thecapitol | I'm not paralyzed [closed]

Entry tags:

I'm not paralyzed [closed]

WHO| Cecil -- just the one from the Capitol, this time -- and Carlos
WHAT| The visitors are gone, but life marches on, and they have an appointment to keep
WHEN| The afternoon of the visitors' arrest, the day before the Arena
WHERE| Cecil's apartment
WARNINGS| Mentions of torture, slight body horror, more to be added

Carlos had seen a lot of people led away in handcuffs in his time. A lot. They were mostly reporters and journalists, but there were others too. Stacey Nguyen, for one, after that unfortunate incident with the ATV. And then there were the Joneses, who had been difficult to handcuff thanks to their status as a tentacled psychic gestalt, but the end result had been the same. They had all disappeared, and only some of them had been seen again.

Carlos had never seen it happen to Cecil.

He knew it could, of course -- no one was really safe, everyone was in some measure of danger from the government -- but he had never really expected it to. Seeing it happen had been surreal. Seeing it happen had also been terrifying, since Carlos knew secondhand what this government was capable of, and firsthand what it considered a slap on the wrist. He still had the burns on his shoulder and neck, bandaged up under his shirt.

Was Cecil alive or dead? Carlos didn't know. If he had been sent back to Night Vale, there was a chance Cecil was dead anyway, if the Capitol had been correct. The worry gnawed at Carlos like a dull ache: he knew there was very little he could do for Cecil now, knew that trying to find out would only make the situation worse, but the fear for Cecil still crept under his skin like persistent skin parasites.

But he knew he had to go on. Paralysis was not an option. Even if Carlos could neither act or react, he could not come to rest. The momentum -- of ordinary Capitol life, of old plans -- would carry him forward, and that momentum took him to Cecil's apartment, where he and Cecil had arranged to meet a week ago.

He rang the doorbell, a horrible mess of carefully hidden, very personal feelings.

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Cecil had been holding on to normalcy admirably, or so he thought. He'd run the broadcast last week, the same as any week. He'd walked smiling among the Tributes' family members, shaken hands and given directions to local sights and asked them friendly, only mildly intrusive questions. He'd managed to see his mother (no, not his mother) only from a distance.

He'd held up through seeing, on the screens, what looked like his own hands around Kevin's throat, and what looked like his own face scowling at him over a coffee cup. He'd held up through seeing his mother's face (no-- not his mother's face) for the first time in twenty years. He'd held up through learning that Carlos, dear Carlos, was only waiting for the Capitol to decide that he was not fitting in enough, only waiting for the moment when it was easiest to render him forgotten. And then they had taken his mother away in handcuffs (not his mother, not his mother, but a mother of him, a woman who had a son called Cecil Palmer, and wasn't that close enough? Wasn't it?), and Cecil was not holding up anymore.

He opened the door to Carlos with a smile that could only be described as determined. (That wasn't strictly true: It could also be described as bright, artificial, and unsuccessful.)

"Hi!" he said, and he could hear how the false brightness grated. "Come in! I already put Khoshekh in the bedroom, so. How are you?" He stepped back to let Carlos into the apartment, and did not glance at where he knew the security camera lay, imbedded in the hall ceiling.

How are you.

What a loaded question.

Carlos had known the man called Cecil Palmer for a very respectable amount of time, but he had never seen a smile quite like that on Cecil's face. He stepped into the apartment, allowed the door to close behind him, and was absolutely not fooled into thinking that they had any privacy.

"I--" he began, but stopped.

"I am--" he tried again.

He looked at Cecil, and his shoulders -- usually squared, framing a straight back, carried with confidence and better posture than anyone who spent hours crouched over beakers should have -- his shoulders slumped, just a little, as though they, too, no longer had the energy to keep up a pretense. Because Carlos couldn't do it, not to Cecil's face, not after seeing that face muzzled and led away; to anyone else, Carlos could have managed small talk, but not to Cecil, not right now. But he couldn't talk about what he wanted to talk about here, not with the cameras, and in his current state, a natural-sounding request to take the conversation somewhere else was beyond him. Carlos looked at Cecil mutely, his face a close-mouthed grimace, reduced to silence by circumstance and by surveillance.

