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Blaze knew many things about Sonic the Hedgehog. She knew how much he admired freedom, what his favourite foods were, and how much he loved and cherished his friends.
What she didn’t know until now, however, was that Sonic could be a very good liar when he wanted to be.
“It’ll be fun,” Sonic said, pulling an extreme gear out of its carrying case. It looked out of place in her dimension, even if they were standing on a beach outside the palace grounds. “You need a break from all your princess duties anyways, right?”
Blaze crossed her arms. “I get plenty of breaks. In fact, I was in the middle of taking a break when you warned me about ‘urgent danger’ outside the palace.”
Sonic stopped what he was doing with the board to give her a pitiful look. “You were sleeping. I think you have to be awake for it to count as a break.”
Okay, maybe he had a point. Blaze rolled her eyes but didn’t respond, uninterested in turning this into a debate. Instead, she watched him flick a switch on the board and bring its engine to life. She was no stranger to extreme gears, having seen many during her visits to Sonic’s world, but had always observed them from a respectable distance. This was her first time seeing one up close.
“Your mandated break starts with this.” Sonic patted the top of the board. “I want to teach you how to ride it.”
That was unexpected. “Why? I can already fly.”
“So what? I can run, but I still find extreme gears fun to ride. Just give it a shot!”
He brought the board close to the ground. She raised an eyebrow. “Do I just stand on it?”
Sonic stood parallel on the other side of the board. He placed his feet a shoulder-width apart. “Like this,” he said, gesturing to his footing. Blaze stepped onto the board and followed his example. “Okay, good. Now bend your knees.”
“They are bent,” Blaze said. She tested her footing, putting more weight on her front foot, and yelped in surprise when the board shot forward with her on it.
The benefit of having Sonic as a teacher meant that she wasn’t alone for more than a second. Almost immediately, he caught up with the extreme gear and ran in step beside it. “Break by putting weight on your back foot!” he yelled, pointing to her other foot, as though she didn’t know which one was which. “Just not too much—you’ll flip over if you break too hard!”
You can fly, she reassured herself. Even if you flip, you’ll be fine.
Listening to Sonic’s advice, she shifted her weight onto the back foot slowly. To her relief, the board slowed to a stop and she jumped off as soon as Sonic told her it was safe.
As Blaze recuperated, legs feeling a bit like jelly, Sonic only grinned and took the extreme gear back into his hands. “That was awesome! You went really fast.”
Watching him take the board away, as though he’d assumed she would shy way from something at the first hint of danger, touched a deeply-buried nerve. The princess of the Sol Dimension did not back down from challenges. After everything she’d been through with the hedgehog, she was almost insulted that he would assume she was afraid of hurting herself.
She held out a hand. “Give me the board. I’m not done.”
His grin turned impish. “Are you sure?” he asked, a challenge in his words. She almost rolled her eyes—that was always some kind of challenge in his words. The only thing Sonic loved nearly as much as running was goading people into challenges for fun.
Well, then consider Blaze successfully goaded. She didn’t bother to answer him directly, opting instead to snatch the board from his grip and place it at her feet again.
“How do I turn?” she said curtly.
“Lean your body back to to turn right. Lean forward to turn left. Don’t worry about anything else—you’ll learn the tricks later.”
Blaze stepped on the board. She considered Sonic’s words, flashed him her own taunting smiles, and said, “I think you already taught me one, Sonic.” Then she leaned all her weight on her front foot and took off.
It wasn’t as bad the second time around. She tested the sensitivity of its turns by leaning her body back and forth, pleased to see that it require her to practically fall forward to make a sharp turn. The beach circling the island was smooth enough that she wouldn’t need one, and despite her insistence on proving herself here, she would rather wait until she had a bit more experience to practice making any difficult turns.
Of course, Sonic ran beside her the whole way. He kicked up sand as he ran beside her, showing no exhaustion despite the breakneck pace she’d set on the extreme gear.
“You’re doing great!” He gave her a thumbs up, his competitive attitude from before nowhere to be seen. “Are you going to do a flip?”
That was the plan, but Blaze wanted it to be big. With a flick of her wrists, fire consumed her hands. She angled her hands behind her and then shot a her of flames out of her palms. When she reached the fastest speed she could manage, she slammed the breaks and shot into the air.
Her experience with flying meant that she never got disoriented in the air. She curled her body to ease the flipping process, then extended her limbs again when she sensed the bottom of the board was parallel to the ground again. The fire jets gave her some good distance from the ground, so it took a few seconds to fall to the earth again. The board hit the ground hard, and she lost her balance—
As soon as she recognized that she was crashing, she felt a pair of familiar arms wrap around her torso and pull her back against his chest. They tumbled into the sand together, rolling over a couple of times until they stopped.
