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Moment to moment; victory to victory, the way he likes it. Sonic’s never known anything different.
Stop for noone, pause to beat Eggman into the ground, back on track: feet to the ground, earth thrumming resonantly with each beaming sprint he streaks across its brilliant green. The world is big, too big for such a short lifespan, but he’ll make the most of it; he carries a map, frayed and fragile at the edges, cracked where he’s creased it one too many times, scribbled in ink from pens stolen from politicians, looping cursive in Amy’s glittery gel pens, the blocky slant of Knuckles’ handwriting.
Stop for noone. The world tries plenty, though.
Dealing with corrupted Gods of destruction and the end of the world certainly wasn’t how he envisioned spending his teen years, but he swings into the change, same as everything else – he dives in headfirst, heedless of the fall. The wind whips past him and the world sings and he doesn’t know when he’ll hit the ground but he knows he’ll bounce back, somehow, anyway, springing right to the next opportunity life launches at him.
Somewhere along the line, he becomes a hero. There are eyes on him now, a world in awe that this lanky kid and his ragtag group of friends had managed to claw the planet back from destruction. He doesn’t mind it; he has more free stuff and sponsorship offers than he’ll ever know what to do with. The food trucks he’d haunted as a kid know him by face. And free food is always a plus.
His world is changing and he welcomes it with open arms. Sure, people get nosy and sure, others need to learn to keep to their own business, but he’s not worried.
He can always run, and noone’s ever been able to catch up to him.
This is his thought when GUN decides to try and kidnap him, and isn’t that idea in itself enough to send his past self spinning. Bursting out of that helicopter, cutting through the air – the sky bending bright around him – he laughs. Freedom has never been so beautiful as the streets that blur past his vision in a smudge of colour, the audible whip of the air with each wide arc he makes around the city’s tight corners, peeling away from the speeding truck and right back to stunning sunlight.
When the coast is clear, he simply stands there, breath coming in choppy pants, sweat dampening his quills, grin breaking uncontrollable across his face, warmed by the sun and the spring air. Here, the thrill of it. What he lives for.
Even when the sky darkens and GUN sends more of its finest, he doesn’t falter; this fight is his, and he revels in it. Whatever beef they have with him specifically he doesn’t much care, but it is extremely gratifying to watch their smug faces fall each time he breaks away from them.
And then –
Against the night sky, he’d be so easy to miss if not for the streaks of red cutting through his fur. Well, that and the emerald he holds with the reverence of the world, setting his face aglow with fragments of brilliant green.
A shadow. His shadow; the upturn of his quills more reminiscent of his super form, but the same sure smirk and fire in his eyes that gives Sonic pause. His fur appears a velvety midnight, almost, a satiny shimmer that follows the arc of his arm as he holds the emerald up, wide eyed and dangerous.
Standing atop the mech he’d destroyed moments ago, tall where there had been only spaceless air before, Sonic has to blink a few times to make sure he isn’t seeing things. But there the other hedgehog is, cutting into his landscape all unfamiliar.
It hits him with a laugh. Wherever GUN dug this guy up from, they did a damn good job finding a copy.
Just a copy, though. Sonic smooths out the creases in his gloves, feigning impatient disinterest as the stranger speaks, voice in an odd lilt that he can’t quite place.
Then he darts forward, a straight shot to where the other is standing, arm already outstretched to grab the emerald right from his hand –
And then the world stops.
Before the long fall, before the next adventure that’ll have him at world’s end, there’s always a moment. One foot over the edge, the horizon warping in impending protest, everything slows, and the boundless sky edges into his view. It asks him if this is what he wants, knowing the price, knowing what happens when you don’t stick the landing. It asks, are you sure about this?
Like every other time, Sonic breaks for open air.
Their eyes meet for the briefest of moments, Sonic’s gaze twitching over to the emerald getting away from him, drawn immediately back to its owner. The challenge in his eyes, the self-satisfied tilt of his mouth. As if daring him to try it.
And then it’s gone. Something yanks him back from the edge, sends the moment to splinters and Sonic sprawled across the ground, confused. That something being the sirens in the distance, the heavily armed soldiers closing in, and the fact that the stranger had again vanished into thin air.
“My name is Shadow.” that strange, strange voice says, from high above. Sonic whirls around against the wind to face him, his voice the clearest even amongst the cacophony of slowly growing racket. “I’m the world’s ultimate lifeform.”
He tosses the emerald in the air, careless, so sure of himself. Sonic feels dumbstruck. “There’s no time for games… farewell.”
A flash, and he’s gone. Again. Jolted back to reality, Sonic finally registers just how much GUN have closed in; he turns slowly, a little sheepishly. No exit routes that aren’t blocked by hordes of robots – he may have exhausted his good luck for tonight.
