Work Text:
Stan doesn't really think there's a chance they'll have school tomorrow, not with the snow pouring down past the bedroom window in a slanting blizzard of silver and black, but he still tries to sleep.
It doesn't go very well.
From his bed is a clear view of the laundry basket he's had since he was a kid; blue and yellow with a cartoon dog frolicking in a field of daisies. Stan stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, and confronted daily with the mutational horror of Goofy.
An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.
And then, out of the chilly winter silence, rings his text chime.
Stan sits up and gets his phone off the bedside table, muttering about the time and rubbing his eyes against the agonising blue square of light that projects directly into his retinas.
It's Kyle.
Stan's frown disappears and he logs in immediately to read the text.
Usually, he just stickers a thumbs up to the corner of messages, but Kyle is different, he requires care and attention. Stan types a reply, then deletes it, opting for something more casual.
The phone is ringing before he even has time to process the movement of his own thumbs.
Kyle picks up with a dramatic, self-pitying groan. “Stan. These AP classes are actually going to kill me."
He leans his head against his shoulder and hums. "Maybe if you weren't busy with basketball, debate club, social media, the job you don't even need, cleaning up the messes your parents make through their various legal and sociopolitical ventures—"
"Oh, shut up." Kyle laughs but it's undeniably webbed with exhaustion. "The actual work is the real monster. It's nonstop, I can’t take it on my own... I need emotional support, like a service dog or something.”
“And I’m that service dog?” Stan says in a mock offended monotone voice.
“Of course. Don’t act too flattered.”
"Woof woof." He lays back in his bed and smiles because it’s obvious, at least to him, that this is just Kyle’s excuse to talk; he loves busyness, the sense of being overextended and not knowing what to do first. A manic energy propels him, and he always gets everything done.
The phone is on speaker, and by the slightly muffled sound of it, on either Kyle's thick blue comforter or resting on one of his pillows. He audibly shuffles through some papers and talks a bit about the test tomorrow that Stan's sure isn't gonna happen with the foot of snow already covering every drivable surface.
He nods along to his words and offers a few lazy replies.
"Oh!" Kyle startles him with the sudden exclamation and grabs the phone, typing something. "Let me email you the essay I finished a few hours ago. It’s on Soviet defection. Took a while to finish. I don’t know how good it is though, you know my tangents.”
“I love your tangents,” Stan says.
“I’m not asking you to edit or anything, just read it y’know? Maybe highlight any big sections you want me to take out.”
“Let me guess, it’s like five pages lo— oh holy shit.” Stan’s eyes widen when he opens up the email on his phone. “Dude sixteen? Fuck. I wrote three.”
“I told you.” Kyle draws out sadly. “These tangents are out of my control.”
“Oh, the horror! Tell me there were no fatalities.”
Over the phone, he huffs out a half–annoyed laugh. “Just read it. I have a ton of other shit to do.”
If this were anyone else, Stan wouldn’t do it. He doesn’t care about history, much less Soviet defection, but somehow his friend manages to make every paper interesting.
To an amateur, all the credit would go to Kyle’s writing style; it’s witty, slightly sporadic and, although generally filled with a ton of grammar errors, seems undeniably smart.
But Stan knows Kyle and therefore knows better. The real reason he can pull off interesting papers on boring subjects is because he cares. Really. If something doesn’t enthrall him he avoids it, but when lucky little subjects and people stick in his brain, he cares about them with near hallucinatory intensity. Weeks of research, days of work, hours of vivid, violent, wakeful dreaming at the keyboard, and for Soviet goddamn defection.
Still, Stan is charmed by the painstaking evocation of a midcentury foreign hellhole with its slang and architecture. Wow creepy, damaged yet oddly tender Stalin and your sociopathic grace! How interesting! How about a second date?
He finishes the essay with a bizarre feeling of having been transported through time and space to the murder and espionage and political turmoil behind the late Berlin Wall, and then back to his chilly room in Colorado.
It leaves him oddly inspired, although he knows the only thing he really cares about enough to write with the same passion as Kyle does, is the redhead himself.
He licks his lips and smiles, shuffling deep under his coverlets and staring at the call time tick up on his screen. “I think it was really good.”
There’s no reply. The only thing he hears is the occasional shuffling of sheets and the almost inaudible tide of Kyle’s exhausted breathing.
“Kyle?” Stan chuckles at the thought of him asleep with the homework strewn across his bed. Kyle's a cute napper, he curls in on himself like some little animal, head on his forearms, knees bent. "I bet you look adorable right now."
As soon as the words leave his mouth, a strange emotion overtakes him. It might be regret, or relief, or grim satisfaction, but in one way or another, having said that guilty little thought that he'd considered a million times before brings a blush to his cheeks and lifts a weight off his shoulders.
"But I guess you're always adorable," Stan says quietly.
There it is, there's that feeling again.
"You'd think I'd have a resistance to it by now, but I'm just like everyone else, melting at the sight of your eyes. They're bright though. I mean crazy bright. Like when we swam in Starks Pond right in the middle of summer when it was all green, and I opened my eyes underwater and I could see the sunlight shining through all that microscopic life..." Stan puts a hand to his heart and can feel the faint flutter of its effort to keep up with his reeling mind. "That's the only color that comes close to your eyes. But I bet there's some distant planet that matches them completely. Like maybe Heaven or some junk, I don't know."
The more he talks, the more right this feels, and the more words bloom into the front of his mind, thoughts he didn't even know he'd had.
"If you were a girl I'd totally swoon over you. It's not even funny. I'd have the biggest, lamest head–over–heels, butterfly–inducing, phone–cord–twirling crush." For a second, he wonders how he can say that as a confident fact, then the admission pours out his mouth before he fully accepts the answer. "Maybe I already do."
Silence.
Stan slaps a hand over his mouth and stares at nothing with wide eyes. His face feels hot. Everything feels hot.
That was wrong. He shouldn't have said that. Crud. It just came out. He's glad Kyle isn't actually—
"Did you really mean that?" Kyle murmurs tiredly through the phone.
Stan makes a strangled sort of noise in surprise and slams his eyes shut. Fuck. "W–whuh huh?"
He yawns, letting it fade into a hum. He doesn't seem upset at all. "I asked if you meant it, you know, having a crush on me. Or if you were messing around. Or if it was a mistake."
Stan doesn't know what he was doing. It seems so dumb in hindsight, like waking up in the morning after procrastinating a week's worth of homework. "I... I'm not sure."
There's a pause. "Do you do this every time I doze off on call?"
"No!" He assures quickly. "Absolutely not, I swear."
Kyle laughs quietly. "Well okay then." He hangs up.
Stan groans into his pillow, kicking his legs in frustration. At least he didn't seem mad. But still.
He overthinks himself into exhaustion and then to sleep.
───※ ·❆· ※───
Stan wakes up to the sound of his phone going off. His eyes crack open. It's still dark but the early winter light is pooling at his curtains. He throws his hand over to the bedside table and feels around.
One notification from the school that it will, in fact, be a snow day, and... three new texts from Kyle.
He stares at it for a while, stomach tight with dread and nausea, then logs in to see what he said.
