Conjugations
Words.
Carlos stares without a trace of motion. Quiet, with a useless phone hanging from his fingers, he lets his eyes take their time.
It is with a blank in his mind that he watches those creatures of ink, born from hours of work, wake and euphoria, tenderly dissolve under the touch of blood. The veins of the paper fill with black – natural, logical, as if it had always been their destiny.
He feels useless, abandoned to his thoughts of capillarity and fluids. He feels lonely.
Words, letters, discovery. It isn't the medium that matters, he muses. That only changes the speed. Gone in a flash, in smoke from his laptop, or washed away like that – the result is loss in any case.
He cleans up the blood, now a purplish mixture, mechanically. Like sandpaper, his cloth grazes away one year of efforts.
It is not about the method, nor the timing. Words are always fragile, always traitorous. There is no language in the world that can be preserved, nor universally transmitted – it all travels through signs and conventions, through fickle things so easily destroyed. It takes sensation, feeling, to truly understand.
He couldn't entrust such important things to words. They vanish fast, and are quickly forgotten. Still, he thinks, sometimes they are the only way.
When you regret, for example, and are forever sorry. When there are wonder and pain too great for a tongue to express, yet with the need to try. Mostly, when you are far from where you are supposed to be.
That is why he needs to go – to pronounce words he never said, and make up for them with all the rest. He will rewrite his life in care, touch, presence.
He doesn't even finish cleaning before he walks out. As relative as time may be, he knows for a fact how terribly late he is.
Words.
There is nothing more to the goods Cecil sells to the town, as a duty, for a living. It is a trick easily fallen for – he weaves sound and meaning together so well, unmatched through the years. He is a fine servant of his language.
Then again, when his eyes opened, he was the first to stop believing in them.
What he already knew, as any pioneer of storytelling, was the tricky nature of his tools. He felt their textures clearly as they flew through his mouth, measuring their power to deceive, to reshape and disappoint.
What he didn't know yet, at least to its true extent, was their insignificance. It had taken a miracle, and new perspective, to fully understand – how a string of letters cannot hold a candle to a touch, to a gentle smile, and the whole universe of warmth that is a human being.
He is aware now, with his words lost in a signal, and no ear to sweetly whisper them in. Through the clouds of his bad mood, more often than not, he lingers on the golden desert or the night sky – he nourishes his imagination with all he sees, with different resources, other senses.
Cecil is familiar with the nest of words he has built around himself. It is to break it, change it, that he wants to make this choice. There is someone he needs to share this new part of his life with.
After all, Carlos loves what he is doing with it. He caused it, for the most part. He must be worth leaving Night Vale behind.
He repeats it to himself. He tries to push back his memories, the images of all he knows and loves, as they nag at the back of his mind. This night, a fierce mirror of his turmoil, does not make it any easier.
The rain is a rare sight in his town – he must enjoy it. At the corner of his eye, faithfully, lights and reflections walk along his pain. They bid him goodbye, in their own bizarre way.
Just before the song of brakes, before the voice that calls him, he bows his head.
Indeed, words and truth are parted by an ocean.
"Listen, now."
The game Dana is playing is a gamble, for more than one life. It is also a game she never chose. With time comes acceptance, however, and the ability to adapt.
She holds just enough power in her hands, and has no desire for more. That, even in Night Vale, might be what kept her alive for so long. All it takes now is her plan – more than for the sake of safety, of support, she will do it for a friend.
She knows Cecil well, even in his distance. She always knew his tormented relationship with belief, his heavy mood swings, caught between truth and declarations. She just cannot blame him for that – in the end, as she had to learn fast, with great power comes great responsibility.
There is no room for regrets here. His trust is at stake – it is what she needs the most, especially now and from him. She cannot let him go for something she never even dreamt of doing.
She will teach him a lesson, oh, she will. Her sudden smile puzzles the Council.
Dana learnt the meaning of words in the desert. She had plenty of time to reflect on their call, step after step, lost in that boundless silence. What was hidden in them, their potential, turned around her whole youthful confusion.
She found their light, and she followed them home. She never stopped trusting them – on them she built her whole plan, over time, to help save a town. She meant each and every one of them, in her desire for the safety of whom she loved.
Words are powerful on their own. The key to making them true is believing in them.
"We are risking it all," she orders, her eyes alight with confidence. "We are keeping him safe. And – don't even try to doubt it – we are going to succeed."
What bursts out of Janice's mouth is a river, breathless and without rest.
Of that jumble of sounds, not a single letter is planned. What swells and rushes to her uncle's warm belly is a flow of disorganized sincerity – it is her only hope to tell him everything.
She gives it her best, with all she has. In between her voice, her pressed cheek and the terrible fear of loss, the message lands right where it was meant to.
Janice cannot know, but this is it – she is the purest token of what he had been missing. She looks up at him with the stars she was given as eyes, those little lights Cecil seems unable to stop complimenting, and returns that fuzzy feeling to their whole surroundings. Her enthusiasm, followed by the inconsolable sadness of children, makes it impossible to bear.
What she says, all in a few seconds, creates giant cracks in his resolve. He is swept away, impotent, from the stale circle of disappointment that has become his natural state – he rethinks, feels again, and is left without any idea what to do next.
Her voice is also gentle and kind. It always was, since her little life joined the chorus. It is enough, just as it led him astray, to bring him home.
He is caught in one word, that particular word. It is a name.
It is only a name.
He raises his gaze, astonished. In three minutes, the world comes together again.
There is a meaning to grammar, Cecil and Carlos establish, in the tangle of memories and hopes that leads them through the night. There are the many timbers of tenses and moods. Different shapes to give to the same doing word.
There is the past – they count its knots and its fibers, one by one and in each other's arms. What they left behind, forever gone and forever there to treasure. On the other side, there is a future in the making, being born with them as each second, or its illusion, goes by. They taste the slow walk of time on their tongues, in a cycle of was and being and will be, aware that all three are defined by a single thing – what they are now.
There is possibility, and desire. Not tonight, however. They find nothing more they could wish for, as long as the moon, beautiful out of time and space, shines on their desert as it always did. They turn hypothesis and longing to dust – the roots and suffixes for those are their covers and their skins, in their cloud of newly shared warmth.
They recall the existence of impossibility, too. If they were to walk back – impossible – and count, one by one, the paths that could have been – useless. The tree of fate has too many branches, too many dead ends, and paths that not even the most attentive of governments could control.
Cecil could never scold him again for saying things like these. He missed them too much. Tonight he laughs, and kisses him to an apparent infinity – undetermined, eternal, as some verbs are and aren't.
Then, when the dawn climbs up the dunes and they have consumed the last of their energies, they teach each other the last truth, in sleepy touches and breaths. Some moments in life can drive the deepest roots of language to meaninglessness.
What they have learnt is true – words have the power to bind close or to separate, with the equal strength of the tide, wherever feelings follow them. Words can much, but not everything. Not when they are not needed.
In what is left of their morning, the first morning of a long row, doubtful ideas are left behind.
There is only certainty.
Happy anniversary, Night Vale friends. Here's to a new year of fantastic writing and fantastic characters. Happy cheesiness, too.