Cecil’s making his migraine face. It’s a face Carlos knows well for its peculiarity; the deep furrow of his brow, the tightening around his jaw, softened by the misty gleam in his eyes that he swears only contain the idea of tears, the understanding of physiological overreaction in the absence of danger.
“Do you…well…I mean…I could give you a massage?” Carlos offers, because the ibuprofen hasn’t worked, and drinking water hasn’t worked, and he can’t just sit there and pretend nothing’s wrong.
“How would that help?” Cecil’s words are slurring in the aftermath of another trip to the bathroom, another round of heaving up what wasn’t there.
“It might not,” Carlos says, ever in the business of facts and uncomfortable truths, “but it might at least relax you enough to try and sleep.”
He interprets Cecil’s grunt as an agreement to try and coaxes him up into a sitting position, kneeling behind him on the pillows. Cecil puts all his weight into him, heavy and warm. It’s surprisingly intimate and sends his heart up into his throat for a moment, nostalgic nervousness of days gone by. His hands find Cecil’s shoulders, the junction at the curve of his neck, and he thinks about moving toward the pulse point underneath his jaw just to test if he feels it too. (Not that there’s any doubt, not really–it hasn’t been that long since he first went to test for radioactive material at the station, aware of how the back of his neck had prickled as his equipment went haywire in his hands, less aware of the host in the studio until he started making all-too-public declarations of love for him. It hasn’t been that long. But it’s been long enough to wonder.)
He is rational and he knows better than to think otherwise, but he is intrigued (and triumphant) nonetheless to feel the tiny thrum beneath his fingertips as he positions his hands to rub Cecil’s temples in slow circles, a little fast. There is so much of Cecil in his thoughts and in his memories, and yet here, fitted against his chest, so much smaller than his presence conveys, here he is, all sinew and viscera and gentle pulsing, vulnerable and human.
Carlos pushes out the thought (or tries to) of him, pale and sterile against a reflective table, and he pushes out the thought (or tries to) of running a scalpel from throat to belly, watching him unfold in reverse-metamorphosis, veined red and glistening in unnatural ways. He stopped sleeping for a while after the clocks stopped working, and instead of nightmares he was left with these, split-second flashes that left him cold and confused and blinking as though to rid himself of the afterimages from a sun that would not set. As with all things in Night Vale, he eventually learned to adjust, learned to sleep and learned to live largely without fear in its most basic and primal form, learned that Cecil himself was not so frightening beyond his capacity to love and his capacity to know what there was to know as it happened so that he could spread the knowledge to others. He knows he would never actually hurt Cecil, would never want to hurt Cecil, but he remembers the clocks filled with sand and fights to believe there isn’t something more to the people in this town than simple organic matter.
If Cecil registers any of this, he does not stir; Carlos pulls himself back to Earth again, pauses out of instinct (and to know that he could) to splay his hand across Cecil’s forehead. No fever.
The mirror above the dresser is covered all but for the top-right corner, casting a beam of light over the headboard. Carlos leans in, lets his vision burn white.