A/N: Sorry, not sorry. I have other things that I should be working on, but I'm going to write this instead. A Happy New Year to all!
Also, ever go to write a story with a plan for how it's going to end and it just...decides that that is not going to happen? Yeah, that happened with this one. This had an entirely different, much darker ending, but Carlos and Cecil had other plans. So that's that.
Minor TW for attempted suicide.
I don't own anything. If I wrote WTNV, Carlos would be home already, gosh darn it.
The First Law of Motion
By MarkyMarquee
Carlos is falling.
The wind whistles sharply by his ear. A song, out of tune, that he only vaguely remembers. It is a memory, from another life, far away from this godforsaken desert and the sun that scours his skin like sandpaper. He recalls snatches of lyrics briefly, and then the fragmented phrases evaporate as the fabric of his tattered lab coat snaps in the air that dashes past his body.
Something had been chasing him. He remembers the tinny scratch of long claws in the sand and the smell of death and decay on the creature's breath. He had been doing experiments on the molecular structure of the Desert Otherworld's fauna (seriously now, yucca plants are not supposed to ooze pus like that, I mean, come on-) when he had been happened upon by the canine like creature and it had decided that Carlos looked like a good lunch.
Really now.
The cliff top above him rapidly shrinks in the distance. Carlos closes his eyes and pictures Cecil's face. He imagines his white blond hair, mussed, and his cerulean eyes are half closed in sleepy adoration. Pretends, just for a moment, that the rapid rush of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide is Cecil's hand, brushing through his hair, as he laughs, commenting on just how long it's gotten in these past few months. Carlos smiles. He can almost feel-
And, all at once- sharp, like a thunder clap- it is over.
When Carlos was eight, he fell out of a tree.
Something had been chasing him. A few of the older boys from school had decided that they'd had just about enough of the weird new boy at school who spoke almost no English, and decided to teach him a lesson. The three fifth graders had cornered him in the park as he was walking home after school on a warm and sunny Wednesday in October. The tallest, a light-skinned boy with chestnut hair, had grabbed him by his brand new Pokémon backpack and had thrown him, face first, in the chain link fence. Another had brandished a stick, and waved it, threateningly, at his knee caps. All three had laughed when he wet himself in terror.
Carlos had pushed off the cold metal of the gate and had, in a fit of courage, shoved past the boys and bolted his way to and up the nearest tree.
At the bottom, the boys yelled angry words at him, in a language he did not know. Carlos curled into a ball and cried, wishing they would just go away.
He hated this new country, where they did not understand him. The food was all weird and everything was just too gosh darn green and rained all the time and wasn't anything at all like his Abuela's home in Hermosillo. He missed the sands and the hot sun. He missed his family, his whole family, where everyone spoke in Spanish like he did. He missed his friends and his old school and he did not want to be here in stupid Massachusetts with its stupid rain and- OW!
Carlos looked down at the boys, who, instead of giving up, had decided to throw rocks at him to try and force him out of the tree.
"Please!" he called down to them, one of the only English words that he knew. "P-Please!"
They laughed at him, and called back to him. Carlos did not understand what they said, but their tone made it perfectly clear what they meant- They were not going to just go away.
One of the rocks, perfectly aimed, sailed up and up and collided with the side of Carlos' head with an audible CRACK! The blow knocked him hard to the right and he lost his balance, tumbling from his precarious position.
He landed with a dull thud and a screech. His attackers backed slowly away, eyes wide with shock. When Carlos chanced a glance at his right arm, he could see why.
He took a deep, shuddering breath, and screamed, "¡Ayuda!"
Help me!
When Carlos was sixteen, he fell apart at the seams.
The Ramirez family moved frequently. After Carlos' father lost the job that had taken the family to Massachusetts in the first place when Carlos was eight, they were forced to move where ever work could be had: first New York, then Florida, California, and now Kansas. Carlos felt like a tornado- constantly in motion, spinning in dizzying circles and tearing up everything in its wake. He was in his eighth school in so many years, and while his English had improved drastically since his original move eight years ago, it was still difficult to find friends when you didn't stay in the same place for more than a year.
To make matters worse, his junior prom was coming up. His mother kept asking him which girl he was going to ask. He didn't have the heart to tell her that there weren't any girls that he had in mind. There were, however, a couple of boys.
