Chapter Text
He’s had this reoccurring dream the last couple of months.
There was never much to it; the finer details always hazy, slipping from his memory before he fully wakes. All he can really remember is standing barefoot in the woods, the smell of snow and sap heavy in the air, surrounded by the wild underbrush at the base of the mountains, alone.
Only, he’s not alone. Not really.
There’s always something behind him, at the edge of his periphery.
At first, it was only a distant sense of a presence. The soft crunch of snow, a twig snapping, a shadow that crept closer each time he drifted off.
Last night, it was close. Closer than ever. Breathing slow and deliberate above his head, like a bear raised on its haunches, towering. It made his spine stiffen and his limbs turn to ice. Tension formed at the base of his skull and rooted itself behind his eyes, blinding him the same way his migraines usually started.
No matter how hard he tries to turn around each time, he can’t. He’s always paralyzed -- helpless to do little else than stand and stare right into the knotted trunk of a decades old pine tree, or at his feet – anywhere that was directly ahead, he just can never turn around.
The dream always ends soon after, snapping him back to the crushing weight of reality, yanked away from that same spot in the woods like he wasn’t meant to have been there at all.
He wakes up the same way each time: drenched in a cold sweat, shaking.
There’s always the same sinking, sour feeling in his stomach like he’d just watched himself die.
Again.
He remembered those dreams in great detail. Maybe too much.
There’s never any point in trying to go back to sleep, after.
The shadows in the corner of his room would love it if he did, all closing in on him as he lies there, trying to catch his breath, tears welling up at the corners of his eyes; flight or fight instincts taking over and --
He ends up on his feet most nights, reeling.
The floor lamp suffered the brunt of his swinging fist a few nights ago.
He could’ve sworn the shapeless thing was in his room with him, then. Echoes of its breath coming from nowhere and everywhere at once; sucking all the oxygen right out of the room, suffocating him in the process.
The bulb had shattered when the lamp hit the floor.
He spent the rest of the night on the couch, staring at the ceiling, listening. He hadn’t wanted to go back in his room for three days, and by then, he’d forgotten to clean up the mess.
He steps on the little shards now.
A particularly long and gnarly piece gets him in the arch of his foot, right where the skin is the thinnest, and he lets out a series of low curses as he stumbles on his uninjured foot towards the switch on the opposite side of the dark room.
The harsh overhead light comes on after a series of flickers, chasing the shadows back to their place of waiting, until the next time he falls into a fitful sleep.
He looks down to confirm that, yes, he’s bleeding and that, yes, the bulb shard is still embedded in his foot. The alarm clock reads in blurry red-LEDs 3:28AM.
“Fuck.”
Blood never really bothered him. Not with the amount that he’s seen in the course of his lifetime. Same with pain.
But he had a long day ahead — overtime at the garage, then bussing tables at City Wok. There wasn’t room for an injury in a schedule already stretched thin.
He’d only really drifted off a little after midnight, once he finally gave in and rolled himself a spartan joint with what remained of his stash.
He’d been trying to cut back, lately. Some part of his brain – the one that sounded like a certain red-headed childhood friend – kept telling him that going to bed in an impaired state might be what was fucking with him. That the dream was nothing more than a side effect of sleep deprivation and cheap pot.
Plus, feeding a habit was expensive. It was a win-win, to ration, really.
Normally, he doesn’t dream when he is on the wagon. It's something to do with brain chemistry re-balancing, or whatever. But even when he tried the stone-sober route, he'd end up in those same damn woods.
At least being high or drunk -- or some combination or both -- let him drift into an undisturbed nothingness for a few hours. He was down to three a night now, and even that was starting to feel like a luxury.
Legs still trembling from adrenaline, he retreats to the bathroom quietly, careful not to wake up the other sleeping occupants in the house. That would be the last thing he’d need right now, dodging projectiles as they were tossed at his body, profanities catching him in the ear.
The piece of bulb is about two inches long, but it had only dug in about a quart of that. It still hurts like a bitch as he yanks it out of his own flesh, releasing a new stream of blood and accompanying curses.
He cleans up most of it with an old towel that had been torn up into smaller segments. He’s pretty sure it had been washed in the last few days, but he rummages around under the sink until he finds the brown bottle of peroxide.
Not that anyone would particularly care about the crime scene he’s made on the bathroom counter, he still methodically cleans up the evidence, anyway.
