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“Delivery for you, sweetheart,” Rouge cooed, setting down what upon closer inspection appeared to be a very disheveled and only semi-lucid Sonic practically as soon as Shadow opened the door to her.
“What is this?” he asked, squinting down at Sonic.
“He needs a hand,” she hummed.
Clearly. His quills were messy, sticking up at all the wrong angles at matted with odd colors that could have come from dirt or grime or yet something else entirely; his eyes were droopy and only ever half open at once, blinking at an abnormally slow pace for him and yet never quite giving him enough time to focus on anything in particular; and there was an obvious gash on his right hand, blood leaking through his glove steadily, likely exacerbated by his incessant tapping of his finger against the floor.
He wasn’t right. He didn’t seem himself.
“What happened to him?” Shadow frowned.
Rouge scoffed derisively. “That’s his story for you to wrangle out of him. He made a deal with me not to go running my mouth, and even if he now owes me double, I’m still not spilling his secrets, hon. Have fun.”
Shadow crossed his arms. “Rouge.”
“…Just worry about his immediate wounds,” she caved, sighing. “The other… stuff’s normal for him, apparently. I don’t know how exactly he got injured, but frankly, I’m not sure he knows either.”
Sonic was clearly in bad shape, and yet the strangest thing about it all was how minor his actual wounds seemed to be. He’d hardly been mauled, he’d hardly been beaten, and he most certainly didn’t seem to have lost some major fight. He was perhaps a little bruised and battered, but other than that, only the wound on his hand stood out to Shadow. He was bad now, yes, but it was nothing compared to how he’d been after being rescued from Eggman during the war. So what exactly was wrong with him?
“Why me?” he had to ask.
“He asked for you,” she answered, airily. “Sort of.”
“Did he really now.”
“It was close enough for me,” she said. “And for as much as I’d like to help, I have plans, and you’re the one who knows the most about medical care between the two of us, Shadow.”
He bristled uncomfortably. “You’re perfectly capable of patching yourself up.”
Rouge turned away, hand flitting along the door frame before settling on it with the lightest touch. She clicked her heel against the floor.
“It’s different, when it’s someone else.”
…Right.
Rouge wasn't especially caring or tender. Or, no, it wasn’t that she couldn’t be, because multiple late nights spent at Shadow’s side would certainly say otherwise, but it very much depended on the person, and Sonic… He and Rouge had some kind of strange symbiosis. She only did things for him if she was owed favors for it, but Sonic was already the type to want to spend all of his time helping people out anyway.
So Rouge wasn’t the type to patch Sonic up on his darkest nights but she was the type to get him to someone who she knew would.
Him… apparently.
“Fine,” Shadow conceded. “Just don’t make a habit or this.”
She swiveled her head around just enough to blow him a kiss.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, hon’.”
And then she was gone. Shadow turned, and threw Sonic over his shoulder to carry him to somewhere more productive. That didn’t garner nearly as much complaint as Shadow would have assumed it would usually, but perhaps that wasn’t a surprise by this point.
He sat Sonic down in front of the bathroom cabinet, and snapped his fingers in his face.
“Sonic,” he intoned promptly.
Sonic seemed to try to shake himself awake, twitching both of his ears out of sync, and flinging… something out of his quills over Shadow’s floor.
“Gimme a sec…” he mumbled.
Why was he so lethargic?
“No,” Shadow growled, “stay awake.”
“Alright, whatever…” Sonic muttered, groaning as he sat himself up properly. “What’s… What’s going on?” He squinted at Shadow. “…I’m supposed to know you, aren’t I?”
Shadow’s eyeridges shot up.
“Supposed to?”
“Just an impression,” Sonic laughed, a sudden sound. “You’re lookin’ at me like you know me, and… I dunno, you do seem kinda familiar, I guess. I’m a little… lacking in the memories department right now, I reckon, sorry. Did I rescue from something before? Or…”
Wasn’t this ironic now? A true reversal of their fates.
“I suppose you did, in a way,” Shadow hummed. “How much do you remember about yourself? Or in general?”
