Chapter Text
It might have been fate, or it could have just been a coincidence. Either is logically possible, but Kevin isn’t really thinking about that at the moment – he can’t focus on anything, not even the bitterly cold wind that’s stinging his cheeks and making his eyes water as he sprints across the sand.
It’s great to hear any voice again.
How can he let himself become that? Does he try and fight it? At all?
A smile, a twitch of the wrist.
Sentient heat trapped in a temporary body gone cold. He’d rather die than become anything like that.
He’s been running for well over an hour, at a guess (the sun was barely slipping behind the hills when he left, and now he’s desperately stumbling through the pitch black) but the white hot pain in his muscles hasn’t quite caught up with him yet. Any other person probably would have had to stop by now, but Kevin isn’t like that. Not after what they did to him. It’s not efficient to get out of breath easily, is it?
Night Vale isn’t silent in the dead of night, because nowhere is ever truly silent, but it’s close to it. As he approaches the edge of town and shoots past Larry Leyroy’s house, he catches the warbled sound of a laugh track on TV and a cat hissing defensively as the trashcans rattle in his wake. Someone is standing in the centre of the vacant lot next to the Ralph’s and their eyes follow as he sprints past, but he’s too absorbed in getting there before the tightening in his chest becomes too much to breathe with. You can’t run forever, echoes Lauren as the old oak door slams on repeat in his mind. That doesn’t mean he isn’t going to try.
It doesn’t matter that he’s only ever been there once – he lets muscle memory of watching Carlos leave him behind lead him to the purple door with the chipped paint and ignores the way the lawn angrily whistles due to him waking it up. The gate lets him in without having to struggle with the latch; maybe it’s because it thinks he’s Cecil, but he knows that realistically gates are cleverer than that. Come on, he wills his useless body as his legs start to falter on the way to the door. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get to actually knock or press the doorbell. Fortunately, he’s almost certain they’ll be alerted in some way by his head smacking against the wood and then knocking him out cold on the step beneath it.
***
“...to hurt us? He doesn’t exactly... the past, does he? We can’t just...”
Awareness is desperately trying to swim into a blurry focus. In the background there’s talking, hushed voices too soft for him to quite be able to home into them properly. Vaguely, he’s aware of the tidal wave of pain waiting just outside of the hazy bubble of unconsciousness.
“...just leave him, Cecil? That’s not right and you... might have heard you, did you even...”
Kevin tries to lift his head ever so slightly, only to signal to the voices that he’s present and awake, but the movement lets the pain leak into his chest and he immediately welcomes sleep once again.
***
The next time he wakes up, it’s properly. That doesn’t mean it takes any less than a couple of minutes to push himself up into a sitting position, but he manages to stay conscious once he’s in it so he’s counting that one as a win. Every movement causes spots to dance in front of his vision, but he just grips the edge of the couch he’s apparently seated on and lets his knuckles stay white until his vision returns. Gingerly, he lets himself take in his surroundings – the white loveseat he’s haphazardly strewn across, the little oak coffee table in front of it with mugs of half-drunk coffee and creased SCIENCE! magazines, the flat screen TV paused on what looks like The Breakfast Club with russian subtitles and the open screen door behind it. Nobody seems to be in the room, but Kevin is sure the voices he heard earlier weren’t in his head and if he focuses he can hear them again, so he decides to go and check in what is presumably the garden. Unfortunately, the second he puts two feet on the lilac carpet and stands, the blood rushes from his head and his knees promptly give way again. The noise that catching his elbow on the table and the pained noise that comes after it seems to catch the attention of the conversation-havers, due to the way Carlos rushes in and Cecil hesitantly follows.
“Don’t stand up again!” Carlos pleads, darting over to help him pull himself back up onto the couch. “Your body is incredibly exhausted – I don’t know what you did, but you need to stop and rest before you do- well, anything else, really,” he explains, grabbing a glass of water from the coffee table and handing it to him. Cecil is still watching the two of them uneasily from by the glass doors. “What is it that you did, exactly? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I ran from the Bluffs to here,” he croaks out, wrinkling his nose at how rusty his voice is and happily taking a long drink from the water. “What?” he asks as Carlos gapes at him, voice a little smoother now.
