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Teddy Williams was on his way home from the bowling alley when he spotted someone coming out of the library, some old person with a lapful of books being pushed down the hadn’t-been-there-yesterday ramp in a wheelchair. He shook his head. People should know better, really they should. Even if they could get away from the librarians unscathed, that didn’t mean Teddy wasn’t going to get a call from the Sheriff’s Secret Police later to come patch the idiot reader and their helper up after they’d been thoroughly interrogated. Or put through re-education, which was basically the same thing just stretched out over a longer period of time.
It wasn’t until he’d already gone past that he realized the person in the wheelchair had been sporting a cast on one leg. Teddy checked his rear-view mirror and scowled. What had Cecil been doing in the library? More to the point, what had Carlos thought he was doing taking Cecil to the library? Teddy thought he should probably turn the truck around and demand answers from the scientist, maybe try again to talk some sense into his baby brother about being more careful while he was at it...and that was when he noticed something else: Cecil’s hair was all white, not just in the front the way he usually had it. At first Teddy thought it was because the hair had just grown out and Cecil hadn’t gotten around to dying it yet…but then the man reflected in the mirror shook his head and Teddy saw the long white ponytail hanging down, tipped with black at the end like a fox’s tail in reverse. Carlos’s silver-streaked dark hair was even longer than that, woven into a thick braid that fell halfway down his back. Teddy’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. There could only be one explanation: They’d gone back outside the valley…back outside of time and space to that place Cecil referred to as ‘Europe’.
Teddy abruptly decided stopping to yell at the two men was a bad idea and drove the rest of the way home in a highly disturbed frame of mind. He hadn’t been back to see his brother since that day the faceless old woman had been killed, so he wasn’t sure what had been going on since then. Had he been right, had Carlos only gotten close to Cecil because he was interested in what Cecil could do? That would explain why the scientist might have taken Cecil to such a dangerous place even though he still had a broken leg. Going to the library was different; Cecil could have convinced Carlos to take him to the library just because he was bored, which would have been somewhat understandable but also problematic on a whole different level. The reaction of the local authorities to library visitors aside, Cecil’s mother and her mother before her had supposedly had ties to the library and the librarians, so Cecil going there was much more likely to start people talking.
Or maybe not now it wasn’t, since there were still a lot of sinkhole stories going around, new and old, about rescues and people helping other people and things going on in the bowels of the collapsed hospital. The one about how Carlos had climbed down into the sinkhole by himself to rescue Cecil got re-told and embellished a lot, and so did the stories about Hiram pulling Carlos and Tony out of the hospital right before Scott had declared the rescue operations over. People thought very, very highly of Night Vale's fire department now, and public sentiment against the Sheriff's Secret Police and the mysterious government agency – neither of which had pitched in to help at all during the disaster’s aftermath – was rising.
Teddy didn't think that was a good thing. You didn't get anywhere by fighting the status quo, and in Night Vale the status quo was the police and the agency. Station Management had been part of that once, but the earthquake and the sinkhole and Khoshekh had taken them out of the picture. Cecil should have learned a lesson from that incident and stopped shooting off his mouth about things, to Teddy’s way of thinking, but Cecil was stubborn and keeping his mouth shut was an ability he'd apparently lost entirely while he was in 'Europe'. Teddy tried not to think about Europe. He'd thought Carlos was with him on that at one point, because the scientist had said as much, but what Carlos had apparently meant was that he tried not to think about what the existence of Cecil's Europe meant, not that he was avoiding thinking about Cecil having been there at all. And that obviously hadn’t stopped him from going there and taking Cecil with him.
With a broken leg. In a wheelchair. Through the fucking library that wouldn’t stay burned down and was inhabited by feral librarians. For a supposedly smart guy with multiple PhDs the scientist sure didn’t have much sense, and Teddy made up his mind that the next time Carlos needed the services of a physician he was going to take his sweet time fixing the damage. He’d teach the guy to endanger his baby brother like that, no matter what his reason had been for doing it.
Teddy pulled up in front of his house, braking rather abruptly when he noticed someone sitting on his front porch. He turned off the engine, got out slowly. The someone was Carlos. “You and I have to talk,” the scientist said without preamble. “About your brother.” Carlos ran a hand through his hair, which was almost indecently perfect. He was wearing a white shirt with flowing sleeves, unbuttoned halfway down his chest to expose sculpted muscle; he looked like he’d just stepped off the cover of a cheap romance novel. “Tell me, Teddy, do you wish he just hadn’t come back? That he’d died out there?”
