Try to remember.
Chapter 3: We have an understanding.
Disclaimer: I do not own South Park, Young Justice or any of the works in/related to H.P Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.
—?M?—
Kenny's eyes snapped open and he was greeted by the sight of the roof over his head, in his dark bedroom at the Dupuis home in upper Gotham. Feeling sullenly pissed off, and very worn, the teenager sat up in bed. He was wearing that old familiar orange parka, the coat that seemed to be a part of him when resurrecting, or reanimating, or reawakening or whatever it was he did to come back.
Patting himself down, Kenny felt no lasting scars. Scarring didn't happen often and didn't last, but when a death was brutal enough, sometimes the wounds didn't fully heal. Assured that he was fully intact, Kenny shifted his gaze over to his alarm clock. 6:25PM. Twenty five minutes had passed, not that there was ever a standard amount of time, but it was still pertinent to note such things.
Hopping out of bed, Kenny mulled over how to go about letting his foster parents, and more importantly Karen, know he was home. As it wouldn't do to just, appear, so to speak. Then his blue eyes caught sight of the setting sun out his window, and he got his answer. Opening the window, Kenny elected the easiest option and clambered out into the cold evening chill. With ease he navigated down the wall, using the guttering and artfully decorative foliage to guide his descent.
In a minute he was over the garden wall and back round to the front of the house, pulling out his key and opening the front door.
"Young man, would you care to tell me what happened at school today." Inside he found the stoic Jonathan Dupuis waiting for him in the living room.
Kenny had to physically hold back a tired sigh, instead answering blankly. "Some older girl was bullying Karen. So I put a stop to it."
Then it was Mr. Dupuis turn to sigh tiredly, before taking of his glasses in a thoughtful manner and saying. "Kenneth, come and sit with me in the study."
Kenny quietly followed his foster father to the office-like, gothically decorated room, where he sat across the desk from Mr. Dupuis awaiting the lecture. "Kenneth, you badly injured a fifteen year old girl."
"It shouldn't happen again." Kenny offered.
Mr. Dupuis shook his head slowly, then said. "Now that's not good enough, Kenneth, I want a promise from you that it will never happen again."
Kenny met his foster father's eyes, and then resolved. "It won't happen again, so long as no one threatens or hurts Karen."
"No, now Kenneth, even then you should tell a teacher, not resort to mindless reactionary violence."
"Sorry, but that's not how it is." Kenny was now the one shaking his head in a thoughtful manner.
"What do you mean by that, Kenneth?" Mr Dupuis inquired, trying to be sympathetic.
"I mean bullies don't understand that kind of authority. Even if a teacher was watching over them all day, they'd still find a way to try and make someone feel smaller than them… So I show them a new authority. It works differently because these kids are rich, but the same thing is true in every school i've been in." Kenny finished his statement by simply looking at Jonathan and awaiting a response.
"Kenny, I understand you and Karen have been through a lot, but you can't just… You can't just attack people like that, and a young lady as well, it's just not proper behaviour for people of our standing." The stolid gentleman was approaching a point where he was raising his voice now.
"Someone of 'your' standing." Kenny shot back reflexively. Mr. Dupuis' eyes bulged in anger, but Kenny jumped in before he could start ranting. "Mr. Dupuis if you're saying people of 'our' standing; meaning you, your wife, Karen and myself, then I don't think you do understand… It's true that, given time, Karen might become someone of 'your' standing, but me…? I can't just sit by while someone picks on my sister. I've got to do what I know works, and that was to attack Loretta Inzerillo."
"… Can I at least have your word that if something like this might happen again, that you not resort so quickly to violence?" To Jonathan's credit he did appear to be understanding where Kenny was coming from.
"Alright." Was the blonde teen's answer. Because in a way the man was right, beating up the Inzerillo girl had not worked out well for him.
"Okay, I'm glad we have an understanding. You may go. But mind you watch your behaviour, Kenneth. Your second day at school, and already…" Was how their little talk finished, with Mr. Dupuis trailing off into disgruntled grumbling. So Kenny got up and left, heading for Karen's room to check up on her after the day's events.
Heading down the hall, Kenny gave a little knock on her door, before he heard her voice from inside say. "Come in."
Pushing the door open halfway, Kenny poked his head in to see his sister sitting cross legged on her bed, books spread out and open in front of her. "Hey, Karen. How are ya?"
She nodded simply, smiled at him and said."I'm good."
"You get home alright?" He inquired, hoping she hadn't encountered trouble anywhere near as bad as he had.
"Yeah. Barbara and Steph gave me a ride." Her smile sweetened and Kenny got the feeling that she was going to be alright at this new school. The incident with Loretta Inzerillo had not filled him with hope, but now, he could rest at least partly assured.
"Cool…" Seeing as she was busy, and he himself felt like he could sleep for a decade, Kenny ended by saying. "Okay, g'night Karen."
"Goodnight Kenny, thank you." She replied softly, before turning back to her books.
