"It's unlikely he'll survive."

Stan didn't need to hear the doctor's description. He didn't want to know about the painful and slow death brought on by a brain tumor.

He didn't want to hear about how Kyle would waste away, how his personality would change and the epilepsy would worsen and the doctors were trying their hardest, they really were, the surgery just hadn't been effective and they were going to try chemotherapy but there was no guarantee since they caught him so late.

Kyle's mother was crying, clutching at his father. Stan's mother tried to hug him.

Kyle was in the same bed he'd been in for the last few months in the Denver hospital. His face was the color of soured milk, and his smattering of freckles stuck out like they'd been pasted on.

"You look like a real ginger," Stan said, truthfully.

Kyle laughed, a little too high-pitched, a little too weak. He set his Biology textbook on the bed next to him.

"Chemotherapy, huh?" Stan sat in his usual chair.

Kyle wrinkled his nose. "At least I'll finally loose the fro."

Stan chuckled along with him, and he wanted to scream.

Wanted to yell, how dare you be cheerful, how dare you try to keep your hopes up.

They must have told him. He must know.

He clenched the edge of the wooden seat, looking not quite at Kyle.

"Did Mr. Garrison grade my last assignment?" Kyle tapped the textbook.

"Yeah." He pulled the paper out of his backpack and handed it to him. The 100% was sprawled across in bright red ink. "Congratulations. You're officially the smartest fifth grader in the universe."

Kyle grinned, which pissed Stan off again. How could Kyle want to spend his last few months doing his goddamn science homework? How could he pretend it was normal?

"Is everything okay?" Kyle asked.

No. Everything's not okay.

"I have to go." Stan jerked to his feet a little too fast. "I have - it's really late, and I stayed late last night, yeah."

Kyle watched him with dull eyes as he shuffled towards the door. "Come back tomorrow?"

"I'll come back tomorrow," he echoed. He'd said it every day for months.

Stan was afraid of a lot of things. Spiders and snakes and alien abductions and global warming and mad cow disease and traffic accidents and everything else on the list.

He wasn't afraid of, say, his girlfriend breaking up with him, or his parents getting another divorce, or not having people to eat lunch with. Not anymore.

He sat on the sidewalk outside the hospital, waiting for his mother to come out so they could make the hour-and-a-half commute to South Park, and he wondered why he kept doing this.

His parents took turns as chauffeur, but still, it was a lot of gas to drive him up to visit Kyle every day.

He had a lot of homework. He had a social life to deal with. And he hated watching Kyle weaken every day.

Why did he keep coming? Kyle was going to die in the end, anyway. It wouldn't change anything.

He hid his face in his hands.

He couldn't keep doing this, coming back to this same hospital every day. Nothing changing.

He had to do something about it.

Kenny McCormick wasn't afraid of anything, as far as Stan could tell, otherwise why would he sit on the edge of the train tracks on the wooden bridge, feet dangling over the side, throwing rocks into the river a hundred feet below?

Of course, Kenny had a good reason not to be afraid.

"S'up," Kenny mumbled, the words muffled through his hood.

"Hi." Stan stood awkwardly on land. He had to speak up to be heard over the wind. "Um. I need your help."

"Nice to see you too, Marsh," Kenny said sarcastically. "Oh yes, I'm fine, how about you. Thanks for asking why I've skipped school for the past month. It's no big deal, perfectly normal for fifth-graders to drop out."

Stan blinked. "Wait – you've been skipping school?"

"It doesn't matter. What do you need help with?"

"Um." He hesitated again. "Look – Kyle's dying."

"I know." Kenny pushed up the sleeve of his parka to give his arm more leverage. The stone plunked into the water, fifty feet out. The resulting splash tore at the surface of the water, crumbling the moon superimposed on the reflection.

"You know?" Stan demanded. He was angry again, even though he didn't want to be, and he didn't know why. "How could you even know? You haven't been to visit Kyle."

"Have to. I just saw him a week ago." Kenny threw another stone.

"Oh." Kyle hadn't said anything about it. "Well, he's dying. And I want to do something about it."

"Go to med school, get your degree in brain surgery."

"Is this funny to you?"

"No."

Stan shook his head. "Look. You die, like, all the time."

"Point?"

