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The fact Cecil could barely remember any of his life was… fine. Really, it was fine. Lots of people in Night Vale had memory issues, it wasn’t like he was the only person here who couldn’t remember large stretches of their childhood. Or their adolescence. Or their young-adult years. Or how old they were, or when they started their current job, or their birthday. It was normal. Perfectly normal. Time was weird in Night Vale, after all. Carlos - beautiful, perfect Carlos - had said so years ago. Time didn’t work here at all for lots of people.
At least until recently, anyway. Time worked normally in Night Vale now. It’d worked normally ever since Lee Marvin’s 31st birthday. No one was quite sure what had caused it to start working normally, but that wasn’t any of their business, now, was it? Time could do whatever it wanted, and if what time wanted was to progress normally, then a simple community radio host couldn’t exactly tell it to go back to not working, could he? Hypothetically. If that were a thing a simple community radio host was worried about.
Carlos had been so excited, and Cecil had been excited because Carlos had been excited, and then they’d gotten stuck in a cycle of scientific joy based on the correct passage of time in Night Vale, and Carlos had done that thing with his hands and the bouncing that Cecil thought was so, so wonderful and perfect. And then, well, swept up in Carlos’s excitement as he was, Cecil hadn’t noticed the early seeds of anxiety that had buried themselves deeply into his chest.
Cecil had never worried about aging before. He didn’t age, and that was just a fact of life for him and for a lot of people in Night Vale. He didn’t age, and so keeping track of such little details of how old he was didn’t really make much of a difference. He had more important things to worry about. Like bringing Night Vale their news. And then, one day, it had hit him that he would age again, and he didn’t know… what that meant for him. So he pushed it into the little box in his brain where he’d also put all the information he wasn’t allowed to know or didn’t want to know and shut it tight and pretended like it wasn’t an issue.
It wasn’t an issue!
Really!
Who needed to know how old they were, anyway? Everyone dies in the end, and it doesn’t matter in the long run how many years you have with a beating heart, and lungs which expand and contract, and a brain that could think. Who cared? Not Cecil Gerswhin Palmer, that was for sure!
He was fine with it, even when he looked at Carlos next to him one sleepy, gray morning and couldn’t tell just how much time he’d have-
No. Nope, that thought went into the Forbidden Thoughts Box. None of that.
Carlos’s eyes opened slowly, and Cecil found it was really easy to chase the bad thoughts back out of his brain when he could just stare into his perfect, beautiful, wonderful husband’s sleepy eyes instead.
Cecil stared at the document in his e-mail, the neat, heavily-censored Courier-New typeface of the Sheriff’s Secret Police memo he’d been sent during the community calendar, as though reading it a fourth, fifth, sixth time would make the words on the screen no longer true. He wasn’t sure how he was still reading, voice moderately stable, as the insultingly-tidy text threatened to collapse his entire life.
Warrant. Carlos. Arrest.
They stood out as if in blood from the screen, unimaginably horrible, and no matter how many times- seven, eight, nine, ten- he reread it, they stayed there.
Arrest. Carlos. Warrant.
Carlos.
Warrant.
Arrest.
Carlos.
He had to-
“I’ve got to call Carlos, I-”
Cecil wasn’t sure what he’d do if Carlos didn’t pick up.
He fumbled his phone, once twice thrice, and- there was a voicemail, and he let it play over the air. He was used to the Secret Police, yes, you sort of had to be used to the Secret Police if you lived in Night Vale. Sometimes, though, the situation caught up to him, and this was one of those times. A time where Cecil remembered that so, so, so many people arrested by the Secret Police never saw the light of day again, never saw their families again, he was losing Steve and Carlos all at once-
“Let’s go to the weather,” he heard himself say, distant and underwater. Carlos, no, not Carlos-
He left the recording booth in a rush, the intern in the production booth looking up at him with concern as music flooded the room and the radio.
