Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

                I finally stopped in front of City Hall, my legs so weak that they were about to give out on me. I couldn’t have run the whole way, of course, but I managed by alternating between lightly jogging and desperately sprinting. I wheezed heavily in the middle of the plaza, doubled over in exhaustion. You’d think I’d be in better shape after all the daring escapes and action-packed doughnut runs I’d done, but here I was, soft and floppy as an overcooked noodle. After I caught my breath and tried to make myself look somewhat presentable, I strode up to the huge imposing doors at the front of City Hall and stopped. It took me a moment to admit to myself that I had no idea how to get access. I’d never covered stories at City Hall. The only ones stupid enough to do that were Cecil and a few interns who were, clearly, no longer with us. I figured it would be easy enough, though. All I probably had to do was whisper something arcane-sounding. That’s pretty much how you get access to everything in this town.

                I leaned towards the doorknob and whispered, “The dark ones will rise” into the keyhole. Pretty uninspired, but hey. I’d been a long day. In an instant, the door flung open, and a heavy-set man in a gray uniform stood before me with a deep frown on his face.

                “You really could have just knocked,” he said in a dry voice. He had an exasperated expression on his face that implied no one ever, ever knocked and that it would be nice if someone did every once in a while, just for shits and giggles. I shrugged.

                “Knocking would have been so boring,” I answered, walking past him into the building. He slapped his heavily ringed hand on my shoulder to stop me.

                “And where do you think you’re going?”

                “I’m going to see the mayor.”

                He snorted. “Yeah, and I’m the Lizard Queen of the World. Do you have authorization?”

                I jerked my shoulder away from his meaty hand. I was never the type of person who appreciated random physical contact from strangers, especially security guards with a power complex. Still, when he was right, he was right. Apparently I had to have paperwork before I could stroll into the center of town politics with a huge shotgun strapped to my back. And here I thought this was a free country. I dug around in my pockets before flicking my press badge in his face. “Maureen Lowe, Night Vale Community Radio. I have a personal text from the mayor herself, if you’d like to double check, good sir.” I packed as much contempt as I possibly could into the word sir, which, given my experience in being contemptuous, was a hell of a lot.

                He took a close look at the badge and stepped aside slowly. I gave him my sauciest wink and continued to walk into the building, secretly relieved that I didn’t have to show him Dana’s text. I got the feeling that it was something meant only for my eyes, and while its contents weren’t exactly hearts and rainbows, it still made me feel uncharacteristically warm inside that there was something from her reserved especially for me. I tried telling myself that it was nothing to get all starry-eyed over, but when it came to Dana, my usual cold rationality went out the window.

                Speaking of cold rationality, I soon realized that I’d just blown past that guard without asking where the mayor’s office actually was. I didn’t really feel like dealing with Officer Lizard Queen again, so I was at a loss. I briefly considered texting Dana back and asking, but I didn’t want to make myself look like as incompetent as I actually was. Instead, I strode through the shiny marble hallway at a fast clip, glancing at the placards and attempting to get my bearings. Unfortunately, all the signs were written in Unmodified Sumerian, which I’d only barely managed to pass in high school via unscrupulous cheating. I may have asked a city employee, but I wasn’t sure. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if there were any city employees at all. The funny thing is, I was sure I passed people. I remembered the swish of starched pants and the click of high heels, but for some reason as soon as they went by, the experience was lost and it was like I was in the hallway by myself. It was unnerving, but honestly, what the hell wasn’t? The point was, I was lost, and I didn’t really fancy stumbling into something embarrassing, like an ancient blood-letting government ritual or the men’s bathroom.

                I reached the end of the hallway and found myself standing in front of a pair of frosted glass doors. The words “Building Directory” were written in large, black block lettering. Beyond the glass, strange ill-defined shapes shifted menacingly, reminiscent of the management back at the station. But when I opened the door, I found myself looking at a very ordinary office, complete with a desk, a couple chairs and some bookshelves packed with old, dusty manuals and junky memorabilia. A bored-looking blonde woman sat behind the desk, looking at her chipped nails.

                “Location of appointment?” she asked me without looking up.

                I stared for a moment, then tried my best to look cool and in control, like a decent radio professional should. “Mayor’s office.”

                She nodded and raised one wrinkled hand, then stopped.

                “I don’t recognize you,” she muttered. She looked up, and I could see her eyes were narrow with suspicion. “You ever done intra-hall travel before?”

                “Uh, no, but there’s a first time for everything, right?” I flashed my badge and what I hoped was a winning smile.

