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Cecil is a miracle.
No, literally. A medical, scientific miracle—Carlos doesn’t even know that much about human biology, except for a couple of neuroscience classes back in undergrad, before physics claimed his mortal soul for its own and woe to all ye who tried to follow.
But he knows enough. Tests have been performed, reports written, minds (typically Carlos’s) boggled. Cecil is a miraculous balance of functional impossibility and complete lack of concern about sprouting extra limbs. Some of which only exist on Thursday. Cecil has a list of his favorite superfluous limbs, complete with color-coded tissue samples, and whenever the census rolls around he chops off the less appreciated one until he’s back at the council-mandated eight to ten.
Carlos does not have eight to ten limbs (at least, he really hopes he doesn’t) and Cecil only giggles when questioned and pats his hand. It’s disconcerting. And kind of unfair, because Carlos is easily distracted by such quotidian things as a miracle touching him. In person. Palpably, in person. He’s never won the lottery in his life.
(He also will never, ever, EVER call Cecil a miracle to his face. He has this theory about the secret police repression and what it does to Cecil’s ability to filter any non-regulated topics. It’s not pretty. Also, Carlos didn’t know he blushed before coming to Night Vale.)
Oh, is he doing it again?
The fact that he’s having to digress in the middle of a tourist gift shop because his boyfriend is distracting (and miraculous) is really sad. The bearded old lady running at the register chews something that hisses and stares at the back of Carlos’s head darkly. Carlos, admittedly, is being indecisive.
The reason: would it be weird to get Cecil a card?
It’s not a special occasion or anything. The last holiday was Memorial Day, and all of Night Vale spent it huddled under comfortably tall pieces of furniture, with their mouths covered in protective duct tape in case they accidentally forgot themselves—except Cecil. Cecil spent the day in his slightly radioactive bomb shelter of a radio station while Carlos shivered and clutched desperately at the hacksaw he borrowed from Old Woman Josie down by the car lot, hoping—praying—pleading with the ungodly forces that governed this twisted town that they never, EVER find him.
He didn’t know what being “it” entailed in Night Vale, but after a while you stopped questioning the mass hysteria. Besides, Cecil was very sweet and kept reading off mortality figures and it was like he was speaking directly to Carlos; making him feel like it really was all just a simple game—
Off topic again. This is beginning to be a really bad habit.
Carlos has basically stopped taking ongoing survival for granted, though, so when you think about it, who needs a special occasion to get someone important a nice card? To extend a gesture of appreciation? And if they’ve only been dating for a week and a half, well… Cecil professed his love not forty-two hours after their first meeting. And having lived in Night Vale for a long enough period to understand that this experience was neither on candid camera nor a horror movie plot with a clearly stated conclusion, Carlos gets why Cecil would find that sort of thing necessary. Besides, Cecil almost died yesterday.
Which isn’t unusual. Carlos spends half of the radio show with racheting blood pressure and Cecil’s number on speed dial. Maybe the interns bodily shield Cecil because he’s a miracle. Maybe he’s indestructible.
Does Cecil even like cards?
The bearded woman harrumphs noisily behind Carlos.
Okay, all things considered, Carlos can just pretend that he bought the card to test atmospheric phenomenon or something. So far, that’s worked pretty well. Like the time when he forgot to throw the trash out and the whole lab smelled like rotten potatoes and formaldehyde and Cecil had taken him by the arm very gently and made him breathe fresh air until he remembered that he had a sense of smell.
(Embarassing.)
So Carlos shuffles his feet, hums the weather a little bit, and peruses the very, very anorexic card selection of the shop more times than necessary. He finally walks away with one that has a haloed, winged figure on the cover and the inscription: I’m Definitely Not an Angel. Those Aren’t Real. But If I Were, I Would Totally Recognize You as a Kindred Spirit. You, Undisclosed Citizen, Definitely ROCK!
Followed by one of Night Vale’s charming reminders to test your objective reality twice daily with a thermometer and a can of alphabet soup.
“Would you like extra emotion included?” The bearded lady asks. Whatever she’s chewing—still hissing like a malicious kitchen sink—it has rendered her teeth the approximate color of moss. Carlos shakes his head at the suggestion. He’s pretty sure that he’ll be able to provide emotion on his own. Or, failing that, Cecil tends to charge full speed ahead at the nearest dramatic moment, so they’re probably covered.
