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Craig Tucker was a lot of things. If asked to describe himself, he would probably use words such as "cool", "awesome", "the best", and maybe even "the supreme overlord." Yes, he was many things. He could cook a mean egg, he could recite the alphabet backwards even while shitfaced, and he was something of a prodigy when it came to winning bets and dares.
But Craig Tucker was not immortal.
And so, rolling down an ice-coated hill at 100mph on a bike with a rickety wheel and broken brakes, Craig gazed at the swiftly approaching fence overlooking the partially-frozen Stark's Pond and accepted his death.
The front wheel struck the fence with an impact so hard it knocked the breath out of his lungs, and the cursed bicycle launched him into the air like a ragdoll. For a second, he felt the joy of flight. Then he felt the joy of cracking open his head on rock solid ice.
He slid across the ice, spinning slowly, leaving a thin trail of red behind him, before finally coming to a stop at the edge of the frozen pond. The world was bright white, too bright, and his head ached and his shoulder ached and jesus, even his fucking legs ached for some reason, he hadn't even landed on them! Well, whatever. He didn't care about that, about the pain or how cold it was or how pissed he was at Stan and Kenny for daring him to do this stupid shit. He had already accepted his death.
And so, Craig Tucker closed his eyes.
Then, he opened them again.
Seems like death had passed up a golden opportunity.
He sat up, immediately regretting it and laying back down with a dull groan as pain exploded behind his eyes. His head felt like somebody had attempted to use it as a soccer ball for the past... however many hours it'd been. Or maybe days. Or years, wait, what if he'd been in a coma? That'd be something. Waking up out of a coma after a decade and being famous and getting a ton of money just for taking a ten-year nap.
Unfortunately, this place seemed a little too dark to be a hospital. The ceiling was that ugly white plaster that poor people's ceilings always were, swirled with some shit excuse for a pattern and stained with god-knows-what. Craig didn't even know how a person could get stains on their ceiling.
He made a daring move and tilted his head a bit, gritting his teeth at the pain, to get a better look around. A nightstand, drawer half-out, overflowing with empty chip bags and a few boxes of condoms. A lamp with no shade. Dirty, cracked walls covered in posters of obscure bands and cartoons. An ugly green carpeted floor, covered in cigarette burns and cigarette ashes and actual cigarettes, just laying there half-smoked.
There was no doubt about it. He was in the Mccormick household, Kenny's room in specific.
Without having to check, he knew he was laying on a mattress on the floor, almost definitely with no sheet on it. Kenny said sheets were a waste of time. Craig was pretty sure he just couldn't be fucked to do the laundry every time he and whatever freak he brought home got jizz all over them.
Why was he here? A mystery the world may never be able to solve. He tried to remember what'd happened after landing on the ice, but his head was foggy and it felt like trying to run underwater. Great, he was concussed. Concussed and laying on Kenny's gross mattress in Kenny's gross house in Kenny's gross neighbourhood.
He fucking hated Kenny. Kenny was a stupid drunken fuck who was always trying to sell him bad weed and seemed to know exactly what buttons to push to piss him off in as short a time as possible. It was like he got off on it. He was also too hot to really be allowed to exist as a person.
As if thinking about him had summoned the very devil he was cursing in his head, the door to the bedroom suddenly opened. It creaked loudly on ancient hinges and Craig groaned loudly as the sharp noise lit up pain fireworks in his head. He lifted sluggish arms and covered his face with two large, pale hands, barely paying attention to Kenny until the blonde was seated beside him.
After a minute or so he cracked open one eye and peeked out behind his fingers at the teen, who looked uncharacteristically... nervous? Constipated? He didn't know. Craig Tucker was a lot of things, but emotionally adept was not one of them.
"You're--" Kenny started loudly, saw Craig wince, and finished in a whisper, "--awake. Finally. It's been like, 4 hours."
He was holding a bottle of orange Gatorade and a plastic baggy full of weed paraphernalia. As he unzipped the bag that weird constipated face started to ease a bit, and he was back to his regular shit-eating grin by the time he'd packed his shitty pipe full of shitty weed.
"Here." He held out the pipe expectantly.
Craig gave the pipe the most withering look he could manage, earning a snort from Kenny. "You can keep your kitty litter, thanks," he grated out. His voice felt sort of weak and wavery. He, in general, felt pretty weak and wavery, and it was pissing him off. To be laying down in front of bitch ass Kenny looking and feeling like this was truly shameful. Against his better judgement, Craig slowly started to push himself up into a sitting position. Kenny, weirdly enough, dropped the weed and started grabbing at Craig.
