it, I'm looking pretty good. See?" Out of the corner of his eye, Cartman flexed, not that Kyle needed to look to know that he did see. It hadn't gone amiss to him that Cartman had inherited his mother's attractiveness. He still shuddered when he admitted that much to himself though, so he wasn't about to admit it to Cartman.

"No, I can't see. I'm reading," he said, staring stubbornly at the words on the pages, but not really taking them in, too distracted by Cartman's presence to do so.

Cartman clicked his tongue irately. "Hey. Pay attention to me."

"Why should I?"

"Because I'm awesome and you're missing out."

Kyle scoffed and overtly rolled his eyes. "Yeah, right. Why don't you go home and kiss your own ass?"

"I don't have the gymnastic skills to pull that off, stupid."

"Because you're fat, huh?"

"No! And you just said I wasn't fat."

"No, I said you weren't quite, but almost were. Now you've bothered me though, so I'm calling you full-on fat again."

"Ay!" Cartman cried loudly. "That's it! Give me my doughnut back!" Defiantly, Kyle looked Cartman square in the eyes, and he crammed the remainder of the doughnut into his mouth. Cartman stared back at him, gaping and aghast, before demanding, "Regurgitate it!"

"I haven't even chewed it yet, never mind digested it!" Kyle scoffed, chewing as he spoke, grossly enough. Cartman always seemed to manage to make him do things that he would never normally do.

"Well hurry up, Jew! Finish chewing it and then regurgitate it!"

"Would your fat ass really want a regurgitated doughnut?!…" Kyle paused in his chewing and looked pensive for a moment. "Wait, that's a stupid question. Of course you would. You're a fatass who'd eat anything."

"God damn it, Jew!" Cartman snarled, looking ready to throttle him. "I'm going to-!"

"Will you guys stop fighting for just five minutes?!" Stan shouted through cupped hands from down on the playing field, surrounded by laughing teammates. "We're trying to practise here!"

Kyle hunched his shoulders and ducked his head like a told-off child, immediately sobering under all the sets of eyes on him all of a sudden, and, with the majority of a doughnut still muffling his speech, he apologised, "Sorry, Stan."

"Mind your own business, Marsh!" Cartman called back through cupped hands of his own, not an inch of shame to be seen in him. "If you can't play with distractions then you shouldn't play at all, pussy!"

Stan raised his middle finger to Cartman. "Fuck off, dude!"

"Go screw yourself, Marsh! I mean, you might as well, since your girlfriend isn't going to screw you anymore!"

"Dude!" Stan gaped up at Cartman, aghast, and then looked to Kyle, disbelief on his face. "You told him?!"

Shocked to be turned on in zero seconds flat, Kyle finished chewing his doughnut and swallowed it hastily, almost choking on it by doing so. "I didn't think it was a secret!" he yelled back, slightly panicked, and a bit befuddled because their break-ups were so often and renowned an occurrence that it was like keeping the fact that they breathed a secret. "Besides, it's Cartman, dude!"

"Exactly!" Stan exclaimed, before he shook his head, looking disappointedly down to the grass to mutter, "God. Whatever, dude." He turned back to his teammates to continue play, and Kyle felt guilt hit him as he watched his friend's retreating back. Maybe Stan was right – maybe he shouldn't have told Cartman of all people if he was going to tell at all; but something about Cartman eased words out of Kyle's mouth sometimes in a way that he couldn't control and sometimes didn't even notice before it was too late.

Wanting to share the guilt, he turned to glare at Cartman. "Nice going, Fatass."

"Don't look at me, Jew, you started it."

"When?!"

"When you called me fat!"

"But you are fat!"

"Big-boned, Kyle!"

"That excuse is getting pretty old, pretty fast," Kyle muttered disdainfully. He sighed and slumped forward, placing his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, his book abandoned on his lap. "Great. Stan's mad at me now."

"Eh, don't worry about it. He always forgives you. He'll come running back to you like an abused ex. I'm sorry, Kyle! It wasn't you, it was me! Take me back, babe! Just watch."

Kyle had to admit, Stan was often far too forgiving towards him and much too easily prepared to drop or overlook anything he did wrong, so Cartman wasn't exactly misled in his presumptions. He felt angry that Cartman was talking badly about his best friend, of course, but when his mean words had been well-intentioned and meant to console him, he couldn't find himself quite angry enough to start up a verbal disagreement about it. And so, he just let what Cartman had said hang unanswered, that line of conversation finished.

That wasn't the only thing that finished though – it became clear that Cartman was done with him when he announced, "Well, I hate to deprive you of my totally awesome company, but I must be off, Jew. I've got shit to do." Kyle looked up, a little surprised, and with what almost felt like an inkling of sadness, as Cartman got up from the bench with a grunt of exertion. Cartman's presence had somehow made Kyle forget that it was cold. At the notion of his leaving, he was suddenly aware of winter all over again, so that it made him quiver.

"Like what?" he asked. He chided himself for wanting Cartman to reply, "Nothing important enough to leave for after all," and sit back down beside him.

"Like stuff you should keep your big, nosy Jew nose out of," Cartman replied, and Kyle should have expected nothing more or less than that. But then Cartman smiled down at him from where he stood, in a way that was too unfairly attractive for Kyle to bear, so that he had to return his attention to his book.

"Whatever," he said as he did so, feigning indifference. "See you, Fatass." He expected for Cartman to respond with a similar farewell that had an insult of some kind tagged onto the end of it, so he was left quite in wonderment when he got something a little different.

"Here," Cartman said, and Kyle yelped in surprise as he felt something soft and warm being slapped onto his head and obscuring his vision. "Take care, Jew."

As he heard Cartman's footsteps leaving, Kyle pulled the something up from over his eyes, to enable himself to see. From feeling it, and from noticing the way the hair of Cartman's retreating head was suddenly on show, he realised that it was the brunet's woollen ski cap. It felt nice, and covered the tips of his ears in a way that stopped them stinging from the icy breeze – ears which, once red from cold, were suddenly red for a new reason, along with his cheeks. Bashfully, Kyle lowered his head back to the book, so that anybody who might have been watching couldn't see, and pulled the hem of the hat lower over his face for good measure.

"Dumbass. Now you're gonna get cold," he chided quietly, though he did so with his lips convulsing into a helpless smile. In spite of his mind being elsewhere – on brunet hair and heavy footfalls – Kyle wiped fallen sugar and fried crumbs from his book's pages, and tried to continue to read.

"Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not…"

Author's Notes:

I genuinely can't remember what inspired this since I thought it up so many weeks ago. Actually, I think that it is a mixture of different wants. At first I wanted to write them in winter attire, and then I wanted Cartman to warm Kyle up (Cartman giving Kyle his clothes is becoming a recurring theme in my writing, I notice), and then I wanted to write for a Kyle that has a crush on Cartman, and then I wanted them to share food. I don't know, I just wanted them to be cute together, so here we frickin' are.
I think Cartman and Kyle might parallel Pride and Prejudice a little bit. I feel like there's a lot about Cartman that Kyle hasn't gotten to the depths of yet, so he's judged him before he really knows him. That's why that book plays a part in this story; but it's also because Kyle is a bookworm in my mind, and I imagine he reads while he waits for Stan to finish football practice, which I imagine is something he does often. Ah, I'm rambling my headcanons off now because I don't really know what to say about this story! Okay, okay, I'll shut up now...
Thanks for reading this, and I hope you enjoyed doing so as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Disclaimer: South Park does not belong to me, but to its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Pride and Prejudice does not belong to me, but to its creator, Jane Austen.