As Tweek tries to knock the teas off the top shelf of Tolkien's kitchen cupboard with a ladle, he hears his friends in the other room lower their voices. He can't make out what they're saying in their hushed tones. Sometimes he's not sure they are his friends anymore. He has other concerns, though.
Chief among them is the horrible stomachache that's plagued him for days. Tolkien noticed he was clutching at his stomach and probably making irritating pained sounds, and pointedly informed him about the ginger tea in the cupboard. He assumes they wanted to get rid of him so they could talk about Craig's situation.
It's not like Tweek wants to hear about it anyway. Maybe a small masochistic part of him does, but mostly he just resents them treating him like a child. Like he isn't one of them. If he's not, that's fine, but why still invite him? To shoo him away when they have important man business to discuss? It's not like Clyde's really one of them either, but he isn't a receptacle. Tweek is, now, and a faulty one at that. No one should even know but it's a small town. People talk.
With a huff Tweek sets down the ladle and climbs up on the counter. He stands up and sees the ginger tea way in the back of the cupboard. He could never have reached it from the floor. A wave of pain hits him hard and his head swims but he manages to grab onto the cupboard door, yelping at that lurch in his gut from having almost fallen.
“You good, dude?” Clyde bellows from the other room.
"Nnnh, yeah!" he yells back.
He boils the water and clenches his jaw when hears them laugh. It might not be about him—nothing is anymore, and that’s fine. When the kettle whistles, he pours the boiling water into the large mug and sets the kettle back down. He breathes in slowly for four counts, holds for four, and releases for four. He keeps at that for a minute, just til the cup doesn't burn too badly for him to touch, and returns to the living room.
When he comes back into the room, Craig is trailing off, “—don’t really wanna talk about it,” and Tolkien flashes Tweek a tight-lipped smile.
Tolkien asks if he’s feeling better and Tweek replies he isn’t. He hasn’t even had any of the tea—how would he be feeling better already? They talk about Clyde’s community college plans around him and he drinks his ginger tea before it’s cooled, spacing out to escape his discomfort. Why do they keep inviting him?
Since that day at the doctor’s, Tweek has gotten quite good at spacing out, thinking about nothing, and finding much time has passed when he comes to. It probably helps that no one cares to even pretend to engage him.
When he snaps out of it this time, Tolkien and Clyde are getting set up on the couch to play video games. Implicitly, Tweek knows he isn’t invited but that’s fine. He has other plans. His bedroom ceiling isn’t going to stare at itself for the next several hours.
"Need a ride?" Craig offers, his tone bored and flat like usual, as they make their way to the front door.
“Mnnh,” Tweek says, with a jerky sort of nod. He really does need one—he’s not allowed to walk home alone after dark anymore. Even though he doesn’t smell, his size is a dead giveaway as to his status. Still, it’s uncomfortable to have to ask, to have to be at Craig’s mercy.
They walk out to his car wordlessly. He forces himself to settle into the passenger’s seat, to unclench his jaw and muscles. It smells like Kyle and that makes Tweek want to throw up, but he doesn't. He's good instead. He can take this reality, the one in which Craig is with Kyle and they're going to move away together soon.
He can't bear to ask how Craig really feels about that. He doesn't want to hear if he's looking forward to it, which makes him feel like a bad friend. He wouldn't know how to deal with it if he's not, which makes him a bad friend.
Eventually Tweek manages to tune out Kyle’s scent. Why can he pick it out so clearly all of a sudden? It doesn’t smell nice to him. It smells like sour milk. Maybe it’s like buttermilk and fresh laundry to Craig. He’s not going to ask. They don’t talk about him. They don’t talk about anything anymore.
Craig’s scent comes through strongly on its own. It just smells like him, the way Craig has always smelled to him—like the comforting familiarity of his bedroom, and all those times he would wrap an arm around Tweek’s shoulders drunk and Tweek would nestle into his armpit. It reminds him of the way Craig would only laugh and smile like that for Tweek. He would look at Tweek like he was something special.
