“Cassidy,” Sandy said with a heavy sigh, stopping at the door. The nausea hadn’t gone, not at all, but she couldn’t just let him get away with making something u like that, it was damaging. Damaging to a group that was already fraying at the seams. “Alejandro asked us to stir up trouble on a post on the network. You saw it, it wasn’t locked or filtered away from you. It’s not our fault if you didn’t read it, or forgot about it.”
She swallowed. She might not have been an empath, but thoughts had emotions attached to them too and she could feel his hurt, his anger. She’d heard the thud of him falling against the dresser, heard the -my knees are going to give- that rippled through his mind. She heard the echoes of a kid on a couch, abandoned by his family.
But he wasn’t the only one that had been abandoned. He wasn’t the only one that was afraid of losing people. Sandy was trying to reach out, trying to repair what was apparently damaged but Cassidy was working on his own story and making it real by behaving like this. She couldn’t fix everything.
She couldn’t fix herself.
“I’ve always been with Cal and Scotty,” she pointed out. The anger was drained from her voice, now, in its place there was a defeated sadness instead. “That’s never been anything you haven’t known. But you? For a while it was the four of us. I didn’t have to share you. And then I did. And I got used to it. I got used to our company not being enough for you when we were in the warehouse and you snuck out to seek… whatever in other people. And you do that here. But you always came back. Scotty- he wasn’t coming back.”
And maybe she did something wrong, she didn’t know, maybe she should have just left him to it. Maybe she should just leave them all to it because it was becoming clear that holding onto the cracks in their foundations with her fingertips was doing nothing but making her hands bleed.
“I- I don’t know what you want from me, Cassidy. We’ve not been keeping secrets. Scotty- what happened to him in Florida isn’t my thing to tell. I keep the things I learn from you in your head. I was doing the same for him. If you’d really wanted to know what happened and if he sold us out, because you wanted to talk to him, maybe you should have talked to him?”
She shook her head, swallowing past a lump in her throat. She caught the train of thought that she was different, but she didn’t understand it. Different how?
“And I shouldn’t have to ask, Cassidy. I shouldn’t have to feel like I need to schedule time in to see you because you- you’re too busy for me otherwise.” Her lower lip trembled again and she drew in a breath, feeling it hiccup - the first sign that she was going to cry and she balled her hands into fists to tightly she could feel her nails carving half-moon marks into her palms, biting into the skin. “You think you’re the only one that feels like we’re drifting? You aren’t. But I don’t know what to do to pull us back together when everyone’s so insistent on being the sole victim of their own emotions.” And she didn’t just mean Cas and his made up story about some secret meeting. She meant Scotty and his rage. Alejandro and whatever guilt it was that she kept catching on the edge of his mind. It was her own desperate need not to lose anyone. And maybe it was her fault. Maybe all of this was her fault somehow but she couldn’t right that, she didn’t know how.
She blinked and tears rolled down her cheeks. She couldn’t do this right now, she just- she just needed some air. Some space.
[Please, Domino, don’t push us away because you think that’s what’s happening to you,] she told him as she left the room. [Cause we’ll all end up alone. I don't want that. Not again.] Her message was accompanied by a very private memory, something she’d never shared with anyone; her, at nine, watching her father’s truck drive away. In her arms, the bunny that she still had, guarded with her life, in much better condition than it was now. The day she was abandoned, left in a roaring, loud city. Nothing more than a child.