Looking at it objectively, not a great situation, but he still finds a renewed determination, a renewed wonder rearing itself at the back of his mind. Even when he feels a prick at the side of his neck, even as his vision blurs and the world tilts on its side. There’s a million thoughts running through his muddied mind, the loudest of the dark silhouette against a viridian sky, the moment suspended in time. The world’s ultimate lifeform.
And hey, GUN really means business. Bringing out the big guns this time, ha.
And it’s all just so exciting.
Sonic falls limp to the ground, mind swimming with red and black and green.
It’s easy to say now that he should’ve known it wasn’t just surface level. He’d tried to shake off the claustrophobia of the cell with his thoughts, but he’s working on the thinnest attestation of proof. The stranger – Shadow – was an enigma, the encounter pure chance. Pure luck, even though it hadn’t gotten him much further than the cell until Amy and Tails came to get him out.
Sonic bolts across the harbour, propelling himself with a metallic clang across a yawning gap, pointedly not looking down at the span of water below as he vaults over the GUN mechs. The world’s ultimate lifeform, his doppelganger. Eggman’s involved, somehow. And the Chaos Emeralds –
He skids to a stop at a break of vivid green, trees rushing at his feet. He pants, casting his gaze up to the sky –
And there he is. Again.
Sonic grins.
“I found you, faker!” he hurls his arm out all accusatory, bluster the hardest he can fake it.
Shadow, much clearer now against a bright blue sky, looks down at him with smug disdain. His lip curls fiercely when Sonic speaks, eyes narrowing in contempt. Bingo.
“Faker?” he snarls, the flare of his quills visible even from this distance. “I think you’re the fake hedgehog around here.”
Oh, this guy’s a riot. So serious.
“You’re comparing yourself to me? Ha!” Shadow steps forward; even without the emerald or the cover of night, he cuts an admittedly intimidating figure, red eyes alight with challenge. “You’re not even good enough to be my fake.”
So two can play at that game. Sonic launches himself forward with a wild laugh, satisfaction flaring at the startle that flashes on Shadow’s face.
“I’ll make you eat those words!”
It’s an admirable fight, and one that neither of them really end up winning. Each hit Sonic gets in is met with equal measure, each swift dodge equal to the next punch to the gut. Shadow lives up to his namesake; he moves quiet, precise, a learned skill that rings uncannily similar to the GUN soldiers he’d fought earlier, just cranked up to 100.
So maybe Sonic’s finally met someone who can keep up with him. Only with those weird jet boots, though, he thinks with a note of smugness. Faker. A cheap copy.
More than anything it’s interesting. Sonic narrowly dodges a strike to the head and thinks, where have they been keeping this guy? A debatably lucky strike of fate, the two of them fighting right now; so remarkably similar that Sonic wonders if GUN had finally engineered their own lookalike, Metal’s more organic and slightly less pointy distant cousin.
But looking at him now – the both of them at a standstill, clutching at their bruises with heavy breaths – he knows that can’t be true. The odd unplaceable accent, the rings circling his wrists and ankles, the fire in his eyes – that’s all his own. Something different, something new.
Sonic wants to know what he’s about, really, wants to pick him apart.
So start with a conversation.
He saunters forward, stopping a reasonably safe distance away, hand held out in greeting. Shadow’s eyes pin him with utter indignation.
“I think we got off on the wrong foot–” he ducks out of the way of a well-aimed kick. “Hey!” he grabs at the outstretched leg, flinging Shadow over and right onto his back. So much for the pretence of a truce. “What’s your deal, man?”
He’s up again in moments, fist swinging hard into Sonic’s side. He grits his teeth, grinning. “C’mon, nothin’ to say to me now?”
For all his fronts, this guy is almost too easy to rile up; his quills flare out in anger again, throwing himself haphazardly into another attack that Sonic counters with a shove.
“My deal–” they circle each other once more, neither having enough energy to lunge again but neither wanting to draw back and admit defeat. “-You’re in my way. That’s all.”
“I’m in Eggman’s way.” Sonic counters, pedantic. “I’m talking about you. What are you doing here, Shadow?” the first time he says his name aloud, and it sounds sort of foreign to his tongue.
What happens next is unexpected. Something clouds Shadow’s face, then, an unreadable thing that he approximates somewhere between anger and honest to god confusion; a twist to his expression that immediately sours the atmosphere.
Sonic nearly frowns, remembers at the last second not to betray the vulnerability. The anger he’d expected, because Shadow’s entire being seems to exude it – the confusion is new. A far more fascinating flaw than the short temper, an entirely new trail to follow as he tries to get a feel for who this guy really is. What he wants.
