Work Text:
There are police on the Night Vale side of the old oak door. Of course there are. Carlos tries to keep his cool and focus on the job at hand: getting people home safe. They're all on the same team, here.
He ushers the last Night Vale refugee through the portal, and moves to follow.
There's a Walther PPQ pointed at his face before you can say angels don't exist. "Not you, interloper."
"It doesn't matter what side I'm on," says Carlos, as patiently as he can. He's tried to explain all of this without any threatening or suspicious jargon; even in a dimension where none of the cops could reach him, he's bent over backwards to stay in line with the town's labyrinthine laws; he's even made a point of denying that he would dare to use an umbrella without a permit. "Night Vale natives need to be where they belong, and otherworld desert natives need to be where they belong, but anyone else can be on either side. It doesn't affect the outcome."
"So you can stay right there, and everything will be fine," says the secret police officer. "Is that what I'm hearing?"
"Not everything!" Carlos takes a cautious step forward. If he can just get his feet on the familiar asphalt of the parking lot behind the Ralph's...if he can just make it there, then Cecil will find some way to deal with any injuries he gets. Probably. "I have a house in town. I have a mortgage to pay. I probably owe Cecil a large number of home-cooked meals by now."
Another step. Almost there.
"I work with your local scientists...when they'll let me...which is mostly just when it comes to the house that doesn't exist...but I've helped you before, and I can again. I —"
Two gunshots ring out across both worlds.
Carlos slams into the sand, knocking the breath out of him, stomach and one leg suddenly on fire. He clutches at his torso, some ancient scrap of TV memory saying put pressure on it, but his hands are shaking and his chest heaves and stutters, and it's too slippery to even know what he's holding thanks to all the blood bubbling out onto the sand.
The last thing he sees through the red haze of pain is the door slamming shut and vanishing.
***
The masked warriors do their best, but any one of their fingers is as large as Carlos's calf, and there's only so much even the most skilled surgeon can do on that scale.
He's glad to be alive, the next time he's conscious enough to notice. Glad the bullet through his torso didn't shred any irreplaceable organs — the surgeon, whose name is Archie, shows him the carefully sun-dried carcass of what he recognizes as a kidney, and he's pretty sure that's the thing you only need one of. Glad they were able to save his knee, because prosthetics are easier to engineer when you don't need to include as many artificial joints.
...although, come to think of it, where is he expecting to pick up a prosthetic leg? The giants make replacements for their own battle-lost limbs, but not miniature versions, not good ones. He doesn't know how to get back to Night Vale, if they would even let him have one, no matter how thorough he was in preparing the necessary burnt offerings. As for the place he came from before Night Vale....
He doesn't remember anything before Night Vale.
Why hadn't he noticed that before?
***
They also saved his phone, praise the beams. And the app Carlos rigged to stream NVCR is still working. He gets it to connect right in the middle of Cecil's show...just in time to hear Cecil talking about the "calls, emails, telegrams, and sympathetic glances" he's been getting from people who are wondering if Carlos is back yet.
The thought makes Carlos's heart twist in his chest. People in Night Vale are worried about him? He'd gotten so much wariness, suspicion, hostility from the day he arrived. It took the better part of a year for him to accept that the one person who claimed to like him might genuinely mean it, instead of having some kind of malevolent ulterior motive.
(...to be fair, it also didn't help that Cecil had somebody driven out of town for cutting his hair. Until Carlos learned that the whole thing had been a smokescreen for an unrelated battle, it felt a lot more like dangerous obsession than innocent crush.)
So he expects grudging tolerance, at best, from everyone-but-Cecil. If he's getting concern...?
"And here I remind you that he became trapped there while saving our city from treacherous dark forces," intones Cecil. "I remind you he is a hero. I remind you that my boyfriend is a hero."
Oh.
The concern and sympathy is for Cecil. Carlos can imagine it all too clearly: You poor thing, fell for an interloper, and of course now he's run off to some other universe and left you behind. To the point where Cecil isn't just scolding the offenders one-on-one, he's getting on his bully pulpit and drumming a reminder into the heads of everyone in town.
At this point, Carlos doesn't have much hope that it'll soften anyone toward him, but he's grateful that Cecil has never stopped trying.
He calls as soon as Cecil does the closing credits...and gets voicemail anyway. Which probably means Carlos is getting Cecil's phone at an earlier date, because if this was the first call Cecil had gotten after days of Carlos being MIA, he would have been poised to jump on the ringing phone. Carlos leaves an edited description of what happened. Promises he'll find a way out of here soon.
No mention of the attack. He doesn't want to sound like he's criticizing the police on a tapped line, or they'll never let him come home.
***
A group of giant children, young enough that they're wearing loose hoods instead of their adult masks, bring him clothes and little accessories to try on. The toy shoes are about as ergonomic as carved slabs of wood, but the handmade crutches work just fine, and the tunics and pantaloons are surprisingly soft.
He hobbles in and out of a prettily-patterned doll-tent to change from one outfit to the next. The kids, who weren't on the front lines for the battle and might not have seen anyone his size before, ooh and ahh at the sight. Carlos feels kind of like a trained seal, but it's only fair that he pay them back for their generosity somehow, so he can suffer through a little embarrassment for the sake of entertaining the kids.
It's all going well until he hops out in a blue-and-gold tunic...and one of the children laughs. "That's not how you wrap it! You're a boy, you need to wrap it the boy way."
So saying, she picks him up with a chubby hand around the chest — pinning one arm to his side — and pulls loose the wide cloth belt.
Panic washes over Carlos — she has no right, she can't just grab him and yank his clothes off, although obviously she can, he's tiny and helpless and they have all the power, but it's his body, she has no right! He flails and kicks, smacks her wrist (as wide as his waist) with the crutch, loses his grip and drops it, resorts to scratching and biting until she drops him with a yelp.
