➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 10
WELP, I'm a couple days off schedule. WE'RE JUST GONNA. THING. AND NOT THINK ABOUT IT.
So, like I imagine it happened with most people, Welcome to Night Vale showed up on my Tumblr out of nowhere one day like a particularly bad rash, like one second everything was fine and the next it was like, "the fuck is this? where is all this coming from? excuse me, what's covered in jellyfish?"
So that's a thing I'm listening to on the commute to and from work.
➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 10
For rumpledlinen, Welcome to Night Vale, Cecil/Carlos, 7100 words
rumpledlinen asked me for Cecil/Carlos, anything from Carlos's POV! Keep in mind that I'm not entirely caught up yet -- I'm only on episode 24, which is the one before the anniversary episode, so this is canon compliant only to a certain point and then squiggles off into the void.
Unproofread, as usual. Do the light format thing, trust me.
[read @ AO3]
"Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it."
Hebrews 13:2
Carlos Montenegro only has one thing to say to you.
It's good advice, so listen up.
If you, at a very convenient point in your life, are offered an unpaid internship in your dream field that seems like it's been tailor-made to fulfill your every career-driven desire, and honestly, everyone says you'd be stupid to pass it up, do not take it.
It's going to be a trap.
Fuck, it's probably going to be Night Vale.
-
Because we don't believe in building suspense or wasting time, here is everything you need to know about Carlos Montenegro:
He is twenty-eight years old. He's going grey around the temples, but he insists that it's premature, hereditary on his mother's side of the family, you understand. Sprays of silver existed in his sister's hair before she even entered high school; she parted her hair so that it framed her face, making her look at least six years older than she actually was. She insisted it came in handy when buying alcohol while underage, but Carlos knows for a fact that Isa has considered alcohol to be supremely boring from the first moment she tried it, and she said these things because they were expected of her. The Montenegro siblings always did what was expected of them -- they were sensitive like that.
This was the same sister who learned to read before he did, and while cheerily showing off her new knowledge, insisted that the "e" on the end of the Life cereal they were munching away at was silent.
Carlos, then just four, thought this was abominable -- a letter, silent? A letter that serves no purpose? Letters are amazing, letters are building blocks of an entire language, you can't just shut one up like that! She had to be lying!
(That was the first and only time Carlos successfully beat Isa up. He's always been a little proud of that; usually when he tried, she just sat on him until he gave up.)
His favorite song -- yes, he can pinpoint one favorite song exactly, although like everyone else, he goes through phases where he'll listen to one thing on repeat and not at all the week after, and, also like everybody else, he scrambles to find something to say at the dreaded "what kind of music to you listen to?" question -- is "Smoke on the Water," and once, the day before his semester final in O-Chem, he deleted everything else off his iPod and streamlined that song until he came out the next day on the other side of the Rubicon, shaky and exhausted with a solid passing grade in the class.
His mother jokes that she raised him on Flinstones vitamin tablets and the good side of Credence Clearwater Revival's Cosmo's Factory, and Carlos finds everything with a sound like "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" inherently comforting, nostalgic, although if you're going to talk about CCR, you've got to pay respects to "Bad Moon Rising."
("Ah, yes, the town anthem," Cecil will say later, but we haven't gotten to him yet.)
He graduated from Truman University in central Missouri when he was twenty-two years old, and four years later, graduated from med school in South Dakota simply because that's what he was expected to do. His parents didn't give him many options: it was either doctor or lawyer or President of the United States, and since Carlos thought it strange that people could go their whole lives living in the same body without knowing much about how it worked -- what the pancreas looked like or what went on inside a kidney or what happened along the line of human evolution that made breathing involuntary, giving human ancestors the ability to focus on other things, like eating and complaining about how tedious the primordial soup had been, god, weren't they glad they didn't have to go back to that mess? -- he majored in anatomy and went to med school from there.
Then, around the time that the rest of his classmates were talking about the kinds of residencies they were likely to get, a friend of his invited him to a presentation the brand-new missus was giving at the SCCC.
Kirlia Onwensowu was a bright-teethed, pear-shaped woman that Carlos liked in a really vague, don't-know-her kind of way, having always prioritized schoolwork over getting to know his friends' girlfriends and thus frequently got caught off-guard when those girlfriends became wives. She was one semester away from obtaining her Master's in Geology, and she'd elected to attend this conference and give a presentation on the desertification of the Oklahoma prairie land.
Carlos attended and sat with Qaasim, who gripped his shoulder and thanked him for showing his support, which made Carlos feel gratified and a little guilty, because he didn't really want to be here, but it was important to both the Onwensowus, so.
There were four presentations total that day: Kirlia's, and one on the effects recent breakthroughs in seismology had on volcanology research in Indonesia, and another on ocean-floor cartography, and by the time the fourth one ended (a refutation of the popular belief that California will just someday fall into the sea -- it won't, shut up,) Carlos's tailbone was numb and his heart was sing, sing, singing in his chest, humming with feedback like a guitar amp. His ears were full of bees and he felt like the dust was shivering off his bones.
He graduated from med school, because he was already there, he might as well, and shocked everyone (except Isa) by promptly turning around and enrolling at the SDCC, where Kirlia now taught two introductory Geology courses.
He tells her, eventually, that it had been that conference that hit him the way some people look at John 3:16 and light up from the inside.
"Not once in my life have I sat in one place and thought, 'this. This is what I want to do,'" he tells her, pouring water from the kettle into their cups and watching the mate leaves swell at the surface. "I thought people just made that shit up. And then I felt it. I wanted to know everything there was to know about earth science."
"Yes!" she says delightedly, tucking an afghan around her enormous belly and rubbing it absently, her fingers finding the baby's head and then its heels under the surface of her skin, the way she does. "That's it exactly."
He hands her the yerba mate and the pipe, warning her it'll need a minute more to steep.
"For me," she continues. "It was Terry Pratchett. You know Discworld?"
"Yes!"
"Yes. There was a line, I know it, about time and how time breaks the instant you try to apply it to anything except humans, how stone doesn't think about time. The Earth is so young that the continents are still exuberantly bouncing off of each other just for the joy of crashing together. To me, that was always the most perfect description. To give the tectonic plates such a childlike euphoria like that. It made me want to be a scientist."
They absorb this, sipping thoughtfully at the mate through their pipes.
Carlos's phone buzzes with a text. Got out early, says Qaasim. Is my wife with you? Will I interrupt mad science if I come over?
"Sometimes, I think it's hard to control what you wind up doing," Kirlia continues. "It's nice to think that you can choose the direction you life goes in. Sometimes … sometimes, though, it just happens to you."
-
Two years into his new program, Carlos idly logs into the community college's Career Connect and browses through available internship opportunities. There's never anything listed, of course -- all the internships in Sioux City are for business associates and the CompSci kids, with the occasional posting aimed at suckering in an education student -- until suddenly there is.
-
Carlos's interviewer is a strange, small white man who doesn't show his teeth when he smiles, and instead of introducing himself as "Mr." or "Dr.", he says, "Agent," and Carlos forgets the name of the Bureau he's representing almost as soon as he says it. He just knows it's a government internship. He offers Carlos a two-year position in a city called Night Vale in southern New Mexico -- the Bureau will cover the rent, but he gets no wage and all other expenses are on him. He'll have the equipment and the lab space he needs. They are basically writing Carlos a blank check to study seismology for two years. They are giving him a sandbox and telling him to play.
He says yes, of course.
Wouldn't you?
Of course you wouldn't. You paid attention to Carlos's warning at the beginning of this story, like we told you to. You know better.
-
The first person in Night Vale he talks to is the superintendent of the building where he will have a one-bedroom apartment for the next two years. She has straight dark hair cut severely at her chin and big, pearlescent earrings that remind him of Betty Rubble from The Flinstones, and she waits patiently as he fumbles his earbuds out of his ears and tilts towards her, saying, "Sorry, what?"
In a polite kind of way, she repeats herself, "What's the weather like today?"
Carlos blinks, and backs up so that he can look out through the broad glass door, which shows a very clear view of a very clear sky.
"Er," he goes, because surely the answer should be obvious, even to her? "Sunny?"
She nods, still in that polite way, and continues, "Who's it by?"
-
Night Vale, New Mexico, has a population of 22, 506. It has seven churches, seven McDonalds (by city ordinance passed in 1972, one cannot exist without the other,) two elementary schools, four Army Surplus stores, one place to get pizza, and one Arby's. The average birth rate is six children per three parents. The average life expectancy is 29 years, which explains the family size, as surviving childhood is generally seen as a great accomplishment, worthy of praise and only mild murder attempts from that point on. Murder attempts, by the way, are usually reserved for bank holidays -- it's considered impolite otherwise. The official city color is mauve. The official city motto is "HP Lovecraft is a motherfucking tool," with a more family-friendly version of "motherhugging" inscribed under the crest of the Night Vale High School, which is rather Oedipal and has been confusing generations of Night Valiens since was motto was decided on by the City Council in 1959.
