Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I typically do not write forewords for any of my works but I felt this one was necessary for world-building clarity purposes and, first and foremost, to thank you. Since posting IWTSYSA in December 2024, I've worked on this final installment almost daily in between my busy job and part-time college degree, and what started as a simple closure ficlet has spiralled into over 200,000 words of Sonadow slowburn.

Your constant support through kudos and your lovely, kind comments gave me purpose in completing this (and getting through my shitty job). I am so fortunate to have captured your attention and I hope as you go on this journey with me throughout this work you enjoy reading it just as much as I loved writing it.

World-Building Notes Not essential reading, but helpful for context.

Longclaw's Story - I'm using the deleted scene from the first movie where Longclaw comes to Earth with Sonic and survives (search "Sonic And Longclaw Deleted Scene" on YouTube) as my version of their backstory. In this version, she never died on Mobius, and instead passed away after a year or so on Earth with Sonic at her side.

Perspective - This is written primarily from Sonic's POV with occasional jumps. If there are moments when it’s unclear, please assume it's his perspective.

Writing Style - Parts of or whole sentences will be written in italics like this. I’ve used this to symbolise characters’ inner thoughts, or when they're talking over the phone.

'Mobius' is the planet I use as their original home planet.

Timeline - While there is no official timeline of the movies, I’ve used this one to base the story off of:

Movie 1: Summer 2022 (Sonic 13)

Movie 2: Summer 2023 (Sonic 14, Tails 7, Knuckles 15)

Movie 3: Summer 2024 (Sonic 15, Tails 8, Knuckles 16)

As there isn’t a great deal of material from the cinematic universe I’ve taken some liberties with characterisations which mean that they stray from their game counterparts. This applies to how they might tackle situations – I’ve really tried to capture their youthfulness in this, because oftentimes in Sonic media we see them as grown, functioning adults even though they’re meant to be in their teens. Just bear this in mind if their actions seem immature — it’s intentional, don’t worry!

There will be trigger warnings in this work which will be updated in the tags as I go, and will be highlighted in authors’ notes at the beginning of any relevant chapter. However, on the whole, this is G for general audiences and the only triggering material will be occasional depictions of gore.

A personal ick — I despite em-dashes (en-dash superiority ftw) but AO3 can't distinguish the difference between a hyphen and en-dash, only a hyphen and em-dash so I am sorry in advance for the yucky use of 5 zillion em-dashes throughout.

As a final note, this is a completed work. I will update regularly/weekly for the remaining 23 chapters (inc. epilogue) and will include timelines of when you can expect the next chapter in my A/Ns.

Again, thank you so much for reading. Please enjoy, and let me know your thoughts!

Chapter Text

Green Hills and its rolling valleys are a snowdrift, bearing the brunt of the snowstorm that’s been passing over the area since Sunday evening. Though the worst of the storm has passed, Montana is still finding its feet after having one of the worst blizzards it has seen since December 2003.

As the weatherman on the television had promised, this Christmas is a white one. Green Hills is carpeted in twenty four inches of thick snow, and the only colour for miles and miles comes from green fir treetops and their spindly branches in the forests and rolling valleys. The sunroof on their bedroom has fallen victim to the snowdrift, leaving the only light source in their room a small window with its blinds drawn, drawing the space into pitch darkness.

Sonic’s throat burns with each sleepy inhale and exhale he makes, tucked tight under two quilts in the far corner of Tom and Maddie Wachowski’s attic. Although the cladding and insulation in the roof is thick enough that not even a bullet would be able to shoot through cleanly — a work of art on Tom’s part to layer expanding foam, sponge, and foil behind plasterboard that would probably not pass a fire inspection test — on snowy days like this it’s nigh on impossible not to get goosebumps even in the warmth of your own home. With each gust of wind and each pelt of powdery snow caught in its gale, a chill carries through the attic, biting the exposed points of Sonic’s face above his blanket.

During winter, Sonic usually doesn’t wake until the sun is at least at the peak of its arc. He reckons it might be a hibernation thing but has no evidence to back it up other than ‘It’s just a gut feeling’ , and on cold mornings like this he feels the sentiment even stronger. Sonic would have to be physically woken up to shake him out of sleep, because his brain sure as hell isn’t going to do it for him.

It's to his horror when a pair of paws do just that by landing square on his stomach and kicking him awake. Who needs an alarm clock when you have a younger brother?

“Guh!” Sonic cries, pulling himself into an even tighter ball beneath his quilts to shield himself from the sudden onslaught. He tucks his head beneath the quilt’s hemline and screws his eyes closed to ward off the dim light from above.

His mattress creaks as his assailant, now on all fours, pounces on him and shakes him like a rabid dog that’s found bait. “Sonic, Santa came!” Tails calls into his ear. “Wake up, wake up!”

“Guh.”

“Wake uuuuuuup, Sonic!” cries Tails. He wriggles his hands under the heavy layers of the quilts and presses his freezing-cold paws against Sonic’s back to shock him awake — and it does the trick — causing him to jolt away with a third groan. Unlike Sonic, the cold doesn’t deter Tails; especially not on the most festive day of the year.

Last year was, unfortunately, not a holly jolly Christmas. They found out the hard way during their Christmas dinner that Mobian stomachs were not, in fact, equipped to digest eggnog the same way a human’s was. Their plans to visit Rachel and go tobogganing and make snowforts and stuff their bodies full of turkey were dashed as soon as the eggnog hit their digestive tracts. The rest of the Christmas period was spent in collective misery over the rough days following, with Tom and Maddie taking it in turns to clean out sick bowls and feed them dry pieces of toast providing they could keep it down. Tails this year isn’t going to let anything stand in his way of having his Christmas fantasy — not even his sleepy brother.

He hops up onto his feet and jumps up and down at the base of the bed. The frame creaks and groans and Sonic groans with it, burrowing further under the blankets into the warm air and away from the noise and chaos outside.

He’s exhausted, not just physically, but mentally, too. After spending Christmas eve-eve and the better part of Christmas eve with Shadow, Sonic, in true Sonic fashion, had left all of his gift wrapping to do until the last minute. Last night was spent trying to wrestle wrapping paper around strangely-shaped boxes without tearing and wrinkling the rosy cheeks on paper-Santa’s face. He finished sometime in the early hours of the morning and promptly passed out in bed with wrapping-paper scraps and sellotape butt-ends littering his quilt. He doesn’t know what time it is but he feels like he’s got sandpaper behind his eyes so the easy answer is early morning, because he sure as hell hasn’t slept long enough to feel remotely rejuvenated. Sonic’s idea of a Christmas miracle would be getting the chance to sleep until the new year like a proper hedgehog should.

That sentiment is not shared by his brothers. The blanket is quite literally ripped from his body as Knuckles balls it up and sets it aside, exposing Sonic to the elements and another flying kick from Tails. He shrieks as a foot lands just beneath his rib. “Ow!” he crows, unfurling from his ball to cry: “What the heck, dude?!”

“Why is there a fat man in our house leaving us gifts in stockings?”

“Because Santa gives gifts to all the good kids, Knuckles. He obviously thought we did good this year!” Tails cheers, pushing to get off of Sonic, who curls up in a ball.

“I still do not understand why he is in our house.”

Sonic rolls over onto his back. He blinks his bleary eyes up at the sight above: tiny, twinkling fairy lights overhead searing the skin off of his eyeballs, and Tails’ manic, beaming face nose-to-nose with him. “Guh.”

“Wake up! Wake up!” Tails pounces off him, bounding a few times on his hands and feet before he jumps up to his full height and stretches high towards the ceiling. “Come on, Sonic!”

Sonic, feeling some (just some) of Tails’ infectious joy, rolls back onto his shoulders before he pushes up to flip onto his feet. He stands a few heads taller than the rest of them from his position atop the bed, looking down at Tails and Knuckles like a king would to his knights. They’re all in matching pyjamas, barefoot in their bedroom while a small, rinky-dink Christmas tree in the corner flashes through the ROYGBIV spectrum. Knuckles, as per usual, looks slightly perplexed but otherwise happy to be here, and Tails’ wild hair and crazed eyes give the impression that he’s fit to chew on the doorframe just so they can get out of the room. “What time’s it?”

“Seven.”

“Lets go — let’s go!” Tails cheers, taking both of their hands as he tears the wooden hatch off the floor open with enough force to nearly pull it from its hinges. Sonic and Knuckles share a concerned look over his shoulders with pursed lips and raised eyebrows.

A little more awake in the face of Tails’ blinding enthusiasm, they bound down the stairs to rush into Maddie and Tom’s room despite warnings to never go inside without knocking. But it’s Christmas, and surely that rule doesn’t count on the most special day of the year, right?

Tails, running on all fours, bounds onto the bed and nails a sleeping Tom exactly where he nailed Sonic. He groans, hunching over as Tails bounces back onto the mattress and jostles the bed frame against the wall, rucking up their sheets and knocking the (tasteful, chosen by Maddie) decorative pillows onto the carpeted floor. Maddie whips up one eye of her sleeping mask in confusion, face crumpled like a wet dish towel, before she realises what’s going on and falls back onto the bed with a whoomph. She laughs, voice hoarse from sleep, and shakes her head. “You’re a little rascal!”

She tackles him with her arms and wrestles him to her chest as he squeals, kicking and fighting in a fit of tinkling laughter. Sonic, delighted at the sight of the pile on, bounds onto the bed to join in as Knuckles, in all of his eighty-eight pounds of pure muscle, nails Tom again in the stomach.

“Santa’s been!” Tails gushes, rolling onto his tummy and kicking his legs up behind him on the bed. Tom and Maddie have a king size mattress but it can barely hold the five of them without limbs hanging off the corners. Sonic’s grown approximately two apples in height since he first met Tom, and he knows that by next Christmas they’ll be fighting for even more space. Tails is shooting up like a beanstalk day by day, now only three inches shorter than Sonic, while Knuckles just seems to be getting wider. 

Tom, with a mound of tri-coloured fur in his lap, groans. “You guys’re getting a little big just to be jumping on the bed now.”

Maddie swats his bicep with the back of her hand. “Ignore him. He’s just grumpy because he’s sleepy.”

“Too right. Wha’ time’s it?”

“Seven,” Knuckles answers helpfully.

Tom groans: “Guh.”

Ignoring him, Maddie laces her fingers together and folds them over her tummy, feeding Tails’ enthusiasm by giving him a big smile. “So, what did Santa bring?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t gone downstairs yet, but I just know he’s been!”

“Well, then why don’t we have a look?”

They amble downstairs with mussed-up hair while Tom, wounded and nursing his stomach, lags behind as he kicks on his slippers. As the three Mobians skid into the living room Maddie hangs behind to wrap herself up in her dressing gown and sets the kettle to boil in the kitchen. Downstairs is pretty open-plan after their remodel following Knuckles’ demolition of their home, which means that Maddie has a good vantage point of the living room despite being two rooms away. With mugs laid out on the counter she shuffles back into the living room and falls onto the sofa with a sleepy, happy look on her face, giving them permission to dive under the tree to the presents spilling from beneath its belt. Tom joins a moment later, wrapped up in his dressing gown, too, slinging an arm over her shoulders and giving her somewhere to lean her head.

The glass double doors at the far-end wall of their adjoining dining room look out onto the patio and back garden; it’s barely dawn, and the sky coloured a misty, deep blue, thick with cloud. The snow is pressed against the glass and stands inches high, unblemished and virgin, and even through the shut door Sonic can tell that the landscape is quiet; still asleep, still hibernating, still waking up with each pull of the heavy sun that rises above Green Hills’ dense treeline. 

Sonic only realises he’s been staring a little too long out the doorway, lost in his wandering thoughts, when his dry eyes begin to burn. He blinks and suddenly all of the noise in the room comes flooding back: the laughter, the chatter, the hum of the central heating Tom’s just turned on, the sound of someone tuning the radio. He glances away from the window’s white expanse and swallows the coppery taste in his mouth, pushing it down along with the strange swell of emotions in his chest. 

Sonic knows he shouldn’t be feeling so down. After all, it’s Christmas morning and he’s spending it with his family under a roof with plenty of gifts, warm and safe and loved, but a piece of him feels absent like it was left behind in the den. He wonders how Shadow’s spending his morning, alone on what should be a day spent among good company, music, and laughter. Is he watching one of the DVDs I left? Does he have enough to eat? Sonic absently rubs over the place on his chest where the throb centres. I never asked how he spent Christmas in the past. Is this his first one? Did he ever get to celebrate it in the lab?

The emotions in his chest balloon. This is ridiculous, he chastises himself, rubbing the sore spot over his chest with the tips of his fingers. I literally saw him yesterday. It’s not like the guy died, or anything. Why do I care so much? I doubt he even celebrates Christmas, anyway.

A warm hand is placed on the curve of his neck, startling him from his stupor. Sonic jumps and realises he’s allowed himself to get lost in his thoughts once again. He glances up over his shoulder and meets Tom’s eyes. “Hey.”

“Hey, buddy.” The corner of Tom’s eyes crinkle. “You lost in thought?”

“Yeah,” Sonic says, leaning his cheek against Tom’s wrist. The warmth of his skin bleeds through the plaid material of his pyjamas, and it soothes the strange, tangled mess of feelings Sonic feels weighing down the middle of his ribcage. “Kinda tired.”

“Were you up late last night?”

You don’t know the half of it. “Yeah. Last minute gift wrapping.”

Tom’s hand comes up to scruff the top of Sonic’s head where his fur meets the root of his quills. “Come open your presents. Tails is going to have a fit if he waits any longer. You can have a nap afterwards, alright?”

Nodding at the compromise, Sonic joins the rest of them in the living room and sits criss-cross-applesauce on the rug between Tails and Knuckles. The three of them tear through the gifts at the outskirts of the pile each with their own coos of amazement and thanks. Tom joins Maddie back on the sofa, and stretches an arm over Maddie’s shoulders. “What did Santa get you, bud?”

“He got me a new set of magnifying goggles!” Tails remarks with glee, holding them up to the overhead light.

“I am concerned,” Knuckles remarks, looking down at the pouch of animal-shaped rocks in his hand. “How does this strange, fat man know I’ve been collecting animal-shaped rocks recently?”

Tom and Maddie share an intentional look, mouths pressed flat to try and stifle their smile. “Well,” Maddie begins, sucking her top lip into her mouth so she doesn’t ruin the magic. “Remember we wrote those letters to Santa?”

“He actually read those?”

“Santa always listens to the good children of the world. He obviously thought you three were really, really good this year.”

Knuckles picks up a rock in the shape of a horse and holds it up to the light. “This is magnificent. Thank you, Santa. Can we visit him in person?”

“No, Knuckles.”

Sonic picks up a neatly-wrapped package with silver and blue tartan paper with his name on it. It’s pretty weighty, shaped in a box that rattles when he shakes it. He tears at the paper and as soon as he spots the words on the cardboard box he nearly drops the present in his lap. “Holy crap!” Sonic leaps up, half-opened package in his hands. “Dude, no way. ”

“What is it?” Tails leans over, putting weight on his outstretched hands, peering up to Sonic’s hands as he tears off the rest of the wrapping paper. 

“How the heck did you guys find these?!” Sonic lifts the lid off the box and pulls out a pair of immaculate red soap shoes. The arches are yellow and there’s a white band wrapping their circumference, an almost like-for-like for the shoes Jojo gifted him years ago — the same pair he keeps safe on a shelf in his room as a reminder of how far he’s come. Sonic takes the shoes from the box, setting it carefully aside, and he holds the pair in his hands like they’re made of fine glass. He thumbs over the concave and its smooth metal plating, the same yellow as the arch on the side of the shoe. The shoes are in near pristine condition, not to mention the personalisation of the colours. “This model got discontinued years ago!”

“Well, we know a guy,” Tom says with a poorly-concealed smile. “Do you like them?”

Sonic tosses himself at Maddie and Tom and drags them into an arm-locking hug. “I love them,” he says, leaning more weight into their embrace when he feels them hug him back. “How did you know I wanted them?”

Maddie rolls her eyes. “You’re not exactly discreet, Sonic.”

“Still.” He pulls back, face split into a grin. “I can’t wait to try them out—”

“Not without kneepads you’re not.” Maddie arches her brow and nods her head towards the tree. “Go look. They’ll go with one of your other gifts, too.”

“Wait, did Santa not get you those?” Tails asks innocently from his seat near the tree. Knuckles is looking over, too, with a confused frown on his face, and it’s then he realises that he’s the only one out of the three of them who realises Santa doesn’t exist.

Sonic winces. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so loud. “Uh, Santa got me the other gifts,” he excuses, coming back over to the tree to sit back next to Tails and Knuckles. 

“How do you know what Santa gets you and what he doesn’t get you—”

“Coffee!” Maddie remarks loudly. She stands, claps her hands, and flashes a smile. “Anyone up for some hot cocoa?”

“Ooh — me, me!” Tails says, easily distracted. 

Crisis averted, they return to opening up the rest of the gifts. Knuckles gets a really nice stationary kit coupled with a leather-bound journal because he’s recently been learning to write, and some custom-made claws which act as shovels to help him with his newfound hobby of treasure hunting. Tails gets a thousand small trinket-y things to help him tinker; screwdrivers, batteries, drills, screws, the kind of thing Sonic scratches his head at but Tails is so delighted that he flies around the room. And Sonic, along with his soap shoes, is given a skateboard, protective gear, and some new CDs. Tails gifts him a neat, new communicator with the added feature of having voice control, and Knuckles gifts him a carved stone that looks like a hedgehog. They’re all so personal, all so him, that he can’t help but hug both of them tight enough to bruise afterwards.

This year has been different from the others Sonic's spent with the Wachowskis. Maybe it's because he feels like he's grown up so much over the last twelve months, but he's beginning to notice things that wouldn't have caught his attention before: grocery receipts and paper bills stapled together in the kitchen drawer, the lack of trips out of town, Tom's longer hours at the police station and Maddie's extended shifts at the vet clinic.

Tom and Maddie try to keep 'adult' things discreet, but Sonic noticed a while back that they've been cutting back on their usual spending. This Christmas only confirms his observations.

His first year with the Wachowskis was spent drowning under a mound of gifts. The second was shared more evenly with Knuckles and Tails joining the family, though the focus shifted pretty quickly after the Eggnog Incident. This year's haul is significantly smaller, but it doesn't change anything. If anything, it makes the gifts they exchange that much more special, knowing each one had to be chosen specifically rather than bought for the sake of buying.

Sonic's not blind to the fact that year after year they've faced hefty bills. First it was the car, then the house, and most recently Tom's medical expenses and lost income while he took time out of work for recovery, and yet Sonic can’t think of a Christmas he’s enjoyed more. So, all in all, despite a heavier weight on his conscience, it’s a great Christmas all things considered.

With their gifts, big and small, packed aside they dash to the back door to scope out the lay of the land in the garden. The snow has stopped falling but the ground is ripe for snowball fights and tobogganing and Sonic can barely contain his energy that surges in his limbs and demands he runs into the snowdrifts. “Can we—”

“Go put on your sweaters, hats, and gloves,” Tom says before he can finish his sentence. He’s finally gotten his hands on a mug of coffee, and sips it between whined complaints coming from the door. “No ‘buts’. You’ll get frostbite otherwise.”

Without needing to be told twice, the three of them dash upstairs in a tangle of limbs and pull on whatever they can get their hands on. Sonic finds an old hoodie, his trusty gloves, and a beanie to keep his ears warm and practically skids down the banister in his eagerness to go outside and try out his new gear. “Can I take my skateboard, too?” Sonic asks in-between puffs of breath from his dash.

Maddie and Tom are sitting at the dining table next to the glass doors, nursing their coffees and still coming around to an early morning wake up. Tom gestures his head towards the door, cup raised to his chin. “Well, it’s pretty much snowed under out there, bud. Why don’t we have some breakfast, and we can go sledding?”

Knuckles and Tails skid into the dining room at the perfect time, and three pairs of eyes light up like Christmas trees. “We have sleds?”

“No, but some greased-up cardboard will do the trick.” Tom sets down his coffee and heads into the living room to pick up a box from an opened present. He gives it a shake to make his point. “C’mon, food first, then we’ll head out to the garden!”

Maddie rises from the table to get a head start on breakfast because she can practically feel the eager energy radiating off the three of them to get something in their bellies and get outside. While Tails and Knuckles take a seat at the table, Sonic makes a point to help Tom tidy up the balled-up wrapping paper in the living room. Under the sound of the radio playing one of a dozen Christmas songs, Sonic quietly says: “Thanks,” just as Tom crouches down to pick up a stray piece of wrapping. “I know I’ve already said it, but I’m real grateful for everything you do for us.”

He smiles. Tom reaches out and pulls Sonic into a sideways hug. “Always,” he responds quietly. He gives Sonic a jostle, then a few taps on the arm. “Now, go enjoy the day with those two. It’s your last Christmas as a fifteen year old. May as well enjoy it, eh?”

His words cause Sonic to glance up in question. “What’s so bad about being sixteen?”

“Nothing, but it’s always more fun when you’re younger. Sixteen’s a pretty important age, but once you hit that milestone, you’re only a few years off becoming a legal adult.” Tom’s nose wrinkles. “Which is ridiculous, by the way, ‘cause no eighteen year old should be able to buy a house, let alone drive a car.”

“Can I drive a car when I’m seventeen?”

“Why would you want to drive a car when you can run faster than one?”

“Good point.” He rises from his crouch, as does Tom, paper cradled in their arms. “But even if I’m an adult, I’ll still be spending Christmas with you guys, so it’ll be plenty fun.”

His words are cheesy but Sonic keenly feels it as he ages. The little things become the big things and the gestures of kindness and love shared between them all trump any gift money could buy. Sonic is once again reminded of A Charlie Brown Christmas where Charlie goes on the discovery to find out that the true magic lies in humility, simplicity, and the spirit of giving, rather than material possessions or outward displays of celebration.

“You’re awfully sweet this morning.” Tom ruffles the hair on the top of his head before batting him lightly with a rolled-up piece of wrapping paper. “Now, go, before you choke me up!”

Sonic flashes a grin before he jogs into the kitchen and takes the free chair next to Knuckles. Breakfast is quick and simple, just some scrambled eggs over toast, keeping it light so they’re ready for the big dinner ahead around lunch time. Sonic stifles his smile into the palm of his hand and leans his weight onto his arm as he watches Maddie try to mediate a fight over who gets to half the last glass of orange juice. She ends up splitting the portion into two separate glasses rather than one tall one to be fought over, and joins them with her own portion as does Tom, as the space fills with the music from the radio and the quiet clink of cutlery.

"Christ almighty," Sonic swears as he opens the door and the wind's frigid bite practically slaps his cheeks.

“Language, Sonic.”

“Sorry.” Sonic flashes a grin in Maddie’s direction, which he hopes she’ll take as his apology, before he faces the garden again. “It’s just so freaking cold!”

“You behave as if you’ve never seen snow before.” Knuckles stomps out ahead of Sonic like a trooper, his feet sinking into the powdery give of the snow. “Where is all that bravado from when we fought on the snowy mountain?”

“That was different — a Montana winter is colder than the freaking North Pole. I am not built for this kind of climate.” Sonic trudges behind in Knuckles' footprints, grateful for the path where the ground remains somewhat visible. Above him, the swoosh of Tails’ tails announce his arrival as he glides over their heads and plants himself mid-way down the garden on a particularly high snow mound. 

“Guys, we should build another igloo!” he calls out, his voice bright with enthusiasm. Using his mittens, he scoops up handfuls of snow, packing them between his palms to form a solid ball. “If we make these into bricks—”

“Or, into these.” Tails' face disappears behind an explosion of snow as Knuckles' fistful finds its mark. Boisterous, delighted laughter rings out across the garden as Knuckles clutches his stomach, lost to his own hilarity. “Oh my goodness! Your face! ”

“Knuckles!” Tails cries, scrabbling to brush the snow from his muzzle. “What the heck, dude?!”

“I was taught this by the hedgehog. He is also to blame.” Knuckles scoops up another small mound of snow in his gloves, twists it between his palms, and forms a grapefruit-sized snowball.

“In my defence, I did it with sand, not snow,” Sonic says as he scoops up a handful of snow, packs it tight, and launches it square at Knuckles’ head. It hits with a satisfying thump, snowball smashing into a hundred white particles that float around his face and land on his nose. “Bullseye!”

Knuckles splutters as the snow flies up his nostril. Tails giggles, gathering some more snow in his paws and launches a ball at Knuckles, too. Sonic and he share a knowing, conspiratorial glance across the yard, before they begin to stock up on snowballs and launch them at Knuckles as quickly as it takes to make them. Unfortunately, Knuckles catches onto their collusion fairly quickly, and by the time it takes them to toss their tenth snowball Knuckles has a ball the size of his head held between his gloves, and it’s aimed right at Sonic.

Sonic squeals. He tries to run but his feet gain no traction in the snow. He sees Knuckles throw the snowball at him from the corner of his eye and in a bid to escape he tosses himself into one of the snowdrifts, face-planting down a ten-inch deep pile, leaving a Sonic-shaped hole in the ground like something out of a Looney Tunes sketch.

“Pahaha!” Knuckles bellows, his laughter echoing off the trees surrounding their garden. “You fool! You've buried yourself in even deeper snow!”

“No!” Sonic struggles upward, fighting to find his footing, and with snow plastered from his cheeks to his fingertips he jabs an accusatory finger at Knuckles. “I still dodged your snowball!”

“You most certainly did not.”

“Did too!”

Another snowball whistles past Sonic's ear, missing him by mere millimetres. He glances up and catches sight of Tails’ delighted, giggling expression that fails to hide the mischief on his face. “You traitor!” he cries. “That’s it — no more going easy!”

Tails’ confidence dissolves with a shriek as Sonic launches snowballs at him, trying to knock him down from his position in the sky. He dodges them effectively but doesn’t manage to escape Knuckles’ wrath, who knocks him flat on his back onto a snowdrift with a particularly mean snowball aimed right at his back. 

Thirty minutes later, the garden significantly less powdery and far more visible, Tom comes up to Maddie and hands her a cup of hot cocoa. They’re within the safe confines of their home, still in their pyjamas, watching the chaos unfold through the glass doors connecting their dining room to the back patio and garden. The frozen green tips of the lawn peak through bare areas of the yard where they’ve excavated and dug deep for their snowball fight, and the fencing, once a blend of red brick and wooden slats, is splattered with poorly-aimed snowballs.

After having the space practically demolished following Knuckles' arrival and Tails' stolen car stint, they'd been forced to exercise creativity with their savings account and renovate the whole home and garden without bankrupting themselves. The walls surrounding the back garden are patchwork and a D.I.Y. project done with all five sets of hands under the Wachowski roof. The shed was torn down (not that it took much) and a big two-car garage was built in its place which doubles as Tails’ workshop. Buried beneath the snow lie soccer goals, basketball hoops, a dozen mismatched balls, frisbees, and other evidence to show that three rowdy kids call this place home. Gone are the days of flowerbeds and herb planters and perfectly manicured lawns; Tom and Maddie had surrendered that dream the moment they decided to refurbish the attic for Sonic two and a half years ago.

“See? This is why I didn’t shovel this morning,” Tom says, gesturing to the yard and its state. “The boys practically did it for us.”

“I guess we can see the footpath now,” she remarks, bringing the cup of hot cocoa to her mouth for a sip. Outside, beyond the glass of the patio door, Tails is gesturing for Knuckles to place a block of snow onto a deformed igloo to try and rebuild its walls after it was sat on a few days ago. Sonic, meanwhile, is making quick work of shovelling snow away from the small amount of concrete they have at the perimeter of the house so he can put his skateboard to good use. Maddie grumbles, knocks the window to catch his attention, and mouths: “Kneepads!” while pointing to her elbows and knees dramatically.

Sonic tilts his head, clearly not understanding what she’s trying to say through the glass barrier.

She moves to repeat herself but Tom pulls her close to his side, his hand resting on her shoulder. “Leave him. He’ll find out the hard way.”

“I don’t want him to shatter his kneecap, Tom.”

“This is Sonic we’re speaking about. The kid leaps off of buildings for fun.”

“I still don’t want to spend Christmas in A&E. We had enough to deal with last year after that eggnog your Uncle Gary sent over.” She groans at the memory. “What the hell did he even put in that?”

Tom’s lips purse; it’s as if he’s trying to stifle a laugh, or trying to hide a grimace. “I don’t even know. I don’t think it was bad, I just don’t think their bodies could handle it. I drank it, and I was fine.”

She makes a faux gagging sound. “I do not want to nurse three sick kids again tonight. I don’t care if I’m coming off as a nag — we bought those kneepads for a reason.”

The door in front of them opens as Sonic pops his head in. The tips of his fur are damp and his cheeks are rosy from the cold and there’s snow caught in the rim of his hat, snowflakes still frozen in perfect, spindly stars. “Need to get my stuff,” he says, gesturing to the sofa. Tom and Maddie bite their tongue as he leaves a trail of slush behind him because as he picks up his new gift, he makes sure to get the elbow and knee supports too. “Guys, watch me outside! I’m gonna learn to master this by New Years’ Day.”

“Alright, Sonic,” Tom calls behind, giving him a wave as he shuts the door and jogs back down to the garden.

Maddie leans into Tom’s side. She watches the scene play out; of Sonic pulling on his guards, of Knuckles tripping over a stray stone and falling headfirst into the near-complete igloo, ruining his and Tails’ hard work as Tails cries out in frustration. It’s a beautiful chaos, and the kind of sight that would’ve sent her thirty-year old self into a fit of hives if she thought her life at forty-two would involve parenting three alien boys with superpowers. Maddie was always a sceptic, not a sensationalist who believed in conspiracy theories and Crazy Carl’s ramblings, but despite her initial hesitation when she first saw Sonic on Rachel’s kitchen counter it’s impossible for her to deny her own feelings when the sight of them all trapezing around the garden causes her chest to swell with so much affection she feels strangled by it. 

“Aren’t they growing up too fast?” she murmurs, thumbing the warm rim of her mug. “Feels like just yesterday we were giving Sonic the attic, and now look at them all; nine, fifteen, and sixteen.”

“Ain’t sixteen is one hell of an age?” Tom remarks dryly. Outside, Sonic sets the skateboard down and stands on top of it experimentally. As soon as both feet touch its board, it goes flying, and he lands on his back in the snow. 

“I’d love to know more about their culture. Do they go through puberty? What kind of talk do we have to have with them? I mean, they’re growing, I’m pretty sure of that, but do they stop at a certain age? Do they have the same lifespans as us? What’s an adult Mobian meant to look like?” Maddie sighs wearily. “I know a normal mom’s got it tough, but at least they sort of have something to base their teachings off. We have nothing. When I was a sophomore my mom was giving me the birds and the bees talk, I had my first boyfriend, and I was sneaking out late to go to parties. None of them are like that. I’m glad of it — I mean, they’ve been through enough crap already, but it feels sometimes like…” Maddie heaves another sigh, the words escaping her. “It feels like they should be living like other kids their age.”

“They’re not like other kids their age. We don’t know what kids their age are meant to be doing in the first place.”

“I know,” she concedes quietly. “I just don’t want them to get older and wonder why they never got to have the same experiences as…well, other humans their age, y’know? I know they’re different from us humans, but they’re not that different, Tom. Part of me wonders if they’d enjoy going to school, or getting a job, and knowing more people outside of just us.”

“They’re not totally blind to the outside world. If they wanted any of those things, I’m sure they’d say something.” He rubs her arm comfortingly. “I mean, Knuckles has gotten more and more involved with Wade and is already walking his own path — albeit a strange one. Tails is still a baby, but the kid’s a genius. He’ll be happy to tinker with his inventions for the rest of his life.”

They lapse into silence, interspersed by Ozzy’s snores near the sofa and the sound of muffled whoops and hollers from the back garden. Tom continues at a lower volume: “I never worry about those two, but Sonic…?” Tom blows out a bluster. “If there was one out of the three I’d ever get worried about, it would be him.”

“I’d ask you ‘why’, but I know exactly what you mean.”

“He wants to do so much and see so much and he’s growing so, so quickly, that there’s days I forget he’s not human. If there’s any kind of freaking Mobian puberty I just hope that it’s not the same as a typical teenage boy’s. I do not want to deal with a broody Sonic.”

Tom’s exasperation causes Maddie to chuckle. “I know, right? Knuckles is…Knuckles, and we don’t have to worry about Tails for at least a few more years, but my God, if Sonic’s anything like your little brother Jake when he was sixteen then we’ve got a few things coming.”

“I guess we’ve just gotta be thankful he’s not girl-crazy, or sneaking out late at night, or getting into any shady business, huh?”

“Small blessings.”

Both of them watch as Sonic finally manages to plant his feet on the skateboard and glide down the rickety path. They flash him an encouraging thumbs up when he looks over for their approval. “They’ve turned out pretty good so far, so we must be doing something right.” Sonic moves to kick from the ground to gain some speed but it sends him skewiff and he lasts only another second before the board goes flying from beneath his feet and he face-plants the ground beneath him. “I just hope it stays like this. No more alien malarkey. No more Robotniks. No more bureaucracy from G.U.N.. We could do with some peace and quiet.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Maddie murmurs, leaning her chin against Tom’s bicep. “Besides, what’s there to worry about?”

They return from the garden just in time for lunch, igloo project abandoned for another day and Sonic feeling a little more acquainted with his skateboard. Snowboarding had been so easy — why can’t this just be the same?

The table is set immaculately with a whole, golden-brown roasted turkey as the centrepiece and a dozen plates of steaming vegetables, potatoes, gravy, and pigs in blankets arranged along the length of the table. Knuckles, Tails, and Sonic dry their faces off with towels and shuck off their snow-dampened clothes by the back door, set aside to be washed at some point over the weekend. With rumbling bellies, they all take a seat at the table and have their plates piled high with a rainbow of food that Sonic, with a pretty large appetite, wonders if he’ll even be able to finish.

“You’ll be pleased to know that there is absolutely no eggnog in this house right now,” Maddie announces as she takes a seat at the table, dressed up in a festive Christmas sweater dress with sparkling tinsel weaved into her hair.

“Awwww.”

“I quite enjoyed the flavour,” Knuckles says as he takes a fork to a chunk of cut turkey on his plate and tears it apart with his canines. “Even if it did not like me.”

“Guys, can we not talk about that at the dinner table? It’s making me queasy.” Sonic takes a sip from his can of soda and pulls a face. “I’ve been looking forward to this turkey all week, and I don’t wanna think of up-chucking before I eat.”

“For the record, I asked my Uncle Gary what he put in it and he just winked and refused to say, so I guess we’ll never find out what it is you guys are allergic to.” Tom lifts the gravy boat from the centre of the table and smothers his plate. “On the bright side, this turkey turned out great so it’ll make up for last year’s loss.”

“Six hours slow-cooked.” Maddie cuts a piece from the bird on the table and her knife practically slides through the meat. “Did you see that? Look at how good that looks.”

“Can I have a leg?”

Maddie sets down the carving fork and begins to cut the drumstick from the turkey. She passes it over to Sonic's outstretched plate, then begins to cut the other. “Who wants the—”

“Me!” Tails raises his plate up with sparkling eyes. “Please.”

“You sure you can eat all of this?” She cuts it for him nonetheless and places it on his plate. He draws it down to the table and begins to add a small amount of veg and potatoes, too. “It’s a pretty big chunk of meat.”

“If Sonic can eat it, then I should be able to too, right?” When Sonic makes a point of flexing his muscles, Tails copies. “I’m growing!”

She rolls her eyes but can’t suppress the smile that brightens her expression. “Fine, fine.”

They devolve into chit-chatter as they all tuck into their dinner, all with groans of delight when they try something new from their plate. Sonic pushes himself to eat a little beyond his usual beige palette and manages two carrot slices and a single broccoli floret before he hangs up his medal and piles his plate higher with mashed potatoes and pigs in blankets. Knuckles, predictably, eats three whole servings of everything while Tails just about finishes his drumstick and nothing else. 

Tom carves the turkey clean and once he frees the wishbone from its cavity, he grabs a coin and asks them all to choose which side they want before he flips it to decide who gets the pull. It ends up being Sonic and Knuckles, who each hook their pinky around the wishbone and pull on the count of three.

It breaks with a satisfying snap. “Yes!” Sonic cheers, holding up the larger piece of bone. “I win!”

Knuckles looks down at his smaller, twiggy piece with a frown. “I was too strong for it.”

“As if. I won, fair and square.”

Tails leans over with bright, sparkling eyes, hands planted on the table so he can push himself up and get a better look. “Make a wish!”

“Oh, uh.” Sonic quickly closes his eyes and thinks of the first thing that comes to mind. It isn’t anything grand, nor anything profound, because he hadn’t really planned ahead. Most people want to win the lottery or something right? Maybe I should ask for that. His eyebrows screw up into a frown. No, I’m running out of wish time! My wish is that I just don’t want anyone to get hurt this year. There. Done. It should be a simple request — and it would be coming from anyone else outside this household, but Sonic has had nearly three straight years of high highs and low lows where he’s nearly lost people in his life he loves to grave injuries. He just wants one year of respite, one year for things to settle, for Tom and Maddie to get their bearings, for Tails and Knuckles to finally settle into the house without feeling like they need to earn their space, for Shadow to find his feet in his newfound freedom, and for himself to finally feel like he can go to sleep without worrying that there’s someone out there looking to take all of that away him.

With the Robotniks gone and Shadow safely in the den, surely he’s halfway there, right?

Sonic clutches the wishbone in his hand tighter before he opens his eyes and the room's light comes flooding back in. "What did you wish for?" Tails asks, peering down at the small piece of cartilage held in Sonic's palm.

“I can’t say, otherwise it won’t come true,” Sonic says with a wink. He sets the wishbone down next to his can of soda, and makes a mental reminder to store it somewhere safe in his room as a keepsake.

“Oh, that’s a good point!”

“I’m sure it was a good wish. You looked like you were thinking hard, bud,” Tom remarks. He’s leant back in his chair with his fingers laced over his full tummy, Christmas sweater bulging. He gives it a lazy pat.

“I just hope it comes true.”

Maddie picks up the wishbone and sets it safely on a nearby shelf. “I’ll put it up here so it doesn’t get lost when we clear up the table. Are we all done?”

“I am.” Tom reaches forward for a glass of water and takes a long pull. “I was gonna suggest dessert, but I need a few hours, first.”

“Me, too.” Sonic and Knuckles respond. 

Maddie collects their empty plates and balances them atop each other, followed closely by Tails, who helps carry their empty cutlery to the dishwasher. Sonic finishes off his can of soda before he hops off the chair and trots over to the kitchen to help out, even as Maddie waves him away. Tom and Knuckles clear the semi-finished bowls of potatoes, vegetables, and other sides from the table, wrapping them in aluminium foil and cramming them into the fridge wherever they can find space. With ceramic bowls stacked in an uneven Jenga tower and the fridge practically bulging at the seams with the sheer volume of food inside, they all do their part in finishing the kitchen clean-up. Five pairs of hands make work quicker than one, after all.

At one point Maddie disappears into the living room, leaving the four of them to clean the table and sweep the floor. But, a moment later, she calls from the adjoining space: “Hey, Sonic. Come here.”

Sonic sets down the dustpan and brush he’s holding and trots over through the open doorway. She’s on her hands and knees rooting under the tree for something that she can’t quite reach. “There’s another gift under here for you, I think. I can’t get it, but your name’s on it.”

“Santa sure loves this blue hedgehog.”

She strains under a little further before hailing: “A-ha!” and crawling out from under the tree with pine needles in her hair. She sits on her heels and holds out a small, brown parcel. “This is it. I saw it here when I was leaving the gifts here last night. Wonder who it’s from?”

He takes the item from her with a frown. It's a weighty thing, with the same dimensions as an A4 piece of paper and a few inches thick. It's wrapped neatly in a brown paper bag and aside from his name on the upper corner of the parcel, it's largely unremarkable. Sonic would've mistaken it for a brick if Maddie hadn't pointed it out. "Tails, probably," he says, peering inside the bag. "I think it's a book."

Sonic lifts the book out of the bag and as soon as he spots the title his heart stops. The book tumbles back into the bag with a rustle.

Maddie quirks a brow. “Is that a good reaction?”

“Uh,” Sonic responds intelligibly. He can feel his pulse in his throat, in his eyes, in his ears, blood rushing to his cheeks and neck and making it hard to hear anything beyond the thundering sound of his heart. "Yeah. Um." He pushes up to stand on unsteady legs and clutches the parcel to his chest. "I'm gonna go put this upstairs.”

"Alright," Maddie says slowly, unconvinced, watching Sonic scamper out of the room. She brushes the pine needles from her hair, purses her lips, and makes a mental note to ask him what the gift is when he comes back down later.

Sonic, safely out of Maddie’s sight, sprints up the stairs with enough speed to lift the varnish from the wooden flooring. With numb legs he relies on memory alone to do something as basic as walking and makes it to his room without taking a single breath. As soon as the door clicks shut, Sonic sinks onto the end of his bed, looks down at the brown bag in his lap, and draws in a heaving, shuddering inhale.

He glances inside the bag and sees the same print that had him skidding out of the room before Maddie could question why he looked so awestruck at the sight of a simple book. Sonic loves reading as much as the next guy, but this isn’t just any old book or comic, and certainly not one he wants to open in front of his immediate family — not when it’s a gift like this.

Sonic reaches inside of the crinkling brown paper and pulls out a hardback copy of A Brief History of Earth . It’s in mint condition, without a crack in its spine or a dogear to its pages. Sonic smooths his trembling fingers over the cover and realises immediately that this isn’t the same version as the one on his shelf but a newer, recent version dated 2019 in fine-print at the base of the front page. The same hunched-over hairy caveman is shaking hands with a spaceman on the cover, but there’s so much more to the artwork now; paintings of once-undiscovered species, of huge sea vessels, of technology, of flora and vegetation and things Sonic can’t focus on before his eyes flit to the next best thing on the cover. And, of course, behind the clasped hands lie the glowing marble of Earth and its loyal satellite of a whole, undestroyed Moon.

With shaking hands, he lifts the hardback cover, and comes face-to-face with what he had suspected. Who else would think to gift something so simple, yet so profound?

On the back of the hard cover, there are a few lines of neat handwriting in black ink. It's all old-fashioned cursive, with big, looped A's and low, swooping Y's and G's. Sonic thumbs over the ink and finds that it's smudged in places, likely still wet from when the words were written and the cover was closed.

Sonic,

I found this in the storage room during my recent stay in Rhyl. I thought you would appreciate it. It is a collector’s edition.

Merry Christmas.

Shadow.

Sonic barks a wet laugh. He finds that his eyes are damp and scrubs the tears from the corner of one. The message is so weird and so Shadow — blunt, factual, odd, lacking warmth unless you read in-between the lines, which is something Sonic is finding easier and easier to do when he’s around Shadow nowadays.

He thumbs over his signed name at the bottom. It’s a simple thing, but to have someone’s own signed name is like leaving a piece of themselves on paper, as if to say is this how you see yourself? 

Sonic closes the book, holds it tight to his chest, and exhales a deep breath. His heart thunders against the hardback cover and he realises after a moment that it doesn’t seem to want to stop. He stands up, legs weak, and tucks the book next to the older volume already on his shelf. As he lets his fingers linger on its spine, he realises there’s a slight tremble to them. “Oh,” Sonic mutters, looking down to his palm, with the realisation that they won’t stop shaking.

The book sits there innocuously between his other volumes, but Sonic can't help but let his gaze wander back to it. Shadow had been thinking of him. Shadow had seen this book, the specific one they’d read together, and his first thought had been Sonic would like this. When had he brought it back? When did he leave it under the tree? Did he sneak in last night? Why didn’t he just give it to me in person? Did I really love the gift that much? Is that why I’m reacting like this? 

Sonic falls to sit on his bed, staring over at the book on his shelf where, behind it, the walkie-talkie lays hidden. Would it be weird if I called him and thanked him for it now? Does he even want me to thank him? Sonic scruffs his fingers through the fur atop his head and drags them down to press against his mouth. What would I even say? ‘Thanks for the gift. Bye’. He probably just wants to sleep. I bet the guy’s still exhausted. Yeah, it’s best I don’t call. Sonic busies himself by folding the paper bag three-times over, feeling the paper crinkle gently beneath his fingertips. His heart is still racing, but now it's not just from the shock of the gift. Something else is churning in his gut, and Sonic can’t put a name to it. Is it apprehension? Maybe. Nervousness? That could be a possibility, too.

The only thing he knows for sure is that his hands are still shaking even once the adrenaline has worn off, and his heart is still thundering, and Sonic has absolutely no idea what to do about it.

Chapter Text

At the dawn of the new year, Tom and Maddie get chickens.

They're a gift from one of Maddie's twice-removed relatives, suggested after Maddie mentioned just how much they were spending on eggs every week trying to feed three teenage boys with bottomless appetites. The coop is second-hand from said cousin, and the chickens came with the deal; two older, fat hens that cluck and hiss when Sonic gets too close to them but really seem to like Knuckles. They live on a diet of vegetable scraps and are generally pretty low maintenance, and best of all, the eggs they produce are rich and flavoursome — so even though they don't really like Sonic, he'll tolerate them if it's a means to an end. The end being a delicious, protein-packed breakfast.

On one chilly morning in February, he finds himself on egg duty with Knuckles. The winter has been long — spring is dragging its heels, and for a place called Green Hills, there's precious little green to speak of. It's been a pretty bleak few months under a constant cloud of rainfall and misty mornings with short days and long nights, and Sonic just can't wait for the clocks to go forward. There's a cold snap in the air today but the sky is clear for once, and the breeze is fairly light, so they only don hats and gloves to make the trek to the garden’s fair end. The chicken coop sits enclosed by several meters of wire fencing. Sometimes the hens roam freely through the yard, but never in winter, and certainly not when Sonic's on egg duty. Last time that oversight happened, he was chased up a tree by Corn, the fattest hen, who's disarmingly fast when she wants to be. He'd rather keep all his fingers intact, thank you very much.

Knuckles and Sonic crunch down the frozen garden path step by step, huffing misty white breaths into the still-winter air. When they reach the bottom, Knuckles steps over the wire threshold and unclips the latch keeping the coops closed. Noisy with their welcoming clucks, Corn and Carrot, named by the cousin and certainly not Maddie, toddle out of their coops and into the fresh air. "Good morning, ladies," Knuckles greets. Carrot crowds around his feet, so he picks her up and tucks her under his arm. "You're warm this morning." He props up the white hen on his hip as if she were a baby. "And soft."

"And tasty."

Knuckles makes a face as if to say that's true , though he sets Carrot down as it feels wrong to comment on her potential deliciousness while she looks up at him with those big, trusting eyes. Her wings flutter before she settles onto her claws and toddles over to where Corn is, picking at some of the seed on the floor as if it's not quite the flavour she usually likes, but it'll make do, seeing as she's hungry.

"How many eggs did you lay today?" Sonic sings. He makes a move to step into  the chicken-wired threshold but Corn comes running up to protest her fury at him, wings splayed and beak open to demand he get off of her property. "Okay, okay! Jeez! What’s their problem?”

"They don't appreciate how you comment about eating them all the time," Knuckles remarks, stepping further into the coop to begin to collect the eggs.

"But we're literally eating their babies. Dude, that's worse."

Knuckles looks down at the warm egg in his hand with a frown.

They return to the kitchen a few moments later, with Sonic trying to console his troubled friend as he stares down at the basket of still-warm eggs like there’s blood on his hands. Tom's on breakfast duty, so the eggs and toast he serves up are a little burnt but they're still tasty. He's scheduled for afternoon patrol, and with Maddie at the veterinary clinic, they're fortunate to have at least one functioning adult in the house. Out of the three of them, the best chef (read: not awful) is Tails, but that's only because he understands the fundamental chemistry that comes with mixing compounds and heating them up. Sonic and Knuckles remain permanently banned from most appliances after microwaving tin foil — not once, but three times — though they are allowed to make boxed mac-and-cheese so long as it's with the induction stove and not the gas flame.

Breakfast is otherwise eaten over amicable chit-chatter. Knuckles remarks on how well Wade is doing in his upskilled Master Emerald protection training, and Tom remarks on how okay Wade is doing in his detective training. He still hasn't quite mastered the art of interrogation without crying, but they're getting there, Tom explains with his head in his hands. "They always end up interrogating him instead."

"I mean, you're just practicing with other officers, right? What happens when he faces an actual suspect?"

Tom’s groan speaks volumes. "I don't want to find out."

"Wade possesses a good heart," Knuckles defends loyally. "He is just gentle-spirited, which isn't a bad thing. The Master Emerald bonds with those who carry compassion."

Sonic presses his lips together, swallowing both his oversized bite of toast and his opinion about how easily he'd stolen the Master Emerald from Wade — not to mention how Wade had been using it as a hockey puck in broad daylight, ripe for theft. Wade and Knuckles are clearly buddies, and one uncomfortable revelation has already been too much for Knuckles today. Sonic doesn’t want to upset him with a second.

He’s trying to wash down the bite too big for his mouth with orange juice when a voice calls his name from upstairs. He gulps the juice and forces the macerated food down his gullet before calling back: "Yeah, Tails?"

"Can you come here for a second?"

Sonic downs the rest of his orange juice before setting the glass on the table and hopping from the chair. He jogs through the living room toward the staircase, where Tails waits at the landing, fidgeting with nervous energy. He gestures urgently for Sonic to hurry, which only deepens Sonic's frown as he takes the steps two at a time.

The Wachowski home grows narrower over each floor; the first holds a large master bedroom with beautiful bay windows, a family-sized bathroom, a spare bedroom used as an office space, and a utility closet, while the second-slash-attic floor is one room with sloped ceilings just about fitting the three of them and some rogue pieces of furniture. The attic doesn't have a fixed staircase leading up to its floor, just a folding wooden ladder that takes up one wing of the first floor's landing space, but it does the job.

Tails hovers on the landing, anxiously twisting one of his twin tails around his fingers, watching Sonic climb with worried eyes.

"What's up?" Sonic asks quietly, cautious that Tails, for whatever reason, might want a little privacy.

Tails doesn't respond, but does motion for Sonic to follow him as he turns on his heel and scampers up the wooden ladder leading up to the attic. Sonic frowns but follows nonetheless, climbing up the steps that groan beneath his weight. Once he's inside their bedroom, he lifts the attic's trap-door and sets it flush closed to give them some privacy. The blinds are up and the sun is pouring through the window and skylight, highlighting the messy space of their respective corners: one blue, one yellow, one red. Tails glances behind him to check that the door is shut just as his tails fan out. He takes a hold of one, worrying the white tipped fur with his fingers. "Is everything okay, buddy?" Sonic presses, keeping his voice low and his tone gentle.

Tails, suddenly bashful, nods towards Sonic's side of the room. Confused, Sonic walks over to his bed and fails to see anything different to how he left it just a few hours ago. He leans over to straighten up his pillow and it's then he notices a single scrap of paper on the headboard, haloed beneath a shaft of mid-day winter's light. He picks it up, the delicate paper crinkling softly between his fingers.

On the back of the Kroger receipt, written in perfect cursive, it reads: Saturday, ten-pm, Green Hills sign . No address, no signature, but Sonic knows who left it. Who else could it have been?

His fist closes around the paper, pressing it against his chest as mortification floods through him. He spins to face Tails, knowing his face must be crimson; he can feel every drop of blood rushing from his limbs to his head, heart hammering against his ribs, ears flattening in embarrassment. "Tails!"

"I'm sorry!" Tails whisper-cries, flushing, too. "I didn't mean to snoop! I just didn't want to move it, or have someone else find it!"

"Ugh!" Sonic turns away, clutching the note while his free hand rakes nervously through his quills. "Darn it."

"You don't have to be embarrassed, Sonic! You know I totally support what you’re doing with Shadow!"

And isn’t that a strange statement to be able to say?

After they had their teary talk back in December where Sonic spilled everything, it took several days for Tails to come around. Once he realized no genuine threat existed and Sonic wasn't being coerced, his fears took a back seat and, instead, he’d been eager to learn more about everything to do with Shadow; his power, his species, his history, how he managed to harness chaos energy so effortlessly, and what it means for them both with the weight of a secret this big. Tails wasn’t a gossip; he was a scientist, and information this extraordinary, with the potential to change how the world viewed space and time, was irresistible not to know.

His questions were easy to brush off in the beginning with: “I don’t know”s and “I can’t say”s but they only seemed to fuel Tails’ curiosity about their supposedly shared secret. After a few weeks of over-exaggerated winks every time he did so much as open the bedroom window, Sonic decided he had to set some boundaries and lay some ground rules before the situation spiralled beyond their control.

He reiterated to Tails, very carefully, that under no circumstances was he ever to breathe another word to anyone — including Knuckles — that Shadow was so much as alive, let alone in contact with Sonic. He deliberately omitted details about the den or the walkie talkie, keeping the information he shared brief and sharing just enough to satisfy Tails' curiosity without encouraging further investigation. He kept his descriptions of Shadow intentionally vague. Slipping up once didn't grant Sonic permission to expose him further, and maintaining what was left of their agreement was the least he could do to preserve Shadow's privacy and dignity.

Pragmatically, Sonic also needed Tails as an ally. Having someone to cover for his occasional disappearances was insurance against questions from Tom, Maddie, or Knuckles if they asked where he had been disappearing off to. And Tails, being the doting, awesome brother he was, would never hesitate to cover him if they did ask.

The downside to sharing this secret is that Tails often blows his responsibilities out of proportion and goes a little too far to defend Sonic's honour and, by proxy, his relationship with Shadow. He's doing it now; overcompensating, being a little too supportive to the point where Sonic's beginning to think Tails is getting the wrong message about just what he and Shadow are spending time doing. "We’re not in a relationship," Sonic clarifies sternly, schooling his expression into something stony to keep how he really feels from showing on his face.

Tails' little head cocks, brow furrowing. "I didn't say you were...?"

Through trying to diffuse his embarrassment, he’s only managed to trip himself up. Flushing harder, Sonic groans and looks away, tugging his quills down over his face. Again! he bemoans, hunching his shoulders up to his jaw. I'm only making this worse for myself!

To distract from his obvious embarrassment, Sonic unfurls his palm and looks down at the paper in his hand. He un-crumples the note to read the immaculate cursive text again, the exact same handwriting as the one in his atlas. Saturday, ten-pm, Green Hills sign. It could mean anything. Shadow might be intending to jump him. Hell, it could be a trick from Eggman (if he’s still alive) or Stone, who might have excellent copywriting skills. He wouldn’t put it past them.

"What do you think it means?" Tails prompts, his little feet shuffling closer behind Sonic.

Sonic's hackles go up again. He whirls around, hiding the note behind his back with an unconvincing shrug. "Dunno,” he excuses lamely.

"Do you think he wants to fight?"

"Fight?" Sonic chuckles. It diffuses the tension coiled in his shoulders. "That's a real polite way to ask someone to fight. Not to mention, not a very Shadow thing to do.” He annunciates the name with air-quotes. “He's much more a bust-down-your-door kind of guy rather than a send-you-an-invitation one."

That has Tails giggling into his palm. "Oh, man, that's true. Maybe it's just a friendly date, then?"

"A — a date ?"

"Yeah, y'know, like the one we do every Friday? Maybe he wants to go to the movies like you, Knuckles, and I do."

Sonic's heart thumps in his chest, swelling with affection in the face of Tails' naivety. Of course — that kind of date.

His free hand comes out to ruffle the front of Tails' head, and he smiles. Nothing but kindness reflects back in those big, blue eyes, proud of Sonic for mending bridges with their former enemy. "Maybe you're right," Sonic entertains, tone softening, despite the tight band he feels wrapped around his throat. “Though, Shadow and I aren’t exactly friends. We’re like…nearly-friends. I’m working on it.”

“Frenemies? Like you and Knuckles?”

Well, he’s not far off the mark. “Sure. Frenemies.”

"You're such a good friend, Sonic! To befriend a guy like Shadow after everything that happened to the point where he's inviting you to hang? Dude, that's so cool."

Sonic grins. "Keep those compliments coming!"

Tails rolls his eyes, his twintails swaying happily as he spins around to sit on his bed. "Though, I don't know when he came in." Tails glances over to the window. "I've been in the bathroom combing my fur all morning because it's moulting season and I’m shedding like crazy. If he came in, I would've heard him because your bed’s right on top of the bathroom. The window was definitely locked, and he didn't Chaos Control — my MilesElectric didn't pick up on any readings!"

"I dunno, Tails. He's a pretty stealthy guy."

"Yeah... He did get our butts when we first met him in Tokyo, didn't he?"

"Ugh, don't remind me. My ego still hasn't recovered from that."

"I doubt it."

Sonic delivers a flick to the centre of Tails' forehead, which he swats away and giggles at the gesture. A smile blooms on Sonic's face at the sound. He turns away and reaches toward the bookshelf near his bed and picks out the pristine, clean spine of the gifted atlas, opening the hardback's first page and slipping the receipt to rest between the glossy papers. It joins the rest of the memorabilia he's been collecting; the receipt from Christmas, a candy wrapper from Shadow, a dried pine sprig from the woods outside the den, a little doodle Sonic drew of himself and Shadow as chao. These are his keepsakes, there to keep memory of the moments, pressed between the glossy pages like kept secrets.

"So?" Tails presses, cocking his little fluffy head. "Are you going to go?"

Sonic closes the atlas with a whap and sets it back into the bookcase, tucked between manga and an old Ripley's Believe It Or Not. "Yeah," he says, "but you gotta keep this between the both of us, okay?"

"Absolutely! I wouldn't say anything." He mimics zipping his mouth closed. "Your secret is safe with me!"

The word 'date' hangs over him in neon, flashing lights for the rest of the week, swinging like a guillotine that seems to sway closer and closer each passing day. The thought alone keeps him from fully immersing in tasks and drags any of his wandering thoughts back to the same dilemma each and every time. The word lodges itself in his brain like chewed-up gum, clogging the moving cogs of his thoughts during the day and plaguing his sleep during the night. 

Why does that word make me feel so... icky? He chalks it down to nausea and food poisoning from a dodgy burrito for the first few days — the weak knees, the clenching stomach, the racing heart, and the cold sweats, but when it doesn't go away, Sonic begins to wonder if maybe the source of the feelings isn’t physical so much as it’s psychosomatic.

The feelings aren’t brand new. Ever since Sonic raced with Shadow at Christmas he knows things have been different — not in any kind of tangible way, and through no obvious reason, either. He can’t think of anything monumental that happened that night to trigger the change in his perspective, but for whatever reason, Sonic hasn’t felt like himself since gifting Shadow the den. He’s felt different — off.

It’s like when Reese’s suddenly changed the cocoa content in their candy without labelling it, and Sonic knew that something wasn’t right because it tasted sweeter than usual, but he had no evidence to prove it. That’s how he feels about himself and Shadow; like something has shifted, he just doesn’t know what.

During their first night in the den, he remembered noticing things about Shadow he’d never really paid attention to before, picking up on small details his thousand-mile-an-hour brain previously would’ve just glossed over; the way the fur at the corners of Shadow’s eyes was a little lighter than the red in his quills, the way that he had a small lisp and softened his consonants, and the way he bit on his top lip when concentrating or thinking about something tricky. Sonic supposed it was a by-product of spending more time with him — after all, he’d begun to do the same thing after Tails and Knuckles had moved in by proxy of being with them on a daily basis. It made sense, so Sonic went with the easy explanation. 

So, sure, things were a little different, and Sonic was feeling out of sorts, but it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t have to be anything weird. A ‘date’ could be anything.

But why does it still bother him so much? Do I secretly dislike Shadow? Is that why the thought of hanging with him makes me feel sick?

The thoughts plague his waking and sleeping time for days, showing up in dreams and wandering thoughts that leave him sleep-deprived and unfocused. It comes to a breaking point one night in the form of a particularly vivid nightmare, in which his dream-self is greeted at the door by a bouquet of roses and dream-Shadow dressed in a tweed suit asking him: “Are you ready for our date?”

Sonic wakes up in a cold sweat and gulps in deep, heaving breaths in the darkness of the room, vision sparkling at the corners. He crawls under the covers, digs his knuckles into his eye sockets, and screams silently into his pillow. No, he wails, as small flecks of multicoloured particles flash behind his closed eyes. Hell no. This has to stop!

Sonic draws in a deep, heaving breath and blinks his eyes open to stare into the pitch darkness of the space beneath his bedsheets. From across the room, Knuckles and Tails snore away, deaf to his inner turmoil even as he writhes around in bed and scrubs his head against his pillow as if it would scrub the dream from his memory.

Maybe it's just a phase, Sonic tries to reason with himself. I mean, I’m turning sixteen this year, so this could just be a part of puberty. Don’t normal kids my age in Disney movies start to get weird dreams and feel new, confusing emotions right around now? Maybe I’ll hit puberty and get acne and start to crush on girls and act super angsty. He exhales a shaky sigh into the plush fabric of his pillow. Yeah, that must be what it is. Just hormones, and my mind playing tricks on me.

Sixteen feels important; it feels like a milestone, and one he’s expecting to reach with fanfare and fireworks and the stunning moment where everything in his life finally falls into place. All of his recent, weird feelings will eventually go away once he works himself out of this funk. That must be it, he thinks to himself with a degree of reassurance. That must be why I’m suddenly feeling so weird inside.

But Sonic doesn’t get acne, and he isn’t really sure what Mobian puberty looks like at all. His voice has deepened a little over the last year, sure, but unlike Knuckles who seems to grow bulkier as the days go on, and Tails who’s developing patches of brown fur on the tips of his ears and shooting up like a beanstalk, he’s still the same old Sonic. He doesn’t know any girls his age to crush on like other kids in movies do, and other than the occasional flare of anger, he’s a pretty happy-go-lucky guy, all things considered.

Or maybe he’s just looking into this too much, panicking for no reason, and when he and Shadow next hang it’ll all make sense that this was one pointless excursion and everything will fall neatly back into place.

It's not like Sonic has anyone he can ask for advice, either. The only person who knows about Shadow's existence is Tails, and Sonic doesn’t feel comfortable talking about this with him lest it compromise Shadow’s privacy any further. Explaining his jumbled-up, nebulous feelings towards Shadow to anyone else through using a pseudonym would immediately raise alarm bells — he exactly can’t sit Tom down and explain that one of his friends is suddenly feeling some kind of way over his one-time nemesis. Not only would it directly implicate them both, but Sonic’s worried that he’ll hear advice that’ll ruin his perspective on their budding friendship.

What happens if I confide in someone and they tell me that I’m feeling this way because I secretly resent Shadow, and the guilt of it all is why I feel sick? What if I’m only noticing the small details of his behaviour and face because I’m nit-picking? What happens if Shadow really is going to lure me away on Saturday and shank me in a dark alley? I don’t have medical insurance!

Above all — above the chaotic feelings, and his worries, and the stupid ‘date’ word, Sonic just doesn't want anything to change. He likes what they have; that calm, synchronised understanding of what the other's thinking, how the other's feeling, the push and pull of their dynamic. He doesn't want to shatter the moment before it gets a chance to form, to reject Shadow, or to read the whole situation entirely wrong. Was this a date invitation? Have I been leading him on? All we’ve ever done is hang, run, and talk, just like normal friends do. Am I just overreacting? 

He draws in a deep breath and stares daggers into the pillows he’s been suffocating himself with. Yeah, probably.

Sonic decides enough is enough when he wakes up again at hell-freeze-over-o'clock a few days later on Friday morning moments after dream-Shadow hands him a bouquet of red and blue roses, and his dream-self doesn't even mind.

He doesn't even wait for the sun to rise before he sits up, snatches his iPad from the bedside table, and presses it on. The light sears the surface of his eyeballs, but he's too frustrated, sleep-deprived, and tummy-twisted to adjust it. Sonic pulls the sheets over his head so the screen's brightness doesn't wake Knuckles nor Tails and opens up the webpage to the forum he's been lurking on for the past few days to see if anyone else was in a similar predicament to him (which they were not, understandably). His fingers hover over the keyboard, unsure where to start, and decides that an honest brain-dump is his best bet. After all, if he wants relevant advice then he needs to be honest, no matter how confusing the situation might be.

r/Advice

Posted by u/Underscore-Netty2991 10 hours ago

Confused about my feelings!!!!

Hi everyone!!! Long time lurker first time poster. Im coming here to seek some advice becuz i dont know who else to go to.

Fr context im 15m and im friends wiht this guy (unknown age but he was alive in the 70s) (it sounds creepy but its rly not) . Basicalky we hang out togehter all the time but my brother (9m) said the other day that its like were going on a date and its not like he meant it in a weird way or anythinf but ever since then what he said rly bothered me in a weird way (keep getting dreams of us romanticalyl dating etc) 

This wouldnt be a problem but i have no other friends to ask this cos i dont go to school and my family arent allowed to know abotu him otherwise hell basically go to prison . And the thing is that the way i feel abt this guy is NOTHING like how i feel abt my brothers. Hell i dont even know how i feel abt the guy and thats why im nervos cos i know i dont know HOW i feel. Ive never had this problem before lol

I guess i just wanna know if this is a normal puberty thing???? Is it normal to want to impress yuor 1 guy friend a lot particularly becos hes so cool? Is it normal to want to spend all ur time with him and do cool shit so he thinks ur cool

Am i overreactimg? 

Plz no judgementsal comments - thx! 

u/PhillyCheeseCake 10hr

OP get the fuck out of there now and tell your parents and the police. This is fucked.

u/handoverthelemons 10hr

like u/PhillyCheeseCake said bro this is messed up u gotta get off reddit and tell ur parents dog

u/Tiny-Mountain1274 9hr

Upvote 

u/femmeponygirl 5hr

You are in danger. A 60+ year old man should NOT be meeting with a minor. Do NOT meet up with him any more.

u/Splendid-Catastrophy9800 8hr

OP please find somewhere to report this to. This is a federal crime. You are a victim.

u/peterpetercheesestringeater 7hr

you sound like you’re being groomed ….. please get off the internet and speak to your parents ASAP

Read 104 more replies

After a long nap, he reads through the comments over breakfast with a frown, and promptly edits his post.

r/Advice

Posted by u/Underscore-Netty2991 5 hours ago

RE: Confused about my feelings!!!! EDITED!!!!

I dont know how to edit posts and the other 1 was getting soooo many comments so i made a new post. First off thx everyone 4 the concern. I wanna be clearer cos the other 1 was misleading (and had lots of typos, which idgac abt, but will have less on this one promice) but the situation is pretty crazy so here goes:

I got adopted a few years back after moving to the US when i was a baby. Mom died when i was a baby so sort of am the only one i know out of my kind . Since getting adopted i now have 2 brothers (also adopted 9m and 17m, they r great lol) . Anyway last year there was this huge fight and i met this guy in the fight whos also the same kind as me (kind of, half) and we sort of shared a lot of moments. Also hes not 60 that was a typo hes my age lol (15 nearly 16) :) 

ANYYYYYWAYYYYY basically hes on the run (not gonna explain, nto my place) and ive let him crash at my place a few times. Hes got his own place now which i helped him get so were both seeing each other more. Hes had a lot of stuff happen to him in the past so ive bee n trying to get him to come out of his shell a little and hang out wit him more. Last week I got a note from him to say he wants to meet up this  saturday to go out like we always do. Brother #1 (9m, only one to know im speaking to this guy) said it could be a date which i hadnt ever considered…..

Im freaking out though cos i dontknow what to do?? Mom dad and other brother HATE this guy and i dont know how i feel and im getting crazy nervous for when we next meet now.  I dont go to school so i have no friends other than my brothers, him, and i guess some ppl in our town but no one my age and no on emy kind

I also only rly started having friends when i was 13 (i was living alone until then -- dont ask lol) 

I just want 2 talk to someone abut this becos im havning all these crazy dreams and feel weird about them. I dont want them but at the same time i read somewhere before that dreams are your unconscious thoughts which now has be scared cos is this how ive felt this entire time and im only NOW becoming aware????

I dont want anything to change between him and me. HELP!!!!!!

u/Trembling-Cup1873 5hr

Damn the US foster care system sucks ass lol

u/soupangel 5hr

Hi!!!! Maybe don’t use the term ‘my kind’ as it’s quite insensitive and dehumanises minority groups (of which I assume you’re referring to). Someone isn’t ‘half’ something. You are a whole.

u/wafflehousewarrior 5hr

maybe english isn’t op’s first language?

u/soupangel 5hr

It would still need to be translated. I’m just suggesting it’s worded quite insensitively.

Read 33 more replies

u/soupangel 3m

I love you too

u/the-utah-fireman 4hr

Dreams don’t have to mean anything. Your probably just overthinking it. Plus everyone kinda has a friend crush on their cool bros

u/charlottelouisecliff 4hr

Hey OP - why do your family dislike him so much?

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 3hr

He nearly killed my dad

u/charlottelouisecliff 3hr

With all due respect I don’t understand why you’d want to be with someone like that in the first place.

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 3hr

It was a rly messy situation basically he thought my adoptive dad was the guy that killed his sister so he sort of acted out til he realised what happened (my adoptive dad did NOT kill his sister)

u/Trembling-Cup1873 1hr

r/holyfuckjustbreakup

u/thatonechippyguy 4hr

I don’t mean to pry but as you mentioned you haven’t had many friends, are homeschooled (assuming) it’s likely you’re just making a new friend that isn’t one of your brothers for once which feels different. Do you receive counselling from a licensed therapist?

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 3hr

Nop

u/thatonechippyguy 1hr

After reading some of your replies down below I would really recommend it. Good luck, OP.

u/Mini-Corndog1964 4hr

sounds like you had a pretty rough childhood – first off, big hugs to you as that’s a lot to take in at sixteen! 💕 it sounds like you probably just have a crush lol. it can make things tricky if you’re queer and the other person isn’t (or is closeted) so i’m sending you all the good luck in the universe!!

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 3hr

Thx thats really kind of yuo to say . Sorry for asking but what does that mean?

u/Mini-Corndog1964 3hr

i’m assuming you mean ‘queer’ and ‘closeted’? 

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 3hr

Yeh

u/Mini-Corndog1964 2hr

well, queer can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. it typically refers to anyone who isn’t cisgender (gender assigned at birth) or heterosexual (being attracted to the ‘opposite sex’). every queer person interprets the word differently so there isn’t a clear cut definition. closeted means someone who isn’t openly ‘out’ about their queer identity. hope that helps! <3

u/meanbeanmachine 4hr

It seems you sort of know what you’re feeling. Do /you/ feel like it’s a crush?

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 3hr

I have no idea becos in movies it shows all butterflies and crap and i dont feel like that. I dont even know if i have a crush on the guy its just like worst case scenario

u/meanbeanmachine 3hr

Disney movies are garbage representation. A crush doesn’t feel the same way from person to person, it can be super intense or just a tiny bit. If you like the guy a little more than you do a friend (which I appreciate is pretty difficult since you said you don’t have any friends, sorry about that BTW) and he’s on your mind / all you think about / makes you feel nervous and shy, then you probably have a crush.

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 3hr

What if i also kind of wanna fight him

u/meanbeanmachine 2hr

You want to engage in an emotional / physical tousle with him because…you feel a certain way about him? Hate to break it to you but you’re not making your case any weaker, friend.

u/Alejandro-Ten-Toes 3hr

Suck on deez nuts

u/Flapping-Tabletop0096 2hr

103.205.104.102

u/Alejandro-Ten-Toes 1hr

I’m sorry

u/DanielDoesDrums 3hr

Sounds like you’ve got a crush bud. Good luck.

u/bowserismyhusband 3hr

How exciting! Best of luck on your date. My best word of advice is to go in confident. Dress nice, look good, and you feel good :-) 

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 3hr

Thx. What do u recommend?

u/bowserismyhusband 3hr

You’re a teenager so maybe some of this is new to you but make sure you’re always super clean. Brush your teeth and hair, lots of deodorant, and clean clothes. Biggest piece of advice is to be yourself. 

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 2hr

Damn thats actually really helpful. Thanks so much u/bowserismyhusband

u/bowserismyhusband   2hr

No worries. Again, best of luck! Keep us updated with what happens.

u/LegalEagleBeagle 2hr

Please comment this on r/adviceforteens next time

u/bowserismyhusband 2hr

Don’t be a dick

u/dhwjfhwefqhidowhwowoi 2hr

https://www.grammarly.com/punctuation  

u/CookiesRUs 2hr

Hey OP. As a fellow adoptee who immigrated over to the US, I found it really helpful to connect to my culture the older I got. (づ ◕‿◕ )づ It might help you come to terms with why you’re feeling confused/the way you do. Hope this helps! ٩(＾◡＾)۶

Read 36 more replies

The comments are a minefield. 

Sonic has a list of words, terms, and phrases he hadn't even heard before added to his lexicon. He had hoped for clear-cut answers assuring him that this was a normal feeling for boys his age to experience and that yes, he was overreacting a little, but instead of closing doors he feels like another twenty have appeared, all with a scary monster hiding behind, waiting to pounce at him as soon as he twists the handle. 

One comment in particular stands out amidst the confusion: Connect to your culture. 

He's glad that he’s decided to hole himself away for the afternoon because he wouldn't feel comfortable having Knuckles nor Tails read these over his shoulder. Fortunately, Tom and Maddie are at work with it being mid-afternoon on a Friday, and both Tails and Knuckles are occupying themselves in the garden trying to fix their human slingshot contraption. Sonic, having escaped from the chaos unnoticed, had put the latch on the attic door when he slammed it shut so he knows, categorically, that no one's going to sneak up behind him and ask him why he's googling the words hedgehog culture.

Because of all things mentioned in the comments, this feels the most approachable — a safer direction than confronting the jumbled feelings triggered by the ‘date’ comment and the responses in the forum that, unfortunately, confirm what he’d been so anxious about.

Those can go to the back-burner for now.

Connect to my culture. Sonic frowns as he re-reads that comment. What exactly is his culture? He's seen the word used quite frequently online but has never really felt that he fits into somewhere that's culturally him .

He opens up a blank white page on his iPad and draws a big triangle using the touch-sensitive pen Tails made him. At the top he writes: 'What am I?' as a title, and in the triangle’s top percentile he writes ‘Mobian hedgehog’.

Sonic knows that hedgehog Mobians definitely have their own specific culture. Surely back home, there's celebrities and popstars and politicians and heroes who look just like him, but it's not like he's able to Google the term and find a Tumblr blog dedicated to the cause. Sonic hasn’t stepped foot on Mobius since he escaped with Longclaw over a decade ago, and his memories of his childhood are patchy at best. Sonic frowns and draws some red question marks next to the term. 

He's reminded again that the only person who looks just like him — a Mobian hedgehog — is Shadow, but no one really knows what his race or origins are considering he crash-landed on Earth from an unknown location with no memories of where he came from. Both of them look alike and have similar features, like super speed and the ability to harness chaos energy, but Sonic can't warp chaos energy like Shadow can, and Shadow is ageless, so maybe he's part-hedgehog part-something-else? Either way, there would be no point in asking Shadow what he knows about Mobian hedgehog culture. They’re both stuck, it seems.

He figures that the best thing to do would be to strip the 'hedgehog' out of the equation and look at just Mobian culture, but Knuckles and Tails aren't keen to speak about time back home. Knuckles lived a pretty insular and tragic life after the eradication of the Echidna Clan (which Sonic has carefully avoided speaking to him about, seeing as their history tends to overlap and they're both on the opposite ends of the stick) and Tails avoids all discussions about anything related to his pre-Earth excursion. From what fragments of stories Sonic has gathered, he wasn't living a life worth staying for, so that's another no-go. What I would give to have asked Longclaw a little more about back home while she was around…Mobian culture's a write-off, Sonic grumbles to himself silently.

He takes his pen and draws a red line through the word ‘Mobian’ in his pyramid and underlines ‘hedgehog’ instead. Sonic frowns deeper. Hedgehog culture . It sounds strange and funny, even to his own ears. At least he has a starting point though, right? Maybe understanding Earth hedgehogs could give him some insight into himself, and by extension, into whatever these confusing feelings might be. Maybe he’ll open up Wikipedia and find out that male hedgehogs just have a close affinity to one another, and it’s a totally normal, not-to-be-concerned-about thing.

Deciding to get comfortable, Sonic cleans the screen of his iPad with the corner of his quilt before he leans a little further back on his cushions, tucks his knees up, and lays the iPad flat to his thighs, booting up Google. He hesitates momentarily, feeling awkward and embarrassed over searching up what feels like such a silly topic, before he taps the search bar and types in what is hedgehog culture .

Most of the top results in true Google fashion are advertisements, followed by links to folklore websites discussing hedgehogs in pop culture and media. Not quite what he's looking for, particularly when the hedgehogs in children's fables are seen as small, demure creatures that serve tea and scones or roll up in balls and get hit by cars, always straddling the 'sweet, fuzzy critter' category and 'roadkill' category. 

He frowns and scrolls further until he comes across a result from hedgehogstreet.org which looks like it might be a little closer to what he's searching for. He taps the result and the page pops up onto his screen; it's clearly angled towards children, with size 40 Comic Sans font and bright, contrasting colours. At least it makes it a little easier to read through without the snooze-fest that online articles usually are. Sonic adjusts his legs so he's a little more comfortable on his bed before he begins to scroll the website's home page.

As expected, the photos are of orange-sized puff balls with fluffy tummies and sweet, big black eyes. Sure, we both have quills and roll up into balls, but I'm meant to be related to…this? He frowns down at a photo of a hedgehog in someone's back garden drinking out of a water bowl. At least Tom never made me do that.

He taps on the 'ALL ABOUT HEDGEHOGS' banner at the top of the page and is taken to the first page on a series of articles about hedgehogs' behaviours, history, and mannerisms. It talks about where hedgehogs are native to (and Sonic learns that the US is not one of those places — he tucks that fun fact to a corner of his brain because he knows Shadow will find it fascinating). The page, once again, covers the hedgehog's role in literature, where most of them are pictured as meek, old creatures. He frowns. This is nothing like me.

Or Shadow, for that matter. Shadow, who's all sleek darkness and coiled power. Nothing meek or old or demure about him (well, maybe old) — not like these little creatures. He shakes his head to ward off his wandering thoughts and focuses back on the page at hand.

Sonic scrolls a little further down and moves swiftly past the section titled 'delicacies' to the bottom of the page where a handy directory allows for him to choose various other articles dedicated to hedgehogs. They're listed almost chronologically, with 'biology' smack bang at the top. It seems like the next logical step to take so Sonic taps on it. He rolls onto his tummy while the WiFi chugs underneath the request, and sets his iPad propped up on the case's folded lid so he can use it like a monitor. Sonic kicks his feet up into the air behind him as the screen springs to life, displaying a wall of text next to a photo of a very adorable-looking hedgehog on its back curled into a ball.

Sonic knows about hedgehogs as much as the next person does, which is to say not much. He's never really done any research into the topic because he's never felt the need to, so reading this page and looking at something that's supposedly related to him feels bizarre. Sonic blinks down at the photo of the tiny brown hedgehog and expects something in him to recognise it as kin, or feel a connection on a deeper, more animalistic level, but he doesn't. The photo on the iPad's screen is alien to him. Outside of them sharing similar characteristics, Sonic couldn't feel any more different to every other living hedgehog on Earth. Well , he muses, the corner of his mouth ticking up. All but one.

His eyes scan the page, speaking the words aloud to himself. "'An adult hedgehog's body is around 20-30cm long'…well, that's wrong. 'Their spines are…' yadda yadda yadda. Where's the juicy part?" 

He scrolls further down the page, past the biology facts that he can barely relate to. The 'senses' bit catches his attention so he scrolls back up and learns that, apparently, hedgehogs have relatively poor eyesight and instead rely on their sense of smell and hearing to navigate the world. Sonic blinks a few times, as if he's testing his eyes. Is my eyesight bad? He's able to read things just fine, and see colour pretty well, but he's never been tested. Maybe he'll ask Maddie; she’s bound to know. 

Then again, Shadow's vision seems perfectly sharp; always watching, always tracking, spotting the tiniest details from a distance, like how they seem to follow Sonic's every movement even when he doesn’t feel himself being watched. Another way we’re different from Earth hedgehogs, he supposes.

He learns that most hedgehogs are brown or blonde, and can even be albino. "Can't relate," he murmurs, scrolling a little further. When he gets to the bottom page, this time, Sonic takes a better look at the directory. The next in the list is 'habitats', followed by 'what do wild hedgehogs eat?' and smack-bang below that is 'courting and mating habits'.

Sonic slams the face of his iPad down on the bed, mortified, plunging the room into relative darkness.

"Ew," he grimaces. "Ew, ew, ew!"

Sonic isn't civilised like the other kids his age; he doesn't wear clothes, he doesn't go to school, he doesn't bathe as frequently as he should and he sure as hell doesn't have a standard of behaviour G.U.N. looks fondly upon, but the word mating is so un civilised it even makes him physically cringe. He takes a moment in the silence of the room to allow the thundering of his heartbeat to settle and talks himself down from freaking out. The topic feels mature and inappropriate and very much out of his comfort zone so he swiftly moves on from that section and taps on 'habitats' instead.

Unsurprisingly, this also couldn't be far from the truth for him; Sonic, in fact, does not enjoy sleeping beneath hedges and living in the moorlands. He considers all of the contents a write-off and moves next to ‘diet’, which is, at least, a little more interesting. A handy diagram shows a range of creepy crawlies ranging from worms to crickets to millipedes that Sonic honestly probably wouldn't pass up, so long as they were deep fried and tossed in some ranch dressing. When he was with Longclaw, they mainly ate fruits and vegetables and any other perishable items they could get their hands on from nearby farms and orchards. Maddie does her best to incorporate their five-a-day into mealtimes, and even though he's not a picky eater, Sonic is a beige foods kind of guy. But hey, he'll try anything once.

He scrolls to the bottom of the page and purses his lips at the 'next section' arrow practically blinking at him with neon lights. Sonic's finger hovers over the iPad but he can't bring himself to tap it, so he scrolls back up to the directory and taps the only other title in the 'all about hedgehogs' section that interests him: hibernation.

Surprisingly, he finds himself relating to something his furry brown cousins go through. Sonic reads aloud: "'Hedgehogs are one of the few mammals that are true hibernators. During hibernation hedgehogs are not really asleep, instead they drop their body temperature to match their surroundings and enter a state of torpor'... what the heck is that?" Sonic clicks on the hyperlinked text which brings him to a lengthy Wikipedia page on torpor and the ins-and-outs of animal hibernation practices. He doesn't have the attention span to read more than a few sentences on the painfully black-and-white page so he goes back to the hedgehogstreet.org website and continues the article on hibernation.

"This makes sense," he murmurs as the article explains hibernation cycles. While Sonic doesn't totally wind down like a woodland hedgehog would, he does tend to feel a little more sluggish over the winter period compared to Knuckles and Tails, but he's always chalked it down to the winter blues. Feeling bolstered and a little more reassured by that nugget of information, Sonic reads through the rest of the page, happy that he's found a new piece of information that connects him to Earth's hedgehogs. Gotta show this to Tom later! Then maybe he'll let me lie in if it's for biological reasons. Ha. He wonders if Shadow experiences the same winter lethargy. They've never discussed it, but now he finds himself curious about all sorts of things he's never thought to ask before.

Sonic reaches the bottom of the page and finds himself stuck in the same dilemma as earlier. The words ‘courting and mating habits’ draw his attention like they're magnetic, and he finds himself stuck in a moral tug-of-war. It shouldn't feel wrong to learn more about himself — after all, most kids have already gotten the birds and the bees talk by their parents by now — but Sonic isn't most kids and this kind of thing has never really posed an issue for him before.

At least, not until now.

It might be nothing, he reasons, sucking his bottom lip. And you're growing and getting older — this might be handy! Maybe hedgehogs go through a weird puberty? It's always better to be prepared — sooner's always better than later! And hey, maybe this'll answer some of the questions about how I've been feeling funky recently.

He hesitates. It's not like I know of any lady hedgehogs, so what use will this information be, anyway?

Sonic bites his lip and glances over to the hatch door to check that it's definitely, definitely latched, and with a little too much force, Sonic stabs the screen of his iPad to open up the next page. It's unassuming and user-friendly like the rest but he feels, somehow, like he's not meant to be here. Maddie and Tom have carefully avoided this kind of topic and Sonic only knows what he knows from movies and scouring the internet. This feels like taking a step for the first time into unknown, out-of-bounds territory.

Sonic's eyes glaze over information on the page, not wanting to process it quite yet, practically staring with crossed eyes as he tries to find a spot of information that feels safe to digest. He skims over the first paragraph because the word ‘sexual’ jumps out at him and — ew — he's not reading about that. He jumps straight to the second paragraph and reads it out loud under his breath: "'Males attempt to woo females in lengthy encounters that involve much circling and—”

Sonic cuts himself off as he buries his face into his covers with a muffled scream.

Mortified, Sonic slams his iPad's cover closed blindly and tosses it further down his bed so it's out of reach and out of mind. He screams silently again, biting the covers, before he rises for air and drags his hands down his face. He then proceeds to roll back and forth over the bed, tangling himself with his covers, chewing on the corner of his sheets to try and rid some of the embarrassment surging through his body. Sonic’s frustrated cry is muffled by the quilt between his teeth.

Circling. Like when he and Shadow raced in those spiralling patterns on the hillside, their movements synchronised as if they'd rehearsed it a thousand times.

This was a mistake. This was all a mistake. Screw you, Reddit user CookiesRUs. Sonic lets go of the quilt and slaps his face with his hands, fighting every single thought that tries to do so much as to remind him of the dance he and Shadow did on the hill near Christmastime. He didn't do it with the intention to attract Shadow, it just felt natural and right, like they were playing. Besides, Shadow reciprocated too, didn't he? And it didn't feel weird. I'm making this weird!

He beats his head into the covers and screams silently. 

Tomorrow, he bemoans, trying to escape his mortification by closing his eyes and burying his head in the sand. I’m meeting him tomorrow — but I’m totally cool! I’m fine! Don't overthink this.

“Ow,” a muffled voice beneath the floorboards grunts as the wooden hatch of their door thumps. “My head.”

“It’s a push, not pull, Knuckles,” Tails reminds him. “How did you bang your head on something like that?”

Sonic quickly scrambles to his feet, fighting the tangled covers around his body. He slips his iPad under his covers and presses his hands to his cheeks to feel if he’s blushing. He is — big time.

“Oh, it’s locked.” The door is knocked a few times. “Sonic? You good?”

“Yeah!” His voice cracks over the word. Sonic winces, and slaps his already-burning cheeks. Get it together! “One second!”

He quickly makes his bed and takes a deep, measured breath. It’s fine, he urges. Everything is fine. Act natural. 

But as he walks to the door and unlatches it, meeting Tails’ and Knuckles’ oil and soot-smeared cheeks, Sonic can’t help but feel his stomach flip. They can’t see inside his mind, they can’t possibly know what thoughts are bolting through his consciousness, but Sonic feels bare and exposed as if they know exactly what’s on his Google search history and they know, somehow, that Sonic’s having a quarter-life crisis. He steps aside, letting them climb up as they continue their conversation, and laces his fingers together at the back of his sweaty neck. 

Sonic can't just unsee the parallels: the way every comment practically came to the same conclusion, the strange feelings, the way his behaviour could be seen as ‘courting’ — all of it is a punch to the gut wrapped up neatly with a bow and tagged: YOU HAVE A CRUSH!

He makes a strange sound aloud, a mix between a whine and a groan, like the psychological blow physically landed. His fingers, knotted at the knuckle, tighten on his neck as he draws in a deep breath. 

Okay, hypothetically, even if I do have a crush, it doesn’t need to be anything big or romantic. Guys have crushes on other famous guys all the time. Tom loves Tom Brady more than he loves members of his own family. A deep sigh whistles out of his nose. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s only a tiny, teeny one, anyway. I hardly know the guy! And now that I know what I know, it means I can reign it in a little. Yeah, problem solved. Crisis averted. I’m as cool as a cucumber.

“Sonic?” Tails calls. Sonic’s head snaps over, lost in thought, watching as Tails unearths a remote control from his bedside table trawler. “The slingshot is fixed. Knuckles is gonna try it out; we’re gonna launch him over the garage. Wanna come watch?”

“Yeah,” he says, sounding unconvinced. Sonic clears his throat, and slaps a smile on his face. “Yeah, sure. Anything to get me out of this room.”

Chapter Text

On the night of March the first, Sonic finds himself waiting in the cool air beneath the huge, hand-painted sign welcoming every passerby into Green Hills. The sun has long since set, plunging the town into a purple-hazed dusk with dew-thick air that smells of fresh rainfall and vegetation. The spring peepers chirp from the foliage, promising a tepid night to come if the sudden change in weather over the week is anything to go by. It’s not warm by any means, but ten degrees is practically toasty for Montana this time of year.

Sonic has brushed his quills and his teeth, and tried to coax the rats' nest on his head into some kind of semblance resembling a groomed version of his usual mat of quills. He had considered using hair pomade — the kind Tom and Maddie use — but the smell really put him off, and the last thing he wants is to be self-conscious the entire night reeking of VO5 after putting in the work to get clean in the first place. He’s trying to make an effort, as per the forums and websites recommended, but even he has to draw the line somewhere.

While he waits for Shadow, he does a few laps of the town just to keep his body warm and his nerves at bay, breaking a sweat that does little to quell the swarm of butterflies taking flight in his stomach.

This is their seventh meeting ever since Shadow slipped back into Sonic's life in the autumn of 2024 to collect his inhibitor ring. With the introduction of the den, Shadow has, bit by bit, begun to look more like his healthy, old self. Gone is the all-hackles-no-fur look he was sporting; nowadays he's groomed, has regained muscle mass, and has a shine to his eyes he'd previously lacked. He's still flighty, and still walks around with the knee-jerk reaction to look over his shoulder when a dark shadow passes too close; a soldier free from the war but still trained to interpret every little anomaly as a grave threat. But, on the brighter side, he's smiling more. Maybe not physically, because Sonic isn't sure Shadow's quite capable of that (yet), but Sonic can feel the smile. Energetically.

This meeting should be like any other they've had, but with the seed planted by Tails, Sonic can't help but spiral down the hole that tells him he's misjudged this relationship from the beginning. He's been questioning everything over the last few days, so tonight feels more significant than any of the other times they've met. It feels like a test Sonic hasn’t studied for, one he’s bound to fail without knowing how to answer the questions correctly.

After his umpteenth lap of the town, he slows to a jog back at the weathered, wooden billboard and searches for any sign of Shadow. He half expects him to make himself known like he always does; elusive, popping out of the bushes like a wild animal, or swinging down from the trees and planting himself on the sign like a ninja.

What he doesn't expect, however, is for Shadow to arrive with an announcement. Without keeping him waiting too long past ten o'clock, Sonic hears, rather than sees, Shadow's grand entrance from the long stretch of road extending miles from the I-90 into Green Hills. A rumbling growl in the distance materialises into two front headlights, peeling down the long and narrow highway in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes. The bike grumbles as it slows to a halt just a few feet away from Sonic, purring like a big black cat. Shadow leans to the side and props it up with one foot, exuding an aura of intangible coolness that has Sonic feeling small and shy in his presence.

The dust and wind have blown Sonic's carefully-manicured quills away from his face, but he pays it no mind, entranced instead by the beautiful, sleek bike Shadow's riding like a knight on horseback.

"Woah," Sonic remarks, reaching out to touch the shiny, black frame of the bike. It's stunning, with red accents and a powerful engine that rumbles under the press of his palm. "What is that? "

Shadow taps its engine with the tips of his fingers. There's a prideful edge to his expression; a gleam in his eyes, a barely-there uptick to the corner of his mouth. "Not mine," he responds. "I'm borrowing her."

Sonic's smile grows at the use of the pronoun. "Her?"

"Dark Rider is a strong name for a strong bike."

"Dark Rider, huh." Sonic chuckles, thumbing over the print of the name on the tail-end of the bike. It's gorgeous and sleek and totally Shadow. "Y'know, this kind of looks like the one you rode all the way back in Tokyo."

"What, the one I beat you with?"

That earns another laugh from Sonic. "Damn, roasting me straight off the bat!"

Shadow glances away to hide his own, small smile, and Sonic wants to chase it, wants to hold him still just so he can take a mental snapshot and squirrel the photo away. 

Woah, easy there, tiger, he chides himself. He feels like he’s snatched his ballooning feelings by the scruff of its neck before it has the chance to make him do something stupid, but now that he’s got them in the palm of his hand, Sonic isn’t sure what else to do with them, so he just lingers by the bike instead and takes the opportunity to stroke its engine again. How many times can I do that before it gets awkward? Am I already making this awkward for him? Can he tell I’m nervous? Wait, why the heck am I nervous? Stop making this weird when it doesn’t need to be!  "Does the owner know you're borrowing her?" Sonic asks, hoping his attempt at small talk doesn’t come across as plastic as it feels in his mouth.

"No," he says, "though, what you don't know won't harm you."

Shadow steps off the bike and props it up with its stand, positioning himself behind the seat with his arms crossed. Sonic looks up through his lashes to Shadow with a bashful grin, and asks: "Can I rev it?" The question comes out a little flirtatious, though totally unintentional, and Sonic immediately mentally kicks himself. Stop making this weird! He’s overthinking every detail and feels like he’s treading on eggshells, double-guessing every little move and over analysing every word, every phrase, every pronunciation, thinking have I always said it like that?

Shadow, fortunately, hasn’t picked up on Sonic’s inner turmoil. He gestures to the bike with a nod of his head and says: "Be careful with her."

He twists his hand back, wrist flexing, as the bike growls beneath his touch. Sonic whoops in delight, face lighting up, as he does it again and again. "That's enough," Shadow chides, though without much bite, and allows Sonic to do it a few more times before he shoves him away.

"Can I ride it, too?" Sonic asks, rounding the bike.

Shadow raises a brow. "Have you ever driven a bike before?"

"Uh — yeah, of course."

He rolls his eyes. "You’re a terrible liar. Hop on the back. As much as I'd like to watch you fail, I won't let this bike be damaged. Mine or not, a vehicle this beautiful doesn't deserve to be tarnished."

With Shadow re-positioned at the front, Sonic climbs onto the sleek, leather seat and hesitantly places his arms around Shadow's middle. His palms press flat over the black and white fur of his chest, and before he has a chance to remark on just how rapidly he can feel Shadow's heart beating beneath his palm, they're off, kicking up dust and wind as Shadow tears into the night sky with the rev of an engine and the squeal of tyres on tarmac. Sonic whoops with delight as the bike swerves a little before accelerating from zero to sixty in mere seconds. Light work, of course.

Speeding down the highway at someone else's mercy takes some getting used to. It's different from running; here, you surrender your safety and put blind faith in whoever's manning the vehicle, hoping they'll keep you safe. Sonic, a self-acknowledged control freak, finds it difficult to relinquish that control, but giving it to Shadow comes easier than expected. Although he doesn't find running particularly taxing, it's refreshing to experience such high speeds while enjoying the scenic view; the low hills bracketing the road, miles of valleys scalloping against the night sky, the scent of hot tarmac and forestry filling the air as the wind whips through his quills, destroying the clumsy styling effort he'd made. The extra grooming may have been for nothing, but he can't find it in himself to care as the bike kicks up another notch and they head down a dip in the hill.

Shadow maintains the bike at a brisk pace, driving well over a hundred and twenty with the practiced ease of an expert. Sonic watches as the road beneath his sneakers flattens out and the hills around them turn short and stout, rock-tipped with patches of heavy green forestry. The night sky is crystal clear. This far from light pollution and civilisation, Sonic can spot the cosmos and galaxies in pockets of purple and milky blue. He presses his cheek to Shadow's back and watches the stars above twinkle, lulled by the warmth of his body and the rumble of the bike beneath them.

"Where are we going?!" he calls, voice nearly swallowed by the wind rushing past their bodies.

"Away!" Shadow calls back, his low voice barely carrying over the engine's roar.

They drive for miles upon miles, until Sonic feels comfortable enough to loosen his grip on Shadow's middle. In a daring display of cockiness, he tips backwards off the bike and nearly has his head scalped by the wheel, but Sonic kicks into a spindash at the last moment and hits the tarmac like a swallow diving into water. He quickly catches up with the bike in a trail of lightning blue, feeling the familiar burn of exhilaration, adrenaline, and something else — something sweet and fiery and addictive — coursing through his veins. He slows to a run and glances up at Shadow, still on the bike, who looks torn between amusement and exasperation. "Think you can keep up?"

"I beat you once on a bike, hedgehog," Shadow challenges, fixing his gaze ahead. "Let's make it twice."

Shadow peels off down the motorway with the growl of his engine. Sonic, with a bleat of laughter, jogs to keep up with him, hopping and skipping and running backwards with a cocky raise of his brow.

Shadow, frustrated with the pageantry from his opponent, kicks up the speed and rips off with the acrid smell of burning rubber. A true challenge this time. No more entertaining.

Sonic follows suit as his legs move faster, blurring with their speed, catching up with the bike's pathway and running alongside it. They weave in and out of each other's paths, taunting and baiting and nipping at heels, each showing off in their own way; Sonic with flips and somersaults, Shadow by Chaos Controlling the bike in flashes of crimson that light up the open road like fireworks. When Sonic gains speed, Shadow's suddenly there, veering into his path, and when he peels ahead with the squeal of his tyres, Sonic takes it as his chance to really run, sneakers slapping the concrete a hundred times a second.

Neck-and-neck, whooping with laughter, Sonic wonders why he’d been so nervous in the first place. Of course this didn’t have to be weird — why would it? They’ve never needed an explanation for their friendship before and Sonic’s never been a labels kinda guy, anyway. He lets the lingering anxiety in his stomach flutter away with each pounding step he takes, catching up to Shadow’s impressive speed a few metres ahead.

They reach a sharp bend that veers right, taking them away from a cliff edge that overlooks the verdant valleys of Montana. Sonic spots it a second later than Shadow does because, before he knows it, the bike is leaned nearly to its side and a set of nasty claw marks are gouged into the concrete as Shadow reaches the curve of the road's arc and hinges the bike's trajectory with one hand on the handlebars and the other sunk into the road, acting as an anchor. He practically slingshots himself around and when he's safely cleared the sharp bend, he pulls his hand out of the concrete, shakes off the dust, and places it back on the bike's other handlebar to rev it and peel off with a growl.

Sonic, mouth suddenly dry at the sight and suaveness of the display, promptly stumbles over his own feet and faceplants into the ground.

He tumbles several times and comes to a shambolic stop a few feet down the road, knees and forehead grazed and gloves scuffed. Sonic groans into the air around him. He's not in pain, just really, really embarrassed. Way to go, you smartass, he curses.

A moment later a hand enters his field of vision, offering help to stand. Sonic blinks up at Shadow's face and knows he must be pouting, but he takes it anyway, getting yanked back to his feet. "Two-nil," Shadow remarks with a small smirk.

"No fair."

"Not my fault you can't stay on your own two feet."

Sonic brushes down his dusty thighs and bloodied knees. They're not too sore, but his ego is certainly bruised. "I got distracted," he says.

"Always full of excuses, aren't you?"

"Hey, you're the one on the bike."

"If anything, shouldn't that be a handicap?"

"Handicap-shmandycap."

Shadow rolls his eyes. "Get on." Sonic doesn't protest, hopping onto the bike behind Shadow again, who gives him a moment to ready himself before he peels back out onto the open road and glides down the I-90. Sonic wraps his arms around Shadow's chest without hesitation this time, and decides to keep quiet, watching the scenery around them. They're well beyond Green Hills' jurisdiction by now, away from its sleepy, sloping hills and instead traversing the peaks of the Absaroka mountain outskirts, driving along ridges with fifty-metre drops to the rocky crags below. The shattered moon above is nearly at its peak, so Sonic assumes they've been out here for over an hour, likely nearing midnight. The air feels no cooler than when he first left the house, though perhaps that's the warmth in his blood talking.

Some time later, Sonic feels the bike begin to slow to a crawl. He shifts to look over Shadow's shoulder. "Why're you slowing down?"

"Low on gas!" Shadow calls back, tapping the engine at the front of the bike.

Sonic whistles. "Fat chance out here." They're in the middle of nowhere. The road is narrower in these parts and has suffered greater wear and tear, with crumbling edges succumbing to Mother Nature's clawing fingers; weeds and wildflowers edge the strip in a colourful border. They haven't passed any houses, streetlamps, or signs of life for miles. Out in the sticks like this, they could travel for hours before encountering another soul.

There's something oddly familiar about it though; whether it's the scent of pine, or the sight of a poorly patched-up crater in the road, Sonic feels a sense of recognition. Haven't I been here before?

Then, suddenly, it hits him like a punch. He blinks several times in shock and rises up from his seat so he's a little taller than Shadow, pointing ahead over his shoulder. "Hey, I know where we are!"

"You do?"

"Yeah." Sonic casts his eyes behind him, looking towards the treeline. He definitely recognises that. "Tom and I were here when we were — uh, on the run. There's a gas station not too far away, and a bar that sells great chilli dogs that I may or may not be banned from."

"...you got banned from a bar?"

"Yeah, long story, I'll tell you about it on the way back. But I swear if you keep going for a few more miles it'll come up on the right."

Shadow grunts, considering his words. He drums his fingers on the bike's handlebars, focusing his gaze on the tips of his gloves. "Is it densely populated?" he asks, apprehension evident despite his attempt to mask it.

It wasn't the response Sonic was expecting, but it also doesn’t come at a surprise. Shadow may be improving at handling new sensations and experiences, taking greater strides into the unknown, but he's still considered a fugitive. Sonic settles back down onto the seat but keeps his head peeking over Shadow's shoulder, trying to catch his eye, but Shadow deliberately stares ahead at the handlebars. "You're worried about that? We're outside of Green Hills."

Shadow's mouth twists. "You can never be too sure, Hedgehog. I don't want to take unnecessary risks."

"Hey." He places a hand over Shadow's on the handlebar and feels it tense beneath his fingers. "If G.U.N. knew where we were, don't you think we'd have helicopters or something in the sky right about now?"

It doesn't seem to alleviate Shadow's anxiety; he remains a scarred soldier who knows all too well what lengths an agency like G.U.N. will go to not only catch their prey, but toy with it before striking.

Sonic falls silent, his hand warming Shadow's tense knuckles beneath his own. He thinks back to his time with Tom when he was equally terrified of being caught by the same people Shadow's fleeing from, and wonders how they managed to evade capture for so long. Having Tom, an adult, made things considerably easier, but wasn't there something else?

The solution dawns on Sonic and announces itself through a small, tittering giggle. Shadow quirks a brow, glancing up from where his head hangs low to meet Sonic’s gaze in the rear-view mirror. In response, Sonic says: "I've got just the idea!"

After kicking the engine back to life on the bike and cruising down the I-90 at a far more leisurely pace, they come to the respite area around half an hour later. It sits on a scrub of asphalt, a smudge on the otherwise undisturbed, picturesque landscape of Montana's countryside. The gas station is lit with gaudy neons and flickering street lamps with gnats swarming around their bulbs, flocking to the only sign of life for miles upon miles to come. The concrete overhang is dirty, blocky, and thick; unappealing, but it provides solace for Sonic and Shadow as they pull up to the lot on the bike.

They hang back behind one of the overhang's thick concrete pillars, lingering near a dark spot where one of the lightbulbs above has died. Shadow and Sonic hop off Dark Rider and Shadow wheels the bike behind the gas station, propping her up against its mottled concrete wall. "I don't trust humans not to take this," he remarks when Sonic raises his brow at the display.

"Dude, you literally stole the bike."

"I'm borrowing it."

"Yeah, sure." Sonic spins on his heel once the bike has been tucked safely between a wheelie bin and an air conditioning unit. He walks backwards with his hands tucked behind his head, stepping out from the gas station's back lot and into the light of the concrete overhang above the gas pumps. "So, you feelin' hungry?"

Shadow remains in the darkness, hanging in the shadows with his arms crossed over the white fur of his chest. In the low lighting his eyes glint like gemstones, catching the light and twinkling like red rubies. "Not particularly."

"Not even a teeny bit? Not even for a chilli dog?"

"A chilli-what ?"

"Chilli dog. Like, the best combo on the planet. No — ever. It's a hot dog, covered in chilli, covered in cheese."

Shadow's face screws up in distaste. "That sounds... revolting."

"Don't knock it 'til you try it!" Sonic takes a hopping step backwards, nodding his head towards the building across the road. "C'mon, this place has the best chilli dogs—"

"Sonic." Shadow stops him in his tracks with just his voice. He hasn't moved since stashing the bike and has his head tipped down, face pulled into a frown. His eyes, however, hold none of the hostility he seems to be outwardly displaying with his body. Shadow may think he's good at portraying one thing, but his eyes tell another story. "I'm not going inside."

Sonic's lips purse. He backtracks his steps and moves into the shadowy space at the back of the gas station where Shadow stands. Carefully, as if he’s trying not to spook him, he reaches out to take one of his hands from where it’s tucked against his forearm. "Hey," Sonic says, giving it a gentle squeeze. "It'll be fine — I've got a plan!"

Shadow puts up a fight for just a few seconds, enough to make a point that he's not going along with this willingly, before he moves with the pull and follows Sonic reluctantly. When he steps into the light coming from the gas station's overhang, his fingers tighten on Sonic's. "I can't be seen outside,” he whispers.

"We won't be."

"What do you mean? The place is packed — it's a Saturday night!"

Sonic lets go of Shadow's hand and flashes a grin. "I told you I had a plan, didn’t I?"

With a wink and a: "Stay put!" Sonic jogs ahead to the scruffy storefront and pushes open the swinging, yellowed glass door. The gas station's interior is dismal and dirty, with harsh fluorescent lighting and floors that haven't been washed since lockdown. There's an awful country song playing from a banged-up Beats pill on the counter, and the store's clerk is smoking a menthol, holding it between tobacco-stained fingers as she swipes through a magazine. Sonic, fortunately, goes unnoticed as he slips down the aisles, snaking past the scruffy shelves as he searches for one rack in particular.

He emerges from the gas station a few minutes later. Shadow is sitting on the curb under a dark patch, blending into the shadows like a blot of ink. He's only visible by his eyes; two pinpricks of bright red, watching Sonic's every move, wary and nervous. Sonic heads over and watches some of the tension leave Shadow; his shoulders drop, and his chest deflates from its defensive puff. He rises to his feet, eyeing the armful of bric-a-brac Sonic carries. "What on Earth..."

Sonic dumps his spoils at their feet with a triumphant grin. Shadow squats down to pick up one of the items: a tacky pink nylon cowboy hat with tassels and a glitter belt. He holds it up with a look of undisguised disgust.

Sonic swipes it from his hands and places it smack bang on the crown of Shadow's head. "Howdy, partner!"

"Absolutely not." Shadow reaches up to tug it off, but Sonic keeps his hands there, pressing it down on his head. Through the tassels and glitter, a pair of bright red, furious eyes stare back at him. "Is this your plan on how you’re going to get into the bar unnoticed?"

"How we’re going to get in unnoticed. You’re coming, too. So, come on — lighten up! No one's gonna know." Sonic slips on his own hat; a ridiculous red, yellow, blue, and green ball cap with a spinning top. He flicks the propeller and it rotates, whistling as it catches the wind. "I got us some merch, too."

Sonic unrolls two adult-sized t-shirts from under his arm. He passes one to Shadow while he opens his own out by shaking it and flapping it to loosen the creases. He slips it over his head and sports the front proudly: I <3 P.P.

"P.P.?"

"Piston Pit." Sonic gestures over to the bar across the road. "Here, I got you one, too."

Shadow holds it away from him as if it were diseased. He scowls, unfurling the shirt to reveal, in huge black lettering, Mother Born, Piston Pit Sworn. There's a realistic photo of an eagle taking flight next to the US flag, a Raptor, and a rifle beneath it. "No."

"Pleaaaaase! They cost me eight bucks each — pretty please?"

"Absolutely not."

"I even got it in your colour."

"Blue is not my colour."

Sonic's brows wiggle suggestively. "It can be!"

With a growl of resignation, Shadow stuffs it over his head. The shirt, like Sonic's, hangs to his knees in a creased, factory-fresh-smelling mess. Coupled with the hats, they look like two children let loose in a Spirit Halloween.

"Here's the finishing touch." Sonic produces, in his palm, a cotton face mask with a poorly-pixelated photo of the American flag, and a pair of neon yellow shuttered aviators. He personally takes the sunglasses for himself and slips them onto his nose. "That's for you, 'cause it's more private."

Shadow picks up the mask with a frown. "What is it?"

"A face mask. Humans wear them when they're sick, but they do a great job of covering, like, half of your face."

Shadow holds it over his face before pulling it back. "Sonic, my ears aren't where a human's are."

"Oh, yeah. Crap."

They tie the back ends together and slip it over his head. It does the job despite looking a little goofy, but they look strange as is, so it blends right in with their ridiculous ensemble.

"Do you feel bonita?"

"I feel like a fool." His voice is muffled by the mask.

Sonic evens out his cowboy hat for him with a grin. Shadow is glad he's hiding behind the awful print of the stars and stripes because seeing Sonic smile like that, so earnest and kind, has his body involuntarily reflecting the same joy. To quell his smile, he huffs exasperatedly instead, even as Sonic's touch lingers, gently straightening the cowboy hat on his head a little longer than is necessary. "Right," he prompts, pulling back. He pushes the sunglasses up his nose and flashes a wide, toothy grin. "Ready?"

The Piston Pit is, to put it nicely, a dump. It's a stout wooden building with a yard littered with green glass bottles, fist-fighting customers, cigarette butts, and motorbikes. As Sonic and Shadow cross the road to get to the bar, they pass three separate brawls. Each step brings them closer to the smell of hops, grease, and petrol fumes. Shadow hangs back behind Sonic as he whispers urgently: "Act natural," before pushing inside the building. The sound balloons outward, gushing through the crack in the door as if it's a tangible matter, swelling up around their small figures like flames. The humans inside are large and imposing, clad in flannel and leather and denim, reeking of sweat and booze. Shadow presses even closer behind Sonic and wrinkles his face behind his mask as they navigate the busy space, finding a booth shaped out of a beer keg in the far corner of the room where the lighting is poor.

They receive a few glares from passers-by, but Sonic pays them no mind, so neither does Shadow. He hops up onto the stool and gestures for Shadow to do the same, giving him a reassuring look over the rim of his glasses. Shadow ascends with far more grace than Sonic had displayed, and crosses one knee over the other, casting his eyes warily around the room. "See?" Sonic prompts, having to shout a little over the sheer volume of the room. "Not so bad!"

A glass flies over their heads to hit another patron by the bar.

When Shadow first speaks, Sonic can't hear what he says. "Huh?" he calls back, squinting, leaning closer over the table so he can hear him better.

Shadow looks around cautiously before he hooks his thumb into the nose of the mask and pulls it down to his chin, repeating himself: "I feel like we stick out like a sore thumb."

"Is it 'cause I'm wearing pink?"

Sonic's attempt at humour does the job of loosening the tension in Shadow's expression. He rolls his eyes but there's a small smile there, too, barely tugging at the corner of his mouth. "It's fine," Sonic reassures.  It's quite a momentous thing to have him out in public like this, so backing out now is out of the question. "If anyone asks, you've just gotta guilt trip 'em with the whole 'What's wrong with how I look?' schtick. Works every time."

"You've done this before?"

"When Tom and I came here, yeah." Sonic leans his elbows onto the table. The surface is sticky and reeks of stale beer. "Told 'em I had a skin condition."

"And they believed you?"

"I think so. I mean, they didn't kick me out. Not until I started the bar fight."

They're interrupted when an older, grizzled-looking waiter approaches their table. He has a white horseshoe moustache with yellow nicotine-stained tips and a sun-damaged face mottled with liver spots. When he speaks, it's with a timbre low enough to rattle glasses, worn dry from years of alcohol abuse and chain smoking. "Ain't no kids allowed in here."

Shadow hastily pulls his mask back up and looks over at Sonic, panic flashing in his eyes. Unfortunately, he catches sight of a mischievous twinkle on Sonic’s expression, and immediately fears the worst.

Sonic schools his attitude into one of shocked offence, a hand flying to his chest, straight over the plastic lettering of his cheap t-shirt. "I beg your pardon? We are not children!" he squawks in a poor imitation of an English accent.

The waiter's eyebrows are so thick they nearly obscure his eyes. He can't necessarily see that he's being watched, but Sonic can feel those eyes sizing him up from behind the fuzzy thicket. "Y'sure?"

"I'll have you know that my friend and I have a rare genetic condition that prevents our tiny bones from growing any larger than—"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever. What can I get for'ya?"

Sonic, stopped dead in the middle of his dramatic spiel, looks a little disappointed at his fun being cut short so abruptly. Nonetheless, relieved that their blasé response means he and Shadow are off the hook, he perks up, humming aloud. "Can we get the menu?"

The thick brows slowly rise. "Menu?" he echoes in disbelief, his Southern twang ringing a cow’s bay.

"Do you not have one?" 

“Ain’t nobody ever asked for a darn menu in this establishment.”

“Well, there’s always a first time for everything!” Shadow kicks him beneath the table. Sonic yelps, shooting a glare at the hedgehog across from him. "Actually, could you give us a few seconds?"

The server gives them a strange look before wandering off to another table to tend to a thrice-inebriated-looking man on the verge of throwing up his breakfast, lunch, and dinner all over the floor. "What are you doing?!" Shadow hisses once he has Sonic's attention. He tugs down his mask and practically snarls, his canines flashing in the low lighting of the bar. "Why are you drawing unnecessary attention to us?!"

"Hey, Shads, chill!"

"Shads?! " Shadow echoes in horror. “Do not call me that.”

Sonic rolls his eyes. "These guys genuinely don't give a damn. There are people literally breaking glasses over each other's heads out back. I think two short-stacks that look like tourists are the least of their concerns."

"Maybe to you, but not to me." Shadow casts another worried glance around the room for the umpteenth time. "I don't want to get found out. What happens if there's a G.U.N. agent in here?"

"In the Piston Pit? Shadow, we didn't even get I.D.'d walking in. If they're willing to sell alcohol to minors, I don't think a G.U.N. agent would hang around these parts." Beneath the table, Sonic knocks their feet together and offers a reassuring smile. "Besides, worst comes to worst, we just Chaos Control outta here, yeah?"

Shadow fixes him with a withering glare. Sonic meets it with a quirked brow — a battle of two wills.

Finally, Shadow relents, exhaling with a groan. "Fine."

"Live a little, yeah? Besides, I'm 'boutta rock your world when I order for you."

Sonic keeps their feet linked together beneath the table, swinging them a little to the beat of the live band in the corner. They, at least, seem to be the only professionals within the establishment; a folk group fronted by a husky female singer working through some pop songs from the two-thousands, Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" currently filling the smoky air.

When the server comes back around he looks just as unbothered as he did the first time. It calms the nervous storm brewing behind Shadow’s chest, enough for him to enjoy the moment as Sonic lists out a handful of things from the sticky, dusty menu procured from the back for them to order. Once done, the server leaves their table and heads off through a pair of swinging doors towards the back, leaving them back to their own devices. “See?” Sonic says, flashing a grin. “We’re all good.”

Shadow folds his elbows over the table and frowns. “Humans sure are strange beings.”

“How so?”

He twists his mouth, casting his eyes to their left: out that window, two men are headbutting each other. “They have the capacity to do so many valuable things with their time and their bodies and yet they choose…this.” He gestures vaguely at the chaos around them. “How has so much changed in fifty years?”

Sonic shrugs. “I dunno if it’s a time thing, so much as we’re just in a bar. You probably just didn’t see that many humans back when you were kicking around. I mean, there’s billions on Earth. Not every one’s gonna be the same as the next, right?”

“Still…” Shadow’s gaze lingers on the fighting men outside just as one butts the other in the nose. His eyes flick back to Sonic, and he murmurs: “The lab technicians weren’t like this.”

“What, ‘cause they were nerds?”

“They were civilised. These are…” he lowers his voice a touch, glancing to his left and his right, “...wild.”

It encourages a laugh out of Sonic. “Wild?” he repeats, endeared.

Shadow crosses his arms over one another, tucking his hands into the fabric of the oversized shirt’s sleeves. “I always thought humans were workers. They woke up, they worked, and then they went home or went to sleep. None of them seemed particularly…friendly with one another. Everyone behaved like colleagues.” He tucks his chin to his chest, and frowns. “I always thought Maria was different in that regard. She was curious. She wanted to create, and dream, and break the mould. All of the other bigger humans — the adults — were never like her.”

“‘s probably ‘cause they were there for work.”

“Maybe.” He sits back in his seat, worn vinyl squeaking beneath him. “I learned about all sorts of ancient human cultures with her — like the Greeks, and the Romans, who used to build palaces and explore the Earth, but all I saw in the lab were workers. I thought that, maybe, evolution made them grow out of it. I was surprised when I finally got out, and realised humans don’t just do work. Two thousand years on and we still have humans beating each other with glass bottles for entertainment.”

Though he hadn’t intended for it to be a joke, the nonchalant delivery of Shadow’s insightful perspective has Sonic bursting into laughter. Offended at his reaction, Shadow levels him with a frown. “What’s so funny?”

“It’s just,” Sonic chuckles into his hand, the swell of endearment warming his chest, “I had the same thought when I came to Earth: how awesome is it that all of these freaky people can just do whatever they want to? If it’s beating each other with glass bottles or being an artist or even working in a lab, isn’t it great that they have the freedom to choose?”

“And yet some of them choose to do inexplicable things,” Shadow murmurs. They both know what he’s referring to, even if he doesn’t say the quiet part aloud. “They go to war, and harm, and maim, instead of protecting the Earth and its resources.”

Sonic shrugs, blue quills shifting with the motion. “It’s the downside that comes with total free will. People have the opportunity to do awful crap, or to do awesome crap. But, hey, maybe a little morbid, but if those kinds of humans didn’t exist, then we wouldn’t be sitting together right now, dressed like pimps, ready to stuff our faces with enough saturated fats to block our arteries.”

That seems to stump Shadow. He closes his mouth, mulling over Sonic’s words. 

Sonic lets him, admiring him quietly from over the table. Although he feels so closely aligned with human culture, having grown up here since he and Longclaw made the leap through the dimensions, he sees where Shadow is coming from. With humans having the ability to pursue their wildest, strangest dreams, why do some choose to hide from them? It brings him back to his own crisis of trying to figure out what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Tom is a cop, Maddie’s a vet, Knuckles is stuck guarding the Master Emerald, and Tails is already halfway to becoming a world-renowned scientist, but what can he be? Does he need to be something?

Yes, otherwise that’s called freeloading, a voice that sounds strangely like Maddie chimes in his head.

Shadow, seemingly content with the enlightenment Sonic has provided, breaks the comfortable silence. “I never realised that they could have metal implants in their face, or their ears, or have brightly-coloured hair as you or I do. Is it a cultural choice?”

Sonic chuckles at Shadow’s frank, naive perspective. “I guess it can be, sometimes. Most of the time it’s just a fashion thing.”

"I see," Shadow remarks with genuine wonder, looking a little further over to his side as he continues to people-watch. It's without an air of judgement now; he's curious, staring at a lady with a neon pink mohawk that stands against gravity. "There have been so many changes in fashion since the seventies."

“I guess. That was the whole flower-power and flared pants era, right?”

That earns a chuckle out of Shadow; small, quiet, but definitely a laugh. It's a delicate sound, the kind you wouldn’t expect to come from someone so intimidating. His face lights up with it, eyes crinkling at the corners, shoulders dropping, posture relaxing. It sets the butterflies in Sonic's stomach into a frenzy, and he can't help but stare, wanting desperately to earn that sound again. "Is that what it's now known as?"

Sonic grins, propping his chin in his hands. “I guess. You guys had some of the greatest musicians, too! Bowie, Diana Ross, Blondie, Donna Summer…”

Shadow nods appreciatively, a spark of recognition flickering across his face. “Those are excellent artists.”

“And films, too. Did you ever watch Jaws? Or — or The Godfather? Man, those are such great movies.”

Shadow shakes his head, lips pursing in thought. “No, I don’t believe so. Maria and I generally watched ones from the fifties and sixties. The Sound of Music — she loved that one. And Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

The fact that Shadow's not only willingly talking about his past without retreating back into the safety of his shell, but is the one to continuously bring the topic up, is a huge step in the right direction for his recovery. He speaks more and more about her these days, particularly since he's had the den as his safe haven. Maybe it's the psychological security it offers, or maybe it's exposure therapy from broaching the topic so many times, but every time he and Sonic meet up it’s clear he finds it easier to speak about his traumatic past without retracting back into his shell.

Fortunately, Sonic is an eager listener as much as he is a talker. He leans in closer to indicate that he's engaged, folded arms resting atop the table. "Chick flicks?"

“Is that what you call them?” Shadow huffs a breath that could be a laugh, and Sonic finds his own smile growing at the sound. “I think it was more for my benefit than hers. I found the ordeal of horror movies scary, so we stuck to simpler ones. Ironic, considering what I am.”

Sonic shakes his head firmly. "I don't think so." Sure, there's a little irony in there, but Shadow isn't a beast fit for a horror movie. Sonic knows how it feels firsthand to be seen as a monster for the simple crime of being different to those around you. He used to be on the run too, after all. "You aren't a monster. Besides, some of those can be pretty gory and boring. Knuckles can't watch any, and he calls himself the strongest thing in the universe."

Shadow's lips press together. It’s a subtle shift in his expression, and one Sonic doesn’t know how to read yet. He crosses his arms and lays them flat on the table, dropping his chin to rest on his forearm, voice barely above a whisper. "I just thought...if the time I have outside of confinement is limited, then I'd like to be able to watch something uplifting."

It’s such a heavy topic, and yet Shadow treats it casually, like he’s speaking about the news, or the weather, and Sonic supposes that to him this is his normal. His curiosity and limited knowledge about human culture can be seen as charming and endearing so long as you don’t dig beneath the surface to find out why. When the aliens in cartoons come to Earth and find beauty in its life, it’s praised. How cruel is it that Shadow was never given the opportunity to roam, to travel, and be free, and yet his true nature of still seeing the bright side shines through? Sonic gives their feet another gentle jostle beneath the table, a non-verbal I'm here, and I'm listening as Shadow looks up from where he rests his head on his arms, red eyes twinkling beneath the fairy lights hanging above like distant stars. He gives Sonic's feet a little jostle back, too; thank you.

Trying to navigate away from the heavy topic, Sonic prompts: "I'll have to find a DVD copy of my favourite flick — it's called Speed, and it's about this super cool police officer basically trying to stop a bomb from going off on a bus."

It does the trick. Shadow huffs out a barely-there laugh from his nose and sits up straight, keeping his arms crossed over his chest. “Of course your favourite movie is called ‘speed’.”

“Hey! Don’t knock it ‘til you try it!”

Shadow rolls his eyes, a tiny smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “When was it filmed?”

“Uh, like, the nineties, I think?”

Shadow nods. He mulls over that, counting back the decades in his head, a dawning realisation creeping across his face, as if he’s thinking: has it really been that long? “I wonder what that period was like.”

“What, the nineties?”

“Yes. The turn of the century. Must have been quite a spectacle.”

“I guess. I mean, I wasn’t around, but from what I see it’s pretty popular in pop culture. There were loads of new music genres — hip-hop, rap, and R&B….”

“Hip-hop?”

Sonic gawks. “You don’t know what hip-hop is?”

Shadow raises a brow. When he speaks, it’s with a tinge of suspicion. “That sounds like a word you just made up.”

“It isn’t! Oh my god, dude, I’ll totally bring my CDs over next time we hang. I bet you’ll love the stuff I have.”

“...CDs?”

“Y’know, those shiny metal circle donut-looking things. I played the movie off of it?”

“I thought those were called dee-vee-dees.”

The way he enunciates it has Sonic chuckling. “Yeah, DVDs are CDs but for movies. CDs just hold a lot of data, and albums for music.” His eyes widen as a thought strikes him. “Holy crap, you don’t even know about the internet. Dude. We have so much to go through.”

“The inter-net?” Shadow repeats, the unfamiliar word rolling awkwardly off his tongue.

Cutting off the flow of the conversation, a heavy tray is placed on the table as their server returns with a waft of cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes. He places a few tall glasses with beaded condensation rolling down the sides in the centre of the sticky table, followed by countless red plastic boats of greasy, spicy-smelling food that has Shadow's brows rising into the rim of his cowboy hat. Sonic thanks their server with a smile before they’re left alone, and he starts to organise the items on their table. “You ordered a lot,” Shadow remarks, peering curiously down at the items on the table as Sonic swaps and switches the baskets around.

“‘s for us to share.”

“...but it costs money.”

Sonic shrugs. “I’m a working guy now, y’hear? I have my own bank card and everything!”

Shadow shrinks a little into himself, bashful. “Thank you.”

Sonic waves him off. “Don’t mention it. Anyway, let me blow your world. I got us nachos, wings, two chilli dogs, fries, and quesadillas.” He nudges over the drinks, leaving a wet snail-trail of condensation on the table’s surface. “I also got us a rootbeer float -- ‘cause we’re at a bar, and you’ve gotta have that at a bar — and a Sprite.”

Shadow’s eyes glaze over the food with wonder. “Sprite,” he repeats, drawing the sparkling ade towards him like it’s a long-lost friend. “I haven’t had this in years.”

Sonic beams. He takes a hold of his own glass, and raises it in a cheer. “Bingo — we found something familiar! Have you ever done a ‘cheers’ before?”

“Like in the movies?”

“Exactly.” Sonic raises his tall glass towards Shadow, who lifts his own and clinks their rims together hesitantly, the sound crystalline in the noisy bar. Pleased with the reaction, Sonic takes a gulp of his own drink, sharp lemony-lime goodness hitting his tongue.

Shadow follows suit, raising the glass to his lips to take a sip. When he pulls back, his face crumples, like he’s not sure what he’s tasting and doesn’t particularly like it. He swallows with visible effort, and coughs into his elbow, remarking: “Oh my God. It’s so sweet. ”

Sonic takes another sip of his own drink, and frowns. It’s sweet, sure, but no different to usual. Did our drinks get mixed up? “Let me have a taste.” They swap glasses for Sonic to drink from. When he pulls back, he shrugs. “Tastes like normal to me. Was it not like that in the seventies?”

“Absolutely not.” Shadow takes a sip of Sonic’s glass, and frowns. He smacks his lips. “It’s refreshing, but it’s so much sweeter than I remember. I can almost feel my teeth aching.”

“Maybe that’s just your old man taste buds talking.”

He receives a swift kick to the shin for that jab.

They tuck in to the food pretty quickly after that. Sonic explains what every item is, or at least what he thinks it is. Shadow, unsure of what to start with, takes a hesitant taste of a fry. Immediately satisfied with what he tastes, he eats a few more, dipping it in the ketchup Sonic squirts on a piece of greaseproof paper in the basket. “That’s delicious,” he remarks.

“They’re pretty good, right?”

Shadow nods, taking a few more. They’re covered in a salty, peppery red powder that clings to his gloves. “Is this potato?”

“Yep. Or, well, it used to be. If you get them from a nice burger place they’re usually pretty fresh, but I bet these have been sitting in the back of the freezer since you got put into stasis.”

That earns him another kick to the shin.

They move on next to the impressive chilli dogs sitting in the basket. They’re pretty sizable; a thick hot dog between a floury bun, smothered in chilli, cheese, and relish. Sonic picks up his with practiced ease, making cow eyes at it. Shadow, a little more hesitant, struggles to pick it up, turning it this way and that. “How do you eat this thing?” he remarks, picking it up and setting it back down when he can’t quite get the angle right. 

“With gusto.” Before Shadow even has the opportunity to remark on that, Sonic’s already swallowed his chilli dog in a few quick bites. He looks like he’s in bliss, sucking on the pads of his thumbs like he’s been served caviar and Grade-A bluefin tuna rather than canned chilli on a dry hotdog in an even dryer bun. At least the cheese looks real. Shadow, hesitantly, takes a bite of the chilli dog and chews. He makes a few faces as he cycles through the five stages of grief, eventually swallowing. “How do you feel?” Sonic asks, watching the performance with undisguised delight.

“Dirty,” Shadow responds flatly. He looks at the chilli dog from where he took the bite. “Is the hot dog meant to be pink?”

“Yeah, it’s not real meat, don’t worry. Not your thing?”

“I think,” Shadow pulls back the chilli dog to eye it at a better angle, furrowing his brow, “that I can taste every single preservative and additive in the meat they’ve used.”

“That’s how you know it’s good.”

He takes another bite, chewing and swallowing. “It’s not bad, so to say.”

“But...?”

“...but I wouldn’t order it again.”

“More for me!” Sonic scoops it out of Shadow’s hands and swallows it in a few bites, looking delighted in Shadow’s misery. 

They sample each platter as they go, picking and choosing what looks good and what doesn’t. Shadow rates the fries an eight out of ten but remarks that they’re worse when they’re cold, which Sonic agrees with. The wings get a nine, although Shadow is only told after consuming three wings that he’s not meant to eat the bones, and the quesadillas a solid three because they can’t guess what the meat inside was meant to be. The nachos, however, are a ten. “Is this guacamole?”

“I think so.” Sonic scoops some onto his chip and takes a bite. “Maybe, like, 50%. Isn’t guacamole a fun word? Guac-guac!”

Shadow shovels another handful of salsa-covered nachos into his mouth. Sonic’s words bring a glaring issue to the forefront of his mind, one that he can’t believe he hasn’t considered up until now. “Hey — did…what ever happened with Stone and Eggman after the Eclipse Canon blew up?”

“Those two?” Sonic swallows the half-macerated mass in his mouth with an audible gulp. “I don’t actually know, now that you mention it. Gerald died,” he says, perfunctory and blunt without a hint of compassion, “I know that’s for sure. Eggman couldn’t have survived the explosion, unless he teleported away, which I doubt happened. There was nothing left of the wreckage after it detonated.”

Shadow’s mouth twists. “I lost time after the explosion. When I came around, it was already autumn. I understand things quieted down after that — no more attacks, that kind of thing, but it does leave me wondering about Stone.”

“Yeah, nothing from our end. The guy’s totally M.I.A., which is either a good thing, or a really bad thing.” Sonic swallows again, and clears his throat, suddenly uncomfortable. “Were you two close when you — uh — worked together?”

“No,” Shadow says decisively. He shakes his head, the quills poking out beneath the brim of the hat swaying with the motion. “Though he was never cruel to me. He was actually quite kind, all things considered.”

“Kind?”

“Made great coffee.” Shadow scoops a chip. “And guacamole — better than this stuff, here.”

“He made you guacamole,” Sonic repeats flatly.

“Revenge guac.” Shadow stuffs it into his mouth and chews, washing it down with some of the frothy rootbeer float. “He used lots of lime, and cilantro.”

“Right…but, I mean, what did you guys even get up to?”

“Watched telenovelas. He cried a lot.”

“He cried? ” Sonic scoops up a cheese-covered chip and sandwiches it between two fries. “Why?”

Shadow shrugs. “He had a lot of baggage. He was likely disappointed that his partner’s attention was taken away from him. Maybe a little jealous, too.”

“Yeah. I mean, he just sort of fell off the face of the Earth when Robotnik blew up, right? Or, I mean, Eggman. Kinda forgot there were two of ‘em. Was. Uh.”

Shadow folds his hands in front of him, suddenly pensive. “He must still be quite upset. That’s why I’m so concerned. Not for him personally, of course, but because it could mean he’s unstable and dangerous.”

“I mean, sure. Eggman was his boss, but is that really enough to make him that upset?”

“You’re wrong.” Shadow shakes his head firmly, and meets Sonic’s eye from across the table. He recalls the brief moments spent with Stone, when Shadow acted like the ear he desperately needed. More detail than necessary was definitely divulged. There was a lot of back-rubbing involved. “They weren’t just colleagues. Stone was in love with him.”

“WHAT?!” Sonic's cry draws several heads their way. Shadow hisses at him to hush while Sonic sits back down in his seat, shooting apologetic looks and mouthed sorry! s to every startled patron with a bright, embarrassed grin before he narrows back in on Shadow, voice hushed to a conspiratorial whisper. “Stone was in love with him? I thought he was just a super devoted follower!”

“No way. He definitely harboured very intense feelings towards the Doctor. It was quite pathetic.”

The statement hits Sonic straight between the ribs, like he’s been punched by the weight of the words. “Pathetic?” he echoes, throat suddenly very, very dry. “Why — why would it be pathetic?”

Shadow’s sigh leaves his nose as he casts his eyes off to the side, pursing his lips. He doesn’t seem to notice Sonic’s sudden change in attitude, instead lost in his own thoughts, recalling those strange hours spent on the ship while Stone confided in an ally for the first time, likely, in his life, where it all came pouring out. Again, far too much than should have been said. “It would have never worked out between them. Robotnik never saw him as an equal, and Stone never saw him as anything less than a god to be worshipped.”

The tension leaves Sonic in a shaky breath. Shadow’s response wasn’t quite what he was expecting, but it’s not what he was dreading, either. “Right,” he responds, strangely relieved. “Man, you’ve been watching too many of those telenovelas.”

Shadow rolls his eyes. “La Ultima Passion is a complex story that deserves more credit than it gets.”

He’s toeing a topic that he’s afraid to broach and it feels like tearing off the bandaid, or pulling out the wobbly tooth; he has to do it, he knows it’ll relieve him if he does, but it’s still so frightening, particularly if you don’t know what’s underneath. Sonic takes a sip of his drink and finds that he has a slight tremble to his hands. “But, still. You…you really thought they’d never work out?”

Shadow looks back at him like he’s grown a spare head. “Of course they wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Sonic shrugs, aiming for casual but landing somewhere near painfully awkward. "I dunno. Is it?"

Shadow gives him a strange, confused look. He can tell Sonic's skirting around the question he wants to ask. "What are you trying to say?"

“I’m just saying — like — uh — you don’t think it won’t work ‘cause they’re…y’know.” Sonic makes a vague gesture with his hands that clarifies absolutely nothing.

Shadow’s face creases in bewilderment. “Insane?”

“No! I mean, yeah, but no.”

Shadow's frown deepens, creating a small furrow between his brows. “I don’t follow.”

Sonic brings his hands to his lap and twiddles his thumbs, lowering his voice to a tone just above a whisper. “You don’t think it’s ‘cause it’s two guys?”

Shadow's face screws tighter in a frown. His body squares, resuming a defensive position, quills bristling slightly. "Why would that make a difference?" he asks, tone low and dangerous.

Shadow's reaction is definitely not what he was expecting. Hot embarrassment flushes the back of his neck and chest, and Sonic, suddenly, feels like he's on the wrong end of a very pointed stick. "Aren't you from the sixties and seventies?"

“...yes?”

Sonic gives him a weird look. “Or is it that you’re just…super progressive?”

Shadow reflects the same look back at him. “Sonic, I don’t understand where this is going.”

"It's just—" Sonic makes a frustrated sound, tugging at his quills as he struggles to articulate the words he so desperately wants to say. Shadow still looks irritated and Sonic can't bring himself to meet his gaze. "Being into guys is, like, much more widely accepted nowadays, but it was a huge no-no back in your time. It's just weird how you're not against them for being two guys together. I mean -- Gerald was a total ass about Agent Rockwell being a woman in the military!"

Shadow's tight expression relaxes a little, understanding dawning in his eyes. "Sonic."

Still looking pointedly to the side of Shadow's head, he responds with a tight nod. "...yep?"

"I'm an intergalactic space alien that can Chaos Control to the other side of the Milky Way right this second if I wanted to."

"...right."

“Human politics mean nothing to me.” Shadow takes another sip of his rootbeer float. A foamy moustache appears on his top lip, which he dabs with a paper towel left in the fry boat. “Humans have fought wars over the strangest things for millenia. Whether or not someone copulates with the same gender as another human means nothing to me.”

“...copulate?”

“Intercourse.”

“Ew! Ew ew ew — I do not want to think about Eggy and Stone getting it on!”

That earns a true, hearty belly-laugh from Shadow. He reclines in the chair and folds his arms over his stomach, canines shining pointy and white under the bar's poor fluorescents. Mortifyingly, all Sonic can think is thank God he won't slate me for having these thoughts as he watches Shadow's face light up with laughter. "Then you'll be glad you weren't privy to the conversations I had to sit through."

"Dude — no, gross!"

"Do you know how it feels to explain to a grown man that you don't know the difference between—"

"Ew, ew, ew, stop!" Sonic claps his hands over his ears in theatrical horror.

It earns another delighted laugh from Shadow, who seems to take joy in torturing Sonic by making him sit through the mental warfare of having to picture Eggman and Stone getting it on. Shadow wipes a tear from the corner of his eye as he hiccups a few more giggles, and Sonic, again, can not believe how the only thought on his mind is at least I now know this is definitely a crush. “So, in conclusion, no, I do not find it strange that two men, or two women, would choose to be in a relationship together. Do you?”

“Me? God no. Y’know, uh, gay rights and all that jazz. Power to the people.”  Sonic makes another vague gesture, this time resembling a weak fist-pump.

With a strange weight lifted off his chest, Sonic finds he can breathe freely again, meeting Shadow's gaze head on with a tentative smile. Miraculously, Shadow reflects it, hiding behind the brim of the cowboy hat that somehow makes him look both ridiculous and oddly charming at once.

They fall back into discussion easily as Sonic tries to describe to Shadow what AirPods are only to realise he has to describe Bluetooth, WiFi, and of course, the internet. Sonic warns him not to use the internet without being shown how to do it first as it’s a dangerous place, and Shadow, insulted at the notion, vows to get his hands on a stolen cellular device and use it as soon as they split up tonight as an act of rebellion. At some point, their drinks are refilled by a younger-looking waitress with blue-streaked hair. Sonic takes a sip of his rootbeer float and finds it has a little bit of a tang to it but takes no notice, instead choosing to explain to Shadow just what Among Us is and why they should totally play it together back at the den so long as he can hotspot his iPad.

The conversation seems to stretch and shrink with each sip of the drink. Sonic, once he’s had a quarter of it, frowns down at the glass. His eyes feel hot and his neck feels heavy and his lips loose, like everything is hilarious and needs to be said right now — who needs red tape and mental barriers? He blinks his heavy, huge eyes and smacks his lips. 

At that moment, from across the room, the band's music tapers out to a moment of silence before it swells with the punch of piano chords and the steady dum-dum-tss of a drum kit. The music seems to sweep over the room in a wave that dulls the chit-chatter and chaos, and Sonic, suddenly, feels like he can hear Shadow's heartbeat through the cacophony. With his glass of Sprite in his hand, Shadow turns to look towards the band's stage as the lead singer picks up an acoustic guitar and one of the other members begins to pull a bow along the strings of his fiddle. "What's this?" he asks, speaking to Sonic but keeping his eyes fixed on the band.

As the singer opens her mouth to the microphone and croons: “I pictured a rainbow…” Sonic leans his chin on his palm, below propped on the table. His eyes, unlike the rest of the room’s, are pinned to the side of Shadow’s head.

Why would he look elsewhere other than here?

His dark lashes flutter as he takes in the sight of the band blooming back to life and the lead singing from the very pit of her lungs, like the words hold so much weight she has to physically squeeze them out; like he can feel it, too. 

He recognises the song from one of Tom’s old mixtapes that he plays in the car sometimes. Sonic takes another sip of his rootbeer float as the piano’s chords ring out high and watches as the red smudges on the corner of Shadow’s eyes wrinkle and his eyes soften while absorbing the live music and its lyrics. She sings: “You stretched for the stars, and you know how it feels to reach too high, too far too soon. You saw the whole of the moon.”

“It’s by the Waterboys,” Sonic says, the words falling off of his tongue. “It’s called: ‘The Whole Of The Moon’.”

“What is it about?” Shadow asks, blinking his big eyes as he watches one of the back-up singers come up to the microphone to join the lead as they sing the chorus together.

“Tom used to say it was Maddie’s song,” Sonic says, blinking his heavy eyelids. He blusters, bringing his other hand up to cup his chin to keep his head from wobbling. His neck feels like it's too small, a hinge too loose, and his head too heavy. “It’s a love song, I guess. The singer is talking about the light of their life, and how they see everything in a sort of magnificence.”

The singer rucks up her long, layered skirt and moves along the stage with the microphone, singing: “With a torch in your pocket, and the wind at your heels, you climbed on the ladder, and you know how it feels!”

“To get too high, too far, too soon…” Sonic quietly sings along. He takes another sip of his drink and smacks his lips loudly. That same, strange tang rests on his tongue after it. He peers down at its frothy top and wonders if maybe the ice-cream has turned sour in it.

Fortunately, Shadow doesn’t seem to be paying him any attention. He’s utterly transfixed with the music being played as the singer belts out one of the final lines: “You came like a comet, blazing your trail…” From beneath the shadow casted by the brim of his cowboy hat, his settled brow crumples and his face twists, like the words are touching him right there in the centre of his chest. Sonic decides not to say anything because he feels, somehow, that this is a special moment not to be disturbed. Shadow’s hand had set his Sprite down and his fingers are clenched in his lap, twiddling in a self-soothing gesture Sonic thinks Shadow may not realise he’s doing.