(Looking at the brief flicker of expression, the uncertainty that breaks across for just a moment, he wonders if Shadow himself really knows, either.)
Then, just like that, the moment is torn from beneath them both; Shadow’s face dwindles to it’s typical half-frown as static breaks across the radio in his hand, and, well –
The island is about to explode, so there’s that.
Even as he makes a mad dash for it, sending a flurry of leaves and broken GUN mechs in his path, he can’t get it out of his mind. That face, that blatant vulnerability, the faint anger – as if he’d known what it was that Sonic was really digging at.
Who are you, really?
The world keeps turning, Sonic scrambling frantically across its four corners in the search for the Chaos Emeralds, finally beginning to break the slightest sweat. Eggman is still threatening the planet, his plans declared with scary confidence to an audience of millions, a population swarming with keen anxiety even before the madman had blown up the moon as a warning shot.
And GUN is still refusing to back down. Two failed attempts at imprisonment and countless flailing chases later and Sonic is growing impatient, bored even, with the futile struggle. You’d think they’d have better things to do, considering the situation, but each turn of a corner he ends up having to quickly lunge for the next beetle, throw himself wildly at a mech before it can get too close. But still they underestimate him, the lot of them.
Luckily for Eggman and GUN and at this point even Shadow, Sonic thrives like this, in the moments where the pressure would wear anyone else thin. The spiteful and slightly selfish part of him revels in knowing all of these eyes are on him, all these people praying for him to falter.
Let them hope. It won’t happen; Sonic’s just too damn good at this.
The satisfaction of taking the president of all people off guard – the whoop of pride as he and Tails had caught up to his limo, the grin as he’d imagined the absolutely ridiculous news coverage later – is quelled relatively quickly by the discovery of the space colony ARK. The alleged location of the rest of the Chaos Emeralds, kept suspiciously quiet by the government despite the sheer size, the scientific marvel of it. Sonic has a bad feeling about it even before Tails digs up what little files exist on the place.
First there is a general summary, something designed to be a footnote on a page filled with bigger problems. The first colony of its kind, built over fifty years ago; mysteriously abandoned not far long after after a so-called tragic accident – a tragic accident conveniently never expanded upon let alone mentioned again, in the pages of schematics and other miscellaneous notes Tails has on the ARK.
Then, buried innocuously near the end of a page detailing the layout and specs of some storage room, is the first inkling of truth: a diagram of a storage tank, a viewing window spanning one of its faces. Designed to hold roughly 900 litres of liquid – designed to the specific measurements of Project Shadow.
The name alone is nothing. It shouldn’t be anything, really, but Sonic thinks back to those chance two encounters, of the unnatural learned movement of combat, the black and red so atypical of any other Mobian he’s ever seen, and something is so dangerously, frustratingly close to clicking at the back of his mind. That slowly growing itch for more, one he can’t satisfy because Shadow seems such a well-kept secret, one kept maybe for decades, the only giveaways so oblique they may as well not exist at all.
Sonic is so used to getting what he wants, in the end, and never has it seemed so difficult. The long fall of adventure is an easy plunge, the fall effortless, a risk well-learned for its reward. But here he is stuck at the precipice; held back the same way he has been since that encounter in the city, stopped still by some unnamable force and unable to go any further. He struggles and struggles but his brain is stuck at the name Shadow, unable to breach a barrier he can usually brush past easy as breathing.
He catches only glimpses of open sky, beyond the edge. Stares at the full of it, now, stood in the stale desert air, stiff heat beating relentless at his fur even in faltering moonlight. Of course the ARK can’t be seen from this distance, and Sonic hasn’t a clue where in space the thing actually is, but he tries anyway – stares fitfully at a starless black sky, and wonders.
Shadow wandering the abandoned halls of a space station, a dark spot in its pristine lit hallways, nothing but him and the dull thrum of electricity, of a system built to last even after tragedy. Shadow living out of a storage room, confined to a tiny claustrophobic tank for all of existence, maybe breaking out, maybe taking revenge on the researchers that had condemned him to such a sad, small life. Shadow – maybe not related to the ARK at all, a mere fleeting coincidence of name and nothing else, born on Earth the same as everyone else, simply undetected until now.
Sonic must stand there for a long time, simply looking and thinking. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting, some miraculous epiphany to tie these loose, frayed threads together.
But the night sky is empty and the moon is wavering. The heat of the desert stifles and offers nothing in return, and Sonic finds himself stuck in that same impossible position, unable to move forward at all.
Shot back toward Earth, on a one-way journey to what must be death, Sonic should feel utterly hopeless. He does, even, for a moment, when Eggman’s laughter and the reality of what is about to happen sets in with a dread quite unlike anything else he has ever known.
