Chapter Text
Today you might wake up, shower, and howl in your bloodstone circle. Or maybe you would shower first, then remember to wake up at lunch. You might have (gluten-free) pancakes. Or not. The one thing you WOULD do is turn on the radio. You might even be in time to catch the tail end of Cecil's latest interview.
“- Well, it sure was a good thing he was looking into our oranges, or… we could have harmed a lot of people on our way to making a ton of money! So very much money. What’s a few lives? So much money! He’s a good scientist you have there. What’s his name again?”
“Ummmmmmm…..Carlos?”
“Right. That’s right. Carlos. Okay. Good talking to you! Gotta go. Bye!”
“Oh, uhh, okay. Well, thank you, Lauren! Goodbye.”
You don't see the people talking. Because this is radio, and that would be kind of weird, right? You definitely don't see the bloody circle under Cecil's desk, the one even Cecil doesn’t see - or how it flares when Cecil says Carlos's name, then disappears.
Lauren rushes out, smiling brightly.
Cecil continues with a public service announcement from the Night Vale Marine Biologist Association.
Across town, Carlos half-listens to the radio. He shakes his head and chuckles. Of course this arid, land-locked town has Marine Biologists -
And the world goes white
A booming voice whispers from nowhere, everywhere, right in Carlos’s ear, he’s gone deaf he’s gone blind whatishappening…
So you would observe?
OBSERVE.
That was two days ago. No one has seen Carlos.
(He sees them)
Not seeing Carlos for two days isn't actually all that unusual, unfortunately. But he does at least usually call, now, when he's going to be working that much. Or at least an e-mail. Or a text message with an emoji of a sad koala bear doing science to some eucalyptus or something. Usually. So Cecil doesn't even start to look for him until the second day, and even then, it's just to drop by the lab with an extra coffee for him that he makes sure only has one spider in it, since he knows how Carlos feels about spiders in his coffee.
And the other scientists go from giving him looks with eyebrow waggles to looks of alarm. They’d assumed that Carlos had been holed up with him for two days. None of them have seen him.
And slowly, in a growing panic, but slowly, Cecil learns that literally no one has seen him. No one in town. Not Big Rico. Not anyone at the Ralphs. He even asks his Secret Police officer that's outside his apartment, and then the one outside of Carlos's, who swears that the scientist hasn't left. Cecil takes the stairs two at a time and stumbles in, almost falling on his face when he takes a shoulder to the door and it swings open, unlocked.
"Carlos? Carlos!" he tries to keep the panic out of his voice, but he doesn't do a very good job of it.
The apartment is black. Not dim, not dark. This is deeper, as if there's a fog over the windows, the walls, everything. The only light comes from the door, swallowed up within inches.
There
are
peoplethingsinhisheadinhiseyesinhisblood
Carlos tries to close his eyes but - they keep - opening again on new places and he’s not doing it. The view tilts and swoops crazily from the ceiling fan to the computer screen to the phone which rings and
His eyes open.
A man on the other end talks his words flying into
the air in pieces and stitched back together in the speakers there's a watch glittering on his wrist and the pieces fly
away
His eyes open.
to a girl in the desert, dirt-spattered, hair blown back by the blades of helicopters and flip
a couple in a restaurant and a mountain on the plain
and a park with no dogs
stacks of books crumbling and things slithering in
His eyes open.
they are in his head everyone everything he can see them
the ants crawling into a soda can and the masked army striding nowhere and
“Carlos?!”
Noise and noise and noise is WORSE makeitstopmakeitstopstopSTOP
His scream is not heard but felt, shaking the room, the fog roiling into thrashing knots.
Cecil draws back sharply and does fall over this time, scrunches backwards in fear towards the door, though he’s not entirely sure why. And yet, something makes him close it with him inside instead of out, an instinct he does not understand (has never understood) telling him this is better somehow, this is what he does, this is what he does if he wants Carlos back. He doesn’t question it, any more than he questions how he can know what people are thinking or saying miles from where he is when he’s in the booth.
Okay. Close the door. Set his back against it. Think. Be quiet. Think. Think. Remain calm.
"Carlos?" he tries again, startled by how weak his voice sounds in the unnatural blackness of the room. His eyes strain in the dark. He can feel the difference in the air, and it takes him a moment to figure out how to breathe, to slide up the door to standing. "Carlos... can you hear me?" it's pitched lower, worried and tight, and he stumbles a few, cautious steps until he can set his hands on the back of the sofa. There's a lamp on a table next to the sofa and he reaches for it, sets his fingers against the switch. He does not switch it on though, not yet, not until he hears if he gets a response, but just knowing he could fortifies him, just a bit.
Whatisitdoing?
Noisenoise still making noise. So easy to make it stop - it's just a mortal, sososo small. One snap and they break. Behind the human, a knot slowly curls out into a tendril. It slides in, smooth, silent, then lashes around his throat. Just a twist and it goes away and then there will be quiet-
No.
No. No. "Carlos" means something -
Means nothing what does it matter one person you have all of them
My name I have a NAME. I... What am I doing?!
Carlos struggles to make sound, to call out, but how? There’s no lungs, there’s no air… What is happening to him?
