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A cold migraine and a sore twisted shattered heart was all the gray crying skies of the morning had in store for him. He could hear his brain crying too. In many small voices, in unison.
Where’s mommy?
Are we safe?
When will someone love us?
Why do I feel sick and sad?
When’s mommy coming back?
The alarm clock said 5:04 AM. But it was always a lie. The concept of time was just a lie. Sonic could blink and hours sped by faster than him. Or he could remain motionless here on his dirtied rustic bed for five minutes and someone would’ve told him he was actually scratching the ceiling with his dry pupils for a day and a half. Time was never consistent. Time was a bitch.
No one else could know about the littler ones of him outside his door. It was exhausting, enduring the coldness of no one truly knowing who he is, how many facets the blue hedgehog had hiding underneath him. Only a brain surgeon could take his entire body, slam him on the porcelain floor and have him shatter into hundreds and hundreds of pieces, knowing who he truly was. He felt like everything and nothing, all the time or none of the made up constraints of time. Mirrors were fake and liars. He was never who he was supposed to be. Or what anyone else told him who he was.
Except Shadow. He was a brain surgeon who had an unorthodox method of knowing who he was. By just loving them and respecting everything they said and letting them know they were all truly real and deserving of love like the Velveteen Rabbit. A concept so many of his shrinks never seemed to grasp, and Shadow didn’t even bother graduating from high school.
They just wanted to be held and adored. His body began to hurt. It was the simple things in life you truly had to be deprived of to have everything inside of you hurt the most.
Up up up!
Mommy, love us!
His fingertips traced the stitches of a candy-coloured horse toy he didn’t remember purchasing, but Shadow would show him the receipts that he, or someone else inside his head anyways, did purchase this stuffed animal that stared at him inquisitively with its beady pure eyes, pleading as much as his other younger selves to be spoonfed the thing he’s always been nutritionally lacking since the day God mistakenly allowed him to be conceived.
Love.
To his dismay sometimes he would blink and he would feel years of his life drained from him in seconds, with no idea of who he claimed to be now and why he wanted to be alive still. He blinked and he was still on the sofa, fingering the leather cushions mindlessly while the cartoon horse stared mindlessly back at him. Then he blinked again, he could feel warmth. He shivered and blinked again and underneath his dry frail tongue he could catch remnants of sweet morningdew milk sloughed through his tired body. Then he blinked again and he caught a whiff of lavender, Shadow holding him tightly.
Just yet another one of those lonely mornings again. He felt he was lucky that Shadow didn’t seem to mind babysitting someone who was clearly an adult but failed to function like a normal hoglet, so his brain just misfires through him and makes him believe sometimes he was two years old again.
He blinked and strong crimson struck paws cradled him close, fearing he would lose Sonic again. His heart shuddered and he held him tighter. He gasped for air and he felt Shadow’s heart thrumming underneath his clammy skin. The long endured pain of slipped and lost tears during childhood was still there, but it was dull. It was a start to soothe his aching head.
A small whisper escaped from his lips. “Can you be our new mommy?”
To hear himself talk this way. For some reason he often hated himself for letting others see him act like this, but he could never hate the child inside him who just pleaded with Shadow for a not so simple answer to his simple question.
“Some things in life you can’t replace. Sometimes you were never given those things in the first place to even pray for them to be replaced.”
Shadow felt this as well, and it was the only reason Sonic ever let his other facets in his jewel-cut emerald head to even be seen around him.
Swaddled covetously by a baby blue blanket, Sonic’s head felt empty, the dark thoughts leaking from the holes in his mind. Seeing the same colours of an untouched but yet well-loved nursery and the moonlit shades of Maria’s dress made them both enter a state of peaceful trance.
“But I can try my best to love everything about you, even all the things you lost about yourself.”
Sonic blinked and the scent of milky lavenders never left them. He blinked again as tears dusted his eyes like faint stars. He blinked one last time as his younger self breathlessly uttered, “Thank you.” Then they all closed their eyes and slept in Shadow’s arms.