My latest maaaaaaasterpiece
Aug. 19th, 2011 22:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sekritomgTitle: Fake Hipsters (12/14)
Rating: R overall; this chapter, PG
Pairing: Stan/Kyle; various
Summary: You can take Stan out of South Park, but you can't take the South Park out of Stan.
Note: This is ... a sad story, I guess.
If you love formatting, you'll love FF.net! Which is why I will post a link to there when I get this up.
In this chapter: Tuna noodle casserole, quality time in the garage, and Stan pussies out again.
The next day was dismal, sky the color of slate threatening to suffocate Stan as he trudged up the shoveled pathway to Kyle’s front door.
He’d resolved to make this visit over a bowl of Chex. His mother’s endless questioning — when are you leaving? Did you buy a ticket? What kind of milk is that, is that 2 percent milk? I told your father to get 1 percent but he never listens. Honey, how old is that milk? Do you want me to run out and get you a new thing of milk? Don’t put that 2 percent milk in your cereal, Stanley, let Mommy take care of it — seemed less preferable at this point than facing Kyle, facing whatever would happen at their confrontation.
Sheila Broflovski answered, wiping her hands on an apron. She didn’t seem to be in a very good mood, scowling at first glance, but when she recognized Stan a giant grin parted her lips and she said, “Stanley! What a pleasant surprise.” Stan could tell this enthusiasm was genuine.
So he smiled back. “Hey,” he said, waving from the other side of the screen door. “How are you?”
“On, I’m decent enough, decent enough.” Sheila pushed the screen door open and yanked him inside. “Don’t stand out there, dear, it’s much too cold to just dawdle around outside like that. Oh, and your shoes — you can’t wear sneakers in the mountains in two feet of snow! I’d ask where you grew up or something but, Stanley, you should know better.”
Stan looked down at his feet, sopping-wet green Converses, and blushed. “Force of habit,” he said.
“Habit? What habit? It doesn’t get cold in Chicago? I had cousins growing up there, through marriage, my mother’s brother’s wife’s family. Oh, it doesn’t matter. But such violent winters, they were always talking about! You wear those sneakers all year long?”
Well, yes, as he only owned three pairs of shoes. Stan didn’t have a lot of options. “Well, I don’t know, global warming — I guess it’s different.” He shrugged, just to make the point that he didn’t want to continue the discussion. “But, is Kyle home?”
“Oh, yes!” She brushed her hands together. “Of course, you’re not here to talk to me. He’s in the kitchen. Come on.” She began to saunter through the living room, and Stan followed.
“Kyle!” she announced as they entered the kitchen. “Stan’s here, bubbe. You didn’t tell me you had plans!”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Kyle snapped. Then he sat back in his chair, crossing his arms. “But as it happens I didn’t have any plans.”
“Ah, okay.” Sheila raised her eyebrows. “I see. Well. In that case, I’d better leave you boys alone. Kyle, bubbe, any idea where your brother ran off to?”
Kyle shrugged. “I thought he was my babysitter. Not the other way around.”
She sighed, rubbing temples. “You know it doesn’t work like that, Kyle. If you hear from him, you tell him I want him to come home right away. Or do you think he’s going out for New Year’s Eve tonight? I mean, he can’t be planning to be gone all day and all night. I want to know what his plans are. Do you think he’s out with Filmore?”
“I don’t know, Ma. I really, really don’t know.”
“Well, two of us not knowing does us no good.” Sheila reached behind her back to undo the sloppy bow on her apron. She stuffed it in a drawer. “If you boys need something, come find me. And tell your brother he can’t run out for the whole day without talking to me first! It’s New Year’s Eve, and there are sickos out there!”
“Of course.” Kyle nodded.
“Well, goodbye,” she said.
“Go already if you’re going.”
So finally, she left.
Kyle waited until he heard her door slam from upstairs, and then turned to Stan, smirking. “She’s so right about the sickos, though, isn’t she? Lord knows who’s taking advantage of poor Ike right now.”
At this point Stan figured he’d been standing long enough, so he took a seat across from Kyle at the table. Stan realized he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say. Just the gesture of coming here had been a lot of internalize — a step he’d had to force himself to take.
Those cat’s-eye sunglasses were folded up on the table, next to a glass of milk and a plate of tuna noodle casserole — a nice dairy lunch for a nice Jewish boy, Stan figured. Sheila put peas in it, and altogether it wasn’t a very appealing dish, noodles and fish and frozen peas bathed in cream of mushroom, topped with breadcrumbs. This was the shit they used to eat when they were in grade school, sitting on the couch together watching reruns of — what else? — Terrance and Philip, putting off doing homework and thinking about growing up. This was what they did long before Kyle began to slip further and further away from your basic façade of sanity, before he couldn’t sit still without beginning to tear his cuticles off bit by bit until blood came to the places where his nails met his flesh. Or when Stan still had an elementary school girlfriend, Wendy Testaburger — he remembered how badly he wanted to kiss her, not because he was aroused by her in some way, because he was like 8 or 10 or whatever and nothing aroused him like that, but just because she made him feel special and foolish and very, very nervous.
For just a few brief moments Stan caught a whiff of the cream of mushroom soup in those noodles and he was brought back to a reality made out of primary colors and construction paper and blunt shapes where everything and everyone kind of looked the same. The only thing he knew then was that South Park was very, very random and Kyle Broflovski was always going to be his best friend. But when the moment passed, Stan looked around at the room he was sitting in, and Kyle’s half-eaten dish of casserole; everything just looked dingy and old. Kyle himself had bruises around his eyes and they were so very bloodshot and his lips were so chapped they were almost ragged. The complexity of this was too much and Stan no longer knew what he was doing here.
“Hello?” Kyle said, bringing him back from the edge of his ruminations. “You look zoned out. And I’m the one who just slept for 18 hours.”
Which seemed like quite some time. “That’s really a lot,” Stan replied, easing back into a rhythm of conversation he wasn’t sure he could ever regain. “You look pretty tired.”
“Stan,” he said with a desperate kind of frankness. “I’m fucking exhausted.”