-
None of the radio stations in Night Vale play music.
Some nights, when the skies are clear and there's minimal interference from the surveillance vans parked outside on the street, he can pick up the community radio station from Desert Bluffs, some fifty miles away, but all it really plays is the kind of easy-listening Carlos is used to from dentist's offices, and once he swore he heard some mellow jazz rendition of "When the Saints Come Marching In," so how about not.
The stations in Night Vale just seem to play a lot of old Dr. Laura Shlessinger broadcasts, News Hour twice a day (they used to broadcast it all at once, a full hour of news like the name would suggest, but then decided that was poorly balanced, and so separated it into a morning segment and an evening segment,) This American Life ("2012's most popular podcast! This segment has been sponsored by the Sheriff's Secret Police, who disclaim any responsibility for how you'll feel at the end, because this podcast will sucker-punch you,") and two-hour segments of assorted ambient noise, like the babbling of a clear brook with a nice background chorus of a bone saw steadily slicing through something wet.
A few weeks pass before happenstance (read: two of Carlos's fellow interns get eaten and weren't considerate enough to back up their notes on their USB drives beforehand) leaves him with an extra hour after lunch, and he finds himself at Dark Owl Records in Old Town.
It's this overcast hole of a shop on the ground floor of a red brick three-level kitty-corner to the Italian restaurant, with cheap carpeting and a welcome mat that says Warning: Dog Can't Hold Its Liquer despite absolutely no evidence of there being any dog, although Carlos swears he feels something damp drag up the back of his hand when he checks the back of the ZZ Top compilation CD.
The prominent display just inside the door is a cardboard cut-out of all five members of One Direction, cheerfully holding up a vinyl version of their latest single and labeled No Direction and All Directions and Which Direction and You Were Stupid Not to Ask For Directions (Now You're Dead.) The rest of the store doesn't seem to be organized so much by genres like "country" and "alternative" so much as they are "partly sunny" and "slight chance of precipitation."
He asks Lakeisha when he gets home that night and she stops him to tell him he has mail (the same standard one-per-household Big Rico's coupon that every mailbox in Night Vale gets once a week.)
"No one ever taught you meteorology?" she asks, bemused.
"No?" says Carlos, who is beginning to suspect that there are a lot of words in Night Vale that don't mean what he thinks they mean.
"Well, bring your laptop down and show me your iTunes," she says.
With magnanimous patience, she clucks her tongue and rearranges his music library so that the genres are properly listed: Sunny (alternative rock,) strong wind gusts (R&B,) freezing drizzle (the more bluegrass side of indie,) Category 4 Hurricane (Metallica. Metallica is the only artist worthy of this title.) It takes them quite awhile, and Carlos learns that she has three children -- only one of whom is still living, enrolled at NVHS and playing snare drum in the marching band and a Dreadnought Scout in the Night Vale chapter of the Boy Scouts -- and that she's thinking of going back to school to become a travel agent.
Shortly after Christmas, she's dragged off by mute, hyperstrong, mutant children at the Eternal Scouts induction ceremony.
He raps his knuckles on the window of the surveillance van parked across the street and asks for Lakeisha's family address. He sends them a condolences card. It's paltry. It's awful.
For a moment, Carlos Montenegro forgets about clocks, forgets about impossible seismology, forgets about the vague yet menacing government agency that hired him without pay. He promises himself that people don't need to die this frequently and this horribly. They're used to it, but Carlos certainly isn't.
-
There are a lot of things in Night Vale that Carlos doesn't understand.
Time, for example. How to pay the bill at restaurants. How the grocery store can have Abuelita Swiss Miss but not the kind of Swiss Miss that come with the freeze-dried marshmallows that swell up when you add boiling water, for real, what the hell.
He could ask Cecil Baldwin, he supposes. Cecil does the evening half-hour of the News Hour on the radio, and out of everyone he's met, he seems like the most likely candidate for answering his questions with enough information to satisfy all of Carlos's potential hypotheses, because the man does like to wax poetic.
But Cecil's in love with him.
Everybody knows that -- "oh, you're Cecil's scientist!" and its variations have become Carlos's pet names entirely without his consent, and since he's talked to the guy, like, twice, it feels stupidly unfair that he's been flagged like that, like a possession -- and nothing's more useless than a person who makes everything that's you all about them.
So Cecil's kind of a last resort, and it sucks, because objectively, he's kind of Carlos's type, although honestly, Carlos could never tell you exactly what his type is, since he's never given it much thought -- his friends all got girlfriends who became wives who became geologists, and Carlos just … got degrees and posted annoying messages on his sister's Facebook Wall. It's just, every time Carlos lays eyes on Cecil (those two times so far, it's always just been his voice delivering the day's disasters, otherwise,) everything inside of him just takes notice and says, that.
That, Carlos. Tap that.
No, brain, says Carlos.
Carlos, tap that, his brain insists.
I don't want to tap that, Carlos reminds himself, even though he probably does. You know, it's most likely some kind of freaky Night Vale science, like some kind of perception field or something wacky like that that makes Carlos see exactly what he wants to see. Maybe the real Cecil has no physical form.
At this point, Carlos is prepared to smile and nod and run scientific tests on anything.
-
Two times becomes four becomes eight becomes coffee that one time (Carlos does not listen to that night's show, because it was horrible enough living through it the first time, although Simone makes kissy faces at him on the other side of the lab door at the NVCC until Carlos tapes a type chart of fluvial processes over the little window and goes back to work.)
To be honest, he was kind of expecting Cecil to be more … creepy about it.
He doesn't know why he isn't, and it's not exactly something he can ask, like, "Oh, by the way, Cecil, you talk about me sometimes like the sun shines out of my ass and your crush doesn't seem to be diminishing any, but you also don't, like, stalk me at work or anything, in fact, you're being very respectful and I don't know how to handle that, as far as I know, I can't file a restraining order against you having feelings at a distance. What's up with that?"
In fact, Carlos has almost been in Night Vale for an entire year before he steps out of his apartment building, fumbling to get the stupid knot in his headphones undone, when a jaunty voice chirps out, "Hi!" and he jumps about a foot.
"Jesus Christ, Cecil!" he exclaims.
At the bottom of the steps, Cecil fidgets sheepishly. He's carrying two coffee cups, each lid stamped with a fair trade sticker that Carlos recognizes, and he wordlessly extends one.
"What are you doing here?" seems like a good question to ask.
Cecil opens his mouth, closes it again, and, if anything, looks even more sheepish. Purely by accident, Carlos has gotten a lot better at interpreting Cecil's facial expressions. He thought he wasn't doing too shabby on the "developing a social circle" front (whatever, Isa, he's capable of making friends with things that don't need to be approached with safety goggles on, thank you,) except Carlos's social circle keeps getting devoured by things, and Cecil has become a staple by sheer virtue of the fact that he's survived this long.
"I honestly just happened to be passing by," he goes. "And I remembered your coffee order, and … I …" He shrugs, still holding both cups, and bites his lip. "It made complete sense in my head at the time, but now that I'm standing here, it's probably a little creepy. Is it creepy?"
For a beat, Carlos is torn between reassuring him in a kneejerk way, and being honest, and so he stands there and it's a little astonishing, realizing that if he wanted, he has the luxury of honesty with this man; there are a lot of people to try to pacify in Night Vale so that they don't visit violence upon you, but Cecil Baldwin is not one of them.
"A little," he says, and Cecil cringes.
"Sorry."
Carlos rearranges the strap of his satchel and stuffs the headphone knot into his coat pocket before taking the coffee, appreciating the warmth and the immediate smell of it.
He hops down off the steps, sidestepping the cactus garden. He glances back when Cecil doesn't immediately follow.
"Which way are you headed?"
It's an invitation. Cecil hears it; he lifts all the way through onto his tiptoes, eager, and then gets a hold of himself.
"I didn't want to make you uncomfortable," he says, and quickly trips over himself to add, "I mean, not that I don't want to spend time with you! I just don't want to … you know, cross a line or anything." There's definitely a perception field going on, because he's addressing exactly what Carlos was thinking earlier, who does that? "I don't want to stalk you. I leave that for the Sheriff's Secret Police. Hi guys!" He waves to the tallest saguaro in the lot, and sure enough, when Carlos follows his pointing finger, he spots a pigeonhole camera embedded in the cactus flesh.
"Jesus Christ." He has never paid attention to that before, and he's lived here since September.
"So yeah."
Carlos waits. He lifts an eyebrow. Cecil's shoulders lift like they've been filled with helium, and he steps back onto the sidewalk and falls in beside him.
"I do want to spend time with you, though, even if it's just to the bus stop," he offers, almost shy. This is the same person who talks about blood dripping off the walls like it's an NPR segment.
