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I.
“Ceec, you have to come out of there at some point, you know.”
Silence. Carlos knocked on the door again.
“Honey. Come on.”
“Carlos,” Cecil said slowly, through the door. “My darling, precious Carlos. You know how much I love you. How important you are to me. That I would do anything in my power to make you happy.”
“Yeah, sweetie, thank you. I love you too. Will you please at least tell me if it fits?”
“And that is why,” Cecil continued, as though Carlos had not spoken, “I am agreeing to go out in public dressed like this.”
The door swung open slowly, dramatically.
And he looked...good. Damn good. Carlos would be beating unmarried cousins off of him with a stick. Until you reached his face, that is, set in its tight scowl. No one could scowl like Cecil.
“I have literally never worn monochrome clothing in my life, Carlos.”
The trousers fit well. Very well. The snug waistcoat accentuated his shape in a way that just begged Carlos to slip his arms around him.
“You look good, babe.” Carlos said, whistling between his teeth. “Really good.”
“There isn’t even a single color,” Cecil went on, and there was a hint of a whine in his voice.
“Well,” Carlos said brightly, “you’re wearing a pure white shirt. White is the combination of all visible colors. So scientifically speaking, you’re actually wearing every color.”
“I have perfectly good suits at home.”
“Cecil…” Carlos wondered where to begin explaining that multicolored houndstooth, yellow check and that weird bus-seat pattern had no place in a non-Night Vale wedding.
“Fine. It’s fine.” Cecil did not sound fine. “I will do this for you. And for your brother.” He leaned into his habitual slump with a sigh. “And because if I want your parents to like me I’m going to need all the help I can get.”
Carlos smiled, in no small part relieved. “They’re gonna love you.”
“I have a lot to prove. I bet expectations are really high in your family. Especially given…” he waved a hand vaguely.
Oh, dear Cecil, he wanted to say. They already know about us. And it might be a little awkward at times but it will be worth it, to be there with you. But before he could frame the question, Cecil continued.
“I’ve just realized I’m going to have to work harder for them to accept me. It’s okay.” Cecil shrugged and looked away. “I mean what are they gonna say when they find out your boyfriend isn’t even a scientist.”
There was a tense pause. Cecil watched the floor. Carlos replayed the sentence in his head, looking for alternate meanings.
“Cecil. Babe,” he said finally. “You do remember that talk we had last year? About my actual name?”
“I know, I know.” Cecil pulled the little round glasses off the end of his nose and rubbed his eyes. “I remember. But...science is in your blood. Not mine.”
“That was a figure of speech. We are not actually hereditary scientists. It’s more like...a tradition.”
Cecil did not look convinced.
II.
Carlos had been gone for three days.
They’d reviewed the plans over and over. Carlos was helping his brother prepare, meeting his soon-to-be sister in law, smoothing the way for relatives who were not anticipating him having a boyfriend (and there was really no way for anyone to anticipate Cecil, he’d said playfully, and he’d promised he meant it as a good thing). Cecil would fly out a few days later, when his travel clearance was renewed. Carlos would pick him up at the airport. He would introduce him to the family. Everything would be okay.
He was certain of that. It was going to be okay. He promised. He asked Cecil to stop making that face. He knew what face.
But there was one problem: that stupid ugly black suit was gone.
He checked the bedroom closet four times. The hall closet. Behind the sofa. Under the fitted sheet on the bed. Where did they like to hide?, he wondered. Was it intimidated by the brighter, more fun things he usually wore? Had his grumbling somehow insulted the somber thing?
“I’m sorry,” he shouted to the house at large, two days before he was supposed to leave. “I didn’t mean what I said. I’m sure monochrome clothing is really, uh, really in. Somewhere.”
The next day he asked, “Um. Faceless Old Woman? Did you, by any chance, see a black suit that I’m supposed to be packing carefully for this trip?”
When he got home from work all the mugs, glasses and bowls in the house were set up in an elaborate pattern on the bed. So that was probably a no.
Finally, he gave in. The night before he was supposed to leave, he called Carlos’ phone. There was clearly a lot going on over there; he could scarcely hear anything over the riot of voices in the background.
“Carlos,” he said, in his most charming, alluring voice, hoping to mask his failure to keep the suit safe, “my sweet, sexy scientist. I appear to have misplaced that suit. So I can’t wear it to the wedding. Which means I can’t go.” He decided to stack the deck a little, and anyway he’d been lonely and well behaved for three days already. “So I’ll have to stay home. Alone. In bed. Wearing nothing. Maybe you should join me?”
