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Everything was quiet, until there was a brush of a sound in his ear. It was an inky moth, drifting in the dregs of the night toward the haloes of street lamps and light shining from the windows of buildings.
Faux argued with Felix. His voice was not raised. Cyber stopped to watch them. They stood opposite one another in the otherwise empty alley. Felix did not know he was being argued with, he did not know how to read the angles of Faux’s body; one foot taking aim, the other carefully setting his balance. Cyber could recognize the sharp ring in his voice as hurt. He figured Felix only thought of it as annoyance.
Cyber tried to assure that Felix going solo was not him abandoning them. Faux would not listen.
The day before the fall began with a frigid gray-cloaked dawn that hounded the city until almost noon. Faux was in Cyber’s apartment bathroom. The day pulsed like a flush vein. He wiped his eyes, smeared water over his face, made himself blind. He gnashed his molars, grinding them loud enough for Cyber, who leaned against the bathroom door frame, to hear. Cyber didn’t mind anger, but Faux’s expression was turning to one of injury and it sickened his stomach.
“How could he just leave me like that,” Faux growled, just barely audible over the sound of the running faucet.
Cyber’s brows knit together. He felt his lips turn down into a deep frown, which he was sure must have looked more like a pout. It was impossible to not note his word choice there — it was no longer us that Felix was abandoning, but me. Faux. A cold knot coiled uncomfortably in Cyber’s gut.
“He’s not,” Cyber assured him, despite the jealous twinge that gnawed at his heart, “He wants to do his own thing. You have to dig that. It isn’t like he totally just cut contact with us.”
Us, he said, to remind Faux, to remind himself, as well. The jealous flower may be easily soothed when she allowed her petals to unfurl towards the light beside her sisters.
“But why — did he think I was holding him back or something —” he hissed, tightening his grip on the porcelain edge of the sink. Cyber could not hold back the click of his tongue in censure. “Did I mean nothing to him?! How could he just drop me so easily —”
“What about me?” Cyber finally countered sharply.
There were a couple ways that question could be interpreted, and if Cyber was honest, he wasn’t entirely sure which he meant either. His tongue had leapt ahead of his thoughts without his permission. Both were stinging in his chest, the absence Felix would leave in his wake to this impromptu makeshift-crew that had become The Big 3, and how Faux desperately clung to his shadow, as if he were abandoned and alone — while he sat lamenting it in Cyber’s apartment, with him standing right there.
Did he mean so little to Faux?
Faux turned his head, then. He looked over his bowed shoulder towards Cyber, and raised a hand to twist the faucet off. Cyber felt like he must have worn an expression of hurt, not unlike Faux’s perhaps. Still, there was no conceding from him.
He practically mumbled, “You wouldnt understand.”
Cyber felt his upper lip quiver up in a scowl. He tightened his fists at his side.
“That so?” He replied, caustic, “What wouldn’t I understand, exactly?”
Faux turned his head away quickly, turning his gaze back down to the floor.
“This, The Big 3, is all I got,” he muttered.
“What about me?!” Cyber repeated, more insistent, more upset.
Faux whipped his head back around. His voice raised to match Cyber’s. “Like I said, you wouldn’t understand!” He insisted, “You — You got your own crew, don’t you? You don’t know what it’s like —”
“But you still have me!”
Cyber quickly felt like he was arguing with a wall. Faux was right in one thing, that being Cyber didn’t understand. He could not understand the insistence that he was alone, left with nothing upon Felix’s departure from their little group, this feeling of betrayal and abandonment that obviously permeated his being. He was still here. What did Felix have with Faux that would leave him this hurt, that Cyber didn’t? That left Cyber apparently not good enough.
His tongue felt wrapped in wool and tasted of bile. His lips curled in distaste.
Faux did not respond to that last echo of his words. He only glared at the floor some more. Cyber heaved a beleaguered sigh. He reached into his pocket, pulling out his phone and flipping it open.
“Look, I’ll —” he began, weary, clicking through contacts, “I’ll tell Felix to hit you up. You two can go do something. Go talk it out.”