~
Kyle wanted a cigarette, so they went to sit in the empty, open garage (Kyle’s father was at work, with the car — Gerald Broflovski must have been the only self-employed man in Colorado who would go into the office on New Year’s Eve, Stan figured) and talk about whatever it was they had to discuss. Stan wasn’t sure what this was, or maybe he felt it would be better if they just stared at each other and said nothing for a long time. And they did this while Kyle smoked, hunched over on the concrete floor almost as if he were hiding. But as soon as Kyle finished the cigarette and smashed it into the ground, he looked up and said, “Okay, so she won’t hear us out here.”
“Who, your mom?” Stan asked.
“Yes,” Kyle hissed, crawling back over to where Stan was sitting, the steps the led to the mud room door. “She is always listening to me, she’s worse than the CIA. It’s some serious literary thought crime shit.”
“That’s madness.”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “Well, go figure.”
Stan found this pretty amusing, so he laughed a little, but Kyle was giving him the most heartbreaking look of pain, so he stopped. “What?” he asked.
“You fucked Ike!”
“Oh, yeah,” Stan said, like maybe he didn’t remember, although he most definitely did.
“But I’m getting ahead of myself.” Kyle reached up the left sleeve of his sweatshirt, pulling out a well-worn scrap of yellow lined paper. “I want to be angry at you. I mean, I am furious, I am. But I’m tried, dude. And I’m cycling through a bunch of shit and I don’t even know where I am anymore.”
“Well, uh.” Stan raised a ceremonial hand, palm open, toward the heavens. “We’re in the garage.”
Ignoring that, Kyle continued: “Anyway, I have this list.” He unfolded the paper and read it over to himself, lips parted just a bit. (Stan wanted to grab him by the shoulders and slip his fingers inside those lips — not because it was sexy, because it sort of wasn’t, but because it reminded him of opening up an airway, and Kyle looked like he could use some air. Or so Stan was trying to convince himself.) “Ah, okay,” Kyle said. “Number one. Maybe I should explain, though. I’ve been keeping this list since before you came home. Actually, I started writing it in the hospital. Over Thanksgiving.” Kyle’s face went red. He shook his head. “Okay, number one. What are you going to do about Loren, because you clearly hate that guy? Well, that’s taken care of, isn’t it?”
“Actually,” Stan said, “I talked to him yesterday.”
“What!” Kyle snapped. “Why?”
“I figured I owed him a phone call,” Stan said. Then his eyes narrowed. “But what’s it to you?”
“Nothing. Do you know what? I don’t want to talk about Loren. Actually, from now on, I don’t give a shit about Loren. Don’t talk to me about him. Okay, moving on. Two — these aren’t in order, by the way: I do not think I am manic-depressive.”
This theory did not even resonate with Stan. To him, Kyle had so long been fucking crazy that it was as ludicrous as the idea that maybe Kyle wasn’t Jewish or wasn’t redheaded or something. “Uh huh,” he said, nodding as a courtesy. “That’s interesting.”
“You don’t believe me!”
“It’s not a matter of believing you or not,” Stan explained. “We’re sitting on the floor of your garage because you think your mom is spying on you, and in the past week you tried to maul me, and what was that shit two days ago with Kenny and the amphetamines?”
“It’s just Dexedrine,” Kyle scoffed, as if there were such a thing as just Dexedrine.
“You’re clearly bipolar, okay? I’m not going to indulge this crap. If you just do what doctors tell you, you’ll be fine, but if you go screwing around with shit you’ll be even more fucked up. I think we learned that the hard way in high school. So sure, I guess I don’t believe you.”
“Bullshit!” Kyle cried, pointing a finger into Stan’s shoulder. “You’re not a fucking psychologist, or trained in mental/emotional acrobatics, or tuned into anything having to do with neurotransmitters and brain wiring and how truly, truly awful it all feels.”
“I think knowing you is some kinda serious field experience.”
“Fuck you! It is not! You don’t know anything! You don’t know this, but people can be misdiagnosed, Stan! I see it all the time. I met this girl over Thanksgiving; she clearly had a personality disorder but they kept giving her drugs for depression, and she wasn’t like that so mood elevators just fucked her up, so then they gave her downers and she felt like crap, and then she needed even stronger anti-depressant shit just to climb out of that hole — it was tragic, this girl I met. I felt so bad for her, this girl. Lithium, you know, they write songs about it for a reason.”
“Is this someone you keep in touch with?” Stan asked.
“Well, yes.” Kyle lowered his eyes. “Because I’m talking about me.”
“Oh-kay.” Stan stood up, brushing the dust from the garage floor off of his ass. “This is weird now.”
“Sit back down,” Kyle growled. “So help me Stanley Marsh you will sit back down or I swear.”
“You swear what?” Stan asked. He sounded incongruous, but he was still doing it. “You’ll what, you’ll come at me again?”
“I’ll come at you a million times if I feel like it,” Kyle warned. “I’ll come at you so hard and so fast you’ll just shatter.”
“Okay.” Stan rolled his eyes. This poetic crazy nonsense — he didn’t have time for it. “Fine.”
Again, there was silence — Kyle’s brooding; Stan’s annoyed.
Then Kyle said, “This is something I need you to back me up on.”
“I don’t see why it matters what I think. If you think you have some” — Stan waved his hand around, searching for a word — “qualms or whatever, you need to take it up with your doctor. Or at least your parents.”
“My parents would be more willing to listen to me if you got behind me.”
“Huh.” For a moment, Stan did think about getting behind Kyle, in a literal sense, which was the result of his lack of good imagination. It had been a really long time since he’d put his arms around Kyle’s waist, but there were two problems with just grabbing him: One was that Kyle didn’t do well with surprises, and being grabbed from behind would probably set him off. (Stan knew this from high school, when Kenny tried it once and was rewarded by being kicked into a chain-link fence.) Kyle was also tiny, at least where Stan was concerned, and although he knew Kyle could take it there was something foreboding about grabbing the guy, not wanting to break him. So Stan just sat there, tenting his fingers, and said, “I don’t see how me getting involved is going to be any help.”
“Well, they trust you,” Kyle explained. He was clutching his list in a nervous way, fingers trembling just a little, but enough for Stan to notice. “You’re the litmus test of crazy. Maybe I’m crazy but that doesn’t mean every word out of my mouth is crazy—”
Stan wasn’t sure if he believed that.
