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Sonic stared up at the clear sky, hands resting behind his head. The grass beneath him was soft, and the shade of the tree above him gave enough coverage that he wasn’t too hot, but he still felt uncomfortable. He shifted positions, and when that didn’t work, he did it again, and again, until he was groaning in frustration.
“What is your problem?” Amy asked, appearing behind him with her hands on her hip. “It has been so easy going around here lately and you’re over here groaning.”
Things had been relatively calm, and that was the problem. Even Egghead’s robot of the week did nothing to get Sonic’s adrenaline pumping, and he was able to defeat them all on his own with ease. He knew he shouldn’t be complaining about the lack of threats, it wasn’t like he wanted anyone's life to be in danger, but things were too comfortable since he left.
One month without Shadow calling him dumb shit like a ‘pillock’ or ‘mooncalf’ that had him pulling out Tails’ dictionary to understand what he had just been called. One month without getting kicked in the stomach, kneed in the face, or punched in the back. One month without Shadow.
If anything, Sonic should have felt relieved with the thorn in his side gone, but, with each passing day no relief came, just the unsettling feeling that he had fucked up. The feeling was growing so strong that as he looked at Amy, he felt the need to talk about his feelings.
What shit.
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” Sonic said, but the look Amy gave him made him believe she already found him to be crazy. Rude. “I think I miss Shadow?”
“Shadow? As in the guy who used to use you as a punching bag?” Amy asked, and sensing that this might be a lengthy conversation, took a seat next to Sonic. He instantly regretted telling her when he saw the small smile of interest on her face. “Now, don’t make that face! I’m happy you’re telling me about your feelings, even if it does sound kind of deranged.”
“Urg, Ames, don’t make it more than it is. I don’t actually miss the guy. Just bored,” he complained, though it felt like a lie. Boredom didn’t feel like this. “Complicated, I guess.”
“He is a complicated guy,” Amy said, which, yeah, understatement of the century there. Shadow was the most complicated, convoluted, and confusing creature that Sonic had ever had the displeasure of meeting.
And.
Well, he missed him.
“I guess he hit me too many times in the head if I’m feeling like this,” Sonic said while Amy shrugged her shoulders. “Thanks for the reassurance.”
“Don’t act like you didn’t like being thrown about by him,” Amy rolled her eyes, looking up at the sky as she relaxed into the grass next to him. “You two were always weird with each other. I had been secretly hoping you’d come to me for advice, but when he disappeared, I figured you’d never bring it up.”
He hadn’t told the others the exact details of Shadow's departure from the island, or, any details, actually. He knew that they’d have questions, the first one being ‘ how do you know this information’, and he didn’t want to deal with that, so when they hadn’t seen Shadow in a month, Sonic said ‘guess he moved on from the island, finally’ and they all accepted it.
“What do you mean by ‘weird’?” Sonic asked as he sat up to look down at Amy, who just laughed as he felt his muzzle redden at the implication of her words. “Whatever!”
“I’m not making fun of your feelings, Sonic, just your inability to accept them,” Amy remained laying down, and eventually Sonic laid back down in a huff. He didn’t have many other options, and he wanted this off his chest.
“Okay. I miss him and I’m bored because he’s gone. What else is there to accept?” Sonic asked, wondering if it was wise to allow Amy a chance to unravel his tightly wound up feelings that he hadn’t given much thought.
“The ‘why’ you miss him.”
“He challenged me.” When Amy hummed and said nothing else, he took it as his cue to continue on. “With him, I actually lost fights. Eggman is a fine villain of the week. He can be repetitive but it’s a comfortable fight at this point, and like, why am I upset that I’m winning all the time? I sound insane, don’t I?”
“No, you don’t. You sound like someone who is lonely and missing another person. Someone who pushed you to your limits, and that’s something you like, something you didn’t realize you liked until you were pushed.” Damn. Amy was good at this. “I’m not saying that you miss the difficult fights where the village and our own lives were in danger due to Shadow’s actions, but I know he wasn’t always a giant pain in the ass.”
