thecapitol | Today's log brought to you by the letter "C!" C, as in Closed!

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Today's log brought to you by the letter "C!" C, as in Closed!

WHO| Carlos, Cecil, and a ｃamera ｃrew
WHAT| A chat. Carlos has been given a break from working on the disease to see -- right, that guy he confessed love for in the Arena. Too bad it wasn't true.
WHEN| Late last week, before Carlos makes his discovery.
WHERE| In the Capitol! Outside the Speakeasy, then inside the Speakeasy.
WARNINGS| Huge, horrendous amounts of awkward. This is a painful truth. Also, the first part of this log IS televised. Feel free to assume your character has seen it.

Carlos stood, trying not to fidget, on the curb next to the Speakeasy. He had it on good authority that this was the one building in the Capitol where you could have a private talk -- a really private talk, without the Capitol listening in on you. Carlos needed a place like that. The deception he was about to discuss wasn't just for the Capitol's citizens. It was important that the administration swallow it, as well.

But oh, god, was he not looking forward to discussing it.

The camera crews didn't help. They knew exactly why Carlos had been allowed out of the lab and who this appointment was with, and were eagerly asking him question after question.

"Of course I'm looking forward to seeing him--"

"--no, I haven't seen him since before the Arena--"

"--yes, I really thought I was going to die--"

"--thank you--"

"--I'm sorry to hear that, I didn't mean to make anyone cry--"

"--excuse me, but I've been working on identifying a very important disease -- isn't anybody going to ask me about that?"

"--listen, thank you, but I'd really rather not answer any more questions. I'm just here to meet Cecil..."

Carlos couldn't hear anyone's approach, not over the clamor of the press, so he looked around for Cecil instead. With any luck, this place's bouncers would keep the reporters out. It was part of why Carlos had chosen it. Carlos knew he ought to look excited: after all, he was seeing the man he was purportedly in love with for the first time in over a month. Really, though, he just felt sick. Sick, and guilty.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Cecil felt sick, too, for the entire trip across town. Sick with excitement.

He hadn't spoken much to Carlos in the past weeks. This was, he had told himself many times, perfectly understandable! As the Capitol had revived him for the express purpose of putting him to work combating the mysterious illness sweeping the city, it made sense that he should be occupied with his work. It made sense that his replies to Cecil's messages should be terse and distracted. It made sense that he should ignore or refuse every invitation to lunch, or coffee, or to come over and watch a movie, or to stargaze in a rooftop garden, or to help him decide which pictures of Khoshekh to post to the radio station homepage on any given morning. There was nothing strange about that at all! Nothing worth getting frustrated over.

And yet, when one had spent the better part of a month with Carlos' hideous deathbed (death...stair?) confession the only memory one had of what Cecil had to assume was, technically, a relationship, it was difficult not to be frustrated by the silence. Especially when he had given up any bare hope of this happening - when he had consigned it weeks before to the realm of the probably-impossible.

This was why his stomach was in knots as he approached the Speakeasy. He'd seen the camera crews from half a block away, and was not surprised by their presence. After all, they were destined to be a high-profile couple, one way or another! But they were blocking his view of the person he'd come to see - the person he'd thought only weeks ago he would never see alive again, who was now, impossibly, his-- his boyfriend--

--Oh. There he was. Just beyond the press of... the press. Cecil's train of thought ground to a halt.

God. He looked-- radiant. As beautiful as the first time Cecil had seen him. This was literally true, and not just a result of the blinders that Carlos' presence imposed on Cecil, because Carlos had recently been revived by the Capitol, which had rendered all unpleasant modifications to face, skin, and (especially) hair nonexistent.

"Carlos," he said, over the sudden silence of the surrounding press. He found that he had no control whatsoever over the smile that felt as though it might break his face into two pieces-- sort of like Kevin, but less horrifying, and motivated by actual joy of a kind that made his extremities feel detached from him. ...Though that might have been nerves. "Um-- hi."

Carlos's heart sank.

He had hoped that, maybe, Cecil would suspect that the confession had been a ploy. It had been a small hope, since Carlos had not brought up the possibility to Cecil beforehand, but the hope had been there. Now, it wasn't.