Brown eyes turned a dangerous red. “How dare you…!”
“How dare you,” Carlos countered smoothly. “I didn’t just pull that out of my ass, Teddy, that’s what he actually thinks. You let him think you hated him for coming back different, for not being able to conform anymore. He thinks you wish he’d just stayed gone.”
All right, that stung. Because a few times Teddy had wished that; he’d wished Cecil had stayed out there, outside of the valley, and built some other, safer kind of life for himself. He didn’t want that, though. He loved his brother, of course he’d wanted him to come back! “I just couldn’t…”
“Accept the new him?”
Teddy got mad again. “I don’t expect you to understand. He was gone three months…”
“And came back over a decade older, with tattoos that gave him powers, and with stories to tell that you didn’t want to hear.” A smirk. “Especially after he ate a bug right in front of you that first night, right?”
The older man’s eyes widened. There was no way Carlos could have known about that incident, because nobody knew about it. Not to mention, there was no way in hell the scientist could have gotten to his house before him on foot – especially since he didn’t look either sweaty or winded. And Carlos might be a pretty man, but he didn’t look this perfect. “You aren’t Carlos.”
‘Carlos’ smiled, a seductive smile that somehow just wasn’t…nice. “No. This is the way your brother pictures him, I think it’s cute.” And then he stood up and walked down the steps, growing and changing as he did…until the black angel was standing there, still smiling. The smile wasn’t seductive anymore, though; in fact, Teddy wasn’t too sure it was actually a smile at all. “I have been waiting for you to get home. We need to talk. It is important.”
Teddy scowled up at it. “Nobody is supposed to talk to you, you know that.”
The angel shrugged, wings rustling. “What do the petty rules of fearful humans mean to me?” It cocked its head. “Or to you, for that matter.”
“I’m human!”
“Partially. And fearful,” the angel conceded. “But you are not afraid of me, you are afraid of the petty, fearful humans. That is one of the things I wish to talk to you about.”
Teddy wanted to deny that he was afraid…but he really couldn’t. Because he was, he always had been. His mother had been too. “They aren’t a threat to you,” he tried to explain. Maybe it just didn’t understand. “They are a threat to those of us who are…different. If you want to talk to someone, you should talk to Cecil; he won’t listen to me.”
“Because what you thought you were telling him and what he heard were not the same thing,” the angel countered. “Your actions, as well, were a source of confusion. You demanded that he isolate himself from others for his own safety, but then you withdrew from him, leaving him alone.” The arching black wings rustled again, and a sharp black claw pointed at him. “You have hurt him. I do not like that.”
The claw looked razor sharp, almost like the talon of a bird of prey. Teddy had never realized the angels had claws before. No wonder the City Council had told everyone to avoid them. “I wasn’t trying to hurt him, I was trying to keep him safe!”
“You were acting out your own fears upon him,” the angel accused, and then it blinked its five oil-black eyes. //You made him believe you no longer cared for him, because he was different. You left him alone. You made him hurt, and cry, and fear you – although I have fixed the thing that made him fear, so it cannot happen again.//
Teddy drew back, running into the bumper of his truck. He raised a hand to his head, which the angel's voice was inside of now, stabbing him with every word. “Don’t do that, you’re hurting me.”
//Because I am angry with you, and I want to.// The angel was looming over him, although not coming any closer. //Your brother’s mother spoke to him this way, which was also the way your mother spoke to her. Your mother was his mother’s only connection to the rest of the world.//
His mouth twisted. “No, his mother was mentally deficient because one of your kind raped and impregnated her – just like one of you did to my mother.”
And that was when a really horrible thing happened; the angel threw back its head, wings half-expanding…and laughed. Teddy clapped his hands over his ears, but the awful sound was also inside his head so he couldn’t shut it out. //Your mother sought out your father, because she thought he was beautiful,// the angel told him. //She wanted love, she wanted to know the joy of having a child, and her own people would not give that to her because she was not ‘pretty’.// It cocked its head. //Cecil’s mother came to his father for a similar reason…but in her case it was because those same people had rejected her due to her mother’s calling, passed down so carefully in the building of knowledge.// Its wings snapped shut again. //Stupid humans. Her choice erred, though, and the child she conceived was more our kind than yours. To bear it would have killed her, and the child would have died as well. So she and the father worked to change it. // It leaned forward, pupil-less eyes staring down into his, and Teddy swallowed hard. //He was my pod mate. He gave his life to save his Mary and their child, and she lost her ability to connect to the world of humans…but your mother stepped in, and became her connection. We honor them both.//
“If that was true, my mother would have told me!”
