Chapter Text
The white hull of their aquatic base peaked out of high tide, the curvature of its shell resembling the crest of a tombstone. Stone sat cross-legged on the shore, gazing out at their erstwhile base, no, their home. Presently the vessel was inoperable, but not irreparable. He had long memorized the extensive manual Ivo assigned. No, the thing that was irreparable was closer at hand, limply beating in his chest.
Stone’s ears rang. It wasn’t the explosion in the atmosphere, but the silence. He supposed tinnitus wasn’t out of the question. He tilted his head, though he was sure he cleared out the river water by then. No, the ringing was just an echo in kind to Ivo’s wonderfully evocative and impassioned speech. For a moment he did not even notice that someone was trying to get his attention.
“Stone!” a familiar voice called out behind him. In a flash of blue light, there he was: Sonic.
Stone did not answer. He did not even glance at the creature. If this was to be his time as well, then all the better. Perhaps Sonic would launch him into the atmosphere, so he could linger there as amorphous dust. With him.
“Helloooo?” Sonic continued. He waved his hand in front of Stone’s eyes. “Hey, are you…are you doin’ okay?”
Stone maintained Sonic’s gaze. Was that concern? Stone remained silent, looking down at his phone.
“What do you have there?”
“Didn’t you hear?”
“Hear what?”
For what seemed like the millionth time since that night, he unlocked it and pulled up the video and let Ivo’s last words play, ripping through the air like an invisible current. Sonic’s eyes widened as he listened to Dr. Robotnik speak. The shock was apparent. This was perhaps a side to Dr. Robotnik that Sonic had never imagined.
“Geez. Stone…I’m sorry. You know I didn’t realize—” Stone held up his hand.
“What do you want, Sonic?” Stone stood and brushed himself off. It wasn’t any use. The silt and mud had long since dried as if he were buried, the soil settled around him.
“Tails told me you might be here still, so I ran on over….” Sonic trailed off. He had never seen the creature so still before. He wondered what judgment was being rendered in that quilled head of his. For so many months, Stone had only been with Ivo, watching his every move, interpreting his constant movement and ranting and twitching to better help him. What had he missed?
“What’s it to you, Sonic? Without the doctor I’m…” What was he without the doctor? He was a black chess piece perhaps, on the board without a player to plan his moves.
“Uh…I mean. I just didn’t know this would hit you so hard?” Sonic said carefully, ending his lilt in a kid-like questioning pitch, as if carefully exploring a new concept with a parent or guardian.
Stone didn’t have a response.
“I just saw the way he was with you…anyway, I didn’t think Eggman would ever care about anybody that much,” Sonic said. Stone balled his fists.
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand Dr. Robotnik. None of you could.” He stilled himself. “If you’re here to catch me and turn me in, then do it and get it over with.”
“Woah, woah, easy there. I’m—I’m on your side!”
Stone eyed him warily.
“I know we both fought a bunch of times—our team and your team—but Eggman did the right thing when it counted. And Shadow…” Sonic shook his head. “Both of them made a bunch of mistakes. But they did their best to fix things too. And we just wanted to make sure—”
“That I won’t make any mistakes either? That I won’t hurt someone?” Stone said, voice cracking as he looked out to the high tide.
“Right. Exactly. I don’t want anyone,” Sonic looked up at Stone, “to get hurt.”
Stone’s mouth twisted into a pained smile. He didn’t know if he meant to reassure or deflect. “Well, I won’t.” He could not possible hurt any more than he currently did. “Now would you just get out of here?”
“Nuh-uh. No can do,” Sonic said, waving a defiant finger at him.
“What else do you want from me?”
“It ain’t my style to walk away from someone that needs help. Just hang tight, I’ll be back.” As soon as he appeared, Sonic was gone in a flash, leaving Stone alone once more on the riverbank.
Stone’s vision blurred. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and let out a bitter chuckle. “Dr. Robotnik was right. You are dangerously unpredictable.”
By nightfall, he and his cohort returned. Tails was the first to break the ice, keeping focused on the task. Knuckles was silent, but observant as if he detected the delicate nature of this act of diplomacy.
“This ship is where you guys were living, right?” Tails asked.
