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“A Solem?”
That’s how it starts.
“I know,” Sonic says. “Kind of a weird name, but it makes sense. Chao are born outta the Chaos Emeralds, so Solem are from the–”
“Sure, I get that,” Amy interrupts him, pulling back the strand of pink hair the wind carries over her cheek. “But what I don’t get, is why Blaze is trusting me to watch it when we’ve barely even met!”
“Well, I put your name out there.” Sonic adjusts the squishy bundle in his arms.
“Huh? You did? What for!”
“Sheesh, don’t get so loud. I just figured ya weren’t busy, since Tails and Cream and Knuckles and I all gotta head to Sol, and all—”
“Why does everyone get to go but me? You guys are always leaving me behind!”
Like a slap, the thing in Sonic’s arms begins to wail, its mouth much smaller than a Chao’s and its eyes much bigger. There isn’t any halo above it, like a Hero Chao would, just a pair of pokey ears poking up from the top of its head. And those eyes. Big, watery cat eyes. And Sonic there to hush it over one broad, handsome shoulder. Amy could melt in this heat.
“Oh, how cute…” she murmurs in Earthian Japanese, fanning herself better than the breeze ever could.
“Wanna take him?” Sonic offers once the thing has quieted. Amy nods and reaches out for him. He’s got the same bouncy texture as a regular Chao. He looks up at her with those big black eyes. She rocks him til he’s yawning.
“See? You’ll make a great Solemsitter,” Sonic encourages.
“Oh, alright,” she says. “I could never say no to that face.”
“Yeah, he’s pretty cute. Blaze raised him–”
“I wish you could stay and watch him with me,” she whines. “It’s hard to grow up with only one parent.”
“Sure, it’s just, uh, Blaze kinda needs me over there. Eggman Nega isn’t as spineless as ours.”
Amy looks down into the black eyes again. Suppose Sol is no place for a little helpless thing like this right now, not with Robotnik II ravaging the land.
“Blaze must care a lot about you,” she says quietly, letting the Solem take her finger to its teething mouth. When she looks up again, Sonic’s nowhere in sight, merely a footprint of where he once stood. Amy sighs. The Solem gurgles as it drools on her glove.
By the next morning, the little helpless squishy thing is back in the arms of his mother. And, hell, does Amy Rose sweat with a princess standing at her door.
“Thank you,” Blaze nods to her, her Solem bundled up and cooing at her chest. She smiles briefly at him, then turns back up to Amy. “Please, take this. It’s to repay you.”
“Oh, I–I,” she stammers, waving her hands afront her hot face. “It was no trouble at all! I’m just glad you and Sonic got everything sorted out in your dimension. I wouldn’t want your world falling apart, that’d be just awful.”
“Indeed,” Blaze agrees, expressionless. To herself alone, Amy giggles, swaying anxiously in the threshold to her apartment. Between them, Blaze insists her hand forward again. Amy looks down at the glass vial, a dark pink liquid spiraling inside it.
“The flat fruit that Solem eat can be liquified into medicines,” explains Blaze.
Tentatively, she takes the vial to inspect it close. Silver reflections of herself stare back within the glass. “What’s it…do?”
The Solem takes her attention momentarily before she’s glancing up again, and in that soft voice of hers, telling Amy, “I think it may clear some things up for you.”
Blaze leaves swift and quiet. Behind the closed door, Amy peers at the medicine, swishes it in its tube. “Clear some things up..?” Hm. She sets it gently in her vanity drawer and looks over a shoulder at the mess of toys and stuffed animals across her floor. Solem certainly are like Chao.
Her apartment’s clean before she leaves it the next day. There’s a basket on her arm, pink gingham blanket pulled overtop the fresh bread she’d baked this morning. Jam jars clink against each other as she walks. One strawberry, one lemon.
“Sonic?” she asks as she knocks on the door of the workshop. It’s early enough in the spring that she’d rather walk in the cool wind than take the sticky, cramped train. “Sooonic!”
