Work Text:
The ground shakes like seismic activity. Is it the base or is it my own mind exploding?
It's the end either way.
My flawed existence is whirling round my aching skull, my throbbing brain, my synapses bursting at the seams just like this cracking street. It's over. I hardly feel the rain of rubble. How soon will it be the meteors of the collapsing heights? Adrenaline tries to motivate my writhing muscles into flight. But I can't move.
Nothing obeys any of my commands. I’m overheating on overload just like a robot on the fritz, and isn’t that what I am? A broken robot of Eggman’s?
A growl. Not mine. Not Sonic's or Eggman's. Not my hero doppelgangers. Maybe my senses have already been severed from reality, but everything feels too raw other than that.
Then?
Something shoves into my side. I gag.
A swoop of whistling air? A gleaming flash of clean blue light?
Bodily I land. Not hard enough for the cement and metal slabs I should be hitting— or that should be leveling me.
Soft air?
Piercing natural sunlight?
Hissing greenery?
It hurts to move my limbs.
Or maybe my mental functions are just too beleaguered. At last my eyes pop open. My other senses have not deceived me unless I truly am hallucinating.
I should be beaten into biological mud. My breath is shallow as I heave, but I’m breathing at all. I’m staring up at long weeds and pristine grasses green as emeralds. But they’re hardly fairy tale magic. The rougher stalks are cutting into my back, my bare legs and the back of my head. Insects are wandering about me.
I blink.
I stare.
My breath evens out. At last my spinning brain comes into focus long after my vision has accepted the surroundings.
How? I think. Where? Why?
I feel like they are the questions of an infant had an infant knowledge of the words to use for the first cognitive wonderings.
But it’s not a parental voice or a baby blue blanket wrapped by a doctor that gives me first clues. It’s a glow of blue light that does not belong in this empty field.
It hurts, but I force myself look. I shift my head just enough, and I see something I recognize to the point of ridiculousness as to its familiarity. How unhelpful despite its power!
It’s a chaos emerald as bright blue as the clear blue sky above me.
For a long time I stare at it. The stiff brain cogs can make no rational conclusions. Just more questions that divide and divide like cells that cannot form a multicellular force.
I’m so sore. So spent. Maybe something's fractured. Maybe I’m bleeding. I’m too addled yet to discern.
Voices.
Are they real?
“Someone fell over here. I’m sure of it!” At least that’s what I can make out of it for how it echoes.
The voices reverberate through the migraine barrier around my swollen head.
Pride had indeed come before a fall of a figurative swollen head to a broken one, but I have this feeling that it’s not as over as I first thought.
Footsteps thud through the field towards me.
They’re real.
My vision fades as I try to reach for the emerald. It slips deep into the grass, deep into the clumps of dirt like a seed to grow later. They won’t see it, at least. I don’t think so anyway, but I don’t trust my ability to conjecture.
No, I can trust this. Their minds are the minds of common simple folksy people. Their voices are filled with charity.
For me...
As much as I resent it, I can only accept it.
Was this how Eggman felt before he lost his memory and became Mr. Tinker? I almost laugh as consciousness slowly leaves me, but I know I don’t have the luxury of forgetting my past. Regrets, fears, and all the failure I’ve met and dark things I’ve seen and been? They swallow me into nightmares even as the gentle hands reach down to discover whether or not I’m alive.
#
The future…
And so far into it.
I was cured of my wounds in less than a day via a mere siesta in a biobed at the local hospital. My wounds would have healed even in my own time after months of rest. Far more than they would have been able to, had I not been transported to that grassy field. At least the physical ones. I should be dead. That knowledge haunts me.
Chaos emeralds are not known to just spontaneously act even if one did in some ludicrous chance of fate fall from the sky like a meteor on my head just when I was about to get crushed, especially in something so rare as time travel. Yet it is my only clue.
After having slipped away from the hospital before the staff could decide a reason why I had no identification in their databases, I returned to the scene of the crime. After some scouting about for it, the emerald was mine. The chaos emerald as blue as that clear blue sky.
In this future of decadence where most people don’t remember how to fight or the reason for progress, I feel that they are just beginning to rot over the achievements of their ancestors. The endless cycles of the universe go on.
The past, however distant in the most literal sense, is all I have. It torments me no matter how I’ve tried to move on from it. How I built up everything I had to the greatest heights only to fall to the dust of total downfall.
Eggman hovers over me still as he had at the end of our duel. Mocking— and how true his words are. How they burn and twist. Surge and Kitsunami run circles around me. Their very existence drowns me, convulses through me with thunderous overcharge. The heroes, Sonic and the rest…?
Chaos. It’s all my mind returns to.
I begin to work. I must bring order to my mind!
If the chaos emerald was capable of bringing me to the future, it could return me to the past. I vowed once never to use a chaos emerald in my work, and yet I’m building towards using my emerald for everything. Advancements subsequent to my own era are enough to fill in some gaps of what deterred me before. I’m close now.
I may be in better health than I’ve ever been in the physical sense thanks to my rescuers, but the agony inside me can never be healed after everything I’ve gone through.
Can’t think of that. Must go on.
I must embrace the chaos inside me without letting my emotions crumble me. Put it all to use. It’s all I have.
And why should I just return to where I fell? I’ll do more than return. I may not be the leader I thought I could be, but I see now that I can do more by not being in the forefront. I will bring chaos, but I will bring chaos only to control it all in the end. My plan comes more and more into focus. It numbs the emotions into a single passion.
I’m ready.