Sonic released her immediately, jumping to his feet to stand at her side. The fall hadn’t hurt, but she felt a little dizzy as she pushed herself to a sitting position.
“Are you okay?” Sonic asked. She looked up to see genuine concern in his eyes. “That was a bad landing. How are your ankles?”
Blaze rotated her ankles experimentally. Thankfully, there was no pain. “They’re fine. I am fine.”
Moving her feet made her aware of the lack of board at her foot. She looked around for the extreme gear, and to her relief, saw it sticking out of the sand a few metres away. Whether or not it still worked was another question, but she was glad it wasn’t lost.
“Phew!” Sonic wiped his forehead in an exaggerated gesture. He plopped down on the sand beside her. “So, was I right? Did you have fun?”
Blaze hummed in thought. “Despite the crash, I suppose I did have fun. Thank you.”
The hedgehog dug his shoes into the sand, an absentminded action that almost seemed self-conscious. “I love running, but something about the extreme gear just feels more . . . freeing. I don’t know why. It just does.”
Sonic was staring hard at his feet. Blaze watched him closely, feeling as though he were confessing to something she didn’t quite understand yet. As much as she loathed to pry into someone’s personal life, something told her this was the right time to push. Sonic wouldn’t have gone anywhere close to starting an emotional conversation if he didn’t want to have one.
She thought of his words and his reason for disrupting her day. Then she understood why he was so insistent on teaching her to use the board today.
“Did you think it would free me?” Blaze asked. It might have easier for him if she elaborated, perhaps providing a timeframe like free me for today, but she chose not to give him that option. If there was something he wanted to say, he would say it.
Sonic shifted in place uncomfortably. “No. Yes. I used to ride it around after . . . everything.” He avoided saying it outright, but Blaze knew he was referring to the big war in his dimension that had only ended a couple of months prior. “Something about it just felt right. I thought you might feel the same way.”
It wasn’t much of a confession. Once again, Blaze felt like she was stuck on the surface, peeking into a cloudy well for secrets it was slow to reveal. He needed another push—or, metaphorically, she needed to dive headfirst into his undisclosed feelings.
“Being a princess isn’t like being a prisoner,” she settled on saying. “I am sure my palace is much nicer than the Death Egg. Don’t you agree?”
He glanced at her, a fleeting look, and then retuned his gaze to the sand. “That’s not it. It’s more like . . . it’s like, have you ever had deja vu?”
Everyone had that at some point in their lives. “Of course.”
“Okay. Before we started fixing everything, I rode the extreme gear to Sunset City. It was all destroyed, you know? The buildings were collapsed, everything was in rubble . . . I stopped skating to look at it.” He took a deep breath. “And then I got deja vu. Very weird deja vu, but for a city I didn’t even recognize. It was on fire, and I think I could remember hearing voices near me; I don’t remember who, though. I thought it was weird and kept skating. I went to a bunch of different cities. At each one, when I looked at their ruined buildings, I got a better sense of what my deja vu was trying to tell me.”
He turned to look at her. His brows were furrowed in confusion, but his gaze was intense as it locked onto her own. “It was telling me that you’re a prisoner. It wants me to think that you aren’t supposed to be here, in this dimension. Do you think that’s true?”
Blaze felt like someone had dumped cold water over her head. “A burning city . . .” she muttered, unable to parse through her thoughts well enough to understand why the visual of it seemed so significant to her. Was there ever a time when she’d been in a burning city? It was familiar, familiar enough to tug at her heart, but she couldn’t remember why. It was just out of reach, like a dream forgotten in morning or a word at the tip of the tongue. She couldn’t quite grasp it.
Sonic chuckled and nudged her with his arm. “Weird, right? I guess going outside after being cooped up so long is enough to make anyone see things.” He stood up and offered his hand. “Come on, princess. I’m sure there are other things you need to do today.”
Blaze took his hand. She wiped the sand off her pants and wondered if she could figure out just what was so familiar about the city if she stuck around with Sonic.
Hm. It was a good thing she was in charge of her own schedule.
“Actually, I’m free all day,” she said. She gestured to the extreme gear stuck in the nearby sand. “Would you like to teach me some of those tricks now?”
Sonic grinned. “I don’t know, do you think you can land one this time?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course. I just need more practice.”
“Right on, princess. Then let’s go!”
Sonic zoomed over to the board and pulled it out of the sand. As he prepared it to fly, she wondered what it meant for the both of them to find the idea of a burning city so familiar. She wondered, secretly, if that meant they had both been in one before.
Maybe they had even been together, in a shared dream. Or in another life.
She considered what it meant for her dimension to be a prison. Deep inside, the flames burning her soul grew a little bit brighter.