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After, when the world stops rocking beneath his feet. After, when Tom wakes up and Maddie gathers them close, when Tails slips his tiny hand in his and Knuckles knocks their temples together. After, when they return to Montana and Ozzie barking hard enough to make himself sick, when they wash the ash from their fur and breathe deep pine tar and wooden floor cleaner.
After, when they all go quiet at the sight of the nebula scarred across the heavens. After, when they watch him, uncertain, as he presses his knuckles to the place above his heart, hard enough to hurt.
After it all, the whole damn cataclysmic shitshow, Sonic is furious.
It's consuming, the fury. Plutonic, misbegotten where it's been unseated from its hiding place, now a tremor, a sharp-hooked thrum beneath his skin. He feels it as he smiles and cajoles his family, as he races his brothers and nags his parents. He feels it, at night, when his body is seized with a tension too misshapen to name, when he stares, unblinking, jaw tight, up at the attic skylight from his bed, waiting for the shattered moon to pass. He feels it in a fundamental sense, knowing that something has been taken, something has been lost.
It should have been him who did the taking.
Maddie says it's part of the grieving process. She smooths the fur between his ears, cups his face in her hands like he isn't fissile material between her palms. He doesn't know how to tell her that this grief is not the same as what he had felt for Longclaw. That grief had been an arrowpoint, lodged between shoulder blade and breast. Too close to the heart to be removed, but the body had adjusted, had grown around the shrapnel of loss. He had carried it with him, only distantly aware of its ache.
His grief for Shadow is not that.
He thinks maybe Knuckles knows. Of all of them, he's the only one privy to the full extent of what had occurred on the silver crust of the moon, when Sonic had the pulse of Shadow's heart in his hand, when he had nearly made good on his promise of absolution to the dark, sharp thing beneath him. It had poured out of Sonic one night, after Knuckles had found him pacing on the roof, the nebula an unseeing eye above them. It had torn itself from him like a bullet carving out an exit wound, hot and fast and destructive. And Knuckles had sat and listened, his violet eyes watchful, fur washed pale under the moonlight. He had remained silent until Sonic had driven himself hoarse, until there had been nothing left to confess, raw-nerved and heaving. When Knuckles had finally spoken, it was with an awful kind of understanding.
"Yes," he had said, quiet and steady, Trajan's Column unmoved. "I know this kind of grief well. It is the hungry kind."
They had returned to the attic. Wordlessly, they had curled themselves around Tails in his too-small bed. Tails hadn't questioned their presence when dawn had slithered through the windows, milky and cold. He had only tucked his head under Sonic's chin, kickstarting a rickety purr for the three of them as Knuckles had held them both, safe, for now, in the circle of his arms. And Sonic had just laid there, trying to remember how to breathe, thinking of grief. Of hunger.
His dreams are nuclear. He wakes up singed, blasted open at the ribs, his claws caught around a shape that isn't there. The fallout is catastrophic each time.
Tom is perhaps the canniest of them. He wouldn't be Green Hills' sheriff otherwise. For all that they argue, for all that Sonic bites and fronts and stumbles, graceless and young and flinching, he knows with absolute certainty that he trusts Tom, and Tom trusts him. It's for this reason that he balks when Tom approaches, that he ducks from his outstretched hand. He's afraid, ultimately, of what his father will see—that if he looks his father in the eye that his fury will betray itself to that sharpshooter gaze. That his father will take one look at him and finally see him for the atomic, terrible thing that he is. An exposure to the demon core, acute radiation syndrome following, quick and inevitable and unnatural.
He doesn't give Tom the opportunity.
Stars embank the night sky. The daggered points of Douglas firs stab into the nebula's weeping underbelly, its cosmic organ meat the colour of a bruise. His family is asleep in their tents, the embers of the campfire cold. The night is still sticky with roasted marshmallows, the air still sweet with hot, charred sugar and firewood. If he listens closely, he can hear the sound of Ozzie's breathing from his parents' tent, whistling and soft.
He walks into the forest, deep enough for the nightsong of animals and cover of darkness to muffle the splinter-crack of a sonic boom, the supercritical blue of chaos enlivening. For the first time since London, since the Eclipse Cannon, since him, Sonic takes off running and doesn't stop.
Time passes. It must. He only registers the shift in light and change in terrain when he realises where his fury and hurt have taken him. He skids to a halt at the entry to the G.U.N. bunker, his chest going tight at the sight.
