Archive of Our Own ^beta

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If there was anybody who could say with utmost honesty that he liked The New Kid from the start, it was Butters.  The fact that he was their first friend in South Park forged an immediate connection between them—not just from the fact that he happened to get to them first, but because they allowed for it to happen.  They accepted it.  Even if they didn’t talk much…  or at all…  Butters could just tell how grateful they were to have a faithful guide and partner to introduce them to the land of Zaron and the game around the Stick of Truth.

Sure, Eric kind of took over teaching them about all that as soon as they reached Kupa Keep, but it was the principle of it!  Butters always just felt like there was a connection between himself and The New Kid that ran deeper than anyone else in the Kingdom of Kupa Keep could speak of.  A sort of mutual acceptance of each other that neither of them could typically expect from the other kids in town.  The New Kid never made him feel excluded, or worse, like a replacement for somebody he wasn’t, like Eric and those guys had done time and time again.  The New Kid didn’t make him feel like a third or fifth wheel.  They were just…  nice to him.

Maybe that was setting the bar way too low, but it was a fact of Butters’ life that his innocent nature painted a target on his back, for harassment and for a general lack of compassion.  But The New Kid wasn’t like that.  When Paladin Butters healed them in battle and drew enemy fire, they diligently healed him back.  When they made a mistake and their faithful Paladin’s HP dropped to zero, they didn’t leave him there, bleeding on the ground.  They used one of their relatively scarce revive potions and pulled him back to his feet.  Maybe they were being kind, or maybe they just found him to be useful enough to keep around.  Either way, Butters had never felt so attended to.

He came to expect it of them, but still: every time The New Kid’s hand wrapped so tightly around his to help him up, he felt a little explosion of butterflies in his stomach, and a surge of motivation to do better next time.  To impress them, to make them proud, to be better, for them.  He came not to expect punishment for his shortcomings, not to expect to just be told how much he sucked, but to be treated with the same quiet faith and trust as ever, time and time again, no matter how many times he screwed up.  And it felt good to have that.  It felt like sunshine.  It…

Oh, hamburgers, it was a crush.

That only became more and more apparent to him as time went on.  Little things made those feelings flare up big-time.  Mostly, it was how they picked him for stuff—just in general.  Their partner in their fantasy game, one of their allies in their superhero game, even their team in PE.  They didn’t seem to care about their association with a blatantly unpopular kid.  They let him stick around, because…  they were his friend.  A real one.  And they were a good person.  And they were like sunshine—not the loud, blaring kind, but the quiet, calm kind of sunshine that trickles through the rain and makes a little rainbow.

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Cartman was adamant about one thing—come hell or high water, even if he ever lost his filter like that one time he pretended to have Tourette’s and blurted out that he had a crush on Patty Nelson, he could never let anybody on to the fact that he had a crush on arguably one of the lamest kids in town: The New Kid.

I mean, the company that kid kept, for fuck’s sake.  They hung out with Butters but for real.  They hung out with Kyle.  And they were silent, and intrusive, and weird.

But…  the thing about them was, they were, without a doubt, the best minion he could ever ask for.

When he told them to get something done, they did it, without question and without fail.  When he said jump, they…  well, they didn’t say how high, but they jumped, that was for sure.  They didn’t seem like they much cared for what purpose they were told to do anything.  They just wanted to do stuff.

That wasn’t so attractive when someone told The New Kid to, say, revolt against him or something.  But it was very attractive when it meant Cartman could tell them to go beat up Kyle or whoever, for whatever dumb reason he could come up with within in the boundaries of the game they were playing.

Sure, Butters was similarly easy to sway, but there were a couple of things that made The New Kid special.  They didn’t need to be convinced not to be mean.  They didn’t have that naïve, soft center that made Butters so annoying.  They didn’t have much of anything going on in there, as far as a moral code went.  The people they associated with determined that.  They could be a force for good or for evil, or for anything in between—and as long as they were associating with him, he could be the one to guide them along the right path.  To program the correct moral code into them.

Another thing that made them way cooler than Butters was the fact that they didn’t screw up.  Sure, he could order Butters around, but he never let himself fully believe that Butters would actually follow through, or especially that he would do it correctly.  It wasn’t like that with The New Kid.  The New Kid always won, some way, somehow.  They would go to the ends of the earth to get him, for example, KFC gravy, in return for…  what?  He could never quite figure it out, until he decided it must just be because The New Kid was totally obsessed with him or something.

What else could it be?  They seemed to get some kind of gratification just out of doing stuff for him.  Whatever stuff he wanted.  It was practically what they seemed to live for.

And the weird part was, usually he would find that irritating.  But not from The New Kid.  No way.  He actually found himself trying to come up with things for them to do for him.  Not even mean things.  Mostly, it was little tasks of labor: carrying his books somewhere, or fetching something from the store for him, or finding Mr. Kitty that one time he got out.

But then it was things that didn’t make much sense at all.  Things he would’ve felt embarrassed about if the guys found out about them.  Things like picking up their favorite snack at the store and sharing it with him, or calling him at night to distract him from the fact that he didn’t have a dad.

