A/N: This is a lazy, boring (and overlong) chapter and I am sorry for it. There's a lot of backstory, but it does eventually get to the pivotal point of the narrative (honest it does) if you stick with it. I think that really...this was more than just a fanfic idea and I don't actually have the time to devote to it at the moment to do it justice. Which makes me sad.
From the second their eyes had met over that ballet dancer's muscular shoulder, Kenny had known that he and Kyle would be together. The sheer certainty of it had struck him numb for weeks. And, when he had eventually regained his faculties and set out to win Kyle over, Kenny found that nothing had ever felt so inevitable. It was all so easy. The two of them fitted together like puzzle pieces, side by side in their rightful places.
It was a strange relationship, though, lived out in patches. They kept it a secret which they guarded with their lives, as if breathing a word of it would cause it to skitter away as quickly as it had come. For the first six months, until Stan found out, what Kyle and Kenny had was theirs and theirs alone. They would go to school and fake themselves as they had always been: crude, independent and precocious. In class and in groups of friends it was easiest. Nobody treated them any differently there, so it came more naturally to behave as if nothing had changed. They had the same old trials and tribulations of their studies and their social world to occupy them. Sometimes, though, when they came across each other unexpectedly, in the corridor or behind the sudden swinging clang of a fire door, their eyes would catch and the click of chemistry between them would seem so audible, so tangible that Kenny felt that by rights, other people should have been able to hear it; they should have been fucking swept clear off their feet by it. When Kyle took him by surprise like that, he eclipsed the whole of the rest of Kenny's world and not acting on the instinct to slam Kyle against the wall and try to climb inside his very bones became damn near impossible to repress.
They had rushed into sex because they were both boys and both seventeen. They would slip away at lunch, whenever Stan had football practice to keep him distracted. Rushed and furtive, like spies, they would walk the two blocks to the building Kenny's brother was squatting in and fuck efficiently on the untreated floorboards because Kenny would never again trust a mattress owned by his brother. At the time, being with Kyle had seemed like a kind of Holy Grail to Kenny: sex on tap with all-round satisfaction guaranteed and no requirement to spend an hour cuddling afterwards.
"No periods and no pregnancy," Kenny gasped one lunchtime on the shaky exhale of a post-orgasmic breath, "I should have tried this years ago."
Kyle was already pulling his shirt back down over his head and running calming hands through his rioting red curls.
"Yeah. See? I always have the right idea way before the rest of you guys," Kyle replied, so beautifully casual about the whole thing that it made Kenny want to sing hallelujah. He seized Kyle's slender shoulders and plundered Kyle's already raw lips once more. It was burning and lustful as ever, but when they pulled apart there were no pesky stars of romance twinkling in Kyle's eyes; there was only a clear dilation born of too much sex. Kyle squeezed rough, masculine fingers over the muscles of Kenny's shoulder and raised his eyebrows questioningly.
"You coming back to school then, dude, or what?" he asked, and for once Kenny just wanted to go wherever Kyle did, even if that meant forcing his nicotine-throttled lungs through a whole hour of gym.
* * * * *
The lecturer stood in front of the projected PowerPoint display, grinning like an idiot.
"By the way folks, in case you were not already aware, at midnight tonight, the souls of the dead will be returning to Earth again," he announced with the bright-eyed smugness of an impending joke, "And while this might seem like the ideal opportunity to finally settle all those old inheritance tax disputes which have been hounding you for months, please, ladies and gentlemen, do not forget that you do have to return to your base camps tomorrow and brief your firms on what we have achieved here over these past few days. So, do try to remind yourself that spending the night chasing ghosts around the tequila bars might not, in fact, be the most productive use of your time."
A weak, appreciative chuckle ran around the tiny lecture theatre. Next to him, Danny jerked Kyle's notebook out from under Kyle's bent elbow and scribbled across the margin before thrusting the book back. Kyle glanced away from the lecturer's proud smile to read what had been written.
'Accountant humour – never gets old.' The words were printed haphazardly and Kyle couldn't help but feel little nostalgic flush as he read them. He and Stan had been the Kings of passing notes back in school. He clicked the top of his pen and wrote back briskly:
'We're accountants too. We're complicit in this shit. You realise that, right?'
Kyle nudged the notebook back to Danny who scanned Kyle's comment quickly before eloquently jotting back:
'Goddamn. I hate myself so much right now.'
A click from the front and the slide display projected half across the lecturer's face turned from blue to green.
"On that note, ladies and gentlemen," he said "If I might direct your attention to the summary sheet at the front of today's pack..."