A Sonic with some kind of memory loss felt entirely wrong, because Sonic had always been the one to remember but never care. He knew what everyone around him had done, and perhaps that had always made his decision to stick by people like Shadow anyway more admirable. And he was… He was someone who had always still remembered what Shadow couldn’t.
If Shadow couldn’t remember his fall from space, but Sonic then also couldn’t either, then who was to say it really happened? It did. He knew it did. But it was like… If they both forgot, if they both had a large capacity to forget, then it was like something was slipping desperately away.
“I mean, I know my name… I know my closest pals, I think. I know Rouge brought me, uh, here… But it’s kinda hard to tell if I know something or not until I see it, y’know?”
“Do you know why you lost your memory?” Shadow pressed.
If Rouge wouldn’t spill it for him, then Shadow would still make sure he got an answer.
“Uh…” Sonic blinked up at him. “Does it matter…?”
“I’m supposed to be giving you medical treatment, idiot. How am I supposed to help you if I don’t know what’s up? Did you hit your head?”
“It’s nothing you can help with,” Sonic said. “Might as well treat what you can. I’m actively bleedin’ out here, doc!”
He raised up his hand, and flung it about lazily in Shadow’s vague direction. His motion was somewhat loose and floppy. Shadow wondered if he was experiencing muscle weakness.
“I’m not a doctor,” Shadow said, wetting a cloth to clean Sonic’s wound with. “Don’t call me that.”
“No?” Sonic asked, tilting his head with minimal movement, and then still wincing all the same. “Well, sorry, but I don’t remember your actual name, man. What do I usually call you?”
This was a rare opportunity to not be called some inane nickname by Sonic, and yet… It wouldn’t be right. This already hardly felt like Sonic — just some patched together replica completed by equal mix of familiar mannerisms and actions that just felt wrong coming from him.
“Faker,” he admitted, pulling Sonic’s glove off to begin dabbing at the wound.
Despite the tired eye and weak smile and shaky limbs, Sonic didn’t flinch at what must have been a sudden jolt of pain. He just laughed, ever so slightly.
“Heh, sounds about right. You do kinda look like a discount version of me…”
Even more so now that this Sonic seemed to have acquired some kind of strange shifting red streaks. Shadow had initially passed them off as just some effect in the dirt otherwise all across Sonic, but they’d gotten more noticeable in the bathroom — perhaps stronger-looking. He couldn’t tell what exactly were, and given that they were on Sonic, that didn’t exactly narrow much down.
“Other way around,” smoothly, Shadow corrected. “And regardless, you are most certainly not ‘bleeding out’, so would you care to actually answer my question now?”
“Tough crowd…” Sonic sighed.
“Sonic,” he chastised, now rummaging through his cupboard for some bandages and disinfectant.
“Listen, man… I…” Sonic’s ear began to twitch, and he looked away. “I don’t… exactly remember that either. Or, uh, I do… But not the specifics.”
“Meaning?” Shadow prompted. “Just explain what you do know.”
“I went somewhere.” As he often did, and as Shadow had heard as much from Rouge and G.U.N who had been tracking the kind of strange energy levels that usually accompanied one of Sonic’s adventures. “Then, I… I fought something… But it did something to me along the way. I can’t… I can’t remember…” he trailed off, squinting at the tiles on the floor.
Shadow applied some rubbing alcohol to Sonic’s open wound, once again taking note of how his rival did not flinch at this. His focus remained on whatever he was currently lost in — surely picking at what remained in his memories. That was a familiar feeling…
The bandages were next. It was a quick, almost mindless, process for Shadow, to apply them, which usually would have been certainly a positive when dealing with someone chatty like Sonic who filled every moment he was around for, but here… It made each moment hang in, like a frozen frame from a DVD on its last legs.
“Did you get injured?” Shadow asked. “Or was this more… fantastical.”
“More fantastical,” Sonic mused. “Not like I lost the fight.”
Even if he certainly looked as though he’d lost some fight.
“And your hand?”
“Oh, er… I kinda just… got dizzy all of a sudden and tripped. Caught my hand on a sharp piece of metal on the way down. No biggie,” Sonic explained.
“That doesn’t sound like you,” Shadow said, moving away to put the stained rag aside.
