Chapter Text
Cecil had lost another intern today.
He stood outside the station after his show, pausing in lightly chilled wind. Behind him, the flashing red light pulsed over the buildings and streets, letting them vanish then bringing them back in heated organic red.
What was she, number seven?
The loss got easier to accept with each iteration. The pain, less poignant. As Cecil watched his town pulse red and none before him, arms slack at his side instead of hugging his body warm, he realized he felt nothing about this intern's death. Not even a pang of empathy for her family. Not even a flutter of his heart for the wrenching way her life was taken from her. Not even irritation at the need to conduct yet more interviews. Just void.
A feeling of guilt for his lack of sorrow might have comforted him, but nothing came.
Nothing came.
The words echoed with Cecil's footsteps as he followed where he knew the sidewalks must be, their tenuous red existence growing fainter and fainter as he distanced further from the station's light. He walked home, tonight, abandoning the convenience and warmth of his car and again forgoing the warmth of wrapping his arms around himself to protect from the chill of the wind.
The sky above him was Void, utterly. No stars. No clouds. No lights. He thought a little terrified screaming might be cathartic, but just didn't feel up to the effort. He step, step, stepped along the darkening world until he found he was quite far from his home, and instead stood at the edge of the flat sand wastes, head back, shoulders slack, looking up.
In such darkness, it was hard to be sure which way was up, but Cecil let his legs go and he landed on his back in the sand. It was almost cool beneath him; he could not feel it enough. He removed his clothes, an action that was actually not so odd among Night Valeans finding themselves suddenly confronted with nature, and resumed lying on his back, looking up at the Void. It looked incredibly high, or rather, deep, like staring into a bottomless abyss.
He suddenly felt like he might fall in.
This sudden disorientation was quite terrifying. Confronted with a bottomless black pit, Cecil cried out and grabbed the grains of sand, but of course that motion was silly, as they were attached to nothing solid. His hands scrabbled and clutched the loose grains and he again cried out, feeling his back arch away from the earth, his body starting to plummet into the Void, when he heard:
"I have you."
A hush, like the wind, was all the voice was. Cecil felt himself gently pushed up against the ceiling of the solid earth. The Void hung below him, an infinite gaping maw, but as his heart pounded in his chest he continued to feel the gentle pressure keeping him from falling in.
"I don't want to fall," Cecil whispered, his voice also a windy hush.
"I will not let you fall," the reassurance came. Again he felt his back press into the ground. He clenched his hands, began to relax them, and clenched again. Wind caressed his stomach and legs.
"What are you doing? What are you?" Cecil breathed. Looking down, he could imagine falling, and falling, and falling.
"I am the abyss," the whisper said with the faintest hint of wryness. "And you have gazed into me."
Cecil felt wind caress him again, felt the hold on him momentarily weaken, felt his back and knees curve off the ground, then in the space of a gasp was pushed firm again.
"And I have gazed back."
Caresses, there was no other word for the way the night was touching him right now. Cool all over his naked skin, but instead of making him shiver, it made him… made him…
"And I see you are beautiful."
Cecil flushed. "Void," he said, staring down.
"Yes. I am the Void. Do not fear. I have you."
Again, his shoulders and rear pressed firm against his feeble planet. The Void stretched out wide beneath him, showing him its seductive expanse. So great he felt that even held up securely against the desert as he was, it could nonetheless engulf him and his planet whole.
"Am I beautiful," Cecil asked.
"Yes. I see you there. Your delicate body. Made of membranes and heart beats. Stretched and structured around heat and fluids and flurries of things you call thoughts. Clustered most tightly around things you call desire." Cecil felt something dense, something hot, something unmistakeable respond in his groin. He gasped and flushed.
"Don't let me fall."
"I will not let you fall. How can I gaze upon you if you are inside me? No," the Void said, and, rhythmically, began to allow his hips to fall and then be pressed back, "To contain you would make both of us disappear. We can only love from a distance."
The force holding Cecil up continued to play and gyrate at the point of his hips, letting his rear leave the sand only to grind back into it, letting his cock dangle straight down into the Void. He gasped and cried, despite reassurances, at the constant feeling of beginning to plummet.
"This is nothing to fear," the Void breathed.
The Void murmured at him and the wind caressed him and the ground teased him with its fluctuating hold on his pelvis. Cecil let out some cries that did not echo, not with the Void taking them in. No, nothing he spilled into his lover come back; it dispersed his whimpers ever thinner and thinner across its expanse, infinitely thin, infinitely far, no limits against which the sound waves could bounce back.
His hips rose and fell, and the endlessly distant Void heaved further and closer, further and closer, all those negations of presence and absence and enormity and non-existence and measurable and immeasurable thrusting in turn.
The whispering breath, now panting breath, empathetic breath, almost as uncontrolled now as Cecil's breath, slid against him, and as he stared and trembled into that oblivion, he came.
Only a second later, with a great sonorous groan that joined his, the Void climaxed as well, small offering spattering like rain on Cecil's stomach.
The Void heaved a great sigh, pressing Cecil fully against the ground, and then righted him. The planet and Cecil upon it flipped, and he was lying on his back in the sand, gazing up at the Void that now arched over him.
Gentle murmurs thanked and praised him, and then he was alone.
He touched the drops of stickiness on his stomach, then pushed himself to his feet and got dressed. He shook sand out of his shirt and pants. He felt empty. He felt nothing. But then, was that not how the night had started out? Was that not how the night had continued?
He walked back towards town, towards the blinking red radio tower light, and used it to navigate home.