“—and I think if you tell them we talked and it sounds feasible, they’ll take me seriously. I mean, you don’t just tell doctors they’re wrong, Stan. They’re doctors. I’m in a lot of pain—”
“Oh, don’t even go there. You inflict that shit on yourself. If you just stuck to your meds and didn’t try to fucking outsmart everyone, not that it’s difficult, I mean, Kenny, come on—”
Kyle interrupted. “I don’t mean physical pain! I mean, yes, I do think it’s pretty obvious the self-harm is kind of a reflection of how I feel otherwise but I mean, inside. Here.” Kyle tapped his head. “Everything feels wrong, all the time. I don’t think you could possibly know what’s going on in here, I don’t even know usually, but it’s not good, it’s scary.” Kyle’s voice became very small. “I’m scared for myself. I barely even know what I am half the time. There’s no way you could know what that feels like.”
“Oh, I think I could.” Stan shook his head.
“Well, then that’s number three,” Kyle said. He shook his list in Stan’s face, for good measure. “You never tell me anything anymore.”
It was too much. Stan knew then that he should have been a better friend. He should have called. He should have come home for Thanksgiving. Kyle was just babbling, trying to get every single thing in his brain out — he’d been storing cuts of meat in a freezer and now they all had to defrost. It was a dumb metaphor, and Stan realized he was only making it because he was staring at the big freezer in the corner of the garage, the one where Kyle’s mother kept slabs and slabs of meat she bought on sale. That, and Stan was quite cold anyway, what with the cement floor and the lack of heat in the garage and, well, it was late December. Plus he felt nervous and wanted to move a little.
“Can we please go inside?” Stan asked. He wrapped his arms around himself for good measure. “It’s cold out here.”
“I’m not cold,” Kyle lied. Stan could see that he was cold. He was shaking, too.
“Okay, that’s crazy. We’re going inside.”
“But she’ll hear!”
Stan rolled his eyes. “Bedroom, Kyle. Now.”
~
Kyle’s bedroom was familiar, his walls covered by the same posters he’d had when he was 8, 9, 10 years old. Kyle didn’t put a lot of effort into keeping his room neat or in any kind of order. There had been a point in high school when Stan realized that maybe Kyle’s room and his emotional condition were related. It was when they were 14 and, incidentally, the weekend before the weekend when Stan ended his football career while ice skating.
The impetus for this realization was that Stan had stepped on a Lego piece, an insidious little two-by-four gray block, concealed by Kyle’s carpet, which was a similar shade of gray. Stan was not a big fan of Legos, but Kyle was in those days; Kyle built tall, twisting structures, then shattered them to pieces. It seemed one of those pieces had been left on the floor, and had ended up gouged in Stan’s foot. Kyle made Stan sit on the bed, and removed the wedge of Lego with a tweezers. Blood was beginning to reach the wound, and Stan was too shocked to feel any pain. “All better,” Kyle had said. Then he put his mouth to the ball of Stan’s foot and licked the puncture until Stan was aroused and embarrassed.
“Stop that,” Stan had said, cupping his foot in his hands, wishing he had been wearing socks. “You’re acting too weird again.” Stan’s foot bothered him for the rest of the week, stinging through scrimmages and tightening skate laces, until Stan ended up in Kyle’s arms, sweating on the ice.
In the same cluttered room, eight years later, Stan found himself arguing with Kyle, who had blanketed Stan with reams of print-outs on borderline personality disorder. Stan could barely move himself to read one of them, let alone the entire stack. Not that Kyle could shut up for long enough to let Stan read anything:
“This is me, right?” he asked, grabbing at one of the papers on the bed. “I fit all of the criteria?”
Stan laughed. He’d spent enough of his life reading about psychiatric conditions on the internet to understand that, yes, it did all sound ... sort of like Kyle.
“What?” Kyle rolled his eyes. He was kneeling on his bed, looking down on Stan, who was slouching against the headboard. “You think it’s funny?”
“I think you need a doctor—”
“I have so many doctors! What I need is for you to be my friend!”
“I am. I’m your best friend.” Stan really meant it.
“Then you have to support me!” Kyle said. “You, of all people!”
Guilt crashed into Stan’s consciousness. What did that mean, him of all people? Just because he was gay, was that what Kyle meant? Stan had taken enough gender and sexuality studies courses (well, only one, but it was still enough) to understand that he felt gender was very binary. Even gay sex, to Stan’s mind, was anchored to this paradigm. So if Kyle was suggesting that on account of having sex with men Stan should understand that Kyle wanted out of the paradigm — okay, Kyle was probably not suggesting that.
“Why me of all people?” Stan asked, hoping Kyle would not reply, Because you’re gay.
And to Stan’s great fortune, he didn’t. “Because,” he said softly. “You’re my best friend. And — and you’re supposed to love me, unconditionally. And support me. Unconditionally.”
“Oh,” Stan said, rubbing his hands together, just to give him something to do while he watched Kyle slump over, looking like his heart was breaking. This was a very reasonable thing for a crazy person to say. “Well, I do.”
“I don’t feel like you do,” said Kyle.
“Well, you can’t just expect me to be like, ‘Okay, good, you attacked me in the street two days ago, so today let’s invent some new gender.’ I’m sorry, you know, maybe some advance warning is better.”
“I’m not even talking about that.”
“Well, then what are you talking about?”
“Stan, I don’t want to do this here.”
“Well, I’m going back to Chicago in two days!” (In theory. Stan still hadn’t bought or changed his ticket.) “So when and where would you like to do it?”
“I thought you were here for two more weeks!”
“Nope, sorry, changed my mind. I’m leaving here. I hate this town.”
“I hate it too!”
“Well,” said Stan, grateful at least that they had some kind of mutual agreement on that point. “In which case I guess you’re not totally crazy.”
“But I want to leave,” Kyle explained. Sitting on the bed he’d been fidgeting, but the idea of leaving seemed to move him to get up and begin pacing. His bedroom wasn’t enormous, and the floor was littered with crushed pills and what looked (to Stan) like dozens of soiled pairs of boxer-briefs. And torn, crumpled sheets of yellow notebook paper, and other college-student detritus: used tissues, unused tissues, pencils, pens, band-aid wrappers, and … was that a bottle of nail polish?
“I want to leave here,” Kyle kept repeating while he paced. “I don’t think it makes me better; it makes me worse. It makes all of us worse. I mean, look at you.”
“Me? What’s this got to do with me? I don’t even live here.”
“You were here for two days and you had sex with a child,” Kyle pointed out.
