Small Sanctuary

written by Soltian - illustrated by kyuubikun and w0rmsign

-Kyuubikun-

CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
EPILOGUE

Notes

This fic's first chapter was originally posted here - it reads fine without the first chapter, but it's all one continuous story.

Chapter 1

It was Saturday, and Craig's phone was buzzing. He hadn't taken it with him when he went out last night, and he was trying to remember whether he had meant to talk or spend time with anyone other than Kenny. He sometimes made plans without remembering. For some reason the kids at school just didn't make much of an impression, probably because he was bored of seeing them every day. His phone stopped buzzing, vibrating just short of falling off his bedside table entirely. The strap fell off the edge of his bedside table and dangled there with a light clink of his phone charm, a bright red race car and a finish line flag, both of which were battered with the enamel chipping off. He pawed it off the desk, and rolled over onto his back before even flipping it open, holding it against his chest as he breathed in and out, almost falling right back asleep. The phone buzzed against his ribs once, signalling that whoever had called had bothered to leave him a voice mail. He sighed, flipped it open, and was unsurprised to see a blurry candid of Tweek come up on the display, a photo he had snuck a shot of when the boy wasn't looking during lunchtime. Any time he tried to take a photo of him while he was aware of the camera he would bite his lip unattractively, or fidget, or worse yet throw his arms over his face and demand that Craig "point that thing someplace else." Kenny often made very blaise remarks about Tweek's constitution as a reliable person (as well as many unnecessary statements about Tweek's supposed failure in the bedroom, which were well-tested lies), but insults were just his way of showing affection lately. At first Tweek had just been someone to just boss around - you could never have too many of those - but then it turned out that Tweek was someone he really liked. He was also very angry, very strong, and very complicated. Complicated was not what Craig wanted to be handling today, so after another nearly-awake sigh of resignation he slowly tapped out a text response to the unheard voice message.

[Can't come out today. Sick.]

Almost ten seconds later, a reply flashed back, scathing and short-tempered.

[Did you come down with McCormick fever? Knew you would get a disease, eventually. Don't bother calling; I'm going over to Token's. You're on ice again.]

Craig sighed, flipped his phone shut, and put his arm over his eyes. He hadn't bothered to take his jacket off before he slept last night, and he smelled like must and sweat. That's right, Tweek. Keep on playing the bitch card, that always gets your would-be (could-be) lover raring to go. Craig hated when things were difficult, which made him wonder why he was so attracted to people that were impossible to hold on to. Eventually he sat up, tossed his phone aside, and went into the hall bathroom to wash his face, wearing his hat, his jacket, his shirt from yesterday, and boxers. The bathroom was the one room in the house immaculately kept, thanks to Ruby and no one else. She was neurotic about having at least one place she could "feel clean". Craig often found himself helping her out by wiping smears of toothpaste out of the sink to make sure it foamed up in the running water and went down the drain. Though, to be honest, this was mostly to avoid her storming into his room and explaining just what a disgusting pig he (and by definition, all men, especially their father) was. A clean mouth and a clean face later, he went back to his bedroom and found a pair of jeans he'd only worn two days in a row so far, socks that smelled more like detergent than feet, and pulled his hat harder down on his head so that his hair stopped sticking into his eyes.

Downstairs was quiet as if it were never inhabited, even though his mother was sitting on the couch. There was always the route of heading right out the front door and ignoring her hissing demand that he pause and explain himself, but he was feeling just generous enough (with an odd lack of hangover) to enter the living room instead and clear his throat grumpily.

She lifted her dark eyes up from the newspaper she was holding at exactly a ninety-degree angle from her arm, and folded it with just as much precision.

"You aren't high right now. That's at least something."

"I was worried about me last night, too, mom."

"Fine, smartass. I thought you came in because you were going to explain yourself anyway. Where were you last night?"

"Drinking and having unprotected sex. With like five older guys."

"No, but you were drinking. Do you have cash to pay for what you took out of your father's liquor cabinet?"

"No." He did, but not for wasting on his dad's cheap booze. Whatever his dad kept around, he felt entitled to.

"Fine, then you're raking the yard this afternoon."

"I have plans, sorry."

"Tomorrow."

"Busy."

"Choose one, Craig Tucker."

He heaved a sigh, and pulled his hat down again, even though it was already covering his hair. The brim met his eyebrows now.

"I'll do it tomorrow. I'm going out now."

"If you buy any more weed, I'm cutting off your allowance and confiscating your XBox."

"Yeah, yeah, I get it."

"Have fun, dear."

"How could I not?"

~

So, Tweek and Token were out of the question. Clyde had been a crybaby and a chore since Bebe dumped him for the fourth time (there were tedious text messages on his phone that he had not yet bothered to answer, detailing his life having ended and other assorted apocalyptic results of their love being rent asunder). That left Kenny, again, which was more than a little of the reason he had gone to see him the other night in the first place. His first thought was the garage, but when he checked his phone he could see that it was past one; even Kenny would have managed to make it home by now. His house was closer than the garage, anyway, so he shrugged his jacket a little closer together (he generally refused to close it these days, because he didn't get cold anymore, not after living in South Park all his life) and walked the eight blocks that would take him to the dirtiest and cheapest houses in a town of nothing but dirty and cheap houses.

Kenny's in particular was a magnificent specimen of what it really meant to have be poor; it was probably green at one point, but all gray now, and the roof had been patched over and replaced several times. The fact that it was more than one story was a miracle, and for some reason there was barbed wire, half pieces of trucks, and dead land mines in both the back and front yards. There was an iron spike out front that Kenny claimed was a dog post, but gave Craig an eerie sort of feeling when he looked at it. Out back was a shed that reeked of chemicals - once the friendly McCormick meth lab, which was allegedly abandoned now. From the scent of it and the fresh scorch marks on the aluminum pans strewn haphazardly here and there - it was still getting a pretty rough workout now and then. Craig took his usual route in the back, not wanting to bother with the formality of the front door. The screen door was off its hinges and set aside, and the door leading into the kitchen pushed open easily - the knob's latch didn't work, and when it became unbearably cold in the kitchen with it swinging open all the time it was held in place by several pieces of duct tape. The kitchen smelled like cigarettes and the light was out. As far as he could tell the entire building was completely silent - which meant that Kenny's parents and Karen weren't home, all of which were good things. He was on his way up to Kenny's room, but before he could get as far as the door, another one opened, and Kevin was suddenly standing in his path. Craig stopped short with a scowl. In the past he had ignored Kevin completely, to the point of not even caring that he existed. When he graduated middle school and became better friends with Kenny, however, he had to acknowledge that Kevin McCormick was also someone he might see now and again. He disliked Kevin intensely, mostly due to the fact that he had become overweight, very tall, and about as pungent as a freshly laid cat stool. His hair was kept from becoming a veritable minefield of lice by bi-weekly hackings from his mother's scissors - this time she had attempted to give him as close to a buzz cut as she could without a razor, but not without a few scrapes and bumps on his otherwise smooth skull. Kevin was chewing something that smelled like salt, and Craig suspected tobacco for a moment before he realized it was jerky. Craig's disdain for Kevin was heartily returned, but that didn't bother him in the slightest. He didn't want people he hated liking him anyway.

"Wh-what're you looking for, faggot?" Kevin finally stammered out, after a few moments of staring and chewing. He was sticking his lower jaw out as if he had the mumps.

"Your brother, moron," Craig said, his hands still in his pockets, trying not to look too defensive. Kevin was a retard, but he was huge, and he was unpredictable, and Craig was standing at the top of a flight of stairs he didn't want to be pushed down. He braced himself in case he would have to dodge any sudden attacks. Kevin kept chewing, as if he were considering his words, and then jerked his head in the direction of Kenny's room.

"Nothing but dead rats in there. I saw you two twinks leave. Last night. But he didn't come back. He's been gone. He's been gone a lot."

Craig didn't know whether to trust him, but he also didn't want to elbow past him. He could hear strains of death metal coming from inside his room, and for some reason the usually familiar sounds made him shiver.

"He thinks he's so - special." Kevin was talking again, and Craig looked at him evenly. Kevin was still staring at the door to Kenny's room. "Even though I'm the oldest. Even - though. I'm more important. He's always leaving out his window, doing his stupid. Ninja thing or whatever. One time I saw him jump - he broke his leg, or something. Then. Then you know what he did?"

Craig shook his head mutely, not wanting to actually ask. This sounded like one of Kevin's tall tales; he was somewhat familiar with those.

"Screamed. Cursed. Bled everywhere. Then he. Took out a knife, right? Stabbed himself - right in the neck. Next day, he was fine. And we went to school together. I fucking hate school."

"That makes no fucking sense, you empty-headed trash." Craig finally snapped, turning sideways and putting his foot further down on the step, away from the upstairs landing, away from Kevin. "You don't stab yourself in the throat and then go to school the next day. You die. You know that, right?"

Kevin's eyebrows knitted in anger.

"Of course I - KNOW that - you stupid - c-unt. I know a lot more than YOU do. That's what I'm fucking telling you. Kenny - the real Kenny - isn't here, anymore. Not since he was a baby. Okay? These are all just c-opies, and they think he's so fucking special. They want to fucking worship him like he's a messiah or something. But he's not even the real thing. He's a zombie. A ghost. A ghost that's a zombie. Whatever. Do you two fuck? You'd better not, 'cus his insides must be all dead and wormy. You'll b-e lucky if your dick doesn't fall off. Fucking fag."

"We don't," Craig said, crystal clear and smooth, and turned on his heel to walk down the steps, having had enough of Kevin's rambling and certain that Kenny wasn't here. He was going to check the garage after all.

"Liar. Lying fag. Disgusting. I'll get them to see, too. I'm the only one worth looking - up to. They don't know it yet. But they'll figure it out."

Craig slammed the rotted kitchen door behind him, and that was when he heard the most disturbing part of the entire encounter. Kevin was sitting by his window when he walked past it, crooning to himself, in a low hum somewhat in time with his muted music.

"Immortal. Immortal, immortal, immortal. New, fresh, never dead. Come love me. Immortal, immortal, immortal."

~

The next place to check was the garage, but it was empty by the time Craig got there. There was no beer left in the cans they had shared the other night, but other than that, everything was perfectly intact, and the most suspicious thing of all was that Kenny's backpack was still there, too. Kenny never left his own possessions, bare and few as they were, simply lying around for anyone to find and take advantage of. Finding everything neatly abandoned, even in as private a place as this, was disturbing. Even his phone was tucked neatly into the front pocket of the bag.