As the song tapers out with heavy thumps of piano keys and the chords of the synth, a roar rises from the crowd to applaud the group and Sonic barely catches the: “This song reminds me of Maria,” murmured beneath the wave of noise. 

Sonic sets his glass down a little too hard, some of the drink sloshing over the rim — and damn, when did that grow so heavy? “Yeah?” Sonic responds. “With the way you’ve spoken about her, this song fits perfectly.”

“She just saw everything the way this person does…” He gestures vaguely to the space around him with his hand. “The whole of the moon, the glass half full, always the brighter side of things. Always amazing me with how positive her attitude was despite how awful life was.”

Shadow takes a long draught from his Sprite. Although the topic of conversation has taken a rather sharp, depressing turn, he doesn't look put off by it. If anything, Sonic thinks this might be the most unguarded he's seen Shadow all day; open expression, lowered lids, relaxed mouth. "It's nice to think she'd have liked that song, too."

“Dude, that’s so sweet.” Sonic takes another long pull of his drink and feels little sparkles burst at the back of his eyes like tiny fireworks. “Cheers to her.”

They clink their glasses together again, but before Sonic can lower his, Shadow's hand is wrapping around his wrist. A zing of warmth shoots up his elbow, and it takes every nerve in his body not to fall lax and drop the half-drunk rootbeer on the table. One second he's holding it and the next, after he blinks, Shadow has somehow taken it from his grip and is holding it beneath his nose with a suspicious frown. "Doesn't it smell kinda funky?" Sonic slurs, dropping his tingling wrist down to the table with a thump. "I think the ice-cream went bad."

Shadow takes a sniff and immediately screws his face up. “This is alcoholic,” he remarks, keeping it away even when Sonic reaches back out for it with grabby hands. “No.”

“Hey!”

“You shouldn’t be drinking this.”

“Gimmie back my rootbeer.”

“No.” Shadow gives it another sniff. “This definitely has ethanol in it.”

“Whass’at?”

“Alcohol.” Shadow places the half-drank concoction on a table behind him, well out of Sonic’s reach. “The waitress must’ve given you the wrong drink.”

“I feel fine.” Sonic hiccups, slapping his hands down on the table.

At that moment the band decides to kick back into rhythm and the lead singer belts out the opening lines to Mr. Brightside. Shadow glances over his shoulder at their set, but turns his back to it to focus on Sonic, instead, who has suddenly taken an intense interest in spinning the propeller on top of his hat. “You drank over half of the mixture.”

"I literally feel fine," Sonic says, which he thinks is the truth, but his tongue is fat in his mouth and his neck feels hot and maybe he isn't doing so well, but Shadow doesn't have to know that, right? He'd handled some mulled wine at Rachel's last Christmas and everything was just dandy, or at least, that's what his increasingly foggy memory is telling him.

Suddenly hit with a spontaneous thought so intense it nearly bowls him over, Sonic's hand shoots out and grips Shadow's across the table. "Oh my god. Shadow. When Tom'n me were here before, we made this bucket list," Sonic slurs, jabbing his finger at the wooden tabletop, fixing Shadow with an unfocused yet intense gaze. "Tom told me I oughta get one 'fore I kick the bucket. Man, and I only found out what that meant the other day. Dark stuff." He waves his hand dismissively. " Aaaaaanyway , I crossed off a whole lotta stuff in one sitting. Start a bar fight? Tick! Do a slam dunk? Tick! Embarrass Tom publicly? Tick tick tick!" His voice rises with each achievement listed. "Man, we've totally gotta get you one."

“Sonic, you’re intoxicated.”

“I’m fine.” He thumps his chest, and flexes his arm. Does Shadow think it’s cool? Does he think my muscle gains make me look swole? I can nearly beat Maddie in an arm wrestle now. Surely that’s gotta mean something.  “I’m so good. And we need to get you a bucket list.”

“I don’t need a bucket list.”

“Uh, sure y’do.”

"Aren't they for people to complete before they die?" Shadow shrugs, his crimson eyes reflecting the dim bar lights. "That time will never come for me."

Sonic frowns at that, a wave of melancholy washing over him despite his inebriated state. "Hmmm," he grumbles, propping his chin on the rim of the empty glass of Sprite. "We can get you one for the end of the millennium? 's there anythin' y'wanna do?"

Shadow’s mouth twists in thought. “I haven’t really given it much thought,” he tells Sonic. Shadow glances out the window, pensive. “I suppose I’d like to visit the sea some time.”

“Th’ sea?”

He nods. “Maria loved the sea, and everything about it.”

Sonic swipes an off-white napkin from the centrepiece and uncaps the waiter’s pen, writing at the top: GO TO THE SEA in blocky, big chicken-scratch capitals. “There’s y’first one!”

Shadow glances down at the paper with a small, miniscule smile that makes Sonic’s heart flutter. “It’s quite a big one.”

“What’d you like t’do at the sea?” Sonic taps his pen in thought, before his brows fly to the top of his head and he scribbles: GO FISHING.

That earns another, small laugh from Shadow, the sound rare and precious. “I can’t say I’ve ever thought of that one before.”

“Every guy needs t’ go fishing at one point in his life. Rite of passage.”

“Rite of passage into what?”

“That: I don’t know. But it feels right t’ say! Rite. Ha!”

Sonic folds the napkin into a poor imitation of a swan before tucking it into the brim of Shadow's hat with a dopey smile. Shadow rolls his eyes, looking ethereal and somehow softer in the bar's hazy lighting. Sonic tells him as much by remarking: “Shadow, you look so freaking good t’night.”

“Right, time to go,” Shadow announces, moving to step down from the stool.

“Nooooo!”

“You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know exactly what ’m saying,” Sonic says with surety, narrowing his eyes a tad and steeling his gaze into an expression he hopes conveys seriousness. “Dressed all pretty in blue. Said it was your colour, yeah? ‘n I was right.”

Sonic blinks and he’s suddenly standing up, held steady by Shadow’s hand. How did I get down here? A strong hand on his bicep guides him through and out of the crowded bar, past faceless patrons and throngs of people. He barely registers them, laser-focused on the feeling of Shadow’s touch against his arm that he allows himself to be pulled until they reach the front doors and step outside.

The cool night air hits his face, soothing his heated cheeks and tingling on his lips. Sonic closes his eyes as the smell of the surrounding pine forest, motor oil, and Shadow, washes over him with each gust of wind, bringing with it hot tarmac and hops. He feels distantly, subconsciously, that this is going to be a strange, core memory for him. Not a day that particularly stands out for any discernible reason but Sonic somehow knows that in years and years to come, when his fur is grey and his bones are weak, that he’ll smell the same mixture of pine and lavender and warmth and be transported back to his fifteen-year-old’s self being practically carried out of a bar he wasn’t meant to be in by a pair of strong arms as the alcohol overwhelms his small body. He’s a vessel, fuelled by the inexplicable need to claw in close and hang onto Shadow like a limpet, soaking up his heat and smell like a crazed animal.

Sonic leans against Shadow's side and nestles his head into the crook of his shoulder with a contented hum. Shadow briefly pushes him away so he can take the stupid spinning-top hat off, giving Sonic more of a comfortable spot to lean. He burrows in closer, their steps lumbering, mismatched, and slow as they meander down the dimly lit walkway, away from the hustle and bustle of the bar and to the lonely gas station; a liminal space in the middle of nowhere, stuck between night and morning, between the end of something and the start of something new. When Shadow's arm curves around his back to steady him, Sonic leans in closer, nuzzling like a creature seeking sanctuary. “I could totally just sleep here.”

“You will not.” It’s a statement, and a threat, and Sonic pays it no heed.

They reach the gas station after what feels like both seconds and hours. Sonic, through his haze, feels himself being guided to sit down. The concrete curb beneath him is cool to the touch but otherwise comfortable. "Wait here," Shadow orders, his form blurring between one to three versions in Sonic's unfocused vision. "I'm getting gas."

Sonic reaches out instinctively, managing to grasp Shadow's leg. He laces his fingers behind Shadow's knee, holding him in place. "How long will you be?"

“Not long.”

Sonic blinks his heavy lids into the empty space in front of him as Shadow’s figure pulls up the mask to conceal his face and steps out of the loose hold Sonic has on him before disappearing from view. When he comes back, he’s holding a tankard of gas and a plastic bottle of water. He takes off the mask, tosses it aside, and uncaps the water bottle with the twist of his wrist and holds it up to Sonic’s mouth, tilting his head back a little for him. “Drink,” he orders, so Sonic does, gulping it down in thirsty swallows until the bottle is half empty and he’s suddenly aware that his lungs are burning and he needs to breathe.

“How’d y’ pay for that?”

“I pickpocketed you.” Shadow holds out a handful of dollars and coins. “Here’s your change.”

Sonic stuffs them blindly into his little bag. The importance of Shadow willingly stepping inside a store, alone, and likely getting caught on surveillance, doesn’t dawn on him at that moment. Instead, he stares dumbly up at him as Shadow fills the gas tank of the bike and tosses the empty canister into the wheelie bin. He blinks, and without quite understanding how it happens, Shadow is lifting him up onto the bike so he can sit on it before he slides on, too, taking Sonic’s arms and wrapping them around his own waist. “Don’t let go,” he orders. “You’ll look awful if half of your fur is skinned off.”

“Shadow,” Sonic remarks with his tongue stuck to the top of his mouth. “Shadow.”

“What?”

“That song kinda reminds me’a you, too. Blazin’ like a comet.” Sonic blinks. He opens his mouth to say something else, something profound that’s on the tip of his tongue, the cusp of his thoughts. It’s a big secret that he had vowed to himself that he’d tell Shadow; the secret that Tails knows about him, but all that comes out is another: “Shadow,” spoken like it’s something sublime.

“Right,” Shadow grunts. He tightens the tie beneath his chin to keep his pink cowboy hat secure, kicks up the stirrup, and gives a final word of warning: “Hold on!”

The speed at which Shadow drives could be anything between ten and a hundred miles per hour; Sonic has no concept of it. He holds on tight nonetheless, pressing his hot cheek to the warm curve of Shadow’s spine over his blue t-shirt as they peel off down the I-90. The stars above twinkle, those pretty blues and purples housing a magnificent red hypergiant up there somewhere, a big ball of brilliance, shining its light from hundreds of thousands of millions of miles away. 

Sonic nestles a little closer, thinking of that brilliant star shining above, surrounded by countless dying stars. He hopes that star finds comfort in knowing it exists in the same moment as someone who adores its brilliance, and though it will outlive its many neighbours, its light will continue to shine long after it's gone.

He tightens his arms around his chest and burrows closer.

Chapter Text

Sonic wakes up with a pounding headache, a churning stomach, and the realisation that he has no idea where he is nor how he got here.

He groans loudly, reaching out blindly to pull whatever sheet that’s wrapped around his legs over his head. The sunlight streaming through the window feels like two hot brands pressing directly into his brain via his eyes so he draws the blankets tighter to block out everything in the room around him and tries to breathe through the sudden wave of nausea that rushes through him.

What the hell has happened to me? I feel like I’ve just had a second helping of Uncle Gary’s eggnog. Sonic scours his memories and doesn’t have to go far before he realises he’s still wearing his memorabilia t-shirt that’s plastered to his skin in tacky sweat, and that his mouth tastes like a mix between rootbeer and week-old roadkill. Like a back-handed slap, a memory flashes in front of his closed eyes and practically stings as it works his tired brain.

“Shadow, you look so freaking good t’night.”

Sonic promptly screams into his pillows. He kicks his feet into the mattress and draws the pillows around his head. “Kill me,” he groans, hoarse voice catching on the vowels of his words. “Kill me now.”

He blindly fumbles around for a bottle on his bedside table. Sonic finds something and doesn’t check the label before chugging its contents. Whatever it is is tasteless on his tongue so it doesn’t particularly matter. He tosses the empty plastic bottle aside to be dealt with at a later date and finally braces the outside world by lifting the covers from his head incrementally. The room is empty, Tails and Knuckles absent but their beds made, which leads Sonic to believe it’s probably later in the day than he usually wakes up. Using his hand to shield from the light, Sonic climbs out of bed and shuts the curtains on both windows before stripping off the t-shirt, tossing it under his pillow like he’s hiding a corpse, and downing the other half-drunken bottle of Gatorade on his bedside table.

A little more hydrated and gathered, he heads down the stairs, stopping mid-way on his journey in the bathroom to swallow two tablets of paracetamol dry, before coming down to the first floor. He glances outside through the glass door panel and notices that the family car isn’t there so he’s either home alone, or whomever’s here is in the kitchen.

Lo and behold, Sonic is greeted with a warm: “Hey, bud,” by Tom as soon as he steps into the adjoining living room space. He’s sitting at the kitchen counter, reading a news article on his phone, dressed in his weekend comfies. “Nice Sunday lie in?”

“Yeah,” Sonic responds, voice creaky and dry like an old boat. He smacks his lips as he heads past him to grab a glass from the draining board and fill with water from the refrigerator. 

“You coming down with something?” Tom peers over with a frown as Sonic shrugs lamely, glass still filling beneath the steady steam. “You sound hoarse.”

“Maybe I swallowed some dust last night.”

“Well, you were out like a light. Tails and Knuckles have headed out with Maddie to go grocery shopping, and we couldn’t wake you for luck nor money.”

He shrugs and puts on an expression to say: how strange! before hiding it behind the glass of water. It’s downed in three seconds flat, chased by another glass filled to the brim, water hitting his empty stomach with a nauseating slosh . If Tom notices something’s off with him he doesn’t comment on it.

Tom crosses one of his sweatpant-cladded legs over the other and shifts in his chair so that he’s facing Sonic. Sonic glances over past the rim of the glass, and recognising the look on Tom’s face, it causes him to stop drinking and set the cup aside so he has his full, undivided attention. “Y’know, I just got off the phone with one of my old buddies at the station,” he says, phrasing his words carefully, neutrally, so they don’t spook Sonic.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. His dad used to be my coach years and years ago back in middle school, and he’s setting up a track and field summer camp for some of the kids in the school, and word got around that he’s looking for a certain blue hedgehog to help out with the kids.”

Sonic’s head snaps up, and his back straightens. The muzziness from the alcohol still lingering in his system is zapped away and Sonic suddenly feels as sober as a judge. The reaction causes Tom to arch his brow. “Me?”

“No, the other blue hedgehog I keep around the house.”

“Ha-ha.”

Tom's expression softens into something fond and amused. “The kids love you. You did great with them a few months back for their little league game — why not give it a go over the summer? They’ve offered to pay you. Minimum wage, sure, but something’s something.” He folds his arms on the countertop, settling back now that he can see he's caught Sonic's interest. “No pressure, of course.”

“No — no, I’d love to.” The eagerness in his own voice surprises him. The baseball thing had started as a one-off favour just a few weeks before Christmas, just a friendly game with some local kids that somehow evolved into him coaching some of them on how to run faster. Word about the fastest thing alive living in Green Hills had spread like wildfire through the parent networks, and he wasn’t qualified to coach, not by any means, but track and field? That was his bag.

Sonic sets his glass down on the counter and trots over to Tom, hoping how eager he feels isn’t coming across as desperate. “I’d really love that. Do you have any, like, details yet, or…?”

Tom shakes his head. “Nothing concrete. I think the middle school’s still trying to get some numbers in, but seeing as you’re kinda a celebrity I think it would do huge things for their campaign.”

“Yeah, cool,” he says, trying to play it off nonchalantly. “Cool.”

“Yeah, cool, ” Tom mocks in his voice, giving a small, pathetic shrug. Sonic grins and shoves his leg. “Coach Richards’ a real stand-up guy, so you’ll be in safe hands, but this will be good for you, bud. Who knows? Maybe you’ll end up loving it and decide to coach when you’re older.”

“Oh, God. Not the ‘j’ word.”

Tom holds up a hand. “I’m not saying you need to get a job — Lord knows you’ve already been through enough over the last few years. Maddie and I aren’t gonna kick you out at eighteen and start charging you rent, but it would be good for you to think about what you might want to do later in life.” He says the word ‘think’ like it means something else, or that it’s loaded; a little nudge in one direction rather than physically holding Sonic by the shoulders and shoving him off the cliff. “Not for the money side of things, but because we want you to feel fulfilled.”

“I know, I know,” Sonic grumbles. A job? Me? The idea of routine makes his skin crawl. He would rather stick pins in his eyes than do a standard nine-to-five. But, helping kids discover their potential? Sonic’ll happily help out with the local middle school if it’s only during the summer. Maybe Tom’s right — this could be a good thing for him.

“Good. Then, you’ll go, and you’ll help, and you’ll have a great time.” Tom’s hand comes out to ruffle the hair on top of Sonic’s head, flashing a grin. “Sound like a deal?”

“Deal,” Sonic says, holding out his hand for Tom to clasp. They shake on it with a few strong swings, setting the agreement in stone. Sonic suspects he's being gently manipulated into this opportunity, but he's going along pretty willingly anyway.

Satisfied, Tom turns his attention back to the news article on his phone while Sonic peels away to fix himself something to eat. A glance at the clock tells him it’s noon — well, at least that explains why his stomach feels bottomless. 

He’d usually just grab himself a bowl of cereal but the thought of milk alone is enough to churn his nausea back into its full-force. Maybe I should just eat it dry. Or with water. Is that bad? Sonic opens the fridge and scans the shelves for something other than milk when he finds one of Maddie’s expensive almond milk cartons and pills it out. He gives it a shake as he walks to the pantry and grabs a box of Lucky Charms and helps himself a generous portion. Almond milk is one step away from cow’s milk, and his stomach deems that good enough.

Sonic hops up to one of the kitchen island’s stools opposite to Tom, and shovels a spoonful into his mouth, immediately comforted by the sugary, crunchy cereal which eases the gnawing hunger he’s been nursing since waking up. 

As he eats, he takes a quiet moment to reflect on just what happened last night. His memories are a blur after being served his second root beer and he vaguely recalls a conversation with Shadow that involved the word ‘alcohol’. Is that why I feel so gross? Am I hungover? What a lightweight.

Sonic fishes out a spoonful of freeze-dried marshmallow only and stuffs it into his mouth. How did I get back home? Shadow must’ve brought me here. The thought of Shadow carefully getting his drunk, stupid self home safely makes something warm and uncomfortable twist in his chest. Did anyone see him? I guess not. Damn, I’ve really got to thank the guy. Wonder what happened to the bike. Sonic wracks his memories for any other clear pictures of what happened but all he gets are half-formed glimpses of the dark room and the sight of Shadow’s glinting eyes beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. Sonic’s knee begins a rhythmic bounce under the table to rid some of his pent-up energy.

Did I say anything stupid? Well, stupidly out of the ordinary, anyway. He can remember his ham-fisted attempt at flirting but just recalling the thought is cringe-inducing enough to make him want to pull his brain out and physically scrub the memory from its crevices. Not wanting to torture himself before the paracetamol gets a chance to kick in, Sonic wills those memories away and scoops up a spoonful of almond milk from the bowl and slurps at it, blind to the disapproving look Tom shoots his way. Did I tell him that Tails knew? He scours his memories with a fine tooth-comb but he comes up short. No, I don’t think I did. If I did, then I don’t think I would’ve woken up in my own bed. A sigh of relief escapes him. Thank God. That means that I’ll just have to tell him next time we meet. This can’t go on for any longer than it already has.

The right thing to do would be to tell him, but Sonic, selfishly, can’t help but want to cling on to what they have just a little longer. He knows that as soon as Shadow finds out that his identity’s been compromised, he’ll freak out and run for the hills, likely to never return again. It doesn't matter that Tails would literally die before betraying the faith Sonic had put him in to keep the secret a secret — Shadow’s been hurt too many times to take that kind of risk. It’s taken so much for him to reach out to Sonic in the first place, and for him to find out that that trust has been broken, Sonic doesn’t know if Shadow’s fragile trust can withstand another blow. 

There is no easy way to break the news. Sonic knows he has to do it soon. The longer he waits, the more betrayed Shadow will feel when the truth finally comes out, but knowing something intellectually and actually doing it are two very different things. 

Sonic’s lived a life of being different from everyone around him for so, so long. Now that he’s finally found someone likeminded, someone who understands what it feels like to be on the outside looking in, and someone who he genuinely enjoys spending time with, too, it feels scary to lose such a good thing.

What if, one day, he goes back to Mobius and finds out there are no other hedgehogs? What if he really is the last one of his kind, other than Shadow? The thought of losing that connection, of going back to being alone in his uniqueness, leads Sonic to wonder if he’ll ever recover from a blow that large.

What if I never find anything like this again?

Sonic nudges a stray piece of cereal around the rim of the bowl, floating atop the milk like a lonely buoy adrift at sea. “Hey, Tom,” Sonic prompts after a few mouthfuls. He chews, swallows, and continues once he has his attention. “Can I ask you a weird question?”

“You don’t usually ask permission first.” Tom sets his phone face-down on the table and looks up to meet Sonic’s flighty gaze. “What’s up?”

“How did you know that you liked Maddie?”

Surprise flashes across Tom’s face. Sonic has asked him some weird questions in the past, but none so left-field as that. The startled reaction Tom gives causes Sonic to shrink a little into himself, and he tries to hide his nervousness by shoving a huge spoonful of cereal into his mouth, teeth clicking against the cutlery. “What makes you ask that?” 

“Dunno. Curious, I guess,” Sonic says dismissively, even though his body seems to radiate a sense that this was anything but a casual question to ask.

Tom exhales a sigh through his nose, giving thought to Sonic’s question, who’s making a point to chew loudly to try and fill the silence. “That’s probably a question better asked to Maddie herself,” Tom says after a moment. “I liked her the second I met her, I guess. Can’t say the feeling was mutual.”

“The second?”

“Yeah, love at first sight. I thought it was a load of baloney people made up for cute stories ‘til I met her.” Tom leans his chin onto his palm, thumbing the stubble on his jaw idly. “I was in the force with your aunt Rachel years and years and years ago before she started working for G.U.N.. She brought Maddie to a black-tie department event and just like that,” he annunciates by snapping his fingers, “I knew I had to talk to her. So, I sort of made a fool of myself in front of her, if you could believe it.”

“Who, you?”

Tom rolls his eyes, face pulling into a grin at the jibe and at the memory. “I asked for her number. She said no, obviously, ‘cause I had a mullet at the time, which is fair. Then, Maddie just so happened to do some work with us as a consulting vet physician to our K-9 unit. I guess she took pity on me after a while, and eventually said yes to a coffee date. The rest is history.”

The way Tom says it is so simple, so straight forward, that any outsider looking in would just assume that he badgered her until she finally conceded, but Sonic’s not blind to the fact that Maddie’s just as head over heels for Tom as he is for her. Something tells him that it’s a lot less one-sided than Tom seems to think it was, but he keeps it to himself. Relationship talk is not something Sonic likes to engage in, but hearing Tom’s perspective is still helpful for him to weigh up his own experiences against. Did he fall for Shadow at first sight, too?

Sonic pulls a face as he considers the thought. No, he thinks, sure of himself. That’s not to say that he didn’t feel an affinity from their first meet — Sonic had been drawn to Shadow like a moth drawn to a flame, chasing him to the ends of the city just so he could catch another glimpse at this new person, a hedgehog just like him, that captured his attention unlike anything else on Earth had.

But it isn’t love. It’s just a crush — something, sure, but it’s not love.

Sonic likens his feelings to smoking kindling that’s grown into a bonfire over the span of the last few months, becoming this gigantic flame that’s so unbearably fierce he can’t stand too close to it to get a better look lest it burn him. The problem is that Sonic doesn’t have anything to douse the flames other than a big canister of gasoline.

Just a crush, he reminds himself firmly, nudging some of the bloated cereal pieces around the bowl. A piece of blue freeze-dried marshmallow leaves a trail of colour in its wake, catching on his spoon like an oilspill. Nothing more. And I’ll get over it soon once I tell him that his secret’s out.

The thought fills him with a sense of nauseating dread. 

"So," Sonic manages through the sudden tightness in his throat, "how did you know you liked her? Like, for sure?"

Tom’s casual, lax posture suddenly straightens as if a bolt of electricity’s shot through him. He angles his body so he’s better facing Sonic’s hunched shoulders, and asks incredulously: “Wait, Sonic, do you have a crush on someone?”

The spoon clatters to the bowl and splashes milk to the counter. He can barely contain his reaction and school his face into something neutral before his tone betrays his feelings. “No!” he cries, keeping his eyes on the bowl and its rippling surface. “No, I don’t!”

“You do!”

“I don’t!” he protests. Sonic pushes the bowl away when the smell of sweet milk causes the nausea in his stomach to churn, and so he forces himself to meet Tom’s sparkling, delighted gaze, hoping the fire in his eyes doesn’t show how defensive he feels. “I just wanted to know!”

“Is it one of the girls down at the café in town?” Tom leans on his folded arms, closer, into Sonic’s space, steamrolling over the obvious lie. “They’re a little old for you, bud — not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, there’s a seven-year age gap between me and Mads, but you’re only fifteen, and they’re in their twenties—”

“Tom,” Sonic cuts across, cheeks aflame. “Can we not?”

“Right, sorry.” Tom clears his throat and has to physically hold himself back from launching into further interrogating. “So, okay, hypothetically you have a crush on a girl, and you want to know if you like her.”

“Yeah,” Sonic concedes after a moment. The words or a guy die on his tongue before they do so much as even make it out of his mouth. He’s not ready to broach that topic of conversation — not yet. “Hypothetically.”

“Right, hypothetically.” Tom hums quietly as he thinks, scouring his brain for what to say. It’s not every day that you get to offer relationship advice. People don’t often come to Tom for that kind of thing. “I guess if you think you have a crush, then you already like her, right?”

“No, I—” He cuts himself off. Is there a point in lying if it’s not going to make a difference anyway? Tom can clearly see straight through him. “I don’t know how I feel, I guess. How do I know if I like hi—her ?” The slip makes his heart skip a beat, but Tom doesn't seem to notice. “How do I know it’s a crush and not just…wanting to be friends?”

"You know," Tom says gently, reaching over to tap the space between Sonic's ribs, right over his frantically beating heart. "In here. The fact that you're asking me about this in the first place tells me you already have your answer."

“That doesn’t help.”

Tom leans back and folds his arms atop the kitchen island. “Well, there is no solid answer. It’s a lot of things; looking for her in an empty room, getting nervous when she’s nearby with sweaty hands and butterflies in your tummy—”

“—kinda like I’m gonna be sick?”

The corners of Tom’s eyes crinkle. “See, I told you. You already know. Another good way to think about it is like: this girl you — hypothetically — have a crush on. How would you feel if someone else was hitting on her?”

Sonic’s lips flatten. I mean, I can’t really answer this one accurately. It’s not like Shadow’s a social butterfly, ready to go speed-dating at a bar. But, I guess, in an ideal world when he’s not on the run and he’s able to live just like me, how would that make me feel? How would I feel if I saw someone else riding on the back of a motorcycle with him, or seeing him carry them out of a bar? “Sick,” Sonic says after a moment. “Sad.”

“And would you feel that kinda way if it were any other girl you had as a friend?”

“No.” 

“Then, there’s your answer.”

Sonic blows out a long breath. It does little to ease the tension pulling both sides of his chest together towards his heart, like a fist crushing a dry, crumbling leaf in its grasp. “You don’t have to look like someone just died, bud,” Tom reassures him when Sonic doesn’t respond to what he had thought was a hopeful sentiment. He plants a hand on Sonic’s shoulder and gives it a jostle. “Crushes are a totally normal thing. Maybe it’ll work out, who knows?”

“Yeah,” Sonic says quietly. “Fat chance.”

"Hey, don't sell yourself short. You're an incredible kid, any girl would be lucky to have you in her life." Tom's grip on his shoulder tightens slightly. "Why do you look so pooped?"

Sonic lets out a sigh that sounds like a pout. “‘cause it just wouldn’t work out. She’s…” Sonic trails off, trying to find the right word to say. “Unavailable.”

Understanding dawns on Tom’s face. “Damn. Already taken, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, there’s plenty of other fish in the sea.” He leans back, away from their embrace, and stands to his full height. “And if it’s meant to be, it’ll be. Who knows? Maybe she’s thinking the same about you.”

The suggestion is so absurdly impossible that Sonic actually laughs out loud — a short, sharp bark that’s as loud as a thunderclap in the otherwise quiet kitchen. Tom hadn't meant it to be funny, but the idea of Shadow pining away for him is so ridiculous it's actually funny. “Not gonna happen,” he dismisses. Something like pity flickers across Tom's expression, but before he can voice whatever well-meaning platitude he's gearing up, Sonic cuts him off: “It’s fine. I didn’t ask you for advice because I wanted to woo her. I’m happy staying friends. I just didn’t know if the way I was feeling is any different to how I feel about my friends, but…” He sighs out of his nose. “I guess I now know.”

“Oh, buddy.” Tom offers a sympathetic smile. “Having your first crush is hard, right?”

Sonic drops his head into his hands, pressing his fingertips against his closed eyelids until stars bloom across his vision. The pressure helps ground him, and distract from the feelings churning in his gut that have nothing to do with the alcohol. "You don't know the half of it."

That evening, hungover and laying in bed with the newfound knowledge that weighs atop his chest like a ton of bricks, Sonic blearily taps out a response to one of the forum member’s comments. 

u/bowserismyhusband 2d

How exciting! Best of luck on your date. My best word of advice is to go in confident. Dress nice, look good, and you feel good :-) 

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 2d

Thx. What do u recommend?

u/bowserismyhusband 2d

You’re a teenager so maybe some of this is new to you but make sure you’re always super clean. Brush your teeth and hair, lots of deodorant, and clean clothes. Biggest piece of advice is to be yourself. 

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 2d

Damn thats actually really helpful. Thanks so much u/bowserismyhusband

u/bowserismyhusband   2d

No worries. Again, best of luck! Keep us updated with what happens.

u/Underscore-Netty2991 [OP] 32m

It’s a crush.

u/bowserismyhusband   6m

Damn. Godspeed, brother.

He groans, sets his iPad face down, and drops his head into his palms. Well, shit.

Chapter Text

Under a slate-grey sky with no clouds to keep the warmth in, a late spring’s night in Green Hills feels no different to a winter’s. It’s chilly and dark and had it not been for the overflowing vegetation spilling out of the forest Sonic would be none the wiser to the fact that they’re nearly halfway through the year, because the weather has nothing to show for it. They haven’t had a day of constant sunshine since October of last year. He rubs at his biceps as his fur stands to attention to try and keep warm, and crosses his arms over his chest when warming them by hand does nothing.

Sonic moans his displeasure, teeth chattering; a little dramatic, if only to hammer his point home. "You'd think with it being nearly summer that May would be at least a little warm."

Next to him, elegant and poised, Shadow looks ahead to the treeline with his chin held high and his eyes constantly moving, scouting the area for any hidden figures. "May is technically still in spring," Shadow corrects, idly adjusting his inhibitor rings, peering up to the branches high above.

"To-may-to, to-mah-to."

Shadow rolls his eyes. Seemingly satisfied with the state of the area surrounding them, he scuffs his feet and turns to regard Sonic with an unimpressed, bored look on his face. "So, what are we doing out here in the sticks? There are heating pads back at the den."

The way he says it: the den, like it's theirs, and has its own name.

Sonic drops the dramatic act and unfurls his arms from their hug around his body. He opens his clasped palm and holds his hand outstretched, producing a singular, small, golden ring. It catches the moonlight and twinkles under its rays, like a single flash of lightning. Shadow's brow raises at the sight and he leans closer, getting a better look at the thing. "You still have these left over? I thought they were for emergencies."

Sonic shrugs, watching as Shadow examines the ring without touching it. He's right, but what Shadow doesn't know won't hurt him. Besides, what use is it sitting in a drawer collecting dust? If Maddie and Tom were happy to use a spare ring to save on airfare, then Sonic thinks it’s alright for him to use it in the same manner. They are his, after all. "I had some tucked away," he says. That's true, at least.

Shadow pulls back, levelling Sonic with his trademark unimpressed glower, clearly not believing a word he said. Sonic flashes a grin in response as he tosses the ring into the air with the flick of his thumb; it rotates, catching the moonlight, before blooming and quintupling in size to a flickering, shining gate. A halo of tropical sunshine lights up the area surrounding them like a floodlight, causing them both to shield their eyes and squint at the brightness. Wind rushes through the portal, ruffling the fine hairs on their face, carrying the scent of salt. Sonic turns his cheek to regard Shadow next to him with an arched brow and a smug look on his face. "You said you wanted to go to the sea, right?"

Shadow's hand lowers from where it's shielding his eyes, and though he's still squinting a little, his eagerness to see more overpowers his sense of self-protection. He peers into the gate; it's all pale sands and blue skies and clear waters, with not a single soul to be seen along the beige planes. "That stupid bucket list…” he remarks quietly, as if he’s saying it to himself. “Where is this?"

Sonic’s heart soars at the sight of Shadow looking so tentative. His ears are pricked forward and his eyes are bright and curious and he’s so very sweet, but he’s waiting for Sonic to make the first move like he isn’t quite sure on how to accept the sight in front of him; a weary cat being offered a hand to sniff before it feels comfortable enough to indulge in the petting.

Acknowledging, coming to terms with, and accepting his crush was one thing, but actually doing something about it? Sonic would rather eat dirt.

He’s content just to spend time with Shadow like this without needing to take anything further because this is enough — has been enough, and Sonic doesn’t want to be greedy. He’ll take what he can get during the limited time they spend together. “Just off the coast of Korea,” he says. Sonic decides to take the lead, and so he steps over the threshold into the warm give of the sand. He holds a hand out between the two planes and cocks a brow. Casual, nothing more than a friend helping a friend. Cool as a cucumber. “Coming?”

Shadow glances left and right across the treeline that appears inky black against the sheer brightness of the sunny skies through the ring. Triple checking that the coast is clear and satisfied with what he sees (or lack thereof) he lightly, and a little awkwardly, places his hand in Sonic's and steps through the threshold. The gate closes behind him with a whisper and suddenly it's just them, alone on a coastal stretch on Jeju Island, thousands of miles away from their home in Montana. The heat hits them immediately; a warm blanket, washing over them with the smell of salt and sea. Shadow shudders at the sensation and feels Sonic release the gentle pressure on his hand to take off towards the shoreline in bounding steps, kicking sand up as he goes. He whoops and hollers, flipping on his hands in cartwheels as he crosses the short distance to the licking waves. He's an electric-blue pinprick on the clear, rippling horizon, waving his hands and calling for Shadow with a: "What are you waiting for?"

Sonic watches as Shadow's distant figure, standing out like a dark smudge on a white canvas, glances around to check his peripherals, but Sonic knows he'll find nothing. This part of the world, tucked away from tourists and the holiday crowds, was somewhere Sonic had discovered after nights spent researching remote and desolate beauty spots near the sea. His search history makes him look like he's planning to hide a body so unless someone’s monitoring his internet usage, they should go undisturbed and be untraceable.

Bordered by rock pools and sand dunes topped by dry, yellow-green grass, this isolated part of Jeju island is inhabited by a small, aging fishing community, and aside from the odd ebb and flow of tourist attention, is largely barren. This far away from traffic and noise pollution all you can hear is the draw and push of the waves lapping the sand in frothy splashes, and the occasional caw of a seagull searching for scraps on an otherwise deserted beachfront. Shadow's small figure looks back over to Sonic once he's satisfied that they're truly alone before he begins to walk over at a leisurely pace.

The warm give of sand sinks beneath each step Shadow takes, making it difficult to run if he needs to flee at short notice, which he’s very conscious of. His black fur absorbs the heat like a sponge and his inner mechanisms for self-cooling are working triple time for the first time in his life — Montana isn’t generally considered hot, and the lab was always a crisp, air-conditioned fifteen degrees Celsius. Shadow really isn't equipped for this kind of climate but he can't find that he minds it. Over the last few months he's gained back all of the muscle mass and weight he lost since being on the run and here, under the warm kiss of the sun in the tranquillity of absolute peace other than a single, kindred soul, Shadow can't remember the last time he's been so at ease.

He catches up to Sonic a few moments later. The sand here is dark and packed densely, pale yellow turned yellow-brown, dampened by the sea's edge. Sonic has stripped off his shoes and socks and placed them out of the water's reach, while he stands with his feet submerged beneath the sand with water lapping his ankles. He looks delighted, cheeks rosy and eyes bright as he turns his shoulders and regards Shadow with a smile. "Pretty cool, right?"

Shadow dignifies his response with a hmmm, crossing his arms. He bares his face to the southern-facing Sun, quills rustling as another wave washes over the shore and brings with it a sea breeze. “You should come in,” Sonic encourages, nodding his head to the water. “It’s not too cold.”

He cracks an eye open, peering over to Sonic.

Quick, so quick Sonic blinks and misses it, Shadow has shucked his shoes off and stepped into the water. He's hesitant, like he is with all things new, and flinches when the water brushes his feet as if it's wired with electricity. Sonic supposes he's never truly been in the sea like this, only having ever glided across it with his skates, but after a few careful moments he settles, quills flattening, and steps further in so he's ankle deep with Sonic. "It is warm," he remarks, voice low and curious, head tilted downward as he looks at the seafoam.

Sonic tries his damndest to repress his smile but can’t bite it down. He laughs, cheeks hurting with the force of his joy. “Nicer than the lakes back home, huh?”

“Mmm,” Shadow hums, fascinated. He steps in further, wading up to the knee. When Sonic doesn’t follow, he casts a look behind him and quirks his brow; an invitation of sorts.

That bright smile falters. “Uh.” Sonic waves his hands. “No, thanks. Not for me.”

Shadow doesn’t like that response. He frowns. “Why?”

Sonic clears his throat and mutters something under his breath. Shadow tilts his head. “What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“You said something.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Not.”

Shadow quirks his brow. “You said, and I quote, ‘can’t swim’.”

Sonic splutters. “You heard that? Yeah, well—”

His hand is lifted as Shadow takes it, giving it an encouraging pull, more sure with his hold on Sonic’s fingers than he was when they stepped over the portal’s threshold. “Come on,” he encourages. “You didn’t waste a ring to come all this way and not come into the sea.”

“Wasn’t a waste,” Sonic mutters in a tight voice strangled by the sudden vice that grips his throat, but follows him in anyway, wading deeper until they’re at waist level. His spine stiffens and he digs his heels in, stopping them. “No further.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Shadow, I literally can’t swim,” Sonic protests, his voice cracking with genuine anxiety.

“You won’t need to.” Shadow drags him — physically drags him — forward, one deliberate step after another, deeper and deeper into the crystalline water. The sandy bottom slopes away beneath Sonic's feet until he's stretching, balancing precariously on his tiptoes, the cool water lapping dangerously close to his chin. He gasps, panic gripping his chest at that primal fear of being unmoored, of surrendering control. His free hand shoots out, desperately seeking Shadow's other arm. Their fingers connect, then interlock frantically. “There we go,” he encourages, quiet and low, keeping his arms held straight ahead so Sonic has something to hold onto. And hold on he does, gripping Shadow’s forearms with white knuckles to keep hold of the only thing he has tethering him from drifting away.

They’re floating, a little over an inch deeper than their height would allow, water licking their shoulders with little splashing laps. “Don’t let go,” Sonic demands, green eyes flicking worriedly to the ground below and the hands keeping him afloat.

Whatever weird alien DNA Shadow’s sporting keeps him buoyant; he hangs effortlessly in the water, supporting them both without the slightest hint of struggle or exertion. He wriggles his hands out of the clamp Sonic has them in and slips them up Sonic’s arms so that he’s supporting him by the biceps, rather than just being gripped by the forearms. Sonic panics for a second until he gets his bearings and holds onto Shadow by the biceps too, fingers digging into the sinewy muscle. The seawater washes over his shoulders and tickles his chin, dampening the fur there. “I’ve got you.”

“You don’t have a choice,” Sonic grits out. “If I’m going down, you’re going down with me.”

Shadow chuckles, seemingly finding Sonic’s dramatics entertaining. He floats them out a little further into the sea, keeping his head turned to the horizon and its deep blue shimmer. They settle into a comfortable, easy quiet, and bit by bit Sonic begins to relax, shoulders dropping from being so close to his jawline. The water swells them higher and dips them low on certain waves but it’s relatively still, almost rocking them from where they float as they move further and further out to sea. Sonic glances over his shoulder to the shoreline and reckons it must be a good ten to fifteen metres out, their side-by-side shoes propped on the sand barely visible to the naked eye. He turns his head back to the direction they’re floating in, and to Shadow who’s gazing out to the endless stretch of blue in front of them. “Isn’t it strange how so much of the ocean remains unexplored?” Shadow remarks.

Despite how tranquil the sea is, it’s still pretty noisy; sloshing and splashing, keeping Shadow and Sonic company. “You’ve been reading?”

“No.” Shadow shakes his head. “It’s a fact I remember from back in the lab. I can’t imagine much has changed in the last fifty years.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right. We’ve visited the moon and put a couple satellites up in the atmosphere, but no one’s really brave enough to go to the bottom of our seas.”

Shadow huffs a small, singular breath which Sonic thinks might be a laugh. Sonic adjusts his hold on his biceps so he's not gripping him as tightly, growing more comfortable, and lets the water take a little more of his weight. He's not swimming and he sure as hell isn't letting go of Shadow anytime soon, but he wants to enjoy the moment without being so tightly wound. Although it's a little scary, he lets the water lick up to his chin and gives his feet a few hesitant kicks before he gets the hang of it, barely treading water. It's kind of like running, but with a lot more resistance. "Everything and nothing changes, huh."

“Sounds about right.” Sonic looks up from where he’s been studying the shape of his feet under the opaque blue water and finds that Shadow’s watching him. When they make eye contact he averts his gaze, staring back out to the horizon. “The moon and the ocean and the sun haven't changed in fifty years. I bet it was weird waking up after so long and seeing all of these new things next to the old things, huh?”

“It was.” Shadow sighs through his nose. “Though, I wouldn’t say that the moon is exactly unchanged as it stands.”

“Ha!” The corner of Shadow’s mouth quirks at the sound of Sonic’s laugh. Sonic adjusts his grip when his hands cramp, holding him at a slightly different angle, and he looks up at the sky. While the moon isn’t visible at this time of day, he pictures it above; a split pea, spilling its crumbling guts into the atmosphere. “I wonder if they’ll fix it.”

“I don’t know if that’s possible.”

“Just get, like, a really strong superglue to hold it all together.”

Shadow rolls his eyes. 

Sonic continues: “For real, though, they really should do something about it. I mean, it’s probably dangerous, right?”

“The moon is a satellite, which means that it can’t just fall down on us.”

“Yeah, but now it’s two satellites, right?” Sonic’s mouth twists unhappily. “I bet the gravity’s all off, man. One day we’re just gonna be chilling and half of the moon is straight up just gonna fall down on us.”

“I’m sure if it were that big of an issue something would have happened by now.”

“I dunno. The government’s not very good at being proactive.” Sonic squints up at the sky. “There’s a movie about this called Chicken Little.”

“What would a chicken have to do with the moon?”

“No, he’s called Chicken Little.”

“What an awful name.”

“It’s not like he chose it himself. Anyway, this chicken gets hit by a piece of the sky and he, like, predicts the world is gonna end, so he saves it. I’ll get us a DVD copy of it and we can watch it — it’s crazy.”

“I don’t understand how a chicken is capable of saving the world.”

“Dude, we’re hedgehogs. Do you think if I told you there was a movie about hedgehogs teaming together and saving the world you’d believe it?”

Shadow’s mouth twists. “You’ve phrased that intentionally so it sounds stupid.”

“No I didn’t! We’re literally two hedgehogs who saved the world.”

“ You’re a hedgehog. I am the Ultimate Lifeform.”

“Still a hedgehog.” Sonic flashes him a bright grin. “Two of a kind!”

They float on the waves for a while, two specks of primary colour on the vast stretch of ocean, bobbing like buoys. The sun is pretty strong despite it being just past four in the afternoon in South Korea, and though he had a nap earlier to try and catch up on some sleep, his body clock still thinks it's around midnight. The waves lull him with each rock and sway and after a while he starts to feel his eyelids grow heavy, head nodding, far too comfortable under the warmth of the sun and the warm arms holding him up. 

A large wave startles him awake, causing Sonic to jolt and hold onto Shadow tighter. Shadow glances over at him with a raised brow, having been watching the horizon, and Sonic is suddenly aware of just what they’re doing and decides it’s time to dry his fur before he makes a fool of himself.

They paddle back to shore together arm-in-arm. When they finally get to water shallow enough for him to stand his knees nearly buckle, feeling like jelly after hanging out in the water for so long. Shadow straightens him out by keeping their arms interlocked but Sonic gets his bearings pretty easily after the first stumble, and so he lets go of Shadow and trots up the sandy incline of the shoreline with a flush to his cheeks and a stiffness to his frame. 

They shake themselves dry, droplets of water flying left right and centre to splatter on the sand and colour it brown. With the heels of their shoes hooked in their fingers they set off further down the beach, damp fur sticking up wayward like they’re in their super forms. Their pawprints leave tracks in the wet sand that'll get washed away once the tide comes in, and the only evidence that remains of their seaside adventure will be their shared memories; not even the Earth will remember they’ve been here.

The beach stretches for miles and miles, forming a ring road bordering the small island. The path is occasionally broken by rocky limestone cliffs that stretch out of the water like yawning beasts, their huge gaping mouths leading to cave systems and alcoves. They walk for an indefinite amount of time, content with each others’ presence without having to speak a word, broken only when Sonic spots a blockage in their path. He jogs ahead, kicking up sand, coming to a pale, short rocky cliffside, where a flat span of pale grey rocks replace their sandy path. They’ll either have to turn back, or cross over it if they want to loop the island. 

Sonic shields his eyes with a flat palm, sizing up the rocks, before he hops onto them like a mountain goat scaling a cliffside. He gestures for Shadow to follow with an excited wave. "Look!" he calls, the sun behind his head haloing his quills in golden light. He drops down onto his haunches and beckons Shadow with another animated wave. "We can do the next thing on the bucket list!"

Shadow quirks a sceptical brow. He makes it there in his own time, leisurely strolling through the sand as it grows dry and loose beneath his feet. He hops up the rock’s smooth, hot surface until he’s level with Sonic, looking down to where he’s been madly gesturing to.

The rock’s surfaces have dips in them, forming puddles of warm, tropical water ranging from a few shallow inches to pools stretching several feet deep. Shadow crouches next to Sonic as they lean over one directly in front of them. A small school of tiny iridescent fish dart near the lip of the rockpool, their scales catching the light and shifting colour with each angle and kick. They’re so small they look almost translucent in the light; tiny, barely-there things in a tiny puddle. Sonic dips his finger into the water and watches as the ripples alarm the small fish, sending them scattering to the edges of the rockpool in search of shelter.

“You just ruined their day,” Shadow remarks dryly. He, too, dips his finger in, and is pleased to find that the water is almost hot to the touch.

“A huge animal just came and stuck its finger into their sky. Can you imagine if that happened to us?”

“Knowing you, you’d just end up annoying it to the point where it either kills you or leaves in frustration.”

“I’d like to see it try to kill the fastest thing alive!”

Sonic reaches in to touch the mossy green walls, picking up some of the slimy green seaweed stuck to the rock-sides. “What’s that?” Shadow asks, leaning over to get a better look as their shoulders brush.

Sonic pulls some from the wall and holds it in his cupped palm. “This is algae,” Sonic explains, raising it up so Shadow can see it at eye-level. “It’s like a plant that grows on top of the water. Here, hold out your hand.” Shadow does, extending his cupped palms forward. Sonic gently tips the seawater and cloudy algae into his palms. “I don’t know what type of algae this is, but seaweed is algae, and you can find that everywhere. You can even eat it!”

“...I can eat this?”

“Well, maybe not that one. Some algae is super deadly to eat, but some places in the world eat it all the time. Sushi is part seaweed, and it’s really tasty.”

Shadow raises his cupped palms to his eye level and studies the algae. He tips his palms side to side, watching the slimy, green substance slip from one side to the other like mercury, before he lowers his hands and returns it to the water. The fuzzy algae floats, lazing on the warm bed of water as if it were sunbathing. “How is it a plant if it doesn’t have roots?”

Sonic hmm s thoughtfully, poking at the algae. “I read about this ages ago, so I’m not totally sure if I’m 100 per-cent right, but I’m pretty sure they get their food from the water itself. So, if this fish dies, its body rots and then those nutrients go into the water and feed the algae.”

“I see,” Shadow murmurs, crimson eyes reflecting the wavering patterns of light from the water's surface. “So, whereas some plants have roots and eat straight from the soil, this eats from the water?”

“Bingo.”

“Fascinating.” He swipes through the algae with a gentler hand than Sonic had used. “They’re quite advanced organisms.”

“I’m pretty sure algae is one of the oldest things on Earth. Hey, let’s see if they have any books on algae in the area! We’re by the sea, right?”

“Won’t they be in Korean?”

“Oh, great point.”

Satisfied with their findings, they amble over to a higher plane on the rock formation. They hop the craters, careful of the slick seaweed-green mounds, and discover a particularly wide and deep rockpool a little further housing a colony of sea creatures and bigger fish. Sonic and Shadow crouch back down onto their haunches, studying the sight below them. 

“That one’s huge,” Shadow murmurs, pointing his damp finger towards a particularly large, grey fish with beady, watching eyes.

“Dude, that’s a shark!”

Shadow pulls his hand back, startled at Sonic’s tone. “But it’s so small.”

“Yeah, ‘cause it’s a baby.” Sonic leans closer to the water to get a better look, his reflection rippling across the surface. “How’d you get up here, little guy?” Shadow gives Sonic a tiny, quick shove, just enough to throw him off balance. He panics, widening his stance so he doesn’t fall, and shoots Shadow a glare. “Hey!”

Shadow tucks his smirk into his shoulder, looking away.

Sonic duck-walks away from Shadow to the other side of the rock pool to get a better look inside. It’s a few metres wide and deep enough that Sonic can’t see the bottom, so he reckons that the shark isn’t the only scary thing inside. He chooses not to stick his hand too deep, but he does spot something interesting clinging to a small rock outcropping near the surface. “Look at this one.” With incredible care, Sonic reaches inside and delicately detaches a spiny creature from the wall. He holds his hand open, revealing a glossy, wet, reddish-brown sea urchin. "It's you!"

"Ha-ha," Shadow retorts with intentional blasé. He rises to his feet and moves around the rockpool to where Sonic is crouched before settling down beside him. "What is it?"

“A sea urchin, I think.” Sonic raises it up so it’s eye level with Shadow, holding it carefully in his open palms. “Apparently you can crack ‘em open and eat ‘em.”

“Is it alive?”

“Yeah,” Sonic lowers it, peering at the creature with a raised brow. “Though, I can’t say it’s good company.”

“Put the poor thing back.”

Sonic lowers his cupped palms to the water and slowly lets go, letting it float back to where he found it. “There you go, little guy,” he murmurs, drawing his hands back out of the shallow waters. He shakes off his gloves, water droplets skittering across the rock pool’s surface. “Aren’t you a little curious, though, about how they’d taste?”

“Do I need to eat it with the shell?”

“Only if you’re really hungry. Like how you ate those chicken bones.”

Shadow rolls his eyes and gives Sonic’s shoulder another shove. He settles down beside him, curious about what else might be hiding in the rock pool. There isn’t much; a few other sea urchin are gathered in an inky clump, and some seaweed is growing on one of the rocks. “If you rummage around in the sand, you’ll find crabs.”

Shadow lowers his face to the water, peering into the crystal-clear depths. “I don’t see any.”

“They’re probably sleeping.”

“Then we shouldn’t bother them.”

They scale the rest of the cliffside together, pointing out curious shapes of certain formations, their voices echoing against the rocks. At one point, Shadow discovers a mollusc fossil embedded in the stone, which he declares must be related in some form to Pangea because he's seen similar specimens in other countries, too. Sonic keeps the mollusc safe in his little backpack so they can display it on one of the shelves back in their den when they return.

They head down the other side of the rock formation when they’re done, hopping from ledge to ledge until their feet sink into the warm sand again. The sun has started its descent but the sky is still mostly blue, if not growing rosy on the horizon, and it’s still plenty warm. Though, that might just be the sunburn Sonic’s developed on the high points of his face and ears talking.

On this side of the island, there are a few market stalls lining the promenade, built on the incline a few metres above the shoreline. Sonic begins to lead them in the direction of the stalls but Shadow, hesitant, slows his step the closer they get. Sonic notices, and nudges him with his elbow. “We’ll be fine. Trust me, okay?” 

Shadow presses his lips together in a thin line, but that's as far as his protests go. He allows Sonic to lead them up the sandy dunes, through the dry scrub of grass at the top, as they climb to the promenade. There isn't much here beyond a long, concrete path that stretches along the island's perimeter, giving tourists somewhere to walk if they don't fancy trudging through sand, or if the tide is in. But on this particular section of the promenade, a few shop stalls have been set up on wooden carts. All are empty, having been cleared for the day, except one. Sonic can't read the sign above because he can't read Korean, but it features a helpful image of a smiling, blushing orange next to the text.

He trots over and lifts the canvas covering the wooden stall, eyes lighting up at the sight. Mounds and mounds of juicy, fragrant oranges sit stacked in pyramids and rows in all shapes and sizes. “Shadow!” he calls. “Come look!”

Shadow bristles at the use of his name being spoken so loudly, so openly, but he nonetheless comes, albeit with a bit of an attitude. He’s clearly nervous and Sonic gets that, particularly seeing as they’re out and about in broad daylight, but Sonic was so very careful when looking for places for them to go and he knows that this town is practically empty during the off-peak season. The oranges must be for locals. 

Sonic holds the canvas open for Shadow, who peers in like a disapproving grandparent; narrowed eyes, a surly expression, general distaste. “Hold this,” Sonic orders as he slings his backpack around to his tummy. He unzips it and pulls out a few loose notes of cash, slapping them on the counter, before picking up four juicy tangerines and putting them in his bag.

“That’s theft,” Shadow remarks.

“I paid.” Sonic nods up to the cash he slapped on the counter. 

“Do they accept dollars in Korea?”

Sonic doesn’t know about that, but something’s better than nothing, right? He adds a few coins for good measure and takes two final fat oranges from the stack before he re-jigs the arrangement so it’s not too obvious there’s some fruit missing, and lays the canvas sheet back flat. “You ever had a tangerine?” Sonic prompts, picking a pair from his bag and handing one to Shadow as they set off down the promenade, continuing in the same direction as before.

“Not with its shell on,” Shadow responds, holding the tangerine with the tips of his fingers like he’s holding a glass orb.

“It’s called a peel, not a shell.” Sonic laughs. “It’s not an egg.”

Shadow raises the tangerine to his nose, sniffing it. “Do you eat it like this?” he asks, turning it over in his palm. “The skin smells quite bitter.”

“No, silly.” Sonic digs his thumb into the soft dip at the top but there isn’t much purchase between his finger and the fabric. Orange also stains like crazy, and he doesn’t want to lose a good pair of gloves.

Sonic hesitates, glancing over to Shadow, and considers his options. He could always peel the orange with his teeth but the pith tastes something fierce and he doesn’t want to get rind stuck in his teeth. 

The other option is to do what he does with Tails, Knuckles, Maddie, and Tom, and remove his gloves entirely.

It may be simple from an outsider’s perspective; Sonic doesn’t exactly wear clothes other than shoes and gloves, so why be modest now? 

But exposed hands and, by extension, removing gloves was always considered something deeply intimate back on Mobius. It was the kind of thing you only ever did around your family, close friends, and lovers; the closest human equivalent Sonic can think of is underwear, but even that isn't a true like-for-like. Pawpads and palms are seen as sacred and private, and though Sonic and Longclaw didn't exactly have neighbours back on Mobius, he understood customs and practices through what he was taught and what he observed in the Echidna Clan. As a general rule, gloves stayed on. Was it cultural? Definitely — there wasn’t really a biological reason they needed to keep them protected. Were there other Mobians who didn't wear gloves? Probably, but Sonic had never encountered one. Tails and Knuckles never went gloveless in public, or if there were strangers in the house.

Even though his time on Mobius was brief and the majority of his adult life has been spent among humans it still feels right and customary to keep his gloves on outside of the rare occasions he goes bare-handed back home. But this was Shadow, and he wasn’t exactly a paragon of social etiquette in the first place. Shadow hadn't been raised on Mobius, and outside of sharing similar DNA to himself, Tails, and Knuckles, he was practically a different species entirely. It’s unlikely he even knows about the whole de-gloving custom and practice, anyway, and probably only wears his own because they look cool or serve some kind of other practical purpose. 

Besides, Sonic feels comfortable enough around him, and Shadow sort of fits into the social circle where de-gloving is acceptable. Is he family? No. Close friend? Kind of. Lover?

The thought causes blood to flush Sonic’s cheeks and neck red. Definitely the 'close friends' category.

Sonic glances to his right, to Shadow peering charmingly at the orange, before he throws his concerns to the wind. He wedges his tangerine between his chin and neck and quickly removes his gloves from his paws with practiced ease. Sonic stuffs his gloves into the pocket of his backpack before he frees his orange and holds it in his left paw. His palms are a little sensitive from being inside the gloves all day but under the warmth of the sun he feels more comfortable and more liberated without them, as if a veneer has been peeled away.

Sonic hooks his right thumb into his tangerine and peels it swiftly, tossing the rind in a trashcan they pass. He segments it, popping some into his mouth. It’s tart and full of juice, bursting on his tongue. Sonic chews and swallows, smacking his lips. “Damn, these are good. How’s yours?”

When Sonic turns to look at him, Shadow is making a point to look everywhere but where Sonic is. His eyes are focused intently somewhere down the pathway, and he's not even blinking. Distantly, Sonic notices that the apples of Shadow's cheeks have taken on a rosy tint beneath his dark fur.

Shit, Sonic curses inwardly. Mobius de-gloving customs be damned, the apple didn’t seem to fall far from the tree. Maybe the predisposed need to keep your palms covered is a genetic thing, after all, and not something learned through culture. 

Sonic clears his throat and fixes his gaze forward, filling the empty space of their silence by impulsively shoving the entire remaining tangerine into his mouth. He tries to chew but can’t quite shut his mouth fully so each breath nearly chokes him, tangerine lodged from cheek to cheek, prostrating himself just to break the awkward tension. He's frantically trying to make things better but he’s only making things worse as juice spurts from his mouth like blood from a severed artery, trickling down his chin and chest and getting everywhere except inside where it belongs. Sonic grows increasingly mortified, unsure how to escape the physical and situational mess he's created. Does he keep chewing and make an even bigger spectacle, or bite the bullet and swallow it in one go while praying he doesn't choke? Does he put the gloves back on, or would that be acknowledging the awkward air and make it even more awkward?

Shadow, fortunately, doesn't appear to notice Sonic's inner turmoil. This bout of awkward, mouth-stuffed chewing is so characteristically Sonic that it doesn't even phase him. He holds out his tangerine to Sonic, still pointedly gazing into the distance, away from the chaos unfolding on his left. Whether or not he’s noticed that Sonic’s currently choking on a tangerine is beyond him. Sonic's just relieved that Shadow is too embarrassed to notice how equally flustered he is. "Do the same for me."

Plan B it is, then. Sonic swallows the half-macerated orange and it nearly lodges in his throat, bulky and practically whole. It hits his stomach with a cold slop. He scrubs at his mouth with his arm, trying to clear away the sticky juice, but only manages to smear it half up his face. “Whuh.”

“Peel it,” Shadow orders, waving the orange in his face.

Sonic blinks in surprise. He takes it from Shadow; when his bare hand brushes against Shadow's gloved one, Shadow recoils slightly, his ears twitching. Sonic has to press his lips flat, sticky from sweet orange juice, so he doesn’t smile, physically biting back a grin. Shadow's not yet ready to expose that part of himself to Sonic, but he's still eager to enjoy the moment nonetheless. Instead of sulking, he’s wanting to participate; wanting to experience new things with someone he trusts enough to be vulnerable around, knowing Sonic won't mock him for it. Sonic can tease, but he's learned there's always a time and place, and he's come to understand that in moments where Shadow, like a timid animal, is comfortable enough to approach his outstretched hand, the worst thing he can do is reach out the rest of the way himself. Working with Shadow means understanding that he needs to make the rest of the journey in his own time, taking those final steps to reach that outstretched hand and see just what’s so great inside the palm. 

“Magic word?”

“I order you.” Shadow's tone is gruff but lacks real venom.

“Hmmm,” Sonic tuts. “I don’t think that’s the one I’m looking for.”

Shadow growls. He presses the rind of the tangerine to the soft fur of Sonic’s bicep and mutters: “Please.”

“There we go!”

He takes the tangerine from Shadow and peels it quickly with a few swipes of his thumb, collecting the discarded rind and disposing of it in a nearby trash can as he had done earlier. Sonic passes the peeled fruit back to Shadow, who – less flushed now and willing to meet Sonic's eyes, though his gaze doesn't venture below Sonic's chin — accepts it. Sonic leans closer and points to the natural ridges in the tangerine. "You pick them apart. They're in segments, so if you just sort of pull, they eventually come apart by themselves."

Shadow hesitantly pulls at the tangerine from each end and it peels apart. He stares at it curiously, lifting one segment of the tangerine to his eye level. “What’s this?”

“That’s the pith,” Sonic explains. When Shadow raises a brow, Sonic shrugs. “What? I had a lot of time on my hands when I was in the whole ‘Can’t-Be-Seen-By-Humans’ phase. I read a helluva lot of library books.”

“What’s a ‘pith’?”

“The membrane thing, kinda? I actually don’t really know. Anyways, it tastes bad, so don’t eat too much of it.”

Shadow, heeding his advice, picks the membrane off before he pops one of the segments in his mouth. His chewing stops before it restarts and his expressions seem to cycle through one another in rapid succession; surprise, confusion, repulsion, thoughtfulness, before it settles somewhere neutral. “What do you think?” Sonic prompts, tilting his head in Shadow’s direction to catch his reaction better. “Yay, or nay?”

Shadow peels off another segment, humming as he holds it between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s strange,” he muses. “It’s like a sack of juice, except the membrane of the segment is holding even smaller sacks of juice within it.”

“Yeah, but do you like it?”

Shadow pops it into his mouth. “It’s adequate,” he responds with, finishing the rest of the orange off in far more measured bites than Sonic had.

They stroll the length of the promenade and split the bigger orange between them. It’s the size of a small melon with segments three to four inches long. While not as tart or juicy as the tangerines, this one has a better texture and tastes refreshing, like a cold glass of juice on a hot day. The sun has properly begun to set now, casting the clear skies with streaks of butter yellow and sherbet pink, and while it isn’t as warm as it was earlier it’s still a pleasant temperature and feels nice against the gaps in Sonic’s fingers. 

"What're your plans after this?" he asks, working his way through a hefty chunk of orange.

Shadow finishes his segment, chewing thoughtfully. "After we return to Green Hills?”

“Yeah. Are you staying for long, or are you on the go again?”

His mouth gathers to one corner as he considers the question. “I have business to do outside of the state.”

“You have business? ” It’s the first Sonic’s heard of Shadow ever attending any kind of named business, and he can’t help the sharp tone of his voice, unintentionally curt from his surprise. Sonic halts in his step, shoes scuffing against the dry floor beneath his sneakers. “With who?”

“With no one.” Shadow glances out thoughtfully to the sunset. “I’m working alone.”

“Then, what ‘business’ are you attending to?”

Shadow glances over to Sonic. He looks at him for a moment as if he’s considering him, considering whether or not he wants to reveal another hidden layer of himself to the one person he trusts, but whatever he sees on Sonic’s expression causes him to glance away with a feeling of admission. Sonic watches his guard drop, watches the way Shadow’s posture seems to relax ever so slightly, as if just speaking about the issue is a burden relieved. “After we spoke about Stone and Eggman a few months ago, and you said that Eggman had died there on the Eclipse Canon, I’ve been trying to track down Stone.”

Sonic’s heart thumps a strong, heavy beat in his neck. He tries to swallow the orange in his mouth but his throat feels too narrow and he has to physically force it down just to get his words out. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Shadow, not having noticed Sonic’s pause, has kept walking. Sonic hurries to catch up, mind racing to process this revelation. Why am I surprised? Isn’t it only normal for him to want to find the only other guy that was nice to him? Or is he finding him so he can tie up loose ends? Brutal, but understandable, I guess. “It had piqued my curiosity and I was concerned for him.”

“What, like a friend…?”

Shadow's face creases into a scowl. “No. Because he was the only other person Eggman and Gerald allowed to see their work. I can’t let that knowledge fall into the wrong hands.”

“But I thought you were buddies?”

“Buddies?” Shadow scoffs, the word sounding foreign on his tongue. “While Stone wasn’t cruel to me by any means, I’m more concerned about his brain than his heart. Love and revenge can drive you to the ends of the Earth just to find retribution.” The material of his glove creaks audibly as his fingers clench into a tight fist. “Who’s to say he hasn’t got another Eclipse Cannon tucked away somewhere in New York? There’s a chance he could try to capture me to power the devices. I can’t let it happen. Not again.”

Sonic presses his lips together at the serious turn their conversation’s taken. “Have you found anything on him?”

Shadow grunts. He inclines his head from side to side, as if to say a little. “Yes, actually.”

That catches Sonic off guard. He hadn't expected such a direct answer. He speeds up his pace so he’s a step ahead of Shadow, looking over at him and trying to catch his eyes. “What is it?”

Shadow makes another small sound as he glances away from Sonic and off to the sight of the ocean on their left. The setting sun reflects in his eyes; the burning centre of a flame haloed with ruby red. “Not much,” he murmurs. “Just some recent sightings. He’s good at covering his trail, so it took a while, but I’ve tracked him down in black markets across eastern Europe — Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. He’s trying to find various components…it’s like he’s building something, or fixing it.”

Sonic’s face pulls into a frown. That is news; the kind Sonic hadn’t even paid any mind to beyond the far-fetched worry or occasional bad dream that Eggman and his lackeys were going to come back one day and try to take him out. Part of Sonic feels like he’s been lacking — like maybe he should’ve been tracking Stone down, too, and not spending his free time chilling back home with Tails, Knuckles, and Shadow. What if he is building something? What would have happened if we hadn’t had that conversation back at the Piston Pit? Would Stone’s actions have gone undetected until it was too late? Is Stone really looking to get revenge for Eggman’s death, or, is Shadow looking into this too much? Maybe the guy’s just looking for coffee machine repairs!  “When he and Eggy broke up before, he just opened a coffee shop. Maybe he’s doing that again…?”

“He saw the man he loved blow up on screen.” Shadow tilts his head in Sonic’s direction and quirks a brow. “Would you want to brew some coffee if that happened to you?”

He has a point. “I guess. I mean, I nearly killed you when I found out Tom got badly injured.” Sonic laughs humourlessly. It really isn’t funny, and Sonic isn’t even smiling, but it at least keeps the conversation from veering into one of total depression. “Revenge sure is one hell of a drug, right?”

“You don’t have to tell me.” That, at least, is a little funny. Sonic chuckles and Shadow seems to find some ironic humour in it, too, as the corner of his mouth ticks up into a barely-there, miniscule smile. “You really wanted to kill me, didn’t you?”

“Did I ever!” Sonic passes another orange segment to Shadow, who accepts it wordlessly. He bites into the top of his own and speaks with food in his mouth. “Still, though, Eggman basically killed himself. I don’t know who Stone’ll seek revenge for.”

“The system?” He chews his bite of orange and swallows before continuing, unlike Sonic. “You, maybe, for starting him off down this path.”

“Woah, victim blaming, much?”

Shadow shrugs, his shoulders rising and falling with casual indifference. “Whether or not it’s true is beside the point. That’s what Stone will be thinking.”

“Well, what do we do about it?”

Shadow stops chewing. He swallows, and looks to Sonic at his side, all traces of humour vanishing from his expression. “There is no ‘we’. I’m handling this alone.”

“But—”

“No.”

“I can help you. Did you forget how kickass we were as a team? We could totally bring Stone down!”

“I can’t let you do that.” Shadow halts their stroll. He looks at Sonic with a heavy gaze, wordlessly conveying that he isn’t even going to entertain the suggestion. “This is my path to walk. Besides, if you were to help me, my identity would be compromised very quickly. Your family won’t allow you to disappear for weeks at a time, and you’re hardly…discreet. This is something that needs to be done covertly and quietly, which you’re not capable of.”

He’d be offended if Shadow wasn’t so right. He shrugs, an indication that he’s dropping the bone and leaving Shadow to handle it by himself, but quietly stores the information at the back of his head. Shadow may want to handle this solo, but it doesn’t mean Sonic can’t do his own thing on the side. He’s never been one to live and let die. “So, you’re just gonna take the guy down yourself?”

“No. I’m tracking him. I have no intention to do anything for the time being, although his movements are suspicious. Stone was never an inventor; not like Eggman.” They pick up their pace again, continuing to stroll down the promenade with quiet footsteps as the whisper of the waves crashing over the shore wash across the beach. “He isn’t capable of creating something by himself. He’s fixing it, or finishing it.”

“Unless he was like, you know, just buying pieces to fix his car. Maybe he had a flat tire?”

“I don’t think someone with a flat tire would be searching the black markets in Azerbaijan for some carbon steel.”

“You would if you were a wanted felon.”

“Is Stone truly a wanted felon?”

“He aided and abetted a terrorist, didn’t he?” Sonic finishes off his orange segment with loud chews. “Pretty sure that’s illegal.” 

“How romantic.”

Sonic laughs at Shadow’s dry delivery. “‘cause nothing screams romance like throwing your life away just to help your crush try and blow up Earth.”

“I think it’s plenty romantic.” Shadow huffs in his defence. “What’s a display of dedication more grandiose than dedicating your life to your partner?”

“It’s either zero or a hundred for you, huh, Shads?” Sonic peers at him from the corner of his eye. The setting sun bathes them in golden light, turning Shadow's red highlights to burnt orange and his black fur to a rich brown, the same colour as damp soil after rain. He gazes out at the sunset with a distant look in his eyes, unaware of the way Sonic's looking at him, lost in his own thoughts. He’s relaxed enough to drop his guard and let his emotions speak for themselves on his face and Sonic takes pride in that; in having built an environment where Shadow feels safe enough to go outside in the light of day and enjoy Earth’s bountiful sights without fearing for his safety. 

Now would be the right time to confess about the Christmas incident. Shadow’s being receptive to conversation, they’ve had a great day, he’s already eaten, and it’s a perfect storm that means he’ll be more likely to listen to Sonic’s assurances that it was all an accident and that he’s really, really sorry, and that he doesn’t have to worry about anyone finding out because Tails had sworn from heaven to hell that he won’t tell another soul.

Sonic’s stomach lurches because he knows — he knows — that he needs to rip the band aid off and tell Shadow sooner rather than later but all he can think about in this moment is how tranquil Shadow looks at having the opportunity to walk along the seaside for the first time in his life, and how selfish it would be for Sonic to ruin that moment for him by admitting to his own mistake.

He has to weigh up the moral duty of being honest against his own personal desire to spend more time with Shadow, and Sonic has never been one to deny himself indulgence. Not when it comes to Shadow.

“Did you ever have someone like that in the lab?

The words tumble out before Sonic can catch them. He immediately slaps his palm to his forehead as Shadow, jolted from his reverie, stops walking and turns to regard Sonic with an expression that suggests he's just been asked for the nuclear launch codes. "Excuse me?"

Why the hell did I ask that!? What is wrong with me? The logical part of Sonic's brain throttles the impulsive part while his other mental facets cheer from the side-lines. "Oh my God," he groans, slapping his forehead again as self-inflicted punishment. "Please ignore what I just said."

Shadow, however, doesn't seem inclined to let it drop. He tilts his head to one side, studying Sonic — who's desperately trying to disappear into thin air — with a puzzled frown. "You do understand why I was in the lab, right?"

Sonic flushes crimson beneath his fur. "Yeah," he groans from behind his hands, voice muffled.

Shadow purses his lips. “I was an experiment, and the only one there. I had no friends other than Maria, who was my sister, so something absurd as a partner was never even in the picture book, let alone frame. And it never will be.”

The words are cutting. Sonic is growing from embarrassed to mortified, simply nodding along to Shadow as he speaks. “Sorry,” he mumbles, muffed by his paws.

“Don’t be sorry. It was just a silly question.”

“It wasn’t silly — I just phrased it silly-ly.”

“It is silly. I’m an immortal being.” Shadow looks down to his hands and flexes them, frowning at something Sonic can’t see. “Growing that emotionally attached to someone that will only live for a fraction of your lifespan will only bring pain. I’m not built to have acquaintances, let alone relationships.”

Sonic drops his hands to his side. His face is a little red and his fur is sticking up in different directions on his cheeks but he doesn’t care. He’d rather face Shadow while looking unkempt and unattractive than hide behind his embarrassment when he wants to get his point across. “That’s not true.”

“Of course it is.” Shadow glances up to Sonic for a fleeting moment before he looks ahead and begins to walk again. That sweet, distant look is gone from his eyes; this version of Shadow is firmly present, and although he isn’t frowning or showing any kind of displeasure on his face, Sonic knows that he’s touched a nerve. While he may not express his feelings the same way most others do, Sonic has come to read Shadow’s tells and it’s easy, now, to pick up on how he’s feeling. With his ears angled slightly back, his quills fluffed and raised, and his jaw set square, Sonic knows, immediately, that Shadow feels vulnerable and upset.

“No, it isn’t. That’s just junk G.U.N. and Gerald told you. You crash landed on this Earth and they used you like a weapon — you weren’t made for them. You’re just you. None of us were made for anything. Now you’re on Earth, which means you get to decide your own future.” Sonic jogs to keep up with him, angling his body so that he’s facing Shadow even though his legs carry him forward. “What is it that you said to me on the moon? A light shines even though the star is gone?”

Shadow’s head whips around, and he’s now frowning. Not an angry frown by any means — this is his thinking frown, the one he pulls when he’s confused about something. “What has that got to do with anything?”

“It’s the same principle. Just because the time you spend with someone is finite, does that mean it’s not worth it? Or, look, if you have a really good book, are you gonna intentionally not read it just ‘cause it has an ending? The orange in your hand — are you not gonna eat it ‘cause you’ll end up having the last piece and there’ll be no more orange left?”

Shadow frowns deeper at that. He considers Sonic point for a few moments, the only sound filling the space being the clicking of their shoes on the concrete boulevard. “That isn’t the same logic,” he finally says, though it comes out more like a reluctant grunt.

“It sure is.” Sonic tosses the rest of the semi-segmented orange into the air and catches it. “And, hey, there’s always gonna be more delicious, juicy oranges growing on that tree. Even if you eat one, you can always pick another when enough time has passed.”

Shadow turns his gaze back out to the wavering horizon. Ironically, and quite appropriately, the sun has turned into a fat orange half-peeking over the shimmering sea; juicy and full and bright. A family of gulls sit patiently, languidly, on the water’s surface, bathing in the sun’s dying light as the push and pull of the waves rides them up and down in soft humps.

“What if the other oranges aren’t as juicy as the one I just ate? And no orange will ever be as good as that one?” Shadow remarks quietly, his defensive shields lowered, vulnerability seeping back into his voice.

Something tells Sonic this isn’t about fruit at all, but he entertains Shadow’s metaphor with a smile and says: “How do you know unless you try one?”

With a sharp whistle to catch Shadow's attention, Sonic tosses the remainder of his orange through the air. Shadow turns just in time to catch it, then lowers his hand to stare at the pith and opaque skin with an unreadable expression.

“But — y’know, oranges are great, but have you ever had peaches?”

When Shadow looks up again, his face bears a new expression. He’s watching Sonic like he’s just figured something out, something monumental to him, and this time, Sonic can’t read what that look on his face means because this expression is brand new. His heart thumps in his chest, kicking something fierce behind his ribcage, as the burning flame of the setting sun reflects on the glaze of Shadow’s wondrous, bright eyes.

“What if in the future, when all the peach and orange trees have died out, I have no fruit left?”

Sonic bellows a laugh. He kicks up his speed and tosses his words over his shoulder as a twin pair of footsteps quickly catch up with him. “That’s the best thing about being on Earth, Shadow — when one thing dies, another one grows! You’ll just have to plant some seeds first, won’t you?”

“But I don’t know how to.”

Sonic flashes a grin. “Then we can add gardening to your bucket list, and I’ll help you build a garden, so you’ll always have something to look after even when the other trees are gone.”

Chapter Text

After stepping back through the shimmering gold portal and bidding Shadow farewell as he left for another month-long excursion out of the country, the last day of Spring came and went and in the blink of an eye Green Hills was plunged into what was proving to be one of its hottest summers on record. The year generally didn’t peak this far North until the tail end of July, but it was already June and by mid-morning the day was so warm that tarmac was too hot to walk on barefoot. 

With Summer came more time outdoors and more freedom. Days were spent in the belly of Green Hills with Tails and Knuckles, racing and playing and tossing and tumbling down its valleys with broken-bone scares and stern words of warning from Maddie that she: “Doesn’t want to have to play vet!” on them.

During the cool nights, when Knuckles and Tails were otherwise occupied and Sonic had the opportunity to sneak away without much preamble, he began to build the foundation of a small garden a stone’s throw away from the den. And small it was — fashioned out of a few old planters he found in an abandoned allotment further down the valley with tools left in the old sheds on site. He watched dozens of hours of YouTube videos to find out what soil he needed, what equipment worked best, and after plenty of advice from the kind people in the videos he started simple and decided to plant three different crops: potatoes, beans, and lettuce. They weren’t exactly peaches nor oranges, but they were low-maintenance, and if Shadow wanted to pick up gardening as a hobby for his bucket list then they needed somewhere to start, right?

On those nights Sonic would linger by the den in the off chance that maybe, just maybe, Shadow would visit for respite. He’d mentioned something about south-east Asia before Chaos Controlling away the night Sonic last saw him, and he usually goes a few weeks without touching base, but maybe he’s planning to come home early this time. 

I need to get a grip, Sonic chastises himself on one such occasion when he’s alone in the echoey walls of the den, adjusting a gacha figure on one of its makeshift shelves. It always felt lonely without Longclaw here, sure, but this loneliness is different. Maybe it’s because he knew Longclaw was gone and gone for good, and he wasn’t waiting for her to return so much as he was mourning her loss; now, he has something to wait for, but just doesn’t know when it’ll come. Sonic looks down at the mollusc fossil and feels the hunger pangs of his loneliness intensify. 

He doesn’t feel lonely because he’s alone — Sonic has the best family a guy can ask for — he feels lonely because he misses Shadow.

Sonic moves the gacha figure of the chao on an angle so it’s facing the other gacha figures and has some company, before he lets go and drags the tips of his fingers down the length of his face. 

I think I’d die if my family saw me moping around like a sad stack waiting for a guy I see once every few months. Thank God no one else knows about this.

Well, Sonic thinks, nobody but one.

It’s a sore topic. Sonic has well and truly beat himself up over, once again, shirking away from just being honest with Shadow. He’s been avoiding any and all discussion with Tails about Shadow as if it were the plague; the mere mention of his name has Sonic flipping a conversation one-eighty on its head just so he doesn’t have to admit to Tails that, no, he hasn’t told Shadow that he accidentally broke their secret, and yes, it’s been six months since Tails found out and Sonic still hasn’t found an easy way to deliver the news.

He’d planned to do it straight after Christmas when the wound was still fresh so it didn’t have to be a thing but then Shadow didn’t turn up until March and at that point Sonic didn’t want to ruin their first meeting since Christmas-eve-eve. He’d planned to do it at the end of their motorcycle ride but he ended up getting drunk, and Sonic didn’t trust himself to handle such a delicate topic when he couldn’t even walk straight. It’s hard enough to do it when he’s sober, let alone inebriated.

And then there was Jeju Island, where all of the conditions were perfect — they’d had an awesome day, ticked things off their bucket list, and Sonic got Shadow to experience new things together again – and maybe, just maybe, Sonic could break the news without it leading to nuclear fallout. Maybe only a small bomb would go off, and they could laugh about it in months to come after Shadow recovered from the betrayal, but Sonic couldn’t bring himself to do it – again – and now he was back at square one, half-a-year down the line and dreading the conversation.

Maybe I should go back on that forum and ask what I should do. It’s a tactic just to make himself feel better because he knows the right thing is to be honest — to tell Shadow and get it over and done with — but knowing that handling it wrong could lead to the end of their friendship only makes him want to procrastinate further.

Sonic doesn’t want to have to bear any of these heavy secrets alone anymore, but he’s left with the option to keep lying in the hope that it’ll all just blow over and the guilt will lessen over time, or lose a friend. He groans again and peers down at the smiling, crescent-eyed chao figure waving a sparkler mid-air. “What do I do?” he murmurs, hoping for an answer. “Do I tell him, or do I hope he never finds out himself?”

One doesn’t come. Sonic’s sigh whistles through his teeth.

It’s going to be a long, long summer.

Monday, the 16th June 2025

The shrill peeeeep! of the whistle pierces through the tacky summer air as five pairs of feet hit the ground at once, taking off from their pedestal at the track and kicking up red dust as they go. Sonic pushes his aviators further up his nose as he spies the bobbing heads of the eighth-graders sprint the two-hundred metres in a flurry of limbs. He presses his stopwatch as the first shoe crosses the line and whoops: “Twenty-four-oh-four! That’s a new record!”

“Yes!” Melody, the fastest sprinter from the group, cheers. She high-fives one of her classmates and grins as she jogs over to where Sonic’s sitting on a sun-lounger with a Sprite in one hand and his stopwatch in the other. “How was my form?”

“Remember what we said? You gotta run with your arms, too.” Sonic sets down his Sprite and gestures by swinging his rhythmically forwards and backwards, fingers tight in the shape of blades. “That’ll get you an even quicker dash.”

“But you run with your arms behind your back!”

“Do as I say, not as I do.”

She rolls her eyes at his candid nature as the rest of the class comes over along with their P.E. teacher, Mr. Richard, who’s sweating buckets in the summer’s heat. “That was a nice finish from you, Ms. Whittaker.”

“I’m just hoping it’s good enough to get me through the first heat at Nationals,” she cries, crossing her fingers on both hands tight and holding them to the air. “So far, so good.”

“How was mine, Sonic?” A smaller, round-faced boy comes up to his side, rosy cheeked and bright-eyed. 

“Yours was great too, Travis. Hey, I think you beat your personal best.” Sonic picks up his Sprite and raises it in a cheers in his direction. 

He hisses a happy yesss! and fist-punches the air. “Alright, alright,” their teacher chides. “It’s almost time for your parents to come pick you up. Go get your bags and water bottles.” The class erupts into protests and groans but Mr. Richard, pink-faced and exceptionally shiny, shakes his head when they try to plead. “No ‘but’s! Sonic’ll be here the same time next week, as he has been for the last fortnight.”

“Hey, gotta make sure Green Hills High’s future track stars are as fast as the fastest thing alive, or what kind of mentor would I be?”

“Will you come back next week?” one voice pleads.

“And can you show us that cool thing again?”

“Yeah! The one where you turn into a ball?”

“And can you race us again?”

“Please? Please!”

Sonic bursts out into happy laughter while their teacher rolls his eyes but otherwise looks relatively unbothered, if not pleased. “Pinky promise,” he says, holding out his hand as the kids fight to hook their pinkies with his.

They bid him goodbye with a flurry of waves and toothy smiles as he hangs back and helps clean up the high school’s athletics field with Mr. Richard. “You’re a lifesaver, y’know,” he says, heaving as he picks up some cones on the ground. “Dunno how else I’d keep ‘em occupied during the summer break.”

“It’s great fun for me, too.” Sonic picks the rest of them up in a blink of an eye, handing them to Mr. Richard, who thanks him past wheezed breaths. “I never got to be a kid, so it’s nice to help these ones.”

“Nonsense. You’re still a kid now. Say, is your dad coming to pick you up?” 

“Tom?” Sonic blinks at the term. Dad? “Uh — nah, I’ll run home. It’ll take me a few seconds, max.”

“Well, it‘s a good thing he recommended you. I’ve been getting on in my years and can’t run like the kids want me to anymore!”

“He said that you used to coach him — is that right?”

“He’s in the force with my son, which is how word got about the kids wantin’ to train with you, but yeah. Way back. Used to be a real talent with track and field.”

That’s news to Sonic. He follows Mr. Richard as he stacks the cones in the school’s equipment cupboard — an old, rusted shipping container adjacent to the bleachers that acts like a hotbox in the summer – as the door is shut with a heavy thunk. “I never knew that Tom did track and field. He never mentioned it.”

“Yeah. Used to run for the county and all, until his senior year.” Tom is a pretty good sprinter, Sonic will give him that, so it makes sense. He frowns as the thoughts process. “Gave it up for the same reason most people give up their things.”

“He got injured?”

Mr. Richards’ face peels into a gap-toothed grin. “Not quite. Fancied a girl from Westgate High’s band — the drummer, and nothin’ else really mattered to him on that track any more. Not even winning.”

“Maddie won’t like it if she hears about that,” Sonic says with a laugh. “She gets real jealous of ladies that flirt with Tom at the grocery store.”

“Oh dear. Don’t tell him you heard this from me, then.”

Half an hour later, with enough embarrassing stories about a teenaged Tom stored in his brain, he heads back home. Green Hills’ middle school is only a small site, housing around three hundred students and a handful of faculty members, situated on top of one of the rolling valleys. Tom had initially suggested he offer a helping hand for their summer camps after seeing him so listless at home and although he’d initially brushed off the idea, not seeing what could be so fun about coaching little kids to run at a fraction of his own speed, it was one of the most rewarding things he’d done this year. 

Sonic didn’t really do well with too much routine — he liked structure, but so long as it wasn’t the same thing day-in-day-out. He commended Tom and Maddie for their hard work in their respective jobs, but Sonic knows that kind of life isn’t for him. Coaching the kids, though? He’d been enjoying it far, far more than he thought he would. They say that if you love your job then it’ll never feel like real work, and Sonic sort of gets it now. Hypothetically, if his job was to help kids get better at track and field, then he thinks he wouldn’t mind it.

It’s still an uncomfortable thought process. His birthday’s next week and once he turns sixteen it’ll only be a few years until he’s eighteen, and then it’ll only be a matter of time before Maddie and Tom will want him to look for a job and start providing for himself. Time’s not exactly ticking but the last three years have passed in the blink of an eye, and Sonic ought to start thinking about what he wants to do with his life in the long term before he finds himself stuck.

Tails has his gadgets and inventions, Knuckles has his duty as the guardian of the Master Emerald, but Sonic? What’s he going to do with the rest of his life? 

Being an adult is hard. Why can’t I just adventure and explore the world? I don’t want a job! He shakes his head as if it’ll loosen the thoughts and scatter them out of his brain. No, I’m on the right track. Everything’ll fall into place, I’m sure of it. I’ve just gotta be patient. Who knows? Maybe I’ll win the lottery or something.

It’s a particularly nice day so he takes the scenic route on the way home and slows his usual run to a walk. The sun is beaming down from the sky above, and without a cloud in sight, Sonic’s shoulders get prickly hot within ten minutes of standing beneath its rays. He wonders if the skin beneath his fur has the potential to get freckly the way a human’s does, just like how Maddie and Tom get on their nose and forehead. 

The road winds down from the middle school all the way through Green Hills, coming from the rural spot at the top of the hill into the hustle and bustle at the bottom. He sparks up conversation with the guy who runs the greengrocer’s stall outside the bodega in town and picks up a punnet of grapes for Knuckles because they look particularly crispy today. He chats to the waitresses pouring coffee at the tables at the cafe’s front awning — the ones Tom still thinks he has a crush on — and compliments a passerby on their sneakers. The air smells like pollen and freshly-cut grass and hose-water and summer, and physically lifts Sonic’s soul up from the rut he’d worked himself into. By the time he reaches the front door of the house, he feels full and happy in a way that only comes from good company and good weather, filling him with a strange feeling of hope, the kind that makes you want to be productive and try something new just because you’re feeling that good.

Maybe I should let Tails try out those speed-tracking shoes he made me, Sonic’s good mood tells him. Even if they do look insane and could potentially cause a fire. 

He opens the door to their home and calls: “I’m home!” with a trill. He sets the grapes in their paper bag and his sunglasses down on the sideboard, shutting the door behind him with a bang that echoes through the quiet of the house.

Sonic pauses, hackles on end, and knows immediately that something’s not right.

There’s no music, no sound of the radio or television, no voices chatting or laughter, no sound of cooking or cleaning. Sonic’s sneakers squeak on the wooden floor and echo in the hall as he creeps into the empty space. Maybe everyone’s gone out to run errands, or they’re out in the back garden? “Hello?” he calls again, wary. He dumps his backpack at the coatrack by the entryway. “Anyone home?”

There’s a murmur of hushed voices down the corridor, conversing quietly in a whisper so that their words don’t travel. Well, I’m definitely not alone. For better or for worse.  

A voice finally calls: “In here.”

It’s Tom, that much is sure. A relieved breath leaves Sonic as he follows the call. It’s just past three in the afternoon, so there’s plenty of daytime left and there’s no reason why the lights in the house should be on, but the house feels strangely, and unusually, dark. There’s a lack of warmth to the space, like a cloud has passed over an otherwise spotless, sunny day.

It’s unnerving, and Sonic doesn’t like it.

It has his hackles flicking back up as he turns a corner and steps into the kitchen. All of the lights in the kitchen are turned off bar one; a hanging overhead light above the countertop island where Tom and Maddie sit hip-to-hip among scattered mugs of coffee and crumpled-up tissues. Sonic pauses in the doorway and takes note of the sombre atmosphere. Tom’s eyes are tired and drawn, staring down at his clasped hands, and Maddie’s are red-rimmed and raw. It’s clear she’s been crying, and unlike Tom, she’s looking straight at Sonic with a level of detached calmness he hasn’t seen from her since she bided him farewell from the back of a London ambulance.

He picks his feet back up, heels scuffing over the wooden flooring as he shuffles closer to them. “What’s wrong?” Sonic asks, his voice small. “Where’re Knuckles, and Tails?”

“They’re out with Wade for the afternoon.” Tom draws in a shaky breath. His foot nudges one of the breakfast bar’s chairs, kicking it out as an invitation for Sonic to join them. “Come and take a seat, Sonic.”

Sonic’s stomach lurches. Tom’s using his police-man tone, the same one he puts on when he’s speaking to a member of the public after an accident. Sonic’s done some crazy things, Tom knows that most of all, but he’s never used that tone on him. “What’s going on?” Sonic presses, lacing his fingers together anxiously. 

“Just…” Maddie’s voice trails off, nasally and blocked by mucus from the tears she’s clearly been crying, “...come and sit down.” 

Sonic would usually put up a front after being patronised. After all, he’s been with Tom and Maddie for over three years now — he has his own room, his own stuff, and his own space — but they’re treating him like they used to when he was first tranquilised and put in a cage; like he’s a child, like the news they’re going to break needs to be watered down and phrased carefully so it doesn’t alarm him. But, there’s something about the way they’re holding themselves, like two people one wrong word away from shattering, that tells Sonic that now isn’t the time to throw his toys out the stroller.

With dread curdling his stomach, he steps closer to the island, hunched shoulders and wide, worried eyes betraying his nerves. “What’s happened?” he asks again, climbing up onto the stool. “Has someone died?”

“No.” Tom shakes his head. He wrings his clasped hands nervously, and Sonic takes note that his nails have been bitten down to the quick, cuticles red and angry. 

“Has someone really hurt themselves?”

“No,” Tom responds, again. “Sonic—”

“Has Eggman returned? Or — or are one of you really, really sick?”

“Sonic.”

The policeman tone is back, and it has Sonic skidding to a stop. He clamps his mouth shut, teeth clacking with the force of it, and has to bite down on his tongue to physically restrain himself from word-vomiting his worries. The way that Maddie and Tom have fallen into silence doesn’t help; it’s like they’re mulling over how to say what they want to say without giving something away they don’t want to. Sonic can physically feel the nerves crawling up his throat, a burning trail of adrenaline and bile. 

Everything’s moving so fast and he doesn’t know how to keep up with it. No less than a few minutes have passed between stepping through the door and sitting on the chair, but the change in tone has given him whiplash, and he understands, instinctively, that he’s on the cusp of hearing a very difficult conversation with no way to pull the breaks on the truck hurtling towards him.

Tom drops his head into his hands, scrubbing the hair at his hairline with his knuckles. He sighs, deep and long, before his hands flatten into a praying motion and he props his chin on his fingertips. This time, he meets Sonic’s eyes. “Do you remember what we spoke about when we all came home from London last year?”

Sonic doesn’t need to ask just what he’s on about. He understands, and nods to show it. “Yeah.”

“Remember how we said that we were going to have a quiet year, ‘cause of everything that happened? Me in hospital, and you, Knuckles, and Tails nearly…” Tom clears his throat, the words melting on his tongue. He carries on like what he had intended to say has been said; the word died unspoken. “When we said that there were going to be no more big secrets kept?”

“Yeah,” Sonic says, apprehensive. It’s dawning on him, like a shadow crossing overhead, that he’s been found out.

But, unlike when it happened with Tails, Sonic knows everything is watertight; everything has been accounted for.

After what happened with the slip-ups near Christmas, Sonic had laid some ground rules between himself and Shadow: they weren’t to meet without pre-arrangement via walkie-talkie or note exchange, and if they did meet, it was to be at least beyond ten miles of the Wachowski threshold. Back home, Sonic made sure that every time he slipped out that his alibi was either solid enough to stand by itself, or that it was backed up by Tails — and Tails wouldn’t tell anyone, would he? He was ready to support Sonic no matter the cause.

Sonic sweats, rubbing his palms on his legs. He wouldn’t, he assures himself. Watertight was not an exaggeration. Sonic has done everything within his power to keep what he and Shadow have safe; there was no way Tom or Maddie would’ve found out about it.

It’s to his abject horror that Maddie reaches beneath the kitchen counter and lifts up the heavy weight of a hard-back blue atlas and sets it on the table. Its cover has been opened, revealing neat, cursive black script.

Sonic immediately jumps down from the stool. His stomach lurches and it feels like he’s swallowed a chunk of ice that’s numbing the legs he stands on. The shock is moving at three different speeds; his body’s reacting quicker than his mind’s reacting and behind it all his soul is lagging like a lame duck, still caught in the sun-warmed fields in Green Hills’ valleys from hours ago. 

Autopilot is terrifying. He’s fleeing from the perceived threat before he’s even had the chance to understand what it is he’s looking at.  “Where did you get that?” he demands, voice shaky. 

“Sonic—”

“Did you go through my things?!”

His voice breaks when he yells. They all seem taken aback by his attitude; the sudden outburst, the betrayal in his tone, the fact that Sonic’s immediately on the defensive. Maybe Tom and Maddie were hoping for an emotional confession, or an easy explanation, or maybe a poorly-concealed lie, but not anger. Sonic isn’t someone who gets angry; not unless he feels like someone he cares about has been, or is going to be, hurt.

Still in panic mode, Sonic stands his ground with fists clenched and puffs out his chest defensively, staring up at them both from their seats at the island. Maddie sighs, and tries to placate: “We weren’t going through your things—”

“Yes you were!”

“Watch your tone, Sonic.” Tom reprimands, his jaw squaring. 

It hits Sonic right between the ribs. He’s never had Tom turn that voice on him before; that police voice, the one he uses on criminals. Sonic physically recoils in shock by taking a step back, his protests dying in his throat.

Tom, still sitting at the island, sits up straighter. He’s in business mode, wearing the hat of an investigating cop, and Sonic has the words ‘guilty’ stamped straight across his face in bold red ink. “No one was going through your stuff, but, as it was, I was looking for one of my old albums upstairs and just happened to come across this.” Sonic’s lips remain pressed, dry tongue glued to the top of his mouth. Tom’s expression twists like he’s in physical pain as he continues: “Going by the fact that you’re defensive, you know why we’re both so…” he trails off, unsure of what word would best describe their feelings. “Surprised,” he settles on. Diplomatic, and understated.

“What is this, Sonic?” Maddie says as she pushes the book forward. Sonic glances down at the gentle, careful cursive writing and feels sick at the sight. It’s so innocent and was meant for Sonic’s eyes only. Having it out in the open feels like someone’s overheard a secret shared between two and is putting it on blast for the whole world to hear. 

Sonic averts his eyes away from Shadow’s signed name to stare out the back patio door, as if looking away from the mess he’s made will mean he doesn’t have to answer her question. He can hear Maddie’s scowl when he doesn’t dignify her with an answer; a small scoff, angry at his reaction, or lack thereof. She pushes to stand from the island and the stool’s legs grate on the floor, a loud cry in the otherwise silent room. “You’re not even going to explain yourself?”

“Mads—” Tom interjects, reaching out to place a hand on her arm. The police schtick didn’t last long, replaced instead by the mediator trying to find a compromise.

She recoils from his touch, scowling. “No, Tom! He’s been in cahoots with the thing that tried to kill you—”

“Shadow is not a thing.” Sonic defends.

Maddie barks a laugh. He’s fallen into a trap in his eagerness to defend Shadow, and he only realises it before it’s too late. “There we go — I told you!”

Tom’s brows pull together. He directs his gaze to Sonic. “Is this true?”

Now that it’s out in the open with no room for interpretation or backtracking, he can’t hide. He feels guilt twist the knife in his tummy — guilt for keeping the secret for so long knowing it would hurt Tom and Maddie, guilt for igniting the argument they’re having by lashing out, and guilt for letting Shadow down not once, but twice.

The logical part of his brain tells him fighting fire with fire is the wrong thing to do — he owes so much to Maddie and Tom’s kindness but the heightened emotions of being caught out and feeling like his already fraught, nebulous, confusing, and undefined relationship with Shadow is now under scrutiny when even he doesn’t know how to define it propels him forward in defence mode, hackles up. “Why does it matter?”

Maddie interjects: “Because he’s dangerous, Sonic!”

“He’s not dangerous!”

“Yes, he is!”

“No he isn’t! You don’t know him!”

“He’s dangerous enough that G.U.N. have stationed soldiers on our property for the last year to keep a lookout for him!” Maddie heaves in a tight breath. “Why else do you think Walters visits Tom and me every couple of months? For tea and coffee? G.U.N. are so hellbent on catching him that they’re breathing down our necks, too!”

“That’s why Maddie’s so worried, bud,” Tom says, his low tone contrasting against her strained yelling. “Walters…hasn’t exactly been kind to us since Shadow appeared. G.U.N. wanted you when you first came out of hiding, sure, and sent soldiers after us to try and catch you, but what Maddie and I are dealing with now is…well, it’s on a different level.”

“We don’t tell you these kinds of things because they’re ugly, Sonic.” Her voice simmers down to a frustrated grunt. “You don’t need to know about all the crap that goes on in the background. Tom and I are under a crazy amount of pressure from G.U.N. and we didn’t want you to know about it. Walters doesn’t just want to find Shadow — he needs to.”

There’s a moment when the three of them lapse into silence, the only sound coming from their stilted breaths and the faint buzz from the overhead light. Sonic is reeling at the revelation, barely able to process the thoughts and their magnitude. It makes sense – of course it makes sense that G.U.N. would try to get to Shadow through Tom and Maddie — so why hadn’t he considered it before? Taking note of the shell-shocked expression on Sonic’s face, Tom continues at a lower volume: “You know how, at the end of every month we get that big envelope in the mail, and sometimes Walters will come over to visit to make sure everything’s okay?”

“Yes,” Sonic says, meekly.

“And how he’ll talk to you, and talk to Tails, and talk to Knuckles, and then we go away in the office upstairs and he talks to Maddie and me privately?” 

“Yes,” Sonic repeats.

“Well, those are the conditions we agreed to when we took you in. He leaves us alone so long as we clue him in on what’s happening at home, and he’ll visit occasionally to make sure we’re all square. It was fine for a while. G.U.N. had no problems with us doing our thing and keeping you guys safe in our homes, but after everything happened last summer the visits became a lot more…”

“Intense,” Maddie supplies when the words escape Tom.

“We had a habit of taking in kid aliens, so I guess he thought we’d do the same for Shadow.” Tom laughs at his poorly-timed joke, but neither Maddie or Sonic join in. “When he realised that we didn’t, and that we have no intentions to, considering he, uh, nearly killed me, he made us sign a bunch of documents basically holding us to account that if we do come across any information indicating where he was we’ve gotta tell him, otherwise it’ll cause big problems.”

“It’s considered treason, Sonic,” Maddie mutters seriously. “Shadow is considered a terrorist. If they find out we’ve been housing you who’s been in contact with him, well…”

With a mouth so dry it feels like he’s been chewing on cotton, Sonic interjects: “But that’s ridiculous. What I do has nothing to do with you guys.”

“We’re your legal guardians. Whatever you do affects us.” Tom shrugs. “Which is why Maddie and I freaked out when we found this upstairs.”

“How long have you known about him?” Sonic swallows around the gush of saliva in his mouth, the tell-tale warning that he’s going to be sick. “Why didn’t you tell me that he was alive? You know how upset I was when I thought he had died after the crash – you guys told me G.U.N. told you he was dead.” Maddie and Tom exchange a look — sharing an unspoken promise that means they’re not going to be totally honest with him again. “Stop it,” he says, words rushing out of him in a stuttered breath. “Stop doing that.”

“We didn’t say anything.”

“Not literally, but you’re giving each other that look.” He wipes his running nose on his forearm. “If — if you want me to be honest with you, then you’ve gotta be honest with me.”

They lapse into silence. Maddie runs her fingers through the hairs on her scalp, her drawn, tired expression downturned towards the countertop. “We didn’t want to tell you because it would just upset you,” Tom says at last. “If you knew that he’d survived, you’d go looking for him, and we couldn’t have that happening. We were meant to leave this all behind us.”

“So, you lied to me instead?”

“We didn’t lie to you, Sonic.”

“You should’ve told me he wasn’t dead!”

“And then what?” Maddie cuts across. “You go looking for him — and you find him, and then what? He beats you? He seriously injures you? He kills you, like he nearly killed Tom?” Sonic’s mouth closes with an audible clack, and Maddie continues, her teary eyes piercing him on the floor where he stands. “Walters has Tom and me by the balls, wrapped and tied up in enough agreements and contracts and NDAs to make freaking Harvey Specter weep, but none of that matters. It’s you I care about, Sonic. We didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“But he wouldn’t hurt me, Maddie! He’s not like that.”

“You don’t know what he’s capable of Sonic. Not like Tom and I do. The reports Walters have shown us are…” she shudders. “They’re gross. They’re scary. Scary-scary, the type you don’t fuck around with. Sorry for the expletive." 

Tom places a hand at the base of Maddie’s spine comfortingly. It does little to ease her tightly-wound frame.

It makes sense now in a weird, twisted way, but Sonic is still stuck at square one. What does any of this mean? Not only for himself, but for Shadow. They found the atlas and, sure, the secret’s out, but that doesn’t mean it has to go anywhere. He flicks his gaze between their eyes and searches for something that indicates that they’re on his side, but comes up blank. “What are you going to do?” he asks at last.

Tom leans against Maddie’s side, his tired, drawn face tightening into a frown. “We need to tell Walters.”

“No.” The words are out before he’s even processed Tom’s. “No,” Sonic repeats, clearer. “You can’t do that.”

“Sonic…”

“No — you guys don’t understand. You can’t. If G.U.N. know that we’ve been in contact then they’ll capture him again and he’ll go back to being in stasis for the rest of his life.” The thought alone causes panic to grip Sonic’s chest and chokes him from speaking his next words clearly. “He’s free, and he’s not harming anybody. He’s just misunderstood, like I was.”

“Misunderstood? He’s nothing like you!” Maddie slams the palm of her hand on the table and the coffee mugs jump. “He’s nothing like you. He’s not from Earth, Sonic. He has powers even the freaking U.S. government are terrified of — what the hell does that tell you about him?”

“I have powers the freaking government were afraid of!” Sonic cries, tears bursting to his eyes with a sting of salt. She seems affronted, like the words surprise her, like she hadn’t even considered it. “You guys wouldn’t even touch me when I first came here. And I get it, alright? Freaky blue alien in your garage and all.” Sonic scrubs at the tears, but they just keep coming, words coming out like a strangle. “But I love you, and you love me, and that has nothing to do with what I am, or who I am.”

“Maddie isn’t saying that, bud—”

“She is.” Sonic’s breath leaves him in a shudder.

“You aren’t considering the bigger picture here, Sonic.” Maddie crosses her arms. “You being in contact with Shadow doesn’t just end with you — it means that we’re responsible, too. We’re breaking a zillion NDAs and protective orders right-freaking-now by just by having this conversation without a G.U.N. official present!” She presses her thumbs to the crease of skin where the bridge of her nose meets her eyes, pressuring a trigger point to try and ward off a headache. “When G.U.N. finds out that you’ve known all this time about Shadow — that you’ve been in contact with him, we’re done, Sonic.” She shakes her head. “Jobs, house, all of it will be gone. We might even go to prison.”

Sonic is gobsmacked. “But none of this has to do with you. It’s me. I’m the one who’s been speaking to him.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re your guardians, so we’re the ones who’ll take the fall.”

“But you couldn’t have known!”

“Yeah,” she grunts. “You did a real good job of keeping it a secret, huh?”

Sonic presses his lips flat. Mortification and guilt wracks his body and the gravity of the situation is slowly dawning on him, the same way the sun’s gradual rise melts morning frost and exposes the ground beneath it. He knew that once the jig was up that the blowout would be bad, but he’d hoped he’d be somewhat prepared to explain and make sense and bring Tom and Maddie onto his side so they’d understand why Sonic did what he did. 

Maddie leans her head into her hands, elbows propped on the kitchen island. She looks tired, and she looks worn, and the only time Sonic has ever seen her so knackered was at Tom’s hospital bedside. “How long has it been going on for?” she asks, voice low and quiet. Her eyes are closed, like she doesn’t even want to look at the situation, let alone be in it.

Sonic remains quiet. “Sonic,” Maddie prompts, serious.

“Does it matter?” he responds quietly beneath his breath.

She scoffs, looking away. That answer was all she needed; a deflection from the ugly truth they didn’t want to hear. “Jesus Christ.”

It’s all spiralled out of control so, so quickly. Sonic feels like he’s reeling, feels like the argument is moving faster than his mind can compute, that he doesn’t have the time to grasp the severity of the discussion. This isn’t just a falling out over who ate the last cookie or who forgot to turn the oven off; it’s a relationship-defining argument. 

Tom rises to stand and steps around the kitchen island in an approach to Sonic, but Sonic backs away with each step Tom makes. Hurt at the gesture, Tom pauses, and remains standing half-way across the room with his arms awkwardly hanging at his side. Sonic has never expressly told him ‘no’ like that before.

“You need to tell us everything, buddy.” The cop hat is well and truly hung up on a peg; Tom’s in caretaker mode, trying to save the house from the flames before it totally burns down to the foundation. He drops to a crouch so he’s a similar height to Sonic but doesn’t move to take any steps closer, not wanting to spook him. Sonic has his hackles up, defence mode turned up to the max, and one wrong move could trigger another outburst; Tom recognises that in him.

“Tell you what?” Sonic responds, flicking his gaze up to meet Tom’s hurt, watery eyes.

“All of it, Sonic. G.U.N. are going to need to hear it from us — we can’t afford for them to find out for themselves, otherwise it looks like we’ve tried to cover our tracks.”

“No,” he says, looking away. He wrings his hands, sweaty inside the confines of his gloves. “I can’t.”

“Sonic…” Tom protests gently. 

“I can’t, Tom.” The tears are back and they burn his eyes. He lets out a little sob, trying to catch it in the crook of his elbow. It’s embarrassing enough to cry, and Sonic knows once he starts he won’t be able to stop, so the most he can do is choke it back by stifling it. “Telling you would be betraying his trust. I already did it once when Tails found out—”

“Tails knows?”

Sonic drops his arm and waves his hands in front of him, trying to metaphorically keep the flames of their anger at bay. “No! No — Tails isn’t — none of this has him involved.”

Maddie turns to Tom with a look of horror on her face. Sonic can read her like a book; it’s like she’s watching her own family turn on her. “Tails knew, too,” she whispers, almost to herself, eyes growing unfocused as she gazes off to the side. Tom’s head whips around to look back at Maddie and he looks like he’s in physical pain. It causes him to stand, cupping his mouth with a hand as he turns to take a few steps off to the side, mulling over the revelation with disbelief. His head shakes.

“He really, really has nothing to do with this!” Sonic groans in frustration, throwing his hands out. The tears are free-flowing now, trailing navy streaks down his muzzle to splatter on the flood. “Listen to me!”

“Why should we believe you when you’ve been lying for who-knows how long?” Maddie whispers. She’s still leaning against the counter but she’s watching Sonic now, tears clouding her dark eyes.

“I haven’t been lying to you!”

“Well, you haven’t been truthful!”

“But I haven’t lied!” Their voices are at a screaming pitch now. Maddie’s directing her fury at him and he’s directing his at her, while Tom remains on the sidelines, cupping his mouth as he tries to process revelation after revelation. “All of it — everything — was done privately. Private does not mean secret. And what I do has nothing to do with you guys!”

“You’re living under our roof, Sonic. It has everything to do with us!”

“No it doesn’t!”

“Yes, it does! You’re under our care, under our guardianship, and you are not to keep things this big from us!”

“Why do you care?! You don’t own me! And you’re not my mom and dad!”

The barbed words tear from his chest and scrape the skin of his throat as he screams into the thick, tense air.

The flurry and bluster and charged emotions snuff out like water being tossed on a flame as soon as he registers just what he’s said. They plummet into total, earth-shattering silence, the kind where you can’t even hear your own pulse, and Sonic knows immediately that he’s just taken a step over a line that he can’t backtrack. 

Sonic’s nose burns and his face aches and he feels like he’s been slapped but no one’s moved, stuck rooted to their spots like the words he’s spoken has physically paralysed them. Mortification swallows him like a beast eating small fry whole and Sonic is consumed with the overwhelming thought of I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean to say that as he fights the urge to meet their eyes and spew apologies.

He’d said it to harm them, to one-up Maddie, to blurt the only thing that he could think of to get his point across, and although he doesn’t mean it wholly there’s a kernel of truth to his words. It’s not something he’s liked to think about but a small part of Sonic, tucked away shyly in the corner of his mind, knows that beyond the words ‘family’ Tom and Maddie have never really acknowledged what their relationship is with Sonic. They housed him and fed him and nurtured him and loved him, and in turn, he loved them, made them laugh, brought them on adventures and turned their world upside down for the better. 

But, beyond that?

It was a big, scary topic of conversation he didn’t know how to broach. Sonic had pondered the questions — of course he had — but bringing them up and actually asking them: “What am I to you?” was beyond his comfort zone and so he decided to become content with their vague and familial dynamic. He knew they wanted kids, and he knew that that part of their life had been put on pause in favour of taking in Sonic and, eventually, Tails and Knuckles, but it didn’t mean that he’d filled the gap. It didn’t mean that they saw him as their own. 

Sonic doesn’t know his parents and Longclaw is long dead. Maybe his lash-out was that tiny, quashed part of his brain finally crying out after nearly sixteen years of bouncing between houses. Maybe it’s speaking the words he’s been too scared to say before. Does he see Tom and Maddie as his parents? Do they even want that?

Could they ever see Sonic in the same way he sees them? 

He takes one look at their devastated expressions and the sight alone catapults him from his stance. He lets out a distressed cry, raw and heartbroken and embarrassed, and dashes from the kitchen to run upstairs, taking the steps five at a time. He scurries up to the attic and slams the door behind him with a heavy clatter, not knowing what else to do other than to run away from the problem instead of confronting it.

He can barely see through the film of tears. Sonic blinks but it does little to clear his vision because they don’t seem to stop, slipping down his cheeks too quickly for him to wipe. He falls onto his bed with his head in his hands and hears footsteps follow his pathway up the stairs, a twin pair, coming to rest at the bottom of the ladder. 

Before he knows why he’s doing it, Sonic has shot from his bed and grabbed a backpack half-stuck under his bed. He shucks it open and stuffs it with anything in the near vicinity to him; cash, comfort, snacks, all through the wavering swell of his tears that drip down onto the red canvas of his knapsack and colours it in burgundy spots. 

A tentative knock comes at the door’s lid, but Sonic is too mortified to face them. How could he, after saying what he said? He practically spat in their face and doesn’t even have the balls to apologise.

Sonic picks up the fleece throw blanket at the bottom of his bed, a gorgeous forest green checkered print that’s been well loved over the years and one of the first things Tom and Maddie ever bought him when he moved in, and stuffs it in his bag. He slings the handles over his shoulder and scrambles over to the open skylight and climbs out onto the roof, under the blazing sun’s heat. Sonic scales the roof’s tiles and grips on with his hands, breathing through little sobs that carry with them fresh rounds of tears as he tries to escape from the fire he started.

He skids down the roof’s slope, jumping from the guttering to one of the garden walls bordering the property. Sonic lands and rolls onto the grass before he kicks off and takes into the woods, running faster than he’s done in weeks, flying through the underbrush and knots and weeds without sparing the floor beneath him a glance. He moves on instinct, going where his feet take him, threading through the well-trodden ground of Green Hills like a needle through silk. 

An indefinite time later he slows his run to a crawl and finds himself at the den, a safe-haven he no longer recognises as home but still somewhere he feels safe to lick his wounds in. Shadow’s out of town, and for the first time he’s grateful for it. Never mind the fact that Sonic wouldn’t know what to say to him – not considering the whole argument centres around Shadow — he doesn’t want Shadow to him in this state. He wasn’t embarrassed of his anger before — that was fuelled by an attempt to honour Tom. This, however, feels shameful. Sonic feels rotten and bad and undeserving of sympathy.

He slips inside to the homely, well-loved space and takes note of how neat it’s all become. Shadow has straightened out all of the nick-nacks, the bedding, kept it clean and tidy and just how he likes it, and it’s the final crack in the dam that finally has Sonic breaking down into shuddering, hiccupping, devastating sobs. He falls onto a beanbag and hangs his head between his legs, cupping his face as tears stream down his eyes, itchy and hot, loud, ugly sobs bleating into the otherwise silent space.

His chest hurts like he’s been physically injured; a dull, throbbing pain, spreading to his gut and his temples and his feet with each breath and each sob. Sonic scrubs his eyes but can’t stop the hysteria he feels coming over him. He picks himself up and crawls into their den’s bed space, burrowing under the quilt and curling up on his side. He clutches his backpack to his chest and dissolves into raw, animalistic cries, feeling like he’s lost something bigger than himself.

He cries until he has no tears left, until his throat is chapped and raw, until his body aches with each convulsion like it’s bruised itself from the inside out. I don’t want to be alone again he mourns, nestling into the blankets with a shaky groan, eyes squeezed tight closed, a multi-coloured mandala bursting behind his eyelids.

What he said to Tom and Maddie was one of the worst things he’s ever done or said to them. Of course there’s a kernel of truth there, but Sonic didn’t mean to say it. He longs, more than anything, just to be loved by them, be accepted by them, to make them happy and make them smile. The relationship they’ve cultivated over the last few years has been the glue holding his shambolic life together — and Sonic has ruined it for them all. He’s spat in the face of their kindness and doesn’t have the balls to look them in the eyes and apologise.

The spiralling thoughts draw him down and down until his sobs die out into small hiccups and he feels wrung out like an old cloth, tattered and broken and limp. He doesn’t know how much time has passed but the sky has begun to darken and the solar-powered lights running on a timer have turned on, bathing him in greens and blues and reds and yellows; the spirit of Christmas without any of the joy. His itchy eyes and hot, sensitive face burrow into the blankets and at some point he drifts off, caught in the spiderweb of a dreamless sleep, as Tom and Maddie’s distraught faces brand the space behind his eyelids like a reminder of what he’s done.

Chapter Text

When he wakes up, it’s to a gnawing hunger in his stomach, itchy, raw, puffy eyes, and toes so cold they don’t feel like they’re part of his body anymore. Sonic burrows further under the blanket to try and chase the residual warmth from his own skin, and comes around to wakefulness slowly and reluctantly.

There is no sound of Knuckles’ bone-rattling snoring, or Tails curled up in bed next to him because he gets lonely by himself, or Tom or Maddie waking him up because he’s slept in past noon again. There isn’t even a lingering presence in the corner of the den — not his own anymore, shared by someone else — watching him like he always seems to be doing. Sonic, for the first time in quite a while, is truly all alone.

He rolls onto his back and lays starfish, limbs splayed akimbo, looking up at the hand-painted stars on the cave’s ceiling. Some of them are fat and wonky; those are his own drawings done with chubby toddler fingers. The others are thin and bird-like; Longclaw's, who cleverly painted them by stamping her claws a few times over one spot. They had pained those a few months after coming to Earth to find a way to make the nights in the cave less scary and less lonely. Sonic was still small enough to sleep under her splayed wing, kept warm by her body and nothing else. Having stars look down at them made long winters in hiding feel a little bit more bearable, especially when she passed and Sonic only had a static night sky painted on the ceiling for company.

It all feels so long ago now, like it’s a distant memory of his past. He can hardly believe it was just three years ago that he stumbled into Tom’s workshed and embarked on a journey that changed his life for the better — one where he was accepted, one where he found a family, one where he was happy. Sonic’s heart pangs for his younger self and wishes, not for the first time, that he’s able to hug that little boy and assure him that he’ll find people in a few years’ time who love him just as much as he loved Longclaw.

The thought sears a painful emotion into his chest like a brand. No, he corrects. I’m not entitled to even say that. I don’t have the balls to go back home and apologise like I ought to. Why would they want to see me after I basically spat in their face? Way to go, you dumb idiot, he curses himself. What the hell are you going to do now?

He knows he can’t stay out here forever. Well, technically he could, but Sonic’s not self-depreciative enough to feel like one bad argument is the end to the familial relationship he has with the Wachowkis. Maybe after a few days when the depressive and self-depreciative thoughts die down, and the shame he’s feeling isn’t so overwhelming, he’ll be able to come up with an action plan on how he’s going to next see them face-to-face and apologise without sobbing. Tom and Maddie haven’t done anything wrong — it’s all him, the outburst the result of a tumultuous year of kept secrets and strange feelings and revelations that reached a crescendo and ended in an outburst that hurt the people he cares about most. Surely they’ll understand that, right? 

But what if Maddie and Tom feel so hurt by his actions — the lying, the nasty words, the kept secrets, the potential danger he put them all in — that they don’t want him to return home? What if they’ve already told Walters, and he’s got his men combing the forest at this very moment, ready to take him to their London H.Q.? What if G.U.N. interrogate him for information, or keep him in stasis like they did to Shadow, or use his powers for the greater evil? What if Tails is being punished because of the secrets he kept, too, and what if Knuckles is so offended at the dishonour Sonic’s brought upon them that he never wants to see him again?

He pushes to sit and makes the bed with a shake in his hand. None of these thoughts are productive or make him feel any kind of good so he wills them away for his own sanity. Instead, Sonic stands up on the den’s cool floor and stretches, the tight muscles in his back twitching with each tug and twist until he feels a little looser in his bones and more like himself, and decides to tackle the next big issue: the rumble in his tummy. He scopes out the room and finds the backpack he picked up and packed last night; it’s an old and well-loved one, red to match his shoes and adjusted to fit his narrow frame. He hoists it up and sets it on the road-sign table before pulling out its contents.

There’s his blanket, of course, which he lays out at the base of the bed with a lingering touch. He pulls out a few crumpled cereal bars from weeks ago that he’d forgotten to take out, his semi-charged iPod, a handful of cash, and a family-sized bag of Fritos. “Welp,” Sonic remarks, picking up a flattened granola bar and peeling the package open, “guess it’s back to foraging.”

He distracts himself from depressing, wandering thoughts by shucking on his empty backpack and heading into the fresh outdoors, and fresh it is. He’s grown so accustomed to the luxury of digital clocks and watches that he barely relies on looking up at the sky to tell the time anymore, but the skill is second nature to him and by taking note of the humid temperature and high sun he assumes it must be a little before mid-day. The weather’s pretty nice, not too hot but not too cool, with some clouds overhead that signal the potential for rain later in the afternoon. Sonic bites into the granola bar and sets off down the hillside coming from the cave’s covert entrance, treading familiar dirt paths and landscapes with the sound of magpies and blackbirds in their nests tweeting above.

The pine trees stand in heavy clusters high up the mountain, their leaves knitting together like pleated fingers, blocking most light from reaching the forest’s carpet. Sonic treads up the rocky incline of the Beartooth Mountains, thighs burning from the exertion, and heads down to a lower incline where his memory tells him he’ll find his first spoils of the day.

It’s not the season for hazelnuts but it is for cobnuts; they’re oval and protected by thin green leaves that he can peel back with his teeth. The nuts are sweet and light and he picks handfuls from the hazel trees throughout this neck of the woods, putting them in his bag to ripen over the next day as they’re still a little premature. Sonic heads further down the valley until he reaches the prickly nest of berries at the foot of one such hill. The berries, like the nuts, are a few weeks off full ripeness but some of the branches are swollen and heavy and dark so he yields a fair haul of tayberries from those, which he stores in the front pocket of his rucksack so they don’t get crushed by the nuts.

He spends the afternoon foraging for some other familiar foods that he hasn’t eaten in years; dandelions, chickweed, wild strawberries. They’re not super filling but Sonic only has a few dollars on him and he’s going to need to make that stretch unless he wants to start thieving, which is sort of out-of-the-question considering he’s now semi-famous and it would do awful things for his street cred if a photo of him stealing Takis from the gas station went viral.

By the time the sun begins to set, Sonic's hiked miles upon miles across the Beartooth Mountains for the first time in a long, long while. Most of his exercise nowadays is done at a hundred miles an hour; a slower, steeper pace like this does a number on his muscles — the ones he doesn’t have to use much anymore since moving in with the Wachowski’s — so he’s eager to find a moment of respite before heading back to the echoey silence in the den. He has old CDs and albums to fill the empty space, sure, but that’s a pretty sad state to be in.

The path he’s walking begins to ring familiar; the smell of violets and hay and hot tarmac and car wax, so Sonic keeps heading down it. The greenery is full and lush so he has to push through the brambles of the hillside until it brings him to an outcropping staring some twenty metres up. Down below is a gigantic estate stood on perfectly manicured lawn-striped grass, overlooking the rolling valleys of Green Hills like a king overlooking his kingdom.

He used to hang here before he discovered the Wachowski’s. The last time he visited must’ve been when he was around ten, leaving only because the Wachowski’s were that much more interesting to spy on instead. 

The McCollin’s estate was very attractive; a huge, three-story white manor house stood on twenty-acre grounds with chalets, garages, an outdoor gym and swimming pool, and a huge barn for their prize animals. The estate was walled in by ornate wrought-iron fencing and their gate stood ten feet tall, right at the bottom of a winding tarmac road taking any visitors from the mouth of the gate to the gravel drive at the front of the estate. The McCollin’s were the type of folk that lived in Green Hills, but never lived in Green Hills. Their business was always spent in Bozeman, Whitefish, and Helena, where people drove white-leathered four-wheel drives and wore animal fur coats and generally didn’t muck in with the “riffraff” in town. They were in Green Hills for the scenic beauty, and nothing else.

Years and years ago after Longclaw passed, Sonic discovered the estate during one of his foraging outings. He would steal food from the kitchens and blankets for the den that they never noticed go missing, and used to sleep in their barn on colder nights so he had some company for the rainstorms. Sometimes during nighttime, he’d hang around their gardens and watch them eat dinner together, trying to catch a glimpse of the family and wanting to feel a part of something bigger, but their lunches always lacked warmth and their leisure time was spent apart in rooms alone and away from one another. Mrs and Mr McCollin lived in the same house but didn’t really live together, and the children hardly acknowledged one another. Sonic didn’t know much about family life back then, but he knew it wasn’t meant to be that cold.

Then, during one routine trip, he caught sight of a strange man parked curbside speaking to the donuts on his dashboard and decided to follow him home to his house nestled in the forest. He discovered that he lived with a kind vet whom he dubbed the Pretzel Lady, that they had their own dog, and that they were nothing like the McCollins’. Tom and Maddie laughed and sang and hugged and couldn’t get enough of each other, drawn like magnets to the other’s pull. It’s why he found himself visiting the McCollin’s less and less and the Wachowski’s more and more, even if they didn’t have a downstairs pantry-come-cellar he could raid, even if they lived further away from the den, even if Sonic was more likely to get caught spying on them, Sonic found himself growing more and more attached to the Wachowski’s because that, he recalls thinking, is what I want. I want to be a part of that.

With a heavy heart, Sonic hikes his bag higher on his back and hops down the mountainside’s jagged, grey rocks. He easily scales the fence and under the guise of dusky lighting he walks up the striped, mowed lawn towards the McCollins’ swanky barn that’s bigger than the Wachowski’s entire property. Well, a ‘barn’ doesn’t do it justice — it’s an incredibly well-kept building with prize animals kept in separate pens; pedigree horses, racing dogs, that kind of thing. It’s as tall as a four-story building and even has its own security system, of which Sonic easily bypasses when he realises that the passcode is the same as it was all those years ago.

Sonic steps into the space and notes that not much has changed other than a lick of fresh paint and some new wooden panelling for the horses’ stables. He walks past the stalls where two horses he doesn’t recognise rest with closed eyes and folded limbs before coming to the long room that lines the back of the barn. Sonic unlatches the door and spills some amber light into the dimly lit room. Inside, curled up on half a dozen Barbour fleece-lined dog beds, five pairs of inky black eyes blink up at him. “Hey,” he murmurs, shutting the door behind him and tapping on the touch-sensitive light switch by the door. The bulbs overhead flick to life and brighten the space. It’s a well-maintained and well-furnished kennel for the best of the best in Montana; prized racing greyhounds who the McCollins attribute much of their wealth to. “Do any of you remember me, or do I remember any of you?”

He crouches down onto his haunches, pulls off his glove, and extends his bare hand forward. The dog closest to the door inclines its neck forward and gives his hand a sniff before it raises onto shaky, old legs and toddles forward, its whip-like tail wagging shallowly behind it. “Hey,” Sonic greets warmly, reaching out to stroke its neck. “Oh, man, I remember you. Hi, old girl.” She lumbers closer and presses her powdered-sugar face against his cheek, giving a tired but happy whine. He rises back up and comes further into the room where the rest of the hounds, bolstered by the gesture from their oldest pack member, come over to give Sonic a tentative sniff and join in on the pile-on. He recognises one other milky-eyed dog but the rest are new and young, no doubt already state champions on their way to join a lineage of purebred winners.

He settles down in the kennel just as the rain he’d predicted earlier begins to fall. It pitter-patters on the tin roof and soothes some of the wound-up nerves he has tight behind the muscles over his chest. Sonic inclines on the empty dog bed as the others settle around him, giving him something to do as he waits out the rain and wonders how Tom and Maddie are spending the evening. Have they told Tails and Knuckles what happened? Are they looking for me? Did they expect me to return home by now? Sonic worries the skin of his cuticle as the thoughts from earlier cloud his concentration. 

He settles back onto the bed, reaches into his bag, and pulls out his iPod. There’s not a great deal of charge left but it’s enough to last a few hours, so he plugs in his headphones and closes his eyes as his music library shuffles. An old Radiohead album soothes him to sleep as rain pitter-patters on the roof above and the head of a puppy lays on his thigh, finding comfort in his warmth as it dozes off, too.

He’s woken up by a flash of lighting. It jolts him upright, and the dogs with it, too, all of their skinny heads whipping up from where they lay curled next to and around Sonic.

When did I doze off? He blinks blearily into the dark space around him, the light long since turned off by its automatic timer. There’s a small window to let some airflow into the room and Sonic can’t spot the moon, obscured by the thick clouds, but it’s fairly dark and he takes a guess and assumes it’s between late night and very early morning.

It’s a summer shower. Not unusual for this time of year, as the humidity and the air pressure and the change in season make a perfect recipe for disaster. Another rumble of thunder rolls across the ground in a shockwave he can practically feel, causing the fine hairs on his arms to stand on end. “It’s okay,” he murmurs to one restless, young pup on his left. He raises the circle of his arm and it nestles against his hip, seeking comfort.

It’s a familiar, grounding feeling. The realisation hits him like a bus: Tails, Sonic thinks with a sudden, sick feeling in his tummy. He doesn’t do well with thunderstorms.

He rests sleeplessly throughout what’s left of the night night and into the early morning, tossing and turning, catching a few moments of sleep only to jolt awake by his own racing thoughts, a clap of thunder, or the guilt of leaving Tails alone during a thunderstorm. Somewhat lucid, driven crazy by his inability to get shut-eye, Sonic resigns himself to just lie there under the pitter-patter of rain for an indiscernible amount of time. He’s bone-tired but every time his consciousness dips into deep sleep he’s yanked out of the peace of sleep by a flashing memory of Tom and Maddie’s devastated expression, and it feels pointless to even try after the fourth failed attempt.

A perpetual grey cloud seems to hang over Green Hills and the McCollins’ estate. He can’t tell the time because his iPod had died at some point during his sleep, so once he realises that the day isn’t going to get any lighter, he bids the dogs farewell and leaves the barn as well as his only company this far out in the forest. The lights in the McCollins’ home aren’t on so he assumes it’s still pretty early, so much so that not even their in-house cooks have yet risen. He takes the opportunity to pick out some fruit and vegetables from their cold storage and gigantic greenhouse because they won’t eat it, anyway. It always goes to waste, and Sonic only knows that after years of scavenging from them.

He takes his time walking back to the den. Not only does he feel sluggish — tired down to his bones, the type that comes from emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion — but there isn’t anything better to do, anyway, so why rush home? He wanders back through the meandering countryside, past riverbeds that have burst their walls and waterlogged the nearby shrubbery, past rain-heavy greenery and foliage that drips cold water onto the back of his neck as he walks under their hanging branches. The morning has been cloudy and he doesn’t manage to catch sight of the sunrise, shrouded behind grey wispy clouds and grim skies. He moves the small garden he’s been cultivating under the shield of thick branches so his efforts don’t get destroyed, dragging the containers one by one until his gloves have dirt smeared up their surface and he’s safely protected the potatoes, lettuce, and beans.

The den is remarkably well concealed in the forest, so much so that he recognises it from scent rather than sight. It used to have two openings but Sonic boarded one up to keep it secure for Shadow when he was preparing it around Christmas time. Now, its only entrance is carved out into a small alcove in one of the cliffsides, obscured by vines and shrubbery. The alcove is only around a metre in height and width, leading down to a narrow pathway with stairs made of tree roots and slate chips, opening into their den space, enough to give it the impression of a home’s entrance foyer. It makes living in a cave feel a little more dignified.

Shadow hasn’t done much with the den since claiming it as partly his own. The space has remained largely the same since December, other than some of the furniture being re-arranged. He supposes Shadow doesn’t really live here so much as he crashes here for a day or so at a time, so feng shui isn’t really high on his priority list of what to address. The space is remarkably clean, however, which doesn’t surprise Sonic considering how Shadow constantly looks so well groomed even in his darker hours. Shadow may not know what to do with what he’s got, but he values it nonetheless. The floor is swept and the shelves are spotless and organised other than the fine collecting of dust here and there, to be expected. 

Sonic skids onto the cave’s floor and dumps his backpack, heavy with spoils, onto the road-sign table. The lights twinkle above and do something to combat the lonely space’s dark corners. Sonic sorts out his forage into neat piles and picks up a handful of nuts to peel and eat as breakfast, which he chases with some Fritos and another granola bar. He doesn’t have anything to drink so he sucks on some berries to aid the dryness in his mouth, and makes a mental note to use his cash to grab some water later. He could do with a shower but the nearest freshwater stream is a decent run away, and Sonic doesn’t see the point in showering only to dash back and get covered in rain-fresh mud. He settles on the bed, damp from the rain, and drags the comforter over his shoulders.

Maybe it’s the comforting smell of the den, or the exhaustion from hiking, but he can finally feel the familiar pull of sleep at the back of his eyes. Sonic reaches over and sets the portable DVD player on the bed, cracking its lid open, and checking its battery. Forty per-cent. Not great, but he has some double-As stashed in the washing machine, and there’s enough juice left in the machine to get him through at least half a movie. Anything to fill the silence of the room while he tries to get some shut-eye.

Sonic puts on Toy Story 2 and shuts his eyes, burrowing into the pillows, as sleep overcomes him yet again.

“Marvin Gaye,” he says aloud, writing it on the notepad.

Mid-afternoon, refreshed from his nap, Sonic had taken to rummaging through the CD’s and cassettes in his collection and re-organising them by artist. What he hadn’t expected to find, however, were new additions.

Next to his shelf stuffed with old and new CDs — some from his time in the den, some brought over from the Wachowski’s during the December refurbishment — Sonic came across an old cardboard case containing a couple of old, once-white and now-yellowed cassette tapes. They weren’t his, that's for sure. Some had writing in languages he didn’t recognise, others titled something as simple as ‘#2’ or a specific date ranging from the late seventies to early noughties. He wondered if maybe he’d accidentally picked these up and forgotten about them, but Sonic realised after a moment that these may well be Shadow’s, and he’d added them to the collection himself. 

It was the first thing to bring a smile to his face over the last two days spent in lonely, self-imposed isolation.

“What have you been getting up to?” Sonic had murmured, flipping over the cassette tape to read its print. Everything was totally unremarkable, a run-of-the-mill tape bought as part of a multi-pack for home and recreational use. Sonic booted up his old CD-come-casette player, wound the tape backwards with a pen twisted in the cassette’s winding mechanism, and slotted in the first cassette he found into the CD player’s mouth.

The distraction was a welcomed blessing, and gave him something to do that felt productive rather than just procrastinate. The first cassette he played had songs in a totally different language; words that whispered into one another, with rolling r's and hard c’s. He recognised it as vaguely Slavic; Russian, maybe, or Polish. The first few tracks were of a lady singing, some solo and some in a group of some kind. Sonic, fascinated with the discovery and thought of why has Shadow got this in the collection? sat still and listened to the tinny sound of his CD for upwards of half an hour as the songs rolled one into the other. The next song that came on was one he recognised all too well from Tom’s old collection: The Bee Gees, followed by Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, and finally Marvin Gaye. 

He sweeps the e as he finishes writing the name, adding it to his list of cataloguing each artist on Shadow’s strange cassettes. Underneath the list of names and titles and question marks are three other lines of handwriting.

Where did you find these?

Which ones are your favourite?

The last is scribbled out furiously with the pen, so much so that the original text of Do you want to listen to these together? is butchered beyond deciphering. “Stupid,” Sonic grumbles as he colours in the block of text with the ink of the black pen. It’s easy to write down the questions he wants to ask before asking them, but that last one’s a step too far into cringe territory.

He cycles through another tape from the collection, the oldest of the bunch, and recognises the artists only vaguely. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are pretty distinguishable so Sonic labels the album ‘60s’ and makes another note on his notepad: What was your favourite song from before you woke up?

After finishing off his berries in-between music sessions, Sonic decides he needs something a little more substantial to quench his thirst and knows it’s time he stepped outside the den and into the town. His tongue feels itchy and sore and he can feel the beginnings of a headache forming at the base of his skull from dehydration and Sonic knows that if he doesn’t do anything today, tomorrow’s going to be even more miserable.

He can still hear the pitter-patter of rain on the cave’s ceiling but doesn’t have a raincoat nor hoodie to keep himself dry, so he supposes speed will have to be his shield from getting soaked. Sonic shucks his backpack onto his back, empty save the few dollars of cash he has stored loose, and heads back up to the surface to head into town. The sky is patchy and more grey than it is blue; a muddled, dirty tissue hanging above. Rain dribbles down through the thick weave of interconnected trees and while he’s largely protected from the worst of the rain by the foliage, it’s not raining particularly heavy anyway. Sonic can handle that much.

He heads in the opposite direction of the Wachowski home and to the outskirts of Green Hills’ town. It’s not like he’s a wanted criminal, but if there’s any chance of him bumping into someone familiar, it would happen in the heart of the village. Sonic’s not ready for confrontation yet, particularly because he doesn’t know what to expect. Anger? Upset? Confusion? Maybe an absence of the three, which feels impossibly worse.

Sonic dashes through the damp underbrush towards a store he knows still operates on the outskirts; a stout one-story building connected to Green Hills’ only gas station. Sonic breaks the treeline and slows his jog as he comes to the main road. A few cars pass by, sloshing dirty rainwater onto the pavement, but it’s quiet today. He looks both ways before crossing the road and heading into the gas station, tips of his fur damp and cold.

The bell above the creaky, plastic door rings as Sonic pushes into the gas station’s store. It’s remarkably similar to the one next to the Piston Pit; full of junk and niknaks and long shelf-life goods that leave the air smelling strangely sweet and a little stale. The floor is sticky beneath his sneakers, keeping his rubber soles stuck unless he gives each step a quick tug and they unstick with a wet sound. 

Sonic browses past the chips and candy but the handful of change he has isn’t going to go very far if he picks up anything here, particularly for the highway robbery of a price the chips are going for, so he strolls quickly past and avoids temptation. Sonic heads straight to the refrigerator at the back, an old Coca Cola one with yellowing text, and picks up two large bottles of water from the bottom shelf. They’re not cold, but Sonic’s not in any place to be picky, so he tucks one under each arm and carries them to the counter. It’s derelict inside, other than the single, old man working the counter, who’s been watching him beneath the flap of his baseball cap ever since the door opened.

“Hey, Carl,” Sonic greets as he puts two of the bottles on the counter.

“Sonic!” Carl greets in that denture-heavy lisp of his. He crosses his thin arms and leans them on the countertop. “What’s got you this far outta town?”

“Oh, y’know.” Sonic clears his throat. Think — what’s a good, vague excuse? “Errands.”

“Uh-huh. What kinda errands?”

“Uh — I had to deliver a… a parcel to a house nearby. Cheaper than sending it via the post, y’know?”

“Mhm,” Carl grunts. He lifts the bottles and holds the scanner to their barcode, palsy-slow hands shaking. “Well, them errand’ve taken a while, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, word is that you’ve been outta town for a few days. Tom’s been calling around town asking for ya.” Carl pushes the bottles back across the chipped countertop. “Didn’t think deliverin’ parcels took that long.”

Sonic’s heart leaps in his throat, feeling caught out in his bluff. He quickly picks the water bottles up from the counter and slots them into his backpack. “He has?” Sonic asks, voice cracking. “When?”

“Yesterday afternoon.” Carl folds his arms over again and leans them back on the counter as he raises a thin brow. “Been ringin’ every darn store in the neighbourhood.”

Sonic shuts his bag with a few harsh pulls of the zip. His heart is in his throat, pounding a thousand beats a minute. Tom’s looking for me? A strange warmth pools in the pit of his tummy. It’s like he’s swallowed a bottle of honey, warming him from the inside out. “Well, I’m fine,” he dismisses, feigning his muddled emotions with disinterest. There’s no point in getting his hopes up — Tom may only be looking so he can give Sonic an earful. 

“He doesn’t know that.”

Sonic huffs, setting his bag down. He throws his hands out to his side, frustration seeping into his voice — feelings directed at himself, not at Tom. “Why does he even care? I’m not even—” Sonic makes a strangled, pained sound. “I’m not even his.”

Carl’s face darkens. “Now, Sonic, you know that ain’t right to say.”

Sonic knows — of course he knows — and having Carl reiterate the fact only seems to worsen his mood. He reaches back down and hoists the bag onto his shoulder. All four litres of the water sway him off kilter. He steadies himself with planted feet and feigns his nonchalance at the stumble. “It’s true though, isn’t it? I’m not.”

“Of course it ain’t true. He’s worried sick ‘bout you. Says you haven’t got anything on you but a pair of sneakers.”

Sonic glances down. Well, he’s not wrong. “I’ve got cash on me. And my backpack. And Fritos.”

“Yeah, you got some eight dollars to go crazy with.” Carl makes his point by handing over Sonic’s measly two dollars and loose coins in change, which he shoves into the front pocket of his backpack. “D’you wanna use my landline to call home?”

“No.” Sonic tugs the straps on his bag tighter. It gives him something to do with his hands. 

“Well, if you don’t, then I’m callin’ for you.”

“No, you can’t!”

“If it were my junior out there missin’, I’d want someone to call me.” Carl adjusts his hat on his head, shielding his eyes from the harsh fluorescents above. “The guy’s one step away from callin’ a search party for ya.”

Why? Sonic scrubs the back of his neck with a frown on his face. Tom’s never been like that; never clingy, overly cautious, always monitoring, so why now? Sonic’s been on far worse escapades than running away for a few days. Why is this time any different?

I guess this time I’m alone, he thinks. And when I stormed off, I guess maybe he thought I might be running off with Shadow, who he’s sort of super afraid of. And that he thinks will kill me.

“Oh,” Sonic murmurs aloud, everything, suddenly, clicking into place. He falls into contemplative silence while Carl watches him across the counter, tinny radio playing something or other in the background, so quiet Sonic can’t hear it over the pulse in his ears. “Well, fine, you can call him,” Sonic amends, tucking his chin to his chest. “Tell him I’m okay.”

