Life Support - Chapter 9
One Year Later
Kyle felt his phone buzzing for the umpteenth time since the start of his presentation and cringed inwardly, whilst trying to maintain a calm exterior as the eyes of three elderly and distinguished university professors stared down at him from seats in the otherwise empty lecture room. The trio of assessors thankfully did not seem to realise Kyle's slight distress at his pocket's relentless buzzing, and as Kyle continued his perfectly rehearsed presentation the nagging thought that somebody might be trying to reach him for something incredibly urgent was starting to derail his thought processes. For a short moment, Kyle contemplated excusing himself for a few minutes to take the call.
The gravity of this particular presentation then dawned upon him, causing him to push the option completely out of his mind. His entire fucking doctorate depended on this very presentation, and there was no way he was going to compromise it by answering a goddamned phone call.
Kyle had worked long and hard for his research doctorate, a process that had proven to be challenging and mentally taxing in its entirety. Aside from weeks upon weeks of experimental work that eventually saw his thesis getting published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Kyle has had to appeal for a sponsorship from the UK Research Council to fund his doctorate. His alma mater, Imperial College London, had allowed him to continue his doctoral studies in the states, but aside from the convenience of being able to go home when he wished, their arrangements yielded little advantage.
It was the most academically challenging period of his life, and the fruits of his labor would only have a chance to emerge from his hard work if he nailed this presentation and sufficiently impressed his assessors.
Thus far, he seemed to be doing a good enough job. None of the assessors had fallen asleep just yet despite their advanced age, and he was already about seventy-five percent through with his presentation. All he needed to do was to just power through another ten minutes of material and he'd be free to leave and cuss down whichever inconsiderate person had tried to reach him in the middle of one of the most important events in his academic and professional career.
As he neared the end of the presentation, the full weight of what he was doing collapsed heavily upon his shoulders. Ever since he was a kid Kyle had dreamed of being a well regarded scientist who could change the world. It seemed like such a crazy dream back when he was an innocent eight-year-old living in the craziest town in America, but he was now actually in the process of transforming said dream into a reality. He took in a deep breath as he steeled himself for his concluding statements, smiling brightly as a wave of euphoria, marked by the likely finale of his own academic journey, washed over him.
"Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen."
The assessors had next to no questions for Kyle, an observation that would have caused Kyle to second guess himself if it weren't for the impressed looks on the old birds' faces and the knowledge that he couldn't have improved on his work or his delivery in any other way even if he had tried. If there was one defining characteristic that helped Kyle stand out from others his own age in South Park, it was that he was a relentlessly hard worker, and he was not only aware, but also proud of that fact.
Hands were shaken, and the assessors were then politely shown out of the lecture room.
Kyle breathed a massive sigh of relief, trying to rid his system of excess adrenaline from his prior nervousness by stretching alone in the empty lecture room, adding in a few skittish hops for good measure. Striding over to his laptop, he put it on standby before switching off the projector mounted on the ceiling. He then tucked the laptop under his arm and proceeded to walk towards the doors, whistling as he went.
Kyle then recalled the urgent buzzing of his phone in the middle of his presentation and groaned before extracting the device from his pocket.
Thirteen missed calls.
Kyle raised his brow at the almost comically large number of calls, wondering who had tried to contact him so many times in the span of an hour. His bemusement immediately turned to confusion when he realised that both Butters and Cartman had contributed to that figure. The sight on his phone's touchscreen was oddly unsettling. It wasn't unusual for Butters to call him up even if was just to have somebody to chat with, but Cartman, their reconciliation aside, never called him for any reason whatsoever. Their only point of contact since Cartman's return to South Park was his restaurant.
Deciding to call Butters first, Kyle tapped his number and held the phone to his ear, expecting Butters to pick up the call almost instantly. What he didn't expect, however, was to hear another voice, gravelly and nasal, on the line.
"Jew? Is that you?"
Kyle removed the phone from his ear to stare at its screen, wondering if he had dialed the wrong number.
"Cartman? What are you doing with Butters' phone?"
"Why the fuck didn't you pick up your phone, dammit?!"
