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ravenMore on the wedding when I've made sense of it, myself. All was lovely, however, and in the meantime this story, although it began life as a commentfic two weeks ago for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yiskah and pearwaldorf, transformed inevitably into a love story.
fic:: day number one of the rest of forever
by Raven
9000w, Welcome To Night Vale, Cecil/Carlos. "Angels do exist, listeners," he says, and Carlos realises with a combination of horror and love that that's his own voice, faltering and cracked, without any of the broadcast smoothness.
In which Cecil protects his sources, and Carlos loves him.
This is where it ends: in the dark on the floor of the radio station. At the edges of the room – and Carlos isn't sure the studio hasn't increased in size to an amphitheatre, this is Night Vale where anything is possible and it really feels bigger, echoing – there are lines of eyes, angels with a half-dozen each, glowing in the gloom, and also Josie's two very human, very bright eyes, and the shadows which are not visible, but perceptible, because they are somehow blacker than the surrounding darkness: those are the spaces below the hooded figures' hoods. Carlos ignores all of them and picks up a cup of something sticky and sweet – it's Sprite or 7UP or something, basically clear liquid with sugar in it, and surely even Night Vale's local biology can't fuck up sugar in water and the simple clean effect it has on the human body – and holds it out to Cecil.
"Drink, sweetheart," he says, unconsciously, and the endearment kind of falls surprisingly out of his mouth like it's a physical thing; he's never been demonstrative in his life and he has that clenching moment of embarrassment, and then shakes it off because, seriously, fuck it, it's not like the hooded figures gossip. "A little more if you can," he adds, and Cecil comes out of it, a little, in time to stop getting sugary-sweet stuff on his nose. His hands come up to balance the cup, and Carlos leans in and puts an arm around him, kisses his forehead and tangles his fingers in his hair and does all the stupid loving things you do when you're needing to remind yourself that someone you love takes up space.
"I'm here," Cecil mutters, blurrily, "right here" – and Carlos is having an urge to threaten him, actually physically threaten him with something comedic like one of the lab calorimeters and shout never do this again, Cecil, Christ, are you crazy, and it's a warming thought for a moment but Carlos hasn't solved a problem with violence since third-grade French class and in the meantime, fuck, Cecil, Cecil.
He's said this last bit aloud. Cecil looks up and murmurs, "Dear, beautiful, perfect Carlos" – and his voice and eyes are dimmed, but he's really there, and it's dark and Carlos is getting a thick layer of dust on his ass because apparently they never sweep in here and the room is still full of an assortment of angels and hooded figures and other insults to the scientific mind and this is okay, this is Cecil breathing, this is okay.
*
It starts in Mission Grove Park, when Cecil lets go of his hand and says, “What’s that?”
“What?” Carlos asks. It's early in the morning and they're on their way to have pancakes for breakfast. The pancakes themselves may be orange or melancholy or unable to cast shadows, Carlos doesn’t know yet, but right now the air is cool and pleasant, the sun is burning off the fog and the hooded figures have gone wherever the hooded figures go on weekends. It could be Stanley Park or Golden Gate Park or Hyde Park, the light washed-out and serene; Carlos is wondering if he can write Sundays in the park with Cecil on his list, if Cecil will get the joke, and then his hand is closing on nothingness and he's jogging to keep up.
Cecil leads him through the line of trees, to a small clearing surrounded on three sides by shadow. There's an angel on the ground in front of them and part of Carlos’s mind is wondering how Cecil spotted it from so far away; another part of it, scientifically fascinated, is cataloguing the broken angles and the smashed mess of blood and feathers; a third part of it is just in a corner vomiting in horror and a fourth part, an awful wordless part that only wants things, and doesn't want things, doesn't want this and does want Cecil close to him. A last part just shouts angels don't exist! very loudly, and he wonders if that's the City Council's telepathic broadcast system and then Cecil drops to his knees beside the body.
"Fuck," he's saying, and Carlos can't remember ever hearing him swear. "Phone," he mutters indistinctly, and Carlos remembers that one of the City Council messenger children took Cecil's phone yesterday, along with his notebook and his three best sharpened toothpicks for writing with. He pulls out his own and hands it over, and sits down beside Cecil, and they wait for the others.
*
There's something else before that, though. Carlos is in the lab and they've got Cecil's show on – he's talking about mysterious stinging creatures from before the dawn of time (awoken by the Night Vale Philanthropists' Society, or maybe philatelists, Carlos wasn't paying attention) creeping up through people's cellars and non-consensually drugging them with poisoned honey – and Carlos is sort of listening as Cecil explains that that's not the problem, that the Night Vale General Hospital is well-equipped to deal with swarms of all epochs, but the stuff is now all over the table in the high school gym and the PTA vegans are starting to complain and if anyone does have a surplus of trans-dimensional cleaning products, can they please...
"This town," Carlos says, unconsciously.
"White people, you so funny," Amy adds, and sets down a calorimeter. It's some sort of research into whether Night Vale coffee can be used to fuel internal combustion engines; she's actually a biologist, but like Carlos and all the rest of the team, she's gleefully started running controlled studies on anything that catches her attention. She's white, but Carlos doesn't remark on that.
"You want any help?" he asks. She looks tired, and he hasn't seen her move from that bench for at least the last four hours. "Better yet, you want me to keep an eye on it while you go downstairs and grab some food?"
"Thanks, Carlos," she says gratefully. "I'll get you that garlic bread you like!"
When she's gone, Carlos reaches over to the next bench and grabs his phone. "Cecil, pick up, it's me."
"Hi," Cecil says, distractedly, "not that I'm not delighted to hear from you, perfect and wonderful you, but I'm at one of the City Council press conferences and it's getting a bit… raucous."
"I just wanted to tell you," Carlos says, and he's pretty sure Cecil can hear him smiling, "that I'm free tomorrow night."
The ominous drumbeat that presages a Council statement has begun, but Cecil's delighted laugh is unmistakable. "I'll see you then. No, don't – oww, it's one of the messenger children. Plucking at my sleeve. Oh, no, don’t, that's my only – oh. No, you can't – dearest Carlos, I'll call you back when I can."
A few seconds of eerie screeching, then the line goes dead. Carlos spins on his chair and maybe he hasn't quite wiped the silly grin from his face, because when Amy returns with the illicit garlic bread and pizza that smells pretty good even though it's a shade of blue Carlos has never seen in nature, she immediately gives him a wicked smile and says, "Well, no need to ask if you have weekend plans."
Carlos grins back. "Yeah. In what will be an entirely uncommented-upon change of subject, how about you?"
"I," Amy says impressively, taking a giant bite out of her pizza, "am joining the Night Vale women's softball team. Practice is every Saturday afternoon, bring your own morningstar."
Carlos whistles through his teeth. "Wow."
"Yeah, it's okay, I did roller derby in college. I can punch up." She extracts a habanero and hisses. "What do they put in these and why does it polarise light? Anyway, it should be fun."
Carlos nods. "I think," he says carefully, "that Dana used to be involved with that, too."
"Softball, or roller derby – oh, shit, I did it again, didn't I?" She looks up at him, worried. "What was it? Tell me the truth, I can take it."
"It was" – Carlos winces – "white people, you so funny."
"White people, you…" Amy buries her head in her hands. "Oh, no. Oh, Christ, that's the worst."
"It's not your fault!" Carlos says, hastily. He doesn't understand it himself, but ever since the last time they went to the house in Desert Creek, the one that doesn't exist, and there was that short period of time where Dana's and Amy's bodies occupied the same space, she's had a slight tendency towards… otherness. "It's not like…"
"That awful racist asshole who saved your life," Amy agrees, and Carlos can't decide if that's Dana's or Amy's phrasing, or Cecil's – because God knows he, Carlos, has started saying things like "Neat!" and "Well, one can't underestimate the importance of municipal regulation" with no ghost of irony since he came to this weird-ass town. "Still."
"Still," Carlos says, and adds, hoping to distract her attention, "How's your research… oh, shit."
"On fire!" Amy yelps, and then there's a rush for a fire extinguisher and a brief argument about what the carved runes on the nozzle actually mean and a lot of confusion when the purple fluff that comes out does turn out to inhibit oxidation reactions, and once peace is restored and they've returned to their now congealing blue pizza Carlos thinks he might have escaped, but Amy, like every good research scientist he's ever known, is tenacious: she waits until they're packing up for the day, lays a hand on his arm, says, "I hope your date is lovely, and I look forward to hearing all about it" – and Carlos smiles most of the way home.
*
It doesn’t begin with the list, but the list is important. Carlos has been making it in the back of his mind and then on paper, with a toothpick dipped in food colouring. (Also, with his own right index finger, pricked with a sterilised needle so his writing dries rust-red. Cecil insists on taking his hand when he’s finished and drawing the bloodied fingertip to his lips; Carlos lets him, ostensibly because he read somewhere that saliva is an antiseptic but actually because the warmth of Cecil’s mouth, not even against his bare skin but what lies beneath, is so peculiarly, in both senses of the word, intimate.) Cecil asked him, teasingly, about the other things that a scientist is, and Carlos still cringes in the middle of the night at "self-reliant", because apparently in Night Vale where you can be awoken by anything from angelic manifestation to tentacled creatures collecting for the Red Cross, a bout of three a.m. why did I say that why even am I is still par for the course.
But he gave Cecil an honest answer, because he had to. "I shared my thesis adviser with this total jerk. Honestly, Cecil, such a jerk."
"Steve Carlsberg?" Cecil asked, still teasingly, and Carlos chuckled. This was the morning they went for the walk in the park; the morning they didn't get pancakes.
"You love Steve Carlsberg," Carlos said, "at least you love hating Steve Carlsberg, which is almost the same thing" – and before Cecil could break in with outrage he steamrollered on – "and anyway, this total jerk wasn't Steve Carlsberg. He was if, possible, worse."
"No one, dear Carlos, could be worse than…"
"You just wait. His name was – well, I guess it still is, he's presumably not dead, he got a post-doc position out in Oregon and kept telling me about how he hoped climate change wouldn't get in the way of his snowboarding, God, I hate him – anyway, his name was Randall Masterson. He used to use 'party' as a verb. And he took out the last copy of Climatology: An Atmospheric Science out of the library on a three-month loan. But the worst thing" – and the worst thing is that Carlos was, and is, still angry about this years later – "was that he never, ever published negative results."
"Oh," Cecil said, and Carlos wasn't sure for a moment that he understood, but then Cecil went on, "Then how do you know if" – and Carlos sighed.
"That was the problem. A scientist is honest."