“That’s... that’s what, fifteen miles? How long did it take you? Did you stop?”
“I don’t really know. Less than an hour, I think. And no.”
“That’s so fascinating!” he exclaims, sitting down on the arm of the couch like he’s about to start interviewing him. From where he’s still perched by the door, Cecil pointedly clears his throat. Carlos seems to remember himself and sighs, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Oh! Right, I’m sorry. Why did you come here?”
Silence is sometimes easier left unbroken. The pause before Kevin speaks, before he’s physically able to let the words leave his mouth, is deafening. “The radio,” he whispers, so mind-blowingly loud that it nearly breaks him. “I heard you- I heard me.” They were expecting this, he thinks. “I can’t end up like that- I won’t. I’d rather die.”
“Why are you here, then?” asks Cecil, the harshness of his words not matching the underlying fear in his tone. Despite the situation, Kevin laughs, hollow and bitter and forced.
“I can’t die. This useless old thing won’t let me,” he curses, loosely jabbing at his weak body. “I- I just hoped that you might be able to fix me. Y’know. With science.”
“Fix... fix what exactly?”
“Strex did something to me- well, they did quite a few things to me, but one of them was- oh, dear,” he sighs, sinking his head into his hands. Neither of the two men seem to know how to react to this, to even comprehend there’s more to him than the StrexCorp smiling poster boy he’s been for longer than even he can really remember. “This thing in my head. It’s not- it’s not mine, and it’s definitely not me but I can’t get it out and- and it’s getting worse, I can feel it.” Cecil is looking at him like he doesn’t want to be hearing this. “I’ve drifted away from myself,” he says hoarsely, because every single word his future self spoke on the radio earlier that afternoon is scorched into his mind and it won’t go away. “Sometimes I am one me, and then again I am the other.”
“The power of the Smiling God is an endless flow,” Cecil says sadly in return, and Kevin ignores the pain spiking in his chest. “It ebbs, like the tides. But like the tides, it returns.”
“I can’t control it- it’s like it takes over my head, and then I come back and I can’t even remember that I was gone, only the gaps in my memory are getting bigger and more frequent-” he tries, cutting himself off in attempt to regain his composure. Carlos is mostly still in shock. This isn’t the Kevin from the desert otherworld. Kevin doesn’t like feeling like this at all. “I’m scared that I’m going to hurt somebody – or, Gods forbid, I have hurt somebody – and I won’t be able to remember.” Part of him hates this, wants to give in to whatever they put in his head and stop feeling whatever it is he’s feeling now. Another part of him wants to fight it until it’s well and truly gone and won’t ever come back so he can’t be a danger to anyone ever again, so he can spend time with his friends and his family without feeling a crushing guilt every time he closes his eyes.
All of him wishes he could die.
“Um- forgive me for asking, but how did they- uh, give it to you? The personality, I mean,” Carlos asks, and for a minute the sharp pain dulls to an ache because he’s not asking Kevin to leave or even looking at him like there’s something wrong with him. He seems to be at least remotely interested in helping, and he’s even attempting to be delicate with his words, something Kevin hasn’t experienced in a very long time.
“I don’t really understand- or remember, really,” he apologises. It comes to him in little flashes when he sleeps, sometimes, but all he can really truly remember is that it hurt. “They called it conversion therapy- y’know, the electric type?”
“Electroconvulsive therapy? Yes.”
“It was that, but they’d inject me with- with something in between sessions. I don’t know what it was.”
“I’ll take you to the lab tomorrow morning and do some tests to try and work out what it is, and we’ll start from there.”
Kevin wills the silence to pour through his eyes and devour him from the inside. “Thank you.”
“It’s no trouble. It’ll be quite interesting, actually.”
“No- no, I meant- never mind,” he mumbles. Thank you for treating me like a person and not some kind of monster is what he’s trying to say. Carlos probably doesn’t care about him at all. Realistically, he’s doing this because it’s interesting for science. Kevin doesn’t deserve his help.
