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On their second date, Carlos remembers the broadcast after their first date, and informs Cecil with a nervous laugh that he doesn't actually live in his lab. Cecil seems surprised by this, and Carlos asks him if he lives at the radio station – less a sarcastic remark and more an honestly curious inquiry. The answer is no. It's just that Carlos, apparently, talks about his lab the way most people talk about their houses, and makes calls from it when he's clearly just woken up (he doesn't ask how Cecil knows where he was calling from), and returns to it after dates. At night. Just that.
Chatting on the phone between their fifth date and their sixth, while Carlos is working and Cecil is doing whatever it is he does with the twenty-three and a half(ish) hours of the day(ish) that he doesn't spend broadcasting, Carlos tells him that he stays at the lab most of the time because it's strange to sleep and cook and eat and move around in the apartment he shared with his original team. All of them are gone now. New colleagues flit in and out of town, some of them driving off with tires squealing after a matter of days, many of them not having that sort of good sense or good luck. And most of them stay in that apartment.
And he doesn't want to get close to them.
It isn't a particularly intense conversation, as theirs go. The topic changes easily, and slips from his mind.
Sometime after Carlos has stopped counting the dates, he calls to cancel one. And on top of everything else that has happened that day, he does not have the energy to cope with such a crestfallen voice on the other end of the line. His hand twitches and it takes every ounce of self control not to hang up, drop the phone, and crawl under a table.
He takes a deep breath. “Something happened, Cecil. I wouldn't be much fun tonight. Maybe tomor- maybe Tuesday, how does that sound?”
There is a long pause – long enough that he begins to wonder if he's failed to notice being hung up on. Finally, Cecil speaks. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Carlos says calmly. No. No no no. No. So much blood so much such awful marks such awful awful he was MARRIED -
“...Carlos, what happened?”
“Nothing,” he snaps, and he hears Cecil draw a sharp breath, but there's no response. He realizes then that Cecil will really let him leave it at that, if he wants to, and suddenly he no longer does. “...We lost our new particle physicist. Robert. He. He's dead. He died. Today. Tonight. Is what happened. Must've been – after your show ended or you would have – I missed your show, I didn't –” He's babbling. He needs to hang up.
He needs to hang up, but Cecil is talking again, voice quiet and serious.
“Do you want me to come over?”
“Wh- no, it's, I'm, everything's. Okay. Fine. Everything. We're – I'm fine.”
“Carlos –”
“Really,” Carlos assures him. “I'm – I'm okay, Cecil. I just. I'm tired. I'm so... I think I'm just. Going to... go to bed.”
“Are you in the lab?”
“I'm. No. I'm... in the apartment. Tonight. With the others.”
He glances around as he says it. Joanne and Rodrick are passed out in a pile of blankets on the living room floor. Sandra is pacing in the hallway and Ivan is slumped over the kitchen counter, head in his arms.
Please come over, Carlos screams silently. Please come over and stand next to me so I'll know there's at least one person here I might not see die.
“Goodnight,” he says aloud, wincing at the abruptness in his own voice. Cecil echoes him, quietly, and Carlos slams his phone down and forces himself to lie down on the couch and shut his eyes until exhaustion drags him under.
-
They don't talk about it.
-
They don't talk about it for a long time, and then one night at what the clock in the diner assures him is five in the evening and what the sky seems to be insisting is midnight or thereabouts, Carlos realizes that it has officially been Too Long since he went through the apartment. No one is living there at the moment. He's – between colleagues. The phrase occurs to him and he snorts into his drink, laughing because the alternative is hurling his glass at the wall, and that's only taken as a compliment here on Sundays.
He has written to the agency several times, telling them to stop sending people. He has called, and been greeted with voicemail boxes he didn't recognize, and he has left messages anyway. He has emailed. He has texted. He has begged.
He has waited for new recruits to pull up, faces bright with interest and excitement and what he would never have recognized as innocence before watching it fade from his own eyes, and he has taken each one of them by the shoulders and told them exactly what has happened to their predecessors.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes they jump back in their car and drive straight back out of town and probably file a complaint.
