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He was always slippery. Fluxing like streams of gas on the photosphere of the Sun, taunting her with a twinkle he’d never deserved to have, grinning so smugly he must have thought he was the spark that had started the damn Big Bang. It pissed her off to no end.
Not that she couldn’t handle him! Hell no! She was the great wash of storms banding over the surface of a gas giant, the pressure at the core of the largest star, the gravitational pull of any body massive enough to warp space around it. She was the malformed twin in his binary system—a monster of his own creation—inescapable in their joint orbit. She was inevitable.
But it still gave her nothing but headaches to be reminded that he would forever be more of a pain to deal with than the Doc’s stupid simulations could have ever predicted. Surge would be his inevitable end, but holy Gaia, if Sonic didn’t enjoy taking his sweet time playing around with his charade of a happy little solar system along the way.
The people out there really treated him as if he were their only Sun. As if he personally gave them all fucking life, unbounded diffuse nebula, supernova forcing the creation of new elements at the end of a life she wished really was over already, protoplanetary disk of some protolithic protostar just so ready to get building around its egotistical self. They treated him like they were important named planets orbiting him, but they were just a bunch of purposeless rocks. Asteroids, banded together, pointless quasi-moons with way heightened senses of self-importance.
They deserved better than meaningless worship. Surge knew she deserved so much better than periodic, than frequent, eclipsing by the guy this corpse of a body was forced to revolve around. She was going to be a hero, so that just meant she was going to push at him until his supposed great spark began to spill, and all of his great reputation began to overflow into her. She would be what this binary was known for. What it was named for.
Of course, the only problem was that the guy basically loved catapulting himself across other people’s orbits for fun. Surge was faster—she knew she was—but when he burned like this, he still ran circles around her. He still took and took and took from the charge she put into the air around her, the force she lashed out with all around her, tipping them both over the edge to inch closer and closer to implosion.
She hated him. She hated him like the tide must have hated the pull the moon had on it. But when faced with the opposite that she had been created to meet and annihilate, she had always been meant to respond to the taunts.
The Doc had been twisted, and the Doc had been cruel; he’d built her to be pulled in by the false glamour of Sonic’s empty outer envelope, just the same as the people surrounding them that she’d called purposeless rocks.
So what choice did she have but to fight him? What choice did any celestial body have but to revolve around its center of mass, right?
“Heh, having trouble keeping up?” he laughed, diving under a wild swipe with all the accidental grace of any object letting its momentum be swayed and angled by the gravity of a star.
Surge clenched her fist, sparking lightning down like a meteor shower to where he’d dodged. It arced through and rebounded off of his back, and Sonic shook as he darted away. This was the people’s hero? He was so fallible! He jolted and quivered at a single impact! The moon had craters to show for surviving so much more than that, and here he was, the great Sonic the Hedgehog, the clouds in his atmosphere pierced through by a lone object, a wobble in his orbit induced by just the start of a nova at the edges of her new, grander shell.
Today, she was eclipsing him, and who was he to still outshine her radiance?
“Keeping up?” Surge scoffed, zipping over to yank him up and off of his path of pitiful escape by the scruff of his neck. “Does it look like I need to keep up when you’re collapsing right in front of me? Pathetic.”
She shoved him away, and delighted in seeing his meteoric impact with the ground. Maybe he wasn’t so different from those purposeless rocks, marred and cratered and weak, after all.
“Yeah?” He was still laughing, somehow. He picked himself back up with some impossible spring still in his step, grin dancing and burning cruelly like the umbra of a sun spot. “Wanna test that?”
He vaulted over her—as if it was even possible against the universe’s desire for conservation for him to take back that what she had received from him to now kickstart new fusion—and took off ahead, always so wrapped in futile determination to still outshine her. What a joke! She could take enough to go fucking supernova, but him? Oh, he was expanding now, but hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen… all the way up until iron, how far along was he? How much time did he even have left until he collapsed into his much dimmer core?
Sound was fast, but not even fast enough to transmit a crash of thunder on time. Light, though? Everything in the entire night sky was sent here by light and its incredible speed. Sonic didn’t stand a chance against her.
She followed, forever tracing the map of the orbit the Doc had drawn out for her so long ago, regular enough to be planetary, fast enough to be indicative of so much grander, and pushed until she was ready to melt the sky. Collapse was imminent, collapse was inevitable, but it had already been happening since the day the Doc had killed the girl she must have once been. He’d pushed her past the point of simple expansion, and now she was giving out into literal gold.
To look her in the eye was to be faced with decay, new isotopes forming just to jeer in their own instability, just to spit radiation in his face. He did it anyway, when they reached neck and neck, because he was a stubborn, cocky bastard, but she hoped he saw his own future in sudden, unpredictable fission.
“If you’re trying to escape, there’s no point,” she growled. “You’re already meager next to me.”
Because she became charged as she ran, because she was the standard to be based off of as she ran, and because he’d have to kill off parts of himself in the process to truly compare to her, as she ran.
“Bold statement, when I don’t even need to escape. There’s nothing I can’t outrun!”
His tone was playful, always that of the jester juggling the Earth and all of her neighbours with impunity. How could anybody worship this? How could anyone see anything beyond selfish growth for the sake of avarice, behind that flaring surface and grin?
“You think?” Surge mocked. “I’d like to see even your dumbass outrun a black hole.”
If he ran beyond that event horizon, escape would be a joke for an entirely different reason.
“The thing about having no limits,” he said, whilst using his shoulder to bash into her from the side, “is that even a black hole wouldn’t be enough to draw me in!” He flipped over her sideways just to really sprinkle salt onto the wound still bleeding out all of the universe’s most precious metals from the core, from the self, she’d been forced to sacrifice to be here. “And besides, being all spaghettified doesn’t sound like much fun anyway, thanks.”
Like she wanted to have been gutted by the Doc? Like she wanted to have been warped into a light always so close to rescinding back to just some stellar grave? Surge hated the girl whose skin she wore and tore through the burning surface of just as much as she hated him. And yet. Like she wanted to have started her life as a diverging sequence lightyears away from fitting some descriptor of ‘main’, to have started her life bursting out of the remains of an iron-bound corpse?
“Nothing outruns a black hole,” she hissed.
“Sounds like an admission to me,” he quipped, only narrowly avoiding the subsequent pair of hooks she shot his way.
Surge stamped down, catching the edge of Sonic’s shoe—constricting him. “I am light itself. I move like it, I strike with it, I am just as necessary as it. But even I’m not finding just some sprint out of the grip of a fucking black hole! What me to show you what that’s like?”
She lunged forward, and grabbed a fistful of his quills, ignoring how her gloves seemed to be nothing more than an inconsequential bout of atmosphere to them, surely stellar rays, coming from him. It would have never been reasonable to expect to receive no harm from this encounter. It was a fight, for fuck’s sake.
And you know what? Surge shocked him, and Sonic shook once more in her grip. He was pulled in when she yanked, no matter how hard he dug those Earthly feet into this battered, Earthly ground, and no matter how hard he spun his legs around their axis of rotation. There was no way to outrun this, because she was inevitable, and because after all of this, after death, after going through more than any non-stellar body should ever have been able to take, maybe she was the black hole.
Black holes took. They took and took and took from everything around them, light, debris, other black holes, and yet they were the center of almost every large galaxy, and yet they could create the brightest objects in the known universe. Black holes took, and black hole killed, but up in the sky, so often were they also haloed by the sweet orange of their accretion disc. They were balance—that which stopped cosmic misfortune, and that which played both devil and hero—and they were the head of the system that Sonic and Eggman dropping dead at each other’s feet would create.
To be a black hole was to be a harbinger, and with her hand now reaching for Sonic’s windpipe, Surge could certainly be a harbinger. Of death, of a new age with no more stupid Sonics or Eggmans or theories of cycles, of a world where she would finally be free. Freedom was hers to take? Alright, it was right in her hand now, and like a black hole, she was going to fucking take.
Sonic choked a little, before aiming a kick up at her chin, sending Surge reeling for a moment. She kept her grip on his spines, encircling him with the event horizon that even he would never be able to reach the escape velocity to break free from, but it was still enough to let him catch his breath.
“Okay, okay, hang on, Surge. No chance we could go back to being allies?” he wheezed.
That was what he thought his out was? Expecting mercy, expecting compassion, from a corpse that only knew how to take without wanting? The girl who’d probably hated herself enough to actually listen to that was gone, burst all the way out of the main sequence, and after the Doc had controlled what she had exploded into, she was the gravity at the center of everything, and she was the quasar—bright, brighter, the brightest—that blinded everyone who would look her in the eye as she finished them off.
He was always staring at her. Maybe even staring right through her. What did that say about him? Was he himself, the star she’d been created to circle, the star her light just had to always be in imitation of, so luminous that she and her current form meant nothing to him? Or was he just a fool?
“Are you serious right now?” she snarled. “We were never ‘allies’. I was hired help, and then I left. Everything I do is on my merit, not yours!”
“And that’s what I can’t run from?” he said.
