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The masked warriors call it starshine.
Alicia pours what is to them a small drop into the canteen that Carlos carries. It’s too much, even so, and splashes all over Carlos’s hands.
“He can just have a taste. It’s so little, what harm could it possibly do?” says Alicia, in response to Doug’s reproving look. It’s been the masked warriors’ reasoning when it’s come to Carlos himself over the past months, and so far everything has worked out fine. They have every reason to think the same logic might apply just as well in this case, too.
Carlos doesn’t correct them, though he could very easily remind them that they are forgetting about ratios and relative size and other factors that are important when it comes to making rough guesses at blood-alcohol content—if the stuff is alcohol anyway. No one’s really said.
Doug hesitates, looking like he’s on the verge of protesting, but he doesn’t. His perspective on leadership is highly democratic, so while he takes his nominal role of leader seriously, the part of it he stresses most is listening to others. Perhaps more so than usual when it comes to Alicia.
The warriors pass around flasks, drinking in large swigs, in a way that suggests that the intended enjoyment of the slimy, over-sweet liquid is not in the act of imbibing, but in something that will come after. Drinking is, Carlos concludes through observation, a means to an end, and he sips from his canteen, curious to learn for himself what this end might be. He can’t replicate the warriors’ long gulps to scale; the starshine is the harshest substance he has ever consumed. It is worse, even, than Cecil’s higher proof brandies, and that is saying something. The burn of it in his throat makes his eyes water, but he perseveres. Slowly, but at least, surely.
Before long, by unspoken agreement, the masked warriors retreat to their tents, in pairs or groups. A few of them think to give him woozy waves or sad half-smiles as they go. One of them douses the campfire, and Carlos takes that as his cue to leave. He trudges off into the desert, trying not to feel miffed at his sudden abandonment.
He makes it a few hundred paces out into the desert, pulling short drags as he goes, before whatever it is in his canteen hits him. It doesn’t feel like the drunkenness he expected, though, like being clobbered upside the head; it feels instead like being wrapped in a fierce, wanting hug. He doesn’t feel miffed anymore, but in place of that low-grade disappointment, he feels so many other things.
This isn’t at all like drinking in Night Vale. Drinking in Night Vale is funereal. It’s like digging the hole in the ground that you will be buried in when you are dead, except rather than digging it in the ground, you are digging it inside of yourself, and though you are not dead yet, the more you drink the more you feel at any moment you could be. It is the emptying out of memories and thoughts and feelings, until you are as close as you can get to the Void, to being utterly void.
This is really not at all like that.
Carlos sits down and looks up. The stars rush around overhead, jostling for room in the crowded sky, occasionally colliding and bursting into masses of scattered sparks.
“Whoa,” says Carlos, enthralled, and as he looks at the stars he feels the equivalent of their tiny, hot explosions going off in the pit of his stomach.
There is no forgetting. Instead, Carlos remembers so much, sharp and bright and sudden. All the sensory and emotive memories and desires that he carries around with him, but which stay tamped down most of the time, for the sake of propriety, for the sake of ever getting any science done, bombard him all at once. They unbury themselves and rise to the fore of his mind, and his inhibitions fall away like sand.
He can think of nothing but Cecil.
If he ever feared that out here, in this desert, he was beginning to forget the specific details of Cecil’s face, of Cecil’s body, that concern is obliterated. He finds that he remembers the hard angles of Cecil’s shoulderblades down to the decimal; the exact placement of each and every freckle and scar, and the distances between them; the length, thickness, and curvature of his fully erect cock.
Images shuffle through his mind of Cecil gasping, groaning, wanting. The memory that he first falls into, like going underwater, is their most recent sexual encounter, an experiment with video-chatting—only a week ago, though by now it already seems like ages away.
Cecil may have the best voice, but he also has the best body as far as Carlos is concerned, and discovering new things is high on the list of what Carlos enjoys, both generally and sexually speaking. When Carlos stumblingly asked him if he could, you know, watch while he touched himself, Cecil, gracious Cecil, had acquiesced. Rather than lying back, he knelt with his legs spread on the bed in their bedroom, as if he were straddling Carlos’s hips—like he would have been, every sinew of him seemed to insinuate, if he could. Cecil had brought himself off with his eyes closed, and Carlos had watched, and as he’d watched he had noticed so much: the way the skin at the corners of Cecil's eyes squeezed into creases and relaxed in rhythm with the up-down twists of his hand; the way he swallowed hard, making his Adam’s apple bob, before moaning; the way, when he was close, he stopped biting his lower lip and let his mouth fall open.
That time, it wasn’t watching Cecil work his way shakily through orgasm that made Carlos come, but rather, the way Cecil, unthinking and unassuming, licked his fingers after in the daze of it, not trying in particular to be sexy, just finding the easiest solution to the problem of needing hands clean enough to pick up his phone. The efficient pragmatism of it had left Carlos shuddering.
Carlos’s mind lingers over this memory, but there are others fighting to take its place, from longer ago, when their temporal and spatial locations matched, when their lips and skin and hands could meet and find purchase; that ever-longer ago time when Carlos could kiss into the sparser hair on the insides of Cecil’s thighs until Cecil made a noise that was half-whimper, half-growl—needy and indignant.
He remembers, too, the feel of Cecil’s hips under his hands when he’d pressed him back against the pantry door in their kitchen. Kneeling before Cecil, sliding his tongue along the underside of his cock, he'd had to exert firm and unrelenting pressure on Cecil’s pelvis to keep him still, because while Cecil is a horrible tease when focused on getting Carlos off, he is completely impatient when it comes to his own pleasure.
There are other rough ascents to climax that Carlos remembers only as darkness, deprived of sight, left solely with feeling: pressing his face into the mattress to keep from begging while Cecil took his time opening him up, first with steady, slick thrusts of his tongue and then with his thick-knuckled fingers.
He misses Cecil, bodily. How could he not? Impossible, when Cecil, despite trying to play it cool, usually ends up fucking with the heartfelt intensity of someone who’s convinced it’s their last chance before the end of the world. Cecil being Cecil, he probably thinks so most of the time.
Carlos hates to hear the accusation in Cecil’s voice, the saying-without-saying-it hurt over what he perceives as Carlos’s disinterest in physical proximity. If he only knew. While Cecil’s fundamental need for physical comfort is characteristically innocent and kind—above all, hand-holding; eyes meeting across a room; cuddling before bed—Carlos’s tends to take a fiercer form, less easily expressed in casual conversation.
But he will show Cecil, when he can. He imagines it—what he is going to do to Cecil when they can see each other again—and his mind is generous in providing those hyper-real details as well.
His nerves are tingling, and he is so turned on he is beginning to lose feeling in his fingertips.
I should be making a list, Carlos thinks to himself, half-lucid. One with checkboxes. There will be so many checkboxes.
He knows then that he must see Cecil, regardless of the impossibility of touch. There may be strict advisements against astral projecting while under the influence, but he is a scientist, and he is going to be fine. So he does what he has to, to get himself there.
He closes his eyes and wants.
And wants.