“And that you’ll be home?”

Sonic shrugs, suddenly shy. “I don’t think he wants me back there.”

Carl scoffs. “I ain’t ever heard anythin’ more ridiculous. Of course he wants you home.”

“No, Carl, I said something real…real mean to him and Maddie.” Sonic presses his lips together and averts his gaze downward. “I wouldn’t want me back, either.”

“And you think dads and their kids don’t fight nasty like you guys did, too?” There it is: that word again, dad . It strikes Sonic like a bullet, and Sonic doesn’t have it in him to tell Carl that’s exactly what the argument is about in the first place. “Think ’s more unusual for little ‘uns and their parents not to fight.”

Sonic lapses into silence as the conversation washes over him. How is it that everyone’s seeing something he’s not? “Just…call him when I’ve left, okay?”

“And do I get to tell him you’ll be home soon?”

Sonic screws his mouth up. “Don’t get his hopes up.”

The walk home is long and lumbering, as have the other journeys over the last few days. Sonic doesn’t have it in him to run; it’ll only get him home faster, stuck stewing in his own thoughts, alone and with only his guilt to keep him company. He sticks to the shadows when he walks, keeping to the left on pavements and ducking under wet foliage when a car passes a little too closely or slowly. He watches the trucks pass like a hawk, conscious that one of them might be Tom’s, ready to pick him up and chew him out.

After making it out of the precinct, Sonic comes to rest underneath a bus stop. He crouches down and slings his backpack off of his back, setting it put in front of him. He reaches inside, uncaps the bottle, and lifts it with both of his hands, trying to balance its weight in its flimsy, thin plastic. Sonic swigs and as soon as the taste hits his tongue he spits it out.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he cries as he flips over the bottle in his hands and reads its language. Sparkling Water. “God damn it!”

He caps it and quickly pulls out the second. Fortunately, this one is plain old still water, but it’s only two litres. He’ll go through this in a matter of a day. Sonic slumps back onto the damp concrete and lets out a small, defeated cry. He’s wet, and he’s cold, and he smells awful, and he’s thirsty, and he’s just spent half of his cash on a drink he’d rather stick pins in his eyes than drink. Part of him reckons he could buy a small litre bottle with his remaining change, but what if Carl’s already called Tom? What if he’s at the store, waiting for Sonic? Sonic uncaps the second bottle and takes a few, gulping swigs which do little to qualm the queasiness in his tummy. 

Time passes by after that in a drag. He makes it back to the den feeling worse than when he left and has nothing but his racing mind, pounding head, and the box of cassette tapes to keep himself busy with. Sonic drinks half of the bottle of water in one sitting and his Takis, which he’d planned to ration, end up devoured in five handfuls. He chews through the rest of the granola bars and ends up giving himself such a bad stomach ache he needs to lie down and practice deep breathing just so he doesn’t throw up.

It’s miserable. He feels miserable. And worst of all, there’s no one to listen to his woes other than the spiders hanging out in the corners of the den.

“How did I do this for so long?” he asks himself aloud, staring up at the ceiling with a peeling poster of The Flash smiling down at him from above.

He misses Tails’ incessant poigning. He misses Knuckles’ unintentionally crass remarks about his skinny arms and how he needs to bulk up. He misses Maddie’s voice waking him up from deep sleep at eight in the morning so they’re not late for a family function. He misses Tom’s sternness when he needs to put Sonic in his place for something. All of the things that would usually drive him around the bend suddenly become the things he yearns for, only knowing what he’s missing when they’re no longer there.

Sonic presses play on the CD player and lets Chris Martin’s lament about numbers and figures wash over the room from the tinny speakers. He drags his hands down his face and closes his eyes, burning from tiredness, finding respite in the darkness.

It’s only been three days. How much longer can I do this for? He presses into the crevices of his eyes with his fingertips, chasing the throb behind his lids. I don’t think I’m ready to speak to them yet. I don’t even know what I’d say. Won’t they be pissed off that I kept the secret for so long? Three days isn’t going to fix that.

He doesn’t notice it at first; the sound is drowned out by the crooning voice coming from the speakers. The pulsing behind Sonic’s eyes beats in time with his heart, thumping in his ears like a metronome in time with the piano’s chords from the album. The crackles lead him to think that the cassette might be skipping due to few scratches on its surface — it’s Tom’s from when he attended college nearly twenty years ago and has seen better days — but when the same, strange crunching noise comes again from across the room Sonic realises that it has nothing to do with the track at all.

He quickly lowers the volume on the clunky CD player and the music falls to a background whisper as, again, the strange crackle rings from an indeterminable corner of the den. He cocks his head and stills his body, ears pricking upright to try and catch it again. A few moments pass in eerie silence before, from the far-end of the cave, comes a small squeak and another crunchy noise.

Sonic’s hackles flick up as he stalks over to the sound with slow, careful movements. It’s coming from behind a stack of comics tucked against one of the bookshelves. Sonic reaches the spot and peers over the pile, unsure of what he’ll find — a dying animal, a faulty electrical device, a hiding intruder — and is surprised to find none other than the pair to his walkie-talkie. It’s been hidden in a safe place, away from any potential ransackers if they found the den. It’s a very Shadow-y hiding spot; plain sight, but just innocuous enough that no one would think to look there.

Sonic swallows around a lump in his throat when he realises just what’s happening.

He picks the walkie talkie up with sweaty, cold palms and pulls the silver antenna at the top straight out, holding it upright so it picks up a signal.

“—onic? Sonic, can you hear me?”

The voice, whispered and upset, is unmistakable. Sonic finds his knees growing a little weak so he moves to sit back down on his beanbag, holding the walkie talkie up to his chest. Tails. Of course it would be. Who else would think to connect the dots with the walkie-talkie stashed in his room other than him? The brilliant brainiac he is, he had probably put two and two together and assumed that the pair to Sonic’s walkie-talkie is being kept in the same place where Shadow stays during his trips to Green Hills, which is probably where Sonic has been hiding. He assumed correctly, of course. “Sonic,”  his voice calls again, tearful, cracking around the corners. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

The voice at the other line sniffles, crackling through the receiver. “Oh, man,” Sonic groans, leaning back further into the beanbag, hand coming to his eyes. “Jee-zus.”

Speaking to Tom and Maddie is one thing, but having to answer to Tails? That’s a battle he can’t win. Not when his little brother’s crying.

Sonic presses the button on the side of the device, holds it up to his mouth, and responds: “Hey.”

“Sonic!” Tails’ cry is immediate. He howls into the receiver with hiccuping, snivelling sobs, and can barely get his words out in-between his cries. “Is it really you?”

“Yeah,” he responds, thumb remaining pressed on the button. “Yeah, it’s me, little buddy.”

The sound of Tails’ wet laugh rings through the receiver and it’s a bittersweet sound. Sonic feels relief from hearing his brother sounding so relieved, but that feeling is tinged with the knowledge that Sonic’s the reason he’s crying in the first place. Tails snivels, and Sonic can picture him wiping his nose. He’s still his little brother who can’t tackle the big task of crying without every hole on his face streaming quite yet. The mental image is comforting and grounding and one of those strange, obscure things he adds to the list of things he didn’t realise he missed until it was no longer there.

Sonic hides his chin in the junction of his own shoulder, trying to smother his sad smile.

As Tails hiccups into the receiver with heavy breaths, Sonic finally realises that those garbled noises aren’t only coming from him, and that there are other muffled voices in the background of wherever he’s calling from, all trying to chip, all speaking over one another. The momentary relief Sonic had felt for speaking with his brother dissipates just in an instant, because he knows he has an audience now. Of how many, Sonic doesn’t know, but he’s sure Tails isn’t alone.

After getting his crying under (some) control, Tails, in a much more level tone, asks: “Sonic, where are you?” 

Sonic purses his lips. The static crackles with each breath exhaled into the receiver, loud in the silence of the den. Sonic curls his knees to his chest, tucking his chin on the soft fur over his kneecaps.

Tails speaks again: “Sonic, are you safe?”

“Yeah, I’m safe,” he says, choosing to respond to that question rather than the other.

His attempt at evasion doesn’t work. Tails repeats: “Where are you? We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

They have? He doesn’t know why the thought surprises him. If Tails had gone missing without a word, wouldn’t he have searched everywhere for him, too? Sonic is, once again, reminded that he wasn’t exiled out of his house. It was a personal decision, and while he’s been happy to cut all contact, maybe the rest of the family weren’t. 

He presses his cheek to his knees and looks away, down to the stone floor and the faded paint on the walls. “It doesn’t matter.”

The line goes quiet. The microphone is still on, but whoever’s in the room with Tails is speaking with him at too low a volume for Sonic to make out. Voices whisper through the line in strange crackles and words that skip on vowels so Sonic leans a little further into the beanbag, his weight sagging, and removes his finger from the microphone’s ON button. He hates being excluded and feeling left out, and this is no exception — though it’s self-inflicted, so the only person to get mad at is himself, really. A deep breath escapes him but it does nothing to lessen the tight band around the centre of his chest, so he tries rubbing at the space between his ribs with the tips of his fingers, hoping to soothe some of the pain.

The walkie-talkie goes momentarily dead. No static, no muffled breathing, no indication of what’s to come. The band around Sonic’s chest draws even tighter and Sonic hadn’t realised just how quiet the den was until he’s alone again.

Then, the static returns and the speaker crackles. Instead of Tails’ sweet, high tone, a lower, gruffer voice comes through the walkie-talkie’s speaker, and it has Sonic’s spine straightening. “Sonic.”

Panicking, Sonic drops the walkie talkie on the beanbag, watching it like it’s a bomb ready to go off, which it may as well be. Knuckles, he thinks, stomach dropping. It really has all come out now in the wash, hasn’t it? Now everyone knows about my dirty laundry.

He wraps his arms around his shins and pulls them closer to his chest, tucking his face into his knees. “Sonic, I know you can hear me. I can sense it.” Knuckles’ clear, deep voice accuses.

Sonic’s toes curl tighter in his shoes. Can he really?

Whether Knuckles is bluffing or not doesn’t make a difference; it works either way, leading Sonic to pick the walkie talkie back up. He holds it to his mouth, and hesitates for a moment — scared to hear Knuckles’ opinion, scared of being shunned, scared at the potential of losing one of his best friends — before his conscience weighs out and he presses the smooth button on the side of the device. “I’m here.”

A sigh crackles out of the walkie-talkie’s speaker, one of relief. The line goes quiet again as Tails and Knuckles whisper to each other, discussing something out of Sonic’s earshot. “I am glad that you are okay,” Knuckles responds aloud after a moment, voice ringing like a clear bell through the walkie-talkie’s cheap speaker system.

“I’m not okay,” Sonic responds petulantly, voice coming out like a snark. Woah, he thinks, emo much?

“But you are safe, and that is ‘okay’ in my books.” Sonic licks his dry lips. “I understand that you are feeling emotionally hurt. I also understand that whatever happened a few days ago has greatly upset Maddie and Tom. They have been calling around, looking for you, worried sick.” 

“I—”

“Sonic,” Knuckles cuts across, “you don’t need to explain to Tails or myself what has happened. We just want to know that you’re in a location that is safe.”

Sonic shrugs, though no one can see him. “I’m safe,” he reassures, quietly.

“Is—” Tails cuts himself off. He re-starts: “Are you alone?”

That was carefully worded, Sonic realises. No mention of Shadow, even though Tails must know who owns this walkie-talkie. He’s being discreet…so Knuckles hasn’t found out yet, huh? Sonic’s heart throbs at the thought of Tails still being so, so cautious with Sonic’s privacy. He really is too good for his own good.

“I’m by myself,” Sonic responds, ambiguous, hoping Tails understands what he’s implying.

“Right now? Or...or have you been by yourself for the past few days?”

“Yeah, it’s just me out here, kicking it solo.”

“Are you cold? Do you have enough to eat?”

He shrugs again, tucking himself into a tighter ball. “It doesn’t matter.”

Knuckles cuts in: “Yes it does, idiot hedgehog. Don’t brush other people’s concerns off like they mean nothing.”

“Screw you, Knuckles.” The line goes silent again. Sonic groans, dropping his head to his knees. “Jeez, sorry. I’m just so angry and full of emotions and I really don’t wanna talk right now.”

“That’s okay, Sonic.” It isn’t, but hearing Tails’ comforting tone is nice. “Do you…when will you come back?”

Sonic huffs out a laugh and shrugs, although no one can see it. “I dunno.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t know when I’ll come back.”

“But you can’t stay out there — wherever you are — forever. You gotta come home, Sonic.”

“I don’t have to do anything. Hell, I don’t have to return at all. I made up my mind when I left the house. Besides, Maddie and Tom hate me. Can’t exactly show my face after what I did and said to them.”

Knuckles interjects: “They don’t hate you, hedgehog. Don’t be so ridiculous.”

“Of course they do!” His raised voice cracks around the edges, tight from a dry throat and the intensity of his upset. “What I said was cruel. It’s not right for me to show my face back there after that. That’s shameless.”

The line goes dead as the receiver’s button is let go. Sonic is left alone, silent in the cold empty space of the den. He feels his eyes welling up, and wipes them on his knees, sniffling as his already dehydrated body cries the tears he really can’t afford to be crying.

“Sonic,” the walkie talkie crackles. It startles the life out of Sonic and causes all of those issues — the dehydration, the exhaustion, the anxiety, the feeling of uncleanliness — to vaporise in an instant, because that’s neither Tails or Knuckles; that’s Tom. “Buddy, can you hear me?”

All of the placating Knuckles and Tails did to bring Sonic around from radio-silence to stilted conversation is for nought, because Sonic now can’t physically get himself to pick up the walkie-talkie. He stares at it by his feet with his watery eyes, and tries to blink away the tears pooling so heavily behind his lids they feel like they’re weighing his head down with a thousand pounds of water.

He hates that his friendship with Shadow led to the argument. He hates that everything that happened last summer has led Maddie and Tom to become so afraid of Shadow that they won’t even consider Sonic’s side of the story. He hates that he feels like he has to choose between his family or his friendship. He hates that all of these new feelings are causing him to behave in ways he’s never behaved before. He hates that he’s lashed out at Tom and Maddie because of their concern. He hates how he made them feel, hates how it’s made him feel in return. He hates that all of this hinges on the fact that Shadow never had a voice in any of this. He was captured, he was practically enslaved, and now that he’s free he doesn’t even have the leisure of living life without having the entire U.S. government breathing down the back of his neck, snapping at the chance to put him back in shackles.

He hates that all of the problems that happen seem to revolve around him. Maybe it’s me, Sonic laments. Maybe I’m the problem. None of these things happened until I turned up. If I hadn’t hidden in Tom and Maddie’s garage all of those years ago then they wouldn’t have had to go through the problems with G.U.N., all of the money they’ve spent trying to put the pieces back together. Maybe they’d have a kid by now. Maybe Eggman wouldn’t have grown so crazy and maybe he’d just be some normal corporate slave in the government and maybe it would mean Shadow would’ve remained in stasis and been blind to the shitshow in the outside world. Maybe Tails would’ve stayed back on Mobius and found some other foxes, just like him, who’d be his best friend. Maybe Knuckles would’ve re-built the Echidna Clan and remained the strongest warrior in all the galaxy instead of trying to console me over a freaking dollar store walkie-talkie. 

Tom’s voice lifts him out of the depressive spiral he’s found himself heading down. “I’m not here to talk about what happened,” Tom begins, his hardened cop voice gone soft around the corners. “That doesn’t matter right now. All we wanted to know is that you’re okay. And I’m glad you are. That’s all we care about.”

He blinks his heavy, hot eyelids and fat tears splatter on his knees. The small crack in his dam has tiny, hairline fractures blossoming from its centre, a spiderweb of tiny gaps that he can feel drips of water seeping through. He’s practically holding his resolve together with his bare hands. “I’m serious, Sonic, ” Tom’s voice continues through the walkie-talkie, firm but caring, like a parent’s. “None of the other things even matter to Mads or me if you’re not okay.”

Sonic coughs a wet sob into his knees, tears free-flowing, dropping down into his lap; another crack in his dam, splintering straight up the centre, where another gush of water leaks out. He keeps his finger away from the walkie-talkie’s microphone button because he’s scared that he might accidentally press it and confess just how much this has wracked him in guilt. The fight he’s built this all up to be and the resolve he’s gathered and steeled to just tough it out evaporates at the sound of Tom’s warm timbre, and Sonic suddenly feels everything and nothing of his nearly sixteen years of age. He’s a child who wants to run back home and curl up next to his protectors, and a young adult wanting to carve his own path in life even if it means pissing a few people off in the process. He’s straddling the fork in the road and his decision to head one way over the other rides on Sonic giving into the kindness of Tom’s voice, or standing his ground and refusing to give in to their pleas for him to report all of this to G.U.N..

The line crackles and goes quiet before Tom continues in a wobbly, whispering tone: “Alright, buddy. I’ve moved into a different room, and I’ve shut the door, so it’s just you and me, okay? We can talk, and no one’s gonna hear what we’re saying.”

Sonic nods, although Tom can’t see him. “I’m gonna keep talking, even though I don’t know if you can hear me." The line goes quiet again, picking back up a few breaths later. “I know what it’s like being sixteen. Everything is frustrating and no one understands you, least of all your family. You just wanna fight and scratch and punch and keep to yourself. You say things and get caught up in the moment — we’ve all done it, Sonic. Mads and me, too.”

Tom sighs into the receiver. “I get why you ran. I bet you’re feeling all kinds of jumbled up inside. Feeling embarrassed ‘cause of what we found, and probably a little guilty, too, like it’s all your fault, and you don’t want to come back ‘cause of it. Well, one thing you forgot to remember is that I know you pretty damn good, Sonic. Remember what I said last year? About how stuff hasn’t always been easy, but you never changed who you are?” Tom chuckles wetly. “In your lungs?”

Sonic laughs too, a new swell of tears rushing to his eyes. “I know you’re bound to be upset over what you said. I can’t lie and say it didn’t hurt, but if I’m hurting, then you’ve gotta be hurting, too. Probably feeling all sorts of guilty, and you never wanna show your face around us again. Lord knows I’ve had enough fights with my folks where I drove off afterwards and swore I’d never come back again.”

Tom’s gentle timbre chuckles into the microphone, and although it’s crunched coming out of the speaker, Sonic’s heard it enough times to fill in the gaps where the walkie-talkie lacks. Sonic sniffles, and brings the walkie-talkie closer to him, wanting to feel Tom’s warmth and his comfort and his presence even though he’s miles and miles away.

“But I know you Sonic, and I know you didn’t mean it. You couldn’t do anything to take away from the fact that you’re…you’re my boy, Sonic. Nothing is going to change that, no matter how much you fight and punch and cuss Maddie and me out. No matter what you do or what you say or how you treat us — you’re our boy.”

The dam breaks. Sonic scrambles for the walkie-talkie and clicks the button on the side, holding it to his mouth. “Tom,” Sonic sobs into the receiver, drawing in a shaking, heaving breath. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. I’m glad you’re speaking.”

“I didn’t mean it.” Sonic’s words are jumbled up between coughs and cries, coming out stubby, words blocked by the mucus and tears in his airways. “I didn’t mean any of it.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I’m so sorry!”

“Take a deep breath, bud, or you’re gonna have a fit.” Sonic does, drawing it in through his open mouth before exhaling it shakily. “There we go. I know you want your space right now, and I get that, but I’m not giving up on you. We’re not giving up on you.”

“I was so mean — and I —”

“Sonic,” Tom says, cop-voice equipped. “Breathe.” Sonic does; one, long hiccupping breath that feels like he’s trying to pull a piece of yarn through the eye of the smallest, finest needle. “There you go.”

Sonic does it a few more times until the hiccuping begins to space itself out and he can finally see straight without tiny, black sparkles bordering his vision. 

“Better?”

“Better,” Sonic agrees, the ‘b’ softened by the stuffy nose and waterworks. 

“Good. Now, I’m not gonna ask you to come home tonight, ‘cause it’s late, and I don’t like the idea of you wandering outside this time of night when you’re in a state, but it would make Maddie and me a whole lot less stressed if you came back home after that, bud. Okay?”

“Okay,” Sonic responds meekly. 

“Good. I love you bud, alright? Don’t you ever forget that.”

“I—I love you too,” he responds quietly. The feeling has always been there, but saying it aloud? That’s something Sonic’s still getting used to. It fills the space of his ribs with a coiling warmth, like a tie-die of reds and ambers and yellows, all warm colours twisting and blooming in his chest in a mandala. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too. We’ll chat in the morning, alright?”

“Alright.” He draws in a shaky breath. “Can...can you stay on the line a little longer?”

“Sure. Of course.” Sonic can practically hear Tom’s smile through the speaker. “Got nothing better to do.”

“Wow.”

A dry laugh comes through the speaker. “I’m only messing with you. I’ll stay as long as you need me to, okay?”

Sonic nods, holding the walkie-talkie to his chest. He breathes in, closes his eyes, and feels some of the tension ease from his shoulders. They love you. Don’t forget that. “Okay,” he whispers, as the last notes of The Scientist fade out on the cassette’s rolling tape and Sonic feels his heart finally settle back into his chest where it belonged.

Chapter Text

The dirty cotton clouds sit sparse among the night-sky. What amount of pale, blue moonlight there is lights Sonic’s long walk home through the wet carpet of Green Hills’ mountainside. It’s one plagued by deep silence — the type that feels like he’s the only one alive in the world at that very moment, where the only sound comes from the squelch of his steps, the puff of his breaths, and the pound of his heartbeat in his ears. Sonic’s brain is exhausted after a three-day marathon but pushing through its tiredness to keep him on track to his destination. He fails to pick up on any other sense coming from the forest around him; for all he knows, a fire could be rampaging right under his feet and he would hardly notice its warmth.

The moon, fractured and strange, comes into better view as he steps out of the woodland and onto the Wachowski’s plot of land. He was last here on Monday, and it’s now Thursday night. Not even a few days have gone by, and yet the pang of longing he feels is so strong it’s nauseating. Sonic can feel the tears pricking at his eyes, burning and further exhausting him, but he draws in a deep breath and pushes them down while looking for a way in.

The doors are locked but the downstairs bathroom’s window doesn’t usually fully shut so he drags over one of their wheelie bins and hops up onto the lid. Sonic jimmies the window open using a nearby spade and slips inside, immediately enveloped by the familiar smell of soap and laundry detergent and spice and comfort.

Feeling like a stranger in his own home, Sonic is quiet as he leaves the small room beneath the stairwell and treads quietly on the wooden flooring, making his way up to the first floor. He glances left, to the wooden staircase that would lead him up to his bedroom, and then right, to the corridor with one door ajar. The sound of Knuckles’ snores travels through the small hatch in the attic door, and although Sonic misses his own bed, he can barely resist the pull that leads him one side over the other. 

Sonic gingerly nudges the master bedroom door open wider and peeks inside. The room’s in more disarray than usual; clothes are tossed over the chaise lounge at the foot of the bed and balled up near the windowsill, with a few articles lying in crumpled heaps in corners of the room as if they’ve been dumped there to be dealt with at a later time. Used mugs on the dresser sit in coffee rings, stacked and pushed aside. The room’s curtains are thrown open, and moonlight pours through the window to cast an eerie glow on the bed.

Maddie and Tom are on either side of the mattress fast asleep. Both of them look exhausted beneath the rucked-up blanket even while they rest. Maddie has smudges of unwashed mascara beneath her eyes, and has her hair drawn up into a loose bun that’s coming undone at the nape of her neck. Sonic can’t see Tom as he’s sleeping with his back to the door, but he imagines he likely looks just as worse for wear.

This isn’t like them at all, he thinks. They’re usually put together and full of life — this is chaos, exhaustion evident in every inch of the space. And I did this to them.

His hands tremble slightly as he creeps further into the room, coming to the foot of the bed. Quietly, he slips his shoes off, placing them aside with extra care, as if making up for his absence with this small act of consideration. Maddie doesn’t usually let them upstairs without taking their shoes off, so he hopes she won’t mind on this occasion. He’ll take the earful in the morning when they wake up.

Slowly, without trying to disturb them, Sonic climbs up the chaise longue and onto the bed. There’s a gap between them on the mattress that he quietly crawls into, immediately feeling comforted at the feeling of their warmth, their weight, their smell, their breathing. Another fresh burst of tears come to his eyes that he refuses to let fall. Sonic draws in a shaky breath through his nose before he shuffles up a little, head on the pillow, and settles so he’s facing Maddie’s back and has his own back to Tom’s. It’s cold on top, but he doesn’t want to disturb them more than he already likely has by trying to sneak under the covers.

It turns out, his consideration doesn't matter. Whether it's his spidey-senses or parent-senses or just the fact that he realises there's another, foreign body in the bed, Tom is startled awake. He rolls over and through the murky veil of slumber he registers just what he's seeing in the low moonlight. His arms immediately come out to wrap around the small body in front of him, tugging Sonic to his chest with such tenderness it makes Sonic's breath hitch. "Oh, Sonic," he whispers, giving him a squeeze that feels like forgiveness. “You’re back.”

In his tight grip, while still trying not to wake Maddie, Sonic wriggles around so he's chest to chest with Tom. Just as he had suspected, Tom looks knackered, with heavy, drawn lines and dark bags beneath his eyes that speak of sleepless nights spent worrying. At the sight of his face Tom hugs him even closer before he draws him back, hands coming up to cup his furry cheeks, thumbs gently wiping away the wetness there. "Hey, buddy."

"Tom," Sonic sobs quietly, placing his smaller hands over Tom's bigger ones, feeling the familiar calluses and warmth. He sniffles, leaning into the touch, closing his eyes and letting the tears fall freely now. "I woke you up."

Tom laughs quietly, dryly. “Were you just planning to sneak in and sleep here?”

“Yeah,” Sonic admits bashfully. Tom wipes the tears beneath his eyes. Sonic’s not upset, so much as he’s just exhausted, and the tears are evidence of that. Bone-tired, and relieved to finally be back home. “I’m sorry—”

“Hey.” The quilt is lifted and Sonic is brought underneath, into the warmth and the smell of fabric conditioner. “None of that. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?” Sonic nods, letting the quilt settle around his shoulders. He blinks at Tom’s blurry figure in the darkness, burrowing into the warmth when his arms come back around to hug him. “Let’s try to get some sleep. You must be tired.”

"Yeah," Sonic repeats, quiet, settling back down onto the pillow. From behind him, the bed shifts, and another arm is draped over the quilt, keeping him secure and safe. Even though they had tried to keep quiet, it wasn't quite quiet enough for Maddie. She says nothing but makes her comfort known, pressing a lingering, purposeful kiss to the top of Sonic's quills, her gentle fingers smoothing over them in a touch so achingly maternal it makes his throat constrict. She settles back, enveloping him in warmth. "Um...Tom. I know you said not to speak about it any more—"

"Mhm," Tom mutters, his eyes already closed, succumbing to sleep with the reassuring knowledge that Sonic’s finally returned home.

"—but what you said on the walkie talkie, about me being your boy. Is...is that true? Do you mean that?"

Sonic, half-hidden beneath the quilt, watches as Tom opens his eyes again, and even in the darkness, he can see the absolute certainty in them. "Of course it's true. You're our boy, Sonic. You always will be." Maddie's arm tightens around his body, squeezing him in a hug that feels like an agreement. Tom does the same and Sonic, for the umpteenth time in the last twenty-four hours, feels tears sting his eyes. "You're our crazy, loud, wild, chaotic, blue space alien boy. Every part of you. Even the angsty teenager kind."

Sonic nods, sniffling again. He reaches up to give the arms around him a squeeze with his hand, trying to pour all his love into that simple gesture. "I love you guys," he whispers, choked out.

The arms hug him even tighter, creating a cocoon of safety and forgiveness. "We love you too. So, so much. Never forget that, okay?"

"Okay," he whispers back, finally letting his eyes drift closed, surrounded by the steady breathing and the absolute certainty of being loved.

When Sonic comes to, it’s to the feeling of twin hands smoothing his quills back from his face. He leans further into that warmth, into that feeling, and the hands resume, gently stroking the fur across his cheeks and the thin skin of his eyelids. A thumb strokes up and down the bridge of his nose, gentle enough to tickle, and yet he leans into it, a quiet purr forming in the space between his ribs. 

“Go back to sleep,” a voice murmurs, smoothing a hand down his face so he closes his eyes again. He doesn’t protest, offering a small murmur in response before he burrows closer into that warmth, into that smell of home, dozing back off for an undetermined amount of time.

When he wakes back up, it’s to a muzzy head and heavy limbs. Someone’s whispering, quiet so as to not disturb him, and he can’t make out what's being said but he doesn’t recognise one of the voices as Tom’s nor Maddie’s. The door clicks shut quietly, and then he has those hands back on his scalp, stroking the messy tangle of quills away from his face. This time he doesn’t quite fall back asleep, and instead rolls over to move closer to the touch. Someone laughs, and the pair of hands gently scratch behind his ear.

“You’re spoiling him,” Tom whispers from over Sonic’s shoulder, but it’s without bite and reprimand. He blinks his heavy eyes open and comes face to face with Maddie’s tired, but happy, face, gazing down at him.

“Hey,” she whispers, keeping her hands moving, smoothing the fur over his forehead. “How’re you feeling?”

“Tired,” Sonic responds, throat dry and raw from his crying over the last few days. He swallows to try and wet it but it doesn’t do much to ward off the scratchiness. “Better.”

“Good,” she murmurs, resting her head back on the pillow. “Sleepy?”

“Yeah,” he whispers back, blinking his tired, dry eyes. “Who was that?”

“Wade,” Maddie responds. “He’s covering Tom’s morning shift and taking Knuckles and Tails with him for patrol duty, so it’s just us three home ‘til noon.” 

Sonic assumes they’ve done it for privacy, knowing after such an outburst — with it being his first, and a pretty large one at that — that he’d appreciate some time alone. Sonic is once again reminded just how lucky he is to have landed two of the most thoughtful guardians a guy can get, and sinks into the pillows as the warm feeling of gratitude spreads through his veins like honey. “Thanks,” he murmurs. “What time is it?”

“A little gone eight. You can go back to sleep, we’re in no rush today.”

“Thanks, but I stink, and I need a shower.”

They spend a few more lazy moments in bed, wordless, because nothing needs to be said at that moment, enveloped in each others’ arms as the grumble of Wade’s beater car pulls out of their drive and the world around them wakes up. Eventually, though, the sound of his rumbling tummy shatters the illusion and Tom mentions something about waffles so they all roll out of bed to tackle the day and, no doubt, an uncomfortable conversation that needs to happen.

Sonic still feels sheepish even after smoothing the issue over with them. He walks with his tail between his legs as Maddie and Tom head downstairs and he heads into the bathroom. He shuts the door, locks it, and promptly screws the heels of his palms into his eyes and lets out one, long groan.

It’s a release, cathartic in the same way stretching after you wake up from a deep sleep is. Sonic feels wrung and rotten from the inside out, and yet he can’t remember the last time he slept so deeply. He could do with another nap but it’ll have to be after breakfast and whatever conversation waits for him at the dinner table.

He itches his eyes for a moment longer before he pulls back and gets a look at himself in the bathroom’s mirror. Yikes, he thinks, stepping a little closer and pulling the skin of his cheeks down. Jumpscare. He never looked this bad when he was living alone, did he? His fur is in the early stages of matting, as are his quills, and he looks all-around grubby. Sonic doesn’t have much meat on his bones anyway but he’s clearly lost enough weight to make his cheekbones pop, and not in a good way. He cringes and turns around so he can get a look at his back, seeing that his quills are in similar shape (or lack thereof) and his spine is protruding a little from beneath his fur. 

What’s worst of all are his eyes. They look drawn and tired in a way he’s never, ever seen before. He’s been in tough battles against Eggman and experienced worse losses — Tom’s medical scare, thinking Shadow had died, Longclaw’s passing — and while all of those things dwarf his falling out with Tom and Maddie in the grand scheme of things, it’s still shaken him enough to cause him to look like…this. In the thick of those periods, Sonic never had a chance to slow down and breathe, or a chance to look at himself like he’s doing now. He just kept running and running and running, because stopping meant that he had to think about the situation at hand and confront his knotted mat of emotions.

Stopping now feels like he’s hitting a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour. He wonders if maybe his crashout from a few days ago is less to do with Tom and Maddie finding his belongings, and more to do with the cumulative stress over the last few years finally reaching its boiling point.

Something’s changed in him over the last twelve months since he stole the Chaos Emeralds and went super. Sonic feels like his emotions don’t have the same elasticity as they used to; he doesn’t bounce back as easily. He wallows on the down moments, and the bright side isn’t as easy to find as it used to be. It’s there, and Sonic does his best to look at it, but it’s as if there’s a new dimension to all of his problems that he’d never even considered before, as if an object he’s always seen to be a square was never a square at all, but a cube, with six faces instead of the one he’s always been looking at. His younger self would laugh about the ordeal; about his scruffy appearance, about his brief tantrum, about the argument, because he knew that it would all work itself out in the end somehow, but this version of Sonic’s seeing the other five facets of the situation and knows that, now, his actions don’t just end with him, and they never have just ended with him. 

Sonic always thought that those battles against Eggman worked out fine in the end because Eggman lost and he won, and the selfish train of thought — a me versus him — had never prompted him to think about who else was hurting, too. Tom and Maddie slaved away at overtime for months and months to pay for the repairs to their house, and Sonic never considered it. Why would he? A situation might resolve itself from his perspective, but it doesn’t mean that those caught in the crossfire aren’t still bleeding. 

This situation is no different. In the past he’d have laughed about the ordeal and trotted home when he was ready, full of apologies and smiles, knowing Tom and Maddie would just smile back and take him in anyway. He would have never considered just how much those words and actions hurt them , too. He would have been so selfishly convinced that ‘they’ll forgive me because I’m me’ that he probably wouldn’t have thought about the long-term effects of what he said.

Sonic groans again and thuds his head against the wall. 

You can be a real selfish bastard sometimes, Sonic remarks unkindly to himself as turns on the shower and waits for it to heat.

Blissful ignorance was fine, until he was no longer blissfully ignorant. 

With a fresh pair of socks and gloves, and quills so clean they puff out around him like he’s wired with static electricity, Sonic heads downstairs for breakfast. The grey storm that plagued Green Hills for the last few days has cleared and in its wake is a clear sky. It’s a kind of pathetic fallacy that feels a little too accurate, and Sonic’s head’s already sore from dehydration and stress, so he glosses over the strange coincidence and shuffles into the kitchen to scout down where the sweet smell is coming from.

There’s a fat, steaming stack of waffles on a dinner plate on the kitchen island counter that immediately has Sonic’s mouth filling with saliva. His stomach growls again — a demand for food — which announces his presence before he gets the chance to open his mouth. Maddie looks up from the French press she’d been plunging and laughs; it’s a genuine, tittering sound that seems to light up the room, and welcome Sonic back into a home he’d so desperately missed. “Hungry?”

“Enough to eat a horse,” Sonic responds, hopping up onto one of the stools. Maddie pours two cups of black coffee and nudges an already-poured glass of orange juice his way. He downs it immediately, parched, and pours himself a glass of water from the pitcher. It soothes some of the scratchiness of his throat on its way down.

Tom circles from the stove to the island with another plate of waffles. He stacks them onto the pile and grabs himself a seat, too. “Shall we eat, then talk?” 

It feels uncomfortable having it acknowledged out in the open, but Sonic also, strangely, appreciates it. At least now he doesn’t have to pretend like the last four days didn’t happen. “Yeah, I think I’ll eat the freaking table, otherwise.”

“Me too,” Tom says, serving himself enough food to feed a small family. “Eat ‘em while they’re hot!”

The radio playing quietly in the background helps fill the silence, broken up only by the sound of cutlery on cutlery, and stainless steel on porcelain. Sonic drizzles his waffles with syrup and pats of butter and, like Tom, eats enough to fill himself three times over. It’s the first substantial meal he’s eaten since leaving a few days ago. “I have no idea how I used to survive on scraps,” he remarks with half-chewed food in his mouth.

“Swallow or you’re going to choke.”

Sonic chews, and swallows, washing it down with his second glass of orange juice. “I can’t remember the last time I had waffles for lunch.”

“Not while I’ve been around.” Maddie levels Tom with a knowing look. “But I know I share a house with a man who eats donuts for dinner, so I’m not sure I can say for certain.”

Tom shrugs, cutting himself another slice. “What can I say? Donut and dinner have the same number of letters, and start with a ‘d’, so they’re clearly related.”

Maddie directs her attention to Sonic, who’s beginning to feel the effect of five servings of waffles. He’s leaning back in his chair, fingers pleated over his stomach. If he has seams holding his body together they’d be straining. “Now, what’s this I hear about eating scraps?”

Sonic shifts in his seat. “Oh. Like, uh, before I met you guys — or, well, before you met me, ‘cause I lowkey stalked you for a while — I didn’t eat a whole lot. Ate what I could find. Guess I forgot how hard that was until I had to do it again for a few days.”

Maddie purses her lips. She clearly doesn’t like what she’s hearing but also doesn’t have any kind of response that addresses it head-on. “You look…” she trails off, trying to find a polite way to phrase what she wants to say. “You look better now, but you didn’t look healthy this morning, Sonic.”

“Well, yeah. I lived off fruit, nuts, Fritos and, like, three granola bars for the past three days. There was some water in the…uh, the place where I stayed, but not a huge amount.”

“Carl said you bought water when you went to his store?”

“Yeah, I picked up sparkling water by accident.”

“But you hate sparkling water.”

“‘s why I didn’t drink it.”

“Oh, Sonic.” Maddie’s hand reaches out to take one of his, her eyes speaking nothing but concern. It’s as if she feels physically pained by what he’s saying. “You should have just come home sooner.”

He lets her take his hand but shrugs at her words and glances away. “I didn’t feel ready.”

“You would’ve rather go hungry than just come home?”

“After what I said to you? Yeah.” He shrugs again, nervous, and unsure what else to do with his body. “It was eating me up inside. No pun intended — ha.”

Her lips purse. Emboldened to continue, he meets her eyes and says: “I’m sorry, Maddie. Tom.” He knows he’s already spoken to him directly but he makes a point to acknowledge Tom, too, before returning to look back at Maddie. “I didn’t mean to lash out at you guys like that. It wasn’t right of me to curse you out and get angry when it’s your house in the first place. And I shouldn’t have said…”

The words go unspoken, but they all know what he’s saying. Her fingers tighten on his, and her chin tips sideways as she meets Tom’s eyes, and he meets hers. They share a silent conversation with a single look, one Sonic can’t decipher nor understand, but it causes Tom to take a sip of his coffee and say: “Let’s take this into the living room. This stool’s killing my back.”

The change of scenery feels significant; it’s like it’s punctuating the start of a new discussion, like whatever’s going to be said requires a total refresh. They shuffle into the adjoining living space and Sonic takes the sofa, with Maddie sitting one side of him and Tom on the other. She doesn’t let go of his hand the entire time, and by the time that they’re seated, she’s holding both of his gloved paws in the warmth of her palms.

“What Maddie and I wanted to talk to you about is…” Tom sighs, his knee bouncing from where his foot bounces on the floor; a clear sign of his nerves, even though he keeps his tone light and jovial, “...what you said about us not being your mom and dad.”

The guilt grips Sonic like a vice. “Tom—”

“Let me say this first, Sonic,” Tom counters, holding up his hand. He glances to his right, to Maddie, who gives him a small nod, before that hand comes up to rub the back of his own neck anxiously. “We wanted to be really clear here. I get that what we have is a little unconventional, but Mads and I wanted to be clear that we never — and I mean never — considered you a pet.”

The phrase has Sonic recoiling. He hadn’t even considered that. He opens his mouth but Maddie’s already there, a hand on his knee, looking at him with keen intent on her expression. “Before, when you said we don’t ‘own’ you…”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Sonic says, quietly. “I—I never even considered that a thing, or an option.” They both breathe a sigh of relief. For their part, they look embarrassed. “Is that what you thought I meant?”

“No.” They share a nervous look. “But, after a sleepless few nights you start to second-guess yourself, and since Mads and I never defined what we have together with you we thought that maybe, y’know…maybe we had a different impression of our relationship together than what you had. And we never, never ever have considered you any different to us.”

“We know you’re not human. We’re not going to ignore the elephant in the room, but it’s never changed the way we look at you. Even if you were a sixteen year-old human boy we’d still love you the exact same way we love you now. The fact that you’re a hedgehog from a different dimension is...alright, it’s a little freaky, but it doesn’t make you any different to me the way I’m no different to Tom.”

“I think that was one of our flaws, wasn’t it?” Tom shares another look with Maddie. “We never defined anything ‘cause it felt normal having you in our home.”

“But it never needed defining,” Sonic defends gently. I mean, it wouldn’t have hurt, but I liked what we had anyway. I had no idea they were thinking about this as much as I did.

Maddie gives his knee a squeeze. “Things never do, until they do.”

“Great way to put it,” Tom murmurs.

They lapse into silence. Maddie crosses her ankles, gives Sonic’s leg a squeeze, and pins him with a meaningful look. “Sonic, before you came along, I was happy being the cool aunty to Jojo and being a dog mom to Ozzy.” She looks to her left, to Tom, who gives her a nod of encouragement. They’ve clearly spoken about what she’s going to say next, and he’s giving her the go-ahead. Sonic braces himself, putting his smaller hand over the one on his knee. She looks back at him, and that intent expression is there again: meaningful, capturing his attention. “Tom and I, for the longest time, have always wanted our own kids, but it never happened. And we were fine with that, weren’t we?”

He nods, and Sonic’s heart stutters in his chest. “But then you came. You were—” She laughs, shaking her head at the memory, “—the strangest, funniest gift that’s ever turned up on our doorstep. And it was weird — I mean, in the span of twenty four hours Tom and I turned from being two adults saving for a bigger house to move out of the city, to having a kid living with us.”

“Did I think I was gonna be an adoptive mom at age fourty-four?” She chuckles, and Sonic’s heart soars at that word: mom. “God, no. But I wouldn’t change it for the world. You’re our precious boy, Sonic. And we’ve never thought of you as anything less.”

“Everything Maddie’s said is the exact same way I feel, too.” Tom, bashful, adjusts his clasped hands in front of him. His knee is still bouncing. “We’ve loved you like a son for the three years you’ve been here.” He shares a nervous look with Maddie, who offers him a small, encouraging smile. “It feels impossible, but you make us love you more and more every single day. Even when you do stupid shit like blowing up the kitchen or setting fire to the garden or that time you put Tails in the dryer and broke it a week after we got a new one.”

Sonic laughs wetly, and only realises that he’s crying when Maddie reaches up to wipe his eye for him. Sandwiched in between their warmth, he’s reminded of that precious moment all those years ago, sitting together in the attic when they told him that it was his, and he felt like he was truly home for the first time in a long, long time. “If you’ll have us,” Tom continues, wrapping his arm around Sonic’s back, with his hand landing on Maddie’s shoulder, “we’d love to keep being your mom and dad. Make you a true Wachowski, eh?”

Sonic spins on the couch and rises to his knees, bringing them in with his smaller arms. With his wingspan he can barely reach Maddie and Tom together but they make it easier, circling him in a warm, adoring hug; a Wachowski sandwich. “I’d really, really like that,” he whispers, muffled into the fabric of his pyjamas.

Their grip tightens, tension leaving their shoulders in a deep, collective sigh. Sonic pulls back, looking at Maddie with huge, watery eyes. “Mom,” he murmurs, glancing at Tom with a ridiculous grin, “Dad.”

With a delighted whoop, Tom draws him into an even tighter, crushing hug, nearly squeezing the life out of him. 

“We’re gonna have to talk about the whole Shadow thing—” Sonic opens his mouth to protest but Maddie gives him a look, “—no buts. We’ll talk about it later.”

“But…”

“Ah-ah-ah, no buts. It’s not going to be a quick conversation, and I know we’re going to disagree on a few things, but we’re turning over a new leaf, aren’t we?” Maddie presses a firm kiss to Sonic’s temple before she pulls back and shares a look with Tom. “Besides, if we want more honesty from you, it’s time we’re a little more honest with you, too.”

“But you guys are always honest with me.”

“Not as much as we should be.” It sounds ominous, but strangely, Sonic doesn’t feel like he minds. Maybe it’s because there’s an openness to their relationship now that he doesn’t feel burdened by their words. “It’s nothing to worry about, but there’s a few things we’ve kept quiet about because we were waiting until the right time to tell you.”

“...and now’s the right time?”

Tom leans back into the cushions a little, as if the conversation is physically weighing him down. He exhales a bluster, glancing up at the ceiling, and pleats his fingers over his tummy. “We realised that there won’t be a right time. We were going to wait until you were older and explain it to you then, but you’re nearly sixteen, and you’re gonna start asking questions and noticing things you didn’t notice before. If we’re gonna talk about Shadow, then we need to talk about you.”

Sonic’s brow furrows, and his voice falls quiet. “I don’t understand. What do I have to do with Shadow?”

“Like I said, nothing to worry about.”

“You can’t just drop a bombshell on me like that and expect me not to worry, at least a little.”

Tom lets out another sigh, his tummy rising and falling with it. “There were just some conditions that came with us taking you into our home that we had to go through with G.U.N.. Lots of documents, lots of long, long legal meetings, lots of legal crap. Maddie and I’ll go through it later with you, but it’ll answer some of the questions you probably have for us about why we reacted the way we did when we found the book in your room.”

“Can’t we just talk about it now?”

“No, because I need a strong drink before we even begin to open that fucking folder we have upstairs.”

“Language!” Maddie hisses.

“Sorry.” Tom rubs his brow with the tips of his fingers. “Just thinking about it makes me curse.”

Sonic doesn’t think he’s heard Tom speak so crassly before, and it strikes Sonic that this is serious; serious enough for Tom to break an unspoken rule that Sonic can’t say he’s seen him do over the last few years. Tom’s no saint when it comes to language, but he’s never dropped the f-bomb. 

“What’s the folder?”

Maddie’s disapproving frown is still directed towards Tom when she responds. “It’s a folder of documents we have from G.U.N. that Tom and I think you should look at. Now, enough of that — we’re going shopping.”

Sonic groans. “Really? Can’t we just chill here?”

“Ah-ah-ah. We haven’t gone shopping in days, there’s no groceries here, and you’re not staying home alone. Come on, we’ll pick up some of those frozen corn-dogs.”

“The mini ones?”

“As a treat. Go put your sneakers on, and we’ll go in ten.”

Sonic hops off of the couch with a whoop and a holler. Tom and Maddie follow behind at a slower pace, taking their time to clear breakfast while he runs upstairs to get ready. He vaults into his room and the silence strikes him as unnerving. He’s so used to them being here, being around, that their absence feels big and lonely and uncomfortable.

Sonic pauses next to their beds, resting a hand over the headboard, and wonders just how much they know. Are they mad at me for disappearing randomly? Will they chew me out for making Tom and Maddie upset? What I did wasn’t cool — I’d be mad at me, too. His fingers tighten over the wood, and he vows to have a proper conversation with them once they’re home. He doesn’t have long to come up with an action plan, but part of him knows there’s no need to. Knuckles, Sonic, and Tails have always worked best in the moment, without any preamble.

It’ll be fine, he assures himself, feeling his palm grow damp beneath his glove. It has to be, because I don’t know what I’ll do, otherwise.

Chapter Text

Maddie, a Whole Foods veteran who’s out of her comfort zone, marches through WalMart with the authority and command of a military general, directing Tom and Sonic to corners of the enormous store with instructions and a pointed pen in their direction. Their shopping cart is stacked nearly six feet tall, filled with cans and boxes and rolls and tins and enough food to feed an army barrack. “If you wanna get out of here by rush hour, then you better use that super speed of yours and get me three bags of black beans from aisle four.”

“Aye aye, captain!”

Sonic dodges children and scooters and other clueless shoppers as he picks up the bags and returns in five seconds flat. He tosses them atop the pile while Tom, looking worse for wear, carries two family packs of toilet rolls and lags behind their quick pace. “Can’t you slow down?” he whines.

“You asked to come to WalMart at noon on a Friday, Tom. You get the WalMart version of me. If you would’ve just let us go to Costco or Whole Foods instead, then we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Sonic jogs to catch up to Maddie’s brisk pace. “What’s wrong with WalMart?”

“It’s overstimulating,” Maddie says simply, taking a sharp right and leading them down one of the mammoth aisles dedicated to cleaning products. She marches them down to the midpoint and swipes her arm along the shelf to sweep five or six packs of floor wipes into the cart. “Children are screaming. The lights are too bright. Tom always moans.”

“Do not.”

“Point proven.”

“I just don’t see the point in going to two stores when we could just go to one.”

“Because Costco is good for some things and bad for others, and Whole Foods is good for some things and bad for others.” Maddie reaches down and hoists two big containers of bleach onto the underside of the cart. “Shopping should be pleasurable. It should be relaxing.”

“You don’t think this is relaxing?” Maddie shoots a glare his way at his sarcastic comment. “Damn. If looks could kill.”

“You’re lucky that you’re handsome.” She adds another container of something labelled FOREST PINE AND LEMON ZEST into the cart before she grips the bar and pushes it with all her might. “Chop cop, boys. We have twelve more things on my list!”

They whizz through the rest of the store in record time, picking up all of the frozen items Maddie has on the shopping list, and make it out to the car by one-thirty. Sonic, feeling simultaneously drained from the exercise, and invigorated by being back into the swing of things, dozes off in the back of the car while Maddie and Tom natter in the front seat. He’s half-listening half-not, lulled by the rhythmic hum of the car and the swaying motions as Tom takes a roundabout or a turn at a junction.

Going grocery shopping is usually an exhausting exercise in and of itself due to the amount of people who always stop them and ask for photos with Sonic. He’s always amicable, always happy to talk to fans and curious passerbys, but Sonic’s never been particularly interested in the kind of fame that comes from how you look rather than what you can do. Sure, it’s fun to speak to people who are genuinely excited to meet him and it’s pretty cool to see himself on the news and in magazines, but after the umpteenth meet-and-greet gone wrong where a fan got too close for comfort, Sonic had started to get a feeling that most people didn’t see him as an equal, but a freak-show attraction, as cliché as the term is. 

Maybe what made him fall in love with Green Hills so deeply was how kind the residents were to him. None of the townsfolk treat him any differently to the other human residents there, whether it’s because they know him personally, or maybe it’s just because of their kind-hearted nature. Living in such a welcoming community often causes Sonic to forget that most people just don’t see him that way. Walking through WalMart with Tom and Maddie at his side to glare at anyone who stares for too long combats some of the points and stares he’s getting, but Sonic’s used to it. It’s pretty hard to live as a three-foot-six blue hedgehog and not get funny looks.

Sonic loves humans, he really does, but it’s after bad days where someone will scream at the sight of him or try to pick him or touch him without his permission that he sort of understands why Shadow holds such a grudge against…well, everyone, really. 

It makes him all the more appreciative for Tom and Maddie. They’ve always done their best to shield Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles from the masses by driving to out-of-town shopping centres where footfall is so low they’re one step away from being abandoned. Good days are great, but Sonic’s had more than one occasion where a crazed adult super fan has thrown themselves at him.

His body recognises the turn the car makes — a sharp left, then a right — which instinctively rouses him awake and lets him know they’re just a minute away from home. He opens his eyes, feeling considerably more refreshed than he did earlier, and leans his cheek on the seatbelt as the greenery whizzes past the car’s window and Tom makes the tall climb to their cul-de-sac. Sonic spots a G.U.N. soldier in the trees, a permanent fixture of their home following Shadow’s disappearance after the Eclipse Cannon explosion, crouched low dressed in head-to-toe black tactical gear. There’s probably a few more in the surrounding treelines, always watching, always on guard for the occasion that Shadow might reappear in the Wachowski lot. It’s an unlikely scenario, but G.U.N.’s pockets are bottomless, and if they can afford to station military personnel outside of the Wachowski home for three hundred and sixty five days a year then so be it. 

They’re not all too good at their job, anyway. Sonic realised that after Shadow managed to sneak past them five times in a row. 

Tom slows the car to a crawl as it pulls up the sloped drive. He leans off the gas and pulls the handbrake up with a crrrrrank. The car groans, and then settles, and they’re parked, ready to unload a fortnight’s worth of groceries into the house.

Sonic hops out of the truck and casts a glance to the door. It’s then he notices that the light at the top of the house is on, the one in his shared bedroom. All of that relaxation drains out of him at the realisation that Tails and Knuckles must be home, and Sonic has them to answer to, too. 

“Sonic!” Maddie calls from the car’s open trunk. “Can you dash all of the smaller bags inside? Tom and I’ll handle the heavy ones.”

He takes a few, slow steps back and swallows the lump in his throat. Act natural, he urges himself. “Coming!” he calls back, turning around and jogging the short distance. He makes quick work to rush inside the bags full of vegetables, fruit, cans, cleaning supplies, jugs, meats, non-perishables — a rainbow of groceries that consume the kitchen island beneath their mass. He’s done with the thirty-or-so bags by the time Tom and Maddie make it to the front door with their own few, and is already making do by putting the dried pasta in the empty pantry.

“We’re home, boys!” Maddie calls upstairs as she struggles to walk with the bags hooked in her fingers, shuffling with small steps until she reaches the kitchen and lowers them to the floor.

Tom dumps the bags on the tiled floor with a groan. “Cripes,” he grunts, standing up straight and putting a hand to his lower back. “I need my old bones back.”

Maddie swats his butt on her way past and picks up the bags, setting them on the counter. “Want any help”? Sonic offers, coming up to stand next to Maddie as she begins to unload the tomatoes from the brown paper bag.

Her mouth twists in consideration as she weighs two in each hand. “Maybe later. First thing’s first, go upstairs and put Tails and Knuckles out of their misery.”

The nervous coil of energy in his stomach tightens like a spring ready to pop. “Are you sure? I don’t mind. Besides, I bet Knuckles was probably glad to have the extra space.”

Maddie laughs, and gives Sonic’s head an affectionate ruffle. “You wouldn’t be saying that if you saw how worried he’s been for the last few days.”

“Knuckles? Worried about me?” Sonic guffaws in surprise. “Yeah, and I’m the First Lady of the White House.”

“Stop being a smart-ass and go upstairs to see them.” She gives him a nudge towards the stairs and shoots him a look that reads: ‘try me’. “You might’ve felt embarrassed to speak to us, but those two love you regardless of anything that’s happened.”

Sonic leaves the kitchen bashfully, tail between his legs. It feels awkward and uncomfortable; Sonic feels like he’s done something wrong, or he’s wronged them directly, somehow, and he’s having to ask for penance so they’ll forgive him.

Forgiveness for what? He doesn’t know — he’s still trying to figure that one out himself. The horrible amalgamation of emotions he's feeling are curdling in his gut like rotten milk. They’re too ambiguous, too undefined, for him to put a word to just what he's feeling. Guilt, embarrassment, shame, hope, upset; the worst kind of combination, the kind that makes him feel genuinely nauseous at the thought of facing them after days of radio silence and running off without an explanation.

He creeps up the stairs, and pushes the attic door up and open slowly. The whispering halts like a flame being doused, plunging the room into absolute silence. Tails is sitting on his bed with his legs crossed and Knuckles is standing next to it with his arms crossed. Their heads snap towards the door and it’s clear that they’ve been waiting for him. Echidnas and foxes have great senses of smell, after all, and he has no doubt they’ve probably known he’s been back in the house since as early as this morning.

“Hey,” Sonic greets awkwardly, climbing up the rest of the stairs and shutting the door behind himself with a painfully loud thunk . He shifts from foot to foot and clasps his hands in front of him.

“Hey,” Tails greets back meekly. He’s tucked next to Knuckles, who’s watching him with an unreadable look on his stony face. 

Sonic purses his lips flat, lets go of the clasp at his front, and wrings his hands behind his back. The silence drags on, punctuated only Sonic awkwardly clearing his throat and Knuckles doing the same.

Finally, Sonic admits: “I don’t know what to say,” which is ironic in and of itself. He looks down to his feet, embarrassed and ashamed and unsure how to broach the conversation without reading it entirely wrong. Is Knuckles going to feel betrayed? Is Tails going to feel abandoned? Have they decided they don’t want me back in the house? Just how much have Maddie and Tom told them — and how much should I tell them? 

Knuckles looks down to Tails, his purple, steely gaze meeting a pair of big, blue eyes. Whatever they’re thinking, they clearly share the same opinion, and have no doubt discussed their thoughts between themselves before this moment. Knuckles looks back up to Sonic and takes a single step forward, feet coming together to stand shoulder-width apart. It’s not a fighting stance, but it’s not far from one. Knuckles is here to challenge, and Sonic isn’t sure just how far that bullheadedness will go. “It seems that more and more nowadays you act alone.”

Sonic’s frowns at the accusatory tone. Hostility it is, then. “What do you mean? I wasn’t acting alone. I wasn’t doing anything.”

“Yes, you were.” Knuckles plants his feet, stance widening. “I thought we had all agreed on this, hedgehog. After the Death Egg robot, after London, after the Eclipse Canon blew up — we had agreed that we worked as a team. As a unit, together.”

“Knuckles, I didn’t run away to go hunting for Eggman.” He reaches up to ruffle the quills at the back of his head, feeling awkward and caught out. “I don’t know what you think happened, but I can guarantee it’s not right.”

“I don’t need to know the details, but I can infer things well enough. We are a team , Sonic. All of us.” Knuckles places a heavy fist on his shoulder and gives him a jostle. “Regardless of what the problem is, you don’t have to fight it alone.”

Sonic maintains his strong, purple stare without blinking, feeling his heart thump painfully in his chest. “There wasn’t a fight,” he says weakly.

“There was.” Knuckles punctuates it by knocking his fist gently to the peach fur of Sonic’s chest. “In there.”

Sonic purses his lips as his heart gives another sore lurch. Perceptive bastard. Knuckles may be a little thick-skulled at times, but he isn’t dumb. Sonic thinks that in many ways he’s the wisest of the three of them — Sonic wouldn’t have had the emotional intelligence to back down from their argument in London, but Knuckles did, because he knew that standing back was worth more than butting heads. Knuckles’ year in maturity over Sonic surely does show itself on those strange, funny occasions, and this is another one of those times. 

“Yeah, well, sometimes you gotta fight things alone, Knux,” Sonic responds, which feels a little like a cop-out. It’s not true, but addressing his emotions head-on feels like prodding an exposed nerve, hypersensitive and uncomfortable.

Knuckles takes it on the chest with a grunt. He doesn’t move closer, but he does keep his fist on Sonic’s shoulder, keeping them bound and keeping Sonic grounded, as if he’s scared he’s going to run off again. “I know that better than anyone, but we are here to fight alongside you. Regardless of whether you want us there or not. We are here.”

A soft plume of fur brushes up against his knee. Sonic looks down and sees that a tail, just one of them, has wrapped around his leg, like it’s trying to keep him grounded, just like Knuckles is. “Are you okay now, Sonic?” Tails’ sweet, tentative voice asks. He’s still sitting on the bed and there’s a slight tremble to his body, and Sonic is once again reminded of just how far-reaching the impact of his actions have been. This isn’t about him — this has never been just about him. 

Sonic smiles, melancholic at the revelation, and reaches down to gently ruffle the downy hair on top of Tails’ head. “I’m feeling better now, buddy.”

“Is that the honest truth?” Knuckles presses. He nudges his fist, and levels Sonic with the exact same look Maddie gives him when she doesn’t want to ask for something twice. Has Knuckles always done that, or is it another ism he’s picked up while under the care of the Wachowskis? Synthesising their mannerisms and attitudes like real kids do to their parents.

Sonic places his hand over the fist on his chest. “It is,” he says, and it’s the truth. Breaking the habit of keeping secrets in a bid to protect others is hard, but Sonic’s going to take it one step at a time, even if speaking vulnerably from the heart is hard. “I’m not feeling awesome, but I am feeling better.”

“Good,” Knuckles declares, his stony, harsh expression breaking into a toothy grin. He drags Sonic into a crushing, brief hug before he lets him go. “Now that that is done, can we please go and get food? We have been relocated to the bedroom until you all returned from the store. I haven’t had breakfast, and I am so hungry I nearly ate the chicken-shaped rock.”

Tails nods. “It’s true. I had to stop him.”

Sonic draws them all into a tight hug with a laugh and feels the knot in his tummy loosen. It feels like one of the final pieces of the puzzle he’s been trying to mend over the last week has snapped into place; he’s spoken to Tom and Maddie, he’s spoken to Tails and Knuckles, and now there’s only one more person to address in this unwinding mess of a situation, but Sonic needs to clear the air a little more with Tom and Maddie before broaching that topic. The relief is nice, but something tells him it’ll be short-lived. “Yeah, let’s go get some lunch.”

Tails catches him in a tight, squeezing hug just as he breaks their embrace, causing Sonic to stumble at the weight thrown at him. He reaches down and scoops his arms under Tails’ armpits, hoisting him up so he can return the hug. “Don’t ever do that again,” Tails murmurs, muffled against the fur of Sonic’s chest.

“I won’t.”

“If you do, we’re coming after you.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Sure is.” Tails tilts his head back and looks up at Sonic, his arms still wound tight around him. Sonic smiles, and Tails returns it. “We’re serious, Sonic! Communicators on at all times, okay?”

“Crap, I don’t know where my old one went.” Sonic pulls back and glances over to his side of the bedroom where the junk on his bedside table sits in one, unorganised mound. “I haven’t seen that thing since Easter.”

“That’s fine — I’ve been working on upgrades.” Tails pulls back the cuff of his glove and flashes a sleek, yellow screen a few inches wide. He taps on it and it throws up a bunch of figures and graphics Sonic wouldn’t know where to begin in deciphering. “Knuckles already has his, don’t you?”

“It is voice controlled because I cannot use the screen with my gloves.”

“Ah, yeah.” Tails lifts the cuff of Knuckles’ glove up for him and shows Sonic the screen. “Knuckles’ is a little different to ours. I can tweak yours too, Sonic, if you want.”

Sonic peers over, curious, touching the red screen on Knuckles’ bulkier wrist. “This is great, Tails! How long’ve you been working on these?”

Bashful, Tails shrugs. “A while, but only tinkering. I guess you leaving sort of sped up the process.” Before Sonic has a chance to ruminate in the wave of guilt that washes over him, Tails scampers off to the side to rummage through his bedside table’s top drawer before he pulls out a sleek box. He opens it and passes Sonic a watch identical to his own, only this time the metal is tinged blue and the strap to match. “Here.”

Sonic puts it on his wrist. It fits perfectly, and sits concealed beneath the cuff of his glove. “Tails, this is awesome. Thanks, buddy.”

“This is more for my benefit than it is yours.” He taps the screen and up pops the same metrics as were on Knuckles’ and Tails’. “I’ll show you how to work it later.”

“So, what does it do? Does it work like our others did?”

“Yeah, but it’s far more enhanced. Its GPS tracking now extends to well over thirty-thousand miles, so even if you were on the other side of the Earth we’d be able to find you pretty easily! The communicator tracks your heartbeat and your other vitals and feeds back into the mother database. If your heartbeat spikes, then it sends a warning to myself and Knuckles that you might be in trouble. We can also speak to you via the communication function, which is a little like a walkie-talkie. It’s totally encrypted, so no one else can tap in. Pretty cool, right?”

Sonic rotates his wrist, studying the device with fascination. “This works both ways?”

“Yeah, so if Knuckles or me get in trouble you get notified that something’s not right, too. This way, we can all keep each other safe.”

“It is not for surveilling one another,” Knuckles clarifies, tapping his device with the curve of his boxing glove. “This is for emergency situations where one of us disappears without notice.”

Sonic nods. “I’m sorry, guys. I should’ve said something…”

“What's done is done. What’s important is that we now know you are safe, and that you understand it can not happen again.” Knuckles juts his chin out towards Sonic. “We all need time apart. That is why I value going out with Wade. But if I were to disappear after an argument with him and neither of you knew where I was, wouldn’t you be grateful to have the communicators on hand?”

“When you put it like that...yeah, that makes a lot of sense.”

“You say that as if it’s not often I make sense.”

Sonic shrugs. Tails giggles behind his fingers, and lets go of Sonic enough to pull back. “Let’s go play downstairs. I want to test out the monitor on the communicators. This new model tracks blood oxygen levels, and I think I got the hardware right, but it might need some tweaking.”

Knuckles raises a brow and prompts: “Soccer?”

Sonic’s face slices into a grin. “You’re on!”

The change in the house’s atmosphere is night and day to how it was just this morning. Normalcy has returned now that Sonic’s back home, and although there’s still an air of awkwardness, like everyone’s aware of the elephant in the room — that being Sonic’s strange, unexplained disappearance and outburst — no one’s addressing it. Tails and Knuckles watch him when they think he doesn’t notice it, like they’re scared he’ll disappear again, and Tom and Maddie are overly-chipper to compensate for the discomfort they’re clearly feeling too, but it’s a start to the healing process of the fracture in their family bond.

The way they’re all coping is by acting as if the last few days just didn’t happen. Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles grab lunch, play soccer outside until their legs go numb, and avoid any kind of conversation about the obvious. Once the sun begins to set, they spend the afternoon helping Maddie meal prep for the busy week ahead while Tom busies himself in the garage, trying to find the source of a mysterious buzzing sound coming from their car every time they shift into fifth gear. Come evening, Sonic is left to tidy up the kitchen, which he finds enjoyment in for the first time in his life. It’s in the little things — like having a kitchen to clean up in the first place — that makes him realise, again, just how much he missed being home, even if it still feels a touch awkward.

They tag-team the dishwasher, with Sonic on wiping duty before he passes them to Maddie to stack them in the cupboards, both humming along to the radio as they go. Tails and Knuckles have disappeared upstairs, leaving just Sonic and Maddie downstairs in the house. The sun has started its downward arc across the sky, and there's a sense of transition settling over the Wachowski household; it’s the end of one era and the beginning of another, but it's not quite finished, and Sonic can feel that keenly in the strange, electric tension that seems to run through Maddie's slight frame.

He passes her the last mug, which she dries for an unnecessarily long time. It’s like she’s trying to busy herself with something, like she’s waiting for something, or someone.

The moment he opens his mouth to ask if she's alright, Tom steps into the living room and through the open doorway into the kitchen. The sight causes the tension to seep from her shoulders like air from a punctured balloon.

In Tom's hands are two Aldi plastic-canvas bags. Neither hold groceries, that much is certain. Sonic turns away from the counter and hops down from his little stepping stool, heading over to help Tom with the heavy bags as he hauls them onto the kitchen island’s counter. “Promised you the truth, didn’t we?” he says, only a little out of breath from the haul, neck flushed from exertion. 

“What’s this?”

“What I needed a drink for.” Tom wipes his hands down on his jeans before he heads over to the fridge and pulls out a cold, sweating bottle of Corona. “Mads?”

She waves him off.

Tom pops the bottle with a novelty opener he keeps magnetised to the fridge, then takes a seat at the island. Maddie does the same, her stool scraping against the kitchen's stone flooring as she drags it closer. Sonic assumes he should follow suit, so he hops up next to Tom, staring across the counter at the canvas bags. They're unremarkable and smell musty, like they've been kept in a damp, cold space.

“Uh… what’s in the bags?”

Tom’s fingers pleat together, wrapped loosely around the base of the Corona as it sits in a pool of its own condensation. “Some things Maddie and I thought you’re old enough to see now.” He flexes his fingers slightly, fidgeting as he tries to find the right words to say, before he continues: “Before we speak about this, you ought to know that you’re the first out of you three to learn what we’re gonna talk about.”

Sonic glances at the bags. “About those?”

“Not only that. The bags have some documents that’ll help explain a lot of…well, why we reacted the way we did, but if we’re gonna show you what’s in one,” she says, gesturing to the green bag with the photo of a dancing carrot on its side, “which we’re gonna have to do if we’re gonna speak about this Shadow situation, then we need to show you the other.” It’s just as unremarkable, though this bag is red with the photo of a cherry pie on it instead of a grinning vegetable. When Sonic takes a closer look, the red bag seems a little more weathered than the other, so he assumes it could be older.

“Are they not allowed to see what I’m going to see?”

Tom’s lips purse. “Well, it’s not like they can’t , but Maddie and I weren’t ever planning to go through the green bag with you. That was an ‘us’ thing, kept under strict orders from Walters.”

Maddie nods in agreement. “The type of order that means he wouldn’t be too happy with us keeping what he gave us in a grocery bag, let alone speaking to you about it.”

“The other stuff in the red bag?” Tom gestures to it with the lip of the bottle. “Sure, maybe in a few years time. We would’ve shown it to you when you were older. But things change, and hey, here we are.”

Sonic points out: “You still haven’t explained what’s inside.”

“Oh,” Tom says, as if he hadn’t realised he’d veered off track. He drags the red bag forward and reaches inside with straining forearms to lug out, of all things, a folder. It’s a behemoth and it’s seen better days; an old lever arch file along with a cardboard box file barely being held together with tape, staples, and will. It lands on the table with a heavy thud, rattling his beer bottle, splattering condensation across its surface. Tom reaches inside of the red bag and brings out the rest of the contents: elastic-bound papers and envelopes that are clearly a few years old, if the dog-eared corners and scuffed edges are anything to go by. “It’s easier to show and explain rather than just to explain,” he says, emptying the red bag before he drags the other green bag over. 

There’s only a single folder in this one and it’s clearly newer than the others; a huge, plastic lever-arch with a glossy navy cover with enough poly-pocketed papers in its rings that the folder doesn’t even shut properly. 

“Do the colours on the bags mean anything?” Sonic asks naively.

“Nah, ‘s just what we could find. They’re kept in the safe in the office and don’t really see the light of day anymore, hence the smell.” Sonic recalls the safe Tom’s referring to; it’s a pretty sizable thing, about a metre in width, height, and depth, with a steel door a few inches thick, kept in the corner of the spare bedroom room up upstairs. Sonic had always assumed it was for jewellery or car keys, or something else innocuous that meant he wouldn’t have bothered snooping. “This,” he says, punctuating his word by slapping the top of the first pile pulled from the red bag, “is every document we’ve had from G.U.N. pertaining to you, Tails, and Knuckles, and this, ” he slaps the other, “is dedicated solely to Shadow.”

Sonic gawks. “ All of that?” he murmurs in awe, raising off his chair to look at the pile, so Tom pushes the cardboard folder towards him. “Wait — us and Shadow? Why d’you have that? What’s in these things?”

Sonic doesn’t know what to do with all of it. The mass of papers must weigh as much as a few bags of flour, so heavy that Sonic can’t slip his fingers beneath its edges to pick it up. “A lot of it is just legal mumbo-jumbo and jargon; meeting minutes, letters, stuff even I struggle to read.” Tom scratches the back of his head. “All of the information G.U.N. have on you three is in that folder, and you’d be surprised to find out that there’s not a lot. Well, not compared to the other folder, anyway.” He flicks his eyes to the thick, lever-arch file a foot away from where they sit. “Here.”

Tom lifts the cardboard top of the box folder and pulls out the first document on top; a poly-pocket containing half-an-inch’s worth of paper, all written in size twelve Arial with black ink. He sets it down on the countertop and taps the top of it, where a date stands out in bold, underlined black typeface: Sunday, the 1st of June 2025. It’s a form of some sort, printed on thick paper — the type used for certificates, or wedding invitations — with the G.U.N. insignia stamped on the upper right-hand side corner. Other than the black typeface the form itself has been filled out neatly with navy-blue ink in what Sonic recognises as Maddie’s handwriting.

“You sort of just came out of nowhere all those years ago, but you ended up being pretty docile, so while Maddie and I had to agree to a whole lot of stuff to remain your guardians — and parents,” Tom accentuates that with a smile, which Sonic reflects, “there weren’t any major concerns about international safety. So, as part of the agreement we have in place, every month we’ve gotta send reports back to Walters basically documenting anything and everything that’s happened pertaining to you three.”

“You do that…every month?”

“Every month,” Tom echoes in confirmation. “ We get this through our mailbox on the first of every single month, and we gotta send it back within seven days of receiving it. Haven’t missed a postal date so far, have we?”

“Though we came close to it when the three of you got food poisoning last year,” Maddie recalls with a shudder. “ That wasn’t a fun form to fill out.”

She lifts the poly-pocket and shimmies out a piece of paper somewhere from the middle of the pile. “It’s pretty straight forward, and most of the time, we don’t write much. We used to in the beginning, when you were still finding your feet and so were we, but as it goes now, we fill these out for the three of you within an hour or two. On a good month, anyway.” She slides the piece of paper across the counter for Sonic, which he eagerly reaches for, curiosity driving him forward to not only see this document but hear what they’ve written about him. It’s standard human nature, isn’t it? Although, he isn’t exactly human. Figure of speech, he excuses. “We keep the original, and send a copy back to Walters.” She peers over the table to read the form better. “Oh, that’s the brief from the beginning of this month. Again, a pretty boring month, all things considered — but I did write about that allergic reaction scare.”

[13.3] NOTABLE PHYSIOLOGICAL ANOMALIES OF SUBJECT: S

24.05.2024 - Skin near neck breaking out in slight rash due to new type of fabric conditioner used. The Alpha-Isomethyl Ionone and Terpineol are the likely aggressors as their (three subjects) skin doesn’t take well to heavy use of perfumes. Rash lasted approx. two days, causing minimal discomfort and irritation to pre-existing patches of dry skin.

“Maddie!” Sonic exclaims, drawing out the vowels in an embarrassed whine. “You totally just exposed me like that!”

“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about!” she reassures, tone high and light. “It’s normal!”

Tom chips in: “Hey, how’d you know I didn’t write that?”

“Because Maddie and Tails are the only people in the house who can spell all that science-y gobbledygook.”

He scans over the rest of the form, eyes flitting from top to bottom, and without having to ask they pass him the rest of the docket to satiate his curiosity. As she’d explained, the rest of the papers were identical: lengthy questionnaires ten to fifteen pages long, one for each of them. The questions range from basic chart recordings — height, weight, blood pressure (Sonic reminds himself to ask Maddie where she gets this information later) — all the way to near-invasive sections with whole clauses dedicated to mood recordings, behavioural patterns, and the like. Worried about what else he’ll find, Sonic holds his breath as his eyes scan the rest of the pages but is pleased to see Maddie’s neat handwriting commenting ‘Nothing to note’ on a majority of the invasive questions, evading disclosing anything unnecessary. He doesn’t look at the pages for SUBJECT: K and SUBJECT: T because that would be really invasive, and Sonic’s a curious guy, but not curious enough to find out what Maddie’s written for clause eighteen-point-four requesting detail on Knuckles’ hygiene levels. Unfortunately, Sonic already knows that answer himself.

“I had no idea you guys did this,” Sonic murmurs in wonder as he tucks the rest of the papers back into the thin skin of the poly-pocket.

“What, you think they’d just let us — a vet and a cop — take care of three aliens and not breathe down our necks the entire time?” She laughs, though it’s humourless. “We’re lucky Walters is the one in charge, and not one of the other old farts in the top rungs at G.U.N.. Some of those higher-ups can be real hard-asses about the whole having-an-alien-living-with-a-member-of-the-public thing, who’d have known?” When she laughs this time, it’s at her own sarcastic humour. “They threw fits because you weren’t under their constant supervision in a lab. Tom and I had to attend...God, how many was it? Six?”

“I can’t even remember,” he remarks dryly, taking a swig from his bottle, as if the memory alone is cause to drink.

“ Countless hearings at their headquarters when we first took you in. The type where you gotta wear a suit and lawyer up. Remember that summer you spent with Wade, before Tails and Knuckles arrived?”

Sonic’s brows shoot to the roots of his quills. “ That’s where you were? I thought you travelled for that vet conference!”

She rolls her eyes. “I wish . We had to attend one of the last hearings to gain official guardianship of you. We didn’t intend to at first. We just set out keeping home for you while G.U.N. figured out what they wanted to do with you for the first few months, and then things sort of went from there and we realised we didn’t want you to go.”

“Couldn’t bear the thought of you living alone in a lab for the rest of your life.” Tom takes another swig. “So we lawyered up, made our case, and went from there.”

“We had to justify keeping you in our custody, while G.U.N. had to make their case and hear ours. It was intense.” Maddie sighs as she recalls the memory, as if the thought alone exhausts her. “The other higher-ups were awful. They picked us apart for hours and hours. We’re lucky Tom’s aunt Linda — y’know, the one you see at Christmas with the yappy white dog — offered to be our counsel for a tiny fee.”

“It helps to have a big family, doesn’t it?”

“Sure did. We’d have been bankrupt at the first hurdle, otherwise.” Maddie takes a sip from a glass of water on the table. “But, we eventually won, if only with some extra conditions, but Tom and I decided that we’d take that any day over losing you.” She smiles, and some of that tiredness is still present in the crinkle of her eyes, but it’s outweighed by the warmth and joy she radiates. The memory may be an exhausting one, but it’s one that brings her happiness too. 

Sonic looks down at the bundles and bundles of paper that must record years worth of data on the three of them, meticulous down to the very last detail, all just to keep up an agreement with G.U.N.. “I had no idea about any of this. I mean, what you’re saying makes sense. I don’t know why I didn’t question why Walters just let me stay with you guys, but…why did you wait so long to tell me?”

“‘cause you wouldn’t have appreciated it, even so much as a year ago. It’s not to say you wouldn’t have been grateful, Sonic, but you wouldn’t have understood . Not like you do now.” Her hand comes up to stroke the fur over his forehead, and he can’t help but lean into her touch. “You’ll grow up even more over the next twelve months and then the next twenty-four, and the next forty-eight — and you’ll have a totally different outlook on this whole conversation again. Tom and I never intended to keep it from you forever, and if you had asked us at any point how we ended up becoming your legal guardians, then we’d have told you, plain and simple. It’s just that we didn’t think you were ready to hear about it yet.”

He knows they’re right, even if admitting it hurts his ego. This version of himself, matured from the three-apples-tall version that’s now a whopping five-apples-tall, wouldn’t have been able to understand the magnitude of Tom and Maddie's sacrifice. Sonic can feel the weight of what they're saying; the fight they must have endured, the long, painstaking hours of legal meetings and document filling, the character assassinations in court. While he can only grasp it at surface level, still wet around the ears with blessed childish ignorance, the thought alone still causes his chest to tighten and his heart to squeeze. All of that just to give him, Knuckles and Tails a better life. 

He reaches over to embrace them both, and they return it eagerly, the tension finally beginning to ease from their shoulders.

“So, Tails and Knuckles don’t know about this, either?” he asks at last.

They share a weighted look, the kind of silent communication that comes from years of marriage, and Maddie’s mouth twists. “No,” she says, and Sonic can tell that she’s telling the truth. “Like we said, you’re the first. The only reason we’re showing you this,” she pats the opened box folder, “is because we need to show you this, too,” she pats the black lever-arch to make her point, “and that’s something neither Tom nor I are going to share with them. Not ever. It’s a risk showing you, but…if we want you to be honest with us, then we’ve gotta be honest with you about what we know.”

“Wait, so Tails and Knuckles don’t know that you know about Shadow?”

“No. We had debated talking to Tails after you said that he knew, too, but we wanted to hear the whole story from you first. It would’ve just gotten messy otherwise.”

A twin feeling of relief and gratitude washes over Sonic, calming some of his nerves. So Tails and Knuckles really don’t know why I left, after all. “What did you tell them? After I…y’know.”

“We said that we had a disagreement, and that you left for a few days to clear your head.” The topic is clearly uncomfortable to discuss, that much is evident by the look on Maddie’s face. “If we said any more — if we told them that it was over whatever you had with Shadow — then it would’ve just caused a bigger problem. The less people that know about him the better, and that includes those two. If Tails knows we know then it’ll cause him to panic, and potentially land us in hot water if G.U.N. knock on our door and question him. Knuckles doesn’t quite understand how to keep a secret, so that was out of the question.”

Sonic nods. It checks out; why Knuckles had seemed relatively calm, why Tails had looked so upset over Sonic’s disappearance. It was because they didn’t understand. Sonic owes it to them to tell them the truth and the whole truth, but he needs to tell Maddie and Tom first, and it seems like they have something to tell him, too. 

But a question weighs heavy on his tongue, one that he’s been chewing over ever since he woke up on the cave’s floor after his first night, and it burns to keep it in his mouth any longer. “Did you tell Walters?” he blurts, tone betraying his nerves. The relief felt at finally getting the question off his chest is not made any better by the silence in its wake. Sonic flits his gaze between Tom and Maddie, trying to figure out why they look so pained. “It’s okay,” Sonic says, drumming his fingers nervously on the table. “I get it if you did.”

“We didn’t,” Tom says eventually, words leaving him in a sigh. His fingers thread through the front pieces of his hair, and he gives them a small tug. “God knows we should’ve. Mads and I, for the same reason that we didn’t tell Tails, or Knuckles, wanted to speak to you first and get the whole picture. Who knows what would’ve happened otherwise? If we had told Walters that you knew about Shadow’s whereabouts, then he might’ve taken you, Tails, and Knuckles in, might’ve interrogated you to get answers, and we couldn’t…” Tom’s voice cracks. “If it meant keeping quiet and breaking every single agreement we signed with G.U.N., then we’d do it, if it meant keeping you all safe.”

They lapse into silence again, broken by the rustling sound of Maddie's hand rubbing soothing circles in the back of Tom's t-shirt. Sonic remains quiet and stock-still, scared of what'll happen if he does so much as breathe too loudly and shatter the delicate atmosphere settled over the room, fine like a razor-thin shard of glass.

The silence stretches until Maddie breaks it with a soft clearing of her throat. Without a word, she draws the black file toward her, its weight seeming to pull the very air from the room. Unlike the other folder, which is bound together haphazardly with elastic and string and looks like it's been growing over the span of years, this one is new. She flips the heavy cover and reveals its contents: hundreds of poly-pockets lay back-to-back threaded through the rings of the folder in a pile three inches tall, all written with the same G.U.N. letterhead as his forms had.

The page that sits at the top of the pile is practically blank. G.U.N.’s red and blue logo stamps the centre, followed by a whole lot of nothing — titles and words Sonic wouldn’t be able to pronounce — finished with the dramatic red ink ‘TOP SECRET’ stamp. It was like something out of a movie, the kind of thing you didn’t realise actually existed until you had it in your two hands and realised holy crap, they do this in real life, too?

He glances up through his lashes, and timidly asks: “Can I look inside?”

Tom gives a short nod.

Sonic lifts the first page, not sure what to expect. Shouldn't something with the iconic red stamp have Polaroids held on by paperclips, typewriter font, and yellowed pages with easy-to-follow instructions pointing to where the bad guy is? Alas, Sonic is met with another block of legal jargon gobbledegook; it's the folder's index, spanning a whole three pages with titles next to their page number. He flips a few more of the poly pockets, slippery surfaces moving with ease, flipping past pages and pages before he comes to something a fair depth in. It's a report of some sort, but a lot of it has been blacked out with a Sharpie, leaving only two-thirds of the contents legible. Other than reference to a few faceless doctors and professors, it makes no mention of any name other than Specimen 58BQ1. "What does that mean?" Sonic asks, pointing to the word.

“That’s what they referred to Shadow as,” Tom says, leaning over to get a better look at the page.

“They called him a specimen ?” Sonic physically recoils away from the folder, offended at the term on his behalf. It was sterile, and clinical, and detached, and reduced Shadow down to a thing , like bacteria in a petri dish, or a chunk of rock being studied. 

“The code stands for…” Tom trails off, scratching his forehead. “What was it, again?”

Maddie leans in to get a closer look, too. “If I remember correctly, the ‘fifty-eight’ is for the year he was discovered. So, 1958. I think ‘Q1’ refers to the quartile of that year, so it would’ve been January, February, or March. Can’t remember what the ‘B’ stood for, though.” 

“Yeah, me neither.” Tom crosses his arms and leans back into his chair again. “You’d have been named like that too, bud, if they caught you.”

And isn’t that a terrifying thought? That Sonic could’ve wound up in the exact same fate as Shadow, had he not had Tom in his life, that the thin line between his life and Shadow's, is separated only by the random chance. Maybe, if someone had found you like Tom found me, you could have lived the life you deserved, Sonic thinks with a painful swell of emotions.

"If we go back a little," Maddie says, trying to diffuse the obvious state of upset Sonic's getting worked into by softening her tone and moving to sit on the other side of him. She places a gentle hand on his shoulder and speaks quieter, as if it'll do anything to ease the heavy weight of her words. "After the Eclipse Cannon exploded and Tom was still in hospital back in London, Walters came to visit us, remember?"

“Yeah,” Sonic responds quietly.

“And then you went to get some fruit cups with one of the agents while Tom and I stayed back with him?”

Sonic gives a small nod.

Maddie's hand tightens on Sonic's shoulder, as if she knows what she's about to say is going to upset him but she's trying to counteract it with a hug. "Walters told us at that point that he suspected Eggman, Gerald, and Shadow died during the accident. He swore us to oath that if we thought anything…’untoward’ was going on, then we had to tell him at first notice. He’d never come across as strict until that point. It was like he knew something, but he wasn’t going to tell us the whole story.”

“‘Untoward’ being sightings of Shadow, I guess,” Sonic says, filling in the blanks.

Maddie nods in confirmation. “Exactly. Tom and I knew something wasn’t right with the situation, but he was so ill after the accident that it really wasn’t on our list of priorities to kick up a fuss over, so we didn’t question it further, hoping it would blow over eventually. I mean, after Eggman disappeared in the past, he sort of left us to our own vices. He’d never made a point of having Tom and me agree to anything like what he did after Shadow’s disappearance. That's why, when Tom got better and we all went back home, we sat you three down and had that conversation about being more honest, about telling us about any big secrets from now on. It was partially because we now had G.U.N. breathing down our necks to report any strange goings-on.”

“Right.” The irony of that is not lost on him. Walters was keeping secrets from Maddie and Tom, which led to Maddie and Tom asking the three of them to be honest, which resulted in Sonic keeping the very thing Walters was searching for hidden.

Like Tom had, Maddie tugs at the roots of her hair with exasperation. “And then, every single day for two months straight, G.U.N. had cars outside our home.” Her voice strains with the frustration she feels. “Walters visited us every Sunday to check in — to make sure everything was fine, that there were no strangers hanging around, no weird ‘sightings’ as he would say.” Maddie sighs. “It was awful. We felt insane. Every time we asked what they were patrolling us for, because they hadn’t done it for the last two incidents involving Eggman, he wouldn’t give us a straight answer. So we pushed, and we pushed, and I guess it wore him down. Walters eventually told us that they hadn’t found a body for Shadow. The Robotniks — yes, or at least what was left of them, but not him, and that they hadn’t expected to find one, either.”

She continues: “Tom nor I could see why Walters was so scared of Shadow in the first place. I mean, you managed to take him down just fine, right? Just how hard could it be?”

Sonic realises, as Maddie reaches over to gently close its hardback cover, that the folder Walters left behind was meant to be a warning, acting as proof of exactly what kind of monster they thought Shadow might be. She extends her hand and lays her palm on top of Sonic's, her eyes big and emotional with a plea caught in her gaze. “He brought this folder to make a point. There was no need for us to see its contents, but he did it so we knew just what he was dealing with, and why he was so adamant on us reporting any sightings A.S.A.P..”

“What’s inside there isn’t very nice, Sonic,” Tom says, his thumb worrying the lip of his bottle. “Maddie and I have decided to give you the opportunity to read it if you’d like, but it’s not something anyone, let alone a kid your age, should read. We’ll keep the offer open, because you deserve to know what we know and know why we reacted the way we did when we found out you were in contact with Shadow, but I need to tell you that the contents in there were enough to make us pretty upset.”

“What’s inside?” Sonic asks apprehensively, glancing down at the black folder. “I don’t get it — it’ll just be lab reports, right? I don’t get why he’d show you those.”

Tom sighs, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s not just lab reports; it’s lab tests, experiments, studies, that sort of thing from his time in Gerald's lab. I assume that G.U.N. got ahold of all the lab’s records after the raid. It’s…gross. Scary. The type of things you hear about in a freaking X-Men comic — the type of thing you can’t expect a human to survive. If Maddie and I knew what you were getting into when you left for Tokyo…” He shares a meaningful look with her. “We would have never allowed you to step on that helicopter. That’s why Walters showed it to us; so we’d start taking his concerns a little more seriously. More serious than we took his concerns about you, Tails, and Knuckles.”

Sonic swallows down the coppery taste in the back of his throat and re-opens the folder. He glances down at the front page, and flips the poly-pocket. The next piece of paper is a photocopy of a report of some kind; it’s an old one, hand-written on a form template, dated from the seventies. At its upper left-hand corner it has a number: eight hundred and forty-three, which Sonic suspects is the report number.

The implication hits him like a physical blow. Eight hundred and forty-three reports, at least, in less than a couple of years, if he's doing the maths right. That's more than one report every other day. His mind recoils from calculating what that frequency might mean, what they must have been doing to generate so much documentation.

Like he had with Tails and Knuckles, he feels indecent and invasive reading the report, but he does it anyway. Curiosity outweighs his conscience, and as his eyes flit down the page, he comes face-to-face with another jargon-y report taken in the afternoon by a doctor whose name has been redacted.

ENTRY #5

03.02.1970

RECORD AT 18:30

BAY 4, LAB S-L2

DR ██████████

REPORT SUMMARY

Second administration of tabun (C5H11N2O2P) was made in-vitro via left-hand median cubital (3ml liquid form) at approx. 17:20 by Dr. ████████ attended by Dr. ████ and Prof. ████████

No immediate observations to note. Specimen was responsive despite earlier administration of 5ml (refer to entry #2 through #4). Specimen is not engaging with any form of conversation. Note that this is not out of the ordinary.

Grip test strength normal. Reflexes normal. Slightly lowered pulse (50bpm).

At minute 8 Specimen begins to show gradual change in behaviour. Change peaks at minute 12 (see detailed report overleaf) mark and returns to normal levels at 30-minute park. Specimen expressed dyspnoea, leading to expressed sense of panic, brief delirium, and upset. 

Grip strength test (fig. 82 overleaf) produced significantly reduced results. Reflexes (fig. 83-88) poor. Pulse troughing at 32bpm. 

Specimen stats returned to average and expected levels and behaviour within 1 hour of exposure to tabun. Final administration of dose expected at 20:00 to complete 7-day study.

Please see overleaf for charts.

Sonic flips the page, but there’s nothing there, just more snippets from different reports with different titles and date ranges. None of the papers within the folder seem to be in chronological order, nor taken by the same doctor if the different types of handwriting are anything to go by. It’s almost as if they’ve been cherry picked or scrambled together, because their order has no cohesion. Is this all G.U.N. have on Shadow from his time in the lab, or is this just a tactic from Walters to cherry pick information so Maddie and Tom’s perspective skews? Sonic flips the poly-pockets back and tries to decipher some of the other reports but some are so heavily redacted he can’t read in between their lines correctly.

ENTRY #1

17.09.1972

RECORD AT 04:10

BAY 2, LAB S-L1

PROF. ██████████

SUPERVISOR’S NOTE

Breach of containment recorded at 00:12 (see Dr. ████ report labelled XSB092 located in bay 3 archives). 

Dr. ███████ alerted personnel approx. 1 hour ago (accurate figure pending) following ██ ██████ ██ ████. Specimen 58BQ1 displaying elevated levels of ████ upon discovery.

Dr. ███████ presented with severe lacerations to chest, neck, and sternum. Immediate observations imply wounds are superficial. Missing left thumb, unable to be located. 

Dr. ███████ advised that the Specimen’s outburst occurred following ongoing ████████ ██ █████ tests (see overleaf for index and glossary). Behaviour is considered abnormal for Specimen 58BQ1 but Dr. ███████ suggested the outburst may be a result of stress following regeneration of the right foot (incl. ankle) surgically removed as part of ███ ████████ ████ █ tests.

Specimen remains in catatonic state upon discovery of Dr. ███████ injured body. Specimen was located in one of the empty laboratory cupboards in lab S-L1. Unresponsive despite administration of 50kV shock. Second shock administered approx. 30 seconds following first with similar null result. Specimen refusing to leave lab despite contaminated state.

Dr. ███████ relocated to southside med bay. Thumb unlikely to be re-attached.

Detailed report to follow tranquilization of 5ml ██████████████ ███████

Sonic flips ten pages in front, glosses over the report, then moves toward twenty, then back fifteen, then forwards three, trying to glean some kind of pattern with the information presented. He works the numbers back in his head but there aren't eight-hundred report snippets in this folder, only around fifty, and they provide nothing more than a glimpse into the capabilities possessed by Specimen 58BQ1. His thoughts are racing faster than his brain can process them, like he's careening down a steep hill where his legs can't keep pace with the momentum, gravity dragging him forward whether he's ready or not, stumbling to catch up with forces beyond his control. "You were given these for a reason," he says aloud, those speeding thoughts coming out of his mouth while the pieces connect in real time. "Walters wouldn't have just given you classified files if he didn't want you to know something, or do something."

“The file doesn’t just have reports.” Maddie pulls the folder forward and flips through until she reaches about an inch into the paper pile. “The rest of these are contracts, NDAs, without prejudice agreements, that kind of thing. We signed them when we agreed to the confidentiality agreements, agreeing to report any sightings as soon as possible. They’re just in the folder because we wanted to keep them in one place.”

“But this,” he says, flipping back to the front and pointing to a report titled STUDY OF LIMB REGENERATION which causes his stomach to turn over on itself. “Why this? Why do you need to know this?”

“Scare tactics, I guess?” Tom rubs the back of his neck. “The fact that they know he must’ve survived the crash and were so worried about it that they made us sign the nastiest, most stringent legal documents to force us to share any information we have on him should tell you how wary G.U.N. are of him. Maddie and I are legally bound to tell Walters as soon as we find out any new intel on Shadow, regardless of if we saw it first-hand. I guess they thought backing up the agreements with evidence to prove why they’re in place would make us more likely to comply.”

“...but you didn’t,” Sonic finishes Tom’s sentence for him, trailing off with a furrow in his brow. He looks at him with a small nod, squeezing Sonic’s hands between his own.

“No,” he agrees, his voice barely above a whisper, “we didn’t.”

“Because of me…?”

Maddie’s hands land on top of Tom’s, giving Sonic’s a squeeze over the top. “If Walters finds out that you’ve been in contact with Shadow and know he’s alive, or his location, well…I don’t even want to think about what they’d do to you three.”

“Like…torture?”

Tom laughs dryly at his naivete. “You wouldn’t be a prisoner of war, Sonic.”

Maddie continues: “But they wouldn’t consider you faithful. They wouldn’t consider us capable of being honest guardians. I don’t want to speculate, but I can only imagine that they’d take the three of you and keep you in their own accommodations seeing as they wouldn’t just let you guys roam free. Tom and I would probably go to prison.”

Sonic turns his palms over so he’s holding her fingers. Tom’s wide hands come around to cup them all in the warmth of his palms, and Sonic admits: “I had no idea any of this happened. I just thought after the Eclipse Cannon blew up, everything just sort of went back to normal — that Shadow was just a lost cause, y’know? I mean, G.U.N. didn’t even care about him for, like, fifty years, or care enough about him to let him live his life.”

“He’s a danger to their security and to the world, Sonic. He nearly killed Tom. You can’t pretend that you’re not surprised at why they’d want to keep him in a secure facility.”

“But he’s not like that. I’m not like that. Maddie, remember what you said? About how he’s nothing like me?” He pleads with his eyes. “If Walters handed you a folder full of scary things about me — about going super, about the superspeed, about being able to wipe out a city’s power grid — wouldn’t you be scared?”

Her expression falters, as if his words have formed a crack in her resolve. “That’s not the same. He’s capable of different things to you, Sonic.”

“Maybe, but the point is still the same, right? They’re just words on paper.” He shuts the folder and pushes it aside. “I’m not excusing what he did to you, Tom. Hell, I literally tried to kill the guy after he attacked you, but he didn’t attack you. Or, well, he did, but he thought he was attacking Walters, and when you see it from his perspective, don’t you think his anger is a little justified?”

When they don’t respond, Sonic continues with more weight in his tone. “I know you guys aren’t gonna believe me, I don’t expect you to, but Shadow’s not like what you read in those reports.” He directs his attention to Maddie, pinning her there with his gaze. “I’m sure you get lots of animals who’re beaten and neglected at the clinic, and I bet they get really frightened when you touch them, right? ‘cause they think you’re gonna hurt them, like how other humans have hurt them. That’s how Shadow feels. All he’s ever had is people hurting him over and over and over again, and when he finally breaks free and defends himself, suddenly he’s the bad guy? Come on, even you know that that’s not fair.”

“Animals are different,” Maddie protests, but it’s weak, as if Sonic’s words are truly resonating with her and it’s a talking-point she’s reciting, not the way she truly feels. “He’s capable of higher thinking than the animals I see, and even then, all an animal can do is bite. Shadow doesn’t just bite — he attacks with the intent to harm, just like how he attacked Tom and nearly killed him.”

“I know, and I’m not saying he’s an animal, but look.” Sonic jabs his finger at the folder. “They treated him like one. They didn’t even call him by his name. They experimented on him, and isolated him, and when the one human who actually bonds with him gets murdered, he’s locked up for fifty years. Listen — I’m not trying to convince you guys to have tea and cake with him, but I’m trying to show you that this isn’t one-dimensional. Shadow’s dangerous, sure he is, but so is Knuckles, and so am I. That doesn’t mean we’re not deserving of life. At least Knuckles and I have had some kind of freedom with ours. Shadow’s never had that. Not until now, and I know how hard it is to live half-hidden.” A weak laugh escapes him. “I did it for a decade before I met you guys.”

“...you don’t consider Tails dangerous?” Tom asks with a small smirk.

Sonic waves him off with a lacklustre grin. “You know what I mean.”

“Then tell us about it,” Tom implores. “We’ve told you our side, so tell us yours, and why you feel this way.”

“Tell you what, exactly?”

“Everything. I guess a good place to start would be how you found out Shadow was alive after the explosion.”

Taking a shaky breath, Sonic steels himself for what he knows will be one of the hardest conversations of his life. He glances up to the kitchen's lights, as if he's physically having to flick through the picture-deck of his memories. How far back should he go, and how honest is too honest? He wants to tell them the whole truth, but considering how intimate some of the details feel, Sonic reckons that the woolly parts can be left out. Maybe now’s not the time to mention impromptu, accidental cuddling sessions in the attic upstairs.

“Back in October he came to our house,” Sonic begins, and can physically feel Maddie and Tom stiffen next to him at the realisation that he’s been closer than they ever realised all this time. Oh, boy, you have no idea, Sonic remarks to himself. If only he had the balls to say it aloud — but, time and place, and this certainly isn't the time to joke about hindsight with his and Shadow’s friendship, considering the grief Maddie and Tom are under from G.U.N.. Maybe in a few weeks’ time. Or years.

“He came back for his inhibitor ring.” Sonic taps his wrist to make a point. “They’re these bands he wears to control his powers. I, uh — I had kept one that I found. Picked it up in the cornfield a few days after the explosion. It was a miracle I found it out in that mess.” Sonic doesn’t mention how he’d combed that field a hundred times over at a crawling-pace in the days after the accident, searching for a glimpse of a sign that Shadow might be alive, and though the inhibitor ring wasn’t quite what he was looking for, it still brought great comfort in his absence. “He turned up and asked for it back.”

“He just,” Tom gestures vaguely with his hand to the air, trying to express just how vague and casual Sonic’s phrasing sounds, “turned up at the house?”

“In my room. Or, I guess, our room, but I was the only one inside. It was midday and a little awkward and he sort of just asked for it back, so I gave it. He ate the Uncrustable I was holding, and then he left.”

It sounds strange when he says it aloud but it really did happen just like that. Shadow had turned up, emaciated and haggard like one of those cats you see on YouTube that get caught sleeping under cars and have to get pulled out from the engine by mechanics; all skin and bones and wide eyes and a wonky gait like they’re walking with marbles in their shoes. He ate the sandwich, downed half the Gatorade Sonic had on his bedside table, and climbed out of the window like a spider only to jump down into the garden and run into the forest like Naruto.

Sonic says as much because it sounded funny in his head, but Maddie and Tom aren’t laughing, so he swiftly moves on. “He returned a few times after that. He just wanted company, and somewhere to sleep. It was just between us, so I promised to keep it a secret ‘cause he was on the run — and he still is, trying to lay low away from G.U.N. capture.”

Maddie's brow furrows with concern. "But I don't understand. Out of everyone in the world, why did he come to you? What made him trust you?"

Why me, indeed. It’s a question Sonic’s asked himself a thousand times over and asked Shadow a grand total of zero times. “Because I’m his friend,” Sonic says, which feels strangely presumptuous. They’ve never officially discussed it, and friends don’t usually have to confirm their friendship status among one another, but this is Shadow, so Sonic follows up with: “unofficially. He’s a prickly guy, y’know?”

“Sonic,” Tom says, pressing his fingertips to his closed eyes, an exasperated gesture if Sonic’s ever seen one. “This sounds…bizarre.”

“Our lives are bizarre. How is this any different to Tails driving a cop car with magnets, or Knuckles being a defender of an ancient emerald which turns me yellow and gives me freaking superpowers?” 

“We’re getting off track,” Maddie says, shooting Tom a pointed look, although he can’t see it behind the fingers he has dug into his eye sockets, as if he’s trying to physically massage a migraine out of his head. “Keep going, Sonic.”

“Right. So, uh, I started getting worried that he’d get caught. We still have G.U.N. agents who watch over our house and he knew that, too, so we decided to start meeting outside of the house around Christmas.” Sonic doesn’t mention the den. One, because he’d have to explain it to Tom and Maddie which he isn’t ready to do, and two, because it would compromise his only safe location. “Shadow disappears for weeks at a time, trying to lay low from G.U.N., and then he’ll come back to Green Hills to rest up, before he leaves again.”

The statement hangs in the air like an unfinished sentence. Tom and Maddie wait with baited breath, expecting something profound, but nothing comes. Tom stares at him for a long moment, as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. "That's... it?" His voice carries a mix of relief and disbelief, as if he can’t believe how mundane this whole thing is. "You're telling me this whole crisis was because you've been having playdates?"

“That’s it,” Sonic echoes in confirmation, open and confident and bolstered by the fact that he’s telling the truth. He meets Tom’s eyes when he says it, wanting him to understand that he’s being wholly honest. “No fights. No weird, evil plans. We literally just go adventuring, or eating, or sometimes he’ll nap, and then he leaves for a few weeks or months.”

“And how do you know he’s here?”

“Well, usually I wouldn’t. He’d sort of turn up when the coast was clear and we went from there, but it was making me anxious, so I got us walkie-talkies. When he was back in Green Hills, he’d call me on it, and if I was around, I’d answer it and we’d make a plan.”

“That’s how Tails knew to contact you,” Maddie remarks, speaking as if the final piece of the puzzle has clicked into place. “Because he knew about Shadow, too.”

“Kind of. Tails didn’t know about the walkie-talkie, but he did know about Shadow. He found some of his fur in our house, did some testing, and thought Shadow was blackmailing me, so I told him that — no — Shadow wasn’t blackmailing me, but that we were friends, and I swore to him that he couldn’t tell anyone.”

Maddie and Tom share a bewildered, dumbfounded glance. Sonic may as well be speaking in perfect Mandarin.

“Please don’t punish him. He’s just a kid. I made him promise me under any circumstances that he’d keep it a secret, ‘cause if anyone other than me knew about Shadow’s whereabouts, then…” Sonic swallows the lump in his throat. “Then we wouldn’t meet anymore.”

The moment of understanding hits Tom like a switch being flipped. Sonic watches the shift happen, as Tom's eyes sharpen from confusion to painful clarity, like puzzle pieces suddenly snapping into place to reveal a picture he'd been too close to see. "Is that why you reacted the way you did when we found the atlas?"

“Yeah,” Sonic admits bashfully. “I was scared, ‘cause I knew once he knew the secret was out that he’d leave again. The guy’s scared for his life of G.U.N., and can you blame him? You’ve seen the reports. The guy gets held prisoner for a few years while some guys in labcoats chop his ankles off or whatever, and then G.U.N. come in, kill his only friend, and put him under stasis for another fifty. He doesn’t speak about it at all when we’re together, but he’s been getting better at recalling other parts of his past, and even those are grim.” Sonic’s mouth twists. “If he’s not with me in Green Hills, he’s alone, in a village somewhere in Kazakhstan, or Chile, or Mozambique, or the freaking North Pole — the kind of places you didn’t know existed until someone tells you about them.”

Maddie nods slowly, processing. They fall into momentary silence as she tries to absorb all of the huge details and fit them into the missing gaps of the storyboard and timeline she's created in her head. "When did Tails find out?"

“Back at Christmas.”

“So, you’ve been keeping the secret from Shadow for, what, six months?” Her brow furrows disapprovingly. “Sonic…”

“I know, I know,” he grumbles. He drops his forehead into his open palms, elbows resting on the table. “I know I gotta say something. I’ve been meaning to, but the time was never right, and it’s hard ‘cause I know that when I tell him he’ll be mad.” Sonic clears his throat. “Rightfully so.”

She purses her lips. When she speaks next, it's after a beat of silence, and her words are carefully-placed like she's walking on eggshells and delivering bad news to a patient at the clinic. "I have sympathy with what he went through — of course I do. I don't know him like you seem to, but…but regardless of everything Shadow has gone through, regardless of your friendship with him, Tom and I have already signed those agreements with G.U.N.." Their gazes meet in a moment of shared concern. "If they find out that we've kept this from them any longer than we already have, it looks like we've been intentionally deceiving them…"

"G.U.N. won't find out," Sonic is quick to reassure. "I, uh…I'll tell Shadow. I know I have to, I've just been hoping if I ignored the problem it would kinda just go away by itself." The smile on his face is flat and grim. "If you found one other person in the entire universe just like you, when you've spent your whole life feeling like the only one of your kind..." His voice cracks slightly. "Wouldn't you wanna fight to keep it?”

Maddie’s hand tightens on his shoulder and Tom, face drawn and tired, takes a swig of his beer. His words cut them deep and he’s glad of it; at least they can see his perspective. Sonic asks: “So, what happens after that?”

“After you tell him?”

“Yeah.” Sonic shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “Are you still gonna tell G.U.N.?”

Maddie and Tom share a look between them. It’s another one of unspoken words, as if they both seem to read each other’s thoughts. “We’ll pretend we never had this conversation,” Tom says eventually. “If it ever makes it back to G.U.N. that Shadow’s alive and he’s been in contact with you, then…well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, but as far as we’re all concerned, Maddie and I never knew about any of this.”

Gratitude swells in Sonic’s chest. “Thank you,” he whispers, reaching out to give them both another hug. “I know I haven’t made this easy on you guys and I know it’s upset you that I kept it a secret, but can you at least see why now?”

A small, dry laugh leaves Maddie in a huff as she hugs Sonic back. “Yes, but I don’t know what else I expected from you.”

He pulls back, and looks up at her face with a small frown. “What do you mean?”

She reaches out to cup the side of his head, palm fitting against his cheek. “Tom and I were so worried that something else was happening — collusion, blackmail, treason — I dunno, the stuff a parent’s brain comes up with when they’re tired and stressed. I can’t believe you were just…hanging out with him this entire time.” She laughs again, and this time, it sounds a little crazed. “It’s so you. ”

“Is…is that a compliment?” he asks hopefully.

Her hand slips around to hold him by the bicep and she gives him a sideways hug. “Of course it is. It’s also just funny.” She presses a kiss to his forehead, pulls back, and makes stern eye contact with him. “But, Sonic, you know this doesn’t change anything. You’ve still gotta say something to him. Not only for your own and our sake, but his. You need to honour the fact that you’ve broken a promise. Brushing it under the rug will never fix the problem, it’ll only make it worse when it’s found out.”

It’s the final nail in the coffin. Sonic’s breath leaves him in a sigh that seems to drag all the air from his lungs out with it. “I know,” he concedes, defeated. “It’s just that telling him means that he’ll probably hate me, and never want to see me again.”

“That’s his decision to make, not yours.” Tom places a hand on the back of his chair, a warm, comforting weight, despite the chide in his tone. “You fucked up, and that’s okay—”

“Tom, language,” Maddie admonishes.

“You messed up. Sh—crap happens. The most honourable thing you can do is tell him the truth. Wouldn’t you want to be told the truth in his position?” Sonic nods, although his face doesn’t express the remorse his body language does. “Oh, buddy…”

“It’s just so sad. I wish it never had to be like this. Why can’t they just leave him alone? He’s not causing any harm. He’s trying to stay out of trouble and if I’m no longer there for him, then he’s going to be totally alone.” Sonic exhales a bluster, feigning nonchalance, but beneath it all the words feel like they’re being wrenched from him. “He’ll probably live the rest of his life in solitude. When I say he lays low, he’s freaking horizontal to the ground.”

“Aren’t you worried that he’ll try to lash back out? That he’ll try to take down G.U.N.?”

“No,” Sonic says immediately, without hesitation. The response requires no thought. Sonic is so sure of Shadow’s motivations that he feels like he shares them personally. “It was never his idea in the first place to harm Earth — it was Gerald’s. Shadow was the one who helped me protect it. He was the one who took the final hit.” Sonic pauses to take a shaky breath. “I know you don’t believe me, and I don’t expect you to, but if there’s one thing I’m sure of it’s that the guy doesn’t want any more trouble. He just wants to live his life away from all of the conflict. If revealing himself to G.U.N. is needed in order to take them down, then he’ll stay hidden.”

Tom’s hand rises from the back of the chair to place on Sonic’s shoulder. He gives him a tug, and pulls him into a side-along hug. “You’re doing the right thing,” he murmurs, leaning his cheek atop Sonic’s head, who draws in another ragged breath beneath him, fighting the pressure of his ballooning emotions. “This has nothing to do with what Maddie and I want, or what Tails and Knuckles want — this is about you being honest with him. There’s a thousand other things we should and could do, but the only thing you need to focus on is just…being honest with him, alright?”

“Alright,” Sonic whispers back quietly.

“The right thing isn’t always the easy thing to do. It takes courage, and we’re proud of you for it.” Sonic’s arms tighten on Tom, who exhales a breath above, hand rubbing his back. “No more secrets, alright?”

“Alright,” Sonic repeats. Maddie, quietly, gathers the folders and stacks them into a pile as Tom’s warm palm rubs circles in Sonic’s back. “If self-improvement is meant to be good for us, then why does it feel so sucky?”

Tom’s chest bounces as he chuckles. “Ever heard the saying: ‘no pain, no gain’?”

“I thought it was just physical, not emotional!”

“They’re all connected. Our brain, our hearts, and our bodies.” Tom pulls away and presses his pointer finger to the space where Sonic’s heart beats behind his chest, and meets him with an encouraging nod. “And our souls. Yours just so happens to be a Wachowski’s, so you end up listening to your heart a little more than your head sometimes.”

Sonic chuckles wetly. He isn’t crying, but Tom’s words cause a swell of emotions to rise in his chest that feels like it’s too big to handle. “I wonder where I got it from.”

The sides of Tom’s eyes crinkle. He swipes his thumbs against the side of Sonic’s temple, gentle and caring, just like a father should be. “You didn’t get it from anyone — you were born with it, Sonic. It’s who you are. It’s why you are who you are, and nothing will ever change that.” Sonic nods beneath the gentle press of his fingers, feeling the final jigsaw puzzle begin to fall into his hand. He has it within his grasp, and all he has to do now is put it in motion. “We all love you for it. I just wish you’d love your big heart the same way we do.”

“I’m trying. It’s just hard, sometimes.”

“I know.” Tom presses a kiss to the top of his head, and exhales a tired, albeit relieved sigh. “I know you are, but that’s why we’re here; to pick you up when you’re not feeling so hot. We’re a team, remember? All of us, and no one gets left behind.”

Sonic nods, mustering a wobbly smile. “Team Wachowski, right?”

Tom reflects his grin. “Right.”

Chapter Text

Sonic turns sixteen the Monday morning of the twenty-third of June. 

He wakes up to the sun streaming through the skylight, creating a pool of warm, natural light atop his chest. He glances down through bleary eyes, looks at the palms of his hand, and tells himself: these are the hands of a sixteen year old.

Disappointingly, there is no fanfare. He’d expected there to be some kind of monumental shift to his world; a tilt to its axis, where everything, as if he’d been staring through the unfocused lens of a camera, would come into startling clarity. He’d suddenly understand: of course, this is how I’m meant to feel! and all of his woes would melt away as if they were only insignificant problems in the first place.

Of course, none of that happens.

“Huh,” Sonic remarks. He pushes to sit up, quills a rat’s nest atop his head, and rests his back against the headboard behind him. Knuckles and Tails are fast asleep under their quilts in their own respective beds, which is rare for them to do while Sonic’s up. He’s usually the last to wake.

A glance at the screen of his communicator tells him it’s a little past eight in the morning, and strangely, he feels no obligation to go back to sleep. The thrill that comes with one’s birthday sings through Sonic’s body and the last thing he feels like he wants to do is rest, so he springs from his bed, slides his feet into his slippers, and heads down the ladder and the stairs as quietly as he can. 

The rest of the house is blissfully asleep — even Ozzy, who snores away like an old man from his bed near the living room’s TV. Sonic treads quietly into the kitchen, floorboards creaking beneath the scuff of his slippers, and stares up at the cupboards above. Should he make himself a more mature drink now that he’s, technically, nearly an adult? Coffee is a pretty grown-up thing to drink. Or, maybe tea. He pulls open the cupboard and stares at the tub labelled something-something-Columbian-something-something-grounds and decides that making coffee is a little too ambitious for Day One. Today, juice will do the trick.

By the time he’s sat himself down at the kitchen island with a tall glass of (pulp-less, of course) orange juice, the rest of the house is stirs to life The first to appear is Tom, on shift duty this morning and due to leave in an hour or so’s time, who shuffles into the kitchen unshaven and drowsy. He ruffles Sonic’s head and tells him: “Happy birthday, buddy,” while he heads straight for the coffee machine near the counter and does something magic with the tub of grounds Sonic didn’t have a clue what to do with.

“I’m sixteen, now,” Sonic says aloud, fingers tracing patterns in the condensation gathering on his glass. “Does that mean you can start teaching me how to drive?”

Tom stifles a big yawn into the crook of his elbow while the coffee machine behind him gurgles. He crosses his arms and leans his weight onto the counter with a thoughtful look to his face, the type that tells Sonic that his answer won’t be an outright ‘yes’. “Why would you want to drive?”

“Dunno.” The image of Shadow on the back of Dark Rider flashes from a memory. “‘cause it’s cool?”

“I mean, I can teach you if you want, but you’re way faster than a car. Would you rather run to the store in a few minutes, or drive for an hour?”

“Oh, yeah. I hadn’t considered that.”

“Plus, cars are super expensive. Unless you have a few thousand tucked away in your piggy bank, then now would be a good time to start saving.”

“But…” But Shadow drove a bike without owning it, nor owning a licence dies on his tongue. That argument would not go down well with Tom. “Alright, fine.”

“I can still teach you,” Tom says as a way of compromising, “if you want?”

Sonic shrugs. The thought had died a death pretty quickly when Tom put it into perspective like that. “Maybe. You’re right, though, they’re super expensive, and kinda slow.”

Tom chuckles a dry laugh. “Yeah, tell me about it. You’ve gotta pay insurance and gas on top of the price of the car, not factoring in repairs and servicing. Be glad that you’re a good runner. It’ll make life a hell of a lot cheaper for you.”

The machine behind him splutters to a stop. Tom turns around and gives the body of the coffee machine a few hard taps until it jolts back to life. “Speaking of expensive tastes, we need a new coffee machine…” he grumbles to himself, watching the last dregs of pure black caffeine dribble out from the spout of the Moccamaster. He takes the carafe from the hotplate and pours himself a mug, setting it back in place when he’s done and heading to the kitchen island to join Sonic with his juice. 

“Does that even taste good?” he asks with a small curl to his lip. I mean, it smells great, but it hasn’t ever tasted nice. Hey, maybe now that I’m sixteen, my tastebuds have matured! “Can I try?”

Tom’s brows shoot towards his hairline. “You wanna try black coffee?” he asks in poorly-concealed bewilderment. “ You? ”

“Hey, why’d you say it like that?”

“Sonic, you won’t even eat oatmeal without a million spoonfuls of sugar. I mean, be my guest, but I don’t think you’ll like it.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

Tom raises a skeptical brow but nonetheless, he nudges his steaming mug towards Sonic. Sonic takes it in his two hands and gives it a hesitant sniff. It really does smell good; that’s the problem, but the times he’s had anything coffee-flavoured in the past have ended with him spitting it out and vowing to never, ever touch the damn flavour again. Though, he does like the frappucinos they sell in Starbucks that cost an arm and a leg, and that’s technically coffee, right? 

Sonic takes a tentative sip and forces himself to swallow without grimacing.

“Give that back,” Tom says behind a grin, even as Sonic clings on in protest. “I can tell that you hate it!”

“I do not! I’m mature now, and that means I like coffee.”

“You’re pulling this face.” Tom mimics Sonic by crumpling his expression.

“I’m not!”

“Then take another sip.”

Sonic looks down into the coffee that tastes like burnt, dirty water on his tongue. He would rather gag.

A heavy presence next to him, fortunately, puts a temporary halt to the conversation. “Sonic, you do not like coffee,” Knuckles remarks as he takes a seat at the kitchen island next to Tom and him. “Why are you drinking it?”

“I do like coffee. I’m an adult now.”

“No, you do not. And, no, you are not.”

“Don’t speak for me, Knuckles.”

“Very well, then.” He gestures with a jut of his chin. “Take another sip.”

Sonic frowns down into the mug.

Tom eases it back from his hands and presses the juice into the gap of his open palms. Sonic takes a sip of it with a resigned sag to his shoulders. Well, so much for being super mature at sixteen, he grumbles to himself, taking another self-pitying sip of his juice while Tom nurses his coffee and Knuckles fishes something out from the cuff of his glove.

“Happy birthday, hedgehog,” Knuckles says as he hands him a strange-shaped rock. “I found this while scavenging. It looks like a chilli-dog.”

“Wow, Knuckles.” Sonic looks down at the rock in his hand. It does look like a chilli-dog. He holds it up to the kitchen light. “Thanks, man!”

“You are most welcome.” 

“Maddie’n I’ll do our gift exchange when she wakes up,” Tom says, the corners of his eyes crinkled in a smile when he sees what Knuckles has gifted Sonic. “That’s a thoughtful gift, Knuckles.”

“Of course. When I found it, I thought of Sonic.” Knuckles says matter-of-factly, easily, effortlessly sentimental. He gets himself and Sonic mismatching bowls and pulls out a big box of Fruity Pebbles from the pantry before he sets them on the island’s counter. They both tuck into their breakfast while Tom slowly wakes himself up with each sip of scalding-hot coffee.

Sonic sets his new gift in front of him on the kitchen island as he crunches through his first bowl of cereal as the final member of their trio sleepily treks into the kitchen. Tails is rubbing his eye with his fist, blinking the sleep from his eyes, and without even finishing his yawn he says: “Happy birthday, Sonic.”

“Thanks, buddy,” Sonic says around a mouth of cereal.

Tails trots over and gives Sonic’s leg, the only part of his accessible from the floor, a brief hug before he grabs himself a clean bowl and climbs up onto one of the kitchen island’s stools, too. ‘Climb’ is the only way to describe it — for the average human, they’d be able to slide on pretty easily. That’s not so easy when you’re just about three feet tall.

“Want some Fruity Pebbles?” Sonic offers, nudging the box towards him.

“Oh, yes please.” Tails takes it and taps out a healthy amount into his bowl before he drowns it with milk. “We’re nearly out, by the way.”

“Damn.”

“Language,” Tom remarks half-heartedly, nursing his coffee beneath his chin.

“Sorry. Darn.”

“Better.” Tom takes the box and glances inside with a sigh. “Another thing to add to the grocery list.”

“Can we get something other than Fruity Pebbles this time? Can we get Raisin Bran?”

“Ew, no.” Sonic’s nose wrinkles at Tails’ suggestion.

Knuckles remarks: “I love Raisin Bran,” with a mouthful of half-chewed cereal between his teeth.

“No way.”

“If both of you want it, then you’re outnumbered, Sonic,” Tom points out.

Sonic’s spoon clatters to his bowl. “Seriously? Raisin Bran sucks!”

“You know the rule. We buy one box of cereal a week, and if you want a different one, you can wait until next week or you can buy it with your own money.”

Sonic protests with a cry. “But it’s my birthday!”

“You really want us to buy Fruity Pebbles for your birthday gift? Really? ”

“Uh, yes!?”

Tom gives another long-suffering sigh. He stands up from his chair to scribble ‘Fruity Pebbles’ and ‘Raisin Bran’ on the magnetic notepad stuck to the fridge before he slumps back in his seat. After that, they all return to their breakfast without fuss, chatting amicably between their second helpings and glasses of juice. Tails forgoes that altogether, and instead hops off his chair to fix himself a cup of peppermint tea.

As he fills the kettle with water to boil, Tails glances over his shoulder from his position at the sink and asks: “How do you know what your birthday is, Sonic? Not your Earth day, but your actual birthday.”

Sonic chews on his spoonful of soggy cereal as he thinks. It’s such an obvious question, and yet no one had asked him it before. “I guess I don’t know what my real birthday is, ‘cause I never knew my parents, but June twenty-third was the date Longclaw said she found me. I mean, I was a little baby so I don’t remember any time before I was with her, but the date sort of made sense. I guess it’s not my birth- day so much as it was my found- day, you know?”

“Would you want to know what your real birthday is?” Tails asks. 

“I guess the only way I’ll ever find out is if I go back home to Green Hill Zone.” He spoons up a rainbow of floating, limp Fruity Pebbles and looks down at the sight, wondering if it’s worth chewing them at all seeing as they’ve lost all of their crunch. He slurps up the serving and swallows it whole.

“Would you like that?” Tom asks sensitively from across the table. Both Sonic and Tails handle the topic like it’s talk about the weather or a video game, but Tom recognises a deeper undercurrent to the conversation. Sonic gets it — talking about your adopted kid going back home to their birth-country is bound to be awkward, but Sonic has never felt attached to Mobius the same way he does Earth. “You’re always welcome to go back and visit—”

Sonic knocks his slippers against Tom’s beneath the kitchen island, and offers a reassuring smile. “Maybe one day, but not right now. I mean, I haven’t seen Green Hill Zone in over a decade. Who knows what I’ll find?” Sonic sets his spoon back down in his bowl, shifts in his seat, and angles his body towards Tails before he asks: “I mean, you know the place better than I do.”

Tails pulls a face. He pours the boiling water into his mug and stirs the teabag around, watching it bleed a pale, minty green. “I lived on West Side Island, which isn’t anywhere near Green Hill Zone, and I am not going back there.”

Sonic and Tom share an awkward look before Sonic clears his throat and remarks: “Well, there’s that. What about you, Knuckles?”

Knuckles gives a thoughtful hum. He’s finished his two bowls of cereal and is sitting there with his fist beneath his chin, pensive like a wise, old man. “I ought to return one day,” he says after a moment. “The Master Emerald should be returned to its rightful home on Angel Island. Once Wade finishes his training, and once I am ready to return, then I will.”

“Would you go live there permanently?”

“Of course. The Master Emerald needs constant guarding. If Wade ever becomes too busy at his job that he cannot give the Master Emerald adequate protection, then I must resume my duties as its guardian.”

“You’d leave us, Knuckles?” Sonic asks, a pang of pain twinging behind his ribs. It’s not like he thought they’d all live together forever — Sonic’s not that delusional — but still, the thought of being apart from someone he sees every single day is melancholic and bittersweet. “You’d be so far away.”

“We have our communicators, and the aid of rings.” Knuckles’ fist slaps Sonic’s back reassuringly. It does little to ease his worry, but then Knuckles grins, and somehow that simple expression lightens Sonic's mood considerably. “Besides, how would you two survive without me? I am the muscle of our team! Fret not, hedgehog. Even if I move away, you will not be able to get rid of me that easily.”

Sonic rolls his eyes and delivers a punch to Knuckles’ bicep. It feels like punching pure steel. 

With his birthday passing in a blur, time flows in strange, dreamlike vignettes. They say broken bones often heal stronger than before, and Sonic discovers the same holds true for fractured familial bonds. He finds himself gravitating toward Maddie and Tom after their reconciliation, tentatively weaving 'mom' and 'dad' into conversations — awkwardly at first, then with growing confidence when speaking to Coach Richards during practice or mentioning them to local townsfolk. It still feels weird to call them that in front of Knuckles and Tails, and it’s not like Sonic’s embarrassed or ashamed, it just still feels raw, so he’s taking baby steps. As the days turn into weeks he embraces them more freely, laughs with unguarded joy, and feels as though a missing piece of himself has finally clicked into place, making him whole once again. 

On the first day of July, warm afternoon light streams through the windows as Maddie calls him down from his room to the small, spare room they have upstairs which acts as an office. She's still wearing green scrubs from her half-day morning shift at the clinic, wisps of hair escaping her ponytail after a busy few hours. Between her fingers, she holds a large manila envelope, official and imposing. The sight makes Sonic's stomach flutter with recognition.

It takes a few heartbeats for it to click, and when it does, he hurries the remaining distance into the room, quietly shutting the door behind him. The afternoon sun casts everything in golden hues, dust motes dancing lazily in the air between them.

"Is that...?" he begins, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Thought it would be good for you to see it yourself,” she says at an equally low volume, settling into the desk chair with a gentle creak. “Here, come take a look.”

Sonic shuffles over as she tears the seal of the envelope, the sound unnaturally loud in the quirt of the room, and pulls out a wad of thick papers identical to the ones he saw in the folder just a few weeks ago. These, however, are blank. She sets the envelope aside and separates the first few pages from the pack before she tucks those back into the brown parcel, and holds up a docket of pages in her hand. “Want to fill yours out with me this month?” she asks, her tone gentle but tinged with something deeper; the weight of trust being extended.

“You’d let me see that?” Sonic responds, a little surprised at the offer but nonetheless grateful for what the gesture means.

Her smile carries warmth and a hint of resolve, as if this decision wasn't made lightly. “Of course. It’s your information, after all. Tom and I said we’d be more transparent with you, didn’t we?”

“Wow.” Sonic feels a swell of pride balloon in his chest. “Thanks.”

Grateful for the consideration, they settle side-by-side at the small desk pushed near the room’s only window as Maddie lays out the papers all pertaining to Sonic. There’s around ten pages altogether, printed back-to-front with blank questionnaire boxes for the respondent to answer in, clinical and serious like the forms you get when you go through border control. 

Maddie fills out the first few, preliminary sections without much fanfare: time, date, her name and signature, all in the neat handwriting of a vet’s. She flips the page and sets it face-down to read its back, and it’s then they come across the nitty-gritty detail: height, weight, blood pressure, temperature, current mood (not to be confused with a totally different section that goes into far greater detail of his mood record further on), state of health (with ten different subsections) and another list Sonic doesn’t bother reading. The questions span pages and pages, some ranging in one-to-ten scales, and some requiring Maddie to fill out boxes that take up huge areas of space.

“Height — three-seven. Weight, blood pressure, and temp we’ll check later. Current mood observations?”

Sonic considers this, absently running his fingers along the desk's edge. The wood is smooth from years of use, the grain barely legible beneath the pad of his glove’s thumb. "I guess I'm a little hungry," he admits with a small shrug.

She nods thoughtfully but writes something entirely different. "Stable, as normal," she says aloud while her pen moves. "It's better to keep things consistent." 

Maddie’s pen moves down to the next section, and hovers over the response box. “‘Sleep cycle analysis’. Let’s see that communicator.”

Sonic frowns, rolling up his glove's cuff to reveal the communicator strapped around his wrist. The blue glow of the screen reflects off the window glass as Maddie navigates through the biometric readings with surprising familiarity. "Eighty-six minutes per cycle, with thirty minutes of REM sleep," she reads, transcribing the numbers onto the paper.

“How did you know the communicators can do that?”

Maddie taps her temple with a knowing look, easily sidestepping Sonic’s question, before she moves onto the next one on the form. They progress through increasingly mundane, sometimes invasive topics, details Sonic wouldn't normally consider worth documenting. It asks for his shoe size (which hasn’t changed since Christmas), any color changes in fur or skin (none to note), dental health (not as good as Tails’, and not as bad as Knuckles’), among a dozen other things. Maddie's handwriting flows steadily across the pages, occasionally pausing to clarify a measurement or to double-check a detail, but on the whole she breezes straight through. She’s done this every single month for nearly four years, after all.

The afternoon sun shifts lower, casting longer shadows across their workspace as they reach the fourth page. Here, Maddie's pace slows noticeably. These questions cut deeper, probing territories that feel invasive even when Sonic asks them to himself: frequency and intensity of stress responses, social interaction comfort levels, adaptation to routine changes or unexpected events, self-soothing behaviors, and so on and so forth. 

“‘Rate the subject's general mood stability over the past month’…” she reads aloud with a frown.

“That’s super invasive,” Sonic responds with a frown. He leans a little closer to look at the paper. “Why the hell would they want to know that?”

“Heck.”

“Why the heck would they want to know that?” Sonic corrects.

Maddie sets down her pen momentarily, flexing her fingers as she considers her response. "We're providing data they would otherwise collect by keeping you in a lab. It's invasive, yes, but not entirely unreasonable given the alternative." Her voice carries the weight of someone who's wrestled with this justification many times. "Let’s just put: ‘Stable, as normal’ for this one, too.”

Sonic nods in agreement. He watches her looped handwriting fill the section, punctuating the sentence with a thick full-stop. “Do you ever put, like, any detail?” he asks, curiosity overriding his discomfort.

She blows a sigh through her lips as she thinks. “Not anymore. We used to in the beginning, but…” Maddie trails off with another frown. “I started to question myself why they wanted this information. I mean, the basic medical data like height and weight is fine, but this? Personal detail can be misinterpreted or taken completely out of context.”

She shifts in her chair, the leather creaking softly as she turns to face him more directly. "Imagine if I wrote: 'Subject had conflict with guardians and left home for four days.' What kind of response would that create? I’d probably have Walters calling me on speed dial to pry deeper. Besides," her voice takes on a bitter edge, "it’s not like they’d do anything productive to help.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Sonic frowns on her behalf. “That’s bull. Bull crap. Not bull sh— ”

“I get it, I get it.” Maddie shifts back to face the paper and rolls her eyes in what’s meant to be a disapproving look, but only comes off as poorly-concealed fondness. “Next question. ‘How many episodes of apparent distress occurred, and what were the apparent triggers?’" She adjusts her hold on the pen and begins to write: “‘None to note’. Next question: ‘Has the subject shown signs of homesickness or longing behaviours?’"

“Why would they need to know that?”

“To see if you would potentially return home, I guess. Let’s just give another ‘no’ to this one. Alright, next one: ‘describe any new fears or anxieties that have emerged’.” She arches a brow at him for his input.

Sonic’s mouth gathers at one corner while he thinks. If he was being totally honest, of course he could fill out the whole page with just this question alone. His anxiety about his relationship with Tom and Maddie, despite their recent reconciliation, still occasionally surfaces in quiet moments. He’s fearful for his future with Shadow now that he knows the secret is out and it’s only a matter of time before he has to tell him the truth, too. He’s worried about what that’ll mean for himself — will Tom and Maddie be accepting of him? He hardly doubts they’d draw the line at their unconditional love over him crushing on another guy, but who’s to say?

“Where do we start?” Sonic says with a nervous laugh that doesn't quite mask his underlying tension. Maddie's expression softens at his reaction. “Uh…I mean, if I wasn’t here, what would you put?”

She glances back down at the paper to re-read the question. “It would be whatever I’ve observed as your guardian, and mom.”

“Which is…?”

Her lips flatten again as she considers her words. “You’ve been anxious about the secret with Shadow and you’ve kept it for so long that it’s taken its toll. I can see it in the way you carry yourself, how upset it made you — and of course, I wouldn’t include that on paper, but I would put something like: ‘is experiencing standard behaviour expected of an average teenage boy’.”

“Then, let’s put that,” Sonic agrees, relief evident in his voice.

“Okay.” She writes it as such, finishing the section off with a little more detail. “'Sonic demonstrates a normal teenage desire for privacy regarding personal matters, which is entirely appropriate for his developmental stage. We have reassured him that he can confide in us about any genuine concerns, while respecting his need for age-appropriate independence’. There, how does that sound?”

He shuffles his chair a little closer to her, and to the table, gleaming a better look at her response. “Perfect,” he says softly. “You worded it so smartly.”

She offers him a reassuring smile. “Okay, next one: ‘Rate comfort level with human physical contact’. This is a scale question, ranging one-to-ten. What do we think?”

Without hesitation, he leans sideways until his head rests against Maddie's upper arm, the soft fabric of her scrubs warm against his fur. He tilts his face upward to meet her gaze, reflecting her earlier smile with one of his own. “Ten, I’d say.”

“Even if it was with Crazy Carl?”

A shudder physically runs through Sonic. “Ew, no. Let’s just put: ‘with immediate members of the family’.”

Maddie’s smile brightens at the use of the word ‘family’. “Great answer,” she says, scribbling it down for him.

The afternoon light continues its gradual shift, painting the room in golden tones as dust motes hang in air. Outside, the hum of the cicadas drifts through the cracked window above the desk along with the gentle breeze that smells like summer. "Alright then," Maddie says, settling more comfortably in her chair with renewed determination. "Let's get working on the rest of your questions together.”

Time passes in dribs and drabs after Sonic reaches what he’d originally thought to be a monumental, life-changing age, but in reality, nothing much changes. He spends most days of the summer break outside, whether it’s with Tails and Knuckles, or the group of kids at the middle school’s summer athletics camp as he coaches. He takes a few trips out of town with Tails and Knuckles as they make the most of the seasonal holiday: they go to Six Flags, they promptly get kicked out of Six Flags when they’re told they’re not tall enough to ride most of the rides and get into an argument with one of the employees there, they visit the coast in Oregon to spend a few days at the beach, they visit Alaska and try to climb Mount McKinley, and attend a shitty, local comic-con where they walk away with nothing more than some gacha figures and imported Japanese candy.

Tom and Maddie switch up their working pattern for the busy months of June and July, making the most of Tails, Sonic, and Knuckles’ ability to occupy themselves during the longer days, and work overtime to compensate for recent expenses outside of their budget. Some days Tom will be gone from morning to evening, or Maddie will be called in the middle of the night as an on-duty vet for the local surgery. All in all, it’s the tamest summer they’ve had on record. Or, at least since 2022.

2022 was the summer Sonic got shot by Tom, subsequently went on the run with Tom, and ended up moving into the Wachowski home. Summer 2023 was, somehow, impossibly wilder — with the resurgence of Eggman and his new confidant in Knuckles, the introduction of Sonic’s biggest fan in Tails, their eventual facedown with Robotnik in his Death Egg Robot, and the new two roommates Sonic had to share his bedroom with. When they thought things couldn’t get any wilder, 2024 didn’t just trump 2023; it knocked it out the park by a homerun: Shadow, Gerald, working with Eggman (briefly), getting betrayed by Eggman (swiftly), the Eclipse Canon debacle, breaking into G.U.N. headquarters, Tom nearly dying, Sonic and Shadow damn nearly killing each other, ending with Sonic and Shadow reconciling and realising that they might just have more in common than they originally thought.

After the last few years everyone in the Wachowski household has gone through, the quiet is, for once, welcomed.

Then, on one of the hottest Fridays on record, Sonic hears the walkie-talkie crackle.

It’s another one of those perfect coincidence moments; he’d been upstairs trying to find his iPad charger when he heard it ring out from its new place on the bookshelf, standing in proud view next to his growing rock collection and gacha figures. Keeping it on the shelf was meant to be a gesture to symbolise that he doesn’t want to hide anymore, a sign that he’s turned over a new leaf in his quest for self-improvement.

Besides, there’s no need to hide it when everyone’s already seen it, right?

On any other occasion the call from the walkie-talkie was one that filled Sonic with excitement. It meant he’d be able to go adventuring with Shadow again, escaping to their own corner of the world where it was just the two of them, but after the atlas incident with Tom and Maddie and its subsequent blow-out, Sonic knows what they have can’t go on any longer. This time, the call from the walkie-talkie is the equivalent of hearing a knock on your door to let you know that it’s time to go home — fun’s over, time to pack your bags, and say your goodbyes. 

Sonic lets it crackle for a moment longer, relishing in the sound as he stands there beneath a plume of mid-day light streaming through the skylight above. After a beat too long, he closes the distance to the bookcase and picks up the walkie-talkie with a shake in his hand. Has it always weighed this much? he wonders. It feels like he’s holding a brick, one that’s almost too heavy to raise to his mouth.

“Hey,” he greets at last, overly-enthusiastic in an attempt to cover up the dread he’s feeling in every inch of his body.

This is it. It’s happening now. Sonic muffles a shaky exhale into his elbow. Today’s the day.

“Hey,” the voice on the other end responds; a low, soft tone, one that’s clearly tired. 

Sonic takes a seat on his unmade bed and kicks back to lean on his cushions. Amalgamating with the feeling of dread curdling in his stomach, the sound of Shadow’s voice causes a pool of warmth to settle in the pit of his tummy. “Where did you jet back from this time, Mr. Unsmiley?” Sonic asks, unable to fight the grin already pulling at his mouth.

“Welsh countryside. Mild. Rainy.” The microphone crackles as if Shadow’s moving around while it’s still turned on, and Sonic can picture him rolling over on the beanbag to get more comfortable. A long, drawn out yawn comes through the walkie-talkie’s speakers as Shadow finds a spot he likes and luxuriates in the comfort that comes with feeling safe and secure for the first time in weeks. “Very green.”

Sonic chuckles. “Well, nothing Green Hills can’t one-up.” 

“A lot quieter without you, which is even better.”

It’s a jab, but there’s no real weight behind it, just fond familiarity wrapped in gruffness. Sonic doesn’t realise he’s grinning until he feels his cheeks begin to ache. “Nah, you know you missed me.”

They lapse into comfortable silence, one which neither of them feel the need to fill. Sonic pictures himself as one of those teenage girls from eighties sitcoms, twirling a phone cord around her finger while gossiping with friends. He smiles at the silly thought and flips onto his tummy, kicking his feet up behind him and crossing them at the ankle. “My talkie-walkie was moved.”

Sonic’s smile dies instantly. “Walkie-talkie,” he corrects with a lurch to his stomach. Damn it, Sonic! He slaps his forehead. Why didn’t I put it back where I found it in the first place? “That was me. Don’t worry about it. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Why did you move it?”

“Uh — spring cleaning.”

“It’s July, and you don’t clean.”

“Figure of speech.” Sonic waves him off, even though Shadow can’t see him. The line crackles and with it comes a low whining sound, one which Sonic immediately recognises as Shadow’s yawn. “Why don’t you nap, and we can meet in a few hours’ time?”

“Bold of you to assume that I’d want to see you.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever you say,” Sonic dismisses easily, swatting the feigned annoyance away. “It’s freaking hot today, so it should be a little cooler around six. Meet you by the creek?”

“Maybe,” Shadow responds, which Sonic takes as a yes, before the line goes dead. An Irish exit — a very Shadow thing to do. 

Sonic takes a long, deep breath in the wake of that silence. The room is hot and humid and his skin feels like it’s covered in a tacky layer of sweat but he can barely feel anything beyond the pounding bass of his heart which seems to sing across his entire body; he can feel it in his ears, in his chest, in his fingertips. 

He puts the walkie-talkie back on the bookshelf and finds that the shake to his hands is so severe he can barely set it straight without knocking it over.

Sonic’s weak legs carry him down the wooden stairs and down the main staircase. The ground floor is a little cooler but only barely; Green Hills’ heat seems to permeate every wall, reaching every corner of the house, the stuffy kind of heat that makes it hard to breathe, so thick it’s like you can physically chew on it. He shuffles into the living room, which he finds empty, but the patio door’s ajar and Sonic can hear the lilted voice of Maddie’s yoga instructor from the crack in the doorway. He peeks closer and spots her a little further down the patio under the shade of a tree, bent into a position Sonic doesn’t think he could contort into even if there was a gun held to his forehead.

He nudges the back patio door open sheepishly and Maddie, bent in a bridge while the yoga instructor’s voice encourages her through it, makes eye contact with Sonic in the doorway. She arches a brow and he waves her off, murmuring that he’ll come back when she’s finished, but she must read something on his face which is cause enough for her to pause the session’s video on her iPad. Maddie reclines back down and rolls onto her knees to sit up. “Come back — what’s up?”

“It’s fine, you can finish. I didn’t realise you were in the middle of a session.”

“Sonic, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost. What’s wrong?”

He purses his lips, still half-inside-half-outside the doorway. Sonic takes a moment to collect his thoughts and decide what he’s going to say to Maddie when his own voice rings out in his mind: be honest. That’s all they want from you.

“Shadow called me,” he says, turning his body back towards the door and stepping onto the patio. He shuts the sliding glass frame behind him in case Knuckles or Tails take that moment to wander into the kitchen-come-dining space and overhear their conversation. There’s barely a difference to the heat out here; sure, there’s a breeze, but there’s also the sun. A gust of air ruffles the damp quills on his head and he relishes in it with splayed-out arms. “We’re meeting this evening.”

