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Cartman promises himself that he won't cry. From the narrow ceiling of the sky, large wet flakes of snow are smeared in the thick air, and it's so stupid that he has to promise. This time everything is real, the wreath at the tombstone is fresh, flowers are almost blooming; he's wearing a black shirt because the white one would make him sick to wear. Kyle is standing beside him, his hat is missing, with an impenetrable blunt face, looking at the border between the horizon and the sky. It's blurry because the clouds are getting deeper and darker as Kyle is looking through them. He learned to do it so many times, but he rarely did it. His mother won't allow him to cry.
The gravestone is glistening under streams of icy water, shimmering, it hurts the eye with sharp reflections. There is no photo on it, no parting words, no prayer; the engraver must have forgotten how to write anything on these stones other than "Kenny McCormick", there are no dates, crosses, only the number, because, unlike the rest, he counted Kenneth's deaths. Only the small McCormick family, Kyle and Cartman are around. This is a real funeral, and Stan is still too afraid to bury Kenny.
There's no one outside, Cartman crawls out from under a black smooth umbrella when it is already completely dark outside, but doesn't crawl out from under the wet sky. There are no lanterns in the cemetery, so Eric only has an imprint of someone else's name on his retina, but it's enough for him, because he feels a clogging sensation in the back of his throat the moment he finds the outline of someone else's grave in the dark. He's glad that he put on the black shirt, vomit spews out of his mouth directly over his clothes, sorrow pours from him like tar, he tries to rip his own spine out of his mouth, but with his nails only clings to the slippery tongue, so chatty at times.
"Hey- It's useless if you're not calling me broke, just rip it the fuck out."
Eric again tries to rip out his soul, because his ribs are breaking and crunching under the weight, and there's not enough room for the both of them, but he vomits again, now with blood.
***
This happens, it has already happened before. Stan wasn't there that time, and Kyle didn't cry, and Eric put on a black shirt. They were nine, Kenny somehow got used to it, got used to wet black soil and gravestones, he joked about it with Butters, told Karen about who he had met in hell and kept the tally on the walls. No one knew exactly how many times he died, and he himself was not completely sure of the number. Each death is like a label, a scar, a new name. Kenny remembered each one, but his body didn’t, and that’s the best thing about death. You don't have scars - your bones crumble, your skin burns, the blood goes out of your arteries, but your mind rushes about- breathless, it feels the burden of life and the proximity of death. He was always pulled to hell, never interested or asked. The tally is endless on the walls of the underworld.
That time, the wounds opened and Kenny lost count. It's hot in the crematorium, the flames lick off invisible sweat and free his spirit, clefts of scars flow through his soul, he sinks into the depths of the fire, turning into ash. When Cartman drinks it up to the last drop, he meets his soul and doesn't feel the scars. Inside Eric is different. He feels Kenny in his chest, he feels his cunning little soul, and he wriggles like a snake, he stings. Under his skin it's empty, but his soul is small, dense, closed. Kenny doesn't try to reach him from the inside, but he looks for loopholes outside, gnaws out ulcers in the stomach, uncorks the bronchi, leaves traces.
He took revenge on him, tried to get out, tore his muscles in search of a way to escape. Eric's insides are filled with pus, but Kenny doesn't mind if he joins him and starts counting. Everything repeats itself, and Kenny stops remembering his deaths.
***
Stan doesn't speak to anyone around him, he pulls on a hoodie over his own torso and buries himself in his bones. They're fourteen - the older you get, the easier it is to get hit in the gut, learn what death is and be stung by it or it's presence.
"Say hi to this asshole who never even said goodbye to me."
Cartman punches himself in the stomach so hard that he clings to his tongue with his teeth, which is less of a price to pay for his compassion. Kenny hoots under his spleen and chuckles in his ear. He has a broken voice, but in his head he sounds muffled, pops his thoughts like bubbles. Eric drowns in the sense of the unconditional presence of someone else, gets used to boob jokes and screams breaking out from his tongue. Kenny is no longer scared, he sees the stitches on the other's organs and only smirks about his own, but doesn’t tear them.
Kyle stares at Eric dryly, indifferently, refusing to frown as Cartman elbows his ribs. He guesses, and he remembers, but he desperately wants to forget.