There was a temporary lull in the background noise. And then, a snort.
“Carlos?”
The snort grew into a great, hacking cackle. And that was a sound Carlos had never made, ever.
Someone on the other end was trying to get their breath. “Oh lord,” said a voice, and the knowledge that that was not Carlos settled in his stomach like ice water.
“Um. Uh?”
“Hang on a second.” There was rapid speech in the background, but it was impossible to tell what was said because Cecil’s ears were ringing and he felt suddenly light-headed.
After a moment, oh fearsome heavens, finally he heard that sweet, and most of all, familiar voice say, “Hi, Ceec.” And then, when Cecil had nothing to say, he asked “so what did you say to my aunt?”
“Carlos.”
“What, babe?”
“I...I changed my mind I’mnotgoing. I am going to sit in the closet by myself and live with my deep shame until you come home.”
“No, no, it’s fine, she’s still laughing about it. Whatever you said, if it was dirty, you got the right aunt. She’s gonna love you.”
“Oh no.”
“I mean it. Hey--” and it sounded like he moved his face away from the phone, why did he do that, “everything’s okay, right? You still wanna meet my sweetie?”
Cecil could not understand the response over the ambient noise, but it sounded enthusiastic.
“See?”
“I can’t go anyway. Because I lost the suit.” Yes, yes, let’s go with that! “I can’t find the suit and you’re right, none of my clothes are acceptable for the occasion so I’m just going to, um, stay here and--”
“I brought it.”
“You what.” Damnit.
“I brought the suit. I told you I would bring it. I was worried you would conveniently forget it at the last minute.”
Now he was stuck. “Oh. Oh good. Great. I can’t look anyone in your family in the eye and they will probably reject me in the standard ritual of public rejection, with all the pointing and laughing and semi-permanent branding that entails, but at least we have found the suit.” He sat heavily on the bedroom floor. “Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go be mortified.”
III.
They’d talked a lot about clothes. Cecil had apparently latched on to that as a sign of what life was like outside Night Vale. “They all dress like you, right?” He’d asked nervously. “Dull colors? Loose...things? I think I have black tights, would those be good?”
And then, later, “Wait, are all clothes gendered there? Everything? No, I mean, it’s fine. Weird, but whatever.”
Carlos had thought about advising him, helping him pare his wardrobe down into three days worth of vaguely normal-passing clothes.
“No,” he said finally. “I think you should just wear whatever you like. I don’t care. I love you. I love your vulture-print shirt and your mixed patterns and shark socks and that neon windbreaker you insist on wearing every chance you get. They’re going to meet the Cecil I fell in love with, and who cares what they think anyway.”
But Carlos realized when he spotted Cecil in the airport that he’d at least made an effort to tone it down slightly, which is to say that nothing he wore was moving on its own. He still glowed like a beacon of fluorescence, and that made him very easy to find.
He was looking around nervously, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a child that had lost its mother but was too old to burst into tears.
“Hey,” Carlos said as he approached, “you need a ride, hot stuff?”
Generally, Cecil played along with that. Sometimes there was just a bit of flirty back-and-forth, sometimes it lead to all kinds of fun trouble in the back of his car. But this time he leapt at him and shouted, “Carlos thank goodness I finally found you, I was scared you forgot about me, I have never been around this many strangers before and I do not think they wish me well, Carlos, that one in particular has been watching me for five minutes--”
“How could I ever forget about you?” Carlos asked, running his fingers up the back of Cecil’s neck in a way that he generally found soothing. “Calm down. It’s okay. We’re gonna go back to my mother’s, you can meet the family, my aunt will try to feed you--”
“Is it…that aunt?” Cecil did not have to explain which aunt he was referring to.
“Yes. But don’t worry. She’s already decided she likes you, and she told my mom and my cousins--”
“She told people? I’ll be trapped in a house full of people who know that I said that? And that we’re--that we--?”
“I think they already understood that we’re intimate.” Carlos smiled at him, his most charming, reassuring grin, the one he said he fell in love. “How about this--we’ll drive the long way back and talk about it.”
