Chapter Text
With the scorching stream of light beating down on him and his heart beating so fast it threatened to break through the thin fabric of his costume, Kyle kept his showtime smile big and wide. He strained to grin proudly with every festering scintilla of his fatigued body. A quick glance at his partner told him that he wasn’t the only one entirely exhausted.
Stan, too, was sweating from every pore, and like Kyle, he still managed to beam brightly and wave to the audience with forced glee.
We’re almost there, Stan’s eyes seemed to tell him. Almost done.
It was the finale of a long night’s show, their last night in Chicago before they packed their troop and vamoosed the Midwest—Kyle’s personal least favorite part of the United States. And in celebration of such an event, their routine ringmaster opted out of orchestration today. Instead of entertaining, Eric Cartman was in the audience tonight. He sat all safe and sound in the upper booth for only the richest of audience members. Back in the dressing room before the show started, their knife-thrower Craig told Kyle that their ringmaster was up there not only to sit back and relax.
“We’re in Chicago, Lil Bit,” he’d grumbled in that apathetic nasal voice of his while styling his hair in the mirror. “Cartman’s up there with the Vice Lords and Simon City Royals. Fucking the Gangster Disciples, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. That fatass would choose gangs over us any day of the week.”
As he marched down the outer rim of the ring, Stan trailing his steps at the perfect tempo, Kyle tried to catch a glimpse of the rich-person booth. But with the spotlights burning into his retinas, locating Cartman was ultimately impossible.
Besides, Kyle had more important concerns. Here it was, the crescendo of the orchestration. It was the same musical composition he and the ensemble had marched to a thousand nights before, but it never failed to excite him. The finis of the closing number was upon them.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls!” serenaded the voice of tonight’s substitute ringmaster. He gripped the comically over-sized microphone in his calloused hands with dirtied knuckles, fingernails bitten short due to a childhood habit he has yet to break even after twenty eight years of living. Kenny McCormick, the universal swing for Meridional Rez Circus, stood center-stage in a star-covered top-hat and pants that made him look like Uncle Sam. His grin was wild in an exciting way. Unlike the rest of them, he didn’t give even the slightest indication he was tired, even though he had to be the most overworked one of them all, without a doubt.
His fingers flexed around the mic’s handle, tingling with anticipation as he announced, “It’s been an absolute blast to perform for you tonight. We certainly had a lot of fun! Thank you for letting us share our skills with you this evening!”
“Hup,” Stan whispered in Kyle’s ear—their cue for tumbling into a dexterous pose. It looked a lot more complicated than it actually was and always earned applause.
Around them, everyone was doing the same. In duos and trios, the ensemble sprung into tableauxs carefully crafted to demonstrate their strengths and agilities; Craig with his knives, Tweek with his diabolo, Bebe with her flexibility, and Stan hoisting an upside-down Kyle high in the air by the palm of a single hand, just to name a few.
It was a clean finale, Kyle determined a long time ago. It was a nice one. The ringmaster says goodbye to the audience while the performers summarize their tricks from earlier, and then they all deliver a collective thank-you and take their bows. It was a relief to have a finale so simple for bodies already so exhausted. Just a few more baby-steps and then they’d be done.
From below, Stan gave Kyle’s hand a tiny squeeze, signaling he was about to let him down.
Thank God for Stan and all his overprotective precautions. If it weren’t for him, Kyle and his ever-distracted, enervated body would have gotten hurt ages ago.
Kyle flashed another showy smile, before letting Stan toss him up again. He had just enough time to swing his hips beneath his chest, rotating upright, before Stan caught him on the ground below.
The applause was minimal and cheap, as few people wanted to speak over Kenny, who was still talking.
“-and with that,” he announced grandly, enthusiasm bleeding out of his every pore, “we bid our farewells!”
The spot lighting him shifted, shadowing his face for the briefest of fleeting moments. The audience wouldn’t have noticed a thing; they never notice when something goes wrong.
But Kyle, safe on the ground again, didn’t fail to recognize the fleeting shadow. He frowned, turning to look at the tension grid overhead, scanning for any abnormalities.
“Thank you, Chicago!” Kenny cried. “What a thrill it’s been to perform in the one and only Windy City.”
Something metal and mechanical groaned overhead. Kyle was still looking, but the ceiling was too dark and the floor was too bright to make out a thing.
“Goodnight, everyone! Make sure to tell your friends all about u-”
The tiniest of clicks interrupted him– a sound akin to the ignition of a stove. Then came the grating and grinding of the PAR overhead, a sound that should never come from something so heavily depended upon.
Young and spirited Kenny, having noticed his falter, snapped back into character. His smile bounced back effortlessly, lively and bright. But Kyle could still see the fear in his eyes.
“Forgive my stutter. I thought for a moment some of the clowns were sneaking up on me again.”
It was a reference made to a scene earlier in the show; Kenny was always good at whipping things up from the air. The audience chuckled on cue, low and collective. The joke wasn’t funny, so their laughter was only polite.
Again, the mechanical groaning overhead. It sounded like the hull of a ship creaking under the pressure of the sea.
“Goodnight, all! And thank you for coming out to the Meridional Rez Cir-”
A chord snapped. Something shuddered heavily.
A creak, and a groan, and chains going slack, and then—
The PAR light slipped from its hold, collapsing from the rafters. At first, it seemed to fall in slow motion. Kyle could make out every detail of its black metal surface, its circular, bulbous light.