He takes care to wrap the broken bit of bulb in a wad of toilet paper, tossing it in amongst the empty toilet roll and snot-rags as he wipes down the counter, rinsing it out thoroughly with warm soap and water, because he won’t be making another trip to the laundromat for another week.
The water from the tap is already rust-colored from the janky water-heater that’s about to go out any day now, concealing any traces of his blood. He just needs it to last another month, and then he’ll make his way to the U-Pick and grab one that’s only marginally past its prime.
He’d typically forgo a shower to help extend the thing’s life. But today he smells like sweat and feels about five dimensions separated from reality, and there is a good possibility that he might drift off into a ditch on his way into town if he doesn’t bring some feeling back into his bone-weary soul.
He tries to make it quick. Washes himself with the plain bar of soap, but then gives in and stands under the spray for a guilty two-minutes longer than he should, shamefully crawling out when the water immediately switches to freezing cold without warning.
He feels…
Better isn’t the right word, but it’s close enough. He doesn’t feel any worse, so that has to count for something.
He’s also not looking through a layer of sleep in his eyes anymore, feeling some kind of alertness creeping back into his consciousness. He doesn’t acknowledge the darker corner of his room when he slips back inside.
He does, however, pick up the crushed bulb. And the lamp.
Fool him once, and all.
He contemplates throwing on his work uniform for the garage, but opts instead for a cleanish thermal and faded sweatshirt that may have said Thrasher at one point, but was now missing several consonants. And vowels. His shitty canvas jacket covers most of the holes in the material, so it doesn’t really matter.
He dons his grease- and motor oil-stained Dickies before grabbing his keys, phone and wallet, throwing the two separate work shirts under his arm as he heads out the door.
When he was younger, back before he had a license, he used to put the Chevy into neutral and roll it out of the driveway and down the road before cranking it. Mainly because he didn’t want to get bitched out for wasting gas – that he paid for – or lectured by his mom about getting some girl pregnant -- because no good came from being out at the small hours, and if he wanted to end up like his dead-beat dad that was his problem, but she wasn’t about to raise any bastard kid on his behalf -- blah blah blah…
At twenty-three years old and the sole bread winner in the household for the last some-odd years, his care for their opinion of him and his life choices had dropped significantly. Not that it had been particularly great when he was a kid, either, but he’d had this naive idea of setting a good example for his little sister Karen, back then.
She's been off at college for the last year, and he stopped caring about much of anything shortly after he’d dropped her off on campus.
Now? He cranks the near-choked engine in the driveway, close to his parent’s window, and hopes the backfire shakes his parents' window.
He knows it will do nothing to budge them, but he likes to think that maybe it slips into their subconsciousness and pollutes their dreams with burnt exhaust.
The clock on the dash read 4:03 A.M.. Tweak Bros. would be open. Or what used to be Tweak Bros., now just a convenience store with coffee and smokes. That suited him better.
He noses the truck in the opposite direction of the mountains and the dark lines that separate the road from Bear Country.
He doesn’t take his eyes off the rearview mirror until he’s over the train tracks, and only then is it because his attention is ripped away as the truck threatens to come apart in pieces from being jostled over the rails.
He doesn’t look behind him again until he’s put Stark’s pond and the Lee’s farm in-between himself and the woods, only once the lights from town envelope him in something other than the pitch black of pre-dawn.
By then, the mountains are just a blurry smudge in the distance.
He lets out a breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding and turns back to stare at the road ahead, following the fairy lights that had been strung up for Christmas right into the heart of downtown.
Tweak Bros Coffeehouse closed a few years back. In its place morphed Tweak Bros Convenient store, which suited Kenny just fine, considering his options to patron the former were either charitable or a waste. At least now he could get something for his money, like lung cancer.
There are actual signs of life as he pulls the truck to the curb, a few cars already parked nearby, windshields scraped of frost; a light coming from the bakery across the street…
He steps out into the brisk air and can hear tires crunching compacted salt and sludge in the distance. It makes him feel a little less like he’s in an episode of the Twlight Zone.
Tweak is behind the counter, twirling in his seat, when he walks into the little bodega. The news is playing on a caged TV hanging from the ceiling, which the former barista is watching, his mouth a little agape, biting his nails and completely engrossed.
Despite his best attempts at trying to make as much noise as possible to announce his presence and not startle the owner-occupant -- bells tingling violently above the door as his boots squelch across the vinyl floors -- Tweak, as is expected, jumps, anyway.