He seemed so nervous that Carlos tried to keep any eye on him through the big family dinner and the milling about afterwards, while he buzzed around being a Good Son and Brother, but he probably didn’t need to worry too much. Cecil was generally okay in large social situations; he had a sweet smile and a good handshake, and if all else failed he still had the gentle music of his voice to fall back on.
Also, he introduced him to Aunt Linda first and let her watch over him.
“What do you do?” she’d asked pleasantly.
“Oh, I’m in radio!”
“Lucky you were able to break into the field, it'd be a shame to waste that voice.”
“Hmm?” Cecil blinked innocently, and Carlos worried for a second where this was going. “Oh! Well, I didn’t have much of a choice. I mean, prophecy, right?” he laughed lightly.
There was a tense silence. A distant cousin (god what was her name, he always forgot her name) coughed lightly. But Aunt Linda chirped, “Of course! Our Carlos was the same way--in and out of the lab since he could walk, how could he do anything else?”
Carlos could have kissed her, if he’d had the time. But he was pulled away by his father, who was looking more grey and stern than he had the last time they'd seen each other, to provide a brief pep-talk to the increasingly nervous groom.
He floated in and out of conversations over the course of the night.
“All this to-do over a wedding,” he heard Cecil say later, casually tearing his small paper napkin into strips and stuffing them in his shirt pocket. “I mean, the marriage is the important part, right? Couple of chants and a bloodletting, burn an effigy, done and done.”
“Well, they wanted to be married in the Church,” Cousin What’s-her-name interjected, apparently missing every important detail of the preceding sentence.
“Of course they’d be married in a church.” Cecil dismissed this, gesturing with a few of the paper strips. “But this much church? This is a lot of church. More church than I had anticipated, to be honest.”
“Where did you meet him?” Carlos’ mother whispered behind her wine glass.
“Uh. California?”
She nodded as though this explained him, somehow. But there was no explaining Cecil. “Give me a hand with your grandfather, will you? He’s been drinking.”
The next time he spotted his boyfriend, he was all the way on the other side of the room. His smile was tight and brittle, and he clutched his glass so tightly he was in danger of breaking it. His pocket was still full of bits of napkin. He was talking to--
--oh no--
--Carlos’ stepmother. He strode across the room as quickly as he dared, not quite sure who he was rescuing from whom.
“Oh,” he heard Cecil chirp, and that tone of false innocence was always trouble, especially when his eyes were narrowed like that. “You mean that as a euphemism! I get it now. I guess it’s lucky for him we’re both a little funny otherwise he’d be in for a hell of a surprise after this party is over. And that’s a bit euphemistic, too, because by ‘surprise’ I mean a vigorous--”
Carlos gave up and ran, dodging people as well as he could; when he reached them he couldn't slow down on time and bumped directly into Cecil's back. “Oh, there you are!" he said, like he hadn't be running directly towards him. "I just realized you haven’t actually met my brother yet.”
“Carlos, he was like the first person you--”
“Come on, let’s go! I’m sure there’s someone you don’t know here.”
IV.
“That’s just Grace,” Carlos said. Cecil did not feel particularly soothed. “She’s a giant bitch. She probably doesn’t even believe it, she just wanted to make you feel off-balance. She does that. Because she's terrible.”
Cecil leaned on the windowsill and looked away. There were no lights in this sky, only the stars and the round, mocking face of the moon. There was no familiar void to shriek at. He wrapped Carlos' lab coat tighter around himself, a bit of the comfort of home.
“Her smug little voice though. ‘ooh well I always knew that boy was a funny one. Well aren’t you a funny little thing.’ Of all the things people have intentionally tried to make me feel bad about, that’s never--” he bit the inside of his cheek to quiet himself. She wasn’t worth getting upset over. But he was upset. “Does your whole family think like that? About us?”
“No, of course not!” Carlos was sitting on the bed of the guest room, halfway through taking his shoes off. He reached his hands toward Cecil. “My mom thinks you’re cute. Says she can see why you’re good for me.”
Cecil stepped forward reluctantly and stood in front of him, his face still tight with distress. “Aunt Linda thinks you’re a riot, she absolutely loves you. My future sister in law didn’t really get to talk to you, but she loved your shoes.” He slipped his arms around Cecil’s waist and laced his fingers in the small of his back. “And I heard that the groom’s brother thinks you’re totally hot.”
“Oh yeah?” Cecil smiled in spite of himself. “Which one was he? The, uh, cute one with the glasses?” He leaned down and pulled said glasses off of Carlos’ face.
