Chapter Text
Normal becomes a relative term in Night Vale. Normal means nothing when time refuses to remain linear, when a five-headed dragon is now genuinely running for mayor, or when your boyfriend insists on taking the nest of scorpions from his bathroom with him when you move in together into your new duplex in Old Town. Normal redefines itself, no longer referring to something lacking observable abnormalities or deficiencies, but rather simply what you can get used to.
It’s normal to be greeted by their mildly see-through neighbor Pat in the morning. It’s normal to fall asleep with the searchlights of the Secret Police’s helicopter sweeping across the bedroom window as they do their nightly round of the city.
And then it’s not normal to have Cecil burst into the kitchen on a perfectly sunny Saturday morning, brandishing a plastic stick and cheerfully exclaiming that he’s pregnant.
Carlos raises his eyebrows at him over the morning paper, which he’s trying to read before it self-combusts, and isn’t too fussed just yet. Cecil has come out with odder things, after all.
“When you say pregnant... do you mean meaningful? Like a pregnant pause?”
“No, I mean, like, with child. I’m pregnant.” He smiles widely, waving the plastic thing like a magic wand that might conceivably conjure a baby out of the microwave. It hits Carlos that, good grief, that’s actually a Predictor. Cecil took a pregnancy test.
Still, not panicking. Not yet. Not even Night Vale could cause a biological male to conceive a child. Cecil is not, after all, a seahorse.
Carlos knows that for sure. He snuck some saliva a few months back and ran some standard DNA tests. A man has to do what a man has to do when his boyfriend has glow-in the-dark eyes and teeth like a shark, you see.
“You’re a man. You have a penis. I’ve been very close to your penis, it’s... normal.”
“Thank you? I’m still pregnant, though.”
Okay. Time for Carlos to put down the paper, and fold it neatly. He takes a deep breath. “Why do you believe you’re pregnant?”
“I took a test? Peed on a stick. It got a little pink thingy in the middle.” Cecil sits down across from him, pushing the Predictor at him over the kitchen table. There’s a little pink thingy on there, yes, and Carlos has so many questions he is for just a moment stumped as to where to start.
“Cecil... why did you feel inclined to take a pregnancy test?”
“I gained over three pounds in two weeks, I’m constantly hungry, and old woman Josie told me I should take one. She said I was glowing.”
He actually was glowing, Carlos had to give him that. Cecil had looked positively radiant the past couple weeks, in a way that had nothing to do with Radon Canyon, but which he knew could have nothing to do with pregnancy, either. He’d assumed Cecil was just happy, their little house coming together nicely, their relationship going so well.
“Are you suggesting I got you pregnant via anal intercourse? You do realize that’s not how pregnancy works? Even if you’d, ah, been in the possession of a uterus.”
Cecil makes a face at ‘anal intercourse’. Okay, that might not have been the most romantic descriptor, but it was damn well correct.
“I know how pregnancy works, Carlos. I know I’m male, and probably should not be able to conceive. But I also know there’s no such thing as mountains, yet you keep insisting those are real. How is this different? Maybe sometimes things that are difficult to believe can exist, after all.”
Carlos closes his eyes, and tells himself not to get drawn into the mountains debate again. Not now. Not when Cecil was sitting there, utterly convinced he was carrying a child. Carlos’ child.
“Look, I’ll just go see a gynecologist, what’s the harm?” Cecil said.
“Gynecologist. Operative word, ‘gyne’, meaning ‘woman’ . You’re a man. You’re not pregnant. The Predictor thing just misfired because a man peed on it. Cecil. I love you, but this... you’re not pregnant. I’m sorry.”
Cecil observes him for a quiet, disappointed moment, while the newspaper discreetly combusts and burns into an apologetic pile of ashes between them. Carlos isn’t sure what Cecil had expected of him, but this, apparently, had not been it. He rewinds his own words inside his head, replays, wonders where he went wrong.
“This is my body, Carlos,” Cecil says. “I can feel it. Something’s changed. Is it really so hard to believe?”
“Yes,” Carlos answers, perhaps too quickly, perhaps too rashly.
Cecil winces at the finality in his tone. “Fine. I’ll go see a doctor on my own. Whatever. It’s not like it matters. It’s just your baby.”