"No problem." Then he shut the door, and headed into his own room down the hall.
After he'd gotten into bed, deciding to skip patrol tonight on account of a death, Kenny turned his thoughts to the Inzerillo's. One of them had shot him. Which one? Was impossible to tell now, but Barbara Gordon mentioned Loretta being a mobsters daughter. Which would've made those thugs who took him on the henchmen of her father, most likely anyway.
He resolved to look into it further tomorrow, and not leave one of his murders unavenged. Therefore Kenny would investigate the Inzerillo's and whatever seedy business they particularly specialised in. Whether it was drugs, guns, human trafficking. Mysterion would drag it out into the light no matter what.
And on that thought, Kenny fell asleep.
—?M?—
He was deep, deep underwater. Beneath massive, swelling tides of filthy green, murky sewage water. He couldn't see any light filtering down from the surface, yet there was a permeating glow ahead of him, through the mist of the dirty lake.
He pushed himself onwards, not feeling the need to breathe, nor experiencing the heavy pressure that should've come with such depths.
As he approached the pool of light within the waters, he noticed it wasn't simply a spotlight shining down from on high. Instead, it was a sort of bioluminescent thing submerged with him.
A wide, off-white contour in a the hue of sickly skin, all beige and unhealthy looking. It wriggled, either with the tide or of its own accord, rippling in the waters relative stillness. It was quite large too, easily twenty feet long and a little over half that in width. An elongated oval shape it was.
As he floated in the water before it, he noticed something tingling along its surface. At regular intervals, little boils had begun to bulge up from beneath the odd thing's skin. Creating pointed bumps all across its back. It wriggled once more, this living sack of skin and pulsating boils.
As he stared at it, transfixed, the boils began to protrude even more, until they could no longer be called as such. Now they were long enough to be spines, stretching out of the body and arcing softly down its back, away from him. The spines were metallic looking, shining like steel even in these clouded subaquatic fathoms. And as they grew like little hairs down the contour of this beige mass, three tentacular spines at the front began to deviate from the pattern.
These three exceptions did not follow the path of the others, they instead reached out to him, weaving, tendril-like in his direction. Then they stopped, not that far from his face and about a foot out from the mass itself. After they had stopped extending. the tips of these antennae blinked open, revealing three orbs that were incredibly inhuman in all but shape, yet still nonetheless they were identifiable as eyes.
The stalks looked at him, staring directly into his own eyes, blinking several times as he stared back at them. These amber orbs, pinpointed with amorphous grey pupils, writhed in their slimy sockets, much like the skin all along the creature's back.
The eyes are the window to the soul, and what he saw in this alien beings' would've been impossible to correlate in the mind of a normal person. But he had been to far away places, witnessed things no one else was meant to. So he translated the emotion in those inconceivable spheres as old as the earth, and what he saw frightened him.
He saw apathy, and outside of that this things eyes were so alien in feeling, in perspective, that he could not bring himself to try and decipher anything further than that. Except maybe, a distant sense of desire. But desire for what, he could not tell.
After the two had locked gazes for a while, the mass of gelatinous creature shifted. It's front rising up before him to open a great, wide cavity.
Then as Kenny looked into it's black, toothless mouth, he felt something pulling him away. There was a sound, a distant shrillness, repeating over and over as the slug-like creature moved to swallow him whole…
—?M?—
Just like the day before, and most mornings it seemed, Kenny woke with a jolt, springing out of his dream to find himself tangled in his bedsheets. In a cold sweat, he forced himself to sit up and grab hold of the waking world.
Trying to make sense of that dream, that… Whatever it was, posed a frightening possibility. Mysterion's past experience with the occult, especially his trip to a certain star-sunk cyclopean city, gave him an attuned sense for all things eldritch.
When he was ten, he and his friends were stranded in the extra-dimensional city known as R'lyeh. Though this was back during the Gulf crisis that never happened. Even so, ever since that brief sojourn he had dreamt inexplicable dreams, and what occurred in these visions never failed to show themselves in the sane world. Whether it was clairvoyance, or whether he was simply subconsciously aware of these presences, Kenny did not know. But what he did know, is that he didn't like the look of that monstrosity in his dream.
Pulling himself to his feet, he filed his thoughts away, intending to ponder on them throughout the day, or later on patrol. For now he had to busy himself with his everyday life…
—?M?—
Once again at lunchtime, when all the students had flooded out of their classes to embrace their break, Kenny set upon finding Loretta Inzerillo. Not only did the girl need to answer for what she had caused him, but she also needed to apologise to his sister. Something Kenny would make sure she did personally.
There was also the small detail that she had seen him die. In cases like these, Kenny never knew what people would remember exactly. How would his curse write his death out of their memories? Sometimes they would remember he ran away. Or they ran away. Someone took him away, he got separated, etc etc. Whatever it turned out to be though, never failed to seem like a poor excuse to his mind.
