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“Thanks for letting me patch myself up a little before we land,” Sonic says as he sprays another coat of disinfectant on a cut. “Wouldn’t want Tails to think I’ve been neglecting myself or anything.”
Now that he's aboard the escape vessel back to Earth, he's really hoping he can clean up a little on top of patching some of the surface-level injuries he's collected over the last six months. Eggman kept him in decent condition; most of these are from escape attempts, including this final successful one. That, and the cuff chafing on his ankles.
“Ah.” Knuckles starts. Stops. “About that.”
Sonic realizes what’s probably getting at and wrinkles his nose. But he waves off his disappointment quick enough. “Oh, gotcha, no shower aboard? Can’t really hose myself off before we land then... damn. Doesn’t matter, he’s seen me grimier than this. I was really just trying to fix up the cuts and stuff. Don’t want Tails worrying more than he has to.”
Making good on that, Sonic packs another ice pack onto his ankle, grimacing at the sensation. After six months of having those damn ankle cuffs, his ankles are a little oversensitive. He doesn’t even want to know how much flexibility he must have lost on them; he’ll have to stretch them out a lot if he doesn’t want to pull something. Ugh.
Because he’s so focused on treating his injury, he doesn’t quite notice that the room’s gone totally silent.
Rouge shares an uncomfortable glance with Knuckles. Amy looks the most anxious though, actually holding her hands to her face, fingers curled in like she’s about to start chewing on her nails even through her gloves.
Sonic raises a brow at the sallow faces. “What? Guys, I’m serious, relax. My ankle isn’t that bad. I can still run on it, I was literally running fifteen minutes ago-”
“Your ankle better be fine, we can’t afford you to be out of commission much longer,” Knuckles says, but looks intensely at Sonic’s red shoes, and the way the ice packs come away with a bit of a red stain.
Better calm them down before it escalates.
“Oh my god, are you actually worried about me?” Sonic laughs, ready to feel normal even if just for a moment. He’s had six months to come up with nicknames and taunts. Six months to play-act arguments with friends, alone, and think about how they’d respond to anything he says. He wants, so badly, to test out those daydreams against the real thing. He smirks; looks to Knuckles first. “Knuckles, buddy, it’s sooooo sweet of you to care, but I already have mistress, and her name is adventure-”
Amy cuts in before he can watch Knuckles blow his top. In his daydreams to pass the time, Sonic always forgot to account for multiple people being near him at once. Funny how that works out.
“That really doesn’t look good, are you sure you don’t need more bandages-?” Not even waiting for an answer, Amy brings another wet cloth and clean bandages to be wrapped up in sports tape, pressing them all insistently into his hands.
Sonic takes them reluctantly, only to set them to the side for now. “Amy, seriously, it’s alright. I’m alright-”
“You promise?” she asks, eyes big and worried. Amy really does look like she’s scared for him. Huh. She turns back to grab the first aid kit again, but Rouge stops her with a hand on her wrist and a sympathetic look. “Sorry. Sorry. I know. You really have everything you need-?”
“Yeah,” Sonic says, trying a little harder to ease her mind. “I’ll be right as rain with a few chili dogs and some shut-eye. Maybe a little vitamin D, too, I didn’t have a window for most of my time up here. Can’t believe I spent this long in space and didn’t even get to enjoy the view, geez. Eggy really doesn’t know how to host a guy.”
His friends look a little uncomfortable again. Sonic thinks they’ll probably be doing this for a while. They’re somehow less ready to put his six months of captivity behind him than he is.
Whatever. He’ll get them on his side eventually. He’s just got to keep brushing it off and eventually they’ll stop asking. They have to.
Trying again to get them to lighten up, he takes off the ice packs from both ankles, then juggles them with one hand. He hasn’t gotten to do much with his hands in ages – he relishes in relearning his coordination, loving how good it feels to use his speed and dexterity for something other than drumming his fingers to songs he long since forgot the lyrics to. (Forget the isolation, that drove him crazy the last six months.) “I’m serious. The worst part was not getting to experience zero gravity,” he says, barely looking at what he’s tossing. “I mean! It’s space, I should’ve been able to float around and have a good time! The only torture was all the missed opportunities.”
