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The earliest memories he had of his childhood would be the games of hide-and-seek.
Often, he wasn’t invited to play, but if he were, he would accept with a boisterous laugh. The other children would immediately grimace, but that's no matter, because as long as there is an acknowledged disparity between them, that was enough of a win in Robotnik's book.
Because he wasn't like any other child. He wasn't hopeful, wasn't playful and cheery. He had invented an infinite amount of variations for Ring a Ring O'Rosie, solar powered all of the toy vehicles donated to the orphanage. He fearlessly toyed with loose wires at the age of five. He was a technological spectacle amongst the crowd and he knew it, a child with a status so intelligent and superior that it would defy any human characteristic assigned to his person.
And yet, he agreed to the most simplistic form of hide-and-seek— fucking Julia, she learned about the word democracy and hadn't looked back since— but that is no matter. He will win. He will not hide in the same cabinets Mark and Helen would pick and play kissy face in, not under the tables that their caretakers would suggest if someone scrambled into the kitchen by the end of the count-off.
No, his mind was not as feeble and dull-witted. As Owen started counting, idiotically forgetting what number came after twelve, Robotnik had run head first into the forests vignetting his first home.
He didn't know much of the forest, admittedly. He's more of an indoor person, scrambling for spare parts in the basement instead of picking at snails with the other kids. All he knew was that the forest stretched far, farther than Robotnik could imagine. In the viridian infinity of it all, Robotnik thought that the hiding spot was infallible.
And it was. After four hours of waiting, Robotnik could even confirm that as a matter of fact.
He sat against some dirt and loose branches against a maple tree. He snickered to himself quietly thinking, my, what a genius he is for thinking of such a flawless hiding spot. That's what Julia fucking gets for suggesting such unimaginative rules. At this point, she must be bawling her eyes out as one of their weekly-changing caretakers slaps her wrists, and that only makes Robotnik's snickers transform into manic giggles.
Another hour passed, and he stopped laughing. It had nothing to do about the looming, darkening skies or the locusts that began crowding his sneakers, no. Robotnik's hide-and-seek gold trophy was for him to win, thank you very much. The quietness that had possessed his body was just… boredom. He's fucking bored.
He stood up eventually, gloved hands dusting dirt off his bottoms. He stretched, bones popping at the knees. It did feel better to stand, amble around under the arching branches and lingering insects. His outfit matches the trees anyway, so he didn't think he’d immediately be found if he didn’t cling onto a trunk to hide.
Although, something curious pipped nearby. It's somewhere, possibly near the entangled roots. Robotnik's head turned, eyes squinting at a small, white cotton ball. One second later, he realized that it's, in fact, a rabbit.
“Oh hello,” he said, words enunciated. The rabbit glanced back, wide, red eyes peering into Robotnik. “Aren't you a fine specimen?”
The rabbit's left foot scrubbed away at its ear. Then, its head tilted upward, a sudden movement that not even Robotnik would predict. It seemed to notice something from behind, back legs raring to run, and it actually did after a single blink.
Robotnik did not know what came over him, but he felt a particular chill crawl up his neck. It's foreign, so foreign, like something was breathing down his neck. He stood still, paralyzed by— by something, something that crept onto his skin and trailed towards his hands.
He thought he would scream, possibly fight back. His mind knew how to predict scenarios by deviating his thoughts into multiple timelines, but somehow, somehow this— this breathing, snarling thing— this didn't seem to be compatible with his brain, as if it were made of tinfoil, and he couldn't, he couldn't—
Robotnik ran.
—
There’s something about that damn alien hedgehog. Something that Robotnik can't really put a finger on, which is just absolutely terrific for minds like him, because there's just something about this hedgehog that feels so uncannily familiar that it almost offends him. Disgusts him, really.