In no time at all he found the girl he was looking for. Her uniform was once more pristine, her face however was not. She still bore the same cast over her nose from where he had broken it, and she seemed to move her head with a little more care than one normally would.
"Inzerillo." He called out bluntly.
Whirling around she faced him, her eyes widening in anxiety and fear. When she spoke, her voice sounded incredibly nasal, as if she had a bad cold. "Oh! New guy… Hey… What do you want?"
"What do you think?" Asked Kenny rhetorically, furrowing his brow at her.
"…" Her eyes widened, her hand drifting up to cover her nose.
Kenny rolled his eyes and irritably clarified. "I want you to apologise to Karen, dumbass,"
"Oh. Right. Sure…" He hand fell back to her side where she fidgeted with the hem of her skirt, her fingers twitching in an idle, nervous fashion.
"Well…?" Kenny prompted her.
"I'll do it, alright!?" She yelped angrily, before pausing and then starting. "I just, wanna say sorry to you as well… After you kicked the crap out of my brother and his friends… I realised that I'd just been a real…"
"Piece of shit?" Kenny suggested, a lingering mote of annoyance carrying over from the fact that one of her brother's friends had shot and killed him.
"Hey! I'm trying to say sorry, okay?" The blonde teen shot back, stamping her foot in a petulant, indignant manner. Which did shut Kenny up.
"Well, I was just in a mood, and needed to take it out on someone, y'know?" Loretta explained, sighing dramatically. "My Papa's been… cranky, recently and I was just feeling down so… I'm sorry, it won't happen again." She abashedly looked down and away from him, but her eyes drifted slyly back to see if he accepted her apology.
Which he did, albeit a little reluctantly. "That's fine, but I don't need an apology. Karen does."
"Right. I'll go do that now then…" She said, turning away to head off and find Karen. Then she glanced over her shoulder, half to make sure he was following her and half to say. "But, we're cool, right?"
"As soon as you apologise to my sister? Yeah."
The mob princess nodded, then flicked her hair as she turned and trotted off. "Got it." She said, while Kenny followed after her.
It turned out Karen was sat eating lunch with the three from yesterday; Barbara, Steph and Dick. When they saw Loretta head over, their reactions were wary. Then they glimpsed Kenny sticking to her like a shadow, and relaxed.
With no prompting from the tall blonde boy, Loretta began, her hands clasped in front of her, standing primly. "Hi, Karen. Look, I want to say, sorry. To you. For how I acted yesterday. It was horrible of me. I was in a bad mood and I took it out on you, and you really didn't deserve that. So… I'm very sorry." Her apology stopped and started, a form of stage fright getting the better of her. But she got through it with sincerity.
In reply, Karen nodded demurely and said. "Okay, I guess I forgive you."
"You do?"
"Yeah." The mousy haired young teen affirmed, nodding her head and smiling. Before that smile turned into a smirk, and she gestured to her own nose. "Besides, I think you paid you dues enough already."
Loretta looked peeved, but received the good natured humour of the remark anyway. "Oh, yeah. I guess. Well, see you around."
After that, the apologetic teen walked off. Kenny gave Karen a thumbs up, before following after Loretta once more. He had a few more questions for that girl.
"Happy?" She snipped, upon realising he was still tailing her.
Despite her snappish attitude, Kenny could tell Loretta had meant what she said to Karen. "Very… Your nose okay?" He added.
"It's fine! Thank you." She stated indignantly.
"This sort of thing won't happen again?" Was his next question, the hint of a reprimanding tone evident in his voice.
Loretta turned to face him, looked up directly into his eyes and assured Kenny. "No…"
"Are you okay though…? You said your dad was 'cranky' which is why you were acting out… What's going on there?" His inquiry was made genuinely, with concern for the girl's well being. But that didn't mean he did not have an ulterior motive.
"He's not hitting me or anything, if that's what you're getting at. He's just had a lot of work lately, he isn't home a lot and when he is he gets short with everybody. Mom, Jack, me, the maids, our chef, the pool boy, the butler, the chauffeur." Kenny could not help but raise his eyebrows every time this girl listed off another notch of luxury like it was nothing. "His temper's shorter than usual…" Loretta finished morosely, and Kenny's eyebrows returned from where they'd been leaving earth's atmosphere.
"I'm sorry to hear that." He comforted, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
She shrugged it off and replied. "Nah, that's alright. I guess it's all part of his job."
"What's he do?" Was the clinching question for Kenny, but he asked it like anyone else would in conversation.
"He runs a big important shipping company down at the East Side Docks. Apparently he's had trouble with a big shipment, I dunno, he doesn't talk to me about it, thank God. Bore my ass off." Loretta finished with a light laugh, pushing her sunflower yellow curls behind her ears. She was about to carry on talking, when the school bell rang. "Oh, well you get the idea… I'll see you around then… um…?"
"Kenny." He supplied, before walking off to his class. Leaving her to head in the other direction.
—?M?—