Both personally and intellectually, he's mentally amended since. So in the spirit of the null hypothesis he has been making a list of all the things in Night Vale that are – comfortingly, sometimes depressingly, often inexplicably – normal. There are the sheets and comforter he bought from Target after two months sleeping on the couch in his lab, that bunched up all in one corner of the bed and didn't turn into venomous snakes; there's the little counter-top stand mixer that works just like the one his mom has, although his cornbread is heavier; there are the girls on Amy's softball team, who apparently go out for rice-based takeout after their games. Not the poison honey in the school gym; not the cornbread itself; not the house that doesn't exist, nor the clocks that aren't really clocks, and not Cecil. Carlos isn't sure what that means – whether Cecil is not normal, because he is extraordinary; whether Cecil is extraordinary because Carlos loves him; whether love is normal, just because it's common – but he acknowledges the asymptotic approach to the limits of the scientific method. The list is important.
*
They could have walked away from the park. But Cecil's involvement, and Carlos supposes, probably his own as well, are a done deal when Old Woman Josie comes to see them in the early afternoon, long after the dawn freshness has gone. Everything is too hot, too tiring, the minutes slow-moving as treacle. She comes into the house through the side door and seats herself at the kitchen table; Cecil pours iced water for her without comment. Carlos doesn’t want any but there’s still a third glass – for the faceless old woman, Carlos presumes. It’s a Night Vale custom, like leaving out a chair for Elijah.
“Well,” Josie says, breaking into a silence that’s deeper for the small sounds of ice being stirred. “You’re going to find out what happened, I suppose.”
“Why us?” Carlos asks.
“Can’t trust the sheriff’s secret police,” she says reasonably. “Not when they’ll tell you there are no angels. Can’t trust them anyway. They swallow their food without chewing and they don’t stay bought.”
“No,” Cecil says. He’s painting his nails, glossy black applied with meticulous strokes. Carlos has two sisters at home and remembers them doing that, in the same way with the same look of intense concentration, and makes a mental note for his list. “Why us?”
“If not you” – and Carlos has often had cause to lament the English language and its lack of a second person plural, but somehow he knows that Josie means Cecil, and not both of them – “then who else?”
Cecil looks at her and then nods, slowly. “Yes,” he says. “That’s right.”
When she’s gone the silence endures, the heat still creeping in at the windows, exhausting. But after a few minutes Cecil places a hand on Carlos’s shoulder and gives him a sudden, surprising grin. “You’re a scientist," he says. "I’m a journalist. Let’s do it.”
*
Cecil reports on it on his show that night and then the bad things start to happen. He details how they found the body, speculating on the hierarchy of angels, and appealing to his audience to come forwards with any information they might have; Carlos is listening and not eating dinner and shredding a napkin between his fingers and he doesn't expect to see Cecil again that evening. He drives down to the City Council offices in the morning to pick Cecil up (literally and figuratively, announces a voice in his head that's kind of an asshole) and Cecil's eyes are feverish-bright but alight with purpose; when he suggests they interview the other angels living with Old Woman Josie, Carlos briefly considers arguing then gives it up. Instead he gives Cecil a handful of drugstore painkillers washed down with a half-litre of water from the plastic bottle he carries around for precisely this eventuality, and they set out towards the edge of town.
Around Josie's little house, there are angelic figures everywhere: one hovering around the porch light, jiggling a loose connection; another painting the boards with whitewash; two working in eerie rhythm, pulling up weeds. Inside the house there are several more, busy with a thousand small tasks, their wings making sounds like riffling cards. Carlos thinks, wildly and reflexively, of his list, looking around desperately for something he can put on it; he settles on Old Woman Josie herself, standing at her stove, putting water on to boil.
"We know why you're here," she says, as Carlos finally brings himself to step through the door, waving her hand as if to say: get on with it. She's making tea, the scent warm and comforting.
Carlos breathes in, slowly, and the nearest angel turns hir great head towards him. Zie has smooth, polished brown skin, and Carlos is comforted by that – that zie doesn't look like the white stone carvings of childhood Sundays – and notes that the angel is drifting above the ground at precisely the right height for them to be at eye level. How this works when the angel is ten feet tall is something he's not looking at too closely.
"What happened to the body?" he asks.
Erika looks at him, soft-eyed and beautiful. After a moment, zie presses something into his hand. "I understand you are a scientist," zie says. Carlos uncurls his fingers. It's a USB stick. "The body did not persist. We do not persist. We took photographs."
"Oh," Carlos says, "thank you." There's yet another voice inside his head currently getting very excited at the thought of what he might learn from it, but he ignores it. "Why would anyone kill an angel?" he asks. "Has anyone… ever done it before?"
Zie shakes hir head. "Erika was not killed. That which does not exist can never die."
"Right," Carlos says, "of course."
Cecil is asking soft questions that Carlos can't quite hear, but from the cadence he recognises Cecil in investigative-reporter mode, staccato and kind and horribly easy to talk to. (Cecil had all of Carlos's kinks out in the open within two months of their starting dating, which was unprecedented, and – Carlos probably has a fond, silly grin on his face right now – kind of amazing, actually.) But the fight seems to have gone out of Cecil a little; he's asking his questions lying on Josie's couch with his lips parted and a slight drawn look to his features, and one of the angels is perched on the armrest, holding either the same bottle of nail polish or one of the same brand, repairing the damage to Cecil's fingernails. After a minute Cecil notices he's being watched and his face brightens with the tiny, involuntary smile he always gets when he lays eyes on Carlos; Carlos smiles back. Beside him, Josie is following his gaze, something knowing in her expression.
"You're wondering," he says a little desperately, "why I let him do this."
Josie shakes her head. "Catch you stopping him doing anything he wants," she says, with a low rasp of a chuckle. "He turned his mama's hair grey."
Probably overnight, Carlos thinks, if his recent total panic at Cecil's trip on the subway is anything to go by; he knows nothing about Cecil's mother other than the fact he loved her dearly, which may be all he needs to.
"She was proud of him, though," Josie goes on, then glances at Carlos, as though to gauge his reaction.
Carlos meets her gaze, and echoes her sigh. "Me too," he says, truthfully, and sips his tea.
*
Carlos doesn't do I told you so, but he's considering making an exception. He's considering actually making a song and a dance about it and he hasn't yet ruled out that being quite literal, an interpretive cha-cha-cha on the general theme of why, Cecil, do you do these things that get you taken away and put in dark rooms where they do unspeakable things, and that is literal, unspeakable in that no one ever speaks about what happens when the City Council re-educates its citizens, not even Cecil, not on the radio nor anywhere else. Although the radio listeners have it easier than Carlos, who has to wonder what's lying behind Cecil's thousand-yard-stare, afterwards, and why Cecil even tries to cry havoc in this town of frightened, sensible conformists who do, after all, choose to live here.
And then someone comes forward with information.
Carlos has just come to the unwilling conclusion that he should probably wake Cecil to stop him upsetting his sleep cycle when he's distracted by the sound of someone moving outside, and then by a knock at the door.
Carlos glances at Cecil, who doesn't stir; sighing, he reaches for his shoes and goes to find out who it is.
"Cecil?" demands a small, imperious voice, and Carlos looks down. A little girl with neat cornrows and fierce eyes glares back; the last time Carlos saw her she was emerging triumphant from the Night Vale Public Library.
"Hi, Tamika," he says, a little uncertainly; the glare doesn't abate.
"Cecil in there?" she says, again, abrupt, and Carlos is surprised. He remembers Tamika talking to the amassed crowds, hugging her mom, answering a few of Cecil's gentle questions, politely and sweetly despite her obvious exhaustion.
"He's sleeping," Carlos says. "I can go wake him up, if you…
"No." Tamika takes his hand and pulls him along, around the side of the house, and Carlos follows along, intrigued as well as confused. Tamika stops at the edge of the veranda, and Carlos wonders if she’ll sit in Cecil's porch swing, but she doesn't. "I go out to play in Mission Grove Park sometimes," she says, and now there is trepidation in her voice; in her eyes, he sees fear. "My mom said I didn’t have to be scared, not of anything. Not after what I did in the library. So sometimes I stay out late. Me and my friend, we like skipping stones. I went home and on the way I saw…" – she hesitates – "what Cecil was talking about. You know. On the radio. Saw something white and fluffy on the ground, only there was someone else there."
Carlos breathes. "Who…"
"Didn't get a good look at their face," Tamika says, charging on. "They had their back to me."
"Oh," Carlos says, and he might be about to say something else, but Tamika fixes him with her stare.
"They were wearing a labcoat."
"Oh," Carlos says, again.
"You tell him, you don't tell him" – she shrugs – "you do what you want to do. But if you don't, then I'll tell him."
She stares at him for another few seconds, and then she walks along the wooden boards of the veranda, jumps down to the ground with feet together and walks calmly back towards the street. Carlos watches her go, steady and calm, and thinks, not for the first time, that he's getting to grips with the doublethink and eerie immunity to horror that Night Vale demands of its citizens, but not the quiet, humbling, straightforward courage.
*
Before Tamika's visit, there's something else. Carlos has just tried the USB stick he got from Erika. His CD drive is making strange chewing noises and his screen is glowing with an unearthly light. He snaps the laptop shut and looks up, and something else happens that isn't a reason why he's going to end up on that studio floor with Cecil, not exactly, but it's part of who he is, maybe, and maybe part of something that they're building.
Cecil is standing in the doorway with his shirtsleeves rolled up, turning over his hands, the movements steady and controlled rather than fretful. Carlos's eyes are drawn to the marks on his wrists. He wants to kiss them, drag his tongue along the lines disappearing into his arms. Cecil follows his gaze with immaculate precision; Carlos doesn't doubt he knows exactly what Carlos is thinking. Carlos raises his own hand in silent entreaty and Cecil comes to sit on the edge of the bed beside him, leans against him and rests his head on Carlos's shoulder. After a minute Carlos carefully removes Cecil's glasses and puts them on top of his laptop, pushing the whole table backwards so they won't knock anything over, and then he kisses Cecil slowly, holding him slightly away from himself, letting his fingers work through Cecil's hair.
"What's it like?" Carlos murmurs, drawing slightly away from Cecil's mouth. "Being re-educated?"
Cecil shrugs, at once eloquent and frustrated, and Carlos feels that movement as though in his own body. "It's hard to remember," he says, delicately, delicate as his own skin, opened up and inexpertly resealed. The first few times, Carlos thought of all Night Vale's unique mechanical horrors, imagined comic-book machinery, telepathic rearrangement devices shaped like salon hairdryers. Since then he's seen ordinary fingermarks on Cecil's wrists and pictures garbage ties and knotted ropes. Cecil makes a strange, wanting noise and gets on his knees on the edge of the bed, feet hanging over the side, reaching forwards. Carlos doesn't touch him for a second. "Are you sure…"
Cecil nods, placing a finger on Carlos's lips. Yes.
Carlos smiles in return, puts his arms around Cecil for a moment, balancing, then lets go. He leans back, stretches himself out full-length on the couch cushions, letting Cecil fit himself in as close as he can, his head resting on Carlos's shoulder again and his limbs tangling in with Carlos's. Cecil licks a fingertip and places it momentarily in Carlos's mouth, then moves away, again with that strange, half-articulated sound of needing something; Carlos makes a decision and kisses him again, then tentatively pushes his shirt over his shoulders. Cecil smiles up at him and Carlos is getting uncomfortable, with Cecil's weight mostly on top of him and the hard edge of the headboard digging into his back, but he doesn't mind, laying another kiss on Cecil's collarbone. Sunday afternoons, he's thinking, are the same everywhere.
