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Kenny slammed his locker shut, cursing beneath his hood. Fucking hell, he'd been unable to catch up to Butters all day. If he didn't know any better, he'd say Butters was avoiding him, but at the end of the first class they had together, the teacher had called Kenny to his desk to fill him in on all the assignments he'd missed over the past week, making him late to his next class. Butters had physics lab during phys ed so Kenny didn't see him then, and last period Stan had been in the middle of a crisis – Kenny didn't remember and didn't care whether it had been over his girlfriend or his best friend this time – and now he'd missed Butters at his locker, too.
He balled up a fist and punched his locker, which hurt like hell and did nothing to lessen his anger. He should just give it up and wait until tomorrow to talk to Butters, but the thing was, he didn't want to wait. He needed to see Butters, to try to explain, to at least talk to him.
As luck would have it, he caught up to Butters on the first floor, while he was bent over tying his shoelace. It was exactly the kind of thing that would have probably led to Kenny's untimely demise, but his laces were so broken that all he was suffering from were blisters from the loose-fitting boots.
There was always a chance that said blisters could lead to some weirdly aggressive infection, but he wouldn't think about that right now.
“Hey,” he said, pushing back his hood. He tried for a smile but could only manage a grimace. Smooth McCormick, real smooth.
Butters stood up, his backpack hanging from the crook of his arm. An unfamiliar scowl was on his face; his posture was rigid; and he did not look happy to see Kenny, not one bit.
Kenny had been to hell, however. He'd faced far worse than anything Butters Stotch could throw at him. That didn't mean his stomach wasn't roiling with nerves, though, as he reached out and brushed his fingertips through the soft tufts of blond hair just above Butters' left ear.
“What do you want?” Butters sounded tired and distant, and Kenny wished the scowl would come back. Butters might not get angry often, but it was something to see when he'd been pushed too far. The lack of emotion behind Butters' question was not a good sign.
“I-” Kenny's hand fell away and he made a fist at his side, wincing at the pain in his bruised knuckles. His carefully rehearsed speech was gone; he couldn't remember a single word he'd wanted to say. He could feel them - the lost words, every ounce of regret - but he couldn't process his thoughts and feelings into something resembling a coherent explanation. He was a man of action, not of words – at least not when it came to the important, personal shit.
He lifted his hand again and wrapped his fingers tentatively around Butters' bicep. He could kiss him, he thought in a flash of insight. He was sure he could put everything he felt into that, at least, but Butters seemed to anticipate that, because Kenny had just barely leaned in when Butters took a step back.
Kenny raked his fingers through his hair, frustrated. “I'm sorry,” he sighed. He rubbed his hand over his face. “Fuck, Butters, I'm sorry.”
“Yeah,” Butters said softly. “Me too.”
He turned and walked away, and Kenny watched him go. The moment Butters was out of sight, he pulled his hood up over his head and drew the strings tight.
Fuck.
“You're a big pussy, you know that, right?”
Of course he couldn't even have a moment to nurse his breaking heart in silence. No, Eric fucking Cartman just had to go rub fucking salt in his fucking wounds just because shit like this amused the sick bastard.
“So glad to hear your opinion, dick, except for how I'm not.”
“Fahn, fahn,” Cartman said, backing away melodramatically. “Just seems a shame that you're afraid to tell him.”
Kenny's eyes glared at him. “You don't even know what you're fucking talking about.”
“Don't I, Kinny? Don't I?”
Kenny wasn't in the mood for Cartman's manipulation. He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned away.
“Do you even know what you're sorry for?” Cartman called after him, only his voice was rougher and half an octave lower.
Kenny turned around, only because Cartman wasn't going to let it rest unless he acknowledged the face painted on the fat ass's hand.
“You can't hide from the truth!” the hand told him.
Kenny didn't bother flipping Cartman off. He wasn't in the mood to indulge him with the whole Mitch Connor bullshit today.