***
The other two are sat at the kitchen table with what might be wine and what smells like dark chocolate when Kevin stirs awake again. Soft, bumbling jazz music spills out from the nearest open door, the same kind of music he used to play when he’d make cookies for everyone at work. Nostalgia stings like a bittersweet taste he can’t get out of his mouth. He can’t even go into the station anymore without the world shutting down around him. From the kitchen table, he hears a glass clink against the table and a long, purposefully overdramatic sigh is let out. “I don’t trust it.”
“I know, Cece, but I really do think he needs our help.”
“I needed his help when I was trying to overthrow StrexCorp,” Cecil pouts, but he doesn’t actually sound all that angry.
“And you heard him on the radio today when his future self told you that it wasn’t really him- and today, too. I believe him.”
“He didn’t try and kill you.”
Carlos laughs at this, gently. Kevin hasn’t heard anybody laugh in so, so long, not genuinely. “No, he didn’t. He did, however, spend a couple of months helping me in the desert otherworld when we were both trapped there – he’s telling the truth. There’d be these... moments, where he’d do something slightly unnerving and then just straighten up and- and forget. Like, completely. It never seemed to really bother him, and I didn’t keep it in mind ‘cause I was more focused on science and getting out of there and stuff, but it was happening. A couple times he’d praise that Smiling God and then get this odd look as if he wasn’t quite sure what he’d said- or he’d go out for a while and I’d ask him what he’d been doing and he never seemed to be able to remember.”
“Are you sure he wasn’t just lying?”
Kevin wants to be upset at how much Cecil distrusts him, but the only thing he can really hear is the fear resonating from his questions. The fear that Kevin caused is inducing nausea in the pit of his stomach.
“Because humans are humans and anybody can be lying at any time, I obviously cannot be one hundred percent sure, but I’m at least very sure. Back in the desert otherworld, there was this afternoon he showed up at the lab for lunch with me and Doug and Alisha and- and he was just covered in blood. Fresh blood, not the normal dry blood he has on his clothes, and I tested the jacket he left behind and it was human blood. But I asked him what he’d done and he didn’t know.” Kevin remembers this afternoon- or, at least parts of it. He remembers how scared Carlos looked when he stumbled back into the lab and he remembers not noticing the blood dripping from his hands until everyone else started staring at it. He doesn’t remember much else. “Don’t give me that look, Cece. It wasn’t an inconspicuous kind of thing, and he wasn’t trying to direct me away from the conversation or anything. He just looked really, really afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
The room is silent for a while. Kevin thinks his heart might burst inside his chest.
“Himself, I think.” Carlos sighs, yawning and making some stretching noises from his seat. “It’s late, do you wanna go to bed? We can talk about it more in the morning if that’s what you want.”
Only after they’ve closed the bedroom door behind them does he let himself fall back asleep.
***
Despite StrexCorp spending months attempting to engineer his body to require inhumanely minimal amounts of sleep, the calendar pinned up neatly on the fridge in the kitchen tells Kevin he’s slept for one straight day and is midway through his second night when he finally wakes up. There’s a crick in his neck from how he’s been curled up on the couch and his legs ache in a way he’s never felt before, but someone took the time to lay a knitted blanket over him whilst he slept and he very much appreciates the gesture. After slowly wobbling over to the ticking coming from above the stove, the clock whispers to him that it’s three in the afternoon, so he should get outside and enjoy the sunlight whilst it lasts. It’s the dead of night outside when he looks out of the window, so he ignores the clock and instead hobbles over to the lamp beside the couch and turns it on. The soft, warm, orange glow that fills the room is much more welcoming that the searing, blinding omnipresence ever was, the coils of the universe unravelling and hollowing out everything in their path-
Kevin sinks his hands into his hair and takes a deep breath, just like Vanessa taught him to do. He’s okay. He’s safe here. It’s a relative term, but he’s not going to let himself go down that path.
