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He remembers coming in late. It was his fifth G.U.N mission that week. He doesn't officially work for them anymore and is only supposed to be hired as a last resort for the most dangerous of cases, but G.U.N likes to push their luck and his innate need to be told what to do means that he accepted every proposal with a scowl and a curt nod.
(Once a service animal, always a service animal. He can try to forge his own path all he wants but somewhere down the line he’ll realise he’s just heading in the direction someone pointed him in.)
His weariness must have been palpable from the moment he arrived because Rouge accosted him within moments. She seemed angry, almost, the curlers in her hair wobbling as she gesticulated wildly. There were too many words coming from her and he didn’t have enough time to process them before another torrent followed.
Her mouth seemed to be moving out of time with the sound coming from it. It made something ache deep within his skull and he involuntarily closed his eyes.
She quietened. He felt the floorboards move as she shifted her weight uneasily between her feet.
She told him, slowly and clearly, to go to bed. He forced his eyes open to look at the sofa, which is where he slept whenever he got around to sleeping, which was not often. She clarified that she meant an actual bed—hers.
He objected immediately, but his mind wasn’t working well enough to provide detailed reasons as to why he shouldn’t use Rouge’s bed. When she said that it’d only be for a while he found himself trudging to her room.
It may have been because she reminded him that she has blackout curtains.
Lying down was unusual for him—he spent most of his time either standing or, if he was tired, leaning against something—and it was even stranger to be cocooned with a duvet.
He’d been in a bed before, but it was a long, long time ago and it was nothing like Rouge’s. Maria’s bed smelled like disinfectant and dying girls. Rouge’s smells like hairspray and her moisturiser.
It was okay.
She was gone and then she was back. He knew what she was holding before he opened his eyes. He felt the familiar, indescribable buzz of a Chaos Emerald, the one that she had kept in her possession for the past few months.
Rouge’s face had that strain, that reluctance it always had when she did something for someone else, like it physically hurt to show that she cared. She didn’t want to part with the Emerald and made no effort to hide it but she held it out to him anyway.
He took it. Cradled it to his chest. Every cell in his body took a deep breath in. His blood quietened.
She drew down the blackout curtains so that the only light was the dull glow from the hallway, and when she closed the door behind her there was no light at all.
-
And now he’s in the fetal position, curled around the Emerald so tightly that, if it were possible, he would fuse it into himself until they were one and the same.
It isn’t warm to the touch— at least, not in the physical sense. Chaos energy feels a little like warmth, but like warmth in an other dimension. If temperature was two dimensional, Chaos would be three dimensional. The language he has cannot adequately describe it.
He feels both better and worse than he did before. The Emerald is definitely helping; it seems to be doing to him the same thing that plugging Omega into an electrical outlet does. However, being completely still and silent gives him no choice but to acknowledge how his body feels.
He feels like a flickering light bulb. Like the last embers of a campfire before it goes out completely. Like the last dregs of a puddle on an overwhelmingly sunny day, doomed to evaporate.
His fingers (bare; his gloves came off at some point) clutch the Emerald so tightly that the edges dig into him. If he were to peel his fingers away- if he could bare to- there would be lines indented into them.
He needs to get up. He can never rise again. He has things to do. His body has forgotten how to work.
Rouge’s blackout curtains work well, but his senses are too sharp and now that his eyes have gotten adjusted he can make out the outlines of things again. He can see her wardrobe. He can see the bar hanging above the bed from which she sometimes dangles.
He can hear her mumbling in the living room, and Omega’s shamelessly loud responses. He can hear the cars passing outside, the conversations of pedestrians, and the fluttering wings of birds.
It’s grounding to focus on the senses- his therapist tells him to do that whenever things get overwhelming- but it doesn’t work so well when he doesn’t want to be grounded to anything. He wants to be pure energy. He’s too exhausted to be anything more.
He falls asleep.
-
The door opens. Some footsteps. The bottom of the mattress dips under someone’s weight.
“Morning, handsome.” Rouge’s voice is quiet and intimate.
“It’s morning?” He forces out. He’s never slept through the night before.
“Morning for my standards. It’s 5pm.”
If he were capable of doing so, he would leap out of bed and hurry to make up for the outrageous length of time he has missed—over half a day! Over half a day he has been here, occupying Rouge’s bed and wasting everyone’s time, and yet it feels like it has been minutes.
“Where did you sleep?” He asks.
“On the sofa.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll move,” he says, not moving.
“Don’t be. We had a movie night. It was fun.” She turns to the open doorway. “Right, big guy?”
“CHAO IN SPACE 3 IS A PITIFUL EXCUSE FOR CINEMA,” comes from elsewhere in the apartment. “EVERYONE INVOLVED IN THE PRODUCTION PROCESS DESERVES TO BE EXECUTED.”