The whole thing probably took a couple seconds, but it feels like Carlos's whole world has been flipped upside-down and shaken. On hands and knees he scrambles for the flap of the tent, throws himself inside, and rolls up in the thickest rug like a human burrito.
He heard Doug's voice outside, descending over the commotion. "What happened? Is the little scientist okay?"
"I picked it up and it bit me!" wails the girl.
"It's not a doll or a pet, Meg! We talked about this. It's a person, and you can't just pick it up without asking." The light from the tent flap falls into shadow; an eye the size of a watermelon peers inside through a cutout in the mask. "Little scientist? Are you in there?"
"Yes!" calls Carlos from inside his rug. He likes it in here. He's not coming out.
"Are you hurt?"
Carlos has a cramp in his stomach, but it's not the sharp pain of a wound re-opened, so he figures it isn't worth mentioning. And the barked shin is going to bruise, but that hardly counts. He should be grateful he has one shin left to bark. "I'm fine."
"Oh, good! I'm so sorry — I should have been watching the children more closely."
There's a whispered negotiation, then little Meg adds, "Sorry, Mr. Tiny Scientist. I didn't mean to hurt you."
For some reason, though Carlos was clearly and articulately thinking no no no no no a minute ago, it feels weird and jarring that she's apologizing. He has to search his mind for the correct social response. "I know you didn't. Just don't do it again, okay?"
***
He gets Cecil, his own beloved Cecil, on the phone in person the next day. The nomadic warriors have made camp and are working on dinner; Carlos is in his tent, set up on a wagon carrying barrels of something fermenting. It makes the whole thing pleasantly wine-scented.
Cecil gushes over his bravery and asks if he's okay. Carlos says he's fine, and tells Cecil a little bit about the giant animals around here. The human- and dog-shaped ones have four limbs each, but the ones that remind him of giant goats and camels have six. It's weird, isn't it, how an evolutionary lineage can have such a dramatic split in skeletal structure?
"Like Hiram McDaniels, who has six limbs and literally five heads, versus common tree lizards who have four and two?" asks Cecil.
"Very much like that, yes!"
And that reminds Carlos of all the other scientifically fascinating things that must be going on in Night Vale right now. He misses his equipment. Possibly even more than he misses Cecil, because he's only been in love with Cecil for a year at this point, and he's been in love with science for longer than he can remember.
"I should try to put some measuring instruments together," he says, half to himself.
"What, out in that featureless desert wastescape?" asks Cecil. "But you have such nice ones here...you're not going to be away from them much longer, right?"
Carlos swallows. Cecil, I'm scared, he thinks. Cecil, they shot me. Not with blowdarts this time, and not a warning shot like the one that left the scar on my shoulder, you know, normal civilian-pacification techniques...they could have killed me. What if I come back and they stop going easy on me?
Out loud, he says, "Of course not. Or from you. I have to go now, okay? I'll call you back."
He could really use a drink. If only the masked army had some wine bottles in his size, instead of just barrels so big he could fall in one and drown.
He settles for breathing in the fragrance all around him, and maybe crying quietly into a pillow. Just for a little while.
***
One of the warriors, Jasika, lets Carlos borrow some of her jewelry. She has a pair of earrings that are volleyball-sized prisms on Carlos's scale, and a bracelet of silver bangles so polished they make flawless mirrors.
Put together just right, they make a passable jury-rigged spectrometer.
At first all Carlos does is make pretty rainbow patterns. The kids aren't even impressed; the novelty of their talking doll-sized tiny friend has started to wear off, and they've all seen jewelry cut into prisms before.
It takes a while of aimless playing before Carlos notices something interesting. The sunlight out here looks like the sunlight back home...but he remembers his star's spectral fingerprint, and this light is different.
What about the stars twinkling in the night sky? What do their chemical compositions look like?
The prospect of making a real project out of it, of researching something interesting instead of just noticing it, fires up a spark of excitement inside him. Like he hasn't felt since....
He would say since leaving Night Vale, but it's longer than that, isn't it? So much of his research that last year in town had the shadow of Strexcorp hanging threateningly overhead. And before that, the near-death experience had cut down some of his enthusiasm for looking into strange things without a whole lot of safety prep. And before that he'd been second-guessing all his potential projects because of the way the police had found him in the grocery store and tasered him for...he can't remember what specific law his experiments had broken. Just that it was taser-worthy.
It's been a long time since he's felt this uncomplicated anticipation, is the point.
"Do you know anyone who makes lenses?" he asks Alicia during dinner. Their Bichon Frisé is sitting with him in its dog bed: one of the few places Carlos feels secure nobody will accidentally sit on him.
"None small enough for you to handle, tiny scientist," says the warrior. "Unless there are some on the settlement up the mountain. The ruins of the buildings there are more your size."
Carlos pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, self-conscious. "Can we go look?"
***
It's as hard as ever to describe his interests to Cecil while skirting any mention of Night-Vale-forbidden knowledge. Carlos has the sinking feeling he isn't getting the "honestly, this isn't a featureless hellscape" idea across at all.
Things in Night Vale don't sound that complex when you distill them to the municipally-approved details, either. "There are orange trees growing in the desert, even though orange trees are not native to deserts." "People go down into the subway, and when they come up, they are different." "This house seems like it exists, but it actually doesn't. It's science. Just trust me on this."
But back in Night Vale he could always show Cecil what he was working on. Maybe even demonstrate a flashy experiment, letting the bubbles and sparks be more impressive than words ever could. Now he's here, and Cecil is there, and all he can offer is "the mountain is moving, and making sounds, like snarling, but a really big snarl," and "there were these bones, in some mud, from some animal. I don't know what kind of animal. Did I mention the mud was red?"
"Carlos? I don't think it's safe there," says Cecil mid-call, and Carlos has to bite his tongue to keep from laughing. "Listen, I want you to find a way to —"
"Cecil!" interrupts Carlos. "Nothing and nowhere is safe!"
As if anyone in Night Vale knows the first thing about safe.
