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Carlos remembers tornado warnings from the early years of his childhood, before his family moved further north, and something about hiding from gelatinous, oozing masses in a bathroom brings back pleasant memories of hunkering in a crowded basement, stifling giggles while he and his sister poked at each other. Perhaps, he reflected, a fondness for disaster drills really was a sign that he'd been destined to end up in Night Vale all along.
“Do you know what tomorrow is?” he asks, counting through the twine-tied stack of playing cards he'd found under the sink, probably stashed there for just such an occasion. This was a somewhat more stylized deck that he'd played with before: the King of Hearts, usually depicted with a dagger turned towards himself, seems to have taken it several steps further, to full-blown, gruesomely illustrated, self-evisceration.
“Thursday, unless it was cancelled without notice,” Cecil muses, elbows propped against the edge of the bathtub. “Although the Sherif's Secret Police are usually very prompt about alerting the station ahead of time when things happen without notice, so I think I'd know.”
He adjusts the towel he's sitting on in the empty tub and fiddles absently with the shower curtain. Carlos is seated a foot or two away on the bathmat, back against the door and feet braced on the sink cabinet. Whoever designed this apartment had clearly not lived in this town long enough to take into account the necessity of comfortable cowering locations.
“Well, yes, Thursday – as far as I know – but do you remember what happened one month ago tomorrow?”
“Ah. That would be when a buzzing, shadowy, literal void manifested to fill the emotionally crippling, metaphorical void that makes up humanity, and briefly plagued Night Vale before a brilliant, lone scientist managed to put a stop to it.”
Carlos looks up to see his boyfriend giving him a dreamy-eyed, and disarmingly smug, look. He contemplates saying something clever in response, but knows it's only going to end up as an embarrassed stammer so instead plows ahead with, “Tomorrow is also exactly one month since–”
“–our first date! I knoooow! Carlos, It's our gallstone anniversary!”
Cecil throws his head back in glee as he says this, and reaches out a hand to grab Carlos' and give it a squeeze.
“I am... not a big fan of gallstones,” Carlos says, trying to keep his tone as neutral as possible.
“Oh, good! That's good, that's very good, because I wasn't able to find one that seemed appropriate – just the right size and shape, you know – and it struck me as the kind of thing that maybe, oh, well, I mean– I didn't know if you would remember, and I didn't want to seem, you know, to come on too strong too quickly and–”
“–It's okay; I didn't get you gallstones, either,” Carlos gives another squeeze and pulls his hand away. “But there is something else I'd like to give you.”
“Our anniversary isn't until tomorrow!”
Cecil rests his head on folded arms. The height of the bathtub lip means that he now has to look upward to make eye contact, but those smitten, half-lidded eyes are going to be the death of Carlos if he keeps this up.
“We've survived one month without either one of us being killed or seriously maimed. If there is one thing that I learned from the tiny army living under the Desert Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex–” he ignores the little whine of protest the tries to interrupt him, “–it is that I don't want to keep waiting to do things, because otherwise I might never get the opportunity.”
Cecil reaches out again, this time resting a hand on Carlos' knee. “Although we can't escape the inevitable, and probably painful, end we all have waiting, I don't plan on being ritually or otherwise killed this evening. Nor, I hope, do you.”
Carlos takes his feet off the cabinet and manages to better angle himself towards the tub. “It's nothing spe– well, it is special, actually, but... it's not... expensive. Or fancy. But it's important, and I want you to have it.” He fiddles with his wrist for a moment, before handing his watch to Cecil.
“It's a watch. Obviously. It's my watch, the one that I brought here with me. It keeps perfect time; it keeps real time. As far as I can tell, it's the one true timepiece in all of Night Vale.”
“Oh, Carlos!” Cecil clambers gracelessly to his feet, unfolding his protesting knees as quickly as he can. Carlos does the same, and they meet half-way, Cecil gently grabbing his face and pulling him in for a long kiss. They stand for a moment, then, just holding one other, tilting inward and leaning on one another for support, feet and shins separated by the wide, chilly bathtub wall.
“I know that I'm not always very punctual,” Carlos says into Cecil's neck as they tangle fingers into each other's hair. “I know that I get distracted by science. I don't trust the clocks here, and so I don't pay them much attention. But now, no matter what my phone or computer or new watch from the Department Store and Taxidermy Shop on Reed Street says, I can be certain that you know what time it really is. ”
They pull apart and Carlos looks him in the eye, serious and intent, “Do you know what that means, Cecil?”
Cecil is sure of many things that this means, or that it would mean, if time weren't simply a human construct to make sense of a chaotic and unstructured universe. But he says nothing and shakes his head, knowing that a point is being made and this is not a time to discuss temporal physics or meaningless standard conceptualization of the passage of time.
“It means that when you tell me that it's time to stop working, or time to make dinner, or time to go to the movies, I'll listen. Because you'll always be right. You'll always know what time it's supposed to be, even when I think it's time for something else. Ok?”
“It's more than okay.” Slipping the watch onto his wrist and tightening the band, Cecil leans across the low tub wall once more for another kiss and says, “It's perfect.”