It was still dark by the time Carlos' alarm went off, which he couldn't quite help but take as a positive thing time-wise even though he knew it might mean nothing at all. It was at least a positive thing temperature-wise. He started stuffing everything back into his pack as Kevin groaned and rustled awake.

There was a north-facing canyon in the distance, and they headed toward that. A canyon oriented in that direction in this hemisphere would be shaded during the most blistering parts of the afternoon, so it was likely that it would have retained some rainwater. As they neared it, sure enough, he saw a cloud of mosquitoes. They always knew where the water was. He couldn't really afford to be too concerned that they were glowing. If the water had caused that, then so be it. Carlos would glow if it meant he survived long enough to get Cecil back.

They found a small pool at the base of a crag and refilled their canteens. The mosquitoes were happy to have something to bite, so Kevin and Carlos got in and out quickly. If the water didn't make them glow, the bites might. Carlos considered nabbing a few to study later, but by the time he would be able to get around to it they would surely be dead, so he fought the urge to stick a couple in a jar. The old temptations of this desert really were strong.

They'd been maintaining a pretty good pace for a while, soaking up as much of the coolness as they could while it lasted, when Carlos glanced over at Kevin, who was tapping out of an app on his phone. He almost tripped in the sand.

"Is that—" he shut his mouth, not wanting to call attention to it in case he was right. But it was too late now.

"What?" asked Kevin curiously.

"Is that… me?"

"Is what you?"

"Your phone's background." He pointed to the photo partially obstructed by the apps on the screen.

"Oh!" Kevin grinned teasingly. "Carlos, you flatter yourself. No, that's Diego."

"What?" He grabbed the phone out of his hand, swiping the apps aside to see it better. "That's Diego?"

"Yep!"

Upon closer inspection he could see that it in fact, was not him, but the resemblance was… more than uncanny. It was unnerving. "Wow. He looks more like me than you and Cecil."

"I think it's our hair. I have better hair than Cecil."

Carlos didn't exactly agree, but he kept that to himself, still staring at the picture. This was who Cecil had been with this whole time? There was something about that that tightened his gut and felt wrong in a way he couldn't quite put into words. "Should I be concerned?"

"I mean…" Kevin shrugged, looking embarrassed. "Did I start dating him partly because he reminded me of you? Maybe. But then when I actually got to know him, it wasn't like that at all. We like so many of the same things, and he's so sweet and thoughtful—"

"Woah, that's not what I meant." Carlos held up his hand to stop him. "Although that's… good to know, I guess. I meant—" He took one last look at the screen before handing it back over to Kevin. "I don't know what I meant, exactly. Something about Cecil being held captive by someone who looks just like me. It just feels weird."

"Oh. Okay, I'm gonna just, breeze past that one," Kevin chuckled. "I don't know about that, I mean, you're here with me, and that's kind of a similar situation, minus the captivity."

"Yeah. Yeah, I guess so."

They walked on for a few moments with nothing but the sound of their feet in the sand and an animal out of sight making a mating call Carlos recognized from one of his wildlife investigations. He had to remind himself that he was walking with quite an urgent purpose and was not out here to study behavioral patterns of desert animals before he broke the quiet again. "So. You really love Diego, huh?"

The answer was all over his face as he let out a little sigh. "Yeah. I really love Diego. No one's ever been so good to me, at least, not that I know of. He wasn't raised religious like I was, but he's smart. He doesn't believe me, though."

"That he's smart?"

"That I love him. Once he found out about, um, about you, he just got stuck on the idea that he was some kind of knock-off. Nothing I said would change his mind."

"That's ridiculous. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, well." Kevin shrugged, taking a swig of water and wiping his mouth. "It's not a totally crazy conclusion to jump to. I mean, that's how you saw me, isn't it?"

"What? No!"

"Come on." Kevin gave him a look, but that was far from the truth and he needed to know it.

