Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Stan drags the wagon, steering it urgently.

It’s Cartman’s wagon. He’s already bitching about them using it, about all the blood ruining it. Kenny’s blood, of course. It’s not like it’s going to stain, Kenny thinks half deliriously and that’s almost funny. The wagon’s red like blood, convenient, and blood washes off metal anyway, he knows. He smiles and rolls his eyes and it’s probably incongruent with the severity of the situation they’re in.

“Fuck, it’s getting EVERYWHERE!” Eric is still bitching, but he’ll get over it.

He hasn’t told them to slow down yet, still jogging alongside the cart. They’re running, on their way to the hospital. They’re on the wrong side of town though. They’re not gonna make it in time. Ken can feel it. He pats Eric’s arm through his thick puffy coat, to show his appreciation. It’s red like the blood too, so his bloody handprint probably won’t show.

Somewhere there’s a siren wailing, some emergency vehicle occupied elsewhere, not coming for him. Kenny’s okay with that. He doesn’t like hospitals. Or ambulances. He’s wary of fire trucks, and police with their guns. First responders can never save him, usually making it worse, his friends included. But they’re trying.

Beneath Kenny’s shivering, jostling, emptying body, Cartman’s wagon is painted fire truck red. Like the red blood drip-drip-dripping down the sides and back, sloshing, oozing, raining blood spray along the sidewalk as they go. They paint a red trail everywhere the wheels roll. In the wagon, the blood is pooling warmly. It’s Kenny’s blood. Who else? He’s cold, and thinking in circles. Bad signs. That’d be the shock, right.

He tries to stay in his body for a little longer. Hold out, for hopeless hope. Everybody’s trying so hard today. And maybe he’s not ready to go yet. He tries to keep his head, recollect himself, catalogue all his pieces.

Kenny tries to wiggle his toes, looks down, and remembers that his legs are gone, severed just above his knees, and laughs at the strange stumps. The blood loss is making him floaty now.

He looks back the way they came, eyes tracking lethargically along the blood trail they left behind them, the sidewalk like a treasure map dotted red, following it until it disappears around the curve of the corner at the end of the block, back towards the construction site behind their houses they shouldn’t have played at today, where the ‘X’ marks the spot, where they left his legs pinned under the rubble of scaffolding. It was between there or the currently condemned playground. 50/50 gamble, odds stacked against him anyway. Oh well.

Kenny blinks, slowly, vision blurring. Ready to go now? No. Not yet.

Suddenly Kyle’s yelling at him, pleading. “Just hang on, Kenny! We’re almost there!” His friend’s shaky voice rings in his ears. They’re not almost there. He’s lying. Scared.

“Okay.” Kenny placates softly, dying.

“Y-yeah! Keep him talking, Kyle.” Stan is panting ahead of him, pulling.

Kyle is helping to push the cart now. “Ken? Kenny?”

Eric has finally stopped bitching, mostly, cussing under his breath somewhere nearby. “Shit. Fuck. Oh-my-god-you-guys…”

Kenny knows they’re not going to make it. Or, he’s not. He closes his unfocused eyes, the bumps on the sidewalk rock the cart, and it doesn’t hurt anymore.

This all started as a silly kid game. But then again, most of their silly kid games devolve into chaos and cartoonish ultra-violence.

And while Eric likes to look, Stan and Kyle never like this part.

It seems like every other day Kenny’s bleeding out on some sidewalk, in the road, on the train tracks. His friends are usually there as the light fades and he falls up into a blue sky or slips quietly down into darkness.

Sometimes the squeaking is the last sound he hears. Or his friends fighting. Today it’s the cart’s wheels.

When it’s squeaking, rats fighting over his spilled intestines, still steaming and wriggling, alive and prone outside his body, a fresh free meal. All it cost is one worthless recycled life. Kenny, a rat king on his caving chest, bleeding out and feeding it, feeling a bit like Pestilence and his hoard.

When his friends are yelling over each other, something like…

Eric, poking him with a stick. “C’mon, do something. Quit faking.”

“Aw, dude, sick!” Kyle flinching, lamenting, cussing Eric out, begging or threatening him to ‘cut it out, freak!’

Stan running towards the nearest bush. “I’m gonna puke! I’m gonna puke!”

Usually. Something like that. Kenny, the butt of their joke.

Today was a little crueler. The accident didn’t kill him right away. Prolonging this ordeal for everyone. Hapless townie witnesses part the sidewalk for them, mostly apathetic adults, the mommies taking their toddlers shoe shopping and the drunk daddies wandering from the day bar to the adult movie store and back, gaping as they hurry passed. They’ll all forget this horrible thing they’ve witnessed for the next horrible thing in a week, tops.

By then the evidence will have faded. The boys currently swearing and crying and covered in their friend’s blood will be back in class, learning long division or something. And Kenny will be there with them. Back from a little death. In a new body, a new life. No big deal. Until next time.

Kenny bleeds out seven blocks from the hospital. It was nice that they tried.

The next day or the day after, before all the blood tracks wash away with the next snow, their friend/classmate/punching bag Butters Stotch is making chalk drawings alone on the cracked and weedy sidewalk in front of his house. He draws looping pink and blue butterflies bleeding together to make a blurry purple; a lopsided Hello Kitty face with the white chalk and the yellow; a chain of rainbow people holding hands. Bored and lonely and not grounded yet, wondering if Dougie’s home.

The orange outstretched arm of his next chalk person in the rainbow people chain intersects with something stained onto the cement. A thick, dark coppery line. He runs a finger along it. It feels tacky. Some of it’s already faded with the gritty grain of the sidewalk. It looks like somebody spilled or painted something recently. Butters looks up, his eyes following the line on down the sidewalk, tracking its messy path starting here where whoever or whatever it was turned onto the sidewalk from the grass which is where the line starts/disappears, the blood all drunk up by the dirt. Down the block he can’t see where it ends.

“S-somebody made a-a-a mess…” The Stotch boy mutters to himself, thinking. He talks to himself often because he is alone often. “We-well, golly. I oughta make this look nice.” Especially so close to his parents’ house. Feeling helpful and creative and swallowing his ignored dread, he draws around it, beautifying a scar on the landscape, incorporating what he doesn’t know is his good friend Kenny’s dried blood bath into art. He draws more rainbow people over and around the spilled red splotches and lines. He depicts red brick walls and red brick houses with red brick chimneys, rainbow smoke corkscrewing out of them. He draws a chalk rainbow and uses the brighter streaks and smears for the red. “P-retty.” He draws a super hero who is also a puppy from space and turns the dark red line into its cape. “Tha-that’s better.”