To find the possible hypothesis, Robotnik begrudgingly begins with the obvious, a simple baby step: Sonic is fast. He runs, legs spinning almost like a hamster wheel, at speeds Robotnik has never seen, not even with his own manufactured toys and bots. Sonic does it like his life depends on it which, to his captor’s humble opinion— fair enough.
Another— he is seemingly alone. There is no possible way that Robotnik wouldn't have known of him unless the creature was isolated from mainland society somehow. He's not an imbecile, he can hear the dialogue between him and that godforsaken policeman from Green Hills. They don't know each other. Their teamwork isn't seamless, flimsy at some places that can only indicate acquaintance. It’s almost like he's only rekindled with humanity once people were made aware of him and his possible dangers which, again— fair enough.
Robotnik doesn't really know why he tries aligning the quill he's collected to the tip of his tongue. Stone is quiet but has that tiny, wrinkled furrow of suppressed judgment in his brow, but Robotnik lets that go when a jolt washes through his body, the cluster of veins in his body seemingly dissipating then sparking alight all within the same millisecond.
There is no taste to it, too. Just a zap. Somehow, it reminds Robotnik of childhood.
—
“How do you think that fucker even got such an… outstanding, upright guy to be his partner-in-crime? It makes no sense.”
“It surely doesn't,” affirms Stone, snugly tugging down the cuffs of Robotnik's flight suit sleeves. “Tom Wachowski, isn't it? You reported he was just offered a promotion— I suppose we ensure that doesn't come to fruition, after you eliminate that space hog.”
“Jot that down in my calendar,” Robotnik instructs.
When Stone backs away, preparing Robotnik's aircraft to be launched in ten, Robotnik nears one of the digital screens he'd flash. There's no tech jargon at all, the thing functioning more like a mirror.
Robotnik's flight suit hasn’t looked better. It's crisp, thoroughly dry cleaned (thanks, Stone). His eyes flit to his face, adjusting his goggles to fit tightly and symmetrically against his forehead. He thinks, with all this perfection and almost successful planning, he would be able to look at his reflection wholly and beam at the idea of world domination yet to come.
And yet, the first thing he sees are his eyebags. Then his stubble, then his wrinkles. He realizes he’s almost sixty. He thinks he's pretty chipper and active for an almost sixty-year-old, which is good. But that's always been the case, anyway. He's a great dancer, he can easily stride across a large room in two to three steps. His schedules are always full, his body always thrumming with a mix of caffeine and adrenaline.
That's been the way he is for almost sixty years.
—
“He's just a silly little alien,” Robotnik exclaims incredulously, “he didn’t belong here!”
“That little alien,” the ridiculous cop replies, slowly pushing himself back up, “knew more about being human than you ever will. This was his home, and he was my friend.”
For the first time in a while, Robotnik was so aghast he couldn’t spew a witty retort. What is this, friendship is magic? This stupid creature hasn't even met half the town, these people even admit to that, but they stand guard at Sonic's sides, all of them bearing arms as if they were second liners.
Sonic then begins to rise, babbling something about the exact thing Robotnik couldn’t believe is real. Light shines from behind Sonic, and only when Robotnik’s airship begins frying does he realize that it's Sonic's quills, emanating electricity and a soft, blue light.
Everyone around Sonic begins to cheer. It only grows louder when the alien claims that Robotnik has no right to a power that is respectfully his.
This isn't fair, Robotnik thinks, trying his best to regain control of the ship. This puny nitwit got an entire county to back him up in the span of two fucking days. When did humanity become so progressive, so accepting? This isn't fair, this isn't fair—
The next thing he knows, he gets exiled to a planet light years away from earth.
—
Even alone, the thing creeps up his neck.
Before his aircraft died, he tried his best utilizing its technology to at least analyze the place. Escape is not foreseeable but at least survivability is, and goddamn Robotnik if he let mycelium be his last straw.
So it doesn’t make sense, then, that the scans would come up empty. No reported threats to Robotnik, just mushroom, mushroom, and more fucking mushroom. What a pathetic demise, not even Dante would have predicted a hell this unfathomable.
