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ravenFor such_heights, who wanted something about Carlos. Oh my god, you guys, I love this show so much.
fic:: the early signs that daylight's fading
by Raven
1500w, Welcome To Night Vale, Cecil/Carlos. "This is a story," Cecil says, "about you."
“This is a story,” Cecil says, “about you.”
It's not his radio voice. He sounds drowsy and comfortable, lying back on the sand propped up by his elbows. Looking at him, you think, for the thousandth time, that for all it has been completely mortifying, and you can't get away from it, because getting away from it would mean you had to switch off the radio and then you would have to listen to the sounds of distant storms and electronic howling undercutting the frantic rhythm of your own heart, you're lucky to be loved, wonderfully, embarrassingly, enthusiastically, as Cecil loves you. You called him with trepidation and this being Night Vale, a deep fear of the unknown, but in recent days you have started to feel something within yourself unzipping into certainty, like when you pull the green off a corncob and expose the gleaming surface beneath.
You suppose, this being Night Vale, that you're lucky the mortification wasn't literal.
*
The story you have been telling him is about you, and your sister. You were eleven; she was sixteen; it was a hot day in late summer, blurry with haze and buzzing with cicadas. A boy had gone through the front gate, not latching it properly so it drifted open in an absence of breeze. You stood there and watched your sister cry and then you went to see a movie, something comforting in black and white. “Carlos, come with me, I can’t go alone,” she had said, and you went. Your sister cried all the way through, enjoying her tissues and her popcorn, forgetting the boy at the gate, who had vanished while you were looking at him, leaving traces of ash and dust. You found it too cold, the air conditioning taking on a harsh life of its own inside your lungs. The movie might have been Casablanca, or It Happened One Night. It was a special showing. At the end the woman in the movie said, or maybe it was the man, even at that age you were finding gender and sex difficult, as though there were some blurry plastic overlay over everything that you had to peer through, figuring everything out from first principles while everyone else went straight to boy meets girl and they live happily ever after. The woman in the movie, or perhaps the man, said, “Darling, let’s go – let’s get away from all this.”
You have been hoping, all along, that Cecil will not say this to you: you have not told him yet, but you will.
*
You have driven out to the sand wastes, along the single-track road cutting a clean line towards the horizon. You have left the car on the roadside by the bluffs and gotten out to walk across the rise and fall of the sand. The sun is setting and you were slipping and falling, not used to the ground shifting under you, but Cecil grabbed your hand and kept you going and the two of you stumbled along together.
You found a spot where the sand curved into a bowl at the top of a ridge and sat down next to each other. The scrublands roll out far into the distance, unchanging and smooth; the sun’s disc is sliced through with cloud and hazy with dust. The enormity of that landscape is strange and palpable as the weight of water. You were in grad school with professors who told you that the way forwards was the science of the built environment, the way cities warp and distort the fabric of things; you listened politely and ignored them and thought long, slow thoughts about sand and open spaces and the long, bitter, desert night. You can feel that great cooling going on around you and you think, abruptly, that in all this great space of heat being lost to the atmosphere, the only spark of new energy, of anything new at all in this landscape littered with the bones of ancient beasts, is between your left hand and Cecil’s right. Cecil interlaces his fingers with yours. He says, “Tell me something else.”
*
You’re not devout, but you were raised Catholic. Your parents were, and their parents were, and their parents before them, and that means that if you go back, going all the way back, there were once people like you in places like this, high places, desert places. Perhaps it was just all that nothingness rolling out in front of them every day; perhaps they needed God because they needed something, something in the burning bushes, to put in the way of that shattering insignificance. Perhaps it was because the people that came before you were nomads in a land like this one, stumbling over the sand ridges with a gravelly feeling like panic or out-of-control air conditioning rising in their throats when they saw, in the distance, the tall, still figures, never closer nor more distant.
When you were twelve, you saw angels. Three of them, lined by the street outside Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Your mother was inside doing flowers for a wedding. One of the angels was black. You thought they might be waiting for a bus.
*
“What else?” Cecil asks, and you have tried imagining Cecil somewhere else – New York, maybe, or San Francisco. Perhaps your mother’s house, sitting on the couch with his back straight and a tiny teacup in his hands.
It’s dark, now. The moon has cut free of the horizon. In the distance the red light on the top of the radio tower switches itself on, then off, then on, then off. Everything is still and beautiful. You were very young, once, on a train, going past stations shimmering in the twilight. You passed a signal-box that had been gutted with flame; you thought you would choke on the summer's last gasp of humidity. A radio in the carriage murmured, yes, I remember Adlestrop. The graffiti on the signal-box read: beware the sheriff's secret police. That was England. The lights in the sky came later, at an out-of-town Five Guys near Colorado Springs. The air had the frosty clarity of ice; you sat on the hood of your car alone and watched for meaning in those lights, turning themselves on, and off, then on, then off.
