Chapter Text
The literal white picket fence was a bit much.
Ivo stood at the gate, one hand resting on the painted wood, and frowned. He’d known things would be different, it wasn’t like Stone was going to live in the crab by himself, but the suburbs? The man had a lawn, for crying out loud.
Maybe this was his version of lying low. Maybe there was a big basement, or an innocuous shed in the back, brimming with computers and holograms and badniks. Maybe there was some strategic high value target nearby Stone was infiltrating. There had to be some reason for this.
There was even a car in the driveway. A nice, sensible sedan. Surely the death trap he called a bike was parked out of sight. Surely he hadn’t given that up too. Surely.
Ivo took a deep breath. It was just after dawn, and the neighborhood was waking up. Someone was walking a dog a few blocks away, and he’d seen a kid on a bike tossing out papers (which couldn’t possibly be the way anyone actually did things anymore, except here, apparently). The longer he stood here, the more witnesses he accrued. Besides, he had no real reason to hesitate beyond maybe being concerned about the impropriety of knocking on a door at such an early hour, and he wasn’t about to start worrying about being rude now.
He pushed through the gate, letting it click behind him, and walked to the front door confidently. And he definitely didn’t hesitate or nearly turn back before knocking.
Stone was probably awake, unless that had changed too. Ivo waited for an agonizing thirty seconds before knocking again, louder. Stone must have heard him. If he had to -
A tiny whirr drew his attention to a little white disc set in the doorframe, a shiny black lens in the center. A camera. But a consumer model, nothing like Ivo’s brilliant tech. Ivo peered at it as the lens moved, changing angle like it was looking at him top to bottom. The movement stopped, but now Ivo heard something else, a rapid thumping from inside the house. Footsteps.
The door flew open, and there - there was Stone.
He looked good. Ivo’d been expecting, or maybe worried, to find his henchman drunk and depressed in some squalid little corner. Nope. His hair was messy, and he needed to trim his beard, but he looked well kept. Hadn’t let himself go at all, a fact that was painfully obvious because apparently Stone slept shirtless. Thankfully he wore some loose linen pants, or this encounter would have taken a sharp turn for the awkward. It was already weird enough.
Ivo waited as long as he could, trying to let Stone process, but the silence got too heavy. He spread his hands and said, “Surprise!”
Stone actually rubbed his eyes, something Ivo didn’t think anyone did outside of cartoons. Apparently convinced this wasn’t a particularly detailed smudge, he finally said, “Doctor?”
“In the flesh.” Ivo was going to say more - he’d prepared a pithy little introduction, expecting Stone to be stunned to silence - except Stone did something he did not expect, and never in a million years would have.
Stone started crying.
Ivo half-reached for him but stopped in midair. “Woah, hey.” He’d never seen Stone cry before, and he didn’t like it. It made him feel… bad. “Don’t, uh. Don’t do that.”
Stone’s deep brown eyes glittered in the early morning light as tears swelled in them and overflowed down his cheeks. “Doctor,” he whispered, almost reverently. “Is it - is it really you?”
“Yes, yes, it’s me, it’s a miracle, stop blubbering about it.”
Stone sniffled - gross - and wiped his face with the back of one hand. “I’m - I’m sorry, Doctor, I’ll - you’re here? You’re alive?” He reached forward, his hand shaking, and Ivo didn’t flinch away when Stone touched his arm. “Oh my god. You’re…!”
“Yyyeah.” Robotnik quirked an eyebrow. He’d decided, on the Eclipse Cannon, that he’d be nicer to Stone if he ever saw him again. He hadn’t expected that resolution to get tested so soon. “Is this going to take a long time? Should I go get some coffee and come back?”
Stone’s fingers tensed around his arm. “No! No, please, don’t - I’ll make you a latte. Please. Don’t go.”
“Well, since you asked so nicely.”
