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Everything was going to plan, Shadow was sure that Maria’s final wish would be carried out seamlessly. Robotnik, the idiot, was nowhere to be seen, perhaps trying to override the ARK’s final command with the child fox. The Faker and and his red companion had taken the Master Emerald to the biolizard’s holding cell, for a reason Shadow didn’t care to know. Rouge had tried to convince him over radio to help them. She failed. The pink one, the one who had hugged him on prison island and reminded him vaguely of Maria, was also missing.
The timer to impact read three minutes. Shadow felt the Chaos signature of his ‘brother’ activate. A minute later, he stopped sensing the Chaos of the blue hedgehog and red echidna. They had failed. He smiled for the first time in 50 years.
As the space station entered the planet’s atmosphere, shadow allowed himself to fall unconscious.
~{@}~
He returned to the waking world, feeling numb all over. There was no heat, no sound, and a dull red light pounding at his eyelids. He opened them and was immediately overrun with grief and guilt. The earth had been destroyed, he could feel no chaos from it. The planet was finally still.
This wasn’t Maria’s final wish.
They had all failed. He had failed. He had failed everything. He hadn’t managed to remember in time. The world was dead because of him. Maria was dead because of him. Gerald was dead because of him.
He was a monster.
A failure.
He cried, mourning losses he didn’t know he cared about.
Something glowing floated into his blurry, tear filled view. He quickly wiped them away to get a better view. It was the green chaos emerald, the first one he had stolen and inserted into the ARK’s central console.
He was very skilled in the technique Chaos Control. He needed a Chaos Emerald to preform it. There was one right in front of him.
Perhaps, he could he could fix his mistake?
He grabbed onto the emerald with some difficulty, holding it close to his chest and whispering a phrase he knew all to well.
“Chaos Control.”
~{@}~
He needed to be careful, he has only one chance at this and if he ran into is past self or someone else, it would be all for nought.
He quickly chose Amy Rose, the one who was like Maria. She would hopefully, get through to him. He worked carefully, blocking off certain passages to the pink hedgehog as she wandered. It was slow, painfully slow. He wished he could just push her where he needed her to be.
Eventually, She got there. Shadow, the one that hadn’t failed his purpose yet, was glaring out onto the earth. The Shadow that did fail made a soft sound to try and get the woman to notice his doppelgänger. It worked. If this wasn’t a stealth mission he would have whooped and cheered. He quickly used Chaos Control to teleport out of her line of sight.
“Oh look! It’s Shadow…” Amy said to herself.
He waited with baited breath.
“I should really stop whining! Everyone is doing their part to help and so must I!” Amy started to walk over.
Shadow smiled sadly. It was the last action he took before fading from time, knowing inside that he hadn’t failed, he had kept his promise.