Chapter Text
Hello, Night Vale!
Gosh, it’s so very nice to finally meet you all. Just a quick introduction, before we get to the rest of the show: I’m Kevin, and I’ll be filling in for Cecil for a couple of weeks! I know at least one of you knows me already—hey there, Steve Carlsberg!—but for those who don’t, I host a radio show just like this one over at Desert Bluffs Community Radio. Just like this one! It already feels like we’re one big, happy family, huh?
Now, I know I’m not your usual host, but I’ll do my best to bring you the kind of high-quality radio you’re used to hearing. After all, you deserve it! And everyone should get what they deserve.
Everyone. Don’t you think?
Now, then! Let’s get things underway with a look at local sports…
-
Cecil. His brain sparks and stirs. There’s a Voice on the radio, pitched high and upbeat.
Carlos opens his eyes.
Cecil is awake.
He’s sitting back against the headboard, knees pulled nearly to his chest, arms in a loose circle around them. His tattoos are almost manic this morning. Carlos watches them, cataloguing their strange, mind-bending movements, the jittery static of ink beneath skin. Cecil doesn’t appear to notice, his attention caught up in the empty air that drifts between their bed and the wall.
“Cecil,” says Carlos, soft and cautious. Cecil’s lips twitch. His gaze does not focus.
Carlos props himself up and closes the inches of space between them, winding an arm around Cecil’s back. Every muscle is tensed beneath his desert-warm skin, twitching with the occasional tremor, but he is solid and present and Carlos can handle it. Gently, he reaches to turn off the radio.
“Don’t,” says Cecil. He speaks in a strange variation of his Voice, one that Carlos has not previously heard, one that impedes his ability to breathe. Air catches on the inhale, sticks in his throat; Cecil’s voice, his Voice, is flat and commanding, deep-chilled like old stones at the bottom of a well. Carlos is seized by the sudden, vital necessity of getting his boyfriend to meet his eyes. The clock-radio continues to burble like soda, like the sick-sweet, cancerous flavor of aspartame.
“Fine,” breathes Carlos, “but hey, look at me.”
Cecil doesn’t respond, doesn’t even indicate that he’s heard, but his tattoos shift almost imperceptibly, so Carlos waits, pressed tight to his side. Traffic bleeds into the community calendar, which gives way in turn to local news, to a word from the sponsors, to the opening notes of the morning’s weather.
Cecil, suddenly, barely in motion—Cecil turns his head just enough.
“Carlos,” he breathes, “dear, lovely Carlos. I’m not entirely sure I can do this.”
“Cecil, we discussed—”
“I know. I recall.”
The weather drifts in soothing spirals, the faintest hint of discord running through. Cecil’s eyes hold something unfamiliar; his third eye stares like it’s trying to incinerate something only he can see. There is every chance this hypothesis holds true.
The new Voice—Kevin—returns to the airwaves.
“I’m trying,” says Cecil, “I am fighting against every instinct I possess, against every nerve and muscle and bone. The timing is horrifically crucial, Carlos. I shouldn’t just sit here, not with Parade Day…” He trails off, frowning, his tattoos jerking. “The timing,” says Cecil, his eyes glazing over.
Carlos strengthens the press of his arms around Cecil, tries to fight down a spike of raw panic. The way Cecil speaks portends his intentions; his vocabulary shifts to coincide with his moods. Carlos can read his speech like a mood ring, like liquid swirls of thermochromic crystal. “It’s not worth it,” he murmurs. “We need you. You’re needed.”
“I know,” Cecil says, and its color is alarming.
-
Carlos makes a habit of leaving late for work, lingering over breakfast, fidgeting with his labcoat. Cecil’s sleep-cycle has undergone a radical shift; he is often awake long before the alarm, and he’s taken to pacing their bedroom at midnight. His already-worrisome caffeine intake doubles, resulting in jitters that mar bloodstone placement and ruffle patches of Khoshekh’s fur. It is almost physically painful to leave him, despite the unusual number of Secret Police who have taken to lingering outside their apartment. After this week, he has scheduled time off.
Still, Cecil’s real and alive and thankfully present every night when Carlos returns from the lab, regardless of the edge in his voice and the constant background noise of the radio. Carlos orders Big Rico’s and Cecil mutters to himself, to the Faceless Old Woman, to their potted plants. The Faceless Old Woman taps Morse code in response.
Khoshekh rubs his face against Carlos’ leg and purrs like something straight from the Hellmouth.
