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The tea leaves are shapeless blobs.
Reading them doesn’t come as naturally to Amy as Tarot cards, but she likes to try it every so often to see if anything has changed.
Unfortunately, she’s seeing the same stuff she sees every time. Which is nothing.
She can never identify any shapes that the books tell her about, so she comes up with her own meanings for what she does see. For example, some of the blobs look a little egg-like, which means that Eggman will attack soon.
That one always comes true because Eggman is always soon to attack. He needs to find some healthier hobbies. She’d be happy to direct him towards some fun crafts if only he retired early and changed everything about himself.
(It’s surprisingly easy to change everything about yourself, if you really put your mind to it. The hard part is when nobody comments on it or thanks you for finally becoming likeable.)
Full of tea and the knowledge that she still sucks at reading tea leaves, Amy reclines back on the sofa and watches the raindrops slide down the window pane. She wonders, absent-mindedly, if she should try reading raindrops instead.
They’re moving too fast to be sure, but there seems to be a lot of egg shapes. Either Eggman’s on his way this very minute or Amy needs to get better at identifying shapes.
A knock at the door. It’s Sonic.
She can tell immediately because his knock is distinctive and he’s one of the few people that don’t use the doorbell, but even if neither were the case, she’d still know it’s him. She has a sense for these things.
She checks reflection and flattens down her quills with her hand so that she looks somewhat presentable. Ideally, company lets her know in advance that they’re coming so she has time to put on something less drab than this old oversized t-shirt, but it’ll do. It’s just Sonic.
The door opens to reveal a dripping wet hedgehog. If she didn’t know it was raining, she’d assume he’d fallen in a lake.
“Heya, Ames,” Sonic says, leaning casually against the doorframe. “Any chance I can crash here ‘til the rain lightens up? Can’t see a thing out there.” He gestures with a thumb to downpour.
Amy steps aside before she even processes his request. “Of course,” she gushes, assimilating into the role of cheerful hostess. “Would you like some tea? I was just about to make some,” she lies.
“I’d love something warm right now,” Sonic says, rain dripping down his nose.
As the kettle boils again, Amy throws a towel at him and collects his gloves to put in the dryer. She’d happily dry his socks and shoes, too, but she knows better than to suggest he remove those. He gets weird about it.
At least the soles aren’t muddy. He must have been in an urban area when the rain hit.
The dryer rumbles to life just as she hears it— a shrill shriek of fear unlike any sound she’s heard Sonic make before.
Hammer brandished, she whips around to face the unspeakable horror that must be in her living room right now.
There is no such horror. There is only Sonic, fuzzy and freshly dried, with one hand touching the back of his head. “I felt something weird! It was cold and…“ He cringes with his whole body. “Slimy.”
Amy exhales in relief; Eggman’s schemes don’t tend to involve slime. She puts her hammer away.
Sonic’s hand roams as he mutters, seemingly more to himself than to her. “I can’t find it. It’s gone. I swear it was just—“ He freezes in place. And then he screams again and starts running.
There is nothing for Amy to do but watch, arms crossed and unimpressed, as he tries to run away from something that is attached to him. Poor guy probably doesn’t know any other ways to deal with his problems.
“Amy it’s on me it’s ON ME ew EW EW I can feel it moving AMY AMY HELP—“
“I can’t help you unless you slow down!” She’s totally willing to help him out but she’s not so willing to break all of her bones from colliding with a hedgehog moving at light speed. “And you’re wearing a trail on my rug,” she adds, which is less important but still worth mentioning. It’s cute and vintage and she’s only had it for a few months.
Sonic slows to a manageable speed but does not stop, and continues kicking his legs erratically as Amy grabs him and holds him up in the air.
(Picking him up isn’t necessary, but a wise man (Knuckles) once told her that the best part of being strong is getting to show off how strong you are at every opportunity.)
“Calm down, you big baby,” she admonishes fondly as he wriggles- and hisses- in her hold like a feral cat. “Where is it?”
