Work Text:
he has written about this many times.
there is this strange boy in his neighborhood - never talks very much, never smiles very much, doesn't do very much of anything. sometimes you'll hear him laugh if he's with his friends - but even that is a rarity to behold. this boy is a beautiful enigma, tweek has decided. he has a plethora of journals; stacks upon stacks, so many that he's stopped being paranoid that his parents are reading through them, because at this point, they'd probably be exhausted after seeing his word usage in the first page. plus, half of them are on things that would probably bore his parents - conspiracy theories, political opinions, thoughts on when the world might blow up & how. there was a lot of fear in this world already, who cared if he piled a little more onto it? it was a collection, he'd decided, and it was all fascinating in its own right - depressing, but fascinating.
but the boy - his name was craig, he'd heard. something about the name seemed right. it was just boring enough, but also made you wonder what exactly a craig was like. the day he'd caught wind of this being the boy's name, he googled it to figure out what it meant. rock, the internet had said. it didn't really make him think anything - just was another piece of evidence that craig was a really boring name.
he often wrote about how they could meet, but it wasn't really fiction or anything. more like he theorized about the most likely ways to run into each other, and half the time it was exuberantly satirical. at a certain point, The Boy became less of a fascination of his, and more of a personal meme. something silly to pass the time - it wasn't really tangible, just a thing that existed in his mind.
but then, something he wrote came true. he about lost his mind.
it was a rainy day, and tweek lived for those. really, half the time when he woke up, his anticipation was to see if the weather predictions were right or not. half the time they weren't (he thought maybe he'd become a world-renowned meterologist for predicting the weather more accurately than apparently anyone else could), but sometimes, like today, they were. he tossed on his regular rainboots and ran out the door as quickly as he could, grabbing an umbrella right before he passed the threshold of inside-outside. the rain was tapping everything in a gentle manner, and it made him very happy.
after a while of wandering the town, looking at the old abandoned houses and the new buildings that nobody lived in yet but he was pretty sure were haunted, he stopped at the cafe. his dad worked there sometimes, but not always, and when it rained he liked to go by to see if anything had changed. in a funny twist of events, something actually had. the barista working the counter was Craig. he almost had half a mind to swoop right around and head straight out the door, continuing to live with the enigma of The Boy peacefully in his head instead of actually meeting the boy and feeling creeped out by the fact he had basically fantasized about him for..a while. but he didn't, he marched straight up to the counter with purpose, rainboots making a gross slorsh noise on the tiled flooring, and closed his umbrella. "you're n-new," he said matter-of-factly, and the boy's eyebrows furrowed. "yes?" The Boy - craig, replied, and tweek bit his cheek. "w-well, i want a black mountain coffee. w-with no sugar." he said, and then before craig could reply, went and sat in one of the metal chairs they had in the cafe.
he was always fascinated by these chairs - they were like outdoor chairs, but here they were inside! it was unprecedented - who puts outdoor chairs inside. apparently, this cafe does. wow.
after a slight moment of waiting, craig appeared with the coffee. he set it down on the table in front of tweek, instead of handing it to him, which was an small thing tweek noticed. and then he sat down on the chair across from tweek.
"so," he said.
"s-so, what?"
"i like the way you talk." craig said, and tweek couldn't decide if he was like, vaguely insulted, or kind of pleased.
"well, good for y-you."
"it is, for sure."
there was silence for a moment, it wasn't really uncomfortable but it was strange. he'd never had a conversation like this with a stranger- it wasn't quite small talk, and he wasn't used to it.
"is that your usual?" craig asked, and tweek wondered if it was. he didn't come here all the time, usually when it was raining, because most of the time he made his coffee at home. he trusted himself not to fuck it up the most.
"it is, i t-think."
"i'll remember, if you come back." craig said.
by the time he got home that night, he was absolutely flabbergasted. in any scenario, he never pictured The Boy to be the one interested in him, but here he was - pacing around his room, thinking about the way his face looked when he said "if you come back," like he knew that if he made that exact entrancing face, tweek would most definitely come back.
well, he was right.