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Relationships are difficult. This fact should surprise no one—least of all Cecil. He’s been around the block a few times, not that he’d be likely to brag about it—or speak of it at all, really. A person’s romantic past is a room best left shut up, with the doors bolted shut and the windows boarded up. Maybe a little wall sealant to plug up those pesky cracks where memories might skitter through. Heck, it’s best to just volunteer for one of the government recommended mind-wipes and be done with the whole ordeal. So long as you remember that Steve Carlsburg was, is, and always will be a huge jerk.
But then, there’s Carlos. And he’s not difficult at all; not in the normal ways. Things just seem to work when Cecil is around him. He feels happy, at a rate which is likely to surpass this month’s happiness quota by the end of their fourth date. All in all, it’s probably the best relationship Cecil has ever been in. Consequently, it’s the longest he’s ever gone without revealing his not-so little secret. Which is probably why he’s so very terrified.
He’s been meaning to tell him. Really, he has. It’s just not the sort of conversation that comes up organically, and well, Cecil has never been one to push the issue. But they’ve been dating for a while now, and Carlos hasn’t tried to devour his liver just yet, so that must mean they’re at least a little bit serious. Which means that Cecil is quickly running out of time.
There’s a schedule for this sort of thing, before it gets to the point where you’re better off taking the secret to your grave instead of explaining why you waited so long to talk about it. One must be delicate, and overall, considerate. There are certain things that Carlos should know about Cecil before the relationship progresses, and he’ll find out one way or another—so Cecil tells himself when he speaks to his reflection in dreams. Really, what’s stopping him? There’s nothing, nothing at all. Nothing but VOID, all consuming, voracious, unfeeling. He falls into it, and then becomes it.
He wakes up about five minutes later, with no further progress on his decision to tell Carlos.
“What should I do?” he whispers into the light fixture at Big Rico’s when he’s sure Carlos isn’t around.
“Suck it up,” it replies, before switching to a frequency of light which Cecil can only experience through the taste of orange cough medicine on his tongue. As if summoned by thought, which was a genuine possibility, Carlos stepped through the door with that hassled look he gets every time science stops working for a while. But as soon as he sees Cecil sulking at one of the booths, his face breaks into a grateful and radiant smile that sends Cecil’s stomach clambering up into his ribcage.
It’s then that he realizes he has to tell him. Sitting there in the booth listening to Carlos talk about electricity and particulate matter, he makes himself one promise: that Carlos will know within a week, or he’ll never know at all.
“Have you ever had something you needed to say, like, really really badly?”
Carlos glances over to where Cecil is plastered in the corner between the seat and the car door, his face pale and sickly.
“Sure,” Carlos says carefully.
“I mean not just anything,” Cecil continues, fighting down the panic in his voice. “Something super important, that you really want to talk about, but you just can’t because it’s so important, and more than anything you want to just say it, but you also want to flee town and start a new life under a new identity, say, Gary Newport? Do you know what I mean?”
“Um,” Carlos says, squinting at the windshield as if the words of Cecil’s soliloquy were written there to be deciphered. “…No?”
“Oh. Me neither,” Cecil says miserably, sliding a little lower in his seat and turning to watch the sidewalk whip past their window as it speeds off in the opposite direction, a group of terrified pedestrians in tow.
“One time I had to tell my mom that I accidentally flushed her diamond earrings down the toilet,” Carlos supplies with desperate helpfulness.
“That must have been difficult,” Cecil says, because it’s important to be supportive no matter what your own situation.
Carlos shoots him a worried look. “Is everything okay?” Cecil’s only response is a quiet groan.
Suddenly there’s a pressure on his arm, and he cautiously looks down to see Carlos’s hand resting there. His eyes are still focused on the road, his other hand gripping the wheel a little tighter than necessary, but his thumb rubs little circles through the fabric of Cecil’s shirt, and in that moment everything seems a little brighter—even after the mysterious flying lights finish passing over their car.
Cecil covers Carlos’s hand in his own, and they’re silent for the rest of the drive.
“Can I touch this?” Cecil gestures to a system of test tubes as intricate as a working set of human intestines.
“Beer’s in the mini-fridge by the seismometer,” Carlos replies absently. His broad shoulders are currently hunched over a microscope, peering into miniature worlds whose denizens went through their mitotic little lives without ever knowing they were watched. Or perhaps they did know, pinned between slides and forced to stare up forever at the unblinking eye of the microscope above. Cecil takes out a beer.
Despite the cool bottle against his palm, his hands feel hot and sweaty. Cecil sits down in a stool then stands back up, tweaks a beaker full of liquid and recoiling when it hisses. Carlos makes no comment. The silence sprawls out between them, fat and monstrous and demanding to be filled with the words Cecil knows he has to say. Yet all he can think of are ways to avoid it. Perhaps he could write it all down and send it in a letter? He could be in the car outside with the engine running, in preparation for the rejection he couldn’t stand the thought of. He could announce it over the radio; it wasn’t a secret if everyone knew it. He could train a chorus of small birds to sing it to Carlos in his sleep. The possibilities are truly and horrifically endless.