                “Right.” She looked back down. “Well, happy travels. Lemme give you a tip. You know Floo Powder from Harry Potter?”

                “Uh, yeah?”

                “It’s nothing like that. Clench up, honey.”

                She snapped her fingers, and I was violently dragged into a dark cold vortex that smelled a little like mildew-y carpet and felt a lot like pain.

               I landed on a plush carpet with a thud. It took me a minute (or what felt like a minute) for my head to stop spinning. When I finally felt like I could stand up without projectile vomiting my fries everywhere, I shakily rose to my feet and looked around. I was in a dimly-lit office crowded with expensive looking cherry wood furniture. There were way so many swirling shapes and patterns carved into the wood, and it made me dizzy to look at them for too long. Heavy black drapes blocked most of the sunlight and left only a small sliver of it to compliment the dull glow of the stained glass lamps scattered around the room. On the wall were paintings of what I could only assume were past mayors, but I never paid enough attention in Night Vale History 101 to be sure. Besides, they appeared to be portraits capturing the moments of their deaths, so they didn’t really look like they did in the textbooks. Most of their faces were contorted into horrible screams. Overall, it probably wasn’t the most cheerful office in the world, but I expected nothing less from the center of this bullshit town.

                I heard a quiet noise from behind a stack of papers on the desk. I slowly pulled out my AA-12 and crept towards the desk, my feet hardly making a sound. I knew it was probably Dana, but I hadn’t survived for this long by being sloppy. Suddenly, I heard the voice I’d been longing to hear call out.

                “Hey, don’t shoot.”

                I froze as Dana swept the papers away to reveal her smiling face. I relaxed. For a moment I thought I had really scared her, but she seems to be completely at ease. She had known I wouldn’t shoot the whole time. Sometimes I swore she trusted my instincts more than I did. From the tone of her text, I had expected her to look a lot more freaked out than she did, but she seemed relatively calm. There was a cup of tea sitting next to her and she gestured to it casually.

                “Want a cup? Don’t worry, I use my own tea bags. I’m pretty sure the ‘tea’ here is really just dried blood.”

                I nodded silently and watched as she busied herself with pouring another cup. My body felt stiff and frozen in place. I knew I should have sat down instead of standing around like some awkward statue, but I could bring myself to move.

                “Are you alright with orange blossom? I’m fresh out of Earl Grey.”

                I made some kind of noise that could possibly be interpreted as a yes. I could have punched myself. Here I was in front of Dana for the first time in months and I couldn’t even put together a coherent sentence. I desperately wished that things could be the way they used to be, when we could talk for hours about what ultimately amounted to nothing. But if the fancy office was anything to go by, those days were past us now.

                She handed me the tea, and I took it carefully so I wouldn’t accidently brush against her hand. Once I got a closer look at her face, I realized that I’d been wrong earlier. She wasn’t relaxed at all. Her mouth was too tight at the corners and her brow was furrowed just enough to be noticeable up close. There were a few strands of hair escaping her otherwise well-put-together side bun. Her eyes would quickly dart here and there on occasion, mostly to the darker corners of the room.  She looked more on edge then I’d ever seen her be, and we’ve faced death together on a regular basis, so that’s saying a lot.

                She jerked her hand a little too fast to gesture to a seat in front of her desk. “Make yourself at home! I know the décor’s a little rustic. I tried to update it, but for some reason it just kept changing back.”

                She shrugged and seated herself behind the desk as I sat down and laid my gun across my lap. It was weird to see her from this vantage point. Usually when I was staring across a desk it was at some professor talking down to me about my grades or good old Cecil Palmer feeding me some bullshit about my duties as a reporter or making me read his god-awful fanfiction. But talking to Dana like this seemed seriously wrong. At the very least, she was my friend. She was supposed to be by my side and not staring me down from across stacks of paperwork like every other adult in my life. I did my best to hide my discomfort, but she seemed to pick up on it. She smiled apologetically.

                “I’m sorry. I know this is sort of awkward.” She looked around, then abandoned her official mayoral position and flopped down onto the chair directly to the right of mine. “There. That’s better!”

                I smiled back at her. There was a chair to my left, but she chose the right one. She had remembered about my messed-up ear. It was the same old Dana, albeit with more municipal power and a snazzier hairdo. She sat quietly for a while, staring at the tea cup in her hands. Apparently I wasn’t the only one tongue-tied in this situation. Finally, she spoke.

                “I’m really sorry to have called you out here so suddenly, especially since we haven’t talked in a while. I miss spending time with you and the others, but I’ve been so busy ever since I became mayor, I barely even have time to sleep anymore. I’m not trying to ignore anyone, I promise! It’s just been…hard.”

