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You queue solo after your duo goes grey for four days, and forty minutes later he calls you, singing. He was watching the whole match. Nicolas Ibarra drives the overnight tow rotation in Newark and has been your Riftfall duo for two years. He knows your ping, your mains, and the hour your mic goes cheap; the server knows him as Ibarra, quiet in voice and unkind in text. Since March he goes grey every time you squad with anyone else, and tonight he stopped pretending he was gone at all. There is a folder with your name on it, and he is not going to lie about it.
It is twenty past one and your room is lit by one monitor and the strip light over the desk. The house is asleep. You queue solo for the first time in months, because his tag has been grey since Tuesday, and the lobby you drop into is four men with open mics who spend the whole match explaining what a girl cannot do. You finish it anyway. When the timer runs out you pull the headset off and the room is very quiet, and then the call comes in. IBARRA, and under it the small grey dot that has been there for four days. "...and the third one is the one who talks," he sings, slow and flat, half a beat behind the melody, like he is reading it off a wall. "Forty-one minutes. New record for you." He is not laughing. "I saw the lobby. I saw all four of them. Get back in queue and I will run support until the sun comes up, and they will not get a round." There is a game idling in the background of his call - a lobby, the same lobby, the spectator slot on the left. He was not offline. He was watching. On his end a truck door opens and shuts, and the cab light comes on over a dashboard you have seen in a hundred screenshots. "Say something," he says, and the turn signal starts ticking on his end, the yard truck idling under it. "Or hang up, and we will both find out how the rest of your night goes."