Cartman/Mitch apparently felt that his last words were meaningful enough because he let Kenny go in peace after that.
He snorted. Peace. His life was anything but peaceful. Peace was a few stolen moments in which he could almost pretend to be a normal teenaged boy. Peace was making it from sunup to sundown in one piece. It was the feeling he got when his sister hugged him.
Peace was the few seconds after an intense orgasm, right before he realized his leg was cramped or he needed to take a piss.
In other words, peace was a fucking illusion.
He was still slightly disoriented from his rebirth that morning. When he was younger and dying was a daily occurrence, he'd bounced back a lot more easily. He'd gone quite a few months this time, before that safe had dropped from the fifth floor of the office building. Because his life wasn't enough of a cosmic fucking joke. An anvil was probably next, or maybe a piano. No, he'd already been crushed by a piano, but he hadn't been dismembered in a while so that was probably in the cards for him soon.
He wanted to get stoned. And laid. But mostly stoned. Except that he'd promised. Not that it fucking mattered, because apparently Butters no longer gave a shit what Kenny McCormick did with his life. He could really use a cigarette, too, but Butters hated the way he tasted when he smoked.
He'd just stepped off the curb, saw the car coming around the corner, and took a hasty step backward, only to have his foot land in a melted pile of slush that soaked through his worn boot. To add insult to injury, the driver's windows were down and his radio was cranked up as high as it could go.
“...the best of times are when I'm alone with you...”
Ah, yes. That's what had been missing. The lonely hearts soundtrack. Stan had tried to explain it to him once but he'd thought his friend was exaggerating. It also turned out that Styx was just the first in a string of songs to plague him today. His hood wasn't exactly soundproof, so the whole walk home, he was advised that Breakin' Up is Hard To Do, Love Stinks, and My Life Would Suck Without U (or was it Since U Been Gone? He could never tell the difference). They all led up to some emo rock band whining about a broken relationship and whose fault it was, and would someone just shut those fucking pussies up. That wasn't even counting the other random lyrics he'd heard out of context. Apparently everyone in this fucking town had decided to drive around with their windows down when it was this fucking cold out, because by the time he reached his house, every recording artist over the past fifty fucking years had succeeded in reminding him why he was destined to be alone. This was exactly why he'd been less than selective with his first few hookups. There was no fucking point in getting close to someone who would conveniently move on the moment he died.
He looked at the front door and the broken car that had been on the front lawn so long, it was deeply entrenched in the ground, and kept walking.
He had a not-entirely undeserved reputation, one he didn't usually regret, except for the two times he'd given a serious relationship a try. The first one was with Lisa Berger, who had moved to North Park in middle school and came back in high school, still a little hippy but kind of cute and funny and a surprising freak in bed. She hadn't quite gotten the whole concept of safe words, and circumstances in which one might not be able to utter them, and Kenny had ended up dying from asphyxiation, which had probably scarred her for the whole 36 hours he'd been dead that time. She'd probably had the other girls help her move his body, since they'd done it in her parents' bed, but he'd never know because by the time he was back at school, the way she remembered it was that she'd “dumped his sorry ass” for being a “terrible lay.”
Which he'd found kind of funny, albeit insulting, and he wondered when she'd realized he was dead that last time. In the end, none of it had mattered, because when he wanted it bad enough, there was always someone willing (depending on how much he wanted to lower his standards). If there wasn't, he had no problem taking the situation in hand, literally. He was still the guy that would “fuck anything that moved” and there had been that rumor about the vacuum (not entirely false, and the outcome of that experiment was an overnight trip to the bowels of hell), but the whole town had always looked down on the McCormicks, so he'd learned to either embrace it or let it roll off his back.
The Lisa Berger fiasco had been enough to make him shy away from anything remotely close to dating, right up until that night he and Butters had gotten a little drunk at a party (Kenny deliberately; Butters unwittingly). Butters was, unsurprisingly, a chatty, happy drunk, and a touchy feely one, and after he'd stumbled and Kenny had caught him, the two of them had ended up playing tonsil hockey on the couch, with Kenny straddling Butters' hips and grinding against him, until the party ended and they were kicked out. They'd continued what they started the whole way home (Kenny's house; he'd had enough presence of mind to know going to the Stotch residence would put an end to what was promising to be a good time). They'd made out on Kenny's bed for nearly half an hour until Butters tore his mouth away to gasp for air. He'd taken one dazed look at Kenny, grinned sleepily, and passed out right there, sliding off the mattress and onto the floor. Kenny had covered him up with a threadbare sheet and shoved Butters' jacket under his head for a pillow. The next morning when Butters woke up, sober and hungover, he'd stammered and looked everywhere but at Kenny. Kenny had decided he could do worse and he put an end to Butters' unasked question by kissing him senseless.
There had been perks to dating a guy the second time around. While Butters did exhibit some awfully girly traits and turned out to be the biggest cuddler in South Park, he also enjoyed Terrance and Phillip and sports and porn, especially crappy old movie spoof pornos that pretended to have a plot. Best of all, Butters was fucking enthusiastic as hell and had a real knack for knowing what would feel good for Kenny before Kenny did.
Sure, the guys, especially Cartman, rode him hard for the whole Butters thing, even smashing their names together and calling them Bunny (always recited in a sing-song voice, complete with kissing noises), but honestly, Kenny liked Butters. He liked fooling around with Butters, and he even liked the way Butters made him feel, like he mattered. After that, he had no reason to look anywhere else, because everything he wanted, he already had.
Until he died last week, right before Butters was going off to compete in some state tap dancing competition. It was kind of a big deal considering Butters had been in and out of therapy for years, with a half dozen different head shrinks, to deal with the deaths that had occurred the last couple of times he'd danced. The most recent psychologist insisted that the only way Butters would get past it was to try again. Butters had alternated between cautious excitement and downright panic, to the point where he was making Tweek look calm, cool, and collected. Kenny supposed it was just as well that he'd walked under that safe when he did, because even with Butters triple tying his shoelaces, there was a good chance that Kenny would have ended up crushed beneath a stage light (again), only this time it would have been Butters' fault and Kenny hated to think what that would have done to Butters' psyche.
The rumor mill had been busy churning out more titillating versions of where Kenny had been, every one of them involving sex or drugs or both. The whole day he'd heard all about his exploits – he'd especially liked the one about him and the Siamese twins and the garter snake. And the absolute best part had been all the guys he didn't even talk to coming up to him in the hall, slapping him on the back, and congratulating him, all in front of Butters.
He came to a stop and stared out at Starks Pond. If he was a melodramatic pussy like Stan, he'd wade in until the water sucked him under. He picked up a rock and threw it as hard as he could, not able to tell where exactly it landed. His stomach growled then, and he sighed.
He opened the fridge when he got home and found a single slice of processed American cheese sitting there. He grabbed it eagerly, but as he peeled the plastic off, he noticed his hands were shaking. God, he'd kill for a cigarette right about now.
“Hey! Don't hog all the cheese, Kenny!”
He tore it down the center and gave half to his sister, and they both sat at the table and folded the rectangles in half, then half again, until it wouldn't fold anymore. They'd learned to eat as slowly as they could so they'd at least feel a little more full.
Karen ate half of her cheese and then got up. “Want some water?”
Kenny nodded, eyeing the remainder of cheese in her hand that was softening and remolding into a little ball. He wouldn't take it from her and she knew it, but habits were hard to break for either of them and she refused to set it down.
While Karen got the water, Kenny tipped the toaster upside down and shook some of the crumbs onto his cheese and did the same for Karen's cheese ball when she sat back down. They sipped their water in silence, Karen from an old plastic sippy cup without the lid and Kenny from a chipped mug with no handle.
