Contact

by constellatory

Summary:

He hasn't answered your texts.

It has been two minutes, and he has not responded.

You are almost positive he is dead.

Notes:

Spoilers for the August 15th, 2013 episode, Subway.

Cecil does not respond after that. You listen to the weather, tinny on your tiny hand radio, and stare at your unresponsive phone.

Cecil is out there. Cecil has gone into the subway. The subway from which very few have returned.

You look up at your team. They look back at you, fearful, pale. This is a pretty standard way for them to look, but now there is a particular sympathy in their eyes that you cannot stand. You grip your phone hard enough to turn your knuckles pale and you stand with a bang that does nothing to drown out the clanging racket of subway cars. They sound close. They sound everywhere. If your seismometers are to be believed, they are.

Then again, you are not sure how much you trust your seismometers. Or, really, anything at all.

Right now your mind rings with the knowledge that Cecil is gone. You feel like a bell, hollow, reverberating only with that clear, perfect, painful knowledge. You echo with it. You sing it, though you do not make a sound. The radio perched before you on the table croons, and you have to resist the very powerful urge to fling it at a wall with all your might. In the lack of silence, in the dark and buzzing clatter that is so insistent it begins to fill up your soul to the point of catastrophic overflow, it sounds like the derisive, mocking laughter of your most hated enemy.

You kissed him. Yes, you did that; you and only you. He did not make the first move, though you could tell he was thinking about it. So you did it for him, because you hadn't meant that last thing you said to sound quite so much like a rebuke.

You kissed him, and his lips were papery dry and tasted like nothing. It was wonderful, and for a tiny instant, you were certain you loved him.

Then, of course, you got out of the car, and hurried into your lab. You were quite beside yourself, and realized that moment was silly. But still, you thought. But still. It was a very nice kiss.

You think now that maybe it will never happen again.

This thought terrifies you so much that you are unable to keep conducting your tests.

You do not reply, after that. It is all you can do to listen in mute desolation as Cecil returns to his broadcast, voice as creamy and gentle and kind as ever. He sounds as if he has had a revelation. He does, indeed, sound as if everything is so beautiful now.

You think of your earlier interviews with some of the survivors. You think of their emptied out eyes. Their impossibly insubstantial bodies.

When you start to weep, quietly, your team does their very best to pretend they cannot hear you, and that you are in fact not crying at all.

Cecil calls you after the show. You let it go to voice mail, and you refuse to listen to it for several hours. You cannot bear it. You cannot stand it. There are so many things about Night Vale that you, in this moment, truly believe you cannot stand for another instant. You are tempted, not for the first time, to leave Night Vale entirely. To go, to settle in some unnamed motel, and to drink until you truly believe that you dreamed everything you've experienced over the course of what has been, approximately, a year or so. You have never yearned for this option more, and you have never been so revolted by your own cowardice.

You do not leave.

In the end, you never listen to that voice mail. Instead, in the morning, you text him a peace offering, and hope he simply believes you were overworked, and too tired to respond. It is, after all, sort of true. You were too tired to respond. It was just not the kind of tiredness that sleep alone can cure. You are still tired. You will never stop being terribly, fatally tired.

But when you meet him for coffee, and he smiles at you, you decide to carry on.

If there is anything you have learned in the town of Night Vale, it is that you can always carry on. You may not like what you discover in so doing. But it will always be exactly what you were looking for. Even when you did not know you were looking for it.

Notes:

2016 edit: People still read this, apparently, which I'm quite fond of. I'm glad so many have enjoyed it over the years. I do like it too, though I don't listen to Night Vale anymore.

I hate the ending of this fic. What a cop out. I like to pretend that it ends with the line about carrying on. You may choose to believe it ends there, or with its actual ending where I wrote it. I think in the former case it's a little more bittersweet, and that's what I prefer.