Sure, maybe he’d only had Carlos in his life for eight years. And, yeah, maybe eight years wasn’t a long time in the grand scheme of one’s life. But they were still the clearest eight years of Cecil’s life. He… he wasn’t sure how much time had passed before Carlos had come to town. He wasn’t sure how much more time he’d have, how aware of it he’d be without Carlos, he’d started to feel like a person again with Carlos and-
No, no, no, no, all of that was bad and needed to go into the Forbidden Thoughts Box, Carlos would be fine. Carlos would be fine. Carlos would be fine. Carlos was a scientist, and scientists were usually fine.
He sat in the bathroom and stared at Khoshekh, curled up on himself with the door locked, until he was okay again. He’d be okay. He had to be okay. Carlos had to be okay.
And he was, and he was glad for the muted microphone as Steve played over the radio, Carlos’s scientific genius coming through as it always did, because Carlos was a scientist and scientists were always fine, and he was so choked up in relief that they were safe, that they were both safe, that he couldn’t speak for a moment.
“Hey, honey,” Carlos said, sneaking up behind Cecil as he was cooking dinner and snaking his arms around to hug him.
“Hi, babe,” Cecil responded, leaning back against Carlos while keeping the stir fry sizzling away on the stove from burning and sticking to the bottom of the pan. “How was the science today?”
Cecil could feel Carlos’s smile next to his ear, and he sighed happily.
“Mark was convinced that there was a new vacant lot somewhere on the edge of town, which we all thought was strange, so we went to investigate it. We didn’t find a spontaneously-appearing stretch of asphalt, but we did discover a brand new species of fungus in the lab bathroom!”
“Hallucinogenic, I presume?” Most bathroom species of fungus were hallucinogenic, at least.
“Of course. Luisa wanted to eat it, but we decided it would probably be safer to do tests that wouldn’t lead to her likely early demise, you know?”
“Mmm, yeah.”
“We don’t think it’s deadly now, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry.”
“Oh, absolutely. You wouldn’t want to discover one of the fanged varieties on accident by trying to eat it. Made that mistake once.” Wait, when had he…?
“Oh yeah?”
“I think it was a boy scouts thing,” Cecil said, frowning slightly as he pushed the mix of rice, various veggies, and chicken around in the pan. “It’s… been a while, I think, though.”
Carlos knew he had issues with his memory. They’d talked about it. They’d talked about it at length, actually, around six years ago when he’d played some tapes he had no memory of making on the radio. He didn’t like thinking about that part of their lives, though, not because they were having problems but because, well. He pushed it back into the dark corners of his mind. He was here with Carlos, best not to dwell on long-past near misses with corporate dystopia.
So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Cecil felt Carlos hug him a little tighter, and he let himself close his eyes, just for a second. This was nice. Who needed clear childhood memories when he had his family around him now? They probably weren’t that great, really. Overrated, even, if you thought about it.
“But, the point,” Cecil said, in an effort to keep the mood from getting too somber, “it’s probably a good thing you kept Luisa from eating it on a whim.”
“Even outside of Night Vale, it’s common wisdom not to mess with unknown fungi, but. We’re scientists.”
Which, neither of them needed to say, was explanation enough for the both of them. They lapsed into comfortable silence, Cecil leaning into the comfort of Carlos behind him.
Cecil sat with Carlos in the aftermath of Kasper Rhodes on their couch. Neither of them spoke. Cecil didn’t even know if he could speak. He’d celebrated on the radio, yes, joy and surprise and relief intermingling into one messy ball in his chest as he reported on Rhodes’s defeat, but. But the words had left him, and he felt hollow inside.
For the last two weeks, Cecil had been looping Rhodes’s phone call in his brain. Looping the initial, friendly greeting. Looping the moment Cecil heard him give praise to the Smiling God and everything in him had turned to ice. Looping how, for a moment, he was back, six years ago, being told the radio station was-
“Hey,” Carlos whispered, squeezing Cecil’s shoulders. “Remember what The Tall One said. Breathing.”
Breathing. Right. Right. Human lungs need oxygen to function to circulate blood to the brain. It was just science. Carlos taught him that.
Cecil breathed, and then tried to shove Kasper Rhodes into the Forbidden Thoughts Box. It was supposed to be bottomless, just like the City Council had always said. “Lock all your forbidden thoughts in a Forbidden Thoughts Box to cast them into the abyss, never to be known or un-known again!” read the pamphlets passed out at elementary school presentations by the Sheriff’s Secret Police.