"Well, you've talked to God before, right?"

"Stan, God isn't going to care about one little kid. Kyle's dying because he's dying, and God isn't going to step in and stop that."

"Goddamn it!" Stan stomped his foot. "There has to be something you can say to him. I thought Kyle was your friend, don't you care?"

"I don't even see God that often!" Kenny pushed his hood off his head, his blond hair sticking up wild and greasy in a crown. For the first time. Stan noticed the hollows under his eyes, his cracked lips, his thin face and emaciated frame under the heavy parka.

"I usually go to Hell, Stan," Kenny said quietly. "Maybe it's because I'm a bad person, or maybe it's because most people go to Hell. But I don't talk to God much."

"Oh." Stan looked at the water below. The darkness under the bridge bled out into shadows at his feet.

"Would Satan be able to do anything, do you think?"

Kenny licked his lips. "I don't know what I would say to him."

"Then take me with you. I'll talk to him. I'll convince him to help save Kyle."

"You – you'll talk to the prince of darkness?" Kenny chuckled. "You're serious. Of course you are. Great. I suppose this is going to be a crazy trial, and I'm going to die somehow, and the whole town will go after the rest of you with pitchforks, and then at the very end you'll have learned something and you'll make a big speech and then everything will go back to normal."

Stan hugged himself. "Hopefully."

"Well. Goddamn. Goddamn." Kenny threw a last rock, stood, and walked with arms outstretched on the train tracks, tottering from side to side, and inch from falling. He made it to safe ground and hopped to stand next to Stan. "I suppose I'll need to die before we get any deeper into this."

Kenny chose car accident as a means of death because, in his words, it was "over the fastest."

Stan hugged himself as he watched Kenny walk up to the edge of the highway. For a second he didn't believe he was really going to do it. There was a distinct difference between dying and committing suicide, and one implied that you didn't want to come back.

But of course, this was only for Kyle. Kenny didn't really want to die.

Still, he squeezed his eyes shut when Kenny stepped out into the traffic. Tires screamed and horns blared. The splat! and following thud! sent shivers up his spine.

Cars screeched as the drivers tried to stop. The whole highway backed up in less than a second. The sun peeking over the horizon provided just enough light to see the remains of Kenny's corpse. The body had been blown open by the impact, red splattering over the pavement, skin flattened in some places and bulging mush in others.

Stan bent over and heaved his guts.

"Easy, easy," a familiar voice said.

He looked up and saw nothing.

"Why can I hear you?"

"Don't know," Kenny mused. "This works sometimes. You're not going to be the first person I've brought down to hell. Whenever I discuss it with them before hand, they can always hear me after. And I can touch."

Cold, invisible fingers wrapped around his wrist. Stan shivered, but did not pull away.

This was for Kyle. This was all for Kyle.

"Well?" Kenny said. "Shall we?"

"Ow!"

"I said watch your step."

"You didn't tell me the rocks would be, like, daggers or something! Ow, ow, ow!"

He grabbed Kenny's shoulder so he could continue to hop on one foot. The rocks jarred under their feet, and they both slipped and had to snatch at the wall.

"Careful!" Kenny hissed. "I can't die, but you can, and either way it'll hurt."

"Sorry," Stan mumbled. He peered over the edge of the walkway. Orange light poured from thousands of feet below, too far to see anything other than dark, ant-like shapes. The walkway was only a yard or so wide, and steep enough to throw him off balance.

"How far is it?"

Kenny shrugged. "Not far."

"How – is this how you get down to Hell each time?"

"No. Usually I just." He snapped his fingers. "But when it's with other people, it'll take longer."

The rocks slipped. He grabbed Kenny's shoulder. Kenny rolled his eyes, but kept inching down, supporting Stan.

"Aren't you afraid?" he whispered.

"I'm not afraid of a lot," Kenny said.

"I guess I already knew that. I'm kind of jealous, I guess."

"Well, I'm not a crybaby like you," Kenny said, matter-of-fact.

"Hey! Don't you dare-"

"Shut up, Stan. You're afraid of your own shadow. You still sleep with the lights on, I bet."

"I'm not afraid of the dark," he said, and he wasn't.

After a while, Kenny asked, "So, what are you afraid of?"

