Chapter Text
“I just want to go home.”
There was a ringing in his ears, thin and reedy and whining like the first few seconds after an explosion.
Home.
Phantom sensations had burst to life in the blink of an eye, real and solid and now in a way that had stolen his breath away before disappearing as quickly as they came. Fuzzy, crackling static that prickled at his fur, warm vinyl, jello and daisies and gingham.
I never got to visit her grave , he’d realized, as the smallest edge of hysteria began to take hold. I don’t even know if she has one.
His anger was often blinding, but in the next moments he could hardly recall the distance between hearing the question and watching a flash of blue go flying, only the tightness in his knuckles left behind tell what had occurred. The sudden lack of control would have been frightening, if there had been anything between his ears outside the constant, buzzing wail.
“We can fix this!”
Not every mistake can be undone , he’d thought, biting his tongue, thinking of gunfire and shattered glass. He’d watched the other hedgehog fall to his knees, and in a dark little corner of his mind he’d felt some small satisfaction.
The universe was a vast and uncaring place; that he knew well. Any being, no matter how powerful, had a limit- a distance that they could never cross, a weight they couldn’t carry, a battle they couldn’t win. Anyone who tried their luck so often was bound to lose someday, and a lifetime of dumb luck doesn’t make you special.
This is your limit, Sonic , he’d thought to himself as the sky shattered into pieces. You rolled the dice a thousand times, and this time, you lose.
He’d survived so many losses in life. So many betrayals, and failures, and bitter, bitter defeats- and everywhere he went, his cheery little doppelgänger was there to tell him that nothing was hopeless, there was always a way to win, and that if he tried hard enough, if he ran fast enough, everything would be okay.
That if you had enough faith and hope and love in your heart, you could save everybody .
(Like he could have saved her .)
“I know I can get through to him, please- just let me talk to Nine.”
Such blind, childish faith. As if putting your trust in someone somehow made them worth trusting.
Shadow had gone along with it uas long as he could for the sake of their mutual goal, until he’d had no other choice but to take the warped little cyber-kit down himself.
Obviously, that had been the end of that. Foolish, fair-weather Sonic had made another soft, naive little play at hope and mercy and the power of friendship , risking not only himself, but the entire universe, all of reality on the sentimental nature of a codependent social reject with a bone to pick.
Of course it had worked.
Why was he even surprised?
And just when Shadow had been certain that he’d done it again, pulled a miracle out of his ass and attributed it to his flimsy little fairytale code- barely scraped by on the skin of his teeth and managed to learn absolutely nothing - he’d gone and done one of the most honourable things he’d ever seen, and sacrificed his life to save them.
And then survived .
Because of course.
Shadow was not a “touchy” individual by nature, not by a long shot, but after a comrade lays down his life for the universe, the least you can do is offer him a hand.
Still, racing through the shimmering void towards that ever-dimming speck of white light he knows is home , carrying the limp blue body in his arms, his fur prickles.
They burst through the portal in the barest nick of time, landing on a dusky shoreline just as it snaps shut behind them, taking all the copies and doubles and infuriating robot-fakes with it.
Shadow watches as it disappears, like a single shooting star winking from the sky.
The hedgehog he carries is no longer a flickering, ghostly blur. His pained twitches have stopped as well. He is alive, and he is whole, and in time, he will probably be well enough to tease him about this mercilessly.
For now, though, he stands beside the shore and looks up at the stars, and breathes in the air of a world re-made.
It is, as far as he can tell, approximately nine days before the end of the world. Which is good, because her hero is in no fit state to be tackling the apocalypse.
Shadow heals quick, personally, but the ridiculous speedster appears to take his time when it comes to recovering from heroic injuries. It’s been at least an hour and a half since anyone has thrown a punch, and the bruised skin visible between his parted fur is still only just turning warm and pinkish. At this pace, he estimates most of his upper chest and shoulders will be various shades of green and purple by high noon.
Not that he’d checked . It just became apparent as he’d verified that “the blue blur” was still breathing.
It was… strange, to see the speedster holding still for so long. He seemed the type to talk and spin and kick around even in his sleep .
But then again, neither of them had slept much at all these last few days, had they?
