A/N: Okay, so I'm still getting into my stride with this. That means short chapters, a very slowly developing plot and slightly wobbly characterisation. And why this is angsty, I couldn't tell you. I'm all about the light-hearted stuff normally. Hm...

But let's have some Kenny! Yeah, boi.

Stan was a total slob. That was a big part of it.

It wasn't like Kyle hadn't known this about his friend before they had lived together. Shit, he had sometimes thought he spent more time in Stan's room than he did in his own when they were growing up. He knew all about the sock-strewn lamps and precarious piles of aging porn. Kyle knew it all. He had always written it off as something that happened at Stan's and had no larger bearing on his own life. It was irrelevant.

What Kyle had not known was how melodramatically he would react to the slow spread of Stan's mess beyond the confines of his room and the imminent threat that it would soon engulf the entire apartment, Kyle's apartment, which the two of them wouldn't even have if not for him. He was sick of dragging himself out of bed in the morning only to nearly break his neck tripping on various pieces of football paraphernalia, of making his coffee in a pint glass and stirring it with a fork because everything else in the kitchen was dirty, sick of having to remove tubs of hair gel and cans of shaving cream from the sink before he could spit out his toothpaste.

They had regular bickery arguments about the mess, which never got them anywhere. Stan thought Kyle was uptight and overreacting, which was potentially true but, for real? Dirty cereal bowls left in the shower? Stan totally had to be kidding. Nobody was that messy by accident.

Another source of woe were the hookers who hung out on the street corner outside Kyle's bedroom window until five in the morning and solicited Stan and Kyle relentlessly whenever they returned home after dark. The awesome price of the place was finally starting to make sense. They made Kyle feel skanky and violated by association. While Stan kind of agreed on that point, he slept like a goddamn log and was never kept awake by the giggling and catcalls. Stan would have slept through the fucking building burning down. He didn't understand Kyle's pain. Besides, Stan had just started working nights again, which meant he was rarely in the apartment when the girls were prowling outside.

Stan's night shifts also meant that the two friends practically never saw each other, despite living together in the same four rooms. The only time they did see one another, one of them was always a grumpy mess after a gruelling day of work, while the other was in a blind panic, desperate to get out the door on time. The situation didn't make for a whole lot of bonding time and meant that arguments basically never got resolved and were left to hang around in the air instead, festering quietly.

And then there was Kenny. Or, in fact, mostly, there was Kenny.

Exactly five days after the move (Kyle totally unpacked, Stan still in boxes. Wireless up and functional. Curtains? Not so much), Kenny had turned up at the apartment door with a duffel bag full of hastily-gathered belongings and the pitiful look of a stray mutt in his eyes. Kyle had been at work at the time. Maybe if he had been home, things would have worked out differently. But Kyle had been out and there was totally something about Stan and stray dogs.

When Kyle returned to the apartment that night, it was to find his couch turned into a bed and various items of Kenny's snow-drenched clothing hanging to dry over the dining chairs. Trepidation rose in Kyle's throat like vomit.

"What the..." he muttered under his breath as he set his briefcase down by the door.

"Hey, buddy!" a bright voice added fuel to the fire of his fears. Kyle turned to see Kenny padding towards him on bare, silent feet, dressed head-to-toe in Stan's clothes and with a warm, shit-eating grin plastered across his face.

"Hey," Kyle returned, trying to make it sound genuinely welcoming.

Kenny reached out one hand and laid it casually at the side of Kyle's face by way of greeting, flashing that smile even wider as he did so. Kenny had a habit of touching people like he owned them.

"Whassup, dude?" Kyle asked uncertainly. He felt Kenny's hand fall away from his face to rest more comfortably atop his shoulder.

"Aw, man, Kyle..." Kenny shook his head. "Got kicked out, didn't I?"

"You-"

"Fucking sucks, dude," Kenny said with a gleam in his eyes. Kyle couldn't help registering that he didn't look all that put out.

"What happened? She kicked you out? Seriously?"

"Yeah," Kenny lowered his gaze sheepishly in the direction of Kyle's feet.

"What did you do, Kenny?"

"Huh?" Blue eyes flicked instantly back up at Kyle, widening with predictable innocence.

"To get kicked out. What did you do?"

Faced with Kyle's knowing look, Kenny didn't keep up his act for long. A slow, lopsided smile tugged at the blonde's lips.

"Sorta...Kinda...fucked the daughter."

"Argh, Kenny..." Kyle shrugged Kenny's hand from his shoulder and stepped around him, heading for the kitchen. Kenny was hot on his heels and up in arms straight away.

"Hey, she came on to me, man! I was practically assaulted, you know?"

"Bullshit you were."

Kenny ran his tongue over his teeth absently, watching as Kyle tugged the tie loose at his throat. "Yeah. Well..."

"See and now you're out on your ass. Dude, what the hell did you do that for?"

"I'm not out on my ass. I have you guys."

Kyle ignored this remark pointedly and turned his back on Kenny under the pretence of getting a drink. He gingerly plucked the only clean glass from the draining board, which he proceeded to fill with water.