The first several months that Carlos knew Kevin, the guy had an extraordinarily hard time dealing with down time. He thought that if he wasn't doing something, he was worth nothing, and spent a lot of time in a frenzy over what could be done. Carlos happened to share this curse, albeit to a less dire extent and with no excuse, so they alternated between burying themselves in their separate, self-assigned workloads, and eventually forcing each other to take breaks and breathe, even to get out and have a little fun. As Kevin started taking back his own autonomy, he also began to question whether there was a good reason that he had to be cheerful all the time, so he swung wildly in the other direction and began to complain about everything. It could be tiresome, but sometimes his bitchiness was amusing, and he found some kind of balance between it all sooner or later. He started up a brand new radio station almost single-handedly with much drive and even more fuss. Sometimes he'd get so angry he could barely think, could barely see (Carlos could hardly name a person who had more to be angry about), and he would stomp around Carlos' R&D lab while the scientist carefully and quietly took apart inorganic compounds under a microscope until he no longer felt in danger of deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off, or something less Herman Melville and more Stephen King. In turn he would listen to Carlos gripe about the pitfalls of his research and his general uncertainty about where he belonged in the big Scheme of things with steady encouragement and interest.

"No, I won't 'come on'. Listen. Sure, you look like Cecil in some ways, and yeah, occasionally you remind me of him to a degree that's actually kind of painful, but the parts that don't remind me of him at all aren't bad things, or… or less. They're different. They're you. You're no knock-off, I never thought that. I thought..." He paused. Man, something about taking a long trek through the desert side by side really must be spurring them to just spill their guts to each other. Kevin had caught the bug too, willingly talking about things he'd been evading up until now. His mother would probably say it was the spirits of lost travelers compelling them to untangle their thoughts aloud, and suggest seeking out sacred datura in the area.

"What?" prompted Kevin, and Carlos was pulled from his stubborn rumination that the proper, scientific name for the flower was actually Datura wrightii and that it would only be useful if he wanted to block acetylcholine to his central nervous system.

"I thought you were the best friend I've ever had."

"Oh." Kevin seemed to ponder that as they walked, and when he raised his handkerchief to cough the sand from his lungs, Carlos thought he saw him hiding a smile.

So there was really someone out there who looked just like him. Carlos had assumed that was only a phenomenon for people from these scientifically abnormal towns like Night Vale and Desert Bluffs, but that did not seem to be the case. The implications could be staggering. Where was Diego from? The same place Carlos was from, or maybe somewhere nearby?

"I'm the Kevin," he observed with a little chuckle of amusement that may very well have been brought on by the rising heat.

"What?"

"The double with the, um. Less imposing voice. Diego sounds kind of like a young Mark Ruffalo over the phone."

"Who?"

"The actor? I was a big Dr. Banner fan as a kid, not that he was played by Mark Ruffalo at the time, and not that his voice is imposing , necessarily, but y'know, it's deeper."

"I don't know what you just said."

"It doesn't matter." Carlos waved it off. Maybe Diego had the better voice, but he still apparently felt threatened by Carlos. He felt a little guiltily smug about that for all of two seconds before the pieces clicked into place.

I'm afraid this is much more personal than that.

"Oh, no."

It wasn't personal because Diego knew Cecil somehow. It was personal because it was revenge. Against Carlos.

"Something wrong?"

Cecil was being held captive by a crazy man because of him. Diego indulged his phone calls and messed with his head and gave his impossible little ultimatums, because this was all for him.

Another step and a fresh examination of the horizon brought Desert Bluffs Too into view, tiny in the distance, little buildings nestled among the dunes in the shadow of a familiar lighthouse-topped mountain. Carlos' heart leapt. He was going to be sick.

Cecil's life was something he hardly even had to think about anymore. It was easy and narrow. He'd wake up, eat breakfast, Diego would go to work, he'd wile away his time in the bathroom, Diego would come home, they'd eat dinner and maybe they'd watch TV, maybe Diego would get some more work done in his office while Cecil would try and do some chores around the house so he felt like he was contributing something. He didn't work, he didn't pay for his keep, so he figured this was the least he could do. And he knew even as he felt that urgency to do something that it was stupid, since of course he hadn't asked for this life or to be here at all. But he still felt it. Scrubbing down counters and sweeping floors gave him something to do with himself, anyway.