He rolls his eyes so hard it actually hurts. "I know," he says dryly. "None of the other laws of the universe as I learned them make sense anymore, but that much, at least, is a universal constant I can rely on. One of the laws of physics, even. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. As long as time progresses from one instance of now to another, Cecil Baldwin will want to spend it with me."
Silence greets this remark. Silence and the remark shake hands. They exchange pleasantries. They move on, and the silence stretches.
Turning it over in his head, Carlos suddenly realizes that it might have sounded a little cruel, implying that Cecil's feelings for him could be taken for granted.
But when he glances over his shoulder, he finds Cecil beaming at him, all of his teeth on display.
"What?" he goes warily.
Beaming is never a good sign in Night Vale. That much concentrated happiness usually comes from some kind of government-initiated drug regimen.
"You made me a metaphor!" cascades out of Cecil in a rush, the way someone might say, you remembered my birthday! or is this diamond real? "You likened me to physics. That's like calling me a fairy tale. Did you just call me a fairy tale?"
"Oh, no," Carlos sighs, and resigns himself to hearing this gushed about on tonight's show.
-
Qaasim Onwensowu calls him a little after eight in the morning on a Tuesday that is actually a Sunday in the outside world, while Carlos is still flipping on lights in the lab and pulling the chairs down off the tables, clattering them loudly against the linoleum to alert Simone to his arrival. He's already grinning before he even gets the phone completely to his ear.
"Hey!" he goes.
"Bwazaha!" answers somebody who is definitely not Qaasim. That's a very, very young voice.
"Hello?" Carlos says, feeling fond and a little like his heart's been pulped. "Is this Mercy?"
"Ahaha!" answers the voice delightedly, now much closer.
"Mercy, did you take Dad's phone? Mercy, can you give the phone to Dad? Abouya, Mercy, give the phone to your abouya."
There's no reply, just indistinct noises that Carlos is pretty sure is her chewing on the phone case, but after a minute or two, Qaasim's voice floats into hearing range.
"-- chew on that, do you know what my phone bill runs each month? Of course you don't, silly girl, yes, you. Oh, no, who did you call? Hello?" This last is said directly into Carlos's ear.
"Hey!" he says, for the second time.
"Carlos!" Gratifyingly, it doesn't take any time at all. "Brother, how's it? Did my daughter butt-dial you?"
"Chew-dialed, I think."
"A-ye. How you been, though? I saw your Facebook status the other day and meant to leave a comment, but you know how it is when you think about doing something so much you forget you haven't actually done it."
"Yeah, I do." He frowns a little bit. What was his last Facebook post about? He doesn't think he's updated his Facebook in months. Every time he tries to say something about Night Vale, the statuses delete themselves within moments. Carlos doesn't want to point fingers at government conspiracy, but yeah, no, Carlos is pointing a giant neon sign at government conspiracy.
Then again, maybe it's a Facebook post he hasn't made yet. Time's broken, remember?
"I'm good," he says blandly. "How's Kirlia? How's Mercy?"
Qaasim, reliable, wonderful Qaasim, willingly gushes about both of them for so long that Carlos feels like he hasn't left at all, like he's still in his ground-level South Dakota apartment where the snow piles up against the back door, where the wind packs it down to the point where Carlos can open the door and stick bottles of beer into the ice and come back for them later, like he's still scrambling to get to classes on soil erosion and magma classifications, still receiving afternoon calls to come babysit Mercy so that Qaasim and Kirlia can go out. He sits down, homesickness compacting his gut into a tiny, knotted shape.
"But seriously, how's Area 51?"
He shifts the phone to the other ear, and the cool air rushes across the hot side of his face. "Area 49, actually. It's like Area 51, but a little bit to the left."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. The whole town is a government-created psychological and social experiment to test what kind of immunity the human race could potentially build towards catastrophic horror. Every aspect of city life is controlled, including the outbreaks. So far, it turns out that that threshold is pretty high -- the human brain will try to rationalize a lot of bizarre shit, and the rest of it it just … accepts. It's actually not so bad. There's good pizza, although the pizza doesn't come with dough anymore because everything wheat or wheat-related will eventually turn into a malevolent spirit that consumes its host."
"Seriously?" Qaasim doesn't sound so amused anymore. " … Are you kidding? I can't tell, that's your mad science voice and usually you don't joke with that voice."
"Yes, Qaasim," says Carlos softly. "Of course I'm kidding."
-
That day, he draws the short straw and runs out to the Arby's to grab lunch for himself and the other seismologists (and, of course, Simone,) and, because this is just how his day is going, gets in line behind Cecil, who is dressed for work and has his headphones in his ears like nobody ever told him that was rude.
He touches his fingertips to Cecil's spine, a single knob of bone the faintest pressure against his index finger (he thinks it might be T5, or possibly T6, of the thoracic section on the vertebral column, although he'll have to count every one to be sure,) there on the other side of that vest, before he drops the contact. Cecil startles, glancing back and then immediately spinning around, breaking into that unnerving good night, Night Vale, smile. Carlos has gotten so used to his voice in the evenings that he forgets the rest of him is pretty nice, too. Well, it's all right. If you're into that.
"What are you listening to?" he asks.
"Hmm?" Cecil goes.
"The weather, Cecil," Carlos says patiently. "What's the weather like today?"
"Oh!" Without hesitation, he digs one earbud out and offers it to him. "Here, give it a try."
Carlos steps in close, taking the proffered earbud and nudging it into place inside his ear. This close, he can see the places Cecil missed while shaving this morning. In the background, the fry vat sizzles and machines beep their short orders and something growls loud enough to make the Employee of the Month plaques shiver on the wall. He's pretty sure Cecil's stopped breathing.
"Are you guys going to --" starts the hooded figure in line behind them, but then it just sighs and goes, "never mind," and uses the shaft of its scythe to nudge past them in order to go up to the cash register to ask for a #2 Combo and, "like, all the horsey sauce you can possibly fit into a bag."
"There's a legal limit on that," the boy in the Arby's hat says.
The hooded figure says nothing.
"… yeah, okay," the boys gets out meekly, and then the fade-out of whatever Cecil's playing transitions into the beginning of "Smoke on the Water" and all the air crushes straight out of Carlos's lungs.
-
Outside, on the pavement, Carlos squares his feet like he imagines someone might stand down a five-headed, fire-breathing mayoral candidate and says, "Okay, take me out."
He doesn't think about what he'll do if it doesn't work out, if he can't make himself enjoy himself: Cecil Baldwin once drove a barber out of town to drink cactus juice in the desert because he crossed him. All of his interns die horrible deaths or disappear mysteriously. If he can do that, what will Cecil do to Carlos? He doesn't think about it, he can't -- it's the same feeling he had when he sat in a geology conference at the SCCC and thought, this.
"I beg your pardon?" says Cecil.
"Out, Cecil. I'm asking you out. On a date. Or something."
He swears that for a moment, Cecil actually vibrates.
"When?" he goes, crumpling the neck of his Arby's bag in his fist in his excitement. "What day? Tomorrow?"
"No!" Carlos yelps. "Jesus. How about … I don't know, Thursday?"
"There's no Thursday this week," Cecil reminds him.
"What? Why? You know what, never mind, don't tell me, I don't want to know what's going to happen on Thursday that's so horrible they need to cancel it. Saturday?" Is Saturday too serious a day? Saturday's a traditional date night. There's a lot of pressure on Saturdays.
"Yes!" says Cecil, with all the enthusiasm of a tectonic plate, boundlessly young and crashing into things for the sheer joy of being able to do so.
-
And then, on the Thursday that doesn't actually happen due to a scheduling error, something takes hold of Carlos around the throat before he can dodge and tries to suck his soul out by way of his sinuses.
In the hospital, after, he tries calling his sister, and it rings through and rings through and rings --
-
"I'm sorry," says the man from the vague yet menacing government agency. "I'm afraid you cannot relocate. It would violate the terms of your contract, which, might I remind you, you signed and had notarized by Bethany Stiedman at the UPS Store on March 15, 2012."
He's balding. He reminds Carlos of a political cartoon; there's got to be a punchline here somewhere and he exists solely to deliver it. There isn't, of course -- it's just a bland smile, a faux-friendly expression, and Carlos never should have taken this internship. It was too good to be true. It's always too good to be true.
He sets his jaw. "Are you going to stop me, Mr. … ?"
"That's Agent Coulson to you, please, Mr. Montenegro. And I wouldn't recommend it, no." Somehow, with just the smile that pulls at his fish's mouth, he is the most menacing thing Carlos has seen step foot in Night Vale. "Your unique contributions are important to your government and her interests, and we thank you for them."
"Of course," Carlos says darkly. "I'm sure."
-
He walks home, after.