The doors to the bunker are still ripped from their hinges where Knuckles had punched them open. Ash and the debris of another life have since escaped from the blackness within, spilling out into the open, exposed and moon-bleached, like a beast gored, innards left to rot. The night is harsh here, this high up in the mountains. Sonic feels his quill raise from more than the cold, the bite of the wind, unable to tear his gaze from the open maw before him.
This far down the chain, Sonic can do nothing else but step forward.
The moonlight does little to cut through the dark as Sonic cautiously steps over glass and broken concrete, and he eventually has to fumble for his phone to light the rest of the way. Much of the bunker has collapsed inward, unable to support itself after the Robotniks unleashed the black hole device that took a good portion of the mountain with it. The network of tunnels they had first encountered has now been reduced to two. He opts for the one he and Eggman had initially taken and lets the light of his phone guide him.
A military base, a lab, a home. He takes it all in for the second time, a low, creeping unease in his chest. The blanket fort has miraculously remained upright, though the framed photo of Shadow and Maria is missing. He lingers by the fort, fingers trailing through the faded string of stars tied to the front, trying to remember the small, sunny girl in the picture, the shape of her smile.
He can only think of Shadow, draped in his colours in the void of space, as beautiful, as blistering as white phosphorous as they had hurled themselves at their reckoning. Grief, and hunger.
In the darkened adjacent lab, the containment chamber is a monolith, singular and terrible on its raised plinth. Sonic's gaze tracks the shattered rim of it, his unease doubling. Thin, pale blades of moonlight filter through fissures in the ceiling. The glass on the ground glints like diamonds—like stars, detonated, in the cold vacuum of space.
A shift, minute. His ear twitches.
He jerks to the side just as something dark and fast swings out from behind him. It connects with his phone instead of his head, knocking the device from his hands and sending it hurtling across the room. Sonic barely has time to hear it crack against the concrete before there's a knee to his kidney, pain ricocheting up his side, and a hand grabbing him by the neck.
His face smashes into the containment chamber, the glass splintering beneath his cheek. The impact is enough to stun him, vision going a brilliant white, ears ringing. There's a long line of living heat pressed to his back, a set of claws digging into the side of Sonic's head, in his quills, hard enough to hurt, and it's the devastating déjà vu of it all that steals the breath from Sonic's lungs.
"Fool," Shadow snaps, his breath hot on Sonic's cheek—here, now, alive. "You should have left well alone."
Something strangled punches out of Sonic's mouth. He tries to push himself up off the chamber, but Shadow only shoves him down again, the sheer, brute force of him overwhelming, dizzyingly real. More of the glass cracks beneath the pressure, a hairline fracture expanding in Sonic's periphery.
"You're—" Sonic gasps, the words sticking, disbelieving and ragged, "—you're alive."
Shadow growls, and something curls tight at the base of Sonic's spine at the sound. "And you nearly weren't. What were you thinking, returning to this place? I thought you were another G.U.N. soldier."
Another. Sonic shakily tucks that information away. He tastes blood, warm and sour, can feel it ooze from his snout and over his muzzle. "What can I say?" His skin feels tight, hot, his fury catching, incendiary, an exponential growth. "Guess I like chasing thrills."
"Thrills—" Shadow's other hand slams down inches from Sonic's face, the force of it splintering the chamber. Sonic's heart jolts in his chest. "You're more idiotic than I thought. I could have snapped your neck, hedgehog." He cages Sonic against the glass, red, red eyes incandescent with outrage, his body a column of hard, lithe, familiar muscle against Sonic's aching side. Alive, alive. "I could have killed you in an instant, and I would have felt nothing."
Sonic, inexplicably, laughs. It shakes out of him, high and breathy. "Hot."
Shadow's hand spasms against his head. Sonic winces as the claws in his quills threaten to rip them clean from the root. "You've got a death wish."
"Maybe," Sonic allows. With effort, he manages to crane his head back a little, enough to be able to look at Shadow in the eye. "'Could say the same about you, hotshot." His vision is hazy at the corners, his heart thundering hard and fast against his ribs, but the smile he cracks is sharp-edged, his next words aimed to hurt. "'I'm right here.'"