It’s only temporary, though, because Sonic is just as easily gripped by a dizzying feeling, one he is familiar with to the bones of it but one he has never felt this intensely: he doesn’t want to die. There are still so many things he wants to do in life, things he wants to see, people to meet. He thinks of Shadow, again, inexplicably, rather than any of his friends, maybe because his strange impassive face is easier on the mind than the image of Tails and Amy in tears. This unsolved mystery he refuses to let die in that state, left to remain between the lines and spoken aloud not once.
Ironic, almost, how in the end, that elusive technique Shadow had used is what saves his life. He cries out Chaos Control! with the desperate final blaze of a dying star, a blaze that isn’t so final at all, because in a flash that leaves his ears ringing and vision swimming, he is safe and sound back on the ARK. A fake emerald is good as the real thing, given enough determination, apparently.
He can’t wait to laud this over Shadow’s head, see that angry twist to the expression that seems already so familiar to him. The image itself is enough to send him sprinting back toward the action with a grin, though not quite enough to quell the sinking feeling in his stomach the further he delves into the ARK’s cold, cold halls.
They meet again halfway to the end of the world, alarms blaring as Shadow stands between Sonic and the last chance at saving it. Immediately, that intimate sense of pure competition flares strong as ever through his veins.
Shadow appears oddly bereft, this time, an odd twitch to the gaze, though Sonic has no real time to ponder upon it as they race down the halls of the ARK, the both of them at the final stretch of a journey that probably extends further than either of them could really comprehend. He wonders if Shadow went through the same hell he did just to get here, if that’s the reason for the renewed fire in his eyes.
He mentions his own use of Chaos Control just to watch Shadow falter, feels immense satisfaction at his narrowed eyes and spiteful gaze.
“So there’s more to you than just looking like me,” Shadow relents, as if it pains him to admit, disguising it with another jab. It’s a little funny, really, Sonic doesn’t think Shadow has said what he actually means this entire time; “what are you, anyway?”
Sonic beams.
“What you see is what you get!” he bounds away from Shadow, breaking further ahead across the platform, the dizzying entirety of space right beneath them but he isn’t scared. “Just a guy who loves adventure!”
Because isn’t that all this has been for him? Sprinting continent to continent, sent sprawling from earth to beyond, to reaches any average person would deem extraordinary? Moment to moment; victory to victory. The way he’s always liked it.
It’s so exciting. It’s the best thing he’s ever known.
The speed picks up; the entire mad sprint Sonic for once can’t tell which one of them will come out on top, and its exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. If it wasn’t for what’s at stake here he would lose himself in this chase, let exhilaration take over and run his body on autopilot; he thinks fleetingly that after all of this is over, he has to goad Shadow into a race across the city sometime.
Not now, though, where their fight is leagues apart from earlier, wrought with newfound franticity. The both of them playing dirty to reach the ARK’s core first; a well-timed shove from Shadow almost sends Sonic spinning off of the edge into space, and in return Sonic hits him with a spin dash so wild and uncontained that there’s blood smeared across Shadow’s arm, a wound that seems to miraculously disappear and the blood, green blood –
Sonic stutters, momentarily, enough for Shadow to gain the upper hand again, and forces the subject out of mind. There’s no time for this, right now – Shadow is everywhere right now, throwing himself in Sonic’s way with some wide-eyed feral look to the eyes. He likely doesn’t look any better, using claws and teeth and any means necessary to push past.
There’s no time for Sonic to put on a show or gloat, this time; at the first real opening, when he finally knocks Shadow to the floor and the other struggles lamely, unable to get back up as quickly as before, he wastes no time leaving him in the dust.
No hard feelings: they’re only enemies for the time being. Something tells Sonic this won’t be the last he sees of Shadow, anyway.
Later, Sonic would say he could’ve done something to stop what ended up happening from happening. Later, in the months spent racked with guilt, he would conceive every possible scenario to prevent it.
But the truth is this: he knows from the moment Shadow steps in front of he and Knuckles, willing to fight the Biolizard in their stead, that there is only one way this could end, and there is nothing he can do to stop it. Because Shadow stands before him, the set of his shoulders confident in his abilities as ever but the flinch of his expression caught in some painful equilibrium between resolve and resignation and Sonic just knows.
Whatever had brought Shadow to his senses had been as merciless as it had been gracious; the guilt for all he has done weighs heavy in his downturned gaze, the bigger picture only serving as a stab to the heart. Shadow is a weapon, a weapon made to bring destruction to the world, and Sonic’s mind wanders back to the life he had before this, from how little Gerald had spoken of it. Wonders if Shadow has had the chance at any life at all, outside of it.