Humming to himself on the sidewalk, Butters’ chalk drawings and all that blood will eventually fade. But in the meantime… Creating something nice out of nothing good, with the chalk and with his pure child mind, imagination.

Imagination is a powerful thing, too.

One time, Leopold Stotch was God. At least he thought he was, for a minute. He still thinks so, maybe. Maybe he still is. Maybe that’s blasphemous to think so. But he remembers, at least, he thinks he does. It might have just been a game that got carried away, or a weird dream. That’s what he tells himself. He doesn’t quite remember.

‘First there was nothing, then there was Butters…’

The maybe-memory lives in his head in technicolor like a really vivid daydream or waking nightmare. It was probably just a “lucid dream.” A “night terror.” An “overactive imagination.” Leo learned about these in therapy.

Pretend gone wrong. Like it often does. Doesn’t it? Should it do that?

One time he was maybe the most powerful thing in the universe. And the only thing. The last and first thing. Maybe. If you believe in that sort of stuff. In church, they don’t prepare you for real miracles.

One time he created everything from nothing. ‘Imagination Land’ they called it. It was a weird game the boys made up of a make-believe place. That’s how it started. They rode on a hot air balloon to get there and Leo got trapped. Like The Wizard of Oz. Maybe Eric Cartman just pulled an elaborate trick on him, because he does that sometimes. Or maybe, Butters likes to think, so secretly, so close to his heart, it was really real. And he was powerful. And alone in the universe, for a split second. For just a blink. Then he opened his eyes again, and it was over, and everything was all back, like it never happened.

Sometimes he revisits it, that secret place, in dreams. Just in flickers. He can’t actually go back there, can he? That place where he touched God or he was God or there was no God at all maybe, because he had to reimagine Him— reimagine God in his image, now that’s blasphemous for sure. Back when he saved every person, place, and thing ever conceivable with just a little imagination.

And Butters can’t talk about it to anyone ever again, because they’d probably laugh meanly, tease him a whole lot, and call him strange. Well. Because he is strange.

Who isn’t? Who doesn’t have big and little secrets? Strange secrets?

Something else that was strange, way back then, whenever it was, days or months or years ago (time is another strange, fuzzy thing). After he reimagined the whole entire world one time, Leo swears that he remembered something. Or he finally noticed. Finally woke up. For just a minute, when he was the last and only real thing.

The only problem is he’s forgotten it again. He couldn’t keep it, like he couldn’t keep that place. Slipped right through his fingers again like melted cotton candy, like too much beach sand, like smoke. The truth.

It only exists in ideas, in that liminal space between sleeping thought and waking dreams, in the small space of a blink. Turns out, the truth is only real when nobody in the world is looking right at it. The truth is hard to look right at. Like the sun, or too many birthday candles.

His grandma had too many birthday candles at her last birthday party, like fifty, so many lit candles on the cake it almost started a fire! But his grandma is mean, so he doesn’t like to think about her…

Leo likes to think about the truth that he’s forgotten, too bright like the sun, sometimes. When the world is quiet. Like picking at a mostly healed scab.

The truth is, when he was the most powerful thing in the whole universe, he’d had to remember every other conceivable thing in the entire history of the universe. Like a conduit, the sole creator, reimaginer. He hopes he got all the details right (he did).

The truth is there’s nothing… until there’s something. There’s nobody, just crushing alone-ness. There is no God, except what we invent. For that split second, he, Leopold Stotch, was it. The depths of an unfathomable universe existed in the mind of one nine year old boy, trapped in his own imagination. And he’d just turned nine (for the eighth time) that September. Leo remembered time as it is in that moment, before he forgot it again. Too many birthdays.

Another paradox.

And another secret of the universe, a big one: with a suddenly limitless mind, he saw Kenny. He remembered Kenny, for a minute.

His friend hadn’t really made sense, light pouring out of his little body, streaking off in all directions, orange parka fractals and blond hair on fire and a face that changed like a fun house mirror when Leo thought about it too long, this four dimensional chaos being squeezed into fixed time. Not that Leo knew why, except that for a split second he sort of did. The whole big ol’ world depended on his creative, stretchable, elastic mind to know but not know. It doesn’t make sense to try and explain it now. Sort of a ‘you had to be there’ thing, maybe.

Remaking everything else wasn’t too complicated really, once Leo focused and concentrated and tried really hard. God was surprisingly kind of easy to conjure, since he learns a lot about Him in church every Sunday. His parents and his other friends and the school and all of his favorite books and movies came back to him just how he remembered them. Some stuff, lots of other stuff actually, he sorta got the feeling he hadn’t ever thought about or even known about before, but still he imagined his little heart out, and it all came rushing back to him. He tried his best anyway, and everything worked out, after all. He hopes.

And it was all just a game probably anyway. Yeah. He’s okay with believing that, mostly. Most of the time. Except when the world gets too quiet.

He wrote it all down afterwards, what he can remember anyway, in his Hello Kitty Adventures Diary, ‘property of Leo.’ A lot of it was a jumbled mess, like most dream journals are. Something else he’s supposed to do for therapy but he forgets, like his mom and dad forget to take him. Anyway, he tries to start keeping track of weird things after all that. There are a lot of weird things, or he just has a very active imagination, like Dr. Cummings, his psychiatrist, says. He filled up the diary quick, and started a new dream journal. He calls this one his ‘Imagination Journal’.

Some notable recent entries:

We played ninjas and I got really hurt. My friends took me to the vet to fix me up but that didn’t work. The doctors at the hospital almost couldn’t save my eye. I needed twenty stitches! Now I gotta wear this big old bandaid over my eye until it heals. I hope it does.
Kenny didn’t mean to hurt me. He promised to gimme his spare eyes, whatever that means.

The bandages came off today. My mom said now I look like David Bowie. 
A-N-I-S-O-C-O-R-I-A. My dad grounded me for that, too. 

I did it again. I’m bad. I hurt people. There was so much blood. I’m not allowed to dance again.
I’m bad I’m bad I’m bad I’m bad I’m bad I’m bad I’m bad I’m bad 

I guess all my friends are mad at me :( I sure wish they’d tell me what I did this time. Nobody at lunch wanted to sit with me. I wish Dougie was in my grade. I wish Pip was not dead. Kenny wasn’t at school again. 

I have a new robot best friend!
AWESOM-O wasn’t real. Just a trick. I hate Eric!

My parents sold me to a celebrity. Paris gave me back though. I was not a good doggie. 