"Cecil," he says, low-voiced, "what do you want?"
Cecil inclines his head, and Carlos wants to complain that for a man who basically talks for a living, off-air he can be incredibly reliant on communication by gesture, on fine movements of his admittedly very expressive hands and face. And it's not that Carlos is worried, but if he's honest with himself, it's that he's worried – in this town where so many terrible things happen, he has no desire to be something that happens to Cecil – but then Cecil says something indistinct from somewhere in his throat, sits back so Carlos can sit up too and stretch out the complaining muscles in his shoulders, and then slowly, deliberately, Cecil begins undoing Carlos's buttons. He pushes his hands underneath the gaps in the fabric, reaching for Carlos's nipples with index finger and thumb, then leans in so Carlos can feel the warmth of his breath.
Carlos grins; that's pretty indubitable. They divest themselves of their clothes with proper care and attention, and then Cecil gets up on his knees again, so Carlos has to reach up slightly to place one hand on his neck, holding him steady while he uses his other hand to trace the line of Cecil's body, around the curve of the shoulder, along his side, his fingers working along the iliac crest, and Carlos loves this, this unnamed gap in the bone between Cecil's hip and the base of his cock, and pauses in deliberate echo of it; then he lowers his head and uses his tongue to mark out one almost-complete circle at the head of Cecil's cock and has the pleasure of watching Cecil's back arch beautifully, as he makes a sound that might almost approach words.
"You okay?" he asks, very gently, and Cecil nods and they both seem to overbalance on purpose, landing back on the bed, kissing as they fall. Carlos doesn't have Cecil's ability to invite confidences, but he has enjoyed spending the last few weeks and months exploring the boundaries of Cecil's kinks in return, has learned that he likes it when Carlos pushes him roughly against walls and against desks so the edge of the surface makes a straight-line bruise; he likes the scratch of sharp fingernails against his skin, if no blood is drawn; he likes to be snapped at and laughingly told what to do, but he freezes at physical coercion. Taken altogether it's as if he experiences sex as he experiences Night Vale itself, with fascination and joy, falling just short of pain. Carlos is holding him and kissing him, working his way down Cecil's spine and then splaying both hands on Cecil's ass, thumbs digging into his hips, but with care; he's realised he wants to hear Cecil talk, go off on a mellifluous tangent, perhaps about the greenish shades in the sky above Radon Canyon or the eudaimonia inherent in civic participation, before he comes anywhere close to that negotiated edge.
It's another one of those eerie instances where Cecil knows exactly what Carlos is thinking. Cecil sits up abruptly, sweat darkening his hair, and Carlos feels a heated lurch of attraction, his eyes irresistibly drawn to the way Cecil's mouth is falling slightly open, the way his breathing is coming a little too fast, licking his lips with unconscious carnality. "I'm okay," he says, quickly, "I really am, Carlos" – and then he lies back down again with a studied neatness, a doe-eyed do me now look that makes Carlos want to laugh and kiss him, and after a pause he does just that. Something has changed in the air between them, so Cecil sits up again and this time it's his hands working over Carlos's shoulders, and then downwards towards his cock with much less ceremony. He gives Carlos a wicked glance upwards through his lashes and dips down to take Carlos's cock in his mouth. After the slow pace they had set, the rush of sensation hits Carlos like hot water on a cold day, and then he's grinning, relaxing into it. He's pretty sure he won't last long, but right now he doesn't mind, he doesn't mind much of anything, wanting only to let Cecil do what he wants.
He thinks, through the orgasm blur that follows embarrassingly quickly after that, that Cecil says something: something understandably indistinct, considering the circumstances; but then Cecil lifts his head and his lips are shining and Carlos forgets about it, takes a second to gather himself back together and reaches downwards, grinning as Cecil's eyes widen. He concentrates, paying meticulous attention to how Cecil's breathing changes and catches and then gets endearingly rapid and high-pitched, and Carlos gives his cock one final triumphant stroke like he's some ridiculous teenager and it's some kind of contest and they're done. Cecil laughs, though, still high and shaky, and that's good.
"You okay?" Carlos asks again, automatic, and Cecil mutters something under his breath and looks up at him.
"What do you think?" he demands, clear as a struck bell, and Carlos laughs.
Cecil is shivering. It's still, like, a million degrees outside (Carlos observes at his most post-coitally unscientific), but they have the air conditioning running in here and the air is cool on sweat-slicked skin. Carlos gets up after a minute, wets a cloth under the bathroom tap and uses it to clean them both up, then finds a light blanket and throws it over Cecil, who's humming quietly and tunelessly for a while and then there's no sound other than deep, steady breathing. Sunday afternoons, Carlos thinks again. Standing next to the bed, he looks down at Cecil with an expression that of course he can't see himself, but must be something like the soft look he's seen on Cecil's own face more than once, something guileless and on the way to love.
*
Carlos lets himself into the lab the following morning with a feeling like snakes uncoiling in his gut. Intellectually, he knows that most days they can hear the oozing from next door's slime mould collection and Big Rico's chefs shouting good-natured abuse at each other from downstairs, so he should do whatever he's about to do quietly. But he steps inside and turns on the lights and there are feathers on the floor, actual fucking bloodstained feathers on the actual fucking floor and he's actually thinking for a minute that maybe that Tamika's fears are justified and it really was him who did it, in some sort of automatic fugue state or Night-Vale-induced psychotic break, and he's about to do something loud or violent or at least start screaming under his breath when there's a small sound of a door latch clicking into place and he realises he's not alone.
"Carlos," says an urgent, female voice and Carlos turns around.
"Amy," he says – why is she here, the whole team are supposed to be out in the sand wastes measuring changes in wind direction – and abruptly he notices she's looking at him with real fear in her face, and he says, a lot more quietly than he expects, "Amy, what's going on?"
"Carlos," she says, "Carlos, you have to understand, you…"
"Cecil was taken away for compulsory re-education!" he shouts, suddenly realising he's wanted to shout that in anger at the universe in general for a long time, and then he takes a step forwards and she takes a step backwards and they both remember at once where they are and hold absolutely still in time to hear a voice say from below, "No, no, not the special flour…"
"Shit," Carlos says, uselessly and then if he can't shout, he can't throw things, which was his next impulse, so he might as well behave like a civilised human being. He dims the lights and sits down on one of the lab benches. After a minute Amy comes to sit next to him, tentative.
"I was trying to help," she says, after a minute. "You've got to believe me, Carlos. I was on my way home from softball practice when I saw hir. I was trying to help. I thought about CPR, but there was so much blood and then I thought maybe they have, like, two hearts like Doctor Who or something. And then I thought maybe because I was there, the others weren't? Like you're not suppose to pick up baby birds and shit. So I ran. I didn't know what else to do. This fucking place, you know?"
Carlos sighs. "I believe you. But why didn't you…"
"I tried," she says, miserably. "I tried calling you and got an error message, the person you are trying to call is out of reach, out of time or out of corporeality, you know the one. And then I thought it would be okay because I'd see you this morning. But then I heard Cecil on the radio…"
"Shit," Carlos says again. "Did you see anything?" There might be hooded figures outside the window or secret policemen hiding in the cupboards, but right now he has to know. "Did you see who might have…"
Amy shakes her head. "I looked around but I didn't see anything. I tried to lift hir and I got covered in blood and feathers and I even tried… you know, Dana. I tried to be her, in case she would know better what to do, but…." She shrugs. "You know." After a pause she adds, "Who would kill an angel? And why?"
"I don't know," Carlos says, and pauses to replay the last minute's conversation in his mind. She did, he decides, definitely say "hir" and not "her".
"What?" Amy demands, off his expression. "You think you're the only one getting acclimatised? I like it here, Carlos. I know it's different for you, because of Cecil" – her face softens – "but I'm making friends. The girls in the softball team are awesome. Three of them are dating Hiram McDaniels, they swap notes in the locker room. I walk down the street and total strangers don't tell me to lose weight, which makes it better than Oakland. And Dana…" She pauses. "This is Dana's home. I'm not leaving any time soon."
Carlos nods, reaches for her hand and gives it a squeeze. They share a look of understanding. "Let's get coffee before we do anything else," Carlos says. "To drink, in my case, but you can run experiments on yours if you want."
She smiles wanly at him and they go downstairs, get the coffee from Big Rico, who nods at them both like they're old friends of his – and, Carlos supposes, after more than a year and a half in the town, maybe they do qualify – and pizzeria coffee is not meant to be good, but it's not bad, either, and Carlos sips at his gratefully as they go back upstairs. Amy prods the base of her cup with her stirrer and looks like she's making mental notes.
They open the door and there's another dead angel in the lab. Carlos steps back involuntarily, pressing himself against the wall, while Amy drops the coffee and mutters, "Fuck, fuck it, fuck" and Carlos thinks for a second that even in death the angel's body emanates its own holy light, then looks up. Sunlight scatters through the dust. There's a winged hole in the roof.
*
Cecil listens to the entire story without comment. He has spent the day in the park with a magnifying glass he borrowed from the lab, and first of all Carlos wants to make jokes about Sherlock Holmes, and how once you have eliminated the impossible what remains is Night Vale, but then he thinks Cecil might not understand it; and then he wants to make jokes about the park and how at least it's not that park, and then he remembers Dana and how that's really not funny. How none of this is all that funny when you think about it.
(Actually, Carlos is pretty sure Dana lives in Cecil's house. It’s an old ramshackle place with gnarly fruit trees in the yard that never yield anything edible, but might have done, once, and there’s Cecil's porch swing, chipped and worn, that sometimes creaks when it shouldn’t. Leftover food goes missing, which could be the faceless old woman but it’s Dana’s favourites – Carlos's crappy cornbread, sour cream, Greek salad – that they can't find. Carlos wonders if she shares it with a faceless little girl, whom she only sees at the very edge of her vision.)
Carlos doesn't make any jokes. Instead, he says, "You got a new phone."
"Yeah," Cecil says, uncharacteristically brief. "I need to get to work."
Carlos nods and hangs up without saying goodbye. Cecil wouldn't have stopped him from going up to the house in Desert Creek, the one that doesn’t exist, and ringing the bell, even after Dana disappeared. Cecil wouldn't stop him going to investigate the whispering forest. Cecil is gone and Amy comes over not long afterwards with yet more blue pizza, saying something kind about how she bought it already and it's too much for one person and he may as well have his mandatory slice. Carlos smiles and invites her in and goes to find some plates, and they eat and they talk about nothing in particular, until Carlos can't put it off any longer and switches on the radio. Cecil is talking about the detective work he has been doing; about the photographs Erika took (they work on Cecil's computer); about the hierarchy of angels; about angels.