It wasn't a routine he would have chosen, but it was getting to be pretty comfortable. He had dropped weight rapidly the first couple of weeks he had been here from the constant stress and anxiety he held in his body with every waking moment, but he was starting to gain some of it back. He no longer feared for his life every time he took a step or opened his mouth. He knew logically that Diego was just as capable of shooting or stabbing him as he'd always been, he just… didn't think he would.

The comfort of the routine might have been complete, except that Diego kept bringing up that pill every so often, whenever Cecil would be a little mopey or quiet. It was always presented as an offer, with Diego emphasizing that it was completely his choice, but the repetitive nature of the request made it a bit difficult not to feel pressure. Cecil didn't understand. If he wanted him to take it so badly, why didn't he just force him? A gun to his head would be a pretty quick way to get a pill down. Hell, the second morning he'd been here he'd taken two pills that Diego had given him, and he hadn't even seen where they'd come from, too out of his mind with pain to question it. Why tell him about it at all?

Eventually the only conclusion he could come to was that Diego genuinely wanted this to be Cecil's decision. He tried not to make the jump that that meant Diego maybe actually did care about him, but it was difficult not to.

One evening when he let Cecil out of the bathroom, he had a box in his hand.

"What's that?" asked Cecil, stretching out his legs.

"Just a board game I picked up on the way home, I thought it might be fun," he said, setting it on the counter. "I thought maybe you could read the instructions while I heat up dinner and then we could figure it out, I just got us a couple of those frozen TV dinners so it won't take long. I don't know, only if you want to." He shrugged, clearly trying to play it off as nothing. It was kind of cute.

"That does sound fun," agreed Cecil.

"Alright, good!" Diego nodded. "Good."

Cecil peered at the instructions on the couch while Diego tore open boxes in the kitchen. It didn't take long to see that it was a fairly involved game, but he'd probably enjoy the mental stimulation after so long of not much. "1-8 players. I could play this by myself while you're at work."

"Oh really? You'll probably get sick of it and never want to play it with me again, though."

Cecil glanced up. The words sounded joking, but he could never be too sure. "Maybe," he said neutrally. The microwave beeped and Diego came over with the food. "So it looks like we have to… close portals around town to stop monsters from coming in from other planes of existence, and make sure that we don't go insane while we're doing it or else… I dunno, maybe the portals will open up again, or we'll just die, or something." He passed over the instructions. "So basically, just day to day life."

He pulled his meal toward him, a bowl of potatoes and chickpeas. The first bite tasted—weird. Wrong. He paused, his spoon hovering in the air.

"There's like a 'Doom Track,' and if that gets all the way to the end then this big guy called the Ancient One breaks into the town," said Diego. "That sounds bad. Probably should try to avoid that."

"Did you put something in my food?"

"What?"

Cecil's pulse was a dull roar in his ears. "It tastes off. Did you put the pill in my food?"

"No, of course not." Diego looked startled. "I just put it in the microwave." Cecil just stared at the bowl, not sure what to believe. "Cecil. It's a frozen TV dinner of Indian cuisine probably manufactured nowhere near India. I think it's bound to taste a little off."

"Oh," said Cecil, uncertain. Maybe that was right. Maybe he was overreacting about nothing. Diego did look pretty caught off guard by the accusation.

But the fact that he ate a bite that tasted wrong and the very first thought in his head was that he'd been poisoned made him realize that he really didn't trust Diego. Maybe right now he would prefer that Cecil made the decision of whether or not to take the pill on his own. But that didn't mean he wasn't going to get frustrated by his continual refusal and change his mind. If this was really what he wanted, he would probably find a way to make it happen eventually. And then Cecil might not even know. The pill could be tasteless, and he could eat it with his food and lose everything, everyone, and he wouldn't even know it.