“Yeah. He couldn’t stop staring at you.” Carlos pulled Cecil into his lap, drawing a little squeak out of him. “Said he was hoping you’d follow him back to his room when the family thing was over, let him get his mouth on you.”
“Hmm.” Cecil, definitely soothed now, slid his hands over Carlos’ broad shoulders. “Counter-proposal: we ditch the family thing and I ride him ‘til the sun comes up.”
Keeping quiet wasn’t ever going to be easy for Cecil. It hadn’t previously been a problem, although recently the neighbors had taken to banging on the walls and giving him significant looks in the hallway. In all honesty, he’d just never understood the need to suppress his passion, his affection, and anyway by the time volume control became an issue he wasn’t generally thinking about anyone who wasn’t already in the room.
But the heavy silence now, whispered breaths like quiet, private prayers, the muffled gasping, well, all that was definitely working for him. His lover’s face in the moonlight, head back, lips parted, hands tight in the foreign bedspread as though to channel the potential sound into action, pressing his own lips and teeth against the smooth dark skin to keep the noise in, to maintain the silence...Unf.
He put a lot of energy into staying virtually soundless. It did not occur to him to put any energy at all into the sound the bed was making, or the occasional thump of the headboard against the wall. In his defense, though, Carlos didn’t do anything either.
That is, until a fist banged heavily, twice, on the door.
“Keep it down in there!” someone shouted, a voice he couldn’t immediately identify. He froze, his blood cold and his face hot, staring at the door. Did he lock it I didn’t at least I don't think I did oh spire please don’t try the knob--
“Oh, uh, sorry, Ma,” Carlos shouted guiltily.
“And you two better be safe in there!” the voice--Carlos’ mother, because apparently the situation was not uncomfortable enough--added. “You got everything you need?”
Carlos swore softly under his breath and said, out loud, “Uh. Yeah.”
Right, Cecil thought hazily, never leaving this room again. This is where I live now. Stuck forever. Goodbye, Night Vale, Cecil Palmer will never show his face again.
“Don’t worry about it,” Carlos whispered, looking up at him through his lashes as though his own cheeks weren’t hot with embarrassment. “That last bit wasn’t directed at us. She’s fucking with the other house guests.”
“What? Why?”
“I love my mother, but she is a bitter old woman, still compelled toward revenge any way she can get it. And that--” he jerked his thumb behind his head, towards the wall the headboard had been hitting, “--is where Dad and Grace are sleeping.”
V.
“A lovely wedding,” Aunt Linda said, her face slightly pink from wine.
“It was definitely pretty,” Cecil mumbled. “Confusing though. Such a...mobile faith. Easier, grovelling before the Brownstone Spire or submitting to the Glow Cloud.”
Carlos was surprised to find himself mutter, “All Hail” without thinking about it. The surest signed he’d yet had that Night Vale was his home, now.
“You know where you stand--or, um, kneel, rather. Not all this leaping up and down.” Cecil sighed lightly, and apparently he didn’t even see the look Aunt Linda gave him. “Still. It’s a very pretty faith.”
Of all the ways to describe his family’s religion...but he couldn’t really blame Cecil. He’d had a very guarded couple of days and apparently had had enough of his attempts at normalcy. He fiddled with the buttons on his jacket grimly.
Carlos placed a hand on his back and smiled. “Thanks for coming with me,” he said. “And for tolerating my family. And the suit.”
“I wouldn’t even want to be buried in this suit,” he said with a slight shudder. “What a way to spend an afterlife. Also I think I’ve been patient enough, so if your stepmother starts any kind of shit with me today I will finish it and she will not be happy. Keeps giving me looks after last night. Come over here and say something to me, lady.”
Perhaps this should have bothered Carlos, but he just shrugged. “Hope I’m there to see it.”
The stood together for some time and Carlos wrapped a hand around his shoulder. Cecil’s posture softened, and he set his head against Carlos’ shoulder, and for a moment none of the disruptions or revenges or petty family dramatics mattered. They were here, together, now, and they would be home together soon, and he was certain they could tolerate anything as long as, at the end of it, they could stand together just like this.
“Hey,” Carlos said brightly. “Let’s dance.”
“You hate dancing,” Cecil said, but there was a hint of hope in his voice.
“Not with you. Come on. We've been modest and well-behaved for too long. I want to show you off a little.”