And with that Cecil gets up and turns out of their newly painted kitchen. Carlos hears him grab his jacket, his car keys, and slam the door behind him. He feels instantly miserable, but not for reasons he thinks he should be.
***
It all becomes very real when Cecil charges into his lab the Tuesday after and slams a piece of paper onto his aluminum workbench.
“There. Doctor’s note. Confirmed. I’m nine weeks pregnant.”
The past three days had been icy at best. Cecil didn’t make him sleep on the couch, but only just barely. He’d thrown up the morning before, and when Carlos offered him a glass of water he declined, saying he wouldn’t need a drink of water for fake morning-sickness, now would he. That had stung, but Carlos had kept his ground.
Cecil wasn’t pregnant. He just couldn’t be. Except now he was looking at test results of a hospital pregnancy test, stating that a high level of HCG had been detected in Cecil’s urine, indicating he should, indeed, be pregnant.
“This is not possible. They must have mixed up the results,” he says, picking up the paper and reading the results again.
“They ran the tests twice. I’m scheduled for an ultrasound next week.” Cecil’s voice is pinched, and when Carlos looks up at him he looks like he’s about to explode with something or other. Might be anger. Might be nausea. Might be both, actually, and Carlos wonders if he should fetch a bucket.
“If you want to, you can come with. Get visual evidence,” Cecil continues, spitting out the word ‘visual’ so fiercely little flecks of saliva fly from his lips.
Carlos puts the paper down, smoothes it with two hands he tells himself are not trembling. “Cecil. You’re male. I’m male. How. How is this. Why is this. How?” Ah yes, scientist Carlos, asking the hard-hitting questions. He could just about punch himself in the nose for that.
“I don’t know, Carlos! You’re the scientist, you work it out! All I know is, I’m having your baby, and you keep on insisting it’s not really happening! Well whooptidoo, guess I’ll just go deal with this on my own!”
“Cecil...”
But Cecil is already turning, ready to stomp out, again, and that just won’t do. Not when it appears Cecil genuinely is being hormonal, and Carlos fears he might genuinely be acting like an ass, and damn it all to hell they were just doing so well, the two of them. Whooptidoo.
“Cecil, stop that, don’t walk away. Just give me a moment. Please.”
Cecil stops but doesn’t turn, his hands balled into fists by his side. “You need a moment? You do realize I’m the one who’s knocked up, right?”
“Right. Sorry. I don’t mean to say... sorry.”
He rubs his eyes with both hands, and tries to think of what to say. What to do. What to think, actually, and comes up so short it’s ridiculous. A headache begins to tease at the back of his skull.
“Is it okay if I go see your doctor?” he asks.
That makes Cecil turn around. “What for?”
“I don’t know. I need to make sense of this.”
Cecil ponders this, looking like he’s trying to figure out whether to be scandalized or amused, and comes out with a response that manages to combine both. “Whatever. If it’ll help you.”
Carlos thinks it might. A talk with another man of science, and all that. He hopes, perhaps, that someone else telling him this will help him wrap his head around it.
He should have known better, of course.
“But he’s a man,” he says a few hours later, as he is sitting in the office of Cecil’s brand new gynecologist. He’s been anticipating his visit, apparently. They’d put up wagers, about how long it’d take him to show up demanding an explanation.
To be fair Carlos didn’t ‘demand’ anything. He walked in and politely yet firmly asked to speak with the doctor who confirmed Cecil Palmer’s pregnancy. One of the nurses went to fetch him, and skipped off mumbling something about owing the Peds intern 5 bucks.
“It’s not unheard of in our town,” Cecil’s doctor, Dr. Jarmouni, chortles from across his desk. “I had a male birth in the clinic just last August. His wife was very surprised, let me tell you.”
“Oh, can’t imagine why she would be,” Carlos said weakly. “The child, was it genetically hers?”
“Of course it was, why wouldn’t it be? They’re happily married.”
“How could a woman possibly get a man pregnant?”
“We at Night Vale General Hospital find, sir, that certain questions are best left unasked.” The doctor smiles the happy, knowing smile of men well past their middle age, who’d seen it all and stopped giving a fuck about three decades ago. Carlos isn’t there yet. Carlos hopes he’ll never get there. He’d be a shit scientist if he stopped asking questions, after all.