Cartland sounded incredibly agitated on the other end of the call. The ex-bigot hasn't shouted at him in years, a fact that made Kyle's stomach clench up in slight nervousness. The possibility that something might be seriously wrong seemed more evident with Cartman's anger practically radiating from his phone.
"Butters is fucking distraught right now and can't come to the phone. Get your ass into a car and get to Hell's Pass as soon as possible before I track down where you are and fucking drag you here."
Kyle could feel himself striding out of the lecture room and towards the university car park without consciously being aware of what his legs were doing.
"What the fuck is going on, Cartman?"
What Cartman said next made his blood run cold.
"It's Kenny. He just coughed up blood in my restaurant and passed out. Look, just...just fucking get here as soon as you can, alright? I'll fill you in when you get here."
The quivering ball of blond hair and tears wrapped in his arms felt incredibly foreign, an observation that Kyle clinically attributed to his own discomfort with physical contact and the fact that Butters was almost always happy. Kyle had relied on Butters presence in the town as a reminder that it was possible to power through any problem with a smile, and seeing his friend in such a dismal state made Kyle feel somewhat lost, unsure of what to do aside from granting him a tight hug.
Cartman sat across them in the waiting room, and while he might have commented on the fagginess of what he was seeing in front of him in any other moment, the severity of the situation made any form of teasing, delivered in a joking manner or otherwise, wildly inappropriate.
Cartman instead settled on trying to ignore Butters' quiet sobbing in favor of telling Kyle what he had heard from the doctor who had attended to Kenny.
"I don't really remember everything he said, or understand everything-"
"It's alright. What do you know?"
"Something about fluid in his...plu-something? I don't remember what kind of fancy medical term he used, but he was talking about Kenny's chest and lungs, and he looked pretty grim..."
Kyle felt his heart sinking at Cartman's words. From what he could gather, the doctor had probably referred to Kenny's pleural cavity. Though Kyle had never even applied to medical school, his inquisitiveness as a teenager and incessant nerdiness had made him relatively well-versed with most topics of an academic and practical nature.
Pleural effusion, a person's pleural cavity filling up with excess fluid, was decidedly not good.
"The doctor said that he's already done a few x-rays on Po'boy's chest, and he just wants to do a few more tests on his bodily fluids. He said he's pretty sure about was wrong with him, but he doesn't want to tell us until he's absolutely sure."
Kyle frowned.
"He didn't tell you what he suspected?"
Butters, his cheeks stained with tears, then maneuvered his body beside Kyle's such that his mouth was free for talking. His voice emerged in broken whispers as he struggling to maintain his composure, a futile objective considering how it was already lost to the wind.
"He refused t-to jump to c-conclusions, didn't want to be r-responsible in case he got the diagnosis wrong or somethin'."
Butters then burrowed tearfully back into Kyle's embrace, the significantly smaller young man awkwardly rubbing his back as he tried to convey comfort despite the absence of his own. Cartman caught Kyle's noticeably grim expression, and ventured a question.
"You're the brainiest one out of all of us, Kyle. Any idea what's wrong with Kenny?"
Kyle hesitated. While he might have been comfortable confiding his concerns to Cartman in a one-on-one situation, having Kenny's partner in a sobbing mess pressed tightly against his chest made him make reconsiderations about the appropriateness of such a conversation.
"I don't...I don't want to jump to conclusions either. Kenny could be having a whole range of things-"
"Don't try that bullshit on me, Jew. I've known you long enough to know when you're lying about something. You're pretty damn sure about what he has and you just don't want to tell us."
Kyle glared back at Cartman while silently gesturing to Butters' shivering form.
"It's not that, I just don't want to make you guys fearful for no reason..."
"God, please tell me what you think, Kyle! We've been here for hours and nobody is telling us anything. I'm about to storm into that room and seriously hurt somebody. Please tell me something, anything so I don't do something I regret!"
Butters' eyes were wild, making him look absolutely alien to Kyle. The hands that had somehow found their way to his arms were now squeezing tightly in desperation, an action that was making a much smaller Kyle wince in pain. He breathed a sigh of relief when Cartman pulled Butters away from him, and gestured to the concerned receptionist at the waiting room counter that there was no problem. Butters trembled in Cartman's grip, his eyes seemingly staring deep into Kyle's soul, as though trying to draw an answer out of him. His mental state was precarious, and Kyle didn't want to upset him further, but to know that one's lover was lying on a hospital bed comatose and without awareness of what was plaguing him was a truly terrifying thing.
