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Silver prided himself on many things. One such thing was his perceptiveness.
Others usually didn't have the same capacity to read him or his intentions (which was baffling, frankly—if telling the truth didn't help them to understand, he didn't know what would) but Silver had, even if it was born out of necessity, a honed sense for people. One glance and he could tell whether they would help or hurt his cause and what they wanted—either from the situation or from him.
Right now, on a swaying hand-carved gondola, Silver had no idea what Sonic was thinking.
Silver licked his inner cheek, agitation swarming him despite the warm, picturesque twilight. On the ribbon of Soleanna's canal rolling velvet out into the marina, stretching out its arms for the sinking sun, two hedgehogs were scorched by sunset along its waves. One was Sonic, plucking a melody out of a guitar. The other was Silver, levitating a long oar into the iridescent waterway behind them.
Honestly, forget Sonic—Silver had no idea what he was thinking. He barely even knew how they got here.
Okay, this is fine. I can think through this, he thought—a challenge, given how soothing the tune of his guitar was. We... We had food. Charcuterie. I was wondering if my favourite restaurant was around here—see how it was like this far back—and Sonic said we should check it out, and we found it, and ate there... Still had a live band like in my time. Sonic managed to charm a guitar from one of the musicians before he let me know I was in charge of steering, and then... Wow. That music. He's incredible... Were his eyes always so—
The guitar-playing stopped. "You all right, Silv—?"
"Green."
Sonic blinked. Silver, mind catching up with his mouth, only blinked back. The oar sloshed behind them.
A smile curved Sonic's lip. "Green?"
Silver reloaded the clip of his thoughts that left the barrel of his brain smoking, the next shots jammed, his aim wavering at Sonic's growing smile.
"Uh... Your eyes." Silver's hand was at his quills, his heart a thud heavier. "I just hadn't realised before. That your eyes were so green. It..." His gaze swept the bow of the gondola. "The sunset really brings it out."
Silver didn't think to whisper. But to do anything else felt like a disrespect to the sunset's silk veil, the murmuring violets and deep pinks it surged into the sky that corralled them into her arms. He had been on a train of thought, before. Now, it derailed less like a train squealing off of iron tracks and more like their wading gondola, carrying off along another pleated set of waves.
There's no danger, Silver chanted to himself. Hell, this is the opposite of danger.
And yet: pursed lip, tight jaw, rising heat, and a hammering heartbeat when Sonic, with that softening smile, leaned towards him.
"You think so?" Sonic's smile tipped, playful. "If the sun's bringing out anyone's eyes, I was sure they'd be yours. They're like twin stars already..."
He chuckled. Silver, intending to be a functioning, sharp, ever-ready hedgehog, tripped on his own breath, stumbled by Sonic placing a hand over his as he spoke.
What is this? What am I...?
Sonic put down the guitar, the gentlest tap on wood. Silver's spine snapped straight.
The thoughts were sluggish, seeping out his every pore like a body signalling fever, a crisis, as Sonic came even closer. Then he covered Silver's knuckles with his palm and his pulse was a mallet and every vein hardened to a brass gong.
Because Sonic's breath brushed his parting mouth.
Silver's pupils shivered like ripples from water swallowing a pebble, the gondola suddenly a sauna of adrenaline when, through lidded eyes, Sonic glanced up at him in a glimmer of green.
"Too fast?"
"I don't know what's happening," Silver mumbled.
The wood of the gondola chuckled with Sonic. The very metal cuffing Silver's wrists and boots shivered with it. He probably needed medical attention. The gondola tipped; Sonic had stood up the slightest.
Then, he laid a kiss by the corner of Silver's lip.
Like a flood relieving a drought, the dam of Silver's brain broke, cool air vacuuming sharp into his system, the purple twilight and Sonic's blue and his green peeking out in such clear focus, colour itself had leapt out of its sickbed, finally dancing and filled with joy after a life confined to a windowless room.
"That," Sonic pulled back, smile tipping again after a soft swallow, "is...what's happening."