“It’s on me!” Sonic wails unhelpfully.
Amy doesn’t ask any further questions.
She shifts his weight so that she’s carrying him with one hand, and with the other she roots through his quills in search of the slimy intruder. In theory, it should be a simple task, but his agitation and tangled quills make it infinitely difficult.
It takes her, absurdly, back to the fantasies she used to have of romantically running her fingers through his quills. Needless to say, it isn’t living up to her expectations; in her naïve, pre-teen imagination, he was clean and well groomed and he wasn’t wailing miserably and there wasn’t any mysterious but probably harmless slime involved.
After an eternity of struggle, she locates a small slug and plucks it out with two fingers. Sonic immediately goes slack, arms and legs drooping limply towards the ground like a ragdoll.
She drops him, considerately angling him foot-first so that he can stand, and holds the slug in front of his face. “So much hassle for this little thing!”
“It was the texture,” Sonic says, stubbornly avoiding making eye contact with it. “I never felt anything like that with my bare hands before. It was messed up.”
Amy sighs, shaking her head with a fond smile.
“Seriously, take your glove off and touch it,” he insists. “You’ll see my reaction was totally rational.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.” She used to play in the grass and dirt all the time as a little kid so, yes, she knows what a slug feels like. Nothing worth screaming over, but not an experience she’s itching to repeat.
She goes to the window to let the slug out and hopes, for everyone’s sake, that it doesn’t find its way back in.
When she returns, Sonic is nonchalantly splayed out on the couch like nothing happened. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself. Shoes off the couch,” she reminds him.
He drops his feet.
Crisis averted, Amy makes the tea she promised. She makes chamomile for them both, since she knows better than to give Sonic caffeine.
(Not for the expected reason. You’d think that it’d make someone like him bounce off of the walls but, no, it actually makes him sleepy and prone to inappropriately long naps on other people’s couches. He’s weird like that.)
“How often do you condition your quills?” She asks as she brings the teacups over and sets them down on the coffee table. “They were pretty tangled.”
Sonic laughs nervously like she just told a joke in poor taste. “What?”
She narrows her eyes. “You do condition them every week or so, right?” He stares blankly back. “At least once a month.”
He scratches the back of his head and Amy doesn’t hope there’s another slug, but thinks it’d serve him right if there was. “I, uh, wash them in the shower if that’s what you mean?”
“With what?”
“… Soap?”
Amy takes a deep, shuddering breath, bringing her hands to her face. “Sonic. Were you ever taught about quill maintenance at all? You have to use a conditioning treatment on them regularly or else they’ll go dry and brittle, and then they’ll start breaking off.”
A little light returns to Sonic’s eyes, like he finally heard something he understands. “Oh! Like this?” He brings his hand to the side of his head, where she can clearly see the abhorrent thing he does; he snaps one of his quills off with a disconcertingly effortless flick of his hand and holds the half up to her. “Yeah, mine break off all the time.”
Amy is aghast.
“It’s really not a big deal. They grow back.” He puts the broken quill on the coffee table.
She wants to grab him and throw him into the horizon like a javelin. “But—surely that’s so uncomfortable.”
He shrugs, infuriatingly nonchalant about neglecting one of the most important facets of hedgehog self care. It’s as if Tails never brushed his, well, tails. “It might be if I weren’t used to it.”
That’s sad. And annoying.
“Even so, you’d feel so much better if you started looking after them. You’d look better, too,” she adds, hoping to at least appeal to his vanity if nothing else.
Her efforts are fruitless. Sonic shrugs again. “Eh. I can’t be too handsome, right? It’d be unfair for everyone else.”
“If you won’t groom yourself, at least let me do it,” she huffs, taking a judgmental sip of still-too-hot tea and setting it down with determination.
He tenses up a little. “Ah. You don’t have to do that.”
“It shouldn’t take long. Come on,” she says, tapping the spot in front of her with her foot. “Sit down there and I’ll have a better angle.”