Carlos couldn't help but be disgusted by that fact. He had been brought up and raised Catholic, and simply could not get his feelings and his religious beliefs to align. For months and months he struggled, trying to see things a different way, chatting about which girls he found to be pretty with the other boys in school and trying so very hard to be normal for once in his life. He never really had much success with that.
Which is how he found himself sitting on the damp grass outside of his school's gymnasium on prom night in a rented suit, learning back against the building, and clutching a pocket knife in his hands.
He couldn't do this any more. He couldn't sit and pretend to be fine, pretend to be normal, while he felt like he was drowning all of the time, his lungs unable to grab enough air.
He rolled up his sleeve and pressed the blade of the pocket knife into his wrist. He made a few experimental cuts before bringing the blade down sharply and slashing it. Blood began to well almost immediately, and the pain sung along the nerve endings in his arm.
"Jesus, kid, what are you doing?" he heard someone shriek.
He woke, some time later, with a nurse fussing over his neatly bandaged arm, a therapist, and his mother, shaking her her head disapprovingly.
When Carlos was twenty-four, he fell out of touch with his mother.
Most of his family had returned to Mexico, shortly after his high school graduation, but Carlos had stayed. He was just about to finish his master's program in physics at Caltech, and had already applied to several doctoral programs around the country. Despite the distance and the death of his father three years earlier, Carlos had maintained close ties with his mother and sisters. Which is why he was incredibly excited that they were flying in today to attend his graduation. But he was also incredibly nervous. Frankly put, Carlos was petrified.
Because today was the day that he planned to introduce his family to his boyfriend, Mike.
He drove with Mike to the airport, chattering away about his family to Mike. Telling him all about Louisa, who was finishing up med school and wanted to become a doctor, and Anna who was such a gifted pianist that she was thinking about going to Vienna to audition for their opera orchestra and Carmen who was still in high school, but dios mio she was a firecracker. Mike smiled at him indulgently, and held his hand as they wandered up to the terminal where American Airlines flight 2180 was disembarking passengers from a direct flight from Mexico City.
His sisters, so much like him, charged over and tackled him in greeting. His mother hung back, smiling faintly, as her daughters attacked her only son. Once Carlos had regained his breath, he gestured nervously to his companion, and, in Spanish, said, "I'd like you to meet my boyfriend, Mike."
His mother only remained on American soil for 78 minutes. The first minute was spent in silent shock. The next twenty were spent berating Carlos in the middle of the airport, calling him an abomination, a sinner, and a perverter of God's will. Then his mother waltzed back towards the American Airlines queue and spent the next five minutes in line to purchase a ticket on the next flight back to Mexico City, while Carlos' sisters begged her to change her mind and stay. The remaining fifty two minutes were spent going back through security and waiting to board her plane. His mother never even left the airport.
When he called the next day to apologize, she did not pick up. After his sisters returned home a week later, Louisa called to inform him that their mother had taken down all of his pictures in their home and refused to even acknowledge that he existed.
Carlos never spoke to his mother again after that.
When Carlos was thirty-one, he found that he had fallen hopelessly in love with Cecil Palmer.
His life no longer made sense, here in Nightvale. Not that it had made a whole hell of a lot of sense before, but now there were floating cats in men's restrooms and radiation levels that should be causing the DNA of everyone within a 50 mile radius of the Nightvale Community Radio Station to spontaneously rewrite itself. And yet, as he listened to his unpredictable and eccentric boyfriend rattle on about tomorrow's top news story-something about large, poisonous, purple mice?- he found that everything, all at once, seemed to click into place.
He and Cecil had moved in together four months prior, a huge step in their relationship, and one that had made Carlos sick with nervousness. Now, however, Carlos found something quietly comforting about seeing Cecil's purple and orange polka dotted couch nestled next to his favorite brown recliner. Seeing his toothbrush and Cecil's next to each other on the edge of the bathroom sink. Watching his partner wake up in the morning, groggy and mussed, muttering nonsense in unmodified Sumerian. He suddenly found that he didn't care if this made sense- hell, he didn't care if he never made sense again.
He wanted to do this forever.
Carlos was so wrapped up in his own mind that he didn't notice when Cecil stopped talking and stared at him, curiously, over their dinner.
"Ah, you are a million miles from here, trapped in a spire of your own design," remarked Cecil, disturbing him from his thoughts.