He sighed, and shook his head.

Cecil's smile trembled at the edges, and then dropped off his face entirely. He looked back at Carlos, and took in not how good he looked (though even now, even with that defeat on his face, he looked good, of course he did), but how... how tired.

Carlos had blinked first, and that meant, maybe, that Cecil could too. Carlos did not know what to say, and maybe-- maybe that gave Cecil permission to be uncertain, too.

But they could not be uncertain here. Here, uncertainty was punishable. There might not have been cameras in Cecil's apartment (might not have been), but that didn't mean they weren't being monitored. If they were going to be uncertain, it would have to be elsewhere-- somewhere that could drown uncertainty out.

Cecil straightened, and pinned his smile back onto his face.

"--Great!" he said, as though there had been a word at the end of Carlos' sentence, as though perhaps he had said something that simply hadn't been picked up. This time the false brightness came a little more naturally, sounded more on-the-air and less trying-to-talk-around-a-throatful-of-bees. "That's great! I've been well-- work is crazy, but a week before an Arena, what else is new, right?"

He let the silence hang only long enough to support a roll of his eyes - You know how it is - before he brightened again, and bulled aside anything Carlos might have considered saying with a hasty, "Oh! Sorry-- I meant to call you on your way here, but it totally slipped my mind. I know we said we would head right out to the restaurant when you got here, but I had a late breakfast meeting and I'm not hungry at all, so I thought maybe we could... change it up a little today!" Their plans hadn't been all that concrete to begin with, but Cecil's tone implied that this had already been under some discussion. "Don't worry-- we'll still get lunch! But instead of drinks on the rooftop after we get back, I thought we might go up there now! I've had the wine chilling for a couple of hours, and it's really much nicer before the sun sinks down low enough to interfere with the skyline. And the breeze today is just perfect. What do you say?"

Cecil did not usually go out of his way to look for places where he might remain unheard. It ran contrary to pretty much everything he represented, in life. But he knew the many ways that sound could be drowned out, and the combination of changing wind and distance from any surveillance would make their conversation, if not private, at least impossible to follow.

He just hoped Carlos would make the connection.

Two years ago, Carlos wouldn't have put it together. Two years ago, Carlos hadn't lived in any dystopia, much less two. Two years ago, Carlos had not been used to living under surveillance, had not become a rebel element in a hostile world, and communicated with a slightly less complicated system of codes and symbols.

At first his face showed nothing but vague confusion as Cecil rattled off plans they hadn't made -- where was Cecil going with this? What on earth was he talking about? But then Cecil mentioned the breeze, and although two years ago Carlos would not have known that a windy rooftop was a good place to conceal a conversation from hidden listening devices, he knew it now.

"Yes," he said, decisively. "I think going to the roof is a very good idea." Carlos still wasn't so good at lies and concealment -- he definitely wasn't an actor -- but they would make a competent insurgent of him yet.

Oh, thank goodness. Cecil didn't sigh with relief, but his shoulders relaxed a little - any more of that and it might have been obvious.

"Excellent," he said, and as he spoke he was already moving past Carlos into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator and then pulling a decidedly un-chilled bottle of wine out of a cabinet beside it before shutting it again. "I had my coffee up there yesterday, and it was just beautiful - it's a great place to look up at the sky and think about how no increase in your own height makes a statistically relevant difference in your total distance from the stars!" He pulled down two glasses and a corkscrew and handed these to Carlos. "...Also, Khoshekh isn't up there. So."

And then he led Carlos out, before he could change his mind; before he could take in fully the magnitude of what he was doing. He was not the kind of person who sought out deaf spots in Capitol surveillance. He did not want to be that kind of person. He was not sure he wanted, even now, to think of himself as that kind of person.

The roof was set up as an open communal space; there were small tables and chairs set up for viewing the city, and a tastefully-arranged rooftop garden that provided some shade. Cecil set the wine down on a table far from the elevator, where the breeze rattled in the branches of a small decorative tree. Only then did he allow the smile to slip off his face again.

