Kenny was...

There weren't really words for it, and Kyle wasn't sure when he'd started trying to find them. Somewhere along the line Kenny had stopped being the weird quiet one and started being something else. Something bright and dark with shadows under his eyes, something that moved like a caged animal, shoulders bunched up like he might pounce or maybe run, and even he didn't know which it would be. Something improbably, impossibly good-natured and gentle in his wild way; something with eyes that flashed like he actually cared about what you were saying no matter how stupid it was. He'd keep fighting, had always kept fighting, despite everything life and fate and all that jazz had thrown at him. Even when he was little, he'd done his best to appear...normal. The closer you got, though, the more you could see the shining wild parts of him underneath that veneer of just-like-everyone-else, that indefinable something that never let you go.

Maybe that's why there had never really been anyone else for Kyle.

They'd started hanging out a lot more the summer before eleventh grade. Kyle had learned a lot that summer, like how to jump start an engine and what stuff scavenged out of the back of the pantry would make you puke and that Kenny was really, really charismatic when you got him talking. He was just so warm and animated that Kyle could happily spend hours just listening to Kenny talk, watching his extravagant gestures and soaking in the weird magnetism that was Kenny. That was also about when Kyle realized he might like guys. One guy, anyway.

He'd not thought about it much before. Well, obviously he'd thought about it in an abstract, curious way, especially when Stan got his vomit reflex under control once and for all and started seriously going with Wendy instead of that off-and-on thing they'd been doing for a while. But he wasn't the kind to get those transient crushes that seemed to saturate every other human being's life, so he figured it probably wasn't a big deal. He'd overlooked the problematic detail that when he fell for someone, he fell hard. And that was why he could feel liking Kenny as a physical pain, a dull roar that made all else muted in comparison.

It was both unpleasant and intoxicating, the inclinations Kyle wrapped up tight and secret throughout the last two years of high school. He wasn't even sure if he hated them or not. On the one hand, it was a constant effort to move and speak as though nothing were amiss; on the other, it was exhilarating just being in the same room as Kenny and striving to see underneath the hood, metaphorically speaking.

Something else he discovered was that Kenny wasn't stupid. Despite the best efforts of Mr. Garrison, Kenny was quietly setting the curve in math class. He was in the same Calculus class as Kyle and Stan, but he seemed to pick up the information effortlessly. It almost made Kyle hate him, sometimes, when Kyle would stay up all night studying and Kenny would waltz in and Kyle knew he hadn't so much as looked at the textbooks--and then they'd get the same grade. It also, weirdly, made him kind of hot.

Still, Kenny's intelligence didn't mean he got good grades. He'd...go away, still, sometimes. Not as often as when they were younger and noticed it less, but he usually managed to miss at least one major test per semester. Kyle didn't think anybody else saw it, but there was a certain tightness to Kenny's jaw when he missed something important. He held himself differently, like he'd fucked up somehow and wasn't sure if anyone had realized it yet. Like the time Kyle was teching the school play, and when he slipped out of the after-party he'd found Kenny waiting in the shadows, hood obscuring his face, shoulders tight and frustrated. He hadn't said anything, but Kyle thought he understood. It was probably the same with Stan's games, although Kyle wouldn't know because he'd been going to fewer and fewer. It was just...they took up a lot of time, and the outcome was always the same. At first, he'd only missed games for really good reasons. And then the reasons started getting less valid, and more along the lines of 'I don't really want to go.'

It wasn't like Stan minded. He'd said he didn't mind, so it must have been okay. Clyde and Craig and Token all went, so it wasn't like Kyle would be missed.

Besides, they still hung out pretty much every day. They'd kept up the ritual of traveling to and from school together, at least. Sometimes Kyle thought it was a metaphor for the transition between academic and personal lives, or maybe outer lives and inner lives. He'd said so, once, and Cartman had called him a whiny pussy Jew bitch vagina-face. Most of the time, while waiting for Stan to get out of practice so he could give them all rides in his beat-up car, he and Kenny and Cartman would be behind the bleachers, talking yet again about why they were waiting for stupid Stan and his stupid football friends anyway. Cartman would be playing some video game or other, pudgy fingers pounding at the buttons. Kenny would be smoking, and Kyle would alternate between underlining important points in his textbook and lecturing Kenny about smoking. He thought it probably wouldn't make a difference whether Kenny smoked or not, but he wasn't exactly sure how the mechanics of everything worked, and had never asked. So to be on the safe side, he nagged.