Sonic didn’t just trip and fall.
“How would you know?” Sonic asked.
And Shadow froze. Just as he was in the doorway, cloth stained with Sonic’s blood gripped tightly, just as unable to make it past the doorframe as Rouge had been earlier.
Sonic wasn’t supposed to ask him that. Because he was the one who remembered, even when Shadow couldn’t, and why would a question like that even need to be genuinely asked? There had hardly been a point since Rouge had found Shadow for that second time that he and Sonic’s lives hadn’t been deeply intertwined.
He would know because that was just how it was. He and Sonic knew things about each other without them needing to be spoken, and maybe the blatant defiance against that in the current moment — the feeling of truly having missed a development in Sonic’s life that he couldn’t just piece back together as he always did — was the reason this situation just felt so off.
“What?” he asked.
“Who are you to me, Faker?” Sonic questioned, and when Shadow spared him a glance, his stare met Shadow’s eye immediately. “I felt like I wanted someone like you to help me when Rouge asked, but now I’m here, and I just can’t tell why. So what is it?”
Sonic had never clarified that for him, back when he’d been missing memories, and perhaps he’d never had to.
They’d both known what they were, when they locked eyes for the first time in that Shadow’s memory and decided to battle. And these days? When would they have ever felt the need to label what exactly it was that they had together? They fought and they loved, and sometimes, what was even the difference, really?
“Rivals,” he answered, stiffly. “That’s what everyone would call us.”
“But not you?” Sonic hummed, tilting his head so that it rested against the bathroom cabinet by itself.
“You need to clean yourself,” Shadow said. “I assume you’ll be staying over, and I won’t have you in my space like that.”
He was still covered in filth, and even if those red streaks, whatever they were, didn’t seem quite tangible enough to remove, Shadow wanted the rest of that gone before he would consider letting Sonic use his belongings. Frankly, he wasn’t sure Sonic would actually complain if he just left him to sleep on the bathroom floor, given his usual habits, but that likely would be straying too far into disrespectful. Sonic, especially this Sonic was a pain, but Shadow would never go quite that far with him.
“Aren’t you supposed to help me?”
“I can hose you down, if you’d like,” Shadow offered flatly, letting the cloth still run across his fingers idly.
“Somehow,” Sonic laughed, still with that dazed sort of smile, “I don’t think that would go down too well.”
“Fine, then I’m sure you can manage to shower yourself down, whilst I go and set up a bed for you.”
“Ah, but at that point, I might as well just sleep here on the floor,” Sonic shrugged. “S’not that bad. I was worse when…” An odd look crossed his face. “Well, anyway, I’ve dealt with worse.”
Case in point for his initial assumptions…
“You’re a pain, you know that?” Shadow huffed, returning back to give Sonic a hand up. “I’ll run you a bath, and I’ll make sure you’re cleaned properly myself. Is that what you want?”
“You know, I may not remember you, Faker, but I do remember how good it feels to get on your nerves,” Sonic laughed freely.
Shadow just rolled his eyes, and began to get the water running. He ought to check if he had any clean sponges whilst he was at it, because he had a sneaking suspicion just just submerging Sonic wasn’t going to be enough on its own.
When the water level was high enough, and as best Shadow could tell, the temperature was nice, he gestured pointedly at it to Sonic.
“There. Get in.”
“Yeah, yeah, got it…”
After a few moments of fiddling, Sonic managed to remove his shoes, socks, and remaining glove. He shimmied across the floor in a bit of an awkward way, and tumbled in over the side of the bath tub with a groan.
‘Keep the bandages out of the water,” Shadow was quick to instruct.
“On it…” Sonic mumbled, weakly resting his injured hand on the side of the tub.
Shadow approached with a sponge and some products, and dunked Sonic’s head under the water for a moment. As expected, he spluttered about a bit, but it seemed less like… primal panic than usual. Just regular surprise. Just regular, vaguely lethargic, surprise, and a cough and shaken head afterwards.
“Warn a guy next time!” he whined.
“You’re complaining about that less than I expected, actually,” Shadow frowned. “Finally gotten over your fear of water?”