He gets his answer, here; to the question of guilt, Shadow can only offer himself as repentance.
They get a minute to themselves, before the fight that will decide everything. Shadow’s arm is still smeared with the blood from their earlier battle and Sonic’s hands are shaking something fierce from sheer anticipation. But in the moment, Sonic feels irrationally compelled to say something, anything.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says first, which is a useless lie, so then he continues, faltering, “I mean, I…”
He doesn’t mean to say I’m sorry. Sonic has never been one for conversation, let alone when the air surrounding it feels so inexplicably heavy, so when the words tumble from his mouth, thoughtless and feeble, he stands momentarily stunned at himself. Shadow mirrors the same look right back at him. They’re so close right now; Shadow’s hand brushes his own for the briefest moment as he shifts, moves to speak.
“I should be apologising, I think.” he says, lacking any of that bluster from earlier, gaze fixed somewhere very far away. “After everything I’ve done, really?”
“You don’t get it,” Sonic says, momentarily gripped by some horrible, fruitless need to convince Shadow himself of something that will take more than words to mend, an irrational urge that has him grasping Shadow’s wrist in his hand. Nowhere else to send that feeling than to pour it through touch. “I’m sorry – I’m sorry that you never got the chance.”
Shadow doesn’t seem to understand, and Sonic can’t bring himself to explain. He thinks of himself, before this, running through the streets, the stunning crack of the air with each whip turn he makes, surrounded by open air and a city that sings his praises. Then he imagines Shadow, a lifetime spent as nothing more than a scientific marvel, an object, a body that has never truly left the ARK’s desolate halls, thinking himself the weapon that Gerald declared him to be a lifetime ago.
He’s sorry because he never had that chance to live. The same that Sonic so suddenly feels he has been taking for granted.
“It’s all right.” Shadow says, so soft and sincere it hurts. He prises Sonic’s fingers from around his wrist, folds them into his own. “I made a promise. There’s nothing else for me to do.”
Sonic wants to tell him of the rolling green fields of Earth. Sonic wants to tell him about the sunshine and the rain and the bad weather too, the flawed beauty of the world beyond the ARK. He wants to tell him about chilli dogs and all his favourite foods, wants to introduce Shadow to stupid indulgences like chips and soda until he can find his own favourite, too.
But that would be cruel. There isn’t any time for that, when the world needs saving.
So instead, he smiles.
“After this, you and me, let’s race. Okay?” Shadow’s expression stutters for a moment, confused, before his mouth ticks up into a smirk. “Green Hill. No holds barred, winner takes all. You’ll see me at the finish line.”
The intimacy of the situation melts away, back to that competitive flame that feels like the first breath after drowning. The futile tangle of fingers turns to a friendly, daring clasp of hands, the final handshake before a match.
“You’re on.” Shadow says, and then they’re both gone.
There is nothing in the world that could compare to going super. Flames of pure power licking just beneath the surface, thrumming from beneath his skin in time with the emeralds’ power – then, in a burst of pure overwhelming power, the fire overtakes him. World at his fingertips, quills awash with blinding starlight: here, he feels invincible. The Biolizard doesn’t seem half as monumentally terrifying, the countdown less urgent.
Then he sees Shadow next to him, and for a moment the entire world slows.
It’s one thing for himself; the familiar rapture, the sharpening of the mind that comes with going super that makes the world seem that much more extraordinary. It’s something else entirely seeing Shadow, experiencing it for the very first time. Here, amongst the cold empty blue of space, the streaks of red and gold seem royal, an explosion of brilliant colour; everything brilliant, the way Shadow’s eyes seem to wander the world anew, stare down at the planet they’re lightyears above. All those years on the ARK but Sonic doubts he’s ever seen it like this.
And what a gorgeous moment, watching Shadow’s expression break; a smile, a real one, exuding none of the cocksure defiance of their earlier encounters. A smile, maybe tinged with the knowledge that now Shadow has the chance to do some real good.
Now, at least. Even if it may be the only chance he will ever get.
He isn’t sure who initiates it; there is a sudden surge of – of not power, something else, something subtle, an easy warmth compared to the all-encompassing fire that surrounds them, a tiny bubble of summer breeze in the space where their foreheads are pressed together, where Shadow’s hand cradles his face just so.
“Sonic,” he murmurs. His eyes are red, red, red; this close, he can see the flecks of gold and deep caramel that lie within, the watery shimmer as their gazes meet. So much more of him he hasn’t seen, that he may never get the chance to again. “Thank you.”