The surprise that Maddie feels shows on her face for a brief moment: raised brows, an open mouth, a flash of emotion in her eyes, before she steels her expression back to something more neutral. “Okay,” she says slowly. “How do you feel about that?”

It’s a mom response, the kind that offers him no easy answers but instead guides him into reaching the conclusion by himself. He hates that kind. It means he has to think and be vulnerable and Sonic is barely capable of that on a good day, let alone when the air temperature is in the high thirties. “Nervous,” he says. “Uh — really nervous.”

“Anything else?”

“A little excited, like I always am when we meet, but nervous ‘cause I need to…” he trails off, gesturing vaguely. “Y’know.”

She stands up from her kneel and stretches her arms behind her head. The yoga session is well and truly finished for the day. “Do you know what you’re going to say?” she asks, reaching down to pick up her iPad and yoga mat.

When Sonic shakes his head, she heads towards the door where he stands and guides him towards its entrance with her hand. “C’mon, let’s get some ice-cream before I freaking melt.”

Maddie doesn’t usually do sweet treats before dinner, so for her to offer it in the first place means she must know just how big of a thing this is for Sonic to do. He follows her willingly, stepping into the humid air inside and closing the door behind himself. “Cripes, let’s turn on the A.C.. It’s like a sauna in here.” She taps something on a control panel on the wall and almost immediately a gust of air-conditioned, cool air comes from the vent above. Sonic audibly groans at the feeling, and comes to stand beneath its air flow. “That’s better.”

She sets her iPad down and heads to the fridge to get them both a Tip Top: strawberry for herself, and cola for Sonic. They chew the plastic tops off and crunch on the flavoured ice, the only sound filling the silence other than the whirr of the air conditioning unit above. As the sweat cools on their skin, growing tacky and uncomfortable, Maddie clears her throat and picks their conversation back up. “You’re going to tell him today, right?”

Sonic glowers. He sucks on the plastic tube in response. “Sonic,” Maddie prompts with a disapproving frown. “You know you can’t drag this out any longer.”

“I know,” he says after a moment; a resigned answer. “I just don’t want to lose him.”

“You can't control that outcome. Look, my personal feelings about him aside, you need to be honest and tell him that we know — for his own dignity if nothing else. I may not be his… biggest fan, to put it lightly, but if you believe he's going to react poorly, then it's better to rip that band-aid off sooner rather than later."

“I know.”

“Tom and I are willing to pretend that we didn’t know you two were meeting up for the time being, but the longer a secret is kept, then the harder it is to justify.”

“I know…” Sonic's voice grows smaller with each repetition.

Maddie's hand reaches out to ruffle the damp quills on his head with gentle affection. “We can’t prevent you from doing your own thing, Sonic, but we just want to make sure you’re doing it right.”

“What do you mean?”

She sucks on her Tip Top as she thinks, the red dye bleeding from the ice and turning it a pale pink. “We can’t prevent you from meeting with Shadow, if that’s what you really want. I can dislike it. Heck, I can disapprove of it, too, which you know I already do, but I can’t physically stop you from seeing the guy. I just want you to know what the risks are — not only for yourself, but with what it could mean for us with G.U.N..”

“We’ve been super discreet, though,” he protests, though his voice lacks its usual conviction. “G.U.N. won’t ever find out. And I wouldn’t drag you into it, either.”

Maddie's lips purse in that way they do when she's not entirely convinced by his arguments, the same kind she wears when he has to explain that the microwave definitely, certainly spontaneously combusted and it had absolutely nothing to do with the fork he may or may not have left inside the bowl he was re-heating. "Sonic," she says patiently.

"I'm serious!" he insists, desperate to make her believe him. "The last thing I’d ever do is throw you guys under the bus.”

“I know that, sweetheart, but I still worry.”

“Don’t,” he pleads, though there's no real expectation in his voice — he knows it’s the equivalent of asking water not to be wet. Instead, he leans his head against her hip, seeking the comfort of physical contact. The gesture feels instinctive, almost childlike, reminding him that despite everything he’s still just a teenager trying to navigate complicated, foreign emotions for the first time in his life, regardless of how mature he perceives himself to be now.

“Listen, I’ll speak to him tonight. He’ll…probably get really upset, and he might lash out, and he might never want to see me again…” The words taste like ash in his mouth, each one a small death of hope he's been lying to himself for months about, but saying them aloud somehow makes them more bearable, as if acknowledging the worst-case scenario robs it of some of its power to terrify him. “But—”

“—but you’d have done the right thing.” Her free hand comes to settle on his shoulder, holding him close to her side, anchoring him. “You can’t make people do what you want them to do. You just have to do good by them, and let them come to their own decision.”

“Mhm,” Sonic says by way of response instead of using words. Speaking through the tight constriction of his throat feels impossible. Maddie starts a slow, rhythmic stroke with her thumb, drawing gentle circles in his shoulder as he tries to breathe through the swell of emotions in his chest. The Tip Top has long since been forgotten, melting slowly in his slack grip as he focuses on breathing through the swell of feelings in his chest.

The kitchen around them has grown quiet except for the steady hum of the air conditioning and the distant sound of a lawn mower from somewhere in the neighborhood. The ordinary sounds of suburban life continue on, oblivious to the emotional earthquake happening in their small corner of the world.

"You'll be okay," Maddie murmurs, her voice carrying the absolute certainty and faith in him. Her thumb continues its gentle circles, and Sonic can feel some of the tension slowly leaving his muscles under her patient ministrations. The promise settles over him like a warm blanket, not erasing his fear but making it bearable. "Whatever happens tonight, whatever he says or doesn't say, you'll be okay, Sonic."

Chapter Text

The walk to the creek takes an age. Sonic is wracked with nerves and guilt that feel like shackles around his ankles, dragging each step he makes, making each step a monumental effort. The forest path beneath his sneakers seems to conspire against him, roots catching at his feet as though it’s trying to hold him back from the reckoning that awaits, as if it knows how this will all end. 

You’ll be okay, Maddie’s voice echoes in his head, soothing some of his nerves. Yeah, I’ll be okay, he thinks to himself. I just need to explain to him what happened — that it was all an accident and I never intentionally told anyone — and hopefully he won’t get too mad. Maybe a little pissed, and maybe he’ll cuss me out, but if I do it delicately, maybe we’ll have something to come back from.

Sonic frowns at his own thoughts. Actually, I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything ‘delicately’ in my life.

As soon as he falls onto the familiar trail leading from the peak of one mountain down to the creek at its bottom, Sonic spots Shadow through the foliage immediately. It’s hard to miss him amongst nature; where the forest is green and full and bright, bursting out of the floor like an artist has taken broad, crazed paint brush strokes to a landscape, Shadow is carved and intentional and unnatural. The deep black of his fur paired with the cherry red of his quills only ever occurs naturally on Earth in warning signs: false widow spiders, coral snakes, poison dart frogs, and Sonic wonders if maybe that’s one of the reasons people are so wary of him. Humans don’t do well with things they consider dangerous and it leads Sonic to wonder if maybe those farmers who first found Shadow had already made their mind up about him the second they found him in the field.

Shadow is crouched down next to the creek, unnaturally still, as if he isn’t breathing. His feet are planted in the silt like he’s rooted there, and there’s a butterfly on his outstretched finger, fluttering its paper-thin wings. He remains totally still as it crawls along the length of his finger, feeling safe in his presence, and Shadow in its, too, allowing it to land on him without feeling the urge to flinch away.

The butterfly perches on the round of his knuckle. Its wings flutter and fan, catching on the evening’s humid breeze, revealing a breathtaking pattern of black and red spots across its papery wings. An insect, feared for its colours, finding companionship with an alien who sports its matching colours proudly. 

You have got to be kidding me, Sonic thinks incredulously, as his heart rises up from his chest to lodge in his throat. It’s one of those sights that feels too good to be true, almost Biblical in its imagery, the type you see illustrated in thousand year-old oil paintings that get spoken about in fond, sad speeches by historians. The irony is almost too poetic to bear.

The butterfly fans its beautiful wings one more time before it springs from his gloved finger and takes off to the skies, disappearing among the leaves and foliage above. Shadow follows it with his eyes and it’s then he notices Sonic across the bubbling creek, standing some ten metres away like he’s been struck by lightning, sort of half-stepped forward with a look of impossible stupefaction on his face.

Shadow raises back up from his crouch to stand elegant and tall. His quills fan out behind him, swaying with the motion like a willow tree caught in the wind. “How long have you been there?” he asks, his low voice drowned out by the creek.

“Uh,” Sonic says unintelligently. Shadow’s words go through one ear and straight out of the other. He could have just told Sonic the successful numbers to this evening’s Powerball and Sonic would be none the wiser. He blinks, and the strange golden halo that he seems to have hallucinated disappears from Shadow’s silhouette, making him appear far less glow-y than Sonic saw just a moment ago. He blinks a few more times and the world comes into greater focus, sharpened by the embarrassment slowly dawning on Sonic. “Sorry — uh, what did you say?”

Shadow raises a brow, ignorant to Sonic’s dumbstruck. “I asked you how long you’ve been hiding there.”

“I wasn’t hiding,” Sonic retorts defensively. He walks to the water’s edge and hops across the creek using the large, wet stones peeking out from the riverbed. He hops down on the other edge, sneakers sinking into the wet silt and comes toe-to-toe with Shadow.

Shadow looks tired. He always does, of course, but this tiredness isn’t bone-deep; it’s pretty, surface-level, like he’s woken up from a nap and hasn’t quite gotten his bearings yet. His eyes are muzzy, there’s weight to his eyelids, like he needs another hour to come around. His quills are also a little misshapen as if he’s been sleeping on them and hasn’t had the chance to fluff them back out. Shadow smells like clean, crisp soap and the fur around his face is a fuzzy, bourbon-biscuit-brown, so it might be down to that, too.

Sonic realises that he’s staring and notices just how close they are when Shadow, again, raises a pointed brow. Sonic promptly scoots away with a few awkward, stumbling steps before he makes it weird. Have I already made this weird? he laments to himself, plastering a wide grin on his face to hide the inner turmoil he’s experiencing. Behind the windows into his mind, another fight is breaking out between his mental facets. Embarrassed Sonic is cowering in the corner while Logical Sonic is kept in a tight headlock by Impulsive Sonic. No one is winning.

Shadow’s raised brow arches higher.

“Let’s go!” he cheers, heading off down the river without waiting to see if Shadow’s followed him. When he’s a fair distance away Sonic slaps his cheeks with enough force to bruise. Get it together!

The grass tickles his ankles as it dries out the further they walk from the stream’s wet, earthy border. Sonic keeps himself a few steps ahead of Shadow just until he can feel his cheeks cool and his face school into something more neutral and less obvious, less: my big fat crush is big and fat and huge and is it obvious how big and fat it is?

Maybe taking the pace Sonic’s set as a challenge, Shadow catches up with him pretty quickly with a few strides. It’s difficult to skate across the uneven floor of the forest but he makes it look easy anyway, appearing at Sonic’s side with effortless flourish. The canopy above grows thicker the further they walk, charging the air with humidity but giving them some solace from the mid-afternoon sun’s brutal heat. If they weren’t so close to the creek, Sonic would be sweating cobs by now. He likes the sun, but the feeling isn’t reciprocated. 

“Oh!” Sonic exclaims all of a sudden, causing Shadow to jolt next to him. “I forgot — I brought you this.” 

He holds out a clingfilm-wrapped slice of something vaguely cool to the touch that he’s kept in his palm since leaving the house. “I mean — it’s been frozen, ‘cause you can freeze cake and it still tastes pretty good even after it’s been defrosted, so it’s a little cold and probably actually frozen on the inside, especially with the frosting, but this is yours,” Sonic rambles, words tumbling over each other in his eagerness to explain.

Shadow peers down at the offering with the wariness of someone who’s learned not to trust unexpected gifts. He looks skeptical, but he takes it nonetheless, holding it stiffly as if it were a bomb. “Why are you giving me cake?”

“Oh. Uh, it was from my birthday. Since you couldn’t be there, I wanted to keep you something back.”

Something flashes in Shadow’s gaze. He turns to face Sonic, a touch of something in his eyes that Sonic can’t pinpoint, radiating intensity like heat from a forge. “When was your birthday?”

Sonic waves him off, averting his attention to the path ahead rather than the weight of Shadow’s stare. “Last month. Don’t worry about it, it’s fine. I didn’t mention it or anything, so…haha, honestly, it’s fine.” Sonic clears his throat and scruffs the back of his own neck with his hand. “The big one-six. Officially, nearly an adult. Anyway, try it. It's a vanilla sponge cake.”

“Did you make this?”

“No, Maddie did.” Sonic glances back over to the cake Shadow’s carefully unwrapping as if it were something precious, not a hunk of month-cold cake wrapped clumsily in clingfilm. “But I helped,” he adds, as if it would impress Shadow. “And I cut it.”

Shadow gently breaks a small chunk from the tip of the triangle and carefully puts it into his mouth. He chews thoughtfully, his expression unreadable, before swallowing and delivering his verdict: "It's good." The simple words carry an honesty that makes Sonic's chest swell with unexpected pride.

"I know, right?" Sonic beams, unable to contain his pleasure at Shadow's approval. Shadow divides the remaining slice in half, extending one portion toward Sonic with the same careful precision he'd used to eat his own. “Oh, you don’t have to do that.”

“But it’s your cake.”

“Yeah, and I brought it for you.”

Shadow frowns down at the hand he’s extended towards Sonic and gives it a small, insistent shake. Sonic purses lips to stifle a smile and takes the chunk Shadow’s offering after letting it hang in the air just long enough to make his point.

Shadow eats the rest in small, measured bites while Sonic swallows his in one go without really chewing. “I like cake,” he says mildly, a passing comment.

“Do you?” Sonic speaks with his mouth full, sucking the icing off of his thumb. “Did you eat much in the lab?”

“No, not really. But Maria liked sweets, and what she liked, I ended up liking, too.”

“Really? You don’t strike me as a ‘sweets’ kinda guy.”

Shadow’s shoulders lift into a shrug. “I suppose I wasn’t, but I was on a strict liquid-only diet, so having something substantial, something nice on those occasions…I guess you end up adapting. You can’t pick and choose when you don’t have much choice in the first place.”

“I guess,” Sonic says, the feeling of short-lived joy dying a death in the face of the depressing topic of conversation. Shadow seems passive to it, speaking about the sad part of his history as if it were any other menial detail not worth sparing much through to. “So, you ended up being a sweets guy. What’s your favourite flavour?”

“Well, we both—”

“No,” Sonic interrupts, stopping Shadow before he has the chance to finish his sentence. “What did you like?”

The question lands like a stone in still water, sending ripples of consideration through Shadow, causing him to fall silent. They continue walking, sticks crunching underfoot and branches snapping when they head down a bramble patch. Shadow stares off into the middle-distance, figuratively knocked sideways by Sonic’s simple, yet meaningful, question. "I don't know," he admits quietly, his voice barely audible above the sounds of their passage. "When I wasn't alone, I was with her. We did everything together. We liked things together. Everything I am, everything I was, has always been an extension of Maria.”

“Maybe,” Sonic responds, speaking through the churning in his gut that feels like Shadow’s words are tearing a chunk out of his heart, “but you’re both individuals. You liked things together, but I’m sure there are things you liked by yourself, too. Hey, let’s think about it this way: were there any flavours you liked, but she didn’t?”

Another flicker or recognition passes across Shadow’s gaze. “She didn’t like coffee,” he says quietly.

“And you do?”

Shadow shrugs. It’s as if he feels guilty for liking things in her absence, as if he doesn’t deserve it, and Sonic recognises it keenly. It’s the mirror image of himself in the years after Longclaw passed, feeling guilty for the simple reason of surviving the winter when she hadn’t. “I did,” he says at last.

“And, you like oranges.”

“...that’s true.”

“And french fries. And PB&J. And hot chocolate. And burnt cookies. And not Sprite.”

A small, barely-there smile pulls at the corner of Shadow’s mouth. “Awful stuff,” he remarks quietly, following Sonic’s guiding hand out of the dark spiral he’d worked himself into. “Pure sugar.”

Sonic’s grin widens at the sight of Shadow’s change in expression. “Adjust your tastebuds to the twenty-first century, old man.” Sonic yips as Shadow aims a kick at the back of his legs, barely dodging it in time. They hop, skip, and jump down a barely-trodden path leading further into the belly of Green Hills, and Sonic, feeling victorious at managing to get a rise out of Shadow, can practically feel all of his concerns from earlier on in the day melt away.

What was that thing I was worried about, again? he wonders idly. Oh, well. If it’s important I’ll probably remember it later.

"Hey, speaking of which," he says, falling into an easy jog beside Shadow, "I noticed you had some new cassettes in the den the other day."

Shadow's posture straightens immediately, his pace slowing to match the sudden tension in his frame. "Did you listen to them?"

“Yeah. I mean, I had no idea where they came from at first, and then I realised: ‘Oh, Shadow must’ve brought these’.” They adjust their pace to accommodate the shift in conversation, settling into a comfortable walk along the winding path. Sunlight filters through the canopy in golden columns, creating a cathedral-like atmosphere around them. “Where’d you get ‘em from?”

Shadow dips his chin toward his chest, and Sonic feels a flutter of delight when he recognises the gesture — Shadow is actually shy about this. “I found them when I was hiding in Siberia.”

“Ah — that’s what it was. I knew the language in the songs was from Europe, and thought it could’ve been Russian. Were you in Russia because of Stone?”

“Yeah,” Shadow responds grimly. 

“What did you find?”

“Not much. He’s just laying low, but I know he’s doing something, planning something, but my technical knowledge is…” Shadow trails off as he tries to find a word that doesn't self-depreciate, down, “limited.”

“I mean, same. Tails is the brain guy of our bunch.” Sonic kicks at a fallen pinecone, sending it skittering ahead of them down the trail. "How did you even track him down initially? Stone's pretty good at disappearing when he wants to."

Shadow’s face crumples up as if he’s sucked a lemon. “I have a very good sense of smell.”

“...you sniffed him out?”

Shadow groans, as if Sonic’s answer’s so predictable it hurts. “I knew you’d say that.”

“I mean, you can’t say you ‘smelled’ him out and not expect me to find it creepy.”

“It’s not creepy. It’s natural.” Shadow taps his nose with his index finger. “My olfactory capabilities are significantly more advanced than yours. Than most beings', actually."

“Wow. ”

“Grow up. It’s part of my biology.” Shadow splays his hands out wide and flexes his fingers in a gesture, as if to say: this is me. “I can see smells and sense them as if they’re tangible, and with greater clarity.”

“So, you can smell me?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Woooow. ”

Shadow rolls his eyes skyward, the ghost of a smirk playing on his lips as he and Sonic head down one of the mountain’s peaks. “It’s not like that. It’s like…a smell is a thread, and sometimes that thread is clear, or it’s faint, or it’s simply not there if enough distance is between myself and the subject.”

“Like pheromones?”

Shadow’s nose screws up. “When you put it like that I sound like an insect. It’s…different to that. I can’t explain it without butchering the technicalities of things. It’s just another feature of my biology that’s different to…well, everyone else’s.”

Sonic nods, mulling over Shadow’s words. “So, do you find it overwhelming being in rooms full of people?”

“I’m not typically in rooms full of people.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

“The labs were sterile and the technicians were emotionally detached, so their scents were faint and indistinguishable. Coming out of stasis and being in Tokyo, though…” Shadow physically shudders at the memory. “Nauseating.”

“And then you met me.”

“Again, unfortunately.”

Sonic delivers a swift punch to Shadow’s arm. “So, what do I smell like?” When Shadow’s face screws up again, Sonic squawks: “Hey!”

“I’m thinking of what to say,” Shadow defends. “This is my thinking face.”

“That is not your thinking face.”

“Yes, it is. Stop analysing me.”

He takes a few more moments to think of a response, and when he speaks, it’s like he’s treading on eggshells; not because he’s afraid of offending Sonic, but because he’s trying to put something that comes so simply, so naturally, to him into words. “I can smell things like anyone else would. Like, grass, and coffee, and gasoline, and blood, but the other…layer, I suppose, of smell isn’t something I can describe. It’s just ‘you’, like a unique fingerprint. The same way you can't truly define what makes green distinctly green: you know it's a combination of yellow and blue, but what defines yellow? What constitutes blue?”

Sonic nods thoughtfully, processing this revelation as they navigate around a fallen log that's sprouted a garden of moss and tiny wildflowers, as Shadow continues: “That is how my sense of smell works — it’s two-tiered. Sure, there’s scents that come from somewhere, whether it’s sweat or soap or skin, but there’s a different layer that’s indescribable. I just know, instinctively, that it’s you. Or, that it’s Stone, in this case.”

“So it's like how in movies, when a dog needs to find, like, a missing person, they give a dog a piece of the missing person’s clothes and the dog sniffs them out?”

Shadow's features scrunch up again, more pronounced this time. “No, nothing like that at all.”

“Right, right,” Sonic concedes with an understanding nod, though his curiosity clearly isn't satisfied. “Can you tell how people are feeling?”

Shadow splays his hand and tilts it from left to right, as if to say: sort of. “I can gauge intensity levels. Weak scents typically indicate emotional neutrality. Strong signatures suggest whatever they're experiencing — anger, joy, sorrow — is being felt with considerable intensity."

“What do I smell like right now?” The question slips out before Sonic can stop it, his throat suddenly tight as he watches Shadow from his peripheral vision.

Shadow’s head tilts to look at him. A strange, pensive look crosses his face, as he evaluates Sonic where he walks next to him. “Bright. Strong. Intense, I suppose. But, then again, you always smell like that.”

“I do?”

“You do when you’re with me.”

The words hang in the air between them, delivered with such casual honesty that Sonic realises Shadow has no idea what he's just revealed. Shadow's expression remains open and guileless, and Sonic can draw the conclusion he can practically read in Shadow’s eyes: he must think Sonic is just like this, always highly-strung, always ready to move onto the next thing, always full of energy. He isn’t wrong, of course, but he’s missing the glaring, obvious case that Sonic feels this way specifically because he's in Shadow's presence, not despite it.

There's some comfort in Shadow's obliviousness. At least now Sonic knows Shadow is so utterly blind to his crush that he can’t even recognise it when it’s staring him right in the face — or, for lack of a better term, is literally under his nose.

Sonic clears his throat awkwardly and desperately tries to change the topic of conversation, away from the inner turmoil only he’s feeling and noticing. “Well, regardless, It’s great that you’re collecting things! Cassettes are pretty neat!”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not patronizing — I’m being nice, ‘cause I know how it feels to finally have your own collection of stuff.” Sonic’s hands rise as he sets them at the base of his skull, fingers lacing together, cradling his head as he looks up towards the clear sky. He can feel the residual heat of his blush high on his neck. “I’m only asking ‘cause I used to hoard when I was still living in the den.”

“I don’t hoard.”

“I’m not saying you are. ” Sonic says, with less patience than his previous response.

Shadow grunts. “Well, it sounds like you're patronizing me. Stop it.”

“I’m not patronizing you.”

“Then, stop speaking to me in a patronizing tone.”

“Dude, I’m literally not.”

“Yes, you are. Why do you find it so hard to be criticised?”

“Wh—I do not! ”

“Yes, you do. You don’t like being challenged.”

“That is totally not true. Categorically not true.”

“Liar.”

“Shadow, if that stick was any further up your ass it would be coming out of your mouth.”

“ Your head is shoved so far up your backside that you can pull yourself into a knot.”

“Yeah, well, the stick up your ass is so big it’s reaching the moon.”

“I take it back. Your head’s too big and your ego’s too inflated for it to fit up your ass—”

“Shut up, gramps.”

“ Gramps? ” Shadow’s head whips around with a scowl. “See? Reverting to cheap insults because you ran out of clever things to say.”

“I—”

“Actually, I'll take it back. The smartest thing you’ve ever said is when you acknowledged I beat you in Tokyo.”

Sonic guffaws aloud. “I never admitted to that. Besides, I beat you on the Moon.”

“You did not.”

“I did.”

“You didn’t. I surr—” Shadow’s mouth shuts with an audible clack as he rethinks his choice of words. “I diffused our argument because I took pity on you.”

“No, go on, finish what you were going to say.” Sonic cups a hand to his ear comically. “You…surrendered?”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“You literally nearly said it.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did,” Sonic mocks back in Shadow’s low, level tone.

Shadow whips a hand out to shove Sonic but Sonic dodges him in time, quickly sidestepping with ease. “You’re getting predictable, dude. Damn, maybe old age really is getting to you. Dementia’s a mean disease—”

With a quick snap of his finger, Shadow disappears out of sight and Chaos Controls in front of Sonic to, childishly, stick a foot out and trip him over. Sonic stumbles, righting himself after a few flying steps that are pathetically un-cool next to Shadow’s suave teleportation and small, smug smirk.

“Too slow,” Shadow jibes, tutting as he stares down his nose at Sonic. “Maybe your reaction times could be a little…what’s the word, quicker?”

“Oh my God, dude, you are such a sore loser!”

“Says you!”

“Says you!” Sonic mocks again, pulling his cheeks down so his face looks dour in an imitation of Shadow. Shadow’s expression twists at the mockery. “Bet you can’t beat me to the top of that mountain.”

“You’re on.”

They take off with a whistle of wind and a kick of dirt, both hurtling forwards through the forest shoulder-to-shoulder in a clash of red and blue. Sonic tosses his arms behind him to gain speed and Shadow leans himself forward and lower so his body mass is narrower, using it to propel his skates forward. Sonic veers off to the right, towards a shortcut he knows will save him at least a millisecond if he times his jump right, and Shadow, reading Sonic's intentions in the subtle shift of his posture and the gleam in his eyes, anticipates the maneuver and angles his own path to intercept. He angles his body so as to try and shove him off of his trajectory but Sonic, just like how Shadow reads his body language as if he were fluent in it, spots the thought the moment it crosses his mind and peels forward out of his reach just in time.

Using the steep grade of the hillside to build momentum, Sonic crests one ridge and kicks off at the last second to draw tight into a spindash. Sonic’s body arcs through the air, cutting through the skies like a comet, suspended for a breathtaking moment against the dusty blue sky before he lands on the downward slope of the adjacent hill. He uses gravity and momentum to propel himself forward at a speed not even Shadow could match; not when he’s still unfamiliar with the forest compared to Sonic’s foolproof knowledge.

He touches down on the peak of the mountain with a flourish, only a little dirtied and dusty from his run. Shadow lags only a split second behind but it’s a clear victory. “I w—”

“Not a word,” Shadow cuts across, marching ahead without waiting for Sonic to follow. With a dry, charmed laugh, Sonic follows behind, unable to stifle the stupid grin on his face.

They wander together wordlessly for a while, just appreciating the breeze of the late afternoon. Neither feel the need to fill the silence, not needing to pad their time together with pointless conversation. Just each other’s company is enough.

When they reach a divergence in the trail, Shadow tells him: "This way," he says as Sonic begins to veer down the more familiar path from the fork in the road.

Sonic pauses, his sneakers settling among a carpet of wild cress and clover that releases a sweet, green fragrance when disturbed.  “There isn’t anything that way,” he says. “I thought we could go back to see the garden-slash-allotment outside the den.”

“Later. Come this way.” Sonic opens his mouth to speak but Shadow’s already gone, treading up the incline to a higher patch of land Sonic doesn’t usually traverse due to its distance from Green Hills.

Sonic jogs to keep up, climbing the steep, rocky hill with Shadow with some difficulty. His sneakers, as nice as they are, really aren’t made for anything that needs a lot of grip. Running’s his thing, not mountain climbing. “Where are we going?”

Shadow doesn’t respond, although Sonic knows he definitely heard him. Rather than pressing, Sonic simply follows him regardless, scaling the rocky verge with a few more steps. The top planes out into a small area of grass and exposed slate, some distance above Green Hills but not as high as Sonic’s used to hanging out. Shadow stands the plane, scents the air with a few sniffs, and leads them south. Sonic glances down the small hill they’ve climbed; below, the forest-thick green valleys roll, and above, the rocky mountains peak in jagged spikes. They’re around the mid-point of the mountain.

Sonic follows Shadow down the indiscernible path which seems to weave, double-back, and take them down routes Sonic doubts any human has stepped foot before. Fortunately, the evening has begun to cool, so although the journey is gruelling (because he has to walk it, God forbid) it’s done at a pretty nice temperature. The sun’s still plenty high but the forest is thick in this part of Green Hills so the floor feels a few degrees cooler than the open plains.  

Sonic doesn’t realise they’ve reached their destination until they step through the treeline and the smell hits him. “Woah,” he breathes, looking up and up and up to the towering hedge that rises before them. It’s huge, around seven metres tall and three metres thick, so densely woven he can’t see through the gaps in the leaves. Beyond it lies open space, Sonic can tell by the absence of treetops where thousands should be visible, which he suspects could be a field of some sort. 

Shadow treads along the perimeter of the straight-lined hedge, looking for something specific in its trunk. He spots it after a brief walk, ducking, and sticking his hands between two thick branch cords. He pushes the leaves apart and with it a small opening forms, enough for them to sneak through the hedge without destroying its constitution. “Come on,” he encourages, slipping through the gap and onto the other side. Sonic hurries behind and does the same, parting the hedge at the point where two of the trunks meet so he can slip past its prickly wall, crossing over from one side of Green Hills to a side he’s never set foot before.

As he had suspected, the plain in front of him is clear of fir trees, but it’s anything but barren. “Holy crap, Shadow!” The exclamation bursts from him as he steps onto the meticulously maintained grass of what is clearly a working orchard. It must span around fifty acres in size, sitting atop a slight curve in the land, tucked away from the rest of the world by that remarkable hedge. Neat rows of fruit trees, full and lush and heavy, line the land like stitch-work. Wicker baskets and small farming trucks have been abandoned on the sides of the orchard after a hard day’s work, the dirt on their wheels still damp to the touch. The sun has begun its descent, painting streaks of pale, soft pink across the otherwise cloudless blue sky, telling of a humid summer evening to come. The rows stretch down the length of the land, separated only by another similarly-dense hedge which seems to split the lot in half, obscuring the rest of the site from view. “How did you find this place?”

“I’ve been doing a lot of exploring,” Shadow says, walking forward down one of the aisles with the confidence of someone who’s been here before. Sonic skips forward to catch up to Shadow until they fall step-in-step, strolling down the neat row of trees, grass and reed and wildflowers tickling their ankles with each tread. 

“What do these grow? Apples?” Sonic asks, brushing his glove against the chipped bark of one of the trees. Even the wood smells sweet, like honey and kindling. It’s not particularly tall but its branches are wide-reaching, sagged under the weight of the fruit it holds. Sonic picks one from the ground that’s a little overripe.

“Peaches,” he corrects.

“What!? I didn’t know they grew peaches in Montana,” Sonic remarks in delight. He holds it up to the waning sunlight; it catches on its fur and shines a warm gold behind its pinky skin. “Can’t remember the last time I had a fresh peach. I usually just eat ‘em tinned.”

“I don’t think this area sells their goods to supermarkets. It’s likely just a small orchard selling to the local public.”

“Well, there’s only around thirty trees. Can’t yield enough fruit to fill a Walmart with that.”

“These fruits are too high a quality to be sold there.” Shadow jumps up and plucks a peach from the same branch Sonic did. It’s supple beneath his fingers and at perfect ripeness, with soft fuzz and a bruised orange-red colour. He extends it towards Sonic. “Happy belated birthday.”

“Thanks.” Sonic accepts the gift with a smile that transforms his entire face, warming it from within. “You come here often?”

Shadow shrugs, picking a peach for himself. He bites into the flesh and it gives underneath the pressure of his teeth, sweet juice dripping down his wrist. “I try not to take what they can’t replenish,” he says, sucking on the bite mark to lap up the juice that’s pooled in the flesh; bright yellow, the colour of an egg’s yolk. “But, they seem to have had a good yield this summer. There’s so much fruit it can barely be contained within their sheds.”

Sonic sets the overripe peach back down on the floor and bites into the one Shadow gave him. The juice bursts from the taut skin, juicy and tart. “Holy crap,” he says around a mouthful, chewing and swallowing. “Dude, this is so good.”

Shadow hums, agreeing nonverbally, as he leads them down one of the orchard’s rows. Here, the trees are short and thin and a few years off producing fruit. The young branches are held together with string and bolstered with wooden planks to keep them upright. Some of the more robust saplings are sprouting flowers; delicate bunches of white petals with dangling yellow sacks of pollen. “I believe they’re also growing nectarines, but the trees have been fully picked.”

“What’re those?”

“Peaches without fur,” Shadow elaborates. He takes another bite of the fruit in his hand, mulling over his thoughts while he chews. Sonic copies, watching him from the corner of his eye as a gust of wind rustles the quills held back from his face. “Nectarines aren’t commonly eaten in the United States, so they’re quite rare to come across.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever had one.”

“They’re a little more tart than peaches. And of course have the added bonus of being fur-less.”

“You don’t like the peach fuzz?”

Shadow’s face crinkles. 

Sonic's laughter bubbles up from his chest, warm and infectious, as he polishes off the remainder of his peach in several enthusiastic bites. They toss their pits into the hedging surrounding the orchard, to be eaten by the worms and re-absorbed into the earth to fertilise the budding trees. Sonic's attention catches on a full and heavy tree distinguished by its sparsely-set pale leaves distinctive grayish bark some distance into the orchard. He springs forward and jumps up to snatch two apples from the laden branches before turning around and tossing one to Shadow, who catches it single-handedly. The apple is rosy-pink and waxy; Sonic raises it to his nose and gives it a long, strong sniff.

Shadow looks at him with a crinkle to his expression; disgust, and poorly-concealed fondness,  his features softening despite his mock disapproval. “What are you doing?”

“Dude, I think these are Pink Lady apples.”

“Never heard of them.”

“They’re just the best, but Tom doesn’t get them much ‘cause they’re expensive.” Sonic tosses his apple in the air and catches it. “We had them once a few years back and it was so good, but I didn’t think you could get ‘em in the U.S. regularly.” Sonic lifts the apple to his nose for another, decadent sniff before he sinks his canines in and pulls out a chunk of the pale flesh. It crunches under his teeth, crisp and sharp; not as juicy as the peach, but more floral and tangy, like sherbert. “Oh yeah, this is it!”

Shadow, brow raised quizzically, follows suit and bites into his apple, too. His expression softens when the taste reaches his tongue. Sonic finishes the apple off in a few more savage bites, chewing with his mouth full. Shadow, more dignified than that, takes small, measured bites as Sonic tries to swallow around the half-chewed mouthful and nearly chokes when a chunk lodges in his throat. “You are disgusting,” he remarks.

“It’s good, though, right?” Sonic tosses the core to the bushes and sucks the juice from his thumb, material sticky from the syrup.

“It’s alright,” Shadow says, unconvincing, taking another bite from the apple.

“It’s alright,” Sonic mocks in a low, gruff tone.

Shadow kicks his hind, and Sonic yelps, scampering forward away from Shadow’s pestering. He chases him around the orchard for a while, yipping and laughing and yelling as one manages to catch the other until the tables are turned and the advantage flips back and forth between them. Their pursuit carries them through the orchard's underbrush until they emerge into an expansive pasture bordered by weathered wooden fencing, with fruit trees scattered throughout in natural clusters of two and three.

The meadow stretches upward along a gentle incline, extending far beyond the orchard's boundaries toward a distant hillside several miles away. Within the lower reaches of the pasture, a small herd of horses graze peacefully, coats ranging from honey-coloured palomino to chestnut and dappled brown, their heads lowered to crop the longer grasses where afternoon sunlight still provides warmth. 

"Look at that!" Though they've both naturally slowed their chase to a halt, Sonic's hand instinctively reaches out to stop Shadow's forward momentum. "Horses!"

Shadow’s head turns to look out to the paddy. When he spots the horses his brows lift. “That’s a horse?”

“Yeah,” Sonic responds. “Have you ever seen one in real life before?”

“Never.” He approaches the wooden fence and presses his palms against the slats, leaning forward for a better view. Sonic watches him, watches how another fresh gust of summer wind blows his quills from his face and his expression is shown a little clearer; twinkling eyes, open expression, looking at the animals in the field with the same wonder he’s held towards many of the other little joys Sonic has shown him over the last year. “They’re large.”

"Yeah, they really are." Sonic's response emerges softer than intended, slightly breathless. When Shadow glances over his shoulder to investigate the strange quality in Sonic's voice, to see why he sounds so strangled, Sonic just hopes that the way his heart is thundering isn't somehow visible on his face. There’s something so sweet and precious about Shadow in moments like these that makes Sonic understand, with total rationality, the way people throughout history would go to war over nothing more than a single glance from someone they love. With those gentle, open eyes and sweet tone to his voice Sonic wants to run into the woods, lap Earth’s perimeter, and clutch at his chest just to try and expel some of the frantic energy coursing through his veins at the sight of Shadow alone.

“What were you expecting them to look like?” Sonic responds, which is far more measured than he feels, as he comes up to the fence and leans his elbows on it like Shadow’s doing next to him. He smells like lavender and earth and warmth and Sonic is going insane.

“When they pulled the carriages in The Sound of Music they were never that much bigger than the humans.” The sound of their voice has caught the attention of a nearby, older mare; her large head swivels in their direction as if she can understand what they’re saying, sandy, straw-like mane swaying with the motion. Shadow watches her with an apprehensive look to his eye as, with slow, lumbering steps, she comes closer, making her way over at a snail’s pace. “Sonic, it understands what I’m saying.”

The tinge of panic in Shadow’s voice has Sonic laughing, clutching his belly. “It probably thinks we’ve come to offer it food.”

“How does it know?”

“We’re probably on a bridle path. Horses get fed all the time in places like this.” When the lumbering, old horse reaches them Sonic stretches out his palm; it barely reaches the horse’s muzzle but she makes an effort to give him a sniff, her big snout huffing and puffing until she nudges into his palm. “Awww, look — this one likes me!”

Shadow raises a brow. “How does that mean it likes you?”

“That’s how animals show they like you, and that you can touch them. Here, give it a go.”

Shadow extends his hand toward the horse, but she immediately tosses her head away from his approach. He withdraws with a slight frown, and Sonic offers gentle correction: "You need to move more slowly."

“Rich advice coming from you.”

Sonic rolls his eyes. He stretches his hand back out for the horse. “Horses don’t like to be spooked, and this one is an older girl, so you gotta be extra gentle with her.”

“Does she understand us?”

“I don’t think so.” Her nose nuzzles back into Sonic’s palm, so he pets her snout and the short, coarse fur there. “Some of the animals on Earth are more in-tune to human-y things than others. It’s not that she’s not smart, it’s just that she speaks a different language to us, y’know?” With his free hand he picks up Shadow’s wrist and guides his hand to lay flat on the horse’s snout. “If you smooth her gently, she’ll like that.”

Hesitantly and a little awkwardly, Shadow strokes the horse’s snout. She seems to take better to him this time, eyelids fluttering and long lashes fanning as he scratches over the small bumps of her nose. “What about hedgehogs?” Shadow asks, eyes trained on the horse’s serene expression. His hand slips to scratch under her chin and she seems to like that, tail flicking.

The question draws a chuckle from Sonic. “You wanna meet one?”

“No, I’ve seen other hedgehogs before. I’m just wondering if they’re like us.”

Like us. Like Sonic and Shadow — a twin, a matched set, two halves of the same whole, the only two that they know of their kind. “You’ve met other hedgehogs?” Sonic goes with instead.

Shadow’s glove comes up to stroke over the horse’s pink nose. She whinnies, clearly tickled by the gesture, and Shadow huffs out a breath that could be a laugh. He isn’t smiling but he doesn’t need to; his eyes speak every emotion his face doesn’t express, bright with wonder and tentative joy. “They kept some in the lab,” Shadow explains, keeping his eyes trained on the horse even while Sonic’s eyes bore into the side of his head. His touch turns soft, stroking over the horse’s muzzle. “I wasn’t born on Earth, so they were trying to figure out the closest species to me. After a while they decided it was probably a hedgehog.”

“Well, they called me a hedgehog back on Mobius, and I’m pretty sure we’re kinda similar, right?”

“Unfortunately.”

Sonic hip-checks him playfully before he moves his hand to gently pet the side of the horse’s head. “I was one of the only ones of my kind back there, too.”

Shadow’s gaze flicks over to Sonic. When their eyes meet, he quickly looks away, returning his attention to the horse. “How do you know you weren’t the only one?”

“I guess I don’t. I had to have a mom and a dad at some point, right? So there’s bound to be more of us. I don’t remember them, but if you exist, and so do I, and we’re from two different sides of the universe, then what’re the chances we’re the only two from our kind?”

“You think there are other hedgehogs?” Shadow trails off in wonder, his hand stilling. “I hope they’re not as annoying as you.”

“I think you mean awesome as me.”

“I don’t think I do.”

Sonic gives the horse another little pat before he spins away, folding his hands behind his head as he strolls back down the bridle path. Shadow gives the horse a farewell pat before he follows suit, following Sonic down the dirt track under the sunset above and the lattice of trees forming an archway to walk under. “Maybe they’d be blue, like me — or silver, or brown, or green, or pink—”

“I can see the evolutionary benefit of a blue hedgehog, particularly if you’re near the ocean, but a pink one?”

“What’s the evolutionary benefit of having red highlights?” Sonic retorts playfully, mimicking Shadow’s tone. 

Shadow huffs, pushing his quills from his face. “Mine are signifiers of danger.”

“Oooh, and I’m so scared, Hot Topic.”

Shadow chases Sonic down the bridle path with a growl as Sonic howls with laughter, easily dodging his playful swipes and lunges as they chase and give chase. Sonic and Shadow careen down the hillsides, kicking up clouds of dry, sandy dirt and skidding on asphalt paths until they’re back into the wilderness of the Montana hillsides, with fields of reed reaching their hips and oilseed hills stretching in rolls of buttery yellow. They run until the tips of their fur are coated in a floral filmy powder of flower nectar, out of the meadows and into the heart of Green Hills where the trees grow thick and the smell of foliage and damp earth permeate the air; a smell of home.

Sonic slows his dash to a jog as they near a rocky cliffside, one he recognises very quickly as his favourite beauty spot. The outcropping overlooks Green Hills’ rolling valleys; it’s a special place Sonic has known about ever since Longclaw began letting him out of the den. It’s a perfect vantage point to survey the area for food and intruders, but one of great beauty too, where you can spend hours captivated by its breathtaking sights without noticing a single minute has passed. Before sickness overtook her, Longclaw would fly over the valley below the cliffside with Sonic on her back just so he had the chance to see what she could.

A sentimental part of him likes to think that Longclaw’s spirit still remains in the valleys of Green Hills, and that all those times he’s felt safe and secure here is because part of her still protects him even long after she’s gone.

His legs slow to a stop by the outcropping, eyes focused on the sight of the lush valleys below, captivated by its splendor. It’s been a decade since he’s stepped through the portal to Earth but he still finds himself absolutely breath-taken by the sight of his home. Sonic settles down on the sun-warmed rock and pats the space next to him, wordlessly inviting Shadow to do the same.

Shadow crouches and settles onto his hind, letting his legs dangle over the outcropping. Bundles of moss peek through the cracks in the stone, brushing his leg with each swing. “I don’t think I could ever get bored of this,” Sonic remarks, exhaling a contented sigh. He swings his legs to try and rid himself of the excess energy he can feel vibrating beneath his skin, kicking some asphalt and crumbling rock down the verge as the world seems to slow to a crawl. He sighs, and the world sighs with him, as if it’s finally taking a moment of respite after a busy day. 

The evening sky around him transforms into a masterpiece, brushstrokes of pink and tangerine and periwinkle bleeding across the heavens like watercolors on wet canvas. As the sun continues its late descent it colours the sky the same colour as their peaches, while wisps of clouds and vapor trails streak through the atmosphere like dollops of cream swirled through honey.

Everything is perfect. The sight, the vibe, the day, and Sonic, suddenly, has a come-to-Jesus moment when he remembers just what he was dreading to do this morning. This, right here, would be the perfect time for him to break the news he’s been dreading to say since last Christmas.

This is it. This is the perfect moment, he urges himself, fists clenching where they prop him up on the rock. The fur beneath the fabric of his gloves has begun to grow sweaty, and when his fists tighten, the fabric creaks. You can do this.

Despite it nearing the peak of summer there’s still a breeze in the air, enough to ruffle his quills and catch the damp sweat Sonic has beading on the collar of fur around his neck. He twitches at the feeling, hypersensitive, heart beating like a jackhammer in his neck. What had been a beautiful day has turned tail-up in the matter of seconds as Sonic is once again reminded that many of the current problems in his life could have been avoided by just being a little more honest from the get-go. Maybe if he had told Shadow about Tails last year they would’ve ironed out the creases and wouldn’t be in this position where they’re hiding from everyone. Maybe Tom and Maddie could’ve helped Shadow, just like how they helped Sonic. Maybe Sonic wouldn’t be here now, half a year later, the metaphorical wound infected and angry and killing him from the inside out.

Shadow sighs a long, drawn-out breath next to him. “What’s wrong?”

Sonic's head jerks up from where it had been hanging. Shadow’s watching him with a small tilt to his head. His expression is neutral, relaxed, but his eyes, caught by the sun’s rays and coloured a rusty red, bear his concern. "What do you mean?"

“You’re fidgeting.” Shadow shifts uncomfortably. He’s confrontational through his naturally blunt and honest nature, but still loathes having to broach these sensitive topics. Unfortunately, neither of them are particularly good at doing just that. “Is there something bothering you?”

“What? No!” The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them. He’s gotten so used to lying about the big things that it now feels like a default response, his first line of defense against vulnerability.

Stop it, he scalds himself. It isn’t my place to decide what Shadow should and shouldn’t know. I told them and I told myself I wouldn’t lie anymore. Not when it comes to things like this.

Sonic's expression crumples, his shoulders sagging under the weight of his resolve. "Actually," he begins, and the resolution crystallizes within him — he’s raised his leg to step over the threshold, he’s on the verge of tipping over the edge — and he’s ready to take the leap. Months have built up to this moment and Sonic is suddenly aware that he’s finally just a few words away from potentially losing one of the most important things in his life. “Oh, God.” He draws his knees up protectively and buries his face in his hands, releasing a shaking sigh.

You need to do this. He draws in a breath through his nose. You can’t let this go on any longer than it already has.

Immediately concerned at the sudden change in demeanour and with a display so raw and pained, Shadow shuffles closer and places a hesitant hand on Sonic’s shoulder. The gesture carries a protective quality that makes Sonic's chest tighten with additional guilt. “Is something wrong?” he asks, his voice low and alarmed.

“Yes — no — kind of, sort of—” Sonic’s breath punches out of him, and a wave of crippling nausea rolls from his tummy to his throat. He’s stepped over the threshold now, has lifted the corner of the metaphorical bandage, and all that’s left is to pull it. He lets out another shaky, devastated sigh, shaking his head in his cupped hands. “I can do this.”

Shadow doesn’t respond, but he does move, shuffling over on the sun-warmed rock so they’re sitting hip to hip. Shadow doesn’t do this. In fact, Sonic doesn’t know a single time he’s allowed himself to be this vulnerable in front of Shadow. It’s usually the other way around; he’s usually the one who picks up Shadow when he’s broken and beaten, piecing him back together with love and care until he’s a functioning, healthy soldier ready to be sent back out to war.

It dawns on Sonic that this may very well be the first and last time he bares his soul like this to Shadow, to allow himself to be so vulnerable in his presence, and the thought nearly triggers the nausea building in his throat to overwhelm him completely.

“Shadow,” he says at last, the words tearing his heart on the way out of his throat to land bruised and destroyed at his feet. “They know. My family knows about you.”

Chapter Text

There's that age-old saying about how something is always better once it's off your chest.

Sonic had expected an immediate sense of relief to come over him after finally admitting to the secret he’s been harbouring for seven months, because that's what's meant to happen, right? Maybe a bittersweet feeling too, where you feel awkward and guilty but liberated nonetheless. The bandage has been ripped off, the bell has been rung, the bullet has been bitten; he’s done the worst part of the task, so the rewarding feeling ought to follow.

He doesn’t know at what point he had closed his eyes. Sonic only knows they’re closed because he has to pry them open from their tight squint when nothing is said following his admission. Even the forest around them is holding its breath; the insects and rustling leaves and whistle of wind have fallen mute, as if even nature itself is waiting for Shadow's response.

Sonic glances up and to his left, meeting Shadow's stone-cold expression and unblinking, unseeing stare. He’s looking at Sonic, but he’s not seeing him.

That expected relief withers and dies a swift, brutal death. Nausea crashes over him in a cold, sickening wave; it’s a serpent coiling in his gut, writhing and hissing and climbing up his throat. Sonic can't bear to hold eye contact, but Shadow demands it of him when he tries to look away, his voice cutting through the stillness like a blade. “Look at me, Sonic.”

So Sonic does. He lowers his hands to his lap and looks back at Shadow even though it feels like staring into the sun. Shadow doesn’t appear to be mad, but he does look confused. “I don’t understand,” Shadow admits, slowly, like he’s trying to speak to someone in a language he’s not fluent in. “What do you mean?”

Sonic’s breath leaves him in a stuttered groan that echoes off the valley beneath their swinging feet. Speaking requires the strength of all seven Chaos Emeralds, and Sonic, unfortunately, is fighting this battle empty-handed. “My family knows about you. It was an accident — I mean, we’ve been so careful; we had the walkie-talkies to plan ahead, we didn’t meet at the house anymore, and I always had an excuse or an alibi for getting caught late at night,” he says, vowels snubbed by the tears welling up in his system that he refuses to let fall, “but I should’ve known it wouldn’t have gotten past Tails. He figured it out all by himself before Tom and Maddie even had a clue.”

The confession hangs in the air between them like smoke from a suffocated fire. Maybe the words haven’t sunk in quite yet, because Shadow’s expression remains frozen, caught somewhere between concern and confusion, as if he’s lost, and isn’t sure what he’s doing here. “I don’t understand,” he repeats, his voice an hollow echo of itself, as though he can't hear his own words or recall that he's already spoken them. "How could they know I'm alive when I haven't set foot inside your house since last December?"

The words tear from Sonic's throat like they're being physically gutted from his body. "They found the book you gave me."

As understanding dawns, it's like watching the sun set on Shadow's face; not the gentle, golden descent of evening, but the harsh, final eclipse that plunges the world into darkness. It's an expression Sonic hasn't seen in a long, long time; the kind Shadow used to slip into when a particularly painful memory would surface, pulling him away from the present for a few moments and into the dark caverns of his mind, somewhere far away from this world. All colour and vitality is bleeding from his features with each passing second as his eyes take on the dull, glassy sheen of something dead.

He stares into Sonic's eyes with that strange, distant look for what feels like an eternity, seconds stretching into minutes, minutes into hours, and Sonic holds it, feeling like he owes this much to him.

Then, something within Shadow snaps back to the present moment, reanimating him. The rigid set of his jaw softens slightly and his sharp canines catch on the skin of his lower lip, worrying at it in an unconscious gesture of distress. It’s a look of genuine shock, the subtle kind that doesn’t present itself in loud gasps or pointing fingers or twisted features. It’s the real kind, the kind that comes when you don’t have the chance to brace yourself before you’re hit. Sonic feels pinned like a butterfly on corkboard beneath that searching gaze, helpless as Shadow hunts for something in his eyes. All he can do is hold steady and battle the tears that sear like acid behind his eyelids.

“I never intended to tell them — never, ever,” Sonic reiterates. “I’m so… so sorry they found out. But…but it’s okay! They’re not gonna tell anyone, I swear. They swear. No one will find out about you being here.”

He reaches out and lays his hand over the one Shadow has resting on his shoulder. Sonic tucks his fingers into the gaps between Shadow's, but Shadow doesn't reciprocate — in fact, he doesn't seem to register Sonic's touch at all, as if he's retreated so far inside himself that his body has become merely a shell. Still, Sonic gives their joined hands a gentle squeeze and tilts his head to rest his cheek against Shadow's knuckles, like he’s trying to keep him bound there with his touch, if only it’ll buy him time

For someone who’s experienced so much grief, who expects the worst from people and hopes for nothing less, Shadow doesn’t digest the information easily. Each realisation is reached in slow, lethargic steps, and Sonic can practically see the cogs turning behind those big red eyes; an old machine familiar with the feeling of betrayal, but one that hadn’t experienced it in quite some time. “How did they find the book, Sonic?” he asks quietly, his voice barely disturbing the forest air around them.

Sonic gives their joined hands another squeeze, shifting to rest more of his weight against his knuckles while his other hand settles on Shadow’s knee. He knows that Shadow’s more than capable of pushing him away but the animal hind-part of Sonic’s brain is howling at him to keep hold of Shadow now while he’s still within reach, because it’s easier to grip on while he’s still sitting than to grip on when he’s running. “I keep it on my bookshelf. They were looking for something, I think, and didn’t recognise the atlas, so they opened it, and saw the note you left me.”

Shadow, meanwhile, seems to be reconstructing the timeline in his head, working back the story with each puzzle piece he can find by memory. It takes a moment, but the dull sheen over eyes disappears in a blink, and it’s as if a switch has been flicked, because he’s back in the present and Sonic immediately knows that something has changed. When he looks back into Sonic’s eyes he’s no longer searching, but hunting; Shadow’s found what he’s looking for. “How did Tails find out?”

To try and placate him, Sonic untangles his fingers from Shadow’s and moves to rest them on Shadow’s arm instead, but he physically recoils away before Sonic has the chance to do so much as touch him.

The hostile gesture strikes Sonic with a sharp blow to his ego. Shadow’s reaction isn’t unsubstantiated, far from it, but it still hurts Sonic nonetheless like a physical slap across the face. His brows knit, and he feels a twang of pain in his chest, one which he wants to soothe with his fingers as if he could rub it away. But, that would mean letting go of Shadow, and he’s not willing to risk that — not when Shadow already looks poised to bolt like a startled deer.

“Tails found out by himself,” Sonic says after a moment. He reaches out even when Shadow moves away and sets his palm, dirty from their run and still sticky from the fruit’s juice, on his shoulder. Beneath him, Shadow’s frame is ram-rod straight, like a soldier poised to fight. He’s uncomfortable from the touch but not fighting it this time. “He found your fur back in the house and tested it on the Miles Electric.”

“When? I haven’t been at your house since Christmas…?”

Sonic's lips press into a thin, bloodless line, silence stretching between them like a taut wire. Shadow’s revelation is devastating. Sonic feels somewhat like he’s going through a humiliation ritual, as if it’s penance for the mess he’s made. He worries that if he speaks now, the words will bring up everything he's tried to keep down. “How long, Sonic?” Shadow urges, desperation creeping into his carefully modulated tone like water through cracks in a dam.

“It happened just before Christmas.”

Saying it is just as awful as he thought it would be. 

The words hit Shadow like a physical blow, the final devastating punch in a brutal beating that sends him reeling. Sonic can see the hurt and betrayal he feels on his face, the way it’s screwed up tight like an animal’s snarl. And Sonic, for his part, lies under his gaze like prey with its tummy showing; submissive, offering himself up for whatever punishment Shadow deems fit. He's so desperate to keep Shadow here, to maintain his favor and stay on his good side, that he's willing to prostrate and flay himself open just so Shadow can take what he needs if it’ll mean he’ll stay. Sonic is tearing his heart out of his own chest and holding it to Shadow in open, bloody palms, waiting for him to take it like it could atone for the hurt he’s caused. 

“I’m so, so sorry it’s taken me this long to say anything,” Sonic whispers, voice breaking. “I feel awful, I feel sick about it. I knew I couldn’t keep it from you any longer than I already had. I’m so, so sorry, Shadow.”

Shadow says nothing. He just looks straight into Sonic’s watery eyes with the same guarded expression he had when they first met in Tokyo. Like he doesn’t know who Sonic is, or what he is, or why he wants to hurt him so badly. 

“No one’s going to say anything to G.U.N..” The words tumble out sloppy and desperate as his world crumbles around him, and he doesn't have hands large enough to catch all the falling pieces. “Tails won’t — he seriously won’t — and Tom and Maddie won’t, either. I know they won’t. They promised me.” Sonic's grip turns white-knuckled as he pleads: “Don’t hate me. Please. Please don’t hate me. It was an accident.”

When Shadow offers no response, Sonic raises both hands to cup his face, bracketing his soft cheeks with his palms. It changes nothing; Shadow doesn't move, barely seems to breathe, and refuses to break eye contact. “Please say something,” Sonic whispers, and it’s like they’re back in the den, two shy souls beneath the clumsy stringing of multicoloured Christmas lights as Sonic gives Shadow the gift of a place to call home and pleads for Shadow to give any indication of acceptance. “Please.”

“I don’t understand, Sonic.” Shadow’s voice doesn’t sound like his own. It’s toneless, emptied of all its recognisable warmth, like someone else is piloting his body and using his mouth to speak. “You’ve known this since Christmas, and you said nothing?”

Sonic’s lower lip wobbles. “Shadow—”

“Did Tails know I was here while we were still meeting? While I was using the den?”

“Shadow, I can’t—”

“Stop avoiding my questions, Sonic. Did he know.”

“Yes. Yes, he knows,” Sonic admits, the words fracturing around a suppressed sob. “He knows we’ve been meeting, but he doesn’t know about the den. I didn’t want it to tell you ‘cause Green Hills is the only place you have, and I know he won’t say anything to anyone. If I told you he knew, then it meant you wouldn’t have that safe haven anymore—”

“Would you have told me that he knew if Maddie or Tom hadn’t found out?”

His tears aren’t free-falling, not yet, so Sonic wipes them with his wrists before they have the chance to. They leave clean tracks through the dirt on his gloves. “I mean…eventually, yeah, I suppose.”

It’s the wrong thing to say.  In a single fluid motion, Shadow breaks free from Sonic's desperate grasp and surges to his feet, putting enough distance between them to indicate that he perceives Sonic as a threat. “Eventually?” Shadow spits the word out of his mouth. “When? Months? Years? Until I found out by myself? You promised me you’d keep it a secret, I trusted you, and you’ve been lying to me since Christmas.”

Shadow doesn’t shout — he’s not capable of it, Sonic thinks; a voice like that was built to calm and reassure, not yell and protest. And yet his voice, low and gentle and usually soft around the sides, has taken a hard edge. He’s speaking at no louder a volume than he typically does but his words still feel like a yell, even when they barely reach above a conversational volume. He’s only ever heard Shadow speak in a tone like that when he was pleading for Sonic to finish him off on the moon.

“No one knows that you use the den! I mean — Tom’s been there before, but he can’t find it by himself ‘cause it’s so deep in the woods, and he wouldn’t think to look there even if he did find it,” Sonic defends, his voice holding none of the level calmness that Shadow does. The panic he feels gripping his entire body, as if it knows, instinctively, that Shadow is a few wrong words away from fleeing, is creeping into his tone. “Tails doesn’t even know it exists! He just thinks that you and I hang out occasionally in the woods.”

“So, instead of telling me when you found out, you let me stay somewhere for months without thinking to let me know that my location had been compromised?”

“When you say it like that it sounds awful. I told you, no one knows you use the den! And even if the rest of my family found out, they don’t know where you are. How’d you think I remained hidden for a decade here?”

“But they know I’m in Green Hills, Sonic!” Shadow's composure finally cracks, his voice rising above its usual measured cadence. “You’ve practically painted a target on my back!”

The accusation hits him like a sucker punch to the solar plexus. Sonic recoils, shocked to the point where he’s rendered wordless. When he does speak, moments later, the words feel like cotton in his dry mouth. “What?” Sonic manages, horrified. “Do you think I’ve set you up…? Why would you think that?”

Sonic’s panic must be contagious because it’s twinging Shadow’s tone, too, causing his usually carefully-paced words to stumble over each other in their rush to leave his mouth. “Because your fox friend knows I’m in the area when you’re suspiciously away, and your human, Tom, can locate it. Did you seriously not consider that they might talk? That they might cross-reference stories? You said it yourself: Tails is smart enough to figure out my identity through fur alone. You think he doesn’t have the ability to track me? Or — or get some kind of revenge for the problems I’ve caused you and your family?”

Sonic gapes in disbelief. The tears have stopped, replaced by an uncomfortable surge of anger. He'd expected Shadow to be furious — beyond furious, even — but not the mental gymnastics and paranoid connections he’s making. Shadow is calculated, intelligent, and strategic, but he's drawing lines where none exist, and Sonic doesn't know where to begin untangling this mess. "I gave you the den specifically because I didn't want to risk anyone finding you back home. It's the safest place in all of Green Hills for you. In all of Earth, even."

“That is entirely besides the point. Tails has evidence of my fur on his…whatever you called it, proving that I was in your home.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“You think that can’t be intercepted by G.U.N.? You think that his tech hasn’t been monitored by G.U.N., considering how many are stationed outside your house every single day? Do you think that Walters has information on your past hideouts on his file? That he wouldn’t have put two-and-two together if he found out I was in your home, and you were missing on certain days of the year?”

“Shadow—”

Shadow slashes his hand through the air, cutting off Sonic's protest with fire in his eyes. "Stop trying to brush my concerns off, Sonic! You’re treating my concerns like they’re unreasonable!”

“I never said that!”

“You didn’t, but you’re not giving me straight answers, either!”

“I’m trying!” The words leave him in a groaned cry. He reaches up and sinks his fingers into his quills, trying to ground himself with the twinge of pain. “Shadow, I’ve really messed this up and I’m trying to explain to you why—”

“You’ve just told me that you have physical evidence of me being alive in your house, and your family — who I know are in regular contact with G.U.N. — know of my existence, and you want to explain why you did it?” Shadow throws his hands out in a gesture of complete bewilderment, staring at Sonic like he's lost his mind. “Your intentions don’t matter! Whether you intended for this to happen or not, it still happened!”

“Dude, you’re not listening to me!”

“You’re not listening to me!”

“Yes, I freaking am, Shadow! I’m telling you now ‘cause you have a right to know!”

He closes the distance Shadow created between them with several determined steps, and continues with the urgency of someone trying to save their house from succumbing to the fire consuming it: “I’m not trying to defend myself; I only wanna explain why I did it so you understand I wasn’t trying to be evil or malicious or that I was trying to trick you in any kind of way. I never wanted it to end like this. That’s why I held off saying anything for so long.” His chest heaves as he drags in a burning breath, lungs aching from the exertion of shouting. “Everything I’ve done was to protect you.”

“Protect me?” Shadow’s laugh sounds like a bark, sharp and mocking, echoing through the air like the bang! of a gun being fired. Sonic physically recoils at the mockery in Shadow’s tone, appalled at his reaction. “You haven’t been protecting me! You’ve been lying to me.”

“What the hell, man?” Sonic takes another step but Shadow holds his ground, squaring his shoulders off, chin tilting up to meet Sonic’s gaze head-on. “I should’ve told you sooner, yeah, I know, but that doesn’t mean that the stuff we did together was built on a lie.”

“Not even the times you met up with me after telling other people that I’m alive? After luring me into public spaces—”

“Luring?! ” Sonic knows that it’s the wrong thing to do, to fight fire with fire, but the incredulity he feels overwhelms every rational thought in his brain that’s screaming at him to approach this very, very carefully. “I didn’t lure you like some creepy guy trying to kidnap someone, Shadow! Everything we did we did together, and it only if you were comfortable. I never ‘lured’ you anywhere. That’s gross, dude. Why would you even say that?”

Two strong hands push Sonic backwards by the shoulders without warning, shoving him with enough force to send him stumbling. Sonic barely manages to right himself in the time it takes for Shadow to advance forward with a look of fury clouding his expression. “I told you when we first met that under no circumstances was anyone, and I mean anyone, to know about my status. That if anyone knew it would not only jeopardise my safety, but yours, too.” His voice drops to a volume a notch above a whisper. “I trusted you with that information. I trusted you with my life."

Sonic throws his arms out with protest, his voice climbing in pitch. “But Tails won’t tell anyone! He didn’t tell anyone!”

“That doesn’t matter!” Shadow roars, advancing with heavy, quick strides while Sonic scrambles backward, retreating from the directed fury bearing down on him. “You made a decision about my safety without consulting me! If I knew my safety was potentially jeopardised, then I would’ve taken more precautions — I wouldn’t have gone into public spaces at all!”

“Chill the hell out, man!” Sonic plants his feet and squares off against Shadow's approach, refusing to retreat further. Shadow, still seething, stops mid-stride, his chest heaving with barely-contained rage. “I’m telling you this — all of this — so you can make your own decision now with the information I’m giving you. It’s late, but late is better than never. I’ve already apologised. You think this has been easy on me either, huh?”

“Easy on you?!” Shadow's voice cracks with disbelief.

“I’ve had to lie to my freaking family for the last year! I did it ‘cause your safety meant more to me than being honest with them. But what were you expecting? That we would just keep whatever this is—” Sonic gestures between them frantically, “—for the next ten years? That we’d never slip up, or get caught, or move on? That we'd just meet in secret every few months and figure no one would ever question what the hell was happening?”

Maybe it’s the realisation that what they had could’ve never, truly, worked out, but all the fight seems to drain from Shadow in a single exhale. “I don’t know what I was expecting from you,” he murmurs, anger doused like a candle’s flame being snuffed.

Sonic steps forward cautiously, bridging the space between them with his hands extended in a pleading gesture, but Shadow barely takes note of it. He doesn’t move, standing there with a sort of detached exhaustion. He’s circling through the stages of grief in such quick succession he’s practically giving himself whiplash. “What do you mean?”

Shadow doesn’t respond, so Sonic presses: “Shadow, what do you mean? ”

“I meant that I shouldn’t have expected anything less from you,” Shadow says, voice hollow and devoid of emotion. He meets Sonic’s eye but Shadow isn’t looking at him; he’s looking through him, staring somewhere into the middle-distance. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“No — no, that’s not what I wanted to hear. Why did you expect nothing less from me?”

“What do you think I mean?” Shadow says, his tone lowered from its harsh bark a moment earlier to a resigned flatline. “You live the perfect life. You have a family, friends, a home. I could never have fit into that picture. Look at me.” Shadow shrugs, a gesture of self-pity. “I shouldn’t have come back for my inhibitor ring in the first place. I should’ve known that this would’ve ended poorly after what happened when the Eclipse Cannon exploded and I died with it.”

Shadow’s words hit him like a slap to the face. “You think I left you there to die?!” Sonic barks a laugh, incredulous, and that same pang of pain Sonic feels in his own chest is reflected on Shadow’s face. He clearly hadn’t meant it, but he’s dug his own grave, and the modicum of patience left in Sonic has well and truly vanished. “I seriously cannot believe you just said that. Is that really what you think? That I left you for dead?”

Shadow’s expression twists like the words in his mouth taste rancid. He glances away, uncertainty flicking across his features like he’s not sure if he means what he’s saying or not, but like the cornered animal he is he keeps swiping, hitting anything that’s close-by to protect himself. “You’re twisting my words for your own benefit.”

“Then how’d you mean it?” Before Shadow can react, Sonic closes the distance between them. Like Shadow had done moments before, Sonic shoves him back by the shoulders, following through with the motion and pursuing him as he stumbles. “I looked for you after the explosion for weeks, but I had other shit going on! You nearly killed Tom, so I’m sorry that I wasn’t there to comb the freaking Earth to find you. I sorta had other priorities.” An indignant laugh bleats from the gut of Sonic’s chest. “You have no idea what I’ve done for you! How I’ve helped you!”

“ Help me?! ” Shadow roars, his anger reigniting in the face of Sonic’s fury. “I am not some…some basket case that needs helping, or a broken thing that needs fixing. I don’t need help from the likes of you.”

“I helped you because you’re my friend!” Sonic growls back. “I’m so freaking glad that all I’ve done for you has been crap in your eyes. ‘The likes of me’. Screw you, dude!”

“You’re not my friend,” Shadow sneers. “A friend wouldn’t do something like this.”

“Like what? Like, hanging out with you all the time? And trying to make sure you get to see all the cool shit the world has to offer?”

“They wouldn’t lie to me, Sonic!”

Sonic groans furiously, his hands coming up to grip his quills in frustration. “You’re not listening to a word I’m saying!”

“Yes, I am!”

"I said I'm sorry! I'm sorry for keeping it secret for so long, but I wanted this to last as much as you did. I didn’t do everything I did just so we could argue about it at the end. This wasn’t one-sided. Not for a second.” Sonic huffs, dropping his hands from his rucked-up quills. “I’m sorry that I did this to you, but you don’t get to invalidate my feelings just ‘cause you’re angry.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry for hurting your feelings. Just — go home, and hang out with your real friends.”

“You are a real friend!”

“Sonic, you broke the one promise I asked you to keep—”

“Well, friends do stuff like that sometimes, but you wouldn’t know since you haven’t got any—”

Sonic doesn’t know who throws the first punch. All he knows is one second they’re screaming in each others’ face and the next they’re on their elbows and knees in the dirt pouncing on each other. Sonic lays his full weight into the punch he throws at Shadow’s jaw which sends them both careening backwards in a flurry of stumbling limbs and gnashing teeth just as a right hook connects to his cheek. Sonic barely has time to steady himself after the punch before he’s spun around on the spot and pushed onto his back, slamming into tree roots and hot earth as Shadow swings another punch straight to his cheek. He swings for a third with a yell but Sonic dodges it at the last moment, so it lands in the junction of his shoulder instead, knuckles slamming five nasty bruises to the lean muscle of his trapezius.

With a surge of adrenaline, Sonic bucks his hips up and flips them so he’s the one straddling Shadow. He immediately returns the punch, landing it smack-bang on the corner of his jaw. Beneath him, Shadow gnashes in fury at losing the upper hand, the sharp tips of his canines catching on a tendril of sunlight peeking through the thick foliage above, glinting bright and dangerous. Claws pierce through the reinforced tips of Shadow’s gloves’ fingertips, and in a bid to get Sonic off of him, they sink into Sonic’s calf muscles like a stinger on a bee and hook in. 

Sonic howls in agony, the searing pain shooting up his leg like he’s being burnt. He pushes away from Shadow and collapses onto all fours, blood trickling down his leg and splattering onto the dirt and roots below like dollops of hot wax as Shadow scrambles backward onto his hands and feet as well.

They circle each other, watching and waiting for the other to make the first move. With electricity coursing through his calves and adrenaline coursing through his veins like it’s physically fuelling him, Sonic leaps from the ground to pounce on Shadow like a feral animal while Shadow remains static, watching him with the sangfroid of an apex predator. At the last second, Shadow dodges him and delivers a swift roundhouse kick to the back of Sonic’s head while he’s mid-air. 

The force of it sends him flying, whizzing through the air until he hits the ground and skids past the forest’s thick, knotted trees to land in an open plain half a football field’s length away. A trail of carnage lies in his wake as Sonic tumbles to a stop with a whoomph among a bed of ruined clovers and cornflowers, limbs akimbo.

He barely has enough time to roll aside before Shadow rockets through the sky with a whistle of wind. He hovers above ground using his jet skates as the waning sun, a red stamp on the blank envelope of the dusky sky, haloes his head. The outline of his quills glows orange from the backlight and his face remains shrouded in shadow; he’s a dark, menacing deity, staring down his nose at Sonic who misses his opportunity to flee because he’s captivated by Shadow’s terrifying splendour. 

Shadow dives down and fists his hands in the scruff at the back of Sonic’s neck before his jets ignite with a whistle and he’s yanked from the mound of dirt. Sonic grips onto whatever he can get his hands onto as Shadow takes them above the treeline and even further until they’re fifty metres up and Sonic is being suspended only by fisted hands in the hackles on his back.

Sonic spares a glance downward and grows nauseous at the sight; everything is small and so, so far away that the towering fir trees look like children’s toys from this high up. He thrashes and fights but Shadow’s just out of arm’s reach; a dirty trick and a power play, holding Sonic at his mercy without giving him the opportunity to fight back.

Before he has the chance to release him to the ground below or carry him elsewhere, Sonic fights for the upperhand and manages to swivel in Shadow’s grip. His skin pinches and twists beneath Shadow’s fist, capillaries bursting beneath his fingers to paint ugly bruises beneath the fine blue hair on his back, but Sonic pushes through the pain so he can hook his legs around one of Shadow’s. He leans forward and tips them off of their axis, causing Shadow’s jets to shoot skewiff and propel them sidelong as Shadow tries to fight Sonic off of him. Sonic, finally having an opportunity to fight back, locks his arms and legs tight around Shadow’s.

“Get off of me!” Shadow growls, digging his claws into the side of Sonic’s neck.

“You let go of me!” Sonic shouts back, his voice drowned by the hiss of the jets. 

“No. Now, I have you right where I need you, and you’re going to listen to me without throwing a tantrum.”

Sonic, despite the incredibly precarious situation he’s in, scoffs in offense. “Me? Tantrum? You’re the one holding me by the freaking neck ‘cause you’re too much of a pussy to fight me one-on-one on the ground!”

Shadow’s grip in Sonic’s hackles tightens. He raises him up with ease, and hisses close to his ear in a low tone: “You think you can fight and beat me? You can’t even hold your own without the Chaos Emeralds.”

At the feeling of claws so close to his jugular vein, something inside Sonic snaps. He can physically feel it; a small ping! like a connecting thread holding his brain and his body together has been severed straight down the centre. Suddenly, he can sense everything: the oxygen in his blood, the tiny sacs of air in his lungs, his teeth in his gums, the fan of his eyelashes, every minute injury on his body in absolute detail, like a dial in his brain has been twisted to the max in the span of a millisecond and suddenly he’s not piloting it anymore. The animalistic, savage hind-part of Sonic’s brain has dragged itself into the driver’s seat and Sonic falls into the lull of its surging energy, relenting control to a beast he didn’t know existed.

Sonic coils even tighter around Shadow like a constrictor so they’re nearly chest-to-chest despite the grip Shadow has on the back of his neck. He opens his mouth and sinks his canines deep into the meat and muscle of his forearm, teeth piercing through fur, skin, flesh, and scraping against bone at its tightest clench. Immediately, his mouth floods with a sour, wrong-tasting blood which he gags on, burning his tongue and congealing in his gums like gelatine. Sonic pulls his mouth back and spits the blood down to the ground, watching it sizzle as it comes in contact with the air, as if its alien properties can only exist inside Shadow and never outside of him.

Shadow hisses in pain and immediately releases Sonic's hackles. In the split second before gravity claims him, Sonic uses Shadow as a springboard, kicking off to gain momentum before curling into a tight spindash. He cannonballs towards the floor in a blue blur and a flash of electricity while Shadow remains high in the sky, nursing his bleeding forearm where Sonic’s canines tore through flesh and sinew.

His quick thinking helps dull the fall but hitting the ground still knocks the air out of him. Sonic bounces as his spindash revs into the ground with a high whistle before he unfurls and jumps to stand on his two feet. Immediately, and unconsciously, he dips into a low and soft-kneed crouch, keeping the centre of his gravity grounded; he’s in a fighting stance, breathing heavy, pupils dilated to the size of dinner plates, ready to brace against the next attack.

Shadow floats above, shaking his arm after Sonic’s bite. He’s looking at the crescent-shaped mark in his skin like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing, and Sonic wonders if maybe that was enough; if that blatant display of animalistic savagery was the thing Shadow needed to snap him out of whatever spiral he had fallen into.

In a move Sonic hadn’t expected, Shadow Chaos Controls out of sight.

Sonic remains low, ready for impact, but after Shadow disappears with a clap of thunder the open space of the field remains empty. Sonic huffs out a growl and lowers himself further to the ground, taking scope of any movement in his peripherals as he decides on his next move. The trees in the forest provide coverage, and Sonic knows although he can’t beat Shadow in strength he can certainly outpace him, and getting to a good vantage point will be his upper hand.

He takes a few, careful steps backwards, moving back into the forest from the open planes and the crater of his impact. Sonic’s darting eyes scan the landscape in front of him and its ruined state; the grassy verge of the clove field bears a deep scar where he'd been dragged across it after Shadow's roundhouse kick, soil spilling from the gouge like blood from a gaping wound. The sky, once a beautiful pink, has lost all colour, and instead looks dark and mottled like day-old bruises. What had been a tranquil, beautiful afternoon has devolved into a nightmare in the span of an hour.

Has he Chaos Controlled out of here? Sonic’s racing thoughts whisper. He scans his left, and his right, and pricks his ears to listen for any abnormal sounds. Nothing. Has he seriously run away?  

Sonic begins to lower his guard, straightening as he turns to head toward the forest, just as red thunder cracks through the sky and a boot connects with the curve of his lower spine, kicking him with enough force that his body practically wraps around the trunk of a fir tree some distance into the woods. Sonic’s body hits it with a sick whap, shattering a hundred tree rings beneath the force of the blow.

The air rushes out of him in a punch, body contracting so quickly it doesn’t have enough time to even consider bracing. Sonic crumples to the forest floor in a broken heap, landing hard on his side among the carpet of fallen needles and leaves. He opens his eyes to blink dazedly up at the swimming, undulating evening sky as it seems to pulse closer and farther with each heartbeat.

He can’t breathe in. The panic of oh shit something is seriously wrong with me creeps in at the peripherals as Sonic, with an embarrassing, agonised groan, rolls onto his back and tries to draw some air in, but his lungs can’t expand and there’s a sickening stabbing pain where his waist meets his diaphragm that he reckons could mean a few broken ribs.

Above him, a face comes into focus. Terrifying, with hardened eyes and quills framing his features like a crown of thorns. Sonic's bleary vision doubles, blurring Shadow's expression as he looms overhead. “Weakling,” he insults beneath his breath.

“Coward,” Sonic coughs, trying to draw a breath into his battered lungs with a wheeze. “You’re a fucking coward, Shadow.”

Shadow’s boot comes down and, deliberately slowly, presses over Sonic’s tender rib cage. Sonic yowls at the pressure, his hands flying out to grip desperately around Shadow’s ankle, trying to pry his crushing weight away from his cracked ribs. But, his struggles only seem to spur Shadow on to press harder, to grind down the toe of his skates into the soft patch of skin between Sonic’s tummy and the base of his ribcage. “Learn when to stay down.”

Sonic decides that if brute strength won’t save him, then he’ll just have to fight dirty. With his hands clamped on either side of Shadow’s ankle, he twists and pulls with every ounce of strength he has, effectively trying to twist the joint from its socket. Shadow hisses through his teeth, immediately kicking Sonic’s hands away and jumping back from his body. The reprieve gives Sonic just enough time to gather himself and struggle upright, desperately trying to force air into his battered lungs with groaning, laboured breaths.

“Fuck you,” Sonic rasps, spitting a bloody wad of saliva to the dirt that gleams crimson in the evening’s dying light. “I didn’t want to fight you, Shadow.”

“This isn’t a fight,” Shadow goads, taking a menacing step closer, putting some experimental weight onto his ankle after Sonic’s attempt to dislocate it. “A fight is equal. You never had the chance of beating me.”

“I beat you pretty good on the moon when you asked me to put you out of your misery,” Sonic taunts. The voice coming out of him, the person controlling him — none of it feels voluntary or conscious. Sonic is moving by his body’s instinctive will, and it seems the sight of him, so savage and primal, has done something to Shadow, too, because Sonic isn’t looking across at someone who’s willing to step away from this without winning the fight. In fact, Shadow is mimicking his low crouch and flat neck, and his red eyes, usually so kind and full of warmth when looking at Sonic, have been swallowed by the black pool of his pupils.

He huffs a breath through his nose, and Sonic catches a glimpse of something dark and twisted;  a barely-there smirk ghosting across the corner of Shadow's mouth. Whatever this is — whatever they’re doing — a part of Shadow’s enjoying it, and he’s not alone.

Sonic can feel that same twisted euphoria singing through his bloodstream, coursing through his veins at a thousand miles an hour with a jackrabbit pulse, demanding more more more of him, and it’s as if giving into that demand and sinking further into the chaos of their fight physically fuels him, charging his battered body with renewed vigour. With that high coursing through his veins Sonic explodes forward, using his speed and Shadow’s momentary setback from his ankle injury to his advantage, pouncing on him with a snarl. He grips wherever his hands find purchase; Shadow’s face, his shoulders, his neck, the positions changing as they careen down the hillside leading toward the creek. The momentum carries them to a soft patch of earth, damp from the stream a few feet away, where Sonic ends up on top of Shadow with his hands pressed down on his shoulders like a predator pinning its prey, quills framing his face and his wild, grass-green eyes.

More, a part of him commands, so Sonic drives his fist into Shadow's jaw with a sickening crunch that reverberates up his arm. More, it urges again, demanding it of him, and he obliges, striking the same spot with enough force to split skin. His body practically sings when the blow connects, and it’s like he's been dying of thirst his entire life and this violence is his first gulp of water, so sweet to the taste that he wants to drink it by the fistful until he drowns in it. 

He pulls his elbow back for another strike, but Shadow is quicker. In one fluid motion, he flips their positions so he’s the one on top, dirt smearing across his cheeks and quills in streaks that somehow make him look more dangerous, more untamed. Sonic is momentarily mesmerised by the sight of Shadow looking so grand and menacing, and that split second of distraction costs him. Shadow uses it to roll them again in another tumble until Sonic finds himself suspended over the rushing creek with Shadow’s fists gripped tight in the peach fur over his chest. 

That drug-like feeling vanishes in an instant the moment he hears the river in his ears. Sonic's hands fly to Shadow's arms, fingers digging in desperately, while above him Shadow has taken Sonic’s expression for his own. He's not grinning — he doesn't even look happy — but there's something wild and untamed blazing in behind the open curtains of his eyes that depicts an emotion Sonic doesn’t know how to name, where words alone won’t be able to categorise it. The closest thing Sonic could compare it to is the centre of a flame; incandescent and red-hot and dangerous.

“You—”

“Not so brave now, are you?” Shadow's voice is a low growl as he drags Sonic upward, scooting him closer to the water's edge before settling back onto his chest like a bird of prey perching on its victim. He lowers Sonic closer to the water until the backs of his quills are drenched and he’s mere centimetres away from being lowered back-first into the rushing stream. “Go on. Call for your little friends’ help this time.”

“Don’t be jealous because I have what you don’t.”

“Why would I be jealous of you?”

Shadow’s words cause Sonic to tighten his grip on the muscle and sinew beneath his fingers, but Shadow is possessed, and the pain barely registers past the sweet thunder of adrenaline in his blood.

With a yell that tears from the bottom of his diaphragm Sonic bucks his hip and flips them head-over-heels. They go careening into the shallow creek, Shadow first tumbling over Sonic’s head, and then Sonic as he flips backwards with the momentum. He plunges into the dirty water and for a terrifying moment he can’t see, he can’t breathe, he can’t hear, and he can’t stand up. Sonic’s hands fly out in the water to try and find purchase while the small amount of air in his lungs barely keeps him lucid, and eventually, after scrabbling around he finds something slick and ropey to hold on to. Sonic drags himself up using a whip of corded moss fused to one of the larger rocks in the creek, heaving in a breath to his burning lungs, and quickly scrambles up so he’s out of the water and and sprawled atop one of the rocks he’d used earlier to scale the river’s width.

Shadow resurfaces a moment later a fair way down the river’s length, the inky cascade of his quills fanning out in the water around him like a squid’s tentacles; the Kraken, as black as midnight, lurking in the water’s depths ready to strike its prey. His head whips around as he surveys the area and soon he spots Sonic, a slick mess of tangled quills gripping onto the mossy surface of the rock like it’s his only lifeline. They make eye contact and Sonic, despite the higher ground he’s on, bares his teeth in a threat. While maintaining the fierce eye contact between them, Shadow lowers his body back into the water and disappears from sight and Sonic knows that unless he gets out of this river in the next thirty seconds then there’s a chance he won’t make it out alive.

He slips and scrabbles on the moss, trying to right himself in a panicked frenzy. There isn’t a stone any reasonable distance away for him to jump onto and make the trip without having to swim, but the creek’s banking is only a few metres away — close enough that he might make it if he can get his footing right. He drags in a shaky breath through his already numb, screaming lungs, before he squats low and takes the leap.

Sonic barely makes it. The top half of his body lands on the grass but his legs don’t, missing the banking and slamming into the muddy embankment below with a wallop. It hurts, but it’s nothing compared to the pain in his lungs and chest; his slumped-over posture means his chest has taken most of the brute force, pressing his already broken ribs tighter into his lungs. 

Sonic nearly blacks out from the pain alone. The edges of his vision fade in white and his eyes roll back and he nearly throws up, but the fear of knowing if he doesn’t get out now he’s unlikely to get out at all spurs him on. With a strangled cry, he knots his fingers into the grass and hauls himself up the embankment, finally collapsing with a splat on the muddy bank.

Before he has the chance to do so much as breathe in Shadow’s already on him, a heavy weight of sopping wet fur and wild, ruby-red eyes that peek out from the dark veil of his quills. He doesn’t do anything at first; he just stares down at Sonic, possessed by the same beast that’s devouring Sonic from the inside, too. A strange moment of stillness passes over them where their heartbeats seem to sync at the point where their cold, wet bodies touch and the world around them dissolves into nothingness.

It's just them, alone, connected by every fibre of their being, breathing each other's air, existing on some separate plane where time has frozen solid. All Sonic can think about is the overwhelming urge to reach up and consume Shadow; to bite his lip, his nose, his cheek, his mouth, to devour him the way dying stars consume each other in their final, brilliant collapse.

And then, in the space of a single blink, reality comes crashing back with the force of a tsunami, and they're immediately at each other's throats again.

Suddenly Sonic’s on top, gripping Shadow by the ears, trying to wrestle and twist his head to the side. Shadow rolls them away from the creek with the kick of his foot, shaking out of Sonic’s hold only to sink his fingers into Sonic’s quills and do the same to him in return. Froth and spittle and energy courses between them, blood on their canines, electricity sparking and lighting up the area in a blue and red haze. Shadow, with the advantage of being on top, presses down on Sonic with enough weight and chaos energy that it feels as if he’s bearing the weight of a thousand Earths down on him, strangling the air from his lungs and forcing all blood to rush to his head.

They aren’t even speaking anymore, just growling and snarling, punctuated with pained yips and cries when one of them lands a blow. Sonic kicks his feet and Shadow shifts so one of his hands reaches behind, pressing his knee flat and painful down onto the dirt. Sonic yowls, gnashing his teeth as Shadow leans in close, back curved like a cat’s, looming over him like a vampire poised to bite its victim.

Possessed and high on the terrifying, frantic energy coursing through him, Sonic’s claws pop out from the tips of his fingers with small, sharp snicks as they pierce through his gloves. He’s never used them before — never had to — but whatever danger his brain believes Shadow poses is enough for his body to act on his behalf. With his claws protruding from the fingertips of his gloves like tiny, hooked daggers, Sonic frees his right arm and raises it high to the sky, haloed by the waning, evening sun, ready to swipe down. He’s reminded in that brief moment of his hesitation on the moon, when Shadow had looked at him with those sad, hollow eyes and begged for him to kill him, but the eyes looking at him now are alive and on fire, urging him further and further and further and Sonic is ready to swipe, to lay into him like Shadow hasn’t been hesitating with.

With a roar that tears out of his throat like a battle cry, Sonic swipes his clawed hand down to slice through Shadow’s chest.

It cuts through empty air, a fast slash that hits nothing until his hand slams into the ground beside him. Shadow, who had been poised to deliver what might have been a killing blow just moments before, has vanished.

A yell rips through the forest as Shadow is torn from Sonic’s body and thrown across the forest in a black blur. The trees his body hit splinter upon impact, splitting clean in half as he barrels through the woods and disappears out of sight into the thick greenery like a fired cannonball. 

Sonic blinks stupidly, chest heaving as he lifts his head to survey the destruction. The forest is thick and dense here and Shadow’s impact has carved out a shredded pathway, leaving split trees and torn foliage from his impact. Sonic’s head falls back down to the ground with a thud . He stares up at the bruised purple sky and tries to figure out what the hell just happened.

“What the hell,” Sonic says, voicing his thoughts aloud, dumb, his voice hoarse and dry. He pushes up to his elbows. He may be concussed.

The sound of leaves and dry branches crunching underfoot comes from somewhere to his left. Sonic blinks repeatedly, trying to force his double vision back into focus, and steadies himself on his planted hands to prevent toppling over as a wave of vertigo rocks him forward. Definitely concussed.

He sways his gaze up and blinks heavily, languidly, as the blurry outline of the Shadow-snatching culprit comes into view. Sonic first notices the scuffed, dirtied tips of the shoes — red, with green socks. His eyes drift up and up, past the clenched fists, past the tightly gritted teeth, until he meets a pair seething, furious purple eyes. “Uh oh.”

“Get up,” Knuckles orders, his low timbre crackling at the edges like a fire.

Knuckles doesn’t wait for him. He stomps over to his crippled body on the dirty forest floor and hoists Sonic up roughly by the bicep, setting him steady on his two feet. Pins and needles rush to his toes and it hurts to put weight on them but he doubts Knuckles, this Knuckles, the same Knuckles who’s looking at him like he’s one move away from throwing Sonic over his shoulder and marching him home, will humour his complaints. “What are you doing here?” Sonic asks, even though he knows it’s the wrong thing to say, because the right thing to say would be nothing at all.

Knuckles, face screwed up in pure fury, slowly turns to Sonic. All fight having left him, Sonic shrinks a little under his disappointed glare, sagging under the bruises and shame. He wonders if part of Knuckles’ fury stems from the hurt he must be feeling, from knowing that he’s maybe the last person in the family to find out about Sonic’s not-so-little secret.

Knuckles takes a look at the state of him; his sagged shoulders, injuries, dirty fur and red-rimmed eyes, and the fury leaves him in a deep sigh. He shakes his head, quills swaying with the motion. “Him.” Knuckles nods his head up, so Sonic follows his gaze.

Above, hovering like a riverfly, Tails crouches amongst the treetops with his hands clenched in tight fists to his chest, barely concealing his distress. Sonic’s heart sinks, ears drooping on his head in mortification. “What…?”

“He flew me over here when your pulse started racing to a dangerous level,” Knuckles explains, tapping the communicator on his wrist. Sonic looks down and lifts the cuff of his glove, and surprise flashes across his expression when the communicator blinks back up at him. He had totally forgotten he was wearing it.

Knuckles’ lips purse into a thin line. “You should have told me.”

Sonic feels his heart climb up his throat. He feels like he’s looking down at the scene from a bird’s-eye view rather than living it. He can see Knuckles, he can see himself, he can see Tails, but he doesn’t feel present. Maybe it’s the concussion talking, or maybe it’s his mind's way of protecting itself from the full realisation of what just transpired.

“I couldn’t risk anyone else knowing about him.”

“Not about Shadow, you fool,” Knuckles’ frown deepens. “About this — meeting a dangerous foe and the risk it poses. We are a team, Sonic. You don’t have to walk into battles alone any more.”

Sonic keeps his head downturned but flicks his gaze back up to meet Knuckles’. He’s already looking straight at him. There’s not an ounce of judgement there for what Sonic has done; pragmatic and blunt, he sees the situation without the heavy veil of charged emotions Shadow and Sonic share. Despite the fact that he’s been kept in the dark when everyone else wasn’t, it doesn’t matter to him, not at this moment. Knuckles is just disappointed Sonic hadn’t thought to confide in him that he could’ve been in danger. 

He goes to shrug but his shoulder stiffens when his muscles tense. Sonic grunts, and holds his shoulder as he moves it in its rotator cuff, wincing at the pain. That definitely needs icing. “In my defence, I didn’t expect it to end like this.”

“Then you’ve been blinded by your own emotions.” Knuckles shakes his head. “Anyone else would have known it would end like this.”

“How much do you know? About…” Sonic nods his head towards the carved, destroyed pathway through the trees, “this?”

Knuckles grunts. “Now? Enough to form judgement.”

With a clap of thunder that seems to split the air itself, Shadow comes exploding back out of the forest with a furious cry. He has dirt smeared up his cheeks and twigs caught in his quills but he pays it no heed, making a beeline for Sonic like a bloodhound with blinkers on. 

Knuckles, bigger than the both of them and with his rationale still intact, catches Shadow with ease. He picks him up by the scruff of his neck and gives him a harsh shake like he's a badly-behaved animal before slamming him, fist around his throat, to the tree. “Behave.”

“Stop interfering!” Shadow barks, struggling against the grip with thrashing limbs and twisting joints. He’s stronger than Knuckles, but he’s desperate and wild, with all of his common sense drowned beneath the bloodthirsty drive of anger and thirst for revenge. Knuckles, calm and collected, overpowers him with insulting ease. “Keep your filthy hands off of me!”

Knuckles draws his fist back with Shadow’s neck still held tight and gives him another shake before he slams him back up against the tree. Sonic’s mouth gawps open, leaning against a nearby tree for support as he watches Knuckles discipline Shadow like he’s a disobedient puppy.

“Get up, Sonic,” Knuckles demands. The tone in his voice has Sonic jumping to attention like a well-trained soldier, fighting tooth and nail against the vertigo that threatens to bowl him over where he stands.

Shadow gnashes and fights, his movements turned erratic and jerky. He’s trying to bite the hand holding him upright and kick his legs to reach Knuckles, like a dying animal making its last stance against the predator that has it pinned, but the way Knuckles has him gripped means the efforts are futile, and quite frankly, a little embarrassing to watch. “Get off of me!”

“You need to calm down,” Knuckles’ cool, calm tone retorts. He releases him by the throat, and shoves him to the side. Shadow stumbles but catches himself fairly quickly, knees bent and legs soft, like he’s poised ready to fight again. “You are both behaving like savages.”

Shadow marches forward once he gets his bearings with a finger pointed square at Knuckles’ face, his long strides bringing them toe-to-toe. The fury he’d directed at Sonic has been redirected to Knuckles, spurred on by the tone he’s being spoken to in. Knuckles can sound patronising, but it’s unintentional; Sonic only knows that after living with him for two years, and unfortunately, Shadow doesn’t have the blessing of knowing Knuckles’ words are largely impersonal.

The height difference between them also doesn’t do much in his favour; Shadow, standing at his full height, just about reaches Knuckles’ chin. “You should keep your nose out of—”

Knuckles slaps Shadow’s hand away with the back of his boxing glove, face twisting into a frown. “You are letting your anger consume you, hedgehog. It would be wise to let that go.”

Shadow's expression contorts with rage. His breathing comes in heavy puffs through bared, pointed canines, and his features have pulled tight with a fury that transforms his usually composed face into something almost feral. Realising he's not getting the rise out of Knuckles that he wants, he turns his attention to Sonic, who’s watching from the sidelines and clutching his rib with a dirtied, bloodied glove, hunched-over and a little pathetic. “You can’t even fight by yourself now, Sonic? Have to get your lackeys to step in for you?” he goads.

The words are gasoline on the flames of Sonic's anger. He lurches forward, straightening his battered frame and cracking his knuckles with intent to harm. “Don’t you dare call him that!”

“Or what?” Shadow spits. “What are you going to do? You can’t even beat me without the help of the Chaos Emeralds.”

Sonic’s numb, pained legs carry him forward even when his body screams for him to stay back; not only because he’s already pushed himself beyond the realms of his capability, but because it recognises that he’s walking into the lion’s den. He’s not just fighting Shadow anymore — someone who recovers almost as quickly as he’s injured — but Knuckles, too, who won’t spare a second thought before picking Sonic up just like how he picked up Shadow. “You’re just mad that you got your ass handed to you by someone bigger than you for once,” Sonic growls.

Shadow’s face pulls into a snarl. “I don’t see why you think you’re in any position to say that.”

“I can recognise when I’ve been beat.” Sonic points a finger square at Shadow’s chest in the sparse few metres separating them, inches from stabbing him between the ribs. “You can’t.”

“I can’t?! You can barely stand on your own two legs if it isn’t without the help of your lackeys!”

Sonic’s laugh barks through the surrounding trees like a ringing gunshot. “I beat you pretty damn good without either of them before!”

“As if! You barely managed to get your hands on me without the Chaos Emeralds’ power! You’re delusional!”

“You’re insufferable!”

Shadow scoffs, taking a few steps to bridge the distance between them until they’re nose-to-nose and the words are being spoken using each others’ breath. “You act so high and mighty but you’re just weak. All bark, and no bite.”

“I’m all bark and no bite?! Look who’s talking!”

“Did I stutter?”

“I don’t know, Shadow — you’re so freaking quiet I can barely hear you above the…the sound of the stick up your ass!”

“Wh — that doesn’t even make any sense!”

“Yeah, well—”

Knuckles punches a tree beside them, and a thunderclap washes over the forest to drown out their bickering. “Enough!” he bellows.

Sonic and Shadow halt where they remain standing toe-to-toe, startled by the sudden noise, and it’s then they realise just how quiet the forest has become around them, broken only by their heaving, laboured breaths.

They stand there looking utterly wrecked, covered in dirt and debris, still dripping from their tumble in the creek, the adrenaline finally beginning to crash and leave exhaustion in its wake. While Shadow has since healed his injuries, Sonic bears the full brutal catalogue of their fight: sporting a mean, purple bruise on his abdomen, a gash on his calf, a shiner on his jaw, and a hundred yellowing bruises and weeping cuts on the pointy angles of his body. Both have blood matting their fur, and standing next to Knuckles — pristine and strong and dominant — they look pathetic, like two rabid animals fighting over the last scrap of food.

“Won’t you two listen to yourselves? What are you even arguing about?” Knuckles’ low timbre demands. He faces them with open body language, hands by his side with his palms facing out; giving them the floor to address their grievances with him as the mediator. Sonic takes a few steps back from Shadow, putting some safe distance between them as shame floods his system at Knuckles’ words. “You have allowed this anger to consume you, forgetting that you and that blue idiot have nearly decimated the forest. Need I remind you that this very area is consistently being patrolled by G.U.N.? You complain about your safety but fail to realise you are practically demanding attention with the ruckus you are causing.”

Knuckles’ piercing gaze shifts to Sonic. "And you — you know better than to let your anger consume you like this, particularly after what happened last time.”

Usually proud and defensive, even Sonic knows he can’t refute that. He accepts the reprimand with his tail between his legs, dry mouth gluing closed as Knuckles scalds him. From above, taking the lull in the atmosphere as his cue, Tails hovers down and sticks himself to Sonic’s side like a limpet, wet tears darkening his muzzle.

Sonic, aching with injuries that throb at every little movement he makes, pushes through the pain to cup Tails’ damp face. “Hey,” he whispers, stroking some of his tears and snot away. “Why are you crying?”

“‘cause I thought you were both going to kill each other—”

“Hey, hey,” Sonic chides as Tails dissolves into another round of hiccoughing sobs. While Tails has never shied away from a fight and has faced plenty in the last two years they’ve been together, Sonic’s not blind to the fact that what just happened between himself and Shadow transcends their idea of ‘normal’ conflict. They’ve been part of battles against Eggman together but those were humane, almost playful, as if Eggman was no real threat in the end. 

But this?

Sonic had popped his claws for the first time in his life and had, for a moment, lost himself to the intensity of his emotions he only ever seems to experience when he’s around Shadow. When it happened before on the Moon, when he had gripped Shadow’s chest with the intent to end it all right there, the rational part of his brain had been able to pull him back from the edge before his anger tipped him over.

This time had been different. Sonic had been utterly possessed, hadn't been present in his own body, hadn't been his complete, rational self when Shadow had pinned him down. He'd extended those claws with the intent to defend, to wound, and maybe even to kill.

He swallows down the swell of bile burning the back of his throat. If Knuckles hadn’t intervened, who knows where they’d be right now? Maybe he would’ve landed his blow. Maybe Shadow would’ve crushed his chest and squeezed his heart until it popped. Maybe they would’ve killed each other, torn each other to shreds, blinded by their white-hot rage and dying at each others’ hands. 

Tails’ head burrows into his side. The pain in his ribs spikes at the pressure but it brings him back down to Earth, away from the spiralling, dark thoughts rushing around his head. Sonic’s beaten, bruised arms come up to wrap around his shoulders, hugging him close to his chest while he cries. “It’s alright, buddy.”

Tails’ muffled voice cries into his chest: “If only I hadn’t tested that fur then none of this would’ve happened.”

“Shh,” Sonic hushes firmly. “No. None of this is your fault.”

The charged atmosphere has shifted; gone is the fight and the adrenaline and the fury, and in its wake is an uncomfortable silence. Where Sonic is distracted with comforting his crying brother, Shadow stands isolated with no one but his own turbulent thoughts for company.

Knuckles, ready with wise words, steps forward. With a grunt he claps a hand on Shadow’s shoulder; he’s not an ally, but he’s extending companionship in what he knows firsthand is a very, very lonely moment. “I understand your fear,” he says in a low, measured timbre. “I may not see eye-to-eye with you, but I am not a fool, and I can see how frightened you are of being held captive again. But you must understand — and I’m saying this truthfully, as I do not lie — everything that Sonic has done has been done with the intention of protecting you.”

Shadow glances away to the splintered treeline, his eyes suddenly hot and burning. He crosses his arms over his chest in a defensive, self-soothing gesture as Knuckles continues: “That does not mean that he should have kept you in the dark for as long as he did, as I understand that it likely feels that he’s breached your trust.” Knuckles gives Shadow’s shoulder a jostle. “He may be stupid, and an idiot, and tactless, and—”

“Hey,” Sonic protests.

Knuckles clears his throat, and continues: “He may be all of those things, but he is not malicious.”

Sonic tucks Tails closer to his side as he watches Shadow go through the motions. While his expression remains neutral and placid to the naked eye — the straight back, the slight frown, the pressed lips — Sonic knows him better than anyone else does, and recognises the tension coiled in every limb on Shadow’s body. His back isn’t just straight; his shoulders are raised, his stomach is clenched, his fingers are flexed, like the tension he feels in his tummy is festering in his blood and it’s flowing to every corner of his body. He’s not just frowning; his nose is wrinkled and his lids are a little lowered and he’s biting his tongue. He’s resigned, giving up, and Sonic feels torn down the middle by the part of him that wants to rush forward, gather Shadow in his arms, and whisk him back to the den, to a safe place where he can recover beneath a warm blanket and gentle coaxes. 

Shadow is refusing to make eye contact with any of them but nonetheless Knuckles persists, an immovable object in the face of an unstoppable force. His strange pragmatism is an anchor in an otherwise confusing, messy situation, and seems to be the one grounding force between the four of them to remain rational and calm. “You can believe what you want. I am not here to try and convince you to think one way or the other, but if I can do anything, I can point out the obvious. He did not intentionally harm you.”

“Whether it was intentional or not doesn’t matter,” Shadow grunts, his voice rough with suppressed emotion. Knuckles' calm reassurance is slowly coaxing him out of his defensive shell, each tiny step at a time. “He lied to me. I asked for one thing — one thing — and he broke that promise.”

Knuckles’ lips purse. “I know.”

Shadow’s chest rises with a stuttering breath. “Whether someone knew, or people knew, is a problem in and of itself. I can deal with that.” He angles his body away as he fights back the tears, shaking off Knuckles’ supportive hand. He feels raw and cracked open like a broken egg, uncertain how to piece himself back together, worried that even the gentlest touch might be enough to send him completely over the edge. “But knowing that he couldn't even tell me… that's what hurts most."

“I know,” Knuckles says with a little more weight behind his words. He’s feeling that, too.

"And now that everyone knows I'm here, that I'm alive, it's far too dangerous to stay." The fine hairs along Shadow's arms stand on end, his hackles contracting with fear at the mere mention of what could happen. "I can't risk going back into stasis. Not again. I can’t lose another fifty years of my life."

“If it is worth any condolence, I will not speak of this to any G.U.N. official,” Knuckles promises with sincerity. “Neither will Tails.”

Shadow responds in a small, tight voice that barely conceals his pain. “Your platitudes don’t matter to me. I don’t know you — I don’t trust you. Your entire family is intertwined with G.U.N.. Nothing is worth taking that kind of risk."

They all fall into silence, even Tails, who has since stopped crying. The forest around them has gone eerily quiet as well, as if the wildlife has fled the scene, leaving only the soft whistle of wind threading through the thick canopy above and their own stilted breathing, as if that alone is too loud a sound for this fragile moment.

Knuckles sighs, and scratches the back of his head in frustration at the problem at hand. “I don’t think right now is the best time to broach these issues. You both need to go and rest.”

“And then what?” Shadow murmurs, his back still turned to the group. “There’s no point to any of this anymore. I’m not safe.” The corner of his mouth twists, and the edges of his words crack. “You may as well just go tell G.U.N.—”

Sonic’s mouth is open before he has the chance to bite back the retort. “We’re not going to betray you to G.U.N.!” Fighting with Shadow feels electric, impossible to resist, like he’s chasing the sight of the flash in his eyes. And he receives it; Shadow turns back around as twin red eyes focus back onto Sonic, away from Knuckles, and behind them reignites a fire. “Why are you being so stubborn? Just listen and—”

“Stop it!” Knuckles demands. “One more word out of you, Sonic, and I will break your skinny little leg!”

“But—”

“One. More. Word.”

Sonic ignores him. The threat isn’t empty but he’d be damned if he doesn’t get his point across. Sonic takes a shaky step forward and Knuckles has already turned around, marching towards him with a clenched fist and a mean look in his eye, so Sonic opens his mouth before Knuckles gets the chance to shut it. “I’m not a hero, Shadow. Being a hero isn’t about taking care of yourself — it’s about taking responsibility for other people, and I tried to do both. It didn’t work. I know that, and I’m sorry.”

Knuckles stops a short distance away, frowning, but giving Sonic the opportunity to finish what he so desperately wants to say. “I wouldn’t have kept it from you if I thought it would endanger you. I just wanted you to have somewhere safe to stay on Earth, and I knew that if you found out that Maddie, Tom, and Tails knew then…well, this would happen.”

Sonic clears the twang of emotions from his throat and continues: “I know it wasn’t my place to decide what was best for you. It’s been killing me inside every time I see you, but you’ve lived such a shitty life that I just wanted to let you experience some of the things that I get to, even if it meant lying to your face.”

Shadow’s brows knit, his placid façade and mask slipping. He doesn't respond immediately, and perhaps that silence is worse than any outright rejection. Sonic's lower lip trembles as he speaks through the fresh wave of tears springing to his eyes, choking on the words he's struggling to voice. It's embarrassing and humiliating, but Sonic is too emotionally and physically exhausted to care about his pride anymore; this feels like his final chance, and he knows it very well may be.

“Like Knuckles said, I — we — get it. You’ve been through a lot of nasty, evil shit, and it’s hurt you as a person.” Sonic gently guides Tails to his side so they remain close, but now he's facing Shadow directly, walking toward him with renewed purpose despite his injuries. “None of that bothered me. I liked — I still like — you for exactly who you are, effed-up history and all.”

Sonic’s breath leaves him in a shaky exhale, and he looks at Shadow, really looks at him, and something in his gaze causes Shadow to straighten. "Are we finished? Are you able to forgive me for keeping this secret from you for so long?"

Shadow turns so he’s facing Sonic now, shoulders drooped. “Sonic—”

“It’s a yes or no question.”

Shadow's mouth opens and closes helplessly, and it's perhaps the first time Sonic has ever seen him so completely lost for words. The evening air carries the scent of pine and shredded grass and damp soil, but neither of them notices. The world has narrowed to this single, suffocating moment between them, everything else reduced to mere white noise. “It’s not that easy,” he finally manages, words wrenching from the pit of his gut.

“I know it isn’t, but I need you to be honest with me.” Sonic raises his open palms and presses them against his own chest, over his racing heart, a gesture that screams: I don’t want to hurt you anymore . He’s raising his white flag, and he’s leaving it up to Shadow to decide if he wants to raise his, too, or take Sonic’s moment of vulnerability as a chance to fully unleash on him. “Look at me and tell me that you can forgive me for screwing this up.”

The silence stretches taut between them, so thick it’s practically malleable. Sonic’s eyes flit over Shadow’s face, watching him battle the conflicting feelings churning in his chest, trying to decide which emotion and whisper of consciousness to follow. It’s a storm that brews in ebbs and flows, clouds growing grey and heavy and dimming the usually bright gleam of his eyes to something dull, something tarnished. 

When Shadow finally speaks, his clear, cold voice rings like a gunshot in the tense silence between them. "What do you want, Sonic?"

Sonic balks. He hadn’t expected the tables to be flipped back on him. “I—”

“You’re putting all of this onus on me but what do you want?” His eyes swivel towards Sonic, landing on him but not really looking, not really seeing him. “What do you want from me?”

“I…” Sonic's throat works visibly as he swallows hard, clicking over the dryness. “I want to see you again,” Sonic responds, the words feeling like taffy in his mouth, caught between his teeth and making it feel like he can’t speak without having to chew his words first. “I want to apologise for what I’ve done, and give you some time to think about it — but I want to see you again. I want to keep seeing you. I want to take you on adventures to places you’ve never been, and listen to your cassettes with you, and read with you, and laugh, and…live, I guess.” Sonic clears away the emotions suddenly high in his throat, and finishes with a cracked voice: “I just want to see you be happy.”

Shadow shifts where he stands and angles his body so the only part of him Sonic can see is his back and a sliver of his face. Even from here, with a limited view, the pain Shadow expresses in every inch of his body is unmistakable, unhidable. It isn’t loud, nor is it bold; it’s quiet and discreet, and he’s breathing like he has twelve broken ribs with each one pressing backwards to pierce his lungs but he’s trying not to let it show. Neither Knuckles or Tails notice it; not like Sonic does. Not like Sonic always notices the small details with Shadow, where every sign and tell is as significant as the next.

“Do you honestly think that’s possible after this?” Shadow asks, his voice so quiet it only reaches Sonic’s ears by the wind’s direction.

“You didn’t ask me what was possible. You asked me what I want.”

Sonic takes the final step to bring him within arm’s reach of Shadow. He sways, vertigo from the concussion causing him to stagger, but he rights himself with a stumble and keeps his feet planted so he can say what he needs to say without toppling over.

Now closer, Sonic has a better look at Shadow. The sight of his expression, now visible in the fading evening’s light, nearly brings Sonic to his knees. Shadow looks like he’s just seen someone he loves die.

Sonic draws in a breath through his nose to bolster himself before he speaks. “I didn’t come here expecting you to forgive me today. I just wanted you to know that I never — ever — did anything that I thought would risk your safety. I gave you the den because I wanted you to have somewhere you could call home, where G.U.N wouldn’t be able to find you. I swore to Tails that he’d never speak a word to anyone, and he didn’t. I kept it totally secret from Knuckles even when everyone else knew. Maddie and Tom haven’t said anything, either. They're lying straight to Walters' face ‘cause I told them I just needed to see you one last time to say what I'm saying now.”

The confession spills out of him in a rush, and when it's finished, he draws a stuttering breath that presses against the cracked ribs in his chest. “I shouldn’t have kept it from you for so long. I’m sorry about that — sorrier than my stupid concussed brain can even begin to express to you. I don’t expect you to forgive me, not yet, and I don’t want this to be the end, but is it…” Sonic wets his lips, trying to find the words to say. “Is it over? Do you think you'll ever be able to trust me again? Would you ever want to see me again after this?”

Shadow remains silent, his back still turned like a wall between them.

“I asked you a question,” Sonic grits out, his voice taking on a sharper edge as desperation bleeds through his tone. “I know you can hear me.”

“How can I trust you after finding out that you broke the one promise I asked you to keep? Why am I always the last person to figure these things out?” Shadow’s words are unsteady, as if they’re not quite sure how to take form; like he’s never been this vulnerable before, and having to force it is like taking his first steps after decades of stillness. He reaches up with the heel of his palm to swipe at the tears threatening to spill from his eyes, his back still resolutely facing Sonic. “How can I ever believe a word you say after you lied to my face for six months straight?”

The words are knives that lodge in Sonic’s gut. He’d expected it, had rehearsed it a thousand times over in his mind, but hearing it aloud is an entirely different kind of torture. No amount of preparation would ever be able to reduce the severity of this blow.

“Okay,” Sonic whispers, a small, brittle smile pulling his lips together, one that doesn’t reach his eyes.

In a sudden, violent motion, Shadow whirls around to face Sonic with a snarl. His composure is finally beginning to crack, revealing the raw hurt he feels beneath that’s written across every square inch of his face, and the tears he tried so valiantly to stop are pooled in his eyes. They shimmer underneath the dying light, and in their reflection Sonic spots himself, wearing the exact same expression on his own face. “Stop it — stop making this worse than it needs to be!” He snarls. "You created this mess, not me! You're expecting me to just... sweep this under the rug and pretend it never happened? Why are you making me the villain here? This isn’t okay! I’m not okay!"

“I’m not asking you to be fine, Shadow! I don’t blame you for the way you feel. I get it, alright? I made peace with knowing if I told you it meant we wouldn’t be able to see each other any more. I just wish things could’ve been different.” He swipes lazily at the tears streaking down his cheeks, no longer caring who sees. He has nothing left to lose, anyway. “I’m not pissed off at you. I’m pissed off at the situation, and I’m pissed off because we could’ve…been something better.”

Sonic swallows the words he nearly chokes on: “I’m pissed because I know that this means you’re not going to be around anymore. That’s why I’m sad. Me asking you if you can trust me is me asking you if I can ever see you again.”

“Good Gaia,” Knuckles murmurs under his breath, his boxing glove pressing to his forehead. “What a mess.”

Tails shuffles over and carefully as he approaches Sonic who’s swaying and unsteady on his feet. Gently, he lifts Sonic's arm and drapes it over his shoulder, keeping his hand on Sonic’s not only as a gesture of physical support, but emotional, too. Tails has grown considerably over the past few months, though he's still slightly smaller than Sonic, so while he can't bear much weight he offers what support he can to his brother. His peers up at Shadow, studying the way he watches Sonic's hunched, bruised form shuffling away with Tails’ guidance, and spots the moment his heart seems to shatter into a thousand little pieces. 

“You two,” Knuckles starts, but Shadow holds a hand up and cuts him across.

“He’s right,” he says. His tone is perfectly level. He’s defeated. There’s no further effort needed to express his grief and it shows in the way that he can barely keep his eyes focused beyond somewhere into the middle-distance. “I can’t trust you anymore, Sonic. Staying here any longer compromises my safety in ways I can’t ignore. I wish things could’ve been different, too.” Shadow turns on his heel and bares his face up to the strange moon. “But, you’re right. This couldn’t have ever worked out between us.”

Sonic can’t respond. Any word would come out in a cry.

As the night closes in on them like the curtains being drawn to a play, the warm summer of Green Hills seems to reach its end. The birds do not return, and they do not sing, keeping quiet in collective mourning. Shadow doesn’t look over his shoulder, nor does he bid a farewell glance to Sonic. He simply exhales, like a dying animal giving its final breath, before he blips out of existence with a flash of red lightning, leaving the three of them alone to gather the scattered fragments of two shattered hearts that may never heal completely.

Chapter Text

The walk home is — well, a walk.

It’s slow and lumbering, harped by Sonic’s foul attitude and limp. The sun has long since set and the sky is dark but clear, sparse bar a few wayward clouds that obscure the moon behind its milky grey wisps. They tread down the grassy verge and away from the forest clearing with heavy footsteps and jilted breaths, and Sonic can feel the weight of a pair of blue eyes on his side but he doesn’t have it in him to look at where the pressure is coming from. 

He feels raw and exposed and embarrassed and two wrong questions away from bursting into tears. He knew that the discussion wasn’t going to end well; after all, this was Shadow’s safety they were talking about, and the one thing he’s been able to finally have — a semblance of freedom — was snatched from him. Part of Sonic hoped they’d be able to talk it out, cry it out a little, and then come to an amicable solution before skipping into the sunset with held hands and more items to tick off the bucket list. 

Part of him now acknowledges that that was a pipe dream. Shadow was totally justified in freaking the fuck out, Sonic isn’t going to pretend like he wasn’t, but he hadn’t expected it to spiral out of control. He hadn’t expected to feed into the chaos they created with his own emotions, blinded by the need to be heard over being right. He hadn’t expected to be brushing knuckles on the bridle-path during one moment, only to bare his claws in the next. 

The sight of his own hand ready to strike and raised next to Shadow’s face with his bared teeth and slitted pupils is seared into Sonic’s memory. He knows that had it not been for Knuckles, Sonic might be bleeding out in Green Hills right now. Maybe Shadow would, too, if Sonic had cut deep enough so that his rapid healing abilities weren’t even fast enough to save him.

A deep, unhappy sigh leaves Sonic’s nose at the memory. Just what had possessed him to take it so far? Where were the breaks to pull himself back to reality?

Why couldn’t I stop, and why didn’t I want to?

A gentle hand touches his elbow. Sonic glances down as Tails, tears and snot dried up, looks up at him with huge eyes. It’s a sight Sonic would usually welcome but he doesn't really want to be seen or perceived at all right now, and as much as Tails’ concern is sweet, Sonic feels oversensitive and prickly. Something as simple as affection is like sandpaper to a raw wound. “Sonic, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he grunts, curt, shaking off Tails’ hand.

“The fox is only trying to comfort you,” Knuckles defends gruffly. He steps in between Sonic and Tails, putting some distance between them, as Sonic holds onto his bad shoulder and walks a little further ahead by picking up his pace. “You are being petulant.”

“I want to be left alone.”

“We’re all heading in the same direction, so that’s not possible.”

“Yeah, well,” Sonic responds unintelligently, saying something for the sake of saying something. He doesn’t finish his trail of thought, and keeps his mouth closed grumpily instead, feet flattening as the hill pans out into a dirt path that takes them through a hiking trail. 

Knuckles’ longer legs reach him fairly quickly. He doesn’t touch Sonic and doesn’t walk side-by-side but he does make himself known, staying just within the realms of his peripheral vision; a smudge of red in an otherwise dark forest. There are no lights here other than the cloud-veiled moon above, drawing them all into enclosed darkness where the path ahead is barely illuminated. “We are here, Sonic.” Tails’ pace picks up a little, too, to bolster Knuckles’ reassurance. “Whether you want us here or not, we are here.”

Knuckles’ kind, honest words have a sharp lump forming in Sonic’s throat. He’s glad for the darkness and the small amount of distance between them because it obscures the tears filling his eyes and the crumpled look on his face as he fights the swelling balloon of upset filling his chest. Sonic doesn’t respond because he doesn’t think he can do it without cracking, but it doesn’t matter, because Knuckles continues anyway. “You may feel like you need to carry this burden alone, but you do not. Even if you don’t want to speak or say anything, we are always going to be here.”

A small hand gently slips into Sonic’s right one, giving his fingers a squeeze. Sonic glances down and spots Tails’ arm and his little face, still gazing up at him with those huge, kind eyes. He can’t muster a smile but he does squeeze his hand back, and Tails returns it. 

The rest of the walk is spent in silence but it feels lighter, almost. Knuckles’ words have permeated the final protective layer Sonic had up around himself, the one that carried the burden of causing all of this harm in the first place. He knows he’s messed up; by making Tails keep a secret for so long, by subjecting Tom and Maddie to a week of sleepless nights, by keeping Knuckles in the dark the entire time, and in meeting Shadow under false pretences, and the cumulative burden has weighed down so heavily on his chest Sonic feels like he’s drowning beneath it all. The pressure is immense and it’s still there, but having Tails’ hand holding his left one and Knuckles’ calming, protective presence on his right, Sonic feels a little more prepared to carry the burden forward. He knows it isn’t going anywhere, the damage has already been done, but having the support of his brothers by his side no matter what eases the nasty, cold hold squeezing a vice around his heart.

The Wachowski’s house comes into view an indefinite amount of time later. Sonic doesn’t know how long they’ve walked for but the moon is now high in the sky and the cicadas’ choir is deafening, drowning out the sound of their heavy footsteps. The patio’s light, shrouded by fluttering moths and gnats, illuminates the front drive as two figures wait for them on the porch with twin pairs of folded arms and frowns.

“Where the heck have you three been?” Maddie calls as they step onto the threshold. She’s still in her vet scrubs from the day earlier, as if she arrived home, saw the empty home, and went straight into mom-mode. “You’ve been gone for hours — we’ve been worried sick!”

As the drive’s incline grows steeper Sonic’s footsteps become difficult, particularly due to the oozing claw-marks in his calf, so Knuckles and Tails hang back to support him up the hill. The broken ribs don’t make the task any easier but Sonic pushes through the pain and takes each breath shallowly and slowly, and Knuckles, cautious of that, adjusts his grip so he’s holding Sonic up by his elbow instead of his shoulder. As soon as he comes into the light her tune changes and her expression goes from angry to concerned. “What happened?”

Tom storms out from behind Maddie, hurrying down the porch’s wooden steps in his slippers. “What did he do to you?” he demands furiously as he comes down to crouch in front of Sonic and reaches out to hold him still by the side of his arms. Knuckles and Tails part away, giving them both space. “Look at your face! You’ve had the feathers beaten out of you!”

“Nothing happened,” Sonic defends, trying to shake off Tom’s hold. 

But, Tom is nothing if not a worried parent who won’t let petulant complaints deter him. He holds Sonic’s face still by his chin and tilts his head to the side to inspect the shining, purple bruise blooming across one of his cheekbones, the skin split and sore. “Sonic, what the actual—”

“It was him, wasn’t it?” Maddie’s voice rings over Tom’s shoulder. Her arms are still crossed, and her face is a maelstrom of the same anger Tom has. “I knew it. I knew this was going to happen.”

Sonic tilts his head away, and refuses to respond to either of them. He squares his jaw as his teeth clench, biting down on the words he can’t bring himself to admit. Of course it was Shadow. Who else would it be?

Understanding that he’s getting nowhere with Sonic, Tom turns his attention to Knuckles. Seeing no point in beating around the bush, Knuckles speaks the words Sonic refuses to: “There was a heated argument between the both of them that ended in a fight.”

“Sonic…” Tom chides exasperatedly, giving his body a little shake. “Why, dude? You know better than to pick fights with him.”

It touches on Sonic’s already-fried nerves. He snatches his arm away from his touch and storms up the drive, damning his limp that tries to slow him down. “Sonic!” Tom calls as he goes, but Sonic ignores him, stomping up the steps and ignoring Tom’s concerned calls over his shoulder.

He moves through the house in a blur, taking his shoes off by the stairs (because even if he’s angry, he’s not going to track mud through the carpet) before he climbs up each one with a wince. Now that the adrenaline’s run off, he’s sure he’s broken a rib or two and sprained his ankle. Nothing time and a little bit of hot and cold therapy won’t fix, but it’s the cherry on top of his shit cake, and here, finally away from everyone and everything, he allows himself to break down.

As he limps through the upstairs landing to get to the bathroom he sighs out his bundled-up energy, the air leaving him in a groan. He doesn’t cry — Sonic’s done enough crying over the last few months to last him a lifetime — but the cathartic release that would usually come with it leaves him through that breath. It’ll hit him harder in the morning when he realises just how much of a mess he’s made, but for now he feels a sort of detached upset, like he knows he’s lost something big but doesn’t quite know how to move on from it yet, or understands how deep the gap will be in its wake.

He shuts the bathroom door and locks it for good measure. No one will interrupt him if the shower’s on, but Tails can be a little clingy when he’s upset and there have been times when he’s waited just until Sonic’s decent before coming into the bathroom and checking on him. As much as he adores his brother, he wants to be alone right now.

Sonic showers himself clean, scrubbing the dirt and grime and blood from his fur. Cuts and grazes litter his body from his shins to his forehead, with a particularly sore one stretching the length of his back from when Shadow had dropped him to the ground and he barely saved himself through the spindash. It stings under the water spray, throbbing in time with the thrum of his pulse. Sonic feels like one big bruise being poked and prodded at, exhaustion seeping down into his bones; it’s like they’re made of glass, like one wrong move could shatter his skeleton. The physical exertion, coupled with the emotional exertion, has drained him of every last drop of energy. If he doesn’t crash soon, he’s probably going to start hallucinating.

Sonic hops out and dries himself down, keeping the towel cupped over his face for a few moments to revel in the dark. He draws in a deep breath through his nose before he finishes drying the rest of his body, hanging the damp towel up, and brushing his teeth while avoiding his own gaze in the steamy mirror. 

Clean and finally ready to unwind, Sonic unlocks the bathroom door. Unsurprisingly, at the foot of the doorway is a curled-up Tails, his knees tucked to his chest and his ears folded flat onto his head. The noise startles him, and his claws scrabble on the floor as he jumps to stand, worried eyes roaming over Sonic’s injured body. “Are you okay, Sonic?” he asks, paws tucked to his chest. “Are you hurting?”

“I’m fine, Tails,” Sonic says, more curt than he’d intended. To soften the harshness of his tone he ruffles the tuft of hair on top of Tails’ head before he walks past him, heading for the stairs to the attic. 

“Do you want to come down for some juice? Tom, Maddie, and Knuckles are waiting in the kitchen—”

“I’m fine, Tails,” Sonic repeats, sharper this time. He stops, his back turned to Tails, and sighs, head dropping between his shoulder blades. He’s only doing this because he’s concerned. Sonic draws in another deep, calming breath, and exhales it through his nose. Don’t take this out on him. “I just want to be alone, okay, buddy?”

“Are you sure, Sonic?”

“I’m sure.”

Tails doesn’t push any further than that. He wants to; Sonic can see it in his eyes, the way his chin juts out, the way his tongue presses to the roof of his mouth, but he bites it all back because it’s not what Sonic needs. Despite his young age, Tails is socially aware and mature enough to know that sometimes enough is enough.

Sonic climbs up the stairs practically on all fours and shuts the bedroom’s hatch door on Tails’ face, his pinched expression staring up at Sonic from the base of the staircase. He’s tempted to lock the door but it would only mean having to get up and unlock it later when Knuckles and Tails retire to bed, so he leaves it be and climbs under his covers. He doesn’t arrange himself, he doesn’t fluff up his pillows, he just lies there, staring up at the skylight’s window, as exhaustion pulls him under in a quick tug and Sonic is dead to the world.

BANG!

Sonic startles awake as if he’s been physically ripped from slumber.

BANG! BANG! BANG! sounds from downstairs and through the open window in their bedroom, carrying up from the patio below. Sonic pushes up on numb, sleep-heavy arms, and immediately cries out at the sharp pain that stabs his lower abdomen. He curls up into a ball and falls back onto the bed, hands clutching over his ribcage. To say he’s in pain would be a gross understatement. Sonic is wracked with a full-body throb that actually frightens him in its intensity.

His brain takes sluggish steps into wakefulness, trying to navigate the exhaustion and the searing red-hot brand of pain simultaneously. A wave of nausea rolls over him that he has to breathe through to try and fight the urge to upchuck what little he has in his stomach. Once the pain subsides, though only a little, Sonic takes a shaky breath and pushes back up to sit.

He glances blearily around the room. It’s still pretty dark as the sun has barely risen so he can’t make out much other than some shapes and shadows in the low lighting. In the other corners of their bedroom, Tails and Knuckles are in no better shape than Sonic is, roused awake abruptly from the loud knocks from below. Knuckles, still partially dead to the world with a silk sleeping mask pulled over his face, jolts awake with a mumbled huh? Tails is the only one of them that looks alert, sitting upright in bed with his tails fanned and twitching around his lap like two live animals with a mind of their own. He makes eye contact with Sonic across the room, a furrow in his brow, when another three heavy thuds knock downstairs in quick succession: BANG! BANG! BANG!

“What the heck?” Tails grumbles, swinging his legs out of bed to stand. Sonic does the same albeit with a lot more difficulty, having to physically lift his legs to hang over the bed and push to stand using the bedside table on his right. He walks like there’s pins in the soles of his feet and breathes shallowly through each jab to his lower abdomen, joining Tails by the open side-facing window. The sky is still dark and dusky, all navies and greys and slim streaks of orange, so it isn’t really easy to see down below. Nonetheless, Sonic nudges the window open wider so he can poke his head out of the frame and peer down into the garden to get a better look at where the noise is coming from.

“Oh, crap,” he croaks, blinking with wide, dry, and now-alert eyes at the barrage of huge, black G.U.N. military vehicles in their front garden and side street. They line the road like soldiers, armed to the teeth, while the actual soldiers stand crowded half-a-dozen at the front porch with military-grade equipment in their hands like they’re about to storm a terrorist base.

It seems that their fight yesterday hadn’t gone unnoticed, after all.

“What is it?”

“Company,” Sonic murmurs, pulling back so Tails can look out the window, too.

When he catches sight of G.U.N.’s militia his tails stand on end, bushy and startled. “Oh, nuts,” he whispers, voice tightening and cutting off with a squeak.

From beneath them on the first floor of the house a door opens with a creak. It’s Tom and Maddie, and they’ve clearly gotten the memo that there’s a few guests outside after having the door knocked so hard it shook the foundation of their home. Sonic and Tails share a concerned look between them. “Do you think…?”

“I don’t know,” Sonic responds, voice dry and fragile from the abuse it was put through yesterday, though he’s able to pass it off with the low volume he’s speaking in. He turns around and heads to Knuckles’ bed, who’s fortunately a little more awake than he was a moment ago, but still pretty dead to the world. Sonic gives his shoulder a jostle and lifts up one corner of his sleeping mask. “Knuckles, wake up.”

“Guh,” Knuckles groans, blinking up with hazy eyes at Sonic. “Muh.”

“G.U.N. are outside.”

That does the trick. The words don’t register immediately; Knuckles’ sleepy brain has to digest them, but when they sink in, they startle him awake as if they’ve physically stung him. He jolts upright and moves to stand, pulling his eye mask off the rest of the way with a quick shove. His quills, much like Sonic’s, are unruly and stuck up at strange angles but he’s otherwise alert and ready to take on the day. “Is that where the noise is coming from?” he asks, voice lowered to a murmur. 

“I think so,” Sonic murmurs back, one of his hands holding onto his opposite side’s bicep. He rubs the skin there, eyes downcast towards the attic’s door. “Tom and Maddie have just woken up.”

“Do we go down?” Tails whispers, creeping up to stand next to Sonic. He tucks himself to his side, and Sonic doesn’t fight it, letting him find comfort in the touch.

“No,” Knuckles responds, curt. “Be still.”

They all fall into pin-drop silence, ears pricked towards the floor. The upstairs landing creaks as Maddie and Tom head down its length and down the stairs. Sonic holds his finger to his lips before he tiptoes over to the hatch in the floor and crouches low, pressing his ear to the gap between the closed door and the floorboards. Everything’s a little clearer now; he can’t quite make out what Tom and Maddie are saying but he knows they’re speaking to each other, and going by the tone, they’re just as startled as the three of them are. He makes out Maddie hissing: “Open it!” before the latch clicks and the front door creaks open.

Sonic, without knowing what is said, knows immediately who’s speaking just by the sound of the voice. “Crap crap crap,” he whispers, pushing from his hands and knees to stand back up, lungs protesting something furious.

“What?” Knuckles prompts, serious face moving close next to Sonic’s.

“It’s Walters.”

Knuckles exhales a quick, surprised breath. “Oh dear,” he says. Understatement of the century.

Sonic sucks his bottom lip into his mouth. The three of them know exactly why he’s there; what other reason could there be? There’s two huge craters in the Green Hills' forest — one from Sonic’s impact after the kick, and one from Shadow’s impact after Knuckles threw him across the woodland — and a very injured hedgehog nursing a few broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder in the upstairs loft of the Wachowski home. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to take a guess at who could’ve caused that kind of destruction.

How am I going to face him? Who does Walters want to speak to? Is he just here to check out why there’s such a huge crater in the forest, or does he know Shadow’s involved? Is this going to fall solely on me, or are Knuckles and Tails going to be implicated because they were at the site too? Are Tom and Maddie going to be interrogated? Will Walters find out they’ve been keeping silent over the last month despite knowing that Shadow’s alive, much less in Green Hills?

“Sonic.” Knuckles’ strong, clear voice breaks through his haze. His wary eyes meet Knuckles’ as he places a heavy fist on his shoulder. “Remember what I said. We are here.”

Sonic nods quickly, sharply. A breath he didn’t realise he was holding leaves him in a stuttering rush, carrying with it some of the stress congested behind his ribcage. “Thanks, Knux,” Sonic returns, giving his bicep a friendly slap. “Appreciate it.”

Knuckles’ hard expression softens at the edges, happy with Sonic’s response. He gives his good shoulder another squeeze before he pushes away and paces in a semicircle, holding one of his hands to his chin while he thinks. “We do not have long,” he murmurs, mindful of being quiet while Walters, Tom, and Maddie converse in the foyer. “We need to come up with a consensus on what happened yesterday.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is likely that they will question us separately.” Knuckles grunts, planting his feet, and rubbing his chin with his fist. “If we tell them the truth, they will dig deeper to understand why you were fighting in the first place.”

Sonic blanches. Knuckles is right, and they’re already running out of time to come up with a plan just by having this conversation. “Do we say we were ambushed?” Tails proposes, stepping away from Sonic to mimic Knuckles' semicircle pace. Knowing how important of a topic this is to Sonic, Tails isn’t going to take the back seat when it comes to helping his best friend. “At least that way it doesn’t need a backstory.”

Sonic makes a pained noise at the thought of using that as their cover story. Knuckles’ purple eyes flick to Sonic, noting his distress, before they flick back to Tails. “It is the most sensible option,” he agrees, nodding. “Why does it distress you?”

“I can’t say that,” Sonic whispers. “I can’t throw him under the bus.”

“This is not about ‘throwing him under the bus’, hedgehog. This is about providing a story for G.U.N. that is the least convoluted and least suspicious,” Knuckles counters.

Sonic drops his head into his hands and groans, the sound muffled by his gloves. He swipes his palms down his face and averts his gaze to look off out to the window towards the breaking of dawn. Knuckles is right, he knows that, but Sonic won’t be able to live with himself if he uses Shadow as a shield for himself, particularly when he did nothing wrong in the first place. After a stuttering breath, Sonic reiterates: “But it’s not right. He’s not some nut who jumped us in the middle of the forest for shits and giggles.”

“Guys!” Tails hisses, throwing his hands out in a ‘stop’ motion. “We’re running out of time! We need to decide on something, stat!”

“Let’s tell the truth,” Sonic negotiates. Knuckles and Tails’ head snap around to pin him with a look of worry, but Sonic holds his hands up in placation. “Kind of. Let’s tell them that…that I met Shadow in the forest, totally by chance. He was…” Sonic trails off, scouring his brain for a grain of truth, a grain of something that Walters can latch onto, “...he was looking for me, I guess. Wanting to tie up loose ends, and one thing led to another, ending where we had a fight.”

“That doesn’t make total sense…” Tails says, his words trailing off as he cups his chin in thought. “Why would he be in Green Hills?”

Sonic shrugs. “‘cause he knows that’s where we are. Maybe the guy wanted to settle unfinished business, and came here directly.”

Tails’ brows raise in approval at that, but Knuckles grunts, shaking his head in disapproval. “Why would you and Shadow have fought? Aside from the obvious, of course. Walters will want to know.”

“Maybe he insulted me, or something?”

Tails’ fingers click as an idea dawns on him. “You wanted payback for Tom,” he suggests in a whisper-shout. “That makes sense. The details don’t matter as much as your motivation does. Let’s say that one thing led to another, and you decided to get payback for what he did to Tom back in London.”

“Sure, let’s go with that!”

Their enthusiasm is snuffed out as the floorboards on the upstairs landing creak. The three of them drop into lip-locked silence and hold their breaths as they listen for any other sounds, sharing wary, worried looks. Someone’s coming towards the ladder.

Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles all share a look of wordless communication and agreement before they dive back into their beds and pull the covers over their heads. Knuckles, in an attempt to sell their story, begins to snore loudly. Sonic picks up one of his shoes and launches it towards Knuckles’ bed to shut him up just as, a second later, there’s a tentative knock on the attic’s door.

After giving it a few seconds to really hammer home the convincing acting, Sonic yawns very loudly and pushes to sit up. “Yeah?” he calls out, his voice high to his own ears. Jeez, cringe, he bemoans before the hatch in the attic pushes up and Maddie’s frazzled head pushes up. 

“Hey,” she greets meekly, climbing a few more stairs. “Can I come in?”

Sonic nods, shifting so he’s sitting up a little straighter. If she notices how alert he is and how strangely still Knuckles and Tails are in their beds she doesn’t mention it, keeping quiet as she climbs up the rest of the way and shuts the latch gently so as to not disturb them. Maddie swipes her fingers through her fringe to push it away from her eyes, tucking it behind her ears with a deep, weary sigh. “Everything okay?”

“Walters is downstairs,” Maddie says with no preamble. Sonic gasps, his poor acting skills really being pushed to the limits. “You can drop the act, Sonic. You too, boys.”

Knuckles pretends, again, to snore.

“Knuckles, you’re making it worse,” Sonic groans. 

At least Maddie finds it a little funny, if the tiny smirk on her face is anything to go by. She takes a seat on the foot of Sonic’s bed, his small mattress creaking under her weight. “I mean, who can sleep through a ruckus like that?” she teases.

“Knuckles, apparently,” Sonic mutters, which blossoms Maddie’s smirk into a genuine laugh.

Feeling comfortable at the easy-going attitude she’s displaying, Tails crawls out from under the covers to scurry over to Sonic’s bed. He hops on, sitting next to Maddie, his tails fanning out over her lap. She reaches down and pets one of them idly as Sonic sits up a little straighter to hear her better and Knuckles pads over to join them. “Talk about the element of surprise — it’s freaking five-forty A.M..”

Knuckles remarks: “It is a tactic. He is trying to catch us off-guard.”

“He’s a dick.” Maddie gasps once the word has left her mouth, slapping a hand to her forehead. “Sorry. Profanity.” She drags her hand down her face, pausing at her mouth, before they fall to her lap and her eyes snap back open. They hone in on Sonic, gleaming bright in the low lighting of the room, pinning him where he’s sat. He wasn’t planning on going anywhere anyway, but Maddie’s stare has turned that from a decision to an order. “I don’t know what he knows, but we all know why he’s here, right?”

“What did he say to you downstairs?” Sonic prompts.

“Not much: a fake apology for disturbing us so early, asked if he could speak to the three of you, yadda yadda yadda. Tom’s speaking to him in the kitchen right now.” Maddie runs her fingers through her fringe again, clearly stressed even if her tone doesn’t convey it. “What are you three planning to say to him?”

Sonic shares a look with Tails and Knuckles before he shrugs, fingers knitting together in his lap. He keeps his voice low, cautious that they may be overheard with their company downstairs not as far away as they might feel. “We bumped into each other in the forest. One thing led to another and we had a fight.”

Maddie nods, mulling over his words. “Okay,” she says after a moment, “that could work.”

“Are…” Sonic smacks his lips, unsure how to ask what the question he wants to say. It’s not exactly the right time to say it, but it’s been worrying him ever since Tom and Maddie sat him down at the kitchen island last month. “What if he asks you if you knew?”

“If we knew…?”

“That I’ve been meeting him. That we’re — were — friends.”

Maddie sighs again. The thought’s been weighing on her mind, too. “Well, you guys fought late yesterday evening, and it took him a whole seven-ish hours to mobilise his squad and turn up at our doorstep. I’d like to think that if he knew about anything else any sooner, then we’d have probably already had him knocking on our door, don’t you? That makes me think that if he knew we knew any earlier, then we’d probably not be having this conversation all the way in July.”

Sonic nods to himself. Her logic is reassuring, and it helps tame the twisting pit of nerves in his stomach. “Yeah,” he murmurs, “that’s true.”

“Don’t overthink it.” Her hand comes out to take ahold of his own, giving it a little squeeze where his knuckles meet his fingers. “Tom and I won’t let him speak to you alone.” Maddie places a hand over one the tails in her lap and nods her head in Knuckles’ direction. “You two, too. We’re a family, okay? I’m not gonna let this split us apart.”

Sonic gives her soft hand a squeeze, and she returns it.

They take their time to groom themselves, moving with silent ministrations to comb their fur and re-shape their quills as Maddie sits by the window, watching the G.U.N. barrage outside with clear disgust. With their shoes on and selves a little more preened, ready to face Walters downstairs, Maddie stands and heads to the hatch. “It’ll be fine,” she whispers. “Keep calm.”

Knuckles heads down first, followed by Tails. Maddie catches Sonic by the elbow before he descends and presses a hard kiss to his forehead before she nudges him to follow the other two. Emboldened by her gesture, Sonic hurries down the steps behind Tails and Knuckles as they head toward the sound of voices deeper in the house. The stairs creak beneath their steps and their home, somehow, feels cold.

Sonic moves as best as he can without rousing too much suspicion to his state, but his body is black and blue (no pun intended) and he can barely stand without favouring one leg over the other lest it buckle beneath him. Each breath pushes a rib into his lung but he perseveres with a grimaced smile. If he needs medical attention, it’ll have to wait until after this; he’s not giving Walters a chance to see him in a weakened state.