Maybe he just meant to come back soon, Craig told himself. Maybe he's only stepped out for a while, and he's going to be right back. Maybe you should just turn on the TV, enjoy your own goddamn clubhouse you made for yourself and sit your ass down on this couch, and stop worrying about Kenny before this gets out of hand. He's not even missing. He's been gone for five minutes for all you know. He never leaves his phone behind, but so what? This time he did. It just means he feels safe here.

Unconvinced, he bolted the door to the garage on his way out, and mentally traced out a path for himself to the Marsh's house. He hadn't been there in what might have been over a year or so, not since Stan had gotten daring and bold for the sake of a girl he was trying to impress (not Wendy, for once, he and Wendy had been fighting) and threw a party in his parents' basement. A real party, with drinks and drugs and unauthorized teenagers making out and making music with their bodies, some of them even right out in the open. Craig had gone after Stan himself that night, because he'd always wondered what their not-so-little joe next door would look like on his back. The answer had been; easy, pretty, red in the face and breathless, an experience worth repeating once or twice in the future. But not for a while. He knocked on the Marsh's front door like a proper citizen, and sniffed in the cold air. The lawn here was actually mown, there were signs of life in little scuffmarks around the flower beds and the marks of baseballs or footballs hitting the siding of the house. A dog barked inside the house when he knocked a second time, and he heard a young woman (Shelly, Stan's sister's name was Shelly) shout angrily down the stairs.

"MOM, SOMEONE'S AT THE DOOR."

"Don't talk to me like that, young lady!"

"Don't talk to your mother like that, Shelly!"

The door opened and Craig was greeted with the sight of Randy Marsh's brightly smiling mustached face. He nodded in greeting, and Randy blinked in complete lack of comprehension as to who he was, which didn't surprise him. Stan's father had never been too bright, even if he had been acquainted with him for years.

"I'm a friend of your son's. Is he around?"

"Oh, you're Stan's friend- Craig, that's right, of course. Stan's out back with Gordon, go ahead and walk around. We're going to be having a barbeque later, want to join us?"

"Maybe later, thanks." Craig deadpanned, and nodded again, this time in careless gratitude for Randy's directions. Glad to not have to enter the house where Shelly was, he made his way around to the back to have a look, and realized that Gordon was the dog. He and Stan were playing fetch, or about as much fetch as you could manage to play in about forty feet of yard space, so Craig skulked in, staying near the house, and nodded in Stan's general direction. Stan waved, but didn't smile, since Craig never visited him, and Craig didn't blame him; he wasn't sure what to make of his visit either.

"Hey, Stan. Has Kenny been around?"

"No, not since...last week? I think he's been sick, dude."

"He's not, we were hanging out last night."

"Oh. Huh. If you saw him last night, why are you asking if he was here?"

Craig shrugged, his eyes on the brightly panting golden retriever that was jumping up onto Stan's chest, trying to get the small kibble that Stan was holding just out of his reach, above his head.

"He took off. I was worried."

"He's just like that, man. Don't even pay attention to it, he'll show up eventually."

"Sure. Would Kyle know anything?"

"Maybe. Probably not more than I do." Stan let Gordon take the kibble out of his fingers, finally, and then wiped the slobber off onto his pants. That was when Craig finally made eye contact with him, and smirked when he saw that Stan was looking at him as if he had grown an extra pair of arms. He stepped away from the house and walked past Stan - Gordon skirted away from him when he approached. Dogs didn't like him much. Which was all right, since he preferred smaller animals, anyway.

"He's my friend, too, y'know. You don't have to look so shocked."

"I'm not, just - "

Craig put a hand on Stan's chest lightly, and his smirk widened when Stan recoiled, and then he walked away, snickering to himself.

"See you around, Stan. Keep better track of your friends, you never know when one might end up being in trouble."

~

The Broflovski household was one of the few houses that Craig almost never went to. He was pretty sure his parents were mildly anti-semetic, because they never wanted to eat there, never wanted to go over when their parents were having a party, and always gave him a strange look if he was hanging out with the awkward, angry, clever jewish kid in school. Craig never got what the issue was, but he also didn't like Kyle very much - he was okay, it's not like there was anything wrong with him, but whenever they actually talked in school Kyle seemed to find some way to turn it into a debate. A disagreement. Or something. And that always ended up in a glaring contest. A couple of times it had ended up in a few punches thrown. But what else are you going to do when you're eleven and restless, twelve and angry, or thirteen and just plain fucking bored?

No hard feelings. Some people just like to bitch. He knocked on the Broflovski's door exactly as civilized as he had arrived at the Marsh's, and it was, to his relief, Ike who answered. Even if it hadn't been known throughout the entire school since he was in kindergarten that he was adopted, it would have been scathingly obvious to anyone with an ounce of sense. He was growing up strong; his hair was completely black, straight, and easy for him to keep neatly trimmed, and above all, unlike his brother and parents, he knew how to actually keep his mouth shut when he had nothing of value to say. If he was surprised to see Craig at their doorstep in the middle of a Saturday afternoon unannounced, he didn't show it.

"Hey, Craig," was all he said, instead, "Do you want to come in?"

Craig shrugged noncommittally, and stepped over the threshold.

"Is Kyle around?"

"In his room, I think. Are you two suddenly getting along, or something?"

"Not really. I'm failing math so my mom sent me out to try and remedy the situation. My friends are being dicks, so Token's not an option, and besides, he lives too far away."

"You're failing math? How?"

"Shut up, boy wonder. I'm here to talk to your brother, not you."

"Sure, okay, like I said, he's upstairs. I charge ten bucks an hour, though, for tutoring. Just in case you were wondering."

"No way am I spending money on letting some self-important little prick think he can teach me math." Craig was smirking, in spite of himself. Ike's dry assumption of his own importance was something he had to give the kid credit for. He flipped him the bird once with his left hand, then again with his right, then went upstairs to Kyle's bedroom.

Classical music. He was playing fucking Bach, or something. Now he remembered why Kyle was his least favorite of these four shitheads, even below Cartman, sometimes, who could arguably be seen as South Park's very own natural disaster. Sighing in exasperation, but not about to actually enter the room that was bound to be too much stuffiness for his normal teenage senses to take, he knocked on the door to hopefully summon Kyle to him. At least if anyone would actually know anything, it would probably be Kyle.

Kyle had a pair of glasses perched on his head - more accurately, on his hair, which extended in thick curls that he had managed to at least corral into one area, but never enough to keep them actually flat against his head. He was wearing a robe over his pajamas and holding half of a banana-nut energy bar, and was smiling until he saw who was knocking at his door, at which point his expression folded into a confused frown.

"What do you...want?" Was his confused response to Craig's unexpected presence, and Craig smirked at his discomfort.

"Nothing. I'm looking for Kenny. I just saw him last night - but he left all his stuff at my place and vanished. Do you know where he goes, since apparently this is just 'how he is'?"

"Not really, he goes to all the usual places. Which for guys like you and him can mean anything from his bedroom to under the freeway to try to score coke. Have you tried there?"

"Very funny," Craig growled, reminded in full force why he disliked Kyle so much. "I think something's wrong."

"Hate to break it to you, dude, but something's usually wrong with Kenny. We've all learned to deal with it - but how is it any of your business? You two aren't even close."

Craig glared at him for that, but let it pass. They weren't close, or rather, no one knew that they were - even Craig had a hard time wrapping his head around what they were supposed to be most of the time. Not really friends, not rivals for anything, spending too much time fucking to even get to know each other properly-

we're dating, you know that, right. going out to see a dramatic action movie on a friday night means we're dating.

Meaningless fucking. It was easy to have sex with Kenny - easier to get a handjob from him than a decent conversation, so if your opinions about sex being a purely physical release matched up with his, you were good to go for as long as you could bear to touch each other.

"Look, if you don't know where he is, and don't have anything to say except sarcastic shit, I'm going to move on."

"Not sure why you need to ask me in the first place, if you just saw him. And take Ike's tutoring, he'll up your GPA in more than just math."

"Don't eavesdrop on people's conversations, Broflovski."

"Don't be such a boring dick, Craig."

Kyle shut the door to his room, and the sound of violins grew louder. Ike raised an eyebrow at him expectantly as he passed by, which he gave him a friendly shove on the head for before letting himself out of the Broflovski house. He was now more irritated than ever, and down to his last stop on this miserable "where the fuck is Kenny McCormick" road. The Cartman residence was just four blocks away.

Chapter 2

Eric Cartman, if he had his facts straight, was one of Kenny's best friends and therefore the most likely to know where he would disappear off to in the middle of a Saturday afternoon for no reason. He was also the largest jackass on the face of the planet, fat, rude, loud, selfish, racist, sexist, homophobic, bigoted, and generally a giant prick. On top of that, Craig just flat-out hated him. Most of the time he was more than happy to never speak to the bastard, but at this point the sun was going down, Kenny's phone was still lodged silently in his own pocket, and he was starting to get a nervous twist in the pit of his stomach that told him something was very, very wrong.

kenny on his back in his bedroom, his feet bare and his hands covered, stinking of vomit and a tongue that tasted like chalky pills

stabbed himself - right in the throat. went to school with me the next day.

Craig knocked on Cartman's front door with no ceremony, just heavy emphasis. There was a grunt from inside, a shuffle, and then he was faced with the visually impressive, but from experience, physically unimpressive, six foot wide load Eric Cartman.

"What do you want, Craig?"

At least there was that. Open hostility was easier to handle than Kyle's passive aggressive bullshit.

"I'm not here to see you, fatass. Kenny left his phone at my place and I can't find him. Usually I'd think he was just fucking off getting high, but I dunno. Instinct. I think something's wrong."

"Thought you didn't care about shit like that. Thought that you liked the easy and boring path of life."

Craig's eyes were starting to itch. Being near Cartman must be more irritating than he thought - or maybe he was allergic to his four cats. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm, and shrugged.

"Yeah, usually." Then without asking to be invited in, he shoved past Cartman (who let out and offended squawk), and planted himself firmly in the center of the living room. Then he glared at Cartman, willing him to say something useful.

"You think Kenny's in trouble." Cartman said as he shut the door, and this time there was a smug little smirk on his face. "You really love him, don't you."

"Do you know where he is, or not?" Craig asked, feeling ironically relaxed in reaction to Cartman trying to get a rise out of him. He felt his lips tug up in a smirk, to match his, which made Cartman frown, disappointed that his barb didn't land.

"Maybe. I don't know where he goes - but he's been acting up lately. More fucked up than usual, I mean. He hasn't been drinking, or getting high, and he's been coming over at really fucked up hours of the night. He busted the lock on the cellar and made himself a nest in the basement. I keep kicking him out but he just- " Cartman put his hand over his mouth to mimic Kenny's tendency to wear his hood or scarf too high at almost all times and raised the octave of his voice (even though Kenny's voice was actually deeper than his)-

"'Cartman if you know what's good for you you'll butt out of my shit before I kick you right in the nuts.' I wrestled him to the ground of course, but he's a little fucker in a fight so most of the time I just let him stay over out of the kindness of my heart."