Sometimes Kyle wondered how many times Kenny had gone when they weren't there. Had he ever smothered himself in his sleep? Did he ever watch the light fade alone, wondering where Kyle and Stan were, wondering if they'd acknowledge him anyway? Fuck, when he was ten he'd never thought like this. Things were pretty clear. There were bastards, there was Kenny, and there were those in between just trying to get by. Now they didn't even say a word when that thing in its horrible and varied forms happened. They just ignored it and it went away. Because in South Park, things always go back to normal, swinging back onto a predestined path to whatever the future held.

Why all of this made Kyle want to fuck Kenny really, really badly he didn't know. It had something to do with forcing Kenny into reality, mapping out his body so intimately that Kenny would have no choice but to stay, tying him to the cold and dreadful light. It also maybe had something to do with getting close to that spark in Kenny's eyes and the tilt of his smile, being absorbed into his maniac glow and seeing him want badly enough to need.

Of course, all of this was ultimately irrelevant. He could never, ever say anything; never try for more than stolen glances and sort-of-accidental brief touches that burned right through to the marrow, flames licking through his veins. Kenny was not allowed. Some part of Kyle liked it that way, liked it static and safe the way he pushed everything so deep down nobody could ever see. The knowledge that he would never betray his own secret grounded him. There was a peace in knowing that his--whatever, the boy he had quietly and inexorably fallen for so deeply that Kenny was the very foundation of his world, would always be an unattainable dream.

He did dream, somewhat more literally, about Kenny. In fact, it was rare that he had a dream without Kenny somewhere in it. He remembered this one dream a lot, where Kenny was wrapped up in his hoodie, standing too close to Kyle, and put a knife in dream-Kyle's hand and Kyle watched himself, with surgical precision, eviscerate Kenny alive or maybe dead. It was hard to tell with Kenny. But the parka covered his face and he just stood there, watching strange and inhuman organs float to the ground like dead leaves.

Kyle knew he was sort of a bastard. Not like Cartman, who seemed to have none of the ethical boundaries that normal people had; it wasn't so much that he was particularly evil, he just didn't have...brakes. But Kyle knew better, was supposed to know better, and still he stood there cold and blank when bad things happened, even to himself. He could fake empathy with the best of them, and he could remember a time when he really did care about making things right so passionately that it felt like holy fire surging through him. There had to have been some sort of transition between back then and...well, now, but Kyle wasn't sure when or how or why it was. He could be cruel without meaning it, then surprised when other people minded.

Of course, Kenny never minded. At least, he never said if he did. Kyle was grateful for that. Kenny'd listen to Kyle ramble on and on, actually listening, and somehow made whatever Kyle said more noble. Better. Just by smiling at it in that oddly gentle way of his, or interjecting a dirty joke, which for some reason had the same effect. He'd been there the night Kyle quietly lost his faith.

It was a subtle, inexorable process. The more Kyle asked questions, the further he'd had to stretch his faith to fit with his sense of ethics and the books his mother tried to keep him from reading, the more thinking he did, the harder it was to reconcile what he could rationalize and what he could not. Something had to break. And then, one night, it did. Kenny was sitting across a Monopoly board from him, half-sprawled on the floor, chewing his sleeve thoughtfully as he tried to decide whether or not to buy Boardwalk. Kyle was just--looking at him, and stopped believing in G-d. He sometimes wrote the name out, for the novelty, afterwards. When he closed his eyes he thought about writing the name into Kenny's skin and seeing if it would stick. It seemed entirely possible that the letters would slide off, evaporate, maybe dissolve like ash into the breeze.