Six blocks, and he forgets that's where he's going. He gets lost, looks for a bus stop, can't find one, gets lost again, comes out on the other side of a trailer park and suddenly knows exactly where he is, because that's the Arby's, there at the top of the hill. There's only one in Night Vale, after all; the void orbits it. He starts walking again. A pack of feral dogs keep pace with him for awhile, their paws silent and dashing away to mist every time they connect with the concrete; he catches the reflection of the street lights off the surfaces of their eyes in his peripheral, yellowed moons darting in and out of view. Each dog has several sets of them.
He's hungry, he realizes, and once he does, his stomach yawns open inside of him.
He doesn't know what he's hungry for, but he nods to the militia-man parked on a folding chair outside the Desert Flower Bowling Alley, who nods back with the solemnity universal to men who pass each other in the dead of night, silently acknowledging that everyone else is pretending to sleep but they themselves cannot muster the same energy. He's in a pair of overalls and boots ripped along the sole, showing red socks underneath. A semiautomatic lays across his lap. On the radio, Cecil's been talking about the monsters beneath Lane 5 again.
Inside the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, Carlos orders eggs. He doesn't really want eggs. He doesn't know what he wants, just that the longing is there for something and this isn't it -- he wants something that tastes like his mother's chili rellenos, the tamales they spent all Christmas Day making, their fingers wet and pruned, their sleeves covered in flour. He wants something like the popcorn they popped on the stove, shook up in a big aluminum bowl and sprinkled with condensed milk to make it taste perfect. He wants to go home, where Monday progresses into Tuesday without any possibility of a complication, like Tuesday getting sucked into the void or pterodactyls.
He wants toast. He wants to be able to eat a slice of toast without having to worry about mind-control.
He eats his eggs, instead.
Somehow, he isn't surprised when the cowbell attached to the door clangs, footsteps squeak at the linoleum, and Cecil slides onto the bench across from him.
"It isn't our date night yet," he points out. He sections off another portion of his egg, scrapes it away, and puts it in his mouth.
"No," Cecil agrees, and Carlos cannot stand to look at him. Not right now. The picture-frame of his jawline, the knot his fingers make of each other on the table-top -- all of it will break Carlos, fracture right through him like pressure on thin ice. But Carlos has acknowledged Cecil's voice long before he ever set eyes on the man himself, and nothing stops him from hearing how bright Cecil sounds when he says, "Why, am I not allowed to see you before then?"
"That's weddings you're thinking of," he corrects him. "I'm no bride, Cecil."
"No, you're wonderful," Cecil says easily and so damn happily.
There's really nothing to say to that. The waitress comes by, bringing a tall glass of iced tea for Cecil. It smells cool, like shade and summer. Carlos swallows.
"I want to visit my family for a birthday," he says.
"Oh?" says Cecil.
"Yes," says Carlos.
"But?" says Cecil.
"They won't let me," says Carlos.
"People come and go all the time," says Cecil. "Granted, usually not in the same condition, or even in the same pieces, but we never trap visitors, either. Almost never. Okay, not often. I know, I know, not helping, Cecil. Why won't they let you leave?"
His teeth lock against each other. "I am a fixed point in time. Supposedly. I've been locked into place and I can't leave until my internship is over, not even to visit my sister for her birthday."
"You have a sister?"
"Yeah."
"What's she like? Did she try to sacrifice you to appease angry gods when you were little?"
"Yeah," says Carlos again, surprised. They slept in bunk beds until puberty, which is when their parents finally stopped being so stingy about that spare room, and she used to dangle him by the ankles off the side of the top bunk, pretending to slip every time he stopped yelling loud enough to satisfy her. To him, the fall had been fathomless and frightening, and the collection of red scarves and jumbled-up orange and yellow clothes below looked like a pit of fiery horror straight out of Indiana Jones. "Yeah, she did."
"That's so cool," says Cecil. "Did she have any stupid nicknames for you?"
"Stop that," says Carlos.
A pause.
A pause, and then the dreaminess freezes right where it is on Cecil's face. Slowly, it slides off.
"Stop that," Carlos's voice rises. If there was anybody else in the diner, they would have had to work at ignoring him, because he is being very loud. His chest burns, a constriction tightening around his ribs, and it's like a beam of light has been shot straight through him, all of his anger compressing down into one hot, focused point. "Just. Stop."
"I'm stopping!" is said very quickly. "What am I stopping?"
"All of this," Carlos gestures with his fork. "All of this is happening -- you -- you live in a place that's like nowhere else on Earth." He flings his arms out, "And all you're curious about is me?"
Compulsively, Cecil's fingers curl around his glass. They leave tracts in the condensation. His eyes tick left, then right; he clearly wants to give Carlos an answer he wants to hear but he's unsure if what Carlos wants to hear is what Cecil wants to say.
"Yes," he decides on, finally, like he's choosing between two fatal options.
Carlos breathes out through his nose.
"Right," he says, and shoves himself out of the booth with as much dignity as possible. "I'm done."
He doesn't check to see if Cecil pays (or how he pays, since Carlos has never been clear on that one and has mostly been avoiding eating out out of ignorance -- except for Big Rico's, of course, because Carlos has no desire to be arrested or set on fire for not observing the mandatory attendance law, and besides, Big Rico's has the dine-and-bill policy he's used to from the outside world, that's nice of them,) just pushes himself out into the desert night.
He marches across the parking lot, feeling numb all over and unusually sensitive at the same time, aware of how his heels hit the concrete and how different the air feels out here than how it did inside, a sharp dryness at the back of his throat. He tastes eggs around his molars.
At some point while he was inside, the shift changed over at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley, because there's now a high school girl sitting in the chair outside the door, bandolier strapped to her chest and her eyes keen, alert in the dark. Carlos nods to her and receives only a thin squint in response, a tightening of her hand on her school-issued Uzi.
He recognizes Cecil's car and stops. He lays his lab coat across the hood, then folds his arms and waits, chin tilted to the sky.
It's Friday, and the void tonight is beautiful. The stars cluster around it, colored in shades of sugar-white and muted by the city lights; Carlos plays a game with himself, finding one and watching it for as long as he can without blinking, wondering if it is truly a star or just another helicopter. It's usually a helicopter. Okay, they're all helicopters. They form whole constellations of surveillance. There are no true stars in Night Vale.
He doesn't have to wait long.
Footsteps crunch at the pavement behind him, and Cecil says, "You're waiting, is that a good sign --" with the same uncertainty in his voice that he'd once asked ten thousand listeners, Night Vale, does he like me? and Carlos --
Carlos doesn't know what he's going to do until he's doing it.
He turns, already reaching out and grabbing hold of Cecil's forearm because it's the closest part of his anatomy he makes contact with, and uses the hold of it to reel him in. He puts his back up against the side of the car because he knows he'll need it, and Cecil staggers and lands against his mouth with a noise like a man missing a stair in the dark.
Carlos snatches him up by the face to keep him there, kissing him once, twice, and on the third kiss, Cecil opens his mouth and kisses back.
It devours him like void.
-
The week that Carlos Montenegro falls in love, the mortality rate in Night Vale spikes 13%.
-
He could make a map, he thinks, of the inside of Cecil's mouth; he's already doing the math. He could create cartographical art out of the backs of his teeth, that one ticklish spot at the front of his palate that Carlos can just barely reach with his tongue. Cecil's fingers in his hair become a phantom pressure he misses when they're not there.
Carlos has gotten pretty good at predicting Night Vale's next round of fatal bullshit and pinpointing how to minimize casualties when it happens -- he has, after all, had a lot of practice -- and Cecil distracts him for a little while, sure, with the dizzying rush of infatuation, the heartbeat of want, want, need, and the way their hands shake and grasp and hold like they'll never have enough, but Carlos compartmentalizes it all eventually, and Night Vale's death rate evens out again on its steady declining path. Carlos can multitask. He can pull Cecil into the station bathroom before he goes on air and pin him up by the paper towel dispenser while Khosekh watches with the disapproving stare universal to cats everywhere, floating or no ("excellent, I always wanted to have sex at work," says Cecil, after, and Carlos counts L1 to L5 on his lumbar column and says, "you liar, you never thought about it until I walked in here," and Cecil hooks his hands around his neck and admits against his mouth, "okay, true,") and still have time to figure out what's causing the sudden, gruesome deaths of Subway patrons who try to order something with a calorie count over 500, and stop it. Carlos is shaping out to be a pretty valuable government asset, thank you.
"Your heart is pounding," Cecil murmurs to the dark, pressing his ear to the skin over his sternum the way people do when they're trying to break a combination lock. Outside, mysterious lights pass overhead, and out in the desert, a coyote howls. "I like the beat."
And Carlos -- Carlos feels so overwhelmingly fond it's like a burn, a painful awareness coating the inside of his chest.
He touches Cecil's face, drumming his fingers against his jaw in something that might be the riff from "Smoke on the Water", might not, then folding down the tip of his ear just because he can.
"Is that today's weather?" he asks, and Cecil smiles against his skin.
-
fin
Note: The NaNo for the 12th has been cut up, cannibalized, and reabsorbed into NaNos that'll come at a later date. You'll see it again!