“My fear of…? Oh, right. That it explains it,” Sonic sighed, sinking down into the water a little. “Nah, it’s still there. Guess I just learned there are bigger things to be afraid of out there.”
Like what though? What could genuinely scare Sonic the Hedgehog more than the all encompassing ocean which had consistently been the only true thing to slow him down before?
Carefully, Shadow removed his own gloves, and began to lather shampoo on over Sonic’s quills, digging right down into his scalp with his claws. The red streaks distorted when he made contact with them, but never quite went away; they moved and flickered and perhaps even taunted, and they burned off a dull red energy that Shadow could only see if he really focused, but as expected, they would not clean.
“What happened to you out there?” Shadow demanded. “You say you don’t remember it all, and that’s fine, but this is clearly something big. What are these red streaks? And what’s out there that’s more scary than what I thought was supposed to be your biggest fear?”
“Red streaks?” Sonic repeated, sitting up a little in alarm. “Wait, they’re still—”
Shadow submerged him once more, using the sponge to shake and rinse loose all of the dirt and debris caught up in Sonic’s quills. He didn’t waste time in turning to face Shadow with an audacious expression, this time.
“Hey, man, what the hell!” he scowled. “I was about to ask you a question!”
“A stupid one,” Shadow scoffed. “Have you not seen yourself at all recently? You have multiple of these strange red streaks in your quills, and I can’t tell what they are at all. Are they behind your condition?”
“Haven’t really had a chance too… I think,” Sonic mumbled. “Anyway, they’re more of another symptom, I guess.”
“A symptom of what? What even is your condition, Sonic?”
“Let’s talk about something else,” he croaked out. “Didja know Rouge likes red eyeshadow?”
“Do I know that my best friend sometimes wears make-up that matches me?” Shadow paraphrased. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sonic. Answer my question.”
“Ahah, y’know, it’s just ‘cause I didn’t think I’d seen it from her before…”
“She was wearing it at my door an hour ago,” scoffed Shadow. “And she most certainly has worn it before.”
“Ah.”
Sonic fell silent, and his verbal protests stopped alongside a noticeable reduction in flailing. Shadow began to run conditioner through his quills, taking the opportunity for what it was.
“You don’t seem to remember me right now, but I’m not the type to usually express this much concern for you, Sonic. I know you can make it through all sorts of impossible events no problem,” he explained, tone as methodic as his hands running through his rival’s quills. “You made it through the war. They said you were dead, and I thought then ‘not him, not like that’, and now you claim still to be yourself, but I can only think ‘this is not him, not now’. You don’t have to remember any of that yourself… But just know that I of all people would not ask without good reason.”
By the end of his little speech, Sonic was staring, slackjawed.
“I thought you said we were just rivals,” he protested.
“I never said ‘just’,” Shadow frowned. “Don’t argue semantics with me.”
The surprise was a little shocking in itself, but then again, this was Sonic, and he’ practically made it his life’s mission to always keep Shadow on his toes.
“…Cyber corruption,” Sonic said, after a moment. “The details really are a little fuzzy, but that’s it — the fantastical stuff. I went too far, beyond where I was really supposed to, and it stuck. It kinda… comes and goes, like waves. Like I’m carrying the entire ocean with me now.”
The red streaks moved across the shores of Sonic’s quills in response, flittering in and out at their edges like a collapsing wave’s crest, or like the wild ebb and flow of blood seeping from an open wound.
“And you can’t control the tide,” Shadow murmured,
Because Sonic was everybody’s sun, too grand and bright to be reduced to the moon.
“Not like I don’t want to get better,” Sonic said. “But I can’t even remember what’s actually wrong with me, sometimes.”
“I’m rising the conditioner now,” Shadow warned, then, after the procedure, “and I do know what that’s like. Memory loss seems to be yet another thing you’re copying me on, hedgehog.”
Sonic stretched out, accidentally throwing about a cup worth of water over the side of the bath onto both Shadow and the floor. Neither of them took especially much notice of this.
“Guess that’d be why Rouge took my vague nonsense as me wanting to end up here.”
“No,” Shadow shook his head, “that was just because she knows I have proper medical training.”