“Fuck! Will you stop bringing that up? What’s this child shit?”
“It was undeniably fucked-up…”
“Okay! It was fucked up!” Stan threw his hands into the air. Kyle stopped pacing. “How long are you going to hold this against me? Whatever Ike is, okay, he’s not a child. Children might — they might go along willingly if you suggest things to them, but … I don’t know, I don’t suppose a child would initiate sex. How come other people pursue me, and yet I’m the one who gets held responsible?”
“When you’re the party with less to lose, that’s what happens,” said Kyle. “Oh my god. You should talk to my therapist.”
“Which one?” Stan asked.
Kyle felt the sting of this dig, and sat down on the bed. “Yes,” he said, tenting his fingers. “I’d forgotten I’m so massively fucked-up I have more than one therapist.”
But Stan didn’t want to talk about that. “Well, I plan to leave in two days.” He sat up straighter, rolling up his sleeves. He meant business. “So whatever you want to talk about, you’d better tell me now.”
“I’m telling you. I’m trying to tell you. But you won’t listen! I had a list. Where’s my--?” Kyle looked around, feeling the surface of his desk.
“Did you leave it in the garage?” Stan asked.
“Fuck you, no. I’m not that stupid.”
“Well, why don’t you just tell me what you remember is on the list, and as you go along you can make a list of what we’re talking about. Then, when you find the other list, you’ll know what got left out, and what we’ve all ready covered.”
“Okay.” Kyle nodded, getting up to grab a block of writing paper from next to his computer. “That sounds reasonable.”
“Do you need a pen?” Stan bent over, and grabbed one from the floor. It was lying next to a spilled bottle of pills. The orange canister was lying so that Stan couldn’t read the label, so he didn’t bother. “Here,” he said, reaching over to hand it to Kyle.
“Thanks.” At the cap, their fingers met.
Stan blushed, and let go.
Kyle leaned back, scribbling things on his pad. “I remember we already talked about Loren,” he said.
“Yes.” Stan nodded.
“I’ve told you about the misdiagnosis, and I think I need adjustments to my medication.”
“Right.”
“And I think if you talked to my parents about this, they’d be much more open to finding a new doctor, you know, if they say, ‘Have you talked to anyone about this?’ and I say, ‘Yes, Stan, and he thinks I’m making sense,’ they’ll just feel comfortable with that.” Kyle said this, tentative and careful.
Stan realized something: Kyle needed him. He had something Kyle needed, and Stan could hold it hostage. Almost instantly he knew this was a silly plan, that he didn’t want some kind of Stockholm Syndrome love born out of a desperate quest to find medicated stability. But, he figured, it would probably be rash to agree to this so easily.
So Stan said, “Let’s talk about that more later.” Then he realized that he was planning on fleeing in two days. He added, “Like tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Kyle shook his head. “I need to find some kind of gender identity—”
“Pass,” said Stan.
“Can we talk about it tomorrow?”
Stan rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
“I need to get out of South Park.”
“Well,” said Stan, “I don’t disagree with you there.”
“But I’ll never get out of South Park if I don’t get the right treatment. And I’ll never get the right treatment unless I can convince them I’m borderline. But they won’t listen to me, because I’m crazy. So I need you to help me.”
“Okay, well.” Stan shut his eyes. “Does helping you in this case mean I have to help you get a sex change or something?”
“No.” Kyle sounded annoyed. “I don’t want surgery. I want to stop feeling inside my head like I’m nothing or like I’m whatever I’m not.”
“Okay.” Whatever that meant. “Do I have to call you by female pronouns or something?”
“No. It’s not … it’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like?” Stan asked.
“Like everything inside of me is always falling apart.” Kyle swallowed; he sounded so small, so miserable. “Like I don’t have any stable thing in my life, no anchor. I can’t be anything or really even anyone. I don’t understand why you don’t understand. I always thought we spoke the same language, and — Jesus Christ, I need a fucking cigarette.”
“You just smoked one five minutes ago!”
“Well, fuck you, I’m addicted!” Kyle dropped the note paper and buried his face in his hands. “Why did you come here? Why did you come over here if you’re just going to mock me? I need you, don’t you get it? I need you and you just — you just treat me like I’m some fucking sideshow—”
“Kyle.”
“And you tell me you’re leaving in two days, why? You never come over, you never talk to me—”
“Well, the last time I tried to spend time with you, you tried to kill me!”
“The last time you did spend time with me, you fucked my baby brother!”
“He’s not a baby!” Stan wanted to kick a wall. “He’s 15!”
“You’re 22!”
“And if, when I was 15, some 22-year-old guy had wanted to fuck me, I would have been absolutely fucking overjoyed! Instead I had to fucking settle for fucking Butters!”
Stan folded his hands in his lap, waiting for Kyle’s reaction. He was expecting delayed shock.
Instead, Kyle pulled his sunglasses from his face, and threw them on the floor. His eyes were wet and his face was dry. “I know,” he rasped. “Because that’s just what you do, right? You leave me. First it was Butters. Then Northwestern. Now Ike, I guess. I got into Northwestern, Stan. Did you know that?”
“Yeah,” Stan said, although he hadn’t.
“But I couldn’t go. They wouldn’t let me go. I had to stay in Colorado so they could control me from two hours away. Well! That worked out super.”
“It’s not my fault your parents worry about you.”
“No,” Kyle replied, “but you still chose to leave me. You fucking leave me all the time. You run away from me as fast as you can—”
“No.”
“—because I’m an insane freak.”
“No! Kyle, you’re—” Stan stopped himself. He lowered his voice: “You’re not a freak. And I’ve never run away from you because I thought you were a freak.”
“Then why do you keep leaving me? You’re the only stable thing for me, the only stable thing in my life. You’re my anchor. Why do you leave me and tear me up and make me feel this way?”
Stan felt his face burning and his palms sweating. He knew he had to say it. The words were on the tip of his tongue. He was about to do it, about to say it — and then he said, “I don’t think I can tell you.”
A look of recognition settled on Kyle’s face, and his lips pulled into a shallow smile, knowing and satisfied. “Oh,” he said, voice quivering. “Well, that’s all right. You don’t have to.” He lurched forward, putting a hand on Stan’s shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Stan asked, wondering if Kyle wasn’t going to attempt to choke him again.