"See?" he said. "I told you. It's a really great view." This was not a lie, or a subversive statement; only an observation. He hesitated. Looked at Carlos, then away, and then back at Carlos, and then asked a second time: "...How are you, Carlos?"

Carlos accepted the wineglasses and the -- was that a corkscrew? It was clearly an electrical device of some kind, and logically it must have been meant to open the wine, but Carlos couldn't tell from its smooth exterior just how it was supposed to work. Anyway, he took the glasses and the corkscrew and mutely followed Cecil up to the rooftop. It wasn't so different from the Tribute center roof: decorative, communal, usefully windy.

He heard Cecil's question clearly, much more clearly than any listening devices would have, but stalled for time by putting the wineglasses and corkscrew down before answering.

Carlos took a deep breath. "Concerned," was what he said first, but then he looked back at Cecil's face, and corrected himself. "No -- afraid. I'm afraid about the Arena, about the Capitol, about the rebellion -- and not just for me. It's not just my safety at stake here. I'm scared for the Tributes, too. I'm scared for you. I'm scared for all of you, here in Panem." The wind whipped his lab coat around his knees and out behind him as he spoke.

Several of the things Carlos said scared Cecil. Words like rebellion and all of Panem, words that made his fear bigger, wider-reaching, utterly unavoidable.

"What a coincidence," he said, with a hopeless half-smile. His voice was weak. "I'm afraid, too."

The wind was just high enough to give him the confidence to go on. "...Though I am less sure than you are, I think, of who to be afraid for. I am afraid for myself, and for you, of course." He picked up the corkscrew and turned it over in his hands, letting it take his attention. "But-- all of Panem?"

He looked back up. "That is... a lot of fear, Carlos."

Dark brows knitted together over worried eyes, and he looked away, gathering his thoughts. "I used to think that in Night Vale, a monolithic and terrifying system of government was the only way to maintain stability," Carlos began. "I thought that maybe, no other system of government could possibly handle all the strange events that everyone else found so commonplace, and so we had no choice but to live with twenty-four hour police monitoring and citizen sacrifice. But here, I don't think that's the case. Applying that level of municipal tyranny to a world like Panem has done exactly the opposite.

"It's like the difference between putting salt or sodium in water. In one case, you get salt water, which is different from what you're used to, and deadly if you consume too much of it, but not in and of itself bad. But submerging sodium, well -- that's explosive." He looked back up at Cecil. "Panem was volatile even before the Quell, and nothing the Capitol has done has succeeded in stabilizing it. I'm not sure anything could, at this point -- the reaction has already begun, Cecil. Bringing in Tributes from other worlds just catalyzed it." The repercussions could be left implied; they reached far, far beyond Carlos and his punishment by the Capitol.

Now, Carlos, the Cecil of six months ago said, I understand that cultural shifts are a necessary component of sudden movement between universes, but I don't think it's quite fair to describe our government as terrifying! And, well, instability is relative, isn't it? Why, you should have seen us seventy-five years ago!

The Cecil of right now said nothing for a long moment. The Cecil of right now wanted to cover his ears. The Cecil of right now did not want to know what was wrong with Panem, did not want to open his eyes to see how far they were from the lip of the chasm, how few inches stood between his home and the inevitable explosion.

But the Cecil of right now could not be the Cecil of six months ago. He could not even pretend to be - his every attempt to be what he had been before brought his mother's face to his mind, the brush of her fingers against his cheek, and a quiet, helpless anger of a kind he thought he'd left behind.

In the end, it was simply a matter of deciding with which fear he most wanted to live: Fear of what existed, or fear of what was coming. The fear he'd always known, or the fear that had brought Carlos here to speak with him.

He swallowed. "...What reaction do you mean, Carlos?" he asked.

Carlos resisted the urge to glance around. If there were cameras that could pick them up clearly, nothing would be more suspicious. Instead, he hesitated a moment, turning over in his mind all the subversive knowledge he had collected to date. What would be safe to tell Cecil? What would not incriminate others, if this conversation went badly?