More often that that, though, they take it as a challenge. And he can't even be angry at them for it, because he knows he would have done the same thing, once.
But right now, the apartment is empty. Boyd and Elena packed their things and hit the road last week. The week before that is best left out of all conscious recollection. There is a message on his phone informing him that replacements will be arriving in two days. He's not sure when that word stopped being innocuous and started making human beings sound like lab equipment.
The apartment is a mess, but that's not what he's worried about. It hasn't actually been clean even once since he and his original team moved in – just a constantly shifting pile of important clutter, scientifically fascinating and metaphysically horrifying.
But some of that clutter is his. And some of it isn't, in a recognizable enough way to pass for something like remembrance. Mementos.
He stares at his drink, and he's been here too long to be startled by the way it swirls into the shape of an eye and stares back. He sticks his tongue out at it. It widens in alarm and scatters back into a shapeless but now clearly affronted smoothie.
Two days is plenty of time to find what he needs. More than enough. It will take maybe an hour. He could go tomorrow.
He entertains the thought for roughly ten seconds before sighing and pulling out his phone.
–
The supposedly evening air is hot and still, and he regrets walking to the diner instead of driving. It was also significantly brighter outside when he went in half an hour ago.
Cecil's car is sitting outside the apartment when he gets there. Cecil hops out, managing to smile and look worried at the same time. “I could have picked you up!”
Carlos shrugs. “I didn't mind walking,” he says. The real reason is longer and more complicated and it's less that he's trying to be secretive and more that his throat feels full of dust.
All he's told Cecil is that he needs help moving some things back to his lab, but he's almost certain Cecil knows there's more to it than that. Because Carlos doesn't ask for help with these things. Cecil offers, without fail, and sometimes Carlos will accept the offer, but he never just asks out of the blue like this.
It takes him a few tries to get the key into the lock, and as he opens the door, Cecil takes one of his hands. It doesn't actually back up the idea that he knows something is wrong – sometimes Cecil just does that. It should be commonplace by now, expected and normal and boring. It's not. And right now it helps.
“What are we looking for?” Cecil asks.
“Anything with my name on it or in my handwriting,” Carlos says, and thinks they should probably split up, even though it means Cecil letting go of his hand a few seconds sooner. “If there's anything else I'll know it when I see it.”
He has lost all sense of the apartment's size. When he and his team showed up, they found it pleasantly and surprisingly accommodating – not too big, not too small. With every person they lost, it seemed to grow larger. His second night living in it alone, Carlos woke up for no readily apparent reason, and he could not see the walls around him, and he could not make his brain understand that they were there, and he felt as though he were floating in an endless void, darkness pressing in from all sides, and for the first time since he was a small child he hid his face under blankets and didn't mind the stifling heat.
In the morning, the walls were there. There was no 'of course' to add to the discovery, because, of course, this was Night Vale.
The walls were there, but the damage was done, and since that night the feeling of the void has never really left the place. It devours names and crawls over bodies and snakes tight around him but for whatever reason never sinks its claws in.
Now the apartment is huge and gaping like a mortal wound, and every room is tiny.
Tiny and full of papers. And boxes. And beakers, and mugs, and desk organizers, and laptops, and stashes of pens and pencils hidden away.
And Lilly's cell phone and Eric's wallet and Natasha's baseball cap and Lydia's bobby pins, scattered everywhere. And Fadil's glasses and Omar's sketchpad and Alexa's headphones and Molly's jacket that she wore out to the scrublands in the middle of the night. And Joanne's watch and Rodrick's prayer shawl and Ivan's empty backpack.
He's been mindlessly gathering things up for nearly five minutes before the sound of Cecil moving around in the other room registers, and it brings him up short like a splash of cold water. He realizes his arms are full.
Shaking his head and blinking, he moves across the hall to the dining room and dumps it all carefully onto the table.
Which is when he spots the barrette on the floor.
It's blue with thin green stripes, and there's a small purple gem set into one end of it, and he freezes in place as the void rushes in around him and spits out a name:
Adelia.