Kyle kneeled up so he could be level with Stan’s height, and brought their mouths together for the first time.
Rating: R overall; this chapter, PG
Pairing: Stan/Kyle; various
Summary: You can take Stan out of South Park, but you can't take the South Park out of Stan.
Note: This is ... a sad story, I guess.
If you love formatting, you'll love FF.net! Which is why I will post a link to there when I get this up.
In this chapter: Tuna noodle casserole, quality time in the garage, and Stan pussies out again.
The next day was dismal, sky the color of slate threatening to suffocate Stan as he trudged up the shoveled pathway to Kyle’s front door.
He’d resolved to make this visit over a bowl of Chex. His mother’s endless questioning — when are you leaving? Did you buy a ticket? What kind of milk is that, is that 2 percent milk? I told your father to get 1 percent but he never listens. Honey, how old is that milk? Do you want me to run out and get you a new thing of milk? Don’t put that 2 percent milk in your cereal, Stanley, let Mommy take care of it — seemed less preferable at this point than facing Kyle, facing whatever would happen at their confrontation.
Sheila Broflovski answered, wiping her hands on an apron. She didn’t seem to be in a very good mood, scowling at first glance, but when she recognized Stan a giant grin parted her lips and she said, “Stanley! What a pleasant surprise.” Stan could tell this enthusiasm was genuine.
So he smiled back. “Hey,” he said, waving from the other side of the screen door. “How are you?”
“On, I’m decent enough, decent enough.” Sheila pushed the screen door open and yanked him inside. “Don’t stand out there, dear, it’s much too cold to just dawdle around outside like that. Oh, and your shoes — you can’t wear sneakers in the mountains in two feet of snow! I’d ask where you grew up or something but, Stanley, you should know better.”
Stan looked down at his feet, sopping-wet green Converses, and blushed. “Force of habit,” he said.
“Habit? What habit? It doesn’t get cold in Chicago? I had cousins growing up there, through marriage, my mother’s brother’s wife’s family. Oh, it doesn’t matter. But such violent winters, they were always talking about! You wear those sneakers all year long?”
Well, yes, as he only owned three pairs of shoes. Stan didn’t have a lot of options. “Well, I don’t know, global warming — I guess it’s different.” He shrugged, just to make the point that he didn’t want to continue the discussion. “But, is Kyle home?”
“Oh, yes!” She brushed her hands together. “Of course, you’re not here to talk to me. He’s in the kitchen. Come on.” She began to saunter through the living room, and Stan followed.
“Kyle!” she announced as they entered the kitchen. “Stan’s here, bubbe. You didn’t tell me you had plans!”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Kyle snapped. Then he sat back in his chair, crossing his arms. “But as it happens I didn’t have any plans.”
“Ah, okay.” Sheila raised her eyebrows. “I see. Well. In that case, I’d better leave you boys alone. Kyle, bubbe, any idea where your brother ran off to?”
Kyle shrugged. “I thought he was my babysitter. Not the other way around.”
She sighed, rubbing temples. “You know it doesn’t work like that, Kyle. If you hear from him, you tell him I want him to come home right away. Or do you think he’s going out for New Year’s Eve tonight? I mean, he can’t be planning to be gone all day and all night. I want to know what his plans are. Do you think he’s out with Filmore?”
“I don’t know, Ma. I really, really don’t know.”
“Well, two of us not knowing does us no good.” Sheila reached behind her back to undo the sloppy bow on her apron. She stuffed it in a drawer. “If you boys need something, come find me. And tell your brother he can’t run out for the whole day without talking to me first! It’s New Year’s Eve, and there are sickos out there!”
“Of course.” Kyle nodded.
“Well, goodbye,” she said.
“Go already if you’re going.”
So finally, she left.
Kyle waited until he heard her door slam from upstairs, and then turned to Stan, smirking. “She’s so right about the sickos, though, isn’t she? Lord knows who’s taking advantage of poor Ike right now.”
At this point Stan figured he’d been standing long enough, so he took a seat across from Kyle at the table. Stan realized he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say. Just the gesture of coming here had been a lot of internalize — a step he’d had to force himself to take.
Those cat’s-eye sunglasses were folded up on the table, next to a glass of milk and a plate of tuna noodle casserole — a nice dairy lunch for a nice Jewish boy, Stan figured. Sheila put peas in it, and altogether it wasn’t a very appealing dish, noodles and fish and frozen peas bathed in cream of mushroom, topped with breadcrumbs. This was the shit they used to eat when they were in grade school, sitting on the couch together watching reruns of — what else? — Terrance and Philip, putting off doing homework and thinking about growing up. This was what they did long before Kyle began to slip further and further away from your basic façade of sanity, before he couldn’t sit still without beginning to tear his cuticles off bit by bit until blood came to the places where his nails met his flesh. Or when Stan still had an elementary school girlfriend, Wendy Testaburger — he remembered how badly he wanted to kiss her, not because he was aroused by her in some way, because he was like 8 or 10 or whatever and nothing aroused him like that, but just because she made him feel special and foolish and very, very nervous.
For just a few brief moments Stan caught a whiff of the cream of mushroom soup in those noodles and he was brought back to a reality made out of primary colors and construction paper and blunt shapes where everything and everyone kind of looked the same. The only thing he knew then was that South Park was very, very random and Kyle Broflovski was always going to be his best friend. But when the moment passed, Stan looked around at the room he was sitting in, and Kyle’s half-eaten dish of casserole; everything just looked dingy and old. Kyle himself had bruises around his eyes and they were so very bloodshot and his lips were so chapped they were almost ragged. The complexity of this was too much and Stan no longer knew what he was doing here.
“Hello?” Kyle said, bringing him back from the edge of his ruminations. “You look zoned out. And I’m the one who just slept for 18 hours.”
Which seemed like quite some time. “That’s really a lot,” Stan replied, easing back into a rhythm of conversation he wasn’t sure he could ever regain. “You look pretty tired.”
“Stan,” he said with a desperate kind of frankness. “I’m fucking exhausted.”
~
Kyle wanted a cigarette, so they went to sit in the empty, open garage (Kyle’s father was at work, with the car — Gerald Broflovski must have been the only self-employed man in Colorado who would go into the office on New Year’s Eve, Stan figured) and talk about whatever it was they had to discuss. Stan wasn’t sure what this was, or maybe he felt it would be better if they just stared at each other and said nothing for a long time. And they did this while Kyle smoked, hunched over on the concrete floor almost as if he were hiding. But as soon as Kyle finished the cigarette and smashed it into the ground, he looked up and said, “Okay, so she won’t hear us out here.”