Should Professor Chaos change all the STOP signs in town to GO signs…?
Ran out of green paint. Shucks. We’ll get em next time. Muhahahahaha!!! >:D

Kenny’s in the hospital. He had an accident. We don’t know if he’s gonna make it. I drew a picture of us riding ponies. His little sister liked it.

Kenny died. He got better. 

I think I like the name Marjorine WAY better than Butters <3  I wish my friends would call me that. I wish my parents would let me out of the basement soon. 

A whale talked to me at the aquarium! He told me he’s from the moon and he’s gotta get back there! Fake. 

We tricked Miss Brittney Speares into killing herself. I’m sorry. 

Scientists thought I was a giant squirrel! Fed me acorns until I threw up.
Dang it, why do people keep thinkin I’m aminals? animals? 

My friend Kenny died. I went to his funeral. His mom was sad. Everyone was sad. I’m sad too :( Kenny waved at me in the hall today. I don’t remember writing this. 

I guess I’m ‘bike-curious’… whatever that means. I think it means I love and accept myself :)

Got voted 11th cutest boy in 4th grade at school. Not last! That’s pretty neat. 

Kenny died again. No, that can’t be right because he was at school today. 

Ms.Mr. Garrison wants to be a boy again and I guess that’s okay. She’s He’s still our teacher. I like when he reads to us. 

Why do I keep dreaming Kenny died? Over and over and over and over

I have a secret… 
I snuck into Super Phun Thyme with Eric on the pioneer village field trip. I didn‘t wanna! I was just protecting my buddy. Nobody knows. Not even the police. I don’t wanna get grounded! Oh I don’t like keeping secrets. 

I thought for sure I was a vampire! At first it was fun, but then it got scary. It was nice to be ungroundable.
I wonder what it’s like to be immortal? Forever sure is a long time. 

His first entries:

I saw everything.

This isn’t real. Time isn’t real. Nothing is real. Am I real?

I prayed to forget.

I prayed to remember it.

Just another bad dream? My gosh darn imagination acting up again… 

I feel like I know something I’m not supposed to.

There was a brief moment, back in third grade, where Kyle knew everything. Saw everything. Was everything.

It was the end of third grade when Kyle’s parents finally told him the truths that parents always lie about. There is no tooth fairy, the Loch Ness monster is probably just some big wooden log (unless you ask Chef’s folks), all organized religion is only as real as you make it. He’s seen things all his life that would dispute much of this speculation, but at the time it really freaked him out.

His world was rocked. If parents lie and pretend about all that stuff, shaping their child’s whole universe, what other ‘universal truths’ are a let down, a farce, a total construct?

He got really existential after that. Too into it, for a while.

They were doing another scheme, something in the teeth racket, trying to make Sega Dreamcast money. In the end Kyle hadn’t cared about all that, deep in his self-imposed existential crisis by then.

He checked out science and philosophy books from the library, stuff about black holes and consciousness and string theory, humanism and cynicism and nihilism.

The idea that really started to make Kyle’s head explode was solipsism. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” So, the only thing Kyle could be absolutely sure of was his own existence… Right? But what if that wasn’t even enough? What if he was just a fleeting thought in somebody else’s head? Some random side character in a Terrence & Phillip skit? Or just a little 2D video game sprite being controlled by some other real kid playing on their Sega Dreamcast? What if he was a tiny, insignificant, speck? And if that’s all anybody is.

And what if that’s okay? Masters of our own universes, even if we’re all just tiny, insignificant snow globe specks floating around inside a chain of infinitely smaller or bigger snow globes, alongside other specks of varying sizes. Somebody’s gotta hold the snow globe outside of the snow globe outside of the snow globe—

He’d felt it coming on, like a wave. Like a headache. Like a blood sugar crash. Full consciousness.

And if everything is nothing, then nothing is everything.

Briefly, he was everything. Which was good, got them out of a tooth-related jam. In a pinch, a cool but terrifying party trick Kyle’s never been able to repeat. Kind of a relief.

But before he was quite ready to be everything, when the walls of his apparently constructed reality were thinning all around him in his spiral for the truth, or a truth, any truth, Kyle was already hallucinating. Because that’s what it all really was, right? Just a momentary break from reality, a trip, being everything. Aka, a little nervous breakdown. His mom always says a bit of the nerves run in their family, and in this superstitious town, and throughout the nation, the world full of excitable people in general. So, paranoid kids out the breaking rules, manic from getting away with it, plus a little too much dentist laughing gas in the air. Perfectly explainable mass hysteria.

Except the timing’s not quite right, for what he saw. Before he saw/knew/was everything.

He saw Kenny. He looked right at him. Through him. He saw… everything.

Not that Kyle remembers it now. All the details fade or mash together, obscuring and hiding themselves in the shimmery mirage past that keeps repeating. Impossible months and days and minutes and seconds and years that all keep growing longer and further away, that also stay the same.

Logic will fail him now. Kyle doesn’t look too closely at plain old terrifying existence after last time, on principle. It had been impossible, he had done and been an impossible, many-sided thing, everywhere all at once, and that not-so-secretly scared him. Again, not to discount the other thing that had scared him.

Kyle remembers it was blindingly bright and hot, and scary. That’s all, not exactly when or where or what who.

What Kyle saw that he doesn’t remember… Kenny echoed like an optical illusion, stretching and folding sort of like the lava lamp in Stan’s room, and it made Kyle’s head hurt to look at and his stomach drop horribly and his guts twist up, all goosebumps and sweat and vertigo. Reality folding wrongly in the shape of his friend, in the hole he punctured, the distorted and decaying space it occupied. It made Kyle’s eyes water.

Then he’d told Kenny, his voice escaping in a haunted whisper, “Dude. I… see you…”

Then Kyle rapidly blinked the inverted afterimage burned into his retinas away, snapping out of it. Then Kenny was just Kenny, waving at him, concerned. Just Kenny.

What a trip.

What Kenny remembers is them trying to score some quick money in an absurd way at Cartman’s urging, finding out the tooth fairy is probably not real from Kevin when he’d asked, Kyle not taking that news well at all and getting really paranoid and in his own head about things and acting increasingly strange, meanwhile Stan yes-manning Cartman the whole time (which rarely works out), then Ken being kidnapped by the tooth mafia (surprise, surprise) and cinder-blocked for ransom and drowning in embarrassingly shallow water.

Just a typical week in third grade. By the time he’d come back from the dead that time they’d been onto sled racing in the last snow before spring that year. That year was so long ago now.

They’re growing up. Sort of nonlinearly. Sort of not at all. Or very, very slowly, against all odds.

