Chapter Text
Cold.
This first thing Tweek feels when he opens his eyes is cold .
It takes a moment for him to realize where he is, shivers racking his body as he opens his eyes and takes in his surroundings. Sterile white curtains surround a cot. One side is pulled back, revealing a small desk and some wall-mounted cabinets on the other side of the room. The desk is littered with papers, labeled manilla folders, and red crime scene markers. The cabinets are filled to the brim with boxes of bandages, gauzes, generic headache and cough medicines, and a red first aid pack.
A nurses’ office , Tweek connects the dots. Park High’s nurses’ office .
Detectives linger in the room. A low chatter drowns out the hum of the AC unit in the window, but Tweek can’t will his ears to pick up whatever they’re saying. The nurse is sitting in the corner violently shaking as she raises a small paper cup to her lips. Someone is trying to talk to her, but she doesn’t lift her gaze from the linoleum tiles.
Slowly, Tweek turns. The cot he’s standing next to has someone lying in it, a flimsy white sheet covering them. A pair of scuffed chucks peek out from the sheet at the foot of the bed. He realizes that he’s seen the pair before, he sees them every morning when he puts them on, sees them when he looks down and wants to disappear when the other teens start spewing hateful things.
They’re his chucks. He glances at his feet to confirm it.
“You think it was a suicide?” he hears a detective say in a harsh whisper.
“Hard to say,” another answers. Tweek stumbles closer to them, listening in. They don’t look in his direction. “There’s no evident signs of foul play, but there’s also no suicide note.”
“Not everyone leaves a note,” the first detective scoffs.
“This kid was in the drama club,” the second says, giving a hard glance to the first. “There were rumors he was gay, for Christ’s sake. He’d be theatrical enough to leave a damned suicide note. Without one, I’d put money on this being a murder.”
“Mur-murder?!” Tweek screeches, shaky hands coming up to pull on strands of his hair. For how loud he is, no one bats an eye.
I was in the drama club , Tweek thinks distantly. Everyone made fun of me for being gay…
The wheels turn, gears locking into place like a clock that refuses to keep ticking. Tweek’s eyes widen as he turns back to the covered figure on the cot. He shuffled towards it, feet dragging like cinder blocks with every step. His hand shakes as he reaches out and grips the edge of the sheet. It takes all his strength to lift the edge of it, just enough to look at the figure’s face. He recognizes the features immediately.
He drops the sheet, and it’s like he never moved it at all.
Tweek slowly backs away from the cot, breath quickening, before his feet carry him out of the room. He runs through the caution tape that blocks off the door to the nurse, but when he looks back, he sees it’s perfectly in place. He runs faster than he ever had before, flying through the crowded halls and bursting through the school’s double doors. Sprinting through the parking lot, passing the school’s bus stop, he steps off the sidewalk to bound into the street…
But his feet never touch asphalt. Instead, he barrels through the nurses’ office once more, tangling himself up in the clinical white curtains. No one looks at him.
With a sickening lurch of his stomach, Tweek learns the truth.
Tweek Tweak was dead and he couldn’t leave Park High’s grounds. Just his fucking luck.
He wanders through the high school’s halls. Since it was early in the day, classes were canceled and all the other students were sent home. News trucks were parked outside, reporters swarming like moths to a porch light, chattering pleasantly to the cameras about Tweek’s untimely death.
He stands right next to a cheery reporter and screams into her ear as loud as he can. She doesn’t so much as flinch.
Hours pass before Tweek’s body is carted away into a waiting ambulance. They’re no doubt taking him to the morgue. He tries to follow as the car pulls away from the curb, but the moment he steps towards the asphalt, he’s back in the nurses’ office.
He thought there was a chance he would haunt only where his body was, but that theory was out of the question now. Tweek doesn’t know what he did to earn his own personal hell by being stuck at one of the only places he truly hated. Maybe being gay sent you to hell, after all.
Tweek stalks through the halls once more, anger bubbling dangerously under his skin until it inevitably overflows. He screams, the sound deep and guttural, as he slams every open door so violently the mini glass windows crack, upends every trash can and throws them into the walls of lockers, trash littering the halls like confetti, and rips down every flier from the bulletin board until there’s nothing left but old staples and bent tacks.
When he blinks, everything is back in its original places. Like it never happened.
Seeing red, he goes to the only place that redeemed this god-awful school, if only a little: the theater. This was his safe haven, his solace. The stage was like his second home, if he considered the house he grew up in a home to begin with. Tweek had met his friends on that stage, learned how to laugh and escape his miserable life underneath these technicolored lights. And here it stands, unbothered, untouched, like it never meant anything to Tweek at all.
He lets himself collapse into one of the plush auditorium seats in the front row. He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes and wails, crying like a child being pulled out of a candy store with nothing to show from the trip, for the first time in his life.
