Chapter Text
After Carlos realized the truth, he couldn’t go back. Whether Cecil had killed people or not, he didn’t deserve the treatment he was getting. Carlos had to find a way to put a stop to it.
For a month straight, he kept his head down. He did everything he was told with a delightful plastic smile across his face. He never accidentally called Cecil “he” in front of anyone. He spoke about him more clinically, more apathetically, more like an object. And it was working. Kevin would smile with approval when Carlos would say cold, callous things about The Subject.
He started making a plan. He still had no idea where Night Vale was, but he figured he was running out of time before he really became complicit in all of this, or before something happened to Cecil that couldn’t be undone. He needed to do something to help besides be a friendly face for Cecil. Getting him vegetables instead of meat wasn’t enough. He needed to bust him out.
He withdrew a significant amount of money from his bank account. He packed everything in his apartment he gave half a shit about into a duffel bag and put it in his car. He figured, after he dropped Cecil off at Night Vale or at the nearest coast, he would go to Mexico and lay low for a while, start a new life. It’s not like he was too attached to his current one.
“Oh, sir,” Carlos said, stopping by Kevin’s office on his way out. “I know I requested this when I first got here, but now… I understand the situation more fully. I understand the dangers. I was completely reckless in the beginning. The thing is, now, we can only learn so much from observation. I believe, if you’ll let me, it’s time for me to attempt my idea I proposed when I first got here. I want to stay late tonight and get biological samples from the subject.”
Kevin leaned back in his chair, straightened his tie. Carlos waited patiently, anxiously, for an answer.
“I agree that you have developed a better understanding. Hm. Doctor, I think this is an excellent idea. You have my permission to stay overnight to gather samples from Subject NV01. The condition being that you must keep one of your associates by phone at every moment. I’m going to say… check in with one of them every forty-five minutes,” Kevin said, laying down the rules.
“Yes, sir. I understand. Thank you,” Carlos sucked up. He went back to his desk and put his stuff down before running out to the parking lot to catch John on his way out. He called for him when he spotted him getting into his car. “John!”
John stopped and asked, “What’s up?” There was a forlorn expression across his face.
“I’m staying tonight to get samples. I need someone to check in with,” Carlos explained. John winced.
“Sorry, I, uh… I can’t. I just talked to Lauren… I quit,” John said, sheepishly scratching the back his neck.
“You… what?” Carlos echoed in disbelief.
“Yeah, I just… I gotta get out of here, man. This place… it messes with your head. I’m going out of town for a while. Sorry to bail on you,” John said, and Carlos could tell he really meant it. Carlos thought of all the moments, tense and pleasant, he had shared with John. All of the lunches, both quiet and chatty. He’d started to consider both John and Steve his good friends. When Carlos wasn’t too busy planning his heist (which he kept secret from them both), the three would go out for drinks. Now… John was leaving. So suddenly.
“Did something happen?” Carlos asked, still trying to wrap his head around it.
John sighed and said, “It wasn’t one thing. I’ll see you some time, Carlos.”
He turned on his car. Carlos backed away so he had room to pull out, and watched his friend drive off. He would never see him again.
Carlos went back in the building and called Steve to tell him the plan, not mentioning that John had quit. He gathered up syringes and plastic bags for collecting samples. Tonight wasn’t the right night to try and bust Cecil out. Ideally, he’d get to tell Cecil about it, first. This night was to build trust with Kevin, to show him that Carlos was pulling his weight and wasn’t doing anything he wasn’t supposed to. Admittedly, it would have been great to finally get some time alone with Cecil again, but this was a stealth mission. He needed samples,and saw the risk for rejection as too high to gamble with.
He left the building briefly to get some dinner, finished typing up a few reports, and bided his time until midnight, when he thought Cecil was guaranteed to be asleep. The whole night, he sent texts to Steve every forty-five minutes. Steve always sent back a little smiley emoticon. Extremely inappropriate, but kind of nice.
Carlos braced himself for what he was going to have to do, walking down the hall with all of his sample-collecting-equipment in the pockets of his labcoat. Kevin had restored his security clearance to let him into the room on his own. It was all a part of the plan. He took a deep breath before unlocking the door on the fifteenth floor and stepping in.