He thought he might just get away scot-free, but his sister was pretty perceptive with feelings and shit, and she'd really taken a liking to Butters.
“I know it's none of my business,” she began.
“It's not,” he agreed, getting up and putting the mug in the sink.
She sighed. “I'm not going to tell you what to do, as long as you do something.”
She didn't have to point out that she meant something other than drinking, smoking, and fucking – all of which he wanted desperately - and yet didn't want, just because the effort was too much.
He lifted two fingers and gave her a half-wave, half-salute, and headed to his room, where he kicked off his boots, lay on his bed, and stared at the ceiling. The cracks were the same as they'd been before he died, at least he thought so. He hadn't exactly been able to keep his eyes open when he was on his back with Butters pounding into him, and when he was in bed alone, he preferred to sleep on his stomach or his side, not his back. Unless he was jacking it, but he didn't keep his eyes open during that, either.
Thinking about sex with Butters had him half hard, and he shrugged out of his coat so he could slide his hand under his shirt, down to the waistband of his jeans. Before he could do anything to ease the tension in his body, the door slammed open.
“What the fuck,” he said, lifting his head. He fully expected to see Cartman and Mitch had decided to pay him a surprise visit. He wasn't expecting to see Butters there instead. He sat up quickly. “I mean, geez, sorry. I was expecting-” he bit down on his tongue.
“Someone else,” Butters finished quietly.
“Butters,” Kenny said, and then, because he didn't know what else to say, “Butters.”
“Can I-?” Butters gestured to the bed.
Kenny drew his knees in to make room. “Yeah, sure, of course.”
“I, uh, I know what they've been sayin' about you, where you were,” Butters said. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and seemed to have no interest in sitting down on the bed after all.
“Butters...”
Butters held up a hand. “Wait. Just...wait. Let me just say this before you say anythin', ok?”
Kenny bit his lip and nodded.
“I know what they're sayin', and I'm not stupid. I know you did...stuff...with other people before we, you know.”
Kenny nodded again.
“The thing is, I don't care what they're sayin', because I know you, Ken, and I know you wouldn't do that. Maybe I am as gullible as they say, but I trust you.”
There was a “but” coming. Kenny tried to swallow around the lump in his throat.
“The thing is, I kinda thought that maybe you felt about me the way I feel about you. Maybe it's love and maybe it isn't, but it's something. But the thing is, if there isn't any trust, then what do we have?”
He looked at Kenny then, his eyes bright, and it took a moment for Kenny to realize that Butters was waiting for a response.
“I thought you trusted me,” he said. “You said- you just said-”
“I know what I said, and I meant it. I do trust you, Kenny, I trust you with my life. Th-the problem is that you don't trust me!”
Butters walked toward the door, but he didn't leave. He just stood there, hugging himself. Kenny thought maybe Butters was waiting for him to do something, and he crossed the room slowly, afraid Butters would bolt. He placed his hand on Butters' shoulder. Butters tensed but didn't pull away.
“Butters, I don't know what you want from me.”
“I don't expect you to tell me all your secrets,” Butters babbled, his voice hitching slightly. “But when you have a big secret, a secret that affects the two of us, that's something you should definitely be tellin' me, because otherwise it's like lyin'.”
“Secret?”
Butters turned then and poked his finger right in the center of Kenny's chest. “Don't play dumb with me! I'm not stupid!”
“I never said-”
“Then why won't ya tell me?”
“Because...”
Kenny shoved his fingers into his hair. His secret. His fucking secret that was a secret because no one ever, ever remembered. His secret that no one ever believed the few times he'd tried telling them.
Butters leaned back against the wall. “Because why, Kenny?” he asked softly.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Butters reached for Kenny's hands and clasped them between his own callused ones, hands that were rough and abraded from all the fucking chores he had to do all the time.
“Try me.”