Kyle glazed instantly. He'd glanced over the sheet the second he had sat down and had realised that, to his dismay, for the next hour he was essentially trapped in a dumbed-down version of his own dissertation. There could not be a shred of information here that Kyle had not already assessed and catalogued for himself in far superior detail than whatever this jackass had to show.
Kyle twisted his pen between his fingers and began sketching careful geometric patterns around the borders of his summary sheet in a bid to keep his mind from wandering too far.
* * * * *
Their relationship was rough and uncertain at first, but things slowly began to ease. The lust became more manageable and bit by bit they found their way. Their lives gradually twisted to accommodate one another, becoming laced together like creeping vines, until they reached the point where tugging at one would have pulled the other out at its roots.
There were lots of things that could have ruined them. The day Stan caught them together, Kenny had felt sure that it was game over for them. It had been the party of the year at Token's playboy mansion. Not only had Kenny managed to score a nice little portion of weed from his brother, Wendy and Stan had been doing a dinner-with-the-parents thing so were coming to the party later. Kenny had Kyle all to himself until then. They walked the entire way in the cold because they both intended on being too wasted later to even so much as open a car door, let alone drive. When they were within a block from Token's house, Kenny tugged Kyle off the sidewalk and through the bushes, where the glare of the streetlight didn't reach and only gentle moonlight could filter through. Kyle didn't resist Kenny's insistent grip, but his eyes were narrowed and sceptical.
"Fuck off, man. It's way too cold to strip out here. There's no way I'm having sex in the snow," Kyle said tartly.
Kenny clicked his tongue irritably against his teeth and tried to banish from his mind the fresh image of Kyle's flushed and gasping body sprawled across the ice at his feet. He fumbled in his pocket for the carefully folded plastic bag, the packet of Rizlas and the fluorescent plastic lighter.
"Shut up," Kenny said, because you could talk to boyfriends that way without them PMS-ing all over you. He entrusted the weed and the lighter to Kyle before pulling the battered packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket. "I thought we could do with something to make tonight extra rockin'," Kenny grinned and began to expertly strip the paper from around a cigarette. As he was tapping delicate strands of tobacco onto a Rizla to make the joint burn better, Kyle held the bag up to the moonlight, measuring its contents.
"What about Stan?" Kyle asked, but Kenny shook his head.
"There's not enough. Just for us. For you and me, baby. Hey?"
Kyle pressed his lips together, watching as Kenny rolled the joint with swift, practised fingers.
"Hey?" Kenny repeated, looking up at Kyle and finishing the joint blind.
"Yeah," Kyle said and was rewarded with a mega-watt smile. Kenny held the joint out before Kyle's face with the edge of the rizla still protruding from the slender roll.
"Lick," Kenny commanded and Kyle did so, running the tip of his tongue delicately along the paper above Kenny's fingertips. It felt lascivious and dangerous and Kyle's eyes were on Kenny's lips as he wrapped them around one end of the joint. Kyle sparked the lighter, which waited ready in his hand, and held the tiny flame forwards. Kenny caught Kyle's hand to keep the light steady and leaned into it, his eyes locking with Kyle's across the sudden vibrant flare of red at the end of the paper. Kenny sighed his first inhale back out again slowly, while Kyle took the smouldering joint gingerly from Kenny's fingers.
"You ever had sex high, Kyle?" Kenny asked, watching the slow gush of smoke from Kyle's parted lips. Kyle shook his head.
"It's awesome. I promise," Kenny smirked. He breathed his next drag directly down Kyle's throat as he caught the redhead by the back of the neck and pressed their lips together.
The weed hit Kyle the hardest, as substances always did. Kyle had a delicate soul, Kenny thought secretly, which was vulnerable and unused to being ravaged in the way that Kenny's was. Things bled into Kyle all the more freely for it.
By the time they eventually arrived at Token's party, more by luck than design, Kyle's body had become a warm, malleable mass tucked snug beneath Kenny's arm. He was easy to guide towards the distant thump of thick bass and the promise of warmth offered by the glowing lights of Token's windows. They stumbled over the threshold of the unlocked door and through their marijuana haze to an empty room upstairs where time and space seemed to have evaporated altogether, leaving nothing but the motion of lips and hips and the taste of gasped mutual breaths.
The first Kenny knew of a drunk and barely sensible Stan bursting in on them was the back of his head connecting hard with the solid surface of what he could only presume to be a wall. Dazed and reeling from the blow and the drugs and the vice-like hand pressing suddenly against his windpipe, Kenny had only a dim understanding of what was happening. Distantly, as if behind thick cloud, he heard his two friends have a brief, screaming row which only ended when Stan was satisfied that Kyle was not being assaulted and that yes, he and Kenny had consensually been doing that. The grip propping Kenny against the wall eased abruptly and his legs gave out from under him.