It’s over too soon. They check in with each other throughout, and Sonic can’t help but notice the way Shadow’s body starts becoming weaker, the sunny shimmer of his fur losing its lustre – though the man himself seems the complete opposite. The more debilitated he appears, the more frenzy overtakes every movement of his body – Shadow throws himself at the Biolizard like he has nothing to lose, and really he doesn’t. He’s grinning, laughing even, eyes alight with a ferocity that betrays nothing of the energy that Sonic can almost feel draining from him, containing pure power like a sieve.
He is thinking, again, of stars, the kind that burn hottest right before the end, when the Biolizard sends them both spiralling away with one brutal hit; Sonic stabilises and grasps Shadow by the arm, stopping him in his tracks. He feels incredibly light, compared to the unbearable weight of his stare.
“Sonic!” he’s laughing, again, caught somewhere half-hysterical, hands clambering to push Sonic’s away, landing atop his shoulders. “I think I’ve discovered what the ultimate life form is.”
Smiling; beaming, breathless, and Sonic can’t for a second look away – “it might be you!”
And here is where he knows he’s lost him.
There is no time at all to feel victorious as the Biolizard roars for a final time, or after the ARK vanishes back into space with a fireball of pure Chaos energy. There’s no time for him to make any kind of quip or throw his arm around Shadow, friendly, and make a stupid remark about how now Shadow owes him, because by the time he turns back around to face him it’s already too late.
There is a single horrible, hopeful moment where Sonic thinks he has him. Starlight dying in singing streaks across Shadow’s quills, the drop in Chaos energy a palpable loss, leeching all the breath from his lungs – the very tips of their fingers brush for just a moment, and in the haze of adrenaline Sonic thinks that maybe he could pull him back. He starts forward, exhausted body shaking with the monumental effort of it but he has to, he has to at least try–
From below, from a nightmare Sonic will have thousands of times after this day, Shadow smiles so serenely.
Then, he shakes his head softly and brushes him away.
And then he’s gone.
Gone, an inconsequential speck on the brilliant blue of a world he had just died saving. Sonic stares for a long time, longer than he should, until he feels as if he could collapse right down there with him.
He thinks of the long, lonely fall to earth. All of a sudden, none of it seems at all thrilling anymore.
After the ARK, the months drag by. As the world is so oddly wont to do in the aftermath of these things, it goes right back to the way things were.
Noone talks about what happened, the same way they never really have. The government says nothing and the people in the cities go back to their merry little lives, as if the moon doesn’t stand half-destroyed and the ARK, now somewhere far off in space, hadn’t been minutes away from ending it all right there. The amusing indifference of the world when faced with the impossible, no matter what Eggman or whoever else has to throw at it; a funny type of dull resilience carried in normal people with normal jobs who really don’t have time to dwell on the Gods of destruction running rampant in Station Square.
He loves it, the way the world picks itself up in the aftermath of the worst. The fact that he can throw himself right back to the wind; going anywhere, everywhere, sprawled across each continent.
So it makes no sense, then, the way he sometimes finds himself stumbling, nowadays. He speeds through the streets all the same, can still throw quips at stunned bystanders and nosy reporters alike and leave them sufficiently awed with vague one-liners, but then there are these moments: in a wide expanse of forest in Chun-nan, Sonic’s gaze catches on a break in the trees, holds long enough for him to trip on some rock he hadn’t been looking out for. In the cramped alleys of Empire City, he often finds himself searching without realising, looking for something in the ignored space between towering buildings.
There is some immeasurable, irrational sense of lacking about the planet: so Sonic keeps running, because it’s all he knows to do, familiar, and maybe if he explores the entire world soon enough he’ll turn a corner one day to find a crater that could only have been left by a shooting star, shot with red and black and enough fragments of gold to commit to memory.
Nobody sees him for a long time, but that’s always been normal for him; always in and out of people’s lives. He checks up on Tails as frequently as he remembers, which to a self-indignant kid desperate to prove himself independent is apparently still too much, sits in occasional companionable quiet on Angel Island with Knuckles, and speaks to Amy once or twice in passing.
In one such instance, Amy happens upon him, not too soon after. Somewhere outside of the big cities; grassy, where the late summer evening’s heat isn’t quite so oppressive. The quiet of it makes the weight of gold in his hands seem that much more monumental.
He’d tried to give the ring to Rouge, in the end, because Sonic wouldn’t have had much use for it himself, and if there had been anyone to know Shadow the best through this it must have been her. But she’d dismissed the other with a thin sort of smile, looking at him a little sideways, as if she knew something he didn’t. She probably did. Rouge was far more clever than him with her easy deception and ways of needling information out of people, and in that encounter Sonic had felt a little like the subject of interrogation.