…  Okay, well, he definitely didn’t phrase that request in quite that way, but deep down, he knew that was what it was.

And then the thought occurred to him that he should give The New Kid a mission to kiss the most awesome dude in town, and he had to put all that shit on lockdown.  Not because he thought they wouldn’t do it, not because he thought they would get it wrong, but because there was something about it that felt so, viscerally, embarrassingly real about it.

And besides.  After all that happened with Heidi, who was to say The New Kid wouldn’t just turn into a total bitch towards him, too?

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At first, Kenny had thought that it was only Princess Kenny that had a thing for The New Kid.  He got really into that role—it wasn’t hard to believe that in just the same way it had been Princess Kenny who decided to betray her friends and risk bringing about the apocalypse for possession of the Stick of Truth, it had also been Princess Kenny who found it cute how The New Kid went around fighting righteous battle after righteous battle for what they believed in, who was certain they were always fighting for something they believed was right and felt drawn to that.

But that theory went out the window as soon as they all stopped playing their Stick of Truth story, because his crush on them stuck around.

It wasn’t Princess Kenny who admired how The New Kid fought for their perception of justice.  It wasn’t Mysterion who felt a little thrill of pride and something more whenever he saw that gorgeous and formidable new superhero out on the battlefield, or who couldn’t keep a smile off his face thinking about how they took time out of their day to find Karen’s doll and bring it back to her.  That was all Kenny.  Kenny McCormick.

Unlike a lot of The New Kid’s other admirers, Kenny didn’t feel a sense of apprehension at the realization that he was having some beyond-friendly feelings towards them.  Sure, it was his first time having feelings like that towards somebody whose gender he couldn’t be certain was female, but he was open to that.  He’d never ruled out the possibility of dating guys or nonbinary people.  And then again, maybe The New Kid was a girl.  He didn’t care—what was the word for that?  Pansexual?

He’d always felt that way, but his crush on The New Kid helped him put a label to it.  So that was cool.

He felt like he had it in him to tell The New Kid how he felt, but every time he tried, he screeched to a halt at the halfway point.  Even for a boy like him, who didn’t have much trouble at all asking someone he liked if they’d like to go out with him sometime, it was just…  weird, to start talking about something so personal only to be met with silence and an expectant stare.  Sure, The New Kid’s quiet nature was one of the things that Kenny found so cute about them, but when all he could imagine to his offer of a date was crushing, awkward silence…  well, he just wouldn’t know how to respond to that.

He did his best to make sure The New Kid could tell he liked them, though.  He started sitting next to them at lunch and inviting them out when he wanted to get Karen away from his parents and do something fun with her.  He hoped deep down that someday, The New Kid might decide to speak up again just to tell him that they’d noticed, and they might be interested in him, too.

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If Butters was the rock-fucking-bottom of popularity, then Scott Malkinson was floor B1.  He had a lisp and diabetes—what more needed to be said?  He was lucky just to be a part of the town’s roleplaying adventures, and Cartman diligently made sure he knew it, every single day, multiple times a day.

The only time he felt some semblance of being cool and fitting in was when he was dressed up and performing as Captain Diabetes.  There was something therapeutic about playing his disability as a superpower, even if a lot of the time he highly suspected that his persona was just one big joke to The Coon.  He still felt cool—and that feeling was amplified with the advent of his first sidekick.

He understood how it felt to be a sidekick—that was what he had been, constantly, up until that point.  At the same time that he felt a rush of pride over being the main hero, he also felt a sort of painful twinge at the thought that The New Kid might feel insulted by their role.  That was how he’d felt most of the time, after all.  Like an afterthought, or worse, comic relief, at the side of the heroes with all the serious powers.

But that wasn’t how they seemed to feel at all!  There were no sideways glances, there was no subtle eyerolling or impatience or annoyance.  The New Kid didn’t seem to mind playing second fiddle to him.  They didn’t even snicker at his lisp or diabetes.  They took it all at face value, which…  was kind of all he ever wanted from a friend.  The two of them had one hell of an adventure together, even if it all was kind of smutty and traumatizing.

And…  it set Scott’s heart aflutter when, in the aftermath of everything, he thought more deeply than he meant to about the fact that The New Kid had unlocked their time-bending powers to undo his death.

At first, it was just frightening.  He remembered his own death, and that was something that was hard to get over.  But with a little time and adjustment, he got to thinking about how The New Kid had, apparently, wanted so badly to bring him back to life that it had been a sort of trigger to activate the power within.  There was something undeniably romantic about that.

Needless to say, he was unaware of the enchirito.

But as things were, he felt a bond form that night between him and his then-sidekick, and with each passing day he felt more and more electricity flow through that connection like current through a wire.  Or like insulin out a syringe.  Relieving and essential.

It was nice, to feel like he was a part of someone’s life, and to feel like he was somebody worth becoming a hero for.  He wouldn’t mind being their sidekick, one day, knowing they would treat him as a partner and nothing less.  And he was proud to be a part of their origin story that didn’t have to do with their dad fucking their mom.