Stan’s the first of their friends to turn ten. The last one, too.

Nobody’s noticed that yet.

Kenny doesn’t want to stay like this forever like they might, but he also doesn’t envy being next either, because Stan had a rough go of it. Getting older. Change, even minutely, when you’re stuck in a time trap, is hard.

Kenny wonders if growing up doesn’t just change your body, but also your soul. Maybe getting to the double-digit birthday milestone first makes Stan more vulnerable now. Because he is. Vulnerable. Sensitive. Always has been. More perceptive to subconscious feelings than he knows, really. If Cartman’s the scheming hands of their operation, and Kyle’s the brains, then Stan is the heart.

(Does that make Kenny the teeth, because he still has that same last baby tooth, and he’s always hungry, or the growling stomach or the silent mouth? He would be the wings, but he gave those up a long time ago… Could Butters be their fragile skin? Better yet, their eyes? Will they reject him like a rejecting organ? Kenny’s had a few of those. He hopes not.)

But back to Stan, who’s “sensitive”. Maybe too sensitive to the grating universe, looking for a righteous cause when he stops to think too long, when he gets into his own head, when his bleeding heart hurts too badly to ignore for one more second, maybe, and the universe screams back at Kenny’s friend Stan, who can’t keep its secrets either. But he still seeks them.

These shitty situations have a way of reeling them in. Stan, their reluctant leader (when Cartman can’t think of something stupid and dangerous to lead them to first).

Cynic realist. Vegan-ish pacifist. Pessimistic misanthrope. Debbie-downer. Always a new cause or something to complain about, someone to save or fail to save.

His parents were fighting again (and again and again and again). He’s growing up too fast, getting older. His sister’s always hit too hard. Wendy mad at him, Wendy breaking up with him, Wendy going steady with another boy, on and off.

Stan always bounces back though, like kids do. He still has a girlfriend, usually. He is fairly popular, out of their friends. He’s “sporty.” “Normal” enough.

Life made him snap once though, for a little while. Something about birthday parties always makes him sad now, and happy at the same time. That was new. Getting old. They still celebrate the same birthdays, and Stan’s birthday is always first.

But at that first tenth birthday, Stan wished he could have enjoyed his presents longer, wished he could have listened to that Gersploosh CD Kyle gave him and been honest over the phone when instead he’d lied, “I liked it.”

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like anything. He tried to fake it, but he couldn’t. He’s too honest, or he was, or he’d like to be. So, he snapped. Changed, for the worse. Around the bend. For a while.

The world is bleak, and he’d noticed. Stopped fighting it. Hated it, but gave up, gave in. Lost hope. Surrendered. Everything was shit, so what was the point? That’s how bad it got again, that time, the weight of Stan’s too heavy heart.

Whether it was the parents’ second-separation-turned-divorce, or Autism or Aspergers, or hereditary major depressive disorder, or a hereditary addictive personality... Yeah, mark D for ‘all of the above’ maybe.

He turned ten and started to see the world as it was, or worse, as an impossibly world worn cynic wants to see it. Stan was just suddenly so tired. He’d just been nine for eleven years after all. And being ten was strange, is strange, may always be strange and straining, too. Not that he knows that. Not that he cares.

Stan cares less about things now, turned more insular, more selfish maybe, to survive. And he’s already worried now that one day he’ll turn into his dad, who cares about nothing for real. Who starts up then abandons new passion projects, and falls in and out of love with his mom every other week basically— who’s an asshole. When he looks in the mirror someday, Stan prays at church, that he won’t see his old man staring back. But he probably will.

He’s doing better again. Less dark, stressed out, bothered by every little death cult or alien invasion on the news or animal in need— all the just causes and side quests and annoying situations. His mom’s made him take up knitting, a better habit to occupy his mind than the constant worries and troubles or the other magic, bad thing for coping (starts with b, rhymes with lose).

So he’s more selfish now, more insular, more tired, more afraid. Stan makes sweaters for his ancient grandpa in the nursing home whose body still stubbornly refuses to die, and it sort of helps him cope. He hopes he never gets that old: scary, mean, forgetful, sloppy, embarrassingly old.

Stan knows he already gets like that, when he’s not himself. Tired, irritable, messy. Inebriated, he had to sound it out, the first time he heard that word. Of course it had been his mom saying it, calling his dad it. Inebriated. Drunk.

But that warm burning magic liquid helped him forget that the world is shit. It helped him be better, be numb, let everything go. It also helped him remember…

He’d been really going through a hard time, when Kenny found him like that. Better, but not better. Faking it.

Stan, stealing sips of something sharp and tart-sweet from his parents’ liquor cabinet that tasted rotten, giggling and sleepy-buzzed. Drunk like his dad. Drunk and stupid and likable again. He couldn’t quite tolerate things sober then. They hadn’t found the right medication yet. Stan could almost be normal, like this. He hoped.

Kenny could smell it on his breath immediately, when he entered Stan’s room and Stan stumbled up from his bed to give him a hug. He stunk, like Kenny’s old man’s mouth always does.

Kenny didn’t want this for Stan, who only really gets one chance instead of many. Kenny hoped he didn’t get mean like Stuart, or weepy and confused like his mom. But Kenny stayed.

Kenny was supposed to be staying over for a sleepover that weekend while his own house got fumigated. He’d wanted to be playing Stan’s video games or calling up Kyle and/or Cartman on the phone or listening to all the fad ‘tween wave’ cds that Stan probably hates now anyway. But this was something else. Interesting. Different. Almost scary-cool. Ken had rather been here than back at his house with the roach infestation and the air born poisons anyway.

“Oops, you caught me.” Stan said. “Shhhh.”

Ken had not expected this, one of his best friends with a hushing finger to his lips sneakily showing him the air pocket divot his sock drawer where he’d stashed his swiped liquor bottle score, giggling all blearily and proud, its remaining sloshing amber-brown contents already steadily more than halfway drunk from measured stolen sips going back who knows how long. Maybe since Stan stopped being such a bummer and a loner and a loser again after his tenth birthday and his parents got back together, so they’d all decided to be friends again. He had been doing better, or it had seemed like he was better, less sad and less angry. Was this how he did it?

It was around then that Kenny took a sip, too. He has things he’s sad and angry about. He knew this probably wouldn’t help. Still, Stan smiled while he gagged and coughed behind his parka. The stuff was strong, he thought, stronger than the cheap beer Kenny’s parents buy. He’d seen Kevin steal a beer. He’d seen Kevin get his shit rocked for stealing one, too.