“I’d say you need it more than I do, don’t you think?” she’d said, looking at him still in that strange way, as if expecting something from him. He hadn’t known what she meant at the time, and still doesn’t, knows only the childish prickle of indignation in him that sparked at the way she’d said it. Misreading him as an easy mark, maybe, trying to jab at a spot she thought would be worn thin. He felt, very weirdly, annoyed, and had tucked the ring back into his quills with a vague excuse of having places to be.
He hadn’t had any answer to her then, and doesn’t now, so here he sits with a ring that Shadow must’ve given to him at some point, but he can’t quite remember. Stares at it now, in the new moonlight – different, this far away – as if it would supply him any explanation, as Amy suddenly sits down next to him.
Sonic’s never been quite sure what he thinks of her; naive feels a disservice, though he doesn’t know how else to describe the doe-eyed affection she throws to the world, heart forever on her sleeve, beaming resilience in the face of Sonic’s own constant rejections. Lovely, the kind of person you expect to always see regarding the world with that resounding warmth, which is perhaps why it strikes Sonic as so odd when his gaze lands on her expression, oddly downturned. Almost solemn.
Amy’s eyes settle on the ring in Sonic’s hand, and something softens in her expression; “Still thinking about it, huh?”
They’d gotten their hands on some more of Gerald’s notes regarding Project Shadow in the aftermath of everything, backed up to the ARK’s miraculously still functioning databases and later (regrettably) to GUN’s own systems. The rings – inhibitors, they’d been officially called – designed to contain the amount of pure uncontrollable Chaos energy surging through Shadow’s veins, a power too unstable to flow uninhibited without implosion. To be worn at all times, the notes had read, underlined twice in red ink.
Shadow, surely, had known what they were, what it would mean for him to remove even one of them. Willingly giving it up to Sonic, dooming himself in one final, simple sacrifice.
Were he still here, Sonic would ask him why. The last part of him pressed into the hand of someone he barely knew.
But Shadow isn’t here, so there’s nothing else for it, really.
“The Ultimate Life Form.” he says, instead. “Humanity’s hope. Gone just like that. It’s–”
“Unfair,” Amy nods, a shy jerk of the head, ear flicking with odd irritation. “Right? He saved the world and noone even knows he existed. Except us.”
She turns back to him, then, hesitant, but eyes wrought with determination. “Can I tell you something? I spoke to him. Right before you two went out there. I asked him–” she laughs. “--well, I begged him to help us. Whatever I said, it got through to him.”
“I told him, people are good. They deserve a chance to live. But I don’t think it was that.” Amy shakes her head. “No, he told me he made a promise. A long time ago, to Maria. His best friend, and he’d forgotten it all. He promised her he’d protect the humans for her, even when – even after those GUN soldiers…”
Sonic winces. He had, for a while, tried to ignore the uncovered files on the ARK raid. But his curiosity was insatiable, as morbid as his horror at it all was instant.
Maria Robotnik hadn’t even been a teenager, must have been around Amy’s age. He casts back to his own horror at discovering Eggman with a gun to Amy’s head; the pure helplessness, even when he’d held the solution to it all in his hands. Shadow had had none of that; only an uncaring band of government agents to end it all.
He’d seen her die, the report had written, in so many words, in its own clinical way. Escapee may be unstable as a result; use caution if sighted.
And after all that, it had still taken his memories being twisted from his control for that promise to break.
“Thank you.” he says suddenly, earnestly. Amy flushes. “For talking him out of things, I mean. It’s not something I could’ve done.”
He remembers her, stood in front of Gamma, ready to fight Sonic for all the world and her trust in a robot she’d barely even known. He remembers himself , not understanding why she’d do it, still kind of doesn’t. Ready to fight Gamma as long as it meant saving the world, the same way he’d fought Shadow himself on the ARK – he would have been ready to do it again, if not for his change of heart.
Never something he could’ve done.
“I don’t want it to have been for nothing, you know?” Amy must’ve been speaking; he’d drifted off into his own thoughts at some point. “I think – he’d want us to do that. Take care of the world.” her gaze shifts back to him. “So we should keep going, okay?”
He is reminded of the way Rouge looked at him, handing Shadow’s ring back to him with that solemn look in her eyes. He’s reminded of the way Tails had looked at him, saying I’m fine, I’m fine, you go. The way Knuckles had looked at him, saying nothing, but the gaze saying enough.
Like they’re all seeing something he doesn’t. Trying to poke at a corner of his mind he hasn’t the slightest idea how to confront, one he isn’t at all ready to.
It’s easy to feel like he never left the sky above the ARK, here; staring at the sky, inhibitor held feebly in his hand, stood still half baffled, still wondering why Shadow had done what he did.