“Who, your mom?” Stan asked.
“Yes,” Kyle hissed, crawling back over to where Stan was sitting, the steps the led to the mud room door. “She is always listening to me, she’s worse than the CIA. It’s some serious literary thought crime shit.”
“That’s madness.”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “Well, go figure.”
Stan found this pretty amusing, so he laughed a little, but Kyle was giving him the most heartbreaking look of pain, so he stopped. “What?” he asked.
“You fucked Ike!”
“Oh, yeah,” Stan said, like maybe he didn’t remember, although he most definitely did.
“But I’m getting ahead of myself.” Kyle reached up the left sleeve of his sweatshirt, pulling out a well-worn scrap of yellow lined paper. “I want to be angry at you. I mean, I am furious, I am. But I’m tried, dude. And I’m cycling through a bunch of shit and I don’t even know where I am anymore.”
“Well, uh.” Stan raised a ceremonial hand, palm open, toward the heavens. “We’re in the garage.”
Ignoring that, Kyle continued: “Anyway, I have this list.” He unfolded the paper and read it over to himself, lips parted just a bit. (Stan wanted to grab him by the shoulders and slip his fingers inside those lips — not because it was sexy, because it sort of wasn’t, but because it reminded him of opening up an airway, and Kyle looked like he could use some air. Or so Stan was trying to convince himself.) “Ah, okay,” Kyle said. “Number one. Maybe I should explain, though. I’ve been keeping this list since before you came home. Actually, I started writing it in the hospital. Over Thanksgiving.” Kyle’s face went red. He shook his head. “Okay, number one. What are you going to do about Loren, because you clearly hate that guy? Well, that’s taken care of, isn’t it?”
“Actually,” Stan said, “I talked to him yesterday.”
“What!” Kyle snapped. “Why?”
“I figured I owed him a phone call,” Stan said. Then his eyes narrowed. “But what’s it to you?”
“Nothing. Do you know what? I don’t want to talk about Loren. Actually, from now on, I don’t give a shit about Loren. Don’t talk to me about him. Okay, moving on. Two — these aren’t in order, by the way: I do not think I am manic-depressive.”
This theory did not even resonate with Stan. To him, Kyle had so long been fucking crazy that it was as ludicrous as the idea that maybe Kyle wasn’t Jewish or wasn’t redheaded or something. “Uh huh,” he said, nodding as a courtesy. “That’s interesting.”
“You don’t believe me!”
“It’s not a matter of believing you or not,” Stan explained. “We’re sitting on the floor of your garage because you think your mom is spying on you, and in the past week you tried to maul me, and what was that shit two days ago with Kenny and the amphetamines?”
“It’s just Dexedrine,” Kyle scoffed, as if there were such a thing as just Dexedrine.
“You’re clearly bipolar, okay? I’m not going to indulge this crap. If you just do what doctors tell you, you’ll be fine, but if you go screwing around with shit you’ll be even more fucked up. I think we learned that the hard way in high school. So sure, I guess I don’t believe you.”
“Bullshit!” Kyle cried, pointing a finger into Stan’s shoulder. “You’re not a fucking psychologist, or trained in mental/emotional acrobatics, or tuned into anything having to do with neurotransmitters and brain wiring and how truly, truly awful it all feels.”
“I think knowing you is some kinda serious field experience.”
“Fuck you! It is not! You don’t know anything! You don’t know this, but people can be misdiagnosed, Stan! I see it all the time. I met this girl over Thanksgiving; she clearly had a personality disorder but they kept giving her drugs for depression, and she wasn’t like that so mood elevators just fucked her up, so then they gave her downers and she felt like crap, and then she needed even stronger anti-depressant shit just to climb out of that hole — it was tragic, this girl I met. I felt so bad for her, this girl. Lithium, you know, they write songs about it for a reason.”
“Is this someone you keep in touch with?” Stan asked.
“Well, yes.” Kyle lowered his eyes. “Because I’m talking about me.”
“Oh-kay.” Stan stood up, brushing the dust from the garage floor off of his ass. “This is weird now.”
“Sit back down,” Kyle growled. “So help me Stanley Marsh you will sit back down or I swear.”
“You swear what?” Stan asked. He sounded incongruous, but he was still doing it. “You’ll what, you’ll come at me again?”
“I’ll come at you a million times if I feel like it,” Kyle warned. “I’ll come at you so hard and so fast you’ll just shatter.”
“Okay.” Stan rolled his eyes. This poetic crazy nonsense — he didn’t have time for it. “Fine.”
Again, there was silence — Kyle’s brooding; Stan’s annoyed.
Then Kyle said, “This is something I need you to back me up on.”
“I don’t see why it matters what I think. If you think you have some” — Stan waved his hand around, searching for a word — “qualms or whatever, you need to take it up with your doctor. Or at least your parents.”
“My parents would be more willing to listen to me if you got behind me.”
“Huh.” For a moment, Stan did think about getting behind Kyle, in a literal sense, which was the result of his lack of good imagination. It had been a really long time since he’d put his arms around Kyle’s waist, but there were two problems with just grabbing him: One was that Kyle didn’t do well with surprises, and being grabbed from behind would probably set him off. (Stan knew this from high school, when Kenny tried it once and was rewarded by being kicked into a chain-link fence.) Kyle was also tiny, at least where Stan was concerned, and although he knew Kyle could take it there was something foreboding about grabbing the guy, not wanting to break him. So Stan just sat there, tenting his fingers, and said, “I don’t see how me getting involved is going to be any help.”
“Well, they trust you,” Kyle explained. He was clutching his list in a nervous way, fingers trembling just a little, but enough for Stan to notice. “You’re the litmus test of crazy. Maybe I’m crazy but that doesn’t mean every word out of my mouth is crazy—”
Stan wasn’t sure if he believed that.