Everyone flinches at the word torture.
Rouge especially.
Huh.
Sonic would’ve expected her to keep a straight face, if no one else… Maybe six months of an invasion just made even Rouge a little sensitive. Sonic can believe it. It couldn’t have been easy on the surface. Eggman sure liked to brag about how he was taking everyone over, after all. He knows it must have been hard on them.
He doesn’t address the way they react. Best to let them forget all about the t-word. The less they know the better. And the faster he can pretend it never happened, the sooner he’ll feel like himself again.
“Point is,” Sonic says, still juggling the ice packs. “I’m fine. Ready to get back in action just as soon as I get cleaned up.” He pauses, testing out the way his ankle moves. “...I mean, I might need a boost from some wisps if they’re still around since I’m not totally at 100%, but a couple of workouts, some stretching, some extra carbs, and I’ll be good to go. Oh! And Tails’s support gear, like when I had that stupid head injury last year. Between that and the wisps, I’ll be fast as ever.”
For some reason, all his friends look antsy again.
This time though, Sonic has a weird feeling it wasn’t just his injuries. He frowns as he realizes they’d all looked away the instant he mentioned Tails’s equipment.
“What, did something happen to Tails’s workshop, or the support gear…?” Sonic asks, thinking back through the last six months and Eggman’s taunts. He remembers the workshop getting hit but never got a great look at what happened to it. Not really wanting to bring up how he knows about it, he side-steps it entirely. “If it’s gone, no big deal. I’ll make do without it.”
“No, the gear is-” Amy starts, biting her lip. She tries to look at Knuckles for support, but his arms are crossed stubbornly over his chest, and he avoids eye-contact with her as much as with Sonic. Weird. Amy gives up eventually, though not without an annoyed huff. “Hmph.” Then, “No, the gear is okay. The workshop… not so much. We salvaged most of the gear, but we’ll probably have to rebuild the original Mystic Ruins workshop, the badnik bombers kind of wiped it out–”
Sonic stops juggling. He catches one ice pack; the other falls to the ground, right on his ankle. He winces.
So it really was totally destroyed. Tails's first home... Gone. “Is Tails okay? Was he hurt when the workshop was destroyed? He wasn’t inside, was he?”
No one answers, and Sonic’s heart drops.
It’s strange. Sonic had been so sure that Tails was okay after Eggman started targeting the original Mystic Ruins workshop. He’d been scared to death in the moment, terrified as Eggman gloated and showed him the wreckage and burnt metal– but less than fifteen minutes later, Sonic had seen Tails in another mission, flying along with Rouge and Amy a few zones away. Only Tails’s gear was damaged, not the little fox himself.
Had Eggman showed him clips out of order? Had he been biding his time to show him that Tails was gone after all?
Sonic looks around the room, a little more panicked than before. No one wants to meet his eyes. It’s not until Sonic’s almost gotten up out of his seat that Knuckles finally holds up a hand and volunteers some information. Finally.
“Tails wasn’t in the blast,” Knuckles says, and Sonic lets out a sigh of relief – but feels silly for panicking, because he already knew that. “He wasn’t anywhere near the workshop when it was blown up. He was okay. We salvaged what we could and built more. He was fine.”
Sonic feels relieved for less than a second.
Then, the bad feeling in the pit of his stomach spreads to his whole body.
“...Was fine?”
No one immediately corrects him.
Sonic’s heart drops into his stomach.
“Is – Amy,” Sonic says, more urgently than before. “Did something happen to Tails? Did Eggman, did– is he–?”
Amy realizes what he’s trying to ask a beat too late. She covers her mouth with both hands. “Oh! Oh, Sonic, no. No, he’s not, he isn’t dead,” Amy says, at the same time Knuckles interrupts with, “No, he’s alive.”