The absence becomes worse after that conversation, somehow. Sonic begins having dreams, strange ones, about space or the absence of it. There is a hand that he cannot grasp, no matter how fast he runs or how desperately he forces the Chaos energy to flood him – by the end it is always lost to that vast empty nothing.
It really shouldn’t mean as much as it does.
Today, it is raining: Sonic is in some faroff city. In Spagonia he thinks, with its neat little clusters of apartments all clambering for space in the streets, almost claustrophobic. For once, he stands stationary by the window of his rented room – too close to the building storm outside, because every few seconds a raindrop loosens from the windowsill and twitches him out of his reverie. He makes no move to retreat, though, only keeps his gaze cast somewhere far-off and indistinct.
Sonic has spent his entire life seeing the world through the lens of the absolute; when, not if. He holds a steadfast and often rewarded belief that so long as he tries his damnedest, what he wants is never far off, and for so long this has worked fine for him.
Strange, then, the way he finds himself stumbling upon that word so often lately; if he turned this corner here and saw a streak of red and black, what would he do? If he woke up tomorrow to see the city ravaged, the leftover static of Chaos energy still singing the air, would he chase after the only one he could know to be responsible? If he woke up tomorrow and Shadow were alive, where would he fit in the landscape?
Odd, to know his presence only through this lack of it, and for it to wrack him so thoroughly with this uncertainty. Only a few months after and it has already been double, triple the amount of time that they’d ever been allies. A few hours, half-blurred with memory – what are they, to the days since?
The answer: a lot more than they have any right to be.
Sonic’s memory of Shadow, the dreamlike figment of him that lives here on earth through a gold-plated piece of technology, folds itself around the word if. In the end, Sonic had known truly nothing about him; the details of his life left to clinical notes that he went cross-eyed trying to understand, his personality little beyond his short intolerance for Sonic’s antics and seeming lack of regard for personal safety, the way he threw his whole body into each fight.
Perhaps the most certain thing he knows of Shadow is that he truly had wanted to fall. A promise fulfilled, a shooting star far past its use after soaring past the skyline; really, what more would there have been for him? Sonic knows, somehow, that nothing on Earth could have sated the boundless regret, the monumental loneliness burdening Shadow’s heart in the wake of his memories resurfacing. In the wake of the realisation that Maria, her final wish, had been so nearly desecrated.
So Sonic is well-acquainted with the hard truth of things, which is that you can never really save everybody, much less those that aren’t looking to be saved in the first place. By all logic and prior experience, he should be able to take this perfectly in stride, and maybe outwardly it looks as much, to unknowing spectators.
But here he is, stood in a tiny room in the middle of thousands of other tiny rooms all around him, staring dazed at the rainwater gathering in puddles across pebbled streets, wondering how Shadow would like the rainfall. Imagines pushing him out from beneath the safety of the balcony, laughing as anger morphs to irritation and maybe even awe, then. It had been raining in the forest that day they fought on Prison Island, but not this kind, the grey clouds rolling across the horizon, dousing everything in a film of subdued quiet. Some remark about it matching Shadow’s typical sullen mood is on the edge of his tongue, the two of them scrambling across slippery rooftops, raindrops pelting the both of them and Sonic laughs–
A low rumble of thunder and the rain has grown in intensity. Sonic scrubs the sudden spray of water from his face, shaken out of his daydream; when he looks back out of the window only empty space remains.
It hims him, finally, partway through one of his daily runs; halfway across the field, Sonic stops in his tracks. He takes a moment to glance around; at the bright yellow of the sunflowers all around him, at the empty expanse of sky. He takes a moment to think, a slow build of every pointed sympathy and concerned glance in the past few months, what it all amounts to.
And he realises, something horrible and devastating unravelling itself in his heart: I miss him.
Worse, perhaps: I want him back.
But Shadow is gone. None of Super Sonic’s superhuman brilliance could save him from the fall, the single act of a hand brushed away. So very human. So very simple: Shadow was here, and now he isn’t, and there’s not a thing he can do or could’ve done to change that, no matter the protest of his heart, unruly nonsensical thing.
When a shooting star falls, it still fulfils some wish, as significant as anything so priceless as hope could be. Even in death, that light will always have illuminated somebody’s night sky. Lightyears away, lifetimes in the future, maybe someone else will wish upon that same gold streak, close their eyes and hope anew.
The light may be gone, but the warmth persists: in the sun, in its embrace of the sky, the flowers, the planet that Shadow had lived and died for.
So there’s nothing else for it. He will carry this with him, he thinks, until he finally outruns it or some other greater grief takes its place, and he knows which of those options he prefers.
He bolts from the field. Leaves it as he found it, a bloom of sunshine across the Earth, save for a single mangled sunflower, petals twisted where Sonic had trampled it in that sudden stumbling stop.