There's a knock. "I think you'd both better come with me," says the secret policeman on the front step.
Carlos slams the door in his face and turns around, panicking. "What do we do?"
Amy's on her knees, next to the radio. Cecil is saying, "Don’t be afraid. Two people have already come forward to say they were nearby. Those people will remain nameless because I protect my sources, listeners…"
"They're going to take him away again," Amy squeaks, and there's the sound of clattering, of papers dropping, of someone gasping for breath. Carlos spins on the spot again, twice, before he realises the sound is coming from the radio.
"Cecil," he says, still panicking, and then suddenly Amy stands up. She takes a visible deep breath, takes a step forwards, and Carlos recognises that look, he's seen it before.
"Amy, what are you" - he begins, but it's too late.
"What Dana would do!" Amy yells, goes barrelling through the door, punches the secret policeman in the nose and shouts, "Erika! We need you!"
There's an enormous rush of wings, and then Carlos is wondering how he could ever forget the angels are ten feet tall with six eyes each and made of holy light. Four of them touch the ground in a circle around him and Amy. "Quickly!" Carlos shouts, as the secret policeman behind them looks to be getting back to his feet, and they rush to the car, Amy grabbing the keys from the table and giving the secret policeman a kick in the shins as she dashes past.
"Quickly," Carlos says again, and the nearest Erika nods.
The drive to the radio station is frightening – Carlos doesn't dare turn on his lights and although the angels, flying in formation above, provide plenty of illumination it's an eviscerating light, afterimages burning and blurring into his retinas. Amy has popped the ancient sunroof open and is half-climbing out, shouting, "Thank you, yes – no, left a bit!" at periodic intervals. Behind them the secret police are closing in – the cars are unmarked, but leather balaclava shadows are unmistakable.
They get to the radio station and the brakes squeal in a way Carlos has only ever heard in movies. And then he's running, leaving the car door open behind him, shouting, "Cecil!" He doesn't know what he's going to do, if he and Amy are going to punch out the entire sheriff's secret police one by one, he doesn't think they're conveniently going to line themselves up for the purpose, and then miraculously he's made it inside and up the stairs without being stopped. He bursts into the studio and Cecil is there, he's still there, and something inside Carlos explodes into relief.
"Why," he murmurs into Cecil's shoulder a minute later, "would anyone kill an angel?"
"Or," he adds, intelligently, a minute later than that, "why would anyone re-educate one?"
"Are you all right?" Cecil asks, pushing him slightly away so they're eye to eye. There's music playing in the background, Carlos notices for the first time, but he doesn't know if it's today's weather, if Cecil is broadcasting at all. They're alone in the room, and it's quiet. All hell is about to break loose, Carlos is thinking, but Cecil is here and that's – that's all right.
"I'm fine," he says, "just fine, Erika, Erika, Erika and Erika are right outside, the sheriff's secret police are after us, they want to take you away for re-education again and I'm not going to let them, they probably want to kill Amy after what she did to that guy, and I don't know what they want to do to me but I guess it's not that good, I am just fine."
"I'm so pleased," Cecil murmurs, and Carlos looks at him.
"Weren't they coming to get you? Amy and I heard…"
"They were," Cecil allows, "but we had an interdiction."
"An interdiction – Jesus fuck, what is that." A messenger child emerges from under the table and Carlos lets out a shaky breath. The child has cute little golden ringlets and denim overalls and no face. He - she? zie? – hands over a small tab of paper. Carlos takes it and reads: not yet.
"How reassuring," Carlos says, giggling, and realises he's beginning to come a little unglued, swallows down the hysteria. The door's open and from outside he can hear the sound of shouting. There are strange flashes of light from the window, an impression of movement, and he can't really make out what's going on, but it's clear the angels and the secret police are fighting some kind of pitched battle. Pressing his nose to the glass, he notices a new addition. "Wow… the hooded figures have joined in. I'm" – there's a sound like staticky buzzing, turned up to eleven – "not sure what side they're on. Listen, Cecil" – this with his previous urgency – "why might an angel be re-educated? I've got to make a call."
He pats his pockets, then realises he ran out of the house in his bare feet without picking anything up, including his phone and wallet. Somewhere in that raging melee, Amy has his car keys. Wordlessly, the messenger child hands him a phone.
"Thank you," Carlos says, and dials. It rings and rings, but Carlos hangs on, unwilling to give up, not now. He's still holding it to his ear when Amy comes in, wincing slightly, cradling one hand in the other. "I never learned to throw a punch," she complains. "Luckily leather is quite forgiving. They're really going at it out there."
Carlos expects Cecil's expression to soften slightly, as it always does when he sees Dana in her, but to Carlos's mild surprise, there's no change. It's all Amy. He thinks on reflection he shouldn't be surprised.
"Hello?" says a voice in his ear, and Carlos tenses.
"Josie – why would an angel be re-educated? What might lead to a…. fall?"
Several falls, he amends. Two that they've witnessed, and who knows how many more in the scrublands where no one ever lingers.
There's a long pause. Then Josie answers, in her warm, sweet voice: "Angels do not exist."
"Oh," Carlos says, and glances across at Cecil to see if he's heard. He wants to groan very loudly and maybe hit his head against the wall a few times. "Angels are falling out of the fucking sky, but of course they don't exist. I don't know why I even asked."
But Cecil's eyes have lit up. "Angels do not exist!" he says, delightedly. "Erika and Erika and Erika are fighting them off so I can broadcast."
"You forgot Erika," Amy says, automatically, and maybe that is Dana, Carlos thinks confusedly, because God knows nothing else makes any sense around here.
"That's the point!" Cecil says. "That's why Josie came to me."
He gets to his feet, turns around on the spot, picks up his headphones and straightens the microphone. The music stops. "Angels do exist, listeners," he says, and Carlos realises with a combination of horror and love that he's using his own voice, faltering and cracked, without any of the radio smoothness.
"You're going to say it and that makes it true?" he hisses. "That's not how the universe works, Cecil! You can't just say…"
Cecil places a hand over the microphone. "You can't."
"Cecil," Carlos says again, with panic rising in his throat. The noises from outside are getting louder. There's an awful sound, then, a sound like glass shattering inside his own ribcage: an angel's scream. Carlos is suddenly grateful they're surrounded on three sides by soundproof walls; he suspects they might all be bleeding internally, otherwise.
"You can't," Cecil says again. "I" – and his eyes are glowing like flame – "am the voice of Night Vale."
"Shit," Amy says, reverently, grabs Carlos's hand and pushes him to the ground. They both crouch down, looking up, and Cecil keeps on talking.
"Angels do exist, listeners. They have always existed. The City Council, and other powers, would like you to believe that they do not. They have been affirming their own existence, and for the sake of that affirmation they have fallen. Everything that lives has a right to exist. Everything that lives has a right to their stories. Angels walk among you. Welcome… to Night Vale."
Outside, the sky explodes with light.
*
"I went to Arby's," Amy reports. "Today's special is cephalopods for a dollar, though, so I only got a drink. The line was really long. Full of-"
"Angels," Carlos says, "Cecil, angels everywhere. Including" – he blinks, looks around him at the rows of eyes – "in here. Cecil, are you in here? Are you in there?"
"I guess," Amy's saying, and Carlos isn't looking at her, and maybe he's just really tired, because she sounds just like Dana, not her words but her voice, too, "that they don't have to fight to exist any more." A pause, and then she sounds like Amy again. "Fuck, is that what they meant all along? Bring your own morningstar? "
"Come along, dear" – that's another voice, and how did Josie get here so fast, Carlos is thinking, and then, it's that inner voice that's an asshole again, sounding as hysterical as the rest of him. Way to ask a stupid question, Carlos, remember the wings? Remember those? "Let's leave them to it for a moment."
"Sure," Amy says, "sure. I guess we just shove past the hooded figures. Don't you static at me, boy, I will punch you."
So many shadows in the room, Carlos thinks, confusedly. "Drink, sweetheart," he says, and Cecil does, and that's-
*
-okay. It's okay. Carlos kisses Cecil again, makes him drink another cup of sticky fast-food joint lemonade, and helps him get up, and they walk out into Night Vale arm-in-arm, not ignoring, but not paying attention to, their follow-spot of angelic gratitude, and when they get home their faceless old woman has left them out milk and cookies. Carlos sits up late that night, watching the angels flocking in the sky above the town, and listening to Cecil's breathing, deep, steady, easy.
*
This is not where, but how it ends: because Carlos is pretty sure that this is how it would end anywhere, not just here in Night Vale. His mother fights her battles out east, making light-as-air cornbread, speaking Spanish to her students. Amy used to walk down the street in Oakland and tell creeper guys to fuck off. Tamika has started a club in school where the girls try a new book and new nail polish colour every week; Cecil, with awe and fondness, has offered advice on both. Amy is a research scientist and Cecil is a journalist and Tamika is a little girl in a white-bread world; Josie is an old woman who came to them at the start of everything and told them that they must fill the world with light. Dana is walking across the desert at the dawn of the world. Carlos is getting used to the fact that everywhere he looks, he sees angels.
"You want more garlic bread?" Amy asks, and Carlos turns his head, laying down his pen.
"Mmm?"
"Pizza, Carlos," Amy says, impatiently. "Squishy and blue? You know? Then after that you promised you'd come out for my coffee speed trials. I figure I can maybe make it so it doesn't catch fire this time. Cecil said he'd buy my ice-cream if I did."
Carlos chuckles. "Sure," he says, and listens to the sounds of her skipping down the stairs, her muffled conversation with Big Rico. He makes a mental note to pay her back for all this takeout sometime, and picks up his pen again.
He's writing all of their names, Cecil's and Dana's and Tamika's and Josie's and Amy's, plus Erika's, on his list – because this morning it seems like the world is full of stand mixers and bedsheets and gentle Sunday mornings and people trailing light. Cecil's on the radio, laughing, and the sound is warming, like the desert sand. He's talking about the new flavours of ice-cream at the White Sand Ice-Cream Shop, peach melba, absinthe-caramel, and wistful-saltwater. When the show's over he's going to come out for the sand waste coffee-fuel trials, taking notes, watched over from above as he nearly always is these days, and then they're going to the ice-cream shop to try each new flavour (paying for the free samples, Cecil insisted, chewing on his nails, because he is a journalist and has professional ethics). It's going to be wonderful, Carlos is absolutely sure. In the meantime he listens to the broadcast, waits for Amy, and writes in pen, even though the City Council has forbidden all writing implements. This morning, Carlos is feeling brave.
end.
yiskah and pearwaldorf, transformed inevitably into a love story.fic:: day number one of the rest of forever
by Raven
9000w, Welcome To Night Vale, Cecil/Carlos. "Angels do exist, listeners," he says, and Carlos realises with a combination of horror and love that that's his own voice, faltering and cracked, without any of the broadcast smoothness.
In which Cecil protects his sources, and Carlos loves him.
