And here we are! Welcome to chapter 2! Thanks for the nice reviews, and putting me on favorites/alerts. It really pushed me to finish this chapter quickly. By the way, the boys are about 15 or 16 year old in this story. And of course I don't own anything except for the idea.

Chapter 2: Crossing the border

Evening came and went and so did Butters' bedtime. The images from his dream had been half-buried over his daily activities and when he had been eating dinner with his parents and watching a bit of TV after that, he had nearly forgotten about the weird queasy feeling that had accompanied him all day. Now that he was alone, lying in his bed with the blanket pulled up under his nose, his plushy squirrel in his arms, the dream from the night before was rearing it's ugly head again. Butters proudly noted that he had managed to stay in bed for more than three hours now. His parents would be awfully sore with him if he didn't at least try to fall asleep. But they had gone to bed two hours ago and for one and a half hour there had been not one noise from their room. Therefore, the blonde deemed it safe enough to get himself a snack or some warm milk from the kitchen. He quietly got up, listened for any monster that might roam the hallway for a moment, then opened the door and quickly switched on all the lights on his way downstairs. As he gulped down a glass of milk in a matter of seconds, contemplating on whether to make himself a sandwich or just take a bowl of dry cereal up to his room, his gaze was drawn to the window.

Stars, hundreds of them, beautiful little white lights littered the cloud-free pitch black sky and the boy smiled widely, feeling a bit cheered up now. He abandoned the ripped open bag of cereal on the counter and made his way over to the backdoor that lead into the garden. He was still in his dark blue pyjamas with the nice vertical stripes in different blue tones and barefooted, but just for a quick look at the stars it should be enough, right? He found a pair of yellow rubber boots, that he quickly pulled on because after a rainy day like this, their untended back garden was usually a big puddle of mudd. And then finally, he could feel the icy night air all around, the squishy sounds of mudd underneath his boots and he could see thousands of stars in the clear sky. Feeling awed like a little kid, he turned on his heels, stumbled backwards then turned a few times in awkward pirouettes his hands reaching upwards and a wide grin on his face. It was just so pretty! He certainly felt better now. He stumbled slowly through the garden his face upwards so he didn't exactly see where he was going. He danced ungracefully through the small passage between the house and the hedge that separated their grounds from their neighbors' and stood now in their front yard, a content smile on his face and he took a few last deep breaths, ready to go back in now.

But he didn't go back inside as something suddenly grabbed his attention. He first heard it, a dragging sound, the crunching of dirt beneath shoes on the street and a metallic sound. Then, not a minute later he saw him. It was unmistakably Kenny. No one else drew up their hood over their face like that with a few strands of messy dirty blonde hair spilling out in the front. What was perhaps even weirder than seeing Kenny pass by his house in the middle of the night was the fact that Kenny was pushing a motor scooter next to him along on the street. It had a red front, Butters noticed when Kenny came closer to the nearest street light, and it seemed to be rather difficult to push through all the mudd and puddles that had accommodated everywhere on the bumpy road before him even if it wasn't particularly heavy. There was a metallic rattle whenever he dragged the scooter over some cragged part of the asphalt. Butters stood transfixed, the sight of the other boy awaking somewhat mixed feeling in him, relief of course, but also a really strange instinct to stay away from the boy that he couldn't explain even to himself.

However, when Kenny passed his fence he couldn't help but quietly call out to him.

At first it seemed Kenny hadn't heard him, or if he did contemplated whether he would just ignore the smaller blonde, but then slowly came to a halt and slowly turned his head around to find Butters standing only a few meters away in his striped pyjamas and garish yellow rain boots.

"...Hey Butters." He greeted quietly, looking expectantly at his classmate as if to inquire his weird choice of clothing for a walk through the muddy yard at nearly 2am. Butters came tentatively closer to the fence. "W-what are you doing here?"

"Just…uhm, taking care of something."

"Oh. Oh well. But uh, why do you have a scooter with you? You know, you shouldn't do any illegal things. You might really get into trouble…"

"It's not really illegal. I mean, my brother sort of… borrowed it. And I've been kindly asked to return it. But the bastard drove the tank completely empty so now I have to drag it around instead of just driving it back, you know?"

Although Kenny and Butters didn't necessarily talk a lot to each other, Butters knew him well enough to be surprised at Kenny's frustrated undertone. He tried to meet Kenny's eyes in the shadow of his black hoodie but instead found some very prominent discoloring on the boy's cheek. Asked kindly, huh? "Oh, I see… "he stuttered kind of at a loss of what to say.

"Yeah…" Kenny replied awkwardly, shifting his weight again to his arms to get the scooter to move again and to leave. Butters suddenly felt a need to keep him with him a little longer. He seemed alright but what if he really wasn't? And wasn't kind of a weird coincidence that Kenny got beaten up just when Butters had a nightmare in which he got hurt? Kenny often got into scuffles but usually they were more playful than really violent and he had never seen the boy with half of his face beaten black and blue. "Kenny?"

"Yeah?" Kenny paused, seeming slightly annoyed at having to stop again.

"A-Are you alright?"

"What? Yeah, sure I am, why wouldn't I be?"

"Well, you…you have a bruise in your face…and uh…"

"Oh that. That's nothing really. Don't worry."

"But you weren't in school today either, and-"

"I just had to take care of a few things."