Craig doesn’t look at him at all anymore. Tweek is nothing special after all. It makes him want to cry now, that smell, that reminder of having had something so precious only to lose it before it was truly his. He doesn’t, though. He keeps any confirmation of those feelings safe and locked away. His only remaining source of dignity is that he has never said the words aloud.
Craig chokes on his breath. “Dude, are you okay?”
“Mhm,” Tweek murmurs in a strained voice.
“You don’t smell okay.”
“Hngh, great! Sorry I smell bad.”
He’s acting childish. He can’t smell anything through his shallow breaths, but he’s sure he does smell bad. He’s soaked through with sweat, he notices suddenly, but he’s shivering and his nipples form hard peaks beneath his damp button down. Then in turn he’s much too hot, and dizzy.
“Not bad. You smell distressed.”
“Huh?” Tweek asks, disoriented.
Craig shouldn’t be able to smell his feelings. It doesn’t make any sense. His head is fuzzy.
He focuses on that Craig scent again, allows himself the indulgence of fantasies of their past. They’re too tinged with the bitterness of the present to dwell upon much these days, but he desperately needs an escape. He thinks about that one time he woke up after they’d fallen asleep together on the couch, Craig’s arm wrapped tightly around his chest, throbbing cock pressed flush against his ass. Craig had woken up a few short minutes after Tweek and withdrew with a sleepily mumbled, “Sorry.”
But what if he hadn’t? What if instead he’d pulled down Tweek’s pajama pants and fucked him raw right there on the living room couch, grinding into his ass deep, making him come over and over where the Tuckers watched TV, marking up his neck like he hungered for Tweek as much as Tweek did him?
What if Clyde and Tolkien hadn’t come back in the room the time they were play-wrestling and Craig had him pinned, and he could feel the pulse of his cock, the heat coming off of it? He'd wanted it pressed against him so badly, wanted Craig to rip him open and tear up his insides.
He thinks about Craig fucking him in front of all their friends, bending him over the coffee table at Tolkien's house where they had ignored him, making him take his big cock on the floor of the dining room as the Tuckers and the Broflovskis hammered out the details of the arrangement. He thinks about Craig’s arm across his throat, his teeth in his neck, cock stuffed all the way inside Tweek's virgin ass—being dominated, being marked up, being owned. To hell with decorum and dowries and the dread that mounts within him each and every day.
Suddenly there’s a horrible wetness emanating from between his legs; his pants are sopping wet and uncomfortable and he can feel it seeping into the car seat.
“Something’s wrong, I think—I think I’m bleeding!”
“Not blood,” Craig grits out. He pulls up beside his own house, bringing the car to a stop, and rolls his window down, gulping down the fresh air. Craig does look at him now—he looks at him like he's an unpredictable dog of a friend.
Tweek can’t look down, he refuses—looking will make this real instead of a fucking nightmare from which he might wake. How terrible, to be falling apart like this, gushing at his very seams in front of Craig, who he’d hoped might remember him fondly.
Breath coming shallow now, Tweek runs his fingers through the liquid that's accumulated between his legs and brings his fingers to his face. It's clear and viscous, and he can hear Craig's heavy breathing, see that look in his eye that says, "Don't you fucking dare."
"What, hngh—sweet Jesus—what do I do?!”
“Don’t you have, you know, like, toys?”
Tweek laughs bitterly. “No, of course not—why would they bother buying me toys?”
“You should just be ready.”
Tweek’s bottom lip begins trembling of its own accord and his eyes prickle in that way that precedes tears falling. He rubs his eyes harshly to preempt it.
“They thought I’d never, angh—‘cause of the drugs,” he chokes out.
Then without warning, he’s sobbing and Craig tries to pull his fingers away from his eyes. He’s going to win because he’s bigger and stronger, but Tweek is determined and humiliated by his biology, so he puts up a fight.
“Tweek, for fuck’s sake—” Craig finally manages to pry his fingers up, “I have spare toys you can have, okay?”
“Gah, I don’t want Kyle’s fucking used sex toys!”
“Kyle never—my stupid mom got them for me. Just take them so you don’t hurt yourself!”
“Hah, hurt myself?”