The angel abruptly stepped back. “She did not dare,” it said aloud, which was worse than if it had kept hurting him by speaking directly into his mind. Because it had been angry, but now it was sad and that was somehow infinitely worse. “You were a child, she did not feel it was a secret you could keep. She had fear, yes, and you learned it from her, but you assigned the wrong meaning to it. She feared that your brother would be taken for sacrifice if it became known.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t keep it a secret, so now they’re probably going to do that anyway.” Teddy waved one hand dismissively over the town. “All of these idiots now seem to think they can change things; they can’t. My brother and his science boyfriend can’t either.”
“They will…after a fashion.” The angel took another step back, wings rustling. “Things are different now, they are different now. My nephew saved his lover last night, calling on first the power he earned on his travels, then the power of his heritage…and finally, when both were exhausted, the power of his heart. Carlos in turn called on me as one who could help, and I led them across the barrier that they might heal and learn in safety.”
“Learn?”
“The truth, bitter though it may taste. Carlos was to be the world’s salvation…but instead the fool who betrayed him became its destruction. And then that fool found your brother, my nephew, and hurt him as well.”
Teddy nodded slowly. Cecil had mentioned that person before. “Al?”
“That was the fool’s name.” Teddy found himself wishing the angel had stayed mad or sad or just about anything else instead of smiling again. “Now his name is a number. He sits and stares at the warped and broken future which is his present, trying to decide if there was more he could have done, trying to decide if he should have killed instead. He is mad, but not so much that he may be excused by madness for his actions…or his thoughts.” The black wings snapped, making him jump. “My pod mates and I came here because of what his madness wrought, we were curious about this place and its people. We thought to leave before the end, leave all behind. But Josie has taught us, she has shown us many things. She taught us that ohana means family, and family means no one is left behind.” It pointed at him again and switched back to mind-speak. //Teddy Williams, son of Bea mate of Mary mother of Cecil the offspring of my pod mate…I may be angry with you, but you are still ohana. When the time comes, I will give you a choice: Give up the comfort of fear and begin anew, or go on alone in the world you know until it ends.// The disturbingly dangerous smile-snarl widened. //However, I will only ask you once. Remember that.//
And then it was gone. It didn’t walk away or disappear…it just stopped being there between one blink and the next. Teddy waited where he was for a moment, afraid it wasn’t actually gone or that it might just as suddenly reappear, the truck’s rusted grill warm against his back. Once he was reasonably sure the angel had really left, though, he gathered himself and went into the house, locking the door behind him. His head was aching, and he was confused and angry and not sure what to think. What kind of word was ohana, something in angel-language? Why the hell had the angel dropped by to tell him all of that in the first place? It wasn’t like there was anything he could do about any of it even if it was true. You couldn’t fight the status-quo in Night Vale, everyone with sense knew that. People who rocked that boat ended up disappearing, usually to a little stone cell in the underground prison-slash-rehabilitation center. Or to an even deeper buried underground chamber where…other things happened. Usually to people like his brother.
People like him, too, if they weren’t careful. Anybody who was ‘different’…or just in the way.
He thought about that for a minute and then went to find some aspirin, debating whether or not he wanted to wash the chalky little white pills down with bourbon. He eventually decided that he did, and got a nasty surprise; the whiskey tasted like water, and didn’t do a thing for him – no buzz, no comfortable mental numbness, nothing. Realization slammed into him like a speeding semi: The angel had said it had fixed the thing that had made Cecil afraid of him…
Teddy ran back to the bathroom and got sick, repeatedly, as the brutal truth sank in. His brother had been afraid of him. Because he’d turned to the bottle one too many times to block out reality so he wouldn’t have to deal with it. He had made Cecil afraid of him.
He wasn’t angry with the angel anymore, he decided. Whatever else he thought about the things it had said, whether or not he thought he should believe any of it…it had still done him a favor.