***
The rockslide isn't what gets him. Boulders the size of cars smashing their way down the slope of the mountain make him lose his balance, sure, and he can't stay steady on the crutches and hold onto his phone with only two hands and one foot to work with. But he's fine until the quake stops and he gets down to the patch of shale where the phone landed...to discover the screen shattered and the buttons unresponsive.
Carlos brushes the dust off a plane of rock, sits down and cradles his head in his hands just in time for a full-fledged panic attack.
He's been terrified before. But this time it doesn't stop. His heart jackhammers in his chest, he's panting for dear life and still can't seem to get enough air, and he's sure, he's sure one last rock is going to slam down and flatten him any second, or maybe he'll just have a heart attack and drop like a rag doll, and either way this hell will be over —
"Little scientist."
— and Cecil will never know, can never know, because Carlos was clumsy and stupid and oh god he's lost the one person in this or any world who loves him or even cares about him forever —
"Little scientist, you are breathing too fast. You need to slow down. While I count up to seven, I need you to breathe in, and while I count down from eleven, I need you to breathe out."
The deep-voiced, simple directions are just enough to penetrate the hysteria. At first Carlos can't hold the breaths nearly as long as he's told, but Doug says it's all right and has him try again, until Carlos is holding the counts successfully and his head is no longer spinning too badly to see straight.
He looks at the phone again...and the screen is whole. The little indicator light is even blinking, an intermittent green, the happy mirror of the ominous red at the mountain's peak.
"But it was broken," he croaks. "It was broken. I didn't imagine that, right? You saw it! Right?"
"It was hurt, and now it is healed," says Doug serenely, as if that's just how things work out here. "Is it time to call your little boyfriend again? I will leave you alone, if you're ready."
Carlos needs a few more minutes.
Because he needs to heal, and not just from this one incident. There's no way he can go back to Night Vale while he's so fragile he'll be paralyzed with fear at one little life-threatening disaster. Cecil wouldn't want him to come home only to get eaten within the week.
"Be patient with me," he implores, when he gets Cecil on the line again. "I'll be back soon."
Cecil has a plea of his own. "Find that door, Carlos!"
Carlos's stomach hurts. He ignores it. "I will."
***
"I'm taking the dog for a walk," says Alicia. "Come with me, tiny scientist?"
"I wouldn't be able to keep up," stammers Carlos, waving vaguely at his crutches. As if the only reason he can't keep pace with someone whose legs are three times as tall as his whole body is because he's missing a foot.
"Will you ride, then? I would like your company."
They're wearing a patterned head wrap that spirals down over their shoulders and around their upper torso, securely fastened so Carlos could hang in one of the loops like a hammock. He doesn't go for that option — it would make him feel too much like one of the giant infants, who get carried around in slings while their parents are on the move — but sits up instead, leaning back against Alicia's chest and tracing the embroidered diamonds in the fabric that holds him in.
Together the little party hikes a short way up the mountain, then zigzags back down, then up again. Bahati sniffs at trees and barks at giant (to Carlos) lizards. Carlos flinches every once in a while, expecting disaster...but none of the things the dog investigates spit fire at her, or dissolve parts of her, or spontaneously appear in the middle of her torso.
It's really relaxing to watch.
"My partner says you had trouble earlier," remarks Alicia. "When the rocks fell."
Carlos grimaces. "I'm fine. I mean...it's true, I wasn't fine, then. Doug helped a lot. I'm not ungrateful! But I'm better now."
"Were you more frightened than you felt like you should be?" asks the warrior. "It didn't look bad to me, but you would know better what is dangerous for someone so small. Are other people your size this anxious? Do you react more intensely than you expect to when something startles you, even in the safety of camp? Do you feel detached, isolated from others? Do you have nightmares, and, even when you don't dream, sleep lightly?"
"All right! You got me! I'm in bad shape," snaps Carlos. He hadn't realized he'd been that transparent. "Fragile. Weak. I'm working on it! And of course I feel isolated. Who wouldn't? I don't know if I had friends before Night Vale, I spent two years in a place where nobody but Cecil even trusted me, and now I'm the only person my own size in this entire world. So what? A scientist is self-reliant!"
"You are not fragile," says Alicia calmly. "You are not weak. Many of us come back from wars feeling the way you do now. They have the same kinds of troubles. We call the syndrome 'soldier's heart'...and nobody needs to go through it alone."
"I've never been in a war. I'm not a soldier. I'm a scientist."
"You have scars like a soldier."
"Any one of you has more scars than I do."
"Shall we compare?" asks Alicia. "I'll tell the story of one of mine. Then you tell one of yours. We will see who runs out first."
***
Alicia's stories mostly involve spears, knives, and surgeries in response to blunt traumas.
Carlos starts with his leg and his stomach, counting them separately. He lumps together all the tiny scars that pepper his torso from the miniature city as a single incident.
Then there's the line down his sternum from the mandatory municipal heart surgery, the one he didn't realize would be enforced until he woke up in a hospital bed with a citation and a late fee taped to his bandages. The nick under his eye from being hit in the face with a secret police baton, discipline for the time he got caught trying to take notes on an experiment with a pen (the last one he ever used). The pterodactyl bite on his forearm. The spiderwolf bite on the ankle he still has.
"That is all of mine," says Alicia at last. "You?"
"I'm out too." Carlos hesitates, not sure he wants to let Alicia 'win', then realizes he doesn't feel nearly as defensive as he did when this walk started. "...but when I had the other leg, I had these burn scars. Because people in Night Vale can be really territorial about anyone getting too near their mailboxes. Those probably count, right? Even though they're not technically on my body any more."
The warrior laughs. "It's a lot of scars even if you leave those out, isn't it? So I'll let you decide how to count them."
It's an unexpected answer, and a strangely freeing one. This whole conversation has been relaxing...which is weird, when you consider how much potential dismemberment it covered. "Is it a feature of soldier's heart that talking about your war makes you feel better?"