The door opens for her pounding hand. In the hang of it, she sticks her long nose, peeking inside at Sonic and a princess sat side by side in the living room.
“Bl–” Amy starts to stutter, but Sonic’s faster, shooting to the door in under a second. “Heya, Amy, what brings you around?”
“Um,” she peeps, still looking around him through the lit gap in the doorway. Blaze catches her eye for one electric second, and then looks away again, surreptitious.
“Didja walk here? Your face is all red.”
Amy blinks. “Huh?”
“Hullo, Earth to Amy?” Sonic asks with his face all screwed up. She can feel the thinner air slipping out through the threshold.
Her head shakes. “Just, could you…” Forward, she bows, the basket outstretched, “give this bread to Blaze, please! I’ve got to go!”
“Huh, Amy! Wait!”
“There’s jam in there, too!” she yells from a half acre away, one hand defending her skirt from the wind whilst the other waves.
She nearly faceplants into the closest tree. Rather, she gathers her flushed, giggling self up, and takes off through the Ruins, past the train station, out of sight.
Amy gets home and shoves her grin into a pillow. Atop her bed hits both fists, expelling all the pent up giddiness in her stomach. Eventually, she’s rolled to her back, hands flat on her tummy and hair splayed out neatlessly beneath her. “Wow,” she sighs, cupping one cheek. “A real princess…”
The next time she sees Blaze, she’s more prepared for it. It’s later in that same day. She’s not let her mascara run off with the sweating heat, not let a single quill out of place or a wrinkle in her skirt. When she meets Blaze again, in the middle of the Mystic Ruins’ humidity, Amy smells like sugar and Blaze is absolutely everything.
She not dressed proper like Amy’s used to seeing her. Rather, she’s got on a short dress with her hair tied back in a red band and her shoes left on the dock. She sits by a lake with her feet in the water, watching the ripples left behind by fleeting pond bugs. Swallowing, Amy pushes herself forward the few steps it takes to get her attention.
“Good morning, Blaze,” she smiles, clasping her hands politely behind her back. The sun gleams over them and Blaze’s cat eyes look her up and down.
“Good morning,” she murmurs back, looking back to the water again.
Amy stops herself from tapping a foot. Her mouth opens, but Blaze’s is faster– “If you’re looking for Sonic, he went back up to the workshop.”
Blinking, she fumbles to wave both hands. “Oh, no, I– actually, I was looking for you!”
Blaze tilts her head. Were Amy a different person, she wouldn’t swear she reads the expression on her face as stricken, there, nor would she be standing here by the fishing hole frogs around here like best.
Beside her on the dock, Amy curls her knees to her chest and has a seat. She scoots an inch away before she asks, “Isn’t it pretty out here? Big’s so lucky he gets such a nice view right from his own house.”
“Mh.”
“You know him?”
Idly, Blaze nods. A dragonfly, blue in the light, flies over them.
“I guess that makes sense. I know lots of hedgehogs!”
Blaze says nothing, only the cicadas. Amy taps her fingertips together.
“Um…did you like the bread?”
“Hm?”
With that stare on her, Amy nearly can’t go on. “The– The bread I made this morning, and the jam? Didn’t Sonic give it to you?”
Blaze shakes her head. In her ire, Amy drops her legs off the edge of the dock, though still they hang in the air, not long or elegant enough to reach the water the way Blaze’s do. “That Sonic!” Her fists clench at her sides. “I bet he went and ate all of that by himself! Ooh, he’s such a jerk!”
As if she’s suddenly realized all her life’s mistakes, Amy blinks, reddened face turning to look at the other. “S-Sorry, I didn’t mean to get angry, ehehehe…”
But Blaze just laughs. A little chortle into a curled finger. Wide-eyed, Amy’s whole heart ties her up in red, sultry knots.
“Have you used the medicine?” Blaze surprises her in asking.