It wasn’t working, though.
Cecil squeezed his eyes shut, turning his face into Carlos’s side.
Why wasn’t it working?
He felt the questioning noise Carlos made, with his face pressed up to his body so closely.
They were fine.
It was fine.
It was fine.
He… just… needed to fit this into his Forbidden Thoughts Box. Somehow. He couldn’t. The thought, the feeling, rebelled against his every effort to file it away to never be felt again, and he got the sudden, vivid image of a glass of water just on the verge of overfilling. His box was that glass, he realized in a panic. It wasn’t supposed to have a bottom like that. No one had ever hit it in their lives that Cecil had met. Maybe his Forbidden Thoughts Box was just broken?
A little voice in the back of his mind reminded him that the Forbidden Thoughts Box wasn’t an actual box in his brain, just an abstraction he’d been taught to forget unwanted information.
Why was this bothering him so much?
Why was this, something that had unequivocally ended in a victory, messed him up so bad? Why hadn’t it been something more obviously dangerous to him, like- like that beagle? Or StrexCorp?
He pushed that back down. No, bad. Bad thought. Bad thought right now. Too… too close, maybe, too easy to draw connections that would make it harder to shove everything back into the Forbidden Thoughts Box from which it had started to rise up. Too close to something he had to keep buried or else he wasn’t sure what would happen to him.
Maybe if he had a second box, he thought. When you filled up a box too full in real life, you got a second box. Maybe he just needed a second box.
How much had he shoved into that first one? How much time had he had to fill it up?
Into the box. Into the second box if it didn’t fit into the first.
Forget, just forget, just forget-
The second box, in his mind, was painted yellow.
It was February, which meant they’d entered the vague space of time that could contain Cecil’s birthday.
It wasn’t cold outside, but it wasn’t exactly hot yet, either, this early in the morning. It wouldn’t start getting unbearably hot as soon as the sun came up for a month or so yet, so Cecil liked to sit outside in the early mornings when he could. Sometimes he’d carry a conversation with the Secret Police officer who was always parked outside their home.
Today wasn’t one of those mornings.
Today was a “staring up at the vast, empty sky” sort of morning. Today was a “gathering himself after an unsettling dream, or a thought he couldn’t shake immediately” sort of morning.
Today was a “he’d been thinking too hard about his birthday” sort of morning. He’d waved at Romelia, the officer in front of the house this morning, because it was just good manners, but then he’d sat down on the ground and stared up.
He wasn’t sure if it helped. The sky here felt like a giant dome, and yet, something disconcertingly endless and close and ready to swallow him whole. If he stared up long enough, he could pretend like nothing existed but the blue expanse above him. It was better than dwelling too hard on things he couldn’t seem to remember, though.
Probably.
Well, it’d worked out well enough for him so far, he was pretty sure. He… admittedly didn’t know.
No, back to the sky.
It was empty at this time of morning. He could just barely see his house in his periphery. He’d laid down so that most of his vision was taken up by the sky. It wasn’t space, and it didn’t have the same effect as the stars at night, and certainly not the lights above the Arby’s. It felt almost like his VR set did, except he could still feel the grass around him.
He didn’t know why his birthday was bothering him so much, all of a sudden. He’d just sort of ignored it, up to this point. It hadn’t mattered, he wasn’t aging, so why bother keeping track, you know? There wasn’t really one. Not until now, not until time started to move correctly again and-
The color of the sky was nearly one solid color. It was light blue in the way washed-out blue dyed hair was, a little too light to be strictly only blue, but too dark to be yellow or gray. He could lie here for hours, just watching the sun make its trip across the sky, with the occasional rubber-band effect backwards, as if the universe itself were lagging slightly.
Except it didn’t do that anymore, not since time had been fixed. The sun rose and moved and set at almost the same time every day. He’d noticed as the year went on that it took longer to rise, shorter to set in the last few months. It was making Janice moodier, and Cecil wasn’t sure what to do about that or what he even could do about that. Maybe talk to Steve about it? Steve probably already knew. Steve probably already had a handle on it.
