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A humanoid abomination from the black abyss torn asunder within the City Council meeting chambers stood here, on Carlos’s doorstep. It foamed at the mouth and brandishing a slightly dented cardboard box bearing thick black lettering that read, HIGHLY TOXIC. CONTAIN IN SECURE LOCATION.
“Hi!” The abomination chirped.
“…Hi,” Carlos said after a moment of staring.
Whenever he saw his boyfriend, there was a period of adjustment. Carlos went from the security of the laws of physics, glaring computer screens bearing scrolls of binary and equations, darkened labs, and deep contemplation—to Cecil. Cecil, of garishly bright clothing, huge smiles with serrated teeth, and possible omniscience that he either was trying (unsuccessfully) to cover up, or just refused to acknowledge altogether.
Whenever the jarring transition from ‘The World of Common Sense’ to ‘Oh, Cecil’s Stopped By’ happened, Carlos tended to have this momentary lapse in muscle function while his brain… rebooted.
Cecil refused to stop wearing ties that winked at Carlos when he looked directly at them. He claimed that watching Carlos’s mind attempt to invert itself was ‘cute.’
“It’s Saturday,” Cecil announced, fingers skittering up and down the sides of whatever deadly object he had gotten custody of this time. “I don’t have work. Are you busy?” He followed this up with a very solemn gaze. It was probably Cecil’s attempt at displaying maturity and a willingness to leave if, in fact, Carlos was busy. Carlos tucked an answering smile into the collar of his lab coat, gesturing Cecil inside. “Neat!” His boyfriend declared happily, trotting into the dim interior.
Cecil’s skin only let off a few brief bursts of phosphorescence before it calmed down, but his eyes shone like headlights until Carlos finished tracking down the light switch. He was excited about something, evidently. That could be good or bad.
Well, Carlos did have more evidence than that. Cecil was bouncing on his heels, beaming at Carlos in a troublingly sweet way, and appeared to be petting his unquestionably lethal cardboard box. “What’s that?” Carlos asked warily, pulling a chair out for Cecil (and then nudging Cecil into it; Cecil sometimes forgot that he even had knees. Or at least that was what Carlos assumed happened). He flopped back into his own chair, sending his laptop to sleep and watched Cecil’s smile expand dangerously.
“So I was going through some of my old stuff recently…” Cecil practically purred, crossing his legs in one direction—then uncrossing them and going the other way. He was fidgety. This did not bode well. “Knickknacks, old clothes, third grade ransom notes, that kind of thing…”
“So I heard,” Carlos responded. He’d tuned into the radio show like usual yesterday (which had been a Thursday because the City Council had banned Fridays for being unnecessarily casual or something like that) and heard all about the tapes Cecil had discovered. And the apparent death the tapes revealed—followed by Cecil getting completely hostile. Cecil had spent the next two hours picking black plastic out of his palms while assuring Carlos that he was perfectly alright and maybe just had low blood sugar. Carlos had bought that exactly Not At All.
Right now Cecil looked moderately more rabid than usual. It might be that he was still upset about the events of Thursday. Carlos thought to hand him a tissue, and Cecil wiped his mouth while crossing his legs once more.
“Oh, thank you! Lovely, Carlos…” And while Carlos was blushing and trying to pretend that it was the lighting—just the lighting, it was always just the lighting; it made everything look sweaty, flushed, and mildly hysterical—Cecil sighed happily. “I could think of no one better to share this with.” He stopped petting the box and let it lie in his lap and giggled. “I found our old family pet! I’d forgotten we still had it!”
…Pet, Cecil said?
Carlos’s gaze trailed slowly downward. The dented cardboard box continued to proclaim that it should never be opened. “Most people just bury them,” Carlos pointed out after a moment of considering that this was Night Vale and he really should stop letting these things get a reaction out of him.
“Oh, I’ve heard of that,” Cecil announced, tilting his head. “Ritualistic, live burial? It always seemed a little cruel to me. I mean, how will it take you for walks later on? Your leash will just sit there, wasting away… Exercise is important, Carlos.”
Carlos decided that he really should stop letting these things get a reaction out of him. And pointedly ignored Cecil’s phrasing.
“You mean…” he grimaced a little at the box, sitting quietly between his boyfriend’s knees. “You put your family pet in a box? For several years?” When Cecil nodded, still beaming, Carlos felt his heart sink a little. “Um, Cecil. Maybe you shouldn’t open it.”
