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The first thing Stone did when he entered the simple hotel room was take a shower.
Well, that wasn’t quite correct. The first thing he did was fold his jacket, very carefully despite the grime on it, onto the desk. There was immense purpose in his motions, to the point of being almost robotic, but Stone felt if he didn’t focus on every minute part of the task, down to how the muscles moved under his skin, he would break.
There was also the fact that if he did not focus, he would slip into his habits, into autopilot, and begin going through the motions for two again. He needed a hotel room with one bed, please. One set of towels. One bathrobe. One room-service meal. One cup of c–
Not going there.
The shower felt nice; Stone was a very clean person, and being covered with water from a river that had been stated just that year to be full of bacteria from a sewage leak had been a problem on the back of his mind since the crab mech sank.
Of course, it had been superceded near immediately by… Everything else that had happened.
It felt strange, so unbelievably strange, to worry about such a thing when… When…
He scrubbed his skin harder, even as it began to take on a reddish tone. Here he was, focusing on something as mundane, as domestic, as personal cleanliness when the only person who’d given him purpose was scattered among the stars as a fine dust. Atomized.
Gripping his arms so hard that his nails dug little crescent shapes into his biceps, Stone had a horrible thought occur to him. Would any of that dust have made it to Earth? Was it not all ionized by the atmosphere? Had he walked here with the last bits of the smartest man in the world dusting his hair like terrible snow?
Stone bent at the waist, retching, but nothing came out. What a terribly, disgustingly human sound. The doctor would’ve scolded him for it, would’ve told him to pull it together and then threatened him. “You’ll be scrubbing the floors with your own toothbrush if so much as one drop of your horrifying fluids touch any surface in here,” he’d have snarled, and Stone knew he’d have been true to his word. Well, he would’ve been, before the incident with the Master Emerald and the giant robot. After that, all bets were off if Robotnik would’ve even noticed Stone being sick, or if he would’ve continued watching whatever telenovela captured his attention.
It didn’t matter. None of that had ever mattered that much to Stone. When he was noticed, it was a bonus. When he wasn’t, he was content to do his job in silence.
But now… Now… What was there left to do? He wasn’t content. He didn’t have a job to do. All that was left was the silence.
Taking a deep breath that was more a gulp of air than anything, Stone finished washing himself, then stepped out of the shower. He’d used hotter water than he normally preferred, and was keeping the room warmer, too. All of the shows and movies he’d watched and books he’d read had been right; grief was bitterly cold, and not in a strictly metaphorical way. Some cascade of transmitters and hormones was making thermoregulation difficult, though Stone didn’t know enough about biology to say for certain what they were (he knew someone who would’ve). It caused him to shiver as he pulled on the bathrobe and crawled under the covers.
Tomorrow, he’d have to get new clothes. How he expected to do that in either a disgusting suit or a white bathrobe was anyone’s guess. Maybe Uber had a clothing delivery service, or something. Anyhow, that was Tomorrow Stone’s problem.
After a moment of thought, he felt bad for Tomorrow Stone. That version of himself would be in far less shock, and the situation would be much more real. It would hit harder, pack more of a punch, just like that ridiculous cherry-colored creature that had started all of the nonsense several months ago. The doctor’s first foray into teaming up with someone to get their valuable asset. Of course, Stone couldn’t hate Knuckles entirely; he had rescued Robotnik from the mushroom hellscape, and the brink of permanent madness. Well… Madness in the sort of way that didn’t involve killer robots and licking electric quills. The mad doctor had to stay at least a little mad.
In all that time, though… Stone had never truly mourned Robotnik.
He trusted him to remain alive in an alien world. He trusted him to recover from the fall from the giant robot. He trusted him to recover from his depression. And he’d even trusted him when he’d told Stone he was fired, that he was a genius who knew what he was doing, and that Stone was so far below him in a way that was about to be literal as well as metaphorical. He had trusted the doctor to survive.