It shouldn’t be such a relief. Sonic covers his eyes with one hand, then slowly scrubs it down his face, recovering from what had felt like being doused with ice water. He leans his head back, and rests his hand on his heart; still recovering after its missed beat.
“Okay,” Sonic says. “Okay. Good. Chaos, you about gave me a heart attack. Don’t do that to me, not right now.”
He cracks one eye open afterwards, and doesn’t miss the way the others are still exchanging uncertain glances.
That’s not good.
Sonic’s tired of not getting a direct answer, though. And ‘he’s alive’ isn’t the most reassuring thing to hear when there’s no follow-up.
Sonic tries not to let his worry bleed over to anxiety, but by not letting himself feel anxious, it’s starting to bubble up into annoyance. Six months without really regulating his emotions – he’s gonna need some more practice.
“Guys, just spit it out,” he finally says; just barely avoiding snapping at them. “Seriously, what happened? You say he isn’t dead – great. Gold star. Is he okay? Or are you just going to let me keep thinking my baby brother is bunkered down in a ditch somewhere-?”
“That’s not it,” Rouge says, straight to the point. Ever the diplomat, she knows when to cut the chatter and get to the point. Amy and Knuckles look like they’re about to stop her – but Rouge ignores them. “Tails isn’t at the HQ.”
Sonic frowns. “Okay, then where are we meeting him?”
Rouge shakes her head. “Not like that. He’s… Not anywhere nearby.”
“I don’t care if he’s on a mission on the other side of the world. He can be in Adabat for all I care, as long as he’s safe. I mean, I think it’s bullshit you guys let him go unaccompanied on so many missions, but whatever, it’s the apocalypse, I get it. I don’t give a shit, Rouge – just tell me where my little brother is.”
Sonic spares a glance to Amy and Knuckles. They exchange a very worried, very worry- ing glance behind Rouge.
Sonic narrows his eyes and looks back to Rouge’s poker face. “Well?”
“We know that he’s fine,” Rouge says, voice steady enough to soothe at least some of his worries. “His vitals are fine. But he disabled the tracker in his comms.”
There’s a bad feeling in the pit of Sonic’s stomach. “Which means what, exactly? Just tell me where he is, if you guys can’t reach him I bet I can-”
“...You aren’t understanding me,” Rouge says, forcing him to stop and listen instead of spiraling. “We don’t know where he is.”
Sonic stops.
The ship is so quiet he could hear a pin drop.
He hates that they’re telling him in a public space; that all the new recruits are listening to this. Hates that a few of the Chaotix are probably listening in, too, even if they are his friends.
After six months of solitude, he shouldn’t want a minute to himself. But he doesn’t want to feel so publicly, either.
The recruits want to see him strong, probably want to hear a witty one-liner about how it’ll be a sinch, how it’s no big deal, how Sonic can do anything, Tails or no Tails. They probably don’t even realize who Tails is to Sonic. That he’s family, more than any other friend that Sonic has.
His friends probably want him to feel. To be honest. Or at least, to be helpful. For him to start strategizing where Tails might be if the others couldn’t find him.
Sonic…
Doesn’t know what to say.
He tightens his hands into fists and looks determinedly at the ground. He can’t react. He can’t react at all.
“Okay,” he says, face a perfect blanc. No different than Rouge’s. “When was the last time you did see him?”
More avoiding eye-contact.
“Tell me you're kidding, right now. You don’t even remember? Or are you just not going to tell me”
Whether they tell him or not, Sonic knows they were near each other three months ago. On a public mission against Eggman, while he was still at a quarter of the world, rather than almost all of it. Sonic knows, because Eggman showed him. Taunted him with images of his friends struggling without him.
And Sonic, unbeknownst to the others, saw Tails in a few solo missions via Eggman’s taunts six weeks ago.
He thought – he thought Tails’s absence from the group, and the more recent absence from solo missions, was because the others were doing a better job of keeping Tails safe. Or, maybe, that Tails had gotten a little bit hurt, or that he’d been over-stressing, building until his hands went numb and his brain followed. That maybe the others had worried about him and benched him for a bit, until he was back to normal.