Shadow had been designed for survival. He could comfortably go well over two weeks without food, and about the same without water, and to his own knowledge was able to remain functional and conscious for several minutes without air.
A few days confined to a shimmering black-violet void had been aggravating, yes, but he’d objectively been otherwise fine.
He hadn’t witnessed the entirety of Sonic’s exploits between the five worlds, but he can imagine things on his end may not have been so easy.
At the very least, Shadow expects that he will likely wake up hungry, and seeing as their options are limited and his rival is in no shape to argue, he makes the executive decision to lay low and recoup in a secure and well-stocked location with limited outside access.
He takes him to his place.
The door is still locked when he gets there, and the line of small stones peppered across the threshold appears undisturbed, so he’s relatively at ease as he steps inside with an armful of blue quills and makes his way to the spare bedroom.
It’s not an area that sees much use- even when he’s there, which is a rare occasion in itself- but he keeps it clean just in case.
It’s a testament to his absence that a fine later of dust has settled on the end table, and that the air has grown stale from inactivity.
He lays the saviour of reality down on clean white sheets, resigning himself to scrubbing the dirt and oil of battle out of them later.
The hedgehog is filthy- both of them are- but he’s not going to begrudge him this. Just this once, he gets a pass.
He lingers a minute to spread a blanket out over him, and then another debating whether or not he should close the door, and then a third simply standing in the hall with bated breath.
Bracing for what , exactly, he isn’t sure. For something else to go suddenly wrong? For another egg-themed villain or robot horde to appear over the horizon? A flash of light, a banging at the door, another desperate “friend” in need of help?
It doesn’t come.
He’s almost surprised.
In the end, he leaves the door open. Just in case.
His returns, rare as they are, follow the same pattern every time, with only slight variation.
He usually begins with a sweep of the perimeter before entering, but seeing as they’re already inside and no surprise ambush has popped out to greet them, he supposes it’s safe enough to skip to the interior sweep.
Doors and windows are all still locked and untampered. Nothing has touched his security system, and exterior cameras show nothing outside of the usual wildlife has come near in his absence.
The cellar remains dry, which is a relief, as it had flooded during the last monsoon and had taken days to drain and scrub out.
There are no perishables to throw away, no plants requiring tending, no pets or livestock to suffer without care.
There is a vine of poison ivy near the back door that’s easily doubled in size since his last visit, but he thinks he’ll leave it for now. It’s a small deterrent for anyone looking to sneak in and catch him unawares, but one never knows when such a thing will prove an advantage.
By the time he’s finished his inspection, washed off, and performed a rudimentary clean, the sun has risen through the curtains and the chirps of early-morning songbirds have blended with the usual noises of the forest.
There’s been no movement from upstairs the entire time, which… would not concern him if it were Rouge or Omega.
He pulls a box of protein bars and a few sickly-sweet electrolyte drinks from the pantry before he can think too long about it.
Sonic is awake.
He doesn’t seem to notice Shadow arrive. Or at least he’s never been adept at pretending he hasn’t in the past.
Maybe that’s changed, though- it has been an eventful few days, after all. Maybe he’s picked up a few new tricks.
Regardless, it gives Shadow a minute to observe without interruption, and he takes it shamelessly.
The blue hedgehog is still unnaturally motionless and calm. He appears to be looking at the window, where the sun’s glow is filtering through the closed curtains in a warm yellow haze. Here, too, the sound of birds and the distant tide are audible, a welcome change from the hours and hours of nothing out in the crystal void.
He wonders if Sonic had missed it too, or if he’d even noticed with his single-minded fixation on restoring their home.
He’d been so determined to save his friends. What else did their world hold that he could still cherish without them?
At least Shadow has the stars.
He shakes the thoughts loose for another time. Here and now, he snorts, shifts his feet, and places a free hand against his hip to announce his arrival. “Amazing. Two and a half hours, and you’ve managed to sit still without triggering an apocalypse. Is that a new record for you?”
Green eyes dart his way, widen for a beat, then almost immediately calm. “Shadow,” he rasps. “You’re here?”