If he hadn’t, he would’ve kept calling. He wouldn’t have let his broken admission go unheard, he would’ve tried and tried and tried until there were no avenues left to try, and then he would’ve kept looking. Stone had thought he himself would be the one to die, alone with the rest of the Earth. Until seeing the broadcast, he thought that that would be the better outcome, but then there was another independent variable in the equation. Robotnik cared about him. Saved the Earth for him.
There was so much Stone had wanted to ask and say and do but none of it was possible, none of it could be, because there were brightly colored animals in this world who could breathe in space and go into overdrive using magical rocks, and who simply could not stop meddling in his life.
A blade of something sharper than the locked jaw of grief struck him, then.
Anger.
Anger so intense it nearly choked him and he coughed once, twice.
Why did Sonic get to have his happy family, and he was left with nothing? Sonic, the blue alien who had come to Earth on accident, had found an adopted mother and father. He had a little brother who came through a portal to find him, and an older brother he’d duked it out with at first, but eventually realized they were on the same team. He’d befriended Shadow, even, before Shadow had died too (though Stone doubted it. That…. Edgehog was still out there. An orbital beam weapon and the vacuum of space hadn’t been enough to stop him. What was a little radioactive explosion to the ‘perfect life form’?).
Sonic left no loose ends. He convinced everyone from his own world that he met that morality and kindness and family would save the day.
Look where family had gotten Dr. Ivo Robotnik, at the end of the day.
People like them didn’t get families, or siblings or connections or love. Gerald had lost Maria. Robotnik had lost his parents and then Gerald, and Stone had lost Robotnik. It was a ridiculous cycle of madness, agony, and suffering.
Beyond the anger, Stone remembered one memory, from the times before Sonic and his demon crew took over their lives. “Look, Stone,” the doctor had said with a derisive snort, shoving his phone in front of his agent’s nose as they rode in the back of the government-sanctioned vehicle. There was a news article about a protest taking place in some part of the country, with an image of a teenager holding a sign that said ‘hurt people hurt people.’ “I know what it means but couldn’t that ignoramus think of a better slogan? All I see is a command being repeated.” He chuckled again, muttering ‘hurt people’ under his breath. Stone had laughed too, agreeing that the sign left a lot to be desired in terms of efficacy.
Turns out that kid had been right. Hurt people did hurt people, and all Stone could think was that ending the cycle was for losers. If he was going to be hurt, he could get just as good as he could give.
He’d lost the love of his life, his stubborn, prickly, asshole, blindingly brilliant boss, and Sonic had lost nothing. That had to change, the world could not possibly leave that as the status quo. If karma wouldn’t work for Stone, Stone would work for karma. He was, after all, a part of the world, as Robotnik had made sure of with his sacrifice.
Well, time for revenge. He, however, would not stop seeing the forest for the trees. It pained him deeply to admit a fault with the doctor, especially… Posthumously, but the doctor had been incredibly impulsive. What Stone lacked in sheer scientific intellect he made up for in cunning and patience. He grabbed the notepad from the desk with the little hotel logo in the corner, dug his pen out of his suit pocket, and began to write.
He wouldn’t waste the gift he’d been given, the gift of his life. No, he’d sharpen his self preservation skills, but he also didn’t want to reject the task at hand. After all…
Robotnik had saved the world for him. The least he could do was conquer it properly.
There was silence once the door shut and he leaned back against it. It was all that was keeping him upright, after all. The deep breath he took was painful, as he steeled himself to move deeper into the house. He couldn’t just stay there, bleeding into his foyer.
He had no real identity, so no one knew where he lived. He was coasting by on the doctor’s money, still, because Robotnik had also had no identity but did have the mind to create his own system of bank accounts. And what was his was Stone’s, because it was the agent’s job to do the shopping. Whether that had been for peanuts or wingnuts.
So Stone was safe. He had, true to his word, not come close to death, not really. He knew when to retreat when it got too bad, when his outcome looked too grim. He knew not to push his luck.