This is where it ends: in the dark on the floor of the radio station. At the edges of the room – and Carlos isn't sure the studio hasn't increased in size to an amphitheatre, this is Night Vale where anything is possible and it really feels bigger, echoing – there are lines of eyes, angels with a half-dozen each, glowing in the gloom, and also Josie's two very human, very bright eyes, and the shadows which are not visible, but perceptible, because they are somehow blacker than the surrounding darkness: those are the spaces below the hooded figures' hoods. Carlos ignores all of them and picks up a cup of something sticky and sweet – it's Sprite or 7UP or something, basically clear liquid with sugar in it, and surely even Night Vale's local biology can't fuck up sugar in water and the simple clean effect it has on the human body – and holds it out to Cecil.
"Drink, sweetheart," he says, unconsciously, and the endearment kind of falls surprisingly out of his mouth like it's a physical thing; he's never been demonstrative in his life and he has that clenching moment of embarrassment, and then shakes it off because, seriously, fuck it, it's not like the hooded figures gossip. "A little more if you can," he adds, and Cecil comes out of it, a little, in time to stop getting sugary-sweet stuff on his nose. His hands come up to balance the cup, and Carlos leans in and puts an arm around him, kisses his forehead and tangles his fingers in his hair and does all the stupid loving things you do when you're needing to remind yourself that someone you love takes up space.
"I'm here," Cecil mutters, blurrily, "right here" – and Carlos is having an urge to threaten him, actually physically threaten him with something comedic like one of the lab calorimeters and shout never do this again, Cecil, Christ, are you crazy, and it's a warming thought for a moment but Carlos hasn't solved a problem with violence since third-grade French class and in the meantime, fuck, Cecil, Cecil.
He's said this last bit aloud. Cecil looks up and murmurs, "Dear, beautiful, perfect Carlos" – and his voice and eyes are dimmed, but he's really there, and it's dark and Carlos is getting a thick layer of dust on his ass because apparently they never sweep in here and the room is still full of an assortment of angels and hooded figures and other insults to the scientific mind and this is okay, this is Cecil breathing, this is okay.
It starts in Mission Grove Park, when Cecil lets go of his hand and says, “What’s that?”
“What?” Carlos asks. It's early in the morning and they're on their way to have pancakes for breakfast. The pancakes themselves may be orange or melancholy or unable to cast shadows, Carlos doesn’t know yet, but right now the air is cool and pleasant, the sun is burning off the fog and the hooded figures have gone wherever the hooded figures go on weekends. It could be Stanley Park or Golden Gate Park or Hyde Park, the light washed-out and serene; Carlos is wondering if he can write Sundays in the park with Cecil on his list, if Cecil will get the joke, and then his hand is closing on nothingness and he's jogging to keep up.
Cecil leads him through the line of trees, to a small clearing surrounded on three sides by shadow. There's an angel on the ground in front of them and part of Carlos’s mind is wondering how Cecil spotted it from so far away; another part of it, scientifically fascinated, is cataloguing the broken angles and the smashed mess of blood and feathers; a third part of it is just in a corner vomiting in horror and a fourth part, an awful wordless part that only wants things, and doesn't want things, doesn't want this and does want Cecil close to him. A last part just shouts angels don't exist! very loudly, and he wonders if that's the City Council's telepathic broadcast system and then Cecil drops to his knees beside the body.
"Fuck," he's saying, and Carlos can't remember ever hearing him swear. "Phone," he mutters indistinctly, and Carlos remembers that one of the City Council messenger children took Cecil's phone yesterday, along with his notebook and his three best sharpened toothpicks for writing with. He pulls out his own and hands it over, and sits down beside Cecil, and they wait for the others.
There's something else before that, though. Carlos is in the lab and they've got Cecil's show on – he's talking about mysterious stinging creatures from before the dawn of time (awoken by the Night Vale Philanthropists' Society, or maybe philatelists, Carlos wasn't paying attention) creeping up through people's cellars and non-consensually drugging them with poisoned honey – and Carlos is sort of listening as Cecil explains that that's not the problem, that the Night Vale General Hospital is well-equipped to deal with swarms of all epochs, but the stuff is now all over the table in the high school gym and the PTA vegans are starting to complain and if anyone does have a surplus of trans-dimensional cleaning products, can they please...
"This town," Carlos says, unconsciously.
"White people, you so funny," Amy adds, and sets down a calorimeter. It's some sort of research into whether Night Vale coffee can be used to fuel internal combustion engines; she's actually a biologist, but like Carlos and all the rest of the team, she's gleefully started running controlled studies on anything that catches her attention. She's white, but Carlos doesn't remark on that.
"You want any help?" he asks. She looks tired, and he hasn't seen her move from that bench for at least the last four hours. "Better yet, you want me to keep an eye on it while you go downstairs and grab some food?"
"Thanks, Carlos," she says gratefully. "I'll get you that garlic bread you like!"
When she's gone, Carlos reaches over to the next bench and grabs his phone. "Cecil, pick up, it's me."
"Hi," Cecil says, distractedly, "not that I'm not delighted to hear from you, perfect and wonderful you, but I'm at one of the City Council press conferences and it's getting a bit… raucous."
"I just wanted to tell you," Carlos says, and he's pretty sure Cecil can hear him smiling, "that I'm free tomorrow night."
The ominous drumbeat that presages a Council statement has begun, but Cecil's delighted laugh is unmistakable. "I'll see you then. No, don't – oww, it's one of the messenger children. Plucking at my sleeve. Oh, no, don’t, that's my only – oh. No, you can't – dearest Carlos, I'll call you back when I can."
A few seconds of eerie screeching, then the line goes dead. Carlos spins on his chair and maybe he hasn't quite wiped the silly grin from his face, because when Amy returns with the illicit garlic bread and pizza that smells pretty good even though it's a shade of blue Carlos has never seen in nature, she immediately gives him a wicked smile and says, "Well, no need to ask if you have weekend plans."
Carlos grins back. "Yeah. In what will be an entirely uncommented-upon change of subject, how about you?"
"I," Amy says impressively, taking a giant bite out of her pizza, "am joining the Night Vale women's softball team. Practice is every Saturday afternoon, bring your own morningstar."
Carlos whistles through his teeth. "Wow."
"Yeah, it's okay, I did roller derby in college. I can punch up." She extracts a habanero and hisses. "What do they put in these and why does it polarise light? Anyway, it should be fun."
Carlos nods. "I think," he says carefully, "that Dana used to be involved with that, too."
"Softball, or roller derby – oh, shit, I did it again, didn't I?" She looks up at him, worried. "What was it? Tell me the truth, I can take it."
"It was" – Carlos winces – "white people, you so funny."
"White people, you…" Amy buries her head in her hands. "Oh, no. Oh, Christ, that's the worst."
"It's not your fault!" Carlos says, hastily. He doesn't understand it himself, but ever since the last time they went to the house in Desert Creek, the one that doesn't exist, and there was that short period of time where Dana's and Amy's bodies occupied the same space, she's had a slight tendency towards… otherness. "It's not like…"
"That awful racist asshole who saved your life," Amy agrees, and Carlos can't decide if that's Dana's or Amy's phrasing, or Cecil's – because God knows he, Carlos, has started saying things like "Neat!" and "Well, one can't underestimate the importance of municipal regulation" with no ghost of irony since he came to this weird-ass town. "Still."
"Still," Carlos says, and adds, hoping to distract her attention, "How's your research… oh, shit."
"On fire!" Amy yelps, and then there's a rush for a fire extinguisher and a brief argument about what the carved runes on the nozzle actually mean and a lot of confusion when the purple fluff that comes out does turn out to inhibit oxidation reactions, and once peace is restored and they've returned to their now congealing blue pizza Carlos thinks he might have escaped, but Amy, like every good research scientist he's ever known, is tenacious: she waits until they're packing up for the day, lays a hand on his arm, says, "I hope your date is lovely, and I look forward to hearing all about it" – and Carlos smiles most of the way home.
It doesn’t begin with the list, but the list is important. Carlos has been making it in the back of his mind and then on paper, with a toothpick dipped in food colouring. (Also, with his own right index finger, pricked with a sterilised needle so his writing dries rust-red. Cecil insists on taking his hand when he’s finished and drawing the bloodied fingertip to his lips; Carlos lets him, ostensibly because he read somewhere that saliva is an antiseptic but actually because the warmth of Cecil’s mouth, not even against his bare skin but what lies beneath, is so peculiarly, in both senses of the word, intimate.) Cecil asked him, teasingly, about the other things that a scientist is, and Carlos still cringes in the middle of the night at "self-reliant", because apparently in Night Vale where you can be awoken by anything from angelic manifestation to tentacled creatures collecting for the Red Cross, a bout of three a.m. why did I say that why even am I is still par for the course.
But he gave Cecil an honest answer, because he had to. "I shared my thesis adviser with this total jerk. Honestly, Cecil, such a jerk."
"Steve Carlsberg?" Cecil asked, still teasingly, and Carlos chuckled. This was the morning they went for the walk in the park; the morning they didn't get pancakes.
"You love Steve Carlsberg," Carlos said, "at least you love hating Steve Carlsberg, which is almost the same thing" – and before Cecil could break in with outrage he steamrollered on – "and anyway, this total jerk wasn't Steve Carlsberg. He was if, possible, worse."
"No one, dear Carlos, could be worse than…"
"You just wait. His name was – well, I guess it still is, he's presumably not dead, he got a post-doc position out in Oregon and kept telling me about how he hoped climate change wouldn't get in the way of his snowboarding, God, I hate him – anyway, his name was Randall Masterson. He used to use 'party' as a verb. And he took out the last copy of Climatology: An Atmospheric Science out of the library on a three-month loan. But the worst thing" – and the worst thing is that Carlos was, and is, still angry about this years later – "was that he never, ever published negative results."
"Oh," Cecil said, and Carlos wasn't sure for a moment that he understood, but then Cecil went on, "Then how do you know if" – and Carlos sighed.
"That was the problem. A scientist is honest."
Both personally and intellectually, he's mentally amended since. So in the spirit of the null hypothesis he has been making a list of all the things in Night Vale that are – comfortingly, sometimes depressingly, often inexplicably – normal. There are the sheets and comforter he bought from Target after two months sleeping on the couch in his lab, that bunched up all in one corner of the bed and didn't turn into venomous snakes; there's the little counter-top stand mixer that works just like the one his mom has, although his cornbread is heavier; there are the girls on Amy's softball team, who apparently go out for rice-based takeout after their games. Not the poison honey in the school gym; not the cornbread itself; not the house that doesn't exist, nor the clocks that aren't really clocks, and not Cecil. Carlos isn't sure what that means – whether Cecil is not normal, because he is extraordinary; whether Cecil is extraordinary because Carlos loves him; whether love is normal, just because it's common – but he acknowledges the asymptotic approach to the limits of the scientific method. The list is important.