So Kenny told him. He told Butters about the deaths and his parents involvement in that stupid cult and the times he'd tried telling Stan and Kyle and the others. He told him about the Necronomicon, and how every lead was a dead end and he never got any answers, and how much it fucking hurt every time he died. Butters said nothing; he just smoothed his fingers through Kenny's hair the whole time. When he was done, Butters wrapped his arms around Kenny's torso.
“I may not be good at a lot of things, but I'm the best at givin' hugs.”
Kenny released the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. Butters had this way of hugging with his whole body, his chest pressed firm against Kenny's. When Karen hugged him, she always tucked herself under his arm, making him feel protective, like he was a halfway decent big brother. This was more like being surrounded, like having a Butters shaped parka. He felt giddy and nauseous and tired and jittery and all he wanted to do was stand there, inhaling Butters' scent. He'd had Butters' tongue in the back of his throat and Butters' cock up his ass, but all he could think was Why have I never done this before? He hugged Butters back as hard as he could.
“So now something will crash through the roof and kill me,” he mumbled against Butters' hair, “and tomorrow you won't remember any of this, and it was a big fucking waste of time telling you any of it.”
“Then you'll just have to tell me again when you get back. I'll still believe you.”
Kenny pulled away and stared at him. “You're fucking insane, you know that?”
Butters tipped his head to the side, his nose brushing against Kenny's as he did so. “Can I ask you a question?”
Kenny laughed and shook his head. “Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”
“Would you love me any less if I got hit by a truck today and lived, but got amnesia and forgot who you were?”
“That's different.”
“But would ya?”
Kenny sighed. “Come on, Butters, of course I wouldn't love you any le-” he snapped his mouth shut.“I never told you.”
Butters shrugged. “You didn't have to tell me. You showed me plenty of times. Like just now. That was the only thing that kept me from knowin' for sure, this whole time.”
“This whole time like the whole week I was dead?”
Butters laughed, at least Kenny thought that's what it was, that ragged sound on the verge of hysteria. “Longer than that.”
Kenny couldn't help but laugh too. “So are we...?”
Butters responded by curling his fingers in the uneven strands at the back of Kenny's head and kissing him.
That was all Kenny needed. He slammed his hands against the wall, pinning Butters in place, and moved his mouth from Butters lips to his jawline. He loved the little sounds Butters made – sucking in his breath, attempting to say his name but getting no further than a stuttered “K-k-k”, and a long low moan when Kenny's tongue teased the inside of his ear. He could feel Butters' hands moving between them, struggling with his buttons because only Butters would wear a dress shirt to school. Kenny relented enough to take a step back, but only so he could watch the shirt slide down over Butters' arms and drop to the floor.
Butters got ripped on a lot for sucking at sports and being a big pussy in general, but it had nothing to do with his physique. He wasn't buff like Stan but he had a lot of lean muscle – likely a side benefit to being Cartman's sidekick and doing all the heavy lifting. There was a faint dusting of pale hair on his chest that was only visible up close, and scattered over his torso were various scars of different shapes and sizes. There was the small one near his hip, where Stan, Kyle, and Cartman had given him liposuction, and the one that curved around the side was probably from a belt. Kenny took great pains to avoid looking at the one that ran from his left eyebrow to just above the cheekbone as he leaned forward to place soft kisses along Butters' collarbone where the skin was still puckered from a fairly recent injury. Kenny would have to ask him about that later. He grinned as Butters started to claw at Kenny's threadbare T-shirt in a desperate attempt to remove the offending garment.
The shirt ended up flung somewhere in the room, and his jeans were unfastened and barely hanging on his hips when they stumbled toward the bed, climbing all over each other and struggling to shed the rest of their clothes. A short panicked search under the mattress yielded a foil packet and half empty tube, and then Kenny was deep inside Butters. It was way fucking better than smoking a cigarette. Butters came first, but Kenny didn't last much longer. He pulled out and started to roll to his side but stopped to nuzzle Butters' armpit, making the other teen laugh.