“Is that a question?” He jeers, but makes his way over to offer one of the bottled drinks. “Maybe you took a few too many knocks to the head after all.”
He ignores the way the hedgehog’s arm trembles as he accepts- the red one, interestingly. Huh . “Did we win?”
Always with the winning or losing. Honestly, it was like a fixation with him. “Wouldn’t be here if we didn’t,” he says simply, and uncaps the- blue- ugh- bottle for himself.
It tastes like plastic and fake blueberries.
Gross .
He watches Sonic take a sip of his own, apparently unbothered by the saccharine salty-sweet chemical cherry taste. In fact, he almost seems comforted by it, the faintest twitch of a smile at the edge of his lips. “Good,” he answers. “That‘s… that’s good.”
He hums. What else is there to say? What does anyone say after what they’ve seen, what they’ve accomplished?
He takes another drink of crappy plastic blueberry, and sits in the empty chair across the side of the bed.
They share the space in silence. The longest silence, he thinks, that they’ve ever shared while the both of them were conscious. Even in battle, it seemed at least one of them was throwing barbs at the other, trading words as well as jabs and kicks. As rarely as they stood together as allies, companionable quiet was even rarer. Like scooping up a handful of sand on a mile of open beach and finding a diamond.
He considers breaking it, just out of habit, but decides against it. Who knew how long it would be until something like this happened again?
Hopefully never, if it required a world-ending cataclysm every time. He’d take the incessant chatter over incomprehensible destruction every time.
So he sits, and drinks, and watches from the corner of his eye as his self-proclaimed rival does the same. And when they both finish, he unwraps a bar and passes it over without a word.
Then they ear, and sit, and listen to the outside world.
“Is this where you live?”
Shadow opens his eyes. Odd- he can’t recall closing them. “For now, yes.”
“Oh.” Sonic seemed to hesitate. His hands- still dirty, he’ll have to fix that- fiddles with his empty wrapper, twisting and folding and shredding it into tiny silver pieces.
Shadow reaches over and replaces it with another bar, tossing the bits into the wastebasket nearby.
“Ah,” he says, like he hadn’t noticed what he was doing. “Uh- thanks. Sorry.”
Shadow snorts. “Don’t be sorry. Just eat.”
“‘Kay.”
He does as he’s told.
It’s weird.
“Where do you live?”
Green eyes, again, land on him. (He tries not to bristle. It feels wrong, being looked at.)
“Uh,” he says again, like he’d forgotten how to talk some time in the past few hours. “Uh…. well, I guess that… kind of depends?”
“Depends on what?”
“Um. On… what day it is?”
He blinks.
Sonic blinks back.
“That,” he stops himself. “You-“
“I mean, I have a place,” the biggest idiot alive says hurriedly, sitting up a little straighter against the pillows. “Like- a few places, actually. A surplus of places! Man, you wouldn’t believe the places-“
Shadow cuts him off with a raised hand. “Stop,” he says tiredly. “Just… stop.” He pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs deeply, breathes in and out by counts of four like the book Rouge gave him had said.
When the buzzy feeling in his head clears, he looks up to see his guest watching him uncertainly, like he’d stumbled across a live bomb that could go off at any second.
He bristles at the implication. “Don’t look at me like that,” he snaps. “You just- stop. Just stop.”
He stands, gathering up empty packaging as he does. “You’re still recovering, and I need some space. We have eight days until your second chance at stopping Robotnik, so you’re going to stay here, lay low, and take it easy until then.
“ I am going to tidy up. You are going to take a shower and go back to sleep. And when you wake up, we’re going to talk about why your life is a garbage fire. Don’t ,” he growls, stopping the blue demon in the act of standing, “try to leave. I will drag you back and tie you down if I have to, I swear to god.”
At last, he turns to leave. “The bathroom is on the door to your left, towels are in the closet. Do your best not to destroy the planet while you’re in there.”
He makes his departure before his guest can argue. There’s a strong chance he’ll end up kicking him if he sticks around much longer.
He still leaves the door open, though. Just in case.
”You know I love it when you take charge,” he hears, shouted down the hall in a weak and thready voice, cocky as ever.
Obviously nothing has changed.
And to think, he’d almost wondered if they could.