Sitting in the kitchen around their dining table are two suited-and-booted men on either side of Walters. He looks severe and old, dressed in his trademark dark suit with military embellishments, sparse hair combed over his pale head to make it seem like he has more than he does. On the other side is Tom, still in his pyjamas and dressing gown, looking just as exhausted as he likely feels. When he catches sight of the four of them in the doorway he relaxes, if only marginally, but he doesn’t look any happier. He’s just as tired as Sonic is and it shows in the heavy bags beneath his eyes and 5-o’clock shadow on his jaw.

“We really couldn’t do this, I don’t know, when the sun is up?” Tom bemoans for what Sonic imagines isn’t the first time. He screws the heels of his palms into his eyes with another tired groan. “Would it have made a difference?”

Walters, with a palsy tremor to his wrists, places his hands flat on the table. “This is a matter of national security, Mr. Wachowski. Acting urgently is a top priority for the safety of the United States.”

“Is it?” Tom stifles another yawn, hands falling from his eyes. “Could you at least have given us the heads up?”

Walters doesn’t dignify him with a response. The cool, sometimes jovial man that usually visits has been replaced by a hardened version Sonic doesn’t recognise. This Walters sits with his back ramrod straight and watches the five of them with small, beady, unblinking eyes. The fine hairs on the back of his neck stand up and Sonic, inexplicably, has a feeling that this version of Walters is out for blood. Whether it’s because he’s failed at his mission of keeping Shadow secure not once, but now twice, or because he knows more than he’s letting on, he’s not playing ball. That, or maybe he’s just cranky because it’s early for him, too. 

“I’ll put on a pot of coffee,” Maddie offers, bidding herself goodbye with a quick nod, effectively leaving the three of them for Tom to look after.

Sonic is the first to move. He hobbles over to where Tom sits and takes the chair next to him. It’s a subtle but intentional sign — a ‘we’re together’ — rather than standing off to the side to take the opportunity to yap cheekily. Now’s not the time for it.

Tom places a hand on the base of Sonic’s neck, warm and callused, a comforting weight and a sign of protection. Tails follows suit, choosing the chair next to Sonic, while Knuckles stands behind Tom, effectively creating a group of them on one side of the table while the other stands bare. 

A tiny, barely-there smirk pulls at the corner of Walter’s mouth. It’s gone by the time Sonic blinks, but he’s sure he saw it, and it causes Sonic’s plan to suddenly take a nosedive.

Does he know more than just what happened last night? His palms begin to sweat, so Sonic absently clenches his hands in his gloves before stretching his fingers taut in an anxious gesture. Don’t panic. Telling a different story will just make it messier. Stick to the script!

“You’re lucky it’s a Saturday,” Tom grumbles, stifling a yawn in the crook of his elbow. “So, what’s happened for you to bless us at the ass-crack of dawn?”

“I think you know why I’m here, Mr. Wachowski, and why I specifically asked for Knuckles, Sonic, and Tails to join us this morning.” Walters’ wrinkled, thick-knuckles fingers pleat, fingers forming a steeple. His voice is creaky like an old house, struggling beneath the hard tone he’s trying to project. “I don’t think we’ve seen each other in a few months, have we?”

“No, sir,” Sonic responds. He tries not to let the hoarse tone of his voice bleed through into his words.

“Have you been doing well?”

“Yes, sir,” Sonic responds, as does Tails, while Knuckles gives a short grunt and drops the ‘sir’.

“Any new hero escapades that you’ve got going on?”

Sonic, uncomfortable, shifts in his seat. Play it cool, dude. Cool as a cucumber. “I’ve been helping out with the middle school at Green Hills.”

“How wonderful,” Walters remarks. It doesn’t come across as a compliment. “Just yourself?”

“Uh, yeah. Helping ‘em with track and field. Tails’ been tinkering, haven’t you, buddy?”

Tails nods. He doesn’t respond verbally, but does tuck himself closer to Sonic’s side. “I do no such thing,” Knuckles responds. 

“Is that so? I’ve heard you’re rather close with Officer Whipple down at the P.D.”

“Yes. I coach him. He unfortunately requires quite a lot of it.”

“Right,” Walters remarks again in that strange, almost sneering tone. “So, you three understand that this is certainly out of the ordinary for us, as much as it is for you.” He presses his thin lips together, and directs his attention towards Sonic. “Do you understand why I’m here?”

“You don’t have to answer that,” Tom says before Sonic has the opportunity to open his mouth. “Walters, you oughta speak to me before you start speaking to my boys. They’re under eighteen and I’m their legal guardian.”

Walters doesn’t look away from the unblinking, unfaltering staring contest he and Sonic are engaged in. Weak to the pressure, Sonic is the first to look away, glancing to somewhere outside the window, to the shadowy treeline that remains obfuscated by dusk’s dim lighting. “My soldiers informed me of an incident that took place last night in a wooded area not too far from your home,” Walters prompts. 

Tom rubs a hand through his fringe and sighs, as if the conversation is already tiring him out. “What kind of incident?”

“One that I assume Knuckles, Sonic, and Tails were engaged in.”

“You’re gonna have to be a little more descriptive than that,” Tom presses with a small frown. “What kind of incident are we talking about here?”

Walters’ beady eyes flick to one of his men. They nod in acknowledgement, reaching down into their lap before procuring some glossy printed photos from a manila folder kept beneath the table. The soldier slides them across the table; there’s about ten in total, all taken near enough the same time as one another, capturing the scene just as the sun was dipping over the horizon. The three of them stand out like splatters of brightly-coloured paint on an otherwise dark canvas; Sonic, bloodied and battered, with Tails on one side and Knuckles a few feet away with an outstretched finger gesturing at the fourth figure in the photos. Shadow, for the most part, seems to blend into the forest’s dark foliage, noticeable only by his accessories, the gleam of his eyes, and the unmistakable red stripes in his quills. 

Sonic gulps as he looks through them. The first few only capture himself and Shadow, engaged in fisticuffs with expressions so vitriolic, so savage, he hardly recognises himself. The last few capture the moment Shadow departs, leaving the three of them looking very sorry for themselves in his absence.

Next to him, Tom brings the photo of the four of them engaged in a discussion closer, peering down at it with a frown. This is clearly around the time Knuckles was trying to reason with the both of them (unsuccessfully). They stew in silence for the amount of time it takes for Sonic to count his breaths ten times, all the while Tom flips through with his frown growing increasingly heavier and heavier on his face as it seems to weigh down his eyes until they’re nearly at half-mast. 

“Care to explain?” Walters prompts, sitting back in his chair. He speaks without inflection; he’s the one in control of this, and Sonic, disturbed by his lack of engagement, has a sneaking suspicion that these aren’t the only photos he has.

Sonic glances to his left at Tails, who immediately meets Sonic’s eyes. He didn’t even look at the photos. Instead, he’s been watching Sonic, ready and eager to help and show his support. Sonic offers a tiny smile, which Tails reflects, as Knuckles places a hand on his shoulder, a silent gesture of support which gives Sonic the strength he needs to respond.

“What do you want me to say?” Sonic begins, bolstered by the support of his family on his left, right, and back. 

“I’d like you to explain why you’re pictured here next to Shadow.” Walters’ eyes flick to Tom. “I’d also like to know why you didn’t alert us to this, Tom, as you and Madeline had agreed to in numerous signed documents and non-disclosure agreements dating back to last August.”

Tom scoffs. “Back to the first-name basis, are we?”

Walters smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I shouldn’t see why that’s an issue. We’ve had quite an amicable relationship in the past. Would you like me to call you Thomas?”

Tom lets the clear provocation go over his head. Keeping his cool, he responds: “Maddie and I didn’t know until just now when you showed the photos.”

“You didn’t seem surprised by them, no?”

Tom shrugs. “What can I say? It’s early.” He has to physically bite a scowl. “I guess I haven’t properly woken up yet. We’re not exactly morning people.”

Walters’ eyes narrow fractionally. “Do you find this funny, Tom?”

“Am I laughing?”

“Coffee!” Maddie slams down the carafe of freshly-brewed coffee in the centre of the table. “Let me get you boys a mug. Do you still take yours with sugar and creamer, Walters?”

Without sparing her as much as a look, eyes still trained on Tom, Walters responds: “Yes please, Madeline.”

“Just Maddie is fine.” With a pinched smile, Maddie heads back out into the kitchen to get some mugs and stall a little longer.

Though ill-timed, her attempt at diffusing the tension works. Tom, back to a more professional version of himself, clears his throat and matches Walters’ hard stare with his own. “The boys came back late from playing in the forest. Maddie and I didn’t even see them. They went straight to bed, and so did we, around midnight. I’ve got a helluva lot of questions about these photos you have here, but I’m sure there’s an explanation for them all.”

“You weren’t suspicious?”

“About what?”

“About why they were out so late. About why Sonic seems to be injured like he’s been hit by a car.” Walters gestures to him. “He has a black eye and he limped into the room.”

“‘course I was — but these are teenage boys, and they do stupid shit. I’ve caught them playing ‘Lets See How High Tails Can Drop Us Before We Break Our Legs’ twice this month, even though we banned it.”

“It’s true,” Sonic chirps in, because it is. “We haven’t found an answer to it yet.”

Walters, not finding humour in Tom’s attempt to try and ease the tension, huffs. “For such an overprotective father, I find it perplexing that you’re not so much as even startled at the sight of Shadow with your boys.”

Tom doesn’t rise to the bait, even if it does set his hackles on end. “I’m mighty pissed, but we’re all here now, so we may as well hear why it happened. After all,” Tom directs his gaze down to Sonic, meaningful, “like I said, I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation for it.”

Sonic hopes the reassurance and confidence he feels is transmitted back to Tom as they share a long look together. Sonic then turns to regard Walters. “I’m still concussed, so I’m going off a pretty foggy memory,” he says to begin; setting the scene, leaving his words henceforth spoken clouded by the excuse of ‘I wasn’t in my right mind’ if he’s questioned in the future. “I was in the forest last night, doing my thing. Going for a run.”

“Near midnight?”

“Yeah, I get the shakes sometimes. Comes with the territory of being the fastest thing alive, y’know? It was a pretty nice evening so I did a few laps of Green Hills. Scaled a few mountains. Broke a sweat, y’know.” Sonic coughs into his elbow to break up the list. “I guess I felt like someone was following me. Not unusual, by the way. I have a fan club. And Crazy Carl, but he’s pretty chill nowadays. Plus, your G.U.N. guys stalk me sometimes, so that’s creepy.”

Walters sucks on his teeth with a quiet sound that interrupts Sonic. “Please remain on topic.”

“Right, sorry. Anyway, I sort of camped out in the woods for a while ‘cause I couldn’t relax knowing I was being followed. And then outta the shadows — no pun intended — Shadow confronted me.” The words flow freely and easily. Maybe because they’re based a little bit in truth, and because he’s not particularly causing any disrepute to Shadow’s image, Sonic continues guilt-free, confident in his story. “Was I shocked? Uh, hell yeah, man. We all thought he was dead. Like, dead–dead. You don’t survive a big blast like that and walk away with all your fingers and toes still on your body.” Sonic wiggles his fingers for emphasis. “So we talked about that for a while.”

“What did you talk about, exactly?”

Sonic blinks. The pathway of his narrative and story is abruptly shut off, and for a second, he doesn’t know what to say. It’s such a simple question, but in the moment, he balks. “Uh,” he says, mouth suddenly dry. “We spoke about…apples?”

“Apples,” Walters responds, unconvinced. “You spoke about…apples?”

“Well, when you put it like that, it sounds dumb. But, yeah.” With that kernel of truth Sonic hones in on the memories of that day; of the smell and the taste and the orchard, of the feeling of sun on his skin and warmth in his gut. It’s tainted and soured by the events that unfolded afterwards, but those precious moments, a snapshot of the day, ring pure and unblemished. “I asked him how he was. He said he’d been eating apples from one of the nearby orchards.”

Sonic wonders if maybe he’s said too much when one of the soldiers to Walters’ side makes a note of what he’s saying, but he tries to ignore it, and refuses to let it throw him off course. He doubts the orchard has security cameras, but if they do and Walters manages to get ahold of them, well, he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it. “I asked what he was doing in the area.”

“You didn’t ask him how he survived?”

Sonic pinches himself beneath the table. A stupid oversight, but one he quickly recovers from. “Yeah, when we were speaking about apples. ‘cause he looked healthy, y’know? I was all like — woah, you’re getting your apple a day. Doctors must love you.”

“And what did he say?”

“That he’d been, uh, hopping from place to place to keep low and outta trouble.” That, again, is true.

“Where?”

“Didn’t want to tell me.” That’s not true, and Sonic intends to keep that part of the story consistent. Shadow may not want anything to do with him in his life anymore, but he’d be damned if he inadvertently puts him in danger over a slip-of-the-tongue. “Don’t think he’d been in Green Hills before, though. He didn’t know the area.”

“But he knew where you were.”

“Yeah, but dude, I’m all over the internet. All the guy’s gotta do is go to a gas station in, like, Arkansas and ask a clerk and they’d probably tell him that much. Fan club, remember?”

Walters’ thin lips purse. “So he found you, by some miracle, the moment you were running. Sonic, you must see why I find this hard to believe.”

“I don’t think we bumped into each other. The guy might’ve been waiting for me, or something, and he chose that moment. So, uh, we talked for a while. For ages, actually. He told me he woke up not long ago.”

“Where?”

Sonic shrugs. “Didn’t say. He didn’t remember, either. Went into hiding, then started looking around to tie up loose ends. Eggman, Stone, and Gerald are gone, so I guess I was next, which is why we’re here at this table right now.”

Maddie takes this as her moment to return with the mugs. She places them, in mismatched shapes, sizes, and colours, in the centre of the table along with a bowl of sugar and a carton of milk. “Out of creamer,” she says with a forced smile, taking a step back.

“Thank you, Madeline,” Walters’ croaky voice murmurs. He chooses a nondescript grey mug and pours himself a tall helping of coffee, fixing it to his taste with sugar and milk, as Maddie drags a chair over for herself and Knuckles. While he politely declines, choosing to stand, Maddie sits to Tom’s right, and takes his free hand in her own. 

The room settles into an uncomfortable silence as Walters absentmindedly stirs his coffee, the scraping sound of the metal spoon on ceramic grating in a way that feels deliberately unnerving. “So,” he says, drawing out the phrase so it lasts longer than it needs to, letting Sonic stew in his discomfort. “You talked about…apples, and about his recent history, and all of a sudden you fought?”

Sonic reviews the rehearsed story in his head. A fight started because he mentioned Tom. He pins that detail firmly in place and draws a steadying breath before responding: “Yeah, it’s pretty stupid, actually. One thing led to another, and I said something I shouldn’t have, and he said something he shouldn’t have, and then it escalated.”

Walters’ brow quirks with scepticism. “Just like that?”

“Yeah.” Sonic rubs the back of his neck. This kernel of truth is large, enough that speaking about it is uncomfortable. Sonic feels vulnerable and re-hashing their argument from no less than ten hours ago feels like prodding the spot where a tooth has just been extracted; an un-scabbed wound, a blackening bruise. “You’ve gotta understand, he and I made up before we took down Eggy and Gerald. I wasn’t just meeting some guy. I was meeting an old friend, I guess, so we spoke for a while, and I said something that upset him, and he got mad about it, and it all spiralled out of control super quickly.”

It’s vague but it’s rooted in truth, and Sonic knows that keeping the story close to reality makes it more believable under scrutiny. What he hadn’t accounted for is just how strung-up he still is about it, how raw the wound still feels even though he’d braced himself for the fallout months ago. Losing Shadow has been a massive blow, and speaking his feelings only dregs them back up to the surface. He sighs shakily and pours himself a glass of milk from the carton on the table, taking a little sip of it to try and pace himself. The corners of his eyes are damp but he doesn’t make a move to wipe them; that would be prime bait for Walters. “We got into a pretty nasty fight. I mean, you have it on your camera, right?”

Walters’ thin lips press together. He's clearly a man predisposed to suspicion due to his line of work, but Sonic’s story and honesty seem to break through that harsh veneer. The man watching him now has lost some of his hard edge, and while he still looks severe and autocratic, there’s a roundness to his edges. “We do,” he confirms, though his tone carries lingering doubt, “but I’m struggling to understand why the fight was so brutal.”

“What do you mean?”

“You two meet for the first time in a year, you have a long conversation, and then you try to tear each other’s throats out.” The chair creaks as Walters leans back into it and studies Sonic down the length of his nose. “I mean, you must understand why I’m struggling to believe this story, Sonic.”

Sonic’s pulse jumps. “He insulted Tom. I said something I shouldn’t have said about Maria. Any clearer?”

Walters’ face flattens out into something unreadable. It’s vague, but it’s enough, and the soldiers make quick notes of what he’s saying. Walters clearly understands the weight of Sonic’s implications, especially with relation to Maria and what kind of an effect that would have on Shadow. “How did you two get involved?” he asks, turning his attention to Tails and Knuckles.

With a voice smaller than his louder-than-life energy, Tails speaks first. “Sonic’s heart rate was abnormally high on my biometric readings.” Tails taps his communicator on his wrist. “It alerts me if it goes out of the norm, and Sonic’s got a pretty fast heartbeat in general, so I called Knuckles and we tracked him down.”

Knuckles nods, corroborating Tails’ account. “I broke up the fight. Only some words were exchanged between us four. After that, Shadow left.”

Sonic, satisfied with their coordinated alibi, nods. He takes another sip of his milk as Walters chews over the words, searching for inconsistencies or holes in their story.

“Simpson,” Walters prompts. “The transcripts, if you please.”

“Sir,” one of the soldiers, Simpson, reaches into the manila folder and pulls out a bundled sheet of white stapled papers. 

Sonic, suddenly, understands why Walters had looked like he was out for blood earlier. Walters takes the transcripts from the soldier and flips a few pages as a cold dread settles in Sonic’s stomach as he watches Tom lean forward, his expression shifting into something harder and more alert. “What’s that?”

“Witness statements from the squadron who observed the fight.” Walters says it casually, like he hasn’t dropped a bomb, small eyes scanning the words on the paper. He finds what he’s looking for and presses the stapled corner flat, shaking the paper so it remains taut, and clears his throat. “I’d like to read some of these out to you.”

“Not until I get a copy,” Tom interrupts firmly. The playful, laid-back father from earlier has vanished. This is cop-Tom, and one that’s standing up for a blind-sighted Sonic. “You gave us copies of the photos, so I’d like a copy of the transcript, please.”

Walters raises a brow with feigned affront before he shrugs, nonchalant, passing the script over for Tom. He accepts it with a snatch, alert blue eyes raking over the text rapidly. He flips a few pages, reading through the rest, maintaining a poker face throughout. He doesn’t look any more stressed, but he also doesn’t look relaxed, and Sonic isn’t sure how to take that. “This is all hearsay,” Tom says at last, setting the script down on the table with a fwop. “You can’t use this as evidence.”

“Two separate soldiers corroborated this account independently and provided their signatures as witnesses.” Walters physically dismisses Tom’s words with an unsympathetic shrug. “This is admissible in a court of law. You should know that as a police officer.”

The dig forms a tiny crack on the edge of Tom’s cool façade, one that Sonic notices when he spots the jutting vein on his forehead. Sonic peers down at the transcript, already dreading what he'll find there, his mind racing frantically to construct some plausible excuse, some viable defence, anything that might deflect suspicion.

“Would you like to explain this to me?” Walters points a wrinkled, wide-knuckled finger at a statement mid-way down the page. It’s a fairly accurate account of the argument mid-way through, and while Tom was correct about it being hearsay, the content is close enough to reality to be damaging. Sonic squints down at the text and finds that it’s an account of the dialogue when Knuckles was trying to diffuse the tension between himself and Shadow, with one line in particular ringing fairly accurately: ‘I asked for one thing and he broke that promise’ . “Would you prefer to explain this yourself, or shall we hear from Knuckles or Tails instead?”

“This is nothing,” Sonic dismisses quickly, huffing. His mouth is working faster than his mind, words forming before he has the chance to carefully think them through. “We agreed when he first bumped into me that I’d keep it a secret. When Knuckles and Tails came, he thought I’d called for them.”

“Why would you want to keep it a secret?” His thin brow raises. “You’d be willing to lie to G.U.N.? To the law? To violate the agreements we have in place?”

Tom interjects: “Stop it, Walters. He’s a boy. Kids make secrets all the time about dumb shit.”

“This isn’t ‘dumb shit’, Tom.” The words sound plastic and foreign in Walters’ crisp tone. “Someone you have direct guardianship over has admitted he’s willing to lie against multiple bound agreements—”

Tom grits out: “You know damn well he didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then how did you mean it?” Walters redirects his piercing attention back to Sonic, tapping the incriminating paragraph with one thick-knuckled finger. “I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, just like you said there would be.”

Walters’ words are like slime, coating the atmosphere in an uncomfortable, almost dirty way as he continues: “It seems strange that he would put so much emphasis on a promise you made, what, just moments earlier?”

“What can I say?” Sonic attempts a casual shrug, desperately hoping it conceals how much he feels like vomiting all over the damned transcript. “He’s a dramatic guy.”

Dissatisfied with his answer but unsure on how else to approach it, Walters’ mouth screws. He wets his wrinkled finger with his tongue before flipping the page of the transcript and pointing to a section near the top. “And this?” he asks, tapping the capitalised, ugly text. “How would you care to explain this excerpt?”

Sonic looks down and feels his body react quicker than his mind does. His stomach lurches and his hands go numb, blood rushing north, pulsing so strong he can feel it in his gums. It’s nothing he can’t explain away but seeing his words in black and white is like having his dirty laundry aired for public ridicule, like his bared heart is being held up for the world to laugh at and mock in pity.

I like you for exactly who you are, effed-up history and all…Are we finished? Are you able to forgive me for keeping this secret from you for so long?

Sonic slides the transcript closer so it’s not so easily read by the people around him, feeling waves of embarrassment burning across his cheeks and the tips of his ears. After a moment, he decides to flip the document face-down to hide the text entirely. “What do you want me to say?”

Walters shrugs with fake innocence. “I’m not sure — that’s why I’m asking you what you mean by what you said.”

“This is inappropriate.” Tom cuts in, thumping the table with a clenched hand. “He’s sixteen, Walters, not some hardened criminal, and you’re harassing him. He’s explained himself already.”

“How is this harassment?” Walters gestures to the transcript. “This is no trivial matter, Tom. The transcript my soldiers prepared implies that these two are far closer than you let on. As you’re aware, you’re bound by multiple agreements to disclose anything of interest to us, or otherwise face punitive damages. And you, Sonic,” Walters punctuates his name by looking him dead in the eye, “are also bound by these requirements. Can you see why I’m finding it difficult to understand that the two of you, after supposedly being apart for a year and a half, have such a close relationship?” His wrinkled mouth gathers at one corner. “Can you see why this looks suspicious to us?”

Sonic’s fingertips tighten on the paper, and it crumples beneath his fingers. “I haven’t seen the guy since the Eclipse Canon blew up, so yeah, screw me for being happy to see him alive. What else do you want to hear?”

“I’m wondering why you told him…what was it?” Walters gestures vaguely in the air, as if the statement is flimsy and meaningless. It’s dismissive and it’s disrespectful and Sonic feels insulted, offended that what he and Shadow have is boiled down to nothing more than a few words. Hot embarrassment spreads through his chest, paralysing his ability to think clearly. “‘I like you for exactly who you are’ and ‘Are we done?’” Walters’ thin eyebrow raises. “I’m sorry, but I find this very difficult to believe.”

Sonic’s voice, when spoken, comes out like it’s being physically wrenched from him. The cool, calm, and cheeky attitude he’d tried to maintain has slipped away, and in its place is someone trying to defend their dignity with nothing but their own words to act as a weapon. “Yeah, and so what, man? Is it that bad that I have a crush on the guy?”

Acknowledging it out loud is just as awful as he thought it would be. Sonic has to swallow down the nausea he’s practically gagging on, trying to feign casual indifference, and he’s failing fast. He can feel several pairs of eyes hone in on his figure and he fights every single cell in his body that wants to look back at them instinctively, terrified of what expressions he might find there. Right now, wilful ignorance feels like his only form of self-protection. “Why’re you picking on me for something like that? Do you have a problem with it?”

“Not at all.” Walters holds his palms up in defence. If he was expecting Sonic to say something, it certainly wasn’t that. The surprise on his features is evident; his smug smirk is gone, and his small, beady eyes are wide with genuine shock. “All I’ve been saying is—”

“Alright, we’re done here,” Tom announces, pushing to stand. His voice is finite; a full stop, a warning shot, a sign that Walters needn’t push this any further. His eyes are rock-solid and his body, tall and squared, is angled slightly so Sonic is behind him. It’s protective and fatherly and if Sonic wasn’t so tired and wrung out it would’ve choked him up. As it is, he feels tired, and all he wants to do is sleep just so he doesn’t have to face being awake anymore. “Get out.”

“Tom, this is hardly appropriate or professional,” Walters scoffs, reaching across the table to reclaim his papers.

“You know what’s not appropriate, Walters?” Maddie, the silent participant, narrows her eyes at him. She rises so she’s standing next to Tom, and speaks in a low, slow voice, taking back control of the discussion. “You, turning up at our doorstep, at six in the morning. In the documents we signed, protocol said ‘as soon as practicably possible’. With all due respect, Commander, we had barely even fallen asleep before getting woken up this morning. Even if you wanted us to contact you sooner, we haven’t had the opportunity. The boys came back while it was dark, and it’s still dark. What the agreement called for doesn’t apply here — your demands are unreasonable.”

The wrinkles in Tom’s forehead deepen as his brow raises, impressed with his wife’s calm and collected defence. “And another thing,” she continues: “your incompetence to catch this creature does not warrant G.U.N. harassing us at any given notice, particularly as a form of intimidation. You made a promise to Tom and me to leave us the hell alone if we signed all of your agreements and documents and contracts — and we did. We did our part, and you haven’t done yours. Don’t make me remind you who needs who in this situation.”

Blotchy redness has spotted Walters’ neck, inching up with every specific enunciation Maddie makes. “Mrs. Wachowski, I’ll have you know—”

“No, I’ll have you know—” she interjects, pointing a perfectly manicured finger in his direction, “because I know what you’re going to say — that you and G.U.N. agreed and signed over full custody of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles to us when we attended that panel hearing. I have the papers.” The words are practically spat at him. “We agreed to keep in regular contact with you on a good faith promise. Don’t make Tom and me have to rethink that.”

Suitably speechless, Walters sits in his chair gaping at Maddie. Tom, also speechless, practically hands her the big red button to deal the finishing blow. “I think it’s time you left us alone for the day. If you want to schedule another meeting for the future in a more humane manner, then you know what our emails are. But as it stands, I’d like you to leave my house now, please.”

“You have no right to dismiss me.”

“No, but you’re not going to get anything from us in this state. What might’ve worked for other people isn’t going to work for us. The boys are exhausted. They’re upset. We’re upset because of that. Why couldn’t you just arrange a meeting for later on in the day?” Maddie tuts. “Look at what you’ve done instead.”

“You understand just how crucial this matter is to us,” Walters protests, pushing himself to his feet. The pale skin of his face has taken on an angry red tinge, blood-heavy from the spike in his blood pressure. “We could not wait even a moment longer. This is national security we’re talking about!”

“And I get that! You’re fully within your right to storm in and ask those questions, but you’ve known us for three years and those have been three amicable years that you’ve just thrown down the drain.”

“Madeline—”

“It’s Maddie. Stop patronising me.”

Walters presses his lips together, visibly restraining himself. “Maddie,” he corrects himself in a far more measured tone. “I wouldn’t have executed such an invasive search had it not been for the fact that he was sighted by my men.”

She sighs and presses her hand to her forehead, looking as exhausted as everyone else feels. “I understand that, but you can see from the state of us that none of us were prepared for this. If you want to talk to the boys then that’s fine, but you’re not getting anything out of them this morning. Not because we’re unwilling, but because they’re not fit to talk to you right now. Can’t this wait a day?”

Walters hesitates, clearly uncertain how to proceed. “Sir,” Simpson begins, but Walters raises his hand to silence him.

“This isn’t my decision to make,” he grunts.

Maddie counters: “Then speak to whoever you need to speak to, and we’ll go from there.”

“And if they request your immediate arrest for resisting our orderly commands?”

“Then you ought to consider what that’ll mean for the relationship you have with the Wachowskis going forward.”

The room falls into pin-drop silence.

“My secretary will be in contact by the end of the day,” Walters finally concedes. He brushes imaginary lint from his jacket pockets and tucks his chair neatly under the table, preparing himself and his personnel for a swift but dignified retreat.

The sound of jeeps and four-by-fours backing out of the drive rumbles like distant thunder, and it's the only sound that fills the house for a long, long while. It's only a little past six-thirty in the morning, and there's a wet chill to everything that comes with midsummer — all of that sunshine and warmth that yesterday brought has vanished. Sonic doesn't know if it's because of the atmosphere or because of the drop in temperature, but he's never felt so cold during July.

He shifts awkwardly, as if trying to ward off the tension, like the charged electricity in the air is pressing in from all sides, squeezing him. All he can do without making a sound is rock from foot to foot so it doesn't feel like it’s settling on his skin. No one seems willing to break the ice, and no one's making eye contact. Ordinarily, he'd burst into laughter or make a poorly-timed one-liner about coming out, but Sonic feels so utterly crushed, so bone-deep exhausted, so raw, that he can barely muster enough energy to breathe through his broken rib.

Tom tries to diffuse the tension by clapping his hands together and clearing his throat. Sonic jumps, looking over to him, and can tell immediately by the bashful, gauche look on his face what he’s going to say before he even speaks. “Sonic,” he starts, slowly turning so he’s facing Sonic with body language that radiates ‘I’m Going To Make A Speech’. “Maddie and I will always accept you, no matter who you—”

“Ew, ew, ew,” he bats his hands in front of his face, physically shooing the discussion away. He knows they’re only trying to be kind but the wound is still raw and Sonic said it in the heat of the moment half to startle Walters, and half involuntarily. Does he mean it? Absolutely, but it’s not like he did it with the intention to open up a lengthy discussion about his sexual orientation. Especially not when it revolves around someone as contentious as Shadow; the body of that destroyed relationship is still warm. “I do not want to have this conversation right now, guys.”

Tom and Maddie share a look with each other — a lips-pressed-together, brows-raised, eyes-speaking-a-thousand-words kind of look — before they shrug it off. “Okay,” Tom says, drawing out the word, “but whoever you decide to go out with, girl or boy, we’re fine with.”

“Totally fine!” Maddie reinforces with exaggerated cheer. “Your aunt Rachel dated a lovely girl in college!”

“Guuuuuys, ” Sonic moans, dropping his face in his hands. “Please? Can we just... not?"

Whether or not they can tell that he’s not in the mood for jokes they don’t show it, but they do drop the conversation. Maddie and Tom hold their hands up, expressions open and neutral. “Fine, fine.”

“I love you guys, really.” Sonic drags his hands down his face, blinking his dry, bloodshot eyes a few times. “But…can we not make a big deal out of it?”

“No big deal will be made.” 

“Nope — not at all,” Tom agrees, nodding. “In fact, this is such a tiny deal that I can’t even really see it.”

“What deal?” Maddie shakes her head. “I don’t even know what we’re talking about.”

“Me neither, Mads.”

Sonic sucks his upper lip into his mouth to bite down the ugly expression threatening to surface.

“Breakfast!” Tom announces with another clap, spinning on his heel to walk robotically into the kitchen. Yeah, Sonic bemoans, that discussion definitely isn’t over. “Who wants pancakes?”

“Me!” Tails calls, trotting after him a little too quickly, as they disappear through the open doorway to make a breakfast Sonic's churning stomach can't possibly handle right now.

Knuckles lingers back for a moment. He spares a look to Sonic; open, cautious, extending an olive branch without having to say a word. Sonic offers a faint smile and waves him off. "I am here," Knuckles repeats, his voice barely above a whisper, giving Sonic's shoulder a jostle that shakes his whole body

“Thanks,” Sonic murmurs. “Go get breakfast.”

Knuckles searches Sonic’s face; whatever he finds has him giving a curt nod before he disappears into the kitchen to join Tom and Tails, ready to line their stomachs after an exhausting twenty-something hours.

Sonic remains stood in the dining area, rooted to his spot. He feels simultaneously boneless and rigid; tired and wired, like one half of his body yearns to crawl into a dark hole and sleep while the other wants to run away and scream into the universe. He doesn’t want to be around anyone, not even himself. If Sonic could abandon his body and heart and mind and let his soul drift off, just for a few hours, untethered to anything Earthly, he would do it. Instead, all he does is breathe, drawing air in-and-out of his bruised lungs like a broken accordion, trying to find a resolve to drag himself back to bed. 

“Sonic, you coming?” Maddie asks, the half-drunk mugs of coffee gathered in her hands, balancing against one another.

"Oh. Uh, no. Not really hungry," Sonic admits quietly once everyone has filtered into the kitchen and it's just himself and Maddie alone in the dining area. "Stomach's doing kickflips. Gonna go up and get some shut-eye."

"You sure? Not even some toast? Might help settle things."

He shakes his head, the motion barely perceptible.

Without bothering him any further, Maddie turns on her heel and disappears into the kitchen, mugs clinking and clacking in their haphazard balancing act. Now, Sonic’s alone, and grateful for it. He just wants to wallow.

He begins to head into the living room but Maddie’s suddenly there, rushing back in from the kitchen as she dries her hands on her pyjama pants, leaving traces of coffee stains on the pink cotton. “You’re not going anywhere until I get a look at those injuries, mister.”

“I’m fine.”

Maddie opens her mouth like she’s ready to argue but she takes one look at the hollowed-out expression Sonic’s wearing, and the words die in her mouth. “Let’s go upstairs,” she says instead, quiet so only he can hear, and Sonic, without protest, nods.

The sounds of hustle and bustle fade with each laboured step he takes up the stairs. Maddie doesn't rush him, falling behind, letting him set the pace as he lugs his exhausted body towards the landing. Finally reaching the top, he shuffles toward the master bathroom opposite Tom and Maddie's room.

He’d used it last night to clean himself up; showering, brushing his teeth, just to clear the grime from the day away so he didn’t have to wake up in dirty sheets, and while Sonic’s no neat freak, he’s careful to never leave a mess in a shared space out of courtesy of the other four people who have to share the same room. He pushes the door open and is immediately confronted with a sight that floods him with shame: blue quills scatter the floor and protrude from the damp towel folded on the drying rack. Blood spatters the tiles and stains the sink basin. He must’ve been in such a state last night that he hadn’t even noticed the mess he’d been making.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, and Sonic only realises he's crying when his voice fractures and the bloodstains blur before his eyes, vision clouded by tears. “Oh my God, I’m crying again?”

The door shuts behind him with a quiet clack . Immediately, Maddie manoeuvres him gently to sit on the closed toilet seat lid. She crouches down in front of him, peering up at his face to get a better look. “Hey,” she soothes, holding Sonic by the arms. “It’s alright.”

“I don’t know why I keep getting upset. I’m fine. It’s done. It’s over,” he says, but none of the words hold an ounce of belief to them. He cries — ugly cries, the kind that comes from the gut of his soul, clawing its way up his chest and out of his mouth, a beast that’s been growing ever since that Christmas night when he sat Tails down on his bed. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

Maddie gathers him into her arms and he collapses into her embrace, motionless except for the heaving of his shoulders and spine with each sob that wracks his body. He feels wrung-out, squeezed of every last drop of energy and tear to spare, and yet his body still grieves even when he has nothing left to give. It's like he's expelled everything there is left inside him but his body still lurches anyway, wracked with a sickness so profound it's beginning to reject its own core. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry about,” Maddie whispers against his temple, tightening her arms around him in a protective embrace. “Let it out. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

“This is all my fault.”

“None of this is your fault.” 

“It is. I’ve hurt you and I’ve hurt Tom, and I’ve hurt—”

“Sonic, you haven't hurt any of us." She gently eases him back and holds him at arm's length. His face crumples into another sob when he meets the fierce, unrelenting love radiating from Maddie's eyes. He believes her, and that's what makes him cry harder, because he doesn't feel worthy of such unconditional love while also feeling so utterly worthless. “G.U.N. is responsible for all of this. Tom and I have never — not once —  blamed you for what has happened.”

She strokes a gentle hand across his forehead, sweeping the quills away from his face, and speaks with gravity in her voice. “You are a child. You aren’t responsible for other people’s actions and consequences. You didn’t let Shadow out of stasis. You weren’t responsible for capturing him. You weren’t responsible for any of that.” He gives a short nod, fresh, hot tears spilling down his cheeks. “Okay? Don’t let him make you think that any of that was your fault.”

“But I feel so guilty.”

“I know you do, baby. That’s normal. That’s the side-effect of having a Wachowski heart.” Her mouth upticks at the corner, and Sonic chuckles wetly. “Three sizes too big, eh? That’s why Tom was never able to be a big cop in a big city. Too much of a softie. Just like you.”

He nods again, if only to show that he’s listening. She wipes the rest of the tears away from his cheeks with careful, soft fingers, and cups him by his jaw with dampness on her palms. “Don’t ever change that about yourself. That’s what makes you so special. That’s what makes us love you.”

“It hurts,” Sonic croaks. He taps the spot over his heart. “I’m always hurting when I make the wrong decision. And I keep freaking crying — I’ve cried more in the last two months than the other sixteen years and one month I’ve been alive.”

Maddie chuckles, cupping his cheek and steadying his head. “You didn’t make the wrong decision. You made the decision that you felt was right,” she says fiercely. “Not everyone’s gonna like oranges, but it doesn’t mean oranges are a bad fruit. Not everyone’s gonna like the things you do, but it doesn’t make you a bad person. You are not a bad person, Sonic.” 

Maddie's words resonate with him on a level that just seems to click into place. What she's saying is so simple and so fundamental, but he hadn't even realised he'd been trying to please every side, to make the impossible possible, until she'd framed it like that. "Yeah?" she prompts gently, acknowledging the realisation dawning in his eyes. "You're good. You're kind. You're thoughtful. I am so proud of everything that you've become. I’m proud of the person you’re going to be. You're a good boy, Sonic."

“Thanks, Mads,” Sonic responds, a broken but genuine smile lighting up his face. It’s small, but it’s there, and Maddie reflects it with her own. “Madeline.”

“Oh, Jeez, don’t you start saying that, too.”

Sonic chuckles under his breath. “Thomas.”

“What a dick,” she mutters, before slapping a hand over her mouth. “Profanity!”

They dissolve into silly, quiet giggles that last as long as it takes before Sonic cuts himself off with an: “Ow.”

Immediately, her face takes on a worried look. “I knew you were hiding something.” Maddie pushes to stand up, knees creaking with the action. “Ribs?”

“Yeah,” Sonic groans, pointing down to his left-hand side.

“Same ones you broke before?”

“Think so.”

Maddie opens up the cabinet above the sink and pulls down the hefty green first-aid kit she has stocked to the point of bursting at the clasps. It pops open on the countertop; bandages and alcoholic swabs and gloves and dressings and ointments spill out of it to land in the sink. Maddie reaches into the deep container and pulls out a gel packet which she shakes, then whacks on her knee. “Ice,” she orders, passing the cool pack over, which Sonic places against the tender area. “How bad’s the pain on a scale of one-to-ten? No lies.”

He breathes in to measure, and winces when his lungs reach half-capacity. “Seven. I also have a concussion.”

“Nauseous?”

“Yeah, that’s why I didn’t wanna eat breakfast.”

“Hmmm,” Maddie grumbles under her breath, unhappy, though not at Sonic. She grabs a few more things from the cabinet before stuffing everything back into the container and slamming it closed a few times until the clasp catches and it stays shut. “You’re gonna be in bad shape for the next few days after fighting with him.”

“I know.”

“Not all of your decisions were idiotic, but…my God, did you really need to get into a fight so rough you broke a rib?”

Sonic chuckles dryly. “You should’a seen the other guy.” Maddie’s lips purse at his response. She sets down two pill bottles on the sink, which Sonic squints to read, but a headache prevents him from focusing for too long. “What’s that?”

“Something to knock you out. Not until after breakfast. You’ve gotta eat something.”

“What if I throw it up?”

“Then you throw it up, but if you take these without something in your stomach you’re gonna throw up, anyway.”

She uncaps a tube of ointment that burns Sonic’s nose when he smells it. Maddie cleans each cut with sterile swabs and then dabs even layers of ointment on each of his small cuts. Some tingle, some burn something hellish, particularly the claw gouges on his calf. She tuts at the sight of them but otherwise says nothing.

After treating him from head to toe and adding another ice-pack to his cheek to try and reduce the shiner he’s sporting, Maddie tosses the soiled swabs into the bin. “Once you eat, you gotta take the pills and go straight to bed, okay?”

“I thought you weren’t meant to sleep after a concussion.”

She tilts her head from side-to-side in consideration. “You’ve just held your own against Walters. I think you’ll be fine.”

“What’s…” Sonic focuses his gaze on the pill bottle now that it’s a little closer, “co-codamol?”

“Tom’s shoulder painkiller.” Maddie gathers the bottle in her hand, along with the other bottle of ibuprofen.

“Why do I need that?”

“If you want to get better, then you’ve gotta sleep, and if you want to sleep well with some broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, and a hundred-and-one bruises, then you’re gonna need something to take the edge off.”

“Maddie, I don’t think that’s very ethical of you as a doctor.”

“Well, you’re my patient, and I prescribe you with that,” she presses a kiss to his head, “and that. How’d you rate my care, Mr. Hedgehog?”

Sonic rubs his chin in mock contemplation. “Could do with some work.”

She quirks a brow. “Any recommendations?”

He holds his hand out flat. Recognition flashes in her eye. They slap hands twice, shake, twist their thumbs then form a fist, fist-bump, and pull away with a quiet cheer. “Much better,” he says after their handshake.

A relieved smile blossoms across her face. It's as if she can see the tension ebbing from Sonic's body with each passing moment. He's still not quite himself; still dulled, as though he's lost his lustre, but he's significantly better than he was even minutes ago. It’ll be a slow path to recovery. “How are you feeling now?”

“Sore.”

“In here,” she says, tapping the space over her own heart. “How are you feeling there?”

Sonic considers her words for a moment, before he responds. “Sore,” he repeats. A swell of emotions crawls up his chest but he breathes through them, mindful of her words from earlier: you are not a bad person. You’re a good boy. “Sad. Really sad.”

“I know,” she murmurs, drawing him gently against her side.  “Let yourself feel it.”

He swallows around the lump in his throat. “I don’t want to. I want it to stop.”

"You've got to feel it and accept it before you can begin to let go of it." She strokes the corner of his ear with feather-light touches. "Are you sad because you won't see him again?" Sonic nods silently, leaning into her comforting touch. "Okay," she whispers, her thumb tracing small circles over the soft fur. "Do you think he's sad because he won't see you, too?"

"I don't know," Sonic admits, his words muffled against the fabric of her pyjamas. "I don’t think I’m worth risking his safety for."

“Okay,” she responds quietly. “Are you okay with knowing that?”

This time Sonic doesn't respond at all. He remains pressed against her, his weary head resting against her hip. "We'll get through this," she assures him after a moment of shared silence. Sonic closes his eyes and allows the dull throb of his injuries to anchor him to the present. "You'll be okay. I’ve got you, baby. I’ve got you."

Chapter Text

They realise by hour six of Sonic swallowing Maddie’s pill concoction that half of the normal dose of co-codamol for a human is enough to knock a Mobian out to the point where they’re so dead to the world that they don’t even wake up from smelling salts. Sonic ends up sleeping for nearly thirty-six hours straight once they kick in, waking up only to drink, pee, stuff a slide of toast in his mouth and dry-swallow a quarter of another tablet before zonking back out for another day.

Fortunately, a resting Mobian recovers at a rate far quicker than humans. Sonic’s broken ribs have reset and nearly healed themselves within a matter of days, and his bruises are near enough gone other than the sorer ones on his back, shoulder, and jaw; those have remained yellow, disappearing slowly from the outside-in like a half-eaten jawbreaker. He’s a little scuffed and a little dented but he’s much better for wear after Maddie’s magical concoction.

The emotional healing, however, takes a little longer than the physical does.

“Hey, Sonic! Look at the upgrades I made to my drone!”

Tails’ sudden weight bounces onto the mattress, causing the springs on one side to compress and for Sonic’s body to roll towards its concave. Sonic tugs the quilt around his chin higher so it’s not only over his head, but it’s over every part of his exposed body, drawn so tight that not even a sliver of light makes its way past the barrier. He blinks his tired, dry eyes into the darkness of the pattered blanket around him, and musters enough energy to respond in as few words as possible. “Not right now, Tails.”

“But you said that yesterday, and the day before.”

Every atom in Sonic’s body is drawing him further into the cocoon of his blanket, away from the noise, away from the world outside, away from the expectations that await him when reality eventually comes crashing down and Sonic has to come to terms with how much of a mess he’s made his and his family’s lives. Fighting against the guilt that pulls at his heartstrings for ignoring Tails feels pointless. He lets it wash over him, letting it pile on the mound of emotions already weighing him down; guilt is like another coat of thick paint, and beneath it are a hundred other layers of gloss.

It takes the energy of a thousand steps to repeat himself, even at a lower volume, so quiet he can barely hear himself speak. “Not right now.”

The weight on the bed next to his curled-up body shifts as Tails is guided to stand back up from his kneeling position next to Sonic. “Come on, fox,” Knuckles’ voice coaxes, careful with his voice’s volume and Sonic’s oversensitivity to stimuli. He’s learned over the last few days that pushing and prodding Sonic will yield no response. Silence is the least he can offer by way of mindfulness. “I am sure Maddie would like to see it, too.”

“But I wanted to show Sonic.”

“He is resting.”

“He’s been resting all week.” The pitch of Tails' voice climbs higher, laced with confusion and distress, the kind that comes with watching someone you love disappear before your eyes for a reason you can’t understand.

“He is not well.”

“But his ribs are better now, and the bruises are almost gone, so why isn't he—”

“Come on,” Knuckles coaxes again, stern without being unkind. “Let us leave him rest.”

Tails’ weight dips off of the bed fully, tugging the blanket a little with his movement and leaving Sonic back to lying by himself. He can’t even find it in him to pull the blanket back properly, to straighten it out from its ruck. The heat and recycled air beneath his quilt is stifling but Sonic finds the problem not even worth considering. He blinks slowly, and stares sightlessly into the darkness as a twin pair of shoes, one light and quick and the other heavy and measured, shuffle out of the room. The quiet clunk of the door shuts, leaving him alone with nothing for company, not even his own thoughts. The space where his thoughts typically thrive, usually unquenchable and spellbinding, is vast and barren. His mind is an empty concert hall where no one’s seated and no one’s performing.

He’s had periods like this in the past; depressions in mood, where getting out of bed felt impossible and Sonic wanted nothing more than to wallow in his own misery, but through the darkness there had always been a spark of light — a voice in the back of his head — to drag him forward even when every atom in his body fought against it. It was hard after Longclaw’s passing, and it was hard after the events of the Eclipse Cannon, but he got through it.

Now, Sonic can’t even convince himself to speak more than a few words without burning out. Basic functions like eating and drinking and bathing are set aside when the monumental effort it takes to do so much as breathe in and out is pushing the boundaries of his capabilities.

For an indefinite amount of time, where days blend into one another, Sonic lays under the heavy weight of his quilt, drifting in and out of worthless consciousness and dreamless sleep. He wakes up periodically to gentle fingers combing through his quills, or a kind voice asking him if he wants something to eat, to which he never responds. Tom and Maddie’s presence isn’t overwhelming nor is it underwhelming — they’re just there, constant and steady, letting him know that he isn’t alone even when he wants to be. 

“We bought some mini corndogs from WalMart,” Tom’s voice, mindfully quiet so it doesn’t disturb Sonic, speaks from above the quilt one afternoon. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed next to his curled-up body, and his hand, a gentle and warm weight, is rubbing gentle circles over Sonic’s blanketed arm. “Maddie’s heating them up. Do you want me to bring you some?”

Silence stretches between them. Sonic doesn’t respond. Tom releases a soft sigh that Sonic can feel more than he can hear and his hand pauses on Sonic’s arm. “You need to get something solid in you, bud. It’s been over a week. You’re going to get ill.”

“I just want to sleep,” Sonic’s croaky, quiet voice comes from beneath the layers of blanket.

“I know you do,” Tom sympathises. “I’ll bring you a plate and leave it on your bedside table, okay? You can eat it if you’re up to it. We’re worried about you.”

Sonic's eyelids flutter against the blanket, but he offers no verbal response, and Tom doesn't seem to expect one. Instead, he begins to smooth gentle circles into Sonic’s arm, his thumb now brushing back and forth across what he can reach of Sonic's shoulder.

The energy required to do so much as start an internal dialogue feels beyond the realms of his capability. Thoughts, vague and fleeting like wisps of smoke, pass through the empty cavern of his mind and Sonic can barely muster the strength to feel any kind of pity for himself. Shame, guilt, heartbreak — none of that comes. The only feeling present in the hollow pit of his chest is apathy. Sonic feels like this is what hibernation must be like; that this is what all of those hedgehogs he learned about would be going through during the winter time, as they slow every part of their body’s natural pace down to the speed of a crawl just so they can make it through the winter without perishing. That's exactly how Sonic feels: suspended in a long winter, and just waiting for the warmth of spring that may never come.

The rest of the week bleeds in and out like that — infrequent visits from the rest of the family with one-sided conversations and offerings of food and drink that go mostly untouched. Some nights he wakes up to the feeling of someone curled up next to him, a smaller body than his own, tucked against his back like a crescent moon. A peek across the room at the empty space on Tails’ bed tells him as much as he needs to know about who’s quietly sleeping beside him wrapped in his own quilt, trying not to disturb Sonic but still wanting to feel his comfort.

A day doesn’t come where he wakes up and feels magically fixed. There’s a hole where his heart used to be and Sonic recognises the pain for what it is: grief. He’d felt its claws sink into him and hold him down when Longclaw died, and although Shadow hasn’t passed on, his absence cuts just as deeply. 

A little over a fortnight after their fight, something finally manages to pierce through the dense fog clouding Sonic's consciousness. He comes around from the murky depths of his practically two week-long blackout not to a grand revelation or emotional breakthrough but to, of all things, a pang of hunger in the pit of his stomach. 

He's managed to pick at the offerings left within arm's reach during his rare moments of strength — segments of cut fruit, saltine crackers, glasses of water that sat untouched until they grew warm and stale — but never with genuine appetite. This feels different; urgent, like his body has finally decided it's tired of merely existing and wants to try living again, and it's chosen this as an ultimatum: get up from bed, or wither away with the hunger pangs.

With weak arms and what miniscule amount of energy he can scrape from the bottom of his barrel, Sonic peels the covers back from his body and faces the rest of the room in daylight for the first time in weeks.

As soon as the light hits him his eyes water and squint to shield from its brightness. It takes a few minutes for his oversensitive body to adjust to the familiar senses that would have seemed perfectly normal just weeks ago; smells, touch, sight, even noise, all dialled up to a ten when he can barely process a four. Life under the blanket had been dulled and muted and this is almost painful in its intensity. He feels as if he’s on a different plane of existence, some otherworldly reality separate from the one he’s grown up in for the better part of sixteen years.

Everything feels normal when part of him knows that it’s simply not. It’s like he’s woken up from his coma to a movie set of his life rather than the real thing, or like he’s been given a new pair of glasses with a different prescription and told that nothing has changed even though he knows something must’ve, because nothing looks like how it used to.

Despite the weird, dissociative reverie muddying his thoughts the room looks much like he'd left it, and Sonic can hardly believe that all of this has just been waiting for him metres from the mound of blankets he’s been rotting beneath. Life has moved on even with him detached from it.

Bidding the depressing thoughts away, Sonic pushes to an upright position and rights himself with a few pillows behind his back to bolster his upper body. He eases some weight against the cushions and fights off the sudden feeling of vertigo as he takes scope of the room and slowly becomes accustomed to the feeling of movement against his skin once again. Both windows are open, bringing in a fresh breeze and sunlight, and though it’s not much by means of grand spirit-lifting measures, it’s still a nice change from the murky, dank depression he’s been festering in.

Despite the improvement, Sonic still feels wretched. Weeks without taking care of himself have left him reeking in ways that would probably clear a room, and he can feel the way his quills have matted into painful knots at the back of his head, twisted together like barbed wire. Still, he gives himself some grace for making this far and takes a moment to regulate his breathing, acclimatising to the feeling of moving air against his skin and grounding himself with the pumps of his heartbeat to remind himself that he’s still alive, even when he hasn’t felt much better than dead.

Time passes in fits and starts, the way it does during periods of introspection where seconds can feel like hours and hours like seconds. He watches the sun climb to the peak of its arc before it begins its steady descent. He listens to the hustle and bustle of people downstairs: of Tom’s car pulling out of the drive, of Maddie taking Ozzy out for a walk, of Tails and Knuckles playing soccer out in the garden, and of Tom returning in his car some while later with crunching gravel underfoot. He listens to the robins and blackbirds and cicadas and the overhead planes with their rumbling jet-engines. 

He tries his best not to think about Shadow.

It’s torture enough to know the harm he’s caused; ruminating on it will only serve to make him slip back into the pit he’s only just managed to claw his way out of. So, Sonic averts his eyes when he sees a red-winged blackbird, or the tawny puff of the robin’s chest, and chooses instead to focus on the way the shattered moon above seems to drift apart ever so slightly, as if the cracks across its diameter have severed it for good, for it to never be whole again. It’s a little hard to see during the day but Sonic finds it. His eyes never seem to stray far from its hang in the sky nowadays.

When the evening turns amber and the heat of the afternoon begins to bleed into a cool humidity, when Sonic’s eyes have gone a little dry from staring out the sunroof for so long, the tranquil quiet of the room is shattered when the floor’s hatch is rattled with the movement of someone trying to push it up.

Sonic’s head swivels as the trapdoor lifts and falls onto its hinge with a squeak, making way for a tuft of blonde fur that inches up through the gap in the floor. Tails' head is tilted downward as he concentrates on navigating the ladder rungs while balancing something in his hands. He clearly isn’t expecting to find Sonic conscious, let alone alert enough to be watching his entrance; that much becomes apparent when he lifts his head, meets a pair of green eyes, and nearly launches himself backward off the ladder in shock. Hot soup sloshes over the rim of the bowl clutched in his grip to splatter onto his chest with an almost audible sizzle. "Ouch!" he yelps.

“Careful,” Knuckles’ low voice rings from behind him, steadying the bowl with one hand before it topples. 

Tails swipes the spilled soup from his chest as he scampers up the stairs with feet that trip over one another in their hurry. He sets the bowl on Sonic’s bedside table, pushing aside empty water glasses and untouched plates before he practically throws himself at his bedside. He’s not quite on his knees but he’s also not standing fully straight, bent so he’s on more of an eye-level with Sonic’s semi-reclined self. Tails’ eyes flit across Sonic’s gaunt face, drinking in the sight of him since their first conscious interaction all the way back during Walters’ visit.

“Sonic!” he exclaims, his voice shrill in his intensity. “You’re awake!”

“Yeah,” Sonic manages, his throat sandpaper and the edges of his words grating and chipping against it on their way out. He clears his voice roughly and nods toward the steaming bowl on his bedside table, catching the scent of something that makes his empty stomach clench with sudden, sharp hunger. “Is that for me?”

Tails nearly gives himself whiplash with the speed and intensity of his nod. “Yes! We made you some tomato soup and grilled cheese, in case you were feeling up to it.” His words rush out like water through a burst dam and Sonic, even through his exhaustion, can’t help but brighten at the tone. Tails has the ability to lift spirits with his genuinely kind nature, and the sentiment isn’t lost on Sonic even in his sad state. “Are you okay? How are you feeling? Are you hungry? Do you want some water, or maybe some juice, or chocolate milk?”

Knuckles comes up behind Tails’ shoulder and produces said-grilled cheese on a small plate. It’s burnt on one side and underdone on the other, steaming with visible wafts of heat that curl up towards the rafters in tendrils of pale white. On any other occasion he’d probably rib them for the fact that they can’t even toast bread correctly but the gesture is too thoughtful to be mocked. Besides, he hasn’t felt anything beyond grief for days on end and the hunger in his stomach is practically clawing at him at the sight of food, so he sits himself up a little straighter and accepts the plate and the bowl gingerly with weak wrists and a tremble to his fingers.

“Thanks,” he murmurs, balancing the crockery on his lap. The bowl is warm, and creates a hot spot on his lap where it rests over the blanket. He swirls the spoon around the bowl, watching it catch on small chunks of pureed tomato and cream, before he raises it to his chapped lips and takes a hesitant sip.

The taste is a balm to his wounds. He quickly gulps down the mouthful, followed by a few more that nearly blister his tongue. He swipes a corner of the grilled cheese through the soup and crunches down on it, and has to catch himself from moaning at the taste.

Sonic hadn’t realised the depth of his hunger until this moment, hadn’t realised how his body had been running on empty for so long that he’d forgotten what genuine appetite feels like. He barely registers the weight of Tails and Knuckles settling onto his mattress, too preoccupied with the simple pleasure of eating while trying not to vacuum up the food in his lap, china bowl and all.

None of them speak while he eats. The silence is a little awkward, but they’ve all endured enough awkward moments over the past few weeks that a few more minutes hardly seem significant in the grand scheme of things.

With the bowl scraped clean and plate empty bar a few scattered crumbs, Sonic settles back onto the propped-up pillows with a full belly and more energy than he can recall having in a long while. That’s not to say he feels energised — far from it — it’s just that he can find it in himself to engage in conversation without feeling like it’s taking every single atom in his body to cooperate at once.

“Better?” Tails asks, his paw settling over Sonic’s foot concealed beneath the blanket in a gesture meant to comfort. He’s sitting cross-legged at Sonic’s hip while Knuckles has taken a more sensible approach of perching himself at the bottom of the bed, his bulk causing the mattress to dip beneath his weight.

“Yeah,” Sonic says, his voice carrying a little more strength than it had a moment ago. “Thanks, guys.”

“We are just glad to see you eating.” The relief in Knuckles’ tone is undermined by the formality of his speech pattern. But then again, that’s just Knuckles, who seems to speak everything as if it’s a declaration. Sonic can count the number of times he’s heard him contract words on just one hand. 

Tails nods eagerly in agreement to Knuckles’ words. “Are you feeling better?”

Sonic wets his dry lips, buying a moment to think of a response. There’s no point in lying; neither Tails nor Knuckles are fools, and they know him well enough to see through any of his bluffs. Besides, Sonic’s been holed up in bed for nearly two weeks. That’s not exactly ‘well’ behaviour.

“A little,” he concedes, though it feels only half-true. Physically, yes — eating has done wonders for his energy levels, but emotionally? Is there a word in the English lexicon to describe the feeling of physical okay-ness but emotional not-okay-ness? he wonders. “Uh…I guess.”

Knuckles acknowledges him with a grunt of understanding, and gestures to Sonic’s empty bowl with his glove. “My father always said that good food can serve to mend all wounds, whether they are physical, or emotional.” He gives a short, up-ticked nod with his chin. “I hope for your sake it is both.”

Sonic glances down at the injuries on his body — a scabbed-over gash here, a bruise or ten there, scattered in clusters from his cheeks to his ankles. All of his wounds have grown yellow beneath his fur, barely noticeable behind the thick blue wefts and not unless he looks for them specifically, but they feel as if they were made just hours ago. He looks like a bruised piece of fruit and feels like one, too; soft in the wrong places and unattractive because of it.

“I’m healing,” Sonic responds. “Physically, anyway. Emotionally?” He trails off, then forces himself to complete the thought. “I mean, I’m fine.”

“No, you are not.”

“I am,” Sonic insists automatically, the words out of his mouth before he can even think of biting them back.

“You are not fine, Sonic.” Knuckles’ weighty glove lands on Sonic’s blanketed leg. It feels heavier than usual, but maybe that’s just Sonic’s malnourished body talking. “You do not have to lie to us anymore.”

Sonic's mouth opens, another denial forming on his tongue. “I—”

“You do not have to,” Knuckles interrupts firmly. “If you want to, then that is your choice, but you don’t have to lie to us.”

A breath stutters out of Sonic. He glances away from the burning embers behind Knuckles’ eyes, finding it difficult to maintain eye contact the same way that someone can only look at the sun for so long before flinching away. Then, after a long, weighted moment, Sonic admits the whole truth: “I’m feeling like shit.”

He rarely cusses around Knuckles and Tails, a habit borne not only from Maddie’s incessant chiding but from his own want to not use those kind of words, but the crassness of the cuss feels necessary. He doesn’t feel bad, he doesn’t feel hurt — he feels like shit, and to say otherwise would be sanitising the truth. 

“Because of what happened with Shadow?” Knuckles presses in a carefully neutral tone.

A sigh rushes past Sonic’s pressed-together lips. “It’s more than that.” Sonic reaches up to press the tips of his fingers into the soft skin beneath his eyes, applying pressure as if he can somehow squeeze out the ache that's throbbing behind his skull. Speaking is hard and awkward but it’s necessary, and Knuckles’ persistence around his reassurances of: ‘I’m here’ have chipped away at Sonic’s habit of feeling like every battle is his own to fight.

It makes him feel like maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to finally let his best friends see what emotional wreckage he’s been carrying on his back for the last twelve months. They know the situational facts and they know that he’s been in cahoots with Shadow for the best part of a year, but they don’t really know just how deep the roots of their relationship have germinated in Sonic. The seed planted all the way back in October hasn’t just blossomed; its roots have spread like mycelium to his heart, his thoughts, his dreams, making it impossible to distinguish between where Shadow's influence ends and his own identity begins.

“I feel guilty,” he begins slowly, testing each word before releasing it into the space between them. “And I feel shame for what I did to him and how I made him feel, but more than that I just…I feel like shit ‘cause I won’t see him again. He’ll never understand just how much I wanted to try and make things work, and now there won’t be a second chance for me to explain myself. I don’t get another turn.”

Tails and Knuckles remain quiet. Not because there’s nothing to say, but because they’re giving Sonic the floor to speak. Sonic’s gaze flicks to their faces, to their open acceptance, and draws a deep breath that stutters on its way in. “I feel like shit because I’m going to miss him. I already miss him. I know it’s corny and gay and weird and—”

“Stop that,” Knuckles chides with sharp disapproval. “Stop belittling your own emotions.”

“I…I’m not.”

“You are.” Knuckles’ face pulls into a frown. Sonic’s words aren’t the issue, but the cruel manner he’s using to insult himself is. “You are speaking as if the way you are feeling is out of the ordinary, as if it is somehow wrong or undeserving of sympathy.”

“It is. It’s weird. It’s not normal.”

“Who told you that?” Knuckles challenges.

“Everyone. The world.” Sonic shrugs pathetically, the blanket over his waist jostling with the movement . “It’s one thing to have a c…a crush on someone, but to have it on someone who’s repeatedly tried to kill you, and hurt your family, and someone you’ve hurt, let alone a guy, isn’t normal. I don’t feel normal, guys. I feel like a freak. More than usual.”

“Sonic, you are not normal,” Knuckles points out.

The words hit him like a sucker punch. Still trying to act nonchalant, Sonic keeps his face still and his attitude sleepy, despite the fact that he’s now very much awake. Every muscle in his body tenses as the insult sinks in. “Damn,” he mutters, the small word barely scratching the surface of how deeply the comment wounded him. “Brutal.”

Knuckles’ glove around his leg squeezes. “Not because of the way you feel, you buffoon. Because of who you are. You aren’t normal. Neither am I. Neither is Tails. Neither is Shadow, for that matter. That is not a bad thing. It is a fact.”

They fall back into silence as Knuckles’ words ring out like a gong’s toll. Sonic makes a point to look anywhere but at his two friends, while Tails stares daggers into the side of his head and Knuckles stares down at his gloves while he ponders. “I mean, do I get it? No.” Knuckles’ gruff voice pipes up. “Not at all.”

Sonic opens his mouth to defend himself and by proxy Shadow, but he’s silenced by Knuckles’ raised glove as he continues: “However, that does not mean it is not legitimate.”

“...in what sense?” Sonic asks cautiously, afraid to hope for acceptance.

“Do I understand what you see in him? Absolutely not.”

“Hey—”

“—but, that does not mean that it is not valid,” Knuckles finishes firmly, finitely, with a clear full stop. “In the same fashion that you probably do not understand why I will give my life to protect the Master Emerald until the day I die, I do not understand what you find attractive about him.”

“Wait, hold on.” Tails interrupts their tender moment with a raised hand and a twisted expression on his face that Sonic would place somewhere between ‘confused’ and ‘disgusted’. “You find Shadow attractive ? I thought you were just friends!”

Knuckles turns to Tails with a look of exasperation. “Have you not been listening to a word Sonic has said?”

“I mean, yeah, but…” Tails’ scrunched-up expression tilts towards Sonic. He looks like he’s just sucked on a lemon and he has to pretend like it tastes good. “You find him…attractive? Shadow?”

Sonic’s lips purse in a flat line. “You’re not making me feel any better, Tails.”

“Sorry! I know, I know, I just…I just don’t understand. Why him? He’s…”

“...a guy?” Sonic finishes for him lamely.

“What? No.” Tails’ face screws up in confusion, as he states what he hoped would be the obvious: “He hurt you. He’s not nice to you. Why would him being a guy make any difference?”

The mattress dips and creaks as Knuckles adjusts his position, his bulky frame causing the bedframe to groan. “You have mentioned this twice now, hedgehog. Let’s clear up a misconception — neither Tails nor I care that you are attracted to another male.”

Sonic does his best to keep his expression neutral, but he knows that it’s cracking at the edges, betraying just how deep this feeling of shame goes. “You’re just saying that to not hurt my feelings,” he dismisses, finding it suddenly very hard to meet their eyes.

“No, I am not.” Knuckles doubles down fiercely. “Maddie, Tom, Walters, and you all have all been plagued by strange human politics surrounding relationships. That is not a ‘thing’ back home on Mobius. I only know what it is that you are so afraid of because there was an arc in La Ultima Passion where Mateo falls in love with Juan.” He gestures between himself and Tails. “I understand, but the fox doesn’t.”

“I'm completely lost; I don’t get it,” Tails says quietly in agreement with Knuckles. It’s as if Sonic and Knuckles are speaking in tongues, or discussing a chapter from a book he hasn’t read yet, and he’s left having to infer plot points by reading in-between the lines. He’s usually pretty good at reading subtext, but this topic is a blind spot not even he can see navigate around without a little help. “What are you talking about?”

“You mean…that’s not a thing on Mobius?” Sonic asks, hesitantly flicking his gaze over to meet Knuckles’ eyes, sidestepping Tails’ question. “Just a human thing?”

“Absolutely,” Knuckles responds proudly. “Which is why it is so bizarre that it can be considered taboo on Earth.”

“Guys, does someone mind spelling this out for me?” Tails pleads, feeling left out of the conversation.

Knuckles breaks his and Sonic’s charged, shared look before he lays a fist on Tails’ shoulder and speaks: “On Earth, it is seen as abnormal for two men, or two women, to have romantic feelings for one another.”

Tails’ face scrunches up again. Not because of the gender thing, but for an entirely different problem. He directs his clear repulse towards Sonic with another I-just-sucked-a-lemon expression on his face. “You have romantic feelings for Shadow?!”

“Tails, you were literally right there yesterday when I said I had a crush.”

“Yeah! I just thought it was a friend-crush, not a…” A shudder physically rolls through Tails. “A romantic one.”

“Again — not helping here, buddy.”

“Sorry,” Tails apologises, trying to school his face into something that looks less like Sonic has admitted to something profoundly horrifying. “I just…did you think we’d think it’s weird because he’s a boy?”

“Yeah,” Sonic admits at last. His fingers knot in the fabric of his quilt. “It’s not ‘normal’ here, I guess. Or, well, it is, but a lot of people don’t like it and think it’s gross.” Sonic blinks his tired eyes, and stares down into the middle distance, loosely focusing on the patterns in his bedding. “Is that just…normal back home?”

The expression melts off of Tails’ face, replaced by something contemplative as he recalls memories of his time on Mobius. “I never really thought about it. I mean, I lived alone a lot of the time ‘cause of my family issues, but it wasn’t weird.” Tails’ tails fan out across his lap. His fingers find purchase in the tufts of white furl, twisting ringlets around his knuckles; a bad habit he has whenever he recalls memories of home. In a bid to take a left on the fork in the road of their conversation, he redirects the question towards Knuckles. “Was it the same for you?”

Knuckles huffs a grunt. Unlike Tails, he has no issue recalling his childhood; if anything, it’s with fond nostalgia, lacking the guardedness of Tails’ reluctance to discuss anything beyond surface-level detail. Not even Sonic’s managed to pry that out of him yet, and Tails is pretty much an open book with him,  but even he has hard boundaries, one of them being discussion of his homelife prior to his Earthly arrival. “Of course. Plenty of the Echidna Clan lived together, whether they were man and man, or woman and woman, or whatever they identified as.” Knuckles directs the curve of his boxing glove at Sonic. “Why do you think it is strange?”

“I don’t…I mean, I don’t think I do? It’s just…I don’t know.” Sonic makes an uncomfortable sound, struggling to grasp his messy thoughts, let alone articulate them. “I’ve lived on Earth for most of my life. Everything I do is a byproduct of my environment here. You pick up on the way people speak about two guys dating and it’s not generally positive, so you sort of believe it by association, y’know? Even though I ended up liking a guy, it’s like I have this weird feeling of shame associated with it. Like it’s wrong.”

Sonic wipes his sweaty palms on the sheets, and continues: “My original home — Green Hill Zone — all of it feels like a distant memory. Longclaw and I never really… lived with anyone else, and I wasn’t allowed outside unless she was with me. Isn’t it crazy that we three are from the same planet — hell, Knuckles and I have history that goes way back — and yet I feel like I’ve got more in common with Jojo sometimes than I do with you guys?”

The room lapses into silence. Sonic closes his eyes and feels them throb in rhythm with his heartbeat, exerted under the exhaustion he can feel deep down into his bones. All of the energy replenished from the soup and the grilled cheese has well and truly left him, leaving him feeling once again like a hollow shell of his former self, as if he’s been gutted of everything good and bright and whole, leaving behind nothing but his own shadow.

“You are overthinking this because you are tired,” Knuckles tells him, his voice low and comforting as he offers counsel. For all of his harsh edges and blunt disposition, Knuckles is someone who only speaks with facts and logic, never hesitating to give it to him straight, and it’s a nice respite after Walters’ game of psychological manipulation and mental warfare. “‘Normal’ does not exist like Earthlings think it does. ‘Normal’ is just a word used to describe the popular demographic. On Mobius, many of us live in harmony with one another — whether you are an echidna, a fox, or a hedgehog, or whether you are male, female, neither, or both. What is considered ‘normal’ in one tribe will be considered ‘abnormal’ in another, but abnormality is not a bad thing.”

“Am I considered abnormal because of my tails?” Tails asks Knuckles as he drags himself up to sit near the headboard, mimicking Sonic. 

“Yes,” Knuckles responds without hesitation.

“Knuckles!” Sonic scalds.

“It is not an insult. It is a fact. You are abnormal, fox. As am I — the last of the Echidna warriors. And Sonic, so are you. No other creature I know of can travel at the speed you can.” Knuckles shrugs. “Other than Shadow, of course. So, maybe on Earth you are considered abnormal if you bare romantic feelings for another male, but in a room full of foxes with two tails, or back home when my tribe were still alive, would we have been considered abnormal too? Likely not.”

Sonic tilts his head to look at Knuckles who, despite giving such sage and mature advice, has now arranged himself belly-down across the foot of the bed, socked feet kicked up behind him like a teenager ready for gossip. In the same, quizzical tone of voice he continues: “If you stand in a room full of other people who are attracted to the same gender, then are you truly abnormal?”

Sonic blinks. It’s so simple, but so profound, and Sonic is reminded again of just how much of an anchor Knuckles is to him. Trust Knuckles to say something like that without even batting an eye, he thinks to himself with a weak smile. “I guess you’re right,” he acknowledges slowly. The words do something to ease the burden weighing down on his chest, but only slightly. Sonic feels less like he’s being suffocated by a plastic bag and more like he’s being smothered with a feather pillow, trading for a lesser evil. “I just thought you guys would hate me for it. I don’t know why.” 

“We don’t hate you for it,” Tails reassures in a sweet tone, his hand coming out to settle over the top of Sonic’s knee and giving it a squeeze. “We just…”

“We just do not think that Shadow is a good mate for you to choose,” Knuckles finishes, unhelpfully blunt, holding none of the apprehension Tails carries in spades.

Sonic rolls his eyes. So much for the unconditional support. He turns to Tails, who’s pulling the same I-just-sucked-a-lemon face again. “Stop it.”

“I’m not doing anything,” Tails responds, his face crumpled into a grimace.

“Yes, you are.”

“Am not.”

“Is this ‘cause I said I find Shadow attractive?” The look on Tails’ face intensifies. “You’re doing it again!”

A squeal of frustration escapes Tails’ chest. “Just…why him? Sonic, you can do so much better!” Tails whines. “There’s hundreds, no, thousands of people here on Earth and back home who’d actually be nice to you and not beat you up. I bet there’s loads of hedgehogs back on Mobius who would kick Shadow’s butt! They’d be nicer, they’d be cooler, and they’d be better in every way to you!”

Sonic groans and scrubs at the hair on the front of his head. “If things were that easy, then do you think I’d be sitting here right now feeling like garbage? I didn’t choose to like the guy.”

“Obviously. Who would willingly choose to be in this situation?”

Sonic grunts. He glances up and offers a wry smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “This clown.”

“Where do you think he went after he Chaos Controlled away?” Tails asks after a beat. It physically causes Sonic to jolt, as if the reminder of his actions is a hot poker branding his skin. “Oh…uh, too soon?”

“No, no,” Sonic dismisses Tails’ concerns gently, and pushes to sit up a little straighter. He reaches up to worry the quills at the back of his head, drawing one clump over his shoulder to fidget with near his collarbone. “He…well, I don’t really know where he’s gone, but I suspect he’s gone into hiding again.”

“Again?” Knuckles echoes. It’s an invitation, a metaphorical hand opening the door for Sonic to broach the conversation. Sonic’s eyes flick over to meet Knuckles’ to see, again, there isn’t a single ounce of judgement there. Curiosity, sure, maybe, but who wouldn’t at least be a little curious when it comes to Shadow? He’s a walking enigma; everything he does is fascinating, even to those who hate him.

Sonic sucks his lower lip into his mouth as he weighs his options. Knuckles and Tails are still pretty much in the dark about most aspects of his and Shadow’s relationship, aside from the obvious: that they’d meet occasionally, and had grown close — close enough for one of them to develop romantic feelings for the other. 

Maddie’s words from the morning after he returned from his brief running-away stint echo in his head. You might’ve felt embarrassed to speak to us, but those two love you regardless of anything that’s happened.

He’s reminded of his plummet to Earth after the Eclipse Cannon’s explosion, of Tails diving down through the stratosphere without a moment's hesitation just to save him, and how Knuckles' strong arms had wrapped around them both as he risked his own life to get them all safely home together. 

Sonic draws in a deep breath that seems to fill every small sac in his lungs, and bares his heart to the two people on Earth he knows, through thick and thin, will have his back no matter what storms they weather.

“So,” he begins with the exhale, his voice steadier than he expected, “you know how I kept that weird metal bangle on my bedside table after we got back from London? Well, here’s the thing…”

Forty minutes later, with a throat raw and chapped from talking nonstop for the better part of the hour, Knuckles and Tails are well and truly stunned into silence — and that’s a feat, considering they’re the only two people Sonic knows of who don’t know when to shut up. The other one being himself, of course.

“So,” Knuckles prompts after a stilted, awkward pause, “you have known about this since Christmasttime, fox?”

“Not all of it,” Tails responds with a look of pure shell-shock across his face. He’s still trying to come to terms with everything Sonic’s told him without needing to go lie down in a quiet corner. “Not that. Not that they…” A shudder visibly rolls through Tails, “...canoodled.”

“We did not canoodle,” Sonic quips as heat rises to flood his cheeks. 

Knuckles, largely unconcerned with the more delicate aspects of the story that Sonic admitted to through gritted teeth, sidesteps the issue and leaps to the important question. “Why did you keep it from us?”

“Because it wasn’t my secret to share,” Sonic says with a self-conscious shrug. “I know it sounds stupid when I say that I wasn’t expecting it to get this complicated, but part of me hoped that Shadow and I could keep meeting up in private without compromising his safety.” A wry smile pulls at his lips. “That went out the window when Tails found his fur, of course.”

“Sorry about that,” mutters Tails, guilt evident in his voice.

Sonic shakes his head. “Don’t be. You were only trying to be helpful, right?”

Tails gives a shy nod. Sonic gives his head an affectionate ruffle, trying to dispel some of the remorse he’s feeling, no doubt. Tails leans into the contact, his tails smoothing out from their unconscious bristle. “So,” Knuckles prompts, his clear voice cutting through their tender moment, “you believe he has gone into hiding?”

“Ah,” Sonic says aloud as he realises he’s missed out something very, very important. “I, uh, forgot to include one important detail.” He withdraws his hand from Tails’ head and brings it to his lap, thumbs twiddling with one another in a self-soothing gesture. “Shadow has been trying to track down Stone for the last couple of months.”

“Stone?” Knuckles echoes, surprise flashing across his face. He clearly hadn’t spared a thought to the man in a long time. “Why him?”

“I think he’s worried that Stone is a danger to him in some kind of way. I mean, Shadow was manipulated by Eggman and Gerald to do their bidding, so he’s been trying to tie up loose ends so he doesn’t have to keep looking over his shoulder all the time. Stone is one of those loose ends, I guess.” Sonic’s fingers tighten in the knot of joints and knuckles they’ve worked into. “I mean, I thought the guy was pretty harmless, y’know? More of a follower than a leader, and now that Eggman is gone, what harm could he cause? But…well, Shadow’s found out some stuff about him that’s pretty worrying.”

“In what way?” Tails asks, apprehension creeping into his voice.

Sonic exhales a bluster between his lips. “I don’t know exactly. We didn’t really talk much about it, but Shadow’s convinced that Stone’s building something, or fixing something. Shadow wasn’t sure exactly what, but now I guess we’ll never know.” A humourless laugh shakes Sonic’s shoulders. “Guess we’ve just gotta hope the guy is buying stuff to fix his fridge, and that he’s not pulling an Eclipse Cannon two-point-oh in some kind of revenge plot.”

The room falls into uncomfortable silence as Knuckles and Tails stew in the revelation, the weight of potential danger hanging over them like a monsoon that’s a few hours from splitting the climate in a storm.

Sonic continues: “I don’t know how much Shadow dramatized or read in-between the lines, but he’s not the kind of guy to make stuff up. I think whatever Stone has been up to, it’s been enough of a concern to warrant Shadow to track him for the last year. My gut tells me that Shadow’s still out there following him, but…”

But thinking about him is too much to bear, Sonic finishes internally. He exhales another shaky sigh to ground himself, to expel some of the searing pain between his ribs, and continues to twist his fingers in his lap. “Part of me thinks we should get involved and investigate, too, but if we track Stone down it might just lead us to Shadow, and I’m not—” Sonic’s voice cracks on itself. He clears his throat, and continues in a tight voice: “I don’t think it’s right for me to see him after what I did.”

Tails' small hand returns to Sonic's knee, offering gentle pressure, while Knuckles' larger glove settles reassuringly on his foot. “I know you feel guilty,” Knuckles says, speaking to Sonic’s face even when Sonic can’t do the simple thing of maintaining eye-contact, “but I do not believe you acted with malicious intent toward him. I held that opinion before hearing the whole story, and my perspective has not changed. What you did was far from ideal — I will tell you that much — but your actions were motivated by wanting to give him a life worth living.”

“I feel like I just took a huge freaking dump on the trust he put in me,” Sonic admits quietly, the tight wind of his voice making his words sound small. 

“No,” Knuckles interjects, cutting through his self-depreciation. “This is not a black-and-white situation. You betrayed his trust on this occasion, but you honoured it on countless others.”

“I—"

Knuckles continues forward with bull-headed determination: “You kept his identity a secret right up until the moment where you no longer could.”

Sonic’s breath stutters in his chest. “Yeah, but—”

“You put all measures in place to maintain his privacy. You tried, Sonic. You were not successful. But you tried. You did not…’take a dump’ on his trust. You did your best until circumstances made it impossible to continue.”

A devastated sigh rushes out of Sonic. He drops his head into his hands and lets out another deep, shivering breath that feels like it’s wrenching his lungs out of his body via his mouth. “Then why do I feel like I’ve done something evil?”

“I mean, he made choices too, y’know,” Tails says after a moment. He shuffles up the bed until he’s hip-to-hip with Sonic. Gently, without intention to disturb and only to offer support, he lays his head on Sonic’s shoulder. “He voluntarily went out with you and spent time with you on all those occasions. You didn’t coerce him into anything.”

“I feel like I did,” Sonic admits into the palm of his hands. “I feel like I led him on with false pretences.”

Tails lets out a contemplative hum, before continuing: “He’s not a baby. He decided to go out with you, even if he knew the risk was high. I mean, you went to freaking Korea together in the middle of the day. Of course there would have been a chance that you could’ve been caught. He knew the risk, and he went anyway, and that goes for all the other times you guys went out together. He decided the experience was worth the potential consequences. You can blame yourself all you want, but you weren’t the only one in the driver’s seat, Sonic.”

“You should blame yourself to some degree, as you really need to reflect on the impact that keeping secrets can have,” Knuckles chimes in unhelpfully.

Tails steamrolls ahead, pressing his cheek against Sonic’s collarbone. “What I’m trying to say is that he still went along with you on those adventures, and he went along willingly. Even before I found out, and before you knew I knew, he was still coming to our house pretty regularly, and that was under no false pretences, right? The risk has always been high.”

Sonic gives a small, lethargic nod. “I guess…”

“See? This isn’t all on you.”

“The fox is right. You should have been honest with him from the beginning, but you know that. You have paid dearly for that lesson, and I know in the future you won’t repeat that mistake again. However, you shouldn't shoulder all the blame. He's equally responsible for his own choices and actions.” Knuckles jabs his glove in Sonic’s direction for emphasis. “If he wanted to be rid of you once you told him, he could have Chaos Controlled out of the area. But he did not.”

“No, he beat the crap outta you instead,” Tails remarks with a frown.

“I beat him up pretty badly, too,” Sonic retorts with a small, barely-there smile, which softens the look on Tails’ face.

“So, stop treating this like you have yourself to blame. It is getting tiring, and I miss the version of you that existed before all this self-flagellation began.” Knuckles grumbles. “As much as it pains me to say that.”

Sonic glances up from the cup of his gloves and directs a larger, but still pretty meek, smile at Knuckles. “Thanks, Knux.”

Knuckles waves him off dismissively, though his expression and the edge of his gaze remains gentle. The words provide some comfort and nudge Sonic in the right direction, but he still feels the aching yearn of the space where his heart used to be. It's still out there somewhere in the Green Hills forestry, he imagines, lying among scattered pine needles and fallen leaves, pumping blood onto the dirt and waiting for its other half to return home.

Slowly, but surely, things had begun to get easier in the weeks following their reconciliation over soup and grilled cheese.

Bit by bit, Sonic had started to venture out of his room to try and find remnants of the spark he’d lost, all while knowing full well that that version of himself was long gone, its shattered fragments caught in the wind and blown to a valley far out of his reach.

He began to take longer drips outdoors just so he could grow accustomed to the feeling of wind in his quills and the sun in his face; two things that he used to find pleasure in but now found nothing beyond a small tingle of: that's nice. Once his family had begun to notice that Sonic's period of foul mood wasn't going away like it usually would, they became his rock and acted like his crutches when he couldn't bear to stand by himself anymore. When sleepless nights had begun to take their toll, Tom would stay with him on the sofa downstairs until they both ended up dozing off while watching a movie. When he didn't feel like doing much of anything beyond waking up and pushing food around his plate, Knuckles and Tails were there with controllers in their hands and offers for him to join them in a round of video games. When he wasn't up to moving his muscles beyond a pathetic lap of the house's perimeter, Maddie would be there with one hand in Ozzy's leash and the other extended for him to hold as they took him for a walk around Green Hills and its nearby football field.

Everyone had been doing their utmost best to drag Sonic out of his funk when his muscles were just too tired to do it by himself. The issue, however, was that Sonic realised pretty quickly that it wasn't just taking a toll on his own mental health and wellbeing, but his family's, too.

During the two week span when he had been essentially catatonic and dead to the world, the fallout of what happened at the dinner table with Walters had proved far more extensive than he initially had realised based on what little information Tails and Knuckles had gleaned. For the last few weekends since Sonic started venturing out of his room again, Tom had been out of the house for long evenings that sometime spanned days, and when Sonic had asked where he went during those times all he had been told was that Tom was: “Attending some meetings with G.U.N., don’t worry,” by Maddie.

“What do you mean?” Sonic had asked after she first told him. “He’s just…meeting them? That’s vague. Are they serious meetings?”

She had been in the middle of unloading some wet laundry from the washing machine when he’d cornered her with the question. They were both in the utility room and the space, usually small and cosy, did little to help how alone and isolated Sonic had felt during that moment. “He’s just tying up some loose ends after the meeting a few weeks ago,” Maddie explained, dumping the soggy clothes into a plastic basket and hoisting it up with a grunt of effort. “Don’t worry, okay?”

“But—”

“It’s fine — we’ve got this handled.” Her smile tightened. “Honestly, don’t worry.”

Every concern he raised and every attempt he made to offer help resulted in either Tom or Maddie guiding him to sit back down with well-intentioned hands and nervous smiles. Sonic had never been treated like something fragile and breakable in his entire life, and he had begun to wonder if his last few outbursts — running away, fighting with Shadow, and the two-week depression he had fallen into — had convinced everyone that pussyfooting around him would avoid triggering a fourth.

It was an awful feeling. Sonic had never felt guilty for simply being himself before; not at least until recently.

The house during those weeks seemed to sag underneath an unidentifiable stress. With Tom out of the picture attending G.U.N. meetings that Sonic suspected had had to do with defending his own privacy and autonomy following the incident with Shadow, Maddie had been left to pick up the slack by working longer hours and harder shifts. Some nights she'd be gone from sunrise to sunset, only returning when the cicadas had begun to quiet down and she had been reduced to a shell of herself, worked to the point of exhaustion.

To support Sonic’s worries, they began to receive increasing amounts of mail on a weekly basis, ones with scary red stamps that he reckoned might have been bills, and more cardboard-backed dockets Sonic recognised immediately as G.U.N.-sanctioned. Every time he offered to help, even suggesting that the small earnings he'd made over the summer by helping coach at the middle school could contribute to the household bills, he had been gently nudged away with a wordless thanks, but no thanks from Tom and Maddie who had kept looking at him like he was something fragile that was a few words away from breaking.

“Why is everyone treating me like I’m made of fine china?” Sonic asked during one of his and Knuckles’ trips down to the bottom of the garden to collect eggs. Their short-lived summer was well and truly on life support, and for it being late August the weather felt more autumnal than it did summer-y. It did little to ease the hackles Sonic constantly had bristled on his back.

Knuckles had stepped over the chicken wire and burrowed into the small coop to collect an armful of eggs with the wicker basket shucked up around his shoulder. When he emerged, it was with a feather in his hair and a contemplative frown on his face. “Because they are worried about you,” Knuckles responded, as if the point was obvious.

“But I’m fine.”

“Hedgehog, you look like you are ill.”

Sonic had recoiled at Knuckles’ blunt delivery. It wasn’t like he was wrong — he knew in himself that he looked, to put it simply, ill. 

But he was fine. He felt fine. Sure, he wasn’t eating as much as he used to nor was he outside as much as he used to be, but that was just due to the change in season. What happened between him and Shadow was a thing of the past. He was over it. There was no point mourning for something that could have never worked out realistically in the long run.

“I’m fine,” he’d repeated, surer, even as Knuckles fixed him with a sceptical look. With an edge to his voice, Sonic snapped: “Stop looking at me like that. Can we just please stop pretending like I’m going to break? I’m fine.”

Knuckles had opened his mouth to respond but, after a moment's consideration, decided against it. Whatever he wanted to say, whatever he felt necessary to share, wasn’t what Sonic needed at that moment. Even Knuckles was being mindful of Sonic’s state in case of further upsetting him.

It didn’t make things better. In fact, having Knuckles tread on eggshells was maybe the worst thing of all. Knuckles wasn’t someone who ever treaded lightly, and certainly not with Sonic. Not until now.

Instead of putting his gripes and frustrations into words, Sonic growled and stomped back up the lawn, away from Knuckles and his stupid wicker basket and his stupid chicken eggs. Defending himself made him look crazy, and staying silent made him only look more depressed. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t.

The weird staticky, stiff air continues even to the present day, a whole three weeks after he came out of his depression. It’s a few days before the dawn of autumn, where the leaves are still waxy but just beginning to crisp at the edges, and it’s cool enough to go out with a light jacket but only when the sun is high in the sky. On this Sunday afternoon, he’s up in the attic with a quilt half-pulled over his legs, thumbing through his collector’s-edition atlas (because he likes reading it, and no other reason) when Maddie pokes her head up past the open door’s hatch and announces with forced cheerfulness: “We thought it would be a good idea to go for a family meal tonight! What do you think?”

Sonic glances up from the page his thumb had been tracing and has to blink a few times. His eyes are dry; he’s been staring at the same sentence for a while without really registering anything beyond the dull pulse of his heart and the blooming ink bleeding against the shiny, coated paper. “Out?” he echoes, lowering the book to his lap. “Why?”

Maddie waves her hand dismissively, as if her thought process isn’t worth putting into words. “Well, we haven’t done something together in ages, and neither Tom nor I are up for cooking.”

“Okay,” Sonic says slowly, cautiously, accepting her words at face-value despite knowing that there’s something definitely beneath the surface that she’s not willing to share. He’s no rocket scientist, but it’s not difficult to see that she’s trying to keep up the appearances of normalcy without addressing the elephant in the room. They don’t often eat out anymore, not with how tight money’s become. “Uh, when?”

“In about an hour?” She nods her head towards the atlas. She clearly realises what he’s reading, but she doesn’t comment on it, even though part of Sonic wishes she would just so he can remind her that he’s well and truly out of his funk now, and they need to stop worrying about him. “You can finish reading what you’re reading, and we’ll head out around six, okay?”

“Okay.” Sonic gives a tight smile. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” With an equally tight smile, Maddie disappears down the ladder, leaving Sonic to read and re-read a passage on sauropods. 

Fifty-something minutes later, they’re all bundled into the truck and heading down the I-90 into the city. Knuckles and Tails are staring down at the iPad held between them and Sonic, sitting on the left-hand side of the three-seater, is staring out of the window as the fir trees whizz past in a blend of green and brown streaks. The tinny music from the iPad is a little grating but not bad enough for Sonic to snap at them to turn it down. Besides, it doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone else, just him and his fried nerves. He focuses on manually breathing through his nose and out through his mouth to try and ground some of the nerves in his system and elongate his short fuse and even shorter patience. Don’t make a scene, his conscience threatens. Don’t make them pity you any more than they already do.

“Hmmm,” Maddie hums from the passenger seat, an unhappy, contemplative sound that’s only a little louder than the drone of the radio. “Tom, passing cars keep flashing us.”

“What? I haven’t noticed,” he responds with a frown. He keeps his eyes on the road just as a tiny Fiat passes them and flashes Tom with their high beams. “Oh, you’re right. Maybe there’s an accident up ahead?”

Maddie extends her head up to try and peer above the smattering of other cars on the highway. “I can’t see smoke, or anyone slowing down. Plus, they’ve been flashing us for at least a mile or so. Maybe the car’s got something wrong with it.”

Tom copies her by lifting up from his seat a little and peering down the truck’s hood. He squints, flicking his eyes between the road and the car, before he finds what he’s looking for and settles back down on his chair. “Damn it!” he cusses. “One of the headlamps has blown.”

“Really?” Maddie leans back into her chair with a sigh. “You sure?”

“Yeah. Only one of the lights is working. Other one’s dead.”

A groan leaves Maddie’s nose and it sounds like it comes from the pit of her stomach, carrying the weight of this week’s exhaustion and the promise of next week’s. “There goes another hundred dollars down the pan. So much for the overtime I’d worked on Wednesday, huh.”

An icy feeling of shame floods Sonic’s gut. He didn’t cause the bulb to pop, but he once again feels like it’s somehow his fault. After all, a hundred bucks wouldn’t be an issue had it not been for Tom needing to go out of town to attend meetings with G.U.N. and Walters, which has resulted in Maddie needing to compensate for his loss of earnings by working overtime. They’re already being stretched thin money-wise, and this overpriced meal they’re going for to try and lift Sonic’s down-in-the-dumps spirit probably isn’t going to help.

Sonic swallows a rush of nausea that washes over him in another cold wave, and props his chin on his hand as he continues to stare out the window. 

The fir trees gradually begin to sparsen, and in its place come tall, glass-paned concrete buildings that stretch stories and stories high like great monoliths. Sonic watches the road slow from a blur of lights into something sharper and more focused as Tom shifts down a gear and pulls into the Olive Garden parking lot. It’s semi-full, as you’d expect for a Sunday evening, with the restaurant’s warm lighting spilling out onto the pavement every time the front door closes and opens. 

The five of them clamber out into the brisk air, into the acrid smell and taste of pollution that’s pretty potent this far out of Green Hills. Sonic’s accustomed to the fresh air and the humid warmth that comes from living in a densely-forested area; coming to the city has never felt normal, nor welcoming. He keeps these thoughts, the kind he’d usually voice aloud with a smart-alec comment or joke, to himself and trails behind Maddie and Tom silently as they head into the Olive Garden and get shown to their seat by a bored-looking host who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else than here.

With a chorus of: thank you!s they all settle down at the table with shuffling legs and knocking elbows. Sonic finds himself between Tails and Knuckles while Tom and Maddie take the booth chairs on the other side of the table. The booth itself is pretty private, near the far-end of the restaurant so they’re not in direct line of sight by passer-by's, but not so out of the way that it looks awkward. Again, Sonic wonders if that’s by design; if Maddie or Tom had asked for this area just so there was less likely a chance that a fan would stop and bother them when they know he really wasn’t feeling up to it.

The linoleum of the chairs creak as they all adjust themselves, as if it’s groaning in anticipation of one of the most painfully awkward meals it's ever going to be privy to. 

“Well, this is nice!” Maddie says over-enthusiastically once they’ve all settled, and only after a pause of awkwardness that seems to thicken with each passing second. “We haven’t been out like this in ages, have we?”

“Nope,” Tom responds with the same artificial brightness, though it’s not reflected in his tired eyes. “I’m freaking starving, though.” He reaches over for the menu and holds one between himself and Maddie, and then passes two across for Tails, Sonic, and Knuckles. Knuckles takes one for himself while Sonic and Tails share, flipping open its waxy surface with a fwop.

Tails shuffles his chair closer to Sonic’s while they pore over the menu. All Sonic can do is stare blankly down at the page as the words seem to blend into one, and he can barely make anything out past the desert section advertising in big, bold lettering that they have a limited-time orange and peach cobbler for offer. Sonic blinks his dry eyes and averts his gaze away from the section, away from the painful memory of sun-warmed black fur and kind red eyes, and tries to pretend that he’s extremely interested in the side of broccolini that costs nearly four dollars.

“What’re you having, buddy?” Sonic prompts in a tight voice, tilting his head so he’s looking at whatever Tails is looking at.

Tails hums thoughtfully. He hasn’t taken notice of Sonic’s inner turmoil, thank God, attention still focused on the menu with a look of thought. “I think I’m just gonna have the spaghetti,” he says after a moment. “And some juice. What about you?”

Sonic glances down at the menu. Absolutely nothing looks appetising. 

“Chicken tendies and fries,” he says with as much enthusiasm as he can muster, which is close to none.

“You sure?” Tails frowns down at the menu, eyes flicking across its brightly-illustrated photos. “You usually get something a little more exciting.”

“I’m not really hungry,” he admits with a tight smile.

He can practically feel Maddie and Tom’s worried gaze snap up to stare at him at the omission and it takes every inch of his patience not to throw the menu down and demand they stop acting like he’s going to keel over from a stiff breeze.

As it is, Sonic takes the moment to breathe in a steadying breath before he nudges the menu so Tails can take hold of it, and wrangles every atom that wants to instinctively look at them into submission. “Here you go.”

“Thanks.” Tails takes it, and traces some of the menu items with his fingertip, reading them aloud quietly under his breath. “Wow! Look at the calories on this thing!”

Tom and Maddie’s heavy, worried gazes only leave Sonic when their waitress comes to their table. She’s middle-aged, with a false customer-service smile and a voice befitting a Disney character. “Hi! How are we all doing tonight? Good, good?” she greets.

Silence stretches between the group.

“Great, thanks,” Maddie answers after a beat, trying to mirror her smile and failing.

Her voice pitches up when she takes note of the awkward air between all five at the booth. “Awesome!” she responds, keeping her smile wide and bright. “Hey, it’s good to get some celebrities in the house too, huh? Not every day our own resident superheroes book a table at your local Olive Garden.”

“Ha-ha,” Sonic answers awkwardly on his, Tails, and Knuckles’ behalf. Any other time he’d be more than willing to make a show about it, to show off and maybe throw a trick or two, but not tonight. Sonic can’t even make eye-contact with her, just staring off a little listlessly to the dark wisps of curls atop her head. “Yeah.”

When her two volleys fall flat on their face, the waitress’ plastic smile forms a small crack at the edge. “Well!” she continues with bright exasperation, “what can I get you all tonight?”

“Can we have a few more minutes to decide, please?” Maddie asks with a polite smile. “We’re still looking.”

“Of course! I’ll swing by in just a few minutes, don’t mind me.” 

She scurries off, leaving the five of them to their own devices again. Sonic resolutely stares back down at the menu while Tom and Maddie fiddle with theirs and Knuckles begins to play with the console on the table. “Yeah, spaghetti for me,” Tails declares after a few moments. He sets the menu down flat and leans his head to the side past Sonic to look at Knuckles, who’s in the middle of trying to play a round of Plants vs. Zombies. “What’re you having, Knuckles?”

“Five servings of breadsticks.”

A frown settles on Tails’ face. “That’s all?”

“I like the breadsticks.”

“Okay.” Another beat of silence washes across the table. “What’re you playing?”

“Plants vs. Zombies. Look, they are invading.” He tilts the small screen towards Tails and Sonic with a look of serious contempt on his face. With his gloves so clunky and thick to use, the only way he’s able to play is by using his thumbs. “I must stop them.”

“No screens at the dinner table,” Tom chides, just as he sets down his and Maddie’s menu. “C’mon, it’s not every day we get to go out for a nice meal, right? Let’s talk!”

Knuckles concedes with a grunt. He pauses his game and pushes the screen aside, just as the waitress swings by their table with two pitchers of water on her tray, along with some glasses and two small bottles; one of prosecco, and one of a non-alcoholic alternative. “Oh, we didn’t order those,” Maddie starts, prompting her to sit up a little straighter in her seat.

The waitress breaks out into another smile, working doubly hard for her tip. Maybe she thinks they’re loaded because of who they are — she couldn’t be more wrong. “It’s on the house from our shift manager for what you guys did in London.” She flashes a well-intentioned wink as she sets out the glasses. “Saved a helluva lot of lives that day, huh? Always good to see the good guys take down the bad guys for once.”

Sonic’s heart thumps in his chest as if it's trying to claw its way out of his ribcage, past the gristle and bone and skin. Another horrid swell of guilt washes over him, dredging up the feelings that he’s been trying to bury for the better part of the month. Instead of the memory of kind eyes and sunsets reflecting gold against dark fur, all Sonic can see at the forefront of his mind is the sight of betrayal twisting Shadow’s expression like Sonic has fatally wounded him.

The devastation must show on his face, because Tom is swift to step in with a quick: “Thanks. Do you mind just giving us a few more minutes, please? You can leave the glasses here, we’ll handle the drinks.”

The waitress’ curls bounce as she glances between the family members, noting the tension hanging like a storm cloud around their corner booth. Maddie sits rigid, her hands folded so tightly in her lap that her knuckles have gone bloodless. Knuckles stares down at the opened menu, jaw clenched, while Tails fidgets with his napkin, tearing tiny strips from its edge.

“Oh, I don’t mind—”

“Please.” Tom's smile transforms into something sharp-edged, barely contained. “Just a few more minutes.”

“Sure!” The waitress retreats with dampened brightness, her sneakers squeaking against the restaurant's polished floors. “I’ll just be over there.”

The moment her footsteps fade, the table settles into another sick silence. Sonic knows, even though he can’t see it, that all eyes are on him, not just from his family, but from the neighboring tables where conversations have died to hushed whispers. The waitress’ comments have attracted nearby attention and it’s pretty hard to ignore the shutter sounds of mobile cameras and flashes from their torches. What makes it infinitely worse is the way that he feels totally ill-equipped to deal with any of it. Sonic can’t find a single piece of him that wants to show any reaction, good or bad. He just doesn’t want to be perceived.

“Are you okay?” Tails asks quietly. He said it in a low tone, trying to keep it subtle, but the rest of the table was so quiet he may as well have shouted it.

“I’m fine.”

“...are you sure?”

Heat flares in Sonic's chest, sharp and sudden. “Why does everyone keep asking if I’m okay?” Sonic huffs out a breath, and continues in a louder voice: “I’m literally fine.”

“Sonic—” Maddie starts as she reaches across the table, her wedding ring catching the warm amber light from the overhead fixture.

“Can we stop this?” Sonic doesn’t slam his hands down on the table, not quite, but he hits it with enough force to make their cutlery and the empty glasses jump. With splayed-out fingers, he gestures to Maddie, Tom, Knuckles and Tails. “Can we stop pretending like I’m going to explode? Or like everything is totally fine when it isn’t? Pick one or the other, please. Either everything is on fire, or it’s not. You can’t just keep everything from me, expect me not to get upset when no one gives me straight answers, and then keep asking me if I’m okay when clearly no one else is!”

Suitably admonished, Maddie and Tom baulk and Sonic, feeling like the beginning of the floodgates are being opened, rides the wave of his emotions. The words nearly gag him in their weight as he forms them on his tongue. “Yes, I had a crush on Shadow. A big, fat, gay crush that wasn’t reciprocated. It’s fine. He’s gone, we’re never gonna see each other again, and I’ll get over it. I am over it. I had a few rough weeks, but I’m here now, so can we stop pretending like I’m one wrong word away from a mental breakdown?”

Maddie, Tom, Knuckles, and Tails sit in shocked silence in the echo of Sonic’s words. Sonic snatches up the laminated menu from the table, opens it, and holds it up to hide his own face and the heat he can feel searing his cheeks like a hot Blackstone. Behind the barrier of glossy photographs advertising endless breadsticks and pasta specials, he can hear his own ragged breathing echoing back at him.

The waitress heading their way promptly turns back around when she takes note of the energy at their table.

“Sweetheart, no one’s treating you like you’re a bomb—” Maddie starts cautiously.

“Yes, you are!” The menu hits the table along with his hands, sending their napkins scattering with the gust it creates. “No one’s treating me like normal! You’re all pretending like I’m sick, and like…like I’m not the one who’s caused all of the problems we’re going through, like I’m not responsible for all of the crap going in our lives. Why are all of you just…okay with this?” Sonic asks, a little louder than necessary. “Why are you all just nodding, and smiling, and not getting mad at me? You should be! I’ve been awful!”

A few new heads turn their way from nearby tables: a family with three young children, an elderly couple sharing tiramisu, a pair of college students on what looks like a first date. Maddie offers them a tight-lipped smile before she angles her body toward the table, her back blocking out some view. “Sonic, can this wait until we go home?” she asks quietly, discreetly.

“No.” The word explodes from him like a cork from a champagne bottle. Inside his skull, a swarm of angry wasps has taken flight, their buzzing growing louder with each passing second. He feels like one of those butterfly conservatories, his body a fragile glass dome with thousands of frantic insects battering against the walls, suffocating in the heat and pressure, struggling to free. Every heartbeat ratchets up the tension until he's certain something has to shatter. “I’m fine, I’m over it — I just want you guys to treat me like you believe me. I want you to stop looking at me like I’m something sick.”

“Sonic,” Maddie repeats. “Please?”

Suddenly, it's as if a hairline crack has split his glass walls and all the pressure bleeds out at once as a thousand insects take flight and rush out of him with beating wings and vibrating cages.

He lurches to his feet so abruptly that the table rocks on its pedestal base, sending cutlery clattering to the terracotta tiles below. “I can’t do this,” he whispers, voice breaking on itself. Next to him, Tails’ huge blue eyes swivel up and his lower lip trembles and Sonic is sick and tired of feeling responsible for everyone else’s pain. “I’m going home. Finish the meal without me.”

“Sonic, sit back down,” Maddie hisses, but he's already moving, weaving between tables as her chair scrapes against the floor and he glimpses her rising in his peripheral vision.

Tears blur the restaurant into watercolour smears as Sonic pushes through the maze of tables, past families enjoying normal dinners, past couples sharing quiet conversations, past the rest of the world turning while his own hasn’t moved since their fight in the forest.  The cold evening air hits him as soon as he pushes the double doors of the Olive Garden open and cools the burning tracks on his cheeks, but he barely registers the relief.

The moon above hangs, a semi-circle like a lazy eye, watching him as he crosses the distance of the half-empty lot with the fever of someone running away from a murder scene. He swipes his tears with his wrist and storms across the parking lot as he hears, rather than sees, a pair of footsteps jogging to keep up with him. “Leave me alone!” he cries without turning around, picking up his speed and navigating the dark car park without being able to see any further than a few feet in front of him.

“Sonic,” Tom calls in a placating tone that doesn’t quite mask his desperation, his shoes scuffing against the grit and asphalt underfoot.

“Just leave me alone!” But Tom's longer stride easily closes the distance, and Sonic only makes it halfway across the lot before warm fingers wrap around his elbow, stopping him dead in his tracks. “Stop — let go of me!” he cries, thrashing against the grip which only causes Tom’s fingers to tighten until they’re well and truly encircled around his smaller arm.

“Let’s talk about this, Sonic,” Tom urges, a little winded from his dash, dragging them to a halt.

“No! I just want to be left alone!”

Tom's chest rises and falls heavily as he catches his breath. “You’ve been left alone for three weeks. You’re not going back into that dark corner, I’m not letting you. Not again.”

Sonic spins around in his grip, tears flying from his eyes to splatter onto the concrete in dark spots. Tom’s jacket is billowing in the evening breeze and his face, a little red from exertion, is creased in worry when he sees the state Sonic’s in. “Why won’t you just leave me be?” His free hand swipes at the air while the other strains against Tom's hold. “I don’t want to be around you guys anymore and have you pretend like I’m…I’m sick, or something! You’re treating me like I’ve got terminal cancer, or like I’m crazy! I just don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Do what, Sonic?” Tom asks gently, dropping to one knee on the cold asphalt, bringing himself to Sonic's eye level. His hands frame Sonic's elbows, steady and warm despite the tremor in his own fingers.

“This!” Sonic cries, tears streaking down his muzzle. He flinches away when Tom tries to hold him but Tom chases with his hand and grips Sonic tightly so he’s got him in both hands, fingers firm around his elbows. “I’m tired of pretending everything’s okay! And that everything I’ve done, everything I’m doing, everything I’m going to do isn’t hurting you guys! I’m fine, but you guys aren’t!”

“You’re not—”

“I am! You’re doing it again, you’re pretending that none of this is a problem! Do you know how awful this is making me feel? How it feels to know that everything that’s wrong with us is all because of me, and everyone’s pretending like it isn’t?” Sonic scrubs at the tears flooding down his cheeks with his shoulder, and tries to wriggle out of Tom’s grip, but his fingers are tight and he’s considerably stronger than Sonic in this moment, so his struggle is for nought. “I’m so freaking embarrassed all of the time, I just want someone, anyone, to be honest and get angry with me for once! How is everyone acting like this is fine? It's not! I ruined the relationship between you guys and Walters! I got you in trouble with G.U.N. again! I drove Shadow into hiding for the rest of his life! I'm the reason everyone's life is a disaster, and nobody will admit it!” His voice breaks completely as he cries the last part out with guttural pain: “Part of me is glad Longclaw isn’t here to see me anymore, ‘cause at least she won’t be ashamed of the mess I’ve turned into!”

As a sob bleats out of his mouth he finds two, strong arms wind around his chest and pull him forward with a jolt. “It’s alright,” Tom murmurs, bringing Sonic tight against his chest. “I’ve got you.”

“I hate this!” He cries, thrashing against the grip but Tom only holds him tighter, even when Sonic begins to kick his legs out frantically. “I hate everything! I hate feeling like I’ll never fit in, and that all of the problems are caused by me, and that nothing will ever work out! I cause everything to die or turn into ruin and I just—”

Tom lets him rage and weep and thrash until his body has nothing left to give. Together, they sink onto the cold asphalt between two parked sedans, their legs tangling as Tom cradles Sonic's shaking frame. Sonic fights the comfort for several more seconds before something inside him snaps, and he collapses into Tom's arms with a wail that seems to come from somewhere deeper than his lungs.

Sonic doesn’t know how long they stay there. Time passes simultaneously quickly and slowly; like Sonic can count the number of people who get into their cars in the nearby spaces, but doesn't know how long the gaps between each person has been. All he knows is that it takes an eternity for him to wring himself dry of tears, until they fade into something less animalistic and raw and he’s just huffing small, hiccupping sobs against Tom’s neck as Tom’s tight arms keep him close and keep him steady.

Eventually, Sonic goes limp, his full weight settling against Tom's shoulder as Tom finally relents on the bear-hug and shifts one of his hands to rub comfortingly up and down Sonic’s spine. “I’ve got you,” he whispers against his temple. It causes Sonic to shudder out another broken sob, like it’s being squeezed out of him. “I’ve got you, Sonic.”

The phrase echoes Maddie's voice from that awful morning after his fight with Shadow, when she'd held him on the bathroom floor while he fell apart. “I just—” Sonic cuts himself off with a shuddering breath, one that wracks his entire body. In the time it takes for him to recuperate Tom is nodding against his temple, encouraging him silently as his hand continues to rub up and down his back. “I just feel like all of the thoughts in my head are weighing me down and I can’t escape them, and when you guys are treating me like I’m a bomb about to explode, it makes me feel even more guilty,” he finishes, quieter than how he started. It’s a clumsy phrasing and barely scratches the surface of what he’s feeling but even just getting to this point of admitting it is a huge leap.

“Have you only been having them recently?” Tom asks against his head, gentle and measured, giving Sonic something to pace against and anchor to.

Sonic shakes his head after a moment. He knots his fingers into the material of Tom’s shirt and snivells. “No, not really, just…I think they’ve always been there, but recently, it’s just…”

“Accumulated,” Tom finishes for him. Sonic nods, acknowledging that he’s right. “Like everything that’s happened over the last sixteen years has finally filled the bucket, and now it’s overflowing.” Sonic nods again, stronger, leaning his cheek against the steady thump-thump-thump of Tom’s ribcage. “That’s okay. That’s normal, buddy.”

“It’s not,” Sonic says, muffled into Tom’s shirt. “I keep saying that I’m fine, and I am, but no one believes me. I’m not normal, and I feel like…I feel like everyone else can see it, like they know it, even when I’m trying to be normal. I just want to be normal.”

“You’ve been through so, so much — more than most people will ever experience in a lifetime.” Tom’s hand comes up to cup the back of Sonic’s head as he holds him to his chest while another shaky breath leaves Sonic, the warning shot of sob. “Do you know how to make it better?” Sonic shakes his head. “You talk. You talk to me, or Mads, or Knux or Tails, or to someone else — a professional, who’ll help you manage those thoughts and feelings in a way that makes them manageable.”

“I don’t need to see a shrink,” Sonic murmurs into Tom’s chest.

“Well, I have before, and so has Maddie, and so has your aunt Rachel and your uncle Randall,” Tom says. Sonic pulls back to stare with red-rimmed eyes and a wet nose and damp undereyes up at Tom, who’s looking back down at him with crushing sympathy. “There’s no shame in it, Sonic. I do it for my job, and so does Maddie, and we do it because what we’ve gone through is pretty traumatic, too.” His hand comes up to stroke the fur back from Sonic’s forehead. “You’ve seen people die, and you’ve lost people close to you, too. No one is able to handle all of that in their chest without breaking down.”

Sonic's gaze drifts to the side, toward the parking lot's edge where streetlights create pools of orange warmth in the darkness. A jeep pulls out onto the main road, its taillights blinking red before disappearing into the flow of evening traffic. The sight blurs through the thin film of tears still clinging to his lashes. “Really?” The word comes out smaller than he intended. “I just…I just want to be fine. I want to feel like I’m not causing any more issues. I don’t want to feel guilty anymore.”

“I know.” Tom's hand settles protectively over the back of Sonic's head, holding him close. “What else have you been thinking?”

“That…” Sonic trails off with a shuddering breath. “That I've made your life and Maddie's so much harder. That I'm more trouble than Tails and Knuckles put together. That whatever I do, I end up fu… messing it up, somehow.”

“You can say ‘fucking’, Sonic.”

Sonic flinches at the harshness of the word. “I don’t want to,” he murmurs, nestling closer to Tom. “Not in front of you, or Maddie.”

“Well, I’m giving you a one-time pass. No one will hear it, just me.”

Sonic sighs. “Yeah and, like, fifty other people in the Olive Garden car park.”

His words prompt Tom to release one of Sonic’s arms, satisfied he won’t run away anymore, to fumble around for something in his pocket. He pulls out his car keys, presses one of its buttons, and then a small beep beep! rings out a few cars down. “C’mon,” he encourages, giving Sonic’s back a gentle pat. “Let’s go get some food from a drive through, and we can talk it out.”

Sonic glances over his shoulder at the Olive Garden’s stout building with watery eyes. Going back in would be torture, but he feels rude for leaving. “But, Tails and Knuckles and Maddie—”

“—will be fine without us.” Tom offers a reassuring smile. “C’mon, let’s get up and into the warmth. My butt’s gone numb sitting on the concrete.”

Sonic climbs onto his shaky legs with the help of Tom, and together they walk to the car in relative silence, broken up by Sonic’s occasional hiccupping breaths and the scuffle of their sneakers against the asphalt. A gentle breeze carries the scent of cooling pavement and distant fast food and the strange tang of pollution that only ever comes from inner-cities. Once they reach the car, Sonic hops into the passenger’s side and immediately pulls his legs up, hugging his knees to his chest. Tom settles behind the wheel and cranks the heat to full, the vents sighing to life and filling the car with blessed warmth. He checks that Sonic's seatbelt is fastened before backing out of the space, the radio automatically flickering to life to play in the background.

Neon signs blur past in streaks of electric blue and hot pink as Tom navigates toward the familiar glow of fast food chains. Sonic watches the world slide by through tear-blurred vision, his reflection ghostlike in the passenger window, all hollow eyes and dampened fur. The radio murmurs something soft and forgettable between them.

Fortunately, with the restaurant being on the strip it doesn’t take them long to get to the nearest Taco Bell. Fourteen minutes later, they’re sitting in the empty-ish parking lot with the hot bag of food split between them on a makeshift table Tom’s created by using the top of a plastic storage container he keeps in the trunk. Sonic snivells as he tears open the top of the salsa packet and squirts it all over his fries while Tom pulls out of his phone and types out a message with quick thumbs. Sonic stuffs one of the fries in his mouth, and it gives him something to do instead of hiccupping between his stilted wrung-out sobs. The salt stings where tears have left his lips raw, but the simple act of chewing grounds him back in his body.

“Sorry, just texting Maddie where we are and that you’re fine.”

“How’re they getting home?”

“Rachel’s nearby, so she’ll come pick them up once they’re done and drop them home.” Tom sets his phone down in the door’s storage panel before he reaches into their bag and pulls out the rest of their food. Paper crinkles as Tom unwraps his taco and the hum of the engine rumbles beneath them. “So,” Tom says after a bite, chew, and swallow, “what we’re gonna do when we get back is go to bed, and in the morning, I’ll call up the lady I speak to occasionally and we’ll find you someone new, and get you booked in for a few sessions of counselling."

“But—”

“No ‘but’s with this one,” Tom responds firmly. Rarely is he the one to put his foot down — that’s usually Maddie’s job, but in rare flashes like this Sonic is once again reminded that Tom’s a pretty fierce cop when he wants to be. “As your dad, I’m not going to argue with you on this.”

“But I don’t need to see a shrink. I’m fine.” Sonic gestures vaguely to himself, and the drink in his hand rattles when the ice-cubes knock against one another. “That’s for people who are, like, really unwell.”

“You are unwell, Sonic.”

Sonic baulks. His mouth closes, his tongue loses every molecule of moisture, and he’s rendered wordless. Having it be some kind of unspoken acknowledgement is one thing, but Tom pointing it out aloud feels like he’s been stripped naked (well, as naked as he can be) under fluorescent lights. With a tone weighing heavy in concern, Tom says: “You were in bed for two weeks. You’ve been having really, really rough patches where you’re lashing out — and that’s okay.” He reaches out to give the toe of Sonic’s sneaker a reassuring squeeze. “That’s to be expected with all of the crap you’ve gone through, but you don’t need to get to the point where you’re going to blow up before seeing a doctor. Imagine if I had a chest infection, and I told you that I was going to wait until it developed into pneumonia before I got help. You’d call me dumb, right?”

“Yeah,” Sonic admits quietly, the fight draining out of him as understanding begins to dawn.

“I’m not calling you dumb, by the way,” Tom clarifies quickly, taking a sip of his drink. “But, I’m not letting you stew on those feelings until we have another weekend where you run away, or another fight where we all end up screaming at each other. We’re going to get you someone to talk to, just like how Maddie and I and a zillion other people on this planet speak to a professional every now and again just to work through the messy, funky stuff we’ve got going on in our heads, okay?”

When Sonic doesn’t respond, Tom presses with a firm: “Okay?”

“Okay,” Sonic responds quietly, vowels snubbed by the mucus in his system.

“Good.” Tom takes another slurp of his drink, ice rattling around when his straw knocks against it inside his cup. 

The song on the radio switches to a different something Sonic recognises as an updated remix of a track from the eighties. He and Tom pull matching grimaces and switch the station to something more befitting of their shared tastes before they settle back into their seats with their food. “Better,” he remarks as a Bruce Springsteen song begins to play, turning it up a few notches so it’s above a murmur’s volume.

“I think I have this album back at the den,” Sonic remarks absent-mindedly. His stomach lurches when he realises what he’s said, and with his hackles on end, he treads very carefully around the conversation. Tom doesn’t know about Shadow and the den, and he intends to keep it that way. “And my room.”

Tom doesn’t seem to notice the stumble. “Is it one my old CDs?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

He nods contemplatively. “I gave you a whole stack when you first moved into the attic, didn't I? Billy Joel, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Elton John…” he remarks, a wistful look crossing his face and clouding his eyes. “Hard to believe it’s only been three years.”

“Why? Does it feel like it’s been longer?”

“Longer and shorter, I guess. I mean, I’m fifty-one, and three years in the grand scheme of things for me is nothing, but I feel like we’ve had you forever.” Tom chews on his straw as he relishes in the memories. “Part of me wishes I knew you for longer than I have.”

“Really?” Sonic copies him, worrying the plastic lip of the straw with the sharp point of his canines. “I mean, I sort of knew you for longer than you knew me.”

“Stalker,” Tom jokes without much bite.

Sonic, despite himself, feels a small smile pull at his mouth. “Sorry, not sorry.”

The comfortable moment stretches between them, filled with the low rumble of Springsteen's voice and the distant hum of traffic on the main road. Tom's expression grows more serious, tinged with something that looks like regret.

“I just wish you could’a had more of a childhood, y’know?” The smile fades from Sonic’s face as he takes in the look on Tom’s. “You’ve only got to be free recently, and I just…wish you could’ve had it earlier. I know it wasn’t possible due to all of the things happening, but still.” Tom tilts his head toward Sonic and offers a small, reassuring smile. “At least you’re getting to experience it now, even if you’re a little older.”

“Yeah,” Sonic responds breathlessly, a tight pressure building in his chest. “Better late than never, huh?”

“Absolutely. It’s just that teenage years notoriously suck, and also end up becoming the best years of your life. I guess you’ve seen both sides of that now.” Tom gives him a meaningful look, and Sonic shifts uncomfortably under the scrutiny. Having his secrets laid bare makes everything feel simultaneously easier and more terrifying — sure, there’s no more mental gymnastics needed to avoid mentioning Shadow, but now he's pretty much exposed for everyone to judge. “Y’know, something I said a few months back has bothered me. When I was asking you if you liked those girls at the café—”

Sonic cuts Tom off with a groan. “It’s fine,” he dismisses quickly as the dawning horror of: we’re really going to have this conversation now? washes over Sonic. 

“You were talking about him when we chatted a few months back at breakfast, huh?” Tom’s face creases with regret. “Sorry, I didn’t even think that you were…”

“Seriously, it’s fine,” Sonic insists, squirming in his seat. The last thing he wants is for Tom to feel guilty too.

“Hey, it’s not fine.” A frown pulls at Tom’s face and it causes him to sit a little straighter in his chair. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”

Sonic shrugs. “You didn’t know.”

“No, I just didn’t think.” Tom’s drink is set down in one of the holders with a clack as he faces Sonic with the intention to open up the dialogue that Sonic desperately wants to escape. “I’m sorry. I bet it made you feel real awkward, but I hope you know that none of that matters to me though, right? Maddie and me don’t care if you like guys—”

“I don’t,” Sonic interjects, embarrassment leaking into his tone.

“Well, you clearly do, bud.”

“I don’t… like guys, or girls, or…I dunno.” He reaches up with his free hand to anxiously rub the back of his neck as he averts his gaze to look out the window. A lone shopping cart sits abandoned near the Taco Bell’s dumpster, one wheel spinning lazily in the evening breeze as a pair of nearby workers puff on vapes during their lunch break. “I’ve never felt that kind of way about anyone before. I had a crush on Shadow, who just happens to be a guy, but I’m not gay. I’m just…”

“There’s nothing wrong with being gay. Your uncle Gary, my brother, is gay. Rachel dated a lady in college.”

“I’m not saying there’s something wrong with it. I’m just saying…” He lets out a sigh, frustration evident. He’s struggling to put his feelings into coherent thoughts, and those very thoughts into words. “It’s Shadow. It’s him. I don’t like him ‘cause he’s a guy, and if he was a girl, I’d probably have liked him then, too.”

Tom nods in understanding, his expression becoming a little clearer as Sonic’s words connect missing lines between dots. “Well, whatever you are, it doesn’t matter to Maddie or me. Seriously. If you end up bringing home a girl, or a guy, or if you end up bringing no-body home — none of it will change how we feel about you. Maybe we'll have a little bit of an issue if you bring Shadow home, but...” A melancholy smile pulls at Tom's face, like even he knows this is still an incredibly sensitive topic, no matter how much Sonic assures everyone that he's 'over' it. "Well, at least we won't have to go through awkward introductions if that's the case, huh? Maddie and I can get straight to shovel talk."

Sonic stuffs the cruchwrap into his mouth to avoid having to speak. Tom’s words are reassuring, but they don’t address Sonic’s dilemma head-on because Sonic doesn’t even understand his own feelings perfectly, and reassuring Tom feels like it would be a little disingenuous. He’s never felt like this before, never held any kind of intense fondness for someone the way he does Shadow, so sexuality doesn’t really come into the equation nor concern him all too much, because it’s just simply Shadow. It’s never been anyone else other than Shadow, and part of Sonic — the part that grieves the strongest — wonders if it will ever be anyone other than Shadow.

Satisfied that the heaviest part of the conversation has passed, Tom and Sonic finish their meal in companionable quiet. The only sounds are the rustle of wrappers, the occasional slurp of drinks, and Springsteen's voice before the track ends and another one starts. Once finished, they ball their garbage into one of the Taco Bell bags and try to keep as little crumbs from getting into the grooves and gaps in the car’s console. Tom quickly hops out to dump their garbage in a nearby trashcan before he slaps his hands clean of crumbs and climbs back in. “Feeling a little better?”

“Yeah, I do,” Sonic agrees, fully meaning what he says. He leans his sleepy head against the taut pull of the seatbelt. The weight in his chest hasn't disappeared entirely, but it feels more manageable now, like a heavy backpack he's learned to carry properly instead of one that's been cutting into his shoulders wrong. “Thanks for taking me out after I had my freak out.”

Tom’s hand comes out to ruffle Sonic’s head. “Of course, buddy. You’re my boy, remember? We can figure this out together. One step at a time.”

“Mhm,” he murmurs, words feeling too complex to formulate at the moment. Tom gives Sonic’s head another ruffle before he moves it to the handbrake, releases the clutch, and reverses out of the parking lot to head back to Green Hills. Sonic knows another difficult conversation awaits him when they return, but somehow, he feels like he's crested the worst of it. The mountain peak of his breakdown is behind him now, and the descent, while still challenging, feels manageable. The hardest work’s been done and for once he’s glad to take it slow. He’s done enough running to last a lifetime, figuratively and physically.

As they peel out of the parking lot and with half-mast eyes, Sonic spots something unusual from the darkness of a nearby empty lot. It causes him to straighten his head from its lean against the seatbelt and focus his eyes on the sight. It’s as if there’s a pair of rear-end headlights peeking out from a row of trees, two pinpricks of red irises from a thatch of leaves low to the ground. 

He turns to look directly but when he blinks the lights vanish, nothing there but darkness and the gentle sway of branches in the evening breeze.

Huh, he thinks, just as Tom turns the corner and takes them away from the drive-through, peeling off down the strip with his truck’s engine grumbling beneath them. Sonic moves to lay his head back down on the seatbelt, but the prickling sensation of being watched follows him even as they drive down the street, lingering against his skin like static electricity.

When he glances in the side mirror, the road behind them stretches empty and black, painted only with the white lines marking the lanes. Weird.

Chapter Text

The cool blade of a razor presses to the sensitive underside of Sonic’s ear. It’s not much, a barely-there touch but he flinches as if it’s a slap to the face nonetheless. Dramatic? Absolutely, but this is Sonic, and subtlety has never been his strong suit.

The razor is placed on the rolling trolley with a metallic clunk as a pair of hands still his head from its tilted-away position. “You keep moving,” a voice over his shoulder chides. Fingers adjust his chin until he’s staring directly into his own wide green eyes in the mirror's unforgiving reflection. The razor is picked back up and turned on with the press of a button, humming to life like an old car.

The reprimand causes him to stiffen in his seat. He shifts back into position, the leather of the chair squeaking under what little weight he has. “Sorry, I’ve never had my hair cut like this before,” Sonic apologises in a voice smaller than usual. His shoulders hunch toward his jawline, caught between excitement, apprehension, and the sting of being scolded. 

“Well, I can't say I’ve ever shaved an animal before,” the hairdresser murmurs as she repositions the electric razor to the side of his head, pressing its cool surface flush to his skin while he fights off another instinctive flinch. Every other time he’s had something placed this close to his head it’s been with the intention to scalp or decapitate him, so the reaction is one trained on memory alone. Besides, no one likes the cold, do they? Certainly not him, hedgehog instincts and all.

The touch doesn’t cause him to move this time, but he does shoot the hairdresser a pointed look in the mirror’s reflection at her use of terminology. “Uh, ‘animal’ is a pretty offensive term.”

Her brow quirks when she catches sight of the expression on his face. She’s not off-put by his banter; if anything, it causes the stoic expression she’s been sporting ever since Sonic waltzed into the barbershop to shift into something closer to wry amusement. “Isn’t that technically what you are?”

“No more than you are.”

Her brows flatten out, and her lips form into a purse; a non-verbal touché, if he’s ever seen one. “Fair enough, then what do you want me to call you?”

He leans back in the chair and flashes his most disarming grin at their shared reflection. “Just Sonic.”

The attempt to charm doesn’t work. She rolls her eyes, clicks the razor onto a faster setting, and begins to run it along the side of his head in smooth, short strokes.

Sonic’s never had his head shaved before — hasn’t ever had a haircut or anything cosmetic done, really. The few exceptions had been when Maddie needed to shave an area on his arm to draw blood, or that mortifying summer when he got ticks and they needed to comb him head-to-toe every single day for a week to make sure they found every last bug.

Being a hedgehog with a moulting cycle and one that keeps up a fairly decent hygiene routine means that he’s never needed regular maintenance like humans do. But, during the early days back in the den he’d suffered with pretty bad matting issues that he’d learned to handle alone in Longclaw’s absence which often resulted in him trying to work through his tangled fur with his claws and tearing out chunks that wouldn’t budge. He'd faced the same problem again after his two-week depression when basic self-care had felt impossible, but aside from those bygone incidents, Sonic’s typical hygiene routine is functional and done from necessity rather than out of choice. 

Certainly nothing like this.

The razor vibrates against his scalp with a steady, low buzz that seems to resonate through his skull.  It feels a little like the hairdresser has a wasp pinched in her fingers that she’s dragging along his head, its humming body sending small shockwaves down to the high points of his face. The teeth of the blades are fine and they don’t exactly hurt so much as they’re just there, cutting tiny little incisions mere micrometres from the skin beneath, almost teasing his hair-trigger reflexes into jolting, even though something tells Sonic that she won’t humour him for a second time.

“Alrighty then, ‘Just Sonic’”, she says after a moment, her voice carrying a hint of amusement. “Are we still going with the same design?”

She pauses to blow gently on the freshly shaved spot, clearing it of loose blue fur that drifts down like tiny snowflakes, before angling the razor for the next pass. Sonic can't turn his head without disrupting her work, so he tries to catch her eye in the mirror, but her focus remains steady on her handiwork. “Isn’t it a little late for that? I can feel you cutting — well, shaving, technically.”

She huffs out a laugh beneath her breath as she presses the blade flat against the nook behind his ear. “Too right. Let’s hope you haven’t changed your mind in the last twenty seconds.”

He hasn’t, but it’s not exactly a reassuring statement, so Sonic merely crosses his fingers beneath the black cape draped over his shoulders and watches her work in fascination, mesmerised by the way hundreds of tiny blue hairs catch the afternoon light streaming through the shop's windows. They gather in a loose clump on the checkerboard pattern of black and white tiles below, like pine needles from a shedding tree.

Ten minutes later, he's working feeling back into his legs from the pins and needles he has from sitting still longer than his nature typically allows, while pressing a crumpled twenty-dollar bill into his hairdresser's palm. She walks them over to the cash register and rings him up, but his attention is elsewhere, absorbed by one of the shop's many overhead mirrors as he checks out his reflection with a blinding grin.

The hairdresser’s icy disposition melts a little beneath the brightness of his smile, and by the time she hands him his change, there’s a ghost of a smirk on her face. “Happy?” she asks with false exasperation.

“So happy,” Sonic responds through the smile splitting his face in half. He rocks back and forth on his heels excitedly as she passes him a handheld mirror for the umpteenth time and allows him to check out the back of his head from every possible angle. “Do I look cool?”

“You look awesome,” she responds with a hint — just a hint — of encouragement. “Now, get out. You’re getting fur all over my shop floor.”

With a theatrical wave goodbye that makes her shake her head in amused resignation, Sonic pushes through the barbershop's glass door and steps into Green Hills' crisp September afternoon. 

The streets are bustling considering it’s mid-day and mid-week, which likely has something to do with the school kids back in class following the summer break. All of the working parents are back manning the storefronts and taxi-ing to-and-fro, transforming the usually quiet square into something resembling a proper town centre. It’s a rhythm he wouldn’t have noticed before, but spending his summer at the track and field meets opened his eyes to so many moving parts within the bigger machine of the town that he’s grown to appreciate.

As a gust of wind catches the now sensitive spot on the side of his head, he reaches up to touch the area where his fur has been shaved down to tiny, fuzzy nubs. It’s not much of a statement by any means, but it was a suggestion from his therapist (yes, he’s now seeing a therapist on a weekly basis, go him!) for him to get back into the swing of trying new things for the sake of trying new things. 

Following his meltdown at Olive Garden, Tom stayed true to his word and called some contacts he had the morning after their disastrous family night out. Within a few days, they had the name and details of a highly-recommended consultant who specialised in child trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders, and decided to book in a session with her. Sonic wasn’t told just how much they’d cost, but he figured they’d be pricey considering they needed to find someone who could not only cater to his pretty extreme baggage, but also someone willing to maintain absolute confidentiality.

There was no point Sonic talking to someone who was only going to rattle it all back to G.U.N.. He’d only be able to give half the story, after all, and then what would be the point in seeking help in the first place?

Despite his initial reluctance – both emotional and physical, highlighted by Tom having to bribe him just to get him into the car that first Wednesday — Sonic quickly realised there was little to be worried about. Getting over the stigma and his own pre-conceived misconceptions about seeing a ‘shrink’ was the hardest battle won, along with the guilt over how much this was costing Tom and Maddie (who consistently refused his offers to contribute using his summer earnings). At the end of the first session, Sonic had hopped back into Tom’s car, who had patiently waited for him on the street outside for the whole ninety minutes, and asked: “Can we book in another session next week?”

His councillor is a kind, patient older lady named Suzanne whose gentle demeanour reminds him a little of Longclaw. She dresses in browns and beiges and speaks in a slow, measured cadence that makes it seem like her words are strolling, never running. Her office is situated on her property; a huge, four acre piece of land off the beaten path around an hour’s drive out of Green Hills but by no means away from its mountains and valleys. It’s discreet and out-of-the-way and something Sonic thinks Tom likely factored in when choosing an appropriate therapist. 

The office itself is a one-story studio annex at the bottom of her lush garden, with floor-to-ceiling windows and an interior decorated with muted greens and creams and a colour Suzanne called Egyptian Cotton. The brief walk from the property's gates winds through her lush garden, creating a sense of separation from the outside world that makes honest conversation feel safer somehow. It’s nothing like the frightening, sterile spaces he’d pictured in his mind when counselling was first brought up. Speaking to Suzanne feels like he’s speaking to a friend in their living space — just the two of them with no audience — and it’s allowed for him to open up in ways he’s been reluctant to do even with Knuckles and Tails.

Starting, however, had been far from easy. During his first session, Suzanne had given a spiel about the purpose of counselling and what her role was going to be in working with Sonic to help him navigate some problems he was facing. She’d then prompted him with a delicately-worded: “I’d like you to tell me a little bit about yourself.”

Where do you even begin to explain that you were abandoned as a baby, once then twice adopted, forced into hiding for the first thirteen years of your life, prescribed as a terrorist by the U.S. government for a summer, and had multiple people try to kill you? One of those ending up your mortal enemy, the other ending up your brother, and the other your crush, who you also sent packing into a lifetime of isolation all because you tried to play the hero one too many times?

He had admitted to all of it with a laugh and a shrug before promptly breaking down in Suzanne’s comfy Ikea office chair and sobbing for the first half of his preliminary session with her. 

The sessions that followed ebbed and flowed in their intensity. Sometimes they spoke about the mundane things happening in Sonic’s life — trying to bake a cake for Maddie’s birthday with Knuckles, testing out new gadgets with Tails in his workshop, going fishing with Tom, taking up a yoga class with Maddie – and then other times they spoke about the delicate aspects of his life that felt humiliating to admit out loud. Sonic told her about the sleepless, cold nights he’d spent in the den when he was still a young boy, freezing under a stolen, dirty blanket with nothing to eat other than some tree bark and nuts. He'd told her about waking up screaming from nightmares where Eggman had returned to murder Tom and Maddie, only to have Knuckles and Tails gently coax him back to sleep until all three of them were piled onto his mattress, finding comfort in each other's warmth. He'd told her about the guilt that gnawed at him whenever he thought about Shadow, and the shame that came with knowing he had deceived him for so long while relishing in the time they spent together under false pretenses.

Those heavier sessions left him wrung out and exhausted, usually falling asleep in the passenger seat during the hour-long drive home while Tom kept one protective hand on his leg the entire way back.

Sonic knows that therapy isn’t a fix-all for his issues. Suzanne is a fantastic sounding board, acting as someone for him to not only listen but help him navigate the harder issues he may never truly recover from, but Sonic’s got the majority of the work to do on himself. On the bright side, after only four sessions he already feels like a different person to the ghost that haunted his body all throughout August. He feels lighter, less burdened, more authentically himself, and like he’s learning to cope with himself again.

The haircut had been Suzanne's suggestion: try something new and independent of his family's influence. Sonic hadn't considered himself someone who lived according to other people's expectations until he and Suzanne began untangling his motivations and he realised two things:

1. He was a chronic people-pleaser, and;
2. This meant that he often put his own feelings aside in favour of others’.

She'd encouraged him to do something purely for himself, something outside both his and his family's comfort zones, something that served no purpose beyond personal experimentation. They ruled out tattoos (too young and definitely too much for a first step), piercings (too impractical) and hair dye (not his thing) and settled for the middle-ground of a haircut; a small rebellion, temporary and symbolic, a metaphorical toe dip into the waters of newfound autonomy.

And so, with pride radiating from every inch of his frame, Sonic strolls down Green Hills' main street toward Tom's dusty truck parked half a block away. Tom sits in the driver's seat with all the windows rolled down, one arm draped over the sun-warmed door as he works on a massive Big Gulp, catching some colour despite the autumn chill while he waits. The appointment had been Sonic's ‘secret’ though calling it secret was generous considering Tom had dropped him off in town and the barbershop was clearly visible from the truck.

Tom is nothing if not a good father who humours his kid’s antics, even when they’re as clear as clingfilm.

When he spots Sonic skipping down the pavement with a pep in his step he gives a little wave and unlocks the car so he can jump in. Sonic jogs around to the passenger’s side and hops into the warm space of the car just as Tom holds out a filled Big Gulp cup for him, filled to the top with a blue razz Icee.

“Hey, buddy,” Tom greets as Sonic buckles himself in. “What did you — woah.”

“What do you think?” Sonic immediately shifts in his seat, angling the side of his head toward Tom to show off the fresh cut. “Does it make me look cool? The hairdresser said I look awesome.”

Tom’s face rotates through a catalogue of emotions and eventually settles somewhere in the surprised-but-trying-to-look-supportive realm. “It’s certainly…you!”

The tone of his voice causes Sonic to immediately deflate. “Oh, god. Not that voice.” Sonic sets the cup down into one of the holders and turns to look at Tom seriously with worry creasing his features. “Do you not like it? What’s wrong with it? Is it uneven?” He fumbles for the sun-visor and quickly pulls it down so he can check his haircut out in the tiny mirror. ‘Haircut’ gives too much credit for what it is: Sonic has a five-point star outline shaved into the fur beneath his ear measuring barely a few inches in diameter. The shape is only small, but it’s pretty hard to miss. “Do I look bad? Do I look cringey?”

“No, no, it looks great! Let me get a closer look.” Tom reaches out to steady Sonic’s head with his hands and tilts it to the side to glean a better look. After a pause, he says with a tone that carries conviction:  “No — you know what? I like it.”

Sonic glances up through his lashes and tilts his head out of Tom’s grasp, feeling vulnerable and shy. Tom’s words help ease his worry, but this was a big step for him, and his approval means more than it ordinarily would for any other day-to-day decision. “Really?”

“Yep — no, I love it.” Tom might be overselling his enthusiasm slightly but it’s well-intentioned and he’s genuinely supportive, even if the star is a little skewiff. “It’s punk.”

Tom’s reassurances do the trick. The stiffness eases from Sonic’s frame and he takes the compliment to heart. “Nice.” Sonic raises up a little in his chair to check out the shaved star again in the small sun-visor’s mirror. “I was worried it would make me look like I sing in an R&B group.”

Tom chuckles, settling back into his seat. “I think the blue hair sort of saves you on that front.”

“Awesome.” Placated, Sonic settles down onto the car seat, picks his Big Gulp back up, and gives it a loud slurp. His feet swing happily from their hang and he feels rejuvenated, just like how he used to, when life genuinely used to lift his spirits by the simple measure of just existing.

It hasn’t been an easy road but Sonic, finally, feels like the best version of himself again, and it means the rest of the household is thriving, too. The stiff, awkward air has well and truly disappeared; Tom and Maddie no longer edge around Sonic, and Knuckles and Tails are back to being their normal selves, too. 

 “Do you think Maddie’s gonna notice?” he asks as he takes another slurp of his Icee. There’s a small bubble of excitement in his chest at the simple act of rebelling, and part of him is looking forward to seeing her reaction, knowing without having to even hear Tom’s answer that she’s not going to be as complimentary as he was.

Tom leans back into his chair with an uncomfortable look on his face. With Sonic in good shape comes less pussyfooting around him. Maddie is well and truly back as the head of the household, and her opinion is no longer being minced to spare Sonic’s feelings.

Sonic has never been so glad at the prospect of being insulted.

“Well, yeah, but you like it, right?” Tom gestures towards him with his drink, his slushy sloshing against the polystyrene with a whispering sound. “You’ve just gotta tell her that.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Sonic agrees, emboldened by Tom’s reassurances. He slurps the drink again with a loud gurgle. “Yeah! It’s my choice, and I did it ‘cause I wanted to do something new. Who cares what anyone thinks?”