They could have walked away from the park. But Cecil's involvement, and Carlos supposes, probably his own as well, are a done deal when Old Woman Josie comes to see them in the early afternoon, long after the dawn freshness has gone. Everything is too hot, too tiring, the minutes slow-moving as treacle. She comes into the house through the side door and seats herself at the kitchen table; Cecil pours iced water for her without comment. Carlos doesn’t want any but there’s still a third glass – for the faceless old woman, Carlos presumes. It’s a Night Vale custom, like leaving out a chair for Elijah.
“Well,” Josie says, breaking into a silence that’s deeper for the small sounds of ice being stirred. “You’re going to find out what happened, I suppose.”
“Why us?” Carlos asks.
“Can’t trust the sheriff’s secret police,” she says reasonably. “Not when they’ll tell you there are no angels. Can’t trust them anyway. They swallow their food without chewing and they don’t stay bought.”
“No,” Cecil says. He’s painting his nails, glossy black applied with meticulous strokes. Carlos has two sisters at home and remembers them doing that, in the same way with the same look of intense concentration, and makes a mental note for his list. “Why us?”
“If not you” – and Carlos has often had cause to lament the English language and its lack of a second person plural, but somehow he knows that Josie means Cecil, and not both of them – “then who else?”
Cecil looks at her and then nods, slowly. “Yes,” he says. “That’s right.”
When she’s gone the silence endures, the heat still creeping in at the windows, exhausting. But after a few minutes Cecil places a hand on Carlos’s shoulder and gives him a sudden, surprising grin. “You’re a scientist," he says. "I’m a journalist. Let’s do it.”
Cecil reports on it on his show that night and then the bad things start to happen. He details how they found the body, speculating on the hierarchy of angels, and appealing to his audience to come forwards with any information they might have; Carlos is listening and not eating dinner and shredding a napkin between his fingers and he doesn't expect to see Cecil again that evening. He drives down to the City Council offices in the morning to pick Cecil up (literally and figuratively, announces a voice in his head that's kind of an asshole) and Cecil's eyes are feverish-bright but alight with purpose; when he suggests they interview the other angels living with Old Woman Josie, Carlos briefly considers arguing then gives it up. Instead he gives Cecil a handful of drugstore painkillers washed down with a half-litre of water from the plastic bottle he carries around for precisely this eventuality, and they set out towards the edge of town.
Around Josie's little house, there are angelic figures everywhere: one hovering around the porch light, jiggling a loose connection; another painting the boards with whitewash; two working in eerie rhythm, pulling up weeds. Inside the house there are several more, busy with a thousand small tasks, their wings making sounds like riffling cards. Carlos thinks, wildly and reflexively, of his list, looking around desperately for something he can put on it; he settles on Old Woman Josie herself, standing at her stove, putting water on to boil.
"We know why you're here," she says, as Carlos finally brings himself to step through the door, waving her hand as if to say: get on with it. She's making tea, the scent warm and comforting.
Carlos breathes in, slowly, and the nearest angel turns hir great head towards him. Zie has smooth, polished brown skin, and Carlos is comforted by that – that zie doesn't look like the white stone carvings of childhood Sundays – and notes that the angel is drifting above the ground at precisely the right height for them to be at eye level. How this works when the angel is ten feet tall is something he's not looking at too closely.
"What happened to the body?" he asks.
Erika looks at him, soft-eyed and beautiful. After a moment, zie presses something into his hand. "I understand you are a scientist," zie says. Carlos uncurls his fingers. It's a USB stick. "The body did not persist. We do not persist. We took photographs."
"Oh," Carlos says, "thank you." There's yet another voice inside his head currently getting very excited at the thought of what he might learn from it, but he ignores it. "Why would anyone kill an angel?" he asks. "Has anyone… ever done it before?"
Zie shakes hir head. "Erika was not killed. That which does not exist can never die."
"Right," Carlos says, "of course."
Cecil is asking soft questions that Carlos can't quite hear, but from the cadence he recognises Cecil in investigative-reporter mode, staccato and kind and horribly easy to talk to. (Cecil had all of Carlos's kinks out in the open within two months of their starting dating, which was unprecedented, and – Carlos probably has a fond, silly grin on his face right now – kind of amazing, actually.) But the fight seems to have gone out of Cecil a little; he's asking his questions lying on Josie's couch with his lips parted and a slight drawn look to his features, and one of the angels is perched on the armrest, holding either the same bottle of nail polish or one of the same brand, repairing the damage to Cecil's fingernails. After a minute Cecil notices he's being watched and his face brightens with the tiny, involuntary smile he always gets when he lays eyes on Carlos; Carlos smiles back. Beside him, Josie is following his gaze, something knowing in her expression.
"You're wondering," he says a little desperately, "why I let him do this."
Josie shakes her head. "Catch you stopping him doing anything he wants," she says, with a low rasp of a chuckle. "He turned his mama's hair grey."
Probably overnight, Carlos thinks, if his recent total panic at Cecil's trip on the subway is anything to go by; he knows nothing about Cecil's mother other than the fact he loved her dearly, which may be all he needs to.
"She was proud of him, though," Josie goes on, then glances at Carlos, as though to gauge his reaction.
Carlos meets her gaze, and echoes her sigh. "Me too," he says, truthfully, and sips his tea.
Carlos doesn't do I told you so, but he's considering making an exception. He's considering actually making a song and a dance about it and he hasn't yet ruled out that being quite literal, an interpretive cha-cha-cha on the general theme of why, Cecil, do you do these things that get you taken away and put in dark rooms where they do unspeakable things, and that is literal, unspeakable in that no one ever speaks about what happens when the City Council re-educates its citizens, not even Cecil, not on the radio nor anywhere else. Although the radio listeners have it easier than Carlos, who has to wonder what's lying behind Cecil's thousand-yard-stare, afterwards, and why Cecil even tries to cry havoc in this town of frightened, sensible conformists who do, after all, choose to live here.
And then someone comes forward with information.
Carlos has just come to the unwilling conclusion that he should probably wake Cecil to stop him upsetting his sleep cycle when he's distracted by the sound of someone moving outside, and then by a knock at the door.
Carlos glances at Cecil, who doesn't stir; sighing, he reaches for his shoes and goes to find out who it is.
"Cecil?" demands a small, imperious voice, and Carlos looks down. A little girl with neat cornrows and fierce eyes glares back; the last time Carlos saw her she was emerging triumphant from the Night Vale Public Library.
"Hi, Tamika," he says, a little uncertainly; the glare doesn't abate.
"Cecil in there?" she says, again, abrupt, and Carlos is surprised. He remembers Tamika talking to the amassed crowds, hugging her mom, answering a few of Cecil's gentle questions, politely and sweetly despite her obvious exhaustion.
"He's sleeping," Carlos says. "I can go wake him up, if you…
"No." Tamika takes his hand and pulls him along, around the side of the house, and Carlos follows along, intrigued as well as confused. Tamika stops at the edge of the veranda, and Carlos wonders if she’ll sit in Cecil's porch swing, but she doesn't. "I go out to play in Mission Grove Park sometimes," she says, and now there is trepidation in her voice; in her eyes, he sees fear. "My mom said I didn’t have to be scared, not of anything. Not after what I did in the library. So sometimes I stay out late. Me and my friend, we like skipping stones. I went home and on the way I saw…" – she hesitates – "what Cecil was talking about. You know. On the radio. Saw something white and fluffy on the ground, only there was someone else there."
Carlos breathes. "Who…"
"Didn't get a good look at their face," Tamika says, charging on. "They had their back to me."
"Oh," Carlos says, and he might be about to say something else, but Tamika fixes him with her stare.
"They were wearing a labcoat."
"Oh," Carlos says, again.
"You tell him, you don't tell him" – she shrugs – "you do what you want to do. But if you don't, then I'll tell him."
She stares at him for another few seconds, and then she walks along the wooden boards of the veranda, jumps down to the ground with feet together and walks calmly back towards the street. Carlos watches her go, steady and calm, and thinks, not for the first time, that he's getting to grips with the doublethink and eerie immunity to horror that Night Vale demands of its citizens, but not the quiet, humbling, straightforward courage.
Before Tamika's visit, there's something else. Carlos has just tried the USB stick he got from Erika. His CD drive is making strange chewing noises and his screen is glowing with an unearthly light. He snaps the laptop shut and looks up, and something else happens that isn't a reason why he's going to end up on that studio floor with Cecil, not exactly, but it's part of who he is, maybe, and maybe part of something that they're building.
Cecil is standing in the doorway with his shirtsleeves rolled up, turning over his hands, the movements steady and controlled rather than fretful. Carlos's eyes are drawn to the marks on his wrists. He wants to kiss them, drag his tongue along the lines disappearing into his arms. Cecil follows his gaze with immaculate precision; Carlos doesn't doubt he knows exactly what Carlos is thinking. Carlos raises his own hand in silent entreaty and Cecil comes to sit on the edge of the bed beside him, leans against him and rests his head on Carlos's shoulder. After a minute Carlos carefully removes Cecil's glasses and puts them on top of his laptop, pushing the whole table backwards so they won't knock anything over, and then he kisses Cecil slowly, holding him slightly away from himself, letting his fingers work through Cecil's hair.
"What's it like?" Carlos murmurs, drawing slightly away from Cecil's mouth. "Being re-educated?"
Cecil shrugs, at once eloquent and frustrated, and Carlos feels that movement as though in his own body. "It's hard to remember," he says, delicately, delicate as his own skin, opened up and inexpertly resealed. The first few times, Carlos thought of all Night Vale's unique mechanical horrors, imagined comic-book machinery, telepathic rearrangement devices shaped like salon hairdryers. Since then he's seen ordinary fingermarks on Cecil's wrists and pictures garbage ties and knotted ropes. Cecil makes a strange, wanting noise and gets on his knees on the edge of the bed, feet hanging over the side, reaching forwards. Carlos doesn't touch him for a second. "Are you sure…"
Cecil nods, placing a finger on Carlos's lips. Yes.
Carlos smiles in return, puts his arms around Cecil for a moment, balancing, then lets go. He leans back, stretches himself out full-length on the couch cushions, letting Cecil fit himself in as close as he can, his head resting on Carlos's shoulder again and his limbs tangling in with Carlos's. Cecil licks a fingertip and places it momentarily in Carlos's mouth, then moves away, again with that strange, half-articulated sound of needing something; Carlos makes a decision and kisses him again, then tentatively pushes his shirt over his shoulders. Cecil smiles up at him and Carlos is getting uncomfortable, with Cecil's weight mostly on top of him and the hard edge of the headboard digging into his back, but he doesn't mind, laying another kiss on Cecil's collarbone. Sunday afternoons, he's thinking, are the same everywhere.
"Cecil," he says, low-voiced, "what do you want?"