So, like I imagine it happened with most people, Welcome to Night Vale showed up on my Tumblr out of nowhere one day like a particularly bad rash, like one second everything was fine and the next it was like, "the fuck is this? where is all this coming from? excuse me, what's covered in jellyfish?"
So that's a thing I'm listening to on the commute to and from work.
➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 10
For rumpledlinen, Welcome to Night Vale, Cecil/Carlos, 7100 words
rumpledlinen asked me for Cecil/Carlos, anything from Carlos's POV! Keep in mind that I'm not entirely caught up yet -- I'm only on episode 24, which is the one before the anniversary episode, so this is canon compliant only to a certain point and then squiggles off into the void.
Unproofread, as usual. Do the light format thing, trust me.
[read @ AO3]
"Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it."
Hebrews 13:2
Carlos Montenegro only has one thing to say to you.
It's good advice, so listen up.
If you, at a very convenient point in your life, are offered an unpaid internship in your dream field that seems like it's been tailor-made to fulfill your every career-driven desire, and honestly, everyone says you'd be stupid to pass it up, do not take it.
It's going to be a trap.
Fuck, it's probably going to be Night Vale.
-
Because we don't believe in building suspense or wasting time, here is everything you need to know about Carlos Montenegro:
He is twenty-eight years old. He's going grey around the temples, but he insists that it's premature, hereditary on his mother's side of the family, you understand. Sprays of silver existed in his sister's hair before she even entered high school; she parted her hair so that it framed her face, making her look at least six years older than she actually was. She insisted it came in handy when buying alcohol while underage, but Carlos knows for a fact that Isa has considered alcohol to be supremely boring from the first moment she tried it, and she said these things because they were expected of her. The Montenegro siblings always did what was expected of them -- they were sensitive like that.
This was the same sister who learned to read before he did, and while cheerily showing off her new knowledge, insisted that the "e" on the end of the Life cereal they were munching away at was silent.
Carlos, then just four, thought this was abominable -- a letter, silent? A letter that serves no purpose? Letters are amazing, letters are building blocks of an entire language, you can't just shut one up like that! She had to be lying!
(That was the first and only time Carlos successfully beat Isa up. He's always been a little proud of that; usually when he tried, she just sat on him until he gave up.)
His favorite song -- yes, he can pinpoint one favorite song exactly, although like everyone else, he goes through phases where he'll listen to one thing on repeat and not at all the week after, and, also like everybody else, he scrambles to find something to say at the dreaded "what kind of music to you listen to?" question -- is "Smoke on the Water," and once, the day before his semester final in O-Chem, he deleted everything else off his iPod and streamlined that song until he came out the next day on the other side of the Rubicon, shaky and exhausted with a solid passing grade in the class.
His mother jokes that she raised him on Flinstones vitamin tablets and the good side of Credence Clearwater Revival's Cosmo's Factory, and Carlos finds everything with a sound like "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" inherently comforting, nostalgic, although if you're going to talk about CCR, you've got to pay respects to "Bad Moon Rising."
("Ah, yes, the town anthem," Cecil will say later, but we haven't gotten to him yet.)
He graduated from Truman University in central Missouri when he was twenty-two years old, and four years later, graduated from med school in South Dakota simply because that's what he was expected to do. His parents didn't give him many options: it was either doctor or lawyer or President of the United States, and since Carlos thought it strange that people could go their whole lives living in the same body without knowing much about how it worked -- what the pancreas looked like or what went on inside a kidney or what happened along the line of human evolution that made breathing involuntary, giving human ancestors the ability to focus on other things, like eating and complaining about how tedious the primordial soup had been, god, weren't they glad they didn't have to go back to that mess? -- he majored in anatomy and went to med school from there.
Then, around the time that the rest of his classmates were talking about the kinds of residencies they were likely to get, a friend of his invited him to a presentation the brand-new missus was giving at the SCCC.
Kirlia Onwensowu was a bright-teethed, pear-shaped woman that Carlos liked in a really vague, don't-know-her kind of way, having always prioritized schoolwork over getting to know his friends' girlfriends and thus frequently got caught off-guard when those girlfriends became wives. She was one semester away from obtaining her Master's in Geology, and she'd elected to attend this conference and give a presentation on the desertification of the Oklahoma prairie land.
Carlos attended and sat with Qaasim, who gripped his shoulder and thanked him for showing his support, which made Carlos feel gratified and a little guilty, because he didn't really want to be here, but it was important to both the Onwensowus, so.
There were four presentations total that day: Kirlia's, and one on the effects recent breakthroughs in seismology had on volcanology research in Indonesia, and another on ocean-floor cartography, and by the time the fourth one ended (a refutation of the popular belief that California will just someday fall into the sea -- it won't, shut up,) Carlos's tailbone was numb and his heart was sing, sing, singing in his chest, humming with feedback like a guitar amp. His ears were full of bees and he felt like the dust was shivering off his bones.
He graduated from med school, because he was already there, he might as well, and shocked everyone (except Isa) by promptly turning around and enrolling at the SDCC, where Kirlia now taught two introductory Geology courses.
He tells her, eventually, that it had been that conference that hit him the way some people look at John 3:16 and light up from the inside.
"Not once in my life have I sat in one place and thought, 'this. This is what I want to do,'" he tells her, pouring water from the kettle into their cups and watching the mate leaves swell at the surface. "I thought people just made that shit up. And then I felt it. I wanted to know everything there was to know about earth science."
"Yes!" she says delightedly, tucking an afghan around her enormous belly and rubbing it absently, her fingers finding the baby's head and then its heels under the surface of her skin, the way she does. "That's it exactly."
He hands her the yerba mate and the pipe, warning her it'll need a minute more to steep.
"For me," she continues. "It was Terry Pratchett. You know Discworld?"
"Yes!"
"Yes. There was a line, I know it, about time and how time breaks the instant you try to apply it to anything except humans, how stone doesn't think about time. The Earth is so young that the continents are still exuberantly bouncing off of each other just for the joy of crashing together. To me, that was always the most perfect description. To give the tectonic plates such a childlike euphoria like that. It made me want to be a scientist."
They absorb this, sipping thoughtfully at the mate through their pipes.
Carlos's phone buzzes with a text. Got out early, says Qaasim. Is my wife with you? Will I interrupt mad science if I come over?
"Sometimes, I think it's hard to control what you wind up doing," Kirlia continues. "It's nice to think that you can choose the direction you life goes in. Sometimes … sometimes, though, it just happens to you."
-
Two years into his new program, Carlos idly logs into the community college's Career Connect and browses through available internship opportunities. There's never anything listed, of course -- all the internships in Sioux City are for business associates and the CompSci kids, with the occasional posting aimed at suckering in an education student -- until suddenly there is.
-
Carlos's interviewer is a strange, small white man who doesn't show his teeth when he smiles, and instead of introducing himself as "Mr." or "Dr.", he says, "Agent," and Carlos forgets the name of the Bureau he's representing almost as soon as he says it. He just knows it's a government internship. He offers Carlos a two-year position in a city called Night Vale in southern New Mexico -- the Bureau will cover the rent, but he gets no wage and all other expenses are on him. He'll have the equipment and the lab space he needs. They are basically writing Carlos a blank check to study seismology for two years. They are giving him a sandbox and telling him to play.
He says yes, of course.
Wouldn't you?
Of course you wouldn't. You paid attention to Carlos's warning at the beginning of this story, like we told you to. You know better.
-
The first person in Night Vale he talks to is the superintendent of the building where he will have a one-bedroom apartment for the next two years. She has straight dark hair cut severely at her chin and big, pearlescent earrings that remind him of Betty Rubble from The Flinstones, and she waits patiently as he fumbles his earbuds out of his ears and tilts towards her, saying, "Sorry, what?"
In a polite kind of way, she repeats herself, "What's the weather like today?"
Carlos blinks, and backs up so that he can look out through the broad glass door, which shows a very clear view of a very clear sky.
"Er," he goes, because surely the answer should be obvious, even to her? "Sunny?"
She nods, still in that polite way, and continues, "Who's it by?"
-
Night Vale, New Mexico, has a population of 22, 506. It has seven churches, seven McDonalds (by city ordinance passed in 1972, one cannot exist without the other,) two elementary schools, four Army Surplus stores, one place to get pizza, and one Arby's. The average birth rate is six children per three parents. The average life expectancy is 29 years, which explains the family size, as surviving childhood is generally seen as a great accomplishment, worthy of praise and only mild murder attempts from that point on. Murder attempts, by the way, are usually reserved for bank holidays -- it's considered impolite otherwise. The official city color is mauve. The official city motto is "HP Lovecraft is a motherfucking tool," with a more family-friendly version of "motherhugging" inscribed under the crest of the Night Vale High School, which is rather Oedipal and has been confusing generations of Night Valiens since was motto was decided on by the City Council in 1959.