What was he doing?
He wished the sky would actually just swallow him up. He wouldn’t have to worry about any of this forgetting stuff anymore, then.
He could hear the sound of the door to the house opening, the sound of the creaky stair at the bottom of the short steps, the shifting of grass as someone walked toward Cecil. Then, Carlos, beautiful, perfect, just-woken-up Carlos with his beautiful perfect hair still a mess from bed, leaning over him. Blocking his view of the endless, yawning blue sky.
“What are you doing out here, babe?” Carlos asked.
“Gazing,” Cecil responded. He’d done this the last few days, too. Usually he was out of whatever mood he was in now before Carlos woke up for the day, though.
“Want some company?” Carlos asked, perfect as always.
“Sure, yeah,” Cecil said, and Carlos disappeared from his immediate sight as he settled down to lie beside Cecil on the crinkling grass.
“Something on your mind?” Carlos asked, taking Cecil’s hand in his own. His hand was warm in Cecil’s palm. Cecil wanted to lean into it, but he wasn’t sure if it’d make his fragile status quo shatter.
“Eh?” Cecil responded. “Not sure if I’m ready to talk about it yet.”
“Mmm,” Carlos hummed, squeezing Cecil’s hand. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Maybe he’d never be ready, Cecil thought, staring up at the sky.
He squeezed Carlos’s hand back as he resumed trying to drown himself in the dizzying expanse of the desert sky.
“Hey, bunny,” Cecil said, leaning over the back of the couch to drape his arms around Carlos, who’d been proofreading a science thing on his computer. He placed a kiss on Carlos’s temple before leaning further down to get a better look at the computer screen. “What’re you working on?”
Carlos stopped typing briefly to squeeze Cecil’s arm before he resumed typing.
“Report on the floating spirit that appeared in the corner of the lab last week and hasn’t disappeared yet,” Carlos replied. “It pays to have good, readable notes in case it becomes a recurring issue. And even if it doesn’t, it’s nice to have some record of events.”
Cecil nodded, already sketching out the segment on the show he was going to do about it, since he’d gotten a couple other reports of similar incidents. It was starting to turn into an actual news story, not just an isolated incident at the lab. Isolated incidents at the lab were outliers, usually, because the lab was already something of a hotspot for supernatural happenings. No one actually lived in the lab, so they couldn’t blame any of it on the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home, so the lab was just that weird.
Cecil wondered, briefly and wildly, if the Faceless Old Woman might know anything about him he’d forgotten, and he pushed the thought out of the way. Maybe it would fix things if he started back up his morning bloodstone rituals. He’d stopped them after… well, he knew he did them at one point, but he couldn’t really remember when. Which was exactly the problem. He remembered being less worried about his spotty memory when he was doing them, though.
Maybe it was one of those correlation-not-causation things Carlos always told him about. He couldn’t remember doing his morning rituals and knowing Carlos at the same time, either.
“Something on your mind?” Carlos asked, snapping Cecil out of his spaced-out state. He must have been quiet long enough for it to cease being comfortable and start being worrying. Whoops.
“Time,” Cecil said, leaning further into Carlos.
“Time?”
“Yeah. I guess. I don’t know.”
“Brain stuff?”
“Probably.”
“Want to come around the couch so we can cuddle properly, then?”
That sounded nice.
“Yeah,” Cecil said, before joining Carlos on the couch proper.
Lee Marvin, for all of his grief and heartache about his 30th birthday, had at least known how old he was.
Cecil had no such luxury. Cecil hadn’t thought he’d needed to know for so long that it had faded into the background for him. Now, it was such an issue that he couldn’t just sit with his thoughts before the topic arose, threatening to pop the lid of the Forbidden Thoughts Box. So, instead, he kept himself busy. He kept himself busy with the radio station, and he kept himself busy with Carlos, and he kept himself busy with Janice and Steve and Abby, and he kept himself busy being a general nuisance because the other, worse option was to get lost in his thoughts about his birthday, of all things, again.