“Yeah, you have to”—Craig sighs—“if you don’t get mated, you’re supposed to use those toys, the ones that," he hesitates, "that inflate like a real knot.”
Tweek gapes at him in horror.
“I don’t want that!” he shrieks, nausea spiking. “Please, ngh—oh God, Craig! Please don’t make me do that!”
“I’m not making you,” he grumbles, but they both know that’s a lie. Craig can’t even look at him.
“I’m just gonna get them. Then I’ll drive you home. Okay?”
Home, where his parents are. They’ll know right away. They’ll probably auction off his virginity and leave him to suffer in his heat til whichever old creep buys it arrives. He’s kept all his feelings of dread and pain and abandonment down for so long but this thought is simply too much to bear, and it all comes pouring out in the form of the stomach bile he now spews down his shirt.
"Oh, fuck," Craig groans. He grabs some fast food napkins from the backseat and presses them to Tweek's chest and stomach to sop it up. They absorb the liquid right away, so it's just Craig's hands on him, and he shivers and whines at his touch. It should be disgusting, Craig getting the contents of Tweek's stomach all over his hands, but he's touching him so gently, so hesitantly, it makes Tweek's whole body burn and pulse with need.
When he looks up, Craig is panting, his pupils fat, staring at Tweek's body, and then Craig looks up too, and seems to consciously pull himself away. He gathers up all the soiled napkins in a wad and opens the car door.
“Craig,” Tweek hisses, and Craig looks back at him.
“You’ll be fine. Just, don’t open your door. Not for anyone. Okay?”
“Ngh,” Tweek groans, thumping his head back on the seat.
Craig’s words don’t reassure him like they used to. Why should they? He’s going to go and forget all about Tweek.
He still can’t believe Craig’s just going to leave him here now, though. He’s hot and shivering, drenched in his own fluids, and Craig abruptly removes his jacket and drapes it over Tweek. The smell makes Tweek’s head swim, and he's startled when the car door slams closed. The doors click locked and Tweek is left alone.
Re: Tweek/Craig, ABO, overstimulation
As Tweek tries to knock the teas off the top shelf of Tolkien's kitchen cupboard with a ladle, he hears his friends in the other room lower their voices. He can't make out what they're saying in their hushed tones. Sometimes he's not sure they are his friends anymore. He has other concerns, though.
Chief among them is the horrible stomachache that's plagued him for days. Tolkien noticed he was clutching at his stomach and probably making irritating pained sounds, and pointedly informed him about the ginger tea in the cupboard. He assumes they wanted to get rid of him so they could talk about Craig's situation.
It's not like Tweek wants to hear about it anyway. Maybe a small masochistic part of him does, but mostly he just resents them treating him like a child. Like he isn't one of them. If he's not, that's fine, but why still invite him? To shoo him away when they have important man business to discuss? It's not like Clyde's really one of them either, but he isn't a receptacle. Tweek is, now, and a faulty one at that. No one should even know but it's a small town. People talk.
With a huff Tweek sets down the ladle and climbs up on the counter. He stands up and sees the ginger tea way in the back of the cupboard. He could never have reached it from the floor. A wave of pain hits him hard and his head swims but he manages to grab onto the cupboard door, yelping at that lurch in his gut from having almost fallen.
“You good, dude?” Clyde bellows from the other room.
"Nnnh, yeah!" he yells back.
He boils the water and clenches his jaw when hears them laugh. It might not be about him—nothing is anymore, and that’s fine. When the kettle whistles, he pours the boiling water into the large mug and sets the kettle back down. He breathes in slowly for four counts, holds for four, and releases for four. He keeps at that for a minute, just til the cup doesn't burn too badly for him to touch, and returns to the living room.
When he comes back into the room, Craig is trailing off, “—don’t really wanna talk about it,” and Tolkien flashes Tweek a tight-lipped smile.
Tolkien asks if he’s feeling better and Tweek replies he isn’t. He hasn’t even had any of the tea—how would he be feeling better already? They talk about Clyde’s community college plans around him and he drinks his ginger tea before it’s cooled, spacing out to escape his discomfort. Why do they keep inviting him?