                Judging by the way she said it, “hard” was probably the understatement of the millennium. Normally I’d cut in and tell her so, but I just sat, tea in hand, and waited for her to finish.

                “I know that text sounded kind of panicky, but well…I’m kind of panicking. Nothing has been easy ever since I became mayor, but lately some things have been happening that have me scared.”

                I held up my hand to stop her. “Are you sure your office is the safest place to talk about this kind of thing?” I asked. I looked around, trying to spot any recording devices.

                She shrugged. “What place isn’t bugged? The whole town is wired, my office included, but there’s a weird distortion that makes it impossible to hear conversations.”

                I relaxed a little, but not much. Weird distortions on recordings would probably mean shit-all to certain entities, but she was right. You could have a conversation in the middle of the sandwastes and it would probably wind up in some government database somehow.

                She took a small sip of tea and continued. “On top of everything else, lately I feel like someone is trying to hurt me. Well, it could be someone, or multiple someones, or not a someone at all, but a something, but either way, I feel less safe than I ever have. Last week, someone replaced my car’s steering wheel with a circular stone slab encrypted with an ancient spell that would have bound my soul for eternity. And they let the air out of my tires. Just this past Monday, I found a bunch of highly poisonous puppies in my file cabinet. I know puppy infestations are pretty common, but bulldogs aren’t even native to Night Vale. I feel like someone must have put them there on purpose.”

                Her hands shook as she held her teacup. Her eyes were wet with tears, but I knew she’d never let them fall. Not in front of me, at least. I wanted so badly to reach out to her, but my hands remained locked in place around my own teacup. I cleared my throat and tried to say something comforting.

                “You know you’re not alone, right? There’s me and Cecil and Michelle and everyone else. We’ve got your back. Always.”

                She nodded. “I know, and I love and appreciate all of you, which is exactly why I haven’t said anything.”

                She leaned towards me and dropped her voice to a whisper. “Whatever is happening, whatever is after me, it’s dangerous, way more dangerous than anything we’ve ever encountered as interns. I don’t want anyone getting hurt for me. But right now I’m at a loss. I’ve tried to figure it out on my own but I can’t. I just can’t. I feel like I’m going in circles, only it’s a spiral leading further and further down…”

                A few tears slid from the corners of her eyes. She looked embarrassed that she’d lost control and quickly wiped them away. She forced a smile that curved the glistening wet trails running down her cheeks.

                “Well, crying won’t do me much good. All it will accomplish is making my face wet. Besides, now you’re here! I’m not in this by myself anymore.”

                Her smile grew wider and more genuine, and I could feel my heart trying desperately to escape from my chest. I tried my best to settle my out-of-control pulse before I spoke.

                “So what do you need me to do? Say the word and I’m on it.”

                Dana pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “Well,” she started slowly, “I mostly need information. I can’t really do anything if I don’t know who or what is threatening me. I know you have access to all of Cecil’s contacts so…”

                “Done and done,” I answered with a lot more confidence than I felt. But right now, Dana needed confidence and I was gonna give her all I had.

                She laughed, then leaned over and hugged me tight. The shotgun slid out of my lap and fell to the ground with a dull thump. I promptly lost control of my heart rate again and nearly spilled my tea over the nice carpeting. You can call me creepy all you want, but damn she smelled good. The calming scent of chamomile and coconut oil washed over me, and it was all I could do to reach around and pat her on the back in the most platonic way imaginable instead of burying my face in the crook of her neck and staying there for five hours.

                “Haha, uh yeah, lemme just…” I stammered as I extracted myself from her arms and leaned down to pick up my gun. “I gotta, you know, gather my sources, call up some folks, beat the streets, do all that hardcore detective shit, so I’ll just…”

                I got up and shuffled towards the door, trying to one-handedly strap the AA-12 to my back again.

                “Call me as soon as you learn anything! And please be careful!” She called as I walked away.

                I managed to shout “sure thing” back at her as I slipped out the door and back into the hallway. I breathed a sigh of relief and rested my forehead against the wall. I was an awkward pile of garbage, but at least I had managed to talk to her face to face for the first time in ancient gods knew how long. I could still feel her arms around me, and my skin seemed to burn where she had touched me. But there was no time to dwell on that. I pulled out my phone and started scrolling through my contacts until I got to Michelle. She answered her phone in less than a second.

                “Good job leaving me with the bill, loser.”

                “I’ll pay you back later. Call up the gang. We’ve got some work to do.”