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Shadow wonders how long you have to stay in a place for it to be called home.
The Void is dark, illuminated by waves of light emanating from the Gateways. Enormous purple shards float lethargically around him, drinking in colors and trapping them in their crystalline walls. He hates the aimless sensation that presses in from all sides, tossing him around carelessly. It feels a bit like drowning.
The first thing he’d tried to fix was losing the Chaos Emerald to the Void’s pitch-black bog, but each time he managed to avoid a shard, another would bump into him and he would loosen his grip on the jewel, where it would fall down, down, down, its alluring green shine winking up at him in mockery. He’d once, in desperation, put the jewel in his shoe, only to lose both in his attempt to salvage it.
Now he accepts that this is a victory he can’t keep. He doesn’t allow himself to consider what else this loss might entail, because all he has in this numbing, empty space are his own thoughts – and if those turn on him, he may completely lose it.
Instead he focuses on the events he knows he can affect. He watches Sonic tear through New Yoke City and calls out to him – louder, this time, as urgently as he can make his voice sound. Sonic! Keep running! Do not stop!
A blur of blue shoots out of No Place and crashes into one of the larger purple shards near him. “Ugh,” Sonic groans, peeling himself off the mountainous shard. His shoes flicker with residual prism energy, and all his quills shift in the stiff, windless air. The next part only ever takes a moment, before Sonic has even fully opened his eyes. “Shadow?”
Sonic sits up, blearily rubbing his face. “I don’t have time to deal with whoever you are.” Shadow braces himself for the next words, but they anger him regardless. He despises how genuine they sound. “I just wanna go home.”
“Home?” He scowls. “Home doesn’t exist anymore, because of you!”
He dives forward to punch Sonic, but the other hedgehog is too fast, dodging and quickly putting distance between them. The latter bumps between shards like a ping-pong ball before slamming into one, clearly unfamiliar with the low gravity. Still, he manages to run off, albeit slowly, on one of the larger shards, mumbling to himself a plan that Shadow’s heard about a dozen times now.
Sonic notices him following and mutters the same joke, something about Grumpy Shadow, and how it’s redundant. It was almost comforting the first time Shadow heard it, solely because it confirmed that this Sonic was real and left unchanged. His frequent visits to Ghost Hill had instilled a singular fear in him: that he would one day find the flickering form of Sonic there and know for certain that there was no fixing this mess.
He doesn’t even want to imagine what Sonic’s ghostly specter would look like, what dull mantra he would repeat like the others. The thought of Sonic staying still in one place for all eternity is uncomfortable on its own, so despite the anger he feels and the growing urge he has to punch Sonic through layer after layer of crystal, he’s somewhat relieved. Here is the singular other being left intact in a world broken apart.
He stores the thought away for now to focus on funneling his anger into his attacks. He’s harsher now than he was before, eyes trained on Nine’s regulators. His hand reaches out, seizes Sonic’s leg, and flips him a flat slab of sharp rock – twice, the amount he’ll allow himself, because as much as he’d like it, his own spite isn’t going to fix anything. It hadn’t fixed anything the other times.
“I’m stuck in here and it’s all your fault, Sonic!”
“Yeah, yeah, what else is new-” That little - “Wait, how do you know my name?”
Shadow grits his teeth. Sonic grins, and all he wants to do is shake him by the shoulders and tell him that there isn’t a damn thing to be happy about. His presence especially shouldn’t be the thing to evoke it. “Unless...Shadow, you’re you!”
He hugs him, shoulders sinking with relief, and Shadow just as quickly pushes him away. He can’t let Sonic linger. “The only me,” he shoots back, smothering the temporary sensations that came with that embrace in favor of anger. He falls back on anger because he has such an endless amount of it now, picking away at him like a parasite, quick to manipulate and revel in. It’s such a simple emotion and the easiest to be consumed by.
He swears he’s better than that. He’s in control. But he punches Sonic again, who dodges, and his hit sends an impact trembling over the shard they both sit on, shattering it. “You just don’t listen,” he seethes. “What part of “our home doesn’t exist anymore” are you not understanding?”
Sonic pauses as they land on another slab. He’s starting to look just as miserable as Shadow. The first few times Shadow had found a sort of sick retribution in that, but now it just makes him sick. “What did you just say?”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you? When you broke the Paradox Prism, you broke our reality.” He steps closer, clenching his fists tight like that might somehow help mitigate the pain. “Green Hill is gone . It doesn’t exist anymore.”