Judging from the way his friend’s smaller hands than Kevin’s poured another little sip into a plastic Transformers Megatron collectors cup, Stan had gotten away with this before that day for sure. Which was scary and sad and darkly thrilling in the kind of way that made Kenny’s empty stomach do flips. He humored it, for now. They shared the Megatron cup, being bad in Stan’s room (and boy, would Kyle be more worried or jealous?), as the world grew blurry warm swimmy fuzzy.

And that’s how it happened. Stan takes one big sip, and he stops caring so much, stops asking questions, perks up. Stan takes any more sips than that and he starts floating, then eventually starts asking questions again. The deeper kind, with no inhibitions. And the universe is listening.

Once, that weekend, Stan got close to it… A falling star, all the missing pages, the truth of their predicament. Why he’s been ten years old alone for too long now when nobody else is, aside from the obvious fact that he was born first. Eventually somebody else will catch up. Why is it taking so long? False years will creep by first. Little deaths, setting them all back. Mysteries of the universe.

“I-I’m—” Stan had hiccupped. “I’m real glad that we’re friends again, dude.” Stan was telling him honestly, sappy, all those little sips catching up now.

“Me too.” Kenny leaned back to look at him, slow to combat the double vision, bemused and a little sad. They were sitting on the floor between the desk and the window, hiding the bottle between them, both leaned up against Stan’s bed. “I’m sorry.”

He felt real bad about ditching Stan when he needed them— even if that’s what the guys had agreed upon, even made a pact with spit-handshakes and everything, that Stan was lame and bringing everybody down. But they’re all friends again now, and were by then. Kenny was secretly debating telling Kyle about this new mess, or keeping it their little secret when Stan stumbled to his next thought.

“Ken, we been fr-friends for… forever. Wow! For…ever.” Stan’s head slid sideways lazily to look at Kenny, dumbstruck. “When… when did we even meet anyway? I- I can’t actually remember when we be-became friends, dude!” Stan laughed and there was a strangeness to it. Like his subconscious was nervous, like some part of him knew then, even though the rest of him has not caught up yet, may never catch up. He’d looked at Kenny with half-lidded slow blinking eyes, stupid-drunk smirking at his friend, his accomplice. Too tipsy to realize his questions might have been onto something.

“We met in kindergarten.” Kenny told him carefully.

He’d only had one brown sip out of the Transformers cup. Then he has another, for courage like in the movies.

Stan nodded back slowly. “Right, uh huh. I remember meeting Kyle, and Cartman, on our first day… And it’s weird, like, I don’t know, I guess it’s like one day you were just…” Stan shrugged slow and clumsy, and laughed, drawing a blank. “Just there. Huh.”

Kenny had repeated the only words his slow brain could conjure, the easier truth he knows. “We’ve been friends since kindergarten.”

And how long had they been in kindergarten? A couple years? Maybe longer… He can’t quite remember back that far, or earlier. Kenny knows he was born in 1989, at least that’s what his parents told him once. But then again, they were apparently pretty messed up back then. (He knows that from Kevin, who doesn’t like to talk about it.) The years of that decade might have blurred together for them. He’s never seen his birth certificate.

Then Stan shook his head, smiling at Kenny before remembering to feel bad. “Sorry man! It just feels like that I guess ‘cause we’ve been fr-friends for forever.” Stan hiccupped. “Aaaand, probably because I’m drinkin’ this!” He shook up the bottle, its contents swishing and swirling. “I’m sure it’ll come back to me.”

Kenny knew and always knows it won’t. He smiled at Stan anyway. Then he did something kind.

Kenny took the bottle and downed the rest of it in one long swig. He hates drinking it, hated the way the stuff burns going down, but if he was drinking it then Stan isn’t. And Stan shouldn’t. At least the buzz that came after made Ken feel a little lighter still, dizzy in the good way, a weight shifting off his shoulders for just a little while. He pushed down the way it made him think of his parents again, his mother’s boozy cheek kisses, his father’s sour liquor-stench morning breath.

“Hey! Kenny! Noo!” Now Stan was gonna have to smuggle another bottle when no one was looking, but currently slumped against the bed, he was really too messed up to bring himself to care much. “Aw, man.”

Kenny spun the empty bottle on the carpet and Stan’s lazy, heavy eyes watched it spin and spin and spin and—

Stan stumbled over to his trash can, face going green. “I’m gonna hurl!”

Then Mrs. Marsh heard the loud hurling coming from her son’s upstairs bedroom, and promptly caught them with the evidence, her missing cooking wine. Then the whole dulled world was suddenly loud, with lots of mom-yelling.

Kenny took the blame. Although there were no consequences for him, as he was probably forgotten again anyway. Or maybe Sharon was embarrassed. They kept the liquor cabinet locked after that. Kenny still had to leave.

So Stan went to some sort of ‘kiddie rehab’ after school for a week or completed an online D.A.R.E. course for ‘substance abuse and peer pressure’ or something like that; he was too embarrassed to tell his friends about the nature and details of his grounding. This is when Sharon started encouraging/forcing the new knitting hobby.

And Kenny had crashed at Kyle’s house for the weekend instead. Kyle’s parents let him in, mildly inconvenienced, after some begging and guilt tripping of course. They went to the planetarium and counted all the planets in the solar system for Ike and Kenny was a much better friend for Kyle that weekend than for Stan.

Kenny never told Kyle about the booze though. He might’ve told him, maybe, but he’s pretty sure he suffered a fatal Mars-diorama-related accident, waking up in his own bed again, post-fumigation, before he got the chance to decide to spill. And Kyle might’ve just forgotten that he told him anyway, since Kenny is forgettable. Just slips out of existence quietly maybe when nobody is looking, with little resistance.

It takes a lot to pay attention. To take notice. To remember something impossible, and better yet, to do something about it. Most of Stan’s attempts to save the world fail anyway.

Stan got sort of better after that, slowly. Turns out therapy helps. Turns out mindfulness and positive pass times aren’t so bullshit and actually do wonders over stupid-numbing-brainfuzz booze for mopers and overthinkers. Turns out he should listen to his mother more, in spite of his father.

Only maybe it never really went away… The feeling that everything is chaotic and ugly and out of control. Maybe Stan still hides a bottle of strong something or other, squirreled away in a nightstand or desk drawer, to tuck into on hard days. Only Kenny would know about it or remember or wonder. Not even Stan’s real best friend. But Kenny keeps his secrets. It’s a thing he’s good for.

And another thing he’s good for. Being dead.