As he sat there, staring at his bowl that may or may not have been tampered with, he realized there was only one way to make sure that didn't happen. To make sure that whatever happened, happened on his own terms.

He put his spoon down and pushed the bowl away. Even if Diego really had put the pill in his food, one bite shouldn't do a lot of damage. Hopefully. "You're right. Of course. Sorry. I don't think I'm gonna eat it, though. It's pretty bad." He stood up a little unsteadily. "I think I'll just make a sandwich."

"Okay," Diego said like suit yourself. "Sorry about the food." Cecil made a PB&J at the counter, went back to the couch and played Arkham Horror with Diego while silently preparing for what his life was going to have to be after tonight.

The next morning he was awake long before Diego. He had hardly slept the whole night. His mind just couldn't calm down enough to drift off more than once or twice; it kept replaying everything that could go wrong and everything he was risking and twisting his stomach into tighter and tighter knots. By the time the lock on his door clicked open, he was a wreck. He pulled himself out of bed and left the room, not bothering to try and get any more presentable than he was. Looking like a wreck who hadn't slept all night might work in his favor for this one.

Diego was making a pot of coffee in the kitchen. He looked up and Cecil was sure that he was standing wrong, that his hands were wrong, that Diego would take one look at his face and know everything.

"Your eyes look a little bloodshot," said Diego. "Rough night?"

"I want the pill."

It was like someone had threaded a string through Diego's spine and yanked it tight. He might not be needing that coffee after all. "Really?" He slouched back down a little as if realizing the exuberance of his reaction. "Are you sure? You seemed pretty freaked out about the whole thing last night."

"Yeah, but it got me thinking. My knee-jerk reaction was to freak out, because… well, you know, plus I was caught off guard, but the actual moment when I thought I might have ingested the pill?" He stared at his bare feet like he was a little ashamed to admit it, drawing on all the skills he'd acquired playing Pippin in his high school's production of South Pacific. "It was relief. And guilt, at the fact that I was feeling relief, which contributed to the freak-out, but—it was like I didn't have to hold onto this giant weight anymore. I could just… be."

Diego was listening intently, and it wasn't like he ever acted uninterested when Cecil talked or that he didn't listen well, but it was as if this was the first thing of real importance that had ever come out of Cecil's mouth. Cecil was struck with the shivering notion that this had never just been some way to make things easier on him. This was the plan.

"I'll get the pill."

He disappeared into his office and came back with that little bottle in hand, and then poured Cecil a glass of water. Cecil shook out one of the little capsules and placed it on the counter, leaving it there while he took his time making himself a bowl of cereal. He ate at a measured pace, and when he thought it was pretty close to time for Diego to leave for work, pulled the glass toward him and picked up the pill between his thumb and forefinger.

"I'm nervous," he said, entirely honestly.

"It'll just be like dozing off and waking up again," Diego said, his voice gentle as he came around behind Cecil. "No pain."

"How do you know that?" Cecil asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.

Diego crossed his arms over his chest, looking embarrassed. "I had a friend over here once, and she had a migraine. She was in our bathroom and asked what the pills in the cabinet were, and I told her it was aspirin, 'cause we have aspirin in the cabinet, and I didn't even know this bottle was in there. So she took one… It wasn't the aspirin. I felt terrible, still do, but she never suffered any adverse effects other than her memory."

"Yikes." So that was the 'research' Diego had said he'd done? Where did these pills even come from? "Well, here goes," he said, his hand trembling lightly, and thought that maybe he should seem even more distraught than this, facing the erasure of the life he knew. He let the tremor in his hand increase and it was easy enough to produce a few tears in his eyes; he had quite a bit to cry about, after all.

He blinked and one tear escaped past his lashes. Diego rubbed small circles into his back. Cecil popped the pill into his mouth and washed it down with a swig of water. Once he swallowed, Diego stopped the movement of his hand and just stared at him, so Cecil opened his mouth wide, tongue out to show it was gone.

"I think you made a good choice," Diego encouraged.

