Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Carlos was becoming aware of Cecil gradually finding his way into wakefulness on the other side of the bed, but was unwilling to break concentration from his phone just now. He felt Cecil roll over, probably instinctually drawn toward the warmth Carlos was radiating, but the motion jostled him just enough to ruin his careful concentration.

"No! Damn it!" Carlos muttered. He sighed in frustration and looked down at Cecil's slightly worried face that was peering up at him. He gave him a half-smile and a soft "Good morning, Cecil."

Cecil smiled back. “Morning, Carlos." His already deep voice was impossibly deeper and rough from sleep. He cleared his throat. "What are you doing?”

Carlos shut his phone off and snuggled back down into the covers, letting Cecil latch onto him. The man was never the same without his morning cuddles. “It’s this game I just downloaded called Flappy Bird. It’s really frustrating.”

“Oh? Then why play it?”

Carlos thought for a second as Cecil nuzzled his forehead into his chest. “I don’t know. It’s addicting, I guess.”

“Can I try?”

“Sure.” Carlos retrieved his phone while Cecil wriggled around so that his back was pressed against his partner’s chest. Carlos handed the phone off and then reached over Cecil to activate the app.

“So how do you play?” Cecil asked.

“It’s really simple. Tap the screen to make the bird go up. You have to get the bird through the spaces between the pipes.”

Carlos watched with a smile on his face as Cecil’s first poor little bird plummeted beak-first into the ground. On his second try Cecil knocked the bird into the very first pipe. “Oh, I get it,” Cecil murmured.

Carlos held back a snicker, thinking that Cecil didn’t yet realize what he was up against. The snicker died away, however, as Cecil proceeded to clear five, then twelve, then seventeen pipes without even tensing up. Carlos could do little but stare slack-jawed as Cecil inadvertently made a mockery of the previous high score, finally taking a nose-dive at a whopping 76 points.

“Aw, I only got to 76,” Cecil drawled. The high score screen popped up. “Oh, but look. I apparently topped your high score. What was your high score?”

Carlos struggled to find his voice, and then finally managed an answer. “Eight.”

Cecil was quiet for a moment. “Oh. Well . . . ”

Carlos quickly pressed a kiss to Cecil’s forehead, eliciting a small gasp. “You have the most bizarre talents, Cecil. Please don’t ever stop surprising me.”

Cecil chuckled nervously, licking his lips as Carlos continued to exhale warm breaths on what he had discovered was the most erogenous spot on Cecil's body. Cecil claimed that the odd eye-shaped coloring on his forehead had something to do with how he was able to report on what was happening outside his recording booth in real time. While Carlos found that intriguing, once they had gotten together it hadn’t taken him long to find the other fun aspects of the little oddity on Cecil’s forehead.

Cecil squirmed. "Carlos, we should be getting up soon . . ."

"But it's my turn to show you some of my talents," Carlos pouted. He gently licked the spot that the unusual coloring on Cecil’s forehead blended into the rest of his skin tone. Cecil shivered, but didn’t say a single word more in protest.

Chapter Text

Carlos was half-listening to Cecil’s broadcast later that evening as he finished up some of his lab reports.

“Now listeners, there’s something I’ve been very excited to tell you about all day. This morning, my boyfriend Carlos introduced me to a very interesting game on his phone.”

Carlos perked up at the sound of his name, smiling at the way Cecil almost couldn’t say his name on air these days without having the word boyfriend somewhere nearby. At first he’d thought it was a little weird and mildly annoying, but he understood that Cecil was merely a passionate individual, who was excited to have a boyfriend. It was sweet in its own way.

“It’s called Flappy Bird. It’s a fairly simple game, in which you assist a poor deformed little bird whose wings are too small to support even it’s tiny pixelated body to achieve its ultimate dream of flying over great distances through life’s many twists and turns and, sometimes, seemingly impossible obstacles with pride and dexterity. It’s quite a lot of fun, actually.”