The words hit their mark. Shadow snarls, fangs flashing in the dark, and in one beautiful, vicious motion, he yanks Sonic's head back and drives it down, hard, into the glass. The blow ricochets through Sonic, and the delay between his vision clearing and the pain registering should, probably, be something to worry about. But all Sonic can do is laugh through the sensation, the electric, white-hot flare of agony travelling from his skull to his spine, the fizzing rush of adrenaline as a strong arm bars across his collar and claws move from his quills to close around his throat. He's furious. He's euphoric. He's alive in a way that matters, for the first time in weeks.
"Touchy subject, huh?" he challenges breathlessly. Something warm and sticky trickles down the side of his head, and glass crunches beneath his shoes where he tries to keep himself upright. His mouth struggles to work, his words copper-thick and jagged behind his teeth. "What, mad I didn't finish the job?"
Shadow snaps his jaws like an angry dog, quills raised and fur bristling. "Maybe you should have."
"Nah." Nausea coils in his stomach when he tries to move his head, Shadow's claws tightening around his throat reflexively. Heat lightnings through Sonic, his gloves slipping along the glass. "'Wanna keep you around. You're too fun to kill."
Shadow's expression twists, lips curling back over teeth, too sharp, too long to be wholly natural, rage and something else, something darker flaring in that molten gaze. "You're insane."
Sonic laughs. It crawls out of him, equal parts pained and exhilarated. "C'mon, dark 'n' stormy—" his hand reaches out, shaky and uncoordinated, to hook around Shadow's wrist, thumb sliding beneath the cuff of Shadow's glove, pressing Shadow's hand down harder on the swollen curve of his windpipe, "—make it worth it this time."
Shadow's gaze is a yawning eclipse, his wrath singular and livid. The consuming force of the black hole that tore through his home, void-like and relentless and hungry. Sonic sees it, feels it, that hunger, that heaving-flanked want of a weapon starved of its use. And Sonic just smiles in the face of it, eyes hooded and teeth bloodied, waiting, goading.
"Or should I make you beg for it?" he asks, voice pitching low, pitching dangerous. "Like the way you begged me to finish it."
Go ahead—finish it!
The arm at Sonic's collar crushes down and the claws at his throat squeeze. And then Shadow's thigh slots between his legs and it's like the firing pin sliding home, a still-smoking bullet caught in between Sonic's fingers. That hungry grief, ripping clean through the meat of him. It's enough to choke him, the pulse of his heart beating thready and desperate against Shadow's palm. His claws dig into Shadow's wrist as his other hand stutters forward, grasping a fistful of dark, dark fur at Shadow's waist to tug him closer. Closer, inexorably closer, until the seam between their bodies turns molecular, until they know but the ionized filth of one another.
"Still think you'd feel nothing?" he challenges, lightheaded. His claws scrape up and along Shadow's back, catch on the notches of Shadow's spine. He's enthralled at the feeling, at the fluid, fine mechanism of the destructive force beneath his hand.
"I feel," Shadow states, rippling and gravelled, "like I'd like you better dead."
Sonic tries to laugh, but it hitches on something sharp in his chest. There's low-frequency static building in his fingers, up his arms. His stomach lurches each time he moves his head, his vision sluggishly following, blackness encroaching at the edges. Shadow sure did a number on him, he thinks distantly. Still, he persists, urging Shadow closer, claws tangling in dark quills, pressing bony hips to his. He drinks in Shadow's sharp responding inhale, feels it shake in his grasp where he winds them closer, weapon and wielder. Here, now, finally his to take.
"Has anyone ever told you," he begins, their muzzles close enough to brush, close enough that Sonic could taste the shape of Shadow's bite, if he really wanted, "that you sound just like John Wick when you're pissed off?"
Shadow's claws flex around his throat. This close, he smells like motor oil, like ozone. His muzzle glances against Sonic's. "Who the hell is John Wick?"
Sonic swallows. His throat clicks, and it's like a gunshot in the night. In a searing solar flare, Shadow vanishes, and Sonic collapses to the floor. His knees hit the concrete hard enough to rattle the teeth in his jaw, and he sucks down a harsh, desperate breath, his hand clutching at his burning throat. Every inch of him is raw and alight with heady, blistering heat, his body trembling with it. The urge to vomit crests, barely held back as he gags on a laugh, the sound tearing from him, wretched and wrecked. He's furious. He's euphoric. He's alive.
"Alright, faker," he says into the dark, remembering, now, how to breathe. "Let's make this worth it."