There was a story about the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God he should follow up on, and he tried to keep up on it, he swore. But as soon as he saw the building, he felt something implacable in his gut shrivel up, felt the lid of the Forbidden Thoughts Box thud inside his brain, so he left it alone. He’d send an intern. The Joyous Congregation didn’t usually enforce their particular mutilations if you walked in with a smile already. Usually.
Cecil wasn’t walking in there, though.
That aside, Cecil keeps himself busy, and he avoids the connotations of his response to the Congregation, and he avoids thinking about his age or his childhood more than he absolutely has to, and he gets by.
It’s with a layer of detachment he remembers well, is comfortable wearing around him like a shroud. Those are the movements that get him through when he can’t trust himself to get through. It’s what he did when Strex took over, and it’s what he did when Carlos was gone, and it’s what he did when everything fell apart around him over and over and over and over across the last many years.
He’s out of practice, he can feel it. The distance feels ill-fitting in a way it never did before. He keeps himself together for the most part, though.
He should talk to Carlos about this.
He didn’t know if he had the words to talk to Carlos about this.
The words came so easy to him, when he was behind a microphone with a script or even a guideline in front of him. He thrived in a closed room with news reports and prepared ad reads and community calendars. He was never so great when he had to make the words happen by himself. He comes across as rude, brash, inconsiderate, insensitive. People in town liked him because he was on the radio, and it was the sort of place where everyone at least sort of knew everyone, but he tended to make enemies much easier than he made friends.
It had taken reality falling apart on him for him to admit that he was mad at Steve for something so selfish on his part. Something he should have just talked to Steve about years ago, something that he had carried with him for long enough it had made him bitter and hard and angry and never, ever shared with anyone. Something that had strained his relationship with his sister, with his niece, the niece it had all been about, because she was a kid but kids weren’t stupid, in fact they were often very bright and oh, Janice was one of the brightest out there in Cecil’s eyes.
He should talk to Carlos.
Talking to Carlos would probably mean unpacking it, though, and Cecil wasn’t sure he was ready for that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
But that wasn’t what he was doing, he reminded himself, tuning back into the press conference at City Hall that he was likely going to be reporting on later in the day. He was taking night shifts again, much to Carlos’s chagrin, but the normal night shift guy (Cecil… wasn’t actually sure who it was, but he knew the guy existed, at least theoretically) was on vacation, and Station Management had signed Cecil up without, exactly, his knowledge or consent.
He wondered, as he did the first time he’d taken the night shift, whether anyone would be awake to listen to his show at all. Maybe Carlos, but Cecil wasn’t going to ask Carlos to stay up extra late just to catch his show. (He was aware he might not have a say in the matter.) He’d… realistically, just be broadcasting into the dead night again. But, well, he hadn’t made that decision for himself, he’d just been handed his new assignment for the week.
When the press conference was over (and, if Cecil was being honest, he still wasn’t entirely sure what the point of it had been, other than maybe Pamela Winchell getting bored) Cecil made his way to the station. He could at least get his notes together for the show later, and then figure out what he could report during the night shift later…
He jumped a little as his phone rang in his pocket, and he dug it out to see it was Carlos calling. He answered it.
“Hey, babe,” Cecil answered the phone. “What’s up?”
“Just checking to see if you wanted me to stop by the station later with dinner, before I dedicate myself to cooking tonight.”
It jerked some part of the cloudy shroud of unawareness Cecil had wrapped himself in all day, hearing Carlos’s voice. No, maybe that’s not the best way to put it. His voice settled something inside Cecil, something that had been pacing restlessly in his chest over the last few days.
“That would be nice,” Cecil said. “What were you planning to make?”
“I wasn’t totally sure yet. Whatever caught my eye at the store I thought I could turn into a decent meal, I suppose. Any requests?”
“Not particularly. Thanks for cooking.”
“Of course! Not our fault Station Management gave you extra work this week. See you after the show?” He could hear the smile in Carlos’s voice, even across the phone.
“Yeah, see you after the show,” Cecil said, and found himself smiling too. “Bye, sweetie.”
“Bye, honey,” Carlos responded, and then hung up. Cecil put his phone back in his pocket and continued his walk to the station.