The question hit harder than he could have imagined. Just a week prior, Ivo was fused to his armchair, blasting telenovelas, his trash pile expanding as his ruminations filled the space like smog. But they were still his ruminations, his trash. Not even the successes of Dr. Robotnik’s peers compared to his failures. Stone looked out at the hull. He knew the schematics and floorplans by heart; his eyes tracked over where the two of them moved, making mingled webs of movement, back and forth back and forth. And Stone thought of Ivo standing so still on that weapon of mass destruction, that one singular point of his universe, speaking directly, unable to hear him and—
“Well don’t you worry. We’ll get it out of there in a jiffy. Just stay put there, we’ll do the heavy lifting,” Tails said.
“You mean, I will do the heavy lifting,” Knuckles corrected.
“Right, what he said.”
“Just be gentle,” Sonic said, coaxing Knuckles. “Stone’s just—everyone needs someplace to go to, right? Don’t break the Crab more than Tails already did.”
Knuckles stare softened. He nodded and dove into the river.
+ + + + +
The hatch hissed open, a stairwell expanding and dropping before them. He swallowed down a surge of tears. He needed to show control. This was Dr. Robotnik’s turf. The three critters accompanying him needed to remember that. To his surprise, however, they displayed undue cooperation—respect even—but that was no reason to let down his guard. Dr. Robotnik’s last moments notwithstanding, they still had every reason in the world to regard Stone with some animosity. Stone shook his head as he took the first few steps in.
Approaching a nearby console and punching in a code, the backup generator illuminated the interior. The Crab’s automated systems had already flushed out the incursion of water. He heard dripping here and there, but the operation went off without a hitch.
Stone ran his hand along railing as he took it in, as if they had been gone for centuries not days. A byproduct of the crab getting flushed down the drain was that it was somehow cleaner than it was when they had arrived in Japan to intercept Gerald’s drones. The thing was an empty shell now. Much of Dr. Robot—no, Ivo’s trash heap had been washed away. No doubt it all listlessly floated somewhere in London's sewer channels.
For an instant Stone contemplated diving in and retrieving those scraps, the last shreds of this world that he had touched, filthy as they were.
“Everything seems to be okay,” Tails commented. Of course, the Crab was okay! Ivo would tolerate nothing less than perfection. If Ivo had been there when the fox had flushed them away, Stone was certain he would have regained control and brought it to shore safely. And if…if Stone hadn’t been so inadequate, then perhaps he would have made it to the surface in time to beg Ivo to stay.
While inspecting the interior, Stone spotted two plastic microwavable burrito wrappers clinging to a nearby glass panel. Yes, he really had been here! Ivo hadn’t been some fevered vision, but flesh and blood and brains. A few meters further, his armchair was slumped over, waterlogged and reeking of the sers, along with the remains of the acrylic blanket Stone had crocheted.
“How long do you think this will take to fix?” Sonic asked.
“I’m not sure,” Tails replied. “I don’t know much about Dr. Eggman’s robotics. I’m sure I could figure it out though with the proper tools and access—”
“That won’t be necessary. You’ve done enough. I can do the rest on my own,” Stone said through his teeth, a wide, false smile intending to scare more than placate.
“Are you sure? I don’t mind lending a hand,” Tails said.
“Dr. Robotnik entrusted this craft to me.” He glanced around. “I must follow his orders. I can—I have to do this on my own. Apart from him, only I’m allowed access to the Crab’s systems.”
“Come on, man,” Sonic intervened. “You don’t need to follow his orders to a T anymore. He wouldn’t want you doing this alone.”
“And you would know what the Doctor wanted? Better than me?” he said, crouching to stare down the hedgehog. The smile faded.
“Mr. Stone, Sonic didn’t mean it that way,” Tails said, approaching him slowly. Stone couldn’t stand the look in the fox’s eyes: pity. Why should he be pitied? It was an honor to have Dr. Robotnik’s trust. He wouldn’t suffer these three taking that away.
Knuckles scoffed. “Let the man be. If he wishes to follow the commands of a ghost, then it is not our place to stop him. Let us depart.”
“Knuckles!” Tails gasped, looking between him and Stone.
“You heard the man,” Stone blurted out. “Out.”
Sonic stared at him long and hard, but relented.
“Well, you know where to find us,” Sonic said quietly. “You know, in case you don’t feel like being alone.”
+ + + + +
The main power was easy enough to get back online. The power was too. With the ensuing disorder and chaos throughout London and likely every metropolitan zone in the world, no one would notice a slight power spike in an industrial zone along the river.