The other man’s head is on a pivot as he looks everywhere but at the front door, eyes wide, hands firmly on the counter as he backs himself up against the shelves. Finally, he settles on the front door, and he lets out a heavy breath of air.
“You scared the shit outta me, Kenny,” the cashier tells him, accusatory tone trembling slightly.
They’d never been particularly close in school, but they’d always circled the same drains, and therefore Kenny had known Tweak almost his whole life—one of the few from their class still stuck in town— and also knew that scaring the shit outta the other guy was a pretty common occurrence.
There’d been a running joke in school that Tweak was a crack baby, nerves all fucked up in vitro.
With their parents’ shared affliction, Kenny knows that in another life, he’d be the one flinching every few seconds. So yeah—he gets it.
Kenny shoves his hands deeper into his jacket pockets. He never found those jokes funny, anyway.
“Sorry, man,” he says.
Tweak waves him off. Asks, “Just the usual?” even as he rings it in the machine and dips below the counter to grab two green packs of Pall Mall.
He nods, says, "Thanks, man," and means it because he knows Tweak means well and, besides, at the end of the day, they’re all each other has left of their friend group.
So, he smiles. Hollow and vacant as his eyes might be, he tries not to infect the already nervous man across the counter with his own foulness. At least, not any more than what the town itself has already done.
Tweak rings him up, and Kenny pulls his nearly empty wallet closer to his chest, fishing out a crumpled twenty.
“You got any Christmas plans?”
It’s a kinder way of getting information out of him; subtle in its delivery, despite the fact that Kenny can still hear the underlying question: Any word on who’s going to be in town?
Kenny still talks to Kyle sometimes. Stan, less often. A few months ago, he’d gone up to Denver for a transmission and ran into Clyde which meant also Bebe, by extension.
He doesn’t know any of their plans for Christmas. He hadn’t asked, the last time Kyle had called him to tell him his graduation plans. Part of him doesn’t want to know.
“Probably working,” he says, honestly. “You?”
Tweak deflates, like the answer let the last bit of helium out of him.
He shrugs, noncommittal, his left eye twitching. “Probably the same.”
There’s a wistful look in those searching eyes, and, not for the first time, Kenny feels sorry for the other guy. He gets it, after all. The complicated feeling of being abandoned while everyone who ever meant a shit went on and made something out of their own lives.
And that wasn’t even considering the Craig factor for Tweak. Not that Kenny ever asked. Mainly because Tweak never volunteered any information, and that told him everything he needed to know.
They never really talk about important shit like that, anyway. The touchy-feely mumbo jumbo… And yet, Kenny still considers Tweak one of his closest friends now. He tries not to dwell on it for too long.
Tweak hands Kenny back his whopping three dollars and fifty-nine cents in change, nodding towards the TV.
“You hear about that?”
Kenny follows his gaze. The newscaster is pretty—blonde, with her shirt riding dangerously low to the point that Kenny wonders if she’s wearing a bra or just those sticky pasties. He mentions it to Tweak, who slaps him on the shoulder, making offended noises.
“Jesus, take it easy!” Kenny shrieks as Tweak reaches for the stapler like he might throw it.
He puts a good several feet between them, turning back to the TV once Tweak sets the almost-weapon back down.
The newscaster is talking without any sound coming from between her pretty red lips – which, honestly, he preferred it that way, sometimes -- but Tweak has the subtitles on, and they run in a jumbled mess at the bottom.
The screen cuts to footage of blue lights flickering on the broken window of the pizza joint a few blocks down, yellow tape strung across the perimeter.
‘—NO MONEY WAS TAKEN FROM THE RESTURANT AND NO ONE WAS INJURED, THE TONY GUIDA, THE ESTABLISHMENT’S OWNER, REPORTS. MR. GUIDA WENT ON TO ATTRIBUTE THE LACK OF ANY SERIOUS DAMAGES TO WHAT HE CALLS HIS ‘GUARDIAN ANGE;’ THE PASSERBY WHO INTERNEVED DURING THE ARMED ROBBERY, WHICH MANY BELIEVES IS THE SAME UNIDENTIFIED INDIVIDUAL WHO STOPPED LAST WEEK’S SERIES OF CAR-JACKINGS.
LAW ENFORCEMENT CONTINUES TO WARN AGAINST VIGILANTISM AND SAY THAT THEY ARE ACTIVELY FOLLOWING LEADS –’
Kenny gives up on trying to follow the words, rubbing at his eyes. He’s had a creeping suspicion that he’s needed glasses for a while now, but he’s never been for an eye exam and doubts very much that he’d be able to afford whatever prescription they’d diagnose him as needing.