The shroud of mental distance wouldn’t settle back down quite correctly again, though.
It was during a break in the show when he saw it, a potential solution to his birthday problem. He was letting the weather report play, taking advantage of the short break to check his Tumblr. He was happy to see new notes on some of his Khoshekh woodcarvings, and it was nice to have a weather break where nothing, nothing at all happened. Nothing dangerous or life-threatening or world-ending. There were shockingly few weather breaks during which nothing major occurred, at least according to Carlos.
In the middle of his scrolling was a text post that almost caused him to drop his phone, drawing a questioning look from the station’s latest intern, a woman named Harli, in the production booth.
ok, but like, read the text post, why do we even care about birthdays? theyre literally just… dates. pick your own birthday or whatever if you dont like the one youve already got it seems pretty simple actually. weve assigned some really weird, emotionally-loaded importance to them? but that might just be me.
Intern Harli mouthed “you okay?” to him through the producer room window. Cecil gave her a thumbs-up, before quickly scrolling past the offending text post. It was ridiculous. You couldn’t just- pick your own birthday! It was important. Cecil was pretty sure it was important. It had been important, back when time didn’t work right. Keeping track of certain dates, like birthdays, or anniversaries, or holidays was important. If you didn’t keep track of anything, you ran a very good chance of running into some significant time-based problems.
But, now… now, time worked properly. Time didn’t need Night Vale’s residents to keep it tethered through annual rituals of celebration and grief. Time just… moved. Those annual rituals were still important, sure, but probably only in a very abstract way. A method of social bonding, as opposed to a necessary component to reality’s coherence. Did it really matter if a birthday was celebrated on the actual day of one’s birth, then?
Could he just pick one?
Why did it even matter?
The weather report was almost over. Cecil took a deep breath and shook the thoughts out of his brain. He straightened his notes and set his phone down and waited the last few seconds for the weather report to end.
The Delta flight play fiasco was… bad, Cecil judged, but it sure provided a distraction from his birthday woes. Enough of a distraction that the range for his birthday passed without his awareness or acknowledgement. He knew he was another year older. He still didn’t know what that meant.
He pushed it off again, as he always did, focusing instead on his reporting and investigation of the Delta flight. It certainly looked like it might spiral worse, and if Cecil’s job as a reporter meant anything, it meant he had to keep on top of things that might spiral so bad they put people in danger. Especially in Night Vale.
Death was inevitable, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be postponed through up-to-date reporting on crisis situations.
It had… run into something of a dead end, though. He’d been trying to track down the asylum’s owner, to no avail.
It wasn’t that Cecil didn’t know where Charles Rainer was. Quite the opposite, actually. The man was making quite a scene of himself and his recently-emptied asylum. It was more that Cecil couldn’t track him down long enough for an interview, or even just a simple conversation with the man.
“Ugh,” Cecil said, leaning on the kitchen counter. “This is going nowhere.”
“Why don’t you try talking to someone else about it?” Carlos asked as he did the dishes. “Sheriff Sam, maybe.”
“Because I did, and Sheriff Sam laughed and told me to drop it because they had it under control.” Cecil made air quotes around “under control,” because the last time Cecil had checked, the Secret Police were doing the same thing Cecil was: trying to catch Charles Rainer long enough to get any concrete information on the situation.
“They haven’t been around long enough to know just how allergic you are to dropping leads on a story,” Carlos commented. “They’re just new.”
“It’s still frustrating. You hear that, Sheriff Sam?” The statement wasn’t directed anywhere in particular, but Cecil knew the Sheriff would get the message either way. “Super frustrating!”
“Maybe don’t antagonize them, sweetheart.”
“People are getting worried. It’s my job to report the news, and so far, the news is running away from me and everyone else who could get me information into the sand wastes. By himself!”
“Maybe you could do some fun shows,” Carlos said as he shut off the water and dried his hands on the towel hanging on the oven door. “Some listener calls, maybe.”
“Listener calls, huh,” Cecil said, as the puzzle of how to get ahold of Charles Rainer started to unravel itself. “I might do that, actually. Thanks for the idea, bun.”