-
None of the radio stations in Night Vale play music.
Some nights, when the skies are clear and there's minimal interference from the surveillance vans parked outside on the street, he can pick up the community radio station from Desert Bluffs, some fifty miles away, but all it really plays is the kind of easy-listening Carlos is used to from dentist's offices, and once he swore he heard some mellow jazz rendition of "When the Saints Come Marching In," so how about not.
The stations in Night Vale just seem to play a lot of old Dr. Laura Shlessinger broadcasts, News Hour twice a day (they used to broadcast it all at once, a full hour of news like the name would suggest, but then decided that was poorly balanced, and so separated it into a morning segment and an evening segment,) This American Life ("2012's most popular podcast! This segment has been sponsored by the Sheriff's Secret Police, who disclaim any responsibility for how you'll feel at the end, because this podcast will sucker-punch you,") and two-hour segments of assorted ambient noise, like the babbling of a clear brook with a nice background chorus of a bone saw steadily slicing through something wet.
A few weeks pass before happenstance (read: two of Carlos's fellow interns get eaten and weren't considerate enough to back up their notes on their USB drives beforehand) leaves him with an extra hour after lunch, and he finds himself at Dark Owl Records in Old Town.
It's this overcast hole of a shop on the ground floor of a red brick three-level kitty-corner to the Italian restaurant, with cheap carpeting and a welcome mat that says Warning: Dog Can't Hold Its Liquer despite absolutely no evidence of there being any dog, although Carlos swears he feels something damp drag up the back of his hand when he checks the back of the ZZ Top compilation CD.
The prominent display just inside the door is a cardboard cut-out of all five members of One Direction, cheerfully holding up a vinyl version of their latest single and labeled No Direction and All Directions and Which Direction and You Were Stupid Not to Ask For Directions (Now You're Dead.) The rest of the store doesn't seem to be organized so much by genres like "country" and "alternative" so much as they are "partly sunny" and "slight chance of precipitation."
He asks Lakeisha when he gets home that night and she stops him to tell him he has mail (the same standard one-per-household Big Rico's coupon that every mailbox in Night Vale gets once a week.)
"No one ever taught you meteorology?" she asks, bemused.
"No?" says Carlos, who is beginning to suspect that there are a lot of words in Night Vale that don't mean what he thinks they mean.
"Well, bring your laptop down and show me your iTunes," she says.
With magnanimous patience, she clucks her tongue and rearranges his music library so that the genres are properly listed: Sunny (alternative rock,) strong wind gusts (R&B,) freezing drizzle (the more bluegrass side of indie,) Category 4 Hurricane (Metallica. Metallica is the only artist worthy of this title.) It takes them quite awhile, and Carlos learns that she has three children -- only one of whom is still living, enrolled at NVHS and playing snare drum in the marching band and a Dreadnought Scout in the Night Vale chapter of the Boy Scouts -- and that she's thinking of going back to school to become a travel agent.
Shortly after Christmas, she's dragged off by mute, hyperstrong, mutant children at the Eternal Scouts induction ceremony.
He raps his knuckles on the window of the surveillance van parked across the street and asks for Lakeisha's family address. He sends them a condolences card. It's paltry. It's awful.
For a moment, Carlos Montenegro forgets about clocks, forgets about impossible seismology, forgets about the vague yet menacing government agency that hired him without pay. He promises himself that people don't need to die this frequently and this horribly. They're used to it, but Carlos certainly isn't.
-
There are a lot of things in Night Vale that Carlos doesn't understand.
Time, for example. How to pay the bill at restaurants. How the grocery store can have Abuelita Swiss Miss but not the kind of Swiss Miss that come with the freeze-dried marshmallows that swell up when you add boiling water, for real, what the hell.
He could ask Cecil Baldwin, he supposes. Cecil does the evening half-hour of the News Hour on the radio, and out of everyone he's met, he seems like the most likely candidate for answering his questions with enough information to satisfy all of Carlos's potential hypotheses, because the man does like to wax poetic.
But Cecil's in love with him.
Everybody knows that -- "oh, you're Cecil's scientist!" and its variations have become Carlos's pet names entirely without his consent, and since he's talked to the guy, like, twice, it feels stupidly unfair that he's been flagged like that, like a possession -- and nothing's more useless than a person who makes everything that's you all about them.
So Cecil's kind of a last resort, and it sucks, because objectively, he's kind of Carlos's type, although honestly, Carlos could never tell you exactly what his type is, since he's never given it much thought -- his friends all got girlfriends who became wives who became geologists, and Carlos just … got degrees and posted annoying messages on his sister's Facebook Wall. It's just, every time Carlos lays eyes on Cecil (those two times so far, it's always just been his voice delivering the day's disasters, otherwise,) everything inside of him just takes notice and says, that.
That, Carlos. Tap that.
No, brain, says Carlos.
Carlos, tap that, his brain insists.
I don't want to tap that, Carlos reminds himself, even though he probably does. You know, it's most likely some kind of freaky Night Vale science, like some kind of perception field or something wacky like that that makes Carlos see exactly what he wants to see. Maybe the real Cecil has no physical form.
At this point, Carlos is prepared to smile and nod and run scientific tests on anything.
-
Two times becomes four becomes eight becomes coffee that one time (Carlos does not listen to that night's show, because it was horrible enough living through it the first time, although Simone makes kissy faces at him on the other side of the lab door at the NVCC until Carlos tapes a type chart of fluvial processes over the little window and goes back to work.)
To be honest, he was kind of expecting Cecil to be more … creepy about it.
He doesn't know why he isn't, and it's not exactly something he can ask, like, "Oh, by the way, Cecil, you talk about me sometimes like the sun shines out of my ass and your crush doesn't seem to be diminishing any, but you also don't, like, stalk me at work or anything, in fact, you're being very respectful and I don't know how to handle that, as far as I know, I can't file a restraining order against you having feelings at a distance. What's up with that?"
In fact, Carlos has almost been in Night Vale for an entire year before he steps out of his apartment building, fumbling to get the stupid knot in his headphones undone, when a jaunty voice chirps out, "Hi!" and he jumps about a foot.
"Jesus Christ, Cecil!" he exclaims.
At the bottom of the steps, Cecil fidgets sheepishly. He's carrying two coffee cups, each lid stamped with a fair trade sticker that Carlos recognizes, and he wordlessly extends one.
"What are you doing here?" seems like a good question to ask.
Cecil opens his mouth, closes it again, and, if anything, looks even more sheepish. Purely by accident, Carlos has gotten a lot better at interpreting Cecil's facial expressions. He thought he wasn't doing too shabby on the "developing a social circle" front (whatever, Isa, he's capable of making friends with things that don't need to be approached with safety goggles on, thank you,) except Carlos's social circle keeps getting devoured by things, and Cecil has become a staple by sheer virtue of the fact that he's survived this long.
"I honestly just happened to be passing by," he goes. "And I remembered your coffee order, and … I …" He shrugs, still holding both cups, and bites his lip. "It made complete sense in my head at the time, but now that I'm standing here, it's probably a little creepy. Is it creepy?"
For a beat, Carlos is torn between reassuring him in a kneejerk way, and being honest, and so he stands there and it's a little astonishing, realizing that if he wanted, he has the luxury of honesty with this man; there are a lot of people to try to pacify in Night Vale so that they don't visit violence upon you, but Cecil Baldwin is not one of them.
"A little," he says, and Cecil cringes.
"Sorry."
Carlos rearranges the strap of his satchel and stuffs the headphone knot into his coat pocket before taking the coffee, appreciating the warmth and the immediate smell of it.
He hops down off the steps, sidestepping the cactus garden. He glances back when Cecil doesn't immediately follow.
"Which way are you headed?"
It's an invitation. Cecil hears it; he lifts all the way through onto his tiptoes, eager, and then gets a hold of himself.
"I didn't want to make you uncomfortable," he says, and quickly trips over himself to add, "I mean, not that I don't want to spend time with you! I just don't want to … you know, cross a line or anything." There's definitely a perception field going on, because he's addressing exactly what Carlos was thinking earlier, who does that? "I don't want to stalk you. I leave that for the Sheriff's Secret Police. Hi guys!" He waves to the tallest saguaro in the lot, and sure enough, when Carlos follows his pointing finger, he spots a pigeonhole camera embedded in the cactus flesh.
"Jesus Christ." He has never paid attention to that before, and he's lived here since September.
"So yeah."
Carlos waits. He lifts an eyebrow. Cecil's shoulders lift like they've been filled with helium, and he steps back onto the sidewalk and falls in beside him.
"I do want to spend time with you, though, even if it's just to the bus stop," he offers, almost shy. This is the same person who talks about blood dripping off the walls like it's an NPR segment.
