Chapter Text
Kyle laid in his hospital bed, looking up at the broken lights the doctor had yet to fix. Tilting his head back further he could see the remnants of the shelf that had fallen earlier.
He frowned remembering the moment and its impossibility. Cartman and the other fake psychics had started yelling and pretending to mentally fight each other, Kyle had gotten so angry at them for pretending to have those powers to make money off of others, to hurt people for their own selfish gain, and had yelled at them to stop, throwing his hands out in some sort of threat. They hadn’t stopped right away and then… something happened.
The lights had exploded and the shelf behind him had fallen on one side, sending everything on it to the floor. Everyone had turned to look at him and he panicked, fearful of what had caused that, yelling that there had to be a logical explanation for it.
But Kyle knew deep down, even when telling them it was an unrelated accident, that he had caused it. The fall had done something to him that it hadn't done to Cartman, his brain had changed and now he had powers that shouldn’t exist.
Something similar had happened to Kyle before, he knew it had with the same certainty he knew that he had caused the broken lights and shelf, but what happened was troubling Kyle to remember. Normally his memory was sharp, it had to be to keep up with classes between everything he always got caught up in, but the event was staying stubbornly out of reach of his mind.
Kyle groaned and sat up, looking around the room for something to take his mind off the puzzle it had made for itself. His eyes landed on a clipboard that was shoved underneath a chair that looked covered in dust. Kyle frowned and threw the blankets off of his legs and started to get up, listening in case a nurse or doctor decided to check on him. ‘Unlikely, no one here ever cares about us.’
He crouched down and reached for the board, wondering what kind of patient was left behind and who they might be. He pulled out the board after groping around for it and tried to blow the thick layer of dust off. Kyle coughed and held the board away from himself as the dust settled, he decided to return to his bed as he heard someone walk by in the hall.
As he sat down in the bed he wiped away the dust with the blanket instead and held the board toward the window for light.
Kyle froze.
The board was wrong.
It had to be.
The board held the name of his friend Kenny.
The words “Dead at 6:37” mocked him from the page.
Kenny wasn’t dead.
Kyle dropped the clipboard and curled up staring at it, as if the board would show more people he knew dead.
Kenny hadn’t died, he couldn’t have, he was in the same room as Kyle earlier that day. Kyle couldn't even remember a time where Kenny had been to the hospital. His family was too poor to be able to afford any doctor visits besides the free flu shots once a year.
Kyle shut his eyes tightly and tried to ignore the tears starting to try and escape. He had just seen Kenny that day. Kenny was perfectly fine at home. This had to be some fucked up prank Cartman had come up with to get back at him for calling out his lying earlier.
It had to be.
There was no other logical reason for that board to have one of his best friends' name on it.
Kyle uncurled his hands from where they had been digging into his legs to shakily reach for the board to see what else Cartman had written for his horrible prank. The admission date was from months ago, no dismissed date was needed for ‘dead’ patients Kyle supposed.
The disease listed caught Kyle's attention, it was muscular dystrophy. Kyle tried his best to think back to the date listed for admission, had Kenny seemed weaker then? Any signs that Cartman hadn’t pulled everything out of his ass?
Kyle froze again, he couldn’t remember Kenny being seen at all for months after the death date. He had asked Kenny where he had been during last christmas and Kenny had said “Over there.” Where was there? He hadn’t been at his house or school, or any of his other hang out spots that Kyle knew off. But people can’t just disappear for months without anyone noticing, especially not a 9 year old child.
‘But then again,’ Kyle's traitorous brain whispered, ‘No one notices what you do. You go to a different country on christmas eve and no one can even tell that you've been gone. No one cares when you show up at home with cut up clothes and cant speak a single word to them because of the things you've seen. They never can care, or notice, or bother to try and understand you- ’
Kyle suddenly remembered to breathe, taking a deep breath that seemed to be too much air for one small human, mortal body to take in all at once, like he was breathing for more than himself-
Kyle needed to talk to Kenny. Something was horribly, horrendously wrong here and Kenny seemed to be the root of the problem.