"Huh?"
"You're lost in thought, dear Carlos."
"Oh. Oh! I'm sorry! I was just...thinking. That's what scientists do, they think."
Great, Carlos thought. Now I sound like an idiot.
"Oh?" Cecil looked intrigued. His pale eyebrows inched their way up towards his hair line, and he steepled his fingers under his chin, resting his elbows on the table that separated them. "What about?"
"I was just..." Carlos sighed. Cecil was eloquent, able to spin words like silk, into beautiful and monstrous masterpieces. Carlos was, well, awkward.
Stick with what you know, he thought. He cleared his throat and continued.
"I was thinking about how nothing make sense here. Nothing here seems to follow the laws of physics, or stick to any sort of predictability, even day to day. In the rest of the world, science follows a prescribed set of laws: force is always mass times acceleration, an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by another force, acceleration due to gravity is always 9.8 meters per second. These constants, this...certainty, well, it's why I got into science in the first place. Nothing in my life ever seemed to make any sense, but science always makes sense and it always works.
"But here, those laws don't hold any effect: force is sometimes mass times acceleration, but yesterday the amount of force depended on the object's color. And just last week, gravity stopped working for nearly a hour and a half, and only held a force of 3 meters per second. Nothing here makes sense, Cecil, nothing.
"But then... I started thinking about how an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. I thought about how I have been running, moving, all of my life and about how all of that moving has led me to Nightvale. And then, you're here and instead of things making even less sense they all just seem to... gravitate towards you and suddenly, I understand.
"Maybe this world isn't supposed to make sense. Maybe you're just suppose to keep moving until you collide with the force that causes you to lose your momentum and just stay. And, Cecil, you're that force for me.
"I guess what I'm trying to say, Cecil, is that I love you, and that...Iwaswonderingifmaybeyoumightmarryme," the last words rushed past Carlos' lips before he'd had any chance to think them through. His face burned crimson, and he had to force away the urge to apologize and then hightail it out of their shared apartment.
Cecil blushed turquoise, and his mouth formed a small, perfect O. He didn't blink.
Carlos held his breath and waited and waited and...waited. After about a minute, he squeaked, "Cecil?"
"You...want to marry me?" Cecil looked rather like his neurons had forgotten how to fire. Not for the first time, Carlos found himself wondering if Cecil had some sort of reset button.
"Yes, I do. Really. I just, I didn't know how to ask and your always so much better with words but I just wanted to be the one to do it and tell you-" Carlos began, but he he was quickly cut off by Cecil's timid voice saying-
Most of the time, falling hurts. In Carlos' life, falling has resulted in a broken arm, a lost family member, and scars on his arms that he will carry for the rest of his life. Right now, falling has left him with a skinned back and an intense sensation of vertigo.
He sits up, gingerly, and looks around. About ten feet away is an old oak door, blown wide open, with a beautiful view of a cerulean sky, the same shade as Cecil's eyes. Around the door, the sky is dark, and upon closer inspection, Carlos notices that the door wasn't blown open. Instead, it was forced- He can see the large dent that the object that collided with it made. A large object, such as a-
-an object in motion tends to stay in motion-
-a body.
He surveys himself, but finds only minor bruises and a skinned back. His lab coat, or what was left of it after wandering the desert for months, protected him from the brunt of it, but he's sure that he'll have a seriously impressive case of road rash. Behind him, in the distance, Carlos can see the faint glow of the Arby's sign under a sky that is mostly void, partially stars.
Beyond all sense and reason, Carlos has fallen home.
"Yes."
To his credit, Cecil's voice barely shook as he said it. Carlos blinked.
"Yes?" he asked, needing to hear it again.
"Yes," Cecil sounded much more sure now, and he was beaming happily, smiling brightly enough to power the sun. "Yes! Carlos! Dear wonderful, perfect Carlos! That would be, well, it would be..."
"Neat?" Carlos supplied, grinning like a loon.
In response, Cecil dove across the table, capturing his face in both hands and knocking their dinner dishes to the ground. Cecil captured his lips fervently, and when they both came up gasping for air several minutes later they found "GET A ROOM" written across the refrigerator door in mustard.
"Sorry about that," Carlos said to the room at large. And then he took his fiancé's hand and did just that.
A/N: Please R/R!