Chapter Text
In all his time in Night Vale, Carlos has never gotten the hang of the city's municipal paperwork, far less the sheer and top-heavy scale of it.
Marrying an upper-dimensional being-slash-radio-host of infinite scale and appendages, getting pregnant with his decidedly non-human children, delivering them at home -- these were all a simple matter of filing a few brief after-action reports. Securing their hatching permits, on the other hand, involved so much red tape and blood magic Carlos is half-sure the babies will be born before the certificates even come through.
In the end, it's a close call. The permits arrive, fully stamped and notarized in their invisible ink, the very same day that the first egg starts to crack. Carlos is only lucky that he's around and able to get to the door when they arrive -- FedEx in Night Vale is, if possible, even more unreliable than elsewhere in the country, and of course the City Council refuses to send them by any other carrier. Carlos actually has to wrest the envelope out of a rabid delivery woman's gnarled fist before he's finally able to return to the apartment with permits in tow.
But now, at least, it's legal. Carlos sticks the papers over the hatching creche in the nursery, in full view of the window from where the Secret Police tend to snoop. He dutifully texts Cecil the good news, then goes back to hovering over the nest, attentive to every small movement or noise as, within their calcium carbonate shells, his and Cecil's 12 children slowly start to awake.
It is the largest of the eggs -- the last Carlos delivered some weeks ago -- that begins to hatch first. Under Carlos's attentive gaze and the pink glow of the heat lamps, the grapefruit-sized egg shudders and a long, hairline seam ripples down its surface.
Carlos takes a photo with his phone and sends it to Cecil, who urgently texts back asking him to record some video, and promising him that he'll be home soon.
It's a promise Cecil keeps. It is not even mid-afternoon when Carlos hears the tires of Cecil's well-maintained old Buick shrieking into the tenant parking structure, and hardly a minute more before Cecil bursts in -- panting, hair and tie askew -- through the front door of the apartment.
"What did I miss? What? How many?" Cecil gasps. He charges up the stairs and is headed toward the nursery before Carlos even makes it as far as the bedroom.
"None, yet," Carlos assures him, helping Cecil to pull off his disheveled jacket. Azzie is yipping in delighted confusion around their feet. "You didn't miss a thing. But you didn't have to come in the middle of -- Are you going to get fired for this?"
"Maybe," Cecil says, waving a hand over his shoulder. His cheeks are still flushed, and there's a certain mania in his eyes Carlos has never seen outside of his heats, but this is very subtly different. "I'll work it out somehow. I don't care. This is -- This is more important."
In the back of his mind, Carlos is curious to know if the Weather that Cecil left playing on the air when he bolted from the station could possibly last for the full duration of the hatching... but the finer points of Night Vale's time-space dilation as pertaining to melodic vibrations are not high on either man's list of priorities right now. He ushers Cecil to a chair next to the hatching creche instead, then goes to grab some towels.
Cecil cries through most of it. He also squeezes Carlos's hand, while with the other Carlos clears little fragments of shell out of the way and occasionally adjusts the settings on the heat lamps.
The first egg to fully hatch is not the large one but one of its siblings. It barely wobbles at all until a thick crack appears all at once along one side, followed by another, insistent crunch, as though something is aggressively punching its way out from within.
The 'something' is a wet, purplish tentacle, no thicker than Carlos's pinky finger. It stretches instantly for the warmth of Carlos's hand when he draws near and curls around his thumb.
After which, if Carlos is going to be honest, he might have started tearing up as well.
"Oh, Cecil," he whispers, as the tiny proto-suckers along the tendril's length explore each crease of his skin.
The large chunks of the shell begin to splinter then, and from the depths of the egg countless more little tentacles wriggle forth, seeking out Carlos's hand as the entire mass struggles free of its casing. It has no apparent head that Carlos can see -- no upper or lower definition, just a coiling bundle of small tendrils, too many to count.
"Oh, would you look at them," Cecil coos beside his husband. "Carlos, they're perfect."
Carlos cups the newborn in his palm as he brings the little sea anemone creature closer to his chest. The suckers have already fastened themselves to his skin, but it feels like the infant is as fragile as a dandelion puff in his hands. If he even allows himself to shake...
"Here. I should..." Without another word, Cecil leans over and nuzzles the writhing tangle of limbs with the side of his nose. Then he extends his tongue, licking the excess fluid still drenched all over its appendages, working as methodically as Khoshekh may have, once upon a time, with his kittens.