“Don’t be silly!” And oh goddammit, Cecil was already fumbling the corners open. “How else will I show you? Unless you’ve gotten x-ray powers you haven’t told me about, hmmm?” Carlos responded by putting his face in his hands. He did not have x-ray powers, or infrasound hearing, or telekinetic fingernails and he really wished Cecil would stop hinting.
Also, this could end nowhere good. Night Vale was a creatively dysfunctional place, but it still followed basic principles. Like how food, water, and oxygen were necessary to ongoing survival, at least once annually? And Cecil still was still shaken from the cassette tapes. He’d stripped off all the bandages on his hands and appeared to have drawn a thick black X over each of the gashes in his palms; that looked EXTREMELY balanced—finding out that his beloved childhood pet had kicked it probably wouldn’t improve anything.
If Cecil was a normal guy, he could have just bought a dog or sought therapy or something and moved on. If Carlos was a normal boyfriend, he could have...
Well, okay, Carlos didn’t know what to do, which was sort of the point.
Oh no, Cecil had successfully clawed the box open. As Carlos peeked between his fingers to the sight of Cecil shaking strips of cardboard out of his fingernails and brushing the rest of the box open, Cecil said, “Here it is! This is—“ And then his face froze.
Oh no. Oh no.
Carlos waited briefly for some other sentiment or impulse to make itself known, but nope; his higher functions were perfectly content to sit in a chair and think the words ‘oh no’ repeatedly. Thank you, higher functions. Also, screw you.
Okay, he had to do something. This was Cecil. Cecil was… important.
Carlos cleared his throat, getting to his feet. His hand hovered over Cecil—still motionless—trying to choose appropriately comfortable location. He ended up sort of awkwardly touching Cecil’s forearm. It was weird. It was definitely weird.
“It’s alright, Cecil,” Carlos said, hand subtly inching up to his boyfriend’s shoulder, in hopes of that being less weird. Yes, much better. Carlos squeezed gently at the appropriate area of anatomy. “This kind of thing just happens sometimes…” When you lock your pet in an enclosed, airless space for an indeterminate amount of time. Then it happens a whole lot.
“I don’t understand,” Cecil said, voice utterly blank. Carlos winced and felt completely useless.
“We can bury it,” Carlos offered, rubbing Cecil’s shoulder a little. “Together. If… if you want.” When Cecil didn’t answer, Carlos took a breath and looked past the top of Cecil’s head and into the mutilated cardboard. Inside there was a pool of shadows, one of Cecil’s hands resting limply among them, and—
…Huh.
“Cecil,” Carlos said slowly, bending down further to get a better look. “…What kind of family pet is that?”
“It used to be a game of monopoly,” Cecil answered, sounding as mystified as Carlos felt, if for different reasons. “I have no idea what this is.”
Alright, just setting aside that Cecil considered a board game to be a family pet and had apparently been walked (?) by it, the contents of the box were just a large, rectangular game that very much wasn’t monopoly.
As Carlos studied it, and the sheer quantity of pink and smiling began to make him feel slightly diabetic. That was without the obviously sweets-themed characters, brandishing oversized candies and looking utterly unconcerned with whether or not they were about to become a study in cannibalism. He was waiting for Night Vale to manifest a bolt of black, sulfuric lightning to vaporize the affront to its dignity, but that didn’t come.
Carlos had never actually seen a Candyland game, but he’d… played Candy Crush on his phone during moments of absolute masochism. It looked kind of like that, only with an unhealthy level of smiling. Cecil was slowly drawing his hand out of the box, so it was probably disturbing him too.
“Are you sure you didn’t just have two family pets?” Carlos eventually asked, still staring at the box in vague dismay. “For instance… a secret family pet? That no one spoke of or acknowledged?”
“No, no; all the secret family pets were chained up in the cellar,” Cecil exclaimed impatiently. “And I’m sure I put monopoly in here. I labeled it and everything.”
Why was monopoly labeled highly toxi—you know what, no. Carlos wasn’t even going to go down that road.
“This is… this is something else.” Cecil slid out of his chair, collapsing in a pile of long, spidery limbs, and nudging Carlos with his foot until Carlos joined him. Cecil removed the game box from its cardboard quarantine and set it on the lab floor. Together, the two of them peered down at it. The game box continued to smile and beam pink, glittery, 2-D candies upwards, into their utterly confused retinas.
When Carlos looked up, Cecil had fixed him with an intensely pleading gaze. Carlos blinked at it for a moment and then reached out to hold Cecil’s hand.