“Complimentary gift wrap or charming anthrax chemical surprise?”
“I’m good.”
“3.29, please.”
So Carlos buys his miracle card, blushes a little as he hides it in the glove compartment of his truck, and Cecil’s voice filters sinuously through the car radio.
“Now listeners, let me just say that I am so excited about tonight! There will be a celebratory banquet in an undisclosed location for you intrepid explorers. Tonight is a full moon—just make sure you’ve finished preparing your sacrifices to the bloodstone circle at least thirty minutes in advance, Night Vale. We all know how these things… run away from us.”
Carlos climbs into the truck bed, mildly concerned with how Cecil’s voice can simultaneously trigger fond butterflies and indescribable dread. Cecil’s voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. “And let’s keep this just between you and me, listeners—but Carlos has called me over! For a date!”
Carlos nearly runs a stop sign and grumbles at his sleeve, face heating up.
“At least I think it’s a date,” Cecil continues obliviously, to the entire town. “He didn’t say the word ‘date’? But he doesn’t usually call me over in the evening hours either, so do you think it’s presumptuous to assume…?” He cuts himself off with a cough, voice going slightly squeaky. “But then again, dear listeners, if I haven’t mentioned it yet… Carlos is now my—”
Carlos jabs the radio into silence before he can cause a traffic collision. He would like to survive long enough to assure Cecil that it was a date. Is a date. Ugh.
Do you know he’s gotten no science done today? None. He just loitered in the produce section of the Ralph’s for a ridiculously long period of time, picking out dinner ingredients. He also quite possibly forgot to eat any other meals today.
He’s pretty sure it’s a common problem, though. You know, having your brain fall out because you’re dating a miracle? Carlos does not remember seventeen being this awkward, but if it was Cecil across the table, then yes, it would be.
Maybe Cecil was just going to say that Carlos was now his best friend. Or colleague. Or. Um.
Carlos heads into his apartment, blushing to the tips of his ears and cradling the card to his chest. On his way in, he thinks he sees an angel flash him a thumbs-up.
Night Vale is full of amazing phenomenon. It’s true. But there’s only one miracle (there’s only one Cecil).
----
It is difficult to quantify what makes Cecil so miraculous when he’s folded all his long, graceful limbs behind a checkered tablecloth. His glasses are slightly askew. Carlos cannot remember what pants Cecil is wearing (because they are currently hidden by the tablecloth and Carlos was too distracted by Cecil’s tremendous smile to get a good look), but for once he’s not wearing one of his assorted sweater vests and slightly incorporeal ties. He’s wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled down, which never happens, and even if it is mostly turquoise, it also drapes around Cecil in that inescapably dress shirt-formal sort of way. His hair has clearly seen a comb in the last twenty-four hours.
He is awkwardly overdressed, which makes Carlos feel slightly better about the tablecloth purchased specifically for this occasion (which he now regrets, because it looks terrible) and the candles also purchased for this occasion (shoved behind the microwave when Cecil knocked and Carlos panicked spectacularly), and the card.
Alright, well, if you want some miraculous quantification besides what Cecil is wearing and the fact that his smile makes Carlos’s body feel like a helium balloon about to ascend skyward… Well, there are the eyes. They are difficult to describe.
There are also three of them.
Carlos has tested their pupil reflexes, and scanned them, and tracked their optic projections with mildly radioactive dyes—and they are all definitely Cecil’s eyes. They all work perfectly. There appears to be no ocular dominance issues, or amblyopia, or any of the very reasonable concerns that exist in three-eyed creatures outside of Night Vale. The third eye isn’t nearsighted either, and how does that even work?
There is Cecil’s heart, which, to the best of Carlos’s determining, has layers. The outer layer beats, on average, once every two hours. The inner layer beats a few seconds faster than a mouse’s. Together, the sound they make in Cecil’s veins and behind his ribs is like a very frantic symphony with great cymbal clashes demarcating two hours of miraculous survival.
His hands are like his voice—broad, eloquent, and unexpectedly unsettling. When Cecil isn’t paying attention they become cool to the touch and slightly harder than human skin should be. Sometimes, they seem to fade under direct lighting. Right now, as they rest on Carlos’s ill-advised tablecloth decision, they look beautiful and harmless and Carlos wonders if he should be holding one of them. Would that be… normal?
