Work Text:
The announcement of a cyclone coming for the city was made while Shadow was on a mission. Well, technically they were on the way home from a mission when it was made. They got home to their shared apartment to find Rouge tugging inside the sofa that usually lived out on their balcony.
“What are you doing?” was the first thing to come out of their mouth. The first words to come of their mouth in days.
“Prepping for the cyclone,” the bat answered.
Her wings twitched slightly as she tugged hard at the sofa to pull the other end of the sofa over the sliding door tracks.
“There’s a cyclone coming?”
Rouge nodded.
“Yep, it should be here early Friday morning,” That gave them about a day before it arrived. And it explained the overly sad grey sky and how bad the wind was.
Now that the sofa was indoors, Rouge pushed it out of the doorway and into corner.
“…Is it going to go right over us?”
“Nah,” she corrected. “But it is predicted to get close,”
Instead of focusing too much on what that implied, Shadow asked, “What do you need me to do?
The bat finished wrestling with the sofa.
“I’m going to take in all the plant pots out there, can you go around and check that all the windows shut properly?”
They nodded and headed off.
“Thanks, hun!” Rouge called after their retreating form.
Shadow started with the living room’s windows, they were used the most often of all the windows in the apartment. By the time that they finished with checking the last window, the one in their room, Rouge had finished bringing in everything that was usually out on the balcony and was standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to finish boiling.
“Is—- is all the preperation we need to do for a cyclone taking in loose furniture and items?” they asked as they stepped into the kitchen.
“For one that’s a category two like this one is? Yeah. If it was a category three or more, we’d have more to do,”
The kettle finished boiling and clicked itself off.
“…There are different categories?”
“Yeah. Five categories — one’s the weakest and five’s the worst,” Rouge explained while she poured hot water into her mug. “So a category two is more or less like a really bad storm, with a lot of wind,”
“Do you want tea?”
The question was so unrelated to what they were talking about that it caught Shadow off-guard.
“Yeah,” they recovered. “Do we have any choc-peppermint left?”
The bat shrugged.
“If there is, it’ll be in the pantry,”
‘Pantry’ was generous. Their pantry was little more than a cupboard shoved into a corner of the kitchen.
Shadow found a singular teabag left in the brown and green box.
“You said a category two cyclone is ‘like a bad storm’ and we’ve taken in all the things that could get thieved by the wind, but should we be worried?” The question slipped out before he could swallow it back.
Rouge shook her head.
“Nah — we’ll be alright,” She took a sip of her tea (her favourite raspberry-orange, like a heathen, because their housemate had wack tastebuds). “…I forgot you’ve never experienced one of these before,”
“And you apparently have?” They didn’t mean to phrase it like a question but that was how it had come out.
“Yeah. I grew up in a town on the coast that was visited by a cyclone every other summer and I lived here through the last one six years ago,”
That was effectively the end of their conversation.
The rest of the afternoon passed no different than normal. Random documentaries played on the tv while the two of them did their own things. They ate dinner accompanied by the whistling wind.
When she got up the next morning, Rouge dug out their pool towels and dumped them all on the coffee table.
“What are the towels for?” Shadow asked, appearing in the doorway.
“They’re put at the bottom of the sliding door and the windows just in case the water leaks in,” she explained before heading off to toss some bagels into the toaster.
With the apartment prepared, the two of them were set up to wait out and sit through the cyclone together. Until the front door — which Shadow swore they had locked — banged open with the arrival of not the cyclone but a certain blue hedgehog. A soaked blue hedgehog.
“Sonic?!” Shadow questioned when Rouge yelped and dropped her freshly-toasted bagel.
Chaos, these kids.
“What are you doing here?” they asked at the same time that Rouge asked “Did you run through gale-force winds to get here?”
“Wanted to see you, Shads. And yeah, I did,” Sonic rattled off.
That brought up a whole host of questions. Namely…
“Do you have a death wish?”
“It’s just a bit of wind — I’ve run through worse for longer before,”
“You’re soaked,” Shadow pointed out.
“—And some rain,” Sonic amended.
Rouge picked up her dropped bagel, dusted it off and took a bite.
“Don’t know what your plan was after you’d gotten here, but you’re not running back home now,” When he went to protest, she added. “In the couple of minutes you two spent bickering, the wind’s gotten worse. If you try running home in it — even at a hundred kilometres per hour — you’re just going to get blown away,”
“So you are waiting it out here,” Shadow finished for her.
“I can outrun wind — I’m not that slow,”
“Not winds of 150 kilometres per hour you can’t,”
Sonic went to protest again before changing his mind.
“Yeah, okay,” he conceeded.
Smart move, blue. Shadow can and will keep going forever.
Rouge finished her bagel and tossed the other one that she’d toasted at Shadow, who then promptly launched it at Sonic’s head…despite the other hedgehog being less than six metres away from them.
Finally finished in the kitchen, Rouge drifted into the living room to turn on the tv and put on yet another documentary (to both drown out the roar of the wind and rain and to be background noise) before sitting down to work on polishing her gem collection.
“I’m going to crochet. Do whatever you want, just don’t bother me,” Shadow announced, glancing at Sonic.
The two of them ended up sitting across the living room rug with Shadow crocheting while Sonic looked on and gave them unsolicited pointers. Pointers that, despite being unsolicited, were not always ignored.
The bad weather came and passed rather uneventually, except for when the outdoor clock they had forgotten to take down from its hanging place got yeeted across the balcony and exploded into a million tiny pieces of glass. Enough pieces that they would still find bits scattered about weeks later.
Once the winds had died down a little, about four hours after they had first really picked up but still nowhere near close to ‘safe’ (to everyone except a certain speedster), Sonic took off.