Your mother has been asking if you will ever come home.
*
You could take Cecil out of this small crazy town. You could – and this is where you come closest to temptation – take him to the ocean, show him a different kind of endless nothing. You have picked him up when he can’t drive after compulsory re-education and carried him up your front steps, wanting with each step to turn around and get in the car and take him away with you. You would drive to San Francisco or maybe New York, with Cecil sleeping in the back with one of your rolled-up lab coats as a pillow, and it would take days of driving across vast flat landscapes, like in those long-ago stories about the nomads and God. You could rent an apartment, you could call your mother, you could watch as Cecil discovered democracy, and four-way intersections. You could listen to NPR.
But there would still be lights in the sky at night, above the Arby’s. (They have fast food joints everywhere.) And Cecil would leave traces of desert everywhere he slept, so that apartment that the two of you might have, in Brooklyn or the Mission, would be like your bedsheets and the front seat of your car are now, dusted with sand grains as sharp as glass. You would go walking along the old railroad tracks, thinking of nothing, not turning back.
You would see the desert sky in Cecil's eyes, and through them the wall behind him.
(You, and Cecil, are not among the fifty-three percent of Night Vale residents who do not feel pain.)
*
"Let's go home," you say, and Cecil looks out at the shimmering dusky landscape and then back along the single-track road to the town. When he turns to look at you, loving and fey, you kiss him very quickly and follow him back over the bluffs.
That night, under your window through which you can see the red light on the radio tower, blinking on, and off, and on, and off, you kiss him properly. You run your fingers down from the nape of his neck along his spine, working along each rise and fall of bone. You want to tell him about the angels, about Adlestrop, about the lights in the sky that have been shining all your life, lighting your way across the land to this place.
"Have you ever," you say, to get it over, "wanted to just… leave all this behind? Go somewhere else?"
Cecil's eyes are so pale grey they look white. His eyes are pale, and his mother is dead, and the hooded figures lurk in the darkness below the window. You wonder if he's ever had a day at the beach, or gone to the amusement arcade, or taken a class just because he felt like it. He looks at you and says, matter-of-factly, "Yes." And, softer: "There is nowhere else."
You kiss him again, taste the grit and salt in his mouth. It's all the ocean you'll ever find.
end.
such_heights, who wanted something about Carlos. Oh my god, you guys, I love this show so much.fic:: the early signs that daylight's fading
by Raven
1500w, Welcome To Night Vale, Cecil/Carlos. "This is a story," Cecil says, "about you."
“This is a story,” Cecil says, “about you.”
It's not his radio voice. He sounds drowsy and comfortable, lying back on the sand propped up by his elbows. Looking at him, you think, for the thousandth time, that for all it has been completely mortifying, and you can't get away from it, because getting away from it would mean you had to switch off the radio and then you would have to listen to the sounds of distant storms and electronic howling undercutting the frantic rhythm of your own heart, you're lucky to be loved, wonderfully, embarrassingly, enthusiastically, as Cecil loves you. You called him with trepidation and this being Night Vale, a deep fear of the unknown, but in recent days you have started to feel something within yourself unzipping into certainty, like when you pull the green off a corncob and expose the gleaming surface beneath.
You suppose, this being Night Vale, that you're lucky the mortification wasn't literal.
The story you have been telling him is about you, and your sister. You were eleven; she was sixteen; it was a hot day in late summer, blurry with haze and buzzing with cicadas. A boy had gone through the front gate, not latching it properly so it drifted open in an absence of breeze. You stood there and watched your sister cry and then you went to see a movie, something comforting in black and white. “Carlos, come with me, I can’t go alone,” she had said, and you went. Your sister cried all the way through, enjoying her tissues and her popcorn, forgetting the boy at the gate, who had vanished while you were looking at him, leaving traces of ash and dust. You found it too cold, the air conditioning taking on a harsh life of its own inside your lungs. The movie might have been Casablanca, or It Happened One Night. It was a special showing. At the end the woman in the movie said, or maybe it was the man, even at that age you were finding gender and sex difficult, as though there were some blurry plastic overlay over everything that you had to peer through, figuring everything out from first principles while everyone else went straight to boy meets girl and they live happily ever after. The woman in the movie, or perhaps the man, said, “Darling, let’s go – let’s get away from all this.”
You have been hoping, all along, that Cecil will not say this to you: you have not told him yet, but you will.
You have driven out to the sand wastes, along the single-track road cutting a clean line towards the horizon. You have left the car on the roadside by the bluffs and gotten out to walk across the rise and fall of the sand. The sun is setting and you were slipping and falling, not used to the ground shifting under you, but Cecil grabbed your hand and kept you going and the two of you stumbled along together.