But alas, he’s serving dinner. It sort of necessitates being nearer to the oven than Cecil’s cool, slightly stiff hands. Plus Cecil keeps closing his mouth, only for it to split into a wide, helplessly toothy grin all on its own.
Okay. Sometimes, when you do a nice thing for someone, you realize that they don’t appreciate it the way you’d like and you’re left feeling both mildly indignant and mildly ashamed. Caught between the desire to assert just how much time you spent on this, how much effort, how much you are caring for this person through your actions, which is the hardest way to do it—and then comes the unpleasant realization that you maybe didn’t do this for them. Not the way you should have, because you had the audacity to expect fanfare in return, and everyone knows that’s selfish.
It’s difficult to quantify how Cecil is miraculous.
“Carlos,” he breathes as Carlos returns to the table (slightly hating the tablecloth, still). “That smells—it looks—you are—“ Carlos carefully lays the food out. Cecil’s grin is huge and full of gleaming teeth. “Thank you,” he finally manages, in a tone approaching dignity, with hands folded in front of his mouth, coyly and blushing.
Carlos sits down across from Cecil and tries not to be that person who stares when people try to eat. Seriously, he knows that person. Tan jacket. Deerskin briefcase. Kind of awkward to meet in a café halfway through a pastrami sandwich.
Cecil groans loudly, which ruins Carlos’s hard work. Now he has to look up, clearly, and make sure that Cecil hasn’t done anything local across the table from him—and no, it’s just his (boy)friend vocalizing pleasure, head tossed back, holding his folk aloft like a torch in the night.
“This is THE BEST THING I have ever put in my mouth,” Cecil declares to the ceiling. Carlos questions his judgment. Cecil looks at him again, and yes, Carlos maintains eye contact for about three seconds before he’s staring at his plate and fumbling with his fork like a toddler. “Carlos, I didn’t know you cooked! Well, I say cooked, which is a loathsome understatement. Anyone can cook. This is a gourmet—“
“I got the recipe from Google,” Carlos offers, and Cecil forges onward.
“—exquisite, delectable taste sensation. Why, I would not be eating better were I lost in one of the municipally-approved pits in the sand wastes.” Cecil’s voice dips towards the squeaky once more. “This is really wonderful. Thank you?”
Being thanked by a miracle is a weird thing. Carlos mumbles at his pasta and shrugs his shoulders a lot. And he thinks he might be really, really happy. It’s hard to tell. Cecil is distracting him.
One miraculous cardiac cycle later, the food is gone and they’re still sitting around the (slightly horrid) tablecloth, chatting. Cecil is easy to talk to, which is the first thing Carlos ever noticed about him (to be fair, third eyes are easily concealed with bangs and the ebullient warmth takes some time to verify in a world of cynics and sarcasm). All of Night Vale narrowed their eyes and watched Carlos’s every movement as though he were liable to, well, behave like Mayor Winchell, and in the midst of them, Cecil’s welcoming, rumbling questions kept Carlos talking for far too long and explaining much more about his work than he meant to. Or was strictly legal.
Cecil does that now—makes it impossible not to want to communicate with him—until Carlos barely remembers that he is suffocatingly nervous and has possibly sweated through his shirt and now doesn’t dare take off his lab coat because Cecil can say how perfect Carlos is all he wants; pit stains are pit stains.
And across the table, there is Cecil being witty and reverberating, and smiling, and looking absolutely and unquestionably attractive under the pallid, perpetually unctuous light of the labs, which washes out everything and makes it look two-dimensional and bland, unless it was a miracle to begin with. Oh god.
Okay, so Carlos might still be slightly nervous. But they are having an actual conversation that does not consist of monosyllables or prophesized doom and well, Cecil seems happy?
Honestly, Carlos would be a lot more at ease if not for the card. He… can’t stop thinking about the card.
He’s not giving it to Cecil. It would be weird. Buying it was a mistake. An adolescent, overexcited mistake. The date has gone well so far, and Carlos is not going to mess it up by giving Cecil a weird, We Both Survived Another Week and a Half and, Er, I Still Like You card.
No.
He will not.
Carlos is a confident, mature adult, and he’s certainly not thinking of just shoving the stationary under Cecil’s nose and proclaiming that the Glow Cloud made him do it. At all.