-
Carlos, who is not—after all—an idiot, shoots Cecil look of transparent alarm. “Cecil, I swear to god, don’t you dare.”
“I’m just—”
“Cecil.”
“I’m just asking, Carlos.”
They stare at each other across the coffee table, a Bradbury novel splayed across Cecil’s thigh, Carlos’ iPhone buzzing with an incoming message. Behind Cecil’s eyes swims something decisive. Before Carlos can read it, Cecil glances away.
Carlos breathes out a mixture of fondness and fear. “Of course I know.” He stands and joins his boyfriend on the sofa, nudging his hand til their fingers twine. Cecil allows the faint twist of a smile. “The entire town knows, you incredible dork.”
“As long as you know, that’s all right, my Carlos.”
“Well, I love you, too. I hope you know that.”
Cecil hums a low-pitched sound of affirmation, brushing his thumb over Carlos’ palm, smoothing the places where small scars have healed. Carlos rests his head against Cecil’s shoulder, inhaling his inexplicable sage-butterscotch scent. “Promise,” he says, soft and surprising. “Promise you’re not going to do something dangerous.”
“We’ve already had this discussion, dear Carlos.”
“Cecil.” Carlos frowns into the fabric of Cecil’s sleeve. He wishes he had Cecil’s talent for words. “I know you underestimate yourself. I know you’re prone to existential crisis. I know you sometimes use dishonesty as a medium. But you’re real, Cecil, you’re so, so important, and not just to the town, but to me, because you’re you. I can’t… Just promise me, Cecil, promise me again. And then promise you’re not going to go do it anyway.”
“Carlos,” says Cecil, but nothing else. His silence hangs in the air like a sunset.
A headache pulses. The Voice of Night Vale.
-
He drops something—something expensive, he thinks; he’s not sure—but he can’t manage to move, can’t even focus his eyes, although he feels his colleagues’ stares boring into his head.
“Carlos,” says someone, “you need to go.”
He doesn’t react, or he doesn’t think he does—Cecil was not supposed to be on the air today. His suspension cut neatly into Tamika’s rally, cut neatly into their unspoken, coded plans. But then his voice, crackling over the airwaves, his deep, deeply confident radio Voice, devil-may-care and illogically infectious until Carlos started to let his guard slip—
And now, now this. Now radio silence beating down on the desert. Now Carlos completely frozen beneath it, echoes of Cecil’s last milliseconds of sound bouncing between his ears like a bullet. Somewhere distant, a rhythmic humming of helicopters. They drone across the sky like a pestilent swarm.
“Carlos,” says the someone, insistent now, a hand on his arm to accompany the voice. Carlos blinks a slow blink and tries to focus. His pupils contract. “You need to go.”
The air is buffered and beaten by sound, by the mindless rotation of blind machine parts. Carlos lifts his eyes to the sun and reacts.
His fellow scientists do not watch him flee.
-
Carlos is on the move again, somewhere deep in the Whispering Forest. All things considered, he sort of wishes he’d prepared a better contingency plan, but beggars can’t be choosers and his chances are better in here than in the desert. With no car and supplies limited to the contents of his backpack—three bagged lunches, an assortment of homemade scientific devices, and the disassembled skeleton of his banged-up phone—it’s difficult to hypothesize what would have caught up with him first: the StrexCorp search team or the elements. Either way, his odds of survival seemed slim. The Whispering Forest was the best he could do.
“Carlos?” says a tree, high-pitched and hopeful. He deliberately angles away and keeps moving.
He does not think they’ll look for him here, at least not right away, and not with efficiency. Strex does not know how to handle the Forest. They’ll sooner waste resources scouring the desert, saturating the airwaves with promises and fear. But no one knows where Carlos has gone, and the desert itself is a vast dead-end. At the least, he has time.
But does Cecil?
He breathes.
Carlos has been moving every few hours, the time frame randomized by his uncertain wristwatch. He alternates napping and tinkering with his phone, attempting to start the radio app without triggering the Strex-mandated GPS function. It’s risky, he knows, and incredibly foolish, but the gnawing urgency of unanswered questions urges his fingers against the phone’s innards. His lips shape the name with each shaken exhale.
Cecil, Cecil.
The foliage hums.
When Carlos finally catches the signal, he merely encounters persisting dead air, like a ghost of that last, unspoken goodnight, like the sound of the Voice of Night Vale, silenced.