Cecil’s pale fingers laced through his automatically as he said, “Carlos, I hope that—given the strange events of the past thirty-six hours, you won’t think that…” Cecil seemed to be overcome with some great emotion here. Carlos tightened his grip on Cecil’s hand, offering whatever reassurance he had to give, and Cecil eventually managed, “…that I have grown so weak-willed, so infirm as to…”
“No,” Carlos assured him.
“I remember the past,” Cecil said with frustration, hands suddenly claw-like—hard and curved between Carlos’s fingers. They relaxed back into human hands a moment later, as Cecil’s eyes closed. “Or, I think I do? What if…?”
“Cecil,” Carlos said as gently as he possibly could. “When it comes to this, I have absolute faith in you. You never owned this.” Here he gestured to the offending game box. Cecil shuddered slightly, but his eyes opened with little slivers of white still around the pooling void. As Carlos smiled encouragingly, the darkness receded. Together, they gave the game box one last tentative glance.
Still pink, horrifying, and yes, Carlos stuck by his previous statement. Not Cecil’s. Carlos got the strangest feeling that he shouldn’t let Cecil touch it for too long, or it might start burning his flesh.
“Why?” Cecil asked, voice small and hand gripping Carlos’s tightly. “Why have those… tiny cartoons surrounded themselves with dimethoate and thiofanox-based pest removal compounds?”
Carlos stared forlornly at a lollipop and took a moment to be grateful that he knew better than to take candy from the Sheriff’s Secret Police. “They smile excessively,” he offered.
“Their sky is full of pink noxious gases,” Cecil observed, probably meaning the fluffy pink cotton candy clouds lining the toffee (or dangerous pesticide-based candy decoy) city. “And those clouds have swallowed the void itself! What sort of nefarious evil…?”
“And how can they even have clouds?” Carlos grumbled, getting a little more into the spirit of it. “If it rains there, everything will melt. It does not make logical sense.”
Cecil’s voice shook slightly as he added, “Everything I know about my childhood is a lie.” And then Carlos suddenly found his arms full of morose boyfriend. Cecil buried his face in Carlos’s neck and clung to him, very quiet and probably willing to bite if Carlos attempted to dislodge him. Carlos hugged Cecil back tightly, not sure what you did to make amnesiacs feel better, but trusting Cecil to take whatever he needed. And after a while of Cecil hugging Carlos in slightly damp silence, words came rather easily.
“I’m still here,” Carlos told Cecil, stroking his back. His shirt might have been a loud, electric blue, but it was fuzzy under Carlos’s hand, and warm to the touch. There were a lot of parallels to be drawn there. Carlos murmured to his favorite parallel, “Not going anywhere, particularly not in any cardboard boxes. And no matter what, I won’t let you forget me. I certainly wouldn’t be able to forget you.”
Cecil snuffled into Carlos’s collar a little bit. “You’re just saying that.”
“No, really,” Carlos assured him, nuzzling the top of Cecil’s head. “I was absolutely terrified of you for months. I was convinced you were planning to devour my body and use my soul in arcane rituals. That level of trauma does not fade over time.”
Cecil chuckled softly. “Oh, sweet Carlos, I would never have done anything to harm you.”
Cecil also believed in friendly amputation and communal organ-swapping. Uh-huh, Cecil’s definition of ‘harm’ was complex, multilayered, and utterly untrustworthy.
But for now Carlos just held Cecil, breathing in his unique combination of sulfur, coffee, and floral hand soap. “This is not your past,” Carlos promised Cecil. “I don’t know what it is, frankly, and we should probably run some very serious tests on it… but I know it’s not you, Cecil.”
Cecil’s ribs swelled under Carlos’s hands as he took a deep breath and puffed it back out, hot and tingling against Carlos’s throat. Carlos shivered slightly, feeling that this was not an opportune moment to slip away on the mildly narcotic properties of Cecil’s breath. “It is somewhat morbid,” Cecil declared. “Not really my style, you know. I’m a very practical person—as all news reporters must be.”
Carlos stifled another smile against the top of Cecil’s head. “Uh-huh.”
“Okay, you’re right,” Cecil decided, sounding much more like himself. “You’re absolutely right—of course you are. You’re far too intelligent to buy into these silly sorts of lies.” He settled against Carlos more firmly, unwinding his arms and simply cuddling with great purpose. Carlos kept hugging Cecil anyway, because it was fun, and yelped slightly when his boyfriend pressed a kiss under his ear. And then breathed on it.
Argh.