“But I thought you hated humanity, sir,” his façade of a Stone speaks. More accurately, he hallucinates— that is just the undeniable truth— but Robotnik still sneers when he looks over, grass roughly rubbing against his cheek.
“I do, of course I do!” Robotnik says with the cadence of someone defending themself. “Being sentenced to excursion is just the tip of the iceberg with those mouth breathers.”
“Then why seek for escape?” Stone replies. It's more of a taunt, which is so unlike Stone, but that doesn't matter. It isn't about him, anyway.
“Comeuppance, Stone, comeuppance,” he says, practically yells, as if wanting to emit a reaction from the tilted rock at his side. “I want to see them grovel , I want to see them mourn. Humanity has spent far too long turning away from their errors but I see them, I see them all— Ostracization is not just a societal tendency but an inevitability, and they turn away from those truths as if they didn't start the fucking fire!”
“So it’s a revenge ploy?”
“Oh sycophant, it's always been a revenge ploy,” Robotnik replies, voice soft yet harsh and gritty, “and if I stay here— if I rot here— I'm doing nothing but allow them to win at their sick game.”
And even then, even despite his undying determination, there are days where he feels the ghost of the forest monster snake around his neck. It happens often, actually. It particularly happens every time he figures out what to do with the technological scraps he's left to work with. The thing still makes his stomach churn in a way that reminds Robotnik that he's painfully fallible, but at the same time, its dark tendrils feel like a guiding hand of some kind.
For every failed mechanism, the thing whispers in his ear, and Robotnik recognizes that, right, extinction does not wait, so he must keep moving.
—
Loneliness is quite radicalizing, Robotnik thinks.
He is almost finished with his signal tower when he realizes this. Despite the hallucinations, the endless rummaging of a fictional Stone in his head, he thinks he's kept quite sane in this deserted planet.
To be fair, sanity's lost all its gravity when Robotnik's very presence questions its parameters. The arching, towering mushrooms have never felt more homely, almost reminiscent of the evergreens that surrounded his old orphanage. He destroyed that, by the way, when he finally built his own bomb variant at twenty-five, but that doesn't matter. The surroundings remind him of home, of survival, of long years surveying humanity as if he had the horizontal, prey eyes of a lamb— so he supposes that's why his presence here feels almost like a Friday night. A breeze, a formality.
He is angry, obviously, but he's always angry. So whatever. That doesn't matter.
—
“You always have a plan, do you,” Stone whispers to him during the in-betweens, when they're still waiting for the best moment to strike. Even after eight months, he's always the clueless dunce that he is. “No breathing time whatsoever.”
Robotnik rolls his eyes, dramatically at that. “Well of course. What's your point, Stone? Suggesting that you can't keep up?”
Stone blinks, his big, round eyes staring at Robotnik with a pout. “Nobody measures up to your genius, doctor.”
“Spit it out,” Robotnik replies sternly, voice reprimanding. He knows Stone intimately, almost disgustingly so, and part of that is being able to distinguish wordless praise and wandering thoughts. “I know you're not as dumb as you present ninety percent of the time.”
Stone flashes a half-smirk. Only half, because the foolish man knows Robotnik would beat his ass if he does a full one. Motherfucker isn't stealing his brand nor his thunder.
“I think it's objectively impossible for anyone to get on your level,” Stone says. It's almost the same thing as earlier, just more eloquently put. “This includes me, doctor. I don't think I could ever keep up with you.”
Somehow, that leaves a bad taste in Robotnik's mouth. His eyes avert from the hedgehog's message history displayed on the screen, and directly towards Stone. The agent's expression, whatever it was, immediately drops. An apt reaction, Robotnik thinks, as he pulls down the sucker's necktie without warning, causing him to choke and bend forwards.