Since that day at the doctor’s, Tweek has gotten quite good at spacing out, thinking about nothing, and finding much time has passed when he comes to. It probably helps that no one cares to even pretend to engage him.
When he snaps out of it this time, Tolkien and Clyde are getting set up on the couch to play video games. Implicitly, Tweek knows he isn’t invited but that’s fine. He has other plans. His bedroom ceiling isn’t going to stare at itself for the next several hours.
"Need a ride?" Craig offers, his tone bored and flat like usual, as they make their way to the front door.
“Mnnh,” Tweek says, with a jerky sort of nod. He really does need one—he’s not allowed to walk home alone after dark anymore. Even though he doesn’t smell, his size is a dead giveaway as to his status. Still, it’s uncomfortable to have to ask, to have to be at Craig’s mercy.
They walk out to his car wordlessly. He forces himself to settle into the passenger’s seat, to unclench his jaw and muscles. It smells like Kyle and that makes Tweek want to throw up, but he doesn't. He's good instead. He can take this reality, the one in which Craig is with Kyle and they're going to move away together soon.
He can't bear to ask how Craig really feels about that. He doesn't want to hear if he's looking forward to it, which makes him feel like a bad friend. He wouldn't know how to deal with it if he's not, which makes him a bad friend.
Eventually Tweek manages to tune out Kyle’s scent. Why can he pick it out so clearly all of a sudden? It doesn’t smell nice to him. It smells like sour milk. Maybe it’s like buttermilk and fresh laundry to Craig. He’s not going to ask. They don’t talk about him. They don’t talk about anything anymore.
Craig’s scent comes through strongly on its own. It just smells like him, the way Craig has always smelled to him—like the comforting familiarity of his bedroom, and all those times he would wrap an arm around Tweek’s shoulders drunk and Tweek would nestle into his armpit. It reminds him of the way Craig would only laugh and smile like that for Tweek. He would look at Tweek like he was something special.
Craig doesn’t look at him at all anymore. Tweek is nothing special after all. It makes him want to cry now, that smell, that reminder of having had something so precious only to lose it before it was truly his. He doesn’t, though. He keeps any confirmation of those feelings safe and locked away. His only remaining source of dignity is that he has never said the words aloud.
Craig chokes on his breath. “Dude, are you okay?”
“Mhm,” Tweek murmurs in a strained voice.
“You don’t smell okay.”
“Hngh, great! Sorry I smell bad.”
He’s acting childish. He can’t smell anything through his shallow breaths, but he’s sure he does smell bad. He’s soaked through with sweat, he notices suddenly, but he’s shivering and his nipples form hard peaks beneath his damp button down. Then in turn he’s much too hot, and dizzy.
“Not bad. You smell distressed.”
“Huh?” Tweek asks, disoriented.
Craig shouldn’t be able to smell his feelings. It doesn’t make any sense. His head is fuzzy.
He focuses on that Craig scent again, allows himself the indulgence of fantasies of their past. They’re too tinged with the bitterness of the present to dwell upon much these days, but he desperately needs an escape. He thinks about that one time he woke up after they’d fallen asleep together on the couch, Craig’s arm wrapped tightly around his chest, throbbing cock pressed flush against his ass. Craig had woken up a few short minutes after Tweek and withdrew with a sleepily mumbled, “Sorry.”
But what if he hadn’t? What if instead he’d pulled down Tweek’s pajama pants and fucked him raw right there on the living room couch, grinding into his ass deep, making him come over and over where the Tuckers watched TV, marking up his neck like he hungered for Tweek as much as Tweek did him?
What if Clyde and Tolkien hadn’t come back in the room the time they were play-wrestling and Craig had him pinned, and he could feel the pulse of his cock, the heat coming off of it? He'd wanted it pressed against him so badly, wanted Craig to rip him open and tear up his insides.