"That's a recommended treatment, yes." Alicia's path has zigzagged around so they're approaching camp again; their steps slow down. "We're almost back with the others. If you want to keep me company on other walks in the future, I'd like that."
Carlos doesn't like the idea of compromising his self-reliance. But he feels so much better than he did. And hearing Alicia's stories in turn makes it feel like a conversation between...friends?...instead of a favor that he'll be beholden to repay. "I'll think about it. Thanks."
***
One of the giants brings him a stack of lenses as big across as beach balls, wrapped in soft, microfiber cotton.
The peak of the mountain is an ideal place to build an astronomical-grade spectrometer. Carlos looks up blueprints online, a process which goes much faster when he realizes he can stop leaning on the three proxies he'd been using to jump the Night Vale firewalls. Some of the warriors get curious about what he's doing; he lets them help, moving heavy parts and bending metal in ways he wouldn't have been able to do on his own without industrial-grade equipment.
"I'm building a device to measure the stars," he tells Cecil, the next time they're on the phone together. "And there's something I need your help with. Could you sing a few notes?"
Cecil does. His incredible voice is perfect for calibrating the acousto-optic tunable filter crystal. This might actually work.
"So, have you made any progress on looking for a door?" adds Cecil hopefully.
Carlos has a sudden, vivid conviction that there's a secret-police officer under the rock he's sitting on. Any minute now they'll jump out and say, do you have a permit for that crystal? No? Didn't think so. Hold still.
He yanks his leg up before the nonexistent cop grabs his ankle, swallows, and forces his voice to sound cheerful and un-traumatized as he says, "I haven't had time. I've been so busy. With all this science. But I'll call more, okay? I'll make time to call."
***
Carlos has always been an unreliable person.
Even if he doesn't remember specific things from before Night Vale, this is an ingrained part of his self-image, as solid as the knowledge that he is (and was) a scientist. He's easily distracted. Prone to losing schedules. Always forgetting appointments.
The thing is, in Night Vale, he tried. Harder than (he thinks) he's ever tried before. And was still miserable at it, because he never figured out how to manage the complete brokenness of Night Vale time — and gave Cecil the only working watch he ever found. It seemed like such a romantic gesture in the moment! If only he'd known how un-romantic Cecil would find it when he was constantly late for dates, if he made them at all.
Living together made it easier. They would end up in the same house every evening, where they could decide together to go out to dinner or catch a movie, and leave together, hand in hand.
Being in completely different worlds throws a wrench in Carlos's efforts all over again. Some nights he streams Cecil's show and it's clearly from when he was still in town. Every once in a while he gets an episode from the future.
And it's even harder because, here in this desert, time works. What little sense he had for Night Vale time has been entirely wiped clean, now that he can breathe in for a count of seven and out for a count of eleven and know that it's always the same number of seconds, that it will balance the CO2 levels in his blood exactly the way science says it should.
***
The week he manages to call Cecil six nights out of seven, it's hard to tell which of them is more surprised.
***
He was sure he'd have to compromise his research to keep up the regular phone calls for long.
Miraculously, he doesn't.
Because science is easier out here too. He doesn't have to come up with complex workarounds to record the emissions spectra; he can just use a pen. He can study the anatomy of the not-camels (Jasika gets him a scroll with illustrations of their skeletons, and Carlos rides in the front of a wagon with it spread out on the floor, cross-referencing the motions in front of him with the double set of hip bones in the diagram) without having to suit up in armor, or take any of the other precautions you need to approach Hiram McDaniels. No need to give any of the plant life a wide berth; he can walk among any of them with no fear of being turned into a tree.
Carlos started saying I don't study botany or dendrology when an aggressive group of servers at Big Rico's asked why, if he was a scientist, he wasn't doing anything about the Whispering Forest. It's partly true: plants were never his specialty. But when he finds a species of cacti that plays Mozart when the wind blows through their needles, he's enthralled.
He's playing with the music, trying to see if the cacti will respond to his phone streaming a Bach symphony, when an old oak door wavers into translucence in the sand.
***
He doesn't panic, or get sick, or have another of those intense not-quite-hallucinations. He sinks into a protective haze of emotional numbness, and, when the door fades, crutch-hops away to find Alicia without thinking or feeling much of anything at all.
The warrior is working with a few colleagues on their sand-based currency project. This environment doesn't have the resources to support the paper or metal currency Carlos is used to, but they might really get somewhere with a standardized set of coins stamped in glass. Alicia steps away from the firing equipment when they notice Carlos wandering into view. "Is everything okay, tiny scientist?"
"Fine," says Carlos. "Not fine," he corrects. "I don't want to interrupt. But can we take a walk? Maybe soon?"
Alicia gathers him into a hammock-sized fold of their robe, crutches tucked safely into the sheath on their belt where a dagger would normally go, and the two of them set out walking.
Carlos talks around the real issue for a while, and Alicia lets him, until he finally admits what he saw. What he did. And, more importantly, what he didn't do.
"I can't go through the door right now," he says, not so much a statement as a plea for validation. "Not when I still get sick and scared about so many things. I won't be ready to go home to Cecil until I get better. But then — I get sick and scared when I think about going home to Cecil. And he would never hurt me! So what's wrong with me?"
"You've mentioned two things here. Cecil and home," observes the warrior. "And you've told me that Cecil would never hurt you."
"Well, of course Night Vale would hurt me. You've heard all about that," says Carlos crossly. (Cecil recently found out that he's been missing from the last place he called "home" for decades. Even if he remembered it, he'd hardly have any claim to it anymore.) "But I have to put up with it for Cecil's sake. It's not like Cecil's going to move anywhere else — and he hates this long-distance thing. I can hear in his voice how much he hates it, every time we talk."
"You know Cecil won't move?" echoes Alicia. "He's told you this?"
"...not directly, no. But I can hear that in his voice too, when he talks about the town."