He looks out of the window for a moment, as if he’s considering jumping out. He must remember that the slug and its offending texture is out there because he reluctantly peels his gaze away and slides down onto the floor. He scoots on his butt over to Amy’s feet and sits, facing away from her with his legs crossed.
“Wow,” she mutters to herself, taking the time to look at his quills up close for the first time. He’s lucky he’s such a bold shade of blue because the colour distracts from the mess.
The lengths are uneven. Some have snapped or are splitting at the end. Half of them tangled together. There are leaves and blades of grass and flower petals and clumps of dirt, somehow held in place like flies in a spider’s web.
Amy has never been so glad that Sonic never accepted her offers to marry him. She couldn’t be married to someone with a bird’s nest permanently attached to the back of his head— small animals would start nesting in it and she’d feel compelled to look after them and then, next thing she knows, she’d have a thousand pet Flickies.
She peels off her gloves and places them next to her teacup. As reluctant as she is to touch the mess directly, these are her inside gloves and she’d rather not get them too dirty.
To start with, she picks out the leaves and twigs. As the pile of foliage builds, she can’t help but notice that Sonic is unusually stiff. His shoulders are slightly elevated, his arms are completely still, and his back is the straightest she’s ever seen it.
It isn’t totally unexpected; he’s never been fond of physical touch and it must be very weird to have someone touch his quills like this when he’s only ever used them to attack. She wonders if he’s consciously holding back from flaring them.
There’s something else, though. Something hanging heavy in the air.
She puts her hands in her lap and sighs, head lowering with shame. “I’m not… Enjoying this, Sonic. I’m just doing it because it’s going to bother me knowing that you don’t look after your quills. There’s no other reason. Seriously.”
It hurts a little, deep in Amy’s chest, that she has to clarify that she isn’t using this as an excuse to touch him. That he has a very real reason to assume that she would do that.
“Aw, really?” The change in Sonic’s posture is instantaneous. It’s like an invisible string holding him up to the ceiling has been cut and he relaxes. “Dang, I thought we were having a moment here.”
“You wish,” she retorts, and it’s funny because he doesn’t, and neither does she.
… Doesn’t she?
Her hands still, frozen in the act of plucking out a little spider. It escapes from her hold, descending to the ground in a strand of web, and scurries away.
Amy has never needed to re-evaluate her feelings for Sonic. From day one, she was in love (or infatuated, or obsessed, or crazy, as people would mutter when they thought she couldn’t hear). She wanted to hold his hand and hug him and kiss him and get married under the sunset while Eggman exploded and died forever in the distance.
She was never shy about it. She knew what she wanted and she sought out to get it, no matter how off-putting other people found it— no matter how off-putting Sonic found it.
It’s been years, now, and at some point the proposals and the chasing and the flirting became more like inside jokes than genuine expressions of feelings.
She still loves him, obviously, but now that she actually holds the feeling in her hands and looks at it in the light she can see that it has changed.
Sonic is, and always will be, a shining light in a dark world. He’s the most powerful being in the universe and, simultaneously, just some guy that eats too many chilli dogs and takes naps on her couch. He’s a miracle.
She doesn’t think she’d want to be married to him, though, and not just because of the state of his quills. Even the thought of kissing him doesn’t entice her so much anymore. He’s unreasonably good at most things but she has a feeling he’d be a bad kisser.
She can’t believe it. She’s over Sonic! She didn’t know that was possible!
Her bare hands are in his quills, his shoulders are touching her knees, and she didn’t even think about any of that until now. She isn’t flushed or giddy or even particularly excited.
She breathes in the feeling, or lack thereof. As she exhales, her mouth forms a smile. It only took some years, but finally the feelings she has for Sonic have matured into something that fits nicely inside her body without poking out and scaring everyone.
Should she tell him? Would it be weird? He doesn’t like to talk about feelings.
She pulls out a fully intact daisy and reaches over to hand it to him. Their bare hands brush as he takes it and it’s unremarkable.
He takes it silently, twirling it forwards and backwards between his fingers.
