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He was broadcasting, as usual, a subtly static-edged figure behind a microphone whose voice sometimes formed smoky pictures and whose eyes focused dreamily on something just beyond the veil as he spoke. He was broadcasting, as usual, and a soft twilight had settled over their fair and unremarkable desert town, and everything was all right.
He was broadcasting when he heard it.
He stuttered, slowed, and the nebulae in his mostly-void eyes sharpened and swirled in alarm.
"Cecil!" he heard. "Cecil!”
He was broadcasting, he remembered dimly, but he couldn’t see the microphone anymore, and slowly he came to know that he was running-- phasing through spatial reality, as was his way, but quickly, quickly, because
because Carlos didn’t shout. Carlos never shouted.
The scientist was still corporeal when Cecil found him, but an uncertain antimatter blackness drifted up his arms and the side of one leg. His eyes jittered. One pupil slid lazily to the edge of one iris, then snapped back with a guilty self-awareness.
"I saw," he said, seriously, deadly-seriously, in that tone one uses when talking about politics or the dog park on the edge of town, "I have to go, Cecil," and then he tittered, just a little nervousexcited laugh, and then he blinked. Not with his eyes, but with his entire body.
—
Later, or earlier, the intern found Cecil calmly negotiating with the Arby’s sign.
"I don’t ask for much, do I, Night Vale? Please. Let me keep him. Not you. Me.
He doesn't have to go. He is safe here. Haven't you always kept us safe, Night Vale?
Haven't you?"
—
Earlier, or later, Carlos sees -- not hears, but sees, with the sudden and nauseous awareness of a newborn star -- the voice of God Demiurge, the voice of the Metatron, the voice of the Big Bang, the voice that speaks universes into being.
He'd been waiting for so long.
He hadn't known, but oh, he'd been waiting for so long.
—
Behind the microphone again, he cradles Carlos in his lap and in his eyes — Cecil’s, not Carlos’, whose warm eyes had left for stranger pastures — in his eyes are the deadlights.
"We were foolish to worry, Night Vale."
He strokes Carlos’ hair, smiles down at him, the sick sad rictus smile that made the concerned intern back away from him and right into the threshing cylinder that appears in the break-room wall on alternate Thursdays.
It was the wrong Thursday, but that was... all right. That was all right.
"We are all universes unto ourselves, and sometimes we… get a little big for our bodies. We come undone. Sometimes we break, we little fragile things, and have to be deprogrammed. Sometimes we… come to terms with what we are, what we were, what we will be-- and that, my dear, sweet listeners, is what they call a supernova.”
His voice is as it always was, except for that slight quaver that makes listeners all over Night Vale and beyond weep uncontrollably, tearing at their hair, a single name spilling from their mouths.
"Carlos!" the world weeps, exquisitely, and not just for the loss of him, but for the bittersweet envy of him, he who has gone supernova. "Carlos!”
"I hear you, Night Vale," Cecil murmurs, soothingly, "we hear you," and touches his lips to Carlos’ chilly forehead, and behind the wilting skin he feels life, but so far away, too far to matter— he will see him again, but not in Night Vale, and not now, or later, or before, but sometime. Yes. Sometime.
"Stay tuned for funereal, exultant love songs from Alpha Centauri. And remember, faithful listeners, that death is the road to awe.
Good night, sweet Carlos; and good night, Night Vale.”
Good night, whispers a voice that once belonged to a warm-hearted scientist named Carlos, touching Cecil from beyond, from home, from where it is partially void, mostly stars.