Carlos smiled a little wider. “You guide the bird through the pipes, Cecil. That’s literally all you had to say.”

Unhearing of his other half’s critical comments, Cecil continued. “Now, I'm not one to brag, but I've been playing it off and on throughout the day, and have managed a high score of 156. I'd be interested, listeners, to hear if any of you have achieved a higher score, or even just any score that you yourselves are proud of, but first, dear sweet fulfillers of tiny bird dreams, the weather."

Carlos quickly pulled out his phone as the music played and typed out a message for Cecil. "No need to announce it, but if you're interested I've raised mine to 19."

The response came a few seconds later. "Considering your personal rate of success that's quite good."

Carlos grinned, did some quick math in his head, and started typing again. "I'll have you know that my score has increased by 137.5% over the course of the day while yours has only gone up 105.3%. :)"

There was a bit of a pause before Cecil's reply came through. "Did you do that in your head?"

"Yes. Why?"

This time the pause lasted longer than the last one, until Carlos realized that the weather was drawing to a close and Cecil was probably trying to sort through all the Flappy Bird scores that people were sending in. He put his phone away and returned to his paperwork as the last notes of the weather faded away.

"Welcome back, Night Vale. I seem to have learned that perhaps I shouldn't have been so hasty to boast about how far along I've managed to help my little bird. During the weather I received a great many reports from all of you that were far higher than my own. Carlos told me that he has raised his own score by 137 percent since this morning. Old Woman Josie was the first to report a score higher than mine at 187, and even John Peters, you know, the farmer, has gotten in on the fun, calling in with a score of 209, but perhaps most impressive is the score of young Megan Wallaby, who if you will remember was born as an adult man's detached hand, but was recently given the chance to live with a full and completely functional body, and is still recovering and learning to live with her new body. Her best score is an unbelievable 1,057. Congratulations, Megan!"

Carlos nearly fell over at that number. He'd no idea that Cecil was going to introduce the entire town to this game. Not that he actually minded, but he still wished it could have been just between him and Cecil for a day or two. Oh well. He never told Cecil not to. At least it was being framed in an uplifting way, instead of the dark doom and gloom that tended to surround the citizens of Night Vale. Carlos dimly realized that Cecil was still talking.

"I suppose it stands to reason that since she has spent the majority of her life up to this point as nothing but a hand, she would have a very good mastery of the dexterity of her fingers. Nevertheless, her score was nearly double that of the second highest score I've heard today, the honor of which goes to our own radio station intern Laura with 531, and she only managed that because somehow, as she was playing she was absorbed into the game itself. Oh, and on that topic, to the family of intern Laura, she seems to be perfectly fine, if a bit pixelated, but until a way is found to get her out, we recommend that you keep the phone fully charged and turned on with the Flappy Bird app open at all times."

Cecil moved on to wrapping up the broadcast and Carlos returned to only half-listening until Cecil said, “Stay tuned next for a peek into the near future. Very near. So near it’s almost the past. So basically the present. Stay tuned next for a peek into the present. Good night, Night Vale. Good night.”

Carlos quickly shut the radio off and filed away his reports, then headed out of the lab, texting as he walked. “Big Rico’s for dinner?”

“There’s actually a lot of stuff I need to finish here at the station.”

Carlos slid into his car and shut the door. “I’ll come wait for you then. Maybe I can get Laura out of her phone.”

“K”

When Carlos got to the radio station, he found Laura’s situation to be somewhat hopeless, as the phone had mysteriously melted into a puddle on Cecil’s desk where he’d been keeping it safe. Cecil had been forced out of his recording booth while a few members of the Secret Police and some employees of Strex Corp argued over who should be responsible for it, and Carlos eventually discovered him in the break room shuffling through some papers.

Cecil glanced up as Carlos walked in. “Oh, hi. They won’t let me back into my recording booth, and I’m beginning to think I should just come in early tomorrow to prerecord these public service announcements, so we could go ahead and leave if you want.”

Carlos shrugged. “Sure, alright.”