Ivo followed Stone into the house. It was… nice? Bland. Neutral walls and boring modern furniture. The whole place looked like a magazine spread, in the worst way. If Stone hadn’t been here when he arrived he wouldn’t have believed he lived here.
But Stone was definitely here, as evidenced by his refusal to let go of Ivo. Probably going to leave a bruise, given how hard he squeezed Ivo’s arm.
Hmm. Ivo didn’t hate the idea of that.
Even when they reached the kitchen, Stone didn’t release him. He just stood there, staring, until Ivo cleared his throat meaningfully and Stone jumped.
“Right! Sorry. Sorry.” Stone finally let go and took a step back. “Uh… just a couple minutes.” He darted over to a gleaming silver espresso machine that dominated a corner of the kitchen (the first thing that Ivo’d seen he would’ve pegged as Stone’s) and flicked it on. “It’s - the water needs to heat up. You can have a seat. Or, or stay standing, or - you can do whatever you want, I guess. Sir.” He laughed, a weak little thing. “Sorry. I’m - I wasn’t expecting this. I didn’t, um. I.”
Stone fell silent. Ivo let it stand for a minute. The urge to trash this banal little suburban hellscape grew by the second, but he swallowed it down and instead took a seat at the boring kitchen table. “It’s been a couple years, I take it.”
“Five years. Four months. And three days.” Stone smiled sheepishly. “I try not to keep track as closely anymore, but today’s the 16th and it was on the 13th, so.“
Hm. He’d known time had passed, but five years was longer than he’d hoped for. Damn. “You remember the exact date?”
Stone hesitated. “I can’t forget it.” Then he smiled again, or something like it; his eyes stayed sad. “You didn’t know?”
“Long story. For now, I’ll say it hasn’t been nearly as long for me.” He looked around again. “And how long have you been in this… charming little hovel?”
“Uh. Two years? I guess? It’s more space than I need, but I wanted…” He shook his head. “Sorry. You’re not interested in that.”
“If I wasn’t interested, I wouldn’t have askedAUGH!”
The yelp was triggered by something brushing up against his leg. Ivo nearly fell out of his chair, barely catching himself, in his scramble to avoid… a cat. A long-haired calico stared up at him with wide green eyes.
Ivo narrowed his eyes. “What the hell is that?”
“Oh!” Stone hurried forward and scooped the beast up. “That’s Sasha.”
“Sasha?” Ivo glared at the creature, who gazed back at him with an aura of smugness way too big for its body.
“I found her out in the rain as a kitten. She was so small and wet and shivering, and I couldn’t just leave her like that. And now,” he continued, nuzzling against the thing’s head, “she’s all grown up and constantly causing problems. Right, Sasha?”
The beast kept staring at Ivo, so Ivo stared right back. Right up until Stone let it slip out of his arms back to the floor, at which point he was staring at Stone’s chest. Oops.
The espresso machine chimed. “Ah, it’s ready,” Stone said unnecessarily, turning to the machine. “I’ll have your latte in a minute, Doctor. Oh, but I only have cow’s milk. Is that okay?”
Ivo sighed, long and low, exaggerating his disappointment. Stone could have made the latte with turpentine and he’d still drink it. “I guess.”
“Sorry about that, sir,” Stone said as he worked. “If I’d known you were…” He trailed off, then cleared his throat. “I’ll have to see where I can find some. I might have to order it.”
“Uh huh.” Ivo leaned against the table, propping up his own head. “What, Piggly Wiggly doesn’t carry it? I’m shocked.”
Stone laughed. Then he froze again, clinging to the countertop in front of him. When he didn’t start to move again, Ivo stood up.
“Stone.”
Stone sniffed. “S-sorry, sir. I’ll - ah, I’ll just - um, I - “
His voice was starting to wobble, and even from the back Ivo could see him starting to tremble. Ivo approached him from behind slowly, and laid a hand on Stone’s shoulder.