Sonic sinks – not physically, but the cheerfulness he exudes drains out like sewer water. His expression is filled with so much guilt, weighing down on him like Atlas’ burden. “I know,” he whispers brokenly. “It just keeps getting worse.” Not a sorry. Shadow appreciates that he doesn’t say it at all, because there’s nothing he hates more than an empty promise, and what else is sorry than an empty promise?
He sighs. “Follow me.”
They enter Ghost Hill with minimal conversation. Shadow doesn’t stop Sonic from running about, hugging palm trees and zooming through all his favorite places. He doesn’t understand why it takes Sonic so long to figure out that Ghost Hill is just the dregs of what was once their home – the colors are muted and there isn’t a single sound about. The ache of familiarity must be so overwhelming that it he can’t tell, and Shadow doesn’t utter a word to break his reverie. He watches, again and again, as Sonic rushes from place to place with endless, happy energy, punching the air affectionately, shouting into the eerie silence.
Eventually Shadow approaches the moment Sonic’s smile falls. His friends are all droning their lines, an unsettling buzz of the same repeated words. Shadow remembers his first time in here – he'd felt a small inkling of solace when he glimpsed Rouge, but the moment she failed to make eye contact (she always made eye contact, judging with a single look) he knew there was something wrong. He was beginning to get used to the highs and lows of hoping.
“What’s wrong with them?” Sonic mumbles, sitting on one of the rocks dotting the grey beach.
“It’s a Shatter space, Sonic, just like the others. A cruel version to make us suffer.”
Behind them, Amy declares, “The forest is the most beautiful place on Earth...”
“It was cool the first couple of times,” Sonic says, sighing. After a moment, he stands up again, never one to sit too long. “How do I fix this?”
Shadow takes him to the remainder of the Paradox Prism, explaining everything that he believes happened...and then demands the tech for himself.
Sonic says no. Of course he does, no matter how eloquently or precisely Shadow explains the situation. He feels that it’s his responsibility to fix things, to right the wrongs because that’s always been his role. So they fight like they always do, and Shadow changes every move that he can, but the outcome is the same. Even when he manages to get all four regulators, he can’t pass through. The Shatterspaces simply won’t let him.
So every time, he’s forced to give up the tech and work with Sonic.
Every time, they fail, and things start over again.
He’d once believed it was the fights that made all the difference.
It was hard to think rationally, to believe anything else when he’d been so enraged. Nine had just left with the fixed prism. Sonic was crumpled on the floor, staring at the fading portal. Shadow didn’t know how long he’d stood there, trembling from the fury, but before he could even say anything, he found himself dumped back in the Void, like trash – face-first onto one of the massive shards facing Ghost Hill, its purple surface covered in buttery, cold golden light. If there was a sun in such a dismal place, this was it.
Sonic wasn’t in Ghost Hill, and the prism still had its last remaining piece. Stranger yet, he still had his Chaos Emerald, which he thought he’d dropped. And just as the thought occurred, he slammed into a shard and the jewel fell from his hands into the abyss below.
Odd, but he was too irritated to care. When Sonic made his appearance for the second time, Shadow was ready to beat him into the ground. Then Sonic had asked him who he was and the realization hit like a boulder cracking against his skull. The same impact came again and again during each round – he'd begun to think of it as a game in which there was no foreseeable end, and where the only playable thing was his waning determination. But in the beginning he’d had endless anger, endless vexations in which to pour relentlessly through his fights, and he thought that might change things. If he could just win one of these, somehow find a way to make the tech work...Sonic couldn’t be the only one to travel between the spaces, right?
(Shadow couldn’t be the only one who could remember, right?)
In the beginning, he trained. He practiced his aim and precision by speeding through the Void’s many colliding obstacles. He made use of Ghost Hill’s endless, empty fields. He swam long distances on nothing but festering enmity, shaking saltwater from his quills. There was never a moment of rest, especially when the ghostly apparitions of Sonic’s friends were constantly speaking words of encouragement that only served to make him angrier. Sometimes he wished there’d been nothing left.
The fights didn’t change in any way that mattered. He still won the tech in the end, but he could never pass through. The Shatterspaces would contort with prismatic energy, stinging him, pushing him away. The bite of it was like rust on his fur. It lingered as he and Sonic both inevitably came to the same conclusion – that they would have to work together. Then he would surrender the tech and wait for things to collapse in on themselves.
In the beginning, he used to think that winning would save them. It was the way he’d run his entire life. Battle was something he was used to, and, more importantly, they were something he could control. But in the Shatterverse, it didn’t matter if he won. He could win a thousand times and still be as helpless as ever.