“Exactly. Great, confident attitude, buddy.”

Sonic puffs out his chest in pride. “Yeah! This is my choice, and I made it, and I’m proud of it. No one’s going to tell me nothing.”

Tom's smile wavers slightly, resembling more of a wince. “We’ll see.”

“What on Earth is that?!”

“I had it done professionally!” Sonic defends shrilly. He strikes a pose under the living room's overhead light but is quickly shot down when Maddie’s hands still him by his cheeks and hold his head so she can get a better look at the off-centre star shaved onto his scalp. “Doesn’t it look cool? Doesn’t it look punk?”

“Cool?” She cries, crouching down to get a better look. Sonic’s cheeks squish as she tilts his head a little more to the side so she can ogle at the haircut. “You’re bald!”

“I’m not bald!” He retorts, words muffled with his lips pressed into a purse from her grip. “A teeny area’s been shaven. Come feel it, it’s all stubby.”

“No, thank you.” Maddie lets go of Sonic to reach up and pinch her nose, as if she’s a long-suffering confidant and this is the final straw. “Sonic, you know how weird strangers can get when they’re allowed to touch you. Remember that fan meet in Boise where we had to get a restraining order against the guy that kept trying to pick you up? And the one that kept stealing your gloves every time I would hang them to dry on the line outside?”

Sonic opens his mouth to defend himself and explain that a disinterested barber in downtown Green Hills is hardly comparable to the stalkers he’d encountered during a couple fan meet-and-greets last year, when he’s interrupted by the sound of the back patio door rattling open. 

A pair of sneakers slap against the hardwood flooring as Tails, up to his elbows in engine oil and grease, comes hurrying through the open space connecting the kitchen, dining room, and living room together. He’s a little out of breath from his dash from the workshop and he’s wearing goggles that magnify his twinkling eyes so he looks like a bug that’s escaped captivity.

“Sonic, that looks so cool!” Tails gushes, skidding to a stop at Sonic’s side. He shoves the goggles off his eyes and sets them on his forehead, leaving two clean spots on his dusty face and smudging a trail of dark oil across his forehead in the process. The tight straps make the duck-fluff hair on his head sprout upwards like weeds through pavement cracks and Tails, for all his freakish intelligence and fierce wit, is far too charming to be taken seriously at first-glance. Part of Sonic wonders if he’ll ever be able to lose the round-edgeness that seems to encapsulate everything Tails is. He can hardly imagine him as anything less than his sweet, baby brother — the idea of a future version of Tails being somehow grown is impossible to imagine.

“Can I get one, too?” he asks, spinning around to pin Maddie with a pleading look.

“Absolutely not,” Maddie responds immediately. She’s still looking at the star shaven on the side of Sonic’s head as if it’s personally offended her, though she’s doing her best not to let it show. It’s just that she doesn’t have the best poker face when it comes to anything fashion-related. 

“Please?”

“Not until you’re sixteen.” Maddie steps closer again and crouches down so she can get a better look at the new haircut. A frown pulls her delicate features tight. “And not without my permission.”

“I got Tom’s permission,” Sonic defends, feeling that twinge of: just appease her! urge him to back down and acknowledge that maybe he should’ve heeded her advice.

No, he reminds himself. I didn’t do anything wrong, and I did this for me! No more people pleasing over tiny issues like this. “Plus, I’m sixteen now, and it’s just a haircut, right?”

Maddie spins around and pins Tom with an: oh, really? look. He’s sitting at the kitchen island with a half-eaten bacon sandwich stuffed into his mouth and when all eyes swivel to him he raises his hands in defense. “I thought he was just getting a trim,” he says, lowering his hands to fold over his arms. “It’s not bad, Mads.”

“You know I don’t like you guys going to random hairdressers without asking first, let alone Sonic. Not because I’m controlling, but because you find the cheapest ones and don’t check up on their reviews beforehand. The barbers in Green Hills gave you and your brothers ringworm last time, Tom! Do you remember how long that lasted? Three months!”

Tom opens his mouth to counter her argument, but it clicks shut when he realises there’s no good defence. She directs her attention back to Sonic, who meets her gaze head-on and confidently. “How much did you pay?”

“Fifteen bucks.”

“Oh, Lord.” She stands back up straight and pinches the bridge of her nose again with a deep, self-controlling sigh. “Let’s just hope the salon wasn’t run by the same shady folks that gave Tom a skin infection. You know the one in town has a bad rep for health-code violations.”

“Do you hate it that much?” Apprehension creeps into his voice as Sonic reaches up to tenderly touch the spot where he was shaved. That pedestal of self-confidence is starting to teeter, and even against Tails’ blinding enthusiasm, Maddie’s disapproval is a stronger force.

Maddie sighs, softening her tone. “I think it looks fine, Sonic. I’m just—”

“--protective,” Tom finishes for her, bacon sandwich resumed and half-stuffed in his mouth.

She sighs again; tight, high in her chest. “Protective’s the right word.”

It’s not acceptance, but it’s enough to ease the knot of anxiety in his gut. “Well, I’m all good.” Sonic does a spin to accentuate his point, and flashes a grin when her worried expression flits across her face. “All grown up, and getting my first haircut — which I paid for by myself, by the way.”

She musters a wobbly smile and ruffles the top of his head, though her hand lingers, as if she can’t quite bear to let go. “Growing up too quickly for my liking,” she responds, but it’s without bite. With a final sigh that causes the cavity of her chest to rise and fall, she claps her hands to signify the end of their conversation and turns on her heel. “I’m gonna get some juice. Anyone want some?”

“Me!” Tails and Sonic respond in unison, trotting behind her as Tom tucks into his sandwich at the kitchen island.

Sonic and Tails fall side-by-side near the oven while Maddie rifles through the fridge in search for a container tucked somewhere in the back between tupperware boxes and half-eaten bowls of food. “Hey, Sonic,” Tails casually prompts, “I finally got my hands on some lithium-ion batteries to recharge my drone. We can finally send it over to the lead we’ve been following!”

Sonic’s hand flies out to slap over Tails’ mouth with a whap. “Shh,” Sonic hisses, warning flashing in his eyes of a non-verbal: be quiet! Tails’ mouth closes behind Sonic’s hand, so Sonic retracts it and shoots a glance to see if Tom’s heard them, but he’s fortunately so consumed in his sandwich that their conversation is mere white noise to him. “Not here. Tell me once we’re upstairs, okay?”

“What’re you two boys whispering about?” Maddie asks as she finally manages to pull the orange juice out of the game of Tetris happening on the fridge’s shelf.  

Sonic and Tails’ postures snap to attention. “Tails’ new invention,” Sonic quickly responds. It’s true. Not the whole truth, sure, but it’s not a lie.

The fridge shuts, and with the juice balanced in one hand she fetches three glasses with the other, all pinched between her fingers. “You really oughta patent your stuff, Tails. One day, the wrong person’s gonna get their hands on it and sell it for millions.” She pours the juice into glasses evenly and pushes their servings towards them. Sonic, able to (just about) reach the counter where Tails can’t, picks them both up and hands Tails his glass while he sips on his own. 

“No one can understand my blueprints. They’re written in code.” Tails takes a long swig of the juice, smacking his lips at the taste. “They’re fool-proof!”

“You’re lucky you have a good heart,” Maddie teases. “If you were evil, then we’d all be toast. Or, millionaires, but at the cost of others having your designs, I think I’d rather just stick with what we’ve got, don’t you?”

Maddie fixes them a light lunch before she’s due to head out for her evening shift, which Sonic and Tails wolf down as if they’ve not eaten in days. Tom’s on dinner duty, and as Knuckles is out of the house with Wade until past sunset, they’ll have something more substantial when everyone’s home. 

As the evening begins to draw in with a navy haze, Maddie dashes off for her shift and Tom, relegated to dog-walking duties, tries to coax Ozzy up for his evening constitutional. Sonic and Tails seize the opportunity to sneak off upstairs to their shared room, treading with light steps until they reach their bedroom, easing the door closed before sliding the deadbolt across with painstaking care. The soft click might as well be a gunshot in the quiet house, but Tom's voice drifting up from below as he tries to plead with Ozzy to behave suggests that their secret remains safe.

Finally alone in the sanctuary of their bedroom, an electric tension fills the air that makes the fine hairs on Sonic's arms stand at attention. The room itself tells the story of three very different personalities learning to coexist: Tails' side is meticulously organised, his bed made with tucked edges, while Sonic’s side looks like a tornado has hit it with scattered comics and belongings across his rumpled sheets. Knuckles meets them somewhere in the middle; not as messy as Sonic, but certainly not as well-kempt as Tails, and if anything looking a little bare, though Knuckles is pretty strict on how and where he keeps his rock figurines. They’re lined up like little soldiers on the shelf above his bed, watching from above like deities in their strange formation that Sonic learnt a long time ago not to comment on.

He and Tails share a loaded look and Sonic immediately knows that they’re thinking the same thing. At least there’s no point trying to pretend otherwise. “So,” Sonic prompts without preamble, “you managed to get your hands on some?” 

The canvas messenger bag slung over Tails' forearm answers the question before he does. He settles it carefully onto his bedspread and pulls out two brick-like objects, one in each hand. They’re no larger than a big box of pasta but they look like they weigh a ton, encased with black plastic and clusters of red and black terminals designed for heavy-duty cable connections. Sonic doesn’t know much about tech, certainly not when compared to Tails, but if he’s ever seen an object scream ‘high-voltage batteries’ it would be these. They’re the kind of things you see in old cartoons, the kind of thing he didn’t realise really existed. 

“Yep. Lucky number five! Let’s just hope the drone doesn’t short-circuit like the last one did.” Tails reaches across his bed to pick up a Phillips screwdriver he had laying on the bedside table. He holds the handle between his teeth while he fiddles with the caps on the battery-pack, eventually pulling off a panel which reveals a dozen screws for Tails to take a stab at. Taking the screwdriver in his dominant hand and cradling the battery with his left, he begins the methodical process of loosening each fastener. “If I can wire the juice to go straight from this bad boy into the drone’s battery system, then it should have enough power to travel cross-country and stream video for us. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be so difficult, but because we’re aiming for longevity and power it's gotta have a fine balance. The last four prototypes crashed within eight hours of setting off, but this time, we’re looking at twenty hours of flight time at max capacity with a speed of up to two-hundred miles an hour!”

Sonic nods eagerly, drinking in the technical mumbo-jumbo that would typically go straight over his head. ‘Typically’ being the key word here, because Sonic, for the first time in his life, has never been so interested in just how far Tails’ technical capabilities can go. He walks over to stand at Tails’ bed while his brother finishes unscrewing the third screw, watching him tinker with the box with an excited glint to his bright, blue eyes.

“After that lead you found in Maine, I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited to stalk someone,” Tails says, his voice slightly muffled as he hunches over his task, chin nearly touching his collarbone. “As weird as it sounds, I feel like I’m doing it for the good of others, y’know? How else will anyone catch the guy otherwise?”

Sonic nods, directing his gaze towards the window and the loose gatherings of clouds hanging above Green Hills’ mountain peaks, painted pale orange by the last rays of setting sun.

After opening the can of worms that was Stone with Tails and Knuckles, and upon his own recovery from the bout of depression, the three of them quickly realised that their insatiable hunger to finish a job half-done mean that they couldn’t sit idle while they knowingly let one of Eggman’s accomplices operate from the back-ends and beyond of Siberia. 

Instead of piggybacking off of Shadow’s own investigation, which was something Sonic drew a hard line against touching, they began their own covert investigation into Stone’s whereabouts starting from scratch. While Sonic knew little beyond Shadow’s means of tracking beyond being vague and linked to smell, he was determined to avoid any possibility of inadvertently following Shadow's trail instead of Stone's. Part of him knew that this rabbit hole would likely lead to an eventual encounter with Shadow, whether sooner or later, but the alternative — sitting by passively while Stone potentially orchestrated new threats — felt infinitely worse. He wasn't willing to risk another war. Not again.

So, with a vague plan in mind and enough determination to rival an army’s, Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles set out on trying to track the guy down using good old-fashioned research techniques. They scoured newsites, forums, looking for any indication of sightings people may have reported. Stone wasn't exactly a household name, but perhaps there would be reports of an artisan coffee shop opening in some remote location? It had happened once, and lightning could potentially strike twice.

Predictably, after several weeks of intensive research and sleep-deprived nights spent poring over data, Tails had been the one to uncover their first concrete lead using the power of his own technology. Using facial-recognition software he’d personally developed, he'd discovered CCTV footage from a desolate dockyard showing Stone boarding a cargo vessel back in July from a dock in Kamchatka. The lead wasn't particularly robust on its own, but coupled with Sonic’s hazy memory of Shadow having mentioned being in Russia near that time on his own mission, they were confident with the lead.

However, the issue is that the moment Stone left Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky he'd essentially vanished into thin air.

There aren’t any security cameras to hack out at sea, after all, and who’s not to say that Stone didn’t jump off the boat or take a dinghy mid-way through the trip? The lead had brought them to what amounted to a dead end, with thousands of potential routes to investigate but little time and resources to pursue even a fraction.

Sonic parts from Tails’ tinkering to head over to one of the wardrobes on the far side of the room. It’s an older, wooden one the three of them used to share but no longer touch other than to store winter clothes. Or, at least, they used to. 

Sonic pulls open the double doors and comes face-to-face with their base of operations. The wardrobe is plastered wall-to-wall with a world map, and hanging from it are countless add-ons; photographs, post-its, thumbtacks, scribbled notes, a jumble of everything and anything they’ve collated over the last few months. There’s a grainy photo of Stone — a screenshot of the CCTV footage — thumbtacked to the Arctic Bridge as their last officially verified sighting, while the rest of the area around North America is littered with different coloured post-it notes, creating a complex web of information gathered over weeks of investigation.

The most recent addition, however, is a photograph of even poorer quality, added just days earlier.

Tails had pursued a lead suggesting one of the cargo containers from Stone's ship had been redirected southward toward the United States, eventually reaching, of all places, Maine  Not close-by, but by no means Siberia. He had followed the container’s tracking I.D. and travel route, which is highlighted on their map with a trail of red string, and narrowed down the search area to a five-hundred mile radius of Rockland. Then, finally, after hours of painstaking analysis he’d managed to find a single frame of grainy footage from a nearby bed-and-breakfast’s security camera overlooking their car park. The image captured a figure resembling Stone departing the docks and heading toward the local bus station. 

In the photograph, he appears almost spectral, with dark circles shadowing his eyes, his once-impeccable grooming replaced by an unkempt, almost desperate appearance. The man in the footage looks genuinely ill, but Sonic knows in his gut that that’s Stone. 

The lead dates back to mid-August, so they’re around a month behind on his whereabouts. But, now that they have the aid of Tails’ drone at their disposal, they have the capacity to scope out the areas in far greater detail. Hacking CCTV is fine, but it’s time consuming. This way they’ll have remote-control access to not only find the guy, but watch him in real time, too. 

“You think he’s still around this area?” Sonic asks aloud, tapping the red thumb-tack over Maine.

Tails makes a noncommittal sound while continuing his work on another stubborn screw. It drops to the floor with a metallic rattle that he completely ignores. “It’s hard to say when we have no concrete evidence,” he responds. The screwdriver rotates with a few metal clicks before another screw is loosened with a rattle. “But, if the bus timetables were right, then he shouldn't have travelled beyond New York or Ottawa.”

Finally, the battery pack's rear panel comes free. Tails carefully pries it open with his screwdriver before setting the plastic components aside and beginning work on the second unit. He continues: “He’s good at covering his tracks, but not good enough to be totally untraceable. It doesn’t help that the camera footage on the CCTV is abysmal, and as he’s only wearing black and working at night, he’s practically invisible. But, if our tracking and what we know about the guy is correct, he’ll be living out of a remote area where he has access to power and the space to build something. My money’s on an abandoned aircraft hangar, garage, or something along those lines.”

“Because of the stuff he bought, right?”

“Right.” Tails blows a wayward lock of hair from his face while wrestling with a particularly stubborn screw. “He’s buying industrial materials to build something big, or something complex. That’ll require significant power. We’ve narrowed it down to a few cities and towns, and with my upgraded drone, we can fly it out to check it out for ourselves. It’ll be faster and more accurate than trying to hack local surveillance."

“That’s what Shadow suspected, too,” Sonic murmurs as he steps closer to the map. Behind him, Tails stops tinkering, tuning his whole focus onto Sonic. He doesn’t speak about Shadow much nowadays — that wound is still raw and far from healed. Sonic speaks with a distant tone, and can’t quite bring himself to turn back to Tails, so he keeps his back to him as his eyes focus somewhere on the green space of the map in Montana. “He thought he was building something. Or, fixing something.”

“That’s likely.” Tails sets the second battery next to the first and shuffles over to stand next to Sonic, both of them studying the map tacked to the back of the cupboard. “‘What’ he’s building is the real question.”

“You made a list, right?” Sonic scans the map with his eyes and plucks off the piece of paper he was looking for. It’s a printed-out spreadsheet documenting items, dates, and locations of purchases, all data they’ve managed to gather by following him across months and months of security footage back in Siberia. “Servo motors, linear and non-linear actuators, gyroscopes, circuit boards — whatever the hell this means.”

“That’s only what we’ve got evidence of him buying.” Tails points to the list, then to the areas on the map linked to the components. “This is only what I’ve been able to track down. Who knows what else he’s been collecting over the last twelve months?”

“I don’t like it, Tails.” Sonic’s mouth twists. “Not one bit. What does a guy like that need with all of these things?”

“Nothing good, that’s for sure.” He pins the list back to the map and pulls back to study it with a frown. “But, hey, once I get my drone up and running we’ll be able to investigate a little closer. It’ll save us from having to put ourselves in harm’s way, and also keep our investigation covert.”

With a swell of pride that blooms in Sonic’s chest, he tosses an arm around Tails’ shoulder and tugs him into a sideways hug. Sonic smiles down at him, with his oil-stained face and goggle marks. “Maddie’s right. If you put that brain to evil use, we’d be freaking toast.”

“It’s ‘cause I’ve got you, Sonic.” Tails’ face lights up with a grin that matches Sonic’s. “Without you, who knows where I’d be?”

“Then it’s a good thing that I’m not going anywhere.” Sonic tightens his hug with a quick squeeze. “Never again.”

The next few days pass in a blur. While Tails works on fine-tuning the new battery packs to one of his charging points for his drone, which they have yet to come up with a clever name for, Sonic and Knuckles are tasked with smaller, easy-to-manage jobs that even their ham-fisted abilities can manage. Sonic learns to solder, while Knuckles is assigned the mind-numbing task of reviewing hours of security footage that Tails extracted from highway cameras along the I-95. It’s not easy, but with the help of a litre-bottle of Pepsi and plenty of snacks they manage to get through it with only a minimal amount of complaining.

During one such evening, they’ve tucked themselves away in the garage-come-workshop at the bottom of the garden. The garage itself is a pretty sizable space built from cinder-block brick and mortar, big enough to fit two cars although they only have one and it shares its time between being parked on the drive and tucked away in storage. The garage was built after they tore down the old rickety, rotten wooden shed where Sonic was shot with the tranquiliser, making a space suitable for Tom’s amateur mechanical hobbies and Tails’ mad scientist ventures. One side is dedicated solely to that; a long workbench stretches three metres along one side of the garage’s wall, fitted with overhead lamps, docking stations, and wall hooks for their tools. Tails’ equipment has practically consumed what little space there is but he’s tidy enough, especially when compared with Sonic and Knuckles. They make him look like a minimalist by comparison.

With the car temporarily relocated to storage for the weekend, the shared space is tight but usable despite feeling like there’s no room to swing a cat. Tails has managed to make something really neat out of the place and that much is made evident when he summons Sonic and Knuckles to witness the unveiling of their new and improved reconnaissance drone.

Unfortunately, the fanfare falls flat.

“That’s it?” Sonic asks in a careful, neutral tone, as he stares at the device placed on an upturned crate near one of the workbenches.

“That’s it,” Tails responds with unmistakable pride, hands planted firmly on his hips as he surveys the culmination of their collective hard work.

The three of them lapse into silence. Sonic and Knuckles share a quick, knowing look, and realise very quickly that they’re thinking the exact same thing.

With forced positivity, Sonic remarks: “Well, it looks good, but…”

“Why is it bright yellow?” Knuckles finishes bluntly.

Indignation flares across Tails' features as he spins around, his tails moving with him and fanning out around his body like barbed cacti. “Because that’s my signature colour!” he protests, scowling up towards Knuckles’ perplexed expression. “That’s what you’re taking issue with? The hardware is excellent — unlike anything you’d be able to get on the market — and you’ve decided to pick on the colour? Gee, thanks, guys.”

“Don’t you think it makes the whole spying thing less…” Sonic trails off as he tries to find a delicate way of phrasing what he wants to say, “...spy-y?”

With a huff of offense, Tails picks up the drone and holds it close to his chest, as if to make a point.  “I’ve worked all week on this—”

“We’re not picking!” Sonic places a reassuring hand on Tails' shoulder as he watches his brother's face scrunch with wounded pride. “We just wanted to check with you why it was yellow. You did an awesome job. Right, Knuckles?”

Knuckles pulls a sceptical face that earns him a sharp kick to the shin from Sonic. “Yes,” Knuckles responds after a moment, though his diplomatic skills clearly need work. “I do not think that making it yellow was the best idea.”

“Well, what’s done is done. All that matters is that it works, and I bet it works perfectly.” Sonic flashes a smile down at Tails who doesn’t quite mirror it, but it does the job of flattening the scrunch on his face out, so that’s something. 

“Can we test it out?”

The request brightens his spirits a little. Tails sets the drone back on the crate and scurries off to fetch a remote control and a tablet, which he places next to the drone. “It’s fully charged, so we can send it out for its first reconnaissance mission tonight, if you guys want to…?”

“Absolutely,” Sonic answers on his and Knuckles’ behalf. “No time to waste. Plus, those leads Knuckles found point us to a pretty hot trail that we should be able to follow while it’s active.”

Tails nods in agreement. “Alright. Let me program in the coordinates, and we should be good to go.”

They watch as Tails opens up a programme on the Miles Electric (also bright yellow, to neither his nor Knuckles’ judgement this time) and types in a few command sequences. The drone responds instantly, blinking to life with a cheerful electronic trill that sounds almost eager for action.

“It has a three-hundred-and-sixty degree camera that can catch all angles while it flies which will feed live footage straight to my tablet, which we can watch upstairs. The batteries should last around twenty hours on a full charge, but I’ve also included some back-up solar-powered batteries for if it needs to rest and recharge if it goes a little beyond its capabilities. That way, it won’t ever run out of juice.”

“Awesome.” Sonic lifts the drone carefully, examining its impeccable construction while staring directly into the camera lens mounted on its underside. He watches his own reflection appear on the tablet in Tails' hands: his green eye, wide and curious, peering into the device. “Where are you going to fly it first?”

Tails’ fingers fly wildly over the screen as he types in something to a command prompt, spitting out lines and lines of code and text. “The latest lead we have is that he was heading towards Brooklyn. I say we follow that, and see if we can find anything. It’s a needle in a haystack, but I guess that’s better than nothing, right?”

With the drone programmed to a specific set of coordinates they last spotted Stone at, Tails, Sonic, and Knuckles step out into the crispy night-time air beneath the moon and come to stand at the bottom of the garden, where the rickety fence bordering the property ends and the treeline starts. “Well, here goes nothing,” Tails announces, as he sets the sunshine-yellow drone on the floor and bids it a goodbye wave.

With a single press of a button on his tablet, the drone’s propellers whir to life and it rises from the damp grass like a dove taking to the skies. Three pairs of eyes track its ascent until it becomes a distant yellow dot heading eastward, disappearing into the star-scattered darkness like a wandering balloon.

The moment feels oddly anticlimactic. Sonic had half expected it to feel a little like mission control must have when Apollo 11 first kissed the Earth goodbye before it ventured out into the unknown. As it stands, it just feels like he’s sent a paper ship down the length of a river. 

“Well,” Sonic remarks after a long, drawn-out moment. “That’s that…I guess.”

“It’ll be hours and hours until it reaches Brooklyn, so we may as well just head upstairs and get ready for a long night,” Tails responds in a tone bearing more enthusiasm than Sonic’s. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky on the first try.”

“Fifth try, technically.”

“Those other drones didn’t hold a candle to the Mach Five.” Tails raises the Miles Electric in the air to make a point. “This one is miles above the others in terms of hardware and potential. No pun intended.”

Sonic rolls his eyes good-naturedly as Knuckles tosses his heavy arm over Tails' shoulder and leads them towards the porch. While nightfall hasn’t completely swallowed Green Hills in an autumnal dusk, it’s not really a welcoming climate to be standing in at six in the evening, especially since the wind is pretty strong tonight. Tails had mentioned that it might give their drone a chance to get to its destination quicker than expected, but Sonic’s not exactly going anywhere anyway, so he has time to kill.

As they tread up the damp grass lawn of their backyard, Sonic trailing a few steps behind Knuckles and Tails, he’s suddenly struck with the same unnerving feeling that he had a few weeks back at the Taco Bell parking lot with Tom.

He stops abruptly and casts a sharp glance over his shoulder toward the treeline, but the darkness reveals nothing. No movement, no lights, no reflecting eyes, just impenetrable shadows and the whisper of wind through bare branches.

“Guys,” Sonic prompts, sharp and short. “Hey, wait a second.”

Knuckles and Tails heed his advice and stop short, their casual conversation dying mid-sentence. “What’s up?” Tails responds, turned so he’s half-facing Sonic with Knuckles’ arm still over his shoulder.

“I think someone’s watching us,” Sonic remarks, sounding confused and unsure even to his own ears. He tilts his head towards the forest that their garden backs onto.

It causes Tails and Knuckles to go from half-interested to suddenly at full-alert. “Did you see something?” Knuckles asks, his arm dropping from Tails’ shoulder as he closes the short distance Sonic had left between them.

“No — not exactly, but I feel like something’s been watching me.”

“Been watching?”

He reaches up to rub the back of his neck where the hairs stand on end, a self-soothing gesture as he explains what sounds like paranoid delusions. “A few weeks back I thought I saw something watching me from the bushes but I didn’t get a good look at it, and ever since I’ve had this…feeling.”

“...what feeling?” Knuckles echoes, a frown weighing his face down.

“Like I’m being followed, or I’m being watched, or…I don’t know.” Sonic’s hand falls to his side as he turns away from the treeline, facing Knuckles and Tails’ concerned faces. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Sonic, if you feel like something’s not right, then it probably isn’t.” Tails joins Knuckles at Sonic’s side and casts a worried glance out to the ink-black forest. “Do you think it’s…?”

“Shadow?” Sonic completes the question when Tails' voice trails off into uncomfortable silence. Tails gives a short nod. Sonic sighs deeply, his mouth forming a grim line of displeasure. “I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know, but I don’t think Shadow would do something like this. Not after last time. Not with how many G.U.N. soldiers are in the area, especially after the fight.”

“Maybe it is a soldier watching you?” Knuckles suggests. He raises his nose to the air and gives a few quick sniffs. “I cannot smell anything foreign or outside of the ordinary.”

“Then I’m probably just being paranoid.”

Knuckles’ frown settles further on his face. “I would not say that, hedgehog. Gut feeling and sixth-sense are part of our primal instincts. It recognised something, and it is responding to it.”

Tails unconsciously moves closer to Sonic's side, the darkness above them and the wind's haunting whistle suddenly feeling far more menacing than they had moments before. “Let’s just get inside,” Sonic mutters, placing one protective hand on Tails’ back and the other on Knuckles’ arm. “It was probably just one of the soldiers in the trees, or a deer, or something.”

Knuckles makes a dissatisfied grunt at Sonic's hasty dismissal of potential danger, but doesn't press the issue as they walk toward the porch and step back into the kitchen's welcoming warmth and light. He makes certain to lock the door securely behind them and draws the blinds closed for additional peace of mind. Knuckles is fearless when he needs to be, but even he’s wary when it comes to dark spaces and the unknown that lies inside them.

They fix themselves a mixture of Wonder Bread sandwiches — PB&J and bologna and cheese — before scampering upstairs to the attic space. The door is locked and a makeshift observing station is created by pushing all three of their beds together to make a huge mattress. They prop the Miles Electric on a stack of pillows before piling on together to watch the drone as it flies over an unremarkable forest that’s still likely within Montana’s borders. 

“And now we wait,” Sonic comments, kicking up his socked feet and laying back onto the pillows on his own mattress. “How long do we think it’ll take before it reaches New York State?”

Tails blows out a bluster through his lips. “Ten hours at least. The drone can reach speeds of up to two-hundred miles an hour, and as it needs to travel around two-thousand miles, we’ll be here until morning.”

“Well, no time like the present!”

The wait is agonising while it flies. The three of them quickly lose interest in the footage by the second hour and with the food devoured, Sonic and Knuckles nap while Tails takes the reins. Eventually, even Tails succumbs to drowsiness, leaving Sonic to take over surveillance responsibilities during the early morning hours. By sunrise, the drone has crossed into Indiana airspace, currently flying over vast cornfields at peak harvest time, across endless acres of golden stalks spanning the horizon like a butter-yellow ocean.

Sonic heads downstairs while the rest of the household sleeps (Ozzy included) to get some breakfast and sugar to prevent himself from falling face-first into the Miles Electric from exhaustion. He tips himself a generous helping of Fruity Pebbles and watches the sun finish its rise from out the kitchen window, lazily shovelling spoonfuls into his mouth while his mind wanders.

His eyes inevitably drift toward the treeline beyond their property. Daylight has transformed the mysterious shadows into recognisable branches and familiar shapes, but he can’t shake the persistent feeling that something’s out there. He’d felt it back in Helena, and again last night, but without concrete evidence to support his unexplained nervousness, part of him wants to attribute it to paranoia. He knows he’s been through a hell of a lot recently, so maybe it’s just a manifestation of some recent nightmares he’s been having. It’s not exactly like he lived a carefree life before all of the mess that went down with Shadow; Sonic’s been looking over his shoulder from his earliest memory, so really, this should feel no different.

Except it does, and Sonic knows that this is different. The only feeling he can compare it to is how it felt when he’d visited the lab with Eggman, Stone, Tails, and Knuckles, and understood — without any evidence to back his claims — that they weren’t alone. Unfortunately, Sonic found out pretty quickly just who was lurking in the darkness during that visit when a hand fisted in his head and slammed him into the glass chamber. He wonders if this mysterious feeling will go away by itself, or maybe it’ll make itself known in the same brutal way Shadow did.

With his cereal eaten and a sugar spike in his blood singing through his body, Sonic retreats back upstairs to their attic. Knuckles now appears to be half-awake while Tails sleeps next to him in the warm spot where Sonic was previously sitting. He offers a small wave before he hops onto the bed and settles back down in front of the screen, careful not to jostle Tails.

“Any luck?” he whispers, mindful not to rouse Tails’ snoring frame.

Knuckles shakes his head and blinks his sleepy eyes at the screen. He hasn’t been awake for long, if the half-lidded expression he’s wearing is anything to go by. “Nothing so far. However, according to the readings at the bottom of the screen, we are just a few miles from Pennsylvania.”

“How long left?”

Knuckles considers the question with sleep-slowed mental calculations. “Two hours, I would suggest.”

“Let’s let Tails rest until then, and we’ll wake him up when we’re in New York.”

Knuckles nods in agreement before settling onto his stomach, chin propped over his folded arms, watching the screen with lazy attention as time passes. Sonic manages to catch thirty minutes of fitful sleep, drifting in and out of consciousness while tucked against Tails' warm, reassuring side.

It’s not until just gone seven that they finally arrive at the predetermined location. The Miles Electric beeps to let them know that the drone has stopped tracking and is now stationary, flying above the Brooklyn skyline as it waits for its next command. Sonic and Knuckles are both awake, and with a jolt, they wake up Tails with a few quick shakes to his body.

“Huh?” Tails blurts, squinting against the morning light after being pulled from deep sleep. “Wha’?”

“It arrived,” Sonic explains, motioning for the screen. “The drone’s in Brooklyn.”

The announcement causes Tails to wake almost instantly. He pushes himself upright, his hair sticking up on one side of his head, and draws the Miles Electric into his lap. Knuckles and Sonic position themselves on either side, leaning back against the pillows propped against the headboard as Tails accesses the control panel's configuration menu. On the screen, the day appears crystal clear with minimal cloud cover. Sonic has never visited New York personally, but he's living vicariously through the drone as Tails manipulates the screen controls to direct it toward the harbour district.

“According to the information we pieced together, his last known sighting that we know of places him at the docklands,” Tails mutters, his voice dry and scratchy from sleep. “There are a fair number of old, unused storage containers along the front, so I think our best bet is to gain a vantage point and watch the footfall.”

“How much battery is left?”

Tails’ eyes flick up to the corner of the screen. “Around a third. If I find somewhere with enough sun, then the solar-panels can replenish some of the charge, though it’ll take hours.”

“Well, we’re not exactly getting up to anything else, are we? We may as well.”

Tails gives a nod as if to say: that’s true. The drone picks up speed and surveys the docklands as it finds somewhere to plant itself. The available options are somewhat limited, as the docks and naval yard span only a block or two, but it soon finds an abandoned red-brick building that looks like it used to be a fishmonger’s and plants itself in the exposed rafters. This way, the camera is watching the entire waterfront and what little footfall travels back and forth.

The buildings themselves are pretty unremarkable: they’re run down, old, lost to years of disuse as most goods nowadays end up being imported via trucks and air rather than by ship. There’re a few naval carriers drawn up close to the harbour but nothing like Sonic imagines it used to look like back in the nineteen-hundreds, when business was bustling and the area would’ve been a hotspot. It looks like most of the spaces are being rented out as storage units for boats or other miscellaneous items, but seeing as it’s pretty difficult to get to the harbour unless you’re coming by car, most of the footfall is done by people walking dogs every so often or joggers running along the pier.

It's not until Knuckles sits up with sudden alertness that Sonic refocuses on the screen. “Look,” he says urgently, pointing his gloved finger at the display. “That looks like him.”

Tails draws the screen closer to his chest, causing Knuckles and Sonic to crowd in for a better view. The screen shows a shrouded figure dressed entirely in worn, dark clothing emerging from one building to enter another. Their face remains hidden beneath a hood and angled away from the camera positioned several stories above, but the height and body shape could easily match Stone's profile.

“Can you zoom in?” Sonic asks, pointing at the screen where the figure’s exiting one door to head down an alleyway. Fortunately, their camera angle captures the moment when the figure stops to collect a delivery near a metal door on one building's side.

Tails taps something on the screen before he pinches the feed and draws the image closer. It buffers for a second before the image gains clarity and suddenly Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles are staring at a figure they’re certain is Stone.

“Holy moly!” Tails cries. “That’s him!”

“Tails, this is huge!” Sonic pulls the screen towards himself, wrangling it out of Tails’ hands as Stone, looking far worse for wear than Sonic remembers seeing him in the previous screencap, picks up a few more parcels dumped by the door before he hobbles back into the building, totally oblivious to the fact that he’s being watched. “Can we download this or something?”

“Already being taped,” Tails responds, shifting to a cross-legged position with barely contained excitement. “Is it really…?”

“It is him.” Knuckles pulls the screen so it’s between the both of them again, moving so he can get a better look. “No question about it.”

The weeks of work have finally paid off and the revelation sweeps through them with a feeling of hard-won relief. At last, the blood, sweat, tears, and sleepless hours have come to an end, but in its place is a new question, and one none of them had posed up until this moment.

As the voice of reason and common sense, Tails pipes up with: “What do we do with this?”

They exchange uncertain glances when no one immediately responds. “I can’t believe we hadn’t thought this far,” Sonic admits, surrendering the screen to Knuckles while settling back into the pillow arrangement to think. “I mean… I don’t really know.”

“Should we contact G.U.N.?” Tails suggests tentatively.

Sonic pulls a face. “I don’t trust them.” Certainly not after their last clash with Walters. Sonic fears that if G.U.N. track down Stone, it’ll only be a matter of time before they find Shadow, too, providing that he’s still on the same trail. “They’ve worked with Eggy before, and Stone, too. Don’t you think they’ll try to get him back on their side?”

Tails’ brows scrunch up, as if the idea alone is offensive. “You think they’d let him roam free?”

“Maybe not that, but…” Sonic's mouth twists as he works through the implications. “I’m worried that if Stone really is building something, and that something is one of Eggman’s unfinished creations, then arresting Stone would just leave ‘it’ in G.U.N.’s hands. Who knows what they’d do with it? I mean, we don’t even know what he’s up to.”

Their attention returns to the screen as Stone retreats into the shadowy recesses between two weathered red-brick dockland buildings, hunched-over, sad frame shifting into the darkness.

“Is he not on some kind of watchlist?” Knuckles rubs his chin with the curve of his glove. “Surely, because of the role he played with Eggman, there will be some kind of warrant out for his arrest.”

“Knuckles is right.” Tails minimises the live camera feed, swipes, taps, and opens up a PDF of an official report taken straight from the government website. “There’s an Interpol Red Notice out for his arrest. Maybe if we tip off the cops that could work?”

Sonic makes a dissatisfied sound, remaining silent as he weighs their options carefully. “Maybe,” he concedes reluctantly after a long moment. “But I think it’s worth us checking it out, first.”

“You want us to speak to him directly?”

“Not that, but I’m worried that whatever he’s working on might be one of Eggman’s old pieces, and if that gets into the wrong hands, or into G.U.N.s hands, then who knows what’ll happen?”

Knuckles considers his point with a grunt. “They are susceptible to corruption. We saw that when they aided Gerald in the Eclipse Cannon’s construction,” Knuckles mumbles in agreement. “We also do not know what Stone’s been constructing. It may be a bomb of some kind — in which case, shouldn’t we investigate a little more and then decide what to do?”

“I think that makes sense.”

“You are suspicious of G.U.N.,” Knuckles nods in Sonic’s direction, “and rightly so, but I am also apprehensive to tip off the police. I understand that Tom is technically a police officer, but not every officer has the same level of integrity as he does. We do not understand what Stone is working on. I suggest we find out for ourselves first, and then make a decision.”

The three of them lapse into silence as they’re met with a difficult decision to make.

On one hand, they could personally turn up to his base of operations, figure out just what he’s been up to, try and reason with him if needed, and if all else fails they could just kick his butt. 

On the other hand, Sonic also knows how horribly that could (and would, probably) backfire. What if Stone realises that he’s tracked, and activates whatever contraption he’s been working on? What if Knuckles is right and it’s a bomb of some kind that could wipe out the entire United States? What if Shadow just so happens to be in the area watching Stone, too, and G.U.N. capture him as well? It’s all too risky to get too directly involved, and after the grief he’s put Tom and Maddie through over the last few years, it would only serve to strain their relationship further. Sonic doesn’t want to go through another August.

“Then we monitor and collect more evidence, and then go from there,” Sonic decides on their behalf. 

Tails and Knuckles nod their agreement, and with their strategy established, they settle back onto the improvised bed to catch some precious moments of rest. They may not call themselves Team Sonic anymore, but in moments like this, Knuckles and Tails know who to look for when the situation feels impossible to navigate. 

The next few days pass in a blur. Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles find themselves consumed by their newfound duty as secret watchmen, spies in a distant state to something happening that could change life as they know it. 

They create a rota for monitoring the camera, splitting it up into four hour intervals while Tails works tirelessly on creating an artificial intelligence that will eventually do the heavy lifting for them and inform them of any potential dangers. But until his programming is complete, they're relegated to staring mindlessly at the screen for endless hours, documenting any noteworthy behaviour.

Most frustratingly, nothing particularly suspicious happens.

Stone remains inside for the majority of the time. His departures from the abandoned building are infrequent and mundane, involving him disposing of black garbage bags or collecting packages of various sizes delivered to neighbouring addresses. In the time it takes Sonic to watch the guy, he’s made a grand total of two observations. It’s anticlimactic, and while Sonic would ordinarily loathe such a mundane task, he’s grateful nothing obviously nefarious is going on. The drone makes a single trip back to receive a battery upgrade to increase its longevity from twenty hours to forty, during which time they pray nothing crazy happens in their absence, but by the time it arrives back in Brooklyn twenty-four hours later the only difference comes from the pattern of seagull poop on the ground, which is to say totally unremarkable.

Other than his tasked duties of monitoring Stone, Sonic spends the time searching for clues that Shadow’s nearby. Their drone is tucked away inconspicuously between exposed rafters in a nearby abandoned building and he knows he’s not meant to move it, but part of Sonic just wants to fly the damned thing around the vicinity just to check if Shadow’s here, too.

Maybe he’s above us, Sonic wonders idly one evening as he stares at the unchanging feed on the Miles Electric. Maybe he’s in a different building, watching Stone. Or, maybe he’s on the ground. Or in one of the naval ships. There’s not exactly any greenery nearby for him to hide in like he usually does, so it would have to be somewhere pretty discreet for him to choose.

With a sickening lurch in his stomach, Sonic wonders if Shadow isn't in the area at all. He wonders if Shadow has completely sworn off any form of interaction with others, and that his hope of Shadow being somewhere within the drone's vicinity is nothing more than wishful thinking, miles away from any possibility of resolution or reconciliation.

Fortunately, Wednesday arrives with merciful swiftness, and Sonic gladly relinquishes the Miles Electric to Knuckles while preparing for his weekly session with Suzanne. Although daylight saving time hasn't yet ended, the sun has already begun its descent when Tom and he arrive at Suzanne's property just after five o'clock, the air appropriately crisp enough that his breath exhales into white plumes when he steps out the car.

“You all good to go?” Tom asks, his hand resting on the steering wheel while the engine hums softly beneath them.

“All good! I’ll see you in an hour or so, okay?” Sonic gives him a quick wave farewell before closing the door and crossing the road toward Suzanne's property. Tom drives to a nearby layby to wait while Sonic opens the gate, secures it behind him, and follows the sandy gravel pathway winding through Suzanne's grounds toward the annex at her garden's far end.

The trees look huge and imposing today, maybe more so than ever, made worse by the darkness, and Sonic wonders if maybe Knuckles’ fear of anything paranormal is rubbing off on him. He picks up his pace and makes it to the annex a minute before his session is due to start. She spots him, and waves him in, so Sonic quickly hurries into the warm space and tries to shake off the lingering unease from his skin.

With their typical formalities exchanged of: ‘thanks for coming’s and ‘thanks for having me’s, Sonic suddenly remembers something he'd been eager to share all week and promptly leaps up to show her his new haircut. The star on the side of his head isn’t quite as flash as when he first had it done but it’s still evident enough to make her raise an eyebrow in a mild display of impression, giving Sonic the space and time to flex a few more poses before he falls onto the deep-seated Ikea chair upholstered in smooth wood and brown leather. She reclines into her own, and with a mug of something hot in her hands, she opens up their dialogue.

“Well done,” she tells him with a genuinely proud smile on her face. “I know that we spoke about how a small step like that could have a big impact.”

“Oh, it has! I’m…like, really proud of myself for doing it.” He reaches up to feel over the star as he speaks, as if reminiscing to the moment only a mere week ago where he pushed open the barbershop’s door. “I know it’s only a haircut, but…”

Suzanne lets him trail off before she gently pushes back on his self-depreciation. “It isn’t about what the action is. It’s about what the action represents. It’s you claiming ownership over yourself again after a period where you haven’t felt like you’ve been in control.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Sonic openly lets the acknowledgement bleed into his tone. He doesn’t feel the need to mask his true emotions in front of her; not like he sometimes does in front of his family. They’re much more open about discussing his period of depression, but Sonic still isn’t super comfortable bringing it up by himself. Tom and Maddie may not be handling him with kid gloves anymore, but Sonic wants to keep it that way. “And it’s worked, y’know? I felt like I was more me again. Like I was…”

“...in control?” she supplies.

Sonic nods eagerly and settles a little further into the chair. “Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I know we haven’t gone into super great detail about it because of all the other stuff we’ve been speaking about instead, like my upbringing and family life, but keeping the secret I had from Shadow for so long just made me feel so…powerless. It’s like I knew I had to say something, but saying something would mean the end of what we had, and so I was in this weird period of limbo for, like, seven months where I was just waiting for the right moment to come. Except, it never came, and eventually I just had to say it.”

Suzanne nods sagely, the fan of her salt-and-pepper hair moving with the motion. “How did it make you feel to have the decision already made for you?”

“What do you mean?”

She pauses while she thinks, carefully formulating her words, but not with the intention to lie or catch him out. She’s trying to guide him without putting words in his mouth. “You mentioned that your brother found out the secret by himself, as did your parents, which deprived you of the opportunity to tell him in your own time. I just wanted to know how you felt about that.”

Sonic blinks in surprise as the words wash over him. He considers them as if they’re a new food group on his tongue, taking the time to process before he speaks. “You’re right. I guess I would’ve told him eventually, but when Maddie and Tom found out about the atlas and we had our huge fight I felt like the bomb that was ticking down just ramped up to quadruple speed. Every single day I woke up thinking: oh my God, today’s the day, and it just…wracked me in this awful guilt. I felt powerless. I felt like no matter what I did — good or bad — there was a bad ending waiting for me and I had no idea when it was going to come, but that it was definitely on its way.”

Sonic reaches for the glass of water set on the small table between them. He raises it to take a sip before he settles back down in the chair and nurses it with both hands. “If I told him, he would end up hating me and never want to see me again. If I didn’t tell him, then he’d eventually find out anyway. Tom and Maddie knowing about it, and knowing what would happen if Shadow stayed in my life made things worse, ‘cause I knew I had to choose one or the other. I felt like nothing I could do or control would fix anything.”

He exhales a bluster through his lips and continues: “It was like I had four flat tires, but only two backup spares. No matter how I put the tires on the car — whether it’s two on the front, or two on the back, or one on each side — the car’s going to crash. I have a degree of control over where the tires can go, but I know that it doesn’t matter in the end ‘cause I’m on the freeway going a hundred miles an hour and I’m going to crash regardless of how I try to stabilise the car. Does that make sense?”

Suzanne gives another encouraging nod. “Absolutely it does. As humans — and this applies to you — we like to exert a certain level of control over our actions and surroundings, some more than others. You’re someone who enjoys spontaneity, but spontaneity doesn’t mean lack of control.”

“Of course. I like seeing what life’s cooking up for me, but, like, sometimes I don’t want the dish it’s serving to me. For the whole of this year it felt like life was squeezing lemons straight into my mouth and no matter what I did, those lemons never turned into lemonade.”

A small smile quirks on the corner of Suzanne’s mouth. “Okay,” she says, punctuating the start of a slightly different topic. She adjusts her leg and her skirt, long and brown and cotton, billows with the motion. “I appreciate we dived straight into a discussion, but I want to take a step back and look at something new with you this evening. Now that you’ve started taking the steps to exert some more control back into your life, I think it would be helpful to still have some boundaries that you can establish so you understand how to bring things back into control when they start to spin out.”

“Okay,” Sonic agrees, although he’s never really set boundaries formally before. The only recent thing that comes to mind is Shadow’s secret, but Shadow had been the one to set that boundary, not Sonic. “Yeah, I actually think that might be helpful.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Like, when Maddie said we should go out for Olive Garden a few weeks back and I had my meltdown, I probably should've just said ‘no’ but I felt like it would’ve only upset her, so I said ‘yes’ even though I wasn’t really well enough to go.”

Suzanne gives a contemplative nod. “That's exactly the type of boundary I'm referring to. It's not about establishing harsh ultimatums or immediately rejecting requests when they cross your limits, but rather understanding that you have the right to decline during moments when you feel you should accommodate others against your better judgment.”

The session continues for another forty-five minutes, during which they explore practical strategies for recognising his emotional limits and communicating them effectively. By the time they conclude, Sonic feels equipped with tools for maintaining his safe space, something that would have seemed impossible just months earlier. He’s not exactly equipped to use them straight away, but baby steps are better than no steps, right?

“I’ll walk you up,” Suzanne offers as they wrap up, but Sonic quickly raises his hand in polite refusal after finishing his glass of water and setting it on the coffee table.

“No, honestly, it’s fine. Tom’s parked across the street, and it’s barely a thirty-second walk.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

By the time he's closed the annex door behind him, complete darkness has settled over the landscape and the air carries a damp, penetrating chill. The evening's cold hits him like a physical force as the door seals shut with a solid thunk, trapping all the annex's warmth inside while offering none to the outside world. Sonic's hands instinctively rise to rub his biceps as he shivers and begins navigating the gravel pathway that winds from the annex toward the driveway at Suzanne's farmhouse entrance.

Through the annex's glass doors behind him, he can see Suzanne moving about inside, her silhouette graceful as she collects their empty mugs and straightens cushions. The warm light spilling from the windows creates pools of amber on the gravel, making the darkness beyond seem even more profound. 

A buzz of contentment fills the space between his ears as he treads up the lawn. There’s something nostalgic about being outdoors in cold darkness, the kind that he can’t quite put his finger on, and coupled with the emotional unloading of the last hour Sonic feels weightless and simultaneously heavy, as if the only cure would be a long nap beneath heated blankets.

He’s so lax that he barely notices the feeling that creeps along the back of his neck. It’s not his five physical senses reacting to the feeling, but his sixth, triggered by the intangible feeling of something isn’t right as he comes to stand in the middle of her garden and has the sickening realisation that he isn’t alone.

Something is watching him.

His head whips to look over his shoulder towards the fixtures in her garden; a fountain, a rosebush, a wooden swing hanging motionless from its chains, the dense border of towering pines and oaks that line her property like silent sentinels. He searches desperately for any anomaly among the familiar shadows, any movement that doesn't belong.

There’s a prickling sensation on his skin like there’s an invisible spider creeping along his hackles, treading with fine, barely-there legs. Sonic’s sixth sense is crying like a wounded animal that instinctively knows danger is imminent even when it can't see or smell the threat, the same way birds know to fly south hours before an earthquake hits, the way deer freeze moments before a predator strikes.

Sonic’s eyes dart from shadow to shadow, corner to corner, but he spots nothing out of place. He gives the air a quick scent but, again, finds nothing beyond the typical wilderness.

“Hello?” he calls out into the darkness, his voice echoing off the trees and returning to him hollow and unanswered. He peers deeper into the treeline where the shadows are thickest, where moonlight can't penetrate the dense canopy of interwoven branches. Even though he knows, with every instinct screaming at him, that he's being watched.

He squints harder into the darkness, straining to pick out any detail, any flicker of movement. Nothing.

“Are you a fan?” he calls out, trying to inject humour into his voice to mask the growing unease. “Do you want a photo? Even though this is a crazy invasion of privacy, and actually kinda creepy.”

The silence that follows is absolute. No snort of laughter, no sharp intake of breath, no tell-tale crunch of leaves underfoot or snap of a twig. Even the night sounds — the distant hoot of an owl, the rustle of small creatures in the underbrush — seem to have gone quiet, as if the entire forest is holding its breath.

The discomfort he feels rockets up from a four to a ten. Sonic casts a quick, worried glance over his shoulder to Tom in his car before he snaps his head around to watch Suzanne though the glass doors as she continues her evening routine, stacking books and dimming lights, her movements relaxed and unhurried.

Am I imagining things? he wonders silently. Sonic swallows hard around the cloying, metallic taste of adrenaline that's now coating his throat like thick honey. Yeah. Must be. I can’t smell or see anything. It’s probably just an animal.

He shoots another searching look toward the treeline, his gaze lingering on the deepest shadows where branches create natural hiding spots, before he forces himself to turn on his heel and walk toward the car with deliberately measured steps that gradually quicken despite his best efforts to appear calm. I’ll ask Tom, he reasons with himself to try and calm himself down. Maybe he can walk Suzanne back to the house with me.

As Sonic covers the remaining distance to the car, gravel crunching urgently beneath his feet, he can't resist shooting another look over his shoulder. Part of him half-expects to see a shrouded figure lurking in the underbrush, twin red eyes glowing like embers and familiar black and crimson quills catching what little moonlight filters through the canopy.

But he knows the weight of Shadow's gaze by now, can recognise it from a mile away. This isn’t like those times — this is nothing like the way Shadow would look at him.

This is something else entirely. This presence feels invasive, predatory, wrong in a way that makes his skin crawl and his instincts cry. And the most unsettling part of all is that Sonic has absolutely no idea who, or what, is out there watching him with such focused, unwavering attention.

Chapter Text

As summer gives its last dying breath and fully bleeds into autumn, life has largely returned to an uneventful, day-to-day normal.

‘Normal’, of course, has never existed for Sonic; not in the same way it does for a large majority of humans. But he’s happy — content, even, to spend a few months where his life isn’t actively on fire around him and people aren’t trying to kill him where he stands. Normalcy, in that sense, is nice. Sonic likes not having to talk himself down from a panic attack every hour.

With the clocks going back at the end of September and in the weeks that go by leading up to and after it, Tom and Maddie begin new shift patterns to make the most of the shorter days and longer nights. It means that often only one of them is home while the other isn’t, relegating family time to Sundays and the occasional evening where they all settle down for a movie with popcorn. Their routine is hung up on the fridge with little magnets symbolising themselves — pink for Maddie, and green for Tom — allocated to different days of the week-long rota. For October, Maddie is typically working nights while Tom does mornings. It’s not ideal, but it works for them all, especially considering money’s tight.

When the kids go back to school for the start of a new semester, Sonic attends the middle school’s track finals. It’s a fierce race but, lo-and-behold, the relay team wins gold in a photo-finish that has him jumping into Coach Richards’ arms like they’ve just won a million on a scratch-card. The kids all bid him farewell with threats that he needs to come and visit them for their next meet and that he should definitely — honestly, really Mr. Sonic! — start up his own amateur track-and-field club because he already has a dozen little supporters waiting on the bleachers ready to listen to his expert advice with eager ears. Sonic pinky-promises every single kid on the middle school’s team that he’ll definitely stick around, and if he does it with a tear in his eye from how touched he is, then so be it. Fragile masculinity has never been a concern to him, anyway. 

The weeks that follow blur together in the most wonderful way. Sonic becomes a permanent fixture in the middle school's athletics department, arriving twice weekly with training plans scribbled on napkins, building his own little group of track stars and earning a small amount of cash while he’s at it. Between his time spent at the middle school twice a week and his Wednesday mornings with Suzanne, which he now travels to by himself, Sonic’s finding himself with less and less free time on his hands. The same can be said for his roomies — Knuckles has made good use of the stationary kit he was gifted at Christmas and has started to write a memoir as the last remaining member of the Echidna Warriors, finding it his duty to not let their rich and ancient history die out with him. Dinners are now spent with Knuckles reading out a passage per night, which the four other members at the table suffer through with varying levels of interest. Maddie, for the most part, tries to show enthusiasm but Tom, Sonic, and Tails can only listen to him prattle on about ancient fables of water gods for so long before they have to politely ask if he can leave it before the spaghetti gets cold.

Tails, characteristically, has well and truly dived headfirst into their operation into spying on Stone. His days are spent squirrelled away in his workshop at the bottom of the garden while he works on flying a second drone out to replace the first when it needs repairs, as well as fine-tuning his artificial intelligence programme designed to track Stone’s movements. He’d suggested naming it M.A.I.L.E.S. just to try and fit the word into an acronym of his name but Knuckles didn’t understand the double-entendre and Sonic said that it was too cliché, even for him. 

Even with the aid of the artificial intelligence that recognises Stone on the live feed and prompts them to pay attention and get a closer look, they’ve all agreed to at least be nearby just in case anything did happen. The programme Tails engineered was great, but it couldn’t spot human tells or read micro-expressions like they can, so they maintain their watch schedule and take turns monitoring the feed from the comfort of the portable Miles Electric.

Granted, it’s difficult to gain footage of anything happening inside his base of operations because of just how well-hidden the whole thing is. From the outside, it appears to be just another abandoned warehouse in the industrial district, with broken windows patched with plywood and rust stains bleeding down brick walls like old tears. But Tails' reconnaissance has revealed sophisticated security measures hidden behind the veil, leaving no convenient gaps for structural weaknesses their drone can exploit. Stone has chosen his base well, forcing them to rely on external observation while they wait for Tails to develop infiltration technology small enough to slip through the cracks. He had suggested that they could plant nano-cameras on the new drone, which would fly and out allow for the small devices to creep inside to spy on Stone. The difficulty is that they’re weeks out from prototyping and the three of them don’t know if they have that kind of time considering they still don’t know what Stone has been up to. So, they’re relying on just compiling information for the time being until Tails can create a device small enough to spy where their drone can’t reach.

Ordinarily, Sonic would’ve just headed over there by now and busted down the door to demand answers, but considering they could be dealing with dangerous weapons, they need to take a more measured approach this time. For once, Sonic and Knuckles are following Tails’ lead and thinking before they shoot.

Although the busyness of his day-to-day life and the sessions with Suzanne help take Sonic’s mind away from idle thoughts, quiet moments leave Sonic reminiscing about Shadow. How could it not? Shadow was such a huge fixture in his life that he practically became the star in Sonic’s solar system. Just because he’s not around anymore doesn’t mean Sonic thinks of him any less frequently. 

During his morning runs through the forest trails, Sonic finds himself pausing at the clearing where they'd shared their last conversation. The autumn air carries the scent of dying leaves and approaching winter, and he wonders what season surrounds Shadow now. Is he somewhere warm, soaking up the sun to counteract the chill that came from the months spent in Siberia chasing Stone? Or has he sought out someplace cold and isolated to keep himself safe out of harm’s way?

At night, when the silence of the house feels like a breeding ground for intrusive thoughts, Sonic’s questions only multiply in their intensity. Is he eating well, and is he taking decent care of himself now that Sonic’s not there with prepared food and stern words for him to rest? Has he found shelter, or is he sleeping rough? Is he on the other side of the world just so he can put as much distance between himself and Sonic as possible? Is he even on Earth? Maybe he’s Chaos Controlled to a different planet or realm, where he’ll find others just like him and realise maybe Sonic wasn’t so special after all. Maybe Sonic was just a chapter in Shadow's story, not the whole book he'd hoped to be.

Is Shadow still tracking Stone? Is he following the same leads from a different angle? Their bright yellow drone isn't exactly subtle, despite how well they’ve managed to conceal it high in neighboring rooftops. If Shadow is in the area, there’s a chance that he’s already spotted it. Has he already figured out that Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles are planning to strike? Does he care?

He wonders if Shadow has been captured by G.U.N., or by Stone, and wonders if he’s decided to work with their enemies just to spite the figures that have caused his life to be so miserable. Sonic wonders if he’s angry with him for chasing the same target he’s been hounding for the better part of the year. He wonders if Shadow is even thinking about any of this. 

He wonders what would happen if they encountered each other again. Would Shadow run? Would he freeze? Or would he turn around and finish what neither of them had the guts to finish back in Green Hills?

So, sure, Sonic thinks about Shadow sometimes.

Aside from the menial details that keep him busy, not much has really happened in the months leading up to October, other than his short stint trying to manage Knuckles’ brief spark of online fame. As part of his announcement of the memoir he’s writing, he’d decided to pose an ‘Ask Me Anything’ questions-and-answer session on an online forum to drum up interest in the Echidna Clan’s history and culture. Unfortunately, Sonic was the only one out of them who was somewhat media literate and ended up being Knuckles’ spokesperson in responding to comments that ranged from genuine curiosity to downright inappropriate. The stint lasted around a weekend until Sonic decided that enough was enough and that the forum was getting out of control, and that they should just hold a carefully-moderated livestream instead once Knuckles finishes setting up his Instagram profile.

The rapid shutdown of the Reddit thread may have also had something to do with a few clever users linking his tone in u/KnucklesTheEchidnaWarrior’s replies with a post that went semi-viral earlier the year by u/Underscore-Netty2991. Sonic might be out and proud with his family, but he’s not ready to have them stumble across his sleep-deprived confessions on an anonymous confession board in the trenches of his crush on Shadow.

The bright side of the brief internet fame has meant that plenty of local publishers have reached out to Knuckles with enquiries about publishing his memoir, so all’s well that ends well, right?

The one other noticeable change happening in Sonic's life is that he has recently come to terms with the fact that he’s being stalked. 

He first realised he was being watched back when he spotted those strange lights in the car park all the way back in August. Then, in the days following the second incident after releasing their drone at the bottom of the yard, Sonic had just put his reaction down to nerves and paranoia over their recent revelation about Stone. Part of him wondered if it was something as simple and mundane as an allergic reaction to a new detergent — it would’ve explained the awful, itchy feeling he kept getting in the space between his nape and shoulder blades — but no one else was particularly affected by it when he brought it up.

After that evening at Suzanne’s, the feeling happened again and again and again. On one occasion he was guiding middle school kids on how to properly hold a baseball bat during their after-school phys-ed club when he’d felt a burning pressure on the back of his neck coming from the bleachers’ stands. During the next, Sonic was out in the garden (trying, and failing) to collect eggs when he suddenly felt like a thousand eyes were staring down at him from the treetops bordering the Wachowski’s property. A dozen times after that, he was jogging the soccer field for his morning run and felt the entire time like he was being chased by an assailant he couldn’t see, no matter how many sudden stops and direction changes he made.

Every time he turned around during those horrible, eerie moments, there was no one there. No tracks, no lingering smells, nothing.

It follows him for weeks on end to the grocery store, to the garden, to the out-of-town mall, to the school, to the city. He wakes up at night with his sixth-sense gone haywire; an animal, primal part of his body screaming at him that there’s danger nearby and that he needs to flee, even when he doesn’t know what he’s fleeing from. It’s like there’s a piece of him that knows he’s being hunted but there's no logic to it because he can’t point towards any evidence other than an occasional, fleeting gut-feeling.

His feelings had been easy enough to rationalise at the beginning, but after two months of repeated occurrences he’s not inclined to brush it off as simple tricks-of-the-light and paranoia anymore.

The issue is that Sonic can’t see exactly what’s causing him to feel this way. The feeling of being watched is often what alerts him, but by the time he goes to look over his shoulder at where it’s coming from there’s nothing there, like a shadow you see in your peripheral vision that disappears when you turn to look at it fully. He can’t see what this predator is, and he doesn’t have any enemies outside of Stone — but they’ve got full eyes on the guy twenty-four-seven now that their drone is up and running. It couldn’t be him, and yet Sonic can’t think of a single other living being that would follow him with this level of pervasive intensity.

The only other instance he can compare it to was during Christmas last year, when Shadow had followed him for days — to the mall, in the forest, around town — before making himself known. It was a little creepy, sure, but this was Shadow, who had a certain way about his stalking that felt more awkward than it did unnerving. Kind of like Edward Cullen, with the way he’d stand there watching you like he thinks you don’t realise just how obvious he’s being. And now, Sonic recognises the weight of Shadow’s eyes like he recognises the sound of his voice or the feeling of his touch.

This isn’t Shadow. This feels alien, and invasive, and Sonic feels less like an object of desire and more like prey.

The pressure comes to a head on a Tuesday at the tail-end of October. The air has really begun to show the change in the season; brisk, fresh, cold enough to burn when it touches your cheeks. Leaves on trees have crisped at the edges and skies have grown darker and darker earlier and earlier in the afternoon. The wind has an edge to it, like it could slice you during a particularly cold day. Gone are the days of sunhats and sunglasses, and thus Sonic prepares for another cold winter ahead, only this time without someone to look after.

This evening, Sonic is on nightly patrol duty. He’s upstairs in the attic, leaning back on his bed with a big bag of chips in his lap, a two-litre bottle of soda going flat by his side, and a stack of comics he’s been meaning to catch up on. The Miles Electric is propped up on a clumsy pile of cushions at the foot of his bed, its screen showing the now-familiar view of the alleyway adjacent to Stone's building.

A floor below, he can hear Knuckles in the small study writing a new chapter for his memoir. He can’t use computers due to the size of his gloves, and while he can technically write with a pen, tonight he’s opting to quite literally speak his thoughts aloud into a recording device to later transpose onto paper. The sound of his low, level tone provides a comforting backdrop to the evening, punctuated occasionally by Knuckles' satisfied grunts when he says a particularly good passage, or when he tells himself to: “Backspace that part. Okay, future me, let’s start again.”

Then, at the bottom of the garden, Tails is keeping himself busy in his workshop. Sonic has the window cranked open a smidge to let in some fresh air and so he can keep an ear on Tails if he needs anything, but anyone who messes with his brother typically won’t get very far, anyway. He’s a force to be reckoned with if he’s near his tech.

Sonic will occasionally flick his gaze up to the screen between the pages of the comic book he’s reading, but the feed is pretty unremarkable, just like it has been for the last few weeks. One can only stare at the unchanging sight of a dark, dingy alleyway connecting two old red-brick buildings before they lose brain cells. Stone emerges perhaps twice a week on average, always after dark, and always for brief expeditions to collect packages or dispose of waste in black bags that could contain anything from laboratory refuse to evidence of more sinister activities.

The only notable things worth paying attention to tonight are the sheer amount of seagulls near the docklands, and the occasional passerby that’ll get chased by them. Other than that, patrol duty is largely spent watching the sky gradually get darker and studying the changes in the direction of the way the shadows fall.

As Sonic flips through his comic book, he allows his mind to wander. Somewhere out there in the darkness, Shadow might be tracking the same target from a different angle. The thought sends an odd flutter through his chest, part hope and part dread. If Shadow is nearby, they're essentially working the same case from opposite sides of the street, and it’s just a matter of time to see who gets there first.

If Shadow isn’t, then Sonic won’t have to deal with an inevitable, awkward reunion. It also means that once the Stone case is closed, he’ll have little connection to him ever again.

Sonic’s fingers absently crumple the corner of the comic page as he imagines Shadow crouched on a distant rooftop, his eyes studying the same building through a squint. Does he know about their drone? Surely he must; Shadow notices everything, catalogues every detail with his methodical mind. He's probably already identified their surveillance schedule with how frequently the drone shifts angles, knows exactly when each of them takes their turn watching.

Maybe he knows I'm here right now, Sonic thinks, his grip tightening on the comic book. Maybe he's—

The screen flickers once, twice, then dies completely. The familiar view of the alleyway vanishes, replaced by stark green text reading NO SIGNAL against a black background.

He startles. Sonic blinks at the flickering screen as the feed briefly blinks to life, and then dies again, repeating NO SIGNAL in blocky text. “Uh,” he blurts, sitting up straighter and setting his half-eaten bag of chips and comic book aside so he can bring the Miles Electric into his lap. He taps frantically at the screen as if he can will the connection back to life but it changes nothing; their connection is down, and he wasn’t paying enough attention in the moments before it happened to understand why, or how. 

His stomach drops as he realises just what this could mean. In all their weeks of surveillance, they've never lost the feed completely. Equipment malfunctions, weather interference, temporary glitches, sure, but never total signal loss. Not unless something had happened to the drone itself.

He scours his memory for the few hazy seconds he’d been brainstorming prior to the feed cutting out. Did I notice anything? Sonic squeezes his eyes closed and tries to recall an image of what he’d seen, but comes up short. I don’t think there was anything notable. I mean, I don’t know that I don’t know! Damn it, Tails is going to kill me.

Sonic lifts the cuff of his glove and taps on his communicator to bring it to life. He presses the yellow button on its bevelled edge and raises the screen to his mouth. “Tails?”

It only takes a moment before a voice comes out through the built-in speakers of the communicator. “Yeah, Sonic?” Tails responds. He’s speaking like there’s something in his mouth; Sonic assumes it’s a screwdriver.

“The drone’s feed cut out,” he says, lifting the screen into his lap with one hand. “Do you want me to come down to the garage and show you?”

“What?” There's a shuffling sound, followed by the distinct clatter of tools being hastily set aside. When Tails speaks again, his voice has regained its usual clarity. “What do you mean?”

“It says ‘no signal’. The whole thing’s gone black.”

“Dang it.” Tails sighs, and it crackles through the speaker. “If you bring it down, I can run a diagnostics test and see what happened. It’s probably the battery again.”

Sonic makes it down to the workshop in five seconds flat, thanks to the open window. The garage’s shutter door is closed to keep in the warmth but the light still escapes from underneath its lip, spilling warm amber streaks across the garden’s dark lawn. He slips through the side entrance and seals the door behind him, greeting Tails with a: “Hey.”

He’s abandoned whatever soldering work he was focusing on in favour of addressing this sudden setback, that much is evident by the mess atop the worksurfaces. Tails has a pair of magnifying goggles pushed up onto his forehead, and a complex harness of leather belts and metallic strips hugging his sides. He’s managing to reach the height of the workbench with the aid of the contraption strapped around his waist; seven robotic, clever tails mimicking his own hold him several feet higher off the ground, acting almost like limbs as they prop him up and reach items out of his usual grasp. He looks a little like a benevolent Doc Ock, just without the dark trench coat and John Lennon glasses. 

The mechanical tails retract with satisfying clicks and whirs as Tails lowers himself to floor level until they form a small pouch at the base of his back. “Hey. Do you have the Miles Electric?”

Sonic passes Tails the tablet, which he takes with oil-stained gloves. His mechanical tails spring back to life, wheeling over a yellow diagnostic station that looks like it belongs on the bridge of a star ship rather than in a suburban garage workshop, its processors humming in the quiet of the space. 

Tails plugs the tablet into the main console and uses the aid of his mechanical tails to boost himself high enough to reach the keyboard. His fingers move in a blur, typing commands that cause the static monitor to flicker to life. Lines of green code whiz down the black screen like digital rain, scrolling too fast for Sonic to follow even if he understood what any of it meant. 

The goggles come down over Tails' eyes as he studies the readout, his expression growing increasingly troubled, and Sonic is once again grateful that he doesn’t have the burden of being the brains of their team. After several tense seconds, the scrolling text comes to an abrupt halt.

“It’s just giving me a standard, generic error message,” Tails says aloud, sounding displeased by it. “Nothing specific.” He frowns at whatever he’s seeing, and types another command into the console. He slams the enter key and it spits out a whole lot more text. “I think one of the drives malfunctioned.”

“In English?”

“Well, it’s not telling me what happened specifically, but that tells me I can rule out anything that it’s not telling me. It’s not a battery failure. It’s not a camera failure. The device’s navigation systems are still working, so I think one of the fuses short-circuited somewhere in the primary power distribution.” Tails types in something else, and then frowns deeper. “It’s strange, though. No rain, reasonable temperature, minimal wind. This shouldn't have happened.”

“Doesn’t this thing kinda happen all the time with tech? Y’know, things just…go.”

“Not my tech, thank you very much.” Tails lifts his goggles back to his forehead, where his downy fur pokes through the headband gaps like weeds sprouting through sidewalk cracks. “Do you remember what you saw before the screen cut out?”

“Uh.” Sonic shifts uncomfortably. “No.”

“Were you even watching?”

“Kinda? Yeah! I mean, it’s been the same thing for hours. Just sitting on a roof, watching the freaking door, and nothing changed. I swear.”

Whether Tails believes this explanation or not, he lets it slide with a disapproving grunt. “Let me see if I can retrieve the footage data.” Tails returns to the keyboard with the frown still sitting heavy on his face. “I’m worried that the drone’s fallen off the roof and broken into pieces.”

“I mean, I can get to New York and back in, like, three hours. I don’t mind.”

Tails purses his lips as he types. “Yeah, but it’s nearly seven at night.”

“So? I’ll be fine. I know how much time you’ve spent on that thing, and if it’s left out overnight it’ll either get ruined by the rain. Or, if it’s fallen off the building, then Stone might find it. Besides, I’ve got my communicator, right?” He taps the screen on his wrist. “If you get me those coordinates, I’ll pick up the drone and bring it back to you. That way, we don’t have to worry about it going missing.”

Tails mulls on that. “Fine,” he agrees at last, although reluctantly. “Let me find the coordinates.”

Sonic decides that if he’s going to take a nightly detour, then he’s going to need to fuel up. He picks up the half-eaten and slightly stale PB&J Tails has sitting on a plate near his work counter and eats it while his brother tinkers with something on the computer. “Damn. What jelly did you use in this? Tastes funky.”

“Fig,” Tails replies without looking up from his screen. “If you don’t like it, then don’t eat it.”

“I don’t dislike it. It’s just weird.” Sonic smacks his lips. “Like old-people food.”

“It’s healthier and has reduced sugar so it’s better for your teeth.”

“‘kay.”

“And, also, I didn’t make it for you.”

“Yeah, but,” Sonic takes another big bite and speaks with his mouth full, “I’m going to save your drone, so, like, it’s only fair.”

“Whatever.” Tails blinks up at the screen when a series of coordinates come up in blocky green text. He makes a note of them on a scrap piece of blueprint and lowers himself down to the floor with the use of his mechanical tails once done. “Can I have your communicator?”

Sonic shucks it off and hands it over with one hand while he balances his PB&J in the other. Tails takes it and plugs it into his clunky computer. He taps a few buttons, and within the span of a few seconds, is handing it back over to Sonic. “Alright, I’ve plugged them into your communicator. Although…” Tails trails off. “Hold on, this isn’t right.”

“How come?” Sonic swallows the macerated food in his mouth and peers over his shoulder to the communicator in Tails’ palm while Tails looks between the coordinates and the world map thumbtacked to one of the walls of the garage.

Tails boosts himself back up to screen level, checking and double-checking the data. The mechanical tails support his weight effortlessly while he plugs the communicator back into the console and runs the coordinates again. The same numbers appear, unchanged. “These look too north.” Tails slams his fingers down onto the keyboard quickly. “Sonic, this isn’t square.”

“Maybe the GPS got scrambled when whatever happened to the drone happened?” He peeks up at the screen. He can’t see much from the ground, but he doubts he’d be able to decipher whatever jargon’s on the monitor, anyway. “Maybe it recognised something was up and did that thing where it takes itself home to get fixed.”

“Maybe,” Tails concedes, though he looks unconvinced.

“Is it following the path it usually does when it needs to come back for charging?”

“Yes, but…” He sucks his lower lip into his mouth. He unplugs the communicator, and holds it in his palm without giving it back to Sonic. “I don’t have a good feeling about this. My drones are programmed to return home if something goes wrong, but whatever happened isn't showing up in my diagnostics. If the camera malfunctioned and triggered the homing sequence, why isn't there any record of it? I don't like this at all.”

“Hey, it’ll be fine. I won’t be long. Three hours, tops, alright? Two and a half if I don’t hit traffic!”

Tails’ lips purse into a thin, unhappy line. Nonetheless, a moment later, he hands Sonic the communicator. “I’ll track you,” he says wearily. “If something feels off, then just turn around, and I’ll be there as well.”

“Buddy, this’ll be fine. It’s not the first time your drone has died mid-mission, right?” When Tails doesn't respond immediately, Sonic ruffles the fur on his head affectionately. “If I’m not back in three hours, then come fetch me, alright?”

“Three hours,” Tails agrees reluctantly, though his expression suggests he's already mentally preparing for that possibility

Minutes later, Sonic stands in the crisp autumn evening air, performing pre-run stretches while mentally calculating the route ahead. New York State isn’t close, but it’s not exactly a bad run, either. If he maintains a consistent speed of seven hundred miles-an-hour, then he should be able to get to the coordinates in an hour and a half. Any speed quicker than that would make his and Tails’ life a hell of a lot easier, but the PB&J wasn’t exactly an energising snack, and Sonic’s just glad he has nowhere to be in the morning. To make the trip a little easier he makes sure to grab a pair of Bluetooth headphones that connect to the communicator on his wrist that holds a playlist of songs he asked Tails to upload, and finds ones that are upbeat enough for him to run along to their rhythm.

“See you later!” He bids goodbye to Tails’ cross-armed, frowning face with a cheeky grin before he takes off into the familiar roll of Green Hills’ valleys with a sprint.

The comforting, satiating feeling of home thrums through Sonic’s veins as he barrels through the undergrowth and up the craggy mountains of his turf, feeling one with the land that shaped him. The sun is nearly totally set, leaving only scattered streaks of burnt orange threading through the dusky sky like veins of precious metal in marble, colours that seem to race alongside him as he crosses state lines. His route takes him through Wyoming, then Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and lastly, New York, ranging from open farmland to river valleys and hillsides.

He doesn’t stop, but he does admire the view as he goes, watching as the rolling mountains taper out into hundreds of miles of flat, green land and fields of corn as he passes through the Midwest into the Northeast. The terrain here is more forgiving on his calves and thighs, but the wind is harsher as there’s no forestry to slow down its speed. I ought to come back here another time, he thinks to himself, as he sprints through a crop he vaguely recognises as soybean.

Up ahead, he spots the beginning of a rolling storm. It’s miles away from him but he's heading directly toward the system at the same speed it's approaching him, which means he'll likely hit rain within the hour. Sonic adjusts his headphones and increases his pace slightly, crossing into Pennsylvania as the last traces of sunlight fade and leave him running beneath a murky night sky where the blurry moon hangs somewhere above, concealed behind wefts of clouds like a firefly behind cheesecloth.

By the time his communicator tells him he's nearing the spot Tails programmed, the only light illuminating his path comes from what little moonlight streaks through the cloud. This far out in the sticks, there aren’t any streetlights to guide his path, so he’s going by intuition and his admittedly poor night vision. He reduces his speed to something in the low hundreds as soybean fields give way to the towering conifers that mark the outer boundary of New York State Forest. 

He glances to his right, where the typical roads would lead passing-by vehicles towards Brooklyn, and keeps going forward where the small arrow on his communicator points him.

He passes a weathered wooden sign welcoming visitors to a named hiking trail, and his pace drops further to a careful jog. The terrain here feels different from Green Hills' hard rock and steep cliffs; looser, more treacherous in the darkness. One wrong step could send him falling down a mountainside, and while he’s in no mood to stick around, it’s better to be careful than to be sorry.

As the blinking dot on his communicator draws closer and closer, and Sonic jogs deeper and deeper, he can’t help the small quibble of worry that creeps from the back, dark corner of his mind. Why would it be this far out? A small frown pulls his expression down as he tries to find a rational explanation to something that surely has a simple answer. Maybe the drone was flying home and got caught on some trees, he wonders to himself, as he follows the communicator’s guide blindly.

The darkness doesn't help his mood. While Sonic has never shared Tails' and Knuckles' outright fear of the dark, he much prefers daylight, where he can see potential threats coming. Here, surrounded by towering trees that block most of the ambient light, he feels uncomfortably vulnerable. Sonic takes his earbuds out of his ears and tucks them into a small pocket inside his glove, making sure that he’s fully prepared for whatever potential waits within the darkness. 

Finally, after what feels like endless navigating, the communicator on his wrist beeps with a happy trill and lets him know that he has no more steps to take. He’s here — the drone should be in the near vicinity. The small clearing around him is barely visible in the gloom, the trees tall and spindly rather than the dense, sturdy growth he's used to back home. They remind him of telephone poles crowned with sparse, skeletal branches that provide minimal shelter from the light drizzle beginning to fall.

“This is it…” Sonic murmurs to himself as he casts a glance around.

He’s definitely in the right place if his communicator is to be trusted, but it’s certainly not the last place he remembers seeing on the screen’s feed before it cut to a black screen. They’re miles and miles and miles away from any city, so he can only assume that the drone began its homing sequence and potentially failed mid-flight. 

Calmed by his own reassurances, Sonic presses the yellow button on the side of his communicator and speaks into it: “I’m here.”

Tails’ response is immediate this time. “What do you see?” he asks, apprehension clear in his tone, even when it’s obscured through the two-thousand miles of distance between their reception areas.

Sonic exhales a sigh as he casts his eyes around the forest. He says as much as he thinks: "Nothing, really. Pretty barren.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m in some kind of wooded area,” Sonic explains, glancing over his shoulder at the mist beginning to rise from the forest floor. The air carries a clammy chill that settles on his fur in an uncomfortable layer, and despite his usual indifference to hygiene, he's never felt more in need of a hot shower. “Looks like the drone probably crashed mid-flight.”

“Maybe? I mean, I guess it makes sense, but…” Tails briefly disappears out of the range of his microphone, and Sonic can picture him typing something into a computer by his side. When his voice returns, it's clearer but more worried. “Okay, I just checked the logs. Yes, this particular model has an emergency return protocol, but there's definitely no record of it being triggered.”

“Uh, what does that mean?”

“It means that it didn’t arrive there by its own merit.”

The words hang in the air between them like a physical weight. Sonic swallows against the sudden tightness in his throat, his eyes darting from tree to tree as he searches for anything out of place in the darkness. “You’re not joshing me, are you?”

“Why would I be messing with you?” Tails cries, sounding more worried than Sonic feels. “The only thing I can think of is that it did fly home but ended up getting caught in some trees on the way and it somehow screwed up its computer, but…” Tails exhales a worried, stressed sigh into the microphone. “I don’t like this, Sonic. I’ve had a bad feeling in my gut since it cut out earlier. I think you should come back.”

“What? No! I ran all this way. I’ll get your drone, and then I’ll come back, okay?”

“I don’t care about my drone—”

“You do. If I come back now, you’ll say something like: ‘Gee, Sonic, would it really have been that hard to pick it up on your way back? Do you know how many hours I spent building that thing?’”

A small giggle comes through the speaker. It causes Sonic to smile, despite the tight ball of anxiety in his gut that can’t help but agree with Tails’ aspersions. Something isn’t right, and he’s eager to leave, but not without finding their stupid piece of equipment. Danger or not, Sonic would rather not face a week of moaning back home for a two-second job he abandoned.

“I’m gonna scout out the area — might take some time. Keep tabs on me, alright?”

“You got it, Sonic. Be careful, alright?”

He pulls the cuff of his glove up over his communicator before he tries to readjust his eyes to the darkness so that he can take a look around. The trees aren’t as densely-laid nor as thick as they are back home; this forest is tall and lanky, like it’s a field of great monoliths with bare, spindly branches barely shielding him from the drizzle of rain above. It’s not quite coming down heavy, but Sonic knows from experience coming from years of living in the forest that a cloud this dense and low means that they’re due for a heavy shower in the next twenty minutes.

Welp, he thinks, there’s my timer. Can’t say I want to run back in the rain, so the sooner I leave, the better.

The sticks beneath his feet crumble with each step, rotten and wet from the morning’s rainfall, squelching as he steps closer to the huge sign sticking out from the ground a few metres from where he stands. The: ‘We’re glad you’re here!’ written in chipping white cursive feels ironic. Who would be greeting him in the middle of nowhere? This part of the forest isn’t connected to any hiking trails or nearby roads. Maybe it was one time, a lost relic to bygone years. 

He draws a deep breath through his nose to scent the air for any trace that might lead him to nearby humans — sweat, deodorant, food, or the lingering smoke of a campfire are usually good indicators. Even though the area lacks established trails, hikers sometimes venture off the beaten path for picnics or camping spots. Maybe someone found the drone and moved it somewhere safe?

The moment he breathes in he’s hit by the unmistakable tang of something synthetic and mechanical, not too dissimilar to the smell that comes from Tails’ workshop once he’s done soldering. It’s not unfamiliar, certainly not to Sonic, but to smell something that strange this far out only sets to tighten the ball of nerves in his gut. Why would a smell so strong be this deep in the woods when there aren’t any roads for miles, let alone footpaths?

Tails was right, Sonic realises with a start, flicking his gaze from left to right, extremely careful not to move a muscle as he remains half-inclined from his sniff. Something isn’t square in this part of the woods.

When no immediate threats reveal themselves and he doesn’t smell anything different outside of the woodsy stench of rotting leaves and the strange tang of motor oil, Sonic cautiously straightens out. “Weird…” he murmurs, taking careful steps closer to the only landmark for miles to come; the weathered sign marking the trail boundary.

The wooden placard is mostly dry, if not a little damp at the top from the drizzle of rain. Sonic squints across the short distance to the sign to look for anything strange, something catches his eye at the base of the sign. Nestled deliberately between the metal support posts sits what appears to be a package, but as he draws closer, recognition dawns. 

“What the hell?” he murmurs aloud, filling the space with the sound of his own voice for comfort. 

It's their drone. Unmistakably Tails' handiwork, with its distinctive sunny yellow finish that stands out like a beacon against the browns and indefinable shadows of the deep forest. Sonic tosses quick glances over both shoulders, a habit born from weeks of feeling hunted, but finds only the same low, chilling mist that promises heavier rain within minutes.

The drone rests perfectly positioned, as if someone had carefully placed it for maximum visibility. As Sonic crouches to examine it more closely, he notes minimal damage outside of a slightly bent propeller, some scuff marks on the protective bumpers, a few specks of earth clinging to its frame. Nothing that would prevent it from functioning normally.

Tails will be glad, he thinks, sliding his hands beneath the device's considerable weight to hoist it up. That's when he notices something else — a pale yellow sticky note adhered to the drone's top surface, nearly camouflaged against Tails' signature colour scheme.

The Post-it note bears a single line written in unfamiliar block letters, laid across the drone like a funeral flower on a grave:

It’s rude to follow people without their permission. An eye for an eye.

Sonic’s gut inverts itself inside-out the moment the words process and the thought suddenly dawns on him that maybe, just maybe, the drone didn’t crash at all.

Before he can fully process the ramifications, something fast and targeted whistles past his ear, close enough to singe the tips of his quills. He drops into a crouch just as a coin-sized hole appears in the wooden sign, smoking and perfectly circular, mere inches from where his head had been.

Sonic releases the drone and rolls sideways, his legs nearly buckling as adrenaline floods his system. His eyes dart frantically through the trees, searching for the source of the attack while a single, understated thought echoes in his mind: Oh shit.

Through the swirling fog and wet air Sonic spots a pair of red hoops, unmoving, shrouded by the darkness and mist as if it were blanketing it. He squints and steps closer as the glowing red rings move closer, too, and Sonic realises that he isn’t just looking at two LED lights, but a pair of eyes.

Or, should-be eyes. Familiar, in a way he recognises not by sight, but by feel. The way that they peer at him has his hackles on end, the same way he’s been feeling ever since he saw those strange lights in the empty parking lot all months ago. This isn’t the first time he’s seen these eyes. This isn’t the first time they’ve seen him, either.

“You,” Sonic breathes with genuine surprise as he raises his arm and levels a pointed finger at the obscured figure’s face. “You’re my stalker!”

As the figure steps out of the mist with a whirr and gargled electrical noises, its heavy feet clomping beneath its weight like hollow tins, Sonic realises he isn’t just looking at someone who wants to hurt him, but he’s eye-to-eye with a copycat. The figure is all sleek, curved metal panels painted cobalt blue, with red accents both in the shoes and in the eyes. As Sonic tilts his head to get a better look at the robot’s head, it mimics him, copying him in a perfect mirror image as it seems to study him where he stands, too. The motion allows for Sonic to see that the robot has several sculpted quills sticking out of its back in a mockery of his own. It reads ‘Eggman’ from head to toe and Sonic, at that very moment, realises just who this is.

He takes a step forward and the robot, copying him, does the same. “Holy crap — you’re the thing Stone has been building, aren’t you?” Whether or not the robot registers what he’s saying, Sonic can’t tell. Outside of body language and very little change to the red haloes of its eyes, it remains totally expressionless, a perfect foil to his own larger-than-life personality. When Sonic moves a little to the side, it follows with clanking feet, as if it’s studying him the same way certain animals study something that has the potential to be prey or predator. “You’ve gotta be. Did you take our drone?”

Sonic takes another step closer, but this time, the robot doesn’t copy him. In fact, it just remains standing, its body still while its head follows Sonic’s big gestures as he speaks to it like it’s another living being.

“Are you listening?” Sonic calls, speaking directly at the robot’s unchanging face. “Can you hear me, Stone? I know it’s you controlling this thing!”

With a quick push, Sonic shoves his metal counterpart back by the shoulders. It stumbles, barely righting itself with rigid, unpractised movements the same way those robot dogs have to regain their balance after a slip.

Then, like a series of dominoes falling into place at once, the robot rights itself and suddenly seems to take on a mind of its own. No longer is it copying Sonic and watching him with strange, hollow eyes. In the span of time it takes it to right its footing it seems to straighten out to a height identical to his own, pivoting its body so it’s facing Sonic, and raises its thin arm perpendicular to its eyes so its hand is aimed directly at Sonic’s head. The robot’s hand twists, tightening to a fist, as a whirr sounds emanates from within and a glowing red light shines from its palm. 

Like a bullet from a gun, a single shot fires from its palm and pierces another hole through the New York State Park sign as Sonic dodges it with milliseconds to spare.

“Uh oh,” Sonic taunts, crouched low into a squat with one hand on the ground and the other held behind him, “did I hit a nerve? It was just a joke, y’know. Maybe you’re not so much like me, after all.”

The robot pivots and, without hesitation, aims another shot at his head. Sonic rolls out of the way and skids along the leaves and damp earth, gouging skid marks in the malleable floor beneath his sneakers before he quickly gets up and dodges another shot aimed at his chest. “I’m flattered by the cosplay, but you got a few details wrong!” Sonic goads as the robot spins by its waist’s hinge and, feet still planted still in the ground, shoots a few more shots in each direction Sonic dodges. “Can’t blame you, though! It’s hard to copy perfection!”

Sonic hops on the balls of his feet like a boxer dodging punches, letting each shot whistle past him by the tips of his quills. The robot’s aim is practically a homing-missile, following each of Sonic’s dodges as if it can predict them, as if he’s intentionally missing him by a hair’s width just to toy with him and keep him on his toes.

When Sonic realizes the pattern — that he might not be gaining the upper hand so much as being given an illusion of it — he drops the playful pretence entirely.

With his feet planted firmly into the ground, Sonic leans weight into his calves and kicks into a sprint towards his assailant. He throws a kick to the robot’s chest plate who bends backwards in a ninety-degree angle by the hinge of its waist before he makes contact. Sonic sails over its body to land several meters away in a spray of damp earth and decomposing leaves as the robot straightens and re-targets.

A prickle of something close to adrenaline spikes in Sonic’s bloodstream. He hasn’t been challenged like this since he and Shadow fought back in Green Hills, and certainly not with a new foe since they faced down for their final battle with the Eclipse Cannon. He shakes his hands out to get rid of the nerves and excitement and calls out: “Damn, you're actually good at this! What should I call you? Sonic Two? Robo-Sonic? How about Metal Sonic? That has a nice ring to it!”

Another laser is fired, but this time Sonic is quicker. He takes the opportunity to burst forward with a flash of energy and land a kick to the robot’s leg before its eyes can even track his movements. It stumbles, rattled by the blow, making an electronic chirping sound as if Sonic’s kick physically hurt. It makes a swipe at Sonic but Sonic, expecting it, is a millisecond quicker, and dodges out of the way with a well-timed roll. He stands back up and brushes himself off, resuming a fighting position with soft knees and raised fists.

Sonic dodges another shot aimed at his head and has the cheek to stifle a yawn in-between each dodge, as if he’s merely humouring his metal counterpart’s time and attention. “Y’know, Stone, if you are listening, which I bet you are, this is a teeny bit of a let-down. I know you miss Eggy, and you probably finished off building this robot so you can avenge him in some shape or form, but isn’t this a little…predictable?”

Sonic leaps up when the robot aims a shot at his feet, and continues: “Why create something that can't actually beat me? Not to sound big-headed, but the track record speaks for itself. Eggman failed. Knuckles failed. Shadow failed. Gerald failed. Hell, even you failed. No offense, but I'm just too fast! This feels like an inevitable outcome, you know?”

Something in his words triggers a dramatic change. The robot jerks to a sudden halt, its entire frame rocking with the abrupt cessation of movement as if struck by invisible whiplash. The air between them shifts palpably, charged with a new kind of tension that raises every instinct alarm Sonic possesses.

Instead of firing another laser blast the robot moves faster than Sonic can react, dashing forward and delivering a devastating kick to his leg at the exact location, angle, and force that Sonic had used moments earlier.

The kick lands with a hell of a blow. Sonic only manages to catch himself from getting flung across the forest because he absorbs most of the blow with a strong stance. Still, it sends him careening backwards, and he barely manages to catch himself in a steady stance before the robot pivots and aims another kick that he only manages to dodge in time. The robot's energy blasts had been slower than Sonic's reflexes, but its physical movements now match his speed exactly. It hasn't figured this out through trial and error; Sonic handed it the solution on a silver platter with his taunting demonstration.

Growling in frustration, Sonic raises his knee to aim a mean kick at the joint where the robot’s torso meets its hips. It dodges out of the way and when Sonic moves to follow up with a punch, the robot suddenly takes to the sky above with a whirr from the yellow hollow of its chest. With the added height advantage, the robot aims a kick to Sonic’s head, which he manages to shield at the very last second so the toe of its shoes lands against the fragile bones of his wrist instead of his temple, immediately shattering his communicator with a sick crunch. But, Sonic doesn’t have time to worry; he quickly twists, catches the robot’s leg, and swings its body to the side, hurling it out into the forest. It crashes into a nearby tree but recovers quickly, shaking off itself, before dashing towards Sonic with a metallic chirrup that sounds a little like it's mocking his growl.

They clash, hand in hand, pushing and pulling and squeezing, forehead to forehead. With his canines bared, catching in the dim moonlight above with a dangerous flash, Sonic goads: “Dude, your nose is so pointy! You’re gonna poke an eye out with that thing!”

With almost cinematic timing, the heavy clouds from above finally release their burden. Fat splatters of rain come hammering down to the ground in an instant shower that startles the robot for a fraction of a millisecond, but a millisecond is all Sonic needs. 

He yanks the robot forward while driving his knee upward into the yellow power core at its chest. It seizes, judders, before its eyes blink out to black and it collapses in a pile of motionless metal on the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

Sonic staggers back, breathing hard and tasting copper in his mouth as the storm unleashes its full fury overhead. Sheets of rain cascade from the clouds, streaming down his face and pooling around the robot's motionless form. He wrinkles his nose at the sight and kicks the machine away from him, sending it tumbling near the trail sign where its limbs settle at unnatural angles among scattered debris from its ruptured chest cavity.

Lacking his earlier humour, Sonic mutters: “Good riddance. Any time you want a rematch, just let me know.”

He casts a quick glance up to the murky sky above and frowns. The cloud has grown so thick he can’t even see the moon, just the grey streaks of rain as it falls in fat, fast rivulets to pool around his own feet and the crumpled body of the robot. A small distance away the Post-It note falls victim to the sudden shower and practically melts under its torrent, so Sonic considers that piece of evidence a write-off and makes a move to retrieve the drone so he can head back. It’s going to be a long journey, after all, and he’s going to need to do it while soaking wet and cold. Fantastic.

As his feet squelch down the muddy path he’s suddenly overcome with a feeling of guilt that squeezes his chest like a physical hand would. It’s one thing to fight any other of Eggman’s run-of-the-mill ballbots or badniks, but to take down something modelled in his own image has disturbed a piece of him deep down in his soul. Sonic casts a glance to the crumpled body as it lies motionless in the dirt, unseeing, unmoving, dead.

He feels like he’s killed someone. Even though he knows that it’s nothing more than a pile of metal, Sonic feels like he’s killed someone. Suzanne’s going to have a field-day when I tell her I had to kill my own robot copycat, he muses with dark humour, watching the way the rain seems to gather in the hollow beneath the robot’s eyes and trickle down its face as if it’s crying.

An anxious hand rises to scratch at the back of his head as that familiar sensation of being observed creeps across the fine hairs of his neck. He glances over his shoulder and barely has time to register what he's seeing before another gun is being pointed inches from his face, wielded by the same cold, dead eyes been looking at moments before.

Sonic gasps and knocks the weapon aside just as an energy beam cuts through a nearby tree, severing the trunk completely with a smoking, sizzling wound. This robot, a perfect duplicate of the one lying deactivated in the mud, swivels to face Sonic better and re-aims its gun. Sonic barely dodges it this time, tucking and rolling to a mossy patch of stone a few feet away as the robot re-charges and re-aims.

With a newfound burst of adrenaline, Sonic whoops and calls out with a tremble to his voice: “That’s a neat trick! Clones, huh? Don’t tell me there’s more of you!”

A little bit of goading never put him too far off track, and has never failed him until now.

That is, until three-dozen pairs of eyes blink to life through the misty breath of the forest’s fog and the thick lashings of rain ricocheting off the ground. Sonic feels his heart seize behind his ribs as a cacophony of groaning servos and whirring motors all form an otherworldly chorus of noise, giving Sonic the impression that this isn’t just a chance encounter in the forest — he’s not only been set up, but he’s fallen straight into a trap. He draws in a breath through the seize of his chest and suddenly, inexplicably, feels like he’s out of his depth and there’s no way to get out of the hole he’s dug himself into.

“Uh oh.”

He aims a kick at his nearest assailant, causing its arm to bend backwards in a ninety degree angle. It rights itself with its free hand, moving its dislocated bodypiece back into place with a sick twist and crunch, before it re-aims its hand towards Sonic’s head.

One new addition would be fine — but Sonic can’t count the number of clones waiting on the sidelines, hungry for action, like players ready to be tagged in from the bleachers mid-game. He draws in a breath that tastes like copper and stale air and raises his fists to a fighting stance despite the odds he’s facing. “Come at me!” he goads, beckoning the closest robot forward with deliberate bravado masking his genuine fear.

The robot accepts his challenge without hesitation, not that it needed permission anyway. With silent coordination that speaks to advanced networking capabilities of a hive mind, it signals half a dozen counterparts to join the assault. They take to the air in perfect formation, surrounding Sonic in a circle, leaving him no room to escape.

Sonic nearly gags on the gush of saliva to his mouth. He flicks his eyes from side to side, to his communicator, to the skies, to the ground, trying to decide what move would be his best to make. He could potentially take out one and run away with the distraction it would make, but they’d surely just follow him home, wouldn’t they? He can’t fly, so that’s out of the question. He doesn’t have enough time to call Tails for his and Knuckles’ backup — besides, they’re hours away even at their own fastest speed. Sonic could be a goner by then.

The robots hover in their perfect formation, each raising its right arm to aim palm-mounted guns directly at him. Internal mechanisms whir to life as bright light concentrates in their metallic fists, and Sonic feels like a deer frozen in headlights, watching helplessly as an eighteen-wheeler bears down on him.

“Chaos Spear!”

A brilliant flash of golden energy nearly blinds him as a harpoon made of pure, spun starlight pierces through the centre console of the robots surrounding Sonic. It bends and moves as if it’s liquid, threading though each robot’s chest like a needle through fabricwork before dissolving into sparkling motes that fade against the storm clouds. All seven robots fall in a crumpled heap at Sonic’s feet, dead among the puddles of water as rain lashes down atop their bodies. The simple gesture eliminated the robots with a level of swift handiwork that puts Sonic’s attempt from earlier to shame.

His head snaps toward the source of salvation as a shadowy figure emerges from the dense fog, one hand relaxed at its side, the other extended forward with wisps of crimson energy still dissipating around its fingers. The residual glow illuminates features that Sonic would recognise even in absolute darkness. Sonic would recognise every valley, every high point, every crease on that face even if he were blind.

Despite the torrential downpour soaking him to the bone, Sonic’s body is a bonfire, a heat raging from the cavern between his ribs where his breathless lungs lie useless. The rain is nearly blinding in its density, but Sonic’s gaze has never been clearer. Dark fur, sleek and wet like an oil spill, catches what little light filters through storm clouds as crimson eyes meet his across the clearing. Those eyes cut through the thick atmosphere to pin Sonic exactly where he stands, and he finds himself genuinely weak-kneed when his primary concern should be avoiding decapitation.

But how could he possibly focus on anything else? Why would he even try?

Shadow stands like a black orchid in full bloom, petals drawn tight, quills slicked straight from the rainwater's weight. The red ribbons throughout each petal of his quill’s clump stands out starkly like the red warning signs he’d compared Shadow’s likeness to earlier in the summer, and Sonic must be a fool to see such an overt sign of danger and feel compelled to fall at its feet in supplication. The rest of the world fades to insignificance as Sonic becomes blind to everything except this singular presence, with a hard set to his jaw and eyes that have never been able to lie to Sonic, not really. The heat flaring in his own gut is reflected right back at him in a twin ember.

“Focus!” Shadow barks as he strides through the dissipating mist, fog parting before him like a curtain as he closes the distance to barely a meter away. “You nearly got yourself killed!”

“Shadow,” Sonic breathes, his mouth stuffed with cotton and his voice barely audible above the storm. He takes a shaky step forward, his sneakers sinking into the loose earth below, just to get closer to Shadow. Anything to get closer to him. “What are you—”

“Watch out!”

As a metallic claw comes over his shoulder to reach for his neck, Shadow’s suddenly there, gripping his metal counterpart by the wrist with bone-crushing force and promptly launching it to land amongst the other semi-destroyed dozen scattered in the near vicinity.

“Pay attention!” Shadow snaps, his gemstone eyes flitting from side to side to make note of how many more clones are advancing, but Sonic is dumb to it all. Every single mental facet that’s screaming at him to move, to keep safe, to protect himself is totally deaf when the simple presence of Shadow just being here overwhelms all other senses.

Maybe he picks up on Sonic’s dumbfoundedness, or maybe he’s opting for a tactical retreat, but before Sonic can register what’s happened Shadow has him gripped tight in his arms and is flying them way above the treeline with the aid of his jet shoes. They climb against the grain of the rain and Sonic is totally, willingly, at Shadow’s mercy, allowing him to navigate the treetops until he finds somewhere suitable among a latticework of branches. Shadow could be taking Sonic straight to Stone for all he knows. With the pressure of Shadow's fingers tight around his arms and the solid warmth of his body so close, he genuinely can't bring himself to care about potential consequences.

The trunks of the trees are still fairly thick, even this high up into the sky — sturdy enough to support their combined weight as Shadow lands among the branches and promptly slams Sonic backward against rough bark by his sternum. Sonic’s skull bounces against the knots of wood, but he barely registers the pain. His brain is chanting a mantra: Shadow, Shadow, Shadow, that turns every other thought to mere white noise.

While Sonic has clearly lost himself to shock and overwhelming emotion, Shadow remains entirely grounded in the present. As the rain hammers down around them, practically sliding off their faces in rivulets, Shadow tightens his grip on Sonic's chest and unleashes his fury.

“What the hell are you doing?!” His voice drowned out by the thundering rain around them that’s slicking down Shadow’s fur and quills to his face. It makes his eyes pop, gives them a clarity that Sonic can’t help but want to fall into. “You nearly got yourself killed!”

“You’re here,” Sonic responds with absolute wonder, completely ignoring Shadow's beratement as his soaked glove reaches up to encircle Shadow's wrist where it pins him to the tree. “Shadow, you…why are you here?”

Shadow's eyes flash with incandescent rage at Sonic's blatant disregard for his own life. “You freaking—!”

Sonic's grip tightens around Shadow's wrists with desperate intensity, fingers digging into bone and the minimal padding of muscle beneath dark fur. “What are you doing here?” Sonic wets his lips, tastes rainwater and something electric in the air between them. “I mean, I’m not stupid enough to need it spelling out why you’re in the area. We’re both here for the same reason. But…why here? Why are you here with me? Why did you save me?”

He can't help swaying closer despite Shadow's iron grip keeping him pressed against bark, drawn by warmth and proximity like a moth to flame. Shadow looks savage in the storm, with barely any weight to his face nor his body, his eyes two huge marbles in hollowed sockets that speak of sleepless nights and little else. 

All of the progress Sonic had made in gradually working Shadow out of his system relapses instantly. Seeing him here, solid and real and present, is enough for Sonic to realise that his feelings were never just a crush. A word that insignificant, a mere tealight, could never encapsulate the bonfire of how he feels towards Shadow.

Shadow's voice raises, his anger a boiling kettle with the water threatening to overflow and burn everything it touches. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? What are you doing here?! Why are you tracking Stone, after I repeatedly told you not to?! Look at the danger you’ve put yourself in!”

“I asked you a question first!”

A strangled noise leaves Shadow’s lips, as if he can’t quite believe in the absurdity that they’re arguing at a moment like this. “You nearly had your head taken off!” he cries, a mix of exasperation, fury, and surprise. Not aimed towards Sonic, but aimed towards himself, as though he can't believe his own actions. “Why are you alone? Where are your friends? Why are—”

Sonic's hand breaks free from Shadow's grip and clamps firmly over his mouth. “Stop,” he orders, and Shadow, for his part, listens, his wide eyes pops of colour on his dark face and the dark skies behind him. “Have you been following me?”

Sonic drops his hand to give him the chance to speak, but he’s already got his hackles up and blurting out his answer before Sonic’s hand can do so much as fall back to his side. “No, you numbskull—”

“Really—”

“I’ve been following that stupid drone! That ridiculous, bright yellow monstrosity! Do you realise how much danger you’ve put yourself in? How could someone not notice it? You’ve been spying on Stone for weeks without realising how obvious you were being!”

Sonic gawps in surprise. So, he hadn’t been wrong — Shadow was in the area, just out of eyesight. The shame that floods his gut and the urge to defend Tails’ creative (albeit naive) choices die on his tongue when Shadow’s fury returns with teeth, and he unleashes it all onto Sonic, who takes it with a strange swell of glee.

“I told you — I repeatedly told you to leave it be. That I would handle this alone. Now look at what you’ve done!”

With a teeny weeny, itty bitty smile, Sonic responds: “Look at what I’ve done? I didn’t force Stone to make some weird freaking copycats of me in robot form!”

“No, you idiot! You fell into his trap! You think I wasn’t the only one who spotted the drone?”

Sonic's mouth opens in protest but the words die on his tongue before they get the chance to form. Of course. Of course what Shadow’s saying makes sense and has merit, but the three of them had dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s when it came to Stone. Had they just been too naive? Had they underestimated his abilities? At the end of the day, he wasn’t just any other run-of-the-mill G.U.N. workers out there. The title ‘Agent’ didn’t come from anywhere.

“Then, why are you here?” Sonic counters, pushing away from the tree to close distance between them. “You knew we were in the area. You knew we were following — have known for weeks, even. Why are you here?”

“I was investigating—”

“No, Shadow.” Sonic moves so they’re toe-to-toe, nearly nose-to-nose, puffing shared breaths between each other in the night-time chill. “Why are you here? Why are you holding onto me when we’re twenty metres off the ground when you could’ve just stayed back? Why did you save me?”

Shadow’s eyes flit between Sonic’s as his lashes, clumped together by rainwater, fan in quick blinks. The cogs turn behind his eyes and Sonic recognises that look like an old friend. Shadow had acted before he had the chance to think, and now he’s trying to construct rational justifications for purely instinctive actions without admitting the simple, honest truth.

After a loaded pause, he deflects: “Now’s not the time—”

“Why?” Sonic presses, closer until there’s mere inches between them. “Why didn’t you just let me get attacked? I thought you were gone for good. Thought you were done with me.”

“I am, I need to be — I should be — but damn it, Sonic, I wasn’t about to watch you get killed. No matter what the cost is to my safety.” When he says the word, his voice shakes. Shadow averts his gaze to the sight below, of the crawling group of robots that have taken to the treetops in search of them. 

He takes a step away from the charged air between them and grunts his frustration as the robots quickly advance from below. “We don’t have time to talk about this,” Shadow mutters dismissively.

Sonic follows immediately, desperate to close the gap again. “Then, when?” he calls, his voice drowned out over the cacophony of rain hitting every surface of forestry around them.

“After. After we deal with this.” Shadow's gaze snaps back to meet Sonic's, and the fire behind his eyes that never truly extinguished flickers into something larger and infinitely more dangerous. “We can’t do anything while they’re down below.”

“We?” Sonic echoes with the ghost of a smile. Shadow’s eyes flick down to his mouth to track the motion before he looks back out to the swarm below.

“I’d say ‘I’ but I know you’d just interfere and try to challenge me.”

“It’s not a challenge if the winner’s clear before the game starts,” Sonic taunts, reaching out his hands to lace together so his knuckles can crack. Shadow glances back over and arches a brow, which Sonic mirrors. “What? You think you can take out more than I can?”

“I don’t ‘think’. I know.”

A grin pulls at Sonic’s cheeks. He skips forward on the thick branch they’re standing on before he shrugs, a: ‘what can you do?’ gesture, before he promptly launches himself from the height and nails one of the robots a few metres away in a well-placed honing attack. 

The robot clunks at the hit, so he aims again and knocks it down to the floor. Sonic uses the momentum to knock the remaining airborne robots down until they’re a crumpled heap on the floor — not quite dead, but not far off.

Sonic shakes rainwater from his quills before delivering seven precise homing attacks to finish the job completely.

He looks up toward the canopy above, rain making everything difficult to discern, but he spots a flash of crimson and knows somewhere up there a pair of unimpressed eyes are probably rolling so dramatically they might complete a full rotation. “Beat that!” he calls with his hands cupped around his mouth.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take long for Shadow to react, whether it’s from his own self-preservation of not being beaten by Sonic or from the need to protect them both. He plummets from the treetops like a bird of prey, his quills fanning like daggers behind him before he lands a few metres away on one of the robots that had decided to advance into the fray.

“I’ve already taken down seven,” he goads, kicking the robot’s corpse away with his foot. “Make that eight. I believe you're falling behind.”

With a hoot of laughter, Sonic cracks his knuckles and dives into the crowd just as he and Shadow share a brief look of connected understanding.

Fists meet metal in a flurry. The robots chirp and whine as they try to land blows that Sonic and Shadow dodge and return. The clever artificial intelligence implanted in their core means that they’re learning attack sequences and actions in real time, calculating likelihoods of what hits land hardest and which have the highest likelihood of success. Each swipe and kick and blast is quicker than the last, is more accurate than the last, and ends up being deadlier than the last.

At one point in the middle of their scuffle, a laser is pointed at the space between Shadow’s eyes by a robot missing an arm. Sonic reacts faster than conscious thought, booting the weapon aside just as it discharges, the beam slicing through the Welcome! sign and cutting it cleanly in half, scorched wood immediately sizzling under the rain's downpour.

“Quicker reflexes, old man!” Sonic taunts as he lands on the robot’s back with his heels and kicks out its centre console until its eyes go dark.

Shadow growls at the display. “I had that covered,” he grumbles while gripping an approaching robot by its throat mechanism and hurling it to the ground with bone-crushing force. “You need to stop butting in when you have your own problems to look after.”

“You’re seriously giving me that advice thinking I’ll listen?” Sonic ducks out of the way as a punch is thrown at his head. He hops, skips, and jumps across the battlefield littered in debris and metal body parts, and raises his arms to block a second punch thrown. One lands on his shoulder but he gives it as good as he takes, parrying with the robot who just won’t give up. 

While they don’t go down easily by any means, these robots aren’t built to withstand more than a few punches to their centre console. Both Sonic and Shadow quickly realise that’s their weak spot and take advantage of it by taking them down one by one with heel kicks and elbow jabs straight to their core. The forest around them erupts into chaos, seared and charred from misaimed laser blasts and littered with metal scraps. The darkness has consumed the woods and all Sonic can do to navigate the area is find the eyes staring out at him from the darkness and aim for his own chest-height equivalence on the copycat robots.

After taking down the twentieth clone Sonic begins to feel the ache settle into his bones. It’s one thing taking out a single foe, but an army? That’s something he hasn’t had to deal with since he and Shadow took down the Eggforcers from the Eclipse Cannon over a year ago. His calf muscles throb and pull as if they’re a few kicks away from snapping like old elastic bands, and his knuckles feel worn down to the bone, pulsing with each beat of his heart. Sonic shakes his hands out and delivers another elbow jab to an approaching clone, watching it chitter before it crumples like the rest do. 

His chest heaves a breath and he takes the brief moment to spit a wad of bloody saliva onto the forest floor, scouting out the space around him. There are plenty of eyes staring back at him, readily approaching, but far, far less than there originally were. Shadow’s giving it back just as well as he’s taking it, too, but months of apparent exhaustion and sleeplessness and starvation have rendered him a shell of the hedgehog Sonic last saw in Green Hills. This version is akin to the version that approached Sonic in his attic after first waking up from the explosion, all hackles no fur, with big eyes and a hesitance to accept the outstretched hand that wants to help.

But, unlike the Shadow that Sonic first re-encountered back in October, this one isn’t defeated. Regardless of what he’s been through, regardless of how he and Sonic left each other, he’s more concerned over Sonic’s safety than his own preservation. He’s choosing to fight side-by-side with him against a horde of robots that could signify the beginning of a war, and risk exposing himself in the process. 

Sonic has to pry his eyes away from Shadow’s lithe form and the way it twists with each punch thrown and each kick swung. He swallows the rusty tang on his tongue and moves to swing at an approaching pair of eyes when he finds that he can’t move his leg. Sonic glances down and spots a pair of glowing red hoops leering up at him just as a generator, one he didn’t stamp out properly, whirrs and whistles; a dying animal’s last breath.

A quick burst of red light shoots from its chest before the robot at his feet dies, its metallic hand still gripping Sonic’s ankle, and Sonic recognises with a distant, detached awareness, that the blast was awfully close and yet he didn’t feel a thing.

A warm, numbing wave washes over Sonic, as if a damp blanket has been thrown over him, dulling his senses and muddling his thoughts. His ears ring with a hollow, tinny sound, and his neck feels impossibly heavy. His stomach lurches, and it's as if his body has momentarily fallen into a state of euphoria — warm, tingly, and weighted down like he's sinking through honey. Sonic glances back up to the dark, misty forest stretching endlessly before him just as he loses his footing.

The ground beneath him seems to tilt, dropping from under his feet. Sonic, without even having the opportunity to register quite what’s happening, finds his knees buckling and his back slamming to the cold forest floor, winding him of all the breath in his lungs. Air punches out of him with a groan and he feels much like he did when he first tried to ride the skateboard he got for Christmas; the wheels had moved too fast for his feet and he was on the floor before he had the chance to even register that he’d fallen.

A strange fogginess crosses his mind, and it’s like the blinds have been drawn; he doesn’t quite know why he’s on the floor, or where he is, or what’s happening. Nothing is clear. Nothing is obvious. He tries to navigate through the mist clouding his thoughts but each word, each flimsy wisp of smoke, slips through his fingers, and he can barely grasp the feeling of coherence. 

The world around Sonic begins to fade in at the corners like a developing polaroid. A high, ringing in his ears deafens nearly every other sound, dulling the crunching of metal and yells of fury from something further, deeper into the forest, and he doesn’t think those sounds are coming from his own mouth, but he can’t be too sure. Fire and smoke burn his lungs, his lungs that have no air, and lungs that he can’t use to breathe. He tries to draw in a breath but it feels like two cold hands are gripping his them tight and it’s almost impossible to inhale without coughing. He perseveres, body fighting through the bone-shaking pain, as breath by breath the unmistakable, nauseating, excruciating feeling of something’s wrong with me dawns on Sonic realises he can’t move his body. Every single nerve ending below his waistline is on fire.

Each breath moves oxygen to his brain, pumping blood throughout his body, keeping him warm while his back presses to the freezing cold dirt floor of the forest. He raises his hands to his eyes and realises that his vision is crossing, fingers and dirty gloves doubling over and hazing into one another. He can’t move his head so he reaches down to feel around the numb, excruciating pain on his leg. When he raises his hand back up, his glove is soaked through to the fur in sticky, dark blood that trickles down his wrist, washing away with the rain lashing down from above.

“Oh my God,” he cries, his voice sounding strangled and alien like it's coming from someone else entirely. Sonic reaches behind himself to try and push up to a sitting position but he’s shaking so badly he can barely find purchase without slipping. Planting his palms flat, he pushes up and howls with agony, ribs protesting something fierce, but he pushes through the pain with a tortured groan and manages to sit up prone just as a swift, blurred figure dashes through the forest and decimates the rest of the robots in a quick homing attack.

Sonic’s eyes roll as the blood rushes to his head. He bites down nausea as the smell of bile burns his nose and the back of his tongue and tries to make sense of it all; of what has happened, and the injury he’s too terrified to examine. Sonic slouches back onto his hands and watches through the haze of smoke and fire the rest of the robots get pulverised, raining down around Sonic in pieces of metal, glass, and hardware. 

He moves to stand, to try and defend himself, but his leg physically pulses at the thought. Sonic cries out again and steels his resolve before he looks down to survey the damage.

Whatever he thought he was going to find is nothing compared to what he’s seeing. In fact, Sonic doesn’t quite know what he’s looking at. Be it the shock, or the fact that the sight is so abhorrent it doesn’t quite register with him, he stares down to the space between his right knee and hip with a sort of detachment that comes when your brain is moving too fast to process the thoughts coherently. He reaches down to touch the spot where blood pumps like water from a broken faucet, and feels his head grow woozy. His fingers probe the open wound, and he's confused when he reaches beneath his leg only to discover that the laser hadn't just hit him — it had passed straight through skin, muscle, and bone, leaving a clean, golf ball-sized hole through the centre of his thigh that he can literally see through.

Sonic’s heavy head lazily turns to watch as Shadow bounces from robot to robot, twisting their heads from their necks, throwing their bodies to the trees as they shatter into nuts and bolts, kicking holes in their chest plates, and beating them with animalistic savagery. He thrashes and bites and yowls, letting out guttural roars that echo through the forest like the cry of some primordial beast while his knuckles knock the power out of Sonic’s ghoulish, metal counterparts.

It all happens in the time it takes Sonic to drag himself to the nearest fixture — an uprooted tree, which he pushes to sit upright against what’s left of its trunk. Shadow, partially obscured by the sheets of rain and drifting smoke, finishes off the final robot by swiping razor-sharp claws through its neck joint, watching it crumple to the ground in a heap of sparking electronics. He stands among the massacre of twisted tin, shattered glass, and blue steel, his chest rising and falling with deep, gulping breaths. His gloves are completely destroyed, exposing three black knuckles and two red ones.

Sonic expects there to be more blood, but of course, these are robots and not living, breathing things, even though Shadow tore at them like he wanted them to experience a most painful death. He’s haloed by the full moon’s eerie blue light, body bathed in its dimness. Everything else is black except those crazed, wild eyes, which track the space of the forest like they’re looking for something. 

“Thirty,” he announces with a raw voice, the sound echoing off the oaks and hickory trees around them. 

When he receives no response, the look on his face twists into something baring obvious concern. He shifts to look over his shoulder and his wandering eyes finally find Sonic a brief distance away, sitting in a pool of his own blood as he stares lazily up at Shadow through the downpour.

Realisation dawns across Shadow's face in slow, painful stages that Sonic can visually see him cycle through. First comes shock, then disbelief, and finally horror, the kind that contorts his features as the reality of Sonic's condition hits him.

“No,” he utters, stumbling when he takes off into a run before he’s skating towards Sonic at light-speed with legs that can barely support the force at which he's moving. “No, no, no.”

Here, under the thin plume of dim moonlight peeking through the forest’s canopy, Shadow looks wracked with enough pain to rival Sonic’s. Other than the motor oil, ash, and dirt smeared through his fur, he’s physically untouched, but the sight of Sonic has fatally wounded him. 

“Sonic…?” he calls, unsure, almost child-like in his confusion, like he can’t quite understand what he’s seeing or why it’s happening. 

Sonic groans with every drawn-out breath, each exhale punched from his lungs by waves of agony. He breathes through gritted teeth, the sound harsh and laboured in the forest's quiet. It's the only thing he can do to try and manage the pain, as if physically expelling some of his energy might somehow make it more bearable.

Shadow grips the mangled remains of the robot that harmed Sonic and hurls it deep into the forest, to land somewhere in the darkness with a darkness with a distant, metallic clang that echoes between the trees. As if he can no longer manage to stand, Shadow drops to his knees beside Sonic, his arms hanging limply at his sides like he doesn't know what to do with them, or what to do with himself as his breaths puff out in quick, misty plumes that dissipate in the cold air. Sonic lets his head fall back against the tree trunk and watches Shadow through the veil of his half-closed eyelids, noting how even in the dim light, he can see Shadow's hands shaking.

“I’ve been hit,” Sonic grits out, tasting copper on his teeth. He cuts himself off with an agonised groan when he attempts to shift his leg into a more comfortable position, but fierce pain rips through him like lightning, triggering a rush of bile to burn the back of his throat.

“Don’t move.” Shadow's hands instantly fly to Sonic's shoulders, steadying him with a firmness that quickly falls gentle when he realises that he could be causing Sonic undue pain. His palms linger there, holding Sonic's wiry frame still even as tremors of shock course through him. “Don’t speak.”

“Speaking won’t change anything,” Sonic grits out. “It got my leg.”

Shadow pulls back to sit onto his haunches. The light is terrible so neither of them can make much out of the shapes in the darkness other than the glint of eyes, teeth, and the gloss of blood pooling near Sonic’s hip, but Shadow’s expression is unmistakable. There is no single flicker of emotion on his face; no, his entire body is a roaring flame, exuding pure, unmistakable grief at the sight of Sonic in pain. Of all things the things Sonic has seen him experience and reiterate through misty-eyed recalls of memories from times long gone by, not once has he seen this unique expression on his face. If he had to put a name to it, Sonic thinks that Shadow looks like he could cry.

He sucks in a deep breath through his nose to try and quell the nausea that rolls through his body from ears to toes. When dizziness overtakes him and his head starts to tip sideways, Shadow is instantly there to catch him, steadying him with one hand cupping his jaw. 

It’s as if their bad blood, their complicated history, their last bitter interaction all becomes moot at the moment their skin touches. All those months of agonising separation dissolve and suddenly there’s only Sonic and Shadow, together again, two celestial bodies drawn inexorably into each other's gravitational pull. Sonic takes the moment just to lean into his weight, into his warmth, letting his eyes flutter closed as tears burn behind his lids.

“What happened?” Shadow asks, and there's a barely contained tremor in his voice that speaks to how deeply this is affecting him. “I…there’s too much blood to see anything clearly.”

Sonic draws in a stuttering breath, each word an effort. “I didn’t take one out properly and it shot my thigh.” The surprise that flashes across Shadow's face is quickly overshadowed by raw, unfiltered anguish at the sight of Sonic's tears. He reaches up to wipe them away with the pads of his fingers, the gesture so tender and soothing that it actually helps ease some of Sonic's debilitating pain.

“So much for keeping score. Pretty sure I lost,” Sonic croaks, which is probably the most un-cool and least relevant thing he should be bringing up, but Shadow’s finally near me again is chanting at the forefront of his brain like a mantra and all he can think about, past the adrenaline keeping him from realising just how bad the wound is, is that he finally has Shadow back in his arms. The thundering hammer of his heart has nothing to do with the injury he’s nursing.

“I bet you wish you’d never come to help me now, huh?” murmurs Sonic, words slurring with how sluggish he feels, as if moving a single muscle in his face requires herculean effort.

Sonic forces his eyes open, blinking several times as they adjust to the dim light. When his vision clears, it reveals inky outlines, pale moonbeams slicing through mist, and the look of absolute devastation written across every inch of Shadow's face. Sonic glances down, accidentally dislodging Shadow's supportive hand in the process.

“It’s pretty bad,” he whispers, leaning his head back and averting his gaze when he catches sight of the gaping wound. The pain is as steady as his heartbeat, pulsing like a drum, but the adrenaline is doing most of the heavy lifting in numbing Sonic to just how excruciating the injury truly is. “Like, bad-bad.”

“Try not to focus on it,” Shadow whispers, quickly adjusting his hand so that Sonic's lolling head is properly supported. He shuffles forward on his knees through the puddles and slick mud, bringing himself closer, his intense gaze searching Sonic's face for signs of how much pain he's in as if he can somehow take it away from him. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

Shadow removes his hand away from Sonic’s face to reach out and examine the wound more closely, but he hesitates, scuffed-up dirty gloves hovering over the impact site before he touches it. As he gets a clearer look at the damage in the shifting moonlight he lets out a pained, shocked sound, as if he's appalled by the severity of it, as if he didn’t realise how bad it was. 

A catastrophic injury like this would be devastating for Sonic. If it isn’t fatal, it’s life-changing. Bones don’t grow back.

As their tangled bodies fall beneath the moonlight’s catchment, Sonic’s gaze drifts down to the impact site. The area around the wound is singed black, his blue fur charred and burnt down to the follicle. The exposed skin is puckered, blistered, and pink, bubbled and raised. Although it’s obscured by the sheer amount of blood coating the area, it’s impossible to miss the gravity of the shot: a neat hole piercing straight through the muscle and femur, around two inches wide. What Shadow’s most concerned about isn’t so much the bone and muscle damage but the possibility that a key artery has been severed, because Sonic is practically gushing blood, coating the dirt floor with a sticky red film, and it’s having a toll on him. He can barely keep his eyes open, and although he’s lucid and coherent, Shadow knows from experience that it might not last long.

“I need to steep this,” Shadow says, his voice tight with barely controlled panic.

He moves to press his hands directly against the wound but pulls back before making contact. His palms are filthy and his gloves are shredded from the way he tore apart the robots with his bare hands. Touching an open wound in this state is a recipe for infection, and there's no point in stopping the bleeding if it leads to something equally dangerous.

Without hesitating, Shadow tears off what’s left of his gloves with quick tugs and Sonic realises, through the pain and blood-loss-induced haze: wow, this is the first time I’ve seen his hands. They’re thin and elegant; all of his fingers are black-furred but the middle and ring finger are red, the same as his quills and the corners of his eyes, extending from the stripe of red on his forearm. His claws are longer than Sonic’s, but they seem to be retractable, as when his hands come down to try and still the blood flow they’re nowhere to be seen. What’s sweetest of all, in a way that almost feels delicate, is the sight of his palms. They're white-furred, just like his chest.

Sonic must verbalise some of his thoughts, because Shadow grunts a sound mixed between a laugh and a scowl, flexing his fingers, uncomfortable under the attention. 

Sonic laughs too when he hears Shadow's reaction, but the sound strangles into a groan as more pressure is applied to his wound. His own hands, caked with blood and forest dirt, reach out desperately to find purchase, finally gripping Shadow's bicep with pale knuckles. He holds on tight, fighting through another wave of agony with a cry that echoes through the trees, as he feels Shadow pressing into the open wound with firm, steady pressure.

“Is it working?” he grunts, his voice strained.

“Yes,” Shadow lies.

“Okay. Okay, that’s good.” Sonic says, words coming out in a slur. The pain has gone from an intense, blinding force to a dull throb; a toothache, one he’s finding less and less burdensome with each breath he takes. Distantly, he’s aware that it’s not a good sign, like he knows how the sky is blue and water is wet and that Tom is going to be really pissed off when he finds out Sonic’s gotten himself shot. “It’s gone straight through my leg. Doubt you could put a bandaid on that.”

“It’s not that bad,” Shadow says with zero ounce of belief in his own opinion.

“You’re an awful liar, y’know.”

“How…” Shadow's voice cracks slightly as he adjusts his grip, his palms meeting damaged flesh with a vile squelching sound that makes them both cringe. Rainwater rolls down his cheeks in rivulets, pooling around his jaw in fat droplets that rain down to the bloody patch beneath their bodies, and his voice, despite his efforts to keep it level, betrays the panic he's barely keeping contained. “How aren't you completely losing it right now?” 

“I honestly don’t know,” Sonic admits, smacking his dry lips and closing his eyes as he lets more of his weight rest against the fallen tree. The bark is rough against his back, but it's solid and grounding. “I think I’m kinda disassociating.”

“Stay awake, Sonic,” Shadow barks, the heel of his palm pressing down with immense pressure. It shocks Sonic awake, away from the drowsy lull of sleep, fingers tightening in the muscle of Shadow’s arm to bear through the pain.

Shadow growls with frustration as another hot surge of blood wells up through the gaps between his fingers. Applying pressure with his bare hands can only do so much so he looks for something — anything — that might help. But they're surrounded by shrapnel and dirt and they’re stranded miles from any form of civilization or medical aid. All they have are fallen leaves, his destroyed gloves, fragments of shattered robot parts, and each other.

Sonic realises at that moment, at such a rare display of pure emotion from Shadow, that this might be worse than he thought. He might not survive this.

“Sorry,” Sonic says after a moment, his voice cracking around the word. “I’m sorry.”

Shadow’s head whips around. Any pretence of trying to mask his emotions has well and truly vanished. He’s looking at Sonic without a single filter to hide just how mortified he feels. “For what? Why are you sorry?”

“I shouldn’t have made you do this. I shouldn’t have come here tonight. You wouldn’t be here otherwise, doing this—”

“Nonsense.” Shadow shifts so he has one hand pressing down on the wound while the other reaches out to cup Sonic's lolling head by the jaw. “This is absolutely none of your fault.”

“It is. I shouldn’t have kept that secret from you for so long—”

“It’s done. It happened. It was inevitable. None of this was your fault. None. We’re going to get your leg seen, and you’re going to take all of this back when you’re back up and running again, and mock me for it, okay?”

Another fresh swell of hot tears trickle down his cheeks as he gives a small, short nod against the pressure of Shadow’s hands. 

He's survived far worse before — conquered obstacles and faced down threats that posed infinitely greater dangers than a simple gunshot wound. Sonic has physically withstood laser beams powerful enough to obliterate planets, has beat two of the strongest warriors the cosmos have to offer, and walked away with little more than a splitting headache. But it's this, this comparatively mundane injury that might deliver the final blow. The irony isn't lost on him. Maybe Eggman gets the last laugh after all.

Some primal part of Sonic's consciousness recognises what's happening, whether it's the animal instinct buried deep in his brain that knows catastrophic wounds as a sign of death, or simply the fact that Shadow — someone who usually has a solution for everything, who always knows what to do — is completely at a loss of what to do.

The realisation washes over Sonic like a tidal wave. His grip on Shadow's bicep loosens, his blood-slicked fingers slipping down his arm to settle over the bare skin of his knuckles. Shadow’s head recoils at the touch before he’s suddenly there, moving the hand on Sonic’s jaw down to take hold of the one in his lap, as he meets his eyes. They’re watery and tired, only really focusing on the accents of red on Shadow’s blurry figure.

“I’m scared,” he admits quietly, his voice barely above a whisper as he holds onto Shadow's hand like it’s tethering him to reality. “I’m scared of dying.”

Shadow scrambles to grip onto his hand tighter while his other tries vehemently to staunch the relentless flow of blood. “You’re not going to die,” he vows, face twisted in pain at even having to say the words. “Don’t say that. Don’t you dare say that. Shut up. Shut your trap.”

“It’s not like I have a choice,” Sonic says, his voice growing weaker. When he closes his eyes, another hot rush of tears wash down his cheeks, pooling at the hinge of his jaw. “What the hell is a doctor gonna do for this? I’m not even insured!” The joke lands flat on its face. Sonic is the only one laughing, and it's more hysterical than it is because he finds it funny. “Even if I make it through this, I’m never going to be able to run again. My leg’s destroyed. I’m done. That’s me done.”

Shadow swallows hard, his gaze dropping back to the devastating wound. Words fail him completely because he knows, with horrible certainty, that Sonic is right. The center of his leg is utterly destroyed, and no amount of pressure or first aid is going to repair that kind of damage. Bone doesn't regenerate. A hospital might be able to amputate to preserve some quality of life, but Sonic would never walk unassisted again, and that's assuming they could even find medical professionals who understand Mobian physiology. It’s not as if they have any transfusable blood available to make up for what’s already been lost. Even if Shadow were to transfer him to the nearest emergency facility, Sonic’s in such a bad shape that he’s worried that carrying him would cause more trauma to the impact sight and trigger sepsis. His thigh is being held together by fragments of cartilage, a few strips of muscle, and little else.

Sonic's eyes drift closed, his head tilting back against the fallen log with heartbreaking resignation.

“You’re not dying, Sonic.” Shadow, in his panic, slaps him across the face. “Keep your eyes open!”

“Owwww,” Sonic moans, the sound weak but at least indicating he's still conscious.

Sonic feels impossibly heavy, grounded, as though vines and roots have emerged from the earth to anchor him in place, pulling him down toward some inevitable darkness. His hands grow slack in Shadow’s, and his breathing staggers, but he’s still lucid. The pain’s not as bad as it used to be. He’s aware of it but it feels like it’s from a part of his body that doesn’t exist in this realm. 

“Check my communicator,” Sonic murmurs. He tries to lift his arm but it weighs a thousand tonnes. “Right hand.”

Shadow, with blood streaked up to his elbows, fumbles to pick up Sonic’s hand. He peels away his sodden glove to reveal the broken device. “How do I activate it?”

“I think it’s toast, but there’s an emergency button on it.” Without waiting for further instruction, Shadow frantically presses every button he can find — yellow, red, silver — his bloodied fingers leaving dark smears across its cracked surface and bevelled edges. They wait in tense silence, but nothing happens. No lights, no sounds, no sign of life.

“Why isn’t it working?” Shadow desperately presses it again, smudging blood across its sleek surface and up the clean fur on Sonic’s hand, once protected by his glove. 

“It was shot earlier, but I’d hoped…” The tiny spark of hope in Sonic's chest gutters out completely. Fresh tears track down his cheeks, and he releases a shaky, defeated sigh.

Shadow falls back onto his haunches, hanging his arms by his side. He casts his eyes up to the waning moon, shrouded by the foliage and the thick cloud of the autumn night. Sonic watches a thousand memories race through his mind, reflected in the dull light of his red eyes, moments of loss, of failure, of watching people he cared about slip away.

“Guns and you don’t mix well, huh?” Sonic says weakly, then immediately winces. “Sorry, that was shitty of me. Word vomit. Feeling woozy.”

“You’re losing too much blood.” He swipes his hands on his thighs to try and clean some of Sonic’s blood off it. “Sonic, I need to move you somewhere safe.”

“You can’t move me.”

“I need to.”

When Shadow reaches out, Sonic physically has to hold him back, swallowing around the panic that floods his system. “Shadow, if you move me right now, I think I’ll pass out.”

“We can’t stay here!”

We, Sonic thinks with delirious warmth. He’s sticking with me. Beyond that, Sonic knows that Shadow’s right, he knows that, but the thought of doing so much as guiding his mangled leg to a different position fills him with enough dread to override any sense of reason.

“Sonic, if I leave you here, then you’re going to die. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, but—”

Before Sonic can finish his protest, Shadow is balling up their destroyed gloves, binding them together into a makeshift gag. He gently but firmly places the fabric between Sonic's teeth and pins him with a look that invites no arguments. “Bite down on this.”

Sonic heaves in a deep breath through his nose as they lock eyes. After a moment, after searching for reassurance in Shadow’s gaze and finding it by the dozen, he gives a tentative nod, and bites down on the gloves using his molars.

Shadow moves closer, one hand cradling the back of Sonic's head with unexpected tenderness. Their eyes meet again; Sonic's green eyes wide and terrified but trusting, and Shadow's determined, frightened red pair. “I’m going to pick you up. It’s going to hurt more than anything you’ve ever felt. I’m not going to stop. You bite, and you get through this.”

Sonic searches Shadow's expression one final time, then gives another small, brave nod.

The press of Shadow’s bare palm to his back would otherwise be a momentous experience, but Sonic can hardly feel it beyond the freezing chill of the night, the lack of blood in his body, and the state of shock his consciousness has fallen into. One of Shadow's arms slides beneath his shoulders while the other carefully positions itself under his uninjured leg.

“Ready?”

He doesn’t give Sonic time to wait. With a swift, albeit careful, hoist Sonic is lifted up from the earthy floor and into Shadow’s strong embrace.

The agony is indescribable. Sonic's vision explodes into white-hot stars before mercifully going dark as he passes out through the worst of it. His destroyed leg hangs at a grotesque angle, held to his body by little more than a few strong tendons and strips of muscle, draped over Shadow's forearm while his head lolls back against Shadow's shoulder. It’s a makeshift bridal carry, far from romantic. 

When his consciousness drifts back in he’s already sobbing — wet, muffled sounds around the gloves in his mouth as he digs his claws into the wiry muscles of Shadow’s frame. “I’m sorry,” Sonic thinks he hears Shadow say, but he’s not too sure. Everything sounds like it’s coming from above the water and he’s submerged ten feet down, drowning but without a leg to kick up and swim to the surface. “Keep biting down!”

Shadow adjusts his grip so Sonic is secure against his chest before he kicks off from the ground into a dash. They burst from the forest in a streak of black and crimson, leaving behind the wreckage and carnage for moonlit open ground under the slicing barrage of rain to somewhere new and somewhere safer. Sonic doesn’t watch the landscape blur pass, nor does he watch the stars wheeling overhead. Instead, he closes his eyes, tilts his head against the thundering pulse beneath Shadow’s chest, and counts his heartbeats.

Three-hundred beats per minute, Sonic realises with a small, exhausted smile after sixty seconds pass. He recalls the blurry, low figure from the classified G.U.N. files Maddie and Tom had shared with him. They were wrong, he thinks with dizzy satisfaction. He’s just like me. Maybe we’re not so different, after all. Maybe I’m the first to ever know this about him.

“I’ve got you,” Shadow's voice cuts through the rushing wind, strong and certain even as they rocket across the landscape. The moonlight grows stronger as they leave the forest's gravesite behind, but even so, Sonic doesn't open his eyes, nor does he move. He remains perfectly still in Shadow's arms, finding comfort in the unexpected sync of their twin heartbeats. “Hang on, Sonic!”

Chapter Text

Shadow very, very rarely does things with other people. He’s a loner — always has been by design of being an outlier among the human race and a wanted fugitive. His time spent with Maria, although rich and vibrant, was fleeting. He wasn’t allowed out of the lab during certain hours of the day and she had periods where she was too ill to do much of anything. When she died, a big piece of him died, too; a piece he believed would never heal.

There’s a certain kind of silence you get used to when you spend most of your time by yourself, where even your own thoughts can seem loud amongst the absolute nothingness of everything else happening around you. He may not have been fully conscious during stasis, but his brain remembers. Shadow’s memory is good like that. 

Being free of stasis gave him another chance at survival. ‘Living’ was too kind a word for what he was doing, because Shadow wasn’t living, and had never truly ‘lived’ in the way the word inspires thought. He was breathing, and sometimes he would eat and sleep, and the rest of his time was spent looking over his shoulder and planning his next move to somewhere marginally more secure than the last. It was threadbare survival, but measured against a lifetime of captivity, it sufficed.

Luxuries like warmth and companionship and new experiences were so far out of his reach they weren’t even on the horizon. And Shadow had made peace with that reality. He’d come to terms with it, had never wanted for anything more than what he could scavenge and make do with.

That was until he was given a small taste, a brief peek into what life could be like on the other side, and for the first time in his life Shadow experienced an emotion called desire.

All it took was a kind, outstretched hand on the moon to help him up after a fall for the carefully constructed scaffolding propping Shadow’s life up to collapse. From that point on, he could no longer resist the pull that tempted him out of the depths of the life he’d resigned himself to. The part of his brain that understood venturing into unknown territory meant risking everything was overwhelmed by this foreign aspect of himself that suddenly wanted. It craved warmth. It hungered for companionship. It yearned for new experiences, for the possibility of happiness. This piece of him didn’t care just how much danger pursuing those things would invite. It wanted to feel alive, and it wanted to experience those things with someone who made him feel safe.

Shadow had grown so accustomed to his only company being the phantom of his deceased friend and sister that he possessed no capacity for anything new. And yet, Sonic carved a space for himself anyway, settling sound and secure into the margins of Shadow's world until his colours bled from the frame and onto Shadow’s canvas, and Shadow was no longer viewing everything through a black and white filter. Suddenly, his entire existence was painted in shades of blue.

Everything felt effortless with Sonic. He understood Shadow when Shadow often didn’t understand himself. His touches didn’t feel like the bite of a stun-gun, and his presence didn't put Shadow on edge, constantly braced for pain. He was safe. He was ease.

And yet, being here with him like this while Shadow desperately races them away from the threat closing in behind them is one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do. 

Sonic’s body is all lean muscle and thin fat but it feels like it weighs a ton, as if Shadow’s physically carrying the weight of Sonic’s entire, bountiful life in his arms. He doesn’t head in a specific direction at first, he just runs with the intention of getting away from it all, just to get Sonic out of immediate harm’s way. Shadow knows from weeks of surveillance that Stone’s certainly not done when it comes to robot clones but he doesn’t have the capacity to think or plan what that looks like for them. Every single facet that rules Shadow’s mind is overwhelmed with the simple, urgent cause: take Sonic to safety.

He runs out of the storm, skates cutting singe-marks through the valleys as he crosses from New York into Pennsylvania. With the grey clouds long behind them Shadow slows down to a stop in the middle of an open, vast pasture with barns and stout wooden buildings that look like something straight out of the eighteen-hundreds. The scene is tranquil — rolling hills painted in autumn golds and russets, the distant sound of cattle lowing, a windmill's blades turning lazily in the evening breeze, and Shadow pays it little notice.

His breaths puff out of him in quick bursts that mist white in his face, and when he looks down, he’s relieved to see that Sonic’s breath is doing the same albeit at a slower rate than his own. 

Think, think! Shadow curses himself. He whips his head from one endless horizon to the other, looking for something, anything, that’ll prompt him on what to do next.

The last time someone was dying in his arms, he was already too late to try and think of a way out. Sonic’s alive, but Shadow doesn’t know for how long. He could have mere minutes, or hours, left. There’s no way to tell.

Where do I know that it's safe to take him? Shadow gulps the taste of coppery adrenaline in his throat as he repositions Sonic in his arms and hikes him up a little closer. The nearby barns and houses look occupied, and Sonic’s in no shape for Shadow to try knocking on nearby doors while he tries to find them somewhere for refuge.