"Ce-Cecil..."
Carlos isn't sure if he should protest this or not; if this is ritual or instinct coming over his partner; if this is something more dangerous. Cecil had not at any point mentioned licking the newborns clean as part of the birthing process, but he doesn't seem to be harming it --
"Shh... hear that?"
In the creche, another egg is already opening. Carlos sets aside his uncertainties again, carefully transferring their firstborn into Cecil's hands for the rest of its cleaning, while he introduces himself to the new arrival.
Soon, the eggs are hatching faster than the parents can keep up. Carlos gathers their little sucking bodies along his hand, enjoying as they gravitate to the pulsepoint at his wrist, sensing the familiar rhythm there.
He doesn't know if he should be surprised by how little thought is going into any of his movements; how instinctively he reaches out and gently, so gently, gathers the little bundles of tiny limbs into his hand. It's as though he's coming into contact with a part of his own body, rejoining it, drawing it back to his own heartbeat, transferring it to Cecil's.
"They're beautiful," he murmurs to his husband at one point. And it's true. They're not like anything he could have expected, not in form or in how it feels to hold them in his hand.
When Cecil had asked, several weeks ago, if Carlos felt like a father yet, he hadn't known what to say. Now Carlos thinks he does.
Despite its head start, the largest egg is the last to finally punch through its shell, and when Carlos offers the exploring tendrils his sucker-bruised fingers he is surprised when two small tentacles, rather than one, latch onto him at once.
"Oh, wow," Carlos manages, as the significantly larger organism pulls free of the remaining shell, dripping amniotic fluids and slithering up along his wrist. Its mass shifts and separates until he can see that there are not one but two small bundles of tentacles, each of a subtly different hue of vibrant plum, cozying up against his veins.
Twins.
"Thirteen. We have thirteen, Cecil."
"How could Teddy have missed this?" Cecil wonders, so taken aback he's neglected to notice some of the children have crawled up his arms to latch on near his throat, the better to nestle into a warm spot near his pulse.
"They looked humanoid on the ultrasounds," Carlos muses.
"They'll do that. They'll change shape a lot once they get the hang of it," Cecil says knowledgeably. "Thirteen. It's a good number. Auspicious."
Cecil smiles, and the expression is so rich and deep that for a moment Carlos is sure the man is going to start crying again, overwhelmed into silent awe. But then he draws a breath, and the sound and vibration of it makes it clear that the throat and vocal cords he's using now are not something entirely human, or completely confined to nearby physical planes.
"Hello, children," Cecil says, in words that are not quite in any language pronounceable with a human tongue; not exactly intelligible in the standard four dimensions. It registers mostly as a buzzing, a dragging across of sound and color and texture, rippling through living tissue. Carlos can only understand it at all because he and Cecil are bonded, and even then, he'll never be fluent.
Years ago, the voice would have terrified him. Now it brings a pleasant sting of tears to his eyes, to hear Cecil drop into this voice and greet their newborn children in a way that Carlos can't.
His smile falters, however, when Carlos hears a silvery chime rises up in answer. It's not as strong as its parent, but the sound is clear and sing-song, delivered in unison from thirteen upper-dimensional throats.
"Hello, Cecil!"
Carlos's jaw drops.
"Now say hello to Carlos," Cecil continues, a tone of gentle instruction manifesting through the unknowable dark static.
"Hello, Carlos!"
"Cecil," Carlos manages in a short, stifled choke. As the tears spill forth, as his heart seems to cave in within his chest. "You never said they'd..."
Cecil beams at him.
Cecil is against giving the children gendered names until they're able to choose such things for themselves. Carlos can't quite argue with the idea, seeing as he still occasionally gets mail delivered to his department under the name of someone who no longer exists. They settle on something unisex for the birth certificates on all 13 of them: Lex, Jaime, Sol, Rowan, Devon, Micah, Lupe, Ash, Dagmar, Kendall, Zhenya, Wendigo, and Dana.
They grow quickly. Carlos figures that since their gestation is about a third of a human's, their growth cycle must be three times as fast as well. Or perhaps any sort of comparison is inapplicable here -- after all, in the few weeks since their birth, his children have changed shape into puppies, hedgehogs, ambulatory mushrooms, and perfect 1:6 scaled copies of their parents, all without any apparent prompting from either Cecil or Carlos.