Meanwhile, Tweak has his hands tangled in his hair, shifting from foot to foot, eyes locked on the screen. “Oh, my god,” he says, pacing behind the counter. “What if they target the store next? I can’t defend against robbers! Worse—what if they try to kidnap me? What if they pull a gun—Oh, my god!”
Kenny fights to swallow the yawn threatening to escape him. Not that he doesn’t care about Tweak’s concerns, but mostly because he’s dying from exhaustion, and Tweak’s concerns change by the minute, whereas the ranting lasts way longer than he thinks his attention span can take right now.
He watches Tweak pace for a little while longer, ranting to himself about all the awful things that were, of course, inevitably going to happen. Maybe not today, or tomorrow. Maybe not to Tweak himself, but somewhere in the world his concerns would come to fruition.
Finally, Kenny stops watching and grabs his smokes with one hand, reaching over the counter for a stack of disposable coffee cups with the other.
“Might want to get the baseball bat out, Tweak,” he says as he stretches onto his tip-toes, fingers just barely brushing the styrofoam.
Tweak’s crowding him in an instant, batting Kenny’s hand away to grab one off the top, annoyed. Then, like he just registered Kenny’s words, he freezes. “Baseball—how do you know about that?!”
Tweak and Bros’ coffee used to serve the fancy shit – the kind that came from some jungle cat eating the beans and shitting them back out. It’s why it was so expensive, and why it couldn’t compete when chain places started to pop up, like Harbucks.
They must have had a surplus of inventory when they closed, or else Tweak just never went back to normal house grounds, after. He doesn’t hand Kenny the cup to help himself to the self-serve pot by the window, instead walking to the back with it.
“You swung that bat at me a few weeks ago, remember?” Kenny yells after him.
He sure as hell remembers—he was the one who almost got knocked the fuck out, saved only by tripping over his untied laces and crashing hard on his ass.
After some whirring and banging from the back, Tweak returns with a steaming cup, wiping the sides.
He tilts his head, studying the contents, then grimaces at Kenny. “Oh, damn. Right. Sorry about that.”
It never ceased to surprise Kenny that the coffee never actually smelled like shit. It smelled like… Well, something earthy. Something not quite coffee, sure. Whatever it was, it undoubtedly lacked anything close to fecal matter, and was twice the caffeine boost as the normal instant shit they kept at home, sometimes.
He took a sip without blowing on it, yelping a little as it burnt his tongue, causing Tweak to roll his eyes despite this being a near daily ritual.
“Serious, though,” he says after a few seconds of heavy mouth breathing. “You might want to get, like, a piece of plexiglass or something for that counter.”
Not that plexiglass would do much against, you know, a bullet, but still… The way Kenny saw it, criminals were opportunistic. Remove an easy opportunity, and you remove a few percentage points from your statistics of getting shanked.
“Yeah, right,” Tweak agrees, absentmindedly. He’s back to watching the screen, squinting at the typeface before it has a chance to disappear. “I’ll have to look into that for --Hey, look! Cartman made it on the news.”
Kenny almost forgets he’s holding a cup that’s nearly 200 degrees, whipping his whole body around so fast the black liquid sloshes against the flimsy cup edge, scalding his hand. A few drops catch his thumb, making him flinch.
He sticks the appendage in his mouth without thinking, dumbly sucking his thumb as he asks over the appendage, “What?” even as he stares at the screen.
Sure enough, there’s Eric Cartman in the background, decked out in the South Park police uniform—black and khaki—looking smug as he talks to another officer, pointing off-screen and laughing. Kenny can almost hear the breathy, twisted cackles of one of the most demented assholes in town, now equipped with a gun as a part of his job. Absolute insanity.
The shot cuts to the weather, and Tweak quickly grabs the remote, changing channels like the pixelated image of Cartman scared him almost as much as the real thing.
Kenny talks to Cartmen even less than he talks to Stan, and they live five minutes apart. In fact, the last time they shared more than a few pot-shot insults back and forth was when the absolute prick tried to arrest him on a DUI nearly eight months ago, going so far as to put handcuffs on him and read him his Miranda rights, like he was nothing more than a common thug.