But what he does instead is stand up, open his mouth, and say it. His vocal cords vibrate the air, the sound waves travel out, he only stutters a little and then it’s done. Gone. Out into the world and no longer in Cecil’s control. He sags a little as the pressure building in his chest eases. All he can do now is wait for Carlos to respond.
“Mmmhmm. Definitely,” Carlos says.
After about two minutes of intense staring Carlos looks up and blinks. “Uh. Sorry, did you say something earlier? I was sort of distracted. Laws of physics breaking down and whatnot.”
A slow, manic smile spreads across Cecil’s face.
“Nope! Everything’s fine! Very fine, everything is, nothing to worry about, and did I mention your hair?” He turns around and walks briskly to the other side of the room where he pretends to stare at some test tubes while mentally screaming in horror. This was a mistake, a horrible mistake. He can’t ever do this again.
“Can we talk?” Cecil screams at the top of his lungs.
“Is this really the best time?” Carlos yells back.
“There’s just something I need to get off my chest!”
“Me too!” Carlos bellows, wrestling out from underneath the paws of a mutated cat-creature which has him pinned to the floor, and zapping it with one of the standard issue taser sticks. Adoption Day at the local pet shelter was always such a hassle. Still, that was no excuse for puns.
“I just can’t keep lying to you anymore!” Cecil cries over the chorus of yowls and gibbering as he shoves what appears to be a dog-crocodile hybrid back into its kennel. “I have to clear my conscience!”
“Cecil, look out!” Carlos shouts, fighting through the fray to whack a giant leech seconds before it latches onto Cecil’s arm. Whirling around, Cecil kicks something off of his leg and straight back into the tank it climbed out of. He and Carlos make a good team, beating back the endless tide of horribly disfigured animals and forcing them into the bleak cages from whence they came. Really it’s quite romantic.
Finally the last of the animals are trapped or banished, and the cleaners can come in to mop up the bloody mess of prospective pet-owners foolish enough to appear today. Carlos wipes his forehead and lets his taser stick clatter to the floor a few feet away, his face flushed.
“Are you alright?” Carlos asks between breaths. His glasses are askew, his hair perfectly imperfect, and a splattering of gently smoking blood is vibrant on the lapel of his lab coat. Cecil beams, affection coursing through his veins. It’s like there’s a stick of room-temperature butter in his chest that’s melting from the heat of his body to pool in his stomach in a warm, gooey puddle. He knows this is a good moment. And for once, he finds has nothing he has to say.
“I’m great,” is what he does end up saying.
Carlos smiles like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. “Was there something you were trying to tell me?”
Cecil reaches out to squeeze Carlos’s hand. “Yes. I just wanted to say that I had a lot of fun today.”
With a laugh, Carlos runs his fingers through his hair in that maddening way he does. “Well. It was exciting. You know, sort of gross, and probably extremely inhumane, but much better than it would have been. Without you.”
Cecil loops his arm through Carlos’s and presses a kiss to his cheek as they walk back to the car.
“Also, I was thinking of adopting a dog.”
Carlos laughs again, and the knowledge that it’s Cecil’s own words that created such a beautiful sound could sustain him for the rest of his life. And that’s when he decides that he’s not going to tell him. Some things just aren’t meant to be known.
A few days later, Carlos is in Cecil’s apartment. It’s not the first time this has happened, but the sense of wonder at seeing Carlos sitting in Cecil’s very own couch, drinking coffee from his very own mug—well, it hasn’t worn off yet. Neither has the way that Carlos’s throat bobs when Cecil sits down just a little closer than necessary, or the fluttering of his fingers before they tentatively trail over Cecil’s knee. And especially not the way Carlos sets his glasses on the table, ever so carefully, before leaning in for a kiss.
It’s nice. Which is surprising, because normally Carlos’s kisses are nothing less than spectacular. It takes Cecil a moment to realize that there’s a pit of guilt knowing at the bottom of his stomach, a whisper in the back of his mind that not even the feeling of Carlos’s lips can dispel. He tries to ignore it—after all, he’d been through this already. If Carlos never knows, then he’ll never have reason to leave. Or never that reason, at least.
He runs his hands through Carlos’s hair, an activity which never failed to completely wipe his mind in the past; yet although his curls are as lovely as always, the nagging in Cecil’s brain refuses to fade away. In fact, it gets more persistent, a constant chant of this is wrong pounding in his skull.
Carlos’s fingertips run down his chest. Then down his stomach. Wrong.
“CarlosIHaveToTellYouSomething,” Cecil blurts out. Carlos pulls back a fraction of an inch, his eyes wide with concern.
“Is this not okay?” he asks. “I can stop.”
“Noooo,” Cecil says, or more accurately he quietly wails. Carlos’s smile widens and then retreats shyly just as fast.
“What is it, then?” he asks. “You know you can tell me anything. If you wanted. I mean, I don’t want to push you if you’re not comfortable with—what I mean is, I’m here for you,” he finishes in a breath.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Cecil says, wishing more than anything he could stop the words that were about to leave his mouth. “I’ve done something I really shouldn’t have. I’ve…I’m ashamed to say I’ve been lying to you. If only by way of refusing to reveal the truth.”