Now that they were older, something about Kenny had increasingly started to piss Kyle off. And not in the petty way that Stan pissed him off with his stupid habits like the nail-biting and the mess and his tendency to cry like a baby when drunk. No, Kenny had begun to unnerve Kyle in a very deep and profound way. He couldn't put his finger on exactly what it was. Kenny was his friend, had been for years. But there was...something. The whole cyclical death and resurrection thing still had the power to shake Kyle to his very core no matter how many times he witnessed it. And sometimes when he looked at Kenny, all he could see were scenes of the blonde's most spectacular deaths being re-enacted over and over; scenes which were still burned into the back of Kyle's mind.

But that whole creepy matter aside, there were other things about Kenny which made the hair on the back of Kyle's neck stand up. The blonde had a way of guessing stuff a little too accurately, of always knowing a bit more than he should by rights know. Kyle got the impression that Kenny could read him like an open book and he wasn't entirely sure how he felt about that. Add to that the fact that Kenny practically personified all the things that Kyle had always tried to repress most in himself and it left them with a bizarrely hollow half-friendship which was mostly kept alive by their mutual connection to Stan.

Observing the tense lines of Kyle's body, Kenny pushed one hand through his dirty blonde hair and once more dropped the pretence.

"Jesus. I don't know, man. I don't know why I did it. Boredom? I mean she was hot, but...I don't know. Maybe I'm just going through a hedonistic phase right now. So what?"

"Hedonistic?"

"Yeah. It means, like, the pursuit of pleasure-"

"I know what it means," Kyle snapped, inwardly marvelling that Kenny knew too, while at the same time thinking that a word like that would have thrown Stan for a loop. Kenny was just about the least academic person Kyle knew. But he had a shrewd, raw intelligence which put Stan to shame and more street smarts than his other three friends combined. Which was, Kyle felt, just another thing to distrust about him.

Damn, if Kenny thought his residence here was going to be a permanent thing, he was sadly mistaken, Kyle thought.

He leant back against the kitchen counter, intent on telling Kenny exactly that, and immediately wished he hadn't as he felt something damp seep into the fabric of his shirt. He turned quickly to see a spilt puddle of orange juice which had already oozed down the cabinet and onto the floor.

"Ugh, dude! Stan, what the hell?!" he growled, slamming his glass down in order to retrieve a cloth from the sink. "Kenny, why the fuck would you want to live here? Can you not see the place? It's fucking disgusting, man." He whirled away from the counter and found Kenny standing in front of him, cloth already in hand.

"I've seen worse," Kenny said, nudging Kyle aside and wiping at the mess on the counter. Kyle was about to protest that it wasn't a guest's responsibility to clean their hosts' counters, when the king of mess himself blew into the kitchen and distracted him.

"Hey, Kyle," Stan greeted dismissively, collecting his I.D. badge from the top of the refrigerator. "Ken, do you need anything else before I head out?"

"Er..." Kenny turned, cloth dripping.

"Kyle'll hook you up if you need anything. Right, dude?" Stan turned to his roommate, slinging the badge around his neck.

"Stan did you spill orange juice?" Kyle couldn't help it. He swore he couldn't. He was turning into his mother.

"What? I dunno. Dude, I'm gonna be late. I'll catch you guys later, yeah?"

"Stan-"

"Later, Kyle!" Stan called over his shoulder on the way out. The front door closed behind him and Kyle mentally chalked up another mark on the mounting tally of friendship wrongs which he found himself unable to stop keeping.

"Shit," Kenny said behind him and Kyle turned to find his friend staring at him, all-knowing as ever. "Where did the love go, man?"

Kyle sighed, shaking his head wearily. "Don't. Don't even."

Kenny tossed the orange-stained cloth in the direction of the sink and fixed Kyle with his clear, blue gaze.

"Has Stan lost the super?" he asked. Kyle winced at the perceptiveness of the remark.

"Stan has totally nearly lost the super, yeah."

"Weak, dude."

"I know."

"You wanna talk about it?"

Kyle looked at Kenny and saw nothing but open and innocent friendship in his face. Perhaps the thing that unnerved Kyle the most about Kenny was the fact that somehow he knew that all the tension and uncertainty between them was completely one-sided. Kyle could sense that Kenny was totally sure of him and that only made the fact that Kyle was not at all sure of Kenny even harder to stomach.

Kyle didn't answer Kenny's question.

"You want pizza?" he asked instead. The blonde conceded immediately, graciously allowing Kyle to bail.

"Sure," he said, with an easy smile. He pulled a folded note from the back pocket of Stan's jeans and tossed it onto the counter beside Kyle. "It's on me. Well. On our friend the Marsh, anyway. But he owes you, right?"

"Yeah, man. He owes me his fucking balls..." Kyle muttered.

"You got any beer?"

Kyle nodded and picked up the phone from its cradle on the kitchen wall, while Kenny raided the fridge for beer bottles. Kenny cracked open the bottles while Kyle was placing the order. A moment later, he pushed one cold, damp bottle into Kyle's hand with a wink and a cocksure smile before hooking the hood of Stan's college sweater up over his blonde hair and striding away into the living room as if he had lived here all his life.

Kyle watched him go, an alien form clad in Stan's familiar college blue. And above the static crackle of the pizza delivery phone line, the long-ago-studied words, "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look," pulsed heavy in Kyle's mind.

A/N: Plot will come. I swear. Plot will come. Right now though, I am so tired that I could literally, physically die...