Chapter Text
As usual, the peak of Stan Marsh’s Saturday evening started with breaking and entering.
He often forgets that technically breaking into homes is a felony and technically he should feel ashamed while doing so. Still, guilt doesn’t manage to impact him as he feels his fingers along the familiar groove of the house he was sneaking into. Perhaps he didn’t feel guilty because this was a customary part of his weekends, or perhaps he didn’t feel guilty because he was significantly drunk.
Stan’s hands grip the top of the window pane on the second floor, his feet weaved into the trellis that weaves around the dark green bricks of the house from the ground all the way past the window. The white-painted wood of the trellis had peeled and broken in some places due to Stan’s frequent visits, but also due to the fact that it wasn’t meant to accommodate the weight of a 6-foot-tall 18-year-old boy.
Digging his fingers into the pane of the window, he rattles at the frame until he feels it come loose. Then, he pulls upward enough that there is a gap tall enough for his skinny body to slide in through. He does just this, cautiously withdrawing his feet from the trellis before he worms his chest onto the window sill, feet dangling before he slithers inside. In his backpack, the collection of glass bottles definitely not filled with illegal substances clinked together to announce his arrival.
He pushes himself up from the familiar carpet until he sits on his knees and cautiously slides the backpack off his back to lean against the now-open window. The bedroom was quiet aside from the clicking of a computer keyboard from its occupant, who was blissfully unaware of the break-in occurring behind him. He was seated at his desk, his back facing where Stan was quietly creeping across the carpet. He had his headphones on, his head bobbing slightly along to whatever music he was playing. He was seated before his PC and monitor, and if Stan knew him well enough, he would guess he was either playing Minecraft or some shooter game.
Slowly, Stan rises to his feet and steadies himself, reveling in the way his vision spun just a little. He had been sober enough to crawl up the side of a two-story house, but drunk enough that his cheeks felt flushed and if he stared at something still, it appeared to swirl and vibrate in his vision.
Once Stan looms behind the desk chair, he raises his hands up before bringing them down to squeeze the occupant’s shoulders whilst exclaiming, “boo!”
His victim, Kyle Broflovski, immediately tenses, swatting the hands away and screeching at the jumpscare. He turns around with such force that his headphones slip off of his ears, and in his game– which, sure enough, was Minecraft– his character falls off of a cliff and promptly dies.
“Fucking hell!” Kyle shouts, but Stan was too busy keeling over with laughter to see his friend’s infuriated expression. “Jesus Christ, Stan!” Stan’s ears practically ring with the volume of Kyle’s voice, but this was warranted given the fact that Stan often slips into his room and scares the shit out of him.
“Kyle?” Sheila Broflovski calls from downstairs, “Is everything okay, Bubbah?”
Kyle, whose hand was clasped over his heart to keep it from racing any faster than it already was, shouts back, “Everything is not fine! Stan broke in again!” Kyle makes his exasperation infinitely clear by punching Stan across the shoulder, who had laughed so hard that now all he could do was wheeze.
“Ow!” Stan whines.
“You could just use the front door next time, Stanley!” is Sheila’s automated response, but there’s amusement clear in her voice even with its muffle from the space separating them.
“I will!” Stan calls back, but Kyle mumbles, “No you won’t, you dickhead.”
“No, I won’t,” Stan confirms, a brazen smile stretching at his lips. Kyle sighs and slips his headphones to dangle around his neck,
“So, on a scale from sober to fucked up, how are you right now?”
Stan sinks to sit on the carpet, and he blows raspberries in thought, “uh, like, definitely not sober but sober enough to sneak into your room and scare the shit out of you.” Kyle scowls,
“Clearly.” He watches with unmasked scrutiny as Stan stretches across the floor to grope for his backpack which, if Kyle hadn’t already guessed, clinked with every move to reveal its contents. Stan unzips it and riffles through until he settles on pulling out a bottle of vodka and a bottle of peach Schnapps.