He was about to do something terrible. But doing nothing was worse. He forced a smile, which he belatedly remembered wasn't visible under the respirator he had taken to wearing in public.

"Hello, Cecil," he said, quietly -- the face mask muffled it, so even the large fluffy microphones that were being held in the air around him could barely pick it up. "Sorry I didn't call you back. I've been really busy, what with this disease and everything," he admitted, shamefaced. Or at least, shame-eyed and shame-voiced.

There was a part of Cecil that did acknowledge how improbable Carlos' sudden honesty was. But the truth was that Cecil really wanted to believe that Carlos' confession was genuine. That from all of the things they had gone through together (the many lunches and dinners and rooftop coffee dates; the misunderstandings and awkward reconciliations; the mutual acknowledgment of their resident dystopia's less palatable injustices), there could emerge something... well. Something personal.

Carlos was alive, and he had said, out loud, to another person, that he loved Cecil - maybe these good things were a sign that fewer terrible things would happen in the next few weeks!

He wasn't sure how to close the distance between himself and Carlos - they hadn't been in the same place since before the Arena had begun. So he stayed where he was, his hands at his sides in a way that did not remotely suggest relaxation, and smiled as though that could make up for the awkward eighteen inches of empty space between them.

"It's-- it's fine!" he said. "You've been doing important work for the Capitol, and I completely understand that. Keeping our citizens safe from a budding pandemic is much more important than replying to a text every so often, or leaving the occasional message regarding your availability, or letting the people around you know you're thinking about them. It's fine." His tone - light, cheerful - belied the words themselves.

His grin turned a shade of sheepish. Saying these kinds of things to a listening audience of thousands was one thing, but speaking before a bystanding camera was weird. "But-- regardless of this unprecedented attack on our immune systems and the panic that must inevitably accompany its future stages-- I was really looking forward to seeing you."

"Me too," said Carlos -- and it was true and untrue at the same time. He had been hoping to see Cecil again, because seeing Cecil (barring the possibility of one bizarre afterlife) meant that he survived the Arena. However, he was absolutely not looking forward to this conversation.

"I really thought I wouldn't, for a minute, there."

His voice was still quiet, still subdued. In his head, Carlos could hear the District 10 mentor scolding him -- telling him in no uncertain terms that he wasn't fooling anybody. That he would have to do better than this.

Carlos glanced sideways at the camera crew, sighed, then reached out to take Cecil's hand. He was glad to have the mask right now, actually: perhaps his worried eyes would be mistaken for impassioned gazing. At least Cecil's acting was flawless -- that is, if it was acting. It probably wasn't.

Edited 2014-06-27 04:25 (UTC)

No. No, it wasn't acting. Carlos was the most ethical person Cecil knew. He didn't lie, even when it was the safer and more logical option, and even though truth was a word with an extremely relative definition. Cecil believed him - had decided the moment Dave Strider had come to him to tell him Carlos' last words that he would believe him.

His heart picked up when Carlos took his hand. The numbness in his extremities seemed to have been replaced with sudden hypersensitivity in every nerve. He hoped he wasn't falling ill now.

"...So did I," he said, looking from their hands to Carlos' face, and daring to take a small step closer. "For-- for more than a minute, honestly. More like a week and a half. Not," he added, "That I minded waiting! But it was-- it was a little stressful, honestly."

The respirator, he noted, did not make anything about the parts of Carlos' face that he could see less perfect.

"It's all right," Carlos said, because it felt like the right thing to say. He looked up at Cecil, and used his grip on Cecil's hand to pull them a few degrees closer. "I'm back, now."

Then, his heart began to beat faster. It definitely hadn't been before, or if it had, it had been out of guilt and nervousness. This was a very different kind of beating heart, a kind that made you acutely aware of the fact that you were a creature filled with blood, and that an abnormal amount of that blood was flooding the capillaries in your face.

No.

Oh, no.

No, no no no, not now, not with what he's about to say looming over him, not with the cameras on their automatic struts gleaming around them, not with everything else -- Carlos didn't want to feel this now. But with Cecil this close, with the expanse of their shared past stretched behind them, with Cecil's eyes level with his eyes and Cecil's hand in his hand, it was -- a reality that is not real could be superimposed on what was actually true.

It could almost, almost be believed that it was only chemistry hanging in the air between them, instead of a lie. Carlos thought, for a moment, about what it would be like to be here, standing close to Cecil, for no better reason than wanting to.

He couldn't actually believe it, of course; Carlos was far too grounded in reality for that. But it had been tempting.

Carlos glanced at the press, with their eager eyes and their cameras and their functioning lungs, then decided that his chances of contracting the disease are fairly low so long as the press remained at that distance. He latched his fingers under the chin of his respirator, then dramatically pulled it off his face in one fluid movement. It hung from his free hand as he lifted that hand to Cecil's shoulder, feeling his pounding heart push hemoglobin through his body.

His hand moved from Cecil's shoulder to the back of Cecil's neck, as Carlos wondered if he was really going to do this. He wondered if it wouldn't be better if he didn't. But the moment was here, and the press was expecting it, and while this was something Carlos had un-admittedly wanted to do for a long time now, he didn't want to do it like this.

But that didn't matter now.

He leaned over, and kissed Cecil anyway.

Cecil could not have pinpointed exactly the instant at which the kiss became inevitable. He could only have said that there was a point at which that happened - a point at which the air between them suddenly felt close, and Carlos' eyes turned to his with a purpose that he understood on a level below conscious thought. The slight movement of their bodies toward each other was both a signal of what was to come and an involuntary reaction to what had just happened; Cecil knew exactly what was coming, and was surprised by it all the same.

The cameras were there for the first few seconds, in which Cecil's eyes stayed wide open and his eyebrows flew up and his breath caught. They were there for the next few seconds, in which the feeling returned to all of his limbs at once, and he let his eyes fall closed. They remained there as he leaned in, cautiously, ruling out one by one the possibilities that this was a dream, that it was happening in some alternate (and therefore irrelevant) timeline, or that Carlos was acting under the influence of an outside force, such as a brain implant, or an as-yet-undiscovered symptom of one of the mysterious illnesses, or blackmail.

Cecil did not acknowledge the cameras, but they were there in the moment he decided that, even if this was not real, it felt sufficiently so that the difference hardly mattered. He sighed, and with a tug at Carlos' hand pulled him closer.

The kiss was lingering-- of a length perfectly appropriate for television, of course, but lingering enough that Cecil could, after the first breathless moment, shift a little closer, and bring up his free hand to the back of Carlos' head, to tangle his fingers in that perfect, perfect hair.

Oh, no, it was a lingering kiss. Carlos didn't want to pull away too soon -- he couldn't make it look unnatural. Fortunately, Carlos kissed like a movie star even when no one was watching, so the way his hand came around to cup Cecil's jaw, respirator still dangling from his fingers, was highly cinematic.

It was a shame that all Carlos could feel about it was guilt.

The kiss concluded naturally, an unspoken but mutual agreement that now was the moment to pull apart, to catch their breaths and look at each other and pretend to feel good about what had just happened, and that it wasn't a horribly unethical deception, and that having Cecil's hand in his hair hadn't been...well, really nice.

"Come on," Carlos said quietly, letting go of Cecil's face, but not his hand. "We have a lot to talk about."

He turned to look at the camera crews, gave them a dazzling smile his heart wasn't in and a goodbye wave, then turned again to step into the Speakeasy.

Edited 2014-06-30 17:17 (UTC)

Cecil nodded in reply, because his voice was finding his breath difficult to catch up to. He was sure that Carlos felt similarly.

He didn't let go of Carlos' hand as he followed him inside. The cameras would make note of that, he was sure - he would be able to watch this again later if he wanted to, should he find his memory lacking in exuberant color commentary.

"We do have a lot to talk about," he said, once the door had shut behind them and they were weaving their way between tables, rather than camerapeople. "I want to hear all about the Arena. ...Also, about everything you've been doing since the Arena." This with slightly more appropriate gravity. Slightly. "I mean, I've... pretty much just been watching the Games, avoiding infected zones, and broadcasting disappointing news with municipally-mandated blitheness, so."