You found a spot where the sand curved into a bowl at the top of a ridge and sat down next to each other. The scrublands roll out far into the distance, unchanging and smooth; the sun’s disc is sliced through with cloud and hazy with dust. The enormity of that landscape is strange and palpable as the weight of water. You were in grad school with professors who told you that the way forwards was the science of the built environment, the way cities warp and distort the fabric of things; you listened politely and ignored them and thought long, slow thoughts about sand and open spaces and the long, bitter, desert night. You can feel that great cooling going on around you and you think, abruptly, that in all this great space of heat being lost to the atmosphere, the only spark of new energy, of anything new at all in this landscape littered with the bones of ancient beasts, is between your left hand and Cecil’s right. Cecil interlaces his fingers with yours. He says, “Tell me something else.”
You’re not devout, but you were raised Catholic. Your parents were, and their parents were, and their parents before them, and that means that if you go back, going all the way back, there were once people like you in places like this, high places, desert places. Perhaps it was just all that nothingness rolling out in front of them every day; perhaps they needed God because they needed something, something in the burning bushes, to put in the way of that shattering insignificance. Perhaps it was because the people that came before you were nomads in a land like this one, stumbling over the sand ridges with a gravelly feeling like panic or out-of-control air conditioning rising in their throats when they saw, in the distance, the tall, still figures, never closer nor more distant.
When you were twelve, you saw angels. Three of them, lined by the street outside Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Your mother was inside doing flowers for a wedding. One of the angels was black. You thought they might be waiting for a bus.
“What else?” Cecil asks, and you have tried imagining Cecil somewhere else – New York, maybe, or San Francisco. Perhaps your mother’s house, sitting on the couch with his back straight and a tiny teacup in his hands.
It’s dark, now. The moon has cut free of the horizon. In the distance the red light on the top of the radio tower switches itself on, then off, then on, then off. Everything is still and beautiful. You were very young, once, on a train, going past stations shimmering in the twilight. You passed a signal-box that had been gutted with flame; you thought you would choke on the summer's last gasp of humidity. A radio in the carriage murmured, yes, I remember Adlestrop. The graffiti on the signal-box read: beware the sheriff's secret police. That was England. The lights in the sky came later, at an out-of-town Five Guys near Colorado Springs. The air had the frosty clarity of ice; you sat on the hood of your car alone and watched for meaning in those lights, turning themselves on, and off, then on, then off.
Your mother has been asking if you will ever come home.
You could take Cecil out of this small crazy town. You could – and this is where you come closest to temptation – take him to the ocean, show him a different kind of endless nothing. You have picked him up when he can’t drive after compulsory re-education and carried him up your front steps, wanting with each step to turn around and get in the car and take him away with you. You would drive to San Francisco or maybe New York, with Cecil sleeping in the back with one of your rolled-up lab coats as a pillow, and it would take days of driving across vast flat landscapes, like in those long-ago stories about the nomads and God. You could rent an apartment, you could call your mother, you could watch as Cecil discovered democracy, and four-way intersections. You could listen to NPR.
But there would still be lights in the sky at night, above the Arby’s. (They have fast food joints everywhere.) And Cecil would leave traces of desert everywhere he slept, so that apartment that the two of you might have, in Brooklyn or the Mission, would be like your bedsheets and the front seat of your car are now, dusted with sand grains as sharp as glass. You would go walking along the old railroad tracks, thinking of nothing, not turning back.
You would see the desert sky in Cecil's eyes, and through them the wall behind him.
(You, and Cecil, are not among the fifty-three percent of Night Vale residents who do not feel pain.)
"Let's go home," you say, and Cecil looks out at the shimmering dusky landscape and then back along the single-track road to the town. When he turns to look at you, loving and fey, you kiss him very quickly and follow him back over the bluffs.
That night, under your window through which you can see the red light on the radio tower, blinking on, and off, and on, and off, you kiss him properly. You run your fingers down from the nape of his neck along his spine, working along each rise and fall of bone. You want to tell him about the angels, about Adlestrop, about the lights in the sky that have been shining all your life, lighting your way across the land to this place.
"Have you ever," you say, to get it over, "wanted to just… leave all this behind? Go somewhere else?"
Cecil's eyes are so pale grey they look white. His eyes are pale, and his mother is dead, and the hooded figures lurk in the darkness below the window. You wonder if he's ever had a day at the beach, or gone to the amusement arcade, or taken a class just because he felt like it. He looks at you and says, matter-of-factly, "Yes." And, softer: "There is nowhere else."
You kiss him again, taste the grit and salt in his mouth. It's all the ocean you'll ever find.
end.
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