"Hope so." Cecil's voice was small. He wiped his eyes and sniffed. Diego went back to the cabinets and pulled down a plastic bowl, then grabbed the cereal box and had a seat on the other barstool. Cecil stared. Wasn't he going to work? He'd assumed that Diego had already eaten breakfast, since he had just sat there watching Cecil while he ate his.

"You have work today, right?" he asked, hoping he sounded like he was just trying to find something to say. The man nodded and poured some milk into his Cheerios.

"Did I ever tell you about how Kevin and I met?" he asked.

"No," Cecil answered uneasily. As if Diego ever talked about Kevin without prompting. Not since those first few days.

"It was in an old abandoned theatre. Not like a movie theatre, like one for stage plays. I loved that place, I used to go there all the time to be alone and just be with my thoughts. Only this one time, there was this guy there, and that was kind of annoying because that was my place and I went there to try and shut out the world, you know? Apparently he had been running from someone or something, I was never really sure on that because I was annoyed and not really listening, but in any case he had just ducked in there to get out of the street. And I was fully prepared to try and ignore him but then he got kind of flirty and I started listening, because, well, he was really hot."

"Why are you telling me this?" He wasn't supposed to be sitting around reminiscing about his lost love; he was supposed to be going to work. He needed to go to work.

"Because you should know. You need to know." Cecil was quieted by the fervor in Diego's voice. "Just listen, okay? Kevin and I started hanging out there a lot, fooling around and stuff, and eventually we wanted to see each other outside of the confines of some old abandoned theatre. But it didn't work. We'd try to make plans to meet at a certain location, and end up describing some place the other had never even heard of. We could never find each other anywhere else. We eventually put together that we didn't even live in the same town. There was just this old theatre that existed in both Desert Bluffs and Madera, where I'm from. I think it must be similar to, what was it, your dog park? Only not quite the same, because it wasn't quite a pathway between two dimensions, it was just… a place that existed in two at once.

"So besides throwing my whole perception of how the world works on its head, it was really frustrating, because by that point I was pretty sure that Kevin was the love of my life, but I dealt with it and settled for continuing to meet him there, because, well because I was pretty sure Kevin was the love of my life, and it was much better than nothing. But I'd been going to a local college, and once I graduated I got accepted to a grad program out of state. So I left, and we lost touch, and nobody even comforted me by saying we were just kids and that's what happens, because I'd never told anyone about the guy I was seeing in a different dimension."

Half of Cecil's attention was occupied stilling his fingers from tapping out an impatient rhythm on the countertop and his leg from jiggling the stool across the floor, because Diego needed to stop talking and leave, but the rest of him registered enough of Diego's words to realize they didn't make sense. "Wait, what do you mean you were just kids? How long have you known Kevin?"

"Since college, weren't you listening?"

"Both of you were in college?"

"He was finishing up an internship at his local radio station."

Cecil's mouth fell open. "So you meant Desert Bluffs Desert Bluffs. Before…"

Diego nodded gravely. "Before. After, when I happened to find him out here living in my dimension, it seemed like it must have been fate. But there were a lot of things he didn't remember from back then. Myself included."

"Oh." His tongue was starting to feel a little thick and coated, and he was trying not to panic. "So you had to start over."

"More than start over, as it turns out. I had to overcome this new ideal he had in his head that I could never line up with, and I didn't even realize it existed until I found those letters."

Cecil gripped tight to the edges of his stool and said nothing. He knew full digestion took hours, but he also had never heard of a pill that could alter a person's memory before, so he thought he maybe had good reason to be a bit frantic.

"Anyway," grumbled Diego, seeming a little sour, "I just wanted somebody to know that. I have to get to work. I'll see you tonight."

"Yeah," Cecil agreed dimly.

He walked himself into the bathroom. The lock clicked behind him. He waited with bated breath for the sound of the front door. Once he heard it he immediately hunched over the toilet, grabbed his toothbrush, pressed the end of it to the back of his tongue, and retched until there was nothing left of his breakfast.