“Gimme a cup,” Stan orders, and Kyle concedes, watching in silence as Stan pours a considerable dosage of vodka and then adds Schnapps until the drink is leveled at the top of the red solo cup.
“Please tell me you aren’t mixing alcohol with alcohol,” Kyle groans. “I’m no expert but aren’t you supposed to, like, dilute it with soda or something?”
Stan raises his brows, and pretending to be in thought, says, “you’re right, Kyle. I was wrong for what I did. Thank God you said something.” Then, he promptly tilts his head back, Adam’s apple bobbing as he gulps down at least half of the drink. Kyle rolls his eyes.
“Kyle,” Stan says and wipes his mouth on his sleeve as he sets his half-finished drink beside him. He burps unabashedly then continues, “we’re going out.”
Kyle leans his head back enough that his mop of rust-colored corkscrew curls spills from his forehead. “You should know by now that I fucking hate parties and that I’m not interested in watching you stick your tongue down Wendy’s throat.”
Stan frowns, and something in his chest feels tight at the mention of Wendy, just for a moment before it fades. The vulnerability flickered alive just for a moment before it was crushed by the warm, pleasant buzz of alcohol washing over his system. “Oh, come on,” Stan says. “You skipped the part where you beat up Cartman and I cheer you on.”
Kyle stares back at him challengingly, “you skipped the part where you throw up in the bushes and I have to carry you home.”
Stan narrows his eyes, but his lips remained sealed because Kyle had a point and was speaking from (a lot of) experience. “Fuck off.”
“You fuck off,” Kyle shoots back, “I’m not going to a party.”
Stan scoffs, “well, fine, because I wasn’t going to take you to a party, anyway.”
Kyle does not hide his look of disbelief. “You weren’t? Then what are we doing tonight?”
“We are…” he pauses as if waiting for a drumroll, “going to finish the bucket list.”
Kyle’s eyes widen from behind his glasses, his brows raising at the proposition. Stan continues, “we gotta knock everything off the bucket list before we graduate, remember?”
Stan knew Kyle would remember the bucket list. They made it together when they were eleven during the hot summer before sixth grade, sprawled on the carpet of Stan’s bedroom floor, wrestling each other aside to catch the most breeze from the rotating fan.
“But we can only check stuff off the list if we do it together,” Kyle had said, “right?”
“Right,” Stan had replied, and he tapped his pen to his bottom lip in thought. “Kyle?”
“What?”
He hesitated, then, “will we still be friends?”
Kyle pauses, and Stan looked at the crumpled paper they both were leaned over, yet refused to look up, for he felt Kyle’s scrutinizing gaze on his face. “What?” Kyle repeated.
“We have forever until senior year,” Stan said, voice muffled against where he was sullenly slumping his cheek against his hand. He didn’t say this aloud, but in that moment, Stan got the sad feeling that he wasn’t going to make it to senior year. Like the notion of growing up with Kyle and finally getting out of this shithole town was too far on the horizon to be attainable.
Kyle punched his arm, hard enough that Stan yelped. Shocked, Stan pulled his head from his hand and looked to his friend who was so determined that he almost looked angry. Maybe he was a little angry. “We’ll still be friends,” Kyle said, and the way he said this as a statement made Stan’s heart clench pleasantly in his chest, “we’ll still be super best friends, and we’ll do this bucket list.”
Stan blinked, coming back from the memory to the present where Kyle sighs, defeated. “Well, a pact is a pact,” Kyle mutters, and Stan whoops victoriously. Kyle spins around in his chair to face his desk once again and begins to rummage through the drawers for the age-old bucket list. Stan usually isn’t the most physically affectionate person in the world, but the inebriation pushes him to lean forward until his forehead rests on Kyle’s knee. Kyle doesn’t so much as tense, but the rummaging halts and he flicks Stan’s forehead.