"And? That doesn't tell me jack squat except that you're scared for your balls and Kenny's bullying you into letting him stay in your basement. I don't blame him, it's better than his place, even with your farts stinking up the entire house."

"Very funny, Craig. One other thing is, he's always...bleeding. Not a whole lot, but he cuts himself, like some kind of emo freak. He doesn't really tell me what he's been doing, but I know he's been to the Western Plant graveyard, because he's always bringing back bits of bone covered in ash and dirt. I'm like - Kenny that's not cool you can't fucking dig up bones, they put people in jail for grave robbery - I'll show you, in the basement, he left fucking bones down there, it's disgusting."

Craig, intrigued despite himself, followed him down to the basement. It was chilly, but at least carpeted now, since his mom had had it refinished after the many levels of abuse they had all laid into it as kids. Craig still remembered when there was a giant hole right in the foundation, and Cartman had used it for a variety of disturbing activities involving stuffed toys. Craig suspected he still had the toys somewhere. In the corner there was a group of boxes laid out roughly in the shape of a bed, and a nest of blankets on top that was looked as if it were frequently occupied.

"They're right over...here...wait...what the fuck..." Cartman was rooting around near the makeshift bed, trying to find what he had brought Craig down here to see, but his irritation became obvious almost as soon as they got down there. "They're gone - I swear to christ they were here, almost a full human fucking skeleton. It was so fucking creepy-"

"Can it, Cartman, I don't care about your fucking bone story. But Kenny's really been sleeping here?"

"Yeah, that much is obvious, isn't it?"

Craig lifted up a part of the blanket, and held a palmful of it to his face, and breathed in. Sweat, honey, and that mysterious dead hospital smell his whole room had. Yeah, Kenny had been here all right. Cartman was giving him a suspicious glare, and Craig smirked smoothly in response, and let the blanket fall back into its crumpled nest.

"So he's at Western Plant."

"Probably. He goes there a lot during the day, but he'll be back before night - he told me he never stays there after dark."

"Okay."

The cellar door was open, so he pushed past Cartman (ignoring another grunt of protest) to let himself out of it the same way Kenny came and went.

~

The Western Plant graveyard was technically not even in South Park. It was a gray patch of dead earth on the outskirts of town that some people claimed was actually larger than the town itself, due to their lovely town's lack of expansion thanks to a high death rate and low birth rate. Craig wasn't one to doubt it. Most of South Park's dead, however, were buried in South Park - in the little plot behind the church, in family graveyards, in a plot near the park. West Plant was rumored to be infected with radiation - or the dead zombie skeletons of Native Americans, depending on who you talked to. Kids would take opportunities to thrill-seek out there, and each group came back with stories wilder than the last, but Craig had never gone out, because he knew they were all liars. And because he couldn't imagine anything more boring than a graveyard out in the middle of nowhere. No dead people he had known were even buried there, and if they had been it'd have to be tough luck for them, because it was just too damn far a drive to start at some stones in the ground.

So congratulations, Kenny, Craig thought to himself grumpily as he walked to the bus stop with his hands shoved in his pockets, You're officially the biggest pain in my life.

He got on the bus that went the furthest to the end of town, shoved a crinkled dollar bill and some change into the slot, and sat down. Longest route also meant slowest-moving, apparently, and Craig started to get hungry halfway along the ride. A woman who smelled like roses sat next to him, and smiled. He shrugged back, and put his chin on his palm and looked out the window. He heard the rustling of paper and felt a soft nudge at his shoulder about a minute later.

"Hungry, dear?" She was holding out a turkey sandwich, not fast food wrapping, but clean white paper with a little bit of masking tape holding it together. "I wouldn't presume, but you see, your stomach is literally growling. I have four children, so I hate to see one go hungry."

He eyed the sandwich and the woman suspiciously for a few moments, and then took it casually with one hand, sniffing it for any tell-tale scent of narcotics or poison.

"Thanks, I guess. Did you get on this bus just to hand out suspiciously well-made sandwiches to starving kids, or are you going somewhere?"

The lady chuckled, which didn't endear her to him. He didn't like it when people bypassed his sarcasm. Dry wit was his forte.

"Yes, I'm on my way. The Company is about to arrive. You're not part of The Company, are you?"

Craig screwed up his face a little, and took a bite of the sandwich with a defiant shrug. He wasn't going to ask what "The Company" was, and he wasn't going to continue this conversation. He was just headed to the graveyard to make some sense out of Kenny's disappearance, and convince him to stop making him feel like any day now he was going to fade away and disappear for good. Keeping him alive was like trying to hold on to the end of a match without letting it go out. But he knew it would - it only had so much wood to eat. Maybe he could let it burn his finger - just for a little while - so he could lead it to a new string of matches and let the flame keep traveling forever.

"Honey? I asked you what your name was. Please do tell me."

Craig was about half-done with the sandwich, and the friendly-creepy lady was asking smiling earnestly and expectantly. He shook his head.

"I'm eating your sandwich because I take enough drugs to know whether they're poison or not. But I don't go around giving strangers my name. Especially when they smile at me like that."

The bus stopped, and let three people on. That was odd. They could only be about a few stops away from the end of the line, but he could already see four more people waiting at the next stop. Weird.

"Well, aren't you just a button," She giggled, and took out some knitting needles and yarn that was in pastel purple and canary yellow. Looking at the needles flashing in her yarn was making him feel sick, so he distracted himself by watching the people now literally pouring into the bus. Most of them looked dirty and run-down, and none of them were paying fare. Some of them looked homeless, most of them smelled homeless. He saw a tall, sallow-faced kid he thought he recognized from school, but not recently - he had dropped out due to an addiction to ...something. Painkillers? Craig wasn't sure, and wasn't eager to find out. He pulled his hat further around his cheeks and hoped he didn't look his way. Then he saw the bum from the other night - the one who had shouted at him from across the street while Kenny was getting their fried chicken. He burst into a toothy grin as soon as he saw him, and waggled his eyebrows in a way that made Craig's nausea intensify. The bus was packed, so the guy couldn't reach him, but he was elbowing a man standing next to him and whispering excitedly, which made Craig deeply uncomfortable. Finally, he hissed out a question to the woman serenely knitting beside him.

"All right, you win. What's this "Company"?"

"The Company of our Lord of the Ancient World, of course." She looked over at the still wildly gesturing hobo at the other end of the bus, and her smile brightened by a small degree, though she showed no other sign that she cared about what was going on around her. "We're all heading to Mass - and it's a very special night, tonight. Shall I tell you why?"

Craig was now painfully aware that the bus wasn't following the regular line - it was taking them to the graveyard directly. This bus went to the graveyard, specifically, and nowhere else. That was fucked up. He nodded mutely in response to the question, and frowned as he waited for her to continue.

"Tonight is the night we'll open the gate to the Ancient World. Tonight is the night the two worlds become one, and the Gods of Old will be here to rule as they once did, and we will do Their work, and the world will be at peace."

"That sounds really fucking stupid to me," Craig hissed, his skin crawling from the woman's serene tone, as she talked about what basically sounded like an apocalypse, the sort of which his humble, white-bread town seemed to threaten the poor earth with about once every six months or so. "Forget that the whole thing is bullshit, but the world wouldn't be at peace if these 'Gods of Old' want it. We don't want to be ruled."

"It will be at peace," she said simply, and smiled. The points of her knitting needles caught the faint greenish light of the bus' halogen lamps. "The wicked and faithless will be smited. Once the earth is irrigated with their blood, those left will love each other; the earth will be born anew, and the Gods will reside in the Temples we will spend our simple lives building for them."

"Last stop," the driver grunted from his seat, and turned off the motor. Craig stood up, and the packed crowd inside the bus was all eerily silent as they all looked out the window. Out on the horizon he could see the faint shadows of the grave markers, and otherwise - desert. Gray cracked earth stretched for almost as far as the eye could see, with nothing but fog on the horizon, nothing to give a hint that this bleak terrain eventually ended. No trees, no cover, no buildings. Just graves and desert. Craig's heart was pumping and he was beginning to feel very strongly that he had made a mistake. Screw Kenny McCormick and all the weird bullshit he got up to; during the day or at night, it didn't fucking matter. If he was here then he could stay here, and Craig would drive this bus back home himself if he had to. But this didn't seem to be an option. The crowd started to file in an orderly manner off the bus - but there were about fifty people on the bus, and none of them were letting Craig cram himself back into his hard plastic seat. Instead they seemed to press in around him at all sides like a school of fish, and were squeezing him towards the door. Eventually it was easier to just let it happen, and he took a deep breath of cold fresh air when he was out of the bus - finally able to extract himself from the crowd. He wished he hadn't eaten that sandwich, now, because he definitely felt like he was about to throw it up.

Now that he was off the bus he could see the true surreal nature of the scenery. The stars were out in gorgeous full bloom, with a hint of pink still in the sky from the nearly-complete sunset. The ground was gray. The graves were in the distance. Between them and the looming, shadowy graves was a huge white banner of a material fluttering lightly in the practically non-existent wind. In a dark, sticky red was painted on it exactly one word:

WELCOME.

Chapter 3

Other than a quick smile from the knitting sandwich lady, the crowd largely ignored him after they got out of the bus. The driver melded into the crowd, and they all started to walk in rows of three towards the graveyard, slowly, and silently, still. Eerie isn't the half of it, Craig thought to himself, and tried to extract himself from the crowd, but someone took firm hold of his hand, and pulled him into the row with them. Furious, he whirled on the guy, stopping short where he was standing and punching him full-on in the chest. To his horror he saw the bloodshot eyes and grinning yellow teeth of the leering bum from last night (and now from the back of the bus) looking down at him from above his fist. His shout of anger and refusal to move with the crowd had disturbed the flow of traffic slightly, but people were simply morphing around them, bypassing them to form their neat rows of three and slow march towards the graveyard. At the head of the line, someone started humming, and it started to slowly spread until they were all making the same low, thrumming sound.

"It's forbidden to speak just yet," the yellow-toothed man whispered to Craig, and Craig felt a spike of fear go through his chest, real fear, since the first time he had set foot on the bus. The man was still holding his arm, and acting as if the blow to the chest hadn't affected him in the slightest. "Proceed with us. It's just what we need. Our Master is quite fond of you, am I correct?"

"Let go. You fucking creep." Craig said in no uncertain terms.

"Quiet. Walk. It is all safe. It is all serenity. This is the way. Come walk."

The last guy in the crowd - the bum's friend from the train - took a place on his opposite side and took hold of his other arm by the bicep, despite Craig's squirming resistance. We make a row of three, now, Craig thought to himself, and was gripped by the slightly insane urge to laugh.