His throat aches. His mouth is dry, his heartbeat thunderous.
Slowly, he bends down to pick up the barrette, and halfway there some part of him finally snaps and throws its drink against the diner wall and Carlos is on his knees with his forehead pressed against the edge of the table, fingers wrapped painfully tight around the metal hairclip, eyes blurred with tears that drip onto his glasses and distort everything even more and he's dizzy, his head is spinning, full of names dates faces accidents equipment malfunctions freak mishaps impossible phenomena screaming bleeding mutating falling names names names he can't move he can't breathe he can't think he can't –
“Carlos.”
Somehow, above the sounds of his own heart and the roaring in his head, he can hear Cecil perfectly. He doesn't register most of the actual words, but his voice is as smooth and as calm as it ever is and Carlos doesn't struggle as Cecil gently pries his hand open and takes the barrette away.
“You're all right,” Cecil says firmly, and that is definitely The Voice of Night Vale. “Carlos. Everything is fine. They have moved on to the next life or possibly, from their own point of view, just gone to sleep, and you are still here, and you are all right, Carlos.”
Cecil can make nearly anything sound both reasonable and positive, and Carlos appreciates it, he really does, but it's not what he needs, not right now. He shakes his head and shoves his glasses off onto the tabletop and hunches against Cecil and quakes.
And Cecil seems to get it. He stops talking, anyway, and wraps one arm around Carlos's back and strokes his hair with his other hand and doesn't at all seem to mind sitting on a dirty floor and holding a hysterical scientist. But then, people who mind things like that don't last very long in this town.
The void, the almost liquid black mass that Carlos is very aware he is personifying as a manifestation of negative emotions and memories but that he is also very aware might have evolved into something more literally real by now, doesn't seem to know what to do with two people.
The dark retreats. The names, the faces, the ragged screams and the bloody, reaching hands – all of it stops. His mind is blank. Slowly, he catches his breath. He shuts his eyes, head pounding from both the crying jag and the lack of glasses.
“Sorry,” he mutters into Cecil's chest. He's supporting most of his own weight on one arm, but he realizes suddenly that his other hand is clenched tight around Cecil's shirtsleeve. He lets go and clears his throat. “I know this – sort of thing – people d- I mean... I know it just... sort of... happens, here. I just.” He takes a deep breath. Speak. “I've gotten used to a lot of things here,” he rasps, smiling weakly. “The... casualty rates are kind of... a hurdle.” There. Two whole sentences.
Cecil is still stroking his hair. “Do you know how many interns the radio station has lost?” he asks quietly.
Carlos frowns. “No...?”
“I do.”
“...Oh.”
“Months of repression followed by a sudden breakdown is actually one of the top coping methods recommended by the Night Vale Psychiatric Association,” Cecil says brightly, and it takes Carlos a moment to separate the tone from the actual words.
“...Great,” he manages. “That's good to know. I'll make a note. Somewhere. ...Thank you, Cecil.”
“Mmhm.”
They finally begin to separate, and as his senses start functioning properly once more, Carlos takes stock of the situation.
Moments like this were always romantic, when he used to work in places where leaving the television on for background noise was more likely to leave him staring numbly at a soap opera at two in the morning than diving over a chair to make the empty screen stop shrieking.
Nothing about this feels particularly romantic. He's shaky and tired and he aches all over, and they're still on the floor next to a table piled high with things that belonged to dead people, and there's rug burn on his hand where it slid against the rough carpet and his face feels like stretched latex and squinting up at Cecil hurts his eyes.
They kiss anyway.
--
Addendum:
--
Eventually they do get up, and Carlos's back is twinging and his head is pounding and he's pretty sure he bruised both knees, but Cecil takes his hand again, so, really, things could be worse. Even if it is the hand with the rug burn.
“What do you want to do with this?” Cecil asks him quietly, gesturing at the pile of deceptively normal objects on the table.
“Leave it. I should –” Carlos swallows – fumbles his glasses back on, and breathes a little easier for it. “I should come back tomorrow.”
“I'll come with you,” Cecil says instantly, and Carlos huffs a quiet laugh.