“So does she,” Sonic contended. “G.U.N protocol or something? Dunno. She’s patched me up before.”
“Then her favor tally was probably just getting way too skewed towards you owing her. She already surely didn’t trust you to actually pay her back for them, and that’s not the type of deal she likes making too many of.”
Even if she was fully capable of true charity, when it came down to it. She’d never been anything less than what Shadow needed her to be, it was just… It was probably different, when it was Sonic she was dealing with. Everything was different, when it was Sonic.
“Nah, you’re the one who said you’re no ‘doc’. She must have taken me here for your experience. So, got any advice?” Sonic hummed.
He didn’t seem to be trying to hide his weariness. Only minutes ago, he most certainly had been masking it all — masking what he was feeling and why he was feeling as best he could, even for as poor as that attempt had been. Something about that compelled Shadow to speak.
“There are more important things than chasing your past,” he answered.
“Hah, fair enough,” Sonic grinned.
“You misunderstand,” Shadow said. “Those missing memories may truly be important enough to mean everything to you, but if you spend all of your time searching for them, then you lose sight of the fact that you’re still here at all.”
Sonic grazed his bandaged hand against Shadow’s shoulder lightly. “Nah, I got you loud and clear the first time, pal. But you’re preaching to the choir. I don’t wanna forget, but hey, seems like even when I do, I still got people like you willing to take care of me. That’s a nice life, right there.”
Shadow thought of Rouge, rescuing him from that second stasis tank, and then he thought of Sonic, instantly slotting back into place in his life as if neither Shadow nor his memories had ever been gone.
Two disparate pieces which always knew how to click, no matter the circumstances; no matter which tide or wind, which wound or blow, drew them apart, something always did seem to let them drift back together. Every river reached the sea eventually, and out on the open ocean, Shadow knew Sonic’s cries, be them pathetic and screechy at a beach day, or bold and brave as the concept of adventure, like a charted map.
“You’re ridiculous,” Shadow replied, fondly. “You have plenty of people always willing to look after you.”
“Yeah, but right now, it’s you, and y’know what?” Sonic asked, chuckling a little. “I think I quite like you, Faker!”
As per usual, they clicked back together.
“Don’t go getting too big for your boots there, hedgehog,” Shadow snorted. “Come on. You need to go and dry off, and I need to clean this damn bath tub now.”
The water looked noticeably murky from everything that had washed off of Sonic, and Shadow could hardly just allow it to sit in a state like that.
“Towel?” Sonic asked.
Shadow through him one wordlessly, and they moved in tandem for their respective tasks. It was amusing how easily they could fit around each other sometimes, given the frequency of their clashes. Or perhaps that was only because of the frequency of their clashes. Shadow rather thought the line between ‘fight’ and ‘dance’ was all too easily skewed when applied to beings as fast as them.
“Have we done this before or something?” Sonic asked.
Shadow thought back to long nights spent under the stars together, tending to wounds that they had given to each other.
“Or something,” faintly, he smiled.
“Cryptic,” Sonic said, loosely shrugging it off. “Where to next?”
“Bed, for you. I’m not a doctor, but after all of that, I certainly think I still have the authority to put you on bedrest.”
“Oh, haha, you’re a riot,” Sonic returned, with a dramatic eye roll, even as he stumbled out of the bathroom door way and towards the bedroom that logically, he shouldn’t know the location of, but clearly did anyway.
He was adrift in a sea of loose memories, and as fate would have it, they brought right towards someone who’d already ridden that ride to its true conclusion.
“Watch it, or you can still sleep on the bathroom floor,” Shadow warned.
“Aw, you’d do that to little ol’ me?”
Boundaries very easily tended to lose their meaning around Sonic, and yet all the same… Perhaps usually. But not right now. Sonic was at his most vulnerable, and actively needed Shadow; it was returning a sea of favors, and it was love, and it was care that Shadow would always oblige that need now.
And so, “Sonic,” he said, “you’re always welcome to crash on my bathroom floor.”
And miraculously, despite the missing memories and context and semblance of what had led to whatever their connection was, Sonic seemed to understand what that meant anyway.
“Thanks, Faker,” he laughed.