"Cecil," he said, taking a step closer. "Before I say anything else, I want your word that nothing we say here will be repeated. Not to peacekeepers, not on the radio, not to anyone. Do you understand? If anyone finds out I told you this, I will disappear into a black hood and a peacekeeper vehicle and I will not come back." He said this partly out of fear that Cecil would, all in good faith, go to the peacekeepers, and partly to impress upon Cecil just how serious it would be if Cecil were careless with this information.

"I understand," Cecil said. There was something in it that implied more than just understanding of Carlos' situation, specifically - a weight to his voice that said that the consequences were very, very clear to him.

"I have gone to some trouble, Carlos, to keep us from being overheard." His voice was quiet, that it might more easily be lost to the wind. "That is something for which I would face consequences, were it to become clear what we are doing here. If you cannot trust me to remain silent-- trust, at least, that I fear the Capitol's retribution for this as much as you do."

Carlos was almost startled to find himself convinced. It gave him pause, made him stop to think this over one more time. Was he being hasty about this? Was he foolishly endangering himself?

It was only after he had mentally run over his current situation that he felt confident in the safety of going on. Carlos could not rely on Cecil not to be careless, or not to allow important warnings to slip his mind, but he did feel that Cecil did understand the gravity of this.

He drew in a deep breath, drawing the wind that covered them from prying ears into his lungs, then pushed it out through his larynx. It was just wind through flesh, after all, producing patterns of vibration in the air. That was all this was, when it came down to it: vibrations that only held what meaning the listener gave them.

"District 13 isn't dead, Cecil. The Capitol only says it is. There are people living there, people who want to see the Capitol brought down. I can't say for sure, but I believe they have nuclear weapons, which would explain why the Capitol allows them to live. It's a stalemate, Cecil, it's been that way for years -- neither one is capable of destroying the other."

Funny, wasn't it, that some of those vibrations in the air were illegal and others weren't? Funny, when you thought about it; funny, to someone who had spent so much of the past twenty years desperately avoiding producing the wrong kinds of vibrations in the air.

He thought about this to avoid having to think about what Carlos had said for a moment. He allowed the words to wash over him, and not to sink in; he allowed them to hit him like a two-handed shove instead of a punch in the face.

When he spoke, his voice was level, slow and professional. "Carlos," he said. "That is--" He took a deep breath. "I understand that such a situation might be well within the scope of potential actions taken by the authoritarian government to which you are accustomed-- but under this authoritarian government, that is a very serious accusation." Keep it together, Cecil. You are a journalist. It is your job to gather the facts. "It is-- I hesitate to say that it is impossible, because very few things are actually impossible-- but I can think of no reason that the Capitol should choose to-- to hide from us a fact that, should it become public, would fundamentally and permanently destabilize the system of assumptions upon which we have based our entire society for close to a century!"

Sure, the Capitol was not always entirely just - but there was no way, in this or any other universe, that they would go that far.

"Of course they were hiding it," argued Carlos. "They wouldn't have any other choice, if going public about it would destabilize their society." He frowned. "Listen, Cecil, I'm not a political scientist. I'm not an expert in diplomacy or war strategy or even public relations. I can't even tell you who gave me this information." No, really, he couldn't. "But I can tell you that District 13 is the center of the rebellion, and actions are being taken against the Capitol. Being afraid for all of Panem is a completely rational extrapolation, considering the evidence."

The rebellion. There was a phrase that Cecil had not yet truly allowed to enter his consciousness; there was a thought he'd been keeping guiltily out. He swallowed hard, and tried not to think words like anti-government elements and unrest in the outer Districts and she never told her son, I guess.

"But," he said, and he was not even arguing against the truth of what Carlos said, only trying to keep the implications of this from hitting him all at once-- better to take them on one by one, right? Better to not to believe too much in too short a time. "But Carlos-- if no one in the Capitol knows this-- what will happen when they-- the rebellion, I mean-- when they do take action?"