He hadn't told anyone, least of all Kenny. He still exploded in a fury when Cartman aimed his unending vitriol towards Jews; he still went through all the motions with his family, still kept more or less kosher, still let his strings be pulled by habit and convenience. It wasn't as if he stopped being Jewish, stopped feeling the press of thousands of years of history and tradition and suffering on his bones. It was a weight that had always anchored him, but now seemed to feel alien and discordant. Some things still felt holy, and he was starting to think that maybe they could be holy all on their own without a god. Maybe when he was younger he would have tried to explain himself, made some kind of stand, but now...it was like he was fractured, like he'd been flayed by a prism, and he was all right with trying to fit himself around the world rather than changing the world to fit him. Maybe that was why he hadn't tried to pursue Kenny more actively--besides the fact that it was hopeless. It was just easier to pretend like he was the kind of person who would do the right thing, a good kind of person, the kind who wasn't horribly in love with Kenny.

It had occurred to him once or twice that it might be possible to be a good person, or at least a different person, and want Kenny. While he granted this possibility, Kyle's obsession with Kenny was somehow part of every other dirty little secret in his life. All his dark places were wrapped up in an orange parka, chain-smoking and pretending not to crave the world's approval.

That was one of the things that hadn't changed about Kenny. Well, the pretending not to care was relatively new--he'd been more open, more straightforward when they were younger. They all had, without the unwanted subtleties and confusions of experience pressing down on their limbs. Now there were layers and layers of Kenny, folded up like origami. It had taken a while for Kyle to unpack that hunger in him. It was something that he had discovered, that Kenny was always hungry for--something. Kyle wasn't quite sure what. It wasn't attention he wanted, exactly, it was more like comfort. Validation. Assurance, reassurance, acceptance. Kyle could run through his internal thesaurus and still not quite describe the way in which Kenny hesitated so slightly before following the rest of the group, as if he wasn't sure it was okay for him to follow. The way in which something in Kenny's eyes flashed warm and desperately grateful every time his name was spoken kindly. The way Kenny held himself carefully in a crowd of friends, shoulders a little too tight, glancing into dark corners.

It was all part of the way Kenny seemed to live slightly off-kilter with the rest of the world. Kyle was endlessly fascinated with that disconnect: all the small ways Kenny didn't quite fit into the spaces around him. Maybe that was why he kept--going away. The world knew Kenny didn't quite fit, and kept trying to spit him out. Why Kenny kept trying, kept coming back, Kyle couldn't say. Kyle was, of course, profoundly grateful. A life without Kenny somewhere in it was distinctly unappealing.

That was probably why Kyle kept trying to keep Kenny. It was a compulsion, the way he'd use every means at his disposal short of actual physical restraint to make Kenny stay longer with the living, with Kyle. Of course, it never seemed to make a difference, and Kyle felt like screaming every time they found Kenny with his eyes empty and gray and half-lidded, usually mangled almost beyond recognition, leeching color from the air. It was intolerable, and yet everyone around him seemed to tolerate it. It was getting to the point where Kyle had to clench his fists until his nails left marks that would last for days every time Kenny walked away, just to keep himself from reaching out, clutching at Kenny, wrapping Kenny up into a neat little packet and keeping him forever. Cutting out his organs and putting them into jars. Watching Kenny's heart beat glowing in glass, kneeling over Kenny and tracing the leylines of his body. Catching each stray thought on his tongue like forbidden Christmas snow and returning them one by one, still cold-melting in his mouth, to Kenny's mind.

These were probably wrong thoughts to have. But you bastards, us bastards, it really wasn't all that different.

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A/N:

So this is the story I wanted to write about a third of the way through Ink. Started out as a random paragraph at the bottom of the Ink doc that I wrote for no reason whatsoever, and I kept adding to it because stories are very easy to start. And then of course I had half a story and nowhere to go with it. I think the front half of my stories tend to be considerably better than the back halves, because I keep having new stories I want to write partway through. In fact, I wrote the first few chapters within a couple weeks, and then abandoned it for about six months. Now that I've started writing again, I figured I'd better start posting.

Just so you know, chapters will get shorter and shorter. This is both a stylistic choice and an excuse to get lazier with endings.

Maybe this isn't the place for it, but some notes on Ink: yeah, you all were totally right, it finished way too abruptly. That was in part due to this story and school absorbing all my attention and in part due to the fact that I really suck at endings. Trying to get better, but you know. It's a process. I'm glad so many of you thought they seemed canonish; I tend to be pretty cynical about romance but not about love, which makes for a weird combination. And to fandom newbies, yeah, we've all been there.