The loop disintegrates, releasing the human - No, he has a name too –
Cecil
Something looped around Cecil’s wrist, chest, leg, waist, anything would have provoked fight. Not that fighting did anything, of course, but fighting was better than just letting something kill you and even if it did nothing it would make you feel better, and it was always good to take comfort in the moments before death. But the tendril doesn't seek out any of those places, no, it winds tight around his throat and Cecil freezes, because there is the threat of the unknown and there is the threat of death... and then there is the threat of something hurting his voice. His fingers twitch against the switch of the lamp, but something in him tells him not to turn it on, not yet. Something in him remembers.
"Carlos," his voice is soft, quiet, closer to his radio voice than he normally uses at home in tone if not in volume. It's reactionary, something maybe not identical but very similar to whatever tells him things he cannot know dropping him into using his voice, rather than just speaking, at the threat to it. "Is that you? Are you alright? Do you know what is going on?"
And it's that voice which reaches what is left of Carlos, what little remains in the crush of omnipresence.
a man in a tan jacket a submarine and it's spreading further further another town in the desert and a man who smiles too much too wide and the station is full of blood
But there's the VOICE. The voice which tells things as they should be. The one which always called him "The Scientist," giving him a place before Night Vale could swallow him whole. No matter how deep or awful, even the day he died, it's been there. It's a...
Focus.
This time, Carlos opens his eyes on purpose. And they open. And they open.
Eyes appear all over the room, in pairs and trios and entire constellations. They turn from staring at the outside world to this one room, one spot, one person. They glare wide and bloodshot. They glitter in tiny clusters. Parabolic and reflective and compound and (somewhere) one pair of brown - a pair usually framed by thick glasses and mussed hair.
A few glow, casting faint white light over the Voice.
Cecil sucks his breath in, hard, and does not turn on the light, his fingers falling away from the switch. He is frightened, of course, for both Carlos and himself, and surprised, because who wouldn't be, but the little "Oh!" he makes when that sucked-in breath leaves him again also makes it clear that he finds it beautiful.
He can't immediately pick out Carlos's eyes— well, Carlos's original eyes— in the visual cacophony of them, partially because there are so many and partially because it's the glowing ones that are easy to see. He doesn’t know what’s going on, though he feels like maybe he should, that there’s some kind of scout badge for this he just doesn’t remember enough about to be helpful. Instead, he just repeats what he said before, hoping for a response this time that isn’t static screaming through the inside of his skull,
"Are you alright? What happened?" he can feel Carlos in here, knows that he's still alive and he's the one looking at him, even if he doesn't yet understand the scope of what's happening here.
At last there’s an answer, not even quite a whisper in the back of Cecil’s head, but directed, purposeful.
I don't know.
There are a million Cecils. He glows in infrared, flaring. He's fractured into a thousand pieces. He's movement. He's monochromatic. He's a kaleidoscope, colors no human could classify. I'm seeing him through all the eyes, Carlos realizes. No two sets see him the same way. There's something vital in that realization. He concentrates, trying to pull the data together. Cecil speaks, asks something. Carlos can't answer. It's taking all his battered sanity to reconcile the different versions. To make his Cecil, one person out of all the disparate parts.
Keep talking keep going. Keep me here. Please keep me here.
It's too many threads. Carlos grabs hold of the images but the thought slips through. It flies loose, projecting through the whole room.
Cecil sees it flicker through the room, through the eyes, and it's not in any language, doesn't make any sense, and still raises weird not-quite-a-memory hackles on the back of his neck, but he thinks he understands at least the sentiment behind it. Well, sort of. It's hard not knowing what's going on, hard talking to Carlos without knowing if Carlos is being attacked, without knowing if he, himself, is being attacked. But he thinks he understands more. Better. Something.
"It's all you, isn't it? I mean, more of you than normal, but not like... what's happening to me right now isn't what happened to you when it happened," that's nonsensical, but he feels like he needs to keep talking, "Don't worry, we'll find out what happened. I feel like I've seen this before, or something like it, so, you know, when I remember we can--"
His voice falters, because it's just dawned on him that if he feels like he remembers this, but can't, it might have been re-educated out of him, and, if that's the case, what if they take Carlos? But he doesn't particularly want to share that thought at the moment, "--Figure out what's going on." That doesn't make sense either. He's babbling. He's talking to an empty room made of eye fog. There's nothing to center him anymore than there is anything to center Carlos.
There is one point of solid contact, though. Somewhere after his fingers slipped off the lamp-switch, a tendril has curled, loosely, around his neck again. It’s perversely calming, having it there, though it makes him feel strange. Resonant is the word that comes to mind, but he doesn’t know why. He reaches up to touch it, fingers sliding along its mass, feeling out the its texture, seeing if the touch provokes a reaction.
Carlos is busy sorting desperately, grabbing each of Cecil’s words like an anchor. They hold him in place, promising a solution, a future, that this can be fixed. But fixing is secondary. First the system has to operate. Carlos methodically processes the visual inputs, comparing them to his own memories. Each image is synced with the original model. The infrared goes here, the insect there. Piece by piece, he begins to make sense of this chaos, just a little, just enough -
Then Cecil touches him.