Looking at his reflection in the murky crystals, he dreamt of being enclosed in glass, a girl trying to smile up at him as she pushed the buttons that would send him away.
In truth, it all comes down to two people: Sonic and Nine.
Shadow can’t see Sonic when he’s in the Shatterspaces, but he does get occasional glimpses. He’s seen enough of Nine to know that the fox can’t be trusted. New Yoke City is dingy and somber, with ash-choked skies and commandeering robots that pinch and prod at the tepid masses. In a place like that, people itch to take their daily frustrations out on someone. Tails is very much that someone, in every universe.
The distinction is stark, at least to him. Nine looks endlessly tired. His expression is tight, and when he smiles, there’s a scheme behind it, words left unsaid. He’s a tinkerer with too much time on his hands to stick to a plan that isn’t his own. Sonic, being Sonic, still manages to see Tails, his old friend. He’s too trusting. He sees a soul like Nine’s and thinks it’s kindred, that they share the same hopes and desires for themselves. He forgets that Nine has survived in this place without him, carved out a home of his own. He doesn’t need help creating a new one.
He’d only hoped Sonic would want to share it with him. It says enough to Shadow that Nine saw a place as desolate as the Grim and thought it could one day be home.
Did you ever considered what I wanted?
I assumed that after everything we’d been through...you’d see things the way I do. Just like the real Tails.
Nine brings his arms close around his chest, protecting himself. His eyes are wide with betrayal and hurt. I am real!
The argument is seared in Shadow’s mind. Nine leaves with the shards, Sonic stares at the space where the portal used to be, and Shadow fixes his gaze on the empty altar of rocks where their last chance at getting home once stood.
Nine and Sonic. It’s the end of them, every time.
“You’re you!” Sonic shouts for the hundredth time. “Like, really you!”
He hugs him, like he did last time. It gets harder to push him away each round. “The only me,” he grits out. He’s about to punch him when his arm slackens and he steps further away. Sonic’s hackles rise, ready to dodge, but nothing comes.
Shadow is tired. The sort of exhaustion that seeps into your bones and settles in them like an unwanted, slumbering creature. He’d rather reserve the energy he has left trying to figure out how to enter the Shatterspaces, if there’s any way at all. By now he’s beaten up Sonic so many times that it means nothing. He just wants to go home. “I’m only going to say this once, Sonic, so listen up. When you broke the Paradox Prism, you broke our world . Green Hill is gone.”
Sonic’s face crumples. “What did you just-”
“It’s gone ,” he repeats. “It’s all gone.”
He’s staring at one of the floating crystals around them, waiting for Sonic’s despondent mumble of, “I know I caused this. It just...keeps getting worse.”
Shadow meets his gaze. “I know.”
A slow blink. “Huh?”
He sighs. “Nevermind. Just...follow me.”
He’s getting sick of this conversation.
The Chaos Council is just as annoying and relentless as ever. Shadow dashes through Hedgehog’s Pass in an effort to evade the squealing Dr. Babble, Sonic battling another council member nearby. He notices one of the doctors – he can’t remember their names and, frankly, doesn’t care – approaching Temple Mountain, and prepares to shout at Sonic to protect the prism. Instead, he decides to try something else.
“Sonic!” He shouts.
“What’s up?” Sonic lands next to him, kicking at one of the eggforcers. “Look, I need to check up on Nine-”
“He said to give him a minute,” Shadow interrupts. “We’ve got bigger problems. They keep deploying reinforcements. Soon the island will be swamped with them. If we want to buy Nine proper time, we’ll need to get rid of these...” He arches an eyebrow at the odd machines. “ Things .”
The baby releases an outraged squabble, as though it has any dignity to insult, and aimlessly smashes at the clearing where the hedgehogs once stood. He only succeeds in squashing a grove of palm trees, their trunks bending like paper straws. Sonic appears next to him without a scratch. “What’s this?” He smirks, kicking at another hastily approaching eggforcer. “Another team-up?”
“Dream of it.” Shadow hammers his fist into a triad of drones. “But I do have a plan.”
“Go on.”
“We need to dispense of the doctors.” Shadow glares at the largest vehicle in the sky. A laser extends from its lower metal belly, pointing straight at them. He isn’t particularly concerned about a mere laser, but the mountain’s peak won’t be able to take something of that caliber. “Especially whoever is maneuvering that...”
“Yolkomotive?” Sonic suggests.
Shadow pauses. “What?”
“That’s what it’s called.” He does a vague, flippant hand gesture. “It’s a whole theme.”
“That’s absurd.”