“Listen, you know I’m not good at this mushy stuff, but if you need a hug or something - “
Stone turned and threw his arms around Ivo, squeezing hard enough to choke, burying his face in his shoulder. “You’re alive,” he sobbed. “You’re alive. You’re - you’re alive.”
It took a few seconds for Ivo to figure out what to do with his hands. He settled for patting Stone’s head with one and his back with the other. “There, there,” he said, trying to remember what “sympathetic” sounded like. “It’s all right. You can stop - no, wait.” He swallowed down the weird dry feeling in the back of his throat. “You can cry if you want, or whatever.”
“I’m - I’m sorry, Doctor. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Stone’s words were slurring together but at this point they didn’t really seem to matter much. Stone was getting heavier the longer this went on, and Ivo’s eyes were starting to ache. How long was this going to take?
Long enough, apparently, for Stone’s knees to buckle. Ivo managed to control their collapse enough to keep them from getting hurt, but once they were down there was no telling when they’d get over this. Stone was going to leave a puddle on the floor. Jeez.
Eventually, his minion managed to pull himself together enough to stop weeping. He sat up, looking decidedly less well kept than he had when he opened the door, and rubbed his eyes with his wrist. “Sorry, sir,” he said, again. “I just, um. I’ve been. I missed you.”
A simple phrase that hit Ivo like a meteorite. “I missed you too.”
“I don’t - I thought you were dead.“ Stone’s face kept flickering between a grimace and a smile, like it couldn’t decide how he felt. “I saw it happen. How - how?”
“To be honest, Stone, I don’t know all the details myself.” He had died - or at least, he’d felt it, his skin blackening in the flames, the air torn from his lungs, the strange electric crackle of the chaos energy tearing at the very atoms of his body. But there wasn’t much point in burdening Stone with all that, especially not if his reaction was already so dramatic. “Aliens, probably.”
“Right. Them. There’s a pink one now.”
“More? Honestly, you die for a mere five years and suddenly the place is swarming with aliens.”
“I know, sir. I…” Stone sighed. “I tried, for a while. A lot has happened.”
“I can tell.” He stopped and looked at Stone for a long moment. Stone was… hmm. “You look guilty. Why?”
Stone’s eyes went wide. Then he looked down at the floor. “I worked with them. The aliens.”
Robotnik gasped as loudly and dramatically as he could, one hand flying to his chest.
“Not a lot!” Stone added hastily, as if he could smooth over the betrayal. “And I wouldn’t give them any of your tech. It was - missing Badniks would show up in some lowlife’s plans, and I’d take them back, and - it was mutually beneficial, I thought you’d - I - “
Robotnik cut him off with a wave of his hand. “All right, all right, stop your simpering. That’s what I get for not leaving you clear instructions this time.”
“I’m sorry, sir. They said it was what you’d want.”
Robotnik raised one eyebrow. That expressed his thoughts on the topic quite neatly.
“They were very persuasive,” Stone mumbled. “And I wasn’t… thinking straight. For a while.”
It took a minute for Robotnik to understand what he was feeling, because it was novel. This had never happened before. Stone was hiding something from him.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
For a moment, Stone’s eyes went wide with panic. Then he swallowed and forced a smile. “Nothing important, sir. Honestly, it’s been boring without you.”
“Oh, I could figure that out from the state of this place.” Robotnik groaned as he heaved himself to his feet. “Did you buy it like this, or did you pay someone to let you live in a Pottery Barn catalog?”
“You don’t like it?” Stone stood as well, watching Robotnik while Robotnik looked around. “I thought it was… tasteful.”
“Tasteful! Blegh.” Robotnik stuck out his tongue. “This can’t possibly be how you’d decorate.”
“Ah, well… when I first moved in, I wasn’t really… I hired a designer and just sort of gave him free reign.”
“Oh, Stone. You poor thing.” He was still hiding something, but Robotnik had had enough of the conversation. “And where’s that latte?”
“Oh! Right! Sorry.”
