Archive of Our Own ^beta

Across the table, Carlos’s hand looks a bit like Megan.

He’s had the good fortune to be born with an adult man’s entire body. Does he know how lucky he is? No. He cannot conceive even slightly of her suffering.

Also his hands are very handsome (Carlos is trying to keep this a secret, but Cecil sees right through him). That beauty resembles Megan as well. Perhaps Cecil thought she was a very attractive appendage simply because she looked like those two beautiful and perfect hands, ones that Cecil might usually be holding across the table during a lunch date.

Cecil’s eyes are glued to Carlos’s perfect hands like they are planning to make a skittering leap at his throat.

Carlos, for his part, is perched in the booth a little uncomfortably. He’s been watching Cecil glower at his knuckles since he arrived. His concern is apparent. If he decided to voice this concern right now, it would be the fourth time Carlos has asked “what are you looking at?” and “are you okay?”

However, since the first three times failed—Cecil just hissed menacingly when questioned—Carlos might be done inquiring. Science is funny like that. Something about repeated trials to formulate a concrete hypothesis.

(Yes, Cecil took chemistry too.)

Right now, though, Cecil is just in a bad mood, and he knows it’s not really Carlos’s fault. Casual abduction just makes you into a bit of an asshole.

Cecil isn’t the only one. The City Council is having a bit of a meltdown too, in response to all this computerized challenging of their authority. Cecil knows. Cecil is observant. All the timepieces in Night Vale have been set to 00:00. Either the end of days really is nigh, or the council will stop sulking in a few hours and the clocks will once again display more helpful temporal designations.

Cecil momentarily glowers at the analogue clock of the cash register. Its arrows ejected themselves through the glass and are currently embedded in a stack of menus. Cecil still remains unsure how long he spent hogtied by cleaning supplies. Carlos can’t tell him because Carlos wasn’t listening to the radio because Carlos had better things to do and—

Cecil reminds himself sternly, This is not Carlos’s fault.

It can be a little bit his fault, part of him coaxes. His hand is moving. Quick! Rain justice down upon it!

No. This is not Carlos’s fault.

It wasn’t so bad at first, and what’s a little mild kidnapping on school grounds? Cecil could even move enough to scratch his nose. This was before the floor waxer rolled on top of Cecil until he was thoroughly uninterested in moving anything. He was concerned with other things. Like 16B on this morning’s crossword! And breathing.

Yes, the breathing thing. That was an issue.

He just wants to know how long he was trapped. That’s all. It’s not a big thing. It’s just bothering him—everything is currently bothering him. Their waitress’s pinkie ring is bothering him. The clouds are bothering him. Carlos’s rumpled shirt is bothering him. He would like to know how long he was held captive, so he can stop. Questioning. Things.

Cecil keeps exceptional time in his head too. It’s one of those things you walk away with after twelve years of public school—a paralyzing fear of the cafeteria, belief in the existence of algebra, practical application of how to survive on vermin and chocolate bars during detention month, the inescapable sensation of the cogs of cosmic timekeeping grinding away in your very soul, slowly draining away your vitality (also known as internal timekeeping).

Basic stuff.

If he hadn’t lost track after being struck unconscious, Cecil wouldn’t think twice about the time. That hadn’t been the floor waxer’s fault actually—a couple of power cords suddenly had taken issue with Cecil’s rasping, labored breaths while he was trapped under the machine. His neck is still too sore to touch, where they looped around it and squeezed until his eyes felt like they would burst out of their sockets. Every time Cecil swallows, it stings again.

Across the table, Carlos maintains his silence. No questions—good. Great. Perhaps he’s wised up to the fact that Cecil is no longer stricken with this inexplicable urge to detach Carlos’s hand so Megan will have a new companion. Cecil has, after all, put his fork back down.

Usually Cecil is only uncomfortably focused on mutilation on the Tuesdays after soccer games against Desert Bluffs. He wants to stop being angry, but… he can’t.

Blame Carlos, his brain urges again. All this stress is unhealthy. Cecil’s fingers twitch towards the fork.

But when Cecil looks past the plastic table dividing them and his own sluggish thoughts, Carlos looks a little wounded. Cecil immediately double-checks—good, Carlos’s limbs are all intact. So he’s probably just upset that Cecil won’t talk to him.

This feeling in Cecil’s gut is unpleasantly not unlike ‘guilt’.

Looking at his boyfriend’s frown, the blackest feelings ooze away. Cecil is still in a crappy mood, just… he just doesn’t want to relocate Carlos’s hand after all.

Thus mollified, Cecil remains tired and cranky and hating clocks. Which, ultimately, is better than homicidal, so Cecil gives in to the fatigue. He opts to give Carlos (now a little sullenly fiddling with his straw—probably wondering why Cecil called him out of the lab just to sit in unprovoked and moderately hostile silence) a tiny smile. “Sorry. This was a mistake. I think I’d better just go home.”

Carlos looks up. Gives Cecil a long, measuring look. His eyes are very prickly when he narrows them. “Are you feeling okay, Cecil?”

Cecil wonders why Carlos is asking. He also wonders why his immediate response is, “DO NOT TRIFLE WITH ME, FOUL MORTAL WRETCH.”

Well no, that’s probably just the bad mood. Ugh. He’s terrible when he’s like this.

Carlos, to his credit, responds to this not by whipping out a Geiger counter, but instead by reaching over and dragging Cecil’s untouched coffee out of face-flinging range. Reasonably, he tells Cecil, “If you trifle with my voice mail, I will trifle with your life, Cecil. Yes, get over it,” he adds as Cecil’s mouth opens and the air reverberates in preparation to make the basso tones echo menacingly. Cecil’s retort dies into a miffed frown. A distant clap of thunder dwindles into a forlorn grumble, like an interrupted tangent. “This is how relationships work.”

