A/N: Just a bit of a drabble-fic this time around. Trying to work my mind around what spurred Cecil into recording everything he does.
The fateful day Cecil discovered that old cassette tape, it cracked something inside of him. Because that child on the tape, that teenage Cecil? He was a stranger.
A brother? Cecil didn't have a brother. What he did have was a sister, and a, well, Steve Carlsberg. Not the greatest little family, because he didn't think he'd ever quite forgive his sister for marrying Steve Carlsberg of all people, but he knew how to be civil. Most of the time.
What worried him more than a brother he didn't have – because if some kid was blabbing on about a brother then maybe it wasn't actually him in the first place – was the mirrors. Because that? That he remembered. Mirrors had always been dangerous, and he remembered being warned away from them by his mother when he was young. That was one of the few things she'd ever said to him.
She'd looked straight through him, as was her way on the rare moments she spoke to him and not to the house or to the Faceless Old Woman, and told him with perfect clarity, "Someday, someone will kill you, and it will involve a mirror." Cecil had never looked in a mirror since.
But with Cecil's mother dead, only he and the Faceless Old Woman knew what she said to him that day. Yet there it was, on a tape he supposedly made, mixed with things that didn't make sense to him. As far as he knew, Cecil had never had an internship at the station.
So many things were wrong.
Cecil had been re-educated more often than he cared to admit, because he spoke before thinking and occasionally found himself on the City Council's bad side. But to have altered his entire childhood? What could have convinced them that was necessary?
Cecil despised these gaps in his memory.
When the Man in the Tan Jacket started hanging around the station, things got even more out of hand.
For once in his life, Cecil wanted to be in control of his own memory.
So he started recording every moment of his life.
Sometimes it didn't work. If he got too close to Station Management's office while they were in a mood, the static screeching interfered with playback. Angels (which still didn't exist) made the recordings go haywire.
But for the most part, it worked.
He just hoped Carlos never found all those recordings.
It would be hard to explain, in the way that so many things about his life were difficult to explain to the scientist.
Because Carlos didn't know the paranoid, terrified Cecil hidden beneath pale skin and sentient tattoos and his radio voice. And Cecil never wanted him to find out.