“Of course, bee,” Carlos responded, kissing Cecil on the forehead and leaning on the counter across from him. “Still planning on making cookies?”
“Of course. I can’t have Susan Willman one-upping us, now, can I?”
Carlos got that fond smile on his face that made Cecil’s chest warm, even after being together for so long.
“No, of course not,” Carlos said, and everything was okay.
The breaking point came in the middle of the night, in what had been a quiet moment. No danger, no breaking news story, no strange meteorological events. Just a quiet moment in the middle of the night, laying next to his husband in bed. Just a single moment when something slid out of the Forbidden Thoughts Box and he hadn’t been quite quick enough to shove it back in before more followed.
It was just a phantom of electricity, a touch of long-ago pain in his lungs. The smallest reminder of it all that managed to catch up to him and pushed open the lid of one of the Forbidden Thoughts Boxes, and suddenly, he couldn’t keep it shut the way he’d always been able to before. If two boxes ended up sharing the same storage space, he realized, then that was only just another way for the box’s contents to escape unrestricted.
The human brain only has so much space, and adding a second box didn’t actually expand that space in any meaningful way, and now it was coming back around to bite him. It had just afforded a second opening, a second way for things to get out. A second way for everything to explode on him, alone in his own head.
Cecil choked on it, a surge of unwanted midnight memories. It was unfair, he thought, as he attempted to contain sobs behind a hand over his mouth. It was unfair how he’d forgotten so much about his life, about himself, but he couldn’t successfully forget this. He couldn’t lock away the smell of blood saturating his studio, or the terror he felt whenever Lauren would talk about his family, or the pervasive yellow posters and lights and signs and pamphlets promoting Strex products and the Smiling God. It threatened to strangle him.
The second box was yellow.
Strex was gone, a cult of violence replaced by angels who used its name to fund the arts. Strex was gone but some part of Cecil was still trapped in that studio as Lauren forced words into his mouth through threats and “gifts” and violence presented as assistance. He could still see Daniel pulling the plug on his microphone when he said too much and desperately fleeing to the bathroom or the roof or some mostly-empty closet.
This, this breakdown, was a long time coming. After Rhodes, it had become inevitable. The surface tension of that glass, so precipitously filled just above the brim, had broken. He’d added only just a miniscule amount extra and now water was flowing over the edge, onto the table and the floor and anything else the water could reach. It was spilling out of his eyes, terror and fear made liquid and salty.
He felt Carlos stir beside him, and he tried to stop, tried desperately to shove it all back into some emergency container before he could wake Carlos up.
“Mmm. Cecil?” Carlos muttered, turning toward Cecil. Cecil couldn’t get his words to work, backed up and stopped and colliding with the tightness in his chest and his throat, so he just shook his head.
It was just the worst when this happened, when he lost control over his words like this, where he couldn’t get anything out. Instead of words just came another heaving sob. A light turned on.
“Hey, hey, what happened?” Carlos asked, voice quiet and soft and reassuring. Perfect, too perfect for the messy half-reality Cecil was stuck in.
He could still smell blood, still see eye-searing sunshine yellow behind his eyelids, even six years later. He made a strangled, choked-up sound in his throat.
“Hey, shh,” Cecil heard Carlos say, felt the shifting of sheets around him as Carlos pushed himself up. “Brain stuff?”
Cecil, with no words to communicate with, just nodded.
“Okay,” Carlos said, and Cecil could feel his weight against his side. “This okay?”
He nodded again, the fight-or-flight starting to drain out of his system slowly, even as he gasped for breath, even as the metallic taste of bile and blood rested at the back of his mouth. He leaned against Carlos, trying to focus on that realness.
Carlos was there. Carlos was there. Carlos was fine. They were both fine.
“Carlos is here,” Cecil said, as though saying it out loud would make it more true.
“I am, as far as I know,” Carlos responded. “Did something happen?”
“I am safe,” Cecil said, instead of what he wanted to say, but it was safe. It was safe and wasn’t an acknowledgement of things that had escaped the Forbidden Thoughts Box. “We’re both here and fine. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about.” He couldn’t stop repeating.
“You sure?” Carlos asked. Cecil shook his head.