While Stone busied himself with the machine, Robotnik strolled around the house. It wasn’t entirely sterile. The cat had some toys, and there was a takeout menu stuck to the fridge. There was even a photograph, one of those photo booth strips, of Stone and… the fox alien. Ugh.
“Doctor?!”
Stone’s voice had the edge of panic. When he came around the corner to find the doctor in his living room, his eyes were wide. He stopped so suddenly that the latte in his hand sloshed over the edge of the mug, dribbling to the floor.
“Oh - I - sorry, sir.” Stone offered the latte. Its traditional little heart drawing was smudged.
Robotnik took it, but cocked an eyebrow at Stone. “Is this going to be a thing with you now? You’re developing some kind of complex?”
“N-no, doctor. I - I’ll…” He took a deep breath. “You won’t leave without at least telling me, right?”
“I don’t plan on going anywhere right now, agent.”
“But - but when you do, will you… please?”
When. Not if.
Robotnik sipped his latte.
“If that’s what it takes to keep you from having a panic attack every time I leave the room, fine. I promise not to ghost you.”
Stone sighed, tension visibly leaving his shoulders. “Thank you, sir. I’m - thank you.” His watch chirped. He glanced at it. “Oh. Ah.”
“Now what?”
“Nothing. It’s - I need to leave for work or I’ll be late.”
“You have a job?” How could Stone be living such a dull life and keep surprising him?
“Yes. But now that you’re back, I’ll quit. I’ll do it right now.”
“Woah, now.” Robotnik lifted a hand. “Let’s not be hasty. Do you like this… job?”
Stone thought for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s okay. The people are nice and the work isn’t hard. I’d much rather be working for you, though.”
“Oh, make no mistake, you’re always working for me. But my plans are still percolating, and it might wind up serving our purposes for you to be established as a nice innocent civilian…” He gestured for Stone to finish the sentence.
“Data technician.”
“What the hell is a ‘data technician’?”
“It’s just IT work. I’m a little overqualified for it.”
“Yeah. No doy. Don’t let a little thing like my miraculous return from the dead keep you from your exciting day of turning things off and on again.”
“Right. Yes. Okay. If you say so.” Despite his words, Stone didn’t move. Robotnik waved him away, and Stone finally walked out of the room, only to return seconds later with a slightly wild look on his face that settled when he spotted the doctor again.
“I - I think I’ll take the day off,” he said. “If that’s okay.”
Ugh, okay, this was going to be a thing. Hopefully once the shock wore off Stone would regain some object permanence. “Go ahead,” Ivo said. “You can catch me up on what’s been going on in my absence.”
“Thank you, sir. I just need to make a phone call.”
Stone pulled his phone from his pocket - the same one Ivo’d given him years ago, which would be wildly outdated by now and yet still miles better than anything available commercially - and stepped into the hallway. This was kind of pointless, given that Ivo could easily listen in, but Stone kept glancing back at him so it was clear privacy wasn’t as important as making sure Ivo stayed put. Not that he had the slightest intention of leaving.
Hearing Stone speak to somebody else in that subservient manner really pissed him off, though.
Stone wrapped up his call and returned to the room. “All set. I don’t think Dave believed I was actually sick.”
“Do you need a doctor’s note?”
Stone laughed a little too loudly. His face wilted, but he screwed his eyes tight and shook his head like he was willing the expression away. And maybe he was, because when he looked back up at Ivo he was smiling again. Mostly normal, except for the tears.
“Sorry,” he said, wiping them away. “Ignore that. I’m fine.”
Sure he was. On the verge of a fine breakdown, maybe. Robotnik shook his head. “What happened to you, Stone?”
Stone went quiet. “I didn’t handle things well.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“I know. I - I’m sorry, sir. I don’t - it’s hard to talk about.”
Very few things made Robotnik more curious than being told he couldn’t know something. But, he was trying to be nice, theoretically, so instead of pushing the point he flopped into one of Stone’ pristine accent chairs. “Fine, whatever. Fill me in, but you can skip all the nights you spent crying in the bathtub listening to Jewel.”