“It’s a terrible ordeal, of course, male births are. Not to worry, we’ll look closely after your husband, but it’ll be a rough experience. The male body is just not designed for this.”
“We’re not married,” Carlos hears himself say, but he’s focused entirely on something else. Saying the male body is not designed for this is one of the more frightening understatements he’s heard in his life.
The doctor looks disapproving because, of course, having a baby out of wedlock is a great concern when you’re both men and this wasn’t supposed to be an issue ever. The doctor’s office starts leaning subtly to the left, and Carlos wonders if he’s going to faint. That would be a cliché right out of a movie, really, and he hopes he won’t actually go for it.
“How is Cecil going to give birth?” he asks, frowning at the room.
“Well, he can’t, obviously. Without a birth canal or even a vagina, that’ll be a touch tricky!” The doctor actually chuckles at that, like it’s funny. At the look on Carlos’ face he falters, though, and attempts to turn his laugh into an odd, uneven cough. “Caesarian section is how we usually deliver the babies. Minimal, minimal risk to the, ah, father.”
“C-section,” Carlos says. “You’re going to cut it out of him.”
“Crudely put, but yes.”
“Christ.”
“Now now, Mr. Palmer, babies are delivered with C-sections every day, regardless of the gender of their mothers. Fathers. Whatever. There’s no need to fret.”
“Still not married,” Carlos says feebly. “My name’s not Palmer. And I’m sorry, but I think there’s a lot of need to fret. Excuse me. I need to. Go panic for a while.”
He stumbles up from his chair, nods a trembling goodbye, and manages not to vomit until he’s outside Night Vale General Hospital. That’s where he pukes neatly into a rosebush planted beside the entrance, and stands there dry heaving and listening to his own heartbeat for a few minutes.
Pregnant. Cecil is actually pregnant. Carlos reels with so many things all at once it feels like he’s sitting inside some kind of carousel, where the horses are not delicately crafted wooden statues but are real-live animals, frothing at the mouth and screaming loudly.
It’s scientifically impossible, and far too much to explain for just one optimistic scientist by himself in this bizarre desert town. It makes absolutely no biological sense, it’s utterly improbable, and on top of all that, if he peels away the layers of disbelief and insanity, if he can for just a minute make himself not focus on how very much this cannot be happening...
... Cecil is going to have a baby. His baby. They were going to be fathers.
Oh, dear lord.
He drives home too fast, parks his car like a buffalo who only got his driver’s license a week ago, and rushes to the front door. He drops the keys twice, all but falls across the threshold, flounders down the hallway and erupts into their living room in a flurry of raised hands and apologies.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t believe you. I’m a dick. I’m so sorry.”
Cecil stands in the living room, on his bare feet, holding a box of what appear to be his CDs, and for a moment Carlos thinks he is looking so gorgeous, and how he loves him so impossibly much even if Cecil gets him into the weirdest situations.
Then Cecil drops the box, probably breaking a few CDs in the process, and is in his arms before Carlos even realized he’s leapt over the box.
“Thank God! I thought even the doctor wouldn’t be able to convince you! I know it’s a lot to take in, I know it is, but this is happening!” Cecil says into his hair, and Carlos has no words for this situation so he doesn’t answer and just clings to him and thinks a blissful nothing for a few minutes.
“Are you okay?” Cecil asks, hesitating around Carlos’ silence, and Carlos barks out a laugh that veers dangerously close to manic.
“No. God no. I’m not okay. I threw up on a bunch of roses by the hospital. I nearly ran over Mrs. Valster’s pet alligator that nobody will ever be able to convince me is a dog. I’m freaking out, is what I’m doing, and I’m no good at it. But I’m also really sorry for, for saying the stupid things I did. I should have believed you. I should have at least given you the benefit of the doubt. I’m sorry.”
Cecil’s arms tighten around him in a way Carlos can only describe as wary, and he runs a concerned hand through Carlos’ hair. “Would you like a glass of water?” he tries.
“No, I don’t want a glass of water.” Carlos breathes, inhaling through the fabric of Cecil’s shirt which he’s pressed his face firmly into. “Let’s just sit.”
They do, on their brand new couch, in a living room that still smells of paint. Cecil looks hopeful. Carlos feels small and young and in over his head.