“Are you asking for a transference, Agent Stone?” he says, palpably bitter, as if saliva were dripping from his canines. Stone does not scramble to remove Robotnik's hands, despite the wheezes. “You have been my agent for five years and counting and while you are still inconceivably low-level compared to yours truly, you have no choice, no imaginable alternative path outside of trying your damnedest to keep up. Is that understood?”
He lets go of Stone's necktie. Robotnik huffs heavily, and even for someone like himself, he only realizes how aggrieved he's become until he realizes his hands are trembling beneath the gloves. He turns away swiftly, digging his fingers into the digital keyboard in front of him as Stone composes himself.
“I apologize, sir,” Stone eventually chokes out, readjusting his tie. “I assure you that I am and have always been trying my best to fathom your greatness.”
“You have to,” Robotnik murmurs. An upcoming migraine tingles at the corners of his mind. I need the help, goes mostly unsaid, but if there's another thing Robotnik is certain about, it’s the fact that Stone knows. He always does, eventually.
Rabbits are social, codependent creatures, after all.
—
The capabilities of the Chaos Emerald is more than Robotnik could ever comprehend. It's akin to the jolts he gets tasting the blue bastard's quills, body unable to focus on anything but the pleasant thrum it provides. It's almost like an IV, like an act of ascension, but now he's experiencing it longer than quick spasms and the feeling is absolutely divine.
Robotnik cannot understate his intelligence before acquiring the emerald, but this is something different. Something grander than the earth, something ineffable, and Robotnik breathes it in, breathes all of it in, because finally, finally, he can objectively assure himself that he is, in fact, on top of the damn food chain. Hell, he is above that, above science and reason and any meritocratic system that humans invented to declare senseless winners and losers.
Before he returns to the Mean Bean, he teleports way up, above the clouds and the skies in a way that's almost blasphemous, and perceives the world from the galaxies above. Here, in between home and the moon, Robotnik tries fitting the tiny image of his world in his hands, electric fingers pinching and squeezing as if it were a baby's cheeks.
“Soon, they will all pay,” he hisses, smirking like a madman— which he is. “I’ve been waiting for so fucking long.”
Those in power stay in power. That's a lesson Robotnik learned when he was young. With his school bullies and their student council friends, with parents and the normalcy of authoritative hierarchies as familial structures. With capitalists and presidents and militaries. Born a normal citizen and you will not be promised safety your entire life, because, oh honey, that's not the way the world works.
He realizes then that despite his brashness, he needs to make this count.
—
The emerald gets knocked out of him, absorbed by the creature who Robotnik already perceives as the mascot for everything he finds wrong about humanity, and like the first time his prowess was torn asunder, he thinks this isn't fair, this isn't fucking fair, as he falls.
The last thing he sees is a beam of gold heading towards those other freaks and, apparently, Sonic's now so-called “parents”.
He thinks that's the most unfair thing about this entire ordeal, that this is the one thing bestowed upon him before he hits the ground and dies.
—
He doesn't die.
And yet the feeling of a loss of power, of control, of a damn safety net, is worse than death.
—
“You will die,” Stone asserts shakily, sat atop a stool next to Robotnik's makeshift bed. They're in one of Robotnik's emergency laboratories— the Crab, he appropriately names— dutifully brought here by the ever subservient Stone. “You will die if we don't get you any help.”
“That's just uninventive thought, Stone,” he replies, voice admittedly weaker than usual. One wrong move and he can displace one of the many broken bones left unattended in his body.
“Pardon me for a moment, sir, because while I respect your judgment wholeheartedly, I want to have a say on this situation, at least just this once,” Stone grits out, and he sounds livid. It's unrestrained, something like an unstoppable force. Despite Robotnik's instinct to put him in his place, a sense of awe creeps into his chest. “I don't think anything is uninventive if it guarantees you to live. You are— you aren't—”
“Don't say it,” Robotnik murmurs, almost begs. If he could raise his arm, he would gently grab onto Stone's shirt, pleading. “I can't admit to that. I can't, it's world-ending—”
“Can you tell me, at least, why?” Stone asks. He's also pleading. “Am I enough to be privy to that information?”
