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Shadow was in the living room at Sonic’s house when a familiar yet unwelcome feeling started to come on.
The room was packed full, a group of Sonic’s friends crowded around the TV and loudly encouraging the fighting game match that was playing out on-screen. Sonic and Amy were facing off against each other, their voices rising in volume as the match became more heated. Sonic in particular had never been gifted with volume control, and Amy could be equally piercing when she got excited. Knuckles perched on the back of the couch behind them, adding his powerful baritone to the chaos. Tails sat off to the side, fiddling with some sort of gadget in his hands, occasionally interjecting with a helpful comment explaining some mechanic of the game.
Each shout grated on Shadow’s nerves, making him shrink further within himself. His ears flattened involuntarily on top of his head, trying to shut out the assault on his senses. In other situations, Shadow could usually deal with this feeling, chalk up the painful sensation to his artificially heightened senses and shake it off. He was built for the battlefield after all, which wasn’t usually a quiet place, and there he could usually override any uncomfortable noise levels with his laser focus on the combat at hand. But social gatherings were another thing entirely and he sorely lacked the skills to cope in situations like this.
Something notable must have happened onscreen, because the resulting chorus of shrieks and volley of sound effects crackling from the speakers made Shadow flinch. Had the lights in this room always been so bright? He should probably excuse himself, say he had to go to the bathroom and sit on the cold tile floor in the dark until he felt like a living creature again and not just a bundle of nerves and adrenaline. But Shadow’s muscles refused to listen to him, frozen like a helpless prey creature at the hands of a predator.
Surely everyone else could tell that something was wrong by now—would they laugh at his weakness? Or worse, look down on him with pity? Shadow already felt like his presence at these social gatherings was barely tolerated at best—at least by anyone other than Sonic, who had dragged him here in the first place.
A sudden contact with one of his paws made Shadow jump, but it also jolted him out of his frozen state. He blinked at the folded paper that had been pressed into his paw, barely registering the flash of orange fur in front of him. Curiosity temporarily overriding his panic, he unfolded the paper and saw written in Tails’ messy scrawl: Come help me with something in the garage?
It wasn’t phrased like a question, but the question mark seemed to indicate Shadow had a choice in the matter. Next to staying here and trying not to break down, however, anything sounded like a reprieve, so he gathered the last dregs of his willpower and pushed himself up from his seat to follow Tails.
The garage was comparatively quiet, but in his state of heightened anxiety Shadow still found the constant whirring of the ventilation systems uncomfortably loud. He sat on the chair that Tails pointed out, dreading the moment that he would be forced to speak, no doubt having been called here to give some sort of input on one of the fox’s many inventions. But Tails just handed him a pair of headphones and wordlessly mimed putting them on.
Shadow eyed the headphones suspiciously for a moment. He really hoped there wasn’t loud music or something waiting to surprise him, because in his current state it would probably push him over the edge. But, lacking the words to protest anyways, he put them on and suddenly the overbearing noise that had been pressing down on him from every direction was gone.
He couldn’t hear his own sigh of relief, but Shadow felt some of the tension he’d been carrying leave his body, his breaths coming easier and more regularly that before. He closed his eyes as well, shutting out the bright fluorescent lights overhead, and allowed himself to sit for a moment in blessed relief from all the external stimuli.
To tell the truth, Shadow wanted to stay like that for longer, to avoid the exhausting noise of existence as long as possible. But he felt uncomfortable being so vulnerable in front of Tails, so once he felt like he could tolerate it a bit better he opened his eyes and pulled off the headphones. The hum of the ventilation was still there, but it felt more like background noise than the oppressive presence it had been before and Shadow allowed himself to relax a little with the knowledge that his senses were going back to normal. (Whatever that meant.)
Tails wasn’t even looking at him, still fiddling with the gadget in his lap, and now that Shadow was no longer in fight or flight mode, he noticed that the fox seemed anxious as well. He and Tails hadn’t spent much time alone together, their main connection being Sonic, and neither of them were great with unfamiliar people. Not that Shadow would have admitted that talking to strangers made his insides crawl—he was probably just under-socialized from his upbringing on the Ark.