“Do me a favor?” Cecil said as Carlos gave him a slightly peeved look, shivering again. Cecil blinked hopefully upwards, and from this angle, his habitual smile looked a little more fragile than it should have.
“Anything,” Carlos said, and then winced at how that sounded. Erm. Overly sincere. Cecil’s smile widened a little, and he dropped his head against Carlos’s shoulder heavily. The way he stared up did nothing to stop Carlos’s face from heating up.
Cecil had this… way. Of looking at Carlos. It made Carlos’s heart feel like it was being shaken in a tin can, and his throat clog up, and get this increasingly conditioned impulse to kiss Cecil a whole lot. Because really, when some looks at you with such obvious adoration, you’ve got two options, and only one of them was to run away, lock yourself in a cupboard, and remind yourself that the person who had just burned his grin into your soul was probably planning on eating your carcass at the next station barbeque.
There were only so many cupboards in the world. And in fact, Carlos was just a little bit helpless before Cecil when he looked like that.
“Will you smile for me?” Cecil asked, and then chuckled sheepishly. “Um. Please?”
…Carlos might have just been a little helpless around Cecil period.
The look that came onto his face probably looked fantastically stupid—definitely dopey. Goofy. Unprofessional on multiple levels.
And Cecil grinned with all his sharp teeth, a bright flush rising on his cheeks, and ducked his head back into Carlos’s shoulder. “Hm,” he said, sounding breathless. “That was nice. Thank you.”
Carlos just put his face in his hands again.
“Well,” Cecil cleared his throat, voice still slightly higher than it should have been. “Well. While I’m here, anyway, I don’t see why we shouldn’t get some enjoyment out of this game of… mine? Silly me, whose else could it be, sitting in my closet, in my box? So it’s mine now.” He cleared his throat again, visibly reining in the urge to ramble. “Shall we play a game, dear Carlos?”
“Do we even know how to play?” Carlos asked dubiously, eying the box again. Cecil was drawing it closer to them with a surprisingly dexterous foot.
“Perhaps instructions are inside the box,” Cecil suggested. “And if they aren’t, we can always go with the tried and true contest of seeing who can destroy the most game pieces in an allotted thirty seconds.”
Carlos had lasers in this lab. He would take that contest any day of the week. “Alright,” he agreed, and reached out to pop the lid off the box.
It was rather disconcerting when immediately afterwards he found himself sitting on something spongy that was not his lab floor, smelling something overpowering and thick which reminded him intensely of his discovery that librarians, when provoked by numerous checkouts, were prone to releasing a noxious paralytic gas.
Cecil, still in Carlos’s arms, let out a shriek. “Oh!” He cried, bolting out of Carlos’s grip. “Oh—oh—“
Right. Cecil needed a moment. He was only producing that one monosyllable at varying pitch and spinning around. Carlos needed a moment too, while they were on the subject. His lab was nowhere in sight and this was not Night Vale. Or a desert. Or… a coherent reality.
He appeared to be sitting on a large marshmallow.
There were tiny candy floss flowers to his right. Cecil’s frantic movements were upsetting a dollop of lavender icing atop a sixteen-foot tall candy cane, and it was about to land on his head.
“OH—of course!” Cecil finally shouted, completing his thought—and absently side-stepping the sudden waterfall of icing. Carlos gingerly attempted to remove himself from the marshmallow. “How silly of me!” Cecil smacked his forehead with a relieved laugh before turning to Carlos with one of his wicked, amused smiles and saying, “I forgot all about the ESECs!”
“ESECs,” Carlos repeated, peeling clods of marshmallow off of the corner of his coat.
“Eternal sugar entrapment curses,” Cecil filled him in brightly. “They were really popular back in the day, you know. Buy one, turn the nearest normal object into a death trap themed after a candy store! We had this one nice old lady build herself an entire cottage of them so she could feast on all the insects that came to eat it. But I heard that a large praying mantis pushed her into her oven one day, so.” Cecil shrugged away the gruesome death of his fellow citizen. Carlos wrinkled his nose. “It’s before your time, of course, Carlos, and a bit before mine as well… But this is definitely one of them!”
“Lovely,” Carlos decided. He was on solid ground at this point—well, reasonably solid; it appeared to be made of red ribbon candy—and was toeing marshmallow out of the bottom of his sneakers.
“Wow,” Cecil gushed, no longer seeming even slightly concerned about the noxious sky or whether or not the cloyingly saccharine aroma was hiding a great deal of toxic chemicals. “A real ESEC, in person! In my closet!” He sighed. “How lucky.”