The pile on the coffee table resembles a small mountain and Amy, satisfied with the amount of debris she managed to remove, shuffles away and stands up. “Stay there, I’m gonna get some stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Quill care stuff. Conditioner and oil.”
“I don’t need any of that,” Sonic says nervously.
“You need it more than anyone!”
“Listen,” he says, putting his hands out pleadingly, “I appreciate that you’re taking the time to help me out, for real, but I don’t think you gotta be slathering stuff on me. We just discovered that I don’t like touching slime.”
“Then don’t touch it,” she says over her shoulder as she heads into the bathroom.
When she settles back down with some bottles and combs, she’s pleasantly surprised to find that Sonic hasn’t moved from his spot.
“This,” she says, handing him the quill oil, “is for you to take. Apply it to the ends a few minutes before you take a shower. And this,” she says, holding the conditioner, “is for right now.”
She crouches in front of him so that he can see what she’s doing and tips some into her palm. His expression is of mild alarm and she opts to distract him with some gossip. “Have you heard that Team Dark are pretending to be dating?”
“What? Team Dark as in Shadow, Rouge and–”
“And Omega, yeah. All three of them.” She rubs the conditioner between her hands and starts with the quills at the front, the ones she can’t reach from behind without getting stabbed. “There’s a couple’s cruise for the mega-rich that’ll be setting off in a few months and Rouge is trying to get tickets,” she elaborates. “They’re pretending to be a throuple to get in.”
“Surely it’d be easier to pick one of them to fake date,” Sonic snickers. Distraction successful.
“You’d think so! I think she’s bored and making it harder for herself on purpose.”
“Good for her.”
“Good for her! I was so confused when I first heard,” Amy laughs a little to herself as she remembers. “They’ve publicly come out as a throuple, you know, to make it look legit, so I heard about it from a friend of a friend that works at G.U.N.” G.U.N have been surprisingly accepting, though maybe that’s because the alternative is obliteration threefold. “But then Rouge told me about the cruise and that makes much more sense. I mean, she hardly seems like the type to settle down, and I’m pretty sure Shadow’s gay, and Omega is…”
Whether or not he’s capable of romantic feelings (which she’d love to know, actually) she can’t imagine Omega engaging in anything that could distract him from his dutiful destruction of Eggman’s robots.
“Yeah,” Sonic says. Then, after a moment, “Wait, Shadow’s gay? He never told me that.”
“Why would he?”
A moment of silence. “Uh. Because we’re buds.”
Amy has it on good authority that Shadow does not consider Sonic and himself to be ‘buds’.
“I don’t know for certain,” she says. “He’s never said anything to me about it. He’s just… You know.” She mimes the way that Shadow preens his quills. Sonic cackles. “Also,” she adds, shifting to return to her spot behind him on the couch, “there was this one time we ran into each other in the city and he wouldn’t stop staring at this one pretzel vendor. It wasn’t even an attractive pretzel vendor.”
“Hilarious to hear he has bad taste, just didn’t know it’d be in men.”
“You really never thought about it before?” She asks, methodically saturating the quills at the back of his head. Already, they’re getting easier to deal with.
“I don’t usually spend time contemplating the romantic preferences of my rivals,” Sonic says dryly, as if she’s being weird for noticing things. Too bad he sucks at hiding that he’s intrigued. “I’m too busy kicking their butts.”
“Your loss,” she chirps cheerfully. “I do it all the time.”
“Go on, then. Who else is gay?” He tries to swivel around to face her, but she keeps him facing forward with a firm hand on each side of his head.
“Eggman,” Amy says immediately. “When I was on the Egg Carrier, I had to walk through a huge hallway filled with sculptures of… male torsos? It was so weird. Definitely gay.”
“Ew.”
“Oh, and Blaze definitely likes girls.”
“Yaknow, I thought that, too, but I couldn’t tell if it was just because she wears pants. I don’t wanna be stereotypin’ people.”
“No, no, there’s something about her. There’s an extra layer of repression on top of the princess and guardian stuff.”