Stan was deeply apologetic for days after. He bought Kenny lunch for a whole week until the finger-shaped bruises eventually began to fade from Kenny's neck and jaw.
When Kyle went away to college at the end of that year, Kenny had once again expected it to end. He knew that he would not be going to college with the rest of his friends. Kenny was no geek, with the grades to prove it, and his parents barely had enough money to clothe him, let alone pay for a degree. Instead of posting the application form which Kyle had bullied him to complete, Kenny had thrown it, stamped and addressed, right into the trash because college was really no place for a McCormick. Kyle would go. Of course he would. He'd break free, go forth and shine and be adored, the way he always had done, leaving behind the trashy guy he had slummed it with in high school - the guy who was destined to be forgotten. Kenny was resigned to his fate and had been working under the assumption that until college was all the time that he and Kyle had together. However, when Kenny had a little too flippantly expressed as much to Kyle, the redhead had split Kenny's lip open across one agile fist and refused to speak to him for three days. On the fourth day, Kenny had eventually resorted to draping himself over the hood of Kyle's car and daring Kyle to try to drive it right through him.
They had eventually managed to have a rational conversation about it and Kyle had admitted that Kenny was right: ending it was really the only way they could go.
* * * * *
Stan called Kyle at his hotel room that night under the pretence of needing the answer to a financial question. It was a straightforward dilemma which Wendy could have solved in an instant, but Kyle played along because he didn't mind being checked up on. Hearing Stan's voice always made life feel a little bit easier.
"How's Wendy doing?" Kyle asked, once he was through explaining to Stan about the FTSE.
"She's alright," Stan said, voice hushed, "She's sleeping. She sleeps a lot right now. I mean a lot," Stan stressed and Kyle couldn't help but smirk.
"Sucks, dude. Have you got a good stash of mags hidden somewhere?"
"Yeah. But, I mean, it's kind of wrong, though. Don't you think?"
"What? Porn?"
"No. Jerking off to porn when your pregnant girlfriend is asleep in the next room."
"It'd probably be no worse than jerking off when your non-pregnant girlfriend is in the next room," Kyle smirked.
"Yeah, but I never had to when she wasn't pregnant. You know?"
"Just wait til this baby is born, man. Then you won't even have time to jerk off."
"Aw, dude, come on. There's always time to jerk off."
Kyle could hear the tension in Stan's jaw running all the way down the phone line. He was coping with it well, but deep down, this baby stuff had Stan totally spooked. Kyle leant his forehead against the cool dark glass of the hotel window and dimmed his voice down to a comforting hum.
"You'll be great," he told Stan.
"I hope so."
"You will."
The gentle glow of candles flickered warm behind a line of glass-fronted buildings below. People were piling into cemeteries all over the city, arms laden with wax and marigolds, to seek the graves of lost loved ones. Kyle squinted, entranced, past the reflected shapes of his room, at the soft light beyond.
"What are you doing?" Stan's voice interrupted.
"Looking at the candles," Kyle muttered.
"You have candles? Dude, I know you're fag, but seriously. Is that necessary?"
"They're outside, dickhead. Not in here. It's the Day of the Dead."
"What?"
"Day of the Dead. It's a festival thing. They were ringing church bells everywhere earlier because that was when the souls of, um, dead children come back again. And the bells welcome them or something. I guess."
Stan was silent on the other end of the line.
"Adults come back at midnight," Kyle added, eyes fixed once more on the distant candlelight.
"Shit. Are you okay?"
"Yeah. I'm fine."
Stan only hissed a worried breath out between his teeth and Kyle turned his back on the window.
"I'm fine, Stan," he repeated firmly.
* * * * *
Life in South Park had always been mostly shit, but life there without Kyle, without any of the friends whom Kenny had grown up with, was fucking unbearable. It was worse than Kenny had ever imagined it could be. Kyle leaving threw Kenny's entire existence into sharper focus and stripped his world of the dreamy lens which had previously made life liveable. The tattered walls of Kenny's family home kept slowly retracting themselves into his space and cutting off his supply of oxygen at the mains. Kenny tried to spend as much time outside as possibly, freezing his ass off in a bid to feel even slightly less trapped.
He couldn't dream. He couldn't hope. He just got up every day and went to work at whatever place hadn't fired him yet for dying on the job.
