There Is Only Now
I'm very late to the Night Vale party, but I love the show and I love writing fics, so here we are. This is set early in Season 2.
…
Cecil hummed to himself as he washed the dishes, snatches of recent weather reports interspersed with the strange music he often seemed to hear when he was broadcasting. He had never yet located the source of the music, but it never became intrusive and in fact usually seemed to reflect both his mood and the current content of his broadcast, so he had come to accept it as one of the more pleasant unexplained phenomena in his life.
A sudden knock on the door pulled him from his thoughts.
"Who is it?" he called, because it was late and because the rhythm did not match the code for the Sheriff's Secret Police, Big Rico's Pizza, or Janice, who should not be out at this time of night anyway.
"It's Carlos."
"Carlos!" He opened the door at once, to see his boyfriend ('yes folks, I'm pleased to report that I officially have a boyfriend now!') leaning against the frame, red-eyed and dishevelled.
"I'm sorry to show up unannounced," Carlos began.
"Not at all," Cecil assured him, adding the red eyes and dishevelment to the late hour, deducting the smell of alcohol, which was absent, and reaching several swift conclusions, "come on in."
"Thank you."
Abandoning the dishes, he ushered Carlos straight through to the living room and gestured towards the sofa. Carlos sat, immediately folding in on himself like someone in pain or distress. Given the absence of blood, and that he had apparently arrived at the apartment under his own steam, Cecil settled on the latter.
"Here," he said, sloshing vodka, his weapon of choice in situations such as this, generously into a tumbler. "Drink this."
Carlos accepted the proffered glass, took a hefty gulp, and gasped, coughing slightly in the way of people unused to gulping straight spirits.
"All of it," Cecil urged, sitting beside him, close enough for support but not quite close enough to touch just yet. "Trust me, it'll help."
After a slight pause, Carlos followed his instruction and Cecil reached for the empty glass, refilling it and setting it, and the bottle, on the coffee table, ready to be deployed again when needed.
"Now, tell me what happened."
"We were following up on a report of strange occurrences at the post office. You know no-one's really looked into what's been going on there since the Apache Tracker… well."
He stopped there and swallowed, the words 'since the Apache Tracker sacrificed himself for me and was therefore unable to continue his investigation', hanging unspoken in the air.
"So we set up our equipment and a team of us went in, and there was… something… there. We didn't get a good look. I haven't checked the footage yet. It was," he shuddered at the memory, "all foul smell and darkness and eyes and teeth. Nothing should have that many teeth. And it took – consumed – Tristian and Aiko, and Lennox has pretty much been curled up in a ball and shaking since. Ndule and Emma piled him into a car and left. I don't think they'll be coming back. The others weren't in the original entry team. They're busy analysing what data we managed to collect, and I just… it ate them right in front of me, and the sound. Crunch! And slobbering. And, and-"
His breath was hitching up closer to hysteria.
"Here." Cecil deployed the second glass of vodka. "Drink."
Carlos did so, and his breath evened out somewhat.
"How could I do that, Cecil? How could I put them in harm's way like that?"
Cecil frowned, puzzled by this. "They chose this. Or not this, specifically, being devoured by a creature of unspeakable horror, but this science. Here in Night Vale. They chose to face the inexplicable and horrifying and try to understand it. They made that choice, and they lived bravely in the light of the choice they had made, and died horribly as many have done quite without any such sense of purpose." He reached out and laid one hand tentatively over Carlos', keeping in there when Carlos didn't pull away but instead turned his own hand to grip Cecil's fiercely. "None of that is your fault."
"But they died!"
"I know. I'm sorry."
"They died, and that thing, it was horrible, and-"
"Hush. I know. You're safe now."
"It's still there, waiting."
"It's still there. It's not here. Let it wait. In time you will go back and make sure that it can't hurt anyone else."
"How can you be so calm about this?"
He was quiet for a moment, arranging his thoughts as he would before a broadcast. Some things needed to be considered, almost scripted, to ensure that they came out correctly.