Stone’s face was pathetically grateful. “Of course, Doctor.”
Stone started with the destruction of the crab, capsized in the Thames. (Robotnik was unaware of this, and rather pissed off. He’d liked the crab. Stupid aliens.) After Robotnik’s final broadcast, Stone was alone in London with no tech, no connections, no money, not even a passport. After some time, G.U.N. tracked him down and brought him in. Unlike the first time Robotnik had vanished, he was being regarded as a hero, so instead of arresting Stone they offered him a new position. When he declined, they were at least kind enough to sort out his paperwork and put him on a flight back to the States so he could start his new life.
He didn’t stay put for long. Robotnik’s sizable assets were more than enough to fund whatever he wanted to do, and this time no IRS goons got their mitts on it. He traveled for a while. That got boring fast. He picked a spot in rural Africa as a new base of operations, as far as he could get from G.U.N.
At this point, Stone got sheepish. He gathered what he could get of Robotnik’s tech, dredged the crab up and restored some of its functions, and then -
“I tried to attack the aliens, but it… didn’t go well.”
Stone offered no further details.
After that, he returned to his desert base and decommissioned it, storing every bit of Robotnik tech in a heavily fortified underground bunker in an undisclosed location (somewhere in the Peruvian mountains). Then it was more aimless wandering until one of the aliens reached out. Tails had been tracking his smartwatch all along, apparently.
(“That’s the yellow one? Tails?”
“Yes, sir. He’s actually pretty smart. Nowhere near as smart as you, of course, but more than most people.”
“What, are you trying to get me to take him on as an intern? Get on with it.”)
There was some crime syndicate using Robotnik’s code to get into banks, or something. The aliens were having trouble figuring out how to solve that with brute force, so Tails asked Stone if he could help. He should have refused, but the idea that someone was using the doctor’s technology to threaten the planet after he sacrificed himself to protect it pissed Stone off enough for him to act.
Something along those lines happened a few times until working with the aliens was common. And then, after, once he’d tucked away the latest reclaimed tech safely in the Peruvian vault…
Stone skipped some parts here.
This pattern - aimless globetrotting interrupted by brief bouts of heroism - kept up until the night he found himself in San Francisco, walking the streets in the rain. That was when he found Sasha, the pathetic wet furball yowling and shivering and alone. He picked her up, tucked her under his shirt, and got a hotel room to keep them both comfortable for the night.
He couldn’t take a kitten wandering all over the world, so he bought this house and settled in.
“It’s a nice neighborhood,” Stone concluded. “Quiet. I’ve got a space in the basement where I stash any tech I come across untilI take it down to the vault. Otherwise the most exciting things I do these days are volunteering at the library and buying full-size candy bars for trick or treaters.”
Robotnik had long since finished his latte. He’d listened quietly, and carefully. The parts about his tech being appropriated were annoying and definitely merited further investigation, but that wasn’t what he was most concerned about. It was all the things Stone didn’t say, and all the little things he let slip. Like why he was in San Francisco, near the base of the very building where Robotnik had confronted Sonic, without a place to stay for the night. Or what he’d been looking for in the dark corners of foreign cities. Or why the yellow one was apparently around often enough to merit compliments on his intelligence and a trip to some carnival photo booth.
Robotnik could take some guesses. He didn’t like them.
“So, long story short,” he said, setting his empty mug on a side table, “you eat-pray-loved your way around willy-nilly, occasionally dabbling in heroism, until a stray cat domesticated you and you bought it a house.”
“…yes, sir. That’s… that’s about right.”
Aside from all the gaps Robotnik would rather not fill in. “Hmm. Not what I would have expected.”
“What would you have expected?” Stone leaned forward, suddenly intense. “What was I supposed to do? What did you want me to do? What should I have done?”
“Well first of all I would have thought you’d be a dog person.”