Eggman would have shown him, if Tails was gone. If Tails had been captured, or– worse. If Tails was, in the past tense. Eggman would have gloated. Bragged for weeks on end about finally defeating the up-and-coming genius before Tails could dethrone him. Bragged about taking Sonic’s one family away from him.
Because Eggman had never gloated about Tails, Sonic had been reassured, time and again, that Tails had to be fine. Maybe even more fine than the rest of them, because they were keeping him away from the action, even if he was sure it had gotten under Tails’s skin.
It had never even occurred to him that Tails might be missing.
Betrayal burns at his stomach lining. The protein bar Knuckles all but threw at him once he got on this ship wants to come back up.
“Knuckles,” Sonic says – because if there is anyone that should have been checking in on Sonic’s little brother, it should have been him. Someone had better answer him, and it had better be Knuckles. “I’m waiting. When is the last time you physically saw him?”
Knuckles can’t avoid an answer when he’s called out by name.
He’s stepped up to a leadership position for now. To accountability. Good. He better have used that to step up to taking care of Tails, too.
“Two months,” Knuckles says.
Sonic sucks in a sharp breath.
Sonic might be the one to have seen Tails most recently, then. Via Eggman’s taunts. And even then, he hadn’t seen him on-screen in six weeks.
His hands shake from how tightly he’s clenching his hands.
“Okay,” he says, swallowing down anger. “And when did you notice he was missing?”
Knuckles glances back to Rouge.
“...About a week later,” he admits.
“So it took you a week to notice that an eight year old supergenius – the one supplying all your gear and security – was missing?”
“Sonic–”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“–He didn’t want us to notice he was gone, he covered his tracks–”
“I said I don’t want to hear it!”
His outburst makes several of the rookies, including the one who helped him escape, look away. Sonic’s beyond caring. But he does sit back in his seat, arms crossed. Avoids lashing out physically. Stares straight at the ceiling to avoid punching something.
He takes exactly one calming breath, with enough air in his lungs to fill two; then he tries again.
“So where have you looked already? Not that it matters, he’s got a thing about doubling back, and he’s good at avoiding detection. But I’ve gotta start somewhere.”
“We– We haven’t. We haven't looked.”
Sonic sends a sharp look to the speaker – then realizes it’s Amy.
Worse, that Amy is on the verge of tears. She won’t look at him, won’t look at anyone. Her hands grip the front of her dress, trembling.
The stress of the apocalypse has gotten to her. Sonic can tell that much. He feels bad, just a little, for glaring at her. He hasn’t meant to put any of this on her; she’s barely thirteen; he missed her birthday while he was in space. She’s helping to lead – and she’s always been in that weird corner in Sonic’s mind, between a friend young enough that he has to protect her, and a friend that’s older, capable and tenacious enough to shoulder some responsibility.
He still doesn’t blame her. But from the stress-tears pooling in her eyes, he has a feeling she blames herself plenty.
“Amy,” he says, voice a little less accusing. “Just tell me what happened, okay?”
She cracks before Knuckles and Rouge can stop her.
“We didn’t have the resources to look," she says, fast and urgent. "Right as he left, there was another major attack near the base and we lost all the cities around it and we had to fight not to be taken over too, we just couldn’t spare anyone because every single person who could h-hold a weapon was already out making sure we didn’t lose what little we had left-”
“Amy,” Sonic interrupts. “Take a breath.”
She does, and that’s what finally breaks her. She cries and throws herself onto him, old comfort mechanisms unfamiliar now that he’s grimy and stands stock-still in her arms. She barely notices; still buries her face in his chest and cries. “I didn’t notice he was gone until it was too late! I realized he’d taken himself off the security system, and–and then we realized that the mission he’d gone on was fake so he could leave and we just kept getting slammed, Eggman had almost ninety percent of the world by then and he kept making such personal attacks and whenever we wanted t-to look, we just couldn’t–”
Sonic closes his eyes and elects not to push her away, even as he feels a growing wetness on his chest and shoulder. Then, carefully, lifts a hand and gives her a single, soothing motion against her back. It’s uncomfortable, but this is important enough that he ignores the discomfort – Amy’s been through enough. He’d feel bad for denying her affection, just this once. With a soft voice, he shushes her; gives her a soft look though she can’t see it. “Shh. This wasn’t on you, Ames.”