He rolls his eyes so hard it actually hurts. "I know," he says dryly. "None of the other laws of the universe as I learned them make sense anymore, but that much, at least, is a universal constant I can rely on. One of the laws of physics, even. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. As long as time progresses from one instance of now to another, Cecil Baldwin will want to spend it with me."
Silence greets this remark. Silence and the remark shake hands. They exchange pleasantries. They move on, and the silence stretches.
Turning it over in his head, Carlos suddenly realizes that it might have sounded a little cruel, implying that Cecil's feelings for him could be taken for granted.
But when he glances over his shoulder, he finds Cecil beaming at him, all of his teeth on display.
"What?" he goes warily.
Beaming is never a good sign in Night Vale. That much concentrated happiness usually comes from some kind of government-initiated drug regimen.
"You made me a metaphor!" cascades out of Cecil in a rush, the way someone might say, you remembered my birthday! or is this diamond real? "You likened me to physics. That's like calling me a fairy tale. Did you just call me a fairy tale?"
"Oh, no," Carlos sighs, and resigns himself to hearing this gushed about on tonight's show.
-
Qaasim Onwensowu calls him a little after eight in the morning on a Tuesday that is actually a Sunday in the outside world, while Carlos is still flipping on lights in the lab and pulling the chairs down off the tables, clattering them loudly against the linoleum to alert Simone to his arrival. He's already grinning before he even gets the phone completely to his ear.
"Hey!" he goes.
"Bwazaha!" answers somebody who is definitely not Qaasim. That's a very, very young voice.
"Hello?" Carlos says, feeling fond and a little like his heart's been pulped. "Is this Mercy?"
"Ahaha!" answers the voice delightedly, now much closer.
"Mercy, did you take Dad's phone? Mercy, can you give the phone to Dad? Abouya, Mercy, give the phone to your abouya."
There's no reply, just indistinct noises that Carlos is pretty sure is her chewing on the phone case, but after a minute or two, Qaasim's voice floats into hearing range.
"-- chew on that, do you know what my phone bill runs each month? Of course you don't, silly girl, yes, you. Oh, no, who did you call? Hello?" This last is said directly into Carlos's ear.
"Hey!" he says, for the second time.
"Carlos!" Gratifyingly, it doesn't take any time at all. "Brother, how's it? Did my daughter butt-dial you?"
"Chew-dialed, I think."
"A-ye. How you been, though? I saw your Facebook status the other day and meant to leave a comment, but you know how it is when you think about doing something so much you forget you haven't actually done it."
"Yeah, I do." He frowns a little bit. What was his last Facebook post about? He doesn't think he's updated his Facebook in months. Every time he tries to say something about Night Vale, the statuses delete themselves within moments. Carlos doesn't want to point fingers at government conspiracy, but yeah, no, Carlos is pointing a giant neon sign at government conspiracy.
Then again, maybe it's a Facebook post he hasn't made yet. Time's broken, remember?
"I'm good," he says blandly. "How's Kirlia? How's Mercy?"
Qaasim, reliable, wonderful Qaasim, willingly gushes about both of them for so long that Carlos feels like he hasn't left at all, like he's still in his ground-level South Dakota apartment where the snow piles up against the back door, where the wind packs it down to the point where Carlos can open the door and stick bottles of beer into the ice and come back for them later, like he's still scrambling to get to classes on soil erosion and magma classifications, still receiving afternoon calls to come babysit Mercy so that Qaasim and Kirlia can go out. He sits down, homesickness compacting his gut into a tiny, knotted shape.
"But seriously, how's Area 51?"
He shifts the phone to the other ear, and the cool air rushes across the hot side of his face. "Area 49, actually. It's like Area 51, but a little bit to the left."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. The whole town is a government-created psychological and social experiment to test what kind of immunity the human race could potentially build towards catastrophic horror. Every aspect of city life is controlled, including the outbreaks. So far, it turns out that that threshold is pretty high -- the human brain will try to rationalize a lot of bizarre shit, and the rest of it it just … accepts. It's actually not so bad. There's good pizza, although the pizza doesn't come with dough anymore because everything wheat or wheat-related will eventually turn into a malevolent spirit that consumes its host."
"Seriously?" Qaasim doesn't sound so amused anymore. " … Are you kidding? I can't tell, that's your mad science voice and usually you don't joke with that voice."
"Yes, Qaasim," says Carlos softly. "Of course I'm kidding."
-
That day, he draws the short straw and runs out to the Arby's to grab lunch for himself and the other seismologists (and, of course, Simone,) and, because this is just how his day is going, gets in line behind Cecil, who is dressed for work and has his headphones in his ears like nobody ever told him that was rude.
He touches his fingertips to Cecil's spine, a single knob of bone the faintest pressure against his index finger (he thinks it might be T5, or possibly T6, of the thoracic section on the vertebral column, although he'll have to count every one to be sure,) there on the other side of that vest, before he drops the contact. Cecil startles, glancing back and then immediately spinning around, breaking into that unnerving good night, Night Vale, smile. Carlos has gotten so used to his voice in the evenings that he forgets the rest of him is pretty nice, too. Well, it's all right. If you're into that.
"What are you listening to?" he asks.
"Hmm?" Cecil goes.
"The weather, Cecil," Carlos says patiently. "What's the weather like today?"
"Oh!" Without hesitation, he digs one earbud out and offers it to him. "Here, give it a try."
Carlos steps in close, taking the proffered earbud and nudging it into place inside his ear. This close, he can see the places Cecil missed while shaving this morning. In the background, the fry vat sizzles and machines beep their short orders and something growls loud enough to make the Employee of the Month plaques shiver on the wall. He's pretty sure Cecil's stopped breathing.
"Are you guys going to --" starts the hooded figure in line behind them, but then it just sighs and goes, "never mind," and uses the shaft of its scythe to nudge past them in order to go up to the cash register to ask for a #2 Combo and, "like, all the horsey sauce you can possibly fit into a bag."
"There's a legal limit on that," the boy in the Arby's hat says.
The hooded figure says nothing.
"… yeah, okay," the boys gets out meekly, and then the fade-out of whatever Cecil's playing transitions into the beginning of "Smoke on the Water" and all the air crushes straight out of Carlos's lungs.
-
Outside, on the pavement, Carlos squares his feet like he imagines someone might stand down a five-headed, fire-breathing mayoral candidate and says, "Okay, take me out."
He doesn't think about what he'll do if it doesn't work out, if he can't make himself enjoy himself: Cecil Baldwin once drove a barber out of town to drink cactus juice in the desert because he crossed him. All of his interns die horrible deaths or disappear mysteriously. If he can do that, what will Cecil do to Carlos? He doesn't think about it, he can't -- it's the same feeling he had when he sat in a geology conference at the SCCC and thought, this.
"I beg your pardon?" says Cecil.
"Out, Cecil. I'm asking you out. On a date. Or something."
He swears that for a moment, Cecil actually vibrates.
"When?" he goes, crumpling the neck of his Arby's bag in his fist in his excitement. "What day? Tomorrow?"
"No!" Carlos yelps. "Jesus. How about … I don't know, Thursday?"
"There's no Thursday this week," Cecil reminds him.
"What? Why? You know what, never mind, don't tell me, I don't want to know what's going to happen on Thursday that's so horrible they need to cancel it. Saturday?" Is Saturday too serious a day? Saturday's a traditional date night. There's a lot of pressure on Saturdays.
"Yes!" says Cecil, with all the enthusiasm of a tectonic plate, boundlessly young and crashing into things for the sheer joy of being able to do so.
-
And then, on the Thursday that doesn't actually happen due to a scheduling error, something takes hold of Carlos around the throat before he can dodge and tries to suck his soul out by way of his sinuses.
In the hospital, after, he tries calling his sister, and it rings through and rings through and rings --
-
"I'm sorry," says the man from the vague yet menacing government agency. "I'm afraid you cannot relocate. It would violate the terms of your contract, which, might I remind you, you signed and had notarized by Bethany Stiedman at the UPS Store on March 15, 2012."
He's balding. He reminds Carlos of a political cartoon; there's got to be a punchline here somewhere and he exists solely to deliver it. There isn't, of course -- it's just a bland smile, a faux-friendly expression, and Carlos never should have taken this internship. It was too good to be true. It's always too good to be true.
He sets his jaw. "Are you going to stop me, Mr. … ?"
"That's Agent Coulson to you, please, Mr. Montenegro. And I wouldn't recommend it, no." Somehow, with just the smile that pulls at his fish's mouth, he is the most menacing thing Carlos has seen step foot in Night Vale. "Your unique contributions are important to your government and her interests, and we thank you for them."
"Of course," Carlos says darkly. "I'm sure."
-
He walks home, after.
Six blocks, and he forgets that's where he's going. He gets lost, looks for a bus stop, can't find one, gets lost again, comes out on the other side of a trailer park and suddenly knows exactly where he is, because that's the Arby's, there at the top of the hill. There's only one in Night Vale, after all; the void orbits it. He starts walking again. A pack of feral dogs keep pace with him for awhile, their paws silent and dashing away to mist every time they connect with the concrete; he catches the reflection of the street lights off the surfaces of their eyes in his peripheral, yellowed moons darting in and out of view. Each dog has several sets of them.