“In places without enough bloodstone circles, maybe,” Cecil mutters, but now he’s just nitpicking. As Carlos gives him a very unimpressed sort of look, Cecil admits, “…Maybe I shouldn’t drive.”

“You need to get some sleep,” Carlos observes with the utter lack of flattery that comes with having been with someone long enough to know the difference between exhaustion, demon-possession, and respiratory illness. “Your eyes are flickering.”

“My eyes do not flicker,” Cecil objects. His coffee, as he stares into it, swirls menacingly. Red lights do keep flickering in its murky surface, but clearly that’s the result of the grease-colored fluorescents overhead and not, as Carlos keeps insisting, his silly made-up stories about glowing irises.

Please. Cecil was not born yesterday.

Blame Carlos, his brain tries one last time. You still have your eating utensils!

“Uh-huh,” Carlos says, in that tone where he’s not buying any of Cecil’s shit. Cecil hates that tone slightly. He glares at his coffee. “Come on. You’re going home and you’re sleeping it off.”

“I have work,” Cecil musters, with great scandalized aplomb.

“So do I,” Carlos points out. “And oh look, I managed to skip it. The world is not ending. Goodness gracious.”

“Don’t curse,” Cecil mutters, because this is a family establishment and because he’s still nitpicking.

“Yes, yes,” Carlos says, and apparently loses patience arguing with Cecil. That, or he is aware that Cecil is inching closer to the fork again. Carlos herds him out the booth gently, without ever really touching him. “Come on. I’ll even dig that big fluffy bathrobe out of your closet so you can give yourself heat rash.”

“MORTAL WRETCH,” Cecil begins, dragging his feet. Then, “Your life is…” He loses momentum.

In the car, midway to Carlos’s apartment because apparently Cecil can’t be trusted to do his job, which he is paid for, and where he has hungry bosses, Cecil thinks to turn to his boyfriend and ask, a little alarmed, “Am I drunk?” All he's had is coffee. And perhaps an increased dose of mortal terror, but come on, since when does that cause any problems?

“No,” Carlos deadpans. “You called me, tearfully confessed your love, and said you wanted to marry my hair because you’re not intoxicated in the slightest.”

“Oh good,” Cecil exclaims, and promptly passes out in the car seat.

He wakes up in his bathrobe. He’s in bed. His pillows bear overwhelming evidence of having recently been fluffed. He doesn’t remember how he got here.

This is sort of like how it was in the custodial closet. How did Cecil escape? No idea. Someone must have let him out.

Cecil does have this vague memory of flickering red lights somewhere in all that blurry unconsciousness and strangulation. Of gasping in air cloudy with dust, of wriggling his fingers out of a jagged hole full of wires. Of shuffling out of the plaster rubble of a school storage facility, shaking off scraps of hard plastic and shredded circuits… He feels like he got props from somebody in a hood, who referred to Cecil by a name that was at once unrecognizable and, evocative of crushing and suicidal despair.

Wally? …No. Walbert?

Something like that.

Oh, it’s probably not important. That’s lesson one in community radio, City Council brainwashing, and life. ‘It’s probably not important. Put it out of your mind immediately and exist in the quiet, inexplicable horror of someone who has forgotten something terribly n-o-t, NOT IMPORTANT.’

The last time Cecil had forgotten something not important, he’d been in a terrible mood for weeks. His HR retraining session in the black box—the electrified one, with so many sigils engraved into its steel walls that Cecil had to curl up on the floor and not move under all that crushing weight—had taken forever. Station Management had snarled at him when he stumbled out, his bad mood expended, limbs rubbery, and the faint taste of ash in his mouth. Cecil had whimpered, ducked under a chair, and thrown himself at the first coffee-bearing life form in range.

So basically, nothing’s changed.

Since he’s already forgotten, Cecil has not the faintest clue what even put him in that temper. He has this vague memory of Steve Carlsburg sending him a note, and a gas station on Wharton Avenue, and a lot of armored men with large guns. Which is weird anyway, because Wharton Avenue was sucked into the void, like, forever ago. Two years. Somewhere in there.

But god, that memory still pisses him off HOW DARE THEY—

Oh, Cecil just hates it when he gets like this. He’s so snooty.

Instead, he tries to recall how he got into bed. And oh, that’s right. Things have changed, haven’t they? Because now Cecil vaguely remembers letting Carlos tow him up the two flights of stairs to the apartment, install him in bed, and then negotiate Cecil into putting on the Bathrobe of Dignified Comfort.

The one with the penguins.

Then Carlos sat down next to the bed with a glass of water he didn’t drink and a book that did not have the glossy, much censored finish of a municipally-approved library choice. Why, Cecil had wondered? The downstairs chairs were much comfier. Also, Cecil wouldn’t be tempted to gnaw off Carlos’s fingers if he was downstairs.

Then Cecil was snoring into his freshly fluffed pillow and had no such concerns.

Awake now, Cecil blinks the heaviness from his eyelids. It’s a tarry black outside his window, and a puddle of drool in his pillow (ick). He must have been sleeping for a little while. Carlos has turned the bedside lamp on, and his feet are propped up comfortably on the bedframe. He’s halfway through the book—Cecil hopes it’s a good one. Carlos looks over as Cecil rustles. “Sleep,” he orders in the tone of someone who has had to repeat themselves a few times already.

“You’re not my mother,” Cecil claims, although at this point anything is possible. “Repent your imperious folly.”

Carlos reaches over and pats Cecil’s hand, where it’s curled into his pillow. Cecil petulantly stuffs his head back into the pillow.

“Mortal wretch,” Cecil murmurs, and decides to go back to being unconscious. He’s pretty sure his eyes aren’t flickering anymore.