You always are, Robotnik wants to say first. Instead, “I've been running my whole life, Stone,” Robotnik says, closing his eyes. The vulnerability makes him want to wretch. “It’s all I'm used to. All of the ignorant expanse that is humanity wants me dead, and I can't— I can't waste any moment to stop. To stoop to their level. I can't—”
He is just a fugitive in a mechanical crab, drifting away in the Atlantic Ocean. The walls are impenetrable, but without the exterior, he's dead meat. Ready to lose, ready to be swallowed and eaten alive.
“You scored high in your MCAT, right? A combat medic, too,” he says. He doesn't miss the intense grimace on Stone's face. “You can do it.”
“What? No, sir—”
“Stone,” he proclaims loudly. “Please, help me.”
Silence, for a full minute. Then, a deep exhale, as Stone hunches over in his seat. His head is cradled in his arms.
“What if I killed you,” Stone whispers. Robotnik can tell that he's crying, which he rolls his eyes on.
“Don't be ridiculous,” Robotnik huffs in return, “there's probably tutorials on YouTube for this kind of thing.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Stone replies, face lifting a little. His eyes are puffy, their size not helping how troubled he looks. “You are asking me to perform surgery with my rusty medical expertise. I apologize for being a little bit dreadful about this whole thing.”
“There's no other option, Stone,” Robotnik says. “We ask for outside help and we're doomed. You're arguing we allow them to make-do with my body and I don't want that. I can't. My power, whatever else is left of my dignity— it's precarious, Stone. More fragile than my brittle body. I need you to patch me up, to help me, because we're—”
Robotnik swallows, tired.
“Okay,” Stone concedes, filling in the blank for himself. “I'm with you.”
—
Stone actually does it. Of course, it involved a lot of screaming, possibly some do-overs, but he actually did it. Now, Robotnik's left comically wrapped up like a freshly ordered burrito, and Stone has been mouth feeding him consistently in the next days to come.
He doesn't know why, but one night, right as Stone almost dozes off by the armchair that Robotnik demanded replace the stool, Robotnik blurts out a simple, “thank you.”
Stone catches it, of course he does. He doesn't miss anything Robotnik wants or says or needs, unconditionally present no matter what is being requested. Eyes half-lidded, Stone gazes at Robotnik, head tilting to the side as the corners of his lips quirk into a humble smile.
“Finally feeling better, sir?” Stone asks, readjusting the blanket he has on top of himself.
“No,” Robotnik says flatly. “But I feel— I feel safe,” he says, and never wishes to say ever again. If his face weren't obscured by bandages, it would be clear how reddened his cheeks are at the admission. “I feel… normal.”
“Normal,” Stone parrots.
“Don’t act dumb, imbecile. I'm the one injured here,” Robotnik retorts.
“Right,” Stone says, still smiling. “Good night, doc.”
If it doesn't hurt to expound, if Stone weren't on the brink of full fatigue, Robotnik would continue. At least he thinks he could, but his self-preservation is well consolidated. But if it weren't, if he can be honest and vulnerable within the recesses of his head which, he argues, is where all of it appears anyway, the want and the trauma and the hurt, Robotnik would say that he feels free. Not busy planning escape routes, not worrying about what he'd say to Walters next meeting.
He will wake up tomorrow. He will see that Stone has picked up crocheting lessons. The needle he holds will drop immediately once he sees him awake, scrambling to grab some warm soup he'd prepared moments earlier. Later, they'd plan which body of water they should retreat to next. Later, Stone would set up cable TV like what Robotnik begrudgingly wanted all these years. It's a step back in technology, horribly contrasting the red LED's and holograms, but now Robotnik feels okay to succumb to that.
He's not a damn rabbit in the woods anymore.
He closes his eyes. God, he can finally rest.