"Sometimes we do things we never would have considered, take chances we never would have planned on, for the sake of someone we love very much. Have you told him you don't want to go back?"
Carlos jumps like a spooked horse. "I never said I don't want to go back!"
***
When they return to camp, Carlos is riding on top of Alicia's hood, using the horns of their mask like safety rails. He waves at the warriors they pass, grinning all the while.
"You seem to have picked up a new hat, dear," chuckles Doug when he sees them, pulling Alicia into his arms. Through the cutout in the mask Carlos can see his eye crinkling up with a smile. "Very stylish, little scientist. All the young people will be wanting one of you."
"Hi, Doug," says Carlos happily. "Guess what? I don't want to go back."
That night he falls onto the mat in his little tent and sleeps more soundly than he has in years.
***
He gets Cecil's voicemail the next time he calls, so he doesn't say anything too earth-shattering when they won't have the chance to discuss it in realtime, just tries to lay some groundwork. He mentions that it was hard to work in Night Vale at times. That the local law enforcement could be...stifling. Maybe even a little, dare he say it...traumatic.
"I got your message," says Cecil, the evening afterward, "but most of it was bleeped out. Could you tell me again? Only without the seditious and/or forbidden parts this time?"
Carlos's heart sinks. "I'll try."
"If we'd been talking in person, I could have stopped you before you said anything wrong," adds Cecil mournfully. "This would be so much less awkward if you weren't still trapped in that awful place...."
Less awkward, but painful in its own way. Carlos wracks his brain for ways to approach this delicately, that won't get Cecil dragged off to re-education for agreeing. "Cecil...first of all...can you stop saying I'm 'trapped'?"
The request leaves Cecil a little put out. He points out that Carlos is locked here against his will and unable to return, and how is "trapped" not an adequate word for that situation?
Since it's true that Carlos can't go back right now, he tries not to feel too guilty for misleading Cecil about the specific reasons. He focuses on trying to make Cecil see that it's nice here, that he has friends, that he has interesting things to research, that he doesn't feel scared or helpless anymore.
"I didn't realize you felt that way before," says Cecil softly.
Carlos hadn't realized he felt that way. Or at least, he hadn't realized how bad it was, until he ended up in a place where he was completely surrounded by people who care about him. Even the ones who don't know him personally, they at least take it for granted that his life doesn't matter any less because he's an outsider.
"You always seemed so happy on the phone...."
Oh. Cecil is just thinking about Carlos's time here. Well, Carlos was pretty messed up when that started, too. "I didn't want to worry you," he admits. "Or, you know...anyone else who might be worried about me. There wasn't anything you could do, so I — I didn't want you feeling helpless too."
"Oh, Carlos," sighs Cecil. "If you had just told me...I've been really scared, thinking maybe — that is, wondering if you — well, never mind, it doesn't matter now, right? You really feel safe now."
"I really do." Carlos scratches the stump of his knee, relieved that Cecil is still willing to trust him. Once you've told a person two different stories, you lose the right to demand they accept the latest one as true. "I won't tell you everything's perfect or easy, okay? But I do feel like this is where I need to be. You know, for now."
"And what about when it's no longer where you need to be?" asks Cecil. "Have you found a door that could bring you back to Night Vale yet?"
"I haven't," says Carlos, and it's technically true. The door he saw was never fully solid. Not that he put any effort into figuring out how to change that. "Cecil...if I find that doorway, would you, maybe...come here again? Just for a visit?"
He talks Cecil into "we'll see."
Then he talks Cecil through what sounds like an awfully satisfying orgasm. He knows it's not the same as being there in person — Cecil talks so often about how much he misses even the G-rated physical contact, the hand-holding, the gazing into each other's eyes — but he does what he can.
***
Here's one of the cruel ironies of their relationship: Cecil thinks Carlos has a naturally minimal sex drive. Even asked, early on, if he was asexual. Carlos stammered something about how he just really needs to be in the mood, and since then Cecil has made a point of figuring out, both by asking and by paying attention, what can make it for him or break it.
Gloves, capes, and a whole lot of items in solid black have migrated out of Cecil's wardrobe completely. If he's considered a correlation, wondered if these things might all be mood-killers for the same reason, he's never said so out loud.
Carlos isn't sure if he'll ever return to the libido he semi-remembers having. Maybe this is his new normal. Talking about the other causes of soldier's heart with Alicia has made a lot of its symptoms easier...but he doesn't want to talk about this one, even with them.
Here's one of the nice things about the desert: the adults, any one of whom could pick him up and juggle him if they felt like it, never even touch him without asking.
And the kids are learning. During another doll-size fashion show — Carlos throws in dramatic poses now, and does as much of a runway sashay as he can manage with crutches, and from the shrieks of delight you'd think he just invented the Pokémon — he emerges in a long red-and-gold sash, and young Meg says, "You're wearing it crooked, Mr. Tiny Scientist. Can I fix it for you? I'll be careful!"
"Okay," says Carlos. "Just don't pick me up, understand? Fix it right here."
The giant girl unwinds the sash so delicately, he could've been made of spun glass and wouldn't have broken.
***
He could project his image between worlds before, with help from Dana or Maureen. Hasn't been able to do it on his own, and he's spent this whole time assuming he doesn't have the skill. After deciding he doesn't have to go back to Night Vale in person, though, he gives the projection another try...and surprises himself by doing it easily. Whatever mental block he had against it has evaporated.
His projected self-image still has two full legs. With a little effort, he keeps it that way. Let the police think they didn't even scratch him.
That settled, he surprises Cecil with a practically-in-person appearance in the studio.
Incorporeality makes him bolder than usual in singing the praises of the otherworld desert. "The people are way friendlier here," he says, while they do the awkward cross-world equivalent of trying to hold hands. "People in Night Vale can be a little...."
"No, I know," stammers Cecil, not letting him finish. Because he doesn't want Carlos saying it on-air, or because he doesn't want to hear it at all? "I suppose it couldn't hurt to take a little visit."