“Dang. Sounds rough.”
“Who else?” She racks her brain. “Well, there’s Knuckles. He’s… Knuckles.” Sonic nods. Nothing else needs to be said. “I’m not sure about Silver. For all I know, he might not know what romance is.” What a sad thought! The next time he shows up, she should introduce him to the concept of dates. “Oh! And the avian. The green one. What was his name?”
“Jet?”
“Jet! He was totally into you.”
“You’re just saying that because you were jealous.” She can hear the smile in his voice.
“That’s irrelevant,” she insists. “Just ask Tails and Knuckles and they’ll say the same thing. He totally expected you to ask him out after that Grand Prix.” And after the other Grand Prix. And after the other Grand Prix. And after the other Grand Prix.
“I’m breakin’ hearts left and right, huh? I should start sending out apology letters.”
“And Surge is a lesbian. Don’t ask how I know.”
He huffs out a massive sigh. “Of course she’d be immune to my charms.” She’s also uniquely immune to his sunny disposition and relentless hope, which would be funny to watch if it weren’t so miserable for everyone involved.
Now that Sonic’s quills are fully saturated, Amy finally gets to detangling. She can tell already that she was right to use her most expensive conditioner, but with how neglected these quills are it still won’t be easy. She’s been handling them as gently as possible out of fear that they’ll all snap off in her hands.
If it’s too hard to keep them intact, she’ll have to take a different approach. “How’d you feel about no quills?” She asks, giggling to herself at the noise he makes.
“Wuh?” It’d be the most frightened she’d ever seen him if she hadn’t just witnessed the slug debacle.
“I might have cut most of them off,” she says, letting out a fake sigh. “They’re just too unmanageable.”
Sonic butt-shuffles away, hands protectively over his greasy quills. “You’ve already made me slimy, you can’t also make me bald!”
“You’d match with Eggman!”
He pretends to gag. After taking a long moment to judge that she’s just joking and has no real desire to turn him into Eggman’s little blue twin, he shuffles back in place. “Not a chance.”
“A shorter style might be a good idea, though,” she suggests. “It’d be easier to manage. Mine don’t need much styling at all.” She realises after she says it that what she considers to be minimal styling would probably feel like a huge hassle to someone like Sonic. Does he even know what straighteners are?
“I like ‘em long, though. Looks cool when I run.”
He isn’t wrong— at high speeds (which is every speed) his quills stream behind him like the tail of a comet. There’s a reason they call him the ‘Blue Blur’.
The first few times Amy saw Sonic, he looked like the wind itself. He was a rush of air that smiled and held her in his incorporeal arms. He was movement and she was moved, in every sense of the word.
“Did I ever tell you which cards I pulled?” She asks suddenly, her hands stilling.
“Hm?”
“Before we met. You remember how I said I predicted meeting you from my fortune cards?” He hums with recognition. “Did I ever tell you what the cards were?”
“… Maybe? If you did, it was a long time ago and I don’t remember. Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she says. She wouldn’t have expected any different from him; divination isn’t his thing. Even if he understood what any of it meant, he wouldn’t like the idea of being told what’s going on.
“What were they?” He asks, and he’s obviously asking to be polite but she really does want to talk about it.
“There were two that kept cropping up. The first one,” she pauses for dramatic effect, “was The Lovers, of course.”
“Of course,” Sonic mimics.
“It’s often interpreted to represent romantic love but can also be about any kind of pairing or partnership.” She gets back to work on his quills. “It can be about choices, too. The duality of it. A fork in the road. And the other card was…” She sighs wistfully to herself. “Knight of Swords.”
“Sounds fun.”
She knows he’s just humouring her, but she doesn’t mind. He’s listening regardless.
“The court cards- the ones that are people, like the knights- often represent people in your life. So, naturally, I took it, with The Lovers, to mean that my, well, lover was coming. Swords correspond with the element of air, so I always imagined someone dashing, with wind ripping in their hair. Or quills,” she adds, with a little laugh. “Like a… A knight of the wind, you know?”