“We haven’t done too bad,” Kyle says, and Stan points his head upwards to look at the where Kyle had retrieved the crumpled page and placed it on his desk. But, thanks to his drunkness inebriation, Stan squints at the paper, the words too blurry for him to make out. He blinks and rubs at his eyes, but his vision is unable to focus. Kyle looks down at Stan, watching his friend blink and squint. “Jesus Christ,” Kyle mumbles, “you’re so drunk.”
“You could be, too,” Stan proposes, eyes looking up at his friend with a cheeky grin. Kyle ignores this and begins to list out the things they’d completed on the bucket list:
“Sneak into Cartman’s house and tape pictures of Michael Cera to all of the pictures on the walls to convince him that that is his real dad.” Oddly specific, but definitely worth the effort. Cartman had a meltdown that lasted an entire week. “Spike the prom punchbowl, go in public and pretend you successfully time traveled, go camping.” The camping trip the group went on near Stan’s Uncle Jimbo’s had to be one of his favorite high school memories. It was a good time: they pranked Cartman and made him think that Bigfoot was hunting him down, Kenny got impaled by a fishing pole and died, they made s’mores, the usual events. “These next ones have a little bit of a theme,” Kyle says. Stan hums. “Get high and go to an amusement park. Get high and go to the aquarium. Get high and go to a haunted house. Get high and-”
“Okay, okay,” Stan said, “I get it. We did a lot of stuff while high. What’s left on the list that we haven’t done?”
“The first one is to go skinny dipping,” Kyle says. Stan cringes,
“Who the hell’s idea was that?”
“Well, it looks like Kenny’s handwriting.” That wasn’t a shock. “Then what’s left is to TP someone’s house, crash a wedding, and, uh, make out with someone.”
“Make out with someone?” Stan echoes, and his tongue was starting to feel large and slow in his mouth. He lets his head slump to the side so that his cheek is pressed to Kyle’s thigh. “But- oh, that’s right.” He smirks, “we both have to have done something for it to be crossed off.”
Kyle glowers, “shut up, I’ll kill you.” (All there was to be said was that Stan spent most of high school with a girlfriend, and Kyle didn’t.)
“Well anyway,” Stan yawns, drumming his fingers on Kyle’s leg, “we’re gonna finish it all. Tonight.”
“Tonight??” Kyle squawks, “are you insane?? Y’know, to crash a wedding, there has to be a wedding! And no one in their right mind is gonna get married in buttfuck South Park.”
Stan grins, “funny you say that, because yesterday, my Uncle Jimbo told me about how on the other side of the mountain, he saw a wedding getting set up. A big one too.”
Kyle deadpans, “you’re fucking insane, Stan. You’ve seriously lost it.”
“A pact is a pact,” Stan parrots, and so Kyle, after nudging Stan’s head from his knee, devises the plan for the evening. Stan makes Kyle a drink, and with the Sponge Bob episodes playing from Kyle’s PC as ambient noise, the two schemed. They would recruit Tolkien to drive them to the wedding in exchange for a rolled joint (thanks to Stan). Then, they would crash the wedding and gorge on the free food and open bar. Somewhere along the line they would have to find someone for Kyle to make out with before they would vanish to avoid getting caught. After that, they would TP Cartman’s house, naturally. (They were ignoring Kenny’s harsh handwriting of “skinny dipping” for the time being.)
With the plan completed, Kyle finished off his drink, and the two moved their attention to Sponge Bob. They were sprawled on Kyle’s half-made bed, all whilst Stan’s own considerable sum of drinks he consumed started to kick in. Suddenly the jokes were too funny, and the way Kyle’s warm body next to his was both too perfect and not enough, and if Stan weren’t determined to have a fun night out, he would roll over right here and go to sleep knowing that he was home right next to his best friend. But, Kyle tossed his solo cup with a ceremonious clatter of the cup to the ground, and it was hardly another Sponge Bob episode before Kyle was tipsy. “Lightweight,” Stan had teased, and Kyle elbowed him in the gut for it.
“Alright,” Kyle announces, pushing himself up on his elbows. He looks to Stan. “Ready?”
Stan is already rising to his feet when he responds, “always.”