He keeps wavering, though, talking about how it can't take long, and any kind of vacation time is hard to get. Carlos breezes right past his uncertainties as if they aren't there. "Great! So, I'll let you know when I figure out exactly how to get you here. Ugh, I cannot wait to see you in person again."
"Me neither!" says Cecil quickly. That part, at least, he doesn't have to be talked into.
"Cannot wait," repeats Carlos, practically in Cecil's lap. If he concentrates hard enough, he can almost feel the heat of Cecil blushing. "Cannot."
***
He should have felt good, after that. It's never fun knowing that he's giving Cecil a runaround, even when the secret-police observation means can't say the truth out loud, but Cecil always likes it when Carlos is more intently affectionate. And it's not like Carlos was faking a second of it. Carlos adores him.
So why, in the wake of it, does he feel so uncomfortable?
"Maybe I shouldn't have done it during the show," he says to Alicia during a walk. They're wearing a jeweled necklace today; Carlos's head rests against their chest in between two lantern-sized slabs of turquoise. "Cecil always gets flustered when I call during the show. I should have waited for the weather. Or after the good-night. Maybe that's why I feel...icky."
Alicia hums in thought. "Is this the first time your tiny boyfriend has agreed to come visit you?"
"I think so. Yeah. I mean, he was thinking about it before. But this is the first time it was more than a 'maybe'."
"Let me tell you some things about Bahati." (The dog perks up at the mention of her name. Alicia throws in a "good girl," and Bahati trots happily onward, tail wagging.) "I love her, always and unconditionally. I walk her and feed her, every day. I play with her, and pet her, and tell her she's my favorite girl, at any time — for no reason at all."
"Sure," says Carlos. That sounds like reasonable behavior toward a pet. And it's nice that you don't need to worry about fighting with it, or soul-merging with it, or keeping it away from the dog park at all costs.
"Have you had a dog? Have you ever taught one tricks? Trained it to sit, or come, or roll over when you say so?"
Carlos grimaces. For all he knows, he's had hundreds of dogs. "Not that I remember."
"I did it with mine. Used a kind of treat she loves, but can't have too much of. I would give the command, and if she did what I wanted, she would get a treat. By now she is so well trained that she feels satisfied just by doing what I tell her, even if she no longer gets a treat every time."
"I know the general idea," says Carlos. "In science we call it Pavlovian conditioning."
"Pav-lo-vi-an," echoes Alicia. "Well. When you shower your boyfriend with extra affection after he agrees to do something for you, you are using your love like a...Pavlovian conditioning tool. As if it isn't something he gets always, but something you reward him with when he does right, to teach him obedience."
"It's not like that!" protests Carlos — except, oh wow, that's exactly how it played out, isn't it? He can't give Cecil the physical equivalent of a treat right now — no gifts, no special dinners, no in-person sexual favors — all he has to offer is his love and attention. So he's giving Cecil extra helpings of those as if they're prizes for doing what he wants. "At least — that's not how I meant it!"
"I believe you don't mean it, tiny scientist," soothes his ride. "We can have the best of intentions and still end up mistreating someone. Your instincts are telling you something is wrong. Could this be why?"
Carlos drags his hands through his hair, feeling awful. "How many bad things can you do with good intentions, or for the right reasons, before it makes you a bad person?"
"Better not to worry about it, and to put that energy toward doing good things," says Alicia. "Leave the question of when someone is or is not a good person to the tiny philosophers."
***
So Carlos puts his energy toward good things.
He figures out how to call the doors. Not how to make them solid, but he's working on that.
He figures out how to appear invisibly on the Night Vale side, just long enough to pinpoint each door's location.
He starts making a map.
In theory, he could open a door any place in Night Vale, but he needs one that Cecil can pass through with no risk of being followed by someone more sinister. What's a location most people in Night Vale won't visit? There are tons of those (the library comes to mind). What's a location people won't visit for reasons other than its immediate, unavoidable fatality? That's harder.
He only comes up with one answer: the forbidden dog park.
According to his map and his best estimates, it's a long way off the masked warriors' current path. He does the early stages of planning to strike out on his own, until he talks about it with Doug and is told that yeah, sure, the army could wander in that direction for a while.
There may be a few happy tears on Carlos's part. A scientist is self-reliant, he's been telling himself, because it's easier and more comforting than a scientist has no one who will help him, no one he can rely on. And now, for the first time in memory, he has a group of them. He's genuinely part of a team.
The geographical loop Dana described when she was here is still in effect, but according to Doug, it's not as absolute as she thought. You can successfully walk away from the mountain if you follow a set of careful patterns. The army makes camp for the night close to the loop's Schwarzchild radius; after his call to Cecil, Carlos spends the rest of his evening standing next to it, flicking drops of paint onto a blanket-sized tissue at different angles. They fall in different ways depending on which side of the boundary they're on, mapping out a pattern. It's fractal. It's beautiful.
As so often happens when he's doing experiments here, he draws an interested crowd. "What are you doing?" asks Meg.
"He's making art, lambkin," says Jasika.
"No, I'm making science," corrects Carlos with a grin. "It's time I try defining gravity — and you can't bring me down!"
***
He also stays resolute about keeping in touch with Cecil.
Which becomes more important than ever when Cecil starts experiencing holes in his memory, and seeing records of things he doesn't remember doing. Not just childhood things, which he usually doesn't expect to remember correctly, but things from a few days earlier.
Carlos does his best to be sympathetic and helpful, but it's hard. For one thing, his idea of "helpful" includes telling funny jokes or interesting stories, and it takes him a while to figure out that Cecil just finds this aggravating.
For another, he doesn't have any idea how to fix the actual problem. He makes a few science suggestions, which Cecil thinks are endearing, but useless in practice. He tries to think of Night-Vale-y ways of tracking down Cecil's legal owner/tormentor, and gets either what does that even mean? or I tried that already, Carlos, what do you think I am, an idiot?