The silence dragged on between them, and Shadow felt like he should say something—explain himself in some way that didn’t incriminate him as having some sort of weakness that was out of his control like this. But talking still seemed like a struggle, so all he did was hand back the headphones with a non-committal nod that he could only hope conveyed some sort of gratitude without being too emotionally vulnerable.
Tails took them back with a similar nod, still avoiding looking at Shadow. It should have been awkward, but something about it actually put Shadow at ease. Maybe it was because he didn’t feel like he had to force facial expressions as readily as he usually did. Another side-effect of his programming, he assumed, for that to not come easily to him as it seemed to with others.
Finally, Tails cleared his throat. “Sensory overload?” was all he asked, his voice light and hesitant.
Shadow blinked. “What?” He had some idea of what the words meant individually, but he had never heard them together. Was this another of the many modern slang phrases he had been struggling to memorize since his awakening from cryosleep?
“Sensory overload,” repeated Tails, but this time it wasn’t phrased like a question. “When one gets too much stimulation at once and their brain can’t process it.” He sounded like he was reciting out of a dictionary, which honestly shouldn’t surprise Shadow at this point. Tails might be the youngest of their group, but he’d also been known to read complicated technical manuals thicker than his two tails side by side.
Shadow’s pride urged him to deflect this entire conversation, to play it off like nothing had happened, but his curiosity got the better of him. “There’s a word for that? Does it happen to everyone?”
Tails nodded, then shook his head. “Doesn’t happen to everyone, but some people feel sensory input more strongly than others. I saw you freeze up and thought it might be happening to you.”
The thought of someone else noticing any shred of weakness made Shadow’s throat tighten. “I am the ultimate lifeform,” he said, his voice dropping into a practiced emotionless drawl. “My sensory receptors function perfectly at all times.” They had to, or else the experiment would be a failure. And if the experiment was a failure, then—
Shadow hadn’t realized he was digging his claws into his paw pads until Tails shoved the device he’d been fiddling with into his hands. Shadow stared at the oddly shaped piece of plastic and metal, covered all over with buttons he didn’t understand the function of.
“You press the buttons,” explained Tails.
Shadow tried to detect whether there was a hint of mockery in his voice, but there didn’t seem to be any. Not that he was the best at detecting that anyways. Hesitantly, he pressed a blue button on the side and tensed, waiting for something to happen, but all that came out was a satisfying click. Frowning, he tried a few other buttons and was met with similar results.
He looked up at Tails, confused. “It doesn’t do anything.”
Tails shrugged. “It’s not supposed to. Pressing buttons is just fun.”
“Oh,” was all Shadow could think to say, looking back at the device with even more confusion. In the past when he had been handed a device like this, it usually meant that it was about to do something like shock him while a bunch of scientists in white coats scribbled endless notes onto their clipboards. But this device was lighter than those, and he couldn’t hear any hum of electricity inside.
Shadow pressed a few more buttons, and decided that pressing buttons was indeed some kind of “fun”.
“Does it happen to you?” Shadow asked, feeling much more capable of holding a proper conversation now that he had something to occupy his hands. Maybe Tails was on to something after all. “The sensory overload,” he clarified when Tails didn’t reply right away.
Tails nodded. “It does. My hearing is very sensitive so I get overwhelmed easily. And I don’t like the feeling of certain things touching me.”
“Hm,” said Shadow thoughtfully, which didn’t come close to expressing the sudden rush of relief that threatened to overwhelm him in an entirely different way. If Tails, a natural living creature, sometimes experienced it too, then maybe it wasn’t a flaw that the scientists had failed to address in his construction like he had always assumed.
“Has it happened to you before?” asked Tails, which was only fair after Shadow’s question but he still hesitated before answering.
Now that he wasn’t actively panicking, Shadow could recall happier memories aboard the Ark, when he used to get overwhelmed and Maria would find him curled up in the bottom of a storage closet, then coax him out and cheer him up with soft blankets and gentle distractions. She had never thought he was weird or weak for it, and a lump grew in Shadow’s throat as he realized how much he had missed that kind of quiet acceptance, had shut anyone else out from ever seeing him in that state.