Carlos sort of begged to differ—in fact, he had several pressing questions, such as: That’s nice. How do we get home? Or: What happens if it really does rain here? Or: I was running a radiation experiment before you left and that could go poorly if it continues unsupervised. Help?
But Cecil looked so ridiculously happy about having been cursed inside of the Candyland board game that Carlos swallowed his misgivings and just led Cecil away from the overly iced candy cane. As they walked, Cecil absently tugged Carlos aside before he landed himself in a toffee quagmire. Carlos smiled fondly at his omniscient boyfriend, who was currently muttering to himself and staring at Candy land’s buttery yellow sun.
“I’m happy for you,” Carlos said, hugging Cecil to his side. Cecil immediately hugged back, like a lanky, fanged limpet.
“This is nice,” Cecil said.
And it kind of was. It was the most peaceful Night Vale had ever been—although Carlos had absolutely no doubt that any minute now, something would come along and try to massacre them horribly—and you got used to the smell after a while. So there was that.
“Yeah,” Carlos agreed with a smile of his own. “It is kind of nice.”
Cecil looked up at him with shining violet eyes. “Let’s destroy as much of it as we can!”
He then sprang away with a cackle, launching himself at an enormous cinnamon bun. Carlos grinned, and selected the nearest lollipop of decent heft and size. He joined his boyfriend—happily carving his way through a mountain of gently steaming baked good—and swung his makeshift weapon, sending a gumdrop sailing into the horizon. Cecil cheered, and lobbed a chunk of bun Carlos’s way.
And so it began.
Candy flew, shattered, crumbled, and was crushed into multicolored smears. Icing spewed and quivered, like the bodily fluids of some gargantuan, complex carbohydrate beast. Cakes were ravaged, cookies damaged beyond repair, and ribbon candy roads smashed into bite-sized chunks. Carlos paid special attention to the marshmallow, which was left cleaved in half and lightly toasted. War was waged.
(And it was kind of ridiculously fun.)
The sun wavered overhead, like it was planning to go into hiding before they reached it. Cecil, halfway through decimating assorted jawbreakers, howled a sound that made mortal ears scream and try to crawl back up in their skulls. Carlos politely averted his eyes from his boyfriend breaking the laws of physics and sanity. When he looked back over, Cecil stood triumphant in a plain of charred, desiccated rubble and was rubbing his hands together in glee.
Together, they gallivanted for miles, wreaking much destruction—Carlos was a scientist, for goodness sake; half of his interest in the profession was just a fondness for blowing things up. And Cecil, as the Voice of Night Vale, was capable of plenty of destruction no matter how pleasant he was to snuggle. They made a pretty great team.
And as the sun began to set, sending up inconsolable strips of dying light upon its ruined domain, Cecil pushed Carlos up against a candy cane and growled a little bit.
Carlos was… concerned. But only briefly.
“You look tired,” Cecil purred, voice low and rumbling a few octaves between radio-acceptable and unholy hell spawn. Carlos’s ears did not try to recede into another plane of existence, but the bottom of his stomach dropped out slightly, especially when Cecil rested clawed hands at Carlos’s waist. “Let’s take an intermission, shall we?”
Carlos felt a frantic thumping in his chest. His heart was speeding with physical exertion, and from physical proximity, and now also because Cecil was kissing him deeply against perhaps the one intact candy cane in this cursed landscape. Carlos, aware of the irony and yet still unable to stop himself, melted into Cecil.
When Cecil pulled back, he was grinning with all his sharp teeth and Carlos’s head spun at the sight of it. “Beautiful Carlos,” Cecil crooned, proceeding to run his tongue along Carlos’s jaw—and yeah, now Carlos was really hoping this world had nothing to do with Night Vale’s bizarre idea of pest control. “Sweet, gentle Carlos,” Cecil murmured, apparently amusing himself with watching Carlos blush and lean closer to his mouth like a man hypnotized. “Watching you destroy…”
“—A curse,” Carlos interjected, hurriedly.
“—perfect,” Cecil agreed, kissing Carlos’s lips just once. The tease. “I could ask for nothing more, and wouldn’t ask it—I love how delightfully kind you are—“ He kissed Carlos again, with another low-octave growl. And Carlos connected the dots.
He wasn’t sure if it was creepy or cute that Cecil apparently got hot from watching Carlos destroy things. But shall we just say that Carlos wasn’t complaining at the moment. In any capacity.