Even if Kenny had been drinking, at the time. And driving. And, maybe – most definitely – he had ended up wrecking his shitty excuse for a car by hitting a guardrail and nearly careening over the side of a cliff, earning himself an air-flighted trip to the hospital that he was still getting collection notices for – The point remained that it was Eric fucking Cartman – shit of the earth Cartman, of all the fucking brain-dead towny cops – that had tried to press charges on him for it.
Some shit was just plain unforgiveable, and Kenny was planning on seeing this particular grudge to the damn grave.
Tweak huffs out a breath, deflating himself the rest of the way back onto his stool, pouting, Dateline plays in the background now, like Tweak needs anything else to trigger him. Kenny keeps him damn mouth shut, in case he turns back on the news.
He looks at Kenny, all wide-eyed and panicked. “Aw, man. He’s going to be an even bigger pain in the ass now, isn’t he?
Yes, he thinks, but he doesn’t have the heart to say it out loud.
In fact, pain in the ass was probably an understatement. Cartman was going to be fucking intolerable once he saw the footage of himself, in uniform, on the local news.
Kenny sucks his teeth and says nothing as a way of comfort to his semi-friend. He couldn’t. It would all be a lie, anyway.
Instead, Kenny turns away from the screen, pats the fluffy golden poof of Tweak’s hair—a color that rivaled his own—and on his way out says, “Don’t tell him you saw it, if he brings it up.”
From behind the counter, Tweak moans, barely audible, “Yeah. I’ll try not to.”
Like there was a chance that Cartman wouldn’t bring it up. Right.
The sun was nowhere in sight as he made his way back to the truck. He’s got a few hours until his shift is supposed to start, but he’s become accustomed to dicking around before the rest of the town is even awake. He has a routine.
He jumps in the truck and pumps the gas pedal a few times, trying to get some blood back into the Chevy’s veins before he cranks it back to life with a roar. He counts himself lucky that the engine hasn’t seized yet this winter. It would, eventually, but he always pets the steering wheel when it doesn’t, praising the old girl for hanging in there with him for another drive, since his shitty little Nissan was sitting totaled in a scrap yard, somewhere.
He heads farther North, past the suburbs. He doesn’t take his eyes off the road.
He could text Kyle or Stan, ask them if they had plans to be in town for the holidays; see if they wanted to maybe kick it, or something.
His fingers always freeze right as he goes to punch in the contact information. A feeling of complete and utter foolishness overtaking him, sometimes sending the little prepaid piece of shit soaring across the room, sometimes banishing it back into the confines of his pocket.
Kenny wasn’t desperate. Sure, he’d like to see the guys again, but he wasn’t about to beg for their attention. They’d given him more than enough throughout school; took up a paternal nature towards him, mincing words and treading lightly around his feelings, like he was a baby bird teetering on the edge of the nest, threatening to jump.
They are adults now. Kyle was about to go into his first year of law school, and Stan was a contender to take his college career professionally, with a slot for the next NHL draft with his name practically on it already.
And then there was Kenny. Waking up in the middle of the night, terrified. Barely able to keep gas in his truck, but wasting it by driving aimlessly, anyway. Barely able to keep himself upright, but not trying very hard to manage that, either.
He realizes he’s started to chain smoke when his third one dwindles down, and he catches himself reaching for the pack on the seat next to him.
The road gets darker as he nears the highway’s on-ramp, the trees getting a little denser, and he pulls off just short of getting onto the interstate, where a steady line of early morning commuters and truck drivers are already breezing past the exit for South Park.
He reaches for the pack of cigarettes, flicks the lighter, and holds it close to his nose, relishing in the little bit of heat before inhaling on the filter to catch the tobacco alight.
He stays there, watching the highway until the sun starts to come up. Until his coffee has turned cold, he’s burnt through half the pack.
He stays there with the engine off until his toes grow cold, and his teeth start to chatter.
Somewhere, in another place, in another time, he leaves. Gets right onto the highway and doesn’t look back. Just drives until the Chevy finally gives out, so long as it’s outside the state of Colorado.
It’s a quarter after seven by the time he makes his way back.
There’s black ice on the road, and he skids a little when he crosses back over Stark’s pond, foot hovering over the gas as he turns the wheel opposite the way it tries to veer off; thinks, what if he just blew through the railing again. Thinks, what if this time no one pulled him out. Thinks it doesn’t sound too bad, to not have to think anymore.
The truck growls as it lurches over the other side, skidding a final time before he’s back on the main road, heading straight, back towards Bear Country.
He reaches for another cigarette. The drive is quiet as he heads to work.