Carlos blinks once, twice. He takes a breath. His shoulders tense.
“Okay,” he says, a shield rising behind his eyes. “Are you going to tell me?”
“Of course, of course, just—give me a minute,” Cecil says, wishing he could force his heart to stop beating like it planned to make a run for it straight out of his chest. “I’m—” He stops. He breathes, with difficulty. He opens his mouth again.
“I’m—not human,” Cecil finishes in a gust.
Carlos waits politely as if expecting something else. When he realizes there isn’t, he sits back. With a slight frown, his eyes wander down to the shadowy tentacle which snakes out of Cecil's back and has been massaging his knee for the past three minutes, then to the one curled around the leg of the sofa, then to the tattoos of eyes on the back of Cecil’s hands which occasionally become much more ocular than any ordinary ink. Then he looks back into Cecil’s all-white eyes and frowns with the faintest hint of confusion.
“Is that what you’ve been trying to tell me for the past week?” he asks slowly.
“I’m so very, very sorry,” Cecil says, everything coming out at once now. “I know I should have told you sooner, but I was just worried, you’re an outsider and all, which is great, really, wonderful, but I thought you might not understand, and you deserved to know sooner, but I was enjoying our time so much, and I didn’t want it to end…” he trails off miserably.
After a brief and contemplative pause, Carlos raises his eyebrows ever so slightly. “Actually, I kind of…figured it out. Pretty early on. Almost immediately, in fact.”
“Please, you don’t have to do that,” Cecil sighs. “I appreciate you trying to spare me the shame, Carlos, it is as noble a gesture as I have learned to expect from you. But one I hardly deserve.”
Carlos narrows his eyes dubiously. “…Cecil, you do realize that you often have tentacles.”
“Oh, I know,” Cecil says, three of the said appendages rising up to cup the side of his own face in admonishment.
“And I’ve been able to see them from practically the first day I met you,” Carlos continues, laying out each word like a brick in the path which will somehow lead Cecil to a distant and unobtainable revelation.
“Yes,” Cecil says miserably.
Carlos leans forward. “…Are you seeing where I’m going with this?”
Cecil shakes his head. “That I should have told you sooner?”
For a moment it looks like Carlos is about to say something, before he seems to think the better of it. Cecil pulls back, shifting to the furthest edge of the couch and wrapping tendrils around his chest protectively. “I’m sorry. I understand how you’re feeling. Some people just can’t accept it, and then they leave forever, and they’re just, a big jerk with no life who I shouldn’t even care about, but it still…” he clamps his teeth shut. There’s nothing more to be done except wait for Carlos to get up, state his excuses, and leave forever. Pleading never did any good.
He feels Carlos’s weight shift, and it’s like the roll of a ship’s deck which might pitch Cecil over the side into the dark water below. But suddenly he feels a pair of arms winding around his chest which can be reasonably assumed to be Carlos’s, hands fitting over the inhuman digits currently wringing the life out of Cecil’s tie.
“Cecil,” he says, “I knew what I was getting into the moment I called you that night. You remember it?”
“I could never forget,” Cecil says truthfully. The memory of sitting on the hood of his car, Carlos’s hand on his knee, his heart singing louder than the unearthly hum of the Arby’s sign twenty feet above them.
“Then you remember what I said.”
Cecil looks down at the arms enveloping him. “Yes.”
Carlos presses his lips to the hollow of Cecil’s neck. “You are one of the strangest people I’ve ever met. And one of the most wonderful.” He feels Carlos smile, and can hear the shyness in his voice. “In fact, you might be one of my favorites.”
Hardly daring to trust his own ears, Cecil twists around to look him in the face. “Really?”
Carlos presses their foreheads together, his eyes gleaming. “Really. Tentacles and spontaneous eyes and all.”
Suddenly it seems that Cecil’s stomach has been filled with warm, excitable, and pleasant worms. He grins, and then stops because you don’t want to look too eager. Then his smile is splitting his face ear-to-ear in a completely metaphorical sense, because he just can’t help himself.
“You’re one of my favorite people too.” It doesn’t need to be said, but he puts it out there because it feels good and he can. For a moment they just sit there, quiet and close and content, with the eyes on the backs of Cecil's hands blinking as placidly as a cat in the sunlight.
Except then Carlos is pulling back again, that baffled frown dogging his features. “So you’re seriously telling me the rest of the town doesn’t know?”
“No. Just a few people, really.”
Carlos stares into space for a minute. “…And how does that work, exactly?”
“I haven’t told them.”
“Yes, but—you can plainly see—” Carlos looks like he’s about to argue, gesturing vaguely at the tangible, visible, and in-all-ways-present appendage currently snaking around his calf like a living strand of shadow, but then just shakes his head.
“Something tells me I will never understand this town,” he says with a quiet smile, seemingly to himself.
Cecil leans forward and kisses him again. “Give it time. Every mystery can be solved. Although there's always the possibility that the answer will be so horrifying that there mere thought of it will send the fragments of your mind howling into the netherworld. But rest assured, the answer does exist."
Carlos smiles Cecil's favorite smile. "You always do know what to say." He leans in for Cecil's favorite kiss.