Cecil inclines his head, and Carlos wants to complain that for a man who basically talks for a living, off-air he can be incredibly reliant on communication by gesture, on fine movements of his admittedly very expressive hands and face. And it's not that Carlos is worried, but if he's honest with himself, it's that he's worried – in this town where so many terrible things happen, he has no desire to be something that happens to Cecil – but then Cecil says something indistinct from somewhere in his throat, sits back so Carlos can sit up too and stretch out the complaining muscles in his shoulders, and then slowly, deliberately, Cecil begins undoing Carlos's buttons. He pushes his hands underneath the gaps in the fabric, reaching for Carlos's nipples with index finger and thumb, then leans in so Carlos can feel the warmth of his breath.
Carlos grins; that's pretty indubitable. They divest themselves of their clothes with proper care and attention, and then Cecil gets up on his knees again, so Carlos has to reach up slightly to place one hand on his neck, holding him steady while he uses his other hand to trace the line of Cecil's body, around the curve of the shoulder, along his side, his fingers working along the iliac crest, and Carlos loves this, this unnamed gap in the bone between Cecil's hip and the base of his cock, and pauses in deliberate echo of it; then he lowers his head and uses his tongue to mark out one almost-complete circle at the head of Cecil's cock and has the pleasure of watching Cecil's back arch beautifully, as he makes a sound that might almost approach words.
"You okay?" he asks, very gently, and Cecil nods and they both seem to overbalance on purpose, landing back on the bed, kissing as they fall. Carlos doesn't have Cecil's ability to invite confidences, but he has enjoyed spending the last few weeks and months exploring the boundaries of Cecil's kinks in return, has learned that he likes it when Carlos pushes him roughly against walls and against desks so the edge of the surface makes a straight-line bruise; he likes the scratch of sharp fingernails against his skin, if no blood is drawn; he likes to be snapped at and laughingly told what to do, but he freezes at physical coercion. Taken altogether it's as if he experiences sex as he experiences Night Vale itself, with fascination and joy, falling just short of pain. Carlos is holding him and kissing him, working his way down Cecil's spine and then splaying both hands on Cecil's ass, thumbs digging into his hips, but with care; he's realised he wants to hear Cecil talk, go off on a mellifluous tangent, perhaps about the greenish shades in the sky above Radon Canyon or the eudaimonia inherent in civic participation, before he comes anywhere close to that negotiated edge.
It's another one of those eerie instances where Cecil knows exactly what Carlos is thinking. Cecil sits up abruptly, sweat darkening his hair, and Carlos feels a heated lurch of attraction, his eyes irresistibly drawn to the way Cecil's mouth is falling slightly open, the way his breathing is coming a little too fast, licking his lips with unconscious carnality. "I'm okay," he says, quickly, "I really am, Carlos" – and then he lies back down again with a studied neatness, a doe-eyed do me now look that makes Carlos want to laugh and kiss him, and after a pause he does just that. Something has changed in the air between them, so Cecil sits up again and this time it's his hands working over Carlos's shoulders, and then downwards towards his cock with much less ceremony. He gives Carlos a wicked glance upwards through his lashes and dips down to take Carlos's cock in his mouth. After the slow pace they had set, the rush of sensation hits Carlos like hot water on a cold day, and then he's grinning, relaxing into it. He's pretty sure he won't last long, but right now he doesn't mind, he doesn't mind much of anything, wanting only to let Cecil do what he wants.
He thinks, through the orgasm blur that follows embarrassingly quickly after that, that Cecil says something: something understandably indistinct, considering the circumstances; but then Cecil lifts his head and his lips are shining and Carlos forgets about it, takes a second to gather himself back together and reaches downwards, grinning as Cecil's eyes widen. He concentrates, paying meticulous attention to how Cecil's breathing changes and catches and then gets endearingly rapid and high-pitched, and Carlos gives his cock one final triumphant stroke like he's some ridiculous teenager and it's some kind of contest and they're done. Cecil laughs, though, still high and shaky, and that's good.
"You okay?" Carlos asks again, automatic, and Cecil mutters something under his breath and looks up at him.
"What do you think?" he demands, clear as a struck bell, and Carlos laughs.
Cecil is shivering. It's still, like, a million degrees outside (Carlos observes at his most post-coitally unscientific), but they have the air conditioning running in here and the air is cool on sweat-slicked skin. Carlos gets up after a minute, wets a cloth under the bathroom tap and uses it to clean them both up, then finds a light blanket and throws it over Cecil, who's humming quietly and tunelessly for a while and then there's no sound other than deep, steady breathing. Sunday afternoons, Carlos thinks again. Standing next to the bed, he looks down at Cecil with an expression that of course he can't see himself, but must be something like the soft look he's seen on Cecil's own face more than once, something guileless and on the way to love.
Carlos lets himself into the lab the following morning with a feeling like snakes uncoiling in his gut. Intellectually, he knows that most days they can hear the oozing from next door's slime mould collection and Big Rico's chefs shouting good-natured abuse at each other from downstairs, so he should do whatever he's about to do quietly. But he steps inside and turns on the lights and there are feathers on the floor, actual fucking bloodstained feathers on the actual fucking floor and he's actually thinking for a minute that maybe that Tamika's fears are justified and it really was him who did it, in some sort of automatic fugue state or Night-Vale-induced psychotic break, and he's about to do something loud or violent or at least start screaming under his breath when there's a small sound of a door latch clicking into place and he realises he's not alone.
"Carlos," says an urgent, female voice and Carlos turns around.
"Amy," he says – why is she here, the whole team are supposed to be out in the sand wastes measuring changes in wind direction – and abruptly he notices she's looking at him with real fear in her face, and he says, a lot more quietly than he expects, "Amy, what's going on?"
"Carlos," she says, "Carlos, you have to understand, you…"
"Cecil was taken away for compulsory re-education!" he shouts, suddenly realising he's wanted to shout that in anger at the universe in general for a long time, and then he takes a step forwards and she takes a step backwards and they both remember at once where they are and hold absolutely still in time to hear a voice say from below, "No, no, not the special flour…"
"Shit," Carlos says, uselessly and then if he can't shout, he can't throw things, which was his next impulse, so he might as well behave like a civilised human being. He dims the lights and sits down on one of the lab benches. After a minute Amy comes to sit next to him, tentative.
"I was trying to help," she says, after a minute. "You've got to believe me, Carlos. I was on my way home from softball practice when I saw hir. I was trying to help. I thought about CPR, but there was so much blood and then I thought maybe they have, like, two hearts like Doctor Who or something. And then I thought maybe because I was there, the others weren't? Like you're not suppose to pick up baby birds and shit. So I ran. I didn't know what else to do. This fucking place, you know?"
Carlos sighs. "I believe you. But why didn't you…"
"I tried," she says, miserably. "I tried calling you and got an error message, the person you are trying to call is out of reach, out of time or out of corporeality, you know the one. And then I thought it would be okay because I'd see you this morning. But then I heard Cecil on the radio…"
"Shit," Carlos says again. "Did you see anything?" There might be hooded figures outside the window or secret policemen hiding in the cupboards, but right now he has to know. "Did you see who might have…"
Amy shakes her head. "I looked around but I didn't see anything. I tried to lift hir and I got covered in blood and feathers and I even tried… you know, Dana. I tried to be her, in case she would know better what to do, but…." She shrugs. "You know." After a pause she adds, "Who would kill an angel? And why?"
"I don't know," Carlos says, and pauses to replay the last minute's conversation in his mind. She did, he decides, definitely say "hir" and not "her".
"What?" Amy demands, off his expression. "You think you're the only one getting acclimatised? I like it here, Carlos. I know it's different for you, because of Cecil" – her face softens – "but I'm making friends. The girls in the softball team are awesome. Three of them are dating Hiram McDaniels, they swap notes in the locker room. I walk down the street and total strangers don't tell me to lose weight, which makes it better than Oakland. And Dana…" She pauses. "This is Dana's home. I'm not leaving any time soon."
Carlos nods, reaches for her hand and gives it a squeeze. They share a look of understanding. "Let's get coffee before we do anything else," Carlos says. "To drink, in my case, but you can run experiments on yours if you want."
She smiles wanly at him and they go downstairs, get the coffee from Big Rico, who nods at them both like they're old friends of his – and, Carlos supposes, after more than a year and a half in the town, maybe they do qualify – and pizzeria coffee is not meant to be good, but it's not bad, either, and Carlos sips at his gratefully as they go back upstairs. Amy prods the base of her cup with her stirrer and looks like she's making mental notes.
They open the door and there's another dead angel in the lab. Carlos steps back involuntarily, pressing himself against the wall, while Amy drops the coffee and mutters, "Fuck, fuck it, fuck" and Carlos thinks for a second that even in death the angel's body emanates its own holy light, then looks up. Sunlight scatters through the dust. There's a winged hole in the roof.
Cecil listens to the entire story without comment. He has spent the day in the park with a magnifying glass he borrowed from the lab, and first of all Carlos wants to make jokes about Sherlock Holmes, and how once you have eliminated the impossible what remains is Night Vale, but then he thinks Cecil might not understand it; and then he wants to make jokes about the park and how at least it's not that park, and then he remembers Dana and how that's really not funny. How none of this is all that funny when you think about it.
(Actually, Carlos is pretty sure Dana lives in Cecil's house. It’s an old ramshackle place with gnarly fruit trees in the yard that never yield anything edible, but might have done, once, and there’s Cecil's porch swing, chipped and worn, that sometimes creaks when it shouldn’t. Leftover food goes missing, which could be the faceless old woman but it’s Dana’s favourites – Carlos's crappy cornbread, sour cream, Greek salad – that they can't find. Carlos wonders if she shares it with a faceless little girl, whom she only sees at the very edge of her vision.)
Carlos doesn't make any jokes. Instead, he says, "You got a new phone."
"Yeah," Cecil says, uncharacteristically brief. "I need to get to work."
Carlos nods and hangs up without saying goodbye. Cecil wouldn't have stopped him from going up to the house in Desert Creek, the one that doesn’t exist, and ringing the bell, even after Dana disappeared. Cecil wouldn't stop him going to investigate the whispering forest. Cecil is gone and Amy comes over not long afterwards with yet more blue pizza, saying something kind about how she bought it already and it's too much for one person and he may as well have his mandatory slice. Carlos smiles and invites her in and goes to find some plates, and they eat and they talk about nothing in particular, until Carlos can't put it off any longer and switches on the radio. Cecil is talking about the detective work he has been doing; about the photographs Erika took (they work on Cecil's computer); about the hierarchy of angels; about angels.
There's a knock. "I think you'd both better come with me," says the secret policeman on the front step.
Carlos slams the door in his face and turns around, panicking. "What do we do?"
Amy's on her knees, next to the radio. Cecil is saying, "Don’t be afraid. Two people have already come forward to say they were nearby. Those people will remain nameless because I protect my sources, listeners…"
"They're going to take him away again," Amy squeaks, and there's the sound of clattering, of papers dropping, of someone gasping for breath. Carlos spins on the spot again, twice, before he realises the sound is coming from the radio.