At least, according to Eric, it’s a blessing. Ken’s secret talent. Like a magic trick to exploit. Counting cards or sleight of hand on the sidewalk, to pull one over on/pick-pocket the universe. And their universe is pretty small, mostly, since they are nine and a half-ish (times infinity so far, so maybe actually it’s unfathomably limitless).

Cartman loves Kenny’s death gimmick for the perks, mostly. Kenny just likes to be noticed.

Unlike all their helplessly aloof friends, Eric sees him all the time. For better or for worse, Eric sees the silver lining in death. Eric’s not psychic, but it’s pretty close.

See, Ken and Eric’s connection goes way back. Further than possession. Further than Cartman seeing Kenny’s ghost every other time he’s died, haunted since all the way back in third grade, even.

Eric remembers Kenny. Always. Hard to forget or look away when Kenny’s little infinite lives glitch keeps stubbornly butting in on Eric’s life, reminding him that HE isn’t magic, HE doesn’t have cool super powers, HE isn’t so special.

Kenny’s always been special. Conceived as an unholy affront to nature, destined to save or destroy, still barreling towards some distant and beautiful disaster, Kenny will always be special. Eric’s just a clinger-on. An afterthought. Usurper.

It started with the cornea graft. That connected them. Eric would have just as hard a time recalling kindergarten as Stan or Kyle, but everything after getting Kenny’s eye he’s seen crystal clear. All eleven years. That could drive anyone a little insane, let alone a spoiled rotten brat with a prior conduct disorder. It’s a nightmare recipe and probably a ticking bomb, to give a kid like that unlimited time to scheme and misbehave and never grow up, and infinite chances to prove he doesn't have to. The consequences never stick, the game must go on.

Eric’s life is a cartoon action-comedy where he wants to be the star. Kenny’s life is a horror movie, and he’s tired of being final girl (or boy). He’d very much like to jump genres soon. (He’s been rewatching Sailor Moon…)

Anyway, the point is maybe Eric was always going to drink his best friend’s human remains because something was already drawing them together by then. Kenny’s body had wanted to become whole, reunited as it was by its last remaining pieces. Kenny had no say in it. Blessing or curse. Maybe he and Eric are inseparable.

So when Kenny dies, Cartman sees him. Not that Kenny remembers much of that, being dead. Not yet.

When Kenny dies, sometimes he goes to Heaven. Sometimes he goes to Hell. He never goes to the other place again, the older place— save in dreams, or when he almost sees it in the pulsing red behind his eyes. Sometimes he doesn’t go anywhere.

He’s a phantom shadow cast in the darkest corners of his house or the boys’ locker room at school or in Eric’s bedroom at night. He’s a distorted reflection in the ripples at Stark’s Pond, his friends skipping stones right over him. Or the impossible flicker of an orange parka in the bushes outside the Stotch house next to Eric, crouched, throwing pebbles at Butters’ window and mostly missing. Maybe a fading laugh on the wind or the smell of Eggo’s burning. That eerie static between tv and radio stations, the remote always being misplaced or the channel inexplicably flipped to Monster Truck Mania again. He’s Eric’s second shadow at the bus stop that shouldn’t be there and doesn’t quite make sense but nobody says anything, because nobody hardly notices. There might be a crossed out journal entry in Butters’ diary about it.

When Kenny dies, he’s hardly himself. He’s hardly anyone. Mostly he’s no one. Until he comes back whole again, all his pieces rearranged. The luck of the draw.

Sometimes he haunts. Or visits, makes psychic house calls. Sometimes he tells Cartman, the only one who will listen, premonitions, trying to effect things from beyond, warning Eric about the test he forgot, or attempting to save all their friends and the world for when he’ll get back again, another fallen angel. Sometimes Eric talks to him, his ghostly friend who’s see through, without a face and/or bloody and terrible and/or just Kenny looking back at him from under that parka hood or not.

It’s not scary, the shock worn off. Eric doesn’t like his sleep disturbed or to be bothered when his shows are on, but otherwise he doesn’t mind. Just their little secret. And he likes secrets.

Sometimes Eric is the least wicked and his closest friend, when Kenny's dead. He actually looks peaceful when he sleeps.

It’s easier to not hold grudges and to see his friends for who they are, when stripped of his worldly affections or a form or vessel (save that damned parka; he always takes that to the grave, and after).

Eric is needy. Stan is aloof. Kyle is self-righteous. Leo is lonely. They’re still just kids.

Kenny is lonely too. He probably always has been. Practically all alone in the universe, there is nothing like him. God knew that. Satan saw it too. Other great and powerful and all-mighty and terrible beings will find him soon. Like a beacon. Casting out distress signals. He is both home and far from home. A satellite, slipping in and out of their universe.

He really doesn’t have to feel so singular though, so alone. Kenny has plenty of friends. More than he knows.

Some might even call him popular, despite his closest friends’ reputation for trouble and a warpath of nonsense and complete lunacy following them that is actually sometimes out of their control. (Really, indirectly, it’s usually Kenny’s fault, since chaos follows him, chooses him, targets him, doesn’t it? Not that he chose this, really. Or maybe he really did.)

Friend group wise at school, there’s Craig and his gang. That is, when they’re not all pissed at Ken for something probably Stan or Cartman did that just he got roped into (or willingly participated in). Craig usually calls him an asshole in detention later on or outside the principle’s office or after school if they’ve both missed the bus again, usually when there’s no witnesses, then flips him off, then they’re even and Kenny’s forgiven for his terrible taste in other friends. So that’s a new development.

And their friend Timmy’s great, when his wheelchair’s not fatally malfunctioning. He’s not much for conversation, but that’s alright by Kenny, who on most days isn’t either. They like the same music, loud metal with lots of head banging guitar solos.

They aren’t exactly his friends, but all of the nice girls Kenny kisses behind the school are fun to make smile and make laugh and make blush, and fun to waste time with. He thinks he’s getting better at kissing too, but he’s possibly running out of girls to kiss. He likes how long and shiny and soft girls’ hair is when he runs his fingers through it (and he doesn’t pull their pigtails anymore). He thinks about growing his out, under the parka.

Kenny has other friends too, but just has trouble remembering them. He only visits them in the little sleeps. His blips away from this living world. Time in the dark, down below.

Each time he visits them, they make reintroductions. They try again. Progress is stalled.

Now Kenny’s lying on the hot, smoking ground again when a white gloved hand appears. Someone offering to help him up, a kid like him, judging by their smaller hand. Vision still blurring at the edges, Kenny’s not sure who's attached to it yet.