Then the closer it got to the ground, the faster it fell. From behind, Kyle felt Stan’s hands wrap around his wrist, pulling him back before he could even think about running out there. The falling spotlight picked up speed, falling quicker, and steeper, until-
The ringmaster wasn’t allowed the liberty of breaking character, not even to glance upwards for the briefest of moments, before the spotlight plummeted directly through his cranium. Metal shattered bone on impact, severing the skull and shivering the spinal cord.
There was screaming. Too much of it. The clamor was so loud that at first Kyle didn’t recognize that he was screaming too, his strained voice screeching into the abyss. Stan pulled Kyle’s backside against his chest not to comfort him, but to hold him still. He clamped a large hand over Kyle’s mouth to stifle the screaming, trembling despite his strength, and murmured, “Oh God…”
Only when Kyle stopped screaming did Stan’s hand leave.
“Stan…” Kyle didn’t mean to whisper, but when he tried to speak, that was all that came out. The rest of his voice was trapped inside his closing throat. “Stan, Kenny just…”
Someone pulled the fire alarm—a desperate attempt to clear the way for the standby EMS workers before the ambulance arrived.
It was a whisper, but still Stan managed to hear him over the shrill siren and the catastrophic screams. Either he had impeccable hearing, or he was listening with his instincts, not his ears.
“I know,” Stan said, backing up. “We should- We should get out of here.”
Meager illumination came only from scattered spotlights, so people stumbled around blindly. Meanwhile the sound machine broke, replaying the same eight beats of their music again and again and again, growing louder and more distorted with each measure. Through the formidable music and parlous semi-darkness, the audience was leaving in masses. They stampeded towards the exterior doors while the performers and stagehands fought each other, wrestling over what to do.
And that wasn’t figurative, that was a literal observation. Cast and crew alike were screaming curses at each other in a myriad of languages, throwing punches and pulling one another into headlocks. The tussling between men and women in the center ring was more red-blooded and violent than the time when Cartman announced they weren’t making enough money to keep them all fed, so the performers would go on rationed diets.
It was absolute havoc in every direction. Families scrambled over one another to squeeze through the congested emergency exits, EMS personnel clawed their way through the crowds to get to Kenny, and circus folk were thrown every which way. A few audience men even jumped down to the ring, filming the whole thing on their phones and joshing roughly.
A phone light flashed directly in Kyle’s eye, the phone’s holder stomping imminently near.
“Hey, did you see that?” he screamed–at his phone or at Kyle, they couldn’t tell. “Did you see- Did you see that? It totally came crashing down on him, like, wham! Y’know?”
Stan’s grip around Kyle’s arms was so tight now that his fingers dug into every tendon of his arms—svelte arms trained into being muscular after so many grueling hours of rehearsal.
“Kyle,” he hissed into his ear, “Let’s go. I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit. Let’s leave.”
“Hey hey hey, y’all two are the ones who-” The man hiccuped. Kyle could smell the whiskey on his breath now. “Y’all are the ones who were tumblin’ ‘n shit. Hey. Hey! Hey, do somethin’ funny, ya damn clowns!”
Immediately the work lights switched back on, and without warning. The grating uproar only magnified. One moment they all blundered around in petrified quasi-darkness, and then in a sheerly cut split-second, the arena was flooded in blinding light.
Stan stumbled backwards and Kyle nearly fell with him. But before he could collapse, the drunk man ensnared Kyle by the wrist, yanking him forward.
The man’s eyes were sleek and wet with seduction, his lips curled into an obscene smirk. The light of his still-recording cell phone beamed directly into the shrinking pupil of Kyle’s eye, and that’s when he felt something snap.
Heart thundering against his ribs, Kyle careened forward, barreling right into the man’s midsection. Fists flying, he attacked him with a frenzy unmatched. All exhaustion was forgotten, replaced by outrageous, electric fever that made his punches harder and his kicks harder.
“Kyle, we’re leaving!” Stan cried. Before the drunk man even got the chance to defend himself, Stan was wrestling Kyle away. He was kicking and clawing, but Stan was inherently bigger and stronger and dragged Kyle out without a word.
The man bent over, blood spouting from his now-broken nose, while Kyle’s body twisted and bucked, struggling against his partner.
An ambulance siren blared from outside and somewhere near, a baby was crying. Shit… shit, the audience was full of kids, wasn’t it? Kids whose parents just wanted to take them out for a fun night…
Kyle gasped, panting and heaving. His body went lax in Stan’s arms, his heels dragging against the ground.
Now that the lights were on, he could see it all clearly. All the chaos. All the ruckus.
An EMS worker leapt over Kyle’s dragging legs as he ran by, emergency bag in hand.
Kyle let his head loll back, relaxing into Stan’s hold. His gaze traveled around the arena, taking it all in. Now that the lights were back on, he could clearly see the booth overhead, the special booth where the usual ringmaster sat with his anonymous goons and bruisers. Lucidly could he see Cartman’s tightly clenched jaw, his panicked, grim eyes.
Instantly, their gazes met, and their eyes locked.
Cartman, pale in the face, shook his head slowly. There was nothing he could do; that power was beyond him now.
Grief swelled and swelled until it broke, bursting in Kyle’s chest and drowning him in anguish. That’s when the tears came, bursting at the eyes and streaming down his face. Kyle wept and bawled, keening and wailing while Stan, somber-faced, could only drag him out with a firm frown.
He marched to the wings where the rest of the performers had fled, all in one place. He set Kyle down on a nearby crate and helped him sit upright. Tweek was sitting on the same crate, and instantly he scrambled to Kyle’s side like a frightened, needy puppy and snatched him into a tight, tight hug.
The whole ensemble looked at one another, paler than they had ever been before. No one could speak, because what could they say? This was the first time—and the last time—the show would not go on.