“And so I told him,” Cecil is saying with an enthusiasm that involves him pantomiming stabbing Steve Carlsburg in the eye with his fork. “That everyone knows that there’s no such thing as an immune system, and even if there was, it definitely wouldn’t be made of microscopic nucleated dots, and if he got snippy with me, my boyfriend the scientist would just have to come down and have a talk with him.” Cecil smiles up at Carlos through unfairly long eyelashes, looking shy and happy and vaguely smug all at once.
Carlos manages not to dive under the table in an attempt to hide from the fact that Cecil—Cecil the brilliant radio host who is utterly confused about how the human body works—can now call Carlos his boyfriend in person, without either of them being delusional. The situation is turning Carlos’s stomach into some sort of disturbingly unsteady gelatin. He still hasn’t tried to hold Cecil’s hand.
He… wants to.
Cecil blinks at Carlos. His smile fades for the first time this night.
“Carlos?” He questions, tilting his head.
Oh no, thinks Carlos.
Carlos is staring at his arm. It is attached to a hand, which is currently clawed around a card with an angel on the front. He quite possibly just tried to chop Cecil in the throat with it. Oh great. That was smooth.
While Carlos is staring at the card, aghast and sort of willing it to light on fire in a way that has nothing to do with living in Night Vale and everything to do with living as a person, Cecil delicately prizes the card out of his fingers. “Oh,” he says. He’s still not smiling. Carlos’s heart feels like it’s being sucked out of his ribcage. With a straw.
“I understand,” Cecil says quietly. “All this…” he looks up at Carlos and suddenly his smile slides back into place, only this time Carlos doesn’t have the urge to bury his face in his hands and a) groan like a dying elephant, b) produce a high-pitched whining drone, c) ask if he can hold Cecil’s hand. “You don’t have to invite me to dinner just because someone’s asked you to deliver a secret message, you know,” Cecil admonishes with subdued warmth. “Really, it happens all the time. A simple text would suffice.” Even his professional demeanor deflates a little. “…I thought this was a date.”
It is a date! Carlos shrieks in his head. His throat is playing at inconvenient mutism. “Ah,” he says. He tries to gesture; Cecil isn’t looking. The straw is succeeding. Carlos’s eyes squeeze closed.
“I bought it for you,” he blurts out. There is absolute silence from Cecil’s side of the table. Not good. “It’s, um. A gift. Not a secret message.” On a scale of one to fuck you, how awkward is this? Carlos peels an eye open. “Sorry, I… didn’t know how to—“ interact with the rest of society? “—bring it up.”
Behind his glasses—now slightly more askew, and Carlos is pretty sure that reaching out to adjust them would be inappropriate—Cecil’s eyes are huge. “This,” he holds the card up like Carlos imagines you might hold up a small dead rodent found in your basement. “Is a… card? From you to me?”
Carlos nods miserably. “I—“
Cecil is sprinting for the exit.
Carlos lets his head land on the table and its abominable tablecloth. Hard.
As he begins to try to process the fact that he just literally made Cecil run away from him (although not screaming; there might be hope), and that he can probably never leave his lab again out of a deep sense of shame, Cecil shouts from outside, “Carlos, come on! I need your help!”
Carlos stares morosely at the checkerboard tablecloth for a minute. And then it kind of registers that Cecil doesn’t sound furious or embarrassed or anything. He sounds kind of impatient. Which is not necessarily a negative thing.
Carlos knocks over his chair in his haste to get to the door (probably a good thing about the candles then). He finds Cecil on the lawn, having clawed his way through a good layer of sod and dirt. He is… burying the card.
Cecil looks up at Carlos, face pale and streaked with red earth. The full moon lights his glasses up. He looks like he could eat an entire family renting a cabin for the summer, and also so beautiful that Carlos ends up sitting down because he’s dizzy and relieved and his knees maybe gave out just a little.
“Give me a hand?” Cecil asks, continuing to tear out chunks of Carlos’s lawn.
Given the evening, Carlos thinks there’s little else he’d like to do more than consign the card to an earthy grave. He joins Cecil wordlessly, sifting through the rock and soil (mostly rock). Its gritty and it tears up the skin on his hands, and every so often, his hand brushes Cecil’s and Carlos ends up having to bite his lip not to smile.