Everything hurts, dully fading. He hears tortured screams distantly and is thankful that’s not him currently screaming.

Is this Hell? Kenny doesn’t remember how he got here. Wait, yes he does— his friends stupidly playing pirates in an active construction site, one wrong step “off the plank”, then all the falling scaffolding, his legs pinned under debris, his legs gone, that last long wagon ride. Agony fading into darkness, vision swimming, and then the long, dark tunnel shot him out here. Hell. Right.

He takes the hand, attached to a small British person, who is now talking to him. “Cheerio, Kenneth!”

A blond boy… Kenny thinks he knows him. Or knew him?

It’s hot in Hell, so Pip Pirrip is always sweating. He dabs his forehead with a little lacy kerchief. “Dreadful weather we’re having, old chum!”

Damien, son of Lucifer— who is taller than Kenny remembered him, and taller than both of them— appears in a puff of fire and black smoke behind Pip, chiding. “Philip-!” He hisses.

Like it’s some big secret Kenny’s not supposed to get yet. A practical joke they’re pulling, and he’s out of the loop or something. Kenny blinks, feels disoriented and a little self-pitying. He accounts for all his limbs, his recent death still fresh.

“Oh yes, right! Moving too quickly, are we? We’ve missed you is all, my good fellow.” Pip nods, sympathetic, and happy to fuss over Kenny. He brushes ash and brimstone dust from Kenny’s sleeved shoulders. “But you don’t remember a thing, do you? Poor creature! Haven’t the foggiest again? Rough landing! Oh, poor dear.”

“Shit, um, sorry.” Kenny clams up, forgetful and feeling crowded. Among strangers… Or is he?

Damien rolls his eyes, not entirely evilly. In fact, almost fondly. Which is far creepier. Except it isn’t. It’s almost familiar.

This has happened before. It always happens. Like short term amnesia, reversed, swapping places with his friends still alive elsewhere, Kenny gives his friends in Hell the same treatment. He knows them, but doesn’t know them. Like long lost friends, like meeting someone in a dream.

Staring at the gaunt, little British dead boy and his scary demon friend, it comes back to Ken slowly, his voice falling. “Pip… from school? You’re in… Hell?”

In life Pip was kind of annoying, but never mean nor cruel, far from evil. He shouldn’t be down here. Too bad this system doesn’t work like Santa’s ‘naughty or nice’ list. Arbitrary mormons.

“Oh it’s quite alright!” Pip smiles, though his voice is always a little watery, lilting and sad. “Dying, you know… Suppose I came out tip-top though. Seeing as my best mate already resides down here, three quarters out of the year anyway.”

Kenny tries not to wince as he nods. He’d never been exactly friendly to Pip in life. Maybe he could change that in death. He always thinks this, because he’s a better person than he knows. A good kid.

And come to think of it, speaking of the not-so-good, this Damien kid, didn’t he send Kenny to a Hell dimension one time? Was that his idea of a bad joke? Cartman had found it pretty funny anyway.

Damien answers Kenny’s wary look, “South Park sucks cenobite-ass. Not enough heathens, too much snow. I transferred to Scottsdale, for summer school. Arizona is almost hotter than Hell. ” Then he adds, reading Kenny’s mind, “And the Hell dimension WAS funny, alas I was still new to Earth mortal pranks. In Scottsdale we just egg and TP each other’s houses, do the ding-dong-ditch, and make crank calls. ‘Go Scorpions.’”

Kenny wants to be more annoyed, but the school spirit ‘Go Cows!’ schtick has always been more of Stan’s thing. And the holding grudges thing is more Kyle and Eric (and secretly Butters). Plus the way Damien speaks, he might just be being sarcastic.

And also, Kenny’s still wrapping his head around knowing dead people. Or people in Hell. Besides Satan. This always happens too. He’s about to ask, ‘so ummm, how’s your dad?’

Reading Kenny’s mind again, which should maybe be creepier, Damien confirms with an unnerving smile, “My father has asked me to look in on you… And Philip tagged along. We are your friends.”

“Yes! Old school chums, as it were!” Pip tips his brown tweed cap and laughs, stating the painfully obvious. “Not getting any older!”

“Well, I am. Intermittently, on my mortal summers.” Damien corrects, and then correctly notices, staring unnervingly at Kenny. “As are you… Slowly. Inevitably. Does it hurt?”

“Does what hurt?” Kenny tucks his hands in his pockets, shrugging without meaning to, uncomfortable. (And he thought the devil-kid looked older, taller).

“You know.” Damien insists darkly.

Kenny shrugs again, nods or shakes his head. “Yes. No. Sometimes.”

“Be not afraid, Kenneth… Or, you know, be very very afraid… I’m still a demon, after all.” Half-demon, on his father’s side. Petty semantics. Damien grins with rows of pointy teeth, proving it, eyes glowing hellfire. Antichrist. Right.

“He’s just kidding!” Pip lightens the mood.

“It will be a short stay.” Damien predicts, hand falling suddenly on Kenny’s shoulder. “Come. Tonight we will raise hell.”

“It will?” Kenny asks, dumfounded. “We will?”

On his other side, Pip’s arm links with Kenny’s, the permanently-dead boy still chattering. “Ooo, would you care for some tea? We do have time for tea, yes?”

Damien nods. They have time for tea.

Satan’s house looks how Kenny remembers it. They have tea in the sun room. Ironic, because there is no sun. Just fire and volcanic lava and lightning. Demon minions serve their tea party.

Sipping his oolong, this all feels like a dream, or some Alice In Wonderland meets Alice In Chains nightmare, to Kenny. Not that he’d say it out loud. Too polite.

“Thank you, we try.” Damien accepts Kenny’s would-be compliment(?) anyway, reading his mind.

“You are welcome, your wicked Highnessss!” One of the low demons pouring their tea miscalculates, speaking out of turn, and Damien scorches it into a pile of ash.

“Not YOU!” Damien huffs, then waves a bored, dismissive hand. “Begone, minions.”

“Rude!” Pip tsks the prince of darkness as devil-minions quickly scatter.

“Oh, it’s fine! It’ll rematerialize on the seventh level sooner or later.” Damien passes Kenny more devil’s food cake. “Old family recipe. Eat. You are skin and bones again.”

So Kenny eats, knowing it won’t stick. He can’t take it with him, a full belly, back to life. Still, it’s good to not feel hunger pangs for once. He lives better in Hell than at home, than in life. Huh.

“Oh, Kenneth, you must try the angel food cake as well.” Pip insists. “It is to die for! Hah!”