Growling as he spit a clump of blood from his mouth, Stone finally pushed off the door and limped into the hallway. He didn’t want to get bloody handprints on his wall.
He hadn’t won. Of course he hadn’t, Team Sonic had friendship and Stone fought alone. It felt ridiculous in hindsight that he’d even thought himself capable of winning. Even with an army of Sonic-shaped robots, designed and built by his own hands, Stone could not win. He really did try to treat the bots like family. Like he’d done with the badniks, even when the doctor complained. Not sure why, as the man called them his babies, but that was beside the point.
Maybe Stone shouldn’t have designed them to look like his enemy. Maybe he’d looked at them with too much bitterness in his eyes, like a child that bore the visage of a cheating lover due to some unlucky genetics. He’d just… Figured there was something special about the aliens’ anatomy that allowed them to do what they did.
He would never know if he’d be right, because Tails, damn him, had convinced one of his bots to join their side, and the rest was history. There was only one Sonic-Bot now, and it was off playing catch with its new mummy and daddy.
Stone pressed his hand to his left cheek. He remembered the feeling of one of those long metal talons ripping into his face, clawing all the way through his skin into his mouth and down his chin, leaving him stunned and bleeding heavily from the final blow that won the fight.
After that he’d fled, under the cover of the heavy smoke and sparking rubble, making a detour at Maddie Wachowski’s vet practice; he knew it would be empty, because she was dealing with the aftermath of what her super-powered furry children had done, and he needed medical supplies. Right there in the back of the clinic, he used a medical-grade stapler to close the wound, to keep his face together, and bundled together supplies to take to his house, including a second stapler.
He was just glad the claw had missed his eye. Some of his good looks would be gone, that was true, but who did he want to look good for any more, anyways?
The former agent dropped his bag in the hall bathroom on the way to his room and, by proxy, the shower. He hadn’t killed a single stinking alien, and the defeat weighed heavily on his chest. Is this how the doctor had felt, whenever he’d lost? Stone ever really felt the terror that came with almost losing the doctor. The loss of the battle was always secondary.
Peeling off his long purple-and-black coat, he tossed it after his bag, a far cry from the restrained deliberateness he’d shown in the hotel in London almost nine months prior.
On his pained trek to the comfort of the shower, Stone passed by his living room, not even bothering to look in.
“Is that any way to treat your superior? You look like hell, if such a place existed.”
He stopped. Turned.
“You,” he said. “Are dead.”
“Do I look dead?”
Robotnik sure didn’t quite look like he had when he was alive; he had dark circles under his eyes and looked less kempt than he had in years past, but unlike their time in the crab mech he was gaunt instead, looking skinny to an unhealthy degree. Stone was struck with a burning desire to get him a real meal and a latte.
When Stone had hesitated long enough, the doctor waved a hand. “Don’t answer that question.”
He wanted, desperately, to get an explanation next, to ask–
(“How?”
“Hedgehog. He can teleport. For some absolutely unfathomable reason he saved me, but we still fell way too far back to Earth.” He grimaced. “Apparently that gaudy gold jewelry he had gave him a power cap. Why he wanted that I’ll never know, such considerations are below me. But he was able to get us juuust to a survivable height. Then smash! Landed in the dirt. I may be the smartest man on the planet but I am just as woefully squishy as the rest of the worthless populace.”
He looked mad about it.
“Do you know how hard it is to engineer a spinal implant and prosthetic when you’re the patient? And you’re stuck in a run down, abandoned house in the woods because your legs decided to give up but the rest of you didn’t?”
“No, sir.”
“Thought not. But me, being the brilliant man I am, managed. And then I learned to walk again like the world’s tallest brainiac baby.” He paused. “Shadow helped. A bit. Mostly with acquiring things to fuel both us and my tools.”
Stone nodded. That made as much sense as anything else.)
but he didn’t ask. Not right away. Instead, painful as it was, with his crudely stapled facial wound and countless other scrapes and abrasions, he smiled. Smiled like he always had, but even brighter. Even more relieved.
“Welcome home, sir.”