I've been staying in line, was implied there. He added, brighter: "Khoshekh missed you! We watched you compete together."

He wanted to ask more specific questions. He wanted to know if the Capitol really had had it out for Carloa in the Arena. He wanted to know what Carlos had learned since coming back. But even in the dull roar of this crowd, he did not quite want to bring up something so sensitive yet. He didn't trust that they weren't still being watched.

...Also, he still needed a moment to recover from that kiss. He might need a few more moments to recover from that kiss.

Carlos chose a secluded table near the back -- not that any of the tables weren't secluded, but this was a dark corner far enough away from most of the other patrons that what they said would be indistinct, but not so far that the chatter of the crowd wouldn't mask their conversation.

Brushing his lab coat (which was casual, today -- they were going to a bar and he hadn't really seen the need to dress up) out of the way, Carlos slid into the booth, and immediately started fidgeting with his glasses, taking them off and twirling them around his fingers and putting them back.

He sighed, then looked up at Cecil. "I asked you to meet me here because it's the only building in the Capitol with no cameras or microphones. There's something I need to tell you, Cecil. Something I haven't been honest about."

Carlos could stop this right here, he knows. He could make up something else, and go along with the relationship, and not have to have this difficult conversation. But that would only compound the unethical thing he did in the Arena. It would be horrible, to lie to Cecil about his own relationship. No, this conversation, as painful as it promised to be, had to happen.

Cecil had never been inside the Speakeasy before. It was only very recently that he'd started actively seeking out places where he wouldn't be heard - most of his career involved actively avoiding such places, after all. He would be lying if he said the idea didn't make him a little uneasy - disappearing off of surveillance for even an hour at a time felt to him like a risky move. But if what Carlos had to say was important enough--

--But at Carlos' words, Cecil's smile faltered. He propped it up again quickly, but it had lost some of its brightness. That they would talk about sensitive and important things, he had assumed. That they might trade secrets, he had been counting on. That Carlos had been-- been lying about something...

He folded his hands in his lap, to keep from twisting them nervously around each other. There was the barest beginning of a frown between his eyes. "...Oh?"

Carlos knew he shouldn't have made the confession in the Arena. He hadn't wanted to do it -- that was why he had left it until the last possible moment, when he was sure, so sure, that he hadn't been impressive enough to bring back. He had known it was a terrible thing to do even as he was doing it. But it had seemed a choice between lying and death, and Carlos had chosen to lie.

He was ashamed of that.

"It's about what I said in the Arena," said Carlos, painfully at first, but picking up speed as he explains. "Cecil, I -- I never meant to say what I did. When the District 10 Mentor suggested it before the Arena, I told him that I wouldn't go through with anything like that. It would be unethical, and -- and unfair to you. But when everything in the Arena started trying to kill me, I didn't understand that it wasn't because they were trying to kill me for good but because they were trying to get me back. I thought that...that if I didn't say it, I would die."

He made himself look at Cecil's face -- the least Carlos could do was look Cecil in the eye as he said this.

"Please, don't think I did this because you don't matter to me, because you do." Carlos knew that that wasn't very convincing, considering the circumstances, but it was true, and heartfelt. "I'm so sorry, Cecil."

But I'm not in love with you.

.....Oh.

Cecil noticed, distantly, that the feeling had gone back out of his extremities. Funny, wasn't it, how many different emotions produced that particular somatic effect? Excitement; nerves; pervasive, crushing disappointment.

"...I see," he said, softly. He looked down at his hands, which had, until a moment ago, been twisting nervously in his lap, for all his preventive measures. They were still now. "I... I see."

It made sense. It made perfect sense. There-- there really wasn't anything here to be angry about, was there. It was a strategy that had worked for other Tributes in the past - Cecil could have listed them from memory, if he'd taken a moment to think about it. There were no holes in Carlos' logic. And, well-- they'd brought him back! Right?

It had just been wishful thinking. Foolish, foolish Cecil.

"So," he said, slowly, because so long as he was still registering that this was an actual thing that was happening to him in a fully extant reality, he might as well be talking, "Outside. When you kissed me-- that was--?" --also a lie?