“I think absurd is in the job description for these guys.”
Hey! A voice booms, shaking the valley. A loudspeaker protrudes from the (he refuses to say the name) floating vehicle. Did I hear you marmots making fun of my ingenuity? You try building something of this size and figuring out a name for it!
“Easy,” Sonic declares. “I’d call it the Sonic-Plane. Or – Sonic in the Sky. Yeah, I like the sound of that.”
“I see why Tails is in charge of inventing,” Shadow says dully.
Sonic rolls his eyes. “Whatever. How are we defeating this thing? It’s huge .”
“I can see that,” he deadpans. “You see those minions they sent after us?”
“You mean the approaching army of eggforcers?”
Shadow pinches his snout. “Of course they’re called that.” His hand shoots out and grabs a miniscule drone about to laser-beam Sonic’s head, crushing it into tin. Sonic doesn’t even flinch. “I say we crush two birds with one stone. Use one enemy to annihilate the other.”
Sonic glances at the laser. “You know, sometimes you have smart ideas.”
“Just get moving , Sonic.”
They move in tandem. Sonic is the distraction because he’s more annoying (“I’m eye-catching, ” he insists.) Shadow launches him at the airborne vehicle’s windows, where Sonic sticks cartoonishly, splayed out like a starfish.
“Hiya!” He greets, smiling impishly at an enraged Mr. Dr. Eggman.
“ Why you- ” The doctor repeatedly presses one of the myriad of buttons on his dash. A windshield wiper appears, and for a moment, Sonic’s body is wiped this way and that, his still-grinning mouth sliding over the glass in an act of complete pettiness. “Get off my windshield, you roach!”
“Aw, come on, that’s not even close.”
Shadow tries not to laugh and occupies himself with the laser, shifting it towards the army of eggforcers making their way towards Temple Mountain. He leaps off and whistles, signaling the end of Sonic’s harassment. As a final touch, the blue hedgehog sticks his tongue out and wiggles his fingers. “You don’t have the guts to blow up a whole mountain.”
“I’ll have you know I did it thrice building New Yoke City,” Mr. Dr. Eggman preens.
“Woah. Not a cool flex, you know-”
That seems to be the end of Eggman’s patience. He clicks the button, and bright orange fires up at the end of the laser, burbling like the surface of a lava pit.
Sonic jumps down to join Shadow on the crest of one of the many hills flanking Temple Mountain. They watch as, gloriously, the laser misfires and detonates a thousand eggforcers, which blow up into smithereens. It’s the only thing Shadow’s enjoyed seeing shattered.
“That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Shadow turns to look at Sonic. The orange light illuminates his dark colored fur. His shoes glitch with iridescent energy, and color seems to show in his veins, illuminating his skin in a vivid array of colors. He finds a strange joy in fighting this way, taunting the enemy...Shadow will admit he’s never enjoyed that sort of foray until meeting Sonic. It’s a familiar dance, and they’re nearing the final pirouette, the ending symphonic crash.
“Yeah,” he says, jerking his head away.
(He decides there and then that he won’t let this happen again.)
“How could you?”
Sonic jolts. Shadow doesn’t usually say anything during this pocket of silence, busy awaiting the moment he dreads most, where things will reset. But a combination of Nine’s departure and his own frustration fueled anger drag the words from his mouth.
“I told you, Sonic,” he says levelly, grinding his teeth. “Hell - I told you , Sonic. I told you what would happen if you chose to trust Nine.” He almost laughs from the sheer exhaustion. How many times has he watched this pathetic scene again? “But you still did anyway. You just never listen, do you? What are those damn ears of yours for if you won’t listen? ”
“Did you never think about Nine’s own intentions? Was nothing ever suspicious to you?” He asks, a small, cruel chuckle escaping his lips. He walks closer, Sonic’s back to him. “That’s your problem, Sonic. You were thinking of too many people at once, trying to help all those iterations of your friends in the Shatterspaces. And yet you forgot that they aren’t your friends. Why were you surprised when Dread betrayed you? He isn’t Knuckles. Thorn Rose is not Amy. Nine is not Tails. They will never be the friends you want them to be because they are completely different people. They are strangers .”
Sonic flinches. Shadow continues, the resentment steaming at his fingertips like it’s something he can throw. “It’s not worth it being kind to them. You need to get in. Get out. Maybe they’ll even thank you for it.”
His voice drops, still as a lakefront. “The next time you see Nine, Sonic? Don’t talk to him. Don’t look at him. Don’t help him. Think of it as though he doesn’t exist...so you can save what’s left of our existence.”