Soon he managed to filter the river water through the Crab’s systems and he was able to take a much-needed shower. While he was at it, he decided to launder his shirt and what he could scavenge from his quarters. He examined his quarters, a simple pullout cot and footlocker. Stone didn’t need much, but certainly he needed a blanket.
Ivo’s blanket might have been a lost cause. What he didn’t use for patching Ivo’s coat was wet and stretched out of shape from the interior’s flooding. If it were wool yarn, then perhaps he could salvage it. Stone was used to getting things out of wool: goat’s milk, oil, salsa, blood. Everything stuck to the acrylic, however.
Ivo, in his own way, had insisted on the choice of yarn. Not that Stone blamed him. This insistence had not been expressly mentioned by Ivo; Stone just had his ways of listening closely and reading between the lines. And what Dr. Robotnik wanted, Stone was more than happy—thrilled—to provide.
In Dr. Robotnik’s emotional dip following the mecha disaster back in the States, he had made numerous allusions to a blanket he had coveted as a child. At times, a specific image or memory would seize on Dr. Robotnik, vexing him.
“And of course his grandmama made it just for him!” Dr. Robotnik snorted from his chair, gesturing wildly, his hair tousled and tank-top stained with salsa. “Can you imagine, Stone? Such a flagrant sign of weakness? HA! We were schoolchildren. Well, he was a school child; I already was in possession of greater mental faculties than the entire faculty combined.”
“I have no doubt, sir,” Stone replied. “I’ve seen all your report cards.”
Ivo ignored him and continued. “How he would go on and on about his family and how close they all were! ‘We’re going to my grandmama’s for Christmas, for Easter, for the Fourth of July! Didn’t he have much bigger things to concern himself with? I am happy to have sloughed off sentimentality so early. It quite bogs down the mind.”
Within the day, Stone had researched this unnamed classmate, finding social media accounts, public records and even his social security number. The obituary for this classmate’s grandmother yielded the desired intel. Sure enough, one of the accompanying photos featured her in her early 60s. She was a pretty woman with a beehive hairdo, green dress and patent leather shoes. She sat embracing a child who fit the profile of Ivo’s meandering disdain. Draped over the back of the armchair in which she sat was a crocheted blanket in a floral pattern. The child clutched the corner. He must have brought it everywhere.
Stone color-matched the yarns and corrected them to account for the age of that era’s film manufacturing and for the age of the newspaper clipping. He never crocheted before, but he would learn. The pattern appeared to be a fairly standard floral. He had done more challenging things in terms of dexterity and morality on the doctor’s behalf before. If she missed a stitch, he would miss one. If a knot was off, his would be too. It needed to be as exact a replica as he could manage.
If this gesture would proffer some comfort to the Doctor, then how could he refuse the call? After all, Stone knew what it was like to not fit in at school. Now that old emotional tick was melding with their more recent setbacks. The loss of their federal support, the chaos emeralds, and the loss of that one thing that he knew the doctor valued above all else: pure concentrated awe and undivided attention.
When Stone offered the blanket to him, Dr. Robotnik cackled from his cushioned throne. But Stone saw it as Ivo snatched it from him, that glint of recognition, the scant affirmation of Stone’s observational astuteness. His heart raced at this seemingly small but mountainous acknowledgement. It was like being observed momentarily by a fearsome, fulminating god, like being waved away by an omniscient titan, like receiving the last baleful and fatal sting from a bumblebee.
Without another word, Stone took his cue. Ivo gazed up at him as Stone leaned in close to drape the blanket over him, tucking in the edges around him.
“I hope this keeps you warm.” Stone was still skeptical of the acrylic.
Ivo gripped his wrist. Stone beamed.
“This is…this is most…most adequate. Y-you are dismissed.” Of course, the Crab didn’t leave much space to put between them. Stone retreated to the rear of the vessel, pretending he couldn’t see Ivo run his hands over the crocheted blanket.
Ivo’s voice seemed to echo around him. Water dripped around him and Stone blinked back to his new, harsh reality.
The chair was empty and overturned. The space was eerily silent. He didn’t know if Ivo’s presence suffused the Crab or if Stone himself was haunting it instead. The blanket wrinkled in his shaking grip. Despite his recent shower, he brought it up to his heaving chest. It was soggy and a bit smelly, but such things never stopped him from getting close before.