Chapter Text
On June 12th, Kenny McCormick died. For the six-hundred and twenty-third time. Not that he was counting or anything.
Kenny looked down at his spotless white T-shirt and then at his body on the floor. He watched as red blood soaked into his orange jacket and pooled around him. The force of the gunshot and his body hitting the floor had caused the hood that usually hid his face to fall back. The bright orange ring of fabric cradling his head almost looked like a halo and his messy blond hair reflected the weak light streaming through the clouds. There was a smudge of dirt on his cheek and the muddy red of a barely-healed cut above his lip from some fist fight he'd already forgotten the cause of. All of the colors together made Kenny look almost like a sunset, which he thought maybe someone else might have found poetic. The image was only boring to him. Maybe he could have cared more if there was any actual finality to his death.
Kenny looked away from his body as the blood began to ebb more slowly and glanced again at the figure he was now. He put a hand against the spot in his chest where the bullet had entered and thanked whatever divinity there was for the numbness he felt. The first countless times, he had felt excruciating pain every time he died, at least in the first moments where he slipped between life and afterlife, but he guessed he stopped feeling it after a while. Became desensitized. Whatever. Thank fucking Christ. Kenny didn't know where the bullet that had killed him came from. He didn't care. Couldn't be bothered to, really. It seemed inevitable that some sort of horror always found him. Especially lately.
"God fucking damnit-" Kenny muttered to himself. It was jarring even to his own ears to hear his voice unmuffled by his signature jacket. The words had just left his mouth when a bizarre stretching-tingling-pulling sensation spread through him. It felt like he was a knit sweater and all the threads of his body were being pulled away from him and unraveling his very being. In only a moment, though, he was back to the familiar numbness. Instead of the familiarity of the streets of South Park and his own dead body, however, he was surrounded by an endless abyss. He couldn't see more than swirling shades of green and black and the occasional odd building or item that floated gently by.
"I'm so sick of this shit." Kenny's voice was still clear, despite the fact that when he moved his arms to cross them over his chest the air felt thick, almost like he was moving through water. The weird green void was relatively new; Kenny could still vividly remember the first time he got stuck there instead of simply fading into whatever nothingness he used to spend his time in before jolting back to life. It was only three or four years ago that he first ended up in the green place, but he'd gotten sent there enough times to have realized that he absolutely did not like it.
Kenny still didn't know a lot about how his dying worked. He didn't know why he always came back, or how, or why it was that no matter how many times he died, there was never any consistency to how long his revival took, but he did know he didn't want to spend a single second longer in that strange green limbo. After the time in fourth grade when he'd gotten stuck as dead for weeks until a mishap with his cremated remains and his dumbass friends trapped him in Eric Cartman's body, the most hellish place he had ever been, he still felt a jolt of fear when more than an hour passed without him waking up. He didn't think he could survive weeks of limbo in the green void. Luckily, only around five minutes had passed when Kenny felt a familiar tickling vagueness crawl across his skin, feeling like a mix of pins and needles and the way touch felt in dreams. He was still a few seconds away from completely vanishing, however, when a boy floated into view and immediately froze.
"Um, who are you? What are you doing here?" the kid asked. His voice was bizarrely echoey, despite the clarity Kenny's own voice had. He'd realized that about the people in this place. The boy looked like he was younger than Kenny, but there was something in his glowing green eyes that told Kenny that he was older than he looked. Kenny didn't answer the question. He'd met too many creeps to just give away his name when prompted. The guy must have noticed his apprehension because he backed up a few inches and held his hands up as if Kenny was a wild animal. The weird ghost tail that took the place of the kids legs flickered and Kenny's skin crawled under his green gaze. Although his body language was coaxing, his eyes were sharp and questioning.
"Look, I'm not trying to interrogate you, it's just that… well, I know a thing or two about the Ghost Zone and I've bumped into pretty much every spook here at least once, or at least heard of them, but-"
"But you've never met me before," Kenny finished. He let his mouth split into a grin, pulling his lips wide. He watched as the kid's eyes darted to his missing tooth and then as a frown immediately fell across his face.
"You're missing your tooth," he said simply.
"So?"
"And there's a cut above your lip." He pointed at Kenny and Kenny flicked his tongue to run it quickly over the wound, tasting the irony flavor of the scabbing blood.
"Huh. So I do." It was always hit or miss whether non-death related injuries stuck with him into the afterlife.
"You…" The kid paused, running a gloved hand through his white hair. "You are dead, right?" The boy seemed stressed. For some reason, Kenny bothered him. Kenny didn't particularly care, but he answered the question anyway.
"I am now." Kenny reached out and flicked at a yoyo that was passing through the air. It changed course and careened out of sight.
The white-haired guy's brow drew together. "Right," he said. "Of course. You're a ghost in the Ghost Zone. Of course you're dead." He seemed to think for a moment, then opened his mouth to speak. Before he could though, however, Kenny's stomach swooped. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes again, he was back in his bed. The familiar must and dirt scent of his room flooded his nose and he breathed a sigh of relief, thrilled at the fact that he could breath at all. His clothes were back intact and free of any blood stains. The worn fabric of his jacket against his skin was comforting. He shivered, shaking off the numb coldness of death as the warmth of his blood pumping through his veins spread through him fully. Kenny stared at his smudged white popcorn ceiling and listened to the sound of his breathing and felt the strong pulse of his heart beat. He couldn't help but laugh, a wide grin spreading across his face. God, did Kenny McCormick love to be alive.