Kyle inhaled deeply, a little ashamed at having to ask questions that he should already know the answers to, if not for the fact that he had been so busy over the past few months that he couldn't find some time to hang out with his friends.
"Tell me as much as you can about Kenny. Has he been coughing a lot lately?"
"Y-yes. He's been coughing for about two months now. We thought it was just because of that new plant that got built in the town pollutin' the air and all that, y'know?"
"Has he been sleeping well? Lost any weight recently?"
Butters looked a bit unnerved by Kyle's seeming clairvoyance.
"Not at all, he's been waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweat. He's lost a whole bunch of weight too."
Cartman frowned as he heard what Butters was saying.
"Why the hell didn't you guys go to a doctor before today?"
Butters started wringing his hands in nervousness, a trait that he had supposedly outgrown as he was growing up.
"I wanted him to! I insisted that he go to see our physician, but he kept saying that doctors were expensive and that there was probably nothing wrong with him..."
Kyle swore under his breath. The affirmative answers that Butters was giving did not bode well for Kenny's diagnosis. His mind was already reeling in disbelief at what he believed Kenny was suffering from, the unlikelihood of such a disease manifesting in a young healthy adult and his desperation at proclaiming that Kenny was perfectly healthy clashing with the truth that lay in front of his eyes. Suddenly, Kyle knew why Kenny's doctor had gotten x-rays of his chest done. He knew why a blood sample had been taken, the reason likely being for culturing and microscopic analysis. Excess pleural fluid, night sweats, loss of weight and a relentless cough didn't match up with the majority of lung-related illnesses, with the exception of one particularly deadly and prominent one.
Tuberculosis.
Kyle didn't want to say shit. He didn't want to have to be the one to tell Butters that his boyfriend might just have one of the most potent and deadly lung diseases known to man. He wasn't a doctor, after all. He could very well be wrong about the whole thing. Kenny might just walk out of the examination room a little shaky on his feet, but otherwise fine and spouting crass and flirtatious sentences as he always has.
Kyle's brain didn't want to believe it, but his gut told him that he was right.
Fucking Tuberculosis.
Kyle gazed into the isolation ward, where Kenny was lying on a hospital bed, all sorts of wires and tubes attached to him and about half a dozen monitors at the side of his bed. The very picture of a sick Kenny McCormick seemed wrong to him, and as Kyle observed a gentle sheen of sweat coating the man-child's skin and his slightly paled skin beneath his smile, an invisible weight pressed down hard on his chest that made it hard for him to breathe.
A horribly ironic metaphor, considering Kenny's condition.
The isolation ward only allowed a maximum of one visitor at once, which meant that Butters could get some alone time with Kenny without anybody else in the room. Butters looked out of place himself, decked out in a full set of protective clothing, but it seemed that he was more than happy to be there for Kenny when he needed it. Something told Kyle that Butters wouldn't have minded any inconvenience whatsoever as long as he could spend time with his boyfriend.
Kyle bit his lip, which was now feeling raw from the workout it was getting after four consecutive hours in the hospital just worrying about Kenny. The doctor still had not gotten back to them about the true nature behind Kenny's condition, but if the mandated isolation ward was any indication, it was likely that the doctor had had the same fear that Kyle had. The name of the disease kept popping up in Kyle's head, and although Kyle tried to push it out of his mind it appeared to be permanently adhered to his brain. Watching the happy couple just talking in the isolation room made Kyle feel somewhat cold at the lie which he had told Butters.
"You seriously think that's what Kenny's got?"
Kyle turned his body to face Cartman, who was similarly standing at the glass and looking into it, just watching Kenny and Butters talk. Upon hitting puberty, Cartman had towered over Kyle, but right there in that hospital, the look of worry on his face seemed badly matched with his physical stature. Fifteen-year-old Kyle would have jumped at every opportunity to stay away from his fifteen-year-old nemesis, but ten years of separation had fixed that nervous itch of his.
"Yeah, I think so."