Then, it hits him. The den! he realises with a jolt of something that feels like a fluttering of hope in his chest. Montana is the safest place he can think of among all the other locations he’s frequented over the last twelve months, which is to say not many. The issue is that it’s over two thousand miles away and the journey would ordinarily take hours by foot at the highest speed he can run, but Sonic doesn’t have that kind of time. The only other alternative is to Chaos Control, but it’s a massive burst of Chaos Energy. He’s already used his Chaos Spear once, which was risky enough. Chaos Controlling would practically act as a beacon to nearby G.U.N. soldiers, or satellites above.

Shadow steals another glance at Sonic, and watches the way his eyelids flutter weakly, how his lashes tangle together with moisture and blood. Sonic's breathing has grown more shallow, each exhale a whispered struggle against the darkness above.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, his voice barely audible above the wind rustling through the grass. He holds Sonic tighter, closing his own eyes and bracing for what comes next. “Take a deep breath.”

With a sharp electrical snap that seems to tear reality at its seams, time and space around them decelerates to a crawl — slow enough for a mosquito's wings to beat at a snail's pace, slow enough for the nuclear fusion occurring in the sun's core to practically pause. Shadow draws a shuddering breath before launching into another desperate sprint heading west, navigating by scent and his knowledge of the frozen constellations above.

While the world moves in slow-motion around them, time flows normally for himself and Sonic, as if they exist on a separate plane of reality. Chaos Control serves only to freeze the external world; its power offers no respite to those who wield it. So while the landscape blurs past in nanoseconds and the rest of the world fall blind to their movements, Shadow still faces the race against time to reach Montana before Sonic bleeds out in his arms.

Shadow crosses eight state lines in a relentless thousand-mile-per-hour sprint, his feet barely touching the ground as he weaves between frozen raindrops and motionless birds suspended mid-flight. He reaches speeds he wasn’t even aware he could travel at, clutching Sonic’s body tight to his chest the entire time so he’s secure and his leg isn’t jostled too badly. Sonic grows less responsive with each passing minute. By the time they're crossing through South Dakota, he's no longer moaning in pain, just lying against Shadow's collarbone, his quick, shallow breaths creating small puffs of warmth against Shadow's fur.

Every step, every second, every heartbeat stretches too long, and Shadow can only continue running even when his body screams for mercy, when his legs lose all sensation and the signals from his brain to his limbs fall on unresponsive nerves. He’s got good stamina, but the last two months have been devastating for his health — going weeks without food and barely sleeping in between excruciatingly long days will do that to you. 

He reaches the I-90 and uses its flat, even surface to his advantage. Shadow pushes his body beyond the realm of possibility, breaking the sound barrier until the sights around him merge into one dark, muddled streak, the only blip of colour coming from the blue in his arms smeared with cranberry red.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity compressed into a heartbeat, Shadow skids to a halt as Montana’s Welcome! sign greets him on the highway, and reality snaps back into focus with the force of a sonic boom. Suddenly, the clouds are moving in the sky and the wind is rustling through his quills again, as if hours hadn't passed when only a single second has elapsed for the rest of the world.

The sky is murky and grey and it feels like a pathetic fallacy; like even the heavens are mourning after what has befallen their brightest star. No cars or houses can be found for miles on this stretch of wilderness, so Shadow has no concerns about being observed, though that doesn't mean he's eager to linger.

His legs nearly give way beneath him when he finally comes to a stop. They’ve lost all feeling, he feels like he’s walking on two metal poles that can barely support his weight, attached and moving on instinct rather than with intentional thought. Sustaining Chaos Control for so long is no easy feat even on his healthy body, let alone in the emaciated state he’s in now. Wielding it in short, sporadic bursts for quick-fire use is easiest, but he’s never been particularly good at controlling that unstable ball of energy in his chest for anything longer than a couple of hours at most. 

Shadow heaves deep, cloying breaths but can’t get enough oxygen into his lungs, and his throat tastes like adrenaline and blood and sick. His skin tingles from such a prolonged use of time-bending abilities, but he pushes through it; pain is a secondary emotion to the desperation clawing his chest open to get Sonic somewhere safe.

Shadow plants his feet wide to maintain balance despite his wobbly legs, and looks down at the figure in his arms — curled up and limp, breathing small puffs against the fur of Shadow's chest. Sonic's face has taken on a waxy quality that causes his heart to skip a beat.

“Sonic,” he calls, giving him a little shake.

No response. He’s alive, and he’s breathing, but Shadow doesn’t know for how long it’ll last. 

“Sonic,” Shadow tries again, his voice rough with exhaustion and fear. “Can you hear me?”

Sonic doesn’t respond beyond a small, muffled groan. Barely a sound, but it’s a proof of life. Another warm spurt of blood gushes from Sonic’s leg and onto Shadow’s forearm from where it hangs, trickling down his elbow and the already soaking-wet fur to splatter on the tarmac below. 

Shadow hoists him a little higher, careful not to jostle his wounded leg, and murmurs: “We’re nearly there. Hang on. I’ve got you.”

The nearest city to Green Hills, Helena, has a hospital. With greater clarity to his thoughts returning, it’s Shadow’s instinctive port-of-call to take them there. A&E doctors and nurses would be best suited for dealing with catastrophic trauma like what Sonic has endured, and the hospital would be staffed, ensuring immediate care. But while this option solves one problem, it creates another two in its place. A hospital wouldn't have any appropriate blood for transfusion, and the practitioners wouldn’t know how to operate on a body like Sonic’s. They wouldn't know who to contact as his emergency contact, meaning Sonic could very well die surrounded by strangers. That thought alone deters Shadow from considering it seriously.

It would also mean surrendering himself to the public. It’s not like Sonic would be able to walk himself into the waiting room, and considering that Shadow doesn’t think it’s in Sonic’s best interest anyway, the hospital option becomes moot.

He glances over to his left towards the treeline, where their den waits only a few miles away. 

Shadow’s second thought is to provide the medical care himself. He understands Sonic’s physiology better than any other living being on Earth, providing it comes close to his own. The den would provide solace for Sonic to rest while Shadow discreetly ransacks the hospital in Helena to get him all the equipment and treatment he needs. Sonic will need bandages and fluids and a thousand other items Shadow doesn’t know the name to, only knows by sight after spending nights with Maria in the hospital wards, but he’ll be able to staunch the wound and buy them a little time to figure out how the hell to get them out of this mess without implicating himself. It’s not a fix, but it’s a time-buyer, and with such limited options to choose from with such little time Shadow feels like it makes the most logical sense.

Taking the step to make the right decision feels like trying to unstick his feet from a pool of knee-deep black tar. It’s nearly impossible, and every single atom in his body is pulling in a different direction to the other. 

Shadow gives Sonic another, little shake. No response, again.

Shadow’s heart lodges in his throat. He glances up ahead to the Welcome! sign, and back down at Sonic’s figure nestled in his arms. There is one, other option; a third choice, the one he knows Sonic would choose himself.

Getting Sonic professional help will mean sacrificing his own freedom for the rest of his endless life. Fear of being recognised and captured is what landed them in this mess in the first place and Shadow is so frightened by G.U.N. he’s practically paralysed at the thought of putting himself close on their radar.

A reel of memories cycles through his head; nodes on every inch of his body tracking every breath and every thought, tasers pushing him along corridors like he’s cattle, the suffocating gel that filled his nose and lungs in the stasis chamber. If he does this, there would be no more Christmases and no more PB&J sandwiches or atlases or bucket lists or peaches or oranges or apples. But, then again, those simple luxuries would be meaningless without Sonic there to share them with, anyway.

Shadow’s eyes linger on the shallow swell and dip of Sonic’s chest where he breathes, and remembers how much he had pleaded with every deity in the heavens just to see Maria’s do the same after the explosion in the lab.

The third option is the scariest of all because it means total surrender, and he knows it's the choice he must make. He closes his eyes for a brief, quiet moment, drawing in what feels like his final breath of freedom — once he does this, there’s no going back.

You need to do this, he urges himself. Do it for him. Do it for her.

Shadow waits a beat, feeling the breeze rustle his sweaty quills, taking in the smell of pine and fresh air and grass as his last time a free being, before he kicks up asphalt and skates forward, dashing past the welcome sign and towards the town of Green Hills.

The moon watches them above like an all-seeing eye, the only other being privy to the blasphemous sight of an immortal creature sacrificing their own life for the sake of a mortal’s. Shadow isn’t big on fiction like Sonic is but he knows that this is how plenty of fables end, with some kind of intricate message woven throughout. Maybe this one would be considered a tragedy. 

Shadow skates into the desolate town centre, the only sign of life coming from a tavern across the street and the old-fashioned gas station a few blocks down. Green Hills is all dated two-story squat buildings lining a haphazard grid system, and it looks stranger up close than it ever did from the mountain’s viewpoint. Shadow glances left and right as he stands in the dark centre of an empty crossroad, and tries to recognise some landmarks, but he’s never actually stepped foot this deep into the valley before.

Shadow raises his head and scents the air. Everything smells stronger and dirtier and messier, like the threads of clear-cut smells he’s used to tracking are jumbled up and tangled in one, fat knot. He sharpens his focus and sifts through the smells, like he’s unpicking the knot to find a specific thread, and after a moment he finds it. Shadow follows the trail down a side road further into the belly of Green Hills, down a path that winds into a residential area where the carriageways turn into lanes, past houses and bungalows and garages, leading up a hill’s incline to a walled-in property. There’s a car in the driveway, and the lights on in a room on the lower floor.

Shadow picks up his speed once again, skidding up the driveway, asphalt and grit spitting onto the lawn. He reaches the door and hammers on it with his blood-soaked fist before slipping his hand back under Sonic’s body to keep him propped up. Sonic whimpers at the change in weight distribution, leaning his head back to Shadow’s shoulder. 

From inside the house comes the sound of footsteps, voices, life continuing its normal course while Shadow's world balances on the edge of collapse. In a few seconds, that door will open, and Shadow's fate will be sealed forever.

“It’s going to be okay,” he mutters into the blue fur on top of his head, hoisting Sonic a little higher in his arms when his muscles tire. “You’re home.”

Just a few moments later, the door to the Wachowski household opens. One of Sonic’s humans, the lady, is dressed in a pair of pink pyjamas and looks incredibly pissed off, as if she’s ready to start a fight with whoever has the audacity to hammer her door like that at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night.

As soon as she catches sight of just who it is, though, her expression crumbles. She recognises Shadow, and then looks down to the limp body in his arm, and shrieks: “Oh my God!”

“He’s been shot,” Shadow says, frank and direct, ducking under her arm to step into the house. “I’m coming in now. Excuse me.”

She staggers back, one hand on the door handle while her other hand flies to her mouth. “Tom!” she screams, slamming the door behind Shadow. He dashes in, navigating the beautiful home with quick, searching eyes. He’s never been down here on the ground floor before but everything is tastefully decorated and clean, with glossy wooden floors that click beneath his skates and walls adorned with family photographs. The house smells like home-cooked meals and fabric softener and coffee and warmth, enveloping Shadow in a hug, exactly the type of place he can picture Sonic thriving in.

He moves through the house at random until he reaches the biggest room on the bottom floor. An open archway leads him into what must be the living room, where the other human, Tom, had been reclining on the sofa watching a movie in his pyjamas. He’s in the middle of standing up, clearly alarmed by the tone of Maddie’s voice.

When Shadow comes into the room, Tom snaps to attention. “What the hell are you doing here—”

As soon as he registers just what Shadow’s holding the words die on his tongue. The other human comes up behind Shadow, hand still over her mouth, following him in behind the trail of sticky, red blood dripping over their clean flooring and pale rug.

“What did you do?” The words are torn from somewhere deep in Tom's chest, a sound more animal than human in its anguish, as he lunges toward Shadow to reach for Sonic.

Shadow sidesteps him entirely. With one decisive kick, he sends the coffee table skittering across the room to crash against the far wall, then kneels to lay Sonic down on their patterned white shag rug with absolute care.

For the first time since Shadow spirited him away, Sonic stirs into consciousness — perhaps drawn from his stupor by the familiar voices or the comforting scents of home. His eyes flutter open, but they roll backward, unfocused, and he can barely form words without slurring his consonants.

“Shadow—” he starts, his voice snubbed by the cloying wad of blood and saliva pooling in the back of his throat.

“I’m here,” Shadow murmurs, guiding Sonic's body to recline against the rug's plush surface with one hand supporting the base of his neck, the other steadying his shoulders. “Can you hear me? Do you know where you are?”

Sonic squints against the harsh overhead lighting, but lacks the strength to focus when the intensity proves too strong for his sensitive eyes. His pupils roll again, lids fluttering as he struggles to adjust, so Shadow quickly snatches a throw pillow from the scattered furniture and slides it beneath Sonic's head so he’s not only in a more comfortable position, but he’s not directly beneath the glare of the overhead lights..

Sonic’s hand reaches out to grip on the closest thing he can for anchorage, which happens to be Shadow’s knee, as he’s gently manoeuvred into a more comfortable position, but each movement is a firebrand to his leg that causes him to wail in pain. The sounds turn voiceless eventually, just small, dry cries from Sonic as Shadow eases his head down with the gentlest touch he can muster. Sonic's claws extend through his gloves, puncturing Shadow's skin as he rides each wave of torment and Shadow could hardly care less about his own feelings. They’re insignificant, meaningless, next to the list of Shadow’s bigger concerns. He’s just revealed his identity to two humans in cahoots with G.U.N. who want him dead, and if he doesn’t do something about the bleeding in the next few minutes, Sonic is going to go into hypovolemic shock.

“Sonic, I need you to look at me and tell me where you are,” Shadow commands firmly but gently. When he hears no response, he brackets Sonic’s head with his bloodied palms and gently tilts his head so he can look him in the eyes. “Can you tell me where you are?”

Although he can hear Shadow, Sonic can barely focus his eyes for more than a few seconds without fluttering his lids. Fortunately, Tom seems to pick up on his distress, and in his stupor finds it in himself to stumble to the lights and turn them down to a lower brightness. It does the trick, and Sonic finally comes around with a little more lucidity. He focuses his wan gaze on Shadow on his right-hand side, and then shifts his gaze to his left where Tom has returned. Sonic reaches out a shaky hand towards him and without taking a breath Tom drops to his knees next to him, taking Sonic’s hand between both of his own, calm-shelling around his cold, gloved fingers.

“What happened?” Tom demands immediately, his voice still caught in that strange tone that sounds like it’s being spoken from the gut rather than from his chest, as if the shock has physically winded him.

“He was shot,” Shadow answers on Sonic’s behalf. A small gasp comes from the other human in the room, the one whose name Shadow can’t remember. “We need to staunch the wound before he loses even more blood than he already has. I’m going to need to patch it. Stay there and hold him while I can’t.”

Without waiting for permission Shadow lets go of Sonic and rises to his feet on legs that can barely support his weight. His hands hang blood-soaked and filthy at his side like dead weights, feeling numb now that they have nothing to hold on to.

As he takes sight of the scene in front of him — Sonic laid in a growing pool of his own blood, Tom at his side looking like he’s about to throw up, and the other human stood off to the side in pure shellshock — Shadow can feel the cogs in his brain turn as he shifts from panic mode into work mode. His spine straightens, his focus sharpens, the clouds of his emotions that’re obfuscating his thoughts recede; a single mission becomes clear. A switch in his brain has been flipped, detaching him from his emotions so that he can focus on his goal with a body that moves on instinct rather than piloted command. It’s done for self-preservation and maximum efficiency. Sonic doesn’t need emotion, or panic, or indecisiveness.

Shadow’s eyes sweep the room before he spots what he needs. He glides over to a radiator near the patio door and picks up a clean t-shirt that’s drying against its heat. With bloody palms, he holds it taut and and tears strips out of it in long, white strands that he gathers in his arms as he skates back over to Sonic’s twitching body. Being in familiar territory has restored some awareness to Sonic, but it's only making him fight against his own helplessness. He repeatedly tries to push himself upright, but it's as if he can't distinguish where the floor ends and his hands begin — arms windmilling awkwardly while his body forces him back down, caught in a feverish cycle of desperation and disorientation.

By the time Shadow returns, the dynamic between the two adults has shifted. Their minds have finally caught up to the crisis unfolding before them, and Tom is beginning to surrender to panic. Shadow spares him a glance and can practically watch Tom's face age in real time as the reality settles in: Sonic is dying on their living room rug, and the only person who knows what happened is the same individual who has brought unimaginable grief to the Wachowski household for over a year.

Shadow knows little about Tom outside of Sonic’s obvious adoration for the man, and with the way he’s looking at Sonic like his entire world is crumbling beneath him, Shadow can easily see that the feeling’s mutual. 

Shadow glides down to his knees at Sonic’s right-hand side, bandages in tow, as Tom mutters quiet reassurances to Sonic, who barely knows where he is. 

“Okay, okay,” Tom soothes beneath his breath as his hand strokes Sonic’s sweaty, cold forehead, brushing the damp fur back from his fluttering eyes. “It’s alright, buddy. You’re home. You’re safe. You’re going to be okay.”

When Sonic makes a distressed sound, either from the pain or the confusion or as a means of communicating, Tom’s other hand gently stills Sonic by his shoulder. As Shadow lays out the strips next to his body it causes Sonic to tilt his head to track the movement — though he’s likely just seeing blurred colours and shadows without much detail. Sonic is looking at him, sure, but he’s not really seeing him. Shadow meets his eyes and tries to offer reassurance in his gaze but Sonic’s eyes are dull, and they’re lost, and Shadow can tell just by that sight alone that he’s losing Sonic by the minute.

He quickly averts his eyes away from the painful sight and turns instead towards the grizzly injury. Focus, he urges, willing himself back into action. 

“I’m going to wrap the wound. This may hurt,” he warns in a quiet, clinical tone, as he reaches for the shortest strip and begins to wrap it around the gnarled area of the gunshot wound. Neither humans make a move to stop him, whether from shock or recognition that Shadow clearly intends to help, not harm. Shadow can't afford to analyse their motivations, so he pushes the thought aside and concentrates on the task.

Each strip is threaded beneath his knee before being tied as tightly as possible around the wound, absorbing the blood flow and creating a makeshift tourniquet. Every movement that jostles his leg tears a howl of agony from Sonic's throat, a sound that seems wrenched from the depths of his soul, a cry that raises the hackles along Shadow's spine.

Everyone watches on helplessly as Shadow tries his damndest to be as swift as possible while not compromising his care. Each tug and each movement is a hot iron branding Sonic’s skin, touching a nerve-end and twisting it in its root, and so Shadow works quickly and neatly, layering the bandages until the bleeding is eventually staunched well enough that it’s at least staying within his body. He’s lost a dangerous amount of blood between New York State and here, but going by the fact that Sonic is still lucid Shadow knows he has a little more time on his hands than he initially thought he would. Not a lot, granted, but a little is better than nothing.

With the worst of it over, Sonic collapses with a groan back onto the cushion propped behind his head. He’s more lucid now, a little more alert, tracking the moving shadows as if he recognises them for who they are. His eyes drift lazily to Tom's figure beside him as Tom rises slightly and directs a furious, incendiary glare toward Shadow, who, for all his internal turmoil, is barely expressing any emotion on his face.

“You had best tell me what the hell happened right this instant,” Tom hisses, finally addressing Shadow; the elephant in the room. Both of his hands are clenched around Sonic’s limp hand, and while his body’s angled down towards Sonic’s prone frame protectively, he’s looking straight at Shadow with intense, apoplectic blue eyes.

Shadow flicks his gaze up once, momentarily, before it drops back down to Sonic’s wound, unfased by the anger being directed at him. He wraps another cotton strip around Sonic’s leg and ties it in a double knot

“Sonic was ambushed by a hoard of robots. A jet beam hit him in the thigh, clearing straight through the femur.” Someone gags at his description. Shadow continues, monotone, keeping his eyes downcast: “I was there with him when they attacked, but I was too late to stop it from happening.” Shadow’s jaw squares and his eyes fixate on the knot of the bandages slowly bleeding red. “I didn’t know where else to bring him after he was hit.”

Tom’s anger redirects to Sonic, warping into concern: “Sonic, what the hell were you doing out that late at night—”

“He wasn’t doing anything,” Shadow defends, shooting a sharp look at Tom. “That’s why I referred to it as an ambush.”

Tom takes Shadow’s words and look as a challenge. He opens his mouth to protest but is quickly silenced as Sonic stutters through clenched teeth: “It came out of nowhere.” His teeth chatter, giving Tom’s hand another squeeze as a shudder runs through him from the memory alone. With temporary clarity returning to his eyes, the earlier haze lifting briefly as he recalls the scene, Sonic pleads with his gaze. “I was trying to pick up Tails’ drone, and then they came out of nowhere. Faster than any robot I’ve seen before.” A small sob leaves his mouth that creases his face in devastation. “It took out my leg. It’s like it knew to go for my legs.”

“Shh, shh.” Tom's anger toward Shadow evaporates instantly. Tom hushes Sonic and moves his shaking hands to gently cup Sonic’s head as his hands return to gently stroke through the shorter quills near the top of his scalp, soothing Sonic’s agonised expression at the touch alone. “You’re going to be okay. I know it hurts, but you’re going to be alright. We’ll sort you out, okay?”

Sonic nods, blinking his hot, watery eyes. Twin streams of tears streak down his face, dripping to the pillow beneath him. 

“Maddie,” Tom prompts, looking over to his wife. She nods, her teary face obscured by her hands as she watches on with distraught horror. “Do you — can you…” His breath leaves him in a shudder, like he can’t quite believe he’s having to ask this of her. What mother ever anticipates having to practice on their own child? “Can you take a look?”

She nods hesitantly, approaching on unsteady legs. Maddie settles to her knees beside Tom and places a shaking hand over Sonic's leg, hovering above the wound while her other hand comes to rest on his chest where his heart flutters beneath her palm. She carefully probes the edges of the sticky, red bandages, tilting his leg slowly and gently from side to side.

“I…” she trails off, snivelling, withdrawing one hand while the other remains pressed atop Sonic’s chest. “I’m going to need to unwrap it to get a better look.”

“You can’t,” Shadow protests before Tom has the chance to respond. She looks over, teary, red-rimmed eyes meeting his. “He’s lost too much blood already.”

“Maddie’s a vet,” Tom interjects. “She’s the most qualified person here.”

He shakes his head, a frown pulling his expression down. “If he loses any more blood, he’s going to be at risk of going into shock,” Shadow explains. “You can’t do a blood transfusion. We don’t share the same blood types. Unless Tails and Knuckles do, then any further loss could kill him.”

“With all due respect—”

“He’s right, Tom,” Maddie whispers, shaking her head to confirm Shadow's assessment. She reaches up to wipe her eyes with her wrists, smearing wet tracks toward her temples as a shuddering sigh moves through her body. “If he loses any more blood, it could be the thing that…” The words won’t come out. She draws in another shuddering, shaky breath, before she regards Shadow with a hard, determined look in her eye. “Did you get a good look at his wound?”

“Yes,” he responds simply, militarily, bound to this cause and intending to do it well, even if it means conspiring with the very people who want to see him dead.

“Can you describe what you saw?”

Shadow purses his lips at the request. He settles further onto his heels as he considers her question. “The wound…” he trails off, mulling over the words in his mouth before he speaks them aloud. The moment feels like it took place ages ago, foggy and blurred around the edges in his mind like an old memory. Among the fire and smoke and blood the one thing he can remember clearest was the shocking sound of Sonic’s cry, ringing like a dead bell, as if it were calling to Shadow in the darkness to tell him he’s already too late.

He closes his eyes and recalls the moment with greater clarity, speaking as he steps through the messy path of his recalled memories. “It’s a few inches in diameter. It pierced through the muscle and the bone like a bullet wound — so the exit wound is fairly sizable. The injury was caused by a beam of some sort, so the skin is quite badly burned around it. I imagine that it’s likely blistered, although it was difficult to see at that time. It was raining, and there wasn’t any light.”

The words keep on coming; his mouth is a tap that's handle is jammed, unable to stop the unrelenting flow of water: “From the time he was injured to the time we’re at now, I suspect it’s been around an hour and a half. For us, I mean, as time works…differently when I Chaos Control.”

Shadow grunts when he realises how convoluted his explanation is becoming. He gives his head a little self-depreciating shake before he continues: “To put it simply, he has been bleeding for an hour and a half, and his wound wasn’t staunched until just a moment ago. I believe his femoral artery may have been struck. I tried to staunch it but I had no suitable equipment.”

“An hour and a half?” Tom hisses. He isn’t angry, just frantic, trying to make sense of the whole thing. “Where were you both?”

“New York.”

Confusion and surprise twists his expression. “New York? But…that’s a thirty hour journey by car.”

Shadow nods in agreement. “I ran very fast.”

Tom’s face contorts in disbelief as he regards Shadow with a strange look in his eye Shadow hasn’t seen before. No one’s ever looked at him like that. He doesn’t know what to call it. “You ran from New York to Montana in an hour and a half?” he repeats.

“Yes.” Shadow wets his lips nervously. “I wish I could have been quicker. I’m…I’m sorry.”

They all fall into silence at the remark. The three of them are watching Shadow; Tom, Maddie, and even Sonic, with a hazy look to his eyes that lets on that he might not be as lucid as Shadow has suspected he was.

Shadow sits up straighter, and regards the two humans with bare frankness, even as they look at him like they’re only just now seeing him for the first time: “I understand that you don’t want me here. I know what this means for my safety, and for your agreement with G.U.N., but I’m not leaving until I’m satisfied that Sonic has received as much treatment as he can.”

They fall into silence yet again. Shadow meets Tom’s hardened gaze. He’s shattered, wracked with agony and fear, but there's a fierce determination burning behind his eyes that seems kindled by Shadow's words. Shadow isn’t sure if it’s the good kind or the bad kind — the kind that makes him want to throw Shadow out by the scruff of the neck at the challenge, or shake his hand as they tackle this problem together. 

“You say he’s been shot through his bone?” Maddie asks, breaking the tension. She speaks through her tears, processing the information with clinical detachment that contrasts with Tom's emotional approach. Where he clings to optimism and hope, her professional experience offers no such comfort.

Shadow grunts, “That’s right.”

“And he’s lost…how much blood?”

“I don’t know, but he’s been bleeding very badly. I don’t know if an artery was severed.”

“I need to know roughly.” She raises her shaking, cold fingers to wipe at the tears beneath her eyes and gestures towards the wound with her chin. “Sonic’s blood type isn’t the same as Tails’ nor Knuckles’, so we won’t be able to transfuse anything. I can get him fluids, but if he’s lost over a third, then…”

Shadow swallows against the constriction in his throat. Dread swells in his chest like an allergic reaction threatening to close his airways. “What happens if he’s lost over a third?”

“Has he?” Her voice rises, tight with barely controlled panic.

He gives a jerky nod. “At least.”

Maddie’s face does something Shadow has only ever seen once on another living being. It feels like he’s looking at Gerald again, trying to seek reassurance after Maria was shot, and knowing immediately by the look on his face that she was dead.

Her hands reach down to cup over Sonic’s ears. Fortunately, he’s so out of it that he doesn’t pick up on it nor take notice, and merely leans into her gentle touch. “That’s catastrophic,” she whispers, voice fracturing at the edges. When she shakes her head, the tears dribble down to her jaw, wetting the hem of her pyjama top. “Animals that I see with these kinds of wounds usually face amputation to try and save them, but…I don’t think he’d be able to cope with the additional blood loss. In any other case, they’d be euthanised.”

She bleats a sob, and tries to hide it in her shoulder to muffle its volume. The blow is devastating. Tom’s expression shutters, eyes glazing over, as Maddie coughs out another muffled sob. “I don’t know what to do,” she weeps. “I don’t know how we can save him.”

“It’ll be fine, Mads.” Tom places a palm against the small of her back, but her sobs only intensify, shaking her slight frame with each breath. His words carry no weight — he speaks as though he doesn't believe himself, as if these empty reassurances are his only means of coping. “He’ll be fine. He’s gotten through worse than this before, right? You said we can get him fluids. It’s fine. He’ll be okay.”

“We…we can try to move him to the clinic and give fluids, but he needs to have his wound dealt with immediately. You can only tourniquet something for so long before it causes even more harm. I’ll need to have a look at the wound, but if the bone’s been destroyed, then it’ll probably need to be amputated, and I don’t know if he’d be able to get through it.” She snivels, scrubbing her eyes with her shoulder while her hands remain occupied cupping Sonic’s ears. When she blinks them open they’re distant and hazy, as if she’s not really present.

She’s doing the exact same thing Shadow had done — withdrawing for self-preservation — except unlike him, Maddie seems to have completely shut down. There’s hardly a glimpse of personality reflected in the warmth of her brown eyes, just an empty shell of a human running on autopilot. Beneath her hands, Sonic shudders and groans, eyes fluttering behind his closed lids. They’re running out of time — fast.

“But that’s something right?” Tom presses desperately. “If we get him there, we can help him. You’re an amazing vet, Mads. Even if you had to amputate,” Tom practically gags around the word, “it would still increase his chance of survival, right?”

Maddie doesn’t say anything. She tips to the side, resting her head on Tom’s shoulder, and the lack of answer is enough.

Shadow, uncomfortable at the sight of such an intimate, precarious moment, isn’t sure what to do with himself. He feels like a burden being here, the sore thumb of the otherwise precious family unit, but he doesn’t intend to go anywhere. He looks away from their embrace down to Sonic’s body. A thin layer of sweat has formed on his fur and his lips have gone pale. 

The sound of twin footsteps creak the floorboards upstairs and pull them away from their spiralling thoughts. Shadow glances over to the open doorway as Maddie and Tom whip their heads to look over their shoulders, towards the dark corridor leading from the stairwell into the living room. Shadow, even through the darkness, spots a flash of red and yellow as they mope down the stairs to see what all the commotion is about.

“Tom,” Maddie whispers, alerted, her eyes flashing with panic. 

Tom swivels around and staggers to his feet, trying to move fast so neither Tails nor Knuckles have the opportunity to reach the bottom of the stairs and look inside the room. “Stay out there, you two!” he calls, and they halt in their footsteps mid-step. As the lights are off in every other room bar the living room, and given the angle of the room meaning Tom, Maddie, and Shadow can see them, but they can’t see inside the room, they don’t seem to have noticed Shadow yet. Shadow watches as Tails turns around to regard Knuckles with a confused frown, who matches it with his own.

“Is everything okay?” Knuckles calls after a moment. Loyally, he remains put, waiting for Tom’s order.

Tom wipes his hands on his pyjama bottoms and stands up straighter, walking on legs so shaky they can barely support his weight. He leaves the room through the open doorway to hang by the staircase, his face shrouded in the darkness, broad back blocking their view and their way. 

In a tone far more controlled than he must feel, Tom says: “I need you guys to go back upstairs, okay?”

“Why?” Tails asks.

“Because I said so.” The firm calmness wavers as a hint of panic seeps into his tone. It doesn’t quite overshadow his sense of authority, but his desperation to keep Tails and Knuckles at bay is obvious enough to only have the opposite effect on them. Their curiosity and concern is instantly stoked. 

Shadow watches as a strange expression crosses Knuckles’ face. His nose twitches as he scents the air. It only takes a moment for the smell to register, and suddenly he’s standing bolt-upright with a flare to his hackles.

“I can smell blood,” he states flatly.

His eyes sweep through the darkness beyond Tom’s shoulder. It only takes him a few seconds before he finds what he’s been looking for; splatters of glossy blood trail in from the front door throughout the corridor, leading down the hallway beyond his view. He follows the trail with his eyes and watches as it turns the corner into the living room.

“Upstairs!” Tom demands as he catches on to just what Knuckles is doing, but it’s pointless; his voice is already cracking around the edges and the illusion of calm and collectedness is crumbling with each passing moment.

“Tom, have you been crying?” Tails’ sweet, childlike voice asks. “What’s wrong? Is someone hurt? I could hear yelling—”

“No one’s hurt.”

“I can smell blood,” Knuckles repeats. He takes the final step down the stairs which grants him a partial view into the living room, past Tom’s outstretched arm and bigger body, where he makes immediate eye contact with Shadow. Fortunately, from this angle, he can’t see Maddie or Sonic, just Shadow’s hunched over, dark figure looking straight back at him with a glower.

The look of concern on Knuckles’ face immediately twists into a defensive snarl. “What is he doing here?”

The shift in tone alerts Tails, who follows suit and scampers down the rest of the stairs to hang back next to Knuckles. Similarly, he’s shocked at the sight of Shadow, and it shows on his open, young face. 

“I really need you two to go upstairs right now,” Tom orders, moving so he’s standing back in front of them to block their way any further. Shadow can’t quite catch their reaction, but he knows that asking that of them is futile. They’ve spotted blood, and Shadow, and it’s only a matter of time before they ask where Sonic is, too.  “I’m not asking. This isn’t something either of you need to be dealing with.”

“What is he doing in our house?” Knuckles demands, his voice low, gravelly, and angry.

“It doesn’t matter. You need to go upstairs.”

“But—”

“Boys.”

Tails' gentle voice asks: “Tom, why are you crying?”

With his back turned, Shadow can’t see Tom’s expression, but he can practically hear his heart shatter in his chest. Any remaining resolve he has dissolves like a tablet in water, the fight leaving his body in a long, shaky sigh. Knuckles, shocked at the reaction, takes the opportunity to sidestep Tom and head straight forward in a beeline, down the corridor of the hallway and towards the living room, towards Shadow. 

When he steps into the threshold and takes a look at the grim scene in front of him, all signs of confusion and anger turn to horror as he takes sight of Sonic’s ravaged, dying body on the carpet. He staggers, shock colouring every inch of his body as he takes a stilted step forward. 

“Oh dear Gaia.”

Tails is close behind. His slippers scuff against the floor as he skids into the room and as soon as he lays eyes on Sonic he shrieks: “Sonic!” 

His hands fly to his mouth as his young mind struggles to process the sight. The trauma is too much for his little body to handle — Tails immediately collapses to his knees, his legs giving out entirely as he stares helplessly at Sonic's bleeding form. He gags, physically fighting back the bile rising in his throat, triggered by a violent rush of shock to his system. Tom, despite his own state, quickly grabs a half-empty popcorn bowl and dumps its contents, holding it ready for Tails just in case his stomach gives out on him. As he shivers on the floor, Tom crouches behind him, rubbing circles in his back as he works through the life-altering trauma.

“Don’t come closer,” Shadow warns, extending a bloody, bare hand to protect Sonic’s body as both newcomers threaten to come closer. Knuckles looks furious at the command, while Tails has surrendered to shock, hands clamped over his mouth as he dry-heaves. “He’s gravely injured.”

The word gives Knuckles pause, leaving him standing just behind Maddie's shoulder.

Shadow settles back down onto his heels, but keeps his arm out to protect Sonic even though the threat level has gone down. He understands that Sonic trusts the knucklehead echidna and kit like they’re his blood brothers, but any further interference would only cause further pain for him. Maddie, fortunately, still has his ears covered, of which Shadow is grateful for. The last thing he needs is to know the whole gang has rocked up.

“He’s in a very, very temperamental state right now. Any further stress could prove fatal,” Shadow explains calmly, hoping the thinly-veiled threat of: keep your hands to yourself, gets across. 

“Fatal…” Knuckles echoes, his usually harsh, masculine features contorting into a grimace. “I do not understand. What happened? Why are you here?” He spins around, regarding a teary-eyed, exhausted Tom trying to console Tails, and throws his arm out to point to Shadow. “Why have you let him into our home, after all he has done?”

As Tails pushes the empty bowl aside, his body still working through dry-heaves but without the risk of throwing up his lunch, Tom uses his free hand to wipe his eyes with the hem of his pyjama shirt. When he speaks, he sounds resigned and exhausted. “He’s the one who brought Sonic here.”

Knuckles turns back to Shadow with the same surprised recognition Tom and Maddie had shown, as if truly seeing him for the first time. “Then…?”

Shadow, uncomfortable and a little embarrassed, shrugs. He feels defensive, and knows his tone betrays it. “I’ve been tailing your drone. We four had a common target, but Sonic has a bad habit of running straight into danger, even when he knows it’s not safe to.”

Knuckles crosses his arms, nodding his chin at the body on the carpet. “And this?”

“This is one of those times. He was shot, and I wasn’t fast enough to get to him. I didn’t realise that he’d been attacked until it was too late.” Shadow’s hand drops, settling with a feather-light touch over the rapid rise and fall of Sonic’s chest.

The room falls into an uncomfortable, cloying silence, the only sound coming from Sonic in pained wheezes as he tries to work through the pain. He’s not as lucid as he was just a few moments ago; his eyes are clenched shut, and when they do open, they focus on the shadows and lights in the room without truly registering what they are, or who they are. His hands lay by his side, twitching and flexing with each breath, and his complexion has grown dangerously pale.

“I knew something wasn’t right,” Tails whimpers, his shaking hands clutched tight over his chest. His eyes keep flicking back and forth between Sonic’s body and anywhere else in the room, as if he can’t stomach the sight for more than a few seconds. “I told him he shouldn’t have gone, but his communicator was fine — all of his readings were normal, and if he wasn’t back in three hours, we were going to go and get him.”

“It was destroyed,” Shadow tells him, and realises that this is the first time he and Tails have ever really spoken face-to-face. Though, Tails is refusing to look at him, so Shadow’s merely speaking to the sight of his forehead. “Sonic tried to contact you but the communicator was caught in the crossfire.”

With his gaze still averted from Shadow, as if he can’t quite look at him, he shuffles close to Tom and tangles his fingers in the fabric of his pyjama pants. “What’s going to happen to him?” his small voice asks, the trembles extending to the rest of his body as he works through the shock and trauma of the sight in front of him. 

Shadow purses his lips. He glances over to Maddie, who can’t seem to meet anyone’s eyes, staring into the middle distance as silent tears fall.

“Hedgehog.”

Knuckles’ voice startles them all. Its timbre is like a clap of thunder during an otherwise soundless night, startling everyone from the stilted silence. Shadow, realising he’s the one being addressed, glances up to the echidna in front of him. Knuckles’ expression has fallen back to its usual harsh glare, but Shadow, for the first time, doesn’t feel like it’s being directed at him. Maybe that’s just the way he looks, he thinks.

“Yes?” he responds.

“Can you perform Chaos Healing?”

The words strike him central in the chest.

He recoils, regarding Knuckles with a strange, confused look. The words are a slap to his face. 

Chaos Healing, he echoes in bewilderment as the words alone feel like they gut him. How could I have forgotten?

The phrase drags up a memory long lost to time, one Shadow hasn’t even broached the prospect of uncovering as of yet. So many of his memories from his time in the lab are buried beneath years of repression, beneath self-imposed barriers he struggles to overcome, creating black spots in stories that he tries to recall. Having a term from that time, one Shadow only ever heard during lab experiments and evenings spent at Gerald’s side in his research facility, feels like a piece of him is being forcefully unearthed, as if someone has reached inside a grave and pulled out the bones of a dead person without dignifying them with proper excavation.

“How do you know what that is?” he whispers, unintentionally breathless, stupefied as to why Knuckles of all people would know of such a thing from Shadow’s past that not even he himself remembered until now. 

Shadow’s reaction causes a strange look to pass over Knuckles’ hardened expression. “You understand what I am referring to,” he responds, an echo of surprise in his own voice, too, as if he wasn’t expecting his shot-in-the-dark to land.

Tom walks forward from where he’d been standing in the doorway, and places a hand on Knuckles’ shoulder. He’s frowning, clearly missing a page out of this book. “What’s ‘Chaos Healing’?” he asks with an edge of desperation.

Knuckles crosses his arms over his chest. It comes off as hostile but it’s meant to be self-soothing, a way to ground himself through a traumatic situation. “It is an old, old magic, using the power of the Master Emerald to heal all ailments. Our tribe shaman used to practice it.” He shakes his head and grunts. “That was far before my time. I only heard fables of it from my father, and by then, the Master Emerald had long since disappeared.”

Knuckles glances up towards Tom, watching as he quickly swipes his face clean of the tears that had fallen down to his jaw. “It is not something I recalled until I began to write the Echidna Clan memoir. I figured that since the hedgehog seems to be able to wield Chaos Energy, and can also rapidly heal himself, that he would also be able to use it in the same manner as our tribe shaman did with the Chaos Emerald’s energy.”

Knuckles’ hard, searing gaze flicks back down to Shadow. He pins him in his spot with his eyes and takes a step forward, closer to Sonic’s body and closer to Shadow. Here, with just a few metres of distance between them, Shadow realises this may be the first time he’s had an amicable discussion with the echidna; every other time they’ve spoken have been a result of, or resulted in, an argument. Now they have a common goal, and even though they don’t like each other, grievances have been put aside for the sake of helping their closest friend.

“You recognise what I’m saying, don’t you,” Knuckles says, without question. There is no need to ask further. Shadow already knows what Knuckles is implying, even when it’s not being spelled out for him, and suddenly, so does everyone else.

In the span it takes for the remaining three pairs of eyes to land on him, he goes from being an outsider in the room to having all attention directed where he sits. Shadow falters under the weight of their stares as his cool, collected calmness wavers beneath the pressure.

Chaos Healing was never something that Shadow innately understood how to use. In fact, most of his powers weren't things he truly understood how to wield. Chaos Energy flows through him like he's both conduit and power source, but wielding it proves no easier than expecting a human to understand the importance of breath control. Sure, through careful mentoring and techniques they can learn new skills — to whistle a melody or hold their breath long enough to swim under water for extended periods of time — but without truly understanding how to do it, how is someone meant to know they possess such capabilities?

Shadow is no different. He crash-landed on Earth with no memories prior to his arrival, knowing only that if he concentrated hard enough, he could pause time around him and perform what Gerald dubbed Chaos Control —the manipulation of Chaos Energy to an absolute point where it slows space and time to a millisecond of their normal pace. Everything that came after was taught to him by Gerald as they learned day-by-day just what he was capable of. Hell, Shadow had no idea he could even go Super. Who knows what other abilities lie dormant within him?

Of all Gerald's theories regarding Chaos Energy's capabilities, Chaos 'Healing' was among his most audacious. He hypothesised that Chaos Control, which paused time around Shadow while leaving him unaffected, could potentially work in reverse. It would require Shadow to concentrate Chaos Energy in a localised area, separating it from the current plane of time and space; a polar opposite to Chaos Control's mechanics. Gerald believed that a more concentrated application of energy, rather than the mass expulsion that Chaos Control demanded, could not only pause time in a specific area but even accelerate or reverse it, providing Shadow understood how to channel the energy correctly.

It was an utterly preposterous theory, and due to its complexities, it only became something Shadow experimented with during the final months of his time in the laboratory, after years of studies and experiments had led Gerald to the suggestion in the first place. Most of Shadow's early years were spent as a test subject for the capabilities of an immortal being through endurance trials, regeneration studies, and combat simulations. It was only after years of data collection that Gerald grew increasingly fascinated with the potential of the energy Shadow wielded. That was when Shadow's role shifted from lab rat to something far more complex: a living weapon to be refined.

Harnessing Chaos Energy for prolonged use required an entirely different skill set; new neural pathways, undeveloped energy channels that Shadow had never accessed before. Short bursts were intuitive and simple, but he could only draw from his well of Chaos Energy for so long before it depleted, leaving his reserves dry. Even maintaining Chaos Control for more than a few hours was exhausting, and that ability didn't require specific targeting.

So, he started small and simple: Shadow was tasked with blooming a potted plant from a seedling to a flower. Months and months of failed experimentations finally led to a successful outcome after countless trial and error, where the flower initially remained unchanged, to a small period of growth, and finally to full bloom. 

It took one-hundred-and-forty-seven flowers for him to finally succeed. The rest either fell back into their bulbs when he pulled too much, or wilted to their deaths when he pushed too hard. But, one-hundred-and-forty-six rotted flowers was all it took before Gerald declared the hypothesis a success and he was moved to experiment on living subjects after that.

Early experiments had him healing paper cuts in a manner of minutes by focusing his energy on a small segment of a lab technician’s thumb and speeding up the platelet and fibroblast production and tissue generation. Then, he moved onto fractures and sprains where he worked to reverse time to repair the injuries by returning the injured area to the state it was before the trauma occurred. It had an equal success-to-failure ratio; for every injury healed, another test subject would be left with a hand aged twenty years too long, or a leg shrunk and paralysed. Shadow was skilled but it was a difficult practice to do well, as it required physically withdrawing Chaos Energy from his own energy core to heal another. Tests had to be spaced far apart to allow his energy to regenerate, and even then, they were difficult to measure. Some people's bodies accepted Chaos Energy readily, while others resisted. Every individual healed at different rates, so while one assistant required only a brief touch, another needed lengthy, exhausting sessions, even for identical injuries..

The thing is that Gerald hadn’t called it Chaos Healing. That name was far too passive for what he did, because Shadow was not a healer; he was a conduit, a tool, engineered for destruction with the hope that eventually he’d be able to help his grand-daughter as part of his grander plans. Gerald, instead, had referred to it as Chaos Concentration. It was Maria who had dubbed it with a kinder term.

Many of those memories remain buried in the darker recesses of his mind, the trauma of his laboratory years having carved deep channels of avoidance in his psyche. If he wasn't actively helping an injured test subject, he was causing them further harm, and what terrified him most was knowing he'd eventually need to use the ability on Maria once his success-to-failure rate improved to acceptable levels. Perhaps mercifully, they never reached that stage in his development. The raid came long before that was possible.

Shadow knows little about the Echidna Clan outside of what Sonic’s mentioned briefly. He understands they have a historical connection to the Master Emerald, which, much like himself, serves as both conduit and power source for Chaos Energy. But, he suspects that the 'Chaos Healing' Knuckles' father spoke of likely bears little resemblance to what Shadow has come to know—his own version feels artificial, almost blasphemous, only kindly named because of Maria's compassionate heart. Still, it's comforting to think that an ability he possesses might not have been conceptualised and coined by Gerald Robotnik after all. Maybe some part of him isn't inherently linked to a man who caused such devastation and destruction; maybe Shadow's gift to harness this energy connects him to something more ancient than he realises, and perhaps he's not so isolated after all.

After a long, stilted pause that seems to hang over the room like a swaying guillotine, Shadow responds: “The echidna is right. Chaos ‘Healing’ as you call it is something that can be seen as miraculous to some, and I can perform it without the presence of the Chaos Emeralds, but…” Shadow trails off, dropping his gaze down to his palms. They’re caked with blood, clotted and matted into the white fur and tan pads. These hands have caused so much damage over his lifetime, and it feels almost obscene to think they could wield their last chance at saving Sonic's life.

He can’t replenish the copious amount of blood he’s lost. He can’t rewind his entire body back to the state it was a few hours ago — it would cause his heart to beat backwards and that would be catastrophic. But, if Shadow can somehow isolate just the small part of his leg damaged by the blast, even if it’s just to heal the skin and not the bone, then that’s something, right? Maybe Tails could build him a prosthetic, providing he survives the night. Maybe it’ll still need amputating. Maybe Sonic will never run again.

Shadow hasn’t used those powers since the seventies, but isn’t it worth a try? For Sonic, he’ll do anything.

He flexes his fingers nervously and settles for clenching them into a tight fist. “I had barely begun my training before I was seized by G.U.N... I’ve only ever healed small injuries, like burns and sprains and fractures, and I haven’t done it in so long… I’m not sure what your father told you, echidna, but it’s not a straight-forward process—”

Tom drops to his knees with a thud that echoes in the tense silence, returning to his position at Sonic's side. But something has shifted in his demeanour; there's a new purpose in his movements, a desperate determination that focuses entirely on Shadow. “Try,” Tom orders, leaning over Sonic’s body and into Shadow’s face with a grave, grim expression. 

Shadow sucks in a breath through his nose as he glances down to Sonic’s body. Maddie’s hands are still cupped over his ears but he’s so out of it, lying there with shallow breaths and fluttering lids, that he doubts it would make a difference whether she blocks him from hearing their conversations or not.

Shadow wipes his damp palms on his thighs, smearing blood and sweat. He clenches and unclenches his palms nervously, the motion repetitive and telling. You need to do this, he urges himself, eyes screwing shut against the weight of expectation. 

Shadow draws another whistling breath through his nose, attempting to centre himself, and searches deep within the pit of his chest for the spark of memory and the Chaos Energy he needs. Chaos Concentration, or Chaos Healing as Maria preferred he call it, isn’t like using Chaos Spear, or Chaos Control; those were sporadic bursts of energy that he could harness at-will. Chaos Healing was a different beast entirely, which is why his training progress was so slow during his time studying back at the lab. It required a steady application and prolonged use, drawing from his chakra in a continuous pull rather than a quick tug.

He feels around in that darkness, searching for a thread, anything, to show him that his ability to  locate, control, and channel Chaos Energy through sustained focus still exists somewhere within him.

“I can’t remember…” Shadow's voice breaks slightly as he trails off. He shakes his head in frustration, eyes still closed, fumbling through the depths of his memories like someone searching for a light switch in an unfamiliar room. “I can’t remember how to trigger it.”

“You need to,” Tom urges, and though Shadow can't see his expression behind closed eyelids, he imagines it mirrors Knuckles' from earlier: determined, hard, desperately hopeful, placing all faith in Shadow when Shadow can barely muster faith in himself.

The pressure is suffocating. Everyone in this room is counting on him, the same person who has brought nothing but destruction in his wake. How can they blindly put their faith in someone like him after all of the harm he’s caused them?

“I—” Shadow draws in a shaky breath, his calm façade beginning to crack at the edges. “I can’t remember—”

Two warm, human hands grip his shoulders, giving him a short, sharp shake that cuts through his panic. Shadow’s eyes snap open and meet Tom’s intense gaze over the small distance of Sonic’s body, his eyes boring holes into Shadow.

“Look at me,” he orders, voice sharp as the crack of a whip. Shadow's ears fold flat against his head at the command, which carries the weight of authority mixed with desperation, and he feels suddenly small under Tom's hands, like a lost child in the presence of an unfamiliar adult. “Shadow, I need you to take a long, deep breath.”

Tom leans closer, urging him with the same, intense look in his eyes while he keeps two warm weights on his shoulders. “Breathe.”

But there's something about the calm, controlled authority in Tom's voice that strips away his defences, leaving him feeling his actual age for the first time in decades. Tom mirrors the action when Shadow draws in a deep, shuddering breath, both of them inhaling together in perfect synchronization, until Tom encourages him to exhale with a subtle nod of his head.

The breath leaves Shadow like a hiccup, ragged and uncertain, so Tom guides him through it again. They take another shared breath, deeper this time, until it feels like the chaos and calamity of the room has faded away, leaving just the two of them in a bubble of forced calm. It comes easier the second time, some of the crushing tension leaving him with the exhale. Tom's grip softens on his shoulders, and the hands that moments ago felt like stern authority now carry the gentleness of a parent calming their child, using power to comfort rather than control.

“I’m going to need you to focus,” Tom instructs, voice neutral and low, cautious, like he’s trying so carefully not to spook a wild animal. “I know this is hard, but if what you said is true, then this could heal the wound?”

When Shadow doesn’t respond, the words caught in the tight wire tied around his throat, Knuckles steps forward to answer on his behalf. “While I may not know if the hedgehog and myself are referring to the same technique, the Chaos Healing I know of has the capability to heal all wounds. That is what my father always said, and I trust his words as if they are my own.”

Knuckles' gaze shifts to land on Shadow with a weight that feels surprisingly like acceptance rather than judgment. Shadow can't directly meet his eyes but feels the impact of that look, and suddenly, when he next blinks, he realises his vision has gone blurry with unshed tears. When did that happen? he wonders with a surge of panic, quickly swiping at his eyes with his wrists, uncertain whether the reaction stems from Tom's unexpected kindness, the culmination of stress from the past two hours, or the weight of a lifetime's worth of buried trauma finally surfacing.

Although he must notice it, Tom decides not to comment on Shadow’s tears. He slips one of his hands up to cup the back of Shadow’s head and gives his quills a scruff, the same way he would to Sonic when he was feeling particularly overwhelmed.

“Even if you’ve only used it a handful of times in the past, you’re all we’ve got.” Tom musters a small, barely-there smile that he hopes is encouraging. “So…we’re relying on you, Shadow.”

Shadow's eyes flick past Tom to survey the room behind him. Maddie has shifted to stand, her sleeve pulled over her hand and pressed to her mouth as she chews nervously on the cotton hemline. Her eyes are red-rimmed and wide with the kind of terror only a parent can know; the fear of losing a child. At her side stands Knuckles, arms still crossed but posture somehow less rigid, violet eyes watchful and weary but no longer openly hostile. He meets Shadow's gaze with a curt nod, like he's granting permission or offering support. Then, hovering behind Tom is Tails. He has streaks of tears running down his cheeks, soaking his muzzle a dark orange. His tiny frame is trembling, like it can’t quite process what he’s seeing.

This is Sonic's family. These are the people who chose him, who love him unconditionally. The weight of their trust and desperation settles on Shadow's shoulders like a physical burden.

Shadow swallows around the sticky, rusty adrenaline in his throat, and exhales a long, deep breath. His shoulders square, and his gaze steels. “I can’t promise anything,” he begins, voice stronger now.

“We know.”

“I’m not…skilled with this practice. I may only seal up the surface wound. His bone and muscle will likely never properly regenerate, and I can’t replenish his blood supply.” The words taste like ash, but they need to understand the limitations.

Tom gives a weak smile. “We’ll take anything.”

Shadow nods once, sharp and decisive. That's what he needed — that permission, that confirmation from the man Shadow knows Sonic treats as both father and friend. It's not that the rest of the family's opinions matter less, but Shadow understands how much Tom means to Sonic. If he's going to act in Sonic's best interests, he needs to do it with the blessing of the person Sonic trusts most.

With another cantering breath, Shadow settles his resolve and feels himself slip into that detached, analytical state he'd defaulted to earlier; the clinical mindset that had helped him survive years of experiments. Without prompting, the room falls into silence, the only sounds being the distant howl of wind through the trees and Sonic's laboured breathing that comes in an uneven, stuttering rhythm.

Using this moment of clarity, Shadow closes his eyes and the room seems to interpret it as a signal to give him space. Tom's hands withdraw, and even the quality of silence shifts, becoming deeper and more respectful.

Despite his outwardly calm façade, Shadow trawls through his memories with the speed and grace of a flightless bird attempting to take to air. His most traumatic memories are stored in dark, carefully sealed compartments within his mind, organised like files in a storage cabinet, except he has no idea which drawer contains what he needs. Shadow's subconscious had tucked them away during his fifty-year stasis to make his consciousness more bearable; the weight of key memories alone is enough to crush a person, and Shadow carries hundreds.

He clumsily shuffles through his memories, metaphorically having to open each folder and blow off its dust before discarding it when he doesn’t find what he needs. He uncovers one long-repressed memory of Maria in hospital during a particularly violent flare up of her illness, and another with a lab technician injecting something ice-cold into a vein on his arm. He recalls one incident where he'd been instructed to run until his body physically couldn't continue, until the muscles in his legs literally tore from overexertion, while technicians in the glass observation module above his training track made notes on how quickly he regenerated compared to previous trials of the same nature.

He practically fumbles his way through that shrouded corner of his mind, searching for the last time he successfully healed an open wound using Chaos Healing. The process feels like looking for something buried in a field without knowing where he'd hidden it, forced to use his bare hands to dig at random patches of earth until he's exhausted and stressed and has no idea whether he's even close to finding what he seeks.

The memory, when he finally grasps it, comes in fragments: the warm weight of a lab technician's injured hand in his palms, the strange pulling sensation in his chest as he drew energy from his core, the red glow that seemed to emanate from his fingertips, and the incredible drain that left him unconscious for hours afterward.

But beneath the clinical details, he remembers something else: Maria's face when she saw him heal someone for the first time, the way her eyes had lit up with wonder and hope. “You're not just a weapon, Shadow,” she had whispered. “You're a miracle.”

His eyes snap open and he’s there, present in the room, with a level of clarity he last possessed in the seventies. The fog of panic and self-doubt has lifted, replaced by something sharper, more focused. With a crispness to his tone that cuts through the heavy atmosphere, he orders: “I’m going to need two clean bowls. One of them filled with warm water, the other empty, and non-iodized salt. Kosher, if you have it.”

Maddie is the first to respond, jolting into action as if grateful to finally have a task. She nods briskly, wiping her eyes with the damp hem of her sleeve before hurrying toward the kitchen. As the kettle begins its quiet rumble toward boiling, she rummages through kitchen cabinets, searching for bowls that have been tucked away in the back, and then cleaning them in the sink with hot water and soap.

“Next,” Shadow continues, eyes flicking to Knuckles, “I need liquid antiseptic, and clean rags. Tea towels would be best, but I can work with flannels and bath towels, too.”

Knuckles jumps to it, heading off down the hall to scurry upstairs to the bathroom.

Finally, Shadow looks to Tails. “I’m going to need you to keep him still,” he orders. “When I perform Chaos Concentration — or, Healing, I should say, Sonic won’t feel much, but to get to that stage I need to clean his wound. It will likely cause him to wake up and thrash, so you need to hold him down. Can you do that?”

Tails' lower lip wobbles, and his twin tails twitch nervously behind him. He's still drawn and pale, his normally sunshine-yellow fur appearing dull beneath the lighting above, but Shadow's instruction brings some spark back into his blue eyes. It's as if having a concrete plan and having a role to play in saving his big brother is enough to pull him back from the edge of despair.

“I’ll try,” he whispers, but his voice holds strong despite its low volume.

Shadow nods gravely. “I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think you couldn’t do it.”

Tom’s hand on his shoulder gives him a gentle squeeze. He has a strange look on his face, and Shadow wouldn’t say he looks proud so to say, but there’s something tender there, like he knows that the words Shadow had said to Tails mean a lot more than he had intended for them to.

But, Shadow doesn’t have time to even spare a second thought to it. Every second counts now. “Tom,” he orders, giving him a curt nod. “I’m going to require you to pass me the items as I sterilise the wound. You’re also going to have to console Sonic while all of this takes place, because it’s going to be a traumatic experience for him.”

“Got it.”

“In the meantime, this area needs to be clear. We don’t have time to sterilise everything, but Sonic is going to need to be undisturbed for quite a while after the process.” He knows Sonic can’t hear them — the look on his face is enough for Shadow to tell that much — but he still makes a point to lower his volume just in case as a sign of respect. “The process involves me transferring my Chaos Energy onto and into him, which will be taxing on his body. Previous experiments have resulted in patients sleeping for days — weeks, even.”

Tom shifts nervously in his seated position. “You make it sound like he’s going to be in a coma, or something.”

Shadow’s mouth twists. “Yes — effectively, he will be.” When Tom doesn't respond immediately, and Shadow can practically see the dozens of questions racing through his mind, he wets his throat and decides to go back a few steps. “I’m going to focus a high concentration of Chaos Energy on Sonic’s leg with the aim to isolate it from the current plane of existence, and change its position in time and space back to how it was a few hours ago. This can work in both directions of time as we know it, but there’s no value in accelerating Sonic’s natural ability to heal because the damage is so catastrophic that his body won’t be able to recover naturally. So, I’m going to try and reverse ‘time’ on his leg. It’s my least preferred way of conducting Chaos Healing, as moving time backwards is usually a…messy subject, but it’s the only option we have.”

The words feel strange in his mouth, half-remembered fragments from countless hours spent listening to Gerald theorise and refine his hypotheses. Even Shadow doesn't fully understand the mechanics of how it works; the ability had always felt clunky and unreliable, often more frustrating than rewarding. But if it's Sonic's only chance at recovering, even partially, then none of those concerns matter.

Shadow takes in a breath, and swallows to try and wet his sore throat. “Like I said, I can’t replenish his blood supply, so he’ll require fluids to be transferred in-vitro. His body is going to be in a great deal of shock while it catches up to the change, and providing I can recover some of his muscle and tissue, then he’s going to need extensive physiotherapy afterwards. Like I explained, I’ve never performed on an area this big, nor this catastrophic before. It may be that his body won’t be able to take it, or…” Or I won’t be capable of maintaining the flow of energy for long enough to help him, Shadow wants to finish, but the words die in his mouth. The admission feels too much like accepting defeat before they've even begun.

Tom, however, doesn't push for the completion of that thought. He doesn't rush or demand answers Shadow can't give. Instead, he simply looks at Shadow — really looks at him — with an expression that conveys both trust and understanding of the enormous responsibility being placed on his shoulders. It's both humbling and terrifying.

With another deep breath to steady his nerves, he finishes his trail of thought. “The process is difficult to manage because it requires a constant, steady force from myself to him, and the results aren’t often instantaneous. We may not know if his leg is so much as functional until he wakes up, and that can vary depending on how receptive his body is to the amount of Chaos Energy I’m going to need to use. At least Maddie's veterinary skillset will help you monitor his recovery.”

“That sounds…” Tom trails off, clearly struggling to process the enormity of what Shadow is describing.

“It’s not really how it works,” Shadow dismisses with a shrug. “It doesn’t really make sense in the way we’ve come to conveniently understand time, space, and energy. I’m sure the fox will be able to theorise something or other about it.”

While everyone is preparing the living room — moving furniture out of the way, laying towels on the floor to try and make it as sterile as possible — Shadow washes his hands in the kitchen. Maddie has helpfully provided a small folding stool for him to stand on, which he assumes the rest of the Mobians use, as human kitchen equipment isn’t really built with smaller heights in mind. He takes his time in scrubbing his fur up to his elbows with the nice, lavender-smelling soap at the basin, washing away the rusty-coloured suds until they lather white. Shadow cleans under his claws and between his fingers, and though the rest of his body is tacky and dirty and bloody, he doesn’t have time to fully sterilise — just his hands will have to make do. 

He’s moving with the practice of someone who’s performed the task a thousand times but he’s not really him; he’s embodying one of his clinicians, going through the same motions that they used to do before operating on him. They’d clean his wound — whether it was self-inflicted or a by-product of an experiment — and then sterilise. It feels gross having to embody their methods but if it’s going to give Sonic a fighting chance, then he’ll sit through all the emotional discomfort the world will give him.

Once Shadow’s done, he dries hands with a clean tea towel before returning to the sitting room where a strange, grave, thick atmosphere has settled. The lights have been turned up to their original brightness but it still feels dark. Everyone is looking to him, waiting for his direction, putting their entire trust in him.

Shadow steps around Sonic’s limp, pale body and settles down on his side near his hips, while Tom sits on his opposite. His requested equipment has been lined up neatly, ready for him to use. They’re makeshift and nowhere near surgical-grade and the clinicians who used to operate him would scoff at the crude line-up, but they’re already working on borrowed time and beggars can’t be choosers. Shadow takes count of everything before he raises his head to regard the room, sweeping his gaze from person to person who sit in varying levels of distress.

“Are you ready?” he prompts; a final check, a final chance for them to opt out before they allow the person who made their life a living hell to take the wheel and drive the car out of the burning forest behind them.

They all give stilted nods. Shadow, taking that as his permission to start, begins tipping some salt from a cardboard container into the basin of steaming water. He stirs it with a glass straw, watching as the crystals dissolve into the water until it’s a little cloudy. When he’s satisfied, he nods to Tails, who draws in a deep breath, and drops to his knees behind Sonic. Slowly, gently, he raises Sonic’s limp neck and sets his head on his lap. His fingers comb the quills from his face, big, blue eyes filling with tears again.

“Oh, Sonic…” he whispers, stroking a thumb over his brow. Sonic gives no reaction aside from a weak flutter of lids. His fur is cold to the touch.

Shadow raises Sonic’s injured leg gently and sets it atop a couch cushion wrapped with a towel to keep it clean. Here, raised and directly beneath the ceiling light, he can get a better look at just what he’s working with.

The makeshift gauze has steeped the blood pretty well, considering it was fastened out of a t-shirt. The edges of the wrap are dry, blood losing its red lustre and looking more brown that it does red. However, with the time spanning the original application and now, it’s managed to stick itself to the wound like a second skin. Shadow’s mouth twists in displeasure when he realises that he’s already reached the first hurdle, and it’s a pretty big one at that.

“Once I start,” Shadow says, flexing his fingers nervously, eyes pinning Tails with a serious look, “I'm going to need you to keep him absolutely still. This is going to hurt him badly.”

“I’ve got it.” Tails nods, moving his hands to press down on Sonic’s shoulder. “You can trust me.”

Shadow grunts in acknowledgement. He casts one, final look to Tom, who gives him a nod, too.

Shadow draws in a deep breath between his teeth as he shuffles closer on his knees. He reaches over and begins to peel back the gauze, gentle with a careful balance of urgency and gentleness. Each strip has practically glued itself together, blood caking the material in between the wefts, sealing the layers in a bond. Shadow’s face twists in concentration as he uses his thumbs and pointer fingers to unpeel each wrapped layer, careful to not jostle the leg and cause Sonic any undue harm. The layers come off easily in sticky tendrils that he disposes of to his side, each unravel growing denser and denser with the amount of blood steeped in its material. Soon, he reaches the last strip, hermetically fused to his fur in a combination of congealed blood and raw flesh binding to whatever dry surface it could find.

“Hold him,” Shadow warns before he peels off the final layer.

Sonic moans in pain, and while his eyes remain shut, his face and body twists with pain. Shadow works carefully, slowly removing the gauze and taking seared, burned skin with it that detaches from his body like stuck chewing gum does to the sole of a shoe. The wound beneath is nasty; grizzled skin is flared around the entry point, smarting from the trauma. Now exposed to the air, a bubble of dark blood blurts from the wound, dribbling down his leg like a tear. Shadow clenches his teeth and sops up the flow as best as he can with a spare towel as he surveys the injury.

It’s bad. He was hoping that the wound he saw in the forest just looked particularly bad, obfuscated by the dim lighting, but now that he’s seeing it here beneath the living room’s lampshade in perfect clarity Shadow doesn’t even know where to begin. Maddie turns away once she catches sight of the wound, her chewed sleeve covering her mouth as she takes several deep breaths to steady herself.

“Rag,” Shadow orders, holding out his hand.

Tom’s face is ashen. He picks it up and passes it to Shadow, his hand trembling. 

Shadow dips the corner of the tea towel into the warm water and begins gently cleaning the area around the wound; the singed fur, the burns, the blood, and the debris. Sonic twitches beneath him, moaning in his fever, but Shadow perseveres, rinsing the dirtied towel in the clean bowl before dipping into the warm water again and repeating. He does his best not to aggravate the wound and for the most part Sonic remains unconscious, and though he does thrash and groan and resist, Tails is doing a wonderful job of keeping him under control, holding him down with what little weight his body has.

After what feels like an age in which he’s breathed barely more than a sigh, Shadow sits back once he’s done the best he can. The wound is clean, or as clean as it can be, flayed and grizzled but a lot less bloody. 

“Antiseptic and another rag,” Shadow orders with a tight, dry voice. Tom unscrews the cap from the brown bottle and passes it to him along with a clean rag.

Shadow tips the bottle upside down on the clean rag’s corner, saturating it with an amber, strong-smelling antiseptic that brings tears to his eyes. He sets the bottle aside with a quiet clack, and balls the rest of the loose rag in his palm so he’s holding the antiseptic-soaked corner like he would a pen.

“This is going to hurt a lot more than what I just did,” he warns, hovering his hand above the wound. “Tom, you might need to help with this.”

Tom makes a move to shift closer but Tails shakes his head, squaring his jaw off. “No,” he retorts, voice stronger than it’s been all night. “I can do this.”

Shadow shares a long, tense look with Tails before he nods in encouragement. Leaning over, Shadow draws in a breath before he begins to swipe the liquid antiseptic along the edge of the puncture.

The reaction is explosive. Sonic bolts upright as if struck by lightning, green eyes flying wide as his arms reach out desperately to grasp something, anything. His hands latch onto Shadow's forearm and the hem of Tom's pyjama shirt, pupils dilated with pain and confusion, looking for all the world like he's back in that forest, being hunted, powerless against forces beyond his control.

“Keep him down!” Shadow barks at Tails, who squeaks in surprise as if he wasn’t expecting such a visceral reaction, before he quickly pulls Sonic back down to his lap. His leg shakes beneath his hand and Sonic, suddenly awake, is full of fight; an animal caught in a trap, desperately trashing and trying to escape the danger he’s perceiving to be life-threatening. Delirious, he doesn’t quite register where he is or what’s going on, barely lucid to anything outside of the searing, blistering pain consuming his right leg.

Shadow returns to cleaning the wound immediately, eager to get this horrible part of the process over and done with. He knows exactly how Sonic’s feeling; he’s been in his position plenty of times, and the process of sterilisation never, ever got easier.

With each careful swipe and dab, Sonic jolts as if electrified, his spine arching from the floor as he twists side to side, fighting against the pain. Tails doesn’t make the same mistake twice and holds Sonic down with all of the weight in his body, his hands a vice keeping his shoulders firm to the wooden flooring. Sonic’s eyes swivel around the room like rolling marbles, moving from corner to corner, lids fluttering as they fight to keep open.  The sudden burst of adrenaline from the pain is already depleting, but now, slightly more lucid, he's beginning to recognise the familiar faces around him.

“Tom,” he slurs, consonants soft and vowels blurred together. He releases his death grip on Tom's pyjama shirt and reaches up with a shaking, unsteady hand.

Tom shuffles closer on his knees, immediately reaching him where he is and taking his outstretched hand between both of his own. “I’m here, buddy,” he reassures, though his voice cracks with emotion. His larger hands dwarf Sonic's smaller one, holding it like the most precious thing in the world as Sonic jerks when Shadow touches a particularly sensitive area.

“Dad,” Sonic sobs as fat, hot tears streak down his cheeks, hoarse voice pleading: “It hurts. I’m hurting so much.”

“I know you are.” he manages, voice thick with unshed tears. He releases one of Sonic's hands to stroke his forehead, finding it covered in cold, clammy sweat. Sonic's eyes can barely focus on one spot, pupils blown wide with shock and pain. “You’re being so, so brave.”

“It hurts,” Sonic repeats, consonants soft and vowels slurred, barely intelligible through his distress. Tom gives his hand another tight squeeze and offers a reassuring smile, but Sonic can’t really see it.

Shadow continues working with grim efficiency, grateful for Tom's distraction as Sonic endures the worst part of the treatment. Maddie chooses this moment to join them, kneeling beside Tom and placing her hand over their joined clasp while her other hand settles gently on Sonic's chest, feeling the rapid rise and fall of his laboured breathing.

“We’re here,” she whispers, her thumb stroking in soft, tender circles over his sternum. “We’re right next to you, okay, sweetheart? It’ll be over soon. You’re going to be alright.”

Her words seem to anchor Sonic momentarily, but as another wave of pain washes over him, his composure crumbles entirely.

“I don’t want to die,” Sonic cries, two streams of scalding tears streaking down the sides of his face to splash beside Tails' knees. His voice breaks on each word, raw and desperate. “I’m scared of dying. I don’t want to go.”

Above him, Tails' own tears fall like rain, spattering against Sonic's hairline, but Sonic is too consumed by pain to notice. Small, hiccupping breaths shake his shoulders as he struggles to maintain any semblance of control, barely holding himself together. The sight of Sonic, so bright and bursting full of limitless zeal for life, reduced to this broken, terrified state threatens to undo everyone in the room.

Maddie rises on her knees to press a lingering, tender kiss to the space between Sonic's eyes, her lips trembling against his fevered skin as fresh tears trickle down his temples. Behind them, Knuckles, the only person still standing, has to turn his back to the scene, his shoulders rigid as he works through his own overwhelming grief. Shadow is struck with the sudden realisation that it feels like the family are preparing to say goodbye, bidding him with well wishes as he struggles through what’s looking to be a race without any winners.

“It’s nearly done,” Shadow mutters, his voice barely audible but carrying like a lifeline through the suffocating atmosphere that’s so thick it’s choking him. He sweeps the rag beneath Sonic’s leg near the exit point to make sure that’s clean, too; reversing the degeneration of cells is one thing, but Shadow can only work with what Sonic’s got. If a foreign substance were to remain lodged and trapped inside his leg’s wound while it knitted itself back together, it could cause an infection and lead to sepsis. Liquid antiseptic and saline solution are laughably inadequate but it’s better than nothing.

On his final few sweeps of cloth, the grip on Tom’s hand begins to grow slack and Sonic’s eyes roll back, struggling to remain conscious. The sight prompts Shadow to dab a little antiseptic close to the centre of the wound to startle him awake, maybe a little cruelly. It does the trick, and he bolts upright, eyes wide.

“Stay with me, Sonic,” he growls. “You’re almost there. Don’t give up now.”

Sonic falls back onto Tails’ lap with another anguished groan, leaning his clammy cheek on the warmth of his thigh. But, finally, Shadow’s done with the sterilisation and the worst of the worst is over. He dumps the dirty rag reeking of antiseptic next to the bloodied tea towels used to clean his leg and the soiled bandages. The wound is raw and pink and angry, and while he’s stopped bleeding, it’s not necessarily a good sign. Shadow leans away from Sonic and puts some weight back onto his numb thighs as he surveys what he’s got in front of him.

“It’s sterile,” he remarks, finding the voice of his edges dry and cracked. When was the last time he breathed?

Tom’s chin crumples. The room settles back into that tacky, thick silence that he can practically taste, and while they aren’t directly looking at him, Shadow knows they’re waiting on his next move.

“What now?” Tom prompts after a moment, saying what everyone — even Shadow — is thinking.

Shadow gulps around a dry throat, vocal chords sticking together like two pieces of tape. What is next? He wrings his dry hands together nervously and settles them in his lap as he searches for the words to say. Like a broken record, Shadow repeats: “I haven’t healed a flesh wound like this before — not with destroyed muscle, tendon, and bone.” He clenches and unclenches his hands, shaking his head. “Not to mention, I haven’t used this power since nineteen seventy four.”

The admission hangs in the air like a death sentence. Fifty-one years. Half a century since he'd last attempted anything remotely like this, and now he's expected to perform a miracle on the most catastrophic injury he's ever encountered.

Tom’s free hand, the one that had been stroking Sonic’s cheek, reaches out and settles on Shadow’s shoulder. The unexpected touch causes Shadow to jump, head snapping up to meet Tom’s watery eyes. He’s wearing that same expression from earlier, the one he'd shown when Shadow had inadvertently praised Tails — something tender and knowing, as if he sees something in Shadow that Shadow can't see in himself.

“What do you need us to do?” he asks quietly, gently.

“What do you mean?”

“How can we help you?”

Shadow draws in a deep, shuddering breath. The offer feels like a drop in the ocean. There's nothing Tom could possibly provide that would make this monumentally difficult task any simpler, but…

“I need perfect silence,” he requests after a long moment. It's a small thing, considering no one seems to know what to say anyway, but it will help him concentrate. “I’m not going to be…here, mentally. I’m going to be elsewhere. It’s how I connect with my Chaos Energy on the level I need, and waking up could disrupt the flow, so…” He trails off, hoping they understand.

The room immediately falls into absolute silence, quiet except for Sonic's shallow, wheezing breaths. Although he feels self-conscious under their watchful eyes, Shadow takes the moment to lay a hand over Sonic’s chest and savour the rhythm of his beating heart. It helps him feel grounded, even though Sonic doesn’t know he’s there, it spurs Shadow on to have that final moment of connectedness before he delves deep into the murky, endless darkness of his memories.

Shadow closes his eyes and inhales a deep, cantering breath before raising his left hand to join the right, spreading both flat with fingers splayed. They hover several inches above Sonic's body, motionless as hunting birds, acting as conduits for the Chaos Energy he'll need to channel through his palms.

He exhales slowly through his nose, then draws another breath, letting calmness wash over him in waves. With each inhale and exhale, he feels his consciousness begin to tip backward, falling away from the pedestal of wakefulness and retreating into the dark corners of his mind, the same way an old soul might greet Death when they finally recognise it's their time to surrender.

When Shadow's awareness shifts and his inner eye opens, he finds himself standing in a cold, vast cavern. Darkness stretches in every visible direction, limitless in its depth, so endless that despite the countless miles he must have walked over many years, he's never found its walls or boundaries.

He doesn't visit this place often anymore. It has no name because Shadow considers it an integral part of himself; this is where he stores his innermost thoughts and memories, a necessary archive for an immortal being like him. The mortal brain can only hold so much information before it damages itself, so this corner of his mind and soul functions a little like a storage room, preserving what consciousness cannot safely carry.

Shadow reaches out a hand into the dark and swipes through the dense, cold air. He feels it between his fingers, rubbing his forefinger and thumb, trying to sense a feeling or a tug to lead him in one direction over the other. There’s a thin layer of murky water on the floor that ripples with each step he takes, the click of his skates echoing into the empty, hollow space around. His earliest memories of his existence were spent within this cave; before crash landing on Earth, before truly living, so he should be plenty familiar with its same-y layout, and yet Shadow feels a stranger within the confines of his own soul. He glances left, and right, but it’s nothing but dark, dimensionless pits, and without a sense of where to go, Shadow remains standing still in the shallow waters, searching for a sign.

He knows this isn't real in any conventional sense. He knows that he's not actually standing in the depths of a yawning chasm, sure, but it feels absolutely real. Everything, from the taste of stale air to the chill on his skin when his steps send water droplets onto his fur, carries the weight of tangible reality.

When he breathes, his breath mists white, clouding the air in front of his face. The only source of light seems to be coming from himself; a tiny tealight in an otherwise empty cathedral, lighting up the way just enough to see a few steps ahead but never any further. Shadow exhales, uncomfortable in this familiar space, and casts his eyes around.

Without a sign to know he’s going in the right direction, Shadow heads forward. The water ripples beneath him, kicking up small droplets with each step as he treads the never-ending darkness in no discernible direction. The steps echo, bouncing off the ceiling high above, cascading down the hall but never bouncing back. 

It’s lonely here with no one but himself for company. He’s visited here less and less lately, too preoccupied with hopping from location to location or tracking Stone, but the cavern has always behaved as his own safe haven when everything was too much to bear in the outside world. Here, he knows he cannot be harmed. After all, he is truly alone.

He walks until his fingertips grow numb with cold and moisture beads on his nose. The darkness remains unchanging until — after what feels like hours but could be minutes in this timeless space — the thin, pale threads of his memories begin to materialize. They took considerable effort to reach, buried deep after Maria's death and years of deliberate suppression. The memories dangle from the invisible ceiling in delicate tendrils of pure starlight, their curled edges hovering inches from the floor. They range from silver-grey to pale yellow and soft salmon pink, tickling his fingers and cheeks as he moves through them like walking beneath a weeping willow's hanging branches.

He reaches out with a finger to touch a pale, green tendril and sees flashes of night skies, pale flowers, and blonde hair, the smell of a guitar’s strings and petrichor. Not here, Shadow realises, pulling his finger back. I need to go deeper.

The quiet hum that seems to emanate from the tendrils grows louder as he heads further into the farm, buzzing in his ears like cicadas during a humid night. Here, past the outer-most pale tendrils, the colours have grown a little brighter, and a little deeper. Some tendrils are clumped together in messy knots, overlapping and tangled with the way they hang, while others are suspended alone. Certain sections glow angry red, and Shadow doesn't need to touch them to know what parts of his life they represent. He steers clear, heading left instead toward a sparser area where shorter threads hang in pale yellows and oranges.

He touches one, and watches as a younger version of himself is hit with an electric shock from a collar around his neck when he answers a test question wrong.

Not this, he thinks, pulling his hand back. But I’m on the right track.

He swipes his fingers through a few shorter tendrils. Another version of himself has just accidentally sliced off one of the lab technician’s thumbs and is hiding in a storage cabinet just to get away from them. He blinks, and the memory has changed; a different version of himself from his past memories is forced to withstand exposure to a nerve agent considered deadly to humans as they strap him down to a table by his neck.

Nausea washes over him as he withdraws from those memories. You’re fine, he reminds himself. You’re not there anymore. They can’t hurt you like they used to.

On legs suddenly less steady, Shadow keeps walking until he comes across a cluster of thin strands hanging a few feet away. They’re woven together and glowing a faint, unremarkable silver that he immediately recognises as: the one. These strands are strung by themselves, away from the reds and bright, angry colours, lacking any hue except that subtle luminescence that marks them as faint, confused, deliberately hidden where his darkest memories lurk.

Shadow squares off to the glowing tendril. He reaches out to touch the dim, silver aura around the plaited strands and the presence of his touch causes it to shiver, shifting away from his touch like it’s alive. Shadow draws in a deep breath, smelling the cold water below and hearing the sound of Gerald’s voice in a faint echo, before he reaches out and takes ahold of the thread in a tight clasp.

The interconnected memories flood back in rapid, staccato snapshots: healing self-inflicted wounds on his own body; accelerating the regeneration process when lab technicians decapitated an earthworm; mending papercuts; realigning broken bones; easing some of Maria's pain as she lay buried under masses of tubes and blankets, frail and weak and so terribly pale.

He feels the swell of Chaos Energy in the centre of his chest, growing and expanding like an inflating balloon. He breathes through the frightening pressure building, allowing for it to grow and grow even when his body becomes oversensitive and he can feel the electricity begin to concentrate in the ridges of his fingertips  as a power he'd forgotten he possessed comes rushing back like a dam breaking.

He lets the painful memories wash over him, a warm tidal wave from the tips of his quills to the fur on the soles of his feet, as a cool, tingling feeling spreads the lengths of his palms. Both within the depths of his mind and in the Wachowski living room, Shadow keeps his eyes closed and senses a faint light beginning to emanate beyond his thin eyelids, like tinder catching flame. Moving on instinct, Shadow sways his hands up the length of Sonic’s chest, flexing his fingers with a cautious, slow movement. Rather than see it, he hears a long, deep breath escape Sonic below, as if all the pain and weight his body was bearing is eased straight off of him. Maria had likened Shadow’s pain-reducing abilities to a good night’s sleep and hot bath.

I forgot I could do this, he realises distantly, as he hovers his hands a little closer to the fur below him. I forgot I could help people, too, and take away their pain.

“You’re doing it,” Tom whispers, his hand moving in gentle, reassuring circles on Shadow's back. “Keep going.”

Tom’s voice echoes in the cave Shadow’s submerged in. As the energy flows from his fingers, he can feel the slow, cold rise of water up his legs, licking at his shins in a grimy push and pull. He shudders, fighting through the discomfort to keep still and keep his eyes closed and the energy flow constant. Breathe, Maria’s voice echoes, coaching him through it like she always used to. Breathe, Shadow.

Shadow draws a deep breath through his nose and releases it slowly as his hands drift down Sonic's body until they reach the injured leg. He cannot see, but he knows instinctively that this is where he must focus his energy. The aura emanating from the wound feels raw and angry, radiating pain in waves, and his own Chaos Energy core responds to it with an urgent plea: I can help you. I can repair this. Let me fix what has broken.

Shadow lowers his hands until they hover just inches above the impact site and curls his fingers slightly, allowing the energy to flow with greater intensity from his core, down through his fingertips, and into the wound.

The water around him in the cave rushes and churns, the tide drawing in as a gush of cold, gritty froth washes past his knees, carrying with it the debris of old failures and half-buried shame. He grits his teeth and continues to take deep, measured breaths with his eyes screwed shut, picturing Maria's radiant smile to fight away the cold and discomfort. The Chaos Energy flows from his core through his fingertips, tingling his palms until they burn with electric fire. They're sore and hypersensitive, and he can feel his joints seizing up like rusted machinery, but he fights on, grunting under the mounting pain as his hands begin to tremble and the red glow emanating from his form grows stronger, more urgent.

Time seems to blend into one, limitless blur. Shadow can only pace himself by using the tide’s sway as a metronome and indicator each time the water level reaches a higher point on his body. The slowly-rising cold, murky water level is now licking at his lower ribs, dredging silt and grit across his fur and coating him in a dirty film. He groans in frustration, trying to shake off his discomfort. Keep going, a memory of Maria’s voice chimes, sweet and gentle in his ear. You’re doing it, Shadow!

Shadow controls the energy flow with a careful hand, flexing his fingers when a little more needs to be applied and straightening them out when he wants to ease off the gas. His elbows pull back as his palms lower to focus his energy on the exit-point of Sonic’s wound, eyes still closed, using nothing but his sixth sense to guide him.

Water begins lapping at his chin as the tide reaches its fiercest pull — gritty, silty, contaminated with everything dark about his nature. He is the monster in children's nightmares, the creature confined to cave depths like a beast. Wet warmth trickles down his cheeks as the cold, seizing pressure travels up his forearms to his biceps. Part of him wants nothing more than to surrender to the water, to let it wash him away and drag him down to its murky depths where he won't be anyone's burden anymore.

When he emerges from this trance, returns from the safe but isolating corners of his mind, he'll be alone again. At least here he has his memories for company. There's strange comfort in that thought; knowing he'll always have this sanctuary, even if it's built from pain.

A quiet, wet sob leaves his lips as the water keeps rising, ready to claim him. The pain of channelling so much energy radiates up and up his arms like liquid fire, ready to consume him entirely. Shadow feels like he's balanced on the cusp of completion, on the verge of something monumental, but he's clinging to consciousness by a thread and the agony is too much for his small frame to bear. He pushes and pushes and pushes until the water reaches his lips and he inhales it in a sharp, desperate breath that rushes into his airways — a flood that's broken through every dam he's built, ready to destroy anything that lies in its path.

As it all grows too overwhelming for his exhausted body to bear any longer, he collapses like a dying star; a brilliant red hypergiant floating in the empty void of the universe, buckling under its own gravitational pull when it's burned through every last bit of fuel it has. Shadow's knees buckle and he drops toward the murky depths of the water, but the shock of falling physically rips his consciousness away from the dark, dank depths of the cave and hurls him back to the present in a startling burst of clarity.

Suddenly, he's present on the earthly plane, still kneeling on the rug, blinded by the warm overhead light that seems harsh after so long in darkness. With his body drained of every ounce of energy he possessed, Shadow collapses backward, falling like a dumped ragdoll.

Instead of hitting the hard floor, he's caught by a pair of warm, calloused hands, holding him like he's something worth handling with care. Immediately, Tom's strong arm comes around his shoulder, scooping him into a warm embrace to bolster his unsteady frame. Shadow has no idea when Tom moved, lost as he was in the trance. He'd barely registered anything beyond the searing fire in his hands. Who knows how much time has passed in the real world? Who knows if any of his desperate efforts even worked?

“You did so well,” Tom whispers, his voice rough with emotion as he gives Shadow's shoulders an encouraging squeeze. “You did so, so well.”

All Shadow can hear is a faint ringing in his ears and the thunderous pulse of his heartbeat, muffling Tom's words as if he's speaking from underwater or through thick glass. He groans, a wave of bone-deep exhaustion washing over him as his body winds down from such an intense expulsion of energy. Everything feels tender and hypersensitive, every muscle, every nerve ending, like he's one giant bruise. He feels wrung out of every ounce of Chaos Energy he had left to give, his core hollow and aching like a tree struck by lightning.

He allows his head to fall back against Tom's shoulder as exhaustion takes over completely, his breaths coming out in short, shallow pants. Tom's arm tightens around him, supporting him as he slumps into the warm, protective embrace.

“Is he alright?” are Shadow's first words, coming out like a croak between heavy breaths. He can barely form the syllables without gasping between them, but his own wellbeing feels insignificant compared to his desperate concern for Sonic. “Is he alive?”

Tom’s grip tightens around his shoulder. He gives Shadow another squeeze, and nods where their heads are pressed together. “Take a look.”

Shadow can’t physically push himself to stand, so Tom lifts him back up a little straighter, holding him around the shoulder. Shadow tips his head down with tremendous effort and looks at the impact site.

The wound is gone.

The skin is slightly raised and faintly pink like a month-old scar, and though the impact site is hairless, it otherwise looks entirely normal, as if the injury had never existed at all. Shadow's tension leaves him in one long, shuddering exhale as he slumps forward, smoothing over the healed area with his bare thumb in disbelief. He reaches underneath Sonic's leg to feel the exit site, but that too is unmarked, whole.

“Holy cow,” he breathes, and it earns him a laugh from Tom, a sound that's a little wild, a little shocked, but mostly filled with overwhelming relief and joy.

“Is he going to be okay?” Tails asks from somewhere nearby, his small voice hoarse and fragile with cautious hope.

Shadow's eyes immediately fly up to take inventory of the rest of Sonic — his chest, the pulse point in his neck, his face — but he looks remarkably, almost mundanely, fine. His lips are still pale from blood loss, and his expression remains drawn even in unconsciousness, but he's no longer breathing in those terrible, laboured gasps, nor is his pulse lolloping below its usual jackhammer pace. But, Shadow knows that appearances could be deceiving. Sonic is still low on blood, and just because his leg looks alright doesn't mean the internal damage is truly healed. It's a victory, but short-lived.

Shadow’s quills sway in front of his face, hanging limp from the rainwater still caught between clumps. He pushes them back with a shaking hand and remarks grimly: “We aren’t out of the woods yet. This may just be cosmetic. I worry that the sinew and bone haven’t healed, and there may be a risk of internal bleeding. He needs to be seen at a hospital—”

Tom stops him with a raised hand, shaking his head slowly. He's staring down at the wound site in pure wonder, like he's witnessed a miracle. “We watched it,” he says. “It re-grew.”

Shadow tilts his head in question when Tom’s words don’t register, so Tom reiterates with barely-restrained relief: “When you were working on it, the bone, the muscle, it literally just…re-grew. Or, re-versed, I guess.”

Shadow blinks slowly, processing this. “That’s…” he trails off. “That can't be right. I've never been able to... my healing has always been limited to pain relief and surface wounds…”

“I wouldn’t lie about this.” Tom's voice is steady, honest. “Everything regrew. Everything. Other than the fur, but who cares about that?”

With a look of pure astonishment spreading across his exhausted features, Shadow's head falls back down to study the wound site more carefully. He reaches out with a shaking hand to gently touch and press down on the area, testing it with careful precision. Tom is right — everything feels exactly as it should: lean muscle responding to pressure, solid bone structure underneath, and the subtle warmth of functioning blood vessels pumping life beneath the skin barrier.

“I…” Shadow gawps at the revelation. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that I… that I did that.”

“You did great,” Tom urges, pulling Shadow into another sideways embrace that feels like gratitude made physical. “You did really, really great.”

The weight of it all — the relief, the lingering dread, the shock, the bone-deep exhaustion — becomes too much for his overwhelmed system to process. Shadow slumps back into Tom's hold in complete surrender. The alarm bells that should be screaming in his mind, warning him against accepting comfort, against staying in this house, against letting his guard down, have been silenced by his exhaustion. Every fibre of his being that usually fights against being held or remaining under this roof has simply given up the battle.

He’s just so tired, and there’s something comforting, almost healing, about having someone twice your size put their arm around you. Almost as if they’re protecting you. Shadow hasn’t felt that from another human since Maria passed away, and Gerald sold him to the dogs.

Beside him, Sonic sleeps peacefully. He's sweaty and looks completely drained, but he's very clearly alive, his chest rising and falling with deep, steady breaths. He allows that sight, that realisation that his duty has been served, to cut the final thread holding his composure together. Shadow completely unwinds, unintentionally melting further into the solid warmth of the chest behind him. Tom adjusts his hold to better support him as Shadow's eyelids grow heavy and he finds himself surrendering to the overwhelming temptation of unconsciousness, finally allowing himself to rest in the knowledge that, for once, he's managed to use his powers for the greater good and Sonic, above all, is alive. 

Chapter Text

Shadow jolts upright with a startled yelp.

His cry echoes in the yawning space around him, reverberating like a plucked string in an empty concert hall with no audience but a single, lone violinist. His hands quickly come out to steady his seated position, slapping against the ground with a wet splash that sends drops of gritty water skittering across the cave’s flooring like skipping stones. The water is cold and only reaches wrist-height but it’s pooling around his thighs and his hips and as his senses come to grips with wakefulness yet again, he’s struck by just how gross the water is. Stagnant, cold enough to draw goosebumps, with a thin layer of silt that sticks to his fur like spider eggs.

His consciousness moves in syrupy, slow steps, wading through a lake of molasses that comes from deep sleep. Shadow casts his gaze to his left and to his right before glancing over his shoulder only to be greeted by the same, endless nothingness of darkness that stretches as far as the eye can see. The only thing he can make out is his own body, illuminated by a light that seems to emanate directly from within in a soft, ethereal glow that paints the water around his seated form and catches his reflection in its restless surface.

Shadow has spent large portions of his life here and he recognises this space as part of himself, the same way he understands instinctively that his arms are his arms, that his feet are his feet. This cave is what his soul looks like, and yet he’s never gotten over the discomfort of simply being here. Time is nebulous and liminal, as if it doesn’t really pass at all, detached from reality and abiding by unearthly laws that only he seems to be able to grasp.

Here, in the cave, Shadow doesn’t need to sleep, nor eat. He simply exists, free to roam the shallow lake and its damp air until he eventually comes across clusters of memories he’s subconsciously tucked away out of immediate reach, until forces beyond him decide to pull him back out to reality. It’s never been any different, and Shadow thinks that it’ll never change, either. Why would it? His life is one big, bad memory formed of snapshots; a gigantic sycamore with limbs that branch off endlessly, creating a hivemind built on suffering that's simply too massive to comprehend. This tree bears no flowers. It produces no fruits. It has no leaves. It’s barely a thing that survives winter each year, yet still stands despite the odds.

Why am I back here? his thoughts echo as he turns to look straight ahead into the unchanging nothingness.

Where was I before this?

He pushes to stand, flicking the gritty water from his hands and shaking off the droplets from his legs. It’s not as cold as it can be, but the water still feels uncomfortable to stew in for any longer than necessary.

Shadow glances around his immediate surroundings and takes a step forward, the clicking of his skates echoing towards the cave’s yawing ceiling. He glances down to his gloveless, bare palms, and frowns. The inhibitor rings hang like handcuffs around his wrists, glinting gold in the dim lighting coming from his skin. He’s never been here without his gloves before; he can count the number of times he’s even seen his own palms, so the revelation is unnerving.

Why are my palms bare? he wonders again, but to no obvious answer. Shadow thumbs along the pad of his hand’s heel and frowns deeper. He gives a quick glance to his immediate surroundings to see if he can spot his gloves lying somewhere nearby but he’s well and truly alone, which only serves to make the situation even stranger.

Shadow casts another look up towards the endless, inky depths in front of him and calls: “Hello?”

His words echo just like his cry did; unanswered, unending. Experimentally, he extends his bare hand into the thick, moisture-laden air, fingers cutting through its density as he searches for direction. To his surprise, something responds — a faint but unmistakable pull that seems to hook directly into his fingertips.

He stumbles and keeps his hand outstretched as he follows the faint, but definitely-there pull drawing him down an indiscernible pathway through the shallow lakewater. Strange, he thinks to himself. While the cave has occasionally nudged him in certain directions before, such clear compulsion is rare.

As the pull grows stronger Shadow follows it by instinct rather than physical feeling and drops his arm back to his side. He veers towards his left, towards a side of the cave he must have headed down before — surely — although this feels different. This feels strange, urgent, and the tug suddenly grows from a guiding feeling in his gut to a sensation that grips his chest with the same, icy fingers as anxiety does.

With a greater sense of urgency, Shadow picks up his pace and follows that tug deeper and deeper into the deep, dark depths. Every step he makes kicks up small silvery droplets, flicking them up to his ankles and calves that skitter higher when his steps turn into a jog and suddenly he’s skating across the lake’s surface, barely touching it, chasing after something he can neither see nor hear but can only feel. 

The depth of the sloshing sound beneath his feet grows lighter and lighter until his feet aren’t touching water anymore, but gravel. The fine stone crunches underfoot as he slows his pace down to a stop and he realises he’s no longer on a lake of inch-deep shallow water, but at its very edge. Before him rises a small incline of packed earth, silt, and asphalt that tells him he’s not only at land but that he's discovered something entirely new within his own psyche.

Shadow stops dead in his tracks once he plants his feet on the land. He can barely see more than a metre in front of him so he crouches down to feel the ground for himself with his bare hands. His fingertips brush coarse grit and small stones, and when he pulls his hand away, amazement washes over him. His fingers come away completely dry.

Where am I? His thoughts echo in the space around him. Each step taken away from the water’s edge leads him up a shallow incline of grit and silt and sand that his shoes sink into.

How have I never been here before? How have I stayed here for so long and never seen this side of my soul?

The loose grit beneath his skates grows firmer as the incline increases and turns from asphalt to dense earth packed with surface-level gritty stones that crunch beneath the ridges of his soles. Every stretch of hillside he scales grows steeper and steeper, causing his calves to burn and his muscles to protest something fierce. When the climb turns too difficult to walk by legs alone he uses his claws to drag himself up too, sinking them into the packed earth and hoisting his body up like he’s scaling a mountain.

I’ve never seen this before, his racing thoughts whisper, only fuelling his confusion as he pushes through another wave of exhaustion and hikes another metre higher with a groan. The cave has always been a cave. I didn’t realise there were fixtures. I’ve walked this plane a million times over and have never found the lake’s edge. Why? Why did I never find this?

He pauses for respite and heaves in a breath that cloys in the back of his throat. 

Why am I only finding this now?

Shadow scales the mountain with muscles that plead with him for respite but he pays it no heed, spurred on by his own stubborn curiosity towards an unknown destination. Finally, after a groan and a hiked pull, Shadow reaches up for another handful of rock but his hand slaps flat ground when he makes a move to draw himself higher. He feels around in the darkness of the flat plane for purchase before he sinks his claws into the earth and pulls himself up the rest of the way. Shadow hoists his body over the lip with shaking muscles to land, at last, at the precipice of the hill he’s been climbing. 

He rolls onto his back and splays his limbs out with a groan of relief at the respite. Unlike the rest of the endless darkness that he’s become so familiar with down below, the air on top of the hill is easy to breathe, so he breathes it in by the lungful, tasting greenery and freshness on his tongue. When Shadow stretches his fingers wide he feels the tickle of grass brush between their gaps. He strokes it, feeling each blade with a level of care that comes from someone discovering something precious and new for the first time.

The strain in his neck from looking upward during the climb forces him to turn his head sideways for relief. Instead of seeing another stretch of darkness, he has to suddenly squint to protect his eyes.

There, at the far, far end of what looks like a flat mountaintop plane, is daylight. It’s a mere pinprick from this distance but it may as well be a beacon when compared to what Shadow’s had to endure for decades of endless, pitch darkness.

Shadow rolls to his hands and knees, then struggles to stand on legs that shake from both exhaustion and shock. For as long as he's known this place, the cavern has been a simple expanse of shallow water where traumatic memories lurked in shadowy alcoves, safely distant from his conscious mind. Whenever he had described it to Gerald, the professor had theorised it to be a vault for memories; a ‘mind palace’ where memories and knowledge behaved as objects within the layout of an area. It was never given fixtures.

But, then again, maybe this was always here, waiting for him to develop the ability to find it.

The grassy plateau stretches before him — unremarkable in its simplicity yet miraculous in its mere existence. It is just a stretch of pebbles and grit interspersed with patches of cropped grass that burst from its surface like knotweed. Most spectacularly, Shadow has climbed so high that he’s now able to see the cave’s ceiling for the first time. It’s suspended just a few metres above his head with jagged stalagmites hanging like pinecones from branches, the rest of its surface uneven and curved. Beyond them, further down the plateau, there’s a source of light but he can’t quite yet see just where it’s coming from. 

Above that — above the new fixtures, the promise of daylight, of greenery and the first sight of boundaries for this place — Shadow is captivated by the sight of something much more magical. 

There, a short distance ahead, a cluster of memories hang from the low ceiling in twinkling strips of pure, spun starlight. They practically sing his name and he’s powerless to disobey its call; Shadow staggers forward on knees gone weak from the shock, closing the distance between the edge of the cliff he’d climbed over and the new farm of memories hanging like wisteria from the stalagmites above. They’re bright and delicate, curled in loose ringlets in colours ranging from yellow to green to blue to pink, clumped in groups of threes or standalone singles. 

He reaches out with a curious hand to touch a pale pink tendril and the moment his fingertip makes contact, reality dissolves.

He's suddenly standing in a sun-drenched orchard that smells of ripe apples and fresh peaches, of golden hay and the particular sweetness that only comes with summer afternoons. The memory is looking back at him with happy green eyes and affection that wraps around Shadow like the warmth of the sun itself.

Shadow snatches his away as the memories pass his vision in quick vignettes. The feeling fizzles behind his eyes like tiny carbonated air bubbles that he quickly blinks away as he reaches out for another memory. Shadow grips the amber strand in the circle of his palm and feels a warm wave of comfort wash over him. Now, he’s in a dimply-lit room that smells like fabric conditioner, dust, and wood, the mustiness of a well-loved home. His eyes are half-lidded and drowsy in the memory and he knows, instinctively, that there’s something glaringly important about this moment that he can’t quite grasp but desperately needs to understand.

With a cry of frustration, Shadow rips back from the memory and nearly falls onto the grass. How have I never seen these before? his thoughts cry, an animal that knows it’s missing a member of its pack but doesn’t know who, or what.

With a cry of frustration, Shadow tears himself away from the memory and nearly stumbles to the grass. How have I never seen these before? his thoughts keen, frightened and desperate and yearning like an animal that instinctively knows it's missing a member of its pack but cannot remember who or what has been lost.

Driven by growing fever, Shadow swipes through a clump of pale, knotted buttercup-yellow ringlets and feels the weight of soft hands brushing his quills from his face with kind blue eyes and blonde hair that smells like coconut. He stumbles toward an isolated tendril some distance away and cups it in both palms, feeling the vibration of a guitar’s strum against near his head while breathing in the smell of amber and resin. A soft voice sings a song he almost recognises; familiar, but just beyond his ability to place.

Shadow pulls back and swipes his hands down his face as panicked breaths leave him in gulping huffs.

What is this? Where am I? Who are these people? Are these memories? Are they mine?

The vignettes feel familiar, and they feel real, so why can’t he remember anyone in these memories’ faces or names? Why are these memories stored so far away from where he usually finds himself stuck in the murky, dank depths of the cave? It’s as if his consciousness has deliberately tucked them away for safekeeping, as if they’re too precious to be left at the depths. No, these require somewhere totally separate — a sanctuary. The only thing is that Shadow has no idea why they’re here, and how long they’ve been here.

He pushes past the tendrils and dashes forward on weak legs, feet thumping against the grass and asphalt as he runs to the other side of the hill, moving closer and closer to the day’s light. Shadow pelts at the ground until the light grows stronger and he arrives at the beginnings of a decline leading down to a shallow valley.

The light isn’t coming from an opening in the cave, as if he’d expected. Instead, he finds himself looking down upon a field of snow-white lobelias that paint the valley in waves of pristine beauty. Light seems to emanate directly from them, just like it does from his own form, and Shadow is by a recognition so profound it buckles his knees. He can only describe the feeling as yearning, as if he recognises something in them that’s tethered directly to his soul. That’s me, he thinks. This is part of me. Those flowers are a part of me.

The light doesn't emanate from any opening in the cave, as he'd expected. Instead, he finds himself looking down upon a field of snow-white lobelias that paint the entire valley in waves of pristine beauty. Light radiates directly from their petals, just as it does from his own form, and Shadow is struck 

He half-runs, half-falls down the slope until he's ankle-deep in flowers that stretch across the valley in swathes of twinkling white that smell so sweet it brings tears to his eyes; like distilled, pure joy. When he touches their petals, they feel soft and delicate, nothing like the cold, gritty water he'd lived in during the fifty year stasis. This is me, too, he thinks with rising hysteria. They’re glowing, just like I am.

The sight of their unblemished petals prompts him to slip off his shoes so he doesn’t crush them beneath his tread. He leaves his skates at the edge of the garden before he treads down the valley, his splayed fingers brushing the lobelias’ petals as twinkling memories continue to hang down from above, their curled edges nestling among the flowers and backlighting them in peaches and ivories and periwinkles. 

Without conscious direction, Shadow's feet carry him to a particular patch among the flowers where an especially brilliant memory hangs at eye level. This memory is thicker than the others; this one, Shadow instinctively knows, is special. That’s why it’s hidden so far away from the darkness, near to the light, to the flowers, kept somewhere where it can remain undisturbed and safe.

With a trembling hand he closes the distance and reaches out to touch the tendril of concentrated starlight. 

The memory takes hold of his entire body, ripping him away from the cave’s sweet air to place him high in the cosmos, sitting under a dark blanket of twinkling diamonds. The ground beneath him is cold and hard but he feels unimaginably warm, lit like an old fireplace that burns long after it’s been doused. His memory looks up at the blue marble that is the Earth as the sun peeks over its horizon, casting light across the world as a new day begins. 

A light shines even though the star is gone, echoes a voice, an angel’s call, just as a gentle hand settles over his own with the tenderness of someone placing a benediction.

His memory-self looks toward the hand resting across his fingers, then lifts his gaze to meet the face of a sight so radiant that Earth's sunrise pales into insignificance. Shadow feels his heart throb as he stares through his memory's eyes into kind green ones that speak volumes of warmth without saying a single word. In that moment, Shadow’s entire existence tilts on its axis and he knows that this — this — was the true beginning of his life, and of something new.

Shadow comes to with a yell.

He bolts upright, his heart hammering against his ribs so violently it threatens to crack them. Cold sweat soaks through his fur in a clammy film that makes his skin crawl. Every memory, every thought, every feeling floods over him in a tidal wave: the ambush, Sonic getting shot, carrying him home to the Wachowski’s, healing him.

Sonic, Sonic, Sonic, his name chants like a mantra, like a heartbeat, like it’s the only word that matters.

His vision blurs as he tries to process the sensory overload to his brain. Shadow reaches up to cup his forehead and tries to blink away the muzziness, trying to grasp at something, anything, to ground him to the moment as memories whizz past him like a swarm of locusts. The worst part isn't the memories themselves; it's the terrifying void of time that follows them. He doesn’t know how much time has passed since he passed out and wandered the depths of the cave again. Hours? Months? Years? That thought alone paralyses him with fear. 

Has it happened again? Terror closes around his throat with a tight grip. Have I lost another century of my life?

The room around him is totally dark; he’s either somewhere without windows, or it’s very late at night or very early in the morning. After a few blinks his eyes register to the shapes of the room and he realises that he’s still in the Wachowski’s house, specifically, the same room he brought Sonic into. It’s still in disarray, with bloodstains smeared up the cream walls and splattered on the sofa and wooden flooring, although the soiled rug has been removed. The room is a pitiful sight but, still, it brings some comfort to him, realising that he hasn’t been asleep for that long — that he hasn’t lost another lifetime. 

As he takes in the sight of the furniture and wall decorations, Shadow realises that this is the only other room he’s somewhat familiar with at the Wachowski’s. Aside from the time he dropped off Sonic’s Christmas present last year, all of his other visits were spent in the attic, hidden away from prying eyes and listening ears. That space felt separate from the rest of the home somehow, like he and Sonic were in their own pocket of the world. As the rest of the ground floor’s layout slowly comes into focus he realises that he’s never really known much about Sonic’s homelife. He's been granted only glimpses, fragments, never the full picture until something tragic finally warranted the need.

The living room is dark and depressing and he knows that it shouldn’t look like this — this room should be full of life and laughter. Part of Shadow wonders if things will ever return to normal for the Wachowski’s after this. It’s not easy to bounce back when you’ve seen someone practically die in your arms. Shadow knows that all too well.

Finally turning his attention inward, Shadow registers himself. He’s tucked up on one side of a huge sectional sofa, wrapped with an old, pilling, soft quilt to keep him warm. He reaches up to stroke the quilted fabric with his bare fingers and even though no one is watching he suddenly feels shy as understanding dawns. Someone must have put this here, Shadow realises as a strange, unknown feeling he can’t name fills his gut. Someone carried me to the sofa and put the blanket over me.

He strokes the quilted squares with his bare fingertips, then pulls the hem up to his chin, wrapping himself tighter with the blanket and mimicking the act he’s seen humans do in movies. He knows it’s meant to bring comfort, so for a few precious moments he allows the quilt to envelop him in a hug, soaking in the feeling of being cared for.

However, comfort never lasts long for him, and without letting the moment last longer than necessary he’s struck with the urgent need to find a way out of the room with as little detection as possible. Shadow unfurls the quilt from around his chin and pushes it to the side as he sweeps his gaze from wall-to-wall. 

The longer I’m here, the more danger I’m in. G.U.N. could capture me at any moment. Hell — if Sonic’s humans have already sold me out, then they could be right outside that door. There’s no time to waste.

Shadow shifts to rise from the sofa, trying to find where his exhausted body starts and ends so he can get up and get out. But, instead of finding an empty space beside him, he sees that there’s someone else on the sofa, too. 

Lying supine next to him is Sonic’s still, sleeping body. He has his head propped on a pillow and his leg elevated on the opposite arm of the huge sofa, with his own arms laid straight to his side. His face is neutral and relaxed, chest rising with long, shallow breaths; Sonic is very clearly alive but only if you squint. An IV drip has been hooked up on a rail standing behind the sofa’s back, trickling clear liquid through a tube that feeds directly into Sonic’s forearm. 

He’s such an animated, bright character that seeing him here in the low lights, pallid and quiet and so very not him, feels wrong. 

Panic propels Shadow forward. He scrambles onto his hands and knees, positioning himself behind Sonic's prone form so he can press his ear against the soft peach fur of his chest. Ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump. Slow, but surely still pumping; his heart is a bass drum thumping along like a trusty metronome, keeping the marching band of his organs in time and in sync. 

Sonic draws in a particularly long breath at that moment; a sudden movement that startles Shadow into recoiling. Sonic’s body shudders with the breath, ribcage filling out and expanding, before he exhales and drifts back into deep sleep, unmoving. 

Shadow releases his own shaky breath, one he didn’t even realise he was holding in. His hand hovers uncertainly over Sonic's head, wanting to adjust his position on the pillow but unsure if touch is welcome.

“All good?” A voice says, hushed and whispered from the living room’s open doorway.

Shadow’s head snaps toward the source of the sound, feeling caught in the act of such an intimate gesture. He snatches his hand back as if he’s been burned, and places it on his own lap as his eyes strain to identify the blurry figure across the room. In the doorway, stood in a pair of old pyjamas and a pair of slippers, is Tom; tall, shrouded by the darkness, catching Shadow red-handed.

Before he realises what he’s doing and before his rational thoughts can intervene, Shadow has resumed a defensive position; the hackles on his back flick up and the beginnings of a clicking growl catch in his throat. He swallows it before it escapes but he can’t quite shake off the curve of his spine, or the way his head remains dipped instinctively low, watching Tom like he’s a threat and a danger to Shadow’s life.

Shadow’s reaction, however, doesn’t seem to deter nor bother Tom. “Sorry, did I startle you?” he apologises while he walks over to a standing lamp in the corner of the room and flicks it on.

The light is low and warm and makes everything feel a little less scary, less dangerous, even while it illuminates the face of someone Shadow can’t help but feel deathly terrified of. This version of Tom is very different to the one Shadow’s seen so far; he’s not the suited-and-booted person Shadow saw in G.U.N. H.Q., nor is he the same person who watched him last night like he was a bomb ready to detonate. Though this Tom appears softer around the edges, he’s still an unfamiliar figure and Shadow knows better than to place blind trust in people he doesn’t know. If he had to categorise him, this version of Tom is similar to the one Shadow has seen reflected in Sonic’s stories and descriptions of the man who saved his life; fatherly, domestic, proud of his family and carrying that knowledge with his gait. He’s got a mug of something hot and strong-smelling in his hand that billows up in steam clouds around his face. Shadow assumes it’s to nurse himself back to comfort after such a stressful period — a period of how long he's yet to find out. Strangest of all, he’s smiling at Shadow. Small and barely there, but it’s definitely a smile.

Shadow doesn’t know what to do with that.

His experience with human interaction exists within very narrow parameters, and those parameters don't include kindness. Interactions he’s had during his lifetime have been limited, so Shadow knows he’s awkward and he’s constantly reminded of it in painful moments like this. He can’t read people’s facial expressions nor can he understand implicitly what they want from him the same way everyone else does — that’s how he got so easily fooled by the Robotniks despite how obvious it now all seemed. He can’t navigate complex double and triple entendres the same way everyone else’s able to.

Shadow feels like Tom’s smile should mean something else. He’s learnt over the years that he should never assume a kind act is done without some kind of malicious intent. After all, Gerald never valued him as an equal in his plan to avenge Maria — he was just a pawn, controlled and led by his own emotions. The humans in the lab didn’t ask him how he felt because they cared — they asked because they wanted to know for their medical records. He was only ever praised after a job well done so it would spur on high performance and motivate him to do better, to be better next time. 

They saw him as Specimen 58BQ. None of those people saw him as worthy enough of dignity, so he came to expect negative connotations as a standard. It’s all he knew what to expect. Nowadays, Shadow wonders whether it’s his own fault that adults treat him the way they do. Maybe there’s something about him that makes them want to hurt him. Maybe it's his nature that marks him as an 'other,' as something beneath dignity and basic decency.

Why would Tom be any different from the other adults in his life who have always tried to hurt him?

“Shadow?”

Tom’s voice breaks him from his spiralling thoughts. Shadow blinks a couple of times to focus his dry eyes and realises that Tom has moved a little closer so he’s now standing at the other end of the sofa, where Sonic’s feet remain propped up beneath a blanket. He shifts his gaze up and as soon as they make eye-contact Shadow immediately looks away and back down to Sonic. Looking at Tom feels like looking at the sun; overwhelming, uncomfortable, almost painful in its intensity when his nerves and senses are already feeling raw.

The confident, defiant hedgehog who had confronted Tom earlier has vanished completely. In his place sits something smaller, more vulnerable, a shadow of his former self. The process of transferring all of his Chaos Energy into Sonic has well and truly sapped his core, rendering him exhausted, defenseless, and weak. Shadow doesn’t even have the capacity to Chaos Control right now, and the thought is one that nearly causes him to throw up. He feels as if he’s missing a limb, or as if one of his senses has disappeared and he's forced to navigate the world with both eyes closed.

Wouldn’t this be the perfect moment for G.U.N. to capture me? Have Tom and Maddie already told them what I did to Sonic? Do they know that all my Chaos Energy has completely depleted, and do they know that it means I’m practically defenseless? 

While his thoughts spiral and he tries to regulate his rising panic with some practiced breathing, hoping he’s not alerting Tom to just how frightened he feels, Tom’s attention is focused elsewhere. He places a wide, callused hand on the tip of Sonic’s shoe and gives it a little squeeze. Then, he thinks better of himself, and places his mug on the floor with a quiet clack before beginning to gently work Sonic’s shoes off. Shadow watches from the corner of his eye, keeping his head tilted down to avoid detection, but Tom notices anyway. When their gazes meet, Tom offers another small smile.

“Thought it would make him more comfortable,” he explains, as if he’s reading the question on Shadow’s face.

Shadow tracks Tom’s movements as he sets Sonic’s dirtied shoes aside and tucks the blanket around his socket feet so they’re warm and protected, before he picks his mug back up and takes a sip from the rim. 

The quiet that settles over the room feels different now — thicker, more charged than when Shadow thought he was alone, even when Tom’s making small sounds with each sip or blow of his drink to cool it. Shadow is typically most comfortable during the quiet, but this silence feels tangible and thick and uncomfortable to stew in. Tom, too, seems to be searching for what and how to say what he’s thinking, and it only serves to make Shadow’s gut coil tighter.

He simply doesn’t know what to expect from Tom. Hostility is pretty high on the list, and Shadow feels braced for it, but he doesn’t know how hard the blow is going to be. Is he going to tell Shadow that G.U.N. are waiting outside, and that he’d best leave quietly so as to not disturb the rest of the house? Is he going to march him outside with fanfare? Is he going to take his anger out on Shadow for everything he’s ruined?

“Are you going to hurt me?”

The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them — blurted, loud, ringing out in the silence that follows. There isn’t an echo, but if the space was big enough, Shadow’s sure that the question would reverberate right back to him.

Tom watches him with a strange look on his face, though Shadow can barely focus his attention for more than a millisecond before he’s averting his gaze. He's neutral, trying not to give anything away, but trying not to spook him, either. Clearly, he’s had some practice at perfecting a poker face over the years, as is customary for any police officer, and Shadow doesn’t know what to think when a tactic like that is being used on him. It makes him feel like a criminal, and it makes him feel guilty.

“Do you think I'm going to hurt you?” Tom says at last, keeping his tone light and unaccusatory. 

“I don’t know.”

“Do you expect me to hurt you?”

“Maybe.” Shadow’s hackles flatten a little, and he shifts where he sits, drawn tight like a spring compressed into a tight wind. “How long have I been out?”

Tom reaches up with his free hand to rub the stubble on his chin while he thinks. It makes a strange sound, a little like tinsel does when you clench it in your palms. “A little over a day, I think? It’s nearly midnight on Wednesday.”

The admission is both a relief as much as it’s torture. Twenty-four hours. Enough time for them to contact G.U.N. and nowhere near enough time for me to have replenished any kind of Chaos Energy back into my core. Are they waiting for me outside? Do they know that I’m in a weakened state, and that’s why they haven’t flanked me yet? Do they know that I can’t run because my energy has depleted? Are they waiting for me to surrender myself?

Shadow feels saliva gush into his mouth, the telltale warning that he’s going to throw up. He draws in a deep breath through his nose and exhales it out of his mouth, trying to ground himself, trying to slow his racing thoughts down so he can just think.

“You’re safe.” Tom’s words don’t quite snap him out of his panic, but they do draw his attention, even though it takes a few seconds for them to sink in. Tom shifts his grip on the mug handle as if his palms are sweating. “No one knows you’re here.”

Shadow swallows hard. He doesn’t look at Tom, so he looks wayward to him, just off to the side, focusing on the creased hem of his t-shirt sleeve. Looking at his face feels like it’ll be too much to handle. What if he’s smiling? What if he’s kicking Shadow while he’s down?

“I don’t believe you.”

Tom’s sleeve rises and falls as he shrugs. “I know you might not, but I’m telling the truth.”

“I don’t believe you — why would you…” Shadow's confusion escapes as an involuntary cry, like a violin string plucked too hard. “Why haven’t you…”

“...why haven’t I ratted you out?” Tom finishes on his behalf. Shadow doesn’t respond verbally, but he does give a small nod to confirm he’s right while he keeps his eyes averted off to the side. “Why would I?”

“Because I hurt you.” The words are simple, matter-of-fact, not up for debate. “I hurt your family. I made your life incredibly difficult. I know you’re under pressure from Walters to report me.”

Tom exhales a sigh past his lips as he considers Shadow’s response. “I mean, yeah, you did make my life hell.” Tom shifts as he moves his mug from one one hand into the other, before he scratches at his stubble again. It’s an unconscious gesture that betrays his own nervousness, despite the steadiness of his voice. “Without even talking about the emotional rollercoaster we’ve had to go through for the last year, and what all of this has done to Sonic’s physical and mental health, you broke most of my ribs, and my arm, and ruptured my appendix. And dislocated my shoulder.”

Each word lands like a physical blow, driving the air from Shadow's lungs. He doesn’t even have it in him to open his mouth to breathe. Tom’s words weigh him down as much as they cut him free of any hope that maybe this adult wasn’t like the rest. Of course Tom would be no different. How could Shadow have been naive enough to think otherwise?

“But, I was disguised as Walters when you punched me, so I guess it’s not that surprising why you did it.”

Shadow stops breathing.

The words hang in the air, completely contrary to everything he'd braced himself to hear. That dangerous bubble of hope swells in his chest as he risks a nervous glance upward to Tom's face, only to see that he’s watching him with a twinkle of mirth in his eye. He’s not smiling. He’s not frowning. He’s not doing much at all, too tired to express anything further than a tiny quirk to the corner of his lips, but his eyes speak a thousand words that his face doesn’t. 

It’s not quite forgiveness, but Shadow was expecting resentment and hate. This unexpected understanding by comparison feels miles away from that.

Tom leans his hip on the couch’s arm next to Sonic’s feet and gestures to his own elbow, hidden beneath his pyjama shirt. “It hurt like a bitch, I’ll give you that. Couldn’t drive for months. Couldn’t pick up my kids, couldn’t dress myself, or do much of anything, really.”

“Sorry.” The word is barely a whisper.

“But I guess you thought you were punching the bastard who caused all of this mess in the first place, huh?”

Going two for two; Shadow is, again, gobsmacked at Tom’s candid attitude and his perspective. The thing is that he’s right — that was exactly why Shadow had done it. He simply hadn't expected anyone else to understand the rationale, let alone acknowledge it as valid. Not even Sonic.

He searches Tom’s kind, friendly demeanour for a sign that he’s hiding something; a sign of malice, something to prove that this is all a sick joke to prod at Shadow’s empathy, but Tom is an open book, extending an olive branch to someone who really doesn’t deserve it.

“Besides,” he continues, “without you, Sonic wouldn’t be here right now. You saved his life. That’s not the kind of thing a dad can brush off, you know?”

Shadow exhales a long, trembling breath as his throat muscles tighten and spasm, as if his body is going into some form of emotional shock. The display of kindness and compassion is understated and probably unintentional on Tom’s part, but it’s monumental for Shadow. He’s only ever experienced the same kind of compassion from two other people in his entire life, and while Tom’s platitudes are likely just a reflection of his kind nature and a normal part of his day-to-day lexicon, Shadow isn’t used to such casual kindness from a near stranger. He feels as though Tom's words are too large to penetrate his defensive barriers, like enormous molecules trying to pass through tiny microscopic pores. He has to break them down first, word-by-word, syllable-by-syllable, before he can absorb them fully and begin to digest their meaning.

When Shadow feels the telltale feeling of heat flushing across his face, he has to physically bite down on his tongue to ground himself. You will not cry, he urges, claws lengthening just so he can tuck them into the meat of his palms and double-down on his anchorage. You will not make yourself look weaker than you already do.

Through the blur of tears he's desperately fighting, Shadow watches Tom's watery outline as the man crouches down in front of him. Sometime during Shadow's internal struggle, Tom had quietly slipped into the kitchen to dispose of his mug. Now he has something else in his hand, balled up and poised like he’s holding a pen. With callused but warm palms — the palms of a hardworking man and father — he reaches out with his free hand and gently takes one of Shadow’s battered paws. When Shadow doesn’t flinch away from his touch, Tom pulls his hand out and turns it so his palm faces upwards, and begins to gently clean his fur with the warm, damp dishcloth in his other hand. 

The fabric feels soft against his skin and carries the clean scent of dish soap. Shadow keeps his head lowered in silence as Tom works with careful wipes and circular motions, removing dried blood and the sharp antiseptic smell that clings to his palms. By all rights, his hands should be scratched and bloody from the fighting and clawing he'd done during the crisis, but Shadow's accelerated healing means that while he still experiences the same pain anyone else would, physical evidence rarely remains to prove it.

When the cloth grows dirty Tom folds it over and uses the clean side, moving to clean the grimy spaces between his fingers. Shadow is struck at the tenderness of his touch, the selfless gesture, of being on his knees and helping clean the dirty palms of a creature like him.

“There you go,” Tom says quietly when he finishes. “That’s a little better. Wouldn’t want it to stain.”

When he’s done with his left hand Tom moves to his right, using the clean corner of the cloth to follow the same ministrations; to swipe, to clean, and to warm, gently cleansing his soiled, filthy paws with the tenderness of a father wiping his son’s knee after falling down and scraping the skin.

Small droplets begin falling from above, spattering in warm patches across Tom's hands. It causes him to pause, and to look up to see where they’re coming from.

Shadow's head remains tilted downward, his expression carefully neutral and completely void of emotion. He almost appears relaxed, with half-lidded eyes and a slight frown pulling at his features, but betraying this practiced neutrality is a steady stream of tears leaking from his lower lids. Each blink causes tears to collect in his lashes before splattering down to land on Tom's hands and knees in hot droplets. His breathing has barely changed either, just long ins-and-outs through his nose like he’s sighing, as if he's simply tired rather than emotionally overwhelmed. He seems completely unaware that he's crying.

It’s such a tragic photo of someone so broken and beaten that they’re physically crying without giving into the cathartic release that comes with it. No sounds, no movement, just a steady trickle of hot tears cascading down his face that don’t seem to stop. Tom presses his lips together and feels urged to say something, to do something, to offer comfort or words of consolation, but he still doesn’t quite understand Shadow and isn’t sure what that would do to his already fragile state.

Of the three of his boys, Knuckles had the hardest shell to break through. It took Tom and Maddie months and months and months to get to the hugging stage — and even that was a hard-fought battle — but Knuckles was already leagues and bounds ahead of Shadow when it came to interpersonal relationships. Tom wouldn’t even know where to begin when it comes to giving reassurance to someone like Shadow; a beaten and broken fighting animal that gets back up to re-enter the ring after every single time he’s knocked down because it knows of nothing else.

Tom isn’t a pushover by any means, but the sight of someone crying without even realising they’re crying over such a simple gesture of kindness dwarfs all of his earlier concerns tenfold. If the waterworks are a tactic to have Tom drop his guard then they’re goddamn working.

He takes hold of Shadow’s other hand, cradling them both in a loose grip, and gives them a gentle squeeze. “You okay?” he murmurs softly, careful not to disrupt the fragile atmosphere that's settled between them.

Shadow nods, though his head remains downturned. Tom watches him blink, flicking tears from his lashes to his lap below.  He rubs small, slow circles over Shadow's thumbs with his own and offers another reassuring squeeze.

“I’m gonna go run you a shower,” Tom offers, still crouched down in front of Shadow. He lifts his clean paws and places them back in his lap, piecing him back together. “Get you warmed up.”

“You don’t want me to leave?” Shadow asks, his voice low and completely toneless. He's resigned himself to disappointment, no longer even maintaining his defensive posture. His hackles have flattened, his spine has straightened, and he's watching Tom with the hollow-eyed acceptance of someone who's given up fighting. “Aren’t I a threat to you?”

Tom shrugs, passing the statement off as irrelevant even though he can clearly see how much it means to Shadow. “You're hardly in any condition to fight anyone right now. Besides, a shower’s the least I can offer you after…everything.”

Shadow slowly turns his head to regard Sonic, who’s fast asleep next to him on the sofa, comatose and dead to the world.

“...I can’t leave him,” Shadow protests quietly. “I need to stay here with him.”

Tom's exhausted face brightens with a small, genuine smile. “I’m here to look after him, too. He hasn’t moved in the last twenty-something hours. I don’t even think he can hear us.”

“He can,” Shadow murmurs. “Or, the victims can. Sometimes. Speaking to them can help calm them.”

“Then Sonic must be losing his mind if he can hear us having a normal conversation like this, huh?”

When Shadow doesn’t respond, Tom places a gentle hand on his knee. Shadow flinches underneath the touch this time but Tom doesn’t budge, and instead gives it a small squeeze as a means of comfort. “I know you might not trust us — and that’s fine, Shadow — but we have the same goal here. We both want to protect Sonic. Regardless of whatever complicated feelings exist between you and me, Maddie, Tails, and Knuckles, I know that you know that we wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise Sonic’s wellbeing.”

Tom reaches out and takes one of Shadow’s hands, slowly, like he’s handling a nervous animal he doesn’t want to spook. Which, alright, he technically is.

“So, let me give you a chance to wash up, alright? Seriously. It’s the least we can do.” He gives his fingers the barest of squeezes. “If Sonic can actually hear us, and if he ever finds out I lied to you or broke a promise to you — hell, I’d be more scared of what he’ll do than anything G.U.N. could ever throw at me. I’m not asking you to put your blind faith in me, but I guess you can rest assured that if anything bad happens to you, then we’ll have Sonic to answer to when he wakes up, and you know how much no one wants that.”

The placations lowers Shadow’s metaphorical drawbridge. Although with some initial resistance, he goes with the gentle pull on his hands and stands up with Tom’s aid for the first time in hours. His legs are dead, riddled with pins and needles, and it feels good to finally stretch them. He feels small next to Tom, barely reaching his hip, but unlike the other humans — the lab technicians, the Robotniks, Walters, and the soldiers — Tom doesn't loom over him. He’s not peering down at Shadow like he’s waiting for his next wrong move, or like he’s frightened of what Shadow’s capable of. He’s looking at him the same way Maria used to.

“Through here,” Tom says, gesturing for him to follow as he heads off down the hall. Shadow casts one last, long look to Sonic on the sofa before he follows Tom apprehensively.

Even if he’s being led into a trap, Shadow’s too tired to fight any hypothetical enemies. He doesn’t think he could even defend himself if G.U.N. or Knuckles and Tails or even Gerald were around the corner ready to capture him. Maybe it’s the exhaustion from having his Chaos Energy totally depleted, or the fatigue from everything — months on the run, little sleep, little food, the stress of selling himself out to the enemy, and watching Sonic nearly die in his arms — but all he can feel is a faint sense of detached apathy in the hollow of his chest where his heart usually beats.

Because none of it matters anymore. Not really. Whether he’s sold out by the Wachowski’s, or if he ends up leaving of his own accord, he’s set to live the rest of his life by his lonesome. It’s a lose-lose, with no silver lining.

They’re quiet as they navigate the house, moving with slow, shuffling steps, careful not to wake the rest of its sleeping inhabitants. The house is large and very much what Shadow had expected from the family that took Sonic in; warmly coloured and decorated with personal touches from each personality in the household. It’s the type of place you’d see on a sitcom, or in a children’s picture book when they recall their rose-tinted childhood. It’s the kind of place he’s only ever seen through the eyes of another. 

Tom leads him through their hallway and past a utility room until they reach a door tucked beneath the staircase. He opens it with a careful push and pulls a string connected to the ceiling to flick on the light. 

The room is small and bright and white, reminding Shadow a little of the lab but with a lot more seashell-patterned tiles and fluffy, white checkerboard towels. There’s a glass cubicle shower, a toilet, an airing cupboard, and a countertop sink all tucked in such a small space that somehow makes it feel cosy despite the fact that it’s simply a bathroom. What free space there is is cluttered with colourful bottles, and beneath the cabinet’s mirror speckled with waterflecks is a jar holding toothbrushes and half-squeezed toothpaste tubes. 

It’s a little scruffy and lacks polish but it only seems to make the space seem warmer, evidence that can only come from a real-life home that’s well lived-in.

“Thought a shower might suit you better, as you wouldn’t want to just sit in your own soup,” Tom mutters, mindful to be quiet as he steps into the small bathroom and gestures for Shadow to follow. He reaches out across the short space and pulls the shower’s sliding glass door aside with a low clatter. A silver, slinky wire connects the box on the wall to a fixture on top of the cubicle. “You’ve used a shower before, right?”

Shadow peers inside at the box on the wall with all sorts of nozzles and buttons and dials. It looks a little like a spaceship. Were showers always this complicated?

“Not like this.” 

When Tom remains quiet, Shadow assumes he’s trying to find a kind way to ask how do you bathe? So, Shadow clarifies: “I was regularly sterilised in a chamber at the lab by the technicians using pressurised cleaning mechanisms. Since being free, I use freshwater streams.” And isn’t that a luxury to be able to say aloud? Since being free.

The response seems to pain Tom. He presses his thin lips together and looks to the side, searching for what to say to such a simple, yet heartbreaking, statement. 

Shadow, feeling awkward at having made Tom feel awkward, tries to steer the conversation elsewhere. He admits: “I don’t know how to use this device,” while pointing to the box on the wall.

It’s a welcomed distraction. Tom exhales out of his nose and turns so Shadow can see him again. He steps inside, pointing to each nozzle as he speaks. “This one’s for heat — but I’ll pre-set it for you. If you want it hotter, go to the right, and colder is to the left. This button is for on or off, and these are to change the water pattern and pressure.”

Shadow nods, attentive and eager to understand so he doesn’t mess up what seems like a simple task. Tom gestures to various containers held in a caddy on the shower wall. “We have shampoo, conditioner, and just good old soap here, so just help yourself.”

He pulls back from the shower and gives Shadow a once-over. It isn’t judgemental — more like he’s trying to determine what would work best for him. Beneath his gaze, Shadow instead feels like he’s being evaluated; a trooper sizing up his private. 

At last, Tom says: “The boys just use soap or shampoo, so I’d suggest you go with that.”

The boys. The way he says it; like they’re his, like they’re his family, like they’re one unit. 

Shadow’s heart throbs. For such a tender statement, he is yet again reminded he’s a stranger in this household and is already overstaying his welcome.

Maybe Tom picks up on his distress, maybe he doesn’t. Shadow doesn’t meet his eyes so he can’t tell, and instead moves to step into the shower space, touching the walls, the wire, the door, curious at something new. A standard to the Wachowski household, but a luxury to Shadow; warm water to clean himself for the first time in…well, ever.

“Well.” Tom breaks the awkward silence with the sound of his own voice as he walks backwards to the doorway and leans against the frame. “I’ll leave you to it.”

“Does this have a time limit?” Shadow asks, gesturing to the shower unit.

Tom, this time, musters a small smile. “No, Shadow,” he says, stepping out of the doorway and drawing the door half-shut. “Take all the time you need. I’ll put some coffee on, alright?”

The door shuts with a quiet snick and Shadow is left alone in the white, seashell-themed bathroom. Not wanting to linger, he steps back out of the cubicle and presses what he assumes is the ‘on’ button.

Immediately a spray of water gushes out from the fixture above. It hits the glass walls and washes onto the floor with a gentle, trickling sound, quickly filling the space with steam that smells clean and inviting. Shadow hesitantly places his bare hand under the spray and is delighted to feel a warm patter of water touch his skin. Not too hot, not too cold, just perfect.

He shucks off his shoes and eagerly steps under the warm, trickling spray. As soon as the water hits his head he audibly groans at the feeling and steps further under, feeling the warm, fresh water wash over his quills and face and body. He closes his eyes against the stream and bares his face to its spray, unsure of how long he stands there motionlessly but he does it until his head goes fuzzy and the heat grows stifling in the small room. When every last square inch of fur on his body has been drenched he opens his heavy eyes and is surprised to see that the whole room has filled with steam, so he reaches over to turn down the temperature dial. Instead of it lowering just a little, freezing cold water gushes out, so he quickly turns the dial back to the right and discovers just how sensitive the pressure is.

He finds somewhere just right — hot enough to melt his goosebumps but not so hot it’s uncomfortable, and after luxuriating under the spray long enough for his pawpads to prune, he picks up a plastic, opaque bottle from one of the shower’s shelving units. It has a photo of some leaves and berries and a half-sliced coconut on the front. Shadow uncaps it and peers into the lid. He curiously squeezes the bottle and watches as a trickle of sweet-smelling opaque liquid comes from the spout, which he catches in his palms, rubs between his fingers, and watches as easy suds form across his fur.

He triple cleans himself until the water runs clear and his fur and quills feel lighter than they ever have before. His chest fur, for the first time since leaving Prison Island, is a pure, brilliant white, his red streaks bright like a tart summer fruit, and his black fur inky and glossy. Shadow’s bathed himself plenty since being on the run but it’s one thing to have a dedicated, clean washstation with soap that seems to lather at the barest touch, and another to clean himself in frigid streams with nothing more than a rationed bar of soap if he’s lucky. He hadn’t exactly made a habit of carrying around toiletries when he moved from one hiding place to another.

He switches the unit off and steps out of the cubicle onto the soft plush of a shower mat, shag carpet soft beneath the pads of his feet. He looks for the towels and finds some tossed over a metal ladder-like contraption near the sink. When he picks one off, he’s delighted to find that the towel is warm to the touch, and quickly cleans himself off with scrubs, wipes, and presses.

Sated and drowsy from the warm shower, he turns on his heel to scope out the rest of the room and finds himself coming face-to-face with his own reflection in the water-speckled mirror.

Shadow doesn’t recognise the person staring back at him.

The version of himself is one that he hasn’t seen in a long, long time. He’s clean and neat, just like how he used to keep himself when Maria was there, when he would primp himself in his spare time. Part of it was out of necessity — Gerald would sometimes bring high-profile visitors to the site, and he always needed to look his best for any impromptu visits — but part of Shadow liked looking neat, too. It helped him feel in control, even if it was over something so trivial.

Shadow reaches up and fluffs his quills and is suddenly transported back to the seventies to a small, salmon-pink and tan bathroom, watching Maria fix her curls. She didn’t always wear her hair like that, but on the special occasions they had visitors or family over, she loved to style her hair like Olivia Newton-John’s. On those special nights, she would stand behind Shadow, making eye contact in the mirror’s reflection, and gently fluff up his quills the same way she would do to her own hair. He used to preen under the touch, letting her separate and clump his quills in even, neat spikes.

“Like this,” she would demonstrate, pushing her hair back from her face with delicate fingers. He would copy, hands too big compared to her dainty touch, and it made her laugh. That bright, tittering, beautiful laugh.

In the present, his bare hands reach up to gently fluff his quills away from his face. He looks clean and properly groomed just like he once did, but he looks sad, and emaciated, and a shell of his former self.

Unable to look at himself any longer without getting upset, Shadow turns away from the mirror and finishes drying himself off with the fluffy towel as the extractor fan whirrs overhead with a monotonous hum. He goes to put on his shoes but they’re quite dirty, and it feels wrong to put something like that on such a clean body straight away. Instead, he picks them up by hooking his fingers in their heels and leaves the bathroom with a plume of steam. His inhibitor cuffs stay on, hanging a little loose from his wrists and ankles. They’re awkward, but removing them is out of the question.

The air out here feels chilly on his damp fur compared to the bathroom’s humid warmth. He shuts the door behind himself and looks down the corridor, hesitantly taking a step forward onto creaking floorboards. The house is a little more difficult to navigate without Tom but he manages to find the living room by guidance of smell and memory. An additional light has since been turned on, spilling a warm glow from the living room’s open doorway into the hall, inviting him in.

Sonic is still there, unmoved, his chest rising in shallow, long breaths. Shadow’s gaze lingers on him, compelled to rush over and lie at his side like a loyal dog until he wakes. Instead, conscious that Tom is somewhere in the adjoining kitchen space, Shadow walks further into the room in search of him. He finds Tom sitting at the kitchen island with a cup of something bitter and strong-smelling in his hands. When he notices Shadow he looks up with a tired smile, gesturing for him to come over with a nod.

Shadow, bashful, heeds his orders and shuffles over. He feels bare and defenseless without his skates but Tom hasn’t given him any reason to be fearful so far, so he allows the tension to seep away just a little and comes to a stop a few feet away from the counter.

“Nice shower?” Tom prompts, his voice’s volume still relatively low so as to not disturb the rest of the silent house.

Shadow nods shyly. “Yes, thank you.” He holds up a neatly folded towel under his arm and presents it to Tom. “I’ve gotten fur on your towel. I’m sorry.”

Tom looks at the towel in his outstretched hands with a strange expression, something caught between confusion and recognition. It takes a moment for his thoughts to fully realise and when they do they cause something behind his eyes to click into place. Suddenly, without any warning, he lets out a small laugh beneath his breath. “You’re Mitsy.”

“Sorry?”

Tom’s laugh bubbles into something hysterical. He has to muffle it in his hands as he giggles away like a mad man, fuelled by a mixture of exhaustion and disbelief. “Oh my God,” he cries, wiping away dampness from the corner of his eye with the edge of his finger as he catches himself in another giggle that leads Shadow to wonder if he’s really that emotionally stable after all.

“Oh God, oh God,” he repeats, muffled by his hands cupped around his face. He drags them down the length of his face and leaves his hands resting below his jaw as his laughter tapers out into little huffs of breath. “I’m not crazy. It’s just — you see, there’s a black cat next door, and around Christmas time last year I found a towel with black fur over it in the bathroom washbasket.”

Tom recounts this as if Shadow should immediately understand the significance, but he merely stares blankly, failing to see the humour in black fur on a towel. Tom shakes his head as if to free himself of the lingering dregs of laughter before he continues. I was in the living room at the time, or maybe the kitchen — can't remember exactly — and I said to Sonic and Tails: 'Guys, isn't it weird that the cat got back in the house?' Because I'd specifically told Mrs. Calahan to keep Mitsy out since Maddie's allergic to cat fur. And Sonic got all flustered, insisting it had to be the cat, absolutely had to be. He was so adamant about it. At the time I thought he was just eager to get back to whatever game he and Tails were playing but I see now why he was so quick to cover it up.”

Shadow realises what Tom’s referring to a beat too late. Uncomfortable and embarrassed, he turns his head away and averts his gaze to the floor. Tom seems to find it funny, but Shadow does not. “I assume you think it’s my doing?”

“Assume?” Tom echoes the word like it’s hilarious. “Sonic admitted to us that he kept you in the attic around that time last year. It’s not really a secret anymore, even though he kept it pretty damn well for so long.”

Shadow nods stiffly as the words wash over him and he’s suddenly filled with a feeling of strange shame. Shame for what, he doesn’t know. Maybe it’s over being caught out despite trying vehemently to be subtle, or the humiliation of having had nowhere to stay, or maybe it’s because someone now knows the details of his and Sonic’s clandestine meetings. They hadn’t gotten up to anything bad, but it felt intimate, sacred, like a secret not to be shared.

“That was partially my doing. I asked him to keep my identity a secret.” Not that it worked, he thinks a little bitterly. Me sitting here is pretty big proof of that.