“I don’t understand how this happened,” he says.
“Neither do I, but I don’t think it’s that relevant. It did happen. The how and the why... whatever.” Cecil shrugs. Whatever. Of course. “But I get that those are important to you. That’s what you do. You figure out things nobody gets. So, it could be an opportunity, for you? To study. I’d let you.”
“You’re my boyfriend, not my test subject,” Carlos says, and surprises himself with how whiny the words come out.
“Semantics.”
“No, not... Cecil. Okay. Maybe. A few simple... non-invasive, harmless tests... what am I even saying? Let’s just, let’s just set all that aside for a moment. Don’t look so shocked, I’m dealing with a lot of things all at once. Cecil. Are we really going to have a baby?”
“Several medical tests seem to conclude that yes, we are.” Cecil smiles an uneven, careful smile.
“A baby. A living little human being.”
“I certainly hope so.”
Oh God, Carlos hadn’t even factored in the possibility of it being something else yet. He really doesn’t have the mental capacity at the moment to worry about that one, too.
“A person that we’ll be responsible for for the next eighteen years.”
“Probably longer.”
Carlos goes quiet again. He stares at their coffee table, Cecil’s coffee table that he’d taken with him from his colorful little apartment. It was a heavy thing, all wood of indefinable origin, that they’d had a hell of a time logging from the moving van into the house. It wasn’t even pretty, not necessarily, and Carlos wasn’t entirely sure the dark stains and deep grooves exactly in the middle were that trustworthy, but Cecil said it had character and that Carlos had to agree with.
“Cecil. Are we really there, yet?” he asks quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve not even been together a whole year. We’re still unpacking. How are we going to raise a child?”
Cecil’s turn to go quiet. “I hadn’t thought of it like that yet,” he says.
“Raising a family is a lot of responsibility,” Carlos adds. His mind supplies him with images now, like clear-cut Technicolor commercials, full of diapers and broken nights. A slide show, showing him minivans, safety rails, spit-up on expensive shirts. But, image by image, the picture changes, like the sun dropping into the living room after a rainy morning.
There’s not just safety rails but there’s safety wheels, on a little red bicycle, and chubby little fingers holding thick Crayola crayons over colored paper. Little shoes, kicked out by the front door, little hand prints on the windows.
It’s like getting hit in the face with a frying pan made of happy stereotypes. Carlos sees birthday cakes and Christmas trees. Band-Aids on scraped knees, a swing set squeaking in their tiny backyard, little arms wrapped tightly around his neck and sticky kisses on his cheeks.
He knows this is Night Vale. He knows the birthday cake might not be edible, the Christmas tree might be full of tarantulas, and the swing set might be the worst idea anyone has ever had.
But he sees a child with dark curly hair, the moon in its eyes, and a smile with too many teeth in it, and it tugs his heart a little to the right and his stomach a little to the left. He’s not sure of this, he’s not really sure of anything right now, but he’s certainly having a moment.
“It’s not too late to put a stop to it,” Cecil says, and the whole stupidly idyllic daydream screeches to a halt.
“What?”
“Abortion. I could... I could still.”
Carlos gets lost in the specifics of that for a moment. How would they perform an abortion on a man? But then he’s pulled back into this reality, where this is his Cecil, who’s pregnant with his baby, and is now talking about removing it. Because Carlos is, once again, a giant ass who expressed doubts about this being what he wants.
He feels something he’s never felt before. It’s strong, and it’s primal, and it’s coming from a place within himself he didn’t know existed. An urge to protect, and to cherish, an urge to mortally wound everyone and everything that will threaten this new life spawning between the two of them. That clump of cells will have its chance to ride that little red bicycle, so help him God.
He puts a hand on Cecil’s very flat underbelly and shakes his head. Cecil catches his eye and slowly, very slowly, he smiles.
It’s not even a whole week later when they’re both back in the doctor’s office, looking at a blurry grayscale blob on a worryingly old monitor. It’s got a heartbeat. It’s already got little arms, and little legs, and sits quiet and alive in a gestational sac that’s miraculously appeared in Cecil’s abdominal cavity.
“That’s our baby,” Cecil says quietly, in awe.
“Yes,” Carlos answers.
He’s never been so terrified and so exhilarated in his life.