“Oh, but he was always a giant pain in the ass!” Sonic exclaimed, gesturing up towards the sky as his memories spilled open. “Always going on about how he was the ‘ultimate lifeform’ yet he barely knew anything about being a normal person, taking Eggman’s side when he knew it wasn’t right just to fight me, arguing with me about the damn color of the sky just to argue, setting and changing markers for the end of a race, waking me up in the middle of the night just to piss me off, tossing me in the ocean and making me beg to get pulled out, ugh!”
“And you miss it?”
“I miss it!” Sonic said as he covered his eyes with his hands. “Amy. I am crazy. Sticks is right. I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I should’ve taken that tinfoil hat she offered me yesterday.”
“You’re not crazy! You just have a lot of unsaid feelings, and that hat was ugly. If you give into her delusions, it’ll only make it worse.”
“Isn’t that like, not good? To want that? To miss that?” He asked, not understanding how easily she was taking all of this in. She should be shaking him, telling him he’s an idiot, that something isn’t screwed in right, forcing him to read one of her dumb self-help books that maybe aren’t so dumb after all. “I don’t want to deal with unsaid feelings. That doesn’t sound fun.”
“Yeah and that’s how you got yourself into this mess,” Amy said with a hard eye roll. “It was certainly not healthy when the two of you would just beat the shit out of each other due to hatred, but clearly that was some kind of bonding thing you two had going on,” Amy said, making him squirm.
Yeah, he and Shadow’s relationship had shifted at some point, and the blows didn’t feel quite so dangerous as they once had, but he didn’t think that they shifted towards a romantic tone.
“You two weren’t always fighting, and half the time, you were being just as annoying towards him as he was towards you. You showed your passion in your own way. It was obvious that after a while, you two were just playing with each other.”
“Playing with each other? You’re comparing us fighting to children playing?”
“Well for you two, high speed chases on this small island are child’s play,” Amy muttered, and yeah, she was right. “So, what happened between you two? Do you know where he went? Did he tell you?” she gasped, sitting up with her hands against her mouth in shock. “He kissed you and LEFT! OR WORSE, he kissed you and YOU REFUSED! Sonic, how could you be so stupid?!”
“Hey, what the hell did I do?! We didn’t kiss, and if we did, I’D be the one kissing him! I wouldn’t let him hold it over me forever that he kissed me first!” Sonic argued, sitting up as well. He ignored the fact that kissing Shadow didn’t seem so repulsive to him. “He just, I dunno, said after a race one night that he was done with the island.”
He had known something was off when they had raced that night; Shadow’s mind was clearly elsewhere, but Sonic used that to his advantage to slide across their invisible and sandy finish line on the beach before Shadow could. He had been all smiles until he saw how serious Shadow was; like they might actually come to blows over the results of the race, but then Shadow had opened his mouth, and no insults came out.
“Done with the island?” Amy asked, as confused as Sonic had been that night.
“Yeah. Said it was time for him to go back, which confused me because I thought he was from space, but maybe that was one of Stick’s crazy theories that he went along with because he thought I was gullible. Said he had a friend waiting for him. That part made me laugh, as if he has friends, but, apparently he does,” Sonic explained, still not fully understanding.
Shadow had been short, per usual, barely giving information unless Sonic asked the right questions, and unfortunately for him, Sonic always asked the wrong question. He remembered the way his gut dropped each time Shadow gave him one word responses that became more and more aggressive as their conversation went, until they were fighting, yelling at the top of their lungs.
It had been a miracle no one had heard them, or maybe at this point they had learned to tune the two of them out.
“And then he vanished?” Amy asked, furrowing her brows. “Without another word?”
“Sorta, he did say something else,” Sonic didn’t know if it would be wise to share the next part, but they were already here, so why not? “He asked me to join him. I didn’t know what to say.”
Amy stared at him, frozen, before she balled her fists and hit Sonic repeatedly. “I can’t believe this! You ALWAYS have some smart-ass thing to say, and yet when words mattered most, you couldn’t say anything?!”