Stone laughed. It was good; it broke the tension, which was getting unbearable. “I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Sasha’s very insistent.”
“It weighs like eight pounds and doesn’t have thumbs.”
“Spoken like a man who has never tried to control a cat.”
“Stone, are you telling me you can’t get a cat to behave?”
“She’s nearly as stubborn as you, Doctor, and I couldn’t - “ He cut himself off mid-sentence, again.
Ivo was perfectly aware it wasn’t a terribly nice thing to do, but he rolled his eyes. “It’ll be less irritating if you just say the thing and then weep about it for a few minutes.”
“I’m - I’m sorry, sir. I’m having… difficulty keeping my emotions in check, but I’ll do my best.”
Be nicer to Stone. “Why?”
Stone blinked. “What?”
“Why?” Ivo shrugged. “There’s nobody here but me. And given that I am personally the direct cause of your distress, I am granting you explicit permission to get all weepy about it.” He waved a hand dismissively, but his eyes were fixed on Stone.
But Stone furrowed his brow. “I don’t understand.”
“Really? I could’ve sworn I used small words.”
“I mean - why would you - you’ve always hated when I got emotional.”
“You know what that is?” Robotnik lifted a hand and splayed his fingers like a blooming flower. “Growth.”
That got a smile from Stone. A small one, but it seemed real, so he’d count that as a victory. And it got him out of explaining the real reason that seeing Stone in this borderline state hurt so much. He might have grown, but he wasn’t ready for that yet.
Sidestepping the issue, he said, “Fill me in on what else I’ve missed. Is La Última Pasión still on? Did Miguel take over the drug business or did Carmelita talk him out of it? Also, who’s the president now?”
The shift in topic worked nicely, and they spent some time discussing what Ivo’d missed in his long absence. Some of it was urgent (they recast Luisa??) and some of it was useless (a new pope, like he’d ever cared about the old one) but it was easy, safe conversation. Aside from a couple particular celebrity deaths, nothing emotionally shattering there.
In fact, Ivo managed to avoid making Stone visibly cry again for the rest of the day. The closest was when Stone made lunch and Ivo said something nice about it. It really wasn’t that big a deal but he still caught Stone turning away to hide his face.
Most of the day was spent in the basement, where Stone hauled aside a steel shelving unit to reveal the secret sub-basement (a few feet of walled off space). The space contained stacks of plastic crates and a small, suspiciously clean and unused workspace. Had Stone set this up for himself and never used it, or had it been some kind of tribute to Ivo? Either way, it was decently equipped, and depending on what exactly was in those crates he could probably get up to a lot of trouble.
The crates held three badniks, one heavily damaged and the other two with their power sources removed. There were also bits and pieces - screens, wires, hydraulics, the usual materials, mostly in rough shape, having been yanked from the hands of lesser minds. And it was clear that, despite Ivo’s misgivings, Stone had been right to take these things back. Someone had taken an old prototype prosthetic arm and duct-taped padding around it. One of the badniks had been painted camo green. The worst was definitely the jetpack prototype: gutted, and then outfitted with - eugh - consumer grade PC parts. He didn’t even want to finish the jetpack project, but that didn’t mean he was okay with seeing it desecrated.
Ivo picked at the painted badnik with a fingernail; a fleck of deep green came off. “Is everything in Peru in this kind of condition?”
“Not all of it. Depends on how long it was out there before I found it.”
Ivo sighed heavily, his lips drawn in a tight line. He was not going to berate Stone. His henchman had done his best in absence of instructions, and Ivo was better off with a handful of defaced tech than nothing. He was in control of himself. He would simply keep the disappointment and anger bottled up, like a healthy adult. It was certainly a change, but a necessary one. For Stone’s sake.
“Could be worse,” he said out loud. He didn’t add a “well done” or “good job,” because he wasn’t that much nicer. But he didn’t chew Stone out, either. His certificate of sainthood was probably already in the mail.