He's hungry, he realizes, and once he does, his stomach yawns open inside of him.
He doesn't know what he's hungry for, but he nods to the militia-man parked on a folding chair outside the Desert Flower Bowling Alley, who nods back with the solemnity universal to men who pass each other in the dead of night, silently acknowledging that everyone else is pretending to sleep but they themselves cannot muster the same energy. He's in a pair of overalls and boots ripped along the sole, showing red socks underneath. A semiautomatic lays across his lap. On the radio, Cecil's been talking about the monsters beneath Lane 5 again.
Inside the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, Carlos orders eggs. He doesn't really want eggs. He doesn't know what he wants, just that the longing is there for something and this isn't it -- he wants something that tastes like his mother's chili rellenos, the tamales they spent all Christmas Day making, their fingers wet and pruned, their sleeves covered in flour. He wants something like the popcorn they popped on the stove, shook up in a big aluminum bowl and sprinkled with condensed milk to make it taste perfect. He wants to go home, where Monday progresses into Tuesday without any possibility of a complication, like Tuesday getting sucked into the void or pterodactyls.
He wants toast. He wants to be able to eat a slice of toast without having to worry about mind-control.
He eats his eggs, instead.
Somehow, he isn't surprised when the cowbell attached to the door clangs, footsteps squeak at the linoleum, and Cecil slides onto the bench across from him.
"It isn't our date night yet," he points out. He sections off another portion of his egg, scrapes it away, and puts it in his mouth.
"No," Cecil agrees, and Carlos cannot stand to look at him. Not right now. The picture-frame of his jawline, the knot his fingers make of each other on the table-top -- all of it will break Carlos, fracture right through him like pressure on thin ice. But Carlos has acknowledged Cecil's voice long before he ever set eyes on the man himself, and nothing stops him from hearing how bright Cecil sounds when he says, "Why, am I not allowed to see you before then?"
"That's weddings you're thinking of," he corrects him. "I'm no bride, Cecil."
"No, you're wonderful," Cecil says easily and so damn happily.
There's really nothing to say to that. The waitress comes by, bringing a tall glass of iced tea for Cecil. It smells cool, like shade and summer. Carlos swallows.
"I want to visit my family for a birthday," he says.
"Oh?" says Cecil.
"Yes," says Carlos.
"But?" says Cecil.
"They won't let me," says Carlos.
"People come and go all the time," says Cecil. "Granted, usually not in the same condition, or even in the same pieces, but we never trap visitors, either. Almost never. Okay, not often. I know, I know, not helping, Cecil. Why won't they let you leave?"
His teeth lock against each other. "I am a fixed point in time. Supposedly. I've been locked into place and I can't leave until my internship is over, not even to visit my sister for her birthday."
"You have a sister?"
"Yeah."
"What's she like? Did she try to sacrifice you to appease angry gods when you were little?"
"Yeah," says Carlos again, surprised. They slept in bunk beds until puberty, which is when their parents finally stopped being so stingy about that spare room, and she used to dangle him by the ankles off the side of the top bunk, pretending to slip every time he stopped yelling loud enough to satisfy her. To him, the fall had been fathomless and frightening, and the collection of red scarves and jumbled-up orange and yellow clothes below looked like a pit of fiery horror straight out of Indiana Jones. "Yeah, she did."
"That's so cool," says Cecil. "Did she have any stupid nicknames for you?"
"Stop that," says Carlos.
A pause.
A pause, and then the dreaminess freezes right where it is on Cecil's face. Slowly, it slides off.
"Stop that," Carlos's voice rises. If there was anybody else in the diner, they would have had to work at ignoring him, because he is being very loud. His chest burns, a constriction tightening around his ribs, and it's like a beam of light has been shot straight through him, all of his anger compressing down into one hot, focused point. "Just. Stop."
"I'm stopping!" is said very quickly. "What am I stopping?"
"All of this," Carlos gestures with his fork. "All of this is happening -- you -- you live in a place that's like nowhere else on Earth." He flings his arms out, "And all you're curious about is me?"
Compulsively, Cecil's fingers curl around his glass. They leave tracts in the condensation. His eyes tick left, then right; he clearly wants to give Carlos an answer he wants to hear but he's unsure if what Carlos wants to hear is what Cecil wants to say.
"Yes," he decides on, finally, like he's choosing between two fatal options.
Carlos breathes out through his nose.
"Right," he says, and shoves himself out of the booth with as much dignity as possible. "I'm done."
He doesn't check to see if Cecil pays (or how he pays, since Carlos has never been clear on that one and has mostly been avoiding eating out out of ignorance -- except for Big Rico's, of course, because Carlos has no desire to be arrested or set on fire for not observing the mandatory attendance law, and besides, Big Rico's has the dine-and-bill policy he's used to from the outside world, that's nice of them,) just pushes himself out into the desert night.
He marches across the parking lot, feeling numb all over and unusually sensitive at the same time, aware of how his heels hit the concrete and how different the air feels out here than how it did inside, a sharp dryness at the back of his throat. He tastes eggs around his molars.
At some point while he was inside, the shift changed over at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley, because there's now a high school girl sitting in the chair outside the door, bandolier strapped to her chest and her eyes keen, alert in the dark. Carlos nods to her and receives only a thin squint in response, a tightening of her hand on her school-issued Uzi.
He recognizes Cecil's car and stops. He lays his lab coat across the hood, then folds his arms and waits, chin tilted to the sky.
It's Friday, and the void tonight is beautiful. The stars cluster around it, colored in shades of sugar-white and muted by the city lights; Carlos plays a game with himself, finding one and watching it for as long as he can without blinking, wondering if it is truly a star or just another helicopter. It's usually a helicopter. Okay, they're all helicopters. They form whole constellations of surveillance. There are no true stars in Night Vale.
He doesn't have to wait long.
Footsteps crunch at the pavement behind him, and Cecil says, "You're waiting, is that a good sign --" with the same uncertainty in his voice that he'd once asked ten thousand listeners, Night Vale, does he like me? and Carlos --
Carlos doesn't know what he's going to do until he's doing it.
He turns, already reaching out and grabbing hold of Cecil's forearm because it's the closest part of his anatomy he makes contact with, and uses the hold of it to reel him in. He puts his back up against the side of the car because he knows he'll need it, and Cecil staggers and lands against his mouth with a noise like a man missing a stair in the dark.
Carlos snatches him up by the face to keep him there, kissing him once, twice, and on the third kiss, Cecil opens his mouth and kisses back.
It devours him like void.
-
The week that Carlos Montenegro falls in love, the mortality rate in Night Vale spikes 13%.
-
He could make a map, he thinks, of the inside of Cecil's mouth; he's already doing the math. He could create cartographical art out of the backs of his teeth, that one ticklish spot at the front of his palate that Carlos can just barely reach with his tongue. Cecil's fingers in his hair become a phantom pressure he misses when they're not there.
Carlos has gotten pretty good at predicting Night Vale's next round of fatal bullshit and pinpointing how to minimize casualties when it happens -- he has, after all, had a lot of practice -- and Cecil distracts him for a little while, sure, with the dizzying rush of infatuation, the heartbeat of want, want, need, and the way their hands shake and grasp and hold like they'll never have enough, but Carlos compartmentalizes it all eventually, and Night Vale's death rate evens out again on its steady declining path. Carlos can multitask. He can pull Cecil into the station bathroom before he goes on air and pin him up by the paper towel dispenser while Khosekh watches with the disapproving stare universal to cats everywhere, floating or no ("excellent, I always wanted to have sex at work," says Cecil, after, and Carlos counts L1 to L5 on his lumbar column and says, "you liar, you never thought about it until I walked in here," and Cecil hooks his hands around his neck and admits against his mouth, "okay, true,") and still have time to figure out what's causing the sudden, gruesome deaths of Subway patrons who try to order something with a calorie count over 500, and stop it. Carlos is shaping out to be a pretty valuable government asset, thank you.
"Your heart is pounding," Cecil murmurs to the dark, pressing his ear to the skin over his sternum the way people do when they're trying to break a combination lock. Outside, mysterious lights pass overhead, and out in the desert, a coyote howls. "I like the beat."
And Carlos -- Carlos feels so overwhelmingly fond it's like a burn, a painful awareness coating the inside of his chest.
He touches Cecil's face, drumming his fingers against his jaw in something that might be the riff from "Smoke on the Water", might not, then folding down the tip of his ear just because he can.
"Is that today's weather?" he asks, and Cecil smiles against his skin.
-
fin
Note: The NaNo for the 12th has been cut up, cannibalized, and reabsorbed into NaNos that'll come at a later date. You'll see it again!