And worst of all, the whole thing sets off a torrent of awful, terrible feelings that Carlos hates himself for having.
He suppresses them on the phone, chatters and jokes and goes on long tangents about his research in a desperate effort to keep Cecil from noticing, and ends up yelling a lot to Alicia and Bahati, who listen with a sympathetic and a confused ear, respectively. "Of course some terrible Night Vale thing was going to happen to Cecil eventually!" he exclaims, pacing on his crutches around Alicia's sandal-laced feet. "Did he think he was immune? Did he think it was my fault that place shredded me like it did, that it was because I did things wrong, or the town didn't love me enough, while he was safe?"
Or: "Maybe if he was here already, he'd be safely out of range! Serves him right, being all hesitant and undecided when I asked him to come visit. Maybe if he'd agreed from the start, none of this would be happening."
Or: "Good! I'm glad he's being controlled and hurt and violated. At least now he'll know how I feel!"
Then he usually clings to the car-sized Bichon Frisé for a while and buries his face in her fur, like he thinks he can run away from his own brain if he hides deeply enough.
Alicia pats his back if he asks for it, or doesn't touch him if he doesn't, and tells him that when you go through irrational and horrible things, you sometimes come away with irrational and horrible thoughts. It would be cruel to lay those on Cecil...which is why he's working through them with other supportive friends instead. That's the brave thing to do. It's the good thing to do.
***
As the nomadic army circles closer to the dog park, Carlos does what he can to be an equal member of the team.
He touches up the text on some of Jasika's weather-worn scrolls, taking advantage of his tiny hands to touch up the finest brushwork as easily as a master calligrapher. Being tiny is also an advantage when it comes to pulling out splinters or extracting miniature glass shards, so the warriors start coming to him for that, instead of relying on doctors whose finest tweezers aren't as deft as his fingers.
He shares his astronomical discoveries with Alicia, using science to confirm which star is which as they shift position from night to night. He shares other discoveries with the kids, becoming a casual science teacher in a way he once hoped he could be with the Scouts of Night Vale, until he realized that suspicious parents (with Steve Carlsberg being the most suspicious of all) didn't want him near their kids. He streams songs from his universe for Doug, and the other musically-inclined giants, who take up their instruments and put their own spin on everything from Beethoven to Gershwin to Disney.
You haven't really lived, Carlos decides, until you've been to a sitar circle with dozens of three-story-tall children bellowing I DON'T CAAARE WHAT THEY'RE GOING TO SAAAY! at the top of their lungs.
***
His emotional stability feels like it's going in circles. It's always one step forward, two steps back, then a jump to the left, a step to the right, put your hands on your hips, and bring your knees in tight...as the old proverb goes.
Cecil says he needs space, needs time to process this Lot 37 thing on his own, and asks Carlos to call less. Later, Carlos overhears him crooning on-air over a painting he's made, evidently taking more comfort from a silent unmoving image of Carlos than the real live person. It's hard to think of a starker illustration of how spectacularly unhelpful Carlos has been.
At the same time, Doug and Alicia throw a party to celebrate that it's been six months since Carlos's last panic attack. And it strikes Carlos that, wow, he may still be struggling in a lot of other ways, but it's been a whole six months since his last panic attack.
That would have been its own reward, but the warriors commemorate it with one more thing: his very own miniature mask.
It's been a few days since he's talked to Cecil, so Carlos dares to call him that evening, and lays out all the details in a voicemail bursting with pride.
***
Tiny scientist illustrations.
***
Doug comes back from a routine scouting run with the report that he's found another tiny person.
For a moment Carlos gets the shock of his life — Cecil's already here! But wait, no, that's not Cecil, that's his Strex-employed lookalike from Desert Bluffs. And he's in such terrible shape that even the vicious little serves you right thoughts that sometimes pop up in Carlos's head keep quiet. He's malnourished, weak, and sunburned, with glassy brown eyes sunken into his face.
The army offers the same level of instant, thorough emergency care that they did for Carlos. But this time, they have Carlos himself around to help; it isn't just their large, comparatively clumsy fingers checking the patient's vitals or sluicing fluids into his system.
Kevin's memories from before the desert are mostly good ones, still wrapped in the haze of the Smiling God's distortions. The worst thing he'll say about the War is to call it "unpleasantness." He isn't sure how to deal with the idea that he wasn't Cecil's friend. He apologizes for making fun of Carlos's hair — "did it really look that good before? I remember it so differently."
So it blindsides him when he starts having flashbacks: hallucinating that everything around him is covered in blood, that it's all over his hands, soaking into his shoes.
Carlos walks Kevin through deep-breathing exercises, and talks about which of the soldier's-heart grounding techniques have worked best for himself, and gets back a little of the confidence he's lost in his fumbling with Cecil. He's not an inherently broken or unhelpful person. He's made mistakes, that's all. He can learn.
Also, he really is much better at being supportive in person.
***
And then, all at once, they're camped on a rocky stretch of desert that corresponds to Night Vale's forbidden Dog Park.
Carlos needs this to be a real-time conversation with Cecil, and he keeps getting Cecil's voicemail, so he keeps having to think up new miscellaneous messages to leave on the tape. He babbles his way through scientifically accurate jokes. He talks about tattoo ideas.
He claims he's found lost people from Night Vale here. It's not true — the first set of old oak doors wouldn't have closed in the first place if anyone native to Night Vale was still on this side — but it's grimly satisfying to imagine the Sheriff's secret police swallowing the lie. Yeah, that's right, in your scramble to keep the interloper away, you totally abandoned some of your own. Choke on it.
That's probably the cleverest twist he manages. The stupidest is when he opens a voicemail with something like I know we talked about space and boundaries and all of that, but you know the rules are different when an important scientific discovery is made! The words aren't even all the way out of his mouth and he's kicking himself — it doesn't take a clarifying conversation with a masked warrior-therapist to understand why screw your boundaries is a cruel thing to say, to your boyfriend or to anyone.
