So Far Away (stan x kyle)

Disquiet and Stark's Pond

     "Hey."

      Things aren't the same anymore.

      "Oh, hey, Stan."

      They haven't been for a while.

      "How long have you been waiting?" he asks hesitantly, a guilty grin spreading across his face.

      Kyle didn't know when it had changed, but it had, if only slightly.

      "Not long," Kyle replies apathetically, triggering Stan to let out a breath.

      There was tension now, even if gentle tension, in places only comfort used to reside.

      "That's good," Stan says, twirling the guitar pick around his neck as he begins to walk alongside Kyle, the afternoon sun making his hair glow with its golden hues.

      The pressure—the tension—it got scary sometimes, but it was easy to ignore. It wasn't always there, but usually. Kyle kept his eyes on the cracking concrete beneath his feet. In arms reach of his best friend, on a sunny autumn day, he felt more alone than he had in a while.

      It was almost comfortable, though. The awkwardness had become so familiar in their gaps of silence that it was beginning to disappear—or, no, it wasn't disappearing; it was just getting easier to ignore. They would walk home from school together every day, always in this recurring uncomfortable silence.

      "Guess I'll see you tomorrow?" a voice rang, and suddenly Kyle's house was just ahead. He couldn't remember how it had happened, but that was something else that was becoming frequent.

      "Yeah," he replied, meeting Stan's eyes as he finished shaking the clouds from his hair. "See you tomorrow," he echoes, but it's almost a whisper now. Stan's eyes always stole his breath in such a childish way, blue hues reflecting in gray irises and making Kyle's stomach churn with a dreadful kind of delight.

      "Cool," Stan says with a stupid smile, saluting Kyle with the hand he kept out of his pocket as he stepped farther down the sidewalk.

      "Cool," Kyle said back to the empty street that faced him. Somehow it felt poetic, but Kyle just couldn't put his finger on why.

      "Oh, welcome home, bubbie," Shiela sings, the unmistakable sound of a knife against a cutting board echoing from the kitchen to the front door as Kyle slips his backpack from his shoulders.

      "Hey, Ma. Is Ike home yet?" he questions flatly, scanning what he can see of the house for any sign of his brother.

      "Not yet, bubs, but I'm making him a snack if you want me to make you any," she hums with distinct warmth, the familiarity of the Broflovski home easing Kyle's jumbled nerves.

      "No thanks, Ma," he declines, barely offbeat, preoccupied as he drags his bag up the stairs to his bedroom. His father was no doubt still at work, Ike surely still on the bus ride home. It was routine. Everything was routine for Kyle nowadays, from the classes he took to the way he brushed his hand across the wooden railing as he made his way up the stairs every afternoon. He almost felt programmed, day after day of being stuck in his same monotonous rut—it wasn't all bad, though. What else was he going to do, hang out with people?

      No, he didn't really have any friends. He knew it already, but thinking those words made the temperature in his bedroom drop slightly. He hadn't had much of an appetite recently, he just ate when he was told to and not much other than that. It was weird, but it had turned into his normal. Most of his normal used to be weird for him.

      He spent the afternoon studying, the air feeling dense as he didn't do much more than breathe it in and flip the pages of a book he's already read before. He didn't really feel awake. He didn't really feel in control. When the sun began to set, hours after Kyle had been called to eat with his family, the oncoming darkness of the night sank into his skin along with the quiet chill brought on by his window, cracked open just enough for the chilled air to reach him. There was something so comfortable and familiar about the air of an autumn night, one that reminded him of the way Stan and him used to sit on Stan's rooftop as he burned through a cigarette and Kyle reminded him how unhealthy it was. They could just talk for hours and it felt so normal, but it was hard now. Kyle always thought it would be easy to talk to Stan forever, but it hasn't been easy for a while now. He reaches for his phone, reminded of the songs Stan used to play for him. It was silly, it was—he didn't even like this kind of music—but he listened to it anyway. It was often enough now that he began to learn the lyrics to all these songs, these stupid songs that reminded him so much of his best friend that felt so far away.