Edited 2014-07-02 15:53 (UTC)

A familiar panic crawled up the back of Carlos's neck, up his spine and into his cerebellum. It was the same panic he felt when Cecil called their meetings dates, or complimented his shirt, or asked him about weekend plans. Carlos had always dealt with situations like this by not dealing with them -- by brushing past them and carrying on with the conversation as though nothing had happened.

It was a terrible thing to do right now, but it was instinctive. Carlos couldn't talk about how complicated that kiss had been. He couldn't. He didn't have the words. So instead, he opened his mouth and said, "We need to talk about what we're going to do about this." That was better. That was something he could explain. "I understand if you don't want to keep up a pretended relationship. I shouldn't have put you in this position in the first place, and I'm not going to hold you to something I didn't even ask you about." He didn't quite manage his usual no-nonsense, all-business tone, though. Carlos still felt too guilty. Somehow, the fact that Cecil wasn't angry about it made it worse. It reinforced how helpless a position he was in, as a Tribute, and how unsurprising it was that someone would make the decision to lie about a relationship in order to save his or her life.

Cecil considered, for a moment, being angry. He considered leaning in and throwing words like stones at Carlos' face, one by one-- I asked you about the kiss, Carlos, he could spit, or If you can't be bothered to tell me you're planning to lie to me, Carlos, the least you can do is listen when you finally come clean--!

But no. He couldn't do that. No matter how angry he wanted to be - no matter how much he wanted to react to this like a normal person would react to the realization that their stated affection had been used as a means to an end - he realized with a sinking stomach that he couldn't do that to Carlos.

Even now, there were things happening here that were more important than his anger. A too-public fight with Carlos might make it clear that the entire confession had been a plot. To destroy the illusion only minutes after their first-ever onscreen kiss (their only kiss, he tried not to remind himself) would be suspicious at best, and they could not afford suspicion. Not now.

He made himself look straight at Carlos. "...I am not sure, Carlos, that we have a choice." His voice was, at least, even. He could not manage normal, but-- it was even.

This was easily one of the worst conversations Carlos has ever had. He can remember very few that had been truly worse: it was hard to be worse than I used the way you feel about me to increase my popularity as a gladiatorial prisoner-slave in a desperate bid for survival. I kissed you outside and I can't even talk about it because the way I feel is more complicated than Night Vale's tax laws. If we break up, it might be suspicious enough to get us arrested, but if we don't, it'll be a fake relationship done exclusively for the cameras both visible and hidden.

But he continued it, because this discussion had to happen. Carlos couldn't run from it any more than he could have run from a parasitic organism that had already burrowed into his skin. The only way out was to go on.

"But there must be something we can do," he argued, looking thoroughly miserable. "I won't force you to do this, Cecil. If there's some way you could make it look like you -- you lost interest," he said, still miserable. "Or you realized I wasn't what you thought I would be, or I stood you up one too many times to stay late at the lab, or no matter what you say I can't talk about how I feel and you've just had enough--" Somewhere along the line, this had turned from a list of hypothetical reasons to break up with Carlos to a list of real reasons people had broken up with Carlos. Carlos didn't seem to notice, though, and just went on.

"Please. I don't want you to do this because you don't have a choice. That would be just as wrong as what I did in the first place." He hoped that it was clear that he was listing these reasons not because he wanted to end this false relationship at all costs but because he wanted to give Cecil an out from a truly awful situation.

God. It was like Carlos didn't realize what he'd done. There were relationships you could end, in life - arrangements that just didn't work out, whether for external reasons or because of incompatibility, or timing, or people's disinclination to call you back, Cecil, god, it's only been three hours, I said I'd call when I got a moment-- no, I'm not ignoring you--!. Those relationships petered out slowly, or exploded quickly, and the circumstances of their ending didn't matter at all. No one watched those relationships; no one judged a person's sincerity, or political loyalty, or likelihood to commit an act of high treason, based upon the small relationships they ended or allowed to end.

This was not one of those relationships.

"It isn't that I do not have a choice, Carlos," Cecil said heavily. "It is that my choice lies between the vindication of my own feelings of hurt, disappointment, and betrayal, and the very real possibility that the Capitol will find a public spurning of your affections suspicious. And by suspicious I mean likely to render one or both of us expendable." There was no way, in Cecil's mind, that a breakup could look convincing - a deathbed confession couldn't be canceled out by a few too many late nights at the lab, and it was difficult to argue for a frustrating lack of emotional availability when Carlos had spoken the words I love him on national television.

But he was managing matter-of-fact now, bringing his voice back up to speed, distancing his tone from his feelings a little. "While I do feel hurt, and disappointed, and betrayed, and while I understand that the vindication of those feelings through a messy public breakup would be considered by some to be a justifiable reaction-- I-- I cannot consider that a viable choice."

"But you know what this means," pressed Carlos, through his own writhing feelings of guilt and shame. "Cecil, the relationship won't just be for the public. We'd have to keep it up in private, too. Fooling the Peacekeepers won't be as easy as fooling the public."

Hearing Cecil say all this -- knowing what it all meant -- it was a level of rationality Carlos honestly wasn't sure he had expected. He wasn't used to feeling like between the two of them Cecil Palmer was the better person. He wasn't used to Cecil Palmer being right.

He felt like such an unethical scientist right now.

Well, maybe you should have thought of that, Carlos, before you--

--No. That was unfair. Cecil had grown up in a world where most of his life was monitored. Keeping his relationships as public as possible was, in some ways, an unconscious reaction to it - the lines between a public and a private romance were much, much blurrier for him than they were for Carlos.

No, this bothered him more because it smacked of a conversation they'd had weeks ago, in Cecil's living room, on the evening he'd gotten his last-ever bid. This wasn't the same situation - not by a long shot - but thinking of what a false relationship would entail (what had just happened would not, could not be their last kiss, for one), Cecil found that it had a similar aftertaste.

"...I have told you before, Carlos, that I would never ask anything of you with the expectation that you would be unable to refuse me." He was looking at Carlos just to fill his field of vision with something - it made it easier not to picture what the next few weeks were very likely going to look like, should they decide to go through with this. "And it is for that reason that I ask you now: Would you be able to keep up a relationship in private?" I am not the problem here, was what he did not say.

He let the silence sit a second. ...Just a second. "If not," he couldn't help adding, "Then we will have to find a different and equally convincing way to persuade the Capitol either that your insincerity was in no way self-serving, or that my extremely public affection for you this past half-year has been completely meaningless. So."

Can I do that? wondered Carlos. He, too, understood what the next few weeks would be like. There would be dates, and hand-holding, and kissing -- his face flushed a little redder -- and talking about his feelings. He could see the Flickerman interview already.

The worst thing about it was that it wasn't a lie. Not completely. Carlos wouldn't say he was in love with Cecil; feelings like that took time, and intimacy, and more shared experience than he and Cecil had, Carlos felt. But Carlos felt a lot of things about Cecil Palmer. He wasn't in love but he was at the point where he was awkwardly not saying anything about how he felt, and if Carlos had had his way, he would have wanted at least another few weeks of casual saying-absolutely-nothing before getting into a serious relationship.

If he agreed to do this, the deception would be twofold. He would be pretending to the public that his feelings were real, and pretending to Cecil that they were a lie.

How did one of these things not scientifically cancel out the other? How was neither one a truth?

What if he told Cecil now? What if he explained his feelings as best he could, and tried for a real relationship? Carlos turned the possibility over in his mind and found that no, he didn't want to do that. If he confessed his feelings now, in the context of dishonesty and a PR-motivated relationship, it would be hard to keep straight what he actually felt and what he was exaggerating for the cameras, and even if the Arena confession hadn't happened, Carlos wasn't sure he'd want a relationship right now.

He wanted to kiss Cecil. Just not like this.

"I," he began slowly, thoughtfully. "I could." He didn't know how convincing he could be -- after all, he wasn't any kind of actor at all -- but Carlos knew that this was important. Cecil was in danger now, too. "If you can."

Cecil felt misery curling in his stomach. He had believed it. He had really, really believed what Carlos had said in the Arena. He wondered now how much of it had been blind wishful thinking; he wondered how he had managed to extrapolate so much feeling on Carlos' part from a few public dates, a few private conversations, and a brief moment on a rooftop with Carlos' hand on top of his. He wondered how he had been so definitively, pervasively wrong.

More than that: He was realizing, in the distant, under-the-skin way one realized the air was getting heavier before a storm, that he did love Carlos. For all he had been saying it for the better part of half a year, this was more than an embarrassingly public crush on a celebrity from a foreign world, and more than dates and hand-holding and candid photo shoots in tasteful and well-coordinated outfits. He cared for this beautiful, awkward, seditious scientist in a way that felt important-- in a way that he (he!) didn't feel he could communicate.

It was both the source of his crushing disappointment, and the reason that lying to the entire Capitol about it even seemed possible. Because Carlos - Carlos as a living, breathing, person, Carlos as his entire self with all its imperfections, Carlos standing not on a pedestal over Cecil but sitting right before him looking thoughtful and sad and guilty - Carlos was more important than any relationship, true or false. Carlos was worth protecting.

He looked up at Carlos. There was resolve in his expression. This was not the time or the place to say any of this - not knowing what they had ahead of them. But, well-- people said something about how actions spoke louder than words, right? That was a thing people said. (Cecil was willing, this one time in his life, to allow himself to believe that that was true.)

"Look," he said, "I am a journalist. I think I'd have to be pretty good at acting to get a job reporting facts in the Capitol!" This wasn't remotely sarcastic - this was a genuine argument in his favor. "So. You won't need to worry about me."

(All the words he was saying made it sound like they were really doing this. God. They were really doing this.)

"I'll do the best I can," Carlos promised, looking up at Cecil. He knew that if he wasn't convincing, the deception would reflect badly on Cecil as well, and Carlos would no longer be the only one in danger. And here Cecil was, willingly risking his own position of relative safety -- by pretending to have a relationship he'd wanted badly for six months.

Carlos felt another surge of hot shame.

"I'm so sorry, Cecil."

As soon as they left, their respective safeties would depend on Carlos's ability to lie. It was a sickening thought.

Cecil opened his mouth to say It's fine, Carlos. He failed to say this, and tried again with I understand, Carlos. This also being less than a success, he made an attempt at You have nothing to apologize for, Carlos, and that failed miserably as well, and he gave up.

"These things happen, Carlos," he said. (Actually, they didn't - he was fairly certain their case was unique, even among Hunger Games-related entanglements - but they were the exception that proved the rule, he supposed. That was what that meant, right?) "Though I think I should ask, before we--" Before we leave this place hand-in-hand and gaze into each other's eyes as we pass the cameras-- "...before we... leave, whether there is anything else you have to tell me."

This wasn't a tone he usually took, and especially not with Carlos. It was pointedly neutral, the kind of tone under which anything could comfortably sink. It was... professional.

Anything else?

Carlos thought. He thought about District 13. He thought about Brainiac 5, and his offer to deliver technology from Lonestar. He thought about the Initiate, and the Tributes banding together to stand against the Capitol.

He thought about his own experience of death in Night Vale, and about what he had thought as the world went black.

He thought about the other Cecil Palmer, most likely dead one way or the other, and about how at some point that Cecil had become the other Cecil. He even thought, briefly, about Steve Rogers.

He shook his head.

"No," he said. "I think that's it."

Cecil nodded.

"Well," he said. "As I don't have any confessions to make...."

He stood up, pointedly. He'd thought this date would last longer, when he'd gotten Carlos' request to meet. At this point, though, he had no interest in seeing it continue. Maybe tomorrow, he'd feel ready to spend hours in public with Carlos; but in this place, devoid of cameras and microphones, without the invisible buffer of their shared deception between them, another moment of this conversation felt absolutely unbearable. Pretending that they were obsessed with each other felt easier right now than sitting here under a throbbing cloud of Cecil's unrequited disappointment.

They hadn't even ordered drinks; the exit would be easy. After a second's pause, Cecil held out his hand to Carlos.

"We should probably stop by my apartment before you go," he said briskly. "Just for... oh, half an hour? For the purpose of promoting gleeful media speculation, of course. After that, I'm going to-- that is, Khoshekh and I are..." The outstretched hand made a brief Never mind gesture. "I have some work to get done."

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