"W-well it's still weird, you know? Cause, you seem awfully sore about something, and you're usually so cheery and got beaten up- and I know it's stupid to worry when you said not to, but I just had this really weird dream too…!"

Kenny rolled his eyes behind his hood impatiently, not really in the mood to listen to the boys endless rambling. "Butters, I think you're old enough to tell nightmare from-"

Butter interrupted his sentence rushedly. "I know! I am! But it was a really bad dream!"

The taller boy sighed defeated and pushed some stray strand of hair back into the confines of his hood. "I gotta go Butter, I-"

"Please Kenny! I'm just worried about you!"

"I'm FINE"

"But you died in my dream and it was so terrible and really realistic, and you suddenly are all beaten up and moody and I just want to help you, cause you're my friend 'n all…"

Butters had lost the other boy's attention after the first few words. Kenny stood frozen like a statue, staring straight ahead, his back to Butters who continued to babbly his head off at alarming speed.

"How did I die?" he pressed out, still not looking at the fretting boy behind him.

"W-what?" Butters squeaked, who had lost the thread during his constant broken explanations.

"In your dream. How did I die?"

Kenny sounded surprisingly hostile all of a sudden, his shoulders so tense that the small blonde feared that something might just snap if he kept being so strained. "W-well, it was kind of stupid.. but errm… we were all out to see a movie, Stan and the others, and Clyde and Token and even Craig and Tweek were there. And it was pretty dark and there was a big street and uh…well, there was a car that got out of control and I dreamed that it hit you and killed you…" Butters mumbled, his head beet red. Now that he was supposed to recount it it suddenly sounded totally stupid and childish. He just waited for Kenny to throw some insult along the lines of "Grow up, fag!" at him, but nothing came. Not an insult, not a gesture of brushing him off. There was no reaction at all from the taller boy. Which again sent Butters into a fit of worry and panic.

"I'm sorry, I know it's really stupid, but when I woke up I just had this really bad feeling… forget I said anything."

There was an incomprehensible mumble beneath Kenny's hood that could have meant "What the fuck?" but he couldn't be sure. The tension left his back however and he slumped forward as if defeated.

"Butters, what would you do…if that hadn't been a dream?"

Now the smaller boy was confused. Of all things Kenny could have said or thrown at him, he asked him to spin together some unrealistic sort of what-if-theory?

"W-well, I would be devastated of course. Everyone else would be, too, that's for sure!"

Kenny sighed a deep long sigh as if he had just fought an epic battle and lost.

"Can we talk somewhere private, Butters?"

"Well, sure I guess. But you have to be really quite so we don't wake up my parents, ok?"

Kenny nodded solemnly and followed Butters through his front yard, leaving deep marks in the muddy ground with the wheels of the scooter. He leaned the machine on the back wall of the Stotch's house, and left his completely dirt covered sneakers hidden behind Butter's rain boots outside on the porch before following him upstairs to his room.

Kenny sat down heavily on Butter's bed, the smaller boy silently switching of the light in the hallway, then shutting the door and moving to sit next to his classmate.

"Are you alright, Kenny? You don't look so good…" And boy, did he not look good. He had pushed down his hood inside the warm house, his dark blonde hair messily standing out in every direction, looking as if it hadn't seen a brush in some time. There were dark circles underneath his eyes, further succeeding in making him look tired and unhappy. The bruises on his face had roughly the same color, but there were far more of them than Butters had expected, even a few gashes above his right eye that must have bleed rather profusely. He also had a split lip, nothing too bad, but there was still some dried up blood on his lower lip that looked as if it must sting quite a bit.

Kenny wiped both his hands through the mob of hair on his head, stayed for a moment with his head down and then looked up at Butters with a gaze that was far more serious than any the boy had ever seen from him.

"You have to tell me what exactly you remember from your dream."

"Y-you're starting to scare me Kenny…." To his surprise a warm hand found it's way onto his back.

"There's no need to be scared. Please just tell me everything, ok?"

And so Butters retold his dream, often drifting off to minor details, trying to stall the gory parts for a bit longer. But eventually, he told Kenny about the sickening crunch of bones, the blood, the screams and having this terrible foreboding feeling all day.

"God damnit…." Kenny forced out, his face in his hands after Butters had finished his retelling.

Butters stared at him the whole time, trying to measure his reactions and finding some meaning behind it but failing horribly. Kenny didn't make any sense at all and it was really starting freak him out by now. Sure it was nice that he listened to what Butters had to say, but to react this strongly to a dream, wasn't that a little overboard?

"What is going on here?" he nearly whispered, as if fearing any loud noise could provoke Kenny into a sudden fit of rage. Again he had to wait a minute for an answer.

"Look, Butters. I really don't know how to explain. No one ever remembered before, you know? So I never made plans on what to say."

Okay, maybe it was time to give the nearest mental institution a call… Butters carefully shifted away from the obviously very confused boy next to him.

"Alright, so what if I told you what happened yesterday was not a dream?"

"Of course it was a dream." Butters reasoned, "There's no way you could have survived that accident."

"Yeah, well, you see, that's just the point. I kind of didn't."

End of Chapter 3. Sorry for the Cliffhanger- in the next Chapter we will witness Kenny's explanation and claims that he isn't completely crazy. Feedback is very much appreciated!