They were friends, right? They were close enough, they'd been friends for as long as he could remember, but he still felt like he didn't know Kenny at all.

The rocks trailed down into the darkness below. The highlights of orange light only split the shadows, but did not dissolve them, and he could not see all the way down the path.

"I'm afraid of certainties," he said. "Most of them stupid. Like, did you know that, like, five spiders crawl into your mouth and die there over a lifetime? While you sleep?"

"I heard it was twelve," Kenny said.

"Either way, man, that's a lot of spiders dying in my mouth."

Kenny laughed, breaking the silence.

"Anything else?"

"Dying, I guess. I guess most people are."

"Not me."

"Of course not you."

The words hung in the air, awkward and twisting and wrong, and they soured until they shamed him.

"More certainties," he said. "We're going to grow up, go to college, drift apart. That's a certainty."

"It is."

"I'm afraid of Kyle dying."

Silence.

"That's another one," Stan added.

Kenny sighed. "I thought you wanted to do something about it. That's why I killed myself, that's why we're going to Hell, isn't it?"

"Yeah, yeah, that's why," Stan said. "I guess, I guess I'm so goddamn scared of it being a certainty. That's why. Because it's not. It's not." He clenched his fists, hard enough to make Kenny yelp dude, not so hard! and for him to pull away.

"He was always the smart one," he said. "And even now he's still doing his goddamn homework, even though there's no point, there's no goddamn point, he's going to die anyway. He should be throwing rocks at cars and playing all those stupid video games with me and it's not fair!"

He yelled it into the rocks and the empty orange light, and he didn't know who he expected to answer, and he didn't get one, anyway.

"So," he said. "What are you afraid of?"

Kenny was silent, and Stan had to squint to make out his expression in the dim light.

"Are you afraid of Kyle dying?"

"No."

It hurt. Only a little.

"Why, because you'll see him down in Hell?"

"I'm not half as selfish as you, Stan," Kenny snapped. "So don't make me out to be. I wouldn't Not Care for a reason as shallow as that-"

"I'm not selfish-"

"Yes, yes you are. You were complaining about how it wasn't fair for you, how you didn't like Kyle being in the hospital because you wanted him to be hanging out with you, and you don't give a damn at all how Kyle feels. You make excuses not to hang out with him anymore, because it's just so hard, just oh-so hard for poor Stan who's in perfectly good shape to have to watch his best friend die."

"You-!" He pulled his hand away, stumbled back. Kenny stopped and turned to glare at him.

"That's not how I feel," he said. "It's not."

Kenny sneered back at him. "Well, it's how you're acting."

"When did you get so fucking vicious?" Stan snapped. "Who the hell are you, Kenny? I thought you were always the nice one, the one we could come to for help-"

"The one you could come to for help? I'm taking you down to hell, you fucking asshole! If that's not helping out a friend, I don't know what is!" Kenny balled his fists inside his threadbare mittens.

Stan took another step back. "If you don't want to take me to Satan-"

"Just shut up, Stan. I'm finishing what I started. I'm taking you to the Prince of Darkness, for all the good it will do."

"Kenny!"

Damien disengaged himself from his Xbox and skipped over to wrap his arms around Kenny's neck.

"It's been weeks since you died," he said mournfully. "I was starting to miss you. Oh, you brought a friend." He nodded to Stan. "What's the special occasion?"

Kenny patted him on the back, once, then managed to wriggle free. "Hey. Is your dad in?"

"Oh. My dad." Damien pouted a little. "People only ever want to see him. Yeah, he's in. Come on."

As he followed Damien through the halls, Stan stared at the furniture, the upholstery, the domestic details. It all seemed so human, so normal. It gave him hope that the Prince of Darkness would understand.

Damien opened a door, and instead of another quaint little room, he revealed a huge hall, lined with suits of armor, walled with dark stone. Stan gawked at the giant red man sitting on the throne.

"Dad?" Damien bounced forward, interrupting Satan's conversation with his advisors. The Prince of Darkness sighed and turned his attention to his son.

"What is it?"

"Kenny's here."

"How unusual."

"Kenny's here and he brought a friend and they want to see you now, dad."

Satan sighed again. Stan stepped behind Kenny, shoulders up.

"You'll have to excuse me," he said to his advisor, who nodded and stood without a word. Satan leaned forward in his throne, eyeing Stan and Kenny.