So it turns out Kenny has friends in low places. They keep him company.

After tea, an activity. They prank call people from Hell, at Damien’s insistence. Damien swears they ‘do this often.’ Pip surprisingly corroborates. Kenny stays intrigued.

They can call anyone in the world. Of course they call Cartman.

“Kinny, quit callin’ me from beyond the grave!” Eric whines. “I’m playing Xbox right mneow! When are you gonna be not dead again? You missed the new episode of Terrance and Phillip tonight, and now you won’t get all the jokes next week!”

“Philip? Why that’s my christian name!” Pip whispers excitedly. “What a coincidence!”

“Kinny, quit hangin’ out with your weird ghost friends and come back to life so I can beat your ass at Xbox!” Eric whines some more.

Annoyed, Damien channels his demon powers from afar to make Cartman’s lights flicker. The colors on his Xbox game invert, the paused image on the screen corrupting. Mr. Kitty yowls and hisses. Flies gather on the windows. Food in the kitchen fridge rots rapidly.

Damien takes the phone from Kenny. “Hello. Is your refrigerator running?” Before Cartman can even check, Damien answers deadpan, “No.”

Then he hangs up.

“I don’t get it.” Pip chuckles half-heartedly in good nature anyway.

Kenny shrugs at him, his parka hood muffling his words like always. “I don’t either.”

They both laugh more at the absurdity of Damien’s attempt. Pip laughs like a foppish school boy, prim and proper, almost rehearsed. “Hah hah hah!”

They’ll have to corrupt it out of him, Kenny thinks, forgetting where they are for a second (because Satan has a good interior decorator). If not for the distant screams and the boiling heat and the fact that Pip’s been dead for nearly a decade…

Pip looks the same as in distant memories. (Or not so distant, if only Kenny could remember).

Kenny had noticed immediately that Damien looked older. Taller. Maybe fifth or sixth grade by now. Like he escaped the time trap, somehow. It makes Kenny wonder now, with a distant heartache, if far away people, like his first long distance girlfriend Kelly, are just out there somewhere growing up without him. Why do some escape?

Damien reads his mind, and Kenny's getting used to that.

“Your curse is shrinking. Or perhaps spreading. We’re in the eye of it, like a maelstrom. Or a dormant virus. A zombie fire. Keeps popping up again and again… Oh, well. ‘Darn.’ We shall see.” Damien is both mysterious and blasé about it, popping his p’s nonchalantly, seemingly not invested either way. His quick glance to Pip out of the corner of his eye tells different though. Aw, the prince of darkness cares. Weird.

Kenny doesn't know what to say to all that anyway. It’s sort of making his head spin. Maybe this really is all his fault… Oh no.

Pip pipes up then, swatting fearlessly at the antichrist, “Don’t scare him!”

“I didn’t!” His unholy majesty dodges easily. “… Much.” Damien’s wicked grin warps his face all mischievous and cruel when he redirects, “Whom shall we call upon next to inform about their refrigerator running?”

Kenny suggests Mr. Mackey, the South Park elementary school councilor. They proceed.

“Good sir, your ice box is… displaced!” Pip tries. He is never good at this.

“Oh nooo, mmkay? Not this again, mmmkay!” Throughly pranked, Mr. Mackey exclaims to chittering prankster whispers through what sounds like distant, blood curdling screams over the other line. It sounds like the devil himself called him up on his landline.

Kenny quickly hangs up Satan’s telephone, giggling.

“Muhahaha! That was a good one!” Damien cackles.

“Ooo yes, let us do another!” Pip squeaks.

Kenny nods, agreeing.

So Damien is like a little devil on his shoulder. A bit like Cartman but, like, actually evil incarnate. Does this make Pip Kenny’s fair haired, awkward, lisping angel on the other shoulder? (And does he already have one of those up there in life, too?)

Pip is a bit cherubic. They’re an odd pair, that’s for sure. Pip especially looks a bit out of place down here.

One time, days or years ago, even more disoriented from that plummet, Kenny had asked Pip, “Why are you even in Hell?”

“Turns out I’m a b-b-blasted buggering sodomite! Or I would have been, you know, had I lived.” Damien’s been teaching Pip curse words, to varying success. Pip made a face, trying to recall just why again he is not worthy to be up there on high, “… That, or the angels were full up on jolly good Anglicans. I cannot recall...” He rubbed something in his vest pocket. “But I am here now.”

“Oh.” Kenny failed to mention the mormons, unsure of how strict that rule’s actually enforced, considering he’d snuck in upstairs once or twice (or many, many forgotten times).

Pip had shrugged. “Aside from the dreadful weather, I quite like it down here anyway.”

Kenny doesn’t quite remember this conversation now. Just the lingering question: why? Why Pip? Why does the afterlife seem so random and unfair? Just like life.

“He is in Hell because it is predestined. Thus it is so.” Damien answers Kenny’s skeptic mind cryptically.

Then again, Pip does seem pretty happy here. He fits in better in Hell than in South Park. Kenny almost relates to that.

Pip jumps at the opportunity to brag, “Damien says I’ll soon get my wings. Then I’ll have a new purpose… A demon name, a classification— naturalized, as they say! I have to earn it…  Then maybe I will grow up. This is no such place for children, really.”

Damien shrugs noncommittally.

And at this, a cursed grandfather clock groans and moans from somewhere in the bowels of Satan’s humble abode, the cursed sound of the hour. Time flies. Kenny’s time is up.

Pip’s still talking hurriedly, digging something out of his vest pocket. “Say, that reminds me! Before you go!”

To Pip’s bright new-old idea that Kenny’s still completely in the dark on, Damien comments, “It won’t work this time. He will not remember. But you can try.”

“Very well.” Pip chuffs, with indignant determination. “Kenneth, I have a gift for you…”

A purple stone, shining out in the palm of his hand, presented, just for Kenny.

“Pretty.” Kenny says.

“We’ll see you soon.” Damien tells him.

Kenny wakes up in his bed, hungry. His hand is clutched into an empty fist. He feels like he’s forgotten something. 

“Kenny!” Karen’s calling for him from the kitchen. She’ll need help toasting her Poptarts or reaching something off a high shelf. “Are you awake?”

Kevin must be at wrestling practice or out doing yard chores or sneaking off on a date with Shelly Marsh again. Their parents are who knows where. Not here. 

And Kenny’s back. Alive, breathing, with all his limbs. It only feels a bit like something opened him up while he was sleeping.

“Yeah, I’m up, Karen! Be right there, don’t worry!” He peels himself off the mattress, off to save the day.