I believe they have nuclear weapons, Carlos had said. "...What will happen to us?"

Carlos frowned deeply, troubled. "I'm not a historian, Cecil. I'm not even a social scientist. Therefore, I'm not exactly qualified to predict what will happen to the citizens of the Capitol when the rebellion acts." He drew in a slow, slow breath. "However, when a working class rises up against its oppressors, even I know what happens if it wins."

The silence hung darkly between them after this ominous proclamation.

For a long moment, Cecil was silent. He looked away from Carlos, out over the surrounding rooftop gardens and to the distant mountains visible between less distant skyscrapers. He did not actually appear to be taking in any information with his eyes.

"...Look," he said, slowly, as though even now, with his words hidden under the breeze, he was afraid of saying the wrong thing. He did not meet Carlos' eyes. "I will not pretend that the Capitol has acted justly. I will not pretend-- will not pretend any longer - that this secrecy is justifiable. And I will not pretend that I have not pretended, for most of my life, to believe that it was." I will not pretend that I was not complicit.

Now, he looked up at Carlos, and his expression was confused, and sad, and frightened. Mostly frightened. "But-- surely, Carlos, the crimes of our government are not our crimes. Surely we cannot be punished with indiscriminate nuclear retribution for our terrified silence. Surely-- surely if someone had only told us-- if we had only known what was going on in the dark and quiet moments between the bright hours that make up our lives--"

If she had only told me what she was doing-- If they had only told me what happened to her--

One gets the feeling that this is not the first time he has had a similar thought; one gets the feeling that he is not addressing only this, most recent, injustice.

When Carlos looked at Cecil, his gaze was still steady, but first confusion surfaced, then interest.

"This isn't the first time you've thought about this, is it," said Carlos quietly. Even behind his glasses, his eyes are piercing. Piecing together what set this Cecil apart from the other Cecil was still a problem that gave Carlos trouble, but he's getting a sense that here is a difference: that this Cecil has doubted his monolithic, inscrutable government. "You've suspected that something was wrong before now."

Cecil's government is monolithic, it's true; but he would not necessarily call it inscrutable. He would never claim to understand it, nor even to have gotten a proper look at its inner workings, but he has, once or twice, caught a glimpse of the wires that run through it; seen, like a shadow on a wall, the reflection that implied the terrible, twisted form.

He glanced up at Carlos, and then back down, fixing his eyes on the wine on the table. That brief glance spoke, though-- yes. Yes, he had thought about this before.

He was not sure, for a moment, whether or not he would speak about it. Twenty years was a long silence to break. Twenty years represented a great deal of accumulated fear to overcome. Twenty years was a long time in which to turn deflection into a habit and ignorance into a defense.

Cecil took a slow breath. "...Yes," he said, and it was low and quiet - almost inaudible. "Yes, I have."

This admission was -- was unexpected. This was new ground between Carlos and Cecil. The realization came slowly, not like a wave crashing but like a river gently rising around his feet, but Carlos came to realize that he was seeing only this Cecil, not the other one. This expression, this tone, this worry, this fear belonged only to the Cecil before him.

Carlos pulled a chair away from the table and sank into it, an unspoken admission that he would listen to whatever Cecil had to say, for as long as Cecil wanted to say it. There was gravity in his voice as he asked:

"What happened?"

Even now, Cecil wondered if he should take back what he had just said. If he should deny it right now, before this went any further-- pretend that he'd misunderstood the question, or that he'd lost his courage, or even that he'd become suspicious of Carlos' motives. He could even lie, he realized - he could think of something mildly and almost harmlessly rebellious to say, something that had nothing to do with sudden disappearances, or the roots of a resistance, or his mother...

...and then he thought of the woman that they had brought in to District Six. The woman with his mother's face, and his mother's voice, and his mother's soft hands, who had never seen him before. He had had an agreement with the Capitol, these twenty years, or so he had thought - an unspoken promise that, so long as he said nothing, they would never find a way to use his mother's memory against him.

They had broken that promise. Cecil reminded himself of that, and something in his eyes hardened-- turned more determined.