He had to see outside. He had to make sure that all those lights, all those yellow and orange lights and triangles, were gone. He thought they were, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d forgotten something so important.
He climbed out of bed and walked to the window, where he could see the rest of the street.
“What’s going on, babe?” Carlos asked, moving to sit on the edge of the bed. He was watching Cecil with worry. No, not worry, concern.
“I am looking out the window,” Cecil narrated, because that was safe. Carlos knew. Carlos had known for a while. He’d known after he’d started narrating, microphone-less, while everything had been falling apart… four years ago? That sounded right.
“What’s out there, then?” Carlos asked.
“Night Vale is dark,” Cecil continued at Carlos’s prompting. Talking was good. Talking he had control over. Talking was safe. Now that he had his words back, he could talk through this. “There are the lights of the Ralph’s in the distance, and the Arby’s. The lights above the Arby’s still shine. Everything is as it should be. Not a trace of-” No, acknowledging it was dangerous. He had to, though. Otherwise he might be forgetting. He had to make it clear. “Not a trace of yellow in sight,” he finished, because he had to.
“Oh,” Carlos breathed somewhere behind him, but didn’t ask. Cecil wasn’t sure if it would be better or worse if he had.
“Everything is okay,” Cecil said, and did his best to believe it. Everything would be okay. Cecil was still here, and so was Carlos. It would be okay.
It was just him and Carlos, sitting alone in their living room, after surviving the Pilot of Delta flight 18713. It was just him, and Carlos, and their thoughts, and their dark living room. Just like it had been in the aftermath of Kasper Rhodes, and when the phantom ocean had been raging through Night Vale, and after reality had nearly fallen apart and only just stitched itself back together, and every other time one or both of them had been terrified or just survived the brink of disaster.
They’d almost died again. They’d come so close to true oblivion this time. It was its own kind of horror, to be that close to an ending with nothing Cecil could do about it, no report he could give that would solve the problem. It had been luck. Pure and simple luck.
They truly owed so much to Amelia Anna Alfaro and her mother.
Life would go on. Life would return to normal, or whatever counted for normal in Night Vale. Cecil would continue to report the news on the radio, Carlos would continue to do science, and the world would continue to spin- with them in it.
Somehow.
Somehow, it would go on, and they’d move on, and they’d forget about this. They would forget all about Delta flight 18713, and they would forget about Kasper Rhodes, and they would forget about everything else that had happened to them.
Maybe they wouldn’t.
Maybe they’d never forget.
Maybe they were past forgetting.
“Hey,” Cecil said, gripping Carlos’s hand tight. “Why do we do this?”
“Do what?” Carlos asked, holding on just as tightly.
“Sit in the dark after every apocalyptic event.”
Carlos fell quiet for a moment.
“I don’t actually know,” he responded. “We just started doing it.”
“After you got back from the desert otherworld, right?”
“I think so.”
“We should do something else.”
“What do you propose?”
“Something. Anything else. I don’t…” Cecil paused. “This feels fragile.” It was too easy to get swallowed by his thoughts in the dark and the silence like this.
“Hm.” Carlos said, looking up at the ceiling. “I have an idea. Wait here for a second?”
“Sure.”
Carlos got up from the couch, and Cecil watched as he flipped on the lights and collected his phone and their speaker.
“Dance party?” Carlos asked, waving the two objects in the air. Cecil felt a smile cross his face.
“Dance party is something new,” he said, and joined Carlos at the counter as they set up the speaker and his Spotify playlist. The acoustic guitar which came out of the speaker, slightly staticky from the volume, made everything feel more solid. More real.
They started a new habit, then, whenever they survived something they weren’t sure if they would. They danced, and they cried, and they held each other close. Cecil could feel all the fear, all the terror from the last month that had been building up for weeks, just wash away in the kitchen lights and tinny mariachi music.
They’d be okay. Even if they didn’t forget, they’d be okay.
One day, he might not even need the Forbidden Thoughts Box in order to be okay.
Cecil sort of looked forward to that day, if he were going to be fully honest with himself. That day may not be today, or tomorrow, or even next week. But it would come. He’d speak it into existence if he had to.