"Whoa, whoa, dude! Jesus! You just cracked your skull open like a fuckin' jack-o-lantern, lay down. Idiot." His hands were really warm on Craig's really cold shoulders. They shared a moment of awkward eye contact before Craig forced out a scoff and laid back down.
"I fell off a bike, Ken, relax," He muttered, closing his eyes.
This weird motherly doting thing was creeping him out. The last time they'd spoken, Kenny was slapping five bucks into his hand and congratulating him on signing his own death certificate. That was right before he'd hopped onto the brakeless bike and taken a joy ride into Concussion Land.
"You could've died!," Kenny's half-whisper sounded so emotional and concerned that Craig opened his eyes again and gave the blonde a long, confused look. What the fuck was his problem? "You could've literally died and it would've been my fault so shut the fuck up and lay down and smoke this weed and drink this Gatorade."
Kenny muttered this out so quickly that it took the brain-fogged Craig a few seconds to sort through it all. So he felt... guilty? Huh. That was weird. He didn't really know how to handle that, to be honest. He could deal with people being rude or sarcastic or dismissive or aggressive, but genuine and honest caring always made him uncomfortable.
For a painful 20 seconds, there was silence. Kenny had picked up the dropped pipe and was fiddling with it in his lap, gaze forcefully averted, and Craig took the chance to study him. He was still wearing that stupid orange jacket, even indoors, and his hair was the same mess it'd always been, but in that weirdly attractive way that only Kenny could manage. He had a weird bruise shaped like a boot on his knee, which was exposed through the massive holes worn into his jeans. His fingernails were bitten down. He had a Hello Kitty bandaid on his pinky finger.
Kenny Mccormick was a lot of things. If Craig was asked to describe him, he'd use words like "dicklord," "massive faggot", "the worst," and maybe even "absolute cockgoblin." He could drink more than any human being ever should and still be functional, he was insanely good at drawing, and he sometimes got this weird, snide look in his eye that made Craig's face hot.
But Kenny Mccormick was not a nice person.
At least, Craig hadn't thought he was. Not until tonight, while he lay on a gross bed with the worst headache of his life, watching him fidget and twist and spin the pipe awkwardly. He'd never considered for a single second in all 17 years of knowing Kenny that maybe he wasn't just an alcoholic loser with a really pretty face who only talked to him to get a kick out of pissing him off.
But he remembered now, even through the brain-fog of a mild concussion. Laying on the ice. Watching Stan and Kenny at the top of the hill, watching Kenny race down, run across the ice (slipping twice on the way, fucking idiot) and pick him up and fuck, he was strong, wasn't he? He didn't look that strong. Craig was at least 6 inches taller than him but Kenny lifted him like his little sister picking up one of her baby dolls. His hands had been really warm and he'd looked really worried and he was saying some shit but Craig hadn't really been listening because he'd been too busy bleeding all over the place and being concussed.
So Craig lay on the mattress, feeling a weird warmth in his chest, watching Kenny fidget and fidget and fidget some more. Despite the splitting headache currently making him want to cut his own head off, he found that he was smiling.
"That's the gross kind of Gatorade, you stupid fuck," He finally said, breaking the silence and extending his hand in a grabby gesture towards the pipe Kenny was holding.
Kenny looked up at him, surprised for a second, and then grinned.
"You're the gross kind of Gatorade, asshole."
Craig stayed over at the Mccormick household for a couple days, and Kenny kept a close eye on him the entire time. He didn't really know fuck all about medicine, but he knew enough to force Craig to lay down as much as possible, drink a fuckbunch of Gatorade, and give him as much weed as he could currently afford to.
The intense guilt he'd been smothered by for the first night after the "accident" had subsided now into a quiet gnawing on his subconscious, but he knew it'd be back with force later. Craig seemed to be completely over the fact that he had literally nearly died only a few days ago, but Kenny wasn't so quick to forget. Craig wouldn't come back to life like Kenny did. If he died, it'd be for good, and it'd have been Kenny's fault.
He'd been fucking around at Stan's place when Craig had knocked on the door and asked Stan if he could borrow 5 bucks. Stan told him to go fuck himself. All three of them had been varying levels of drunk, and Kenny had remembered Stan's busted old bike and stepped in to offer Craig the chance of a lifetime, knowing full well the fellow teen never refused a dare when he was intoxicated.
Ride the shitty bike down the icy hill, and he'd get those 5 bucks. Craig, as Kenny had known he would, had instantly accepted and Stan had hauled the old piece of junk out of the garage and presented it with pride.
In Kenny's drunken mind, he'd imagined Craig falling off the bike at the bottom of the hill and scraping his knee and looking pretty dumb. They'd laugh, he'd leave with his hard earned cash, and Kenny and Stan would return to watching re-runs of Friends and trying to paint eachother's toenails.