“After this? Really?”
“Especially.”
There is nothing to say to that.
They go out to the car, and Cecil motions for him to get in. Carlos isn't sure what he'll do if Cecil drives him to the lab, because admitting out loud that he doesn't want to be alone is the one line he can't bring himself to cross tonight. He's pretty sure he sidestepped it on his way to sobbing over a dead colleague's hairclip on a kitchen floor, but, on the subject of lines, there is a thin one between sidestepping and crossing and his last shred of self image is currently draped over it. (And it's nothing to do with dignity, which is a dangerous concept in Night Vale. It's to do with identity and personality and the way he perceives himself, and he has never been the type of man to lose his composure like that.)
He lets his head fall against the window, and the cool glass is the best thing he has ever felt in his life.
“You can sleep on the couch,” Cecil says. “If you wouldn't be comfortable in the bed. I wouldn't mind you in the bed. I just don't want you to think I'm presuming.”
Carlos blinks. “...We're going to your apartment, then?”
“Yes. Or if you really want to go back to the lab, I'm sure I could stay out of your way there.”
“Your place is fine,” Carlos says quietly. “Thank you.”
He doesn't even know if he's been awake long enough to justify being tired. The sky is now a hazy pink and orange barcode pattern, and the dashboard clock is blinking a cheery A S K A G A I N L A T E R.
Slowly, tentatively, a new thought creeps in.
“...Cecil?”
“Hmm?”
“What you said... Is that your – 'coping method'?”
Cecil glances sideways at him, briefly, before looking back at the road. “With the interns, yes. Usually.”
“So are – are you –”
“I'm fine for a while.”
Carlos leans back in his seat, trying to take in all the implications of that statement. Almost none of them are pleasant. “You should call me,” he says, before he can think better of it. “I mean, unless you don't want to – I just mean, I would... like... to be there. For you.”
Cecil's blushing smile would be more suited to a lovestruck confession or grand romantic gesture than the stammered pre-planning of his own emotional breakdown, and he says “Thank you, Carlos,” with the same air of pleasantly surprised euphoria that Carlos heard on the other end of the line back when they made their first date.
The familiar dissonance is one of the most reassuring things that has happened all night.
“Any time,” Carlos says faintly.
-
Late enough the next night that it's nearly morning, there is a backpack full of important and illegally recorded papers hidden beneath a pulsating sigil in Cecil's bedroom closet, an overfull box of odds and ends next to his television, and a half-asleep scientist on his couch.
Carlos lies with his head in Cecil's lap, reading an article on his phone while Cecil runs careful fingers through his hair and talks about whatever comes to mind. It's a nice way to fall asleep, though his glasses are digging into his face and the small part of his brain that still has time to concern itself with such things is wondering at the full implications of the fact that they brought everything back here. Some of the components to a few of his current projects have already been here for a couple weeks, and he hasn't even explicitly admitted to calling the laboratory home yet, and he's not sure exactly how the awkward stage of beginning to move in with someone but not calling it 'moving in' is supposed to start when he's not even sure where he's denying moving out of.
"You're thinking too much," Cecil says quietly, running one hand down the back of his neck. Carlos shivers. Cecil is still talking. "You need to fall asleep soon. They keep track of that more closely at this residency level."
"Right," Carlos says, and turns off his phone. "Of course."
-
The truck pulls up to the lab just past noon, by the last clock he looked at. A man and a woman step out, and double-take the instant they see him.
His hair is too short to be pulled back; it hangs into his eyes and sticks out in all directions, the gray more prominent than it really should be, given his genetics. He showered, this morning, but he put yesterday's clothes on afterwards and has been working all day since then. His white labcoat is stained with mud and grass and strategically chosen neon-bright chemicals, and a bit of blood he smeared along the collar after a fortuitous papercut. He is ready.
The woman recovers first. She steps forward and introduces herself. He pretends to listen, and nods just as attentively when the man follows her lead.
Handshakes are exchanged. He doesn't offer his name. He grabs the man by the shoulders and looks the woman dead in the eyes and takes a deep breath.
"Run."