"Silent," yellow-teeth said again, and Craig could tell he was hyped up on something from the way his unnaturally strong fingers shook like twigs. "Silent. Walk. Walk with us." The other man nodded, and they began to walk, having no trouble catching up to the humming procedure ahead of them, and at the very end of the line. While they continued humming, Craig began growling, and clawed both his stiff fists into palms, his feet dragging two dark trails in the gray dirt - the only marks that were being left behind them.

The rows of three began to break apart neatly once they reached the graveyard. The row on the left turned left, the row on the right turned right, and the center row alternated smoothly to form a thin single-file circle around the entire graveyard. Because they were bringing up the rear, Craig and the two creeps strong-arming him didn't have to make a decision of which way to turn, they simply stepped up to the line and filled the last gap. When Craig looked down at the dirt under his feet, he could see that there was a faint red smudge outlining the circle they had all created, and he tried not to suspect that it was blood. The humming was getting louder, and the way Craig's arms were being held no longer looked strange, since the group had extended their hands and were all holding them peacefully. Craig could almost feel the vibrations from their humming along his arms, and it was starting to make the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The pink in the sky was completely gone, now, the only light seemed to be reflected from the bus' headlights against the gray earth (that was becoming blacker now). After what felt like over an hour, their humming abruptly fell away into dead silence. Squinting in the dark, Craig could see movement out in the center of the graveyard, something that looked like a hunched-over animal against a headstone, but then it was climbing the headstone and standing on top of it. When it was perched on two feet Craig could see that it was a person. The silence in the entire circle was deafening, especially considering it was so dark that the person standing on the headstone in the center of the graveyard could hardly be seen. Then, in a raspy, tired voice that Craig recognized with a jolt, Kenny growled out a single word.

"Light."

At his command, at least six (on second count, eight) members of the circle clicked on spotlights they were holding, all focused on the now bright orange figure standing at their center, on top of a headstone, surrounded by, now that Craig could see, an artful arrangement of human bones, and one large, stained, dusty book. Kenny's eyes looked bruised from sleep deprivation, and he looked as ragged as ever, but he gestured to the grave he was currently desecrating with a crooked smile.

"My maternal grandmother. What's left of her, anyway. I'd say it's good to see you shitheads, but it's not good for me, is it?"

There was a murmuring chorus of "No sir," from the members of the circle. Craig was about to lose it. This was too fucking surreal. Yellow-teeth on his left was shivering in excitement. He took a large breath to try to shout something, but, abruptly, the man on his right released his arm, and clapped it over his mouth, instead. The mild scuffling must have been deafening to listen to in the silence, however, because as soon as he growled into the guy's filthy hand Kenny whirled in their direction, his eyes wide with anger, and this was when Craig noticed that his hands and front were both stained with blood.

"Is there unrest in my circle?"

Craig wanted to laugh. What the fuck was up with the way he was talking? Too much, this was all way too much.

"A non-believer, sir. He seemed to have been there by accident at first, but then we realized that you meant us to bring him as tribute." It wasn't yellow-teeth talking - Craig could hear that it was the lady with the knitting needles, and murmurs of agreement from the crowd, which died off quickly as Kenny's face went livid.

"Let him go. Immediately. You do not touch outsiders, you useless sacks of MEAT." The hands restraining Craig released him immediately, and he spat violently at the ground before rounding on the guy to give him a square kick in the stones.

"KENNY MCCORMICK YOU FUCKING WASTE OF SPACE," he shouted, and suddenly he didn't need the lights to see, his eyes were burning, sparking, he could feel his cheeks singe from what felt like a sudden hot flame across the bridge of his nose. "GET DOWN FROM THAT FUCKING HEADSTONE OR I'LL KILL YOU MYSELF."

There was noise all around them, now, fucking finally. The circle broke, and a few of them started to try to surround him, which he responded to with emphatic violence. His foot connected with several shins before they finally broke their tight circle around him, and looked nervously between the tall, furious boy with the glowing eyes, and the blood-stained child they claimed was their master.

Kenny looked down at him with a chilly expression that made Craig's breath catch in his throat. He had seen something similar the other night when yellow-teeth and Kenny had confronted each other, but having it turned on him made his insides feel like they were about to freeze over. He felt the flare of heat on his face flicker out, though singing remains of it burned in sore circles around his eyes. The sudden brightness and clarity he was seeing the scene with suddenly went out, and everyone looked like dark shadows surrounding him, even Kenny. His blue eyes looming from his high vantage point on the grave were now the only thing standing out from the darkness.

"Leave, all of you," Kenny finally spoke, and it was so quiet it felt like something he had whispered in Craig's ear, but he could tell that everyone in the circle had heard it.

"But-"

"We've been waiting for weeks-"

"Master, please don't-"

"SILENCE. Be silent, and depart. You've tainted the ceremony, and should be glad I don't just fucking kill you all! Leave the way you came, be quick, and don't you dare look back."

They all went silent, then, aside from a few resentful murmurs. Craig thought he could even hear a few of them quietly sobbing, which seemed like a really fucking dramatic over-reaction to him. But then, he didn't know these people. He didn't know how long Kenny had been working them up to this moment - how long he had been stringing them along with bullshit promises of another world or new gods or a goddamned fucking apocalypse. It was still a complete mystery to him why any of them thought Kenny was capable of that kind of shit, but as the last of them filed past him, his two friends from the circle stopped, impudent, and yellow-teeth's more taciturn friend looked Kenny right in the eye.

"Even God owes his people some explanation, and we know you to be our Prophet, Old One, but not yet our Lord." He had a slow, steady voice, surprisingly, Craig found himself thinking of Morpheus from the Matrix for some reason. The retreating crowd gently and almost reluctantly turned their heads to hear what he had to say.

"I don't owe you anything," Kenny returned, even colder than before, though Craig could see him shaking now that his eyes were adjusting to the minimal light. "And I am your Lord on this side of the veil or the side of the True World, which non-believers will never see. This you would know, if you had ears, Stone."

Stone seemed to be piecing together Kenny for what he was, for what Craig knew he was - a fraud, a bunch of cheap tricks, probably morbid ones, Craig knew Kenny to be an expert on faking his own death, though how he did it was still a mystery even to him.

"You bleed red like a mortal boy," Stone said slowly, and pulled, smooth as silk, a knife from his pocket, and tossed it from palm to palm causally. "And you delay our 'New World' for nothing but the affection of another insignificant boy. The ceremony is untainted - you simply don't want us to hurt your friend - or you."

Kenny stood strong for a few more moments as he looked at the knife, but then something broke in his expression, his knees went out and he was kneeling on the grave, now. His lips were moving, but Craig couldn't make out the sound - just from reading his lips he would guess that Kenny was mouthing "always - always, always, always." His stomach clenched, and for the second time that night he felt very close to vomiting what he had eaten that day. He saw Stone raise the knife, he saw Kenny shut his eyes and turn away, and then the heat returned to his face in full force, and before he even knew what he was doing he was running forward, and he was between Stone and Kenny, and there was brilliant blue light in front of him, and the knife made a dull thump as it hit the ground, drowned out in the piercing cacophany of Stone's screams and the sizzling electric sound of his skin and flesh being steadily fried off of his bones. The rest of the crowd stood still, shocked into silence and powerfully afraid, and Craig heard his own voice break that silence, cracking embarrassingly and sounding more like he was crying than authoritative.

"ARE YOU ALL FUCKING DEAF? GET. THE FUCK. OUT."

And with that, all of them fled, and the burning electricity over his face flickered out again. Craig touched each of his cheeks slowly and flinched - they felt badly burned, and despite it being nothing but a dark smudge, he couldn't tear his gaze off the sizzling remains of Stone's body. Fuck. Was this going to leave scars? That had never fucking happened before. The last time he had to deal with this bullshit nothing burned his face, it was just nice and clean and easy - supernatural laser beams came out of his eyes and a five minutes later there was a dead guinea rat in front of him. He had even thought that it was a dream from his that one loopy week he had in the fourth grade, when he experimented with some candy that really wasn't candy and ended up in the hospital.

Turns out it was real. Or this whole thing was a dream, which seemed just as likely. Kenny was still behind him, but he was being quiet, way too quiet. Quiet as a - well, as a graveyard, Craig thought to himself with a humorless snort. Enough of that.

"Speak up," Craig finally mumbled hoarsely, "I know you're there, and I know you're still watching me. I don't care how dark it is, I can hear you breathing." There was another long pause, and then Kenny's voice finally came hesitantly across to him.

"Are you...okay? You sound like you're crying..." Kenny sounded uncertain, and younger than he was.

"I'm not fucking crying. My eyes are watering because I just killed a guy with them. For you, just in case you had any doubts. Not that you deserved me even being worried about you, let alone coming out here in the middle of fucking nowhere to find you."

Craig paused for a few moments, his mind catching up belatedly to the full impact of what he was saying. He had killed a guy just now, hadn't he. And if this wasn't a dream, there were fucking consequences for that. Not jail - he wasn't even eighteen and no one would believe that he murdered a guy just by thinking too hard (or thinking not at all), but what if what his mom always said was right - he was rotten, he had just come out wrong, somehow - what if this was the final step into becoming truly insane?

[Always playing it safe, are we? Dry and boring, you stupid son of mine. You're not dry and boring. You're not apathetic. I don't know what made you lock yourself away like this, but the harder you try not to care, the worse it's going to be when you find out in the end that you do, you do care, Craig Tucker. And if you don't let it be a good thing now, one day it will rear up and eat you alive.]

When Craig came back from his thoughts, Kenny had turned on a flashlight, and had come down from his grave perch to stand next to him. After a few moments of evaluating each other quietly, Kenny pressed his pink, bloodstained fingertips against his cheek. Craig breathed in slowly, his hands forming into fists instinctively to push him away, but he forced himself to relax, and keep his tense hands at his sides. When Craig finally looked at him he was surprised by how concerned Kenny's face was - but he smiled a little when they finally made eye contact.

"Looks pretty bad, but I've seen much worse. I'd say I'm surprised, about your eye lasers, but I'm more surprised that you used them to save me. Mostly I'm just kind of pissed that you burned yourself. Sucks to have powers that turn on you like that."

"What do you know?" Craig hissed bitterly, which made the warmth in Kenny's eyes flicker like a candle, and his mouth flattened as he got to his feet.

"Whatever you want to say is fine by me, but let's get out of here. My ritual is ruined, thanks to your skinny heroic ass, so we might as well get home. Fuck. Craig. Why did you even come here?"