Things didn't go according to plan. The bike hit the fence, but Craig didn't fall. He flew.
Kenny was running before he even hit the ground, and even from halfway up the hill he heard the sickening thud of head on ice. He'd slipped and slid his way across the ice, scooped up Craig (wow, he was light), and made his way back to the safety of solid ground. Stan stood dumbfounded at the top of the hill and Kenny decided to ditch him and head to his own place, all the way talking to a dazed and confused Craig, trying to keep him awake. People with head injuries weren't supposed to sleep or they'd die, or something, he couldn't remember. All he knew was that Craig was bleeding and it was Kenny's fault and he couldn't take him to a hospital because he wasn't much better off than the Mccormicks and certainly couldn't afford the medical bills.
So he took him home, laid him in bed, cleaned up his head, and waited.
An hour passed, then two, and Kenny had to piss so bad he finally gave in and left Craig alone for a few minutes. After the bathroom break he dug around in the kitchen for something to eat, found nothing, and ended up returning with a bottle of Gatorade that'd been left forgotten in the back corner of the fridge. Halfway back he changed his mind and returned the Gatorade, then changed his mind again and re-acquired it. On the final trip back to his room, he also grabbed the little baggy of weed stuff he kept hidden in his great grandmother's pot of ashes. His hands were shaking a bit with nervousness. He felt sick with guilt.
When he opened the door he heard a loud groan and realized Craig was awake. The teen had covered his face with his hands. Kenny gingerly closed the door and sat beside him, setting down the bottle and baggy and just watching him with a cartoonish sort of concern on his face. After a bit, Craig spread two fingers and glared out at him, those pretty blue eyes narrowed with pain and a bit of confusion.
Admittedly, it was weird to see Craig Tucker in any sort of vulnerable state. The last time Kenny had seen him resembling anything other than a completely stony-faced asshole was when they were like, twelve years old, and Craig's guinea pig had died. He was generally the picture of complete nonchalance, and no matter how hard Kenny tried to push him to laugh or get mad or do anything, he couldn't seem to break through whatever monumental wall Craig had built up.
To summarize, Craig was a massive dick.
He didn't seem like a dick right now though. He just seemed miserable, and he was quick to refuse Kenny's offerings of weed and Gatorade. Kenny let his gaze drop to his lap as he played with his cheap pipe, feeling awkward and guilty and uncomfortable. He didn't know how to apologize properly, or how to make Craig feel better without weed, or even how to really talk to this guy who he'd always thought was an irredeemable douchebag.
Turns out redemption wasn't as impossible as Kenny had thought. After an excruciating silence that went on so long that Kenny had been considering getting up and throwing himself out of the window, Craig finally spoke. Then he smoked, and drank some Gatorade, and after insisting on getting up and then falling over like an idiot, he went back to sleep.
The next few days went by in a flash, with Kenny supplying Craig with generous amounts of water, weed, and toaster waffles. They watched a few movies together, both of which Craig hated, and Kenny painted his nails black while he slept on the second night.
On the third morning, Craig woke up Kenny in the middle of pulling on his jacket, which had been laying on the floor for the past few days. Kenny rubbed his eyes and yawned, which caught Craig's attention.
"Going home?," Kenny asked sleepily. He picked lazily at one eye, trying to dislodge a piece of sleepdirt.
"Yeah." Craig said. He paused for a second, gaze cast towards the floor. "Uh, thanks, by the way."
"Thanks for what~?," Kenny teased, grinning up at him from the dirty floor where he laid, covered by a thin blanket and a few sweaters.
Craig glowered down at him, chewing on his lip for a second before huffing and returning to buttoning up his coat. It was the most emotional response Kenny had ever managed to receive from Craig, and it was thrilling.
"You should come back later. This weekend. Nobody'll be home."
Craig didn't respond. He shoved his feet into his dirty sneakers that Kenny had tossed into the corner of the room three days prior.
"I'll have more weed then. And more shitty movies. And, uhhhh, plenty of toaster waffles, and maybe eve--"
"Yeah, yeah, I'll come. Jesus." Craig cut him off in the middle of his increasingly pathetic attempts to entice him. He turned back to look at Kenny, the same stony mask he usually wore sitting on his face. "Buy blue Gatorade this time. That's the good shit."
Kenny gave him a thumbs up, a big goofy grin materializing onto his face. Craig unceremoniously turned and left, closing the door softly behind him.
Kenny Mccormick was a lot of things. If asked to describe himself, he'd likely use words such as "stud", "idiot", and maybe even "super sexy dickmaster". But right now, the most fitting way Kenny thought to describe himself was "starting to crush really fucking hard on Craig Tucker."