“—and I think if you tell them we talked and it sounds feasible, they’ll take me seriously. I mean, you don’t just tell doctors they’re wrong, Stan. They’re doctors. I’m in a lot of pain—”
“Oh, don’t even go there. You inflict that shit on yourself. If you just stuck to your meds and didn’t try to fucking outsmart everyone, not that it’s difficult, I mean, Kenny, come on—”
Kyle interrupted. “I don’t mean physical pain! I mean, yes, I do think it’s pretty obvious the self-harm is kind of a reflection of how I feel otherwise but I mean, inside. Here.” Kyle tapped his head. “Everything feels wrong, all the time. I don’t think you could possibly know what’s going on in here, I don’t even know usually, but it’s not good, it’s scary.” Kyle’s voice became very small. “I’m scared for myself. I barely even know what I am half the time. There’s no way you could know what that feels like.”
“Oh, I think I could.” Stan shook his head.
“Well, then that’s number three,” Kyle said. He shook his list in Stan’s face, for good measure. “You never tell me anything anymore.”
It was too much. Stan knew then that he should have been a better friend. He should have called. He should have come home for Thanksgiving. Kyle was just babbling, trying to get every single thing in his brain out — he’d been storing cuts of meat in a freezer and now they all had to defrost. It was a dumb metaphor, and Stan realized he was only making it because he was staring at the big freezer in the corner of the garage, the one where Kyle’s mother kept slabs and slabs of meat she bought on sale. That, and Stan was quite cold anyway, what with the cement floor and the lack of heat in the garage and, well, it was late December. Plus he felt nervous and wanted to move a little.
“Can we please go inside?” Stan asked. He wrapped his arms around himself for good measure. “It’s cold out here.”
“I’m not cold,” Kyle lied. Stan could see that he was cold. He was shaking, too.
“Okay, that’s crazy. We’re going inside.”
“But she’ll hear!”
Stan rolled his eyes. “Bedroom, Kyle. Now.”
~
Kyle’s bedroom was familiar, his walls covered by the same posters he’d had when he was 8, 9, 10 years old. Kyle didn’t put a lot of effort into keeping his room neat or in any kind of order. There had been a point in high school when Stan realized that maybe Kyle’s room and his emotional condition were related. It was when they were 14 and, incidentally, the weekend before the weekend when Stan ended his football career while ice skating.
The impetus for this realization was that Stan had stepped on a Lego piece, an insidious little two-by-four gray block, concealed by Kyle’s carpet, which was a similar shade of gray. Stan was not a big fan of Legos, but Kyle was in those days; Kyle built tall, twisting structures, then shattered them to pieces. It seemed one of those pieces had been left on the floor, and had ended up gouged in Stan’s foot. Kyle made Stan sit on the bed, and removed the wedge of Lego with a tweezers. Blood was beginning to reach the wound, and Stan was too shocked to feel any pain. “All better,” Kyle had said. Then he put his mouth to the ball of Stan’s foot and licked the puncture until Stan was aroused and embarrassed.
“Stop that,” Stan had said, cupping his foot in his hands, wishing he had been wearing socks. “You’re acting too weird again.” Stan’s foot bothered him for the rest of the week, stinging through scrimmages and tightening skate laces, until Stan ended up in Kyle’s arms, sweating on the ice.
In the same cluttered room, eight years later, Stan found himself arguing with Kyle, who had blanketed Stan with reams of print-outs on borderline personality disorder. Stan could barely move himself to read one of them, let alone the entire stack. Not that Kyle could shut up for long enough to let Stan read anything:
“This is me, right?” he asked, grabbing at one of the papers on the bed. “I fit all of the criteria?”
Stan laughed. He’d spent enough of his life reading about psychiatric conditions on the internet to understand that, yes, it did all sound ... sort of like Kyle.
“What?” Kyle rolled his eyes. He was kneeling on his bed, looking down on Stan, who was slouching against the headboard. “You think it’s funny?”
“I think you need a doctor—”
“I have so many doctors! What I need is for you to be my friend!”
“I am. I’m your best friend.” Stan really meant it.
“Then you have to support me!” Kyle said. “You, of all people!”
Guilt crashed into Stan’s consciousness. What did that mean, him of all people? Just because he was gay, was that what Kyle meant? Stan had taken enough gender and sexuality studies courses (well, only one, but it was still enough) to understand that he felt gender was very binary. Even gay sex, to Stan’s mind, was anchored to this paradigm. So if Kyle was suggesting that on account of having sex with men Stan should understand that Kyle wanted out of the paradigm — okay, Kyle was probably not suggesting that.
“Why me of all people?” Stan asked, hoping Kyle would not reply, Because you’re gay.
And to Stan’s great fortune, he didn’t. “Because,” he said softly. “You’re my best friend. And — and you’re supposed to love me, unconditionally. And support me. Unconditionally.”
“Oh,” Stan said, rubbing his hands together, just to give him something to do while he watched Kyle slump over, looking like his heart was breaking. This was a very reasonable thing for a crazy person to say. “Well, I do.”
“I don’t feel like you do,” said Kyle.
“Well, you can’t just expect me to be like, ‘Okay, good, you attacked me in the street two days ago, so today let’s invent some new gender.’ I’m sorry, you know, maybe some advance warning is better.”
“I’m not even talking about that.”
“Well, then what are you talking about?”
“Stan, I don’t want to do this here.”
“Well, I’m going back to Chicago in two days!” (In theory. Stan still hadn’t bought or changed his ticket.) “So when and where would you like to do it?”
“I thought you were here for two more weeks!”
“Nope, sorry, changed my mind. I’m leaving here. I hate this town.”
“I hate it too!”
“Well,” said Stan, grateful at least that they had some kind of mutual agreement on that point. “In which case I guess you’re not totally crazy.”
“But I want to leave,” Kyle explained. Sitting on the bed he’d been fidgeting, but the idea of leaving seemed to move him to get up and begin pacing. His bedroom wasn’t enormous, and the floor was littered with crushed pills and what looked (to Stan) like dozens of soiled pairs of boxer-briefs. And torn, crumpled sheets of yellow notebook paper, and other college-student detritus: used tissues, unused tissues, pencils, pens, band-aid wrappers, and … was that a bottle of nail polish?
“I want to leave here,” Kyle kept repeating while he paced. “I don’t think it makes me better; it makes me worse. It makes all of us worse. I mean, look at you.”
“Me? What’s this got to do with me? I don’t even live here.”
“You were here for two days and you had sex with a child,” Kyle pointed out.
“Fuck! Will you stop bringing that up? What’s this child shit?”