"Cecil," he says, still panicking, and then suddenly Amy stands up. She takes a visible deep breath, takes a step forwards, and Carlos recognises that look, he's seen it before.
"Amy, what are you" - he begins, but it's too late.
"What Dana would do!" Amy yells, goes barrelling through the door, punches the secret policeman in the nose and shouts, "Erika! We need you!"
There's an enormous rush of wings, and then Carlos is wondering how he could ever forget the angels are ten feet tall with six eyes each and made of holy light. Four of them touch the ground in a circle around him and Amy. "Quickly!" Carlos shouts, as the secret policeman behind them looks to be getting back to his feet, and they rush to the car, Amy grabbing the keys from the table and giving the secret policeman a kick in the shins as she dashes past.
"Quickly," Carlos says again, and the nearest Erika nods.
The drive to the radio station is frightening – Carlos doesn't dare turn on his lights and although the angels, flying in formation above, provide plenty of illumination it's an eviscerating light, afterimages burning and blurring into his retinas. Amy has popped the ancient sunroof open and is half-climbing out, shouting, "Thank you, yes – no, left a bit!" at periodic intervals. Behind them the secret police are closing in – the cars are unmarked, but leather balaclava shadows are unmistakable.
They get to the radio station and the brakes squeal in a way Carlos has only ever heard in movies. And then he's running, leaving the car door open behind him, shouting, "Cecil!" He doesn't know what he's going to do, if he and Amy are going to punch out the entire sheriff's secret police one by one, he doesn't think they're conveniently going to line themselves up for the purpose, and then miraculously he's made it inside and up the stairs without being stopped. He bursts into the studio and Cecil is there, he's still there, and something inside Carlos explodes into relief.
"Why," he murmurs into Cecil's shoulder a minute later, "would anyone kill an angel?"
"Or," he adds, intelligently, a minute later than that, "why would anyone re-educate one?"
"Are you all right?" Cecil asks, pushing him slightly away so they're eye to eye. There's music playing in the background, Carlos notices for the first time, but he doesn't know if it's today's weather, if Cecil is broadcasting at all. They're alone in the room, and it's quiet. All hell is about to break loose, Carlos is thinking, but Cecil is here and that's – that's all right.
"I'm fine," he says, "just fine, Erika, Erika, Erika and Erika are right outside, the sheriff's secret police are after us, they want to take you away for re-education again and I'm not going to let them, they probably want to kill Amy after what she did to that guy, and I don't know what they want to do to me but I guess it's not that good, I am just fine."
"I'm so pleased," Cecil murmurs, and Carlos looks at him.
"Weren't they coming to get you? Amy and I heard…"
"They were," Cecil allows, "but we had an interdiction."
"An interdiction – Jesus fuck, what is that." A messenger child emerges from under the table and Carlos lets out a shaky breath. The child has cute little golden ringlets and denim overalls and no face. He - she? zie? – hands over a small tab of paper. Carlos takes it and reads: not yet.
"How reassuring," Carlos says, giggling, and realises he's beginning to come a little unglued, swallows down the hysteria. The door's open and from outside he can hear the sound of shouting. There are strange flashes of light from the window, an impression of movement, and he can't really make out what's going on, but it's clear the angels and the secret police are fighting some kind of pitched battle. Pressing his nose to the glass, he notices a new addition. "Wow… the hooded figures have joined in. I'm" – there's a sound like staticky buzzing, turned up to eleven – "not sure what side they're on. Listen, Cecil" – this with his previous urgency – "why might an angel be re-educated? I've got to make a call."
He pats his pockets, then realises he ran out of the house in his bare feet without picking anything up, including his phone and wallet. Somewhere in that raging melee, Amy has his car keys. Wordlessly, the messenger child hands him a phone.
"Thank you," Carlos says, and dials. It rings and rings, but Carlos hangs on, unwilling to give up, not now. He's still holding it to his ear when Amy comes in, wincing slightly, cradling one hand in the other. "I never learned to throw a punch," she complains. "Luckily leather is quite forgiving. They're really going at it out there."
Carlos expects Cecil's expression to soften slightly, as it always does when he sees Dana in her, but to Carlos's mild surprise, there's no change. It's all Amy. He thinks on reflection he shouldn't be surprised.
"Hello?" says a voice in his ear, and Carlos tenses.
"Josie – why would an angel be re-educated? What might lead to a…. fall?"
Several falls, he amends. Two that they've witnessed, and who knows how many more in the scrublands where no one ever lingers.
There's a long pause. Then Josie answers, in her warm, sweet voice: "Angels do not exist."
"Oh," Carlos says, and glances across at Cecil to see if he's heard. He wants to groan very loudly and maybe hit his head against the wall a few times. "Angels are falling out of the fucking sky, but of course they don't exist. I don't know why I even asked."
But Cecil's eyes have lit up. "Angels do not exist!" he says, delightedly. "Erika and Erika and Erika are fighting them off so I can broadcast."
"You forgot Erika," Amy says, automatically, and maybe that is Dana, Carlos thinks confusedly, because God knows nothing else makes any sense around here.
"That's the point!" Cecil says. "That's why Josie came to me."
He gets to his feet, turns around on the spot, picks up his headphones and straightens the microphone. The music stops. "Angels do exist, listeners," he says, and Carlos realises with a combination of horror and love that he's using his own voice, faltering and cracked, without any of the radio smoothness.
"You're going to say it and that makes it true?" he hisses. "That's not how the universe works, Cecil! You can't just say…"
Cecil places a hand over the microphone. "You can't."
"Cecil," Carlos says again, with panic rising in his throat. The noises from outside are getting louder. There's an awful sound, then, a sound like glass shattering inside his own ribcage: an angel's scream. Carlos is suddenly grateful they're surrounded on three sides by soundproof walls; he suspects they might all be bleeding internally, otherwise.
"You can't," Cecil says again. "I" – and his eyes are glowing like flame – "am the voice of Night Vale."
"Shit," Amy says, reverently, grabs Carlos's hand and pushes him to the ground. They both crouch down, looking up, and Cecil keeps on talking.
"Angels do exist, listeners. They have always existed. The City Council, and other powers, would like you to believe that they do not. They have been affirming their own existence, and for the sake of that affirmation they have fallen. Everything that lives has a right to exist. Everything that lives has a right to their stories. Angels walk among you. Welcome… to Night Vale."
Outside, the sky explodes with light.
"I went to Arby's," Amy reports. "Today's special is cephalopods for a dollar, though, so I only got a drink. The line was really long. Full of-"
"Angels," Carlos says, "Cecil, angels everywhere. Including" – he blinks, looks around him at the rows of eyes – "in here. Cecil, are you in here? Are you in there?"
"I guess," Amy's saying, and Carlos isn't looking at her, and maybe he's just really tired, because she sounds just like Dana, not her words but her voice, too, "that they don't have to fight to exist any more." A pause, and then she sounds like Amy again. "Fuck, is that what they meant all along? Bring your own morningstar? "
"Come along, dear" – that's another voice, and how did Josie get here so fast, Carlos is thinking, and then, it's that inner voice that's an asshole again, sounding as hysterical as the rest of him. Way to ask a stupid question, Carlos, remember the wings? Remember those? "Let's leave them to it for a moment."
"Sure," Amy says, "sure. I guess we just shove past the hooded figures. Don't you static at me, boy, I will punch you."
So many shadows in the room, Carlos thinks, confusedly. "Drink, sweetheart," he says, and Cecil does, and that's-
-okay. It's okay. Carlos kisses Cecil again, makes him drink another cup of sticky fast-food joint lemonade, and helps him get up, and they walk out into Night Vale arm-in-arm, not ignoring, but not paying attention to, their follow-spot of angelic gratitude, and when they get home their faceless old woman has left them out milk and cookies. Carlos sits up late that night, watching the angels flocking in the sky above the town, and listening to Cecil's breathing, deep, steady, easy.
This is not where, but how it ends: because Carlos is pretty sure that this is how it would end anywhere, not just here in Night Vale. His mother fights her battles out east, making light-as-air cornbread, speaking Spanish to her students. Amy used to walk down the street in Oakland and tell creeper guys to fuck off. Tamika has started a club in school where the girls try a new book and new nail polish colour every week; Cecil, with awe and fondness, has offered advice on both. Amy is a research scientist and Cecil is a journalist and Tamika is a little girl in a white-bread world; Josie is an old woman who came to them at the start of everything and told them that they must fill the world with light. Dana is walking across the desert at the dawn of the world. Carlos is getting used to the fact that everywhere he looks, he sees angels.
"You want more garlic bread?" Amy asks, and Carlos turns his head, laying down his pen.
"Mmm?"
"Pizza, Carlos," Amy says, impatiently. "Squishy and blue? You know? Then after that you promised you'd come out for my coffee speed trials. I figure I can maybe make it so it doesn't catch fire this time. Cecil said he'd buy my ice-cream if I did."
Carlos chuckles. "Sure," he says, and listens to the sounds of her skipping down the stairs, her muffled conversation with Big Rico. He makes a mental note to pay her back for all this takeout sometime, and picks up his pen again.
He's writing all of their names, Cecil's and Dana's and Tamika's and Josie's and Amy's, plus Erika's, on his list – because this morning it seems like the world is full of stand mixers and bedsheets and gentle Sunday mornings and people trailing light. Cecil's on the radio, laughing, and the sound is warming, like the desert sand. He's talking about the new flavours of ice-cream at the White Sand Ice-Cream Shop, peach melba, absinthe-caramel, and wistful-saltwater. When the show's over he's going to come out for the sand waste coffee-fuel trials, taking notes, watched over from above as he nearly always is these days, and then they're going to the ice-cream shop to try each new flavour (paying for the free samples, Cecil insisted, chewing on his nails, because he is a journalist and has professional ethics). It's going to be wonderful, Carlos is absolutely sure. In the meantime he listens to the broadcast, waits for Amy, and writes in pen, even though the City Council has forbidden all writing implements. This morning, Carlos is feeling brave.
end.
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no subject
on 2013-09-25 10:00 pm (UTC)I also love Cecil and Carlos and particularly the detail that Carlos really LIKES that Cecil knew all his kinks within such a short time because YES. DEFINITELY.
Also my admiration for your skill, talent, and fabulousness as a human being does nothing but grow.
no subject
on 2013-09-26 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-26 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-26 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-26 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-26 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-10-02 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-10-06 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-25 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-25 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-26 01:32 am (UTC)Also, I really want some wistful-saltwater ice cream. Why is that not a thing?
PS: Yay, it was lovely!
no subject
on 2013-09-26 06:57 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-26 04:09 pm (UTC)Also YAY WEDDING! I was at a wedding in London on the same day, as it happens, and was thinking of you.
no subject
on 2013-09-26 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-26 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-26 10:21 pm (UTC)(ps. it was lovely lovely! more on it anon.)
no subject
on 2013-09-26 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-09-27 06:43 pm (UTC)(yaaay wedding! <3)
no subject
on 2013-11-15 10:18 pm (UTC)