He had never asked for anything, never kicked or screamed or threw any tantrums, because he knew he shouldn’t ask for things he wouldn’t get. But here, in the only place he ever felt safe, the only place he ever felt needed , Tweek desperately and completely wanted to still be alive.
Just as his voice begins to crack, his throat raw with exertion, he feels a presence settle in the seat next to him. Tweek lifts his head and stares at the person next to him.
Tweek never would’ve claimed to know every kid at Park High, but he knows for a fact he’s never seen this guy in his life. Short, messy black hair under a blue beanie with earflaps and a yellow puffball on top, gentle brown eyes, wide shoulders stretched underneath a blue hoodie, glimpses of a red and white baseball jersey visible underneath, tight athletic pants with dirty cleats to match. A box of tissues sits innocuously in his lap. He is the kind of person Tweek would have been acutely aware of. He’s the kind of person that would’ve slammed him into a locker for staring too much.
He stiffens in his seat and tries to shift away from him.
“I thought you might need these,” the guy says, voice nasally and deep. He holds the box of tissues towards Tweek, offering.
“You… you can see me?” Tweek says, sniffling. He takes a tissue and mops his face with it.
“The dead can see the dead,” the guy says with a shrug. Tweek freezes at the words. “Craig Tucker, class of ‘83,” the guy introduces, putting the box of tissues in his lap once more so he could hold out his hand to Tweek. “Well, I would’ve been the class of ‘83. I died my junior year.”
“Tweek Tweak,” he introduces back, tentatively shaking the hand offered to him. Craig’s grip was strong and warm, the first warmth Tweek’s felt since he opened his eyes. He almost doesn’t let go when Craig pulls his hand away.
“Nice to officially meet you,” Craig says, slumping in his seat.
“Wait… your name…” Tweek says, his eyebrows pinching as he remembers. “You were the star baseball player… your team’s trophies a-and your hat is in the display case by the principal’s office.”
“I used to be sent there a lot,” Craig hums, staring up at the theater’s ceiling. “You, too?”
“Usually after the fatass tries to beat me senseless,” Tweek huffs. He slouches in his seat, too, his fingers toying with the hem of his green button down. “You died during a game,” he says hesitantly.
“Ball straight to the nose,” Craig affirms. “Pushed the cartilage up into my brain. Dead before I even hit the ground.” He says it unfeelingly, the fact separated from the emotion of it all, and Tweek guesses that being dead for 40 years must have drained it out of him.
“I’m sorry,” Tweek says quietly.
“Water under the bridge now,” Craig says with another shrug. He turns his head and their eyes meet. “What about you?”
“Me?” Tweek asks.
“How’d you… you know?” Craig prompts.
“How I died…” Tweek breathes, sitting up straight. He stares at his hands as they start to shake. “I… I don’t remember.”
“You don’t?” Craig sits up next to him.
“I try to think back to it, but… this morning, and yesterday… I can’t remember it at all.” Tweek feels the panic start to climb in his chest, his clothes feeling too tight and his breath coming in too quick. “Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s… the first I’ve heard of it,” Craig says slowly. Tweek starts to hyperventilate in earnest. “B-but it’s not the end of the world!” Craig rushes to say. He places both his hands on Tweek’s shoulders, the touch insistent but soft. “Well, it’s the end of the living world , but not the end of the… you know what? Forget it. I’m not good at this. But I do know someone who is.”
“Y-you do?” Tweek says, struggling to even out his breathing. He’s spiraling and he knows it. What did his old therapist tell him to do when he was panicking again? The memory seems too far away.
“Yeah, Mr. Mackey was a guidance counselor when he was alive. He’s been helping us all try to figure out how to cross over for as long as I’ve been dead,” Craig explains.
“There’s… there’s more of us?” Tweek asks.
“We aren’t the only ones to die on campus,” Craig says, “and I figure we won’t be the last. We’re dead, but we aren’t alone.”
“Sure, that makes sense,” Tweek says, not believing the words that come out of his mouth. His school was haunted ? Well, it certainly is now. He never imagined that, out of all his irrational fears, that this one was an actuality.
“But before you go anywhere, you gotta calm down,” Craig soothes, or at least tries to. His hands fall from Tweek’s shoulders, and Tweek misses the contact immediately. He forces himself to breathe more evenly, despite doubting he needed to breathe in the first place. “I don’t want you to die on me,” Craig says, before weakly joking, “well, you know, a second time.”
“Is that even possible?” Tweek asks, looking at him incredulously.
“We can get hurt, it just doesn’t last long,” Craig answers. He gets to his feet and adjusts his hat before looking back to Tweek. “Any other undead questions?”
“A few,” Tweek says miserably.
“Start with one.”
“Can I still drink coffee?”