Rouge nods solemnly. “He’s right, Chao In Space 3 doesn’t need to exist. The story ended perfectly fine after the second one, they clearly just wanted to make another movie for money. You’re lucky you weren’t there, really, even if you did miss out on the cuddling action," she adds, winking.
That’s a joke. Presumably. Unless Rouge and Omega suddenly got into cuddling while he was gone.
(He wouldn’t be opposed, but he’d never try to initiate such a thing.)
“Devastated,” he says dryly, and not just dry in tone— he feels like he hasn’t drank water in years.
“Do you want anything?”
“No.” He wants nothing.
No sound. No light. No textures. Nothing. He wants the Chaos energy within him to dissolve his body until there is no physical matter left. It’s so exhausting to be made of physical matter. So much stimuli. So many functions.
“Rewording: I’m going to get you something, what do you want?” He notices the Omega-ism in her speech but doesn’t have the energy to make a joke about it.
“I don’t want anything.”
“If you don’t pick something, I’ll call Sonic and tell him you’re thinking of getting into chilli dogs.”
An involuntary full-body shiver. “Ugh.”
“I’ll invite him over and he won’t leave until you try all of his favourite toppings.”
“Water, please,” he says.
“On it.” She gets up.
“And…” He pauses. He doesn’t like to ask for things, but if he’s already requested one thing then he can request another. “Do we still have the tiramisu? The fancy one you brought home the other day.”
“Think so.” There’s a smile in her voice. She knows how difficult it is for him to ask for things, for the service animal to request a service. “I’ll get it.”
She brings him a glass of water and a generous slice of overpriced tiramisu in a dish with his favourite spoon, the tiny one that is useless for bringing any more than a pebble-sized crumb of food into one’s mouth at a time.
He is overwhelmed with gratitude. He owes his life, his everything, to her. “Thanks,” he says gruffly.
“Whatever,” she says.
Before she leaves, she lingers just for a moment. She puts her hand down on the bed, not on his hand but next to it. Almost touching but not quite.
He extends a single finger in a quick, twitch-like motion, to reach her.
They don’t hug or hold hands or do any soppy shit like that, but sometimes they do this— the tiniest of touches on the smallest of surface area. That way, there’s plausible deniability. They can both pretend it was an accident, that it didn’t mean anything.
For that moment his finger touches her hand, she is as much of a lifeline as the Emerald is.
-
“ROUGE SAID THAT YOU REQUIRE EXTENSIVE LEVELS OF REST TO RETURN TO PEAK PERFORMANCE.”
Two glowing red pinpricks in the darkness. In his weakened state, he finds this unsettling.
“TO ASSIST, I WILL PLAY SOOTHING SOUNDS. STATE YOUR PREFERENCE: RAIN OR WHALES?”
He pushes his face into the Emerald and tries to think. “… Rain.”
The sound that blares from Omega’s speakers can be identified as rain but only because he knew in advance what it’s supposed to be. It more closely resembles static, loud and unbearable. Whatever sound file Omega is playing has been amped up to the maximum possible volume and probably also corrupted by his pet viruses.
“Whales.”
Silence. Omega’s optics remain focused on him.
And then, the weirdest fucking sound he’s ever heard. At top volume.
He grimaces. “Neither. Silence.”
“I AM PLAYING SOOTHING SOUNDS TO HELP YOU REST.”
“Play soothing silence.”
To his credit, Omega does become silent. Whether he considers this to be ‘playing silence’ or not is unclear. He trudges over to the bedside table and picks up the empty dish, his claws clinking too loudly against the ceramic.
“I HAVE POLITELY REQUESTED THAT G.U.N DOES NOT SUMMON YOU UNLESS COMPLETELY NECESSARY, AS WAS STATED IN THE INITIAL AGREEMENT,” Omega says, holding the dish with both hands. Given that he has never politely requested anything in his life, this is undoubtedly a skewed recount of events.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“AGREED. I DID IT ANYWAY."
“Okay. Thank you.”
“QUERY: ARE YOU SURE YOU WOULD NOT BENEFIT FROM SOOTHING SOUNDS?”
“I’m certain.”
“YOU ARE WRONG, BUT YOUR WISHES ARE ACKNOWLEDGED. SUMMON ME WHEN YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND. ENJOY UNEMPLOYMENT.”
Omega takes the dish away and, miraculously, shuts the door quietly. The room is empty again.
He manages to uncurl a little, flat on his back with the Emerald still hugged tight to his chest. He stares at the ceiling for a while.
He might feel a little better than before. He might feel the same. He’s not sure. It’s okay.
He closes his eyes again.