He thinks about Craig fucking him in front of all their friends, bending him over the coffee table at Tolkien's house where they had ignored him, making him take his big cock on the floor of the dining room as the Tuckers and the Broflovskis hammered out the details of the arrangement. He thinks about Craig’s arm across his throat, his teeth in his neck, cock stuffed all the way inside Tweek's virgin ass—being dominated, being marked up, being owned. To hell with decorum and dowries and the dread that mounts within him each and every day.
Suddenly there’s a horrible wetness emanating from between his legs; his pants are sopping wet and uncomfortable and he can feel it seeping into the car seat.
“Something’s wrong, I think—I think I’m bleeding!”
“Not blood,” Craig grits out. He pulls up beside his own house, bringing the car to a stop, and rolls his window down, gulping down the fresh air. Craig does look at him now—he looks at him like he's an unpredictable dog of a friend.
Tweek can’t look down, he refuses—looking will make this real instead of a fucking nightmare from which he might wake. How terrible, to be falling apart like this, gushing at his very seams in front of Craig, who he’d hoped might remember him fondly.
Breath coming shallow now, Tweek runs his fingers through the liquid that's accumulated between his legs and brings his fingers to his face. It's clear and viscous, and he can hear Craig's heavy breathing, see that look in his eye that says, "Don't you fucking dare."
"What, hngh—sweet Jesus—what do I do?!”
“Don’t you have, you know, like, toys?”
Tweek laughs bitterly. “No, of course not—why would they bother buying me toys?”
“You should just be ready.”
Tweek’s bottom lip begins trembling of its own accord and his eyes prickle in that way that precedes tears falling. He rubs his eyes harshly to preempt it.
“They thought I’d never, angh—‘cause of the drugs,” he chokes out.
Then without warning, he’s sobbing and Craig tries to pull his fingers away from his eyes. He’s going to win because he’s bigger and stronger, but Tweek is determined and humiliated by his biology, so he puts up a fight.
“Tweek, for fuck’s sake—” Craig finally manages to pry his fingers up, “I have spare toys you can have, okay?”
“Gah, I don’t want Kyle’s fucking used sex toys!”
“Kyle never—my stupid mom got them for me. Just take them so you don’t hurt yourself!”
“Hah, hurt myself?”
“Yeah, you have to”—Craig sighs—“if you don’t get mated, you’re supposed to use those toys, the ones that," he hesitates, "that inflate like a real knot.”
Tweek gapes at him in horror.
“I don’t want that!” he shrieks, nausea spiking. “Please, ngh—oh God, Craig! Please don’t make me do that!”
“I’m not making you,” he grumbles, but they both know that’s a lie. Craig can’t even look at him.
“I’m just gonna get them. Then I’ll drive you home. Okay?”
Home, where his parents are. They’ll know right away. They’ll probably auction off his virginity and leave him to suffer in his heat til whichever old creep buys it arrives. He’s kept all his feelings of dread and pain and abandonment down for so long but this thought is simply too much to bear, and it all comes pouring out in the form of the stomach bile he now spews down his shirt.
"Oh, fuck," Craig groans. He grabs some fast food napkins from the backseat and presses them to Tweek's chest and stomach to sop it up. They absorb the liquid right away, so it's just Craig's hands on him, and he shivers and whines at his touch. It should be disgusting, Craig getting the contents of Tweek's stomach all over his hands, but he's touching him so gently, so hesitantly, it makes Tweek's whole body burn and pulse with need.
When he looks up, Craig is panting, his pupils fat, staring at Tweek's body, and then Craig looks up too, and seems to consciously pull himself away. He gathers up all the soiled napkins in a wad and opens the car door.
“Craig,” Tweek hisses, and Craig looks back at him.
“You’ll be fine. Just, don’t open your door. Not for anyone. Okay?”
“Ngh,” Tweek groans, thumping his head back on the seat.
Craig’s words don’t reassure him like they used to. Why should they? He’s going to go and forget all about Tweek.
He still can’t believe Craig’s just going to leave him here now, though. He’s hot and shivering, drenched in his own fluids, and Craig abruptly removes his jacket and drapes it over Tweek. The smell makes Tweek’s head swim, and he's startled when the car door slams closed. The doors click locked and Tweek is left alone.