“It was undeniably fucked-up…”
“Okay! It was fucked up!” Stan threw his hands into the air. Kyle stopped pacing. “How long are you going to hold this against me? Whatever Ike is, okay, he’s not a child. Children might — they might go along willingly if you suggest things to them, but … I don’t know, I don’t suppose a child would initiate sex. How come other people pursue me, and yet I’m the one who gets held responsible?”
“When you’re the party with less to lose, that’s what happens,” said Kyle. “Oh my god. You should talk to my therapist.”
“Which one?” Stan asked.
Kyle felt the sting of this dig, and sat down on the bed. “Yes,” he said, tenting his fingers. “I’d forgotten I’m so massively fucked-up I have more than one therapist.”
But Stan didn’t want to talk about that. “Well, I plan to leave in two days.” He sat up straighter, rolling up his sleeves. He meant business. “So whatever you want to talk about, you’d better tell me now.”
“I’m telling you. I’m trying to tell you. But you won’t listen! I had a list. Where’s my--?” Kyle looked around, feeling the surface of his desk.
“Did you leave it in the garage?” Stan asked.
“Fuck you, no. I’m not that stupid.”
“Well, why don’t you just tell me what you remember is on the list, and as you go along you can make a list of what we’re talking about. Then, when you find the other list, you’ll know what got left out, and what we’ve all ready covered.”
“Okay.” Kyle nodded, getting up to grab a block of writing paper from next to his computer. “That sounds reasonable.”
“Do you need a pen?” Stan bent over, and grabbed one from the floor. It was lying next to a spilled bottle of pills. The orange canister was lying so that Stan couldn’t read the label, so he didn’t bother. “Here,” he said, reaching over to hand it to Kyle.
“Thanks.” At the cap, their fingers met.
Stan blushed, and let go.
Kyle leaned back, scribbling things on his pad. “I remember we already talked about Loren,” he said.
“Yes.” Stan nodded.
“I’ve told you about the misdiagnosis, and I think I need adjustments to my medication.”
“Right.”
“And I think if you talked to my parents about this, they’d be much more open to finding a new doctor, you know, if they say, ‘Have you talked to anyone about this?’ and I say, ‘Yes, Stan, and he thinks I’m making sense,’ they’ll just feel comfortable with that.” Kyle said this, tentative and careful.
Stan realized something: Kyle needed him. He had something Kyle needed, and Stan could hold it hostage. Almost instantly he knew this was a silly plan, that he didn’t want some kind of Stockholm Syndrome love born out of a desperate quest to find medicated stability. But, he figured, it would probably be rash to agree to this so easily.
So Stan said, “Let’s talk about that more later.” Then he realized that he was planning on fleeing in two days. He added, “Like tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Kyle shook his head. “I need to find some kind of gender identity—”
“Pass,” said Stan.
“Can we talk about it tomorrow?”
Stan rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
“I need to get out of South Park.”
“Well,” said Stan, “I don’t disagree with you there.”
“But I’ll never get out of South Park if I don’t get the right treatment. And I’ll never get the right treatment unless I can convince them I’m borderline. But they won’t listen to me, because I’m crazy. So I need you to help me.”
“Okay, well.” Stan shut his eyes. “Does helping you in this case mean I have to help you get a sex change or something?”
“No.” Kyle sounded annoyed. “I don’t want surgery. I want to stop feeling inside my head like I’m nothing or like I’m whatever I’m not.”
“Okay.” Whatever that meant. “Do I have to call you by female pronouns or something?”
“No. It’s not … it’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like?” Stan asked.
“Like everything inside of me is always falling apart.” Kyle swallowed; he sounded so small, so miserable. “Like I don’t have any stable thing in my life, no anchor. I can’t be anything or really even anyone. I don’t understand why you don’t understand. I always thought we spoke the same language, and — Jesus Christ, I need a fucking cigarette.”
“You just smoked one five minutes ago!”
“Well, fuck you, I’m addicted!” Kyle dropped the note paper and buried his face in his hands. “Why did you come here? Why did you come over here if you’re just going to mock me? I need you, don’t you get it? I need you and you just — you just treat me like I’m some fucking sideshow—”
“Kyle.”
“And you tell me you’re leaving in two days, why? You never come over, you never talk to me—”
“Well, the last time I tried to spend time with you, you tried to kill me!”
“The last time you did spend time with me, you fucked my baby brother!”
“He’s not a baby!” Stan wanted to kick a wall. “He’s 15!”
“You’re 22!”
“And if, when I was 15, some 22-year-old guy had wanted to fuck me, I would have been absolutely fucking overjoyed! Instead I had to fucking settle for fucking Butters!”
Stan folded his hands in his lap, waiting for Kyle’s reaction. He was expecting delayed shock.
Instead, Kyle pulled his sunglasses from his face, and threw them on the floor. His eyes were wet and his face was dry. “I know,” he rasped. “Because that’s just what you do, right? You leave me. First it was Butters. Then Northwestern. Now Ike, I guess. I got into Northwestern, Stan. Did you know that?”
“Yeah,” Stan said, although he hadn’t.
“But I couldn’t go. They wouldn’t let me go. I had to stay in Colorado so they could control me from two hours away. Well! That worked out super.”
“It’s not my fault your parents worry about you.”
“No,” Kyle replied, “but you still chose to leave me. You fucking leave me all the time. You run away from me as fast as you can—”
“No.”
“—because I’m an insane freak.”
“No! Kyle, you’re—” Stan stopped himself. He lowered his voice: “You’re not a freak. And I’ve never run away from you because I thought you were a freak.”
“Then why do you keep leaving me? You’re the only stable thing for me, the only stable thing in my life. You’re my anchor. Why do you leave me and tear me up and make me feel this way?”
Stan felt his face burning and his palms sweating. He knew he had to say it. The words were on the tip of his tongue. He was about to do it, about to say it — and then he said, “I don’t think I can tell you.”
A look of recognition settled on Kyle’s face, and his lips pulled into a shallow smile, knowing and satisfied. “Oh,” he said, voice quivering. “Well, that’s all right. You don’t have to.” He lurched forward, putting a hand on Stan’s shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Stan asked, wondering if Kyle wasn’t going to attempt to choke him again.
Kyle kneeled up so he could be level with Stan’s height, and brought their mouths together for the first time.