"...Carlos," he said. He did not sit down yet. There was, of course, no one else he could possibly be speaking to; the address said, with its weight, Listen. "It is important, before I speak further, to ask you: Do you remember the woman who was brought to visit Kevin?"

Carlos's forearms were resting on his knees, his hands folded in front of him, his face upturned to look at Cecil.

"I think so," said Carlos, thinking back. "I only caught a glimpse of her in person, but I saw some footage of her later. She was...his mother, wasn't she?"

It was strange to think of Kevin having a mother. Scientifically, of course, he had to -- or at least was very likely to have had a mother -- but imagining Kevin at any point in his life between his birth and what he was now was...strange.

"Yes," Cecil said, after a pause that was a few seconds too long. Start there. Start with that. "Yes, she was Kevin's mother." That was a part of all this that he hadn't yet started to process in any meaningful way, but it was, so far as everyone who was not him was concerned, the truth.

"She was also--" --my mother. No. That was not the truth. "She was-- she looked very much like someone who--" He faltered. Why was this so hard to say? Saying words wasn't supposed to be difficult. Not for him. It was his job to communicate complex, abstract, and even impossible concepts with his voice. It was his job to make the unknowable into concrete words, carried on the air. What was preventing him now?

Cecil exhaled, short and frustrated. "--I did not know her." He lifted his hands to gesticulate-- not something he often did, but he needed help. "I did not know her. I knew her face, and her voice. I knew her eyes, and her hair, and her hands. I knew the way she sat and the way she stood." His expression was distant, remembering; it came back to the present suddenly. "...She did not know me."

Start there, now. "She did not know me because-- because she was Kevin's mother. But she had a second son. She told me that she had a second son. Or--" A longer, softer sigh. "...No. I told her that she had a second son, because I knew her-- or, not her, but--"

He looked down at Carlos' face, helpless, asking for some sign that he was communicating something. "--but a woman who looked and acted just like her. A woman who died--" No. "--who disappeared twenty years ago. A woman in the Capitol, who had a son whose name was Cecil Palmer."

Comprehension dawned on Carlos's face as Cecil went on: he understood what Cecil was saying, what Cecil was getting at, but he did not interrupt, not until Cecil was finished.

"I understand," he said quietly. Carlos knew a thing or two about familiar voices and hands and faces belonging to people who did not recognize him. He put the implication together immediately: since Kevin was clearly not the Night Vale version of Cecil from the Capitol, then Kevin and Night Vale's Cecil had to be -- brothers.

But that wasn't what they were here to talk about.

"You think the Capitol took her?" he asked, just as quiet.

Now Cecil sat down. He pulled the chair opposite Carlos around to the nearer side of the table, sitting down quickly and leaning in close. Leaning in close was something Cecil did anyway - too often, people had been known to say - but this didn't appear to be motivated by any special desire to occupy Carlos' personal space. No, he only wanted further assurance that he wouldn't be heard.

"You must understand, Carlos, that there has been unrest in the Districts for-- for some time," Cecil said. "Longer than there has been a Rebellion. ...Or, at least, longer than there has been a Rebellion that also exists in the public eye." Even he didn't know how deep that particular rabbit hole went, and he'd always been careful to continue not knowing. "My mother... my mother was-- was involved, somehow. I didn't know that she was. I had no idea that there was anything unusual about her, or about my family, until they-- took her."

His voice was soft, and miserable. "They said that she was dead, and that my brother was gone; that it had been an accident, whose details I was too young to understand; but they do not fill a person's empty house with Peacekeepers for a week following an accident." His tone solidified as he spoke-- turned harder, tinged with anger. "They do not bring bereaved teenagers in for questioning following an accident. I am no expert in Capitol legal procedure, Carlos, but I know that people who die are given funerals, which their families-- even if that family consists only of one fifteen-year-old boy-- are permitted to attend--"

He broke off. He looked almost surprised at his own anger.

"...Yes." He sat back, and took a deep breath in. "Yes, Carlos, I believe that the Capitol took her."

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