Sonic goes still. “Huh.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“I guess that’s it, really,” she says. “I saw those two cards over and over again, and then I got captured by Metal Sonic and you came along. You moved like the wind and rescued me like a knight so, obviously, you were my knight of swords.”
“Obviously.” She can hear the smile in his voice, but he isn’t mocking her. He can enjoy the silliness of her younger self’s fantasies while knowing as she does how serious it was for her.
The detangling is, thankfully, not difficult, but it requires a lot of patience. Amy finishes a section and feels proud of her progress until she sees how much of it is left. Yikes. She adds a few sacrificed quills to the pile of debris.
“I’ve started wondering,” she continues hesitantly, “if maybe that was all wrong. Court cards aren’t always about other people; sometimes they’re just a representation of themes and traits, like any other card. And, like I said, The Lovers isn’t always about romance. The cards could have meant anything.”
They could have been about her. She drew the cards for herself, after all.
Maybe they were about the choice she made, after years of living quietly, to become her own knight. Or maybe they really did represent Sonic, but through the lens that she would view him upon meeting.
(Which, in turn, was influenced by the cards. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Divination can be finicky like that.)
Or… Maybe it never meant anything at all, and it was just a coincidence that those two cards kept showing up.
She wants to regret the mess of feelings it got her into, but she can’t. She’d always had a sense of wonder, a desire to explore, but she never acted on it until she started chasing Sonic. She had never thought that adventure was meant for her until she saw a narrative she thought she could fit into and played that role the best that she could.
(And when nobody liked the role she played? She changed it.)
If she hadn’t fallen head over heels for Sonic, would she have followed him? If they had just been friends and nothing more, would she have felt so compelled to join him in his perilous, unpredictable lifestyle?
Without those feelings that were too big for her tiny body to handle, would she have left Little Planet at all?
She doesn’t say any of that, because Sonic is both the least emotional and least pretentious person she knows, and he probably doesn’t want to hear it. He’s been patient enough with her already today.
“So, yeah,” she finishes awkwardly. “I just think it’s funny that I was so sure I knew what it meant.”
Sonic leans forward to stretch, raising his arms up in the air. His spine cracks. “D’ya think we’d still be here if you weren’t?” He asks as he settles back down.
“I guess not.”
“Then I’m glad you kept getting those cards, ‘cause I like hanging out with you,” he says simply, like that’s all there is to it. “Even when you cover me in weird goo.”
She scoffs. “You make it sound like I’ve done that on multiple occasions.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you to make this a regular thing.”
“We’ll see,” she teases. Then she pauses. She knows she shouldn’t say it, but she can’t stop herself now that she’s talking about their past: “I’m sorry you had to deal with me for so long.”
“’Deal’ with you?”
“Back then. I used to be so overbearing.” A few seconds pass and he still hasn’t responded and she can’t see his face to guess what he’s thinking, so she pivots. “Ha, I bet you like me way more now that I’m not so annoying anymore!”
His shoulders notably stiffen. “I wouldn’t say that.”
For some reason, Amy is annoyed. Nobody’s ever pointed out all the effort she made to become a different person, and suddenly all she wants is for him to acknowledge that the change was for the best. If she’ll never get a thank you, she could at least get acknowledgement.
“You can, though,” she goads him on, hoping it doesn’t sound like begging. “You can be honest.”
“Uh…” He goes to scratch the back of his head and immediately regrets it, wiping his hand aggressively on the carpet. “I don’t know. I don’t think I have a preference. You’re cool now, but you were cool back then, too. I liked how excited you got about things.”
“That’s because it was you I was so excited about.”
“Not always!” he counters. “No matter where we went, you were always so excited to be there. You talked to all the locals and dragged us to community events and markets and stuff. And you used to make this noise whenever you saw Chao,” he makes a horrible, shrill squeal, “okay, not that noise. You used to be so enthusiastic about everything, is what I mean.”