Instead, he lets his eyes settle on the soft lilac carpet he’s currently standing on with dirty boots, and then follows the bloody trail on the carpet to a stain so dark it looks like a pool of blood on the otherwise pristinely white couch. It’s one way to be productive, at the moment, and he thinks that’s what he needs right now. Just to stay in his own head. And it’s not like he’s a stranger to getting bloodstains out of everything – not everyone appreciates the vividness it brings to internal decor, let alone how it replaces the need for finding a good colour scheme. So he busies himself with gathering everything he needs. There’s no glycerine or steel wool in the kitchen cupboards, so he slips out of the front door to head to the Ralphs and pick up everything. After all, it’s only polite to clean the mess he made when they’re being so kind and letting him sleep on their couch. The man who works in the Ralphs jumps and makes some kind of scared noise when he appears at the checkout counter, but Kevin forces his way past it and smiles so hard it hurts and doesn’t let it drop until he leaves the shop. Ominously, the figure he ran past a few days ago in the vacant lot starts slowly floating towards him, but he knows not to make eye contact and just carries on walking with his head down. The sun is starting to rise as he makes his way back to the door, so when he whistles at the lawn it seems a lot happier to see him. Both Cecil and Carlos seem like the kind of people to be late risers so he’s not surprised when it’s still silent upon his return.
The couch is first, he decides, and he gently begins to remove the surface layer of the blood with the toothbrush and brushes it onto the carpet (he’s sure they’ll have a vacuum he can borrow somewhere.) Before he uses the glycerine, he mixes the club soda he went out for and some water and starts blotting the blood out with the undershirt he removed earlier. It’s so methodical and natural that he’s able to sink into the rhythm completely, the movements coming with ease and muscles taking over for him. It takes over an hour of spraying the glycerine-detergent-water mix and circular sponge motions for the stain to disappear completely, but it’s fun work so he barely even notices the time passing. The carpet stains are lighter but wider spread, so it takes what’s probably closer to a couple of hours to steel wool the dried blood out and then blot it all out with the ammonia solution he made over the sink. Work absorbs him so utterly that he doesn’t even notice Cecil is awake until he’s standing right in front of where he’s kneeling on the floor.
“Kevin?” he says slowly, frowning when Kevin eventually stops blotting and looks up at him. “What are you doing?”
“Stain removal,” he says cheerily, going back to blotting when Cecil doesn’t respond. “I made such an awful mess when I interrupted your evening two nights ago, and it would be just plain rude to leave it there. Besides, it’s something to do.”
“You’ve slept for five nights, Kevin. Not two.”
“Oh. What a waste of time, right?”
“The stain is gone,” he points out, and Kevin realises he’s blotting clean carpet. Right. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Of course!” he says as he stands up, Cecil too focused with the way he immediately stumbles and falls backwards onto his ass to pick up on how strained his voice is becoming. “Wow! Aren’t head rushes so exciting?”
Judging from the way Cecil pinches his nose and leans against the couch instead of helping him up, he’s decidedly uncomfortable. “You don’t have to pretend to be happy around me.” The laugh that bubbles up in his throat is uncontrollable and painful at best, and it disgusts him how much it seems to terrify the other man.
“No, I really do,” he grins and speaks through gritted teeth. “If I don’t force myself to stay happy then something else will! That is its job, after all.” It’s not like he wasn’t a happy guy before- before all of this, but it almost hurts to never be anything else; nobody can stay happy forever. He’s heard the story of All Smiles’ Eve many times before (it’s practically a bedtime story for Strex employees) and he’s very, very much aware that whilst the Smiling God is still aware of him or part of it is still manifesting inside his soul then he has to stay happy. He has to force himself to stay happy or it will force him.
The next few days pass, as all time does, and he doesn’t see much of Cecil other than during the evenings. Carlos pops in and out of the house almost constantly, usually too busy frantically searching and muttering science-sounding-mutterings under his breath to stop and talk to Kevin. When he does notice him, he smiles. It means a lot to Kevin. One time he shines some kind of weird light into the abyss of one of Kevin’s pupils and even squishes his cheeks slightly before scribbling something down onto a notepad (with a pen that notably says ILLEGAL on the side in bright red lettering) and leaving again. Obviously there’s nothing stopping him from leaving the house – he’s not imprisoned, after all – but he still can’t really bring himself to do it. Even as much as he wants to be outside, he can’t take the looks he knows he’ll get from the Night Vale citizens he nears.
He’s a monster, and he shouldn’t even be here. How selfish it is of him, to surround himself with innocent people and families and children when he could become a danger to them at any time.