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Starline’s head rested underneath her foot. It would be so easy to grind down. A skull was a skull was a skull, whether it had a motobug or a platypus underneath it. He’d made her good at crushing skulls. (Had there been a test session a day? The tapes had gone up over 600. Even if it were multiple a day, like recently, it was probably still over a year considering it had seemingly been some time before they got to that point. Everything past the last few months was fuzzy, but she’d never thought about it before, too focused on the future, on getting to finally kick Sonic’s ass. Check that, she had and didn’t remember thinking about it. Memories locked away, bubbling and boiling and corrupting away in a swiss-cheese brain.)
Kit chewed on his lip as she tapped her foot a few times before dropping it off. Splattered brains weren’t going to help finish off the plan, at least not until they were called for.
“I’ll… I’ll go get his clothes,” Kit muttered, and she tilted her head before it clicked.
“Got it. Good call, squirt.” She ruffled his hair, and he gave a weak smile before activating his tendrils to hurry away- who knew how long it would be before the doc woke back up again.
In the meantime, she flipped him over and untied the belt from around his waist, peeling it open to expose creamy white fur. It was… odd. Not the bare chest itself, half of Mobius walked around without shirts, but seeing it on Starline in particular… She traced her fingers over it, feeling faint scars hidden underneath the silky smooth softness. He took good care of himself and maintained his appearance, but he’d always played on the edge of fire, and must have gotten burnt before. Maybe she’d even left some of them, before he could lock her back in her own head.
Surge had never seen him as unhinged as he was on those first tapes. Saliva sprayed from his beak, his hair was ruffled and split on the ends, and his words screamed out, spilling all over each other in frantic, emotional mess. The cut to him pacing in front of their tubes had been like night and day. All that emotion had been in reaction to Eggman tossing him out on his butt.
If he hadn’t, she wouldn’t be here. This was all his fault as much as it was Doc’s. Her fingers curled.
Kit returned with the shirt, and she tugged the bathrobe off, crumpling it up and tossing it over to Kit as he traded for the silk. She had to tug Starline up into her lap in order to pull his arms into the sleeves. He was nothing but a bundle of meat that breathed like this, oblivious to the world around him. He really couldn’t take what he dished out so easily.
Surge’s fingers lingered for a moment on the button, the metal of her ring scraping against it before she tugged it through the fabric, completing the illusion of collected control. Put together by her hand, instead of the other way around. (Her hands were shaking.)
She’d been in an oversized shirt that looked like a hospital gown in the early footage, a malleable, identity-less thing. A weak thing. A thing he’d stripped down and rebuilt, given wonderful powers at the price of whoever she’d used to be. Kit fussed with the belt in Starline’s robe, as if it could give him answers its owner didn’t seem keen on sharing. He didn’t say anything, but she could hear his breathing, eyes darting between her and the bundle of fabric in his hands. His pack whirred, and one of his tendrils massaged at his left arm. A nervous tic, maybe.
“Go put it away, we need to convince him everything’s normal when he wakes up. He did it to us a billion times, it can’t be that hard to do it back, right? We’ve-" She swallowed. "We’ve got this.”
Kit paused before he nodded, little hands curling into fists against the silky robe before he scurried off. Surge traced her fingers over Doc’s hair, tugging it back just hard enough that he’d feel a faint echo, but not enough to do anything beyond dismissing it. (Perhaps there had been someone smart in her, at some point.) His throat was bared, slim and soft and vulnerable and it would be so so easy to just short him out or crush the windpipe or snap off a quill and slit it, but…
But.
Four were better than one. She could wait, even as her teeth ground against each other, electricity sparking and frizzing his hair. Her fingers loosened, and his head lolled back again as she lifted him up, body dangling limply as she walked back over to his chair. Depositing him down, she clicked her tongue. “Ugh, missing something, missing- ah!” A zip back to where he’d dropped and she deposited his glasses on his bill, tongue sticking out a bit as she adjusted them before sliding the glove off her hand and back onto his.
(How often had he done this for her before, trying to reset the scene?)
She spat in her palm, smoothing spit over his hair to dismiss the frizziness before hopping up on the railing as Kit came back in. He dropped down to the floor in front of Doc just as the man started mumbling something and stirring in the chair.
Showtime.