Amy’s head shakes. “Not yet. I haven’t thought of the right place to use it yet. It’d be helpful if I knew what it did, though.”
“Find out for yourself,” Blaze calmly says back, lifting her feet from the lake to slip her flats back on.
That night, Amy peers at the vial. It turns and spins and spins and turns in her hand, reflecting itself in her vanity mirror and in the big green fields of her eyes.
“Find out for myself, huh,” she murmurs to no one. The cork pulls from the top and she gives it a sniff. “Oh! It smells just like cotton candy!”
Cork left aside, she steels herself enough to tip the glass back to her lips. Gulp goes the lump in her throat as she swallows the whole thing back, cheeks chipmunked with the liquid til it, too, goes down. “Yechk. Doesn’t taste like candy…”
In fact, it tastes like– The glass shatters against the floor. Amy sits straight-backed, her limbs all wet bread feeling until they likewise tense, stark and solid there at her vanity. Then it passes. Like a string pulled, the tension releases from her body and she’s left there as a ragdoll, blinking as she lifts her groggy head to the mirror. Blaze’s yellow eyes stare back.
The vanity bench tumbles backward, and she’s staring at the ceiling instead. Shaking her ears (pointy little purple kitty things– wah!), she grabs the desk to pull herself up. She peeks shyly at her reflection, eeping back down in shock before she’s able to look again. There’s where she examines her face, truly, the pretty white whiskers and bright, sharp eyes. Blaze smiles back at her in the mirror.
“Well…I guess it isn’t so bad,” she purrs, admiring her sightly reflection some more. “At least like this, I get to be pretty.”
Abruptly, she’s pulled out of her thoughts and dropped into someone else’s, so it seems; she can see Sonic sitting on the dock beside her, untouched by the lake, grinning and saying something close to, “Yeah, but there’s nothin’ wrong with telling her how you feel, anyway.”
In the memory, she stares at the ripples in the water, and cannot bring herself to speak.
“I think that’s her, now,” Sonic says with his hand cupped to an ear. “I’ve gotta run.”
“Wait,” says Blaze’s voice at last, but Sonic’s already vanished, and she can only see herself, now, approaching the lakeside in her big red boots.
“Good morning, Blaze,” she hears herself say.
A flash of white carries her to another scene. Sonic’s beside her and she’s someone else, someone leggier and more agile and moltenly princesslike.
“Funny you say that,” he snickers. “‘Cause I can’t get her away from me, personally.”
“She’s sweet…” she quietly says. Her line of vision changes from Sonic to the wood floor.
“Yeah, sure. All I mean is, I wouldn’t bother going out of your way to find her anymore. Hang around here long enough, you’ll be sick of her in–”
“Sonic? Sooonic!”
“Speak of the devil...”
“Hm?”
A squeak in the door sends Sonic to his feet. “Heya, Amy, what brings you around?” echoes from across the room, a few more back-forths before Sonic shuts the door and steps back inside, basket in hand. She watches him rifle through it, coming back with a fistful of fresh bread. “Mn, she said she had to run,” his full mouth says. “Wanna chase each other around Big’s pond?”
Then she’s somewhere else again, somewhere familiar she’s never been, standing in misfitting red heels and staring out at the open Sol Valley around her.
“Just say you need someone to watch ‘im,” Sonic’s voice rings out from everywhere. “There’s no way she’ll say no. It’s the perfect excuse to talk to her.”
The wind whispers in her ears. At her feet, her Solem crawls, tugging at the hem of her white pants. She picks it up into her arms, and suddenly, she’s got one whole heartbeat again, one soul bound unto itself by silken, Sol linens.
Amy opens her eyes to her own reflection. The vial is broken and the potion is gone. Behind her, the open window trembles her skin.
She returns to the workshop for the third time that day, hammer over her shoulder and bouquet of lavender roses in her hand. “Sonic! Blaze! Are you here? I’ve got a present for each of you!”