As Cecil rose a small portion of the stack of papers in his hand fell to the floor, which Carlos quickly knelt to help pick up. “Sorry,” Cecil muttered.

“No worries . . . what’s this?” Carlos held up a sheet of paper with a long handwritten list of mostly three digit numbers. He saw Cecil’s face cloud over with fear so briefly that he wondered if he could trust his own eyes. He looked at the paper again, and then it dawned on him why Cecil would be frightened.

Cecil smoothly took the paper from his hand and buried it once more within his stack of papers. “Nothing at all. Just stuff.”

They gathered the rest of the papers in silence and headed out into the parking lot. As soon as Carlos was relatively sure no one was within earshot, he lowered his voice and asked, “Was that your handwriting?”

Cecil didn’t answer.

Carlos waited until they both slid into his car and the doors were shut before he spoke again. “I’ve never seen your handwriting before. Can I see it again?” He tentatively pointed at the stack of papers. Cecil tensed up but he thumbed through the papers to locate the one Carlos wanted.

“They’re the Flappy Bird scores everyone sent in.” Cecil muttered.

“Where did you get the . . .” Carlos trailed off, afraid to say pencil or writing utensil out loud when literally anyone could be listening at anytime.

Cecil hesitated, then he grinned a mildly unnerving grin with far too much teeth showing and fumbled with the waistband of his trousers for a moment before producing an incredibly small pencil from an apparently small and secret pocket.

Carlos grinned as well. “Cecil, you rebel.”

“Shh,” Cecil admonished. Though his grin was genuine, it was still tense.

“But why go through all this trouble? I would’ve thought your memory would have sufficed?”

Now Cecil ducked his head, embarrassed but also slightly flirtatious. Carlos was amazed how someone who so often wore his emotions on his sleeve could hide a banned writing utensil and sneak around on rooftops spreading rebellious propaganda without somehow giving himself away.

“I wondered if you would average them. I couldn’t remember all of them.”

Carlos then remembered his question that had never been answered. “Oh yeah. How did you know I’d done that calculation in my head?”

“Third eye.”

“Ok, but why did you care?”

Cecil shrugged, still playing coy. “You doing math in your head is sexy.”

Carlos blushed hard, but tried to keep his cool. He glanced down at the piece of paper and spoke slowly while the gears in his head turned. “So you would find it sexy if I told you that all of these numbers add up to . . . 4,734?”

Cecil finally turned to face Carlos, lips parted and pupils dilated. Carlos laughed internally. So Cecil had a math kink? Who knew?

“And you would find it sexy if I told you that when you divide that total by the number of scores, you . . . wind up with . . . ah . . .” Carlos worked as fast as he could but mental long division was hard for anybody. It didn’t seem to faze Cecil, however, who watched Carlos with utter anticipation. Carlos finally found an answer. “ . . . 263?”

Cecil’s pupils were blown wide to the point his eyes were almost entirely dark. Carlos had seen them do that before when Cecil was wildly aroused and so it no longer fazed him, but it was still a little odd to see Cecil this excited without any physical contact at all. Carlos was almost afraid to touch him at this point.

“I didn’t know you could do math in your head like that,” Cecil breathed. “I hardly knew that I would enjoy it that much, either. I’m honestly quite surprised at both of us. You could have been a mathematician, you know.”

Now Carlos laughed out loud and put the key in the ignition. “No. What’s the point of math if you don’t put it to some kind of use? Science is where I belong.”

“I’ll put your math to good use,” Cecil purred, leaning in over the center console.

Carlos knew that particular voice. He loved that voice. Cecil knew he loved that voice, too. Carlos caved. “We’ve already filled our Big Rico’s quota for the week,” he said. “Want to just go home and relish in these new surprises of ours?”

Cecil nodded slowly. “We can do some . . . experiments . . . with math.”

Carlos let out another huff of laughter. “And then afterwards you have to teach me your Flappy Bird technique.”

“Deal.”