“Oh.” She deflates. She spent her entire life up until this point feeling like a burden for her overwhelming feelings, both good and bad. She never thought that anyone had found her past self anything other than annoying.
Even now that Sonic has said otherwise, it’s difficult to believe it. But why would he lie about that? What would he have to gain?
“I mean, there’s nothing wrong with—“ He backpedals, uncharacteristically awkward. “I’m not saying it’s bad that you’ve mellowed out. It’s just different.”
“I grew up,” she says.
A beat. “You grew up real fast, though.”
“Some people do.”
“I guess.”
Amy isn’t sure if she wants to be detangling Sonic’s quills anymore. He didn’t even ask her to do this.
She wants to be alone so that she can think, or maybe not think at all. With every smooth swipe of her hands she feels a building urge to get up and run and hide in her bedroom, to pull the covers over her head and wait until he gets the message and leaves.
It’s quiet outside. The rain must have stopped by now.
“I didn’t mind it,” Sonic says at last. “The flirting, I mean. It was fun most of the time, it’s just that sometimes it wasn’t.”
This conversation is uncharted territory. With Amy’s shame and Sonic’s aversion to sappy feelings, they’ve gone all of these years without verbally acknowledging what their relationship dynamic used to be.
“I really knew what I wanted, huh?” She says, to put it lightly.
“See, that was the thing. You wanted so much and it freaked me out, ‘cause I didn’t want anything. I just wanted to hang out and you wanted to…”
“Get married?”
“Yeah.”
The job is done and Sonic’s quills look sleeker and neater than ever. It’s unusual to see them so tidy- the shagginess, she realises, is a core aspect of his silhouette- but he’ll rough them up in no time. As long as they aren’t tangled and falling apart, they can be as messy as he likes.
Amy thinks that the conversation is over, but it isn’t.
“You know,” Sonic starts again, “I woulda felt less awkward around you if you hadn’t been so forward, but I don’t think I would’ve liked you as much. Funny, that.”
“Aw, you liked me?” She teases.
“’Course I did,” he says, more seriously than she expected. “I…” He pauses for a second, as if deliberating which word to use. “I liked you, just not in a wedding bells and rose petals kinda way.”
“I know,” she says, because she did. She always had. “Whenever I hugged you, you only struggled for show. You could have shoved me off easily if you wanted to.”
“Hey, you’re strong!”
“I didn’t used to be,” she counters. “And when you ran away, you never went at full speed. Just fast enough that I could almost catch you.” Almost, but not quite.
Initially, Sonic’s mediocre attempts to escape her affection gave her hope that he returned her love and was just shy, especially since he didn’t seem to mind it at all when there was nobody else around, but after a while it made her feel like she was something to be embarrassed about. It hurt that she would gladly proclaim her love for all to hear but he would reciprocate only a fraction, and only in private.
She wanted- needed- someone who was sure of what they wanted, and was sure that it was her, and was unafraid to express it. Sonic was none of those things.
It never would have worked.
She nudges him to get up. “Go wash it out.”
“Gladly!”
During her few minutes of solitude, she brews yet another round of tea for the sake of having something warm to hold. She sits on the couch and holds it to her face, eyes closed, inhaling the fragrant steam.
This conversation changed everything, but it also changed nothing. Knowing that he didn’t hate her as much as she thought he did all those years ago doesn’t mean that she can- or would even want to- go back. There is only the present.
For all the hassle and repression it took to change herself so completely, it isn’t so bad. In it, she discovered an enjoyment of peace and quiet. Sharing her loudest feelings with her journal is better than talking to her friends because she can ramble as long as she wants, circling back to the same points over and over, without worrying that she’s boring anybody.
Maybe she could let those feelings out of their cage every once in a while, though. Just to see what happens.
Sonic reappears, ruffling his head with the same towel he used when he arrived. His quills are back to their usual dishevelled style, without all of the knots and mud.
“So.” He sits back down on the floor even though he no longer needs to, crossing his legs and looking expectantly up at her. “Tell me about this wedding we woulda had."