“It has,” he said simply. He was grateful that Tails didn’t press him any further than that, only acknowledging it with a nod as if his suspicions had been confirmed.
After a few minutes, Shadow’s embarrassment at enjoying something so whimsical surfaced and he made to hand the button gadget back to Tails, but the fox waved him off. “Keep it. I can make another one.”
“You made this?” asked Shadow, then mentally kicked himself for stating the obvious.
But Tails’ face lit up like Shadow had just asked him for the recipe to a homecooked meal. “I call it a fidget device,” he said, pride shining in the cracks of his normally reserved demeanor. “I got the idea because Sonic can’t sit still, and he was always pressing buttons on my devices before I was done setting them up, so I made him his own with a bunch of buttons so he could press them anytime he wanted. He loved it, and I tried it myself and it was really fun, so I started experimenting and making a bunch of them.”
Tails’ arms were waving as he talked, mirrored by his tails, and Shadow couldn’t stop himself from staring a little. He had never seen Tails so animated before, or say so many words at once for that matter. He felt oddly at ease listening as he continued to fidget with the device, even if the technical details about its inner workings—“100% mechanical! No batteries required!”—went over his head.
As Tails’ explanation started to wind down, he suddenly seemed to become aware of how much he was talking and his ears drooped as some kind of invisible shield came back up. “Sorry,” he mumbled, staring into his lap.
“No, it’s fine,” Shadow rushed to say, the words tumbling over each other a little in his haste to reassure the fox. “It was interesting.”
Despite his fumble, the words seemed to have their intended effect and Tails broke into a warm smile. “Thanks, Shadow.”
Shadow let out a little huff, suddenly embarrassed. “I mean, you should hear how much Sonic talks. I’m used to it.”
“I live with him,” Tails reminded him with a little giggle.
“Oh,” said Shadow, trying to process the fact that Tails now felt comfortable enough around him to giggle. “Right.”
“Who talks a lot now?” came a familiar boisterous voice from the doorway.
Shadow’s ears flattened as he startled, and he made to hide the fidget device behind his back. But Sonic produced a similar one out of seemingly nowhere and started to play with it in plain view of the two of them, so apparently it was allowed.
Sonic smirked, his fingers flying over the buttons with mesmerizing speed. “Having a bonding moment with my little brother, Shadow?”
Shadow felt his quills stand up minutely along his spine, his desire to look cool and detached suddenly resurfacing in the face of his annoying rival. “I am the ultimate lifeform. I don’t have ‘bonding moments’.” Then, with a guilty glance at the fox beside him, he quickly added, “Tails was helping me with something though.”
“I was testing my fidget device on Shadow,” explained Tails, and Shadow was grateful for his discretion at not mentioning anything else that had happened. “The experiment was a success! He thinks it’s really cool too.”
Shadow tried not to flinch at the word “experiment”. “I didn’t say it like that,” he mumbled, staring down at his hands even as they continued to fidget with the device.
“Well it is really cool!” Sonic affirmed, launching himself at Tails and playfully messing up the fur on top of his head. “My little brother here is some kind of genius. He makes the coolest inventions!”
“Get off me,” complained Tails, but a small smile betrayed his pride.
Shadow watched them, a strange feeling of warmth rising in his chest. “I guess it is pretty cool,” he admitted, and it was worth it to see Tails’ smile grow wider.
“Oh yeah,” said Sonic, apparently remembering the real reason he’d come. “I was supposed to ask what kind of pizza you guys want. We’re all going to watch a movie while we eat if you want to join.”
The last part he directed at Shadow, who hesitated. Did they really want him hanging around that long or was Sonic just being polite as usual? “I should probably get going,” he said, resigned, already forming an excuse in his head if Sonic tried to argue.
But it was Tails who looked at him and said, “Please stay, Shadow?” accompanied by the biggest puppy-dog eyes he had ever seen.
Well. Shadow suddenly understood why Sonic could never say no to his little brother.
“I guess,” he relented with a huff, but the way the two brothers cheered and gave each other a high five made him feel like maybe he kind of belonged here after all.