Hopefully he'll get a chance to apologize. Hopefully Cecil's desperation to see him, combined with that unrelated yearning to get out of Night Vale for a while, will carry Cecil past Carlos's thoughtless fumbling. Once he's here, Carlos will explain everything, and find a way to make it up to him.
He'll have to.
***
A dozen warriors sit in a loose circle on the rough ground, instruments at the ready. Carlos is perched on Doug's crossed ankles, wearing a loose white robe (draped in "the boy way") that reminds him of the glory days of his now-tattered old lab coat, mask hanging against his chest. Kevin is against Alicia's chest now, safe in a fold of their robes.
"Oof — okay — I am inside the dog park!" reports Cecil on the phone. "Along with all the equipment for this walk, however long it will take. I guess to start I'll just walk away from the walls...?"
"Stay where you are for a second," says Carlos, and raises one hand like a conductor with a baton.
The army starts to play, woodwinds and pipes and horns blending together in a swelling triumphant chord, and an old oak door flickers into view in the middle of the circle.
"Hang on," says Cecil. "Carlos, I — I see one of those doors. Maybe I should just walk through?"
"Yes!" exclaims Carlos. "Yes, come through the door!"
He's still afraid it might not work until the moment when the knob turns, and Cecil — shouldering a camping backpack almost as big as he is, wearing a sun hat and sturdy boots, juggling a canteen in one hand and his phone in the other — emerges onto this world's sand.
"Carlos!" he exclaims — the sound doubled in Carlos's ears — then Cecil hangs up, phone dropping to his side, and it's just his real voice, clear and present. "You're right here!"
Carlos motions for the army to drop the music. The door will stay in place now, as long as Cecil is on this side. "I'm right here."
Cecil doesn't look as delighted about that as Carlos would have hoped. His face twists with tension, confusion. "You were always — you made this door, you could have —"
He looks between his boyfriend's figure and the weathered oak, bewildered and hurt.
"Did you ever even want to come back?"
"I did!" says Carlos quickly. "I did."
The past tense isn't lost on Cecil. "All this time I thought, if I just held out long enough, you'd come home," he says: bleak at first, then with growing anger. "If I was patient, and strong, and survived on my own no matter how bad things got — no matter how much I needed you — it would all be worth it when you came back to me. How long have I been kidding myself, Carlos?"
"It's not like that —"
"Have you been laughing about it behind my back? Gullible, lovesick Cecil, letting himself get strung along for months by a promise you never intended to keep?"
"There are things I couldn't explain on the phone!" cries Carlos. "Things I couldn't even talk about while I was projecting myself into Night Vale, not while we were under observation. It could have put you in danger if I tried!"
"Well, I'm not in Night Vale now!" yells Cecil. "You finally got me here — good job, gold star, hooray for science — now will you finally tell me the truth?"
"I will. I'll tell you everything, honey, I swear." Carlos holds out a hand. "Come here."
"No!"
Cecil plants his feet in the cracked earth and shrugs off his gear, piece by piece. It hits the ground one heavy thump at a time.
"You made me think I had to walk hundreds of miles to get to you, and I didn't even ask you to meet me in the middle. I've spent this whole time pleading and reaching out and chasing after you. Going along with everything you decided, adapting my life to fit every new plan you made, and letting it slide every time you didn't do something I asked for, even when you promised — and I am done, Carlos! You come over to where I am!"
Doug rests a hand next to Carlos, a silent offer to lift him over. Carlos shakes his head, and motions for the giant to hand him a crutch instead. "I will. I'll be right there, Cecil. I'm coming."
The loose robes kept his amputation from being obvious at first glance. Once he's in motion, though, he sees realization flash over Cecil's face.
It's slow going. The ground in this patch of the desert is uneven, strewn with bits of rock and bone; his hard-earned handiness with the crutches is undercut by the scarcity of stable places to put one down. Still, he fights his way through every damn hop, knowing Cecil has to be able to see with his own eyes how Carlos is making every effort to do this as fast as he can.
At last he staggers to a stop at arm's length from his boyfriend, free hand clutching his side.
"I'm here," he gasps.
"You're hurt." Anger and sympathy war on Cecil's face. "You lost a leg and you didn't tell me that either."
"Because I didn't want the news getting back to the secret police officer who shot me."
Now Cecil just looks stricken.
"I love you so much," pleads Carlos. "Let me tell you the whole truth about what living in Night Vale was like. So you'll understand why I can't go back, not unless something changes. And if things can't change, then just...think really hard about all your options before deciding where you want this to go next, okay? Please?"
A hot wind rushes past, tossing the sand around their feet.
"I'm on vacation for a month," allows Cecil at last. "That's enough time for a lot of talking, and listening, and thinking. I won't...rush us through anything. It's not as if I don't have my own reasons to think life back home can be...well. Difficult. At times."
Carlos nods. "I want you to get a break from that out here, too. I have so much to show you. The music. The starlight. Friends. I really want you to meet my friends."
"I — I'd like that."
Cecil takes a step forward, closing the last of the distance between them.
"Show me something nice first?" he asks. With another anxious glance at Carlos's knee, he adds, "You can — lean on me. If that would be easier."
It would. And Carlos would love to. But after all the stress Cecil has been through on his behalf...all the collateral strain that his soldier's-heart has put on Cecil's heart...it's about time Carlos starts making it clear that he won't go putting extra weight on his boyfriend's shoulders just for the hell of it.
"I'm okay for now," he says instead. "I'll pull my own weight. And if there's anything I can do for you...I'm not up for being leaned on, obviously, but anything I'm physically capable of...please tell me."
Cecil swallows back tears, nods...then clasps Carlos's hand in his. A genuine, corporeal, physical hand-holding, the kind he's been yearning after for almost a year now.
"This," he says, voice catching, but fingers curling around Carlos's like he knows he doesn't want to let go. "This is a good start."