“Oh I’m sorry for not being prepared for that!” He said, trying to defend himself. Shadow had given him barely any time to respond, and took Sonic’s silence as an answer before he fully understood what was being asked of him. It hadn’t been fair, to wrestle Sonic to the ground and pin him there, then dump the most ridiculous and out of character request onto him, giving him only seconds to say something before vanishing.
“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
“I didn’t think he’d actually leave, or stay away. I thought I’d have another chance,” Sonic confessed, getting a deep sigh out of Amy.
“Why would he come back?” Amy questioned, and promptly stood when Sonic had no answer. She paced, boots stomping the grass until it was flattened against the earth. “He asks you to leave with him, which for Shadow is basically an admission of feeling, and you just stare at him and then are shocked that he hasn’t returned?”
“I didn’t know, Ames! Does it look like I deal with stuff like this on the daily?” He asked as she crossed her arms. How the hell was he supposed to know that what he had felt, what he was feeling, wasn’t hatred? It sure felt that way most of the time. “All those dumb romance books you tell me about are just fluffy stories of easy relationships!”
“Those are just fiction! This is raw, unfiltered emotion that you’re feeling, that you’ve been feeling and been pushing down!” Amy said, turning to look at him. If he didn’t know her well enough to know she was acting this way out of love, he would be a little frightened with how much she cared. “And you two were so close!”
“I wouldn’t say I was pushing anything down–”
“Oh Sonic, please! Let go of your pride for a moment. This is the LOVE of your LIFE!”
“Woah okay, let’s slow down, no one said that he was THAT,” Sonic couldn’t even bring himself to say that sentence. “The guy and I could barely have a civil conversation.”
Romance wasn’t his genre of any media he chose to partake in. He hated the ease and predictability of it, how the couple became one and lost all aspects of themselves, how they pined and waited for their partner if they were separated for long.
But…he felt that way towards Shadow. He missed fighting and arguing and racing with him. He missed his stupid insults, his confidence, his inability to understand half the jokes Sonic told him. And, worst of all, he missed the moments when they weren’t actively trying to kill each other. When they talked, sometimes joked, and actually got along before one inevitably wanted to rile the other one up for a fight.
Yeah, it was weird to others, but that was how they were, and looking back, Sonic didn’t want that to change. Maybe that was why he had pushed it down; ignored what was budding, refusing to allow it to take any shape.
Sonic hadn’t given himself the chance to discover what he was truly feeling, and now Shadow was long gone.
“Let’s leave the island and look for him,” Amy suggested, frowning as Sonic shook his head. He appreciated her gumption, but there was no way they would find Shadow. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack, and the needle probably didn’t want to be found.
And that was the reality. Shadow didn’t want to be found, and therefore, he wouldn’t be. It wasn’t like Sonic would know what to say if he found him, anyway. They were dysfunctional, and would end up hurting each other more than just physically.
He ignored the ache in his chest that wanted to at least try.
“This is a huge world, Amy, no way we’ll find him with pure determination,” Sonic told her. She deflated at his words, bringing the mood further down. She sank to her knees, letting out a deep sigh.
“I’m sorry, Sonic. I shouldn’t have assumed you two idiots would figure it out without a woman’s mind,” she said, both caring yet still insulting. It was quiet for a moment before an explosion in the distance caught their attention, shifting the mood.
“Egghead really has some great timing,” Sonic muttered, putting his hands on his hips and a smile on his face. It was his mistake, not hers, and the last thing he needed was her being mopey about how dumb he was. “Ready to go save the day?” She frowned at him, as if she was the one in the situation Sonic was in. “C’mon, he might be a challenge this time.”
“Fine….” she groaned, and joined his side. “Maybe all his plans lately have been so bad because he misses Shadow.”
“Hm, yeah, you're probably right. The guy is obsessed with Shadow.”
“Maybe I should put you and him in a support group together?” She suggested, getting a small chuckle out of him. He appreciated the joke, well, he hoped it was a joke. Knowing Amy, she could be serious. He really didn’t need to deal with Eggman’s feelings on top of his own.
“Let’s not push it now. I'm sure if we give him another month, he'll have invented a device to track poor Shadow down. ”