To Knuckles and Rouge, his eyes are a little less forgiving. A little sharper. “So. You didn’t look, and we’ve got no leads,” Sonic says, looking at his older friends more accusingly.
He doesn’t care if it wasn’t just on them. The whole Chaotix could be here, plus Shadow, plus Silver, plus whoever else was roped into trying to save the world without him. They all have a share of the blame.
Knuckles and Rouge avoid eye-contact, and that’s answer enough.
“Okay,” Sonic says. And quietly pockets this memory.
Sonic the Hedgehog doesn’t hold grudges. He knows this about himself. He doesn’t want to change it. Doesn’t want to become jaded or bitter.
A tiny part of him, the part that waited for six months wondering if his friends were ever going to find him, feels the tiniest bit mollified. If they can’t even spare the resources to find an eight-year-old fox-kit who supplies half their weapons and is known to be alive – then maybe. Maybe they really did think he was dead, maybe they had good reason to. Maybe they really didn’t just abandon him.
But the big brother in him… That part won’t forget this any time soon.
Tails can usually handle himself. He’s tough. He was raised by Sonic himself; knows all about self-defense and living rough and coming out the other side no matter how hard things get. Plus, he has a million gadgets to make life on his own easier.
In a lot of ways, he has it a lot easier than an eight-year-old Sonic living alone on Christmas Island. Tails has resources. Tails has (or had, at one point) people checking in on him. Tails can talk, and negotiate his way out of bad situations. He’s a boy genius, and can outsmart Eggman.
But he’s still eight years old, and Sonic isn’t about to forget that.
Amy isn’t Tails. But she is here, and she’s still so young. Sonic can’t help but rest his hand on Amy’s quills, fingertips just barely brushing through unkempt spines, trying to soothe her as her sobs trickle down to sniffles. No one acknowledges her but him; they all know she won’t want them to remember her falling apart.
The ship is quiet. They wait, with baited breath, for Sonic to decide how he wants to proceed.
“The instant,” Sonic finally says, “And I mean the instant we have time to look for him…”
“We will.” Knuckles says. The first thing Sonic’s older friends have been able to say to him in a while now, with that damning silence of theirs.
That said, Knuckles exchanges a look with Rouge, and she leaves them to talk, going back to the Chaotix. Finally giving them a bit more privacy, though the rookies are still far too close.
“...But I promise you,” Knuckles continues, “He’s fine, at least for now. He’s kept his biometrics up to date. We have a live feed.”
Sonic frowns. “And you trust that it’s not just on a loop? You can really trust he didn’t just put it on a flicky kept somewhere safe?”
Knuckles looks away. “I trust that Tails would have left it up, and left it honest, in order to keep us from looking for him. We had some… disagreements before he left,” he admits. “Mainly about whether or not to keep looking for you. But he wasn’t so angry that he’d let us think he was dead. Not after losing you.”
Sonic can read between the lines there.
He knows his little brother must have been the one arguing that he was still alive.
He smirks at Knuckles a little. Tries to make it look dangerous. “Guess he was right.”
Knuckles grimaces, but it looks almost like a smile. “When we find him, we’ll all have our fair share of apologies.”
Sonic nods. But his chest still squeezes when he thinks about Tails out there. In a world Eggman has basically already conquered.
The fact that Amy – who is older than Tails, and more capable in a fight, and more emotionally mature, more equipped to handle trauma – is crying into his chest… doesn’t help matters. He smooths a hand down her back again, hoping the little sniffles stop soon.
No apology in the world, no timely rescue or heroic quip, will change how alone Tails must have been these last few months. Sonic doesn’t want to think about what it will take to undo it. To make him feel safe again.