When Christmas rolled around and Kyle turned up unexpectedly on Kenny's doorstep, bright from his first college semester, Kenny stared at him in shock and felt as if something holy had just torn through his chest.
"Hi," Kyle smiled with the careless ease of someone who was whole-heartedly protected from all of the evil in the world. Kenny had only been able to mouth the greeting back at him, voice lost somewhere in the depths of his throat.
Inside, in the kitchen, as much out of the cold as you could ever be in the McCormick house, Kyle turned to face him and looked him seriously in the eyes.
"So, listen," Kyle said, "I figure that monogamy is too much to expect from either of us right now, as long as we're living so far apart, but I don't think we should give up on this just yet, dude. I've really missed you."
There it was. A lifeline. Kenny didn't even know how to express what he was thinking but his eyes or his face or even his silence must have spoken for him, because Kyle fisted a hand secure in the front of Kenny's sweatshirt and pulled him close.
"I mean...I'll always come back to you," he qualified, "If you'll have me."
Kenny's bark of disbelieving laughter had been verging on hysterical.
"Have you? If I'll have you? Shit, man, I'll have you right here, right now, on this fucking table. Just watch me," Kenny said as he stepped into Kyle, nudging their hipbones together and locking their grins into a kiss.
Kenny lived through a brief flare of optimism, but that soon fizzled out and afterwards things only got worse. Kenny's life was slowly but surely wearing him down and the few snatched moments he had with Kyle simply weren't enough to sustain him. He started drinking too much, too often, and smoking more. Whenever Kyle came home to visit, Kenny would damn near devour him on sight.
But around Kyle, Kenny began to feel neurotic and inferior and not at all like himself. He could get sex right. Kenny knew that much by the way that Kyle would writhe and arch and beg. But some days Kenny thought that might be all he was good for. Kenny would hear Kyle say things to other people, like, "Time is a human construct, dude. There's no point getting all Sturm und Drang over it," and would have no idea what the hell that meant. Kyle never spoke in riddles like that when they were alone together so Kenny reached the conclusion that Kyle must have to dumb himself down just to be around him. Kenny would glance down at his own dirty fingernails and then look at Kyle, the perfect collar of Kyle's Jack Wills polo shirt tucked around Kyle's flawless creamy throat and think, 'on what planet is this ever supposed to work?'
Eventually, Kenny knew what he would do. Next time he died. He knew what he would do.
* * * * *
Kyle hadn't thought it possible, but there was no doubt that La Revo was even busier than it had been the night before. The crowds on the streets heaved with motion. The scent of marigolds and candle wax leaked between the buildings. They were jostled and pressed from all sides, caught up in the human tumult, too deep for turning back to be a viable option. Kyle had to anchor a clumsy grip to Danny's wrist to stop himself being swept away in the crush. Danny glanced down at the unexpected touch before looking back at Kyle with one eyebrow raised.
"I don't want to lose you," Kyle explained and Danny had smiled the slow smile which had fooled Kyle before, back when they had first met.
"Aww, sweet," he cooed.
When Kyle offered nothing but a cold stare in return, Danny rolled his eyes and resumed weaving his way through the crowds
"What the hell's going on?" Danny shouted over his shoulder, "Think this is where all the dead souls are at?"
The word 'no' had been on the tip of Kyle's tongue, but it had slid back down and choked him before he could give it voice. Kyle's feet froze beneath him. The whole world seemed to constrict and solidify, because past Danny, through the crowds and the starlight, a man with Kenny's face was staring straight at him.
* * * * *
On the patio beneath the balcony, bones that were broken knitted back together and ruptured veins wove whole once more between them. Tissue and muscle and organs swelled, whispering back to life. Kenny's eyes drifted open to the cloud-laden sky and he awoke with a mouth full of the familiar taste of freshly-fused flesh.
Alone in the cold, Kenny climbed to his feet and walked away, leaving nothing to be found in the morning but old bloodstains hidden beneath three feet of pristine snow.
A/N: I know this chapter is shit. I can only apologise. I am too distracted by real life things right now to really devote time to writing well! On that note, I will be out of the country (travelling – thank God, I thought I was going to explode with wanderlust!) for three weeks so you won't hear from me in at least that long now.
BUT! As a parting gift: The song which totally was like, made, for this story is Just Jack 'The Day I Died'. It isn't released until the 17th but you can watch the video on Youtube, which is awesome and stars the super-amazing James Nesbitt. I love it because it is so British - I can sing it in my right voice! ^^
As a side note, the song for YCWIOMG was 'I Got Love' by The King Blues. It's totally my Kenny's song.