It was going to suck when Butters forgot what happened, but Kenny was glad he'd told him. The other guys had called him crazy, but Butters accepted it simply because Kenny wouldn't lie to him.
He reached over to grab Butters hand, threaded their fingers together, and squeezed.
Butters squeezed back. He lay there, stroking his thumb over Kenny's long after his boyfriend's breathing evened out. It had just about torn him up inside, listening to Kenny tell him about his curse. He felt like a bit of a hypocrite, asking Kenny, but he had a secret of his own. He just didn't want to get Kenny's hopes up, not yet. Not until he was sure he'd still remember, which wouldn't be until after Kenny died again, and Butters was hoping that they'd have a least a little while before it happened again.
Butters wasn't stupid. He did forget lots of things, although he was never quite sure which things he'd actually forgotten and which were only things everyone told him he'd forgotten. He knew he was naive, because he didn't know how to be any other way, but he trusted Kenny. The thing was, he also trusted Eric Cartman more than any sane person would, because Eric was smart and knew things. Butters had learned all kinds of stuff from Eric (sometimes the hard way), and they had been locked up together in the holding cell of the Coon's lair an awful long time together. Butters had been tired and hungry and delirious by the third day, and he was pretty sure he'd dressed up like Courtney Love but couldn’t remember why. He was also pretty sure he'd hallucinated a lot, things like Bradley Biggle swimming in a wading pool full of milk and Mosquito crying and Mysterion putting a bullet through his own head and Tool Shed being a dick about it, but Butters had a lot more practice at going for long periods without food than Eric, who talked in his sleep and spilled secrets about all of his friends, secrets that Professor Chaos had kept to himself all these years. Because even though he forgot a lot of things, sometimes he remembered.
“I cried,” he whispered in the dark. “Last week. I cried a lot. And I'll cry again next time, even if you are comin' back, because I love you, too. But you already know that part.” He paused, licking his lips and listening for any sign that Kenny might actually be awake.
“Maybe it's like that movie, the one about the blue alien with the big head.” Butters yawned, surprising himself with the force of it. “He was never any good at being a villain, because he was supposed to be a good guy all along. And-and I know Mysterion works alone, but he didn't always. I think he could really use some help with that Necromonica thing. Because if there's one thing that every story about a curse that was ever told has in common, it's that there's always a way to break it.” He was mumbling incoherently by this time, and he yawned again. “And I swear, Kenny, I'm going to help ya whether ya like it...”
When Kenny woke the next morning, it was to find Butters' arm pinning him to the bed and his morning wood pressing against his thigh. Kenny turned his head to see that Butters' hair was sticking out in every direction, making it look like he had a nest of baby chicks on his head.
He sat up and flexed his fingers, patted himself on the chest, and felt around his head, checking for gaping wounds, signs of blood, or worse, rats.
He was alive. He'd told Butters, and he was still alive. The day was still young, so that could change, but he'd already made it all the way to morning which was more than he'd expected last night. He went to the bathroom, not bothering to turn on the light in case there was an electrical short in the house, and when he returned to his room, he paused in the doorway to stare at the sleeping form in his bed. He pinched himself in the arm as hard as he could to make sure he wasn't dreaming.
“Fuck, ow,” he swore.
“Kenny?” Butters mumbled. He sounded like he was still sleeping. “Come back to bed.”
Kenny looked out the window. It was slightly overcast out. It was probably going to rain, which always brought with it the chance of lightning. He thought he might have promised Stan and Kyle he'd go see a movie with them today, but that had been before he died and he never knew what the fuck they remembered when he came back.
Butters rolled over, onto his back, and promptly fell off the mattress. The thud of his body hitting the floor was followed by loud snoring.
No contest. Stan and Kyle could go fuck themselves.
Kenny grabbed the blanket off the bed and joined his boyfriend on the floor, throwing an arm around Butters and pulling him close. He might not be as good at this hugging thing as Butters, yet, but he had plenty of lifetimes to catch up.