"You told Butters that it was pneumonia."
"I didn't want to be the one to tell him."
Cartman turned his head and gave Kyle a tentative look.
"That shit...it's pretty dangerous, right?"
Kyle sighed, folding his arms and staring back into the glass at his sick friend, who was trying his best to have a spirited conversation with his partner despite his obvious breathing difficulties.
"It's one of the biggest killers worldwide. Every year it takes about two millions lives. About one-third of the world's population are latent carriers of the bacterium that causes it, but kids, the elderly, and people with weak immune systems are particularly susceptible to a full-blown case of it. Healthy people are less susceptible."
"Kenny's a healthy young adult."
""Less Susceptible" doesn't mean that he's completely safe from it. There's always a possibility that Kenny's body failed to fight off the initial infection."
"...do you think he'll make it?"
Kyle bit his lip even harder.
"I'm not a doctor, Cartman."
The pair fell into silence for a moment as they pondered the implications of the sudden twist that the fates had thrown their friend. The thought of Kenny actually not making it out of this alive was now present, a massive elephant in the room that no one actually wanted to risk prodding for fear of sparking verbal doubts about the future. Kyle and Cartman silently agreed that silence was the best way to deal with the situation at this point, the point where Kenny's diagnosis was still unconfirmed by a licensed physician and where they could still pretend that things were going to be okay.
The tension was surprisingly broken by a lighthearted comment on Cartman's part.
"Technically...you are going to be a doctor, right?"
Kyle jerked his head in Cartman's direction, completely surprised by the groundless question.
"Huh?"
Cartman flashed Kyle a small grin.
"A few months back, lunchtime, at my restaurant? You told me that you were working to finish up your doctorate, your thesis and presentations and all that, and wouldn't be coming round as often anymore, at least until they were finished. How's that going, by the way?"
Kyle was slightly touched that Cartman actually bothered to remember details from a light conversation that they had months ago. He felt another small stab of shame at not even remembering the fact that he had shared information about his own life with his friends. Kyle's claim that he wouldn't be going to Cartman's restaurant as often until his work was finished had turned out to be a half-truth, as the redhead had not even stepped into the premises of Cartman Burger for an entirety of four months, the day where they had the conversation being his latest visit to the restaurant. Cartman, however, didn't even seem to look offended by the fact that Kyle had not appeared to have a meal in so long.
"It's going...it's going good. Actually, I just finished it today."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. That's why I didn't pick up your calls...I was in the middle of my final presentation to a bunch of old farts who flew down here from London."
"How did it go?"
Kyle smiled.
"I think it went really well. I think⦠I think I'm going to get it."
Cartman didn't say another word. Instead, he settled with grinning at Kyle and raising his clenched fist, an offered gesture of solidarity and congratulations. Kyle smirked appreciatively before bumping his fist against the chef's own, bumping a little harder than he normally would to try and make up for the fact that Cartman's hand was almost twice the size of his own.
The shift in conversation topic was a short break to ease themselves of the tension that had been built up throughout the afternoon. Even as the duo settled back into a significantly heavier mood, brought about by the hospital setting and their blonde friend lying in a bed in a soundproof, airtight room, Kyle couldn't help but feel that there was hope for Kenny just yet. There were so many things they still didn't know about what was happening, so many factors that could come into play that could change things for the better. Kyle knew that he had always been a pessimist, which perhaps explained why he immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion about Kenny's ailment. Cartman was right, healthy adults didn't usually get full-blown tuberculosis so easily, and Kenny had always been healthy.
Hope rose in his chest.
Little did Kyle know that the next twenty-four hours would dramatically affirm his fears, and send whatever hope he had mustered crashing back into the ground. Life was full of unexpected twists and turns, and the craziest town in the country definitely wasn't spared from the fact that fate could just one day decided to drop its pants and take a massive shit on the future.
Author's Note - Was that last bit a little too much? Oh well.
As you might have noticed, I'm planning to ignore the fact that Kenny has ever died at all back in the canonical South Park. It's such a tricky thing to work with and it just doesn't go with what I'm trying to do here with Life Support, so I'm tossing that out of the window for the rest of the story.
Reviews appreciated.
~SUITELIFEFAN
