Cecil is listening to the music.
It’s such a lovely, pleasant orchestra, his house at night. He could listen to it 𝑎𝑙𝑙 night.
The rhythm of the stars sparkling in the sky, the French horn of them playing bright and warm, metallic and twinkling, rich and velvet. They fill the night, light up the dark, give the moon’s tuba an accompaniment. The brass above their head is so beautiful.
The night air is woodwinds, ringing like the windchimes Esteban made out of rabbit bones and jingle bells and streamers, hanging on their front porch. When the breeze moves along, the flutes sound; when the temperature cools, there is a saxophone in the distance. The wisps of clouds that gather above, the mist that slinks along the ground, are clarinet and bassoon; they fill those small gaps in the sound.
Night Vale is nearly a cacophony— it is almost chaos— but it is just enough to make sense. The streets are paved with piano keys; they make sweet music whenever someone takes a step outside. His neighbors are pipe organs, harps, keyboards, harpsichords, a medley of music that fits into odd angles and breaks off in pieces and still becomes a puzzle-picture all the same.
Their home is all the string, strung up around him in lingering notes. The walls are built on violin; the foundation of the house is a double bass. The light fixtures are low, dark, humming with cello. Everywhere there is the comfortable, crowded, familiar feeling of home, and it is carried along by the viola.
Esteban is his percussion section, his joy, his enthusiasm made whole, his heart outside his body. His passion is his snare drum; his curiosity is his timpani; his devotion is his cymbals. Cecil can hear a tambourine in his son’s energetic exclamations, and there is a pounding bass drum behind his skin, a power he is still growing, that rises in tempo all the time.
Carlos is a whale song. The frequencies are plentiful, beautiful; there are layers to the music inside of him. He is patterned, and he is rhythmic, and he is something that can both be explained and cannot. He is sonar; he is undersea; he is from the beginning of time, and will last until the end. The ringing call of him echoes through Cecil’s mind, an accompaniment to the orchestra around him as he curls into Cecil in bed, face buried in his throat, arm wound around him, legs tucked into his, a hand planted on his belly. His breath spreads warm across Cecil’s heart; the song is built of familiarity and love. Family.
There is such an orchestra around him. He’s not sure he is the composer— he’s not sure there is a composer— and it’s so beautiful, all the same. Maybe even more beautiful for it.
And all these sounds— the sky, and the city, and their home, and their son, and his husband, and his music— all sing together into a symphony, a philharmonic, incredible and impossible. Cecil closes his eyes and hums along.
He, himself, has a tone all his own. He has his own music that is inherent to him; his chest rings, and his heart has its own timbre, and it shivers through his insides in metronomic time with the songs around him. His tone falls in time with everything else, and it slots so perfectly into place, Cecil sighs— and the low rumble of his voice— 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑉𝑜𝑖𝑐𝑒— just serves to complete the fragment of the orchestra his tone contributes.
And then, of course, the new tone.
He listens to it with pleasure and delight. Late at night like this, when Cecil can turn his eyes inward and listen to his own heart-tone and blood-rush and thought-crimes without anyone else noticing, it’s so much easier to hear his own music— and deeper, too. To hear his newest tone, the timbre that nearly matches his own, but— brighter. Lighter. An octave above his, shimmering, not quite opaque, still forming its part of the song.
And still such a lovely part of the chorus. Like it was always meant to be here, fitting into the orchestra, chiming away beneath Carlos’s hand.
Cecil lays his own hand over the back of Carlos’s. The tone rings and sings in response, and Cecil realizes what has pitched it away from his own— it’s Carlos’s song, the waves of his whale song, melted into the pitch.
Together— altogether— all, together— it is such sweet, beautiful music.
Everyone is asleep. The city around them, Night Vale resting; Carlos beside him, tucked into him; Esteban between them, wriggled in after waking up halfway through the night; and the rest— the night air, the sky, the stars, the moon, the neighbors, the foundation, the home, the bed— until they meet the tones and surround them.
Cecil listens to the music. It’s so beautiful. He could listen to it forever.
He tightens his grip on Carlos’s hand, sighs, and relaxes into the sound. Even if he’s struggling to get comfortable enough to sleep, still sick enough to feel miserable and restless— he’s never so uncomfortable that he can’t find comfort in Carlos.
The music flows around him, through him, and manifests itself into radio waves. They shimmer around him; the music is audible, and he listens with delight to the manifestation of the song. It finds its way through the air, the rhythmic air, the musical air, until it sings through the radio tower and into the speakers throughout Night Vale.
Cecil doesn’t even notice. He’s half-asleep, with radio waves singing around him, in between conscious and not, and listening to his new favorite song. And everything—
Everything feels 𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡.