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"It's strange how many ways there are to miss someone. You miss the things they did and who they were, but you also miss who you were to them. The way everything you said and did was beautiful or entertaining or important.
How much you mattered."
A List of Cages by Robin Roe
—
Tom doesn't touch him.
Tom doesn't look at him or acknowledge him at times. Sometimes, Tom doesn't even sit in the same room as him. Not even when Stone brings him over to 'mingle' with the others, as the man puts it. The justifications are always more resigned than amicable. An aside about it being good for him, that he should be around other fuzzy little guys like himself. Probably. That he should also keep an eye on the Wachowski family, Sonic specifically, in case the Doctor comes back, of course. Which is, in itself, doubtful. And the logic, Shadow assumes, would generally hold merit. Except, he is nothing like them.
Bumbling and loud, foolish by degrees, they conduct themselves oddly around their humans. Reaching up towards them for strange 'power bumps' and 'high fives' instead of waiting for the usual prompt or order to come first. They never address them by titles (no Captains or Professors or Doctors here), but rather by their names. Always grabbing at their hands and legs and limbs without being given permission. Talking back. Rudely at times. Speaking out of turn and without being spoken to.
Tom conducts himself in a manner he is somewhat familiar with at least. No contact until contact is granted. That he understands.
What he still fails to understand, however, is the way Sonic drapes himself over the back of the armchair Tom has strategically chosen this time. The one on the farthest side of the living space. The one the furthest away from him. Sonic tugs at the shoulder of Tom's arm sling playfully, a remark followed by a punchline (one that Shadow fails to get per usual) leaves him as Sonic reaches down to swipe a mouthful of popcorn out of the bowl in Tom's lap. It's a series of rules clearly broken, and yet no punishment follows as it should. Instead, Tom ruffles the fur between Sonic's ears with a laugh.
Shadow frowns at the display.
Without warning, Sonic zips over to his side of the living space in a flash and barrels into him. Shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee in a blue blur of warmth. Shadow steels himself against the onslaught of unannounced affections. He's learned that this is the way Sonic shows his appreciation for the things he’s attached himself to. That this is how Sonic interacts with his world. Touch, freely given. A hand worms over his shoulders and draws him in tight against Sonic's side.
"Thoughts on 'Speed' tonight?" Sonic chatters, dangerously close to his snout. "Or didja have somethin' a little more emo in mind, MCR?"
Instead of answering Sonic, Shadow's eyes find Tom's across the room. It's rare they make eye contact. If ever. There's something like anticipation—heavy, thick, churning—in his gut at the weight of the look Shadow finds there this time. A furrow grows between the human's brows the longer it lingers, Tom's mostly healed arm adjusting in its fabric cradle almost pointedly.
Maybe he miscalculated this human's intentions. Maybe he misread the signals entirely before. Shadow finds, at times, that it is difficult to read their faces. But the eyes. He can usually tell by those.
“Well?” Sonic asks.
“Fine,” Shadow manages, his thighs burning hotter than they should.
"All right, if you two are cracking out 'Speed' again, I'm out," Tom says, pushing himself to his feet, his uninjured arm held up in defeat. "I think I've seen it enough for one life time, and probably the next."
"What? There's no such thing as too much Keanu!" Sonic insists.
"Uh, yeah, no," Tom says with a laugh. "I really think you're pushing the limit on that one, bud."
"Okay, fine”—Sonic squeezes Shadow in closer by the shoulder as if to emphasize a point—“then me and Shadow will have loads of fun watching him take down bad guys while you're off polishing your lures or whatever boring people do."
"What? I'm not polishing my—" Tom scrunches his face incredulously. "Look, just come get me when you wanna order pizza, all right?"
Sonic sloppily salutes beside Shadow. "Reading ya loud and clear, cap!"
"Great." Tom glances between them with another look that lingers on him for a moment too long not to mean something. There's a downturn of Tom's lip that Shadow can hardly decipher before it's smoothed out again into a smile. "You two have fun."
As the movie plays and Sonic squirms into his side—limbs tucked up into his space in a way he's learned to easily tolerate by now—it's all Shadow can think about. He can see it all right there where he couldn't before. Everything he overlooked or mistook as simply innocuous. The way Tom has kept a notable distance from him the same way the Professor always did when he was around the other scientists and military personnel in the base. Only ever touching him deliberately and sparingly, never looking at him too long unless it was for an intended experimental purpose. Not until they were alone again. When the pretense of the laboratory could fall away into something else. Something warmer, closer, sharply fulfilling.
Tom must be of the same understanding then. Unlike Maddie, who tried to hug him when he first arrived at their doorstep in tow with Stone—citing something about being glad he's alive, that it's all Sonic's moped about since the whole weird space station fiasco. It's nothing like that fox or the echidna who regard him warily and with caution even now. Or Sonic, who practically adheres himself to his side whenever he's within arm's reach. Or even Stone, who merely does whatever he asks of him within careful reason and only when prompted first. He still remembers Stone's words at the flimsy dining table, the easy nod, the quick agreement to what he asked of the human. Yeah, I can handle that arrangement, sure. You're technically a Robotnik after all, aren't you?
After enough time, Sonic becomes so engrossed in the film on the television screen that his hands slip away from Shadow in order to occupy themselves with the bowl of popcorn that Tom abandoned. No longer clinging onto him, or dragging him closer and closer without acting. Shadow's still unsure why there are times Sonic touches him without a plan to initiate anything further. Usually Sonic is more than eager to have sex with him, but only when none of the others are home, or only in his abandoned burrow in the woods. The kind of touching Sonic does here—the kind without an end in mind—it brings a different kind of warmth to Shadow's face. An expectation for more. One without conclusion.
Whenever Sonic usually holds him or hugs him or even kisses him, it either is a result of the hedgehog having already fucked him or it ends with Sonic inside of him. That makes sense. Shadow can understand the pattern Sonic follows for the most part.
Tom, however…
Shadow excuses himself once the restlessness begins to unsettle his quills. Once it becomes unbearable to wait entirely in inaction when he can see it play out behind his eyes, hear it, nearly feel how it would go, even as the movie flits about nonsensically on the garishly large television screen. He imagines Tom’s hands must be similar to the Professor's, to Stone’s—calloused by work, weathered with some amount of age to them. He closes his eyes and they're already there. Belted somewhere around his waist, grounding and solid. All over. Everywhere they can possibly reach.
Sonic only half-hears Shadow voice his excuse to leave, waving him off with a dismissive, shhh, dude, whatever! This is the good part!
Finding where Tom retreated to is simple. Shadow can smell the human the way he can all the others. He's alone, that much is clear. Before he realizes it, the connecting garage door is all that separates him from what finally makes sense in this entire arrangement with the Wachowski family. He looks at the doorknob. Everything between his legs aches like a wound. Heart tamping fast, he reaches for it. He turns it. Breathless. Wanting. Terrified.
It's only logical that Tom would go somewhere more private for this. The Professor always used a small strorage-cum-laboratory space on the military base that was hardly ever occupied otherwise. Somewhere that Captain Walters (or Commander—past-tense now, he supposes) had cordoned off at the Professor's request.
When the door opens with a quiet creak, Shadow can see Tom settled at his workbench. The haphazard tabletop thrown into disarray, only a small space carved out for the project Tom is currently working on. Something to do with the odd and brightly colored fishing lures, as Sonic called them.
Shadow pushes the door open farther. The fur pricks along his arms.
Tom glances over his shoulder at the sound of the door, his eyes widening slightly before that same pinched-up expression takes over.
Shadow hears the door shut behind him with a soft click as he steps inside. His quills tack against where it presses in, nudging him forward, like a reminder to continue his endeavor.
At the sound of it closing, Tom turns towards him in the low shop stool. “Did you need something, bud?"
He knows it will be harder for Tom to maneuver him properly with an injured arm, but he's sure the human can manage. He's sure the man is as capable and wanting as every other human that has used him like this.
"You two already hungry? I thought you'd at least make it through the movie first," Tom says, eyes darting away from him and then back. Like he's looking for Sonic to be somewhere behind or around him.
Shadow takes a step closer and Tom stiffens like a reflex. By now, there's a familiar nervousness to Tom that the man usually carries whenever he’s around. An unease in the tension of his shoulders that Shadow no longer recognizes as fear, but perhaps something else—something the human would never admit to outside the privacy of closed doors.
It makes sense.
He was always told to keep what he did with the Professor a secret after all. What happens here stays between us, you understand that, don't you, my boy? Or they'll take you away from us. From me. From Maria.
"Shadow?"
This is no different. He knows exactly how this is meant to go now. There's no use in waiting any longer.
He steps closer.
“Hey, is everything okay—"
The gap closes between them in what feels like an instant and Tom goes entirely rigid, teeth clicking shut. But Tom doesn't tell him to stop. Tom doesn't protest. Doesn't move away. Doesn't move at all. It's exactly the way Shadow expected this would be. This is how it was always going to go, and his body thrums with the rightness of it. Like he's finally shoved something back into place, misshapen and bloodied, but no longer broken.
Stepped up between Tom's stiffened legs, he reaches for the man's belt. Every ounce of confusion and uncertainty at his purpose in their home fades away the second his fingers brush the buckle of it.
At the least, Shadow understands this.
He's unsure what to make of the Doctor and his strangely devout companion. The Professor seems fond of the former at least. Perhaps overly so.
Instructed to leave the Professor and his long lost grandson to their 'familial bonding', Shadow finds Stone on the far side of the Crab Mech, still within earshot of the merriment on the other side of the craft.
Stone looks down at him, but doesn't offer more than that. Merely a glance before he's back to watching the too wide, too thin television screen and it's oddly colored film playing in a muted muffle. There's a tired cant to the agent's shoulders that wasn't there before. His eyelids drooped like boredom. Shadow knows it's not merely so simple when the man unfolds the crumpled coffee cup in his hands and then crunches it again just as methodically.
"Did the Professor ever tell you about a grandson?" Stone asks without looking at him.
Shadow crosses his arms. He can hear the two still, even from here. Laughter and childish games. His ears twitch down, a frown pulling at his lips. "No."
"He never told me about a grandfather either," Stone says, a sardonic chuckle following his words. "I guess that makes us even."
Even. It's something he files away for later, in case he requires it.
He carefully ignores the continued reunion elsewhere on the ship. He remembers in the military base—in his home, when the Professor had revealed himself from the shadows of it as if a specter—that there had been little time for offered affections there. The Professor had hardly touched him then, and not now either.
Not even a glance spared his way after the Doctor came into the picture. The grandson. A lost prodigy. An obstacle standing in his way.
Shadow watches Stone glance longingly towards the walkway of the vessel once more.
Perhaps they are not so different after all.
When Sonic asked to kiss him the first time, he assumed—like every other word out of the hedgehog's mouth—that it was a joke first and a request second.
Only his third visit to the Wachowski home since Stone had reintroduced them, and already Sonic is eager to shove his tongue between his teeth. Shadow supposes that makes sense. Like the inane children's book Maria had shown him with a laugh, the animals paired off in two's to mate and repopulate the Earth, always exactly alike. Maybe it is merely natural for Sonic to see him and feel an immediate draw. Instinctual, as the Professor might say. It's not a drive he thinks he's capable of in return, but logical indulgence is not beneath him.
Sonic's mouth is small. It's something he notes initially and then it's all he can consider. It's the same size as his own. Regardless, their snouts don't fit together as well as he thought they would and the maneuvering is clumsy. His eyes sting involuntarily as his nose mashes against Sonic's and the other recoils, hands clamped over his snout.
"Sorry!" Sonic says, muffled and distorted.
"It's fine," he bites out. "Don't do it again."
"Yeah, 'course. And look, maybe just…" Sonic tilts his head and points to the opposite side. "And I'll go the other way."
He nods. There's no other affirmation needed here. Sonic's lips are warm against his, not as prominent as a human's mouth. Not as mobile or malleable either. Nothing like Stone's. Sonic's fur catches oddly at his own instead of a smooth cache of skin. He wrinkles his muzzle at the feeling. Even Sonic's spit feels different. Tastes different. Wrong. It's not right at all. The teeth he finds under his own tongue. The tongue itself rougher, animal-like, as if one way sandpaper. He slacks his jaw enough to let Sonic do as he pleases and makes what noises he needs to when appropriate and waits for it to be over.
It ends with a clumsy grope at his waist instead, with Sonic's bent legs slotting between and under his as he presses in even closer. And closer. Until there's a bean bag under his back and shoulders and Sonic's chest on top of his. Sonic's spit, lukewarm and wet in his mouth. Sonic all over him.
Sonic's breaths bleed hot against his muzzle as Sonic pants against the side of his face and asks if he can fuck him (as well as other innocuous things he answers the way he assumes Sonic expects him to: if he's okay with this, if he's ever done this kind of thing before) and he finds himself agreeing. Automatically, breathlessly. Eagerly, despite everything. Shadow’s legs fall open farther as Sonic settles properly between them. Sonic doesn't question any part of him, merely prods ungloved fingers at him clumsily, almost curiously, and Shadow knocks them aside. Tells him to get on with it.
Sonic hesitates. And he doesn't understand why Sonic keeps asking him if he's sure when it couldn't be more obvious. It doesn't take much more to get Sonic to do what he's obviously more than eager to do anyway.
Once Sonic pushes into him with an excited shiver and a groan, Shadow holds onto the other hedgehog in turn—tightly, too tight, his trembling fingers twisted in Sonic's fur—and imagines he's somewhere else. With someone else entirely. His own embarrassing cadence of sounds falls from him as Sonic thrusts quick and fast. Already close. Inexperienced and new. Moaning excitedly through his teeth and making small, desperate noises on top of him. Shadow keeps his face buried under his own arm. Eyes stinging hot. Skin pricking with overwhelm.
He bites at the fur of his forearm to muzzle himself. He pretends the cock inside him is far bigger. That it hurts more than this. That it doesn't feel good at all.
Sonic doesn't seem to mind.
Shadow knew it was only a matter of time before the Professor finally sought him for the kinds of things his grandson simply couldn't provide. Not adequately at least. Clearly, if the Professor is coming to him to complete the supposed 'family time' he and Ivo should've shared. Shadow preens silently as the Professor undoes his belt, shimmying his slacks down to reveal his already turgid cock.
You remember what I taught you, don't you?
He does. Implicitly. Without falter and hesitation.
There's no need to kneel on the metal flooring, he's the perfect height for this. The perfect specimen. Shadow closes his eyes, soothed by the familiar, heavy weight of hot flesh far too big in his mouth. Choking as the gloved hand buried in his quills pushes him down until his nose scratches at coarse hairs and presses into heated skin. Whining and humming contently around the repeated abuse to his throat. Eyes stinging and wet when he's pulled off after a moment, coughing, spit and pre stringing from his lips and snout before he's opening his mouth again, looking up at the Professor and waiting. He's nudged forward once more. He relaxes his jaw. He accepts what he's given.
The Professor tugs at his ear and quills, a continuous string of praises leaving his mouth, Yes…yes, like that, very good, keep, hmm… Aged teeth bare down at him in gritted pleasure, the man's face crumpling as Shadow looks up through damp lashes and gags wetly around the cock that's lodged itself too deep in his throat. Useful. Good. This is what he was meant to do. This is what completes him.
He's lifted up into a chair and sat over the Professor's lap before long. You must've missed me all these years, my boy. Let's fix that, why don't we? Anticipation tingles through every limb until the Professor is finally pushing inside of him. Everything else melts away at the first blunt press and then the Professor's suddenly, impossibly, sunk to the root with a satisfied breath.
Shadow's face twitches at the aching sting, the too large stretch. It's like nothing's changed, isn't it? Remarkable, you feel… the Professor murmurs and cants his hips up while pulling him down. Oh, yes, oh… The sounds the Professor makes as he fucks him are nearly pained, matching his own tightened breaths at the rough friction of every movement. It's a familiar routine. One he settles into.
Until he's held closer as the Professor moves him up and down on his cock with hands firm on his waist. His legs straddled by the knees, thighs pinching to either side of the man. The toes of his shoes sliding in a harsh metallic protest against the chair as he's leveraged the way that's preferred of him. Shadow rests his brow limply against the Professor's chest before long, curled up in the warmth of him the same way he saw the Professor hug his grandson mere hours ago. It's close enough. It's more than enough. This is always enough…
Shadow scrunches his face into an involuntary snarl at a particularly hard yank down and thrust up into him, the near painful pressure inside him growing incessant and impossible to ignore. His tail curls down the higher the burning ache festers. He chokes up a whine on another thrust and bites down on the next one that tries to leave him.
The Professor doesn't slow his movements. Merely fucks him through it until it's all but numb, his pelvis hot and tingling at the friction, at the thickness filling him, again and again. Shadow's fists tangle themselves up in the Professor’s lab coat. Small sounds start to leave him on every descent that he can no longer swallow back.
"You're doing so well, Shadow," the Professor mutters breathlessly into the top of his head after a drawn moan. "Always so good for me..."
His quills flex at the praise. The Professor's arms tighten around him, one hand wrenching at his back quills like a handle. He can feel every exerted grunt from the Professor's chest, the hum of pleasure and satisfaction at a task well done. Shadow grabs at the Professor in kind, holding onto the warmth unfolding in his gut as he grinds down onto the cock completing him. His shivering arms wrap around the Professor as much as they can as Shadow buries his face into the man's chest and shuts his eyes.
With a few more jerky and hurried thrusts, the Professor comes with a long satisfied groan that washes over the top of his head and quills in a humid puff. Hands pull him down onto the man's cock as hips shallowly jerk up into him, until he's held down in a near bruising grip. The Professor's crotch pushes against him mercilessly, the cock inside him throbbing deep. "Shadow…oh, my boy, my…" The Professor rests his face between his ears and sighs heavily, large hands petting over his back. "My son… You're all mine, aren't you?"
Shadow nods against the Professor's chest. He feels the man's cum slowly ease out and sully hot down his thigh a moment later.
Stone tosses the keys onto the kitchen counter and ignores where they slip off the other side of it with a tinny clatter. The apartment is less meticulous than Shadow expected it to be, based on how up-kept the crab had been in the places that weren't already occupied by the Doctor's own messes. Maybe this is how Stone copes, with empty cartons and forgotten glasses. Maybe it reminds him of the Doctor in some small way.
"It's not much, but it's home." Stone laughs and then sobers, looking down at him. "For now. Until the Doctor comes back of course."
Shadow's snout wrinkles. The man's delusional then. How lucky…
Stone had somehow located him in Hardly, Nebraska using the Doctor's salvaged robots. A feat in itself, one that the Agent seems entirely capable of despite the Doctor's repeated insistence of inability all the times prior. Competent is the word he would use to describe Stone. Even if there are discarded t-shirts and boxers strewn on the living room couch, unread mail piled on the kitchen counter and a house plant settled near it that's far beyond saving.
Without prompt, Stone steps around the apartment, tidying up as he goes, running through a spiel that nearly sounds rehearsed. Shadow listens idly, eyes moving towards the characteristically neat bedroom he can see through the partially ajar door on the far side of the space.
Stone explains the living arrangement and Shadow frowns. He doesn't particularly care for separate bedding arrangements. Sleeping on the couch. Showering schedules. Or what's in the fridge at the moment. He wants to know when they're supposed to have sex so he can at least be adequate for it. So he can prepare himself so that Stone will not have to waste the time doing it for him.
Instead, Stone cooks him dinner an hour later.
They eat on opposite sides of the small table. A thin stack of books gathered under him to make him the proper height. Shadow's unsure what exactly any of the meal is, but he finishes off enough of his plate to be polite and sets his utensil down with a sharp click.
"Before, on the crab," Shadow starts, eyeing Stone who's occupied with something on the strange tablet settled beside his plate. "You said we were 'even'."
Stone's brow furrows as he looks up at him. "You've got a pretty good memory for a guy that took a fall like that."
"I would like to make a request then."
"Sure. I'll accept that." Stone turns off the tablet and sets it aside. "What'll it be? I can make a pretty mean latte if that's what you've got the taste for."
Not coffee. Something else. Something he has a feeling the Agent can ultimately provide based off the configuration of his and the Doctor's now terminated relationship. And it's far easier than he thought it would be, getting Stone to agree to what he's after. Especially after he explains away the misconception the other holds in regards to his physiology.
He is not a child.
He never has been.
Stone fucks him harder than he thought he would. Desperate almost. Like he's seeing someone else where he's curved over his back, careful of his quills. One hand planted in front of him, the other steady on his waist. Almost belting him entirely in his palm, fingers digging into his belly, pulling him back by his hip at the right times. Sweat drips into his fur, exerted huffs finding their way to his ears on every thrust. Shadow’s tail swipes in fast patterns against the flexing abdomen pressed over him.
His snout drops to the sheets after a while, jaw slack and teeth biting at them limply in time with the ruts, but his knees stay firm beneath him. Dug into the pillows gathered under them and his shins to account for the height complications. Legs strong and steady where his upper half goes entirely weak. Ungloved fingers groping in tight fists at the sheets, pulling until he hears them tear as Stone's hand wanders over his belly fur and lower, and finds something on him the Professor never cared to.
A foreign feeling swarms low in his gut. Unfurred thighs smack into the back of his legs, the bed frame groaning in kind as the headboard tacks the wall in loud, rhythmic thumps. At this angle, the cock in him rakes back and forth over a spot that makes his toes start to curl and Shadow pants into the linens. There's the wrong title thick on his tongue that dribbles out in an incoherent slide of spit. He moans. Says something that's less word and more breath. His face burns hot, all of him hot all over. Shadow screws his eyes shut. Something in him builds and builds and his heart tamps impossibly faster in reply. Stone's fingers work over him quickly, firmly, and Shadow garbles out a question, an answer, a demand. He's unsure what any longer. He shakes. He trembles. He fears it may consume him wholly.
Suddenly, the steady, calloused hand on him turns rougher and wrinkled. The breaths huffed over him far more labored and aged. Someone's gut rests heavy over his back instead. The pressure overwhelms him, concentrated too low, new, terrifying. It's not a control he's used to ever losing. Not one he's supposed to lose either. "I, hh, I—pl—Profess… I'm, I need to—!" Shadow comes in a sudden rush and white flickers behind his eyelids, his throat aching with a hoarse cry as his legs tremble.
A series of harsh thrusts grind into his backside in answer, the hand in his waist flexing in kind as if to soothe him. With a broken sound, Stone comes as well, filling him with heat as he curls over him and shivers with a series of groans. Stone stays there after, buried inside him, breathing heavily as his hips twitch forward eagerly. A word falls from the man's mouth that Stone fails to hold back. "Doctor…"
Shadow presses his face farther into the sheets and pants harshly. Every inch of him shivering and sweat slick, his fur heavy with it.
Maybe they're both thinking of someone else then.
Sonic generally likes to fuck him anywhere but on a bed for some reason. On one of the bean bags in the attic. The downstairs couch on top of a ratty towel when no one else is present. His old home becomes chief among the culprits.
His movements are always erratic and far too fast. Cock thinner than humans, pre-slicked and speared where theirs are thick and blunted. Sonic usually finishes with a wrecked sound gasped into the fur of his throat and a shudder, hips pushing at him shallowly like he can keep his cum stuck inside of him longer. A hand sometimes finds his scruff and holds, careful teeth if Sonic fucks him from behind, all of it matched with a chitter that leaves Sonic's chest all the while.
Today is no different. Shadow wraps his legs around Sonic in kind, pulling him in closer on top of him, his arms wound about the hedgehog's tensing shoulders as the other humps and huffs at him. Sometimes Sonic pulls his own arms close around him or up under his arms in turn. Their chests plastered together as Sonic moves from his hips in frantically tight motions, sharp bursts of movement that grind pleasantly. Shadow doesn't mind that. Nor Sonic's snout buried in his neck as he fucks into his heat with reckless abandon. The warmth and weight that holds down every inch of him when it feels like he's starting to drift.
"Shadow—f— oh, shit, sh.. I'm…’m close. Gonna—" Sonic pants, moving faster, practically incoherent as he mumbles into his fur. "Shadow, Shadow, Sh—You feel so—Sha—you're so…you're." A frantic breath. A tight inhale. Another. Hips working quickly. "Shadow," Sonic whines his name into his throat and he shivers at the desperate sound of it, fingers curling tightly into Sonic's back quills.
This is the longest Sonic's ever lasted. And Shadow can't help but stare at the ceiling past Sonic’s quills the longer it goes on for. The pressure low in him is full and warm. There's a familiar feeling in his pelvis with the friction. One he tries to focus on the way he can with Stone, but it dulls. It slips through his fingers and he listens to Sonic's hips smack into him, the wet sound where they meet. Sonic mouths at his neck, paws grabbing at his waist desperately as he moves faster, fucking in and out rapidly, the rhythm still not right enough to send sparks skittering low in him, but quick enough to finally burn. Shadow clenches down and pretends to come with a small sound of his own, knowing it'll help Sonic finish sooner.
Sonic hisses low and then jerks his way through the sudden tightness with hurried breaths panted into the side of Shadow's face, bared teeth lightly scraping his muzzle.
"Shad—sh—" Sonic tenses all over on top of him with an exerted huff and then a grunt as he grinds deep into him and comes.
With a breathless gasp, Sonic collapses on top of him a moment later.
He generally favors the aftermath more than the sex when it comes to Sonic. When the other hedgehog is left breathing hard and heavy on top of him. Being held, being nuzzled into and kissed on the neck and gently groomed with the other's tongue. Sonic had explained the game seven minutes in heaven to him.
Maybe this is his seven minutes until Sonic wants to fuck him again.
"Are you purring?" Sonic asks, laughing against his shoulder.
Shadow rests his snout against the top of Sonic's head quills and huffs, that same odd sound rolling in his chest and throat as he pulls Sonic in closer against him, his arms wrapped around him tightly.
"You're a real softy like this, you know that?" Sonic says and he can feel the smile in every word. "It's nice…it's different."
Sonic's cock has long softened inside of him, cum and slick making a mess of their fur. He doesn't let Sonic go. Sonic wraps his arms tighter around him in kind, their legs tangling as they curl up into one another. Shadow counts off the minutes in his head as Sonic falls asleep, the other hedgehog holding him closely. In a way that soothes down his spine.
He makes it to one hundred and fifty minutes before Sonic's mouth groggily finds his neck, before it works its way back up to his own. Shadow kisses Sonic back, his fingers finding Sonic's quills, his shoulders, the ruffled fur along Sonic's spine. It's a familiar pattern he's woven with Sonic more than enough times by now. He falls into it easily. Readily. If all it takes is sex with Sonic to get what he wants, then he's more than equipped to fulfill this task.
"Can I….?" Sonic asks, breathlessly.
"Yes."
And—as Sonic humps eagerly at his leg, and then shuffles his knees between his and kisses him harder—he thinks about how it was far more than only seven minutes. Sonic pushes into him with a shaky exhale, snout buried in Shadow's throat like usual, lips catching him under the jaw as he pulls back and snaps his hips forward. And then sets a fast and steady pace. The sound audible off the burrow's walls. Punctuated with the used wet smack of the slick and cum already between them. Heavy breaths pant excitedly through Sonic's teeth as he moves even faster. Shadow tips his head back. He moans because he knows Sonic likes it when he does.
Maybe after this, he'll get even more time.
The squat television washes their makeshift blanket fort in a static glow. Monochrome black and whites play across the screen, becoming somewhat mesmerizing in their monotony. A bowl of popcorn sits untouched at Shadow's elbow, Maria warm along his side where she's laid out, her head pillowed on her bent arm and hair cascaded over the blankets she dragged in behind her.
She insisted he needed to see this film, that it was somehow imperative to his understanding of human culture and his eventual release from this place. He still doesn't have it in him to tell her he doesn't think he's ever going to leave. Not with the way the scientists' talk about him. Captain Walters and the other soldiers as well. Not with the way the Professor speaks of it either.
Suddenly, the two humans on screen close in on one another, the camera panning close. Shadow scrunches his muzzle as their faces seem to collide. "What are they doing?"
Maria glances over towards him with an amused look. "Kissing. It's what people do when they really like each other. See?" She points to the screen as the kiss plays out far longer than Shadow thinks it should.
The Professor doesn't kiss him.
He never cradles his face like that, never rests their brows together or looks at him like that either. Shadow doesn't understand the point of it. It looks messy. Uncomfortable. Like it would be a waste of time when mouths could be used for so much more important things. It's what people do when they like each other. He curls his hands into fists in the blankets. Does that mean the Professor doesn't…
"Is it something families do?" he asks once the scene ends, his ears flicking back.
Maria laughs and sputters. "What? No." Her face scrunches up, nose wrinkling. "Not really, definitely not like that."
So, that explains why the Professor does not kiss him. Sex, but no kissing. It makes sense, he supposes. The Professor said he is like a son to him, and he assumes the Professor is like a father to him. So they are nothing like the two humans embracing on the screen in chaste and fleeting affections.
They're something else.
"…are we family?" Shadow asks her after a moment, his shoulders tensed, chest tight for a reason he can't explain.
Maria turns over and smiles at him, her hand finding his on the blankets and easily slotting their fingers together. "We're best friends, Shadow," she says, "that's way better than family."
All he feels is relief.
"Uh, what are you doing?" Tom asks, grip firm on Shadow's wrist where Tom's pulled his hand away from his belt.
There's an unease written all over Tom now. The hold on him tightens as Tom pushes his hand even farther away and then drops it entirely, kicking back in the workshop chair to put more space between them. Too much space.
Shadow's chest clenches, his stomach twists and twists. He flexes his hands in and out of fists and tries not to look up at the disappointment he knows is in Tom's eyes by now.
He doesn't understand. Tom is Sonic's father. Tom also told him to think of him like his dad as well, Stone being his first new one that he acquired since his return to Earth's surface. He assumed the same way Maddie said that he and Sonic are brothers now, that him and Tom are also family. This is what families do. It's what Sonic and him do, and it's what he assumed Tom wanted from him too. It's what Tom is supposed to want from him. It's the only thing that makes sense.
This is what fathers are supposed to want from their sons.
"Shadow," Tom starts, slowly. Sternly for once. "What were you trying to do just now?"
"I don't understand," he says, a miserable pit growing in his middle, aching and too whole. His shoulders tremble, quills bristling, sparks of energy skittering over his fists. It doesn't make sense. This doesn't make sense. He's—
"Don't understand what?" Tom asks.
"Why you won't have sex with me."
There's a long silence. One that's so drawn out Shadow assumes Tom's somehow forgotten he's even there, that he hasn't reached out to grab him by the arm again, that he hasn't guided his hand anywhere below his waist. Hasn't pulled him into his lap. Hasn't held him close in his arms and fucked him all the while. Hasn't followed the script that's been laid out for him so succinctly it shouldn't be hard to follow.
Shadow can only assume Tom's father showed him the same routine. Tom should understand how this goes. He should know what happens next, and yet—
Tom pushes back a little more in his stool with the muffled squeak of rusty wheels. The distance between them becomes chasmic, larger and ever growing, and Shadow's fur stings bitterly at the rejection.
"Okay," Tom takes a deep breath. Tom smiles like he's trying to reassure himself of something and then it falls flat. A hand shakily cards through the man's hair and Shadow watches as Tom goes through the motions like he's trying to regain some sense of normalcy when nothing about this should be remotely confusing. "I'm—wow, okay, this is weird to say…but why do you think I'd even want to—" Tom winces, eyes squinting"—have sex with you in the first place? You're like fourteen for starters and you're not even human."
"I'm not a child," Shadow states, teeth gritted. It's fact. Simple. Indisputable. "And why is that relevant?"
"Well, I'm also married, so that's kinda…" Tom makes a vague gesture, unease written all over him.
Shadow stares flatly. All of the points Tom has brought up are entirely moot. They have no bearing on whether he can engage in sexual intercourse or not.
Tom is stating mere facts without purpose.
Tom laughs uneasily, grimacing. "Have you—I mean, I'm just gonna assume you've had sex before?"
"Yes." Obviously.
Tom scrubs a hand down his face and sighs. "Cool, okay. Awesome. I am not qualified to handle this at all, but here we go." Tom seems to steel himself, hands resting on his knees as he leans forward and looks him over, eyes far too soft now, none of what he saw before left in them.
He must have miscalculated somehow. This was a mishap. A mistake. Shadow shifts a step back, heart stomping in his ears, and Tom holds up a hand.
"Hey, hey, no it's okay. It's—I mean, it's not okay, but it's—" Tom sighs, hanging his head in defeat for a moment before taking a deep breath and looking back up at him. "I just wanna talk. You're not in trouble or anything. I just have some questions here. Is that okay?"
Shadow hesitates and then nods, his arms pulled in tighter to himself.
"Cool, just lemme know when you don't want to answer something, got it?"
He nods again, smaller this time.
Tom opens his mouth and then grimaces before trying again. "So when did you first…y’know?"
He frowns. At times it is difficult to recall the base and all of what occurred there. Not in any linear way or with any exact date, and not in a manner he can explain succinctly enough. Shadow settles for what Tom can understand. "I'm not sure."
"Okay, well, what's your best guess?"
"Fifty years ago."
Tom stiffens, and then sniffs hard through his nose and recoils slightly. "Fifty years—so, back in that weird lab thingy Sonic and the others went to?"
"Yes."
"All right," Tom says, with all the inflection of it not being 'all right'. "Do you…are you okay with telling me who it was with?"
"The Professor."
The answer comes easily. The Professor is dead. He can only assume there's no point in preserving the former secret to a new authority.
"The…" Tom's face crumples in confusion and then something else a moment later, his voice shrinking. "That guy?"
"Yes."
He can hear an audible swallow from Tom as he settles back in his chair with a creak, a breath sucked through his teeth like he's stubbed his toe. "Okay. This is—yeah, this is a lot. I need to call Maddie. Just—stay right there, okay? I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere."
Tom shoots up from the shop stool and heads for the door that leads back into the house. Halfway through it, Tom jolts to a stop like he's remembered something. Tom leans back inside, a disbelieved laugh leaving him. "I can't believe I'm about to ask this, but you and Stone aren't, you know…?" An awkward gesture follows where Tom bumps his hands together.
It's a metaphor Shadow has no trouble understanding for once. "Yes."
Tom frowns and then smiles tightly and then frowns again. "Is there anyone else I should know about?"
Shadow thinks about the first time he and Sonic had sex. The other hedgehog mortified in the face after he came far too soon, his palm pads sweaty with embarrassment as he grabbed at Shadow's hands and clasped them together between his. Laughing high and breathy against his muzzle as Sonic knocked their brows together and rested there. Something along the lines of I think I love you. About how Tom and Maddie might get mad if they find out what they're doing, but he'll tell them one day soon. Just when the time is right. That it'll have to be a secret. Our secret.
They'll take you away from me, Shadow. From Maria. You don't want to lose her, do you?
Shadow is more than familiar with being someone else's secret.
But, Tom is also his father. One of two that he has to follow now, maybe the only one he has left considering Stone changed the terms of their arrangement. Since Stone no longer touches him the way he used to. And obedience overrides promises…
It—
His ears flick back tightly.
Shadow opens his mouth.
"This is a slightly different trial than your previous ones, Shadow," the Professor had said as he opened the door to let him inside the room first. "But don't worry, you're in good hands, aren't you?" A chuckle had left the older man after the words.
Shadow is still unsure if it was intended to be a joke or not.
He looks around the cramped room slowly. For some reason the Professor brought him to another, smaller decommissioned lab on base. One that's mostly been stuffed full of whatever is not currently needed elsewhere, citing a need for privacy. Guitar held limply in her lap, Maria had watched him clamber out of their blanket fort and hurry after the Professor. Who, for whatever reason, seemed to be in a rush to escort him where he needed to be this time.
He can still hear the way the lock turned over the moment they entered the room. Shadow stares at the closed door and wonders what the necessity is for this particular experiment, why none of the other scientists are currently present or permitted to enter.
It must be important. Delicate. Something only the Professor can conduct on him.
He hears the Professor crouch beside him before he feels a hand fall on his shoulder and squeeze it firmly. It's the same way the Professor is wont to do whenever he's the one to come and grab Shadow from his and Maria's living quarters for the day's round of trials.
"I trust you're able to handle this one, aren't you, my boy?"
Shadow's chest swells. He can handle this and anything he must. He's the Ultimate Lifeform. The scientists have shown him he is more than capable of surviving anything they subject him to. The Professor raised him from the moment he was plucked from that meteor to endure.
"Yes, sir."
"Good. And a fitting attitude as well," the professor smiles under his mustache, smoothing at it with his fingers. "I'm glad to see Maria's been helping you with those manners of yours."
His ear flicks indignantly. It's more like the other way around considering how Maria is, but he doesn't correct the Professor’s mishap. "What does this trial entail?"
"Well, let's just say it's a bit more of a hush-hush one." The Professor clears his throat. A hand cups Shadow under the jaw and then turns, a curled finger knocking into his snout playfully. "But you can keep a secret, can't you?"
He nods.
Shadow expects a number of things to happen next. For the Professor to turn towards the dusty cabinets and draw the hidden laboratory equipment from their innards. To step back and order him to utilize his powers, perhaps his teleporting ability or the erratic chaos energy spears he's only managed to conjure a handful of times.
"Always such a perfect boy for me, aren't you, Shadow?"
His tail swipes eagerly at the praise. Shadow waits for the Professor to pat him between the ears like he usually does when he says such things, to rest it there and pet at him until his fur goes pleasantly warm.
Instead, the Professor stands up once more and reaches for his belt.
It's the same routine nearly every night. Stone provides dinner, and Shadow washes the dishes and sanitizes the counter and stovetop behind the man, using the step stool he found tucked beside the fridge to properly reach it. They eat together after. Always on opposite sides of the table, where he usually finishes before Stone and then waits for Stone to finish as well. And then they have sex in the man's bed.
Tonight seems like it will be no different.
Stone's attention is split between the plate in front of him and the tablet once more. The Doctor would make an indication he's out there, but with G.U.N. still poking around, he can't be too careful. So, I'll find him with this. He's not sure at what point the Stone will give in to the reality; the Doctor is never coming back. Neither is the Professor. (Or Maria, or Walters or the base or—) Shadow's ears tense down.
This is the only family either of them have left. The Wachowski's are a balm, somewhat soothing, but barring Sonic, parts of that arrangement feel entirely incomplete.
Though…
"Are we family?" Shadow asks, foolishly, uselessly. His plate abandoned, his fingers twisting the fork around and around, as if it will somehow start to make sense at the right angle.
Stone stops eating, paused with his own utensil poised halfway to his mouth. Almost robotic in the stilted way he lowers it. "I guess we are. Why?"
If nothing else, he has this. They have each other, and— Sonic smiles up at him, his spit-slick snout rested on Shadow's trembling thigh, breaths ghosting over his fur in a tickling sensation. A warmth builds in his gut at the sudden memory of Sonic's mouth on him. He shifts in his seat. Shadