Disclaimer: Nope.

Author's Note: This began as an exercise to more fully understand Cecil and the Demon while writing "A Taste of Something." Then it became… um, this. Oops? Enjoy your flashbacks and flash-forwards.

Collection Warnings: Part of the Resurrection Lily series. Occasionally refers to scenes that have already been written in other fics, or scenes that are currently being drafted. Foreshadowing. Back story. Cecilos and Cecearl. Have a touch of Earlos, too, because what the hell, while we're at it. Occasional blood and gore, occasional fluff and humor. Time is broken. (Did you know that there's a spider on your ankle?)

XXX

The jewels shift.

He holds them in cupped hands, cool as water. They dribble, they drip. They spill, brimming over the cradling softness of his fingers and raining down in time-sealed globules. Frozen moments. A glittering cascade of instants, chittering and chattering and chiming and clacking, that bear the reflection of both the present and the past in their polish. Those fossilized fragments glimmer as they tumble, shining with moist sheens that ensnare the light as much as the darkness.

A variegated puddle swells within a basin of lacquered wood. The gemstone droplets heave; he tries desperately not to do the same. They surge; he stills. He pours. Faceted cuts mirror faces, while stones buffed to smoothness shimmer like scrying pools. He pours and pours, and the gems ripple outward in concentric rings, one event inspiring another inspiring another. He pours and pours and pours, and entertains thoughts of the sea. Of riptides and beasts and skeletal ships. Of treasure chests with picked locks and a barren niche where a decoration should sit. Where it should sit, but does not. Not anymore.

Within that pilfered chest, jewels are piling up: foam-white, oceanic-blue, coral-pink, seaweed-green. Pearls have been plucked from the tongues of clams, and the clams are left empty.

His palms are empty. Cold now. The Machine has whirled itself to warmth.

He may begin.

X

The Dark Box

Citrine, 1747

X

I love you.

It is a whisper. It is a whisper from somewhere deep within his ear: a whisper that slides with a licentious wetness through purulent canals and down an engorged esophagus, slippery as centipedes in sugary syrup. He gurgles on the boil of it, on a solution of gravel and skittering legs. On a smoldering slag vomit that is creeping and chunky and alive. The sweet molasses of the sensation coagulates with a desperate flail of spindly limbs, constricted by the velvet rawness of swollen muscles. It crystallizes, compressed into something hard and round and smooth. Like a gem. Like an egg, or a piece of rancid fruit. The vow encases itself in his gullet— tinted to match the infected blood that crusts over old injuries— and with his muzzle lost in the puddled shadows on the floor, there is nothing to catch the delicate ball of sound as it reaches his reddened uvula. As it pearls and peels.

I do.

The gelatinous droplet tumbles. It ruptures. It bursts, premature, like the skull of a child flung against the stone wall, ichor squeezing in luscious clots and clumps from the misshapen lump of a cranium collapsed. Of features flattened. There is an obscenity in the stalled staccato slide of skin against sandpaper grit. Meat grates from fat in strips and ragged ribbons, in pared crimson curls— like the flesh of a rotten apple separated from its pulp. A squelch, a crack. White sigils are dyed in sprayed spurts of ink, ending a story before it could be written. Or, perhaps, telling it so quickly that it cannot be enjoyed. It is illegible; there are no words. There are only discordant noises, animalistic and meaningless. Consonants and vowels rattle against one another like great handfuls of chipped jewels, like rusted chains welded to obsidian partitions, like teeth within the void of a cavernous, howling maw.

I love you very much, Little One.

Elastic lips are stretched bone-white, segregated like the worms that guard the soil of open graves. There are corpses strew before it, embalmed in the finery his suffering had purchased. His heart worn on their sleeves. Their hearts will soon be on his sleeves. Muscles and sinew and other sundry organs, distended from so long a gestation, birth themselves in stringy sheathes of saliva, a series of involuntary spasms pushing the sluicing, scarlet sludge from gaping orifices in various states of solidity. Something too greasy to be tears rolls down the woman's cheek. The others are oozing slugs of snot from their noses. The mucus of multiple membranes, gray and green and glutinous, leave spatters of gruesome color in the blackness; they shine with the iridescence of oil in the cataclysmic supernova that pulsates from his throat.

So let me save you.

He had tried to force other things from his throat. Warnings. Pleads. A language that he had never had in a voice that he has no control over. He had wanted to remind them of Grandfather's threats, of his pre-mortem council and demands; he had wanted to keep the muzzle on. He had wanted to keep it on forever. He did not need to eat. He did not need to drink. He just needed… He had just—all he had needed was…

Let me help you.

All they had needed was…

Let me out.

The boy's family rains upon him in clusters and gristly hunks, leaving him glistening like the gems they'd sought.

XXX

From crystal-cure:

Citrine: Protects from negative energies and abuse. Good for cleansing, purifying, and soothing distressed conditions, both mental and physical. Promotes love, particularly amongst members of the family.