Well, okay, he did offer the token protest of, “Are you sure this is a good idea while we’re cursed?” Cecil smiled at him briefly and then did something with his tongue that had Carlos hurriedly adding, “I see you feel that strongly about it—whoa, okay, now that’s interesting—“
And then, well…
To make a long story short, readers, after that Carlos didn’t say much of anything (at least, nothing he would admit to whilst Cecil smirked at him in wicked self-satisfaction). Once Carlos could breathe properly again (and see straight) he discerned that they were tangled up on the familiarly dusty floor of his lab. Cecil sighed and nuzzled against Carlos’s chest with the proprietary satisfaction of someone who in no way doubts their right to be there. Carlos noted peripherally that the floor of the lab was really cold. Also, he planned on moving: never.
“We’re back,” Carlos murmured, still a little breathless. Cecil cracked an eye open for just a moment, before burying his face in Carlos’s lack of shirt once more.
“Hm. Oh good, it worked.”
“There was a plan somewhere in all that?” Carlos inquired with a grin, impressed in spite of himself. Cecil pinched him and Carlos growled and rolled them over with the intention of squashing Cecil until he begged for mercy. Cecil then cheated.
“Of course there was a plan,” Cecil informed him loftily. “What, did you think I would allow something as insignificant as a life-draining curse to influence the beautiful and perfect Carlos? Certainly not.” He coupled this with another lengthy, thought-derailing kiss. “We just needed to face the curse with something so unbearably horrific that it would release us on its own.” Another kiss, and Carlos tasted the whispered words, “I figured if rampant destruction wouldn’t hack it, true love probably would.”
Carlos pointed out with what fading dignity was left to him, “Kissing is cheating.”
“Oh, I know,” Cecil chirped back, hooked a leg through Carlos’s, and rolled them over again. With Carlos staring up at his boyfriend in increasingly resigned affection, Cecil asked, “So. Do you have to get back to science now?”
“…Not precisely at this moment,” Carlos allowed, because if anywhere could handle a little more radiation poisoning, it was probably Night Vale. “But if we’re going to continue not doing science, we’re first going to get off of the lab floor. This isn’t sanitary. I mean it. Cecil, gmmph—“
It wasn’t Carlos’s fault. Cecil was a very talented cheat.
----
Much later, when Cecil was a mound of softly breathing covers in Carlos’s bed, Carlos slipped outside to terminate the radiation experiment. Thankfully, the materials had spontaneously turned into a swarm of butterflies (he shooed them out the window, hoping they were non-lethal) and as Carlos shuffled back towards the stairs, yawning, he nearly tripped over the game box.
Monopoly again now. Did that mean the curse was broken for good?
Carlos paused for a moment, before picking up the game and tucking it back in its original cardboard container. It was important to Cecil. He thought he felt a shiver along his hand as he did, and that prompted him to pat the game for a moment—then remind himself that no, cardboard was in no way sentient, nor was it a pet. Stop. Remove hand. Back away.
Carlos headed upstairs, eager to return to the warmth of the bed and the sanity that sleep would bring, and discovered that Cecil had apparently migrated to the bathroom. The light was on and the door was open. Carlos poked his head in, still yawning.
“Cecil?”
Cecil made a largely inhuman, sleepy noise.
“Come back to bed?” Carlos suggested, not terribly surprised by the spectacle in front of him.
Cecil gave another sonically impossible mumble. “Mmmkay,” he sighed, shuffling away from Carlos’s bathroom mirror. His hand trailed behind him, momentarily still buried in the mirrored surface before it slipped entirely free and the glass warped back into place. Cecil dove under Carlos’s arm, muttering about warmth, and by the time they made it to the bed, he was no longer a shadowy, partially transparent flicker, but Carlos’s extremely unawake boyfriend. “G’night,” Cecil offered, before pushing his face into Carlos’s shoulder and resuming unconsciousness.
Carlos tugged the covers up around them, waiting for Cecil’s icy body to heat up before he closed his own eyes.
He was already way past the thoughts like, Subject 6 does not appear to be entirely anchored in coherent reality and how did you escape Station Management? and if you were going to pretend to be human, Cecil, wouldn’t the first person you’d have to fool be yourself? He’d been past them the first time he’d hauled a sleepwalking Cecil out of his mirror, and right now, about the only thing he was concerned with were the fact that Cecil’s hands were stubbornly cold between his.
Maybe Carlos was preoccupied, but you didn’t really bother with things like, I think my boyfriend might have be a malignant, body-snatching eldritch abomination when you had something better, like true love and somebody like Cecil who loved you back.