"What's this about?"

"He's the one who wants to see you," Kenny said, jamming a thumb in Stan's direction.

"Well?" Satan asked.

Stan cleared his throat. "Um. I. My. My best friend. Kyle's dying!" He crumpled his hands into fists. "Kyle's dying and he has a brain tumor and the doctors can't do anything and I know you're not God or anything, but you're still the Prince of Darkness and you have powers and stuff and surely you have to be able to do something, so please, please help him!"

Satan observed him quietly. Stan cursed himself for being afraid, forced himself to stand out from behind Kenny.

"Please," he said. "He's my best friend."

Satan shook his head. "I can raise the dead as animated corpses, beings without minds. But if someone is going to die, then they are going to die. There's nothing I can do."

"No!" Stan yelled. "No – you don't get it! I came all the way down to hell for this, I'm supposed to be able to save him, there has to be, there has to be some way-"

Kenny touched his arm. Stan pulled away and ran from the throne room.

Kenny found him a few minutes later, sitting on the front porch, staring off into depths of the River Styx and trying his goddamned hardest not to cry.

Kenny sat next to him and didn't say anything. He felt a little bad for being so hard on Stan earlier. Stan was only eleven, only a little kid. Of course, Kenny was even younger. He didn't feel that bad.

"This sucks," Stan muttered, wiping his eyes. "This – this is completely unfair. What are we supposed to do now, huh? Just go back to the surface and wait around for Kyle to die? Just sit by his hospital bed every day pretending everything's okay?"

"Yes," Kenny said. "Yes, that's what we're supposed to do that."

"I can't do it," Stan said. "I can't go back to that."

Kenny patted him the back, awkwardly. He wasn't much for physical affection.

"I'm afraid – I'm afraid I'll just break down in front of him, and Kyle will be Kyle and he'll try to comfort me and I'll be the weak one, and, and I'm afraid of being weak, of being weaker than I already am, and it's not fair, goddamn it, it's not fair."

They waited for something to happen, for something to change, but nothing did.

"What are you afraid of?" Stan asked again.

Kenny hugged his knees to his chest.

"I'm afraid of the world ending," he said. "I'm sure our stupid parents could figure out a way to accidentally kill us all. Maybe a nuclear war. That's how I think we'll go out, probably."

Stan watched him without saying anything.

"Anyway, everyone will die, including me, but I'll come back, and I'll be the only one left, you know? I'll just wander around, and there will be dead bodies everywhere, and I'll be completely alone. Because it's not the same when you're dead, Stan. I've talked to the dead down in Hell and all the life is out of them, of course, and they're nothing but shells anymore. So I would be the last real person on earth in the event of the world ending."

"I think that's a fairly reasonable fear-"

"Shut up, Stan. That's not all of it. I'm afraid I'll wander around, and all my friends will be laid out in the open, no one left to bury them, even you, Stan, even you. And I'm afraid I'll only start to care when the bodies start to rot and reek. And then I'll just burn the corpses."

He laughed, hoarse, barely even real.

"You're lucky. You're lucky you care so much, even if it's shallow. It means you're still a real person. Having all these fears and flaws and insecurities and shallow petty moments is part of being a real person. And me? I'm not really much of anything anymore. Because when the world ends, nothing will change for me. I'll just keep on living."

He stood, and stretched out a hand.

"Now. Come on. We have to go back eventually."

And they went back, and Kyle was still sick, and nothing had changed.

Stan started making himself stay the whole day with Kyle. He stopped finding excuses to leave. He took Kyle his homework without complaint, and they talked about skateboarding and basketball and Terrance and Phillip and video games.

Pretending.

He ignored the hollowing of Kyle's cheeks, the way his hair fell out and he started vomiting and not keeping anything down and he just grew skinnier and skinner as nothing worked.

They talked about the future, still pretending, even as it grew harder and harder for Kyle to speak.

Kyle only broke down crying once, only once admitted he didn'twanttodieandohgodStanIdon'twanttodie-

Otherwise, they put on the front for each other.

Kenny started carpooling with Stan, riding up to Denver with him and whatever parent was on commuting duty that duty. He didn't talk much, but he was there.

It was all they could do in the end.