"Something was wrong," Craig mumbled, not moving, too angry with Kenny now to follow any sensible line of thought he was giving him, "Something was wrong and no one would fucking admit it. I just wanted to find you. I pretty much tore the whole town apart before Cartman-"

"Cartman," Kenny groaned, slamming the hand carrying the flashlight into his forehead, "What a fat fuck. He told you about this? I didn't think you guys even looked at each other, let alone spoke."

"We don't," Craig deadpanned, even more irritated that Kenny didn't seem to get how worried he had been, how much he had put himself through, when no one else seemed to think it was even a problem, "But your other friends were useless and mine all hate me today for whatever fucking reason, I didn't have anything better to do. I didn't know you were the leader in some kind of fucked up blood cult or believe me, I never would have come." He paused, and swallowed before adding, "How the hell does no one else know about this?"

"Because no one cares. Because no one is supposed to care, that's how. Kenny goes missing for days at a time, that's just how he is - I thought that you were the one that understood that the most."

"Apparently not. So now that I'm finally here - having just saved your ass from getting stabbed, in case you forgot, are you even going to explain to me what the fuck is even going on, aside from something dangerous, creepy, and extremely fucking disgusting?"

"No. I'm not. You already saw enough to figure it out. Besides, I promise to never do it again, or whatever. They're not going to come after you, I won't let them."

"Sure, as if that's the only thing to worry about. They're barely holding back from coming after you - you don't have as great a hold on them as you think you do. This asshole was about to bleed you dry, what happens next time when five of them want to question your 'Word of God'?"

Kenny grinned crookedly.

"All I have to do is pretend the boy with the lightning eyes will strike them down in the name of my wrath if they try anything."

"That's not funny, McCormick - you're already in too deep to-"

Kenny suddenly slumped toward him, one of his arms grabbing Craig roughly around the waist. He dropped the flashlight down between them, and leaned in close enough that their foreheads were pressed against each other.

"You're so sweet, sometimes. When you you get so mad that you forget that you can even be sweet. You fucking asshole."

Craig felt him shiver, and then one of his grubby hands was pulling at his jacket, and he shook his head firmly and pushed it back out of his clothes.

"Are you kidding me right now. Talk."

Kenny snorted, but let his seeking hand go lax in Craig's grip. "Prude. Okay. Fine. You just killed a guy with lasers that come out of your eyes, so maybe...there's a chance that you'll get it if I explained it to you. Plus, I just don't give a shit anymore. Craig, I'm trying to die."

Craig tensed, and let a long, painful silence stretch out. Kenny stayed still for a long moment, and then his hand traveled upward over Craig's chest, turning over almost gracefully to wrap each of his fingers around Craig's throat. It was always his first move any time they were wrestling each other, anger and blood both boiling over as they wrestled to the ground, always ending up with one or the other pinned. Craig tried not to think about how many of their fucks had started out with fighting, first. Even without any violence or pressure in his grip, it was hard not to get turned on by Kenny's fingers wrapped around his neck. When he looked down at Kenny's face, he was grinning, and his eyes were half-lidded and cold.

"Don't fight me. Don't interrupt me. Hear me out to the end, then see how much you want to smash my face in. I'll probably let you do it."

Craig held out for a few more seconds, then pulled Kenny's wrist away from his neck. He nodded once, hissing quietly in a mixture of confusion and the pain of the (now bleeding) burns on his cheeks - from generally feeling too much at once.

"Fine. Talk. I'm listening."

"It's a really tired story when you get down to it. I was born without the ability to die. I've been dying, all the time, ever since I can remember being alive. All the most horrible, most gut-churning, puke-inducing pain you can imagine, I at least remember fragments of that. This one time I got half my head cut off, and I was awake for a full five minutes bleeding out before I finally passed. Immortality. Doesn't it sound like a fucking dream? So this ritual - it wasn't going to start any kind of apocalypse, it wasn't going to summon any Old Gods, I'd never let that happen. It was just going to send me to where I can't come back. Permanently." Kenny's lips were pulled up in a cruel smirk, which emphasized the dark, bruised bags under his eyes, leaned more of his weight against Craig's chest as he continued his story, whatever fucking kind of story this was supposed to be, anyway.

"Not that there aren't any good times. Once I figured out erotic asphyxiation, I spent an entire month hanging myself while jacking off. It really works. Sometimes I didn't even die, just had a really fucking great O and was able to chop myself free afterwards, those were some very happy days. Sex is the best escape from pain, and from death, so combining them seemed only natural. But I can't do that with the girls at school - or you - so, when I'm feeling really frisky, I'll head out to the truck stop to find guys who seem likely to accept a blowjob in exchange for a ride to nowhere. I managed to get to the Grand Canyon once, and I threw myself in it. That was definitely better than the erotic asphyxiation thing, let me tell you. Broad daylight, scorching summer, no one around but me. No body for them to clean up, either, because after it's all over I'm here, in South Park, in my shitty room in my parents shitty house where everything is shit - and anything I might have done in a past life is pretty much over."

There was a long silence after that, and Craig chewed on his tongue. It wasn't like any of this could be true, but what Kenny had said about the lasers raised a good point. Frying people with lasers that shot from his eyes couldn't be true, either. So maybe it was - maybe all of it was. How could he even know? Things in this fucking town made no sense on a good day, so he finally nodded, and said simply;

"Not everything."

Kenny leveled him a sarcastic look.

"I came for you, didn't I? I don't forget about the things you've done. In fact, I'm holding you fucking accountable, and you're a delinquent."

Kenny looked more thoughtful at that, and let his body go somewhat limp against Craig's chest and shoulder, enough that he was forced to put his arms around his waist to hold him up. Kenny wasn't heavy, but his legs were starting to feel weak from holding him up.

"Yeah, I guess I was building something with you, without even realizing it...or maybe you did all the building, and I was just lucky enough to get a piece." Kenny smirked a little lopsidedly, and a little of the light was coming back into his eyes. Familiar - warm. Craig shrugged, and fought off an irrational, ridiculous urge to hug him tight around the middle and carry him from here all the way home. No, not home. The garage. To be alone.

"If you say so."

"What if I said something else?"

"What are you talking about?"

Kenny let out a heavy breath, and closed his eyes for a few moments before continuing.

"What if I said...even though you ruined my ritual, possibly turned my cult against me and consequently ensured me a life of endless, never-truly-dying pain for me until each of those bastards passes on from old age...I kind of love you."

Craig shrugged, and felt his face burn. Look anywhere but Kenny's face, he thought to himself, off his guard for a moment in a way he hadn't been since he had first arrived, which made no sense at all, considering how much more dramatic a black cult ring and frying a guy with his mind were compared to a confession of...love.

"Say whatever you want, I guess," he finally mumbled, but when Kenny started to pull away, he got a sharp pang of what he might be feeling - disappointment, rejection, loneliness - on top of everything else that had been happening that night, he couldn't stand it. He tightened his grip emphatically, and when their chests fit together so did their hips and cheeks, and after a few minutes of holding him tight and still he felt Kenny breathe a soft little sigh against his ear, and felt his arms wrap around his back to return his hold.

"Don't expect me to say it often. You're a cold son of a bitch and I don't know why I like you as much as I do. Thanks for coming out to find me, though."

"I won't do it a second time. If I hear any more about you making trips out here for your little permanent-death spell, I'm staying in and watching Animal Planet."

Kenny laughed, and though he didn't look down, he figured that Kenny was sniffling and wiping a hand over his eyes because he had been crying.

"Don't worry, I'm over it. Let's get to my bike before we both freeze our nuts off."

Chapter 4

He was surprised to hear that Kenny even had a bike - but when he saw it, he was less surprised. About a hundred pounds of twisted metal and an engine somewhere in there, painted garish bright orange at some places, but mostly a dull metallic gray. It looked like it had been literally thrown together by the few useful pieces of scrap that always littered Kenny's lawn. Craig was too tired, too sore, and too cold to protest anything, so he waited, shivering, the ten minutes it took for Kenny to kick the thing into gear, and then hardly could protest when the now brilliantly smiling (was he fucking bipolar or something) Kenny McCormick told him to hop on. Once he was stationed on the back of the bike with his arms wrapped around Kenny's waist to his satisfaction, Kenny revved the engine with unnecessary volume and blasted them forward, out from under the small overcropping of rocks the bike had been sheltered under, across the desert. When the rush of the acceleration was past, it didn't take long for the cold of the wind to become overwhelming, and his already sore eyes began to water even more. He tightened his grip on Kenny's waist, and ducked his head down behind his skinny back to shield his face.

"Sorry about the wind!" Kenny yelled over the sound of the engine. "I only have one pair of goggles, and I don't want to crash into a tree!"

"Just get us home!" Craig was able to shout back, his legs now tightening around Kenny as well, and his fingers going numb from clutching his own wrists. Kenny gave him a sarcastic salute, and he re-buried his face in Kenny's parka. When he closed his eyes and stopped thinking, the momentum, the wind and the night air smelling faintly of plant life and firewood all filled him with an oddly serene sensation, as if he were floating.

-w0rmsign-

About an hour later, Kenny was pulling the bike up to the back of the garage, and Craig's body was sore and shaking all over. Despite that, he forced Kenny to lean on him until they got up the rickety stairs that would lead them to the garage door, although he had to hand the keys to Kenny when they finally got to the landing, because his hands were shaking. Breathing heavily, the first thing he did was to dump Kenny onto the couch, and then he turned on the heater before collapsing next to it, warming his shivering back on the slowly warming coils before they would inevitably become too hot to touch.

He and Kenny stared at each other. There, in the flickering florescent light of his stuffy little garage, with the smell of fried chicken still in the air from the half a box they had abandoned the night before along with the scent of blood and exhaustion from both of them, they saw each other as two kids who had had quite enough of life outside of the room they had just locked themselves into.

"Glad you didn't try to go to my parent's place," Craig finally said, to break the not quite comfortable, not quite uncomfortable silence that had been seeping in through their broken breath.

"The thought never even crossed my mind," Kenny said with a nod, and Craig gave a small groan of relief when warmth from the space heater finally started reach his actual body, easing away some of the worst of the aches. Something was still bothering him about the whole scenario - he could forget about the cultists and their creepy ways in the morning, but for now, he let himself have some more morbid curiosity.

"So...how did you even get all of those creeps to follow you in the first place? You're not exactly mister charisma, as much as you like to think you are."

Kenny sighed tiredly, and put an arm over his eyes instead of answering him verbally. Craig took the chance to get a look at the state of his body - something he had been trying to avoid since he first realized he was covered in blood in the graveyard. Most of the blood had dried by now, and the source seemed to be whatever was under the large stain on his chest. It didn't look like it was still bleeding, though, so that was something. Kenny took his arm off of his eyes slowly, and continued to stare at the ceiling.