Shadow’s close enough to see Sonic’s gloved hands covering his face. Time resets before he can get a better look, but he hears the tears before he sees them. It’s a sound he never wants to hear again.
He knows it’s coming, but the surprise never fades. There’s nothing he hates more than the sensation of falling. Limbs pasted to the shard, he drops into the void, darkness closing in on him from all sides. Sonic’s panicked shout echoes throughout the space. He can see the hedgehog swimming desperately through the murk, reaching for Shadow.
Why? Sonic doesn’t remember their conversation, but Shadow does, every time Sonic hugs him and shouts, you're you!
If only I wasn’t . Maybe there’s a nicer Shadow for him in the universe. Somewhere.
“How do I fix this?”
You can’t. “Follow me.”
He wonders if he should tell Sonic about the time loop.
A time loop? Yeah, right, Shads. Which universe do you belong to? Clown-verse?
He’s decided it’s his burden to shoulder. He doesn’t want to see Sonic panicking about running out of time, because then he’ll get sloppier, make more mistakes...but it isn’t like anything else has worked. He may as well try everything, reckless as it is.
“Sonic, I’m in a time loop.”
“A time loop?” He scoffs. “Yeah, right, Shads. Which universe do you belong to? Clown-verse?”
Shadow swallows a groan. “I’m serious. This is the umpteenth time we’ve had this conversation.”
“Oh, really? And why should I believe you?”
Shadow gestures at the shards around them. “Look at where we are. Think about what you’ve seen. Is a time loop really that unbelievable?”
Sonic pauses. “I guess not. How’s it work?”
“It resets every time you fail to complete the prism.”
“...What?”
“You trust Nine. So you fail every time.”
Sonic immediately goes on the defensive. “What does Tails have to do with any of it? You know, Shadow, it’s starting to get really-”
“Nine takes the shards, Sonic,” Shadow snaps. “You have an argument and lose them all. Including your supposed friend .”
“But...Tails wouldn’t-”
“His name is Nine . They aren’t the same, Sonic. I’ve watched this happen more than I can count. If you’re ever going to change anything, you can’t keep up with this line of reasoning. You need to focus.”
“Focus,” Sonic repeats.
It doesn’t quite work the way Shadow wants it to. Sonic tries, but not hard enough. It isn’t in his nature to just ignore the people around him. His warning about Tails nearly seems to make Sonic befriend the fox faster. And, as it turns out, Sonic can’t find any shards in No Place or Boscage Maze without befriending the inhabitants of those particular Shatterverses – he's too unfamiliar with the terrain. He promises he’s just helping them out for a little, then he’s taking part in New Yoke’s Revolution, fighting robots in the rainforest, and dueling with pirates in No Place.
Sonic insists he’s only offering a hand, but he’s submerged entirely in their universes. When Nine betrays him, he almost looks like he didn’t see it coming.
“Get up, Sonic.”
The hedgehog is standing by the place where Nine’s portal had been. “You told me,” he says softly. “I didn’t listen.”
“You don’t,” Shadow agrees. “But we don’t have much time. Things are going to reset.”
“Shadow?”
“Get up,” he repeats, voice lithe and weary. “You can do this one more time. Please.”
Sonic stares at him. “That’s a first.”
“For you it is. Not for me.” In another universe, Shadow the Hedgehog has only begged once in his life, for Maria’s sake. Now the word please is stale on his tongue from overuse. It’s such an empty word. Just like sorry . He hates it, but he begs anyway. Maybe someone’s listening.
Sonic shoots out of the New Yoke City’s Shatterspace like one of Eggman’s rockets.
His head hits the back of a purple colored slab – an enormous shard. He groans, rubbing his frazzled quills. Around him is a glittering sea of debris, crystalline fragments swimming in the air. Sitting on one of the larger shards, bathed in faint purple light, is a familiar figure.
He approaches slowly until the light spills over and he can identify the black fur and red highlights. The head doesn’t pivot once, even as his shoes make noticeable sounds.
“Shadow?” he breathes. “Shadow, you’re... you .”
He hugs the surly hedgehog from behind, expecting to be pushed away. Instead, Shadow sinks into his embrace. He looks more tired than Sonic’s ever seen him, so he lets them savor the warmth for a bit. He’d never thought he would think of Shadow’s touch as comforting, but in this empty plane of existence, it’s the closest thing to the wind on his back, to the sun on his face.
Shadow pulls away and stares down at a yellow Shatterspace. “Come on, Sonic.”
He follows, with the vague sensation that he’s done this before.