Work Text:
Kyle shifts his feet nervously and wonders if this is a mistake. Cartman hadn’t accepted his apology, and that should have been the end of it—you live and you learn, don’t do it again, some cheesy shit like that. Yet here he is at nine p.m. on a Saturday, knuckles inches away from knocking on Eric Cartman’s door. This is going to be a mistake. He knows it. Kyle shifts his feet again, looking at the welcome mat beneath his feet, halfway covered in snow. There’s no reason for him to be out this late on a Saturday, especially when it’s snowing like a motherfucker. Maybe he should just go home.
But he won’t.
Breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth, Kyle gives the door three sharp knocks in succession. From somewhere inside the house, he hears a muffled, feminine, “Be there in a minute!” and he assumes that it must be Mrs.Cartman, until the door is opened and he is met by the face of Heidi Turner. She tilts her head to the side like a confused dog. “Oh, it’s you,” she says, a hint of disgust in her voice that Kyle doesn’t miss. “Do you need something?”
“Uh, yeah,” he says, staring at his feet. They’re buried beneath about an inch of snow. Has he really been standing out here that long? Damn, he’s pathetic. “I was wondering if I could talk to Car—Eric. I was wondering if I could talk to Eric. Is he here?”
Heidi scoffs. “Even if he was, why would he want to talk to you?”
Kyle is definitely overstepping a line here. Heidi is looking at him like he’s a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of her favorite shoe, and he doesn’t blame her in the slightest. He did break all of Cartman’s things right in front of him. He helped bury them. And now he’s here, on a Saturday night, after Cartman has already refused his apology, trying again. When did he become so self-righteous? Is he even doing this for Cartman, or is he just doing it to make himself feel better? Judging by the way Heidi is looking up at him, he can tell she’s asking herself the same questions, that she probably has the answers. “It’s just—I’m sorry.”
He expects another scoff, but instead, Heidi sighs and sidesteps, holding the door open for him. She tells him to wipe his feet on the mat before he comes inside because Mrs.Cartman already has enough things to worry about and she doesn’t need a messy carpet along with those things, so, with a curt nod, Kyle shakes the snow off of his feet and then wipes them off on the welcome mat. Heidi steps away from the door so he doesn’t have to squeeze past her, and once he’s inside, she shuts the door. “Kyle,” she says softly, almost like his mother does when she has bad news to tell him. “Why don’t you sit on the sofa so we can talk?”
Kyle doesn’t want to talk to Heidi. The look on her face tells him she’d prefer not to talk to him, either. He sits on the sofa anyway, fiddling with his mittens. “I know you care for Eric,” is what she starts off with, and Kyle tries to cut in—that fatass? like hell!—but she doesn’t give him the chance. “You may even love him. But he doesn’t forgive you, he’s with me, and that’s that. You can’t change the past, Kyle. You destroyed his things. It was your decision to go along with it.”
“I don’t love him,” Kyle says ahead of anything else, and Heidi gives a heavy sigh in return, probably gearing up to say something, but he won’t let her—just like she didn’t let him. They’re playing a game of give and take, and the prize is Eric Cartman. “I don’t even like him.”
“Then why are you here?” Heidi shoots back, and though he may not be fond of her, Kyle can admire her quick wit. She always seems to have a response waiting on the tip of her tongue, kind of like...Cartman. “Let me guess: to make yourself better? Self-righteous Kyle Broflovski, huh? You’ve been like this since we were in elementary school, you know.”
“Whatever,” he returns. Unlike Heidi, Kyle isn’t very good at coming up with things on the spot—with time, he can string words together to make a half-decent speech, a half-decent thought. But he isn’t always so good with things on-the-spot, like Heidi and Cartman are. Not everyone is as quick-witted as them, he supposes. “Just tell him I was here.”
As Kyle is standing to leave, Heidi catches him by the arm. He turns to look at her. She’s pretty in a conventional way—big green eyes, shoulder-length brown hair. “He’s here. Upstairs, actually. He saw you from his bedroom window and told me he didn’t want to deal with you, so I came instead. He’s not going to forgive you, Kyle. You need to get over it.”
“But I can’t," Kyle breathes, exasperated. He knows why he’s here, what he really came for, and it floats in the back of his head because he’s trying to pretend it isn’t the reason. Just like he tried to pretend that when he gaped at Cartman and Heidi holding hands, that it was just shock because Cartman is such a fat asshole, but he somehow managed to get a girl to like him—that it wasn’t what it really was, jealousy, hurt—I thought he loved me. “You just don’t get it.”
Heidi shakes her head. “I do get it, though. Eric isn’t the nicest guy. We all know it. It doesn’t matter, though, because you still love him, Kyle. But guess what? So do I. And just because he loves me instead of you doesn’t give you the right to barge over here in all your self-righteous glory to apologize for something that you’ve already been told you won’t be forgiven for.”
There are a million and one things Kyle wants to say to Heidi. The main ones seem to be you’re a fucking bitch and I had him first, but in the end, Kyle can’t say anything. He can only stare blankly at Heidi, her green eyes boring into his own, before he finally breaks out of her hold and she sighs gently. “He won’t stay mad forever, you know.”
“Yes, he will,” Kyle responds. He has his hand on the doorknob, ready to turn it and run out of here, crying like a schoolgirl who just had her heart broken. And he’ll go home, call Stan, and then he’ll be back here tomorrow—wash, rinse, repeat. It’ll be a cycle that won’t be broken until Heidi is out of Cartman’s life, which doesn’t seem to be anytime soon. “He’s Eric Cartman. He’s still mad about that time Scott Tenorman stole his money when we were fucking eight. He isn’t ever going to forgive me.”
And then Heidi is behind him, her hand on his shoulder. He yanks it away. She doesn’t say anything about it. “I know you love him, but he needs me right now. And I’m sorry.”
Kyle pretends that there are not tears in his eyes as he turns the doorknob and throws the door open with so much force that the hinges squeal loudly in protest. He swallows the lump in his throat that he’s sure is either his heart or his pride, and then he says, “You aren’t sorry,” and walks over the welcome mat and down the snow-covered stairs, laughing quietly at the irony of the mat. Heidi stands in the doorway and watches him walk away. Kyle viciously wipes the tears out of his eyes with the back of his forearm like they’ve done him some great injustice.
Wash, rinse, repeat.