"Here I go, then. From the beginning. As much as I can remember, anyway." He put his palms to his face, breathed out one more time, and then began. "A couple of weeks after I turned ten, some cultists came to visit my parents. I'd already known about my special curse since I could walk, but this was the first time someone other than me - someone I didn't even know - talked about it, as if it was real and normal. No one and nothing in this town is normal, but I used to try to pass off the worst of it as dreams. Like you and your eyes - I bet you thought that was a dream at some point, right? But it's real - or we're both having that dream again. Might as well accept that it's reality now." He paused, his eyes closed, and for a moment, Craig thought he wasn't going to continue. Then he opened his eyes again and kept talking.

"Anyway, this nutjob seemed to think that I should live with him and a bunch of other skeezes because to them I was a "chosen vessel". Naturally my parents told them to go shove it because they do love me, useless pieces of crap that they are otherwise. Everything should have gone back to normal after they backed off - but I just couldn't stop obsessing about it all. I knew that if I just started pulling some strings, I could find out more. But the more I looked into it, the scarier it got - that stuff they said about summoning the underworld gods isn't a joke, it can happen." Kenny shrugged with a smile, and Craig nodded once before moving away from the heater slightly, since it was getting too hot to touch it.

"Doesn't look like you summoned any of them, at least," Craig prompted, feeling pretty unsatisfied with this as the full story, even though he knew that was all there was. If the cultists were already organized, and thought Kenny was some new coming of Jesus, it wouldn't have taken any effort at all for him to dig up some old books on super-suicide while telling the group he was going to Apocalypse the world, instead.

"Don't get sarcastic. If you don't believe me, you can just say so - I'm not weaving some kind of story here, this shit has all happened to me." Kenny glared at him with unexpected heat, and Craig nodded, feeling like that reaction was only natural, somehow.

"I believe you. As if the circle of freaks in the graveyard wasn't enough of an argument, I know weird shit happens around you - but the truth is, it happens to me, too," he sighed, and gestured to his burnt face, evidence of something he'd really rather not think about. Kenny's face softened, and Craig kept going.

"And if you're crazy for thinking it's real, I just guess we both are. And no one else ever has to know."

Kenny smiled then, nodded, held both his hands out towards Craig in a warm gesture inviting him to come back into his arms..

"C'mere. I'm tired of you being so far away."

Craig got to his feet stiffly (god his thighs hurt), and took his seat next to Kenny with his arms firmly by his side. Then, he thought better of it, and put his arm around Kenny's shoulders instead.

"Okay. Nice and comfy. Is there more to your story?"

"Yeah. A little." Kenny all but purred, and smiled happily as he nestled into Craig's embrace. "So about a month ago, I died. And I stayed there. That happens sometimes...but this wasn't the usual fare...I was on the other side."

"Hell?"

"No, actually - and I've been there, it's not so bad. This alternate dimension, it's earth, but different. There's nothing green there - they live off farming each other's bodies and drinking blood - being a cannibal isn't just normal, it's how you survive, otherwise you starve to death. It was sick. Anyway, while I was down there, I met...well, in horror stories here on earth, he's known as Cthulhu. Apparently because of the ritual my parents accidentally participated in while my mom was pregnant with me, my father isn't really my father, he is, instead. Well. He made it seem like the ritual made her pregnant with me, but that's too fucked up to even think about. He told me that that death was temporary, but that I needed to find a way to make it permanent, and join him on the other side."

"So you told him to shove it up his tentacled ass, right?" Craig made no effort to hide his displeasure at the way this conversation was going. He was also squeezing Kenny a little too hard now. Kenny just shrugged, and gave him an apologetic smile.

"Not so much. I mean I wasn't having a great time talking to him, or anything, but if that...place is where I come from, then I guess I at least wanted to know more. I asked him why he wanted me there, and he said...well, most of it didn't make sense, but the basic gist of it was pretty simple. I'm a mini-version of the kind of monster he is - half human, but it's not like that ever did anyone any favors. And the longer I stay here, undying, different from everyone else, the more bitter I'm going to become...the less I'll care about other people. And apparently I'll just get more powerful and destructive when that happens. He was a dick for pointing it out, but he told me if I cared about my friends and family at all, they'd be way better off without me. So I decided to go. I found out where the cult members were, and it turns out anyone crazy enough to believe in me for a god is really easy to manipulate. What you got right was that I lied to them. Not about being an immortal, or maybe even being their fucking god, if they want to believe it, but I lied to them about bringing the Old Ones here - I would never fucking do that. No. Instead I was researching a ritual that would send me there. Permanently." Kenny went silent then, and Craig contained a slow boil in his stomach and his fist for as long as he could manage.

"You are the stupidest piece of shit that I have ever met," Craig said, trembling slightly, "I want to hit you so bad right now."

Kenny laughed, and shoved his mouth against Craig's. He started to say something, but he didn't get through the first word before Craig acted on his feelings, and his fist was connecting with Kenny's face and then they were both on the floor, sending the space heater flying and the pile of empty beer cans scattering with a hollow clatter. Craig heard himself growl and Kenny alternately laughed and shouted, then both of them devolved into angry barks back at him as each punch and twist back and forth got dirtier and more personal.

"TRUCE, you maniac," Kenny panted, his fist against Craig's chin and Craig's hand tightly grasping his nuts. "What the fuck even brought that on?"

"You did, you piece of shit," Craig huffed out, his left eye now swollen shut, since Kenny had hooked him right in on his puffy burns, and they were bleeding, "Did you ever think to fucking ask before making this huge elaborate plan to throw yourself into some kind of fiery pit? Ever thought of asking your fucking friends, 'Hey, do you think I should KILL myself?' - or, according to you - just LEAVE and never come back?"

Kenny gaped like a fish, and Craig almost hit him again.

"I...honestly didn't think anyone would...care." Kenny gasped a little, and Craig felt himself slightly pacified by the confusion in his voice, as if other people caring didn't even occur to him. That helped. It was a shitty of him, but if he got the message beaten into him tonight, maybe this would be over for good.

"Well, I do. I care. No cults. No rituals. No fucking netherworld. You depressing piece of garbage. Or I swear, I will lock you up in here and tie you down till you learn some fucking sense."

Kenny sighed, let his head fall flat against the ground, and closed his eyes.

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Now help me get this bed unfolded. I'm fucking exhausted."

The bed turned out to be pretty hard to unfold when they were both battered, bleeding, and already blinking sleep out of their eyes, but they managed somehow. Craig piled the cushions from the couch in the center of the crappy mattress, and they each took their jackets off to use as extra blankets in addition to the big one that was folded up on the couch. Not talking or questioning anything, they ended up right next to each other, their chests pressed together, and Craig thought to himself, in the last moments before he drifted off to sleep, that Kenny had freckles under his eyes when you looked at him really close, and that his breath smelled like burnt leaves.

Chapter 5

He was still half-dreaming. His legs and hips were all submerged in a tank of warm milk, and he was clinging to the edge, his fingers going red and then white with the pressure of his grip. The milk caressed his thighs, then wrapped around his cock, brushing and rubbing at it as he sighed, tilted his head back, and slowly, groggily, opened his eyes and woke up. The heater was still on, and the tiny room seemed to have taken in all of it, the walls must have been insulated because the entire room felt toasty. The blanket was still in place, but Kenny wasn't on the bed - wait. A hand on his thigh. Then another. Craig opened his eyes fully as his mind came to the stuttering realization that Kenny was under the blankets, between his legs.

Craig jerked into a seated position, and shoved a hand into Kenny's hair pulling the blankets off of them both and stopping Kenny midway through peeling his boxers off. Kenny grinned at him lopsidedly.

"Easy...I just wanted to surprise you."

"Touching me in my sleep isn't a surprise, it's fucking molestation. Besides, I hate surprises."

"No you don't." And with that, his boxers slipped free, and Craig realized with sticky discomfort that whatever dream he had been having must have been partially real, because he hadn't woken up until Kenny had managed to lick his boxers into a damp, clingy mess, and his warmed cock was half-erect under Kenny's surprisingly clean palms.

"What happened to the blood?" Craig asked, trying not to let his voice shake, as Kenny now bypassed his cock and laid several affectionate, damp kisses on his abdomen and hip instead, Craig's fist still twined tightly in his hair.

"I washed it off. You were out like a log all night, poor thing. I must've really tired you out. Don't worry, I'll do it again today, holy Sunday is the best day for staying in and fucking till it's night again."

Kenny sat up, dislodged Craig's grip on his hair, and started undoing his pants. He wasn't wearing his shirt, and before Craig could interrupt himself, he was exploring his chest critically - tugging at Kenny's waist and then ribs, turning him this way and that to see some kind of mark or scab or - something. Kenny allowed it with a small smirk, but eventually he put his hands on Craig's wrists, and stopped him.

"Is this what you're looking for?" He peeled his fly open, and then slid his pants down, one leg, showing a heavy and stained bandage on his leg. Craig grit his teeth, and ran his fingers over it curiously.

"I thought it was your chest."

"It was dark last night," Kenny said without even his usual signs of cheek, and slid his pants off the rest of the way. "But I did have to paint the blood on my chest."

"Either way, it pisses me off."

"I know it does. Sorry." Kenny wasn't smiling. He was actually trying to apologize. Craig nodded his acceptance, and let himself relax enough to lay back against the pillows, spreading his knees out with a slight smirk.

"Apology accepted, I guess."

Kenny rolled his eyes, and kissed him. Craig kept his hands to himself at first, but Kenny kept the kiss teasing and light, and he wasn't touching him, either, he was still occupied with digging for something in his now discarded pants. Craig growled his dissatisfaction, and hooked an arm around Kenny's neck to force him closer, then began biting him when he still refused to open his mouth. Kenny giggled lightly against his lips, and Craig finally let go, eyes dark and narrow in frustration.

"If you're going to start something, then finish it."

"It's called teasing, Craig. I know you have no subtlety, but it's the best way to get all the way from wanting to desperate. You'll see. You'll like it."

Craig knew that he didn't, but looking down he could see that Kenny had slicked up his fingers on one hand, and was running his dry one over his torso. A thought from the other night occurred to him, and despite himself, he couldn't help but indulging his curiosity.

"You don't think you need to tie me up for this?"

"You want me to?"

"No."

"Good. Because no, I don't. You'll put up with it even if I don't do anything but talk to you. You don't want me to leave, do you?"

Craig grit his teeth.

"That doesn't mean I won't pin you down and fuck you."

Kenny barked in laughter with unexpected volume, and bit down on one of his nipples. Craig hissed, and shoved at his forehead, but not hard enough to dislodge him. Kenny's slick fingers were on his thigh, then teasing his taint ever so slightly. Fuck. He didn't want whatever feather-touch games Kenny was playing to be working, but he was getting harder in increments, and he could...hold out for a little bit longer.