Roughly one month in, about half the children have taken the form of budgies, several resemble Azzie, and two -- the twins, Wendigo and Dana -- have adopted the unsettlingly accurate appearance of a miniature Laurel and Hardy. Carlos decides that conservation of matter is the only real determinant in the children's shapeshifting at this point, which is probably a good thing, or they might have a few wolves and life-sized comedians running around.
Cecil gushes about the children nearly every day at his work, despite the growing ire from station management. Carlos, meanwhile, fights down a few of his hangups and calls his mother with the news -- although he avoids any specifics about quantity of fingers and toes, as he hasn't locked in on a reliable count of those either.
"I'm so proud of you, mija," his mother says, while he suppresses a cringe at the endearment. She's never quite gotten on board with the whole idea of his transition. "I always knew you would make a wonderful mother."
Carlos creates an excuse to end the phone call rather quickly after that.
"You didn't need to tell her," Cecil says that night during dinner, for which Carlos has made vegan chili and invisible cornbread, with a special nutrient slurry for the kids to soak in.
"No... I did," Carlos says, using a ladle to pour a bit more gruel over Micah and Devon. He still doesn't quite understand how they absorb food at this phase of development, despite all his careful observation and reading of the literature. "I'd like to have some sort of relationship with my mom. We bothered to invite her to the wedding; it only seems fair."
"True," Cecil acknowledges. "Not that she remembers most of the ceremony."
Cecil and Carlos's wedding day had been... eventful, what with Earl Harlan reappearing from the Shadow Realm followed by a roving band of antiparticle phantom creatures intent upon consuming the town. And sure, they could look back and laugh at it now, but it'd been quite stressful at the time, such that things like memorizing vows and dealing with relatives had ended up the least of the couple's problems.
"More gravy, please, Beloved Progenitor," a bright noise buzzes from elsewhere along the table.
"Share with your siblings, Zhenya," Carlos responds patiently, even as he spoons more of the nutrient slurry over the writhing shapes of his children -- over half of whom are two-headed corn snakes at the moment. "And calling me 'dad' is fine."
"Terms of the flesh do not suit the Grand Designers," Zhenya protests.
"I wonder if I was so precocious at that age," Cecil sighs fondly, resting his cheek in his palm. "Actually, I wonder if I ever even was that age."
"You had to have been," says Carlos, "probably."
Finding some time alone to be intimate proves the one near-constant challenge in Carlos and Cecil's new lives. Even in their rare quiet moments, the kids are still there, tucked against their parents' sides or nestled into a cozy spot in the sheets between them.
Ultimately, it's biology that comes to the rescue again. A full seven months since the start of Carlos's pregnancy, Cecil's cycle starts up again in earnest. When he nears a full heat, the children instinctively ensconce themselves into the nursery, sensing on planes of existence that Carlos can't perceive that their parents are in need of privacy for a while.
Carlos still finds the whole situation awkward. Cecil is a bit too hormonal to care, and in the end, hormones win out.
"A little 'feast to famine,' don't you think?" Carlos groans between thrusts, as Cecil's tentacles spasm around him and the strapon harness feels like it's about to break.
"Hnngh," is Cecil's only response from beneath him, not being especially good with words just then.
Carlos is utterly drenched in sweat, to say nothing of various other fluids, coursing down each shuddering line of his body to pool between them on the sheets. His shirt is soaked through, clinging and transparent against his chest. Wet hair falls into his eyes. He feels just slightly like he's about to burn out from within -- meaning, if they're both lucky, they'll be finished in time for Cecil to get to work tomorrow morning.
"Wonder if -- haaa -- wonder if this'll go on for the next eighteen years..."
"Six," Cecil gasps, arching and thrashing, the sucking orifice at the center of his body squeezing down so tightly onto Carlos's rubber cock that Carlos is nearly sure it's about to melt inside of him. "And then... college... Then... I'm getting you pregnant again."
"Not a chance," Carlos answers, though a smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth.
"Nine hundred -- uhhnnnh -- a-and eighty-seven to go."
"We're gonna... run out of names..."
"We can ha -- aah -- aaaaaannghhhhfuckCarlos!" Cecil cries out, far too loudly, his tentacles roiling and lashing and tugging at his husband's hips to drive him deeper, as he starts teetering on the edge of orgasm again. "I need -- please -- !"
"Shhh," Carlos urges, suppressing a chuckle. He picks up his pace, though the muscles in his lower back have started to cramp painfully, another twinge reminding him neither of them are as young as they used to be. "You'll wake the kids."
end