“Ooooh, boy.” Tom chuckles again to himself, though this time without humour. “You have no idea the lengths that that kid has gone to cover your ass. Or rather, the trouble he’s gotten into trying to cover your ass and his ass.”

“I don’t think I understand,” Shadow mutters. “I thought…” Shadow trails off, unsure on how to broach this conversation. Just how much do they know? He feels like he’s missing a few pages; that he’s listening to a joke after everyone’s already laughed, and he’s trying to find out what the punchline is.

Tom glances down to his mug with a slow, tired blink. “Well, I’m gonna need a new coffee if we open this can of worms, ‘cause we’ll be here a while. You want one?”

“A coffee?”

“Sure. You can drink that, right?” 

Shadow nods, his thirst and hunger winning over his shyness. He creeps a little closer to the island and towards Tom, and watches as he pours coffee from the glass cafetiere into a ceramic mug. Tom kicks out the stool for him, silently inviting him up, so Shadow goes, climbing up onto the high chair. Up here, he’s closer to eye level with Tom, and is once again surprised at just how different he is to how his memory recalls him. Tom is handsome with sun-kissed skin and wrinkles that tell a tale of a happy life full of smiles. He is nothing like the lab technicians or Gerald. The closest person Shadow reckons him to are the fathers from the old movies Maria and he used to watch; the ones that would dote on their children — the type of person Shadow has never really met in real life before. Maybe that’s why he feels so out-of-sort in Tom’s company.

Tom nudges the mug towards him. Shadow takes it by its handle, giving it a sniff. “Do you want creamer, or sugar?”

“No thank you,” Shadow murmurs, before giving his coffee a sip.

It’s delicious. Strong and well-bodied, warming Shadow from the inside out. He hums in delight when he swallows and goes in for another sip, letting it wash over him like a warm wave at the seaside. It’s not that the coffee is particularly amazing — Stone’s brews used to be pretty damn good — but there’s something about the cosy atmosphere, the chipped, stained mug, and the fact that someone else poured it for him that makes it taste that much more delicious. 

Tom reclines back in his stool, holding his cup with both of his hands in front of his tummy. “So,” he prompts, voice dry and low. “Tell me about it.”

Shadow flicks his gaze up to him for a brief moment before it’s back down on the marble countertop. “About what?”

“It. Everything.” Tom gestures to the room. “Y’know — the whole situation with Sonic knowing you survived, keeping you hidden, all of it.”

Shadow's mouth tightens as he weighs his options carefully.

This is his and Sonic’s thing. Speaking about it could implicate Sonic and get him into potential trouble with his humans if he hasn’t been wholly honest with them up until this point, but at the same time, what does Shadow have to lose? Sonic’s in a coma, and Shadow doesn’t intend to overstay his welcome here at the Wachowski’s for any longer than it takes for him to finish his coffee. He’s already running on borrowed time and the longer he stays here the more vulnerable he grows. Tom Wachowski might be playing the part of the gracious host right now, but Shadow has no doubt where his affiliations truly lie. By the time this conversation is over, Shadow’s out of here, even if he’s still too weak to run. He’ll walk to the other side of the cosmos if he has to.

What possible difference could it make if Shadow reveals everything now?

“It’s not my place to say,” Shadow says at last, his conscience heart winning out against his brain. He may never see Sonic again after this, but it doesn’t justify tossing him under the bus. 

Tom smiles, as if he finds Shadow’s answer charming. “He’s already spilled his guts. Or, well, as much as he’s willing to.” Shadow glances up with a small, questioning look. “He told you that he told us about all of it, didn’t he?” Tom continues, swapping his mug so he’s only holding it in one hand. His other comes up to scratch the back of his head, gaze drifting to the side as he reclines back into a recent memory.

“Yes,” Shadow murmurs quietly. Saying it hurts, but remembering it hurts even more. 

“And then you had that fight and beat the crap outta him.” The words escape before Tom can stop them. He immediately covers his face with his free hand and groans at his own tactlessness. “Sorry. Shovel talk.”

“...shovel talk?”

Tom shakes his head, eyes still closed, as if he’s hiding from the embarrassment of acting nothing of his forty-four years-of-age. “It’s the dad in me coming out. Ignore that. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

Shadow slowly takes a sip of his coffee to keep himself busy as Tom collects himself. When he’s ready to speak, he makes it known by refocusing his gaze on Shadow over the rim of his mug, blue eyes twinkling in the low light. “I know Sonic already told you that he told us about everything. It killed him to do it. I’m telling you this so you don’t hold any resentment towards him, not because I’m trying to gossip or dig for information. None of that matters to me. But, you mean a lot to him, and I want to clear the air between you two on his behalf — God knows he’s too stubborn to do it himself.”

Shadow makes no indication to speak, so Tom clears his throat, and continues: “A few months back, Maddie and I came across an atlas in his room. You know the one, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Shadow responds, tone strong, defensive.

“Well, it’s worth mentioning that Maddie and I have known you survived the crash since last summer, so finding out you were alive wasn’t exactly news to us.”

That spikes fear in Shadow’s heart. They’ve known about me for that long?

Tom, however, doesn’t seem to pick up his panic. “G.U.N. were on us like flies on a pile of dung after the Eclipse Cannon blew up. Trying to find out what we knew about your whereabouts and all that jazz. The last few times an alien’s crash landed on Earth, we’ve taken them in as our own, so I bet they thought you were special addition number four to our family — ha!”

He reaches up to rub his brow at the memory, the ghost of a weak smile still playing on his face. “But, we knew nothing. Not until Walters told us more and more about you, about Project Shadow, about what experiments Gerald had been doing in the lab, about his grand designs. He revealed a lot of nasty, horrible stuff that he really shouldn’t have. He did it to scare us, I think.”

Tom takes a moment of pause by sipping his coffee, steam billowing up around his cheeks and fringe. When he speaks again, it’s with the same, measured, tired tone from earlier. It’s clear that he’s done with all of this; G.U.N., the bureaucracy, the red tape constantly cropping up in his life, and Shadow wonders if that means that maybe they have another thing common outside of their fondness for Sonic. What’s that age-old saying; the enemy of my enemy is my friend? 

“He shouldn’t have exposed Maddie and me to half the information he did, but he did it so Maddie and I would be so scared of you that we’d report any sightings the second we got wind of your whereabouts.”

“And, did it?”

Tom’s mug makes a quiet sound as it comes to rest on the kitchen island’s countertop. “Did it what?”

“Scare you.” Shadow swallows the coppery-tasting adrenaline sitting heavy on his tongue. “Do I scare you? Am I scaring you right now?”

Shadow’s voice rings like a bell in the silence. He’s looking straight at Tom now, his eyes two pinpricks of blood on the dark, inky span of his face. He can feel his pulse in his ears, in his neck, in his shoulders, body drawn tight like a bowstring ready to release an arrow. 

Tom matches his strong gaze with his own. “Yes,” he says at last, his arms coming to fold atop one another under his ribcage. 

Shadow nods in acknowledgement. He takes a sip of his coffee and finds that his hand is shaking. It makes it difficult to hold the mug without spilling any of its contents down his clean chest so he tries to steady it using his mouth, and when that proves too difficult, he simply puts it down and nudges it aside. The coffee is acid in his gut, climbing up his esophagus with a searing trail that feels like it’s burning him from the inside out.

“I thought so,” Shadow murmurs around the sudden constriction in his throat.

“Shadow.” Tom slides forward to the edge of his stool, leaning across the space between them to place a warm, calloused hand over Shadow's trembling fingers. “Let me finish.”

“What more is there to say?” 

“You’ll know if you listen,” Tom chides softly. He rises from his seat, scooting his stool closer before resettling and taking both of Shadow's hands in his own weathered grip. Their joined fingers hang suspended in the space between them, and Shadow is struck by the contrast; Tom's hands are larger, marked by years of honest work, while his own appear almost fragile in comparison.

“The things written in those reports are…unimaginable. I thought that the stuff Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles were capable of was scary — but you’re on a totally different level. What you’re capable of is…to put it frankly, fucking terrifying.” Tom's grip tightens reassuringly around Shadow's fingers. “I mean, warping space time and reality? Reading that written out in plain text was like reading something out of a sci-fi novel. Imagine my surprise when I found out Sonic’s been keeping you under our roof for the better part of the year without Maddie or me ever catching on. It was finding out the toy your kid is playing with was made out of uranium.”

He draws in a breath through his nose that raises the hunch of his shoulders a little. “So, after finding the atlas, we confronted Sonic on it. Maddie and I were terrified that he was being coerced, or that he was planning something behind our backs, and I guess we weren’t thinking super rationally about the whole thing because of how panicked we were and it led to this huge argument. Sonic was…” Tom gives a skittish laugh, “...furious. Cussed us up and down. He left the house for a week, made Maddie and me grow a few more greys during that time, and gave us a lot to think about. Y’know, we didn’t — don’t — know you, and your mind starts filling in blanks when you don’t have the whole story. When he came back, he told us everything. Or, at least most of everything. Went through a really bad rough patch, but came out the other side and got a ridiculous haircut afterwards.”

Tom shakes his head at the memory, a tiny smile playing on the corner of his lips. 

“Y’know, I don’t think he was mad that we went through his stuff — although, alright, he was a little pissed. But, I think he was more scared about what it meant for you, and what that meant for the both of you, I guess.”

Tom clears his throat, falling into a brief moment of silence, as if he’s uncomfortable with what he’s going to say next. Shadow apprehensively swallows around nothing and weighs up the option of letting go of Tom’s hold just so he can pick up his coffee and wet his mouth, but there’s something intent about Tom’s grasp on his hands that Shadow, instinctively, knows that letting go would shatter this careful moment.

“This guy is crazy about you. And — listen,” Tom lowers his pace to something of a steady statement, as if he’s phrasing his words intentionally carefully. “I’m in no place to judge, y’know? He’s my boy, and I’ll love him in whatever decision he makes in his life, and I’m glad that he tried to mend bridges with someone he used to consider an enemy but when I found out it went further than that… I mean, I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like I was thrilled to find out the guy he’s been sneaking out to see and developed feelings for was you.”

Shadow, despite himself, feels his face pull into a confused frown.

He feels like he’s missing something fundamental in the story Sonic’s relayed to his family. Tom seems to be chalking up his and Sonic’s time together as something more than it was — two acquaintances meeting up to ‘hang out’, as Sonic would say and likely describe it as. Is there some kind of misunderstanding? Does he think that he and Sonic were up to no good? Because there’s a clear level of discomfort with how Tom’s phrasing certain words, like judge and thrilled, speaking as if they’re big and serious and difficult to enunciate without wincing.

“We didn’t do anything bad,” Shadow says in a way of defending Sonic.

Tom, driven into even more discomfort by Shadow’s innocent admission, grumbles. “Yeah, I know that now. Sonic’s not that kind of kid, anyway.”

“I saw him a grand total of ten times. Most of it was just walking.” Shadow shrugs. “We picked fruit and went swimming.”

“That’s…” Tom trails off. “reassuring, actually. He — uh, didn’t say much. An angsty teenager trying to defend his relationship, y’know?”

Again, Shadow notices just how uncomfortable Tom seems to say that specific phrase — relationship — stretching out every syllable like they’re their own word. Re-lay-shun-ship. 

His frown settles deeper. “Why do you keep saying it like that? Are you mocking me?”

Tom’s brows inch up on his forehead. “I’m not trying to mock anything. Especially not your…friendship. Is that what you both called it?” Tom's voice cracks slightly on the upward inflection. “Did you not…uh, make it official? He hasn’t really spoken much about it, so…”

“Make what official?” Shadow’s chin falls down towards his chest. “We had an argument. That meant we were no longer ‘friends’. Not since the fight we had in Green Hills.”

Am I still friends with Sonic considering I saved his life? Were we ever officially friends in the first place? Shadow frowns. How does one quantify a friendship?

They’d never really put a name to it. The only other friend he’s ever had was Maria, and while both she and Sonic have plenty of commonalities, like two circles in a venn diagram with a massive central overlap, Maria was like family to him.

He’s never felt like that about Sonic. What he holds for Sonic is dynamic, fluctuating, something too big for him to even begin to categorise; a vast lake composed of countless tiny droplets accumulated from different encounters, amassing into an enormous body of emotional water. 

What began as fascination upon seeing someone physically similar to himself had quickly died when Sonic emerged as an enemy, forcing Shadow to set aside his curiosity in favor of survival. He never dared to hope nor expected it to go any further than just that. He hadn't expected them to confide in one another over their shared loneliness and loss on the moon, hadn't expected to connect with him soul-to-soul when they had gone super, or feel alive for the first time in fifty years again when they took to the stars together. When he woke up after crash-landing back to Earth and he only recovered one of his inhibitor rings, Shadow's heart had lurched with a desperate, terrible wish that the other was in Sonic's possession so it gave him an excuse to see him again.

That was the moment he realised that the pretense had fallen away, and what had begun as curiosity was quickly transforming into something different, something he’d never experienced before.

Shadow knows his fixation goes beyond friendship, beyond rivalry, beyond anything he understands and feels equipped to name, but what would be the point in voicing it? Shadow has kept that part of himself locked away and tucked in the mean, cold corners of his chest, because expressing his thoughts would surely only burden Sonic. How could he ever measure up to the other people in Sonic’s life? What would a free-minded soul like Sonic, with a roster of better and kinder friends to choose from, want with someone like Shadow — damaged, difficult, temperamental. It was better to orbit silently than risk being pushed away entirely. Sonic was kind enough to entertain their friendship on the sparse occasions they met, and for Shadow, who saw Sonic as a lifeline in his otherwise twisted and dirty life, that was enough.

Losing him over their argument felt like dying. Nearly losing him a second time in New York felt worse than death. Shadow can’t rekindle their bond a third time when he knows it’ll never work out; he just isn’t meant to be in Sonic’s life. The loss would surely kill him.

“Oh…” Tom trails off as something shifts in his gaze. Shadow can practically see the cogs slowly turning behind his eyes. “So you guys weren't, or, I guess aren’t together-together?”

Shadow doesn’t understand what Tom’s asking. Americanised-English really has changed drastically in the last fifty years, and it’s moments like this Shadow begins to wish he’d picked up on colloquialisms earlier. “I don’t know what you mean. We were together when we ‘hung out’, like acquaintances do. That is the definition of ‘hanging out’ isn’t it?”

“...so Sonic hasn’t told you about how he, uh, feels?”

“Feels about what?”

Tom lets go of their joint hands to press his fingertips to his eyes. A quiet, pained groan leaves his nose and Shadow feels like he’s missing something very, very crucial, particularly if it’s enough to cause Tom to flip in a one-eighty. “Jesus Christ. Uh…ignore what I just said.”

They lapse into awkward silence, punctuated only by Shadow retrieving his mug for small, measured sips of now-lukewarm coffee while Tom scrubs at his eyes as if attempting to excavate them from his skull. Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation acting up.

While Tom wallows in his embarrassment Shadow, playing deaf to his mortification, drinks every last drop of coffee from his mug, even the tiny, gritty bits of ground bean. He wouldn’t dare let a luxury like this go to waste. Nowadays his meals — if he can even dignify his diet with that word — are few and far between and consist of stolen and foraged goods eaten in quiet intervals between his travels. Prior to this, the last time he had a hot drink was when Sonic gave him the thermos of hot chocolate nearly a year ago.

When his mug is well and truly emptied, Shadow smacks his lips before setting the mug down on the kitchen island with a quiet clack. “Thank you for the coffee and allowing me to rest here overnight.”

He kicks his feet into a swing before he hops down from the stool onto the floor, cold beneath his bare pawpads. The jerkiness of his vault causes him to stumble when he lands, his weak legs and the bone-deep exhaustion making it so he’s barely able to support his weight. Shadow braces himself on the stool while he waits for the pins and needles to recede from his joints,  desperately trying to gather what little energy remains before venturing back into the night.

“You okay?” Tom asks in concern when he takes note of Shadow’s pained expression and unsteady gait.

“I’m fine,” Shadow grits out, unwilling to let his weakened, vulnerable state be too apparent. He blinks a few hard times to focus his swimming gaze, even as the blood rushes everywhere but to his head. His hands are still bare and it feels instinctively wrong to have them exposed in Tom’s presence, but his gloves lay in tatters back in New York and he doesn’t quite have the fight in him to care for modesty right now — he’s barely able to stand on his own two feet without stumbling over.

“You sure?” Tom, recovered from his moment of shame and embarrassment, takes another swig from his industrial-sized mug. Righted from his brief moment of vertigo, Shadow reaches down for his shoes, scuffed and dirty and in desperate need of a touch up, and holds the heel open while he slips his feet in. Tom pauses mid-sip as he watches Shadow slip back into his shoes, taking a moment for them to auto-adjust back on his ankles, before he sets his mug down. “Are your feet cold? Do you need a pair of socks?”

Shadow glances up from his one-knee crouch, working the other shoe onto his foot. “Sorry?”

“Your shoes,” Tom says, gesturing towards them.

Shadow looks back down to his half-on shoe. He slips his paw the rest of the way in and rises back up to stand, giving his ankle a shake so the inhibitor ring is flush and the shoe snaps back into place on his feet. They were specifically created for him, and so the dimensions are a perfect match to his never-growing body, but it feels strange to put them on after going an hour without them. Chaos Energy is used to power the skates and as he’s sapped himself of it, Shadow’ll be doing a fair bit of walking and running for the next few days, not least until he replenishes enough energy to utilise Chaos Control. He can’t remember a time he’s felt so drained. The coffee does something to combat it, but it’s a drop in a vast ocean of exhaustion.

“I’m putting them on because I’m leaving,” he says, which he thought was pretty obvious.

The look on Tom’s face tells him it wasn’t. “You’re going?”

Is it really that outlandish a suggestion? “Yes,” Shadow responds slowly, wondering if he’s been sending mixed signals considering Tom’s taking this news as a surprise. “I’ve already overstayed my welcome, and it’s not safe for me in Green Hills anymore.”

Tom hops down from his stool and sets his huge coffee mug aside. There’s a strange look on his face, one Shadow can’t make out due to the sudden change in height difference and dim lighting, but Tom’s brows are pulled together and there’s a crinkle in his chin. “Where are you going?”

The: I’m not telling you that dies on his tongue when he takes note of the look on Tom’s face. “Why does it matter?” he says instead. 

Tom’s frown deepens. “Is this because you’re worried about G.U.N.?”

“‘Worried’ makes it sound trivial.” Shadow flexes his fingers at his side at the mere mention of the name. “I’m not going into stasis for another lifetime.”

“We haven’t reported you—”

“You said it yourself: you’re scared of me, and have G.U.N. breathing down your neck. I know you haven’t done anything yet, so I’d like to keep it that way before you change your mind.” Shadow’s mouth ticks down at the corner. “We can just pretend I was never here. That way, you won’t have to report me, and I can just leave quietly.”

“You’ve got something wrong, there.” Tom clears his throat. “You’re right: we should report you, we ought to have done it as soon as we found the atlas, and hell, I was in half a mind to do it when you brought Sonic in all bloodied, but…”

He trails off with a shaky exhale. Tom reaches up to scratch at the back of his neck in a gesture that lets off just how conflicted he is about this whole situation: about Shadow, about G.U.N., and where his family falls in the middle of all of it. “I thought Sonic was going to die last night. He wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for you. You are the reason he’s still here right now, and if you hadn’t been looking out for him, or if you had just left him here on our doorstep and gone back into hiding, then I don’t think he’d still be alive. Besides, G.U.N. and I don’t have the…best history together as it stands, so our ‘loyalty’ is more down to legal requirements than any kind of moral duty.”

“What I’m trying to say is that I’m in a situation where I have to choose what I think would be in Sonic’s best interest.” He drops down to a crouch, knees clicking, so he’s on eye-level with Shadow. It’s such a simple gesture but it feels humbling for Tom to treat him like an equal, not expecting Shadow to get on his own level, and instead bridging the gap himself. “That’s you.”

“You think I’m in Sonic’s best interest?”

He huffs a laugh. “Sonic thinks you’re in Sonic’s best interest,” Tom corrects with a small smile on his face. “I used to stay awake at night terrified that this…this creature that G.U.N. described as capable of mass destruction was going to turn up outside our house and…well, I don’t know, declare war on us or something. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. But then you do show up on our doorstep, and you’re holding Sonic, sacrificing your freedom, your life, for the sake of his.”

Tom takes his hands once again and gives them a long, tight squeeze, voice dropping low. “That means a hell of a lot to a dad like me. Those reports painted you out to be a monster, but even despite that, even despite all of the things you are…you’re a kid. You’re just a kid.”

“You don’t hate me?” Shadow asks, voice cracking on the edges. Tom is right there in front of him but Shadow can’t bring himself to look at him.

“I don’t know you.” It’s so simple, so unremarkable, but it hits Shadow like a bullet. I don’t know you. No one had ever given him the privilege to be known before being condemned before. “I’ve only ever met the version of you on those reports and the one Sonic speaks about. This version’s a little different from those.”

Tom releases one of his hands to place against Shadow’s bicep. It’s not a mean grip, but it has enough strength behind it that it doesn’t make it easy for Shadow to easily shake it off. “So, if you don’t mind me making one more selfish request, I’d like to ask for you to stay until he wakes up.” Tom exhales a shaky breath. “Please.”

It’s the last thing he’d expected Tom to ask him. Maybe a: leave quietly, and shut the door gently on your way out! as a courtesy, but certainly not this. Shadow keeps finding himself surprised by Tom Wachowski in a way that should tell him that his earlier predictions weren’t so accurate after all.

“You want me to stay here?” Shadow can’t help but let the surprise he feels bleed into his tone. “Why?”

Tom releases a heavy sigh and casts a worried glance through the open doorway toward Sonic's motionless form on the sofa, the rise and fall of his chest barely perceptible in the dim lighting.  “None of us know what to do with him. Sure, Knuckles knows a little about Chaos Energy but he can’t wield it like you can. Maddie’s a vet, but Sonic’s coma isn’t like anything she’s seen before. If something goes wrong — if Sonic doesn’t wake up, or if he deteriorates, or if he’s in pain, you’re the only one who can help him. If I’ve gotta choose between selling you out to G.U.N. or saving my kid, I think you can guess which option I’m choosing.” The corners of his eyes crinkle with a mixture of exhaustion and determination. “Besides, if you’d have left without saying goodbye to Sonic, I wouldn’t hear the end of it from him.”

Shadow’s breath escapes him in a shudder. He’s again struck by the display of humanity from one human to another Mobian, something he’d long convinced himself was a rarity reserved for special people like Maria. Above his own want to protect Sonic and see his recovery through to the end, a part of Shadow feels owing, too. After all he’s done to the Wachowski’s, particularly after nearly killing Tom, he’s practically indebted.

“...you’re too trusting for your own good,” Shadow responds instead. It's not untrue, but it serves as deflection from the thousand conflicting thoughts racing through his mind.

“Heard that one before. Why’d you think Maddie and I have three alien kids?”

The joke doesn’t land. Shadow feels too exhausted, too emotionally raw, to find any levity in the situation. This isn't casual conversation for him. This represents choosing between risking his precarious freedom even further than he already has.

As a warning, as a declaration of risk so Tom knows exactly what he’s signing up for, Shadow reminds him: “The longer I stay here, the more danger I put you, and myself, in. What would happen if G.U.N. found out I was here?”

“They won’t.”

Tom sounds so sure of himself, but Shadow’s not keen to put his blind faith in the man. “You don’t know that.”

“No, I don’t, but I’ve dealt with them for years and I’m pretty familiar with how they operate. They won’t find out so long as we keep a low profile, we keep you inside, and we keep your Chaos Energy use to an absolute minimum.” Shadow’s brows inch up his face in surprise. Tom clearly wasn't exaggerating about his strained relationship with G.U.N. The man has obviously given this scenario considerable thought; this contingency plan isn't some spontaneous idea.

Tom squeezes his hold on Shadow. “I mean it when I say that I’m going to choose Sonic’s safety over anything. I can’t keep you hostage, I know that, but if I let you go now and Sonic’s condition deteriorates, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself. This isn’t a kind of medicine we can just call a doctor to fix. You’ve done…whatever you did for him, and now you’re the only person who knows how to manage it.”

The moment feels suspended between endings and beginnings — nebulous and liminal, stuck between the end of something new, like a game that has yet to be played, a song that’s ringing out its final chords, a match on the cusp of catching alight. Shadow finally flicks his eyes up to meet Tom’s; intense, blue, piercing, and pleading, willing to overlook everything Shadow’s done for the sake of Sonic’s own safety. Naïve, sure, but maybe that’s why he and Sonic are such a good match.

He’d like to blame his response on peer pressure or exhaustion, but he’d just be lying to himself. Shadow, just like Tom, knows that this could mean life or death for Sonic. He’s risked his life for him once — what’s the risk of doing it again?

“Very well,” he concedes, finally, as a breath of relief leaves Tom in a sigh. “I’ll stay. But when he wakes, I’m leaving, and if I find out you’ve engaged in any form of communication with G.U.N. then I’ll make you regret ever offering me board and lodge in the first place.”

“That’s fine. That’s perfect.” He gives Shadow’s arm a squeeze beneath his fingers and exhales another relieved, shaky sigh. “Thank you — thank you. I really appreciate it. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Sonic.”

Shadow grunts in acknowledgement. The feeling is mutual.

But, while it’s all well and good to have the agreement now in place, it leaves a thousand unanswered questions in its wake. With discomfort clear in his voice, Shadow asks: “What will the…optics be? Will the rest of the household allow me to stay?”

Going by the way Tom hesitates to answer his question, Shadow wonders if he’s even discussed it with his own wife yet. “For Sonic’s sake, they’ll do anything. We don’t have a spare room, but if you’d like, you can stay in the attic with the boys.”

“I think they’d kill me in my sleep.”

Tom barks a short, sharp laugh, surprised at Shadow’s dry sense of humour. “Yeah, okay, maybe not. Is the sofa fine?”

The sofa is perfect, Shadow wants to say. The closer he can be to Sonic before he leaves, the better. It’s not exactly glamorous and he’s somewhat visible from the outside looking in, but that’ll be easily fixed by drawing the blinds and keeping the curtains closed. 

Besides, Shadow has no intention of maintaining relationships with this family once he leaves. The time spent under their roof will undoubtedly be uncomfortable and awkward, but it's temporary. He’d do best to stay clear out of their way if he wants to avoid being reported in a fit of spite for his bad attitude.

“Yes,” Shadow finally responds, meek. “Thank you.”

Tom’s eyes crinkle as he smiles. “Great.” He gives his shoulder a firm, encouraging pat, and it feels strangely like he’s being welcomed to play on a team for the first time in his life. “Welcome to the family.”

Chapter Text

With their awkward, albeit necessary, conversation out of the way, Tom and he retired to the living room to wait out what remained of the early morning hours until sunrise. A quick glance at the clock hung above the kitchen’s archway told him it was just a little after two A.M., meaning he had five or so hours to go until dawn broke, and a couple more before the rest of the house woke up.

Not that any of it mattered, of course. Shadow was keen to stay as far away from the rest of the inhabitants as possible. He was here to see Sonic through to wakefulness, regardless of whether it took months, and he’d do it diligently. 

Tom had taken the spacious loveseat near the coffee table while Shadow returned to the same spot he’d woken up in; tucked against one side of the sofa while Sonic rested blissfully on the other. He’d wrapped himself back in the quilt and settled down with his head against the armrest as Tom turned on an old movie playing on cable, lowering it to a volume just above a whisper. The film was grainy and sepia-toned and had actors in it Shadow didn’t recognise, already deep enough into the plot that picking up the thread felt impossible. But, neither he nor Tom were watching it. Not really. Shadow wasn’t dense — he knew that Tom had put it on as a means of an excuse to stay in the living room while he kept a careful eye on Shadow. It was a way for him to remain close-by without it being too glaringly obvious. 

Fortunately, the feeling was mutual. For all that he appreciated Tom’s earlier platitudes, the man was still a stranger and Shadow wasn’t all too eager to tuck himself into bed and doze off in a stranger’s home. People who initially appear well-intentioned aren’t always as they seem, and he’s been burned too many times to make that mistake again.

While his plan initially seemed fool-proof — assume a position close to Sonic to monitor his Chaos Energy levels, and keep a close eye on Tom sitting nearby — Shadow hadn’t accounted for just how exhausted he was. The combination of warmth from the quilt, white noise from the television, and the rhythmic rise and fall of Sonic's breathing lulled his defences until he thought it wouldn't hurt to rest his head on the armrest for just a moment. Just to give his tired eyes some respite. But, in the span of time it took for the movie to transition from one scene to another, Shadow was out like a light before he even realised he’d fallen asleep in the first place.

In fact, Shadow only realises what’s happened when he wakes up hours and hours later — well beyond sunrise — to the sound of hustle and bustle in the adjoining kitchen. 

Though not as panicked as the first time he'd woken on the sofa, Shadow still jolts awake as if physically ripped from slumber. He’s muzzy and loose-limbed and impossibly warm beneath the quilt’s cocoon, so he quickly shakes it off and pokes his head out into the blinding light of mid-morning. Low sun-beams pour through the open windows to paint rectangular patterns on floors that have recently been mopped if the lack of blood and smell of lemony-pine scent are anything to go by. 

Other than feeling considerably more rested than he has in months, he notices something else: a faint simmering warmth in his chest. Some of his Chaos Energy has been repleted. Granted, it’s not much — just a tiny percentile, barely a teaspoon’s worth from the massive reservoir he typically carries — but it’s welcomed nonetheless. While it’s nowhere near enough to Chaos Control, the restoration leaves him feeling less lethargic than he has since pouring everything into healing Sonic.

He’s not someone who generally needs a lot of rest and fuel; his metabolism cycles at a far slower rate than humans and Mobians, meaning he only really finds himself needing to sleep and eat every fifty-or-so hours. This is partly because he’s half-fuelled by Chaos Energy, which acts as a sustaining energy source that only depletes if he uses its power. However, with his usual reserves totally depleted, he’s left sapped and coupled with hunger and exhaustion, Shadow can’t think of a time he’s felt so utterly drained.

All of these feelings are only made sharper by the third thing he notices: the smell of something salty and delicious wafting from the kitchen next-door. 

Hunger physically grips his stomach like a vice. His body seems to gravitate involuntarily toward his right, toward the source of that smell. He hasn't felt this starved in his entire life — not even while on the run, nor after waking from stasis. It's a gnawing, clawing thing that threatens to override every other reason he possesses.

But nevermind the ache in his gut, Shadow’s first priority is to check on Sonic. He grunts and pushes up from his curl against the armrest so he can swivel to his side and check on the body lying prone next to him. Sonic is still dead to the world, exactly the same as he was when Shadow left him last night, with his chest rising in soft in-and-outs that would otherwise suggest that he’s just in a deep sleep.

A small, relieved exhale escapes through his nose. Gently, he reaches down to touch the soft fur atop Sonic's head, just fleeting contact, enough to confirm that he's still there and that this isn't a dream.

With the small amount of Chaos Energy he’s replenished, Shadow closes his eyes and fans his palm over the centre of Sonic’s chest to survey his Energy levels. He can’t feel much other than a faint throb pressing back against his palm, but it could be an indication that Sonic’s in some pain, so he presses a steady stream of what little Chaos Energy he has into Sonic’s core to ease that throb and relieve him of whatever’s causing his Energy to flare up. The weight on the sofa shifts as Sonic's body seems to melt into the cushions, tension draining away like air from a balloon. It's one of the many things he'd forgotten he was capable of; this gentle manipulation, this careful tending.

When he’s finished, the small amount of his replenished energy is gone and the simmering warmth from earlier has vanished. The loss is jarring, but he’s satisfied knowing he’s ensured Sonic experiences as little discomfort as possible. The downside is that the hunger pangs in his tummy only seem to intensify, and what little self-preservation he has left is overwhelmed by his body's insistent chant: food, food, food.

You can’t just ask them to feed you, his brain protests against his body’s instinct, and although he’s starving, he can’t help but agree. It’s uncouth. Besides, you said you’d keep as much distance as possible between yourself and them. Someone’s in the kitchen. Don’t go making trouble for yourself.

The hunger pang in his tummy grips him with white knuckles.

With a grit to his teeth, just as the smell of whatever’s cooking only seems to intensify, Shadow casts a quick glance to the adjoining kitchen space. I’ll just take a look, he reasons with himself. Just to see. I’m not asking for anything. I just want to see what’s happening, that’s all.

On weak limbs, Shadow folds the quilt neatly and places it on the empty space he rises from. It’s then he notices a pair of pristine, clean gloves on the coffee table, standing out like a calling card left specifically for him. He lifts them from the table and smoothes over their soft nylon texture with his thumbs, marvelling at how weightless they feel in his hold. Shadow slips them onto his paws and flexes his fingers inside the gloves, turning them over, and surveying how they look. They’re not quite a like-for-like for his other pair — those were thick and leathery, made for combat and durability, whereas these are flexible and breathable to make things much easier to grip and hold. They’re simple and white with snug cuffs and although his inhibitor rings hang loosely over his wrists, these are a thousand times better than being bare-handed.

It’s such a simple gesture, yet impossibly kind. Had Tom left them? he wonders. I’ll have to remember to thank him when I see him next.

Without making a sound, Shadow creeps around the sofa and sticks himself to the wall connecting the adjoining living room and kitchen space. He feels absurd, like a burglar character from some whacky film that’s desperately trying to blend in but sticking out like a sore thumb by virtue of being dressed entirely in black while everything around him bursts with color and light. He doesn't know who's around the corner, but whoever it is probably doesn't want him here. He's a stranger in their home, and the version of him they last encountered before he brought Sonic in wouldn't have been a pleasant one.

Tom is just one fraction of this family, and arguably the member most likely to extend an olive branch. The reaction he's bracing for from the other three falls somewhere between why are you in my house and get out before I beat you to a pulp.

Cautiously, Shadow pokes his head around the corner of the doorway and comes face-to-back with Maddie, the other human of the household, working at the stove. A quick scan of the space confirms she's alone, with Tom, Tails, and Knuckles elsewhere in the house or out in Green Hills.

He retreats a little so he’s barely peeking around the corner now, giving himself just enough scope that he can watch her without being obvious about it. She moves with the practice of someone who cooks frequently and enjoys it, too, navigating utensils and pots and pans without having to really look at where she’s poking or flipping something. Maddie’s dressed in loose cotton trousers and a long-sleeve jersey top, her hair pulled up into a knot on her head, and while Shadow can’t see her face, he can hear her humming along to the radio under her breath. She’s totally at ease as she dances around the kitchen, flipping something circular on a griddle before shifting to another burner to shake two pans’ handles when they splutter and sizzle. The air smells like bacon and batter and butter; rich, homey, utterly torturous.

Without warning, and without giving him time to retreat, Maddie pivots on her heel to grab something from the kitchen island behind her. Shadow’s heart lodges in his throat as he quickly whips around to retreat behind the wall, sticking his back flat to the paint. 

Did she see me? he wonders as his pulse thunders in his ears.

“Jee-zus!” she curses after a sharp gasp. The radio cuts off, drawing the room into sudden quiet. “You scared the crap out of me!”

She saw me. He swallows hard. Well, there’s no getting out of this one. Be polite. Don’t make this any harder for yourself than it needs to be.

Slowly, Shadow peeks back around the corner. He keeps himself pressed to the wall and his chin to his chest, looking up through his lashes at the sight of someone who looks far less happy to see him than Tom did. Which is saying a lot, considering Tom wasn’t exactly jumping for joy.

Maddie stands with one hand on her hip and the other pointing a greasy spatula at him. Her brow is cocked; it’s an expectant look, the look mothers in movies give their naughty children when they’ve done something poorly mannered. 

Despite her outward hostility, despite her obvious disdain, her contempt doesn’t feel like it comes from the same place as it would from other humans. Maddie’s not reacting to what he is, but rather because of who he is — someone who’s harmed her family, who put them through enough grief to last a lifetime. Her reaction is simultaneously refreshing, as much as it’s to be expected.

Her eyes search his face and whatever she finds there causes her to sigh. The stern facade crumbles slightly, her body sagging as both hands come to rest on her hips. “Are you doing that on purpose?”

Shadow blinks. He remains partially hidden behind the wall, with only his head peeking around the corner. “...doing what?” he asks, dumbfounded.

Maddie waves her spatula in his general direction. “That. What you’re doing. With your eyes.”

Shadow blinks slowly again, brow knitting together. “I’m…” he trails off, bewildered. Is she joking? Is this a human custom I don't understand yet? “I don’t follow.”

She sighs, muttering something to herself that Shadow doesn’t catch, before she turns her back on him. Whatever it was she saw in him, in his…well, his eyes, he supposes, it’s enough to melt her icy exterior. Only a little.

“Well, don’t stay there hiding behind the wall. You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

The: I wasn’t dies on his tongue before it makes it out of his mouth. Not only would it be rude, but she’s not exactly wrong, either. Before he has the chance to make a rebuttal, she’s back at the stove and is speaking to him again without looking directly at him.

“You hungry?”

His stomach physically lurches at the word. How is he supposed to respond? He hasn’t eaten in over a fortnight and while he feels fit to start chewing on his own arm, it feels impolite to take more than he’s already being given, even if it’s being offered.

Shadow opens his mouth to politely decline but his stomach responds in his stead, rumbling loudly and humiliating him where he stands. His mouth seems to glue itself together and he damns his earlier self for using so much of his Chaos Energy up — if only he had enough to Chaos Control, Shadow would have fled from embarrassment alone. 

Nonplussed by the reaction, she flips the meat in the pan and presses her spatula to it so it sizzles against the hot surface, bubbling and releasing some more of that delicious smell. “I’ve made enough, since Tom’s already gone ahead and offered you a spot on our couch. Without speaking to me first, of course. Typical.” The words taper off into an unhappy murmur.

Her tone feels accusatory, and though the words aren't aimed at him, they still land like a blow to the chest. Shadow’s at a loss of what to say because Maddie is immediately proving to be a very different host to Tom, but he doesn’t have to dwell on it because she’s not finished. She raises the spatula behind her, still tending to the food with her free hand, pointing its greasy end at him like a weapon.

“Don’t think that this means we’re on good terms. I don’t trust you. If I had it my way, we wouldn’t be in this situation at all, but I’m only letting you stay because of Sonic. Understand?”

“Yes,” Shadow responds, largely unbothered. Sure, it’s a little awkward to have someone basically declare their distrust of him but her hostility isn’t unexpected nor unwarranted. At least one of these humans here is sane. “That’s understandable.”

“You nearly killed my husband and you hurt my boys — especially Sonic. Tom may have forgiven you for what you did to him, but I haven’t.”

“Okay.”

“So I’m doing this for Sonic, not out of any goodness in my heart, and partly because my idiotic husband already made his mind up about you.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not going to be cruel. I’m not going to be unkind. But, mark my words: the moment I get an inkling that you might hurt him, or my family, again then I have Walters on speed-dial.”

Shadow gulps. Something tells him Maddie’s words aren’t empty threats this time. “Understood.”

“Good.” The spatula returns to one of the pans and quickly begins to nudge around something out of eyesight. “Now that we’re on the same page, can you go and get Knuckles and Tails to let them know breakfast is ready?”

That is enough to zap the short-lived warmth from his body. Shadow’s spine stiffens and Maddie pointedly keeps her back to him, tending to the food with an air of nonchalance; she’s dropped a bomb and is watching to see just how much earth it’ll blow up upon impact. He recognises this for what it is: a test, one he’s not certain on how to navigate.

He closes his gawping mouth and scrambles to comb through his racing thoughts that whizz through his mind like a swarm of insects taking flight. There's no clear path forward, no obvious correct answer, and he’s left asking himself: how am I meant to respond to this when she clearly wants me to do something that’ll make me feel uncomfortable? 

He could decline her offer entirely and go hungry, avoiding any further interaction with her or the extended family. But he's starving, and if he doesn't eat now, he'll be forced to resort to stealing later, which would only make a bad situation worse.

There’s also the option to simply say: no, thank you, and take breakfast without offering help, but even Shadow doesn’t have it in him to be so ill-mannered. He’s brash and to-the-point, not rude, and Maria would bequeath him if she found out he spoke so discourteously in the face of a stranger’s generosity.

Alternatively, he can stop overthinking the whole situation, suck it up, and go fetch Knuckles and Tails. This is the option he dreads the most. Shadow would rather starve for the next millennia and go back to his liquid-only diet from his days in the lab than interact with those two after all the embarrassment he’s caused.

Why does it matter? Why do I want to make a good impression so badly? He finds himself frowning at his own conflicting feelings and thoughts. Why do I care about doing this right?

Maybe she can see him overthinking, or maybe she’s just rubbing salt in the wound of his awkwardness, but Maddie pipes back up as she flips a patty on the griddle. “They’re out back, feeding the chickens and collecting some eggs.”

She turns to glance over her shoulder, one manicured brow arched, fixing him with another pointed look that makes it abundantly clear she's not asking — she’s telling.

Shadow’s fingers link at his front. The thin fabric of his new gloves makes touching feel closer, more sensitive, and as he twists his fingers by the knuckles he grounds himself in the twinges of pain. “Uh,” he manages ineloquently. “Where is…out back?”

She nods toward to her right. “Out the patio. Just pull the door to the left and it should slide open.”

Shadow casts a quick look towards the double doors, apprehension growing in his gut. Is this some kind of test? Is she trying to get me captured? “Won’t there be G.U.N. agents surveying the area?” he asks, the tightness of his throat making his voice sound strained.

“Not during the day. We, uh.” She clears her throat awkwardly, and that cold-steel expression from earlier shifts into something marginally softer. “We had Tails remotely disable their security cameras a few weeks back for privacy reasons, and they haven’t noticed yet.”

“They don’t know that their cameras aren’t working…?”

“It plays some kind of a looping feed. We did it for our own sake after a…disagreement with G.U.N. back in the summer.” The way she says disagreement leads Shadow to believe it barely scratches the surface of what sounds like a messy situation. “The soldiers only patrol at night now instead of around the clock, and we’ve already explained to the boys about you staying here for the time being, so they’ve been made aware. You’re safe to go outside. Trust me — I wouldn’t ask you if I wasn’t sure. The repercussions would be just as bad for us for housing you, as it would be for you getting caught.”

Shadow nods slowly. She’s right. While he’s terrified of his own standing, terrified that they might sell him out, they’ve already made their beds and now they have to lie in them. The Wachowski’s have to keep him as low-profile as possible, not only for Sonic’s benefit, but for their own, too. If what Sonic had said all those months ago was correct, if Tom and Maddie really were under pressure from G.U.N. to sell him out, then revealing his identity would only land them in equally hot water. It brings him a little comfort, knowing that if he’s going down then he’s not going down alone. Collateral damage, essentially. 

Although her platitudes do something to ease his worry, Shadow’s feet remain rooted. When he makes no indication to move, Maddie simply tosses another glance over her shoulder, expectant, with her brow inching up with each passing second. 

Mentally kicking himself up the ass and shoving his pride down to the bottom of his gut for the time being, Shadow robotically turns on his heel and heads toward the patio, marching in a staccato rhythm that broadcasts his discomfort. Maddie turns back to the stove but he can tell he’s being watched, somehow, though when he turns to look at her she’s making a point of being very interested in the frying pan in her hand.

A glass door separates the living room from the back garden, opening onto a wooden patio that wraps around the length of the house. He spots the blood-stained rug he'd laid Sonic on just nights ago, now rolled up and set aside for the bin collectors. He quickly averts his gaze from the grim reminder and focuses ahead as he pulls the heavy sliding door open.

Immediately, a gust of fresh October air sweeps through the gap and rushes into the kitchen behind him. It smells of pine and grass and dying summer and, mercifully, of no other humans in the nearby vicinity. He scents the air for good measure but other than Tom, Maddie, and a neighbour at the bottom of the street they’re the only humans in this stretch of the woods. At least until nightfall and G.U.N. resume their patrol duties of the property. 

Shadow tentatively steps out onto the wooden patio and shuts the door behind him to keep the warmth inside. The garden is nothing like he remembers it being — it’s sizable and long and much like the rest of the house in that it’s very clearly lived-in. Function prevails over aesthetics with the semi-kempt grass, the exposed brick-and-mortar garage at the bottom of the garden, and the litany of soccer balls and frisbees and other signs that teenagers live in the house strewn across the lawn. There's an overturned skateboard on one side, a basketball hoop on the other, and a couple of football goals barely clinging to life, pushed against the wooden picket fence that borders the property. Shadow’s memory of the space was from times spent under the cover of darkness of extreme weather, so seeing it in the day feels bizarre. It’s all the same, and yet somehow radically different. 

The one thing he’s sure absolutely wasn’t here during his final visit at Christmas is the chicken coop at the bottom of the garden. It’s only a small structure a few feet wide and a metre or so tall, and inside it are the two people he’s been tasked with finding.

Despite the chaos around them, Knuckles and Tails aren’t hard to spot. They’re two spots of bright, primary colours on the green-yellow expanse of early autumn, happily conversing to one another and blind to Shadow’s looming presence. He’s halfway down the patio steps when he realises that they’re talking and it causes him to stop and seek comfort by holding on to the patio step’s handrail. Whatever Knuckles says has Tails laughing a bright, tittering giggle that seems to warm the very air around him. Shadow not only feels like he’d be a burden to disturb their conversation, but also a hindrance to this otherwise domestic, lovely scene.

He watches and waits. And waits. He looks for the perfect moment where he feels like it’ll be the right time to interject. Maybe he should do it during a lull of conversation, or until one of them spots him, but Shadow knows deep down that there’ll never be a perfect moment; one where all the awkwardness suddenly goes away. It will never feel right to just go up and speak to Sonic’s closest allies while pretending he wasn’t trying to kill them all that long ago.

Knuckles, in particular, is a tough one for Shadow to face. Especially after he handed him his ass so spectacularly in the forest back in July.

Shadow casts a glance behind through the glass patio doors and catches sight of Maddie watching, cooking abandoned, in favour of seeing how Shadow is handling the task-come-test. They make eye contact, and she doesn’t bother hiding the fact that she’s watching him now. She fixes him with another pointed look, head tilted a little downward, lips formed in a pout, wordlessly saying: go on, I’m waiting.

It should be simple. It is simple. So, why is it bothering him so much that he gets this right?

He turns back to the garden, draws in a deep breath, and heads down onto the grass. Get it together, he curses himself. You’re the Ultimate Lifeform. Who cares how these weaklings perceive you?

Only when Shadow’s halfway across the threshold, walking in awkward, clunking steps, do they finally take notice of the fact that they’re no longer alone. Knuckles is half-stepped over the chicken wire with a wicker basket in his hand when he spots the approaching black speck: a smudge of darkness on the otherwise colourful landscape, conspicuous and out of place. His expression, which normally rests in a neutral frown, opens with surprise, and the conversation stops abruptly..

“Hedgehog,” he greets in his usual gruff voice, planting his feet on the other side of the chicken coop once he’s safely stepped over the wire. 

Shadow comes to a halt a few metres away. It feels like a safe distance; close enough so the conversation doesn’t feel weird, but also giving enough space so that he isn’t directly encroaching on their personal space. “Echidna,” he greets in return, polite, before he thinks better of it. “Knuckles.”

“You have awoken,” he states, walking forward and breaking that invisible barrier Shadow had established, moving deliberately into his space. It dawns on Shadow that this is his first time being face to face with Knuckles and Tails outside during the day. All of their previous interactions have either been inside, at night or under the cover of darkness, which was always Shadow’s territory.

In a complete reversal, he's willingly stepped onto enemy ground with his white flag raised. Beneath the bright sun and blue, open skies, Shadow surprises himself when he realises just how young Tails and Knuckles look. He has little grasp of their actual ages but they had always been fierce opponents despite their clumsiness and the jagged edges of their raw, unfettered talent and rag-tag dynamic. Age has never been something Shadow has used to measure someone’s capability and yet here, under the sunny sky, he’s struck by just how boyish they look; their round faces, their young eyes, their earnest expressions. They’re just like Sonic, and the total opposite of himself: a soul dead in the water, trapped within an ageless body, a child who never got to be a child and who will never have the opportunity to, either. Shadow is once again reminded of just how pedestrian and real their lives are, and how he just doesn’t quite fit in. 

Tails comes up behind Knuckles, using his big, bulky frame as a shield. Shadow glances down at him at where he peeks out from behind Knuckles’ shoulders and offers a nod as a greeting and an acknowledgement. 

It draws Tails a little out of his shell. He scoots away from Knuckles but still remains partially hidden, watching Shadow from beneath his brow and long, pale lashes. 

“The woman — erm, Maddie — told me to tell you that breakfast is ready,” Shadow delivers awkwardly. When neither Tails or Knuckles say anything, too busy studying him, Shadow clears his throat and presses his lips together. “She said she wants eggs.”

“Oh, of course,” Knuckles responds robotically. He clears his throat as well, and glances down at Tails with a pointed look; brows raised, and mouth pursed. A: well, would you look at this! expression.

A small, high voice comes from behind Knuckles’ legs. “Are you joining us?” 

Shadow breaks eye contact with Knuckles to look back down to Tails. He’s still cowering, but curiosity seems to have gotten the better of him, and now he’s standing up to the big, bad monster who stole his brother away.

“For what?” Shadow asks dumbly, knowing what the question means but just not knowing how to respond. 

“For breakfast,” Tails clarifies, still watching him intently. There’s something there, something shrewd, that makes Shadow reconsider his previous assessment of him. He knows that Tails is intelligent, sure — good enough to rival even Eggman — but cunning? Over what little interactions he and the fox have had, Shadow had never pinned him as the type.

He narrows his eyes down at Tails who, this time, doesn’t shy away. He’s watching Shadow like he’s trying to figure him out, and Shadow wonders if he’s finally met the true smarts behind the brawn and speed of team Sonic. What does that age-old stereotype say about foxes, again?

Shadow narrows his eyes. Tails merely blinks at him.

He huffs out of his nose and turns on his heel. “Yes,” he says, feigning his bravado, and heads back up the lawn to the house. He doesn’t check to see if Knuckles and Tails are following him, and has a feeling that they’re probably giving each other very pointed, obvious looks behind his back.

When he climbs the stairs and opens the door, he catches sight of them in the patio door's reflection, trailing a bit behind. Shadow draws a deep, steadying breath and wills the nervous flutter in his chest to subside before stepping back across the threshold with an expression that betrays nothing. Maddie’s put the radio back on and the song on air is upbeat with trumpets and a very happy-sounding lady singing about good times and sunshine. Meanwhile, she’s plating up the food she’s cooked on the dining table in the adjoining room while the rest cooks away in the griddle, sizzling away in a mix of butter, bacon grease, and fatty goodness.

Knuckles breezes past Shadow to pop the basket of eggs on the counter before he trudges to the table and hops up onto a chair, taking a seat. He looks right at home, leering over the steaming food with a look in his eye that demands a bellyful of greasy fry-up. 

“Here.” Maybe sensing his discomfort, Tails pushes a chair out from the table and gestures for Shadow to sit on it, before he crosses to the opposite side and hops up on his own.

He’d half-wanted to chicken out but with the invitation hanging in the air, Shadow is left with no option but to accept the offer. He climbs up onto the chair with a little difficulty and seats himself opposite Knuckles and Tails, keeping his hands folded in his lap and his gaze fixed anywhere but the faces across the table. 

It's higher up here than on the floor, and from this vantage point, he can finally get a proper look at the dining and kitchen area in full daylight. It looks much like the rest of the house; tastefully decorated, with marble countertops and sleek grey appliances save a standing wooden island in the middle of the kitchen. Gone are the colourful, curved-edged appliances of the seventies. Everything here seems to be inspired by straight edges and neutral tones; very industrial, and very modern.

Or, well, it looks like it used to be. The aesthetic is trampled by the many pawprints of the newer Wachowski family members, evidence visible in every nook and cranny of what was once likely a pristine, sophisticated space. The cabinet full of uniform white plates have out-of-place brightly-coloured plastic ones on top, next to clumsy hand-painted bowls and mugs with tacky superhero slogans. The fridge is plastered with magnets and photos and hand-drawn art pieces; a young Tom and Maddie hugging in front of Niagara Falls, a younger-looking Sonic dressed in a baseball cap and vest holding up a huge fish in front of a lake, a photo of them all in matching Christmas sweaters next to a pot-bellied Santa in what looks to be a mall. Shadow tunes out the background noise of chatter and fascinates himself at the snapshots of their lives; the fruit bowl full of grapes, the cutlery draw with forks mangled out of shape with teeth marks, the pantry that smells too strongly of mint, and the endless tins of canned chilli inside one of the cupboards he notices when Maddie opens it to find some syrup.

The sight of such a warm, family-focused space brings him back to a memory from long ago of Maria, sleep-rumpled and frail, showing him how to make hot cocoa in their shared kitchenette for the first time. She wasn’t allowed out of her sleeping chambers while she was going through a new round of treatment, and he wasn’t allowed out — period — so they were trying to be as quiet as possible without letting their cautiousness ruin the moment. It was sometime after Christmas when the air was at its coldest because Shadow remembers huddling with her underneath a quilt, standing in the communal space she, Gerald, and a select few of the highest and most trusted personnel shared within the lab. She was wearing two layers of pyjamas and her thin, emaciated frame sagged beneath the weight of the quilt, still smiling despite the shit situation she was in.

“Here,” she had gestured, pouring milk from a cardboard carton into two identical, sterile white mugs. “We’ve gotta heat this up first.”

She hadn’t been strong enough to lift the mugs so Shadow had crept out from under the weight and warmth of the quilt and hopped up on the counter, putting them in the microwave for her to heat as the room filled with the mechanical hum of the whirring fan. Once done, he took them out and copied her as she scooped some chocolate powder into her own, and he scooped it into his. The powder sat atop the milk like an island, floating until it sunk and bled the blank canvas mauve-y brown.

She wasn’t able to go out much after that. This round of experimental treatment was making her sicker than usual, causing her to sleep through mornings only to wake up when the sun was at its peak in the sky. During those few hours when she was at her strongest, she'd play guitar if she felt up to it, read with him, or sing. Her hair had grown thin and patchy, and there were days when her medication left her so disoriented she didn't recognise him or Gerald, gazing at them both with lost, heartbroken eyes. On those days, she didn't do much of anything at all.

“Sausage?”

Shadow’s head snaps around as he’s yanked back to reality. His dry eyes had been staring holes into the calendar on the wall, and he doesn’t know how long Maddie’s been speaking to him, standing there with food in a pair of silicone tongs. He blinks, then looks up to meet her gaze.

“Sorry?” he answers a little pathetically. It comes out dry and cracked. He swallows and clears his throat. “Pardon?”

“Do you want a sausage patty?” she repeats, slower this time.

Shadow clears his throat again. Glancing down, he discovers a plate has been placed in front of him, and across the table, Knuckles is already stuffing several sausages into his mouth. “Yes, please,” he says, because the lady in front of him is offering him hot food — something he hasn’t had since he was at the Piston Pit with Sonic.

She puts it on his plate and puts two on Tails’, before coming back around with a pan with what Shadow thinks may be scrambled eggs. He recognises it because Maria would eat it when she couldn’t really take in much solid food.

Wracked with that painful, gut-churning guilt again at the fact that he’s here and she isn’t, Shadow swallows down the swell of emotions in his throat and tries to will his painful memories away. He’s offered a few more items, of which he accepts all, and ends up with a plate full of food he doesn’t really recognise.

“Are you okay?”

His head snaps toward Tails, who's watching him with that strange, penetrating look again. He can't pinpoint it, can't name it, but it's as if Tails is looking straight through him, seeing him for the weak, broken thing he actually is. In that moment, Shadow decides he really isn't in the mood for empty reassurances from someone who clearly doesn't like him.

“That’s none of your business,” he snaps. Tails recoils, the calculating expression immediately replaced by something wounded.

Stop it, he curses himself instantly, practically grabbing his instinctive urge to bite and snarl by the scruff of its neck.. You said you’d be on your best behaviour, at least until Sonic wakes up. Don’t screw this up before you even make it through one conversation.

Shadow closes his eyes, draws in a deep breath, and holds it high in his lungs. He keeps the breath there until his chest throbs before he exhales it slowly, letting it carry his frustrations and pent-up emotions with it.

“That wasn’t very polite of me. I’m…” The word feels like taffy in his mouth, cloying and thick and too big to say, but he pushes through and says it anyway. For Sonic, he justifies. “I’m sorry.”

A huge, heavy fist slaps the rest of the air right out of his lungs. Shadow coughs when Knuckles delivers a few, safe thumps to his shoulder. His mouth is full of sausage and he speaks with it half-macerated in his mouth. “Do not worry, hedgehog,” Knuckles reassures, “I recognise that look on your face. I still see Chief Pachacamac and no one believes me when I tell them that we have conversations together.”

“Knuckles!” Maddie gasps, mortified by his blunt honesty about what's clearly a sensitive topic.

“What?” He stabs a slice of something beige on a fork already riddled with teeth marks. There’s the cutlery culprit, Shadow comments to himself. “He is clearly ruminating. It is good for someone to know they are not ruminating alone.”

“I wasn’t ruminating,” Shadow defends, voice strained as he tries to find his breath.

“There is no shame in rumination,” Knuckles declares, pointing his fork at Shadow, “only in its denial.”

Knuckles’ strange frankness and hard-hitting slap seemed to be the thing he needed to draw him from his depressive stupor. He clears his throat and flattens his ears to his head when he notices Maddie and Tails watching him, waiting to see if he’ll flip the table and lash out like a wild animal they must think he is.

Shadow, instead, looks down at the plate of food he has. His eyes flit to the knife and fork set on either side of the plate and belatedly realises he doesn’t know how to hold utensils correctly. Shadow glances up at Maddie, who’s holding her cutlery in a way that looks painful, and reaches for his fork. He holds it the same way he would hold a pen and does the same with the knife, sorely aware at how closely he’s being watched by the three silent figures on the table around him.

What’s on his plate looks delicious. He recognises the egg; a fluffy cloud of pale yellow that smells like pepper and butter. The circular patties he now knows are the sausage, though they’re nothing like he remembers seeing on television and in movies — those were long and stout, where these are flat. There are some crispy pink-brown strips, which Shadow thinks might be bacon, a stack of flat, beige bread-y flat cakes with a pat of butter on top, and a mound of crispy, shredded…something.

Whatever half of it is has his stomach growling aloud again, much to his embarrassment. His awkward hold of cutlery hovers over the plate, unsure of where to start, only fuelling his hunger.

“Have you had a breakfast like this before?” Maddie asks. She closes her mouth immediately after and settles back in her seat, as if wondering whether the question was too invasive. It's small talk aimed at politeness and amicability.

Shadow, with his knife and fork still poised and hovering, gives his head a small shake. How much should be divulged? How much is too much?

“I haven’t had breakfast before,” he says — the correct answer, neither too much nor too little. Factual, reserved, polite.

It does not have the desired effect. Maddie sets her knife and fork down with a frown and Tails, opposite, stops mid chew. “You’ve never had breakfast?” she echoes, as if it’s a deeply upsetting fact. “What did you used to eat?” She clears her throat. “If you don’t mind me asking, of course.”

The earnestness she displays mirrors Tom's and Sonic's. It's as if they're shocked by the simplest facts, and what makes it worse is that he isn't even trying to garner sympathy. He doesn't want it. He's tried to keep his responses straightforward and factual, but even those seem to upset Maddie and Tom deeply. They've seen his file, haven't they? Surely they must know what he's endured. Or perhaps something as simple as never having the dignity to shower himself or eat with cutlery is so innocuous that it’s a given that most people already do it.

But, Shadow isn’t ‘most people’, and he’s left feeling more and more like the simple retelling of his life’s facts is somehow tragic enough for any of the Wachowski’s to look at him with that sad look in their eyes.

Shadow shrinks a little into his shoulders and sets his cutlery down. “I didn’t typically have solid foods before,” he clarifies. Before is not expanded on, but he doesn’t feel the need to; he knows they understand. “Only on rare occasions, when…” Shadow clears his throat, choking down the swell of emotions. “When Maria would sneak me something. And then afterwards, once I got out, I ate what I could find.”

He sinks a little further into his shoulders, suddenly shy. Humiliation isn’t quite the word he’d use, but when he’s admitting to having to scavenge for food in front of a family who have a pantry bursting at the seams, it feels embarrassing. If he wasn’t already feeling totally othered, then this would do the trick.

“I see.” She nods slowly, digesting the words and the bitter taste they leave in her mouth. “Is this our first time eating something like this?”

“Breakfast?”

“Real food.”

“No.” Shadow shifts in his seat, and tightens his fingers in his lap as he keeps his gaze averted to the wall behind Maddie’s head, focusing on a strange pattern in the paintwork. “My diet has been expanded recently.”

The ‘been expanded’ is intentional. Not expanded, as if it happened organically and naturally, but been expanded; intentional, directed by someone. “Sonic?” Maddie prompts.

Shadow nods, grateful she’s filled in the gaps herself. It feels awkward to broach this topic in front of the people who know Sonic best but haven’t seen the side of him Shadow has. It’s like they’re both looking at different sides of the moon and proclaiming their view to be the real one, while only seeing half the full picture.

“Like what?” she prompts, feigning disinterest by cutting her food into even smaller pieces.

“Oranges. And…peaches, apples, and…fast food, I think he called it.”

“Hedgehog,” Knuckles says, holding his fork in Shadow’s direction, “have you ever eaten a grape before?”

Knuckles’ brash frankness, again, knocks him sideways. Shadow holds his gaze for a few seconds before he’s back to staring across at the wall’s grain, giving his head a quick shake. Knuckles registers that with a curt nod and a hm, as if he’s making a mental note, before he hacks at the eggs on his plate. 

With a sweet, hoarse voice, Tails raises up slightly in his seat to better regard Shadow. “Have you ever had pancakes?” he asks.

“Pancakes?”

“Oh!” He points down to the beige patties on his own plate with his fork. His own is slathered in jam and syrup, pooling around the plate like a moat. “These.”

“No.”

“These are my favourite.” Tails sinks his knife into the pile and cuts a small triangle out of his stack. “Maddie’s are the best.”

“Thank you, Tails.” Her smile lights up her face. “Shadow,” she says, and it strikes him that this is the first time she’s referred to him by name, “do you want me to cut yours?”

He responds quickly, defensively: “I’m fine.”

“Stop being stubborn and let her help you,” Knuckles’ low voice rumbles across the table.

“I can cut my own,” Shadow quips, finding the will to meet Knuckles’ gaze again.

Something sparks in Knuckles’ eyes, who turns to regard Shadow with a small frown. “You cannot. You cannot even hold the cutlery properly.”

“Boys,” Maddie cuts across, shooting a disapproving frown in Knuckles’ direction. “Knuckles, don’t be rude.”

He holds his hands up in confusion. “I do not understand what is wrong with what I said. I cannot cut mine, either.”

“It was your tone,” she responds. She points her fork at his plate. “Stop instigating fights and eat your food.”

“But I wasn’t—!”

“No ‘buts’!”

They all fall into an awkward silence. Knuckles, from across the table, shoots him a glare which Shadow matches with his own. It’s a tit for tat — payback for what happened in the forest, and Shadow won this round, by proxy of Knuckles losing a fight he didn’t even realise he was involved in. 

Maddie and Tails tuck into their food and Shadow, awkwardly, tries to follow suit. He picks his cutlery back up and tries to hold it the way they do but it causes his hand to cramp and he knows he’s doing it wrong, somehow. His eyes flit to Maddie’s plate as she, deliberately and slowly, cuts into her own pancake, giving him something to mimic. He copies her movements but the knife is difficult to hold and he can’t keep his fork steady without it mashing into the soft dough of the pancake. 

Won out by the gnawing hunger in his stomach, he sets his knife and fork down with a sigh and nudges it towards her. “Could you…” he begins, awkward and uncomfortable, trying to find a way to phrase it without sounding incompetent over such a simple task, “...help?”

“Of course,” she responds, carefully neutral so as to not embarrass him, and cuts the food up into small, manageable chunks. When she passes it back it’s all easy to pick up on the spines of his fork and he quickly catches up with the pace of everyone else’s eating.

The pancakes, as promised, are delicious; malty and fluffy and sweet. Shadow, upon Tails’ insistence, takes it with some jam and finds it tastes even better. Extending an olive branch, Knuckles suggests he stacks the pancakes between a piece of sausage and bacon, which he does, and finds it in his pride to remark how it’s ‘not a bad combination’ which soothes the sore of Knuckles’ ego. He tries not to let his ravenous hunger show but as soon as he starts eating he can’t stop, as though the floodgates have opened and now his body is determined to devour everything in reach. The option for seconds doesn't even occur to him before Maddie's already adding more to his empty plate while he licks his fork clean, giving him another helping she deftly cuts into smaller pieces.

“Hungry?” Maddie prompts, pushing the plate back towards him when she’s done.

He nods. The prickliness that plagued him earlier has been smoothed away by the satisfaction of his hunger, and suddenly it's much easier to maintain eye contact without feeling like he needs to flee when it becomes overwhelming. “Very,” he responds, before he’s scooping up a mix of everything on his fork and shoving it into his mouth with a self-satisfied sigh.

Half an hour later, with clean plates and full tummies, Maddie is collecting their dirty dishes and stacking them in a sliding rack she pulls out of one of the cabinets in the wall. Shadow sits back in his chair with a sudden drowsiness that he very rarely feels anymore; it’s the side effect of feeling sated and full, something he’s never really experienced. There's a sense of tranquility washing over him, pooling in his veins like honey, making all his earlier grievances feel distant or smaller than they had this morning. Much of it stems from the full belly but Shadow wonders if part of it comes from the feeling of safety the Wachowski’s home seems to have. It makes Shadow feel like he doesn’t need to have his hackles up constantly, even when every instinct is screaming at him to keep alert and keep wary. 

Even though his heart and mind is saying one thing, his body isn’t totally on board with that, still tightly-wound and highly-strung. But, then again, it’s always had a mind of its own. It recognises alarm in even the most innocuous things, a habit born from necessity, and one he’s finding hard to break.

He's lived his whole life as a perceived threat, accustomed to being the outlier, the aberration, so much so that it now feels strange to sit at a table with two other beings who look just like him. He can't help but watch Tails and Knuckles from the corner of his eye when he thinks they're not paying attention, marvelling at the length of their arms and torsos, their ears and tails, thinking: they're just like me. Sure, they're not hedgehogs, nor do they possess the same powers as him, but they share similar characteristics, and although he knows little about his own ancestry, it's clear that whatever he descended from is related to whatever they came from.

It’s part curiosity, part fascination. Tails and Knuckles might still consider him an enemy, but that doesn’t deter the wistful part inside Shadow that wonders what it would be like to be among people just like himself every day. He wouldn’t be stared at like a freak anymore. He wouldn’t be forced to navigate the strange customs-and-practices humans do that he just can’t seem to grasp. He wouldn’t have to feel like an outsider anymore. What would that even feel like? His entire life has existed on the fringes of society. Suddenly being part of one feels impossible to imagine.

Although the thought is nice, it dies a swift death when he’s reminded that companionship with others on Earth is a pipedream. As far as he knows, only Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles are of a similar species to himself on this planet, and that would never work out. Not after everything he’s done to Sonic, and certainly not considering he doesn’t plan to stick around Green Hills for much longer. Still. It’s still a nice thought to entertain, however briefly.

Tails sips the rest of his orange juice before he hops down from the chair, sneakers landing on the floor with a stomp. “Hey,” he prompts, looking up at Shadow with those big, blue eyes. “Do you want to play?”

The question shakes him from his reverie. Shadow sits up a little straighter in his chair and looks down his nose at Tails below. “Do I want to…” he trails off, unsure, “...play?”

“Yeah. Do you want to play?”

Shadow grows quiet, not sure if it’s polite to ask what he means again. Tails, blinking up with his huge eyes, tilts his head.

A hand lands on Tails’ head and ruffles his fur. Maddie, with a smile, says: “You’ve gotta explain it to him a little better, bud.”

“Oh.” Tails tries again: “Do you wanna come outside and play with Knuckles and me? We need three for a game.”

Shadow’s chest tightens at the offer. Playing with me? Why would they want to do that?

“Why do you want to play with me?” he asks aloud.

“Because we need three for a game. Sonic usually plays, but he’s sleeping, so…” Tails shrugs, and rocks onto the backs of his heels. “Do you want to play instead? We can’t play with just two.”

“I shouldn’t be outside more than necessary,” he responds as a means to decline. Tails’ expression droops, and despite his earlier reservations, Shadow can’t help but feel a pang of sympathy. “I ought to stay inside and look after Sonic in case he wakes up.”

“But he’s sleeping, and Maddie’s here.”

“A rogue G.U.N. soldier could spot me.”

“They don’t patrol until the evening. If you’re scared of being spotted, we could dress you up,” Tails offers; a compromise. “If you’re nervous, we can put you in some clothes so no one knows it’s you.”

“That’s a good idea,” Maddie says encouragingly, though it’s with a tone an adult would use with a child to humour their suggestion. 

“I can’t.” Shadow shakes his head, quills swaying with the motion. “Sorry.”

“But we can’t play if you don’t join in…”

“No.”

Maddie, sensing the tension beginning to bubble, claps her hands together. “Why don’t you figure out a game to play with just two people?” she prompts, giving Tails’ head another ruffle.

His small face pinches into a pout. “But we never play with two,” Tails complains. “There’s always three of us.”

Shadow, feeling strangely guilty for not only declining the offer but also feeling responsible for Sonic's incapacity, flattens his ears against his head. They all lapse into silence as Tails bores his gaze into the side of Shadow's head, resorting to peer pressure, while Shadow pointedly avoids eye contact and Maddie tries to think of a way to defuse the standoff before it escalates.

“Well, why don’t you and Knuckles play with the basketball, and when Tom comes home tonight we’ll ask him if he wants to join. You can do that with two, right?” she says as a means of compromise.

After a moment, Tails gives up the fight. “Alright,” he concedes, clearly disappointed, but smart enough to know that he won’t get his way even if he pushes. He turns away and heads out to the back garden with a heavy weight in his step, Knuckles trailing behind with less investment in the outcome, leaving Shadow and Maddie alone with only the whir of the dishwasher to fill the silence.

It doesn’t last long. With Tails out of earshot, Maddie turns to him, hands on her hips. “So, you’re staying with us for a while,” she says, a loaded statement.

It feels accusatory. Shadow bolsters himself, squaring his shoulders, and tilts his head up to meet her gaze. “I am,” he responds. “Does it make you uncomfortable?”

“Yes.”

“I did try to leave last night.”

“I know you did.” She sighs, reaching up to press her fingers to her brow, as if to soothe a headache that’s formed at the thought alone. “It’s not like I didn’t expect it, but he’s practically collecting you guys like you’re Pokémon.”

Pokémon? Shadow mouths to himself, confused, as she continues: “My words from earlier still stand. I’m finding it difficult to find it in me to overlook what happened to my husband and my kids. I’m not going to be cruel to you, but I’m not going to go out of my way to make you feel at home.”

At least one of these family members has some common sense, he thinks. I wouldn’t forgive myself, either. “That’s fine.”

She nods, like she’s trying to bolster and convince herself with her own words and confidence. “It’s going to be business-only.”

“As I’ve already told you, I’d like to leave, but was asked to stay. I don’t expect you to be kind to me.”

“Good. Glad we’re on the same page.” She clears her throat and adjusts her arms in their fold. “Now, what exactly do you plan to do while you stay here?”

“I’m here to monitor Sonic’s condition,” he says, the plain and simple truth. “You’ve fed me, which means I shouldn’t need any more sustenance until the time I leave.” That isn’t as truthful — Shadow really does need to replenish his energy considering the weakened state he’s in, but it feels burdensome to rely on these people more than he already has. “All I’d like to do is remain next to him.”

Maddie frowns down at him. She lets silence hang in the air, before she asks for clarity. “That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“You’re not gonna ask for, like, a book? Or a movie?” Her frown settles deeper. “You’re gonna sit there for…however long he’s out? What if it’s a month?”

“Is there an issue with that?”

“I mean, not really.” Despite her tone, Maddie doesn’t look mad, just confused. As if she wasn’t sure what to expect, but it wasn’t this. “It’s just…well, I’ve never seen a kid sit still for that long. Especially not Sonic.”

A kid. Other than hearing it from Tom, Shadow can’t recall the last time he’d ever been handled differently because of his age. The lab technicians and G.U.N. soldiers never really made a point of it because to them he was a weapon and a project first and foremost. Those weren’t things considered humane or mortal, and trivial things like age never came into question.

“Why does my age have to do with it?” Shadow asks instead.

“Well, you’re a teen, right?”

“I’m immortal.”

She rolls her eyes. “What I mean is how long you’ve been alive. I saw the files from Walters — you were found in the fifties, and lived in the lab for fourteen-ish years, and here you are. I’ve got three other kids in the house and I can’t think of a time they’ve sat still for more than two minutes without getting distracted.”

Shadow had never thought of it like that. Age categories like teenager and young adult were reserved for humans, not creatures like him. “I suppose,” he responds after a moment, noncommittal.

“I may not want you here, but I’m not inhumane, Shadow. I can get you a book if you wanna read a book while you’re here.”

“I don’t need to. I have a duty to protect Sonic, and I’ll fulfil it.”

She gives a resigned sigh. He feels like the battle has been won, but something tells him Maddie’s not one to give up so easily. “Y’know, you and Knuckles might get along pretty well. I’ve heard him say something pretty similar about the Chaos Emerald before.”

Shadow’s face pinches. “I highly doubt it. He doesn’t like me.”

“Well, do you like him?”

“I don’t know him.”

His answer causes her to make an expression, as if to say: you’ve just proved my point. “Well, you could talk to him for a start. You guys have a few things in common. I mean, knowing about Chaos Energy is one, right?”

He won't lie and pretend it hasn't been a thought he's entertained over the last twenty-four hours, but again, it's pointless. What good would it do to build bonds with any family members when he's intending to leave as soon as he's able? Regardless, he doubts Knuckles would even want to speak to him. Why would he, when his two best friends are Tails and Sonic? Shadow pales in comparison to their bright, easygoing personalities, an introvert among extroverts.

“Maybe,” he mutters, another noncommittal answer. 

“So, are you just going to sit in the living room with him for the rest of the day?”

“Yes.”

Her brows raise a little. All of her poking and prodding is bouncing off of Shadow as if he’s made of teflon. “Well, I hope you don’t mind company. It’s Thursday, which is my only full day off other than tomorrow and Sunday, and I was planning to chill on the sofa for a few hours.”

Shadow shrugs. “It’s your home. I won’t impede.”

“Good.”

They make their way into the living room where Sonic remains asleep, gently snoring away beneath the covers of the quilt. Maddie pauses next to where he lies and smooths a hand over his forehead, checking his temperature, before she trails her hand over his cheek in a soothing gesture. She parts to sit on the loveseat across from the coffee table, and Shadow takes a seat next to Sonic on the huge sofa. He, like Maddie, pauses a hand over his forehead, but he does it to monitor his energy levels instead.

“How is he?” she asks after a moment, watching Shadow from the short distance between their seats.

“Nothing is out of the ordinary.” The cushions shift as Shadow moves one of the many throw pillows next to his right hip to bolster Sonic’s head. “He’s not in any pain or distress. His energy levels are muted, which is to be expected, so I can’t imagine he’ll be asleep for any longer than another week.”

“How do you know all of that?” She gestures vaguely at Shadow’s height, as if to say all of him. “I went to vet school for six years and I wouldn’t have been able to tell that.”

“It’s not as technical as what you do.” Next to him, Sonic’s breath hiccups on the way in, drawing in deep before exhaling, long and drawn-out. It’s close to a sigh, as if he’s chipping into their discussion with a snarky: no shit, Sherlock. “Chaos Healing is a very temperamental procedure and we’re fortunate that Sonic’s body accepted it so well. I assume it’s because he’s channelled Chaos Energy before by going super. Perhaps prolonged use of the Chaos Emeralds have carved pathways in his body that have made him more reciprocal to receiving Chaos Energy, which is why the healing process worked so well.” Shadow’s expression twists. “Unusually well.”

“Does it not always work like that…?”

He gives his head a deft shake. “No. Never. Particularly not when it comes to humans. Your bodies aren’t equipped to handle Chaos Energy in high volumes. Relieving pain and healing sprains and papercuts is one thing, but there’s a reason for why I was so hesitant to perform on Sonic a few nights ago.”

He recalls the incident where the technician cut off the earthworm’s head and Shadow was to speed up its regeneration process, but the stress the worm found itself under caused its respiratory system to seize and fail. Then, there was another time that he only remembers through pale vignettes, of an incident where he had tried to assist in the reattachment of a lab technician’s thumb that had been severed. How did it end? he wonders to himself, trying to draw pieces of his memories hidden deep, deep inside the cavern up. Maybe there’s a reason I can’t remember. Maybe I’ve hidden those memories on purpose.

A contemplative look crosses Maddie’s face. “How do you monitor a patient’s health?”

Shadow grunts at the thought of trying to explain something instinctive and natural in technical terms. Humans don’t have the same senses he does, and simplifying the experience is akin to butchering, which he tells Maddie as such. “It’s like smell, or taste, or touch. I sense Chaos Energy and read it the same way you feel ice and know it’s cold. Energy isn’t tangible — but I possess a great deal of it, and so I can transfer it from myself to someone else.”

“Right,” Maddie mutters, nodding as the words sink in. She understands what he’s saying, but it’s so difficult to conceptualise that it’s still taking her some time to wrap her head around the concept. She’s a vet, not a physicist. “So, you can…feel Sonic’s energy?”

“Yes. I can sense it. The same way I can sense yours, and Tom’s, and everyone else’s. It’s like taste, I suppose. Your tongue is able to detect if something is sweet or salty or sour, because you possess the sense of taste. I am able to detect certain energy types and levels, because I possess the sense to. ”

“That makes a little more sense, actually. No pun intended.”

Shadow continues, oblivious to her joke: “To answer your question, Sonic is doing as expected. I transferred a great amount of Chaos Energy onto him, so his body is recuperating.”

“If you, say, healed a papercut for me, would I also go into a coma?”

“It’s unlikely, because it would only require a very small amount of Chaos Energy to heal. What Sonic experienced — healing-wise — was quite traumatic, so his body needs to forcefully shut down most of its other functions just so it can focus on recovery.”

“Even though his leg is already recovered?”

“That’s right. Like a system reboot, I suppose.”

“And he’ll be perfectly fine afterwards?”

Shadow blows a breath out of his nose as considers how to respond. “It will take time. He hasn’t replenished much of the blood he lost, and will likely be quite weak, so for time afterwards he’ll be lethargic and tired. But, it’ll pass. Once a patient has been healed, the worst of the process is over and done with.”

Maddie, from her position across the room, raises a brow at him and tucks her legs beneath her, cwtch against the loveseat. “For a guy who didn’t use this power much, you sure do know a lot about it.”

The side of Shadow’s mouth twists into a pinch. “I used it sparingly on others, and primarily on Maria. She needed a lot of pain management during difficult months. Because of how weak she was, it physically exhausted her, so although the process of easing her pain wasn’t particularly strenuous, because of how emaciated she was her body saw it as traumatic. I may not have done a lot of physical healing, but I know how the body recovers from this quite well.”

They lapse into silence afterwards. It’s not awkward, but Shadow feels like he left their discussion on a sour note, and though he’s in no rush to fill the empty space of their conversation he can practically feel the tension in the air. Shadow tucks his knees to his chest and rests his back to the sofa, still, as Maddie takes it as her cue to turn back to the television where they left off and switch it on. She quickly lowers the volume when the sound of a day-time talk-show host’s laugh blares through the speakers so as to not disturb Sonic. As Maddie flicks through the channels Shadow watches, entranced, as bright shapes and colours fill the screen corner-to-corner. This is a far-cry from the tiny screen Sonic had brought to the den and a little difficult on the eyes just because of how intense its clarity is, but Shadow can’t tear his gaze away, transfixed by the vividness of the picture. Maddie’s thumb mashes one of the buttons on the remote, pulling up a black screen with red text, showing a catalogue of media to choose from. She flicks through some tiles under the text 'Telenovelas’ when his eyes catch sight of a familiar set of biceps and long, black hair. “La Ultima Passion…”

The words are out of his mouth before he realises it. Maddie shifts in her seat so she’s better facing Shadow, regarding him with a strange look. “You like L.U.P.?” she remarks, spoken as a statement rather than a question.

L.U.P.? Shadow remarks to himself. Does this TV show have its own abbreviation?

“I watched it once.”

Confusion only twists her expression tighter. “When? How?”

He supposes it isn’t exactly a strange question — Shadow doesn’t recognise music, or social cues, but he does recognise Juan’s impressive gun show. “Eggman and Stone enjoyed the series and had it playing in their lair during the time I was there.”

Maddie huffs, turning back to the TV. “Guess the love for Juan Carlos’ many, many love affairs appeals to villains, too.” She flicks her gaze to Shadow. “No offence.”

“None taken.”

Maddie presses a button on the remote which brings up a title card and episode list. “Well, I’m gonna catch up on the recent season. You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to.” It sounds passive, a take-it-or-leave-it kind of statement, but in the last few hours Shadow has come to pick up on some of Maddie’s cues and it seems that she’s more bluster than actual bite. He turns to look at her and although she’s facing the TV, her eyes are on him, and he can tell that her comment is intended to be an invitation for him to join.

It’s another olive branch, and one Shadow doesn’t feel worthy of receiving, but is learning to accept nonetheless. “Well, alright.”

His answer causes her to huff, indignant but clearly satisfied, as she settles further into the loveseat and presses ‘play’ on episode twelve of season sixteen. “What episode did you watch last?”

“Uh,” Shadow pauses while he thinks. “I’m not sure. I didn’t realise there were so many…”

“Hoo boy, yeah, this airs every single Friday without fail. Tom and I have been watching it since I finished vet school. Usually Knuckles joins us, but we had to stop him watching it after Juan died.”

“Juan died?”

“Jeez, you’re that far back? I mean, he came back at the end of the season at Gabriella and Pablo’s wedding, so it’s fine now, but that is so season twelve.” Maddie angles the tip of the remote in his direction. “We’ve got a lot to catch up on.” Hesitant, but spurred on by the invitation, Shadow nods, settling further onto the sofa. “And you can’t tell Tom we watched this together.”

“Why?”

“We promised not to watch it without each other, but he’s working, and the last episode ended on a cliff-hanger. A girl can only wait so long, y’know?” The strum of a Spanish guitar introduces the episode. Maddie presses a button on the remote a few times, and the speaker’s volume increases. “So, zip it.”

Feeling like a strange bond of secrecy has formed between them, Shadow turns to face the tv as the guitar’s thrum picks up in speed and the birds-eye view of a vineyard slowly pans across the screen. The episode starts with a flourish as a character Shadow doesn’t recognise, but will soon come to learn is Juan’s step-father-come-rival, who introduces himself with a loud proclamation of fury. 

From the moment it plays he’s absolutely captivated by the bright colours and sun-kissed skin and scandal and wine being tossed and loud music. It’s like a drug, drawing him in until he’s on the edge of his seat and gasping in time with Maddie when something particularly scandalous happens. As the episode comes to an end Maddie’s already pressing the ‘next’ button, settling into her seat with her thumbnail in her mouth idly as they pick up on the cliff-hanger. 

He doesn’t know how much time passes. The episodes seem to blur and soon enough they’re offering passing commentary, like: “I can’t believe he just did that,” from Maddie and: “He’s going to regret making that mistake,” from Shadow, with an agreeable hum from Maddie to back him up. At some point the estranged mother-in-law, Carlita, has entered the picture and is wielding the family dagger to Gabriella’s throat when a huge bang! knocks against the window, completely shattering the moment.

In a flash, Shadow springs onto his knees and shoots an arm out over Sonic's prone body to shield him from whatever caused the sound. His heart hammers against his ribs and he can barely control his spiking pulse before he realises what it was: the football Knuckles and Tails were playing with had been accidentally kicked against the door. Knuckles waves an apologetic hand, picking the ball up from the patio floor, before jogging back down the garden to resume their game.

Shadow retracts his arm from Sonic's still, sleeping form, drawing it back into his lap, and shifts onto his haunches. Maddie's watching him with a strange expression, one betraying multiple emotions, surprise being the dominant one. Surprise at how he'd instinctively moved to protect Sonic above all else, at how he'd sprung into a defensive stance at the first loud noise. Shadow pretends not to notice her scrutiny and instead curls back into the warm spot he'd been forming against the couch's arm.

They settle back into the episode but Shadow can tell that Maddie’s itching to say something, to do something, with the way she seems to shift in her seat like she can’t get comfortable. After a moment, Maddie finally breaks their self-imposed tension: “They can be a real pain in the backsides sometimes — always kicking the ball against the house. God knows how many windows we’ve smashed, and that door’s already damaged enough.” It’s small-talk, but there’s something else there, too. It’s less edgy. Less loaded than the previous times she’s spurred conversation. This, unlike the last few hours, feels organic. Shadow doesn’t know quite what’s prompted it but Maddie suddenly feels less like an adversary and more like a neutral ally.

“Does it happen often?”

Maddie groans. That sound is enough of an answer in itself. “Enough for it to knock the door off of its hinges. They get too competitive and take things too far. Typical teenage boys, I guess.”

Shadow swivels in his seat, looking over the back of the couch out the window leading to the garden. Knuckles has jogged back over to Tails and they’re kicking the ball back and forth in a strange game Shadow doesn’t recognise. Whatever it is that they’re doing, there’s no clear rule nor winner. Knuckles picks up the ball and promptly headbutts it, while Tails tries to whip it with one of his tails into a rickety goalpost at the garden’s far end.

“What are they doing?”

Maddie glances over her shoulder, before she shifts in her seat as well to join Shadow as they watch the events unfolding in the back garden. “I have no idea. Usually they play basketball, or soccer. Tails is usually the goalie, so Knuckles is probably wiping the floor with him right about now, but it doesn’t look like soccer, so they’ve probably made up their own game and rules again.”

“Soccer…” Shadow repeats under his breath to himself, watching as the ball is picked back up and Knuckles kicks it with enough force for it to bounce off of the brick wall and ricochet back across the yard at a blurry speed. “How does that work?”

He doesn’t see it, too preoccupied with watching the game underway between Tails and Knuckles, but a small, barely-there smile has formed at the corner of Maddie’s mouth. “Usually the three of them play it together — Knuckles and Sonic have to try and score a goal, and Tails tries to block them from scoring it into the net. There’s some other rules they made up but it changes from week to week, so I honestly can’t remember. Sometimes they have bonus points, and sometimes they have to change goals in the middle of the match for reasons I don’t get.” 

“Who usually wins?”

Maddie hums. “Depends on the day. None of them take well to losing, though.”

Shadow nods. “Sonic’s a pretty sore loser.”

It surprises a laugh out of her. Shadow tucks his chin to his chest at the loud sound, unsure at whether she’s laughing at him or at what he said. “You’re right, he is a sore loser,” she concedes, her small smirk blooming into a grin. It eases the tight wind of his shoulders. Not at me, then, he realises with relief.

“You should go out there and join them,” she prompts, nodding her chin towards the window. “They could do with a third. Tails did offer, y’know. You might have fun. Kill some time.”

Shadow blinks as he watches the ball get launched over Tails’ head and into the goal. Both he and Knuckles are working in sync even if they’re trying to snatch the point from each other, their fun and energy infectious, even to himself as a bystander. Resting his chin on folded fingers perched against the sofa's back, Shadow follows the ball's trajectory as Tails deflects it with a flick of his tail, scoops it up in one fluid motion, spins, and sends it sailing across the yard into the opposite goal. The movements are effortless and natural, born from enjoyment rather than necessity, and Shadow tries to picture himself joining their duo but the image fractures before it can fully form. He would be stiff and awkward and out of place; the dish someone brought to a pot-luck that everyone thinks is unappetising, or a misshapen odd piece that doesn’t fit any jigsaw.

He's only ever used his body as a weapon. Every kick, every movement has been calculated for maximum damage, every muscle trained to remain coiled and ready for the next threat. His limbs don't know how to exist without that constant tension; it serves him well when speed and precision mean the difference between life and death, but he doesn’t know how to translate that into friendly competition. Even Sonic struggled to bring that out of him. Shadow knows with crushing certainty that his presence would dampen that joy.

"I don't know how to," he admits quietly.

“You don’t know how to…?”

“I don’t know how to play,” he says, watching as Knuckles takes the ball to the face and Tails bursts into raucous laughter.

“That’s okay,” Maddie murmurs, her voice automatically softening to comfort him through what she assumes is a moment of vulnerability. Her hostility from earlier has been replaced by the instinct to soothe a distressed child. “They’ll teach you the rules. Soccer’s pretty straight forward.”

“No, I—” Shadow pauses, then tries again with careful emphasis. “I don’t know how to play.”

She blinks at him, mind working over the words, unsure of just what he means until it clicks and it occurs to her that he’s not talking about soccer. 

Maddie makes an involuntary, distressed sound in the back of her throat. Shadow's head snaps toward her, and she's already pressing her hands to her face as if she can somehow contain her reaction. "You don't know how to play," she repeats, the words carrying the full weight of realisation rather than question.

He hadn't meant to upset her. Shadow keeps causing Tom and Maddie to make those pained expressions, as if they're hurting not for themselves, but for him. Tom had looked crestfallen when he mentioned never having showered, then Maddie this morning when he said he'd never eaten breakfast, and now this: admitting he doesn't know how to play with other people.

Why would any of those things surprise them? They know what he is and what he was used for. He doesn't see what's so terribly upsetting about it all. It doesn't upset him, so why does it bother everyone else so badly?

Maddie drags her hands down to her chin. She’s gathered herself but there’s still a twist to her expression. “Well, the great thing is that there’re no rulebooks for playing,” she says, her voice deliberately bright. “It’s the most natural thing a person can do. Even babies play, before they can make out shapes and sizes and colours.”

“But I was never a baby,” Shadow remarks, factual and honest, and Maddie's face does that same thing from earlier, as if she's received terrible news and is trying not to let it show.

He watches her reaction with genuine puzzlement. He doesn't understand what's so tragic about stating the truth. He hasn't experienced, and will never experience, childhood. That is a luxury reserved for others, and not him.

“Then, why don’t you start small?” Maddie suggests, smiling despite the fact that her eyes are not.

“Why would I need to play?” Shadow gestures to the space next to him on the sofa. “I have a duty, and a purpose. ‘Playing’ would be a waste of that time and focus.”

It, again, is a totally factual statement. He understands that the phrase can sound rude but he doesn’t mean it, and fortunately, having caught onto his manner of speaking, Maddie doesn't take offense. “Sometimes you don’t need a…” she trails off, looking for the right words to say, “...a specific, drawn out explanation of why. You just do, because you think you might like it. You might’ve never been a baby, but you’re still a kid, and every kid deserves the chance to play.”

She says it in such a simple way it has Shadow pausing for thought. Because it really is that simple, isn’t it? It’s why he did all of those things with Sonic — trying new foods, going to new places, seeing new sights. It wasn’t with the intention to specifically broaden his horizons or tick things off a meticulous list; they just did it because it felt right, and it was fun, and they didn’t need a reason outside of that.

He blinks his big eyes over at her. Maybe she can see the cogs turning behind his eyes, or maybe he’s not as expressionless as he believes himself to be, because Maddie’s no longer watching him with that sad look on her face. She gives him a genuine smile that causes the corners of her eyes to crinkle.

“Okay,” he responds. “I’ll consider it.”

A quiet moment stretches between them, comfortable in a way that surprises him. Maddie doesn't look away, and neither does he. There's an understanding passing between them, unspoken but weighty. She's seen past her pre-conceived perception of him and has glimpsed something beneath his veneer, something worth extending kindness toward, even if grudgingly.

“Okay,” she echoes softly, and the word feels like an agreement to more than just playing. It feels like a tentative truce, fragile but real.

Shadow settles back against the sofa arm, letting the warmth from the central heating seep into his bones. Through the window behind him, Knuckles and Tails continue their unnamed game, their laughter muffled through the glass. Beside him, Sonic continues to breathe steadily, unaware of the small shifts happening in the world around him. 

For the first time since arriving at this house, Shadow doesn’t feel the constant need to calculate his next move, to assess threat levels, to remain coiled and ready. The exhaustion he's been holding at bay settles over him like a blanket, but it's different from the weariness that came with his Chaos Energy depletion. This is something softer. Something that tells him that it’s okay to rest here, just for a moment.

He glances at Maddie, who's already turned back to the television, though he catches the small, satisfied curve of her mouth. Then his gaze drifts to Sonic's peaceful face, to the steady rise and fall of his chest.

Shadow tucks his knees closer to his chest and hears her words from moments ago echo in his memory. Every kid deserves the chance to play, she'd said. He considers the possibility of what that would look like for him, if maybe, just maybe, the sentiment had space for one more person to join the mix.

Chapter Text

At six o'clock sharp the front door opens with a rattle and a click. The sun has long begun its descent, drawing Green Hills into a haze somewhere between dusk and nightfall. It's cold enough outside that breath mists in the air, and condensation gathers across the corners of the home's windows, hanging from the spiderwebs like tiny jewels. 

Shadow and Maddie, invested in the umpteenth episode of La Ultima Passion, don’t notice the sound until a voice calls: “We’re home!” and the front door shuts with a loud bang. “Whoops, sorry — wind!”

Shadow glances towards the entryway and is startled when he realises just how dark it's gotten. The only lit room is the sitting room, and aside from the patio's lights, the rest of the house remains shrouded in shadow. When did that happen? I could swear it was still light outside just a moment ago. Has time passed by that quickly?

Wait, who’s ‘we’?

Maddie angles the remote control towards the television and presses a few quick buttons to exit off the episode, taking them to the homepage full of other box-sets. She casts a knowing glance in Shadow’s direction, wordlessly saying: you remember what we spoke about? which he matches with a curt, short nod. It’s a seal to their unspoken promise and he has barely another second to reflect on just what that means for him and Maddie when a huge, four-legged creature bounds through the house and skids into the living room with the grace of an avalanche. 

It lunges for Maddie with an open, panting maw, standing up on its hind legs to reach twice its natural height. Its tongue lolls out of its mouth and its tail wags with enough force to beat a bruise into a man. Shadow finds himself curling his legs up tight to his chest, half expecting Maddie to be just as alarmed at the sudden entry, but instead she greets the animal in what looks like a wrestling match, steadying its huge frame with her arms as it nearly bowls her over.

“Hey, buddy!” she greets, running her hands up the side of the creature’s back to give it a good scratch. “Good day?”

It whimpers and whines in its overwhelm, its huge body swaying with the force of its tail’s wag. The creature hops down from her shoulders to dash back out into the hallway in a mess of gangly limbs and paws that skid on the wooden flooring, claws clicking as it likely goes back to see Tom.

Shadow finds himself pressed flat-backed to the sofa, horrified, at the sight. “What on Earth is that?” he mutters, feeling the primal instinct to curl around Sonic's sleeping form and protect him from the strange, furry beast roaming the house as if it owns the place.

Maddie tosses the remote control onto the loveseat and brushes the fur from her chest with quick flicks of her hands. “That’s Ozzy,” she responds, just as Tom comes into the room, dressed in a brown bomber jacket and his tan police uniform. She presses a kiss to his cheek and he presses one to her forehead in return — an easy gesture, one they've clearly performed a thousand times — while the creature lingers next to Tom's side, watching them both with dark, dumb eyes. “You, uh…you ever met a dog before?”

“No,” Shadow responds immediately, his voice clipped and short. 

Ozzy, maybe recognising that it's being spoken about, finally notices Shadow on the sofa. Its tail freezes mid-wag, pointed up like an antenna, as it scents the air. “He’s friendly,” Maddie reassures in a tone that sounds like a warning, which is of no consolation to Shadow, who watches in apprehension as those shiny, black eyes stare unseeingly in his direction. “Maybe a little too friendly.”

Satisfied with having scented the room and finding nothing of threat, Ozzy trots over to the sofa where Sonic and Shadow lay. Shadow scoots his knees up closer to his chest, trying to put as much distance between himself and the dog as possible, but Ozzy pays his body language no mind. The dog hops up onto the sofa to crowd against Shadow, stealing what little space there was left, his warm bulk pressing into Shadow like he's found the most comfortable piece of furniture in the house.

“Ozzy!” Maddie scolds, but the dog ignores her and continues to settle down on Shadow like he’s a bed made specifically for him. Shadow remains frozen, as if stillness might somehow ward the dog away, and does his best to remain calm as Ozzy leans his hefty weight into him and crams himself onto the small amount of available real estate. Maddie cries: “Oh, my God. Tom! Get him!”

Tom doesn’t seem to find the sight that much of a bother. He folds his arms and chuckles as he watches Ozzy press its huge bulk into Shadow like he’s catnip to a cat. The sound of his laughter is warm, genuine; the kind that fills a room without effort. “He likes you.”

In a deadpan tone, wavering with barely-contained panic, Shadow remarks: “It is lying on my face and crushing my lungs.”

“Yeah, he does that. Stretch your legs out and he’ll probably give you a little more space.”

Albeit reluctantly, Shadow does as Tom suggests and returns to how he was sitting just a moment ago: legs stretched out in front of him, feet barely poking over the edge of the couch, trying to move against the sixty pounds of fur and slobber pressing against him. And, as Tom said he would, the dog quickly takes note of the new space and shifts its weight on Shadow’s lap instead of his chest. He folds his paws under his chin and rests his head on the sofa's arm while his belly settles warm and heavy across Shadow's legs, his back paws laying splayed behind him, barely brushing Sonic's head.

“It is lying on me.”

“Yep,” Tom remarks, making no move to retrieve the dog.

“It is incredibly hot.”

“It’s even worse when he’s trying to take up mattress space during the summer, too.” Tom grins at the memory, shaking his head. “Last July, he nearly melted me.”

Shadow glances down at the creature in his lap with a frown. “What did you say it was called…?”

“He is called Ozzy,” Tom corrects, coming over to the sofa to give the dog's head a good pat. His hand is large against the dog's skull, weathered and warm. “This here is my best bud. He seems pretty fond of you.”

Tom parts from Ozzy and stands next to Sonic's sleeping body, blissfully silent next to the commotion happening on the other side of the sofa. He squats down with a slight grunt — the day's work catching up with him — and brushes a hand over Sonic's forehead, testing his temperature like Maddie had done earlier, before giving his quills a gentle scruff. His expression is tender in a way Shadow hasn't seen from many adults. 

“Has he been like this all day?” Tom asks.

“He’s been like this since Tuesday, Tom.” Maddie rolls her eyes but it’s without malice — she’s humouring her husband, and trying to diffuse his worry. “What’d you say, that he’s not gonna wake up for another week?”

Shadow realises he’s the one being spoken to when silence follows Maddie’s words. He glances up to her, then to Tom, and nods. “I’m not certain, but it’s unlikely.”

“Tell him what you told me,” Maddie says, nodding her head in Tom's direction with an encouraging look. It feels like she's giving Shadow an acknowledgement, looping him into the bigger picture of their conversation rather than leaving him hanging on the sidelines like a spare piece.

He baulks, not expecting to be put on the spot. He’s not the best with group conversation but there’s something about the way Tom and Maddie are watching him that feels patient, like they know he'll need time and they're willing to give it to him. His raised defences drop slightly, and he reminds himself that this isn't a fight to be won. He doesn't need to defend himself. Not in front of these people.

“Due to the amount of Chaos Energy that had to be applied, Sonic’s body has had to shut itself down to cope with the healing process. That’s why he’s in a comatosed state. I don’t know how long he’ll be like that as I’ve never dealt with such a traumatic wound, but considering he typically heals quite quickly, then I imagine it’ll be anywhere from a week to a month.” Shadow’s mouth twists. “Unless he’s feeling particularly restless, in which case he might force himself out sooner than he needs to be. Only time will tell.”

Maddie nods as he speaks, listening closely and taking it in as a doctor would when listening to another consultant’s advice. “See? There’s no point getting worked up over something we can’t control.”

“I know,” Tom responds, exhaling out his nose as his hand lingers over the quills on Sonic’s head. “I’m just worried.”

“I know you are, baby. But he’s doing fine. The longer he stays resting, the quicker he’ll get better, right?” Maddie reassures as she comes up behind him and places a hand on the small of his back. 

“Yeah,” Tom sighs the word. “I know…”

“Good.” She gives his back a gentle pat, and presses another kiss to his cheek, a gesture of reassurance more than affection. “Now, come on. I’m going to put dinner in the oven, and you ought to go run yourself a hot bath to relax. Worrying won’t fix anything — it’ll just make you anxious.“

The promise of food fortunately does the job of perking Tom up. His hand retracts from Sonic’s still body as he stands to his full height, leaving Shadow to fend for himself with the dog on his lap. “Oooh — what’s cookin’?”

“Lasagne that’s been in the freezer since last week. Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it!”

They head into the kitchen together just as the door connecting their dining room to the back garden slides open. In comes Knuckles and Tails, short-of-breath from hours spent playing outside, heading in Tom’s direction with bright expressions, rosy cheeks, and wet noses. Tom sweeps Tails up into his arms with a beam, giving him a squeezing hug, as Tails’ twintails kick up into a steady, happy rotation. Knuckles follows closely behind, lazily trying to part his tangled-up quills from one another with just the aid of opposable thumbs. “Boys! Good day?”

“Yeah — I beat Knuckles in basketball!” Tails boasts with a proud smile.

Knuckles clarifies in a matter-of-fact tone: “You did not beat me, fox. I let you win.”

Tom raises his brows with obvious amusement. “Sounds a lot like that means he beat you, bud.”

“His victory was only due to my charity.”

“Tom, Tom, can you play with us?” Tails pulls back from the hug, fingers pleated behind Tom's neck, regarding him with big, pleading eyes that are hard to refuse. “We found the ball we got at Christmas behind the garage and wanted to play soccer, but we only have two on our team.”

Tom’s expression crumples. He eases Tails down onto the floor and makes a small sound when the angle pulls at a muscle in his back. “Ah, sorry bud — not tonight. It’s been a long day, and I’m feeling pretty tired. Maybe on the weekend, when I’ve got a day off.”

Tails sags at that response, so Tom ruffles his hair to try and diffuse some of his disappointment. “We’ve got a new speedster in the house. Why don’t you ask Shadow?” he proposes.

Tails frowns, directing a glance towards the sofa where Shadow sits with Ozzy draped across his lap. “I already asked. He said no.”

Maybe not expecting Tails to have already tried to mend their previously burned bridge, Tom falls into silence, unsure of what to say next. Maddie, fortunately picking up on the lapse in conversation, breezes into the room with a smile and places her hands on Tom’s shoulders. “We’re gonna work on dinner. Why don’t you boys go upstairs, or wait in the living room? It’ll be ready in fourty-ish minutes.”

Shadow, eavesdropping on the conversation he’s not really a part of, cringes at the prospect of socialising with Tails and Knuckles again. The Wachowski humans are one thing — perfectly cordial, a little more mature and socially aware — but Tails and Knuckles are part of a no-man’s-land Shadow doesn’t really know how to navigate. They’re the closest thing in age and species to him but he still feels like an alien in their presence, always two steps behind, always reading from the wrong playbook, only ever getting the joke once everyone’s stopped laughing. 

He keeps his gaze steely and laser-focused forward at the unmoving TV screen as the rest of the family mutter quietly behind the sofa, his fingers sinking into the soft fur of Ozzy’s coat to give his nervous energy somewhere to go. He plays with the curls, absent, looking for something to do so he won’t look so awkward and more out-of-place than he already feels.

Footsteps carry on into the kitchen to his right as Tom and Maddie head to put dinner on. Shadow waits apprehensively for another two pairs of feet to walk past him toward the stairs, hoping they'll take Maddie up on the offer to go to their own room, but they never come. Instead, Knuckles and Tails come into the living room and hop onto the loveseat Maddie had just vacated, and with them settles a feeling of dread over Shadow's entire self that weighs him down like a lead blanket, pressing him further into the sofa.

No, he pleads silently with any deity that’ll hear him out. Not this. Anything but this.

The room cements in a painful, thick silence that no one knows how to break. Both Knuckles and Tails squeeze hip-to-hip on their small couch and without trying to mask their intentions, they both sit there looking at him from across the room like Shadow is somehow holding them at gunpoint, even when he feels like it’s actually the opposite way around.

Kill me, Shadow laments to himself, flicking his eyes up for a brief moment to search their expressions before they fall back down to Ozzy’s fur. Kill me right now.

“I see you have made friends with Ozzy,” Knuckles prompts, doing his best to break the awkward silence after it stretches on for what feels like an eternity. His thick, clunky accent and way of speaking doesn’t make the awkwardness any better.

“He sat on me,” Shadow responds, speaking directly down to the dog, as if addressing the animal rather than Knuckles.

“Yes. He likes to sit on laps.” 

“Yep.”

They fall into silence again. Knuckles swings his legs, feet kicking into midair, coughing after a long beat. Shadow glares down at Ozzy’s fur. Tails, as he’s been doing for most of his time in Shadow’s presence, is staring directly and unblinkingly at Shadow without an ounce of shame. Shadow fights the urge to bare his teeth and tell him, in no polite terms, to shove off, but Maddie’s threat of Walters on speed dial and his own body’s incapacity tells him it might not be the smartest thing to do. Instead, he keeps silent and just hopes that his subtle display of hostility is enough to get his point across without being blatant about it.

Won’t they get a hint? Didn’t Maddie say they could go upstairs? Why are they bothering with me?

When neither Knuckles nor Tails make a move to speak again, Shadow tries to fill the space by giving Ozzy’s fur a ruffle, the quiet shiff shiff doing something to at least alleviate some of the suffocating silence.

Finally, after what feels like forever, Tails clears his throat and asks: “What do you like doing, Shadow?”

It's not at all what he was expecting to be asked. The surprise catches him off guard, though he hopes it doesn't show on his face. Shadow keeps his gaze downturned and his fingers threaded into Ozzy's soft fur, scratching gently at the skin over his spine as he thinks of what to say. “I don’t have hobbies,” he responds at last, the words careful and measured.

“Everyone has hobbies. Do you enjoy video games?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Do you listen to music?”

“Not any more.”

“Do you enjoy reading?”

“I don’t have time to read.”

“Sure, you do. Well, you do while you’re here.” Tails leans forward slightly, his tone persistent but not unkind. “Do you like reading?”

Shadow purses his lips. “Sometimes,” he says after a moment of consideration. He hasn’t really had the opportunity to read much since waking up from stasis. That was always his and Maria’s thing, which eventually turned into his and Sonic’s thing, too, back when there was time for such luxuries. When he’s on the run he’s never in a state of mind where he can relax, let alone read. It was a privilege reserved only for downtime in Green Hills.

“I can lend you some of my books if you want — I have plenty! Sci-fi, murder mystery, autobiographies, fantasy.” Tails shifts forward on the edge of his seat. “If I lend you some of my books, will you play with us outside?”

Shadow shrugs in the face of Tails’ barter, still resolutely avoiding eye contact. “I don’t know,” he says. He’s never played a game like that with anyone before — not one that involves teamwork, and rules, and a score-based system. He has a feeling he’d ruin the experience by not understanding it quick enough, so it would just be easier to refrain from playing in the first place. Maria and he played dominos, board-games, and other strategy-based games — quiet, structured things played in companionable silence. What he and Sonic did felt less structured, more instinctive and spontaneous, like a conversation without words. He never needed to overthink when he was with Sonic, they simply just were: two halves of a whole, understanding each other implicitly without having to spell it out. “I haven’t…” he trails off, kicking himself for starting another sentence he doesn’t want to finish. 

“You do not know how?” Knuckles finishes for him. It’s brash and loud and feels insulting, with the way he says it.

Shadow looks up to shoot a glare at him, but maybe sensing his anger before it has the chance to reach them, Tails is quick to defend, holding his hands out in a placating gesture. “Knuckles can be abrupt. He’s just being honest, not mean.”

Knuckles gives a curt nod. “Of course. I do not see the point in lying.”

Shadow’s hackles flatten as he realises Knuckles wasn’t goading him at all, just being blunt. It’s refreshing, but it’ll take some getting used to. “You’re brash,” Shadow mutters. “You sound like you’re trying to pick a fight.”

“I am not.” Knuckles thumps his chest. “If I was, you’d already have my fist in your face.”

“That’s true,” Tails confirms. “Knuckles is an ‘act now, talk later’ kinda guy.”

Maybe we have more than one thing in common, Shadow muses to himself, averting his gaze back down to Ozzy’s blonde fur tangled in between his fingers. “Why do you guys want to play with me? I’ve hardly been…” Shadow’s mouth twists around the word, “...kind.”

“Oh, please, do not kid yourself.” Knuckles scoffs and leans a little bit further back into the chair. “If what you did was considered special, then we four would be the special-est people in the world.” The four includes Sonic; Knuckles is speaking as if he’s part of the conversation, as if he’s awake and listening.

Shadow’s expression lifts slightly as points out: “I nearly blew up the Earth.”

Knuckles shrugs with casual indifference. “So did I.”

His head snaps up, fixing Knuckles with a look of pure disbelief. “You did not,” Shadow utters, his voice coloured with skepticism. Knuckles tried to blow up the Earth? The same guy who stood valiantly next to Sonic when trying to save the Earth from the Eclipse Cannon? Impossible.

“Yes, I did,” Knuckles retorts. “While you were in stasis, I worked with Eggman to help him attain the Master Emerald.” Knuckles turns to look at Tails. “Have you done anything egregious like that?”

“I hit you with a car!”

“Foul beast,” Knuckles teases with a wolfish grin, punching Tails’ arm playfully, who yelps when he’s hit.

Their candid attitude, their disregard for the severity of his actions, causes Shadow to scowl. Why are they joking about this? Why are they lying? Are they trying to make me feel bad? Or, are they trying to make light out of my situation? 

“I don’t believe you,” Shadow mutters, his own self-depreciation dripping into his tone. “Why…why are you lying? Why are you doing this? Can’t you see how ridiculous this is, joking at a time like this? I hurt you all — I’ve harmed you in more ways than one, I’ve ruined your lives—”

“Do you ever stop this pity-party you seem so eager to parade?”

Knuckles' sharp interjection lands like a slap across the face. Shadow goes rigid, his mouth falling open as Knuckles' swift takedown renders him completely wordless as an unbothered Knuckles merely rolls his eyes and settles deeper into the cushions with an air of nonchalance, as if Shadow's tirade is nothing more than worthless noise.

“I do not know what impression you have of us, and I can tell you have a negative one of yourself, but let me tell you: both of those are skewed. We are not perfect. You were tricked the same way I was by Eggman. I would be hypocritical to hold you to a standard I do not hold myself to. Does that make what you did fine? Absolutely not!” Knuckles beats his chest, and points the curved tip of his glove in Shadow’s direction. “But you are not a monster. Not if I am not considered a monster, too.”

“Knuckles wasn’t lying when he said he tried to blow up the Earth,” Tails adds on, his little face open and earnest. “Before you woke up, he was recruited by Eggman to help take down Sonic and got tricked into handing over the Master Emerald. I mean, that was a few years ago now, so it might seem like old news and maybe that’s why you hadn’t heard about it, but it still happened.”

“The fox is right,” Knuckles nods sagely. “As I said to you: I do not lie. And it is not right for me to sit opposite you and beat you with a stick when I was once in your position as well not that long ago.”

“Darn, weren’t we having this conversation a few months back with Sonic?” Tails chimes in, chuckling. “I mean, what makes a monster, y’know? Is it ‘cause we’re different from humans, and that makes us scary?”

“But, those highlights are pretty frightening…” Knuckles murmurs.

Shadow reaches up to touch them defensively. “It’s genetic,” he growls.

“That is not an excuse.”

“What I was saying,” Tails cuts across, shooting a glare in Knuckles’ direction, “is that everything you think about yourself we pretty much think about ourselves at one time, too. The only difference is that we’ve just…kinda gotten over it. At least you didn’t blow up the house too, Shadow. Then that would’a really caused some issues.”

“I did not blow it up. I merely knocked down some walls. And then the television. And then the shed,” Knuckles corrects. “You also broke the fences surrounding the house with that car you drove.”

“Hey! I did that to save Sonic.”

Knuckles turns back so he's looking at Shadow fully, and the short distance between the sofa and the loveseat suddenly feels both simultaneously vast and nonexistent. It's as if Knuckles' hard gaze can see straight through him, or like he's simply looking at another version of himself as if he’s had this conversation a thousand times with a mirror’s reflection before. Whatever emotion Shadow’s got on his face, it causes Knuckles’ expression to soften as he quirks a brow. “And, for the record, I tried to kill Sonic before you did. So, you are not that bad, all things considered.”

“You tried to kill Sonic?”

“Who hasn’t?!” Knuckles’ boisterous laugh rings throughout the halls. It causes Tails to jump next to him, his ears flattening to his head from its sheer volume. “I think the only person who hasn’t thought about it is you, fox!” He slaps his heavy fist to Tails’ back, who winces at the impact and makes a wounded sound when the air is knocked out of his lungs.

“You’ve gotta stop doing that, Knuckles. You’re going to break my rib again.”

“Whoops. Sorry.”

“You two are so…strange,” Shadow remarks quietly, flabbergasted by their dynamic and still trying to process it in its absurdity. “I mean, weren’t you enemies? How are you all so…friendly? How are you so accepting of each other? It makes no sense. Nothing that you do makes any sense.” A distressed sound escapes from the back of his throat — a noise caught between frustration and confusion, betraying how bizarre he finds this whole situation to be. He's sitting in the living room with people who were once his enemies, with a dog in his lap, while the family who might sell him out to G.U.N. cook lasagne in the kitchen. The incongruity of it all feels surreal. “Why aren’t you treating this with the gravity it deserves? How does this come so…so easy to you, when it’s not easy at all?”

Knuckles and Tails share a long, telling look, the kind that speaks volume without needing to shout. “Time,” Knuckles says after a moment, his tone low and serious. “Time helps.”

“How?” The word leaves him in a rush. “I’ve had fifty years of ‘time’ and I still feel so…”

The words he wants to speak lodge firmly in his chest, refusing to budge. I feel broken, he wants to cry. I feel ruined, like I’ll never be whole again. I feel like I’m not good enough for anything, or any of this, like I don’t deserve goodness at all. 

And yet, no matter how much his body yearns to just scream them into the stratosphere they remain stuck in the column of his throat like chewed gum. The frustration of not being able to articulate what he’s feeling leaves him in another small sound, something caught between a groan and a whine, strangled out of his windpipe to hang in the air.

Knuckles meets him with a look on his face that reads like he understands exactly how Shadow is feeling at that moment. “There is no set timeframe for healing. I had grown up isolated, much like yourself. I had my entire civilization wiped out and lived alone for a portion of my adulthood, festering in this feeling of rage and this badness that made me want to hurt everything around me.” His expression crumples, as if he’s reliving the pain of those years in the present. “Tails was similar — he had no one when he was growing up. You see, even after coming to Earth and allying with Sonic, there was no immediate change nor a moment where things just…clicked. We didn’t assimilate immediately. It took…well, how long has it been, now, fox?”

“Two years,” Tails says quietly, his face taking on the same quality as that on Knuckles’; far away, distant, as if recalling memories of his own damaged past, too.

“Two years. It has been two years since we met each other, and it is still an ongoing process of daily healing. Some days we still fight and I want to toss Sonic out into the ocean, and I am sure there are days when he wants to bury me six feet under and never speak to me again.”

“Sometimes, I wanna throttle Knuckles,” Tails says without a hint of remorse.

Knuckles nods sagely, unaffected by the threat. “You come to realise that you are not so different from your peers, after all, over time.” Knuckles throws his arm around Tails’ shoulder, pulling them side-by-side on the couch. Tails goes with it reluctantly, but doesn’t look put off by the gesture, only a little exasperated. He rolls his eyes, but directs his attention up to Knuckles, who continues his spiel. “But, above all else, we are teammates. I trust Tails, even though he hit me with a car. I trust Sonic, even though he is of the very tribe that wiped out the Echidna Clan, and he trusts me even though I tried to kill him. Multiple times. Through multiple methods.”

“Do you trust him?” Tails asks Shadow. Those big eyes are watching him, unblinking, much like they did earlier that day in the garden, giving Shadow the impression that they can see straight through him; like Tails already knows his answer before he has the chance to speak it.

“I…” He trails off, mouth dry and devoid of any moisture. “I’m trying to, I just…”

Being vulnerable is hard and uncomfortable and Shadow loathes Sonic for his ability to just speak his mind. How does he do it so effortlessly?

After a steadying breath to collect his scattered thoughts, Shadow continues. “It’s…hard.” The simple word is practically wrenched from him but it feels like a massive step for him to take in the first place. Just admitting that alone is monumental. He’s only ever been this honest with Maria and Sonic. With careful control of his vocal chords, while remaining steadfastly focused on the sight of Ozzy’s blond curls, Shadow says: “I’m trying not to let one small thing set me back ten steps every time it happens.” 

“Then, that is another thing we have in common,” Knuckles says. “Along with the ‘trying to kill Sonic’ thing.”

Tails continues: “And it’s not that we forgive you, Shadow. Forgiveness is a weird thing, anyway. I mean, forgive you for what? Forgive you for nearly killing Tom? Forgive you for hurting Sonic? It isn’t our place to assign forgiveness, anyway.”

Shadow opens his mouth to respond but finds that he isn’t too sure what to say. What do I even want forgiveness for? When he searches for a simple answer, or any kind of answer for that matter, he can’t find one. Shadow feels like one, big, bad personification of a mistake — like he needs to apologise for simply being himself, not just for the actions that he’s committed. It feels like all he’s done since arriving is apologise. 

“You have stunned him into silence, fox.”

“Sorry — I didn’t mean to give you a crisis, or anything, Shadow,” Tails apologises, hopping off the loveseat. “It’s just…y’know, when I say we’ve all been through it, I mean it. I don’t know how much Sonic’s told you, but none of us are perfect. Not even him. So, don’t feel like you need to make this into something bigger than it needs to be in your head. Tom and Maddie took Knuckles in after all he did. This isn’t their first rodeo. Plus, you kinda saved Sonic’s life. Pretty hard for us to hold any kind of grudge against you after something like that.”

While Tails shuffles over to a box beneath the TV, fiddling with buttons and cables, Knuckles raises his fist and points it towards Shadow again. “He is right. Dwelling on past mistakes does not solve anything. I still ruminate occasionally, but I try not to let it consume me. Otherwise, I will never move on.”

The TV screen suddenly dips to black before a white panelled-screen flashes to life, and a cheerful, ringing tune plays from the speakers, almost jaunty compared to the heavy conversation that just took place. Tails stands up from the box near the floor and picks up two white controllers. “Wanna play?” he asks, holding one out for Shadow. 

Shadow is still reeling from Knuckles’ words. Everything feels like it's happening at half-speed, like he’s suspended in Chaos Control while the rest of the world continues, mindless to his detachment. After a stagnant beat, he gives his head a small shake to signify: no. “I don’t know what that is…” he says, sounding lost, mind struggling to catch up with the rapid shift in mood. He'd been so geared up for conflict that his body is still winding down from an invisible threat that never really existed.

Those very perceived threats are holding out an olive branch, and Shadow, for the first time, wants to reach out to touch it. “What…is it?” he asks after a moment, nodding his head at the white controller with a shy display of curiosity.

“This is a Wii,” Tails says, tossing one controller to Knuckles. “It’s a games console. Here, do you want my controller?”

Shadow blinks at the strange, rectangle device Tails is holding out to him. “I’ve never played a Wii before.” Or any games console, for that matter. They hadn’t exactly been available in the lab in the seventies. “What does it do?”

“Well, you can play different games with it. Super Smash Bros., Banjo-Kazooie, the Legend of Zelda…” Tails holds out his controller towards the TV and a small pointer finger appears. He guides it towards a box in the upper left-hand corner and brings up a colourful, vibrant video thumbnail, which he clicks. “I chose Super Mario, ‘cause we’re trying to one-hundred-percent it.”

“Just Dance is my favourite,” Knuckles remarks from his seat, already getting comfortable.

“Sonic said he and I should play…” Shadow searches his memory for the word, and frowns when he can’t quite remember its total phrasing. “‘Amongst Us’.”

Knuckles guffaws aloud, his laughter booming through the room before he catches himself and slaps his hand over his mouth, muffling the sound. “I love that game! Fox, bring us the tablets at once.”

“That’s too complicated to explain if you haven’t played video games before,” Tails dismisses, brushing off the suggestion as he heads over to the couch where Shadow, Ozzy, and Sonic are clustered together.

But, compelled by Tails’ apparent lack of faith in his gaming capabilities, Shadow presses forward with a frown. “I want to play Amongst Us.”

“It’s Among Us. We can play it tomorrow. I need to charge up my spare tablet for that, so let’s just settle for the Wii tonight. Plus, there’s only three of us, and unless you’ve played before, it’s too difficult to go straight into a public lobby.” Shadow frowns as he navigates through Tails’ technical mumbo-jumbo, using words he doesn’t think existed a few decades ago. Tails clicks on a few tiles and the game boots up with trills and whistles as a short, stout man runs across the screen dressed in overalls and a charming red hat. “You sure you don’t wanna play?”

Does he? Shadow had never been offered to partake in something like this before —never as part of a group, never as something social. He clears his throat, looking at the proverbial olive branch Tails is extending to him, heart lurching at the sight. Do I even deserve to play? 

Knuckles’ words from a moment ago ring in his mind like a bell. I try not to let it consume me. Otherwise, I will never move on

Shadow stretches out an arm, as much as Ozzy will let him, and holds out a hand that’s shaking slightly. “Okay,” he says, hoping his voice doesn’t betray just how big of a step this is for him. 

Tails places the controller in Shadow’s hand, which is surprisingly heavy for something so small, and points down at the clear buttons. “These are to accept or move forward, like, if the screen needs you to move on to the next step, and this is to jump.” He points to the cross button. “You move using these.”

“I am Mario, because I am red.” Knuckles presses a button, and the stout little man hops on the screen.

“You can be Luigi,” Tails says, pressing a button as a taller, equally jovial man comes onto screen in a green hat. “He’s my favourite.”

“But I’m not green,” Shadow points out, confused by the logic.

“They both do the same thing, so don’t worry. So, all you gotta do is move your character across the screen with these buttons, and jump on the Goombas — those are the brown mushrooms — and hit boxes to get coins and power ups.”

“Where are they going?”

“To save Princess Peach from Bowser.”

“Who’s Bowser? Who came up with these names?”

“I mean, in the grand scheme of things, is Bowser really that weird a name when you’re called Shadow, and he’s called Knuckles?”

Shadow doesn’t respond to that. He presses one of the buttons on the controller and his character takes a step, but moves no further. “You need to hold it down,” Tails directs. There’s little to no space on the sofa so he sits on its edge, on a small amount of cushion between Ozzy, Shadow, and Sonic. “If you want him to walk, hold it, and if you want him to stop, take your finger off of it.”

Luigi takes a few more steps, catching up to Mario. He uses one thumb to control his character’s steps and hesitantly presses the A button on the controller, just as Tails had explained, and watches as his character jumps into the air with an exclamation of joy. He does it a few more times, hitting its head against a brick, which causes a mushroom to come out of the top. Manoeuvring the controller with a little more force than necessary, Shadow guides Luigi up to the mushroom and watches as he grows significantly larger than Knuckles. “Ha.”

“Be careful — if you get hit by a bad guy, then you lose your height,” Tails warns from Shadow’s side.

“I do not need armour, so you can keep the mushrooms, hedgehog,” Knuckles says, mashing some buttons with his huge thumbs as Mario does a leap, a twirl, and lands on one of the funny-looking brown mushrooms, immediately killing it.

“This is quite brutal,” Shadow remarks, moving Luigi along so he follows Mario along the path. “Why is he killing all of those mushrooms?”

“‘cause they’re trying to kill him first, I guess.”

Shadow purses his lips and gives a small nod of understanding. “An eye for an eye.”

“I guess. Hey, watch out for that Koopa!”

But Luigi is hit before Shadow can react, and he loses his height with some sad-sounding noises. Shadow, appalled at the injustice, jumps on its head and turns it into a spinning shell, which shoots across the screen to hit Knuckles with enough force to kill him.

“Hey!” Knuckles cries, gruff, his face pinching into a frown. “Watch it!”

Shadow huffs a laugh beneath his breath — quick, surprised, completely involuntary. He catches himself immediately and presses his lips sealed, hoping no one else heard the reaction. But despite his best efforts, Knuckles and Tails notice it the second the sound leaves his mouth. They turn to look at him with wide, surprised eyes, and embarrassed by their reaction, Shadow tucks his chin to his chest and focuses intently on the television screen.

But, before he can simmer in embarrassment, they burst out into laughter themselves. “He got you!” Tails jeers.

“You shall pay for this, hedgehog!” Knuckles announces with a playful growl, his tone carrying no real menace, as Mario respawns and immediately tries to pin another passing Goomba to take revenge on Luigi for the slight.

Their reactions, the immediate acceptance and the easy laughter, causes something to shift inside Shadow's chest. It's like a butterfly breaking free from its cocoon, or a firework whizzing into the night sky just before it bursts into colour. It climbs up his throat and spreads to his nailbeds and trickles down to his tummy and if Shadow could scratch the itch away he would, but he can’t, because he knows this feeling and recognises it the same way he would an old friend after years apart. It comes at the sight of Sonic’s smile, woven through memories of Maria’s laugh, at the scent of the woods and lavender and the sound of rain on a tin roof and the taste of coffee.

It’s happiness.

Shadow presses the button with his thumb and hops forward, running ahead of Knuckles who remains a few paces behind in their sprint. Tails points out tips for Shadow to follow, which he does, and they quickly advance onto the next level. A pipe spits them out into a cave with moving platforms which Shadow discovers he isn’t so good at. Fortunately, neither is Knuckles, and the both of them die repeatedly without managing to make it halfway through the level without threatening the other. “You need to move faster,” Shadow comments, rotating his controller to the right as Knuckles lags behind.

“You keep dying!”

“So do you.”

“You’ve both died an equal amount,” Tails points out. He's moved fully onto the sofa now, tucked between Shadow and Sonic, with Ozzy half-laid across his lap. He and Shadow are now pressed arm-to-arm, and to Shadow's own surprise, he isn't bothered by the lack of personal space. Tails slotted in so naturally that Shadow barely registered the shift until they were hip-to-hip. If anything, it feels nice to be close to someone new without that immediate spike of anxiety, without feeling like they should be afraid of him. “Shadow, you’ve gotta stop running into the flowers.”

“They keep appearing out of nowhere.”

“They’re timed, so you gotta wait until they go before you run across.”

Shadow frowns towards the television. He pauses next to a pipe, waits, and watches as a flower pops out the top. A moment later it disappears. He hops over it cleanly. “How do I kill it?”

“You’ve gotta get a power-up to kill one of those.”

“Where do I find that?”

“Hit the boxes.” Tails points towards the screen. “See the yellow box with the question mark? If you jump underneath it, it’ll give you special power ups, like the mushroom from earlier.”

Beating him to it, Knuckles pounds one of the yellow boxes and secures himself a star. “Hey!” Shadow’s face pulls into a scowl and he darts a glare in Knuckles’ direction, who’s watching him with a wolfish grin. “That was mine!”

“You asked me to speed up,” Knuckles taunts, running across the screen in a rainbow flashing cycle and obliterating any mobs that stand in his way. “Maybe you are too slow, hedgehog!”

Shadow shares an appalled look with Tails, who merely meets his eyes with a sympathetic look and a shrug. “This is why I don’t play with Knuckles. He’s not a very nice opponent.”

“I can’t believe this,” Shadow remarks in disgust at Knuckles’ playing attitude, as if his own is any better, directing a sneer his way.

“Come on, hedgehog, you are slowing us down!”

Shadow growls and turns back to the screen, following Knuckles’ little character as they dash through the rest of the level together. Fortunately, Shadow manages to peel ahead, and he gets the claim of being the first to jump on the flag at the end of the level, much to Knuckles’ annoyance, so it evens them out.

“That was mine!”

“Then you should’ve been faster,” Shadow quips, as Luigi dashes ahead into the small castle at the end of the level.

They bicker about who gets to press the button for the next level like two cats hissing at each other from both sides of the road, when Maddie pokes her head around the doorway. She flicks her eyes between each of them and at the scene they’re creating: of Knuckles with his Wii controller raised like he’s about to throw it at Shadow, of the four bodies crammed on the sofa together with Shadow goading Knuckles’ threats, Tails raising his hands to protect his face from the potential of an incoming Wii controller, Ozzy laid out atop their laps, and Sonic’s blissfully silent sleeping frame.

“Am I interrupting something?” she asks after a moment, cutting across their chaos.

“Knuckles keeps threatening to throw the Wii controller again!” Tails cries, his hands still semi-protecting his face. 

She raises her brows, and immediately, Knuckles’ arm lowers to his lap. “Knuckles, is that true?”

“No,” he responds quickly. “I was not.”

“You remember what happened last time you threw a controller and broke it,” Maddie reminds him with a pointed look.

“I was not throwing a controller. I was raising it to point at Tails. That is all.”

“You’re a liar!” Tails lowers his hands from his face only to throw them out in a wild gesture towards Knuckles’ suddenly calm-faced and cross-legged on the love-seat near the TV, as if he’s a pacifist turning the cheek to violence Tails is displaying. “He’s lying!”

“I am not. I do not lie.”

“Hmmm.” She levels Knuckles with a long, disapproving look, one with a barely-repressed smile, as if she’s seeing right through his bullshit but she’s unable to bring herself to tell him off for it. Maddie turns on her heel and gestures for them to follow with a nod of her head. “Enough bickering, dinner’s ready. Come grab a seat.”

The atmosphere shifts with those simple two words. Tails’ animosity and Knuckles’ nonchalance evaporates, replaced by the delight of two hungry stomachs at the prospect of food. Shadow is suddenly reminded of Sonic, who reacts the exact same way as soon as food is mentioned, and wonders if maybe he picked the attitude up from Tails and Knuckles, or vice versa.

“Thank goodness — I am starving!” Knuckles cries.

Knuckles presses something on his controller which pauses the level, bringing their game to a grinding halt. He springs up off the couch and bolts toward the kitchen with heavy thuds that echo through the house. Tails, moving with similar urgency, carefully taps Ozzy so he shifts off his lap, then rises from the sofa. He brushes the dog fur from his thighs (which feels a little obsolete) before he totters behind Knuckles, his twintails swaying in rhythm with his steps.

“Shadow?” Maddie calls, moving to peek around the open doorway again. “There’s a plate for you, too.”

Shadow’s stuck sitting on the couch with little mobility due to the weight of the dog in his lap, so he has to twist around to make eye contact. Behind her in the dining room Tom, showered and dressed down in comfy clothes, is setting the table and swatting Knuckles away with a spatula as he tries to reach out for a handful of grated cheese. “No, thank you,” he declines politely. 

“...are you not hungry?”

That’s partially the reason, he thinks. He's so accustomed to going without food for weeks that the hollow pit of hunger in his stomach has become second nature. One meal every other day has always been enough to sustain him on any other occasion, but his core energy is depleted, and even though he only ate a few hours back his hunger feels more acute than it's ever been. His body is screaming for fuel.

But, despite the hunger pangs and the kind offer, he can’t bring himself to disrupt their family dinner. 

Breakfast was one thing; awkward and brief which eventually ended on a high note before anyone could settle into discomfort, but dinner is a totally separate affair. It involves sustained conversation, laughter, eye contact, the kind of intimate family dynamic that exists in spaces he's never belonged, and it’s all so far outside his comfort zone that the mere thought of it is enough to put him off. Besides, what business does he have sitting among a happy family’s teatime, hearing them speak about a routine he’ll never be able to fit into? They were kind enough to offer him board and lodge as is, and even kinder to feed him and speak with him when he doesn’t even deserve those pleasantries.

Shadow knows his place. “I’m still full from breakfast.”

“No problem.” He can tell Maddie doesn't believe him. Her eyes linger on him for a fraction too long, her expression carefully neutral, but she doesn't push and for that he's grateful. “You can still sit with us while we eat. There’s a chair for you. Do you want some water?”

“It’s okay. I’ll wait here.”

“Do you want the TV back on?”

He shakes his head. Maddie’s mouth twists at the corner and although he’s declined everything, she lingers for a moment longer, fixing him with a stare that challenges him where he sits. It’s as if she’s telling him she can see through the bull, and she’s buying none of it.

He matches her look, standing his ground, and when she realises that he’s not going to falter she finally parts with a small sigh, heading back through the doorway into the dining room where dinner is already underway.

Shadow settles back against the couch with a breath he didn't know he was holding, hand settling over Ozzy's fur. He resumes his rhythmic stroking, the motion grounding and repetitive, as the muffled sounds of the family eating drift through the wall.

The chatter coming from the kitchen is partially muffled by the wall but Shadow makes out some of it. They talk about Tom’s day, about a petty crime taking place at the outskirts of Green Hills that he had to investigate which fortunately just turned out to be some kids who stole a lawn mower and drove it downtown. Knuckles and Tails recount their game outside, with both sides proclaiming their win, as cutlery clinks and water is poured and laughter is shared. Shadow sinks a little further into the cushions and settles a hand over Sonic’s head on his right-hand side, getting a feel for his stats and state of his energy.

His energy is a little more lively than it was this morning, a little more present, like he’s incrementally returning to himself. Maybe he’s been listening to everything we’ve been talking about for the last few hours, Shadow wonders, letting his hand settle over his quills. It doesn’t do anything, nor does it move. It just rests there, a comforting weight, letting Sonic know he isn’t alone in his isolation. Maybe he heard everything.

“I bet you’re pretty bad at the Wii game,” Shadow murmurs quietly, low enough so only Sonic can hear, and Sonic’s energy spikes like a punched-out laugh, as if he’s saying: you wish! “Ha,” Shadow huffs underneath his breath, closing his eyes and leaning back into the cushions. “Proving my point.”

“Knuckles, I see you pushing that broccoli aside!” Maddie scolds from somewhere deeper into the kitchen. “It’s just one piece. You can eat one piece.”

“I do not want it. It gets stuck in my teeth.”

“That’s because you don’t floss. Now, eat your veggies.”

A small smile pulls at the corner of Shadow’s mouth. He continues at a low volume, speaking only to Sonic: “How do you put up with them every day? This is exhausting.” He pauses, considering.  “Though, I can see why you fit in so well. They’re just like you. Chaotic. Ridiculous. Impossible to really dislike.”

This time, Sonic’s energy doesn’t change. It doesn’t do much at all after that, as if the small amount of energy he’d accumulated was used for that spike in response to Shadow moments ago. Still, Shadow keeps the timid weight of his hand pressed over Sonic’s forehead as the rest of the family eat in the room next to him, dissolving into laughter at a comment Knuckles makes that they all seem to find hilarious that Shadow wonders if he’d have found funny, too, if he been brave enough to join them at the dinner table. 

But he wasn't. And now he's watching from the margins, as always.

After dinner, Knuckles and Tails return to the living room looking considerably more subdued than when they'd left, their energy spent on food and family time. They settle onto the loveseat together so they can take turns with the Wii controller, squishing hip-to-hip in a tangle of limbs that comes from countless nights of sessions just like this, where being around one another is likely just as natural as sitting alone. 

“Where were we?” Tails asks, stifling a yawn into his elbow as he tucks his smaller figure into Knuckles’ side, letting him take the lead with the game and resigning himself to a back-seat driver.

Knuckles stares at the TV for a moment longer than necessary, caught up in the drowsiness that settles after a full stomach and a full day. He blinks slowly, his heavy-lidded eyes struggling to focus. Finally, he presses a button and the screen flickers back to life, resuming their game so they can advance to the next level.

Shadow, who hasn't done much of anything for the last thirty minutes but watch and rest, finds their exhaustion contagious. He's not accustomed to spending this much time with people anymore — not for extended periods, not like this, and it’s left him feeling brain-tired down to his bones. It’s different than what comes from physical exertion; this kind of tiredness comes from thinking, from feeling, from the constant vigilance of being in close proximity to others. The combination of good food and a day full of play has wound Knuckles and Tails down from a ten to a four, and as they restart their game and pick up where they left off, it's with heavy-lidded eyes and shoulders that seem to sink deeper into the cushions with each passing minute, with slow reaction times and a softened competitive edge.

By now, the sky outside is pitch black and the house is toasty warm from the central heating, a perfect recipe for sleep to creep up unbidden. They don’t talk much as they play out the next level — just occasional pointers from Tails, a grunted comment from Knuckles, and barely a word from Shadow. At some point into the level Shadow cracks open an egg that causes him to mount a strange, green dragon-like creature with a lizard’s tongue. When he turns to ask Tails what it is, he finds that he’s fast asleep against Knuckles’ shoulder, huffing quiet snores under his breath and lost to tiredness of the day.

Shadow keeps the question tucked away and adjusts his position so he's half-leaning against the sofa's armrest. Ozzy shifts as well, now laying across just Shadow's feet, finally giving him some breathing room. Shadow curls up slightly, resting his head in the crook between the sofa's back and the armrest in a position that should be uncomfortable but somehow isn't. Both he and Knuckles advancing to a level inside a castle with looming, ominous music and enemies made of bones and spikes. It’s trickier to navigate than the last, and while Shadow does his damndest to remain engaged he’s nodding off, too. His hands grow slack and the controller rests loosely in his palm, the corners of his vision blurring and his reactions slowing to a crawl.

Sleep isn’t a cliff he drops off of. He doesn’t plunge into the darky depths of unconsciousness like he’s taking a swan dive off a building. Instead, it laps at him like a lazy, warm tide, drawing him under with each blink of his eyes growing heavier and heavier until his head adjusts into the crook of the sofa and he thinks: I’m just going to rest my head here while we play, but somewhere between one moment and the next, the world dissolves around him and he’s out like a light.

Sleep isn’t dreamless, nor is it busy. It’s something in between, a haze of half-remembered moments floating through his consciousness like watercolours bleeding on wet paper. It wraps around him like cotton wool, like a blanket enveloping him in a warm, tempting cocoon that guides him into unconsciousness by the hand, and he goes willingly. 

Shadow doesn't know how long he dozes like that. This sleep is different than the kinds he’s used to, the kind where he’s barely submerged beneath the surface of unconsciousness, always waiting for the slightest sound or the barest of touches before he springs awake, ready to defend. No, this is much like that time last Christmas, where he was given the priceless gift of a safe haven and a bed to rest in. Shadow was able to sleep that night under the protective, watchful gaze of Sonic, allowed to lower his guards completely and finally relinquish control for what had been the first time in decades to someone who finally felt safe. 

He only stirs from his slumber when the game music cuts off and the TV goes silent, the sudden absence of white noise gently tugging him back toward awareness. He's still curled up against the sofa's arm in a position that should be uncomfortable but somehow isn't, and Ozzy is still draped half across his lap, a warm, snoring weight that rises and falls with each breath. Shadow blinks his eyes open slowly, everything soft-edged and dreamlike in his half-awake state as he tries to wade through his foggy consciousness and find out what stirred him.

Maddie is moving quietly around the room on her tiptoes, mindful not to disturb the sleepy bumpkins sprawled across the furniture left right and centre. She turns the overhead light down to a warm, amber glow that’s easier on tired eyes while Tom scoops up a snoring Knuckles and Tails into his arms, one on each hip, one head on each shoulder. They've gone completely limp with sleep, breathing softly against his shoulders as he carries them out of the room with the careful steps of someone who's done this many times before.

The house settles into a deeper quiet once they've gone upstairs, broken only by the gentle hum of the heating and Ozzy's contented harrumphs. Maddie returns after tidying away their controllers, moving with the kind of quiet consideration that comes naturally to years of caring for young ones. She retrieves the quilt Shadow had used the night before from where it had been folded over the back of the loveseat, shaking it out and fluffing it with gentle hands as it billows open.

She rounds the sofa and lays it carefully over Shadow's curled form, tucking it around his shoulders. The gesture is so unexpectedly kind, so full of quiet care, that Shadow feels something tight in his chest finally loosen. Then she pulls back, her footsteps fading as she leaves the room, turning off the overhead light behind her. The house settles into darkness, broken only by the amber glow of the porch light filtering through the windows.

He barely clings to wakefulness after that, letting himself slip back over the edge of sleep, lulled by the feeling of safety that surrounds him: Sonic's steady breathing beside him, Ozzy's warm weight on his lap, and the lingering warmth of Maddie's gentle ministrations ensuring he's comfortable for the night. With that, Shadow finds himself back under the pull of slumber. He dreams of a memory where ROYGBIV lights twinkle above in their clumsy string, where snow pitter-patters on the roof, and the opening carol of A Charlie Brown Christmas fills the space of somewhere he now knows he can finally rest. In that dream, he is full from hot chocolate and white-bread sandwiches and burned cookies, laying in a nest of fleece blankets as a pair of hands touch the red points around his eyes, linger on the slope of his nose, and finally settle behind his ears. He remembers those hands holding him through that snowstorm with an unspoken promise to keep him safe and protected, and as Shadow weathers this chilly October night on the sofa, his own hand remains settled over Sonic’s head as he returns the favour.