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"They're not your real friends"
Shadow remembered telling that to Sonic in the Ghost Hill cavern, whilst Sonic adamantly refused to admit that was the truth.
He didn't understand then. Why would Sonic be so insistent that these people were his friends? They weren't his friends, the people Sonic knew so well, they were completely different, separate people that happened to look a lot like his friends.
But now?
As Shadow looked at Rebel, Batten, and Prim, all three exactly as calm and cool and collected as the Rouge he knew...
He understood.
He understood completely.
The familiarity, the safety he felt at seeing his best friend, the one that had taken care of him at his lowest, fought by his side no matter what, taught him that he didn't have to be alone, he could build his own family of people that understood him better than anyone else...
It was all too easy to forget that this was not Rouge.
That these people didn't know him.
Not his background, not his story, not the hardships he'd been through.
And yet... Somehow he still felt a connection to these people. These strangers that resembled his best friends.
After seeing ghost Rouge at Ghost Hill, meeting a version of Rouge that he could talk to and interact with, that was able to actually acknowledge him, instead of staring right through him and repeating that same damn line over and over.
It was hard not to form some kind of attachment.
He knew that Sonic's heart was softer and weaker than his, open to anyone no matter what.
So if this is what he of all people felt... that hedgehog must be feeling the same thing, by a magnitude of 100.
He felt sympathy bubble up in his chest.
He knew that Sonic had basically raised Tails since they were both little kids, so meeting a version of him after the shattering of the Prism left them both alone? It would have been impossible to not treat him like Tails.
Maybe he should speak about this to Sonic. After all, he was literally the only person in the universe that would ever truly understand what he was going through.
Later, though.
After all of this is over.