Doesn’t want to think about what it’ll take for himself. But he can’t start projecting on what Tails feels. He hasn’t even seen the kid yet.
Maybe he’s fine.
But it’s the not knowing that makes hot anger coil back in Sonic’s chest. Until he can look over his little brother for himself, until he can see with his own eyes that Tails is okay, that nothing too bad has happened to him, he’s going to feel on edge.
His friends had better understand that. And, from the way Knuckles can still barely look at him, Sonic understands.
“You still should have looked,” Sonic says, hand still combing loosely through Amy’s quills. “You know you should have looked.”
“We all wanted to,” Knuckles says. “But we also had to make sure there was a world left for him to grow up in.”
The worst part is that he’s right.
Sonic looks down, finally the one to avoid eye-contact. But there’s a significance in Knuckles’s eyes that tells him they’re still on the same team. That abandoning Tails was as much a betrayal of Knuckles’s own conscience and honor as it was to Sonic’s trust. There had always been an understanding between them. That if anything happened to Knuckles, Sonic would check in on the Master Emerald. And if anything happened to Sonic, Knuckles would look after Tails.
That trust is broken. No matter how good the reason is, and even if Sonic forgives him – that trust will never be put back.
Knuckles puts a hand on Sonic’s shoulder, and there’s a real weight to it. “You understand what we have to do. Don’t you?”
Sonic squeezes his jaw shut. He doesn’t answer.
“That’s why,” Knuckles continues, and Sonic has a bad feeling about what’s coming next. “We need you to back in action if you can. If you really can’t fight right now, I’d agree that a good way to build your strength is to look for Tails. But. If there’s any way you can actually start taking down Eggman…”
And here it is. The choice.
Sonic looks down at Amy, who’s still crying against his chest. No longer crying so openly; she’s a lot calmer now. But he can tell: she’s falling apart from trying to keep the world together. She’s barely thirteen, not nearly old enough to be the last line of defense in a global conquest. And even his older friends…
He sees the shadows around Knuckles’s eyes. The edge that had been present even in Rouge’s voice. She’s a professional at holding it all together, but even she must have her limit. The rest of them onboard – the new recruits he hasn’t met yet, the rookie who took his hand and led him from his cell to the ship, the friends back home he hasn’t seen in six months but who’ve been trying so hard to keep it together – they’re all counting on him.
In the end, there’s not really a choice at all.
“...I can do it,” Sonic says. He knows hope for the resistance shouldn’t sound so much like defeat, but it’ll take him another minute to muster up the enthusiasm they’re counting on. “One condition, though.”
“Name it.”
“I want you to sync up my comms with that live feed you’re so sure is accurate,” Sonic says. “If anything changes, if anything happens to him at all–”
“I wouldn’t stop you from coming for him – not even if I could.”
Sonic nods, grim. He looks back out the window, watching as the Death Egg shrinks into the distance. “If anything happens to him… Eggman’s days are numbered.”
The rookie looks up at him from across the room, startled.
“Heh,” Sonic glances down at Amy. At his friends. He starts again, louder. “I said, it’s official. The Eggman Empire’s days are numbered. Now that I’m out, it’s only a matter of time before we take him down and trash his dumb scheme.”
There’s some enthusiastic murmuring around the vehicle now. Recruits feeling hope again. Knuckles definitely heard the original statement. The Rookie and Amy, too. Sonic doesn’t explain. Doesn’t change his tune more than he already has. And yet, guilt pools in Sonic’s stomach. Not from what he said – but because he still thinks he’s making the wrong choice. If his trust in Knuckles is broken, at least about looking after Tails – what does that mean for Sonic himself?
He can’t afford to think it through.
The time to feel is over. It’s time for action.
So, gently, he pulls Amy off of him, and gets back to fixing up his ankles, disinfecting where the cuffs had cut into his skin, and wrapping them up tightly with sports tape under his socks. This conversation never happened.
“No sense waiting longer than we have to,” Sonic says, and there’s not a trace of emotion underneath. “What’s my first mission? I’ve got six months of payback I’m just dying to spend.”