Passing by at lunch, he only says:
- “Hi, Kenny.”
And doesn't say anything to Eric at all. Cartman hasn't been offended for a long time.
***
“They're grieving."
The soul never sleeps, the soul breaks free, it scratches the walls of the throat, it's interested of the outside it can not reach.
- "No shit, you fucking moron."
Eric isn't sure if that was a statement, scratching his wrists with his fingernails as he stares out the foggy dark window. There is no moon, no precipitation, only a flat dull pink sky and the makings of a fast sunset. Cartman closes his eyes and sees Kenny in front of him. He looks upset.
- “Stan never believed this shit, and Kyle's bitching 'cause you're serving your sentence inside me.”
He doesn’t need to highlight the last word to feel how his tongue bends from the bitterness.
"They never gave a fuck when I died."
Kenny doesn't speak, he thinks. A lacerated, torn scar creeps across his forehead from the time Kyle cut through his head with a chainsaw, but Eric doesn't draw attention to it. Kenny surprisingly has many scars, but Eric never drew enough attention to him.
- “Dude, they were devastated, it just happened too many times.”
He doesn’t put emphasis on "we'', but Kenny catches this thought with his fingers and buries it deep within himself.
"So they’re not grieving."
Cartman doesn’t know when they managed to step over this stupid dislike, when he managed to reform his ridicule into trust. He opens his eyes so he doesn't see someone else's face, and looks out the window. The sky is black.
- “I am.”
Kenny falls silent and Cartman realizes that he doesn't like silence. He presses his tongue up to his palate, just to suffocate, but only falls asleep.
***
Stan and Kyle are seated in different corners of the classroom for the first time in eight years, and only Eric isn’t shocked. Stan rots from the inside, and Kyle has always been pissed off by people who are mentally unstable, regardless of whether it was their fault or not.
“Stan's team broke up, what a bummer."
Kenny isn't sad. He swallows words that will prevent Eric from thinking, but he still sees them flickering in front of his eyelids, ringing in his ears. Cartman is used to it.
His left eye sees several times worse than his right, and Kenny apologizes for this only once, and then doesn’t apologize for anything at all.
"Dude, sorry for the eye, shoulda' said that my eyes are shit."
Kenny's seat is empty, but no one dares to take it, it's dusty, dead and quiet. Eric wants to pull the damn desk down to hell, but the next day he puts on Kenny's hoodie, sits down in his seat and doesn’t justify himself to anyone. Smoke is streaming from the inside of his chest, and he wants to suffocate from the flames burning inside.
***
Kenny falls silent one day and Cartman screams about how he doesn't like silence. His ribs are covered in soot, he pulls his teeth out, black with grime and wants to rip out his own heart to free up some space.
- “Kenny, where are you?”
Silence loves Eric, silence creeps into him through his pores, it soaks the bed and him inside like a sponge. He scratches his chest, trying to break through and find Kenny, his fucking blue eyes and stitches on his scars. Cartman's left eye is now white, blind. He sees in the mirror only half of his stunted flesh, feels his teeth and looks for a loophole. The blind eye looks inside him and sees only a large cruciform scar on his chest, blood and smog.
- “Kenny!”
Cartman yearns and fights with himself, tightens bruises, sucks out green pus. In the mirror, a crack goes where his forehead is, he looks deep into his own eyes - brown, the color of life, pulsating, with a web of burst capillaries, and white - without a pupil, without color, without blood. Cartman doesn't feel him, doesn't feel Kenny and doesn't feel himself. He fights with Kyle after half an hour and argues for a very long time, because he wants to hammer his own head with anything but silence.
He comes to the grave six months later, in a dirty, tattered tangerine-colored hoodie, half-blind and half-dead, trampling the dirty grass. The headstone is crookedly, disgustingly engraved with "Kenneth McCormick" and the number of deaths. Cartman mentally adds one more to two thousand two hundred and three, straightens a three on the marble with a knife and hopes that he will now vomit.
Under the hoodie he has a black shirt, old, with rips and bile stains on the collar, and when Eric vomits in a bush next to him, Kenny sits beside him, smiling and not talking.
- “You're grieving.”
He is hit by a car on the same day.