"That'll be the day," Kenny finally purred, licking his sore nipple, but too...light. God damn it, this was fucking ridiculous - "You're scared to. You're hate how much I like it. At least when I fuck you, you don't have to deal with seeing your own face, how lost you are in the feel of my cock that you can't even think straight. And you want it right now, you're just pissed I won't give it to you."

"You're fucking full of it." Craig knew that he was red, but he also knew Kenny was wrong, so that was something. He wasn't scared of fucking Kenny. He just didn't go for that particular smug look Kenny got when he pinned him down, the way he teased and taunted him even when he had his fingers sunk in his ass. The real problem was that he didn't have enough experience to give Kenny the kind of workaround that he could dish out to him with seemingly no effort at all. The ghost memory of Kenny on his back, wrapping his thighs snug and confident around his waist - come on, cowboy, show me what you've got - sent shivers of mixed shame and apprehension through his torso.

"Don't worry," Kenny was saying, when he came back more aware of Kenny's fingers teasing his taint, his thighs quivering, his chest bitten and raw, and five other fingertips massaging little points of pressure into his side, his abdomen, his lower back, "I'll mount you, too, later. I'm a little disappointed I haven't had your cock yet. Not saying your ass isn't better, but we have all day. I want the full fucking menu." Kenny snorted to himself over his own double entendre, and finally slipped the tip of his finger into the tight ring of Craig's ass. Craig bit down on his lip, clawed into Kenny's bare chest and arm, and waited for that first shiver of sensation to be over - but it didn't end. Kenny kept his fingertip right at his entrance, where he was extremely sensitive, and when Craig finally turned his glare on Kenny's face, he was met with a wide, shitty grin.

"I knew it," Kenny breathed, and slipped another finger into him, and began massaging them both in gentle, soft circles right over that tight ring of muscle that was starting to pulse involuntarily in response to his indulgent attention. "You always sound the most whorish when it's...you know, going in, or going out, I figured there was a reason you liked taking it so much. Your asshole itself is really goddamn sensitive."

"Fuck you. I fucking hate you, you know that?" But there was no power in his words, even as much as he meant them. Or he meant to say that he hated when Kenny spoke. A spike of pleasure completely foreign from the type he got from jacking his cock, getting sucked off, or even getting fucked really deep rattled his nerves and his breath heatedly. Fuck, how was he doing that? Kenny started to pull, not too hard, and dug both of his slick fingertips right on the ring of his sphincter, forcing it open just a little and coaxing an involuntary, humiliating little gasp out of Craig.

"Turn over," Kenny said, his voice thicker now, his eyes glinting, and Craig shook his head, refusing to look him in the face, his mouth stubbornly shut. "Please," he whined, just a little bit, his fingers tightening the pressure he was putting on them by curling ever so slightly - and Craig hissed to cover up a more embarrassing sound, and hit Kenny in the shoulder to get him to back off. He figured that on his front, at least, it'd be harder for Kenny to grin in his face like he always did, and easier for him to cover up any humiliating noises, a number of which he felt very close to.

"Just shut your mouth," Craig asserted as he pushed himself onto his palms and then lowered his whole body to his chest, pretending he wasn't shaking, "I don't want to hear a single fucking word."

"Yeah, sure, no problem," Kenny chirped, and Craig bit his knuckles already when he felt both of Kenny's hands grab tight hold of his upper thighs, his fingers spreading his cheeks out in what must be an extremely pleasing sight to Kenny above him, judging by the unabashed gasp of pleasure he gave just by looking. Craig burrowed his mouth down against the couch cushion and tried to pretend he didn't like hearing it. Kenny's fingers returned, then, pressing and massaging his inner ring curiously and almost gently, then he felt Kenny's weight shift, settling down further between his legs, and then he felt a little puff of breath at his lower back, and a small warm kiss planted there before-

"No." Craig jerked up onto his elbows, and kicked out violently, trying to get Kenny in the crotch if he could, but only managing to hit his thigh, which in this case had about the same effect. Kenny hissed and fell back on his ass again, but when he looked over his shoulder Kenny's face was screwed tight in pain, and Craig remembered the bandages, and felt involuntary guilt wash over him.

"Ugh...I wasn't trying to hit you there." His version of an apology. Kenny grimaced, but shook his head, and peeled the bandages back to get a look at the damage. There was sticky red blood underneath, and black spindly wires - no, not wires, thread - that looked like insects poking out from a puffy bruised line of open flesh.

"It's not bad," Kenny said as he flashed a smile at Craig, who wasn't sure how that was a definition of not bad' - "Just popped a few stitches. You owe me for that one, though." He was already re-wrapping the bandage around his thigh, and Craig felt a warm palm connect with his lower back and urge him back down onto his front. He gritted his teeth, hissed in disapproval, and wished he wasn't still this hard, the flashes of blood and black thread not doing anything to erase his arousal. Sick, he thought to himself, you're fucking sick.

"Well, I'm not letting you lick me there. It's fucking disgusting. You try to put your tongue on my ass again, and I'll rip your whole leg open, then crush your balls."

"You're such a buzzkill," Kenny sighed, kissed the back of his neck peacefully, and let his fingers return to spread Craig's flushed pink sphincter again. "But okay, if you insist. I'm just gonna have to work real hard with my fingers, and talk filthy in your ear till you come."

"I'm not gonna come from your fingers," Craig said with growling certainty, but his body twitched again when Kenny re-initiated the touch he had been missing since he kicked him, pausing only to apply more lube to his fingertips and the lightly shivering flesh of Craig's ass and taint.

"Better be careful what you say," Kenny giggled, "I might think you're challenging me."

Craig knew that for exactly what it was - a taunt, and he wasn't having any of it. He grit his teeth and locked his jaw, but at the same time he kept his eyes mostly closed and his gaze exactly forward so that Kenny would know just how much he wasn't affecting him. Kenny's fingers were small, and bony, as skinny as his own but shorter. He still wasn't putting them inside of him, just massaging him teasingly, playing with his sensitive skin, and kneading his thigh and ass with his free hand like a pleased cat. A cat that was, at the moment, quiet except for slightly labored breathing in his ear, having even calmed down from the giggle he just let out a few moments ago. He finally felt one of his fingers (his middle finger, he was pretty sure) start to slip into his body, and he jerked in response, and allowed himself to let out a soft, shallow sigh. Not enough to encourage him. Just enough to keep him from teasing. Kenny sighed much more emphatically in response, and pulled his slick fingertip right back to the inner circle of pressure he had to get past in order to get to the warm softness further inside.

"Yeah...you always like it when I first go in...I remember when I first fucked you-"

"Shut up, Kenny. If you want to keep your fucking fingers, work with them, not your mouth-"

Kenny crooned, not quite a laugh, now sounding slightly drunk, and Craig shivered as he ignored his demand and sucked the upper shell of his ear into his mouth as he continued teasing.

"When I first fucked you, you made the cutest little squeaks - when I first push in-" he punctuated by pressing a second finger into him, and pressing them both down purposefully on that little ring, causing Craig to gasp and twitch in an embarrassingly unintentional way, "And then again...when I pull out." Craig was ready that time, but he still let out a little hiss of frustration through his gritted teeth when Kenny pressed his fingers down that hard, pulling on his tense muscle and making his stomach spasm. His cock felt tight and pulsing against the mattress, too, and he had to fight the urge to grind his hips down (or worse, up against Kenny's fingers). He refused to give him the satisfaction one way or the other.

"Do you remember that time that I bent you over my bed...and held you down..." Shit, he was shivering now, and the longer that he stayed quiet the harder it became - just...he would let himself breathe, at least - if he bit his sleeve a bit - fuck - "And I slipped just my cockhead into your pink little ass, and I swear, you fucking slut, I was only trying to tease you...but it was better than that, I only went at it like that, back and forth, for like five minutes, and you were trying so hard to hold out, but you came just from me teasing your asshole. That's some grade A fucked up shit right there, you know that, Craig? You better be grateful I've never told anyone. You love it so much I fucking wonder why I'm the one doing this for cash and not you."

"Shut up," Craig said, and pushed himself, shivering, onto his palms, rage finally winning out over this fleeting, humiliating pleasure, but Kenny was quicker than that, and he grabbed the hair at the back of his neck, bit down hard on his ear, and Craig let out a surprised cry as Kenny fully thrust in three of his fingers, and not teasingly, not in the slightest, but hot, slick, and hard, grinding his fingertips down hard on Craig's receptive insides until Craig wasn't able to make the choice of whether to move his hips or not, they were starting to grind without his decision or any sort of thought whatsoever. Kenny didn't let go of his ear, either, and Craig felt his breath getting short from the pressure he was putting on his neck, his head and face both felt hot, he clawed at the sheets but even he couldn't convince himself he was really trying to get away, not this time, not with so much heat on top of him and pressing inside him.

"Stop," he gasped out, and heard a laughing growl of dissent in response, "Stop - stop - don't - I don't want to come like this."

Kenny quieted down, only breathing slowly again, and released his ear with a small, apologetic lick as he tugged his fingers out to tease him at his opening again.

"Yeah? How do you want to come, Mr Tucker?" Kenny was teasing, but his tone wasn't quite light enough, wasn't quite lively enough. Craig felt his stomach clench in frustration.

"Let me up. I want to see you. I want..." he thought over the possibilities in his head, hurriedly, and then let his final decision spill out before his natural inhibitions came along and stopped him from saying it. "I want to ride your cock."

Kenny's fingers retreated from his body completely, and he had to try with all his might to suppress a hiss of disappointment. Then Kenny's hand withdrew from his neck, and he felt him settle his weight onto the bed behind him, punctuated by the soft creak of the old springs in the mattress. He sat up, red in the face, and turned to face him, one arm between his thighs half-covering his erection and his slightly sticky, flushed stomach. Kenny was, unhelpfully, grinning like an idiot.

"You've never asked me for that before. I've asked you. But you always said no."

"Well I'm fucking asking for it this time. Happy unbirthday. Would you get on your back before I change my mind?"

"Please. You're so hard up you look like a cow ready to be milked." Kenny snickered, but obligingly scrambled on all fours towards the head of the sofa bed, where he sprawled himself without any dignity on his back. He spread his knees out as wide as they would go, and Craig could see how taut his briefs were around his crotch, a small damp spot formed right below the waistband of them.

"What're you waiting for? Entranced? Trying to worship me with your eyes? Get over here."

"You be quiet."

"Make me."

"You fucking be quiet, or I won't do this."