Silver breathed out. Sparks crackled from that corner of his lip, blooming and softening and spreading. Epiphany soared him higher than he had ever floated before.
Then he registered: Sonic, sitting back, was tilting away, a knuckle under his nose. Rose powdered the tops of his cheeks: pink fields under two green setting suns.
Silver breathed in deep. The river's breeze smelled as vast as the ocean's.
"We can leave it at that," Sonic said, the clear of his throat quiet. When he looked up, Silver's shadow stroked along his face. "It's all—"
Silver, palm cupped firmly at his cheek, locked their lips together. Strongly. Confidently. Sonic's gasp disappeared into another kiss, when Silver re-angled, pulling back so he could kiss Sonic deeper. With his arm looping around Sonic's back, it was like his body would swallow his down whole.
His grip stuttered and the neck of the guitar fell away.
Gasping after another kiss, Sonic blinked to Silver's snowy fur and burnished eyes tinting neon blue, the sigils on his gloves and the levitating guitar arcing over them wrapped in a cyan glow.
"Feel this."
On a slipstream whisper, Silver clasped a hand of Sonic's, delving in the gaps between Sonic's fingers, fingertips pressing into Sonic's palm as he placed it flat over his own chest.
Sonic, his breath stuttered beneath his ribs, wrestled with the heat, planted like spice numbing his lips, now storming his heart. A weapon had been installed in Silver's chest where a heart should have been. It must have. The way it was beating, so rapidly and so deeply, had no other explanation.
Except that Sonic's heart, faced with Silver's bitten-lip, blushing stare, began to copy it.
"That." Silver squeezed Sonic's hand with feeling. "That was you."
"Silver—"
"You're wonderful." His hand cupping Sonic's face drew away to join his other, holding onto Sonic's hand over his heart. "You don't need to say anything back. I just needed you to know. I've never felt this way—all my life, I thought I'd gone through every extreme and trial and pushed my body to the limit, so nothing could surprise me, but... Sonic, I've always thought you're incredible. Everything you do, everything you are, I could only hope to be, and I"—he sucked in a breath—"will. Need to plan—for a far better way to show my feelings for you than this, but even when I don't have the whole picture, I know when I can't waste another moment." Air flushed out of his chest. "Sonic, you..." His swallow could shake hands with his stomach. "You take my breath away."
Sonic stared at him with an ever parting mouth. With ever colouring cheeks. The Soleanna river may as well have been a mirror, two sheens of pink dyes deepening their reach into the sprinkle of stars above and below.
A chuckle crinkled his eyes, soft and green. He pulled his and Silver's hands away from his heart. His free hand cupped all of them together in another kiss, as soft and miraculous as a wing able to carry a bird to flight.
After parting from a kiss, only a lean away from another, Silver breathed out with barely opened eyes.
"Would you be with me?"
"...Did you know," Sonic brushed his knuckles soft on the side of his face, right beneath his ear, with a gleaming grin, "I can kiss in morse code?"
Silver blinked.
"What?" Like a shudder, he shook his head. "What are you even—?"
"C'mon." Sonic giggled, a snort to it. "Lemme show you."
Everything remotely hardened and cooled in Silver thawed, giving like ice to a blowtorch, as he mapped more and more of Sonic's brilliant, blush-stained smile into the archives and galleries and monuments he kept memorialised in his mind, his heart, his resolve and everything he was.
"As long as you don't show anyone else." Silver leaned in with closing eyes, all purpose. "Then fine by me."
A new flush of steam flowed out of Sonic's nose. His lip twisted on a pound of his heart.
So he whispered out his reply in another kiss, a brittle code easily cracked. Something unspeakably gentle unfurled like petals that opened up to the sun after hugging themselves in a bud, feeling those hands that coursed the power to move buildings and bridges holding so earnestly onto his simple ones, holding onto them back.
So their silhouettes grew softly in the Soleanna sunset, a guitar and a gondola cast in the gold of the sun, bodies wreathed in a warm, otherworldly cyan.