They bury the card without further explanation, about three feet below the grass. Cecil then carefully replaces the sod while Carlos leans back and decides that he will never be getting the dirt out of his fingernails. Cecil has dirt under his fingernails too. Carlos decides he kind of likes it.
“Okay,” Cecil says, once the sod has been returned to a state eerily impossible to differentiate from the original. As Carlos considers the possible implications of how Cecil knows dug-up lawns—or just Carlos’s dug-up lawn—well enough to accomplish this, Cecil turns to him with a rueful smile. “Carlos. Oh, dear, sweet Carlos—you really should ask me before you do these things.”
That would kind of defeat the purpose, Carlos thinks. And then, huh?
Cecil grins at him, dress shirt immediately covered in filth as he crosses his arms and hunches down in affectionate awkwardness. “I suppose that it’s different where you come from, but in a civilized, orderly city like Night Vale, you never... deal with cards in the house.” He seems to have some trouble with the words ‘deal with’. He also shudders delicately and adds, “It was even a Hallmark card. That was… disturbing.”
Carlos reflects on his immaculate lawn and the concern mixed with warmth on Cecil’s face.
And he concludes that this is probably less to do with Carlos being a terrible boyfriend and more to do with Night Vale. Like the one time Cecil screamed and dove for cover under a plastic table when Carlos offered to share his fries. Or the time that Cecil rang the doorbell at three in the morning on a Sunday, threw a bucket of frigid water over Carlos’s head (chanting vigorously), and then led a deeply confused Carlos back upstairs to take a hot bath and drink some tea before he shivered to death.
“But don’t worry,” Cecil says quickly now, as Carlos blinks. “It’s buried now, so the curse shouldn’t come into effect for days. I’ll make your sacrifices for you, and all you have to do is maybe given me a few drops of blood or something—nothing extensive; I only handled the card for a minute—and I’ll draw some helpful sigils in your house so that the next time you wander in with such dangerous items, they’ll helpfully set themselves on fire.” Cecil follows this up with one of those blinding smiles Carlos figured existed solely to prevent you from thinking too hard about what he’d just said.
“I see,” Carlos manages. “Alright. That’s…” He takes a page from Cecil’s book. “Thank you?”
And just like that, Cecil is holding his hand. It’s warm, grimy, and a little harder than human skin.
Carlos looks down at it, and his heart flutters free of the straw.
“And just for the record,” Cecil says, “I did see what you wrote in the card before I buried it?” As Carlos’s head whips back up, excuses about Glow Clouds and municipal mind control on the tip of his tongue, he catches Cecil blushing. “And, um, even though vile, vile Hallmark cards are pretty dangerous items, they can only unleash untold horrors if you have the audacity to bring them into the presence of your hearth and home…” Cecil’s thumb is stroking Carlos’s knuckles.
His knuckles.
Carlos presses his lips together, because if he doesn’t, he was going to make some sort of highly embarrassing noise.
“…So I wouldn’t mind if you got me another one, sometime,” Cecil says shyly. “Maybe. As long as you give it to me outside, where it can be euthanized. Like in a car or something.” Cecil flounders a bit. “Oh no—I mean, later! Later, I once you’ve recovered from the trauma of this near-death experience. I know these things are hard for you…” His blush deepens. “...Obviously you don’t have to. I just thought it might be a little nice—oh, and this was so nice, Carlos! I—I loved our date, it was—it was really, really neat—“
Yeah, Carlos has owed Cecil a card like this for a while.
Truth be told, Carlos still couldn’t have told you if Cecil really was a physiological miracle, or a misshapen, nightmarish existence born out of failed evolution and confused heavenly ethics. It’s kind of a toss-up. He wouldn’t have been able to explain either option. Stockholm Syndrome might perfectly explain the hammering of his heartbeat and the desire to run—fast, hard, and in the opposite direction before he messes things up.
(Or maybe the other thing.)
A year and a week and a half was a pretty long time to wait to tell someone that they exceeded contemplation and made you feel like a child, a man, and a twenty-foot tall dinosaur all at once.
And with Cecil’s voice ringing in his ears like the music of the stars overhead, and feeling like gravity might be imaginary, Carlos leans over their dirty, tangled hands (roots, he thinks) and gently kisses the stammering from Cecil’s lips.