Kenny continued grinning, but it gradually calmed down as he breathed, and then he nodded once, slowly, and held his hands out (one still sticky from lube) and waited for Craig to make the next move. Craig took a few deep breaths, and hesitated, wanting to make Kenny suffer from waiting a little bit, and not wanting to come abruptly from Kenny's messy, clumsy (hot, passionate) fucking, but then Kenny whined softly in his throat, his smile still beaming on his face but his eyes narrowing in need, and Craig had to quit his teasing stint before it even started.

"All right, already," he growled, and put both his hands down on Kenny's chest as he slung one slim thigh over his belly, putting his weight down on his stomach just above where his cock was straining through his underwear. He took a heavy breath and felt Kenny trembling underneath him, from the conscious, impatient little thrust at his hips to the shivering breath he could feel through his thighs and palms, and he pushed his weight down a little harder to keep him from moving.

"God- Craig-" Kenny laughed, and settled his hands on his waist with a rough thrust of his palms to try to push his body into contact with his cock. "You're so shit at this - don't try to be a tease-" He cut himself off with a sharp gasp when Craig moved one of his palms from his chest to his crotch, and ground it in, hard.

"Don't fucking tell me what to do. If you want this so bad, wait, and I'll get on when I'm good and ready."

"But waiting is so-hard-" he tried to giggle, but instead choked out a pained sound when Craig squeezed and dug his nails in. Even through his briefs, that had to hurt, and Craig let himself have a slow-spreading smirk as Kenny finally sputtered into submission. "Fine-fine, you win. Just don't take too long, okay? I want to fuck you really bad..."

"Yeah, I get it," Craig said, deadpan as always, but he couldn't stop smiling. Kenny was so warm between his legs, against his palm, infuriating, smarmy, foul-mouthed as ever, and the sun was hitting his face so that the light was catching his dirty hair, his faint white scars, his gleaming eyes. "Hands off," Craig demanded, and Kenny obliged with a reluctant growl. Craig pushed himself further up on his knees, frowned down at Kenny's briefs, and then, finally unhesitating, pulled them back, freeing his hardened cock and coaxing a soft sigh of relief out of him. Kenny tried to get a hold of his waist again and Craig struck his hands away sharply, glaring a warning.

"I said hands off. Do I have to tie you up, this time?"

"Oh, I don't think I'd like it nearly as much as you did..." Kenny chuckled, but then he stretched out, put his hands above his head, and pressed his wrists together in a mocking gesture as if he were bound. Craig ground his teeth, but as turned on as he already was, at least Kenny couldn't point out the spike in arousal he was getting from that. Great. So he liked it when Kenny was rough with him, he liked it when Kenny played at being submissive, he even liked it, apparently, when Kenny was bleeding. Don't think about it, he snarled inwardly, It doesn't mean anything. Maybe he just liked anything Kenny was. His head buzzed with that last barely-coherent thought, and he took hold of Kenny's cock and pressed it to his thigh, then against his taint, then finally, shivering, his ass. He held it there a few seconds, his body getting plenty of time to feel out just how thick it was, while Kenny closed his eyes and purred.

"God, fuck you," Craig said in a barely-audible whisper before lowering himself, his thighs jerking from the sudden discomfort of his cock head pressing him open, and his entire body seizing slightly as he slid down half-way onto his dick, holding himself upright with one hand clawing viciously into Kenny's stomach. He held himself there, panting, for a few seconds, before Kenny started pawing, not at his waist, but at his hand, and he looked up and saw that Kenny was smiling, but that his eyes were tearing up, too.

"Craig...if you don't move...I'm gonna lose it...please?"

He would have said something about Kenny's threshold being way, way too low, something about what a pussy he was, anything that was an appropriate comeback - instead, he didn't say anything, just pushed his hips down, held tight to Kenny's hand, and stopped thinking entirely, to the point where it didn't matter how deep he got (had it ever stopped hurting that quickly before?) or where his hands went, all he could remember, really, was that he was kissing Kenny when he came and that Kenny left ten rough red crescents on his back from clawing him so tightly that their chests pressed together in rough, uneven breathing to match their rough, uneven heartbeats.

~

Four hours later Kenny was asleep again, and Craig was smoking and checking the messages on his phone. He had missed few texts from Token, which he ignored because he knew they were actually drunk texts from Tweek and he didn't want to deal with that right now, one from Bebe about something mundane (she wanted to go to the county fair and didn't have a ride because her parents had confiscated her keys, again) and then, curiously, one from Stan.

[did everything go ok? kenny's parents aren't worried - but ur right, something weird is up.]

Nice of him to finally wake up a little. Craig breathed out a heavy puff of smoke, and felt his entire body relax. It was good. Someone normal and level-headed like Stan could also touch on whatever sort of weird shit was going on with a freak like Kenny. Which one was he, though? He'd spent his whole life thinking he was the most normal kid in town - but unless he was having a fucked up acid trip, and he really, really hoped he was, he was probably one step away from the crazy level of Kenny McCormick. All for his sake, too. Imagine that.

[found him, no thanks to you. cartman tipped me off. he's safe.]

About a minute went by before his phone beeped Stan's response.

[oh, good, glad to hear he's in one piece. where are you guys?]

Craig took an abnormal amount of pleasure in typing his final response.

[fuck off, stan.]

~

"We should be superheroes," Kenny finally said, after hours of laying on the roof of the garage in silence, nursing a six pack of beer and a few joints between them.

"You'd make the shittiest superhero in the world, Kenny. And I'd make the second-shittiest - but only because you'd be the shittiest."

"No way, we'd be amazing. I'd be the heart and you'd be the body - what you did last night was really sick, man. Kind of pure evil if used the wrong way, but that's where I come in. I'll be the moral compass you're missing."

"Moral compass my ass. You were trying to get yourself permanently offed by a bunch of cultists that you lied to and manipulated. What kind of fucked up freak does that?"

"Hey, don't skip the part where I was doing it all for the good of mankind."

Craig let the silence drag on after that, just staring at Kenny coldly. Eventually, Kenny opened his jacket, and waved a hand to Craig for him to come and lay next to him inside of it. Scowling, he did that much, and put as much pressure as he could on Kenny's chest with his skull, while the other boy wrapped him in half of the threadbare parka.

"Well, forget about it. It's off the table. You can't kill yourself. But...this ritual you were trying to do. It takes you to the 'other side', right?"

"Yeah, an alternate dimension - from the stars, apparently."

Craig snorted, but he couldn't help but take it seriously. Things were too fucked up for it not to be real. And given the situation, he could only think of one thing he really wanted to say.

"Maybe we can go together. Maybe we can fix things - if there's some part of you that's not supposed to be here, maybe we can put it back. And then you can just live normally."

"You'd go with me? What if we don't come back?"

Craig turned a warm smile up at Kenny, and for that moment...everything seemed clear. Everything seemed easy. And it would be easy to help him, if he wanted to. If he really wanted to. He thought about the future - of never getting to lie here and watching the stars with Kenny as a pillow ever again. He really wanted to.

"We always come back."

FIN

Epilogue

Sun. Heat. Sand. Three things that South Park never had, not really - not like this. They had winter, they had mild weather, they had what they had thought was summer. This was summer. This was fantastic. Like a scene right out of a fucking western, they were in a beat up pick-up truck at a gas station in literally the middle of nowhere. Far off on the horizon Craig could make out a smudge that was probably mountains, but the heat waves were thick enough that it was really hard to tell. Next to them about forty yards off was a single cactus. Flies were buzzing somewhere nearby, the comforting sign that something out there was still alive to eat what had already passed on. Kenny was inside, presumably taking a leak, but he had been in there so long Craig was beginning to suspect he was the dead thing the flies were feasting on. That was no good. He straightened up, not actually worried - but checking in through the window, just to make sure. No, he was fine. He was having an earnest chat with an old man who was shielded behind a plexiglass case within the plexiglass case that was the beaten-up storefront of the gas station. He saw Kenny dramatically cross himself, and snorted at how ironic the sight was. Then, after a few seconds of goodbye, he emerged, his face dropping from polite smile to coldly serious as he made his way back to the car. There were a few thumps as he disengaged the gas pump, and then he got back into the driver's seat and heaved a sigh.

"No good?" Craig drawled, pretending, as he always did, that he wasn't interested in the answer one way or another.

"No good. They won't wake up, either. We have to take them down. Did you figure out where to strike?"

"It's a fucking gas station, Kenny. I don't have to figure out where to strike - melt one pump and you bring the whole place down in an instant. Is everyone inside?"

"Yeah. They have a son."

"I don't give a shit. You know as well as I do that they've been cutting up kids way younger than their son and don't feel any remorse for it."

"I just feel like there's more we could be doing, you know?"

"Stop sympathizing. The tip we got from down under was good, we checked it out like you wanted to. Now we take care of business, and kill the weeds." He scowled, and shaded his eyes experimentally, making sure he had a handle on the trigger. "Not that these explosions are much fun for me..."

Kenny smirked crookedly, and turned the key in the rusted ignition a few times to kick it into gear. "They're fun for me, though. I like watching everything go up in smoke. Just as long as I don't get rained with some kid's bloody testicles, I'll be okay."

"Drive. The sooner we set this station on fire, the sooner the town will be safe."

The truck rumbled into gear, and Kenny accelerated - definitely a bit more than was necessary. Once Craig could only see the station about an inch high in the rear-view mirror, he turned around in his seat, and leaned out the window. It had been several months since charging his powers had burned him - practice, training, and a good word from the lord of the world beyond will fix those sort of rookie problems. Now he was as lethal and quick as he was spotless - an untraceable weapon in his face. He grunted softly as the heat charged behind his eyes, and concentrated his gaze (which was sharpened to an abnormal degree) on the base of the gas pump they had just finished filling up at. He was ready just in time to see the old man Kenny had been talking to stagger out of his plexiglass cage mindlessly, and held an arm up in a lazy wave that he knew the other man could not see, and could not return. Then he let loose, and a single jet of ice-hot energy released from his charging eyes to his target, which started to go up in a satisfying cloud of black and orange smoke. Then the explosions continued...and continued. Underneath them. After a few more seconds he had to grasp the beaten orange door of the pick-up truck when the ground started to rumble underneath them.

"Guess we're not far enough away!" Kenny shouted cheerfully.

"Fuck you! Drive faster! You're the only goddamn immortal in this truck!"

"I know, it keeps me on my toes!" Kenny barked back, and took a sharp left, which pulled Craig back into the car. There was a large explosion behind them, and then a smaller one very close to where they had been a few seconds ago. Shit. If there was another tank underground up ahead - but no, even though the ground to their right was blowing up, Kenny had navigated them along a miraculous path clear of pressurized gas and molten explosive death. Craig took several deep breaths, and Kenny whooped in triumph, stuck his head and shoulders out the window, and stood heavily on the gas pedal. The roaring engine hurled them towards the smudge of mountains in the distance.

The End

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