“You can’t outrun a black hole,” Surge reiterated, “and what that means, is that you can’t outrun me. I’ll take your place, and I’ll do a better job at it than you could have ever dreamed of.”
He grinned once more, wicked and sharp, planetary rings catching her light, binary system spinning until half of its orbit was complete. “Let’s test that too.”
She hated him like a black hole must have hated the nebula it had once been born from.
Sonic dove forward, curling up to dash away at as close to max speed as he was capable of initially reaching, and Surge, still clinging to herself and her future through his quills poking holes in her gloves, was taken along for the ride. He was gliding across her accretion disc, surfing across it, almost, seemingly without a care in the world that he was about to be, in his words, ‘spaghettified’.
Growling with the creaking, dissonant static of radio waves freshly released from the open maw at the center of the galaxy, Surge unleashed what spark she still had left in her after what she had used up powering herself through this fight so far, reveling once more in how Sonic had to stop, and how Sonic had to shake.
She certainly felt as powerful as a black hole, watching him tremble. She certainly felt as though she had the brightest light, the strongest gravitational pull, the darkest night, in all of the universe. And when she pulled back, red-shifted with rage, to observe, that look of wear and tear all down his marred, cratered, and weak body, drew forth a fierce smile to her own face. Hers was filled with sharp fangs—the pillars of the universe—and was as wild as a galaxy set straight on a collision course with another.
But he got up. He shook the static out of his quills, juddering her arm as he moved, and he pulled himself back together like the shattered moon in the sky assembling its shards and debris and purposeless fragments. Right, because he was always slippery—always way more slippery than she’d ever been trained or programmed to account for—with that lunar grip on the tide.
If he’d been so easy to crush by collision, Surge would have subsumed him a long time ago. Sonic got up because he refused to see the inevitable, because he refused to look at the center of the future of the universe where he’d see her, and because he refused to note what orbiting planets he was consuming in his red expansion.
He hit like a comet, ice through her system in shock, but Surge refused to stay down either. Like it was even possible to put down a black hole… If she was a marble dropped against the Earth’s surface, she would shatter it all the way through.
She yanked, quick as a whip, speed of light faster than any possible mortal reaction time, and as he stumbled back, she dove forward and struck his ankle, chaining it down in her hands. She had him on gravity’s leash, and there could be no principled uncertainty on where he was going next from it. Could he feel her now? Could he feel power and inevitability and the hand that had been crafted only to take?
Her foot caught him messily on the shoulder from below, straining to pull him down to the ground, to her surface beyond even the event horizon, and truly, under that kind of insurmountable force, she thought she had him, no matter how slippery he was determined to be. Water froze, in the far reaches of space, and there was no vapor that could drift away from the structure gravity pulled it into—nebula, planet, star, galaxy. Surge thought even he had to be feeling that.
But then something buzzed, from deep within his quills, and not because of any kind of shock she had sent. Unconsciously, she recoiled slightly. She didn’t withdraw, could never withdraw, but was this not a little too similar to the first jolt of the Doc’s hypnosis, the sharp before the lull after collision, to her fractured self?
Sonic retrieved a small device from his quills, even as Surge regained her composure enough to go in for another hit. He deftly ducked under her next swipe, squinting into what seemed to be a communicator.
And then he looked up, retreating back inside of his own ring system as he let it smile for him. “Well, I gotta split. Don’t suppose we can call it here?”
Why did he never understand?
“Are you serious?” she barked, kneeing him in the stomach for good measure.
Sonic winced, but once more shook it off as a star would some small probe. She’d never wanted to show him the taste of dirt more. She’d never wanted to show him the taste of molten flame at the center of creation more.
“Yeah, I figured not.” He shrugged lightly, before abruptly whirling all the way around his own axis to send her spiraling out to the edge of the galaxy she was supposed to command. “Catch you another time, Surge!”
That wasn’t how this was supposed to work. Leaving now was attempting the impossible. Nothing escaped a black hole—not even her, when she encountered one yet more massive and enraged than her.
But he couldn’t get that far, Surge figured. He was still over his own limit and siphoning away his own outermost envelope to her. He was still being ionized and burned by the decay she was surrounding him with. He was still skimming the event horizon of a black hole.
The Doc had made her to follow him, always. To be the spark to start a new universe. Functionally, Sonic was already as dead as the past her in that old, in this current, universe. He was stormy thunder on the surface of some lost little planet, but she was the lightning parting the cloud, illuminating the skies.
By now Surge had certainly realised—she’d already been at the end of her life, of the universe, this whole time, and for all of that, inevitability was baked into her blood. There was no escape from a black hole.
Surge took off after him.