Disclaimer: Standard disclaimers and such apply. If you happen to have forgotten them, just go back a chapter and read them over.
A/N: Okay, so I officially need to thank some people. Like, I am the worst author ever 'cuz I don't normally, but then I posted this fic and hours later I had six reviews and like a dozen other emails that people either fav'd it or put it on alert, so like, wow. So, thank you: Hot Monkey Brain, Hypothisos, Dresden Octopus, Alex 0821, xxSay, Newey, KittyBePraised, and Becca for your wonderful reviews. As much as I hate to admit it, I am in fact human, and therefore love it when people review my stories. Especially when it's just the first chapter. It soothes some nerves/paranoia, ya know? Ok, that's it, let's get to it.
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It was still dark when Tweek abruptly pulled himself out of his shallow pool of slumber, his entire body tense for flight. The smell of alien, sterile bedding was suffocating him, and with a muffled shriek, Tweek fell to the strange floor, his body tangled in the sheets.
"Jesus Christ!" he whispered loudly to the dark
"Mmph," an almost unfamiliar voice called from the other end of the room.
Tweek would have immediately jumped up and thrown his alarm clock at the room's glass doors to make a speedy exit, but then he remembered a second before grabbing the clock what had happened just the day before. He settled for pulling at his hair roughly instead.
"G-go back to sleep Ted," Tweek said slowly, trying his hardest not to scream.
"Can't," the man named Ted replied wearily.
Tweek heard a set of old bed springs squeak loudly, as if Ted had shifted his weight. Tweek imagined him sitting up in his bed with his feet dangling over the edge, precariously close to the black hole that was spinning under the bed. Tweek sat up with a strangled Nngh! after remembering that every bed had said black hole under it, and he was inches away from a certain gravity-related doom. In a burst of adrenaline-induced speed, he jumped back onto the bed (tangled sheets and all) and landed in a heap.
Ted was indeed sitting at the edge of his bed on the other side of the room, his head in his hands. The weak moonlight spilled across his silhouette, reminding Tweek for a minute of the mysterious mer-people that had once taken up residence in the house next door when Stark's Pond had frozen over one unseasonably cold summer.
Ted was an okay guy, Tweek guessed. But yesterday passed by in a blur of panic and drug-induced fog, so he couldn't really be too sure. After Professor Miff and his vampire room mate Shaun had confronted him about drugs, Tweek had panicked and tried to flee his dorm. Unfortunately, because he was spazzing out, he inconveniently forgot about the four flights of stairs he needed to go down before he could make it to freedom. After falling down about 23 and a half stairs, Tweek's body saw it fit to temporarily put him out of his misery, and he promptly passed out.
When he had awoken again, his body felt seven times heavier, but for once in his life, he wasn't shaking. By that time Shaun was driving him to San Juan Capistrano (wearing a pair of thick sunglasses and a visor, Tweek noted), and he had been doped up on so many horse tranquilizers that he couldn't even really remember why that was such a bad idea in the first place. He couldn't even make his mouth ask Shaun how much sunscreen he needed to use to drive them all the way to San Juan Capistrano (what was that anyway? His brain had asked. Some kind of park?). When he tried to get his body to cooperate with him, the little Tweek in his brain had freaked out and flipped the 'in case of emergency' switch in his mind, and he blacked out again.
About an hour later, still higher than a kite, Shaun checked him into Hope By the Sea. He had collapsed onto a bed some woman in white had kindly led him to (he didn't even have the energy to ask for the place's bed bug repellent). Early the next day, with all the horse tranquilizers finally out of his system, he had fully freaked out.
It was the spaz to end all spazzes.
He called Craig (unsuccessfully the first three times as he kept shaking and dialing wrong) and had hopefully gotten across the urgency of his situation before two gorillas in nurse outfits trained to subdue crazy people bodily carried him back into his room. He had spent the rest of the day with Ted, who had been rocking back and forth in the corner of the room.
Ted, apparently, had started doing heroine when his fiancée had died six years ago. He had told Tweek that he was only trying to get better because he had finally figured that it was what she would have wanted of him. Tweek had secretly agreed, but had said nothing about it. He only bit his fingernails, afraid that Ted might have secret syringes he could have hidden in the room in case he needed to give AIDS to someone who pointed out the obvious.
The Ted-shaped, merman-silhouette of the present sighed at that moment, pulling Tweek out of his memories of yesterday. It turned its subaqueous face towards Tweek, who crawled a little closer to his bed post, just in case.
"I need someone to talk to," Ted said.
Tweek twitched.
"Oh," he said, pulling at the neck of his standard-issue pajamas. "O-Okay then."
Ted sniffled, and Tweek wondered if he might be crying.
"I miss her so much," Ted said quietly, as if afraid of his own voice.
Tweek yanked on the bedding underneath him to have something to focus on instead of the sagging figure of his room mate.
"It's been six years," he continued when Tweek remained silent. "Do you think it will ever stop hurting?"
Tweek clenched his jaw and blinked harshly, thinking it over.
"I—Nngh—I once had a friend who would die almost every other day. B-by the time we got to high school, no one even noticed anymore. Jesus! Th-there was only one kid who still worried when my-my friend would die. I-I asked him once, that if he knew Kenny would come back, why he still cried and sh-shit. He just said that every time it happened, it was like the first time. Like a-a stab to the heart that he was sure would never go away. He said I w-wouldn't understand. I didn't."
Ted said nothing, but he had lifted his head from its former place in his hands and was watching Tweek with an unreadable expression on his face. Then suddenly, a sad smile spread over his face.
"Even though that's probably just the crack talking, I appreciate the story kid," Ted said. "Go to sleep. Tomorrow you'll go through detox, and then you can finally start your own recovery."
"But what about you??" Tweek asked, pulling at his hair again. "I didn't help at all!"
Ted looked out the glass doors, his hands on the bed behind him. .His eyes seemed glued on some far away star in the sky, happily converting Hydrogen into Helium without a care about the problems of humans thousands of light years away.
"I think you did help kid," Ted said.
He didn't look away from the star that seemed to have captivated him with its twinkling beauty. Tweek wondered if aliens had gotten control of his mind by some sort of inter-galactic Morse Code Hypnosis.
"Too bad you're just a crack whore," Ted said abruptly. "You could have been a philosopher or something. Maybe there's hope for you yet."
"Jesus Christ! I don't do crack," Tweek mumbled even as a fit of twitches attacked his body.
"That's what I said about heroine," he answered, finally looking back at Tweek. Even in the weak moonlight, Tweek could see a look of pity scrawled across his tired face. Tweek hoped he never looked like that in his lifetime. Ted looked as if he'd given up hope a long time ago, and was trying to find the courage to do something about it.
"That's what everyone says."
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A/N: Okay, so I know this was a hardcore fast update, and I know that probably isn't a bad thing, but other updates won't be nearly as speedy. Sorry. It's just that I'm so frustrated with my other projects (both fanfiction and real world-related) and I have nine of these chapters already done... It makes me feel less like a failure at life when I post this after getting frustrated with other stuff, you know? And, also, expect short chapters. Unlike some other stuff, most of these chapters won't be that long. Sorry again if I fail at life.