#a fucking ROCK ON THE HIGHWAY decided to choose violence

[tshifty]

i had to get a car thing done but im hoping to take and post my nash pics when i get home later toniiiiiight ahhhhhh my costume is FINISHED!!! my hair is PINK!!! i am so hyped yall

[blame-canada]

Choose Me

Prompt: Road Trip

Word Count: 872

Pairing: Crenny

Rated: T for mild violence

Hello friends! This is one of the drabbles written for the July 2017 South Park Drabble Bomb, for the prompt “Road Trip!” The pairing is Crenny, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. Read it on AO3 here.

Faded yellow stripes passed like tiny lightning bolts on the driver’s side, and Kenny imagined them to sound like thunder, crackling with each break between them like a rainstorm that the earth around them definitely needed. The grass was dead and the trees were dead, and before jumping into Craig’s shitty Neon with the tires spinning hot underneath them, he was dead too. Not literally, of course, as he’d become accustomed to clarifying, but deep inside his soul, where his spirit was sleeping. He felt dormant, senile and strange, stuck in a town with no future to speak of and a deadbeat family he wanted very much to care about but came just short of doing so. ‘For Karen’ had been his mantra for years, but Karen was grown, and not even her doe eyes could stop him from thrusting himself into Craig’s passenger seat, followed by several glass bottles hurled at him from across the lawn. No, those bottles had sealed a fate, one no amount of younger sister tears could change.

“You’re no longer welcome in this house!” he’d been told, the words slurred and raspy from the morning pack of cigarettes smoked through one by one. Good, Kenny thought, and he’d winced while he rolled his window up by the hand crank as hard as possible, just barely missing shattering glass that he feared dented the door.

“Shit, sorry,” he’d said, breathless for reasons he didn’t know, but Craig had already let go of the brakes, and they were squealing away from the shit hole he called home and out of the shit hole called South Park. It wasn’t until the signs for the next town started cropping up and the road became an empty two-lane highway that Craig seemed to relax, his foot feeling like it eased off the gas, just a bit. Until then, they were silent. Kenny eyed the AUX cord, though it didn’t feel right to grasp for it quite yet; not when his heart was still pounding and the blood still rushed hot and angry in his veins.

Craig broke the silence first.

“What you got in the backpack?” His eyes never left the road, his face steely in a way only Craig could pull off. From the side, he looked like a statue, the kind they painted so it looked like it’d been done on paper. He looked like he belonged on an ancient vase or tapestry, strong, sharp features standing out like the characteristics of royalty. Craig was definitely three-dimensional, though, and Kenny proved it by poking at his dark blue hoodie, feeling the cotton under his fingertips and the way Craig flinched at first contact.

“I don’t know,” Kenny answered, and it was partly true. He’d been in a hurry he hadn’t expected. Craig had thrown a rock into his bedroom window.

It was not just a little bit of gravel either, but a rock that belonged in a river, a sizable chunk of half-polished stone that had soared right into the window panes and caused a downpour of thick glass shards. Kenny had jumped to his feet, rushing to the window and ignoring the commotion of his family yelling from downstairs, and he found that in front of his house was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. It stood in beaten up sneakers and a ratty old hoodie that he refused to throw away, leaning back against a poorly running old car that he’d bought with his own paychecks off a shady guy online.

“Is this the part where I quote Shakespeare and let down my hair?” Kenny teased, just to catch that tiny quirk of his lips that told him he’d said something legitimately amusing to him, and it materialized instantly.

“I’m choosing now,” Craig said, and though he hadn’t yelled Kenny heard it clear as day, ringing in his ears like musical chimes, like the prettiest promise he’d ever been chosen for. Kenny hadn’t given it a second thought. They’d discussed this before, one late night in Craig’s backyard. “One of these days I’m gonna pick up and high-tail it the fuck outta here, and I’m not gonna look back,” he’d promised.

“Take me with you?” Kenny asked, though it was more of a desperate request than a question. Craig nodded, his profile illuminated by the moonlight. “Just tell me when.”

“I’ll choose a day,” Craig said, “and I’ll take you with me.”

The sun outlined his face instead of the moon this time, on this day that Craig had chosen, and the tingling in Kenny’s stomach was a mixture of excitement and genuine fear. It was a thrill, he supposed, and he decided he quite liked the way thrills felt. He’d half expected Craig to forget about him, to leave town and never look back and disconnect his phone number so that Kenny would be left forever wondering if he was alive, or if he missed him.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Kenny asked, eyeing the sign that told him Denver was 92 miles away. It whizzed passed them, the way everything was lost to the wind that whipped around their car like it was invincible.

Craig never replied, so Kenny took the AUX cord.