"Terrible things happen, Carlos. They happen all the time. I know you think Night Vale is terrible and the rest of the world is safe, but even I know enough about the world to question how true that is. Even I know there are places where the forests burn, and take people with them, and floods sweep away homes and streets and villages, and take people with them. Even I know there are places where people are being blown up by other people for reasons that none of them understand except that someone else said that it should be done. Places where people are being beaten and killed for loving someone that someone else says they shouldn't love, or women are being stoned to death for being raped by men who claim they asked for it, or children are living and dying in terror because other children have turned their schools into a war zone. There are places where people are keeping other people as slaves, and places where people are starving, and places where pollution of all kinds spells death for anyone and anything that tries to live there."
"I know, Cecil, but that's-"
It was what? 'Different', yes, but no less horrifying.
It was 'normal', but 'normal' just means that which is usual, typical, or expected. In Night Vale it was normal for radio presenters to gush about their same-sex crush live on air, and the only complaints were from people who 'just want him to get on with the show and stop going on about his personal life. No-one cares, buddy.' It was normal for women to hold positions of power and authority, and while some of those women were bat-crap crazy no-one thought to attribute that to their gender when most of the men (and eldritch abominations) in power were bat-crap crazy too. It was normal for kids to take weapons to school, but he had never heard even a suggestion that any child might for a moment contemplate turning said weapon on their peers. It was not normal for forests to burn, although that wasn't for want of trying because the only forest around had a habit of turning people into trees and no-one had yet figured out a way to stop it. Floods were not normal, because they were in the middle of a desert. Earthquakes were normal, but no-one seemed to feel them, and they never seemed to do any damage, and that, apparently, was also normal here.
It was 'something which only happens to other people', except that wasn't true either because you didn't spend much time as a gay Hispanic intellectual in America without experiencing a share of the homophobia, racism and anti-intellectualism which were all too normal there.
"I'm used to all that," he finished lamely.
"And I'm used to Night Vale. The world is full of horror and nowhere is safe from it, but the only horror that holds the power to horrify us is the horror we haven't faced before."
"What do I do, Cecil?"
"Drink," Cecil suggested, topping up the glass again. "'If you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget.' Or not forget, but to cope. To bear it. Tomorrow you'll inform the families of-" he paused.
"Tristian and Aiko," Carlos supplied.
"-Tristian and Aiko, that their children died bravely, in the cause of science, to which they had committed their lives. They made the ultimate sacrifice in the pursuit of knowledge, and they will be missed."
He had heard those words before, Carlos realised, or others very like them, when Cecil reported on the loss of yet another participant in Night Vale Community Radio's ridiculously deadly internship program. He had never understood before how Cecil could be so accepting of that, but now it made a horrific kind of sense. This was normal here.
He looked up at Cecil, calm and understanding beside him, and Cecil read the silent request in his eyes. "Come here," he said, and drew Carlos in to rest with his head on Cecil's shoulder. "Close your eyes. Let my words wash over you. You are safe now."
Carlos let out a deep breath as muscles tensed against terror, grief and guilt suddenly loosened in the embrace of someone who cared for him and understood what he was going through. As his muscles loosened the tears came, and he sobbed into Cecil's neck as his boyfriend stroked his hair.
"Hush now, you're safe now. The past is gone, the future is not yet here. You are here, now, safe with me. Hush now. It's over now. There is only now."
The alcohol was hitting him hard, blurring the sharp edges of all that had happened, and after a while his sobs eased and he began to drowse. Cecil heard his breathing change and felt his body shift, and nudged him gently without displacing him.
"Carlos?"
"Hmm?" Carlos responded, to indicate he was listening, as he had no intention of moving from the tiny space of safety which Cecil had made for him.
"It's very late, and I can tell you're exhausted, and I hope you won't think this too forward of me, but perhaps you should stay the night. No funny business, I promise!" And it was funny to hear Cecil shift from calm voice of reason and assurance to socially-awkward boyfriend, although Carlos' heart was still too heavy to allow for more than the slightest of chuckles. "Unless you want funny business, of course, although I don't think you're really in any state for it. But I have a spare room, and it's all made up, and you'd be more than welcome to use it."
Carlos raised his head somewhat reluctantly to meet his boyfriend's gaze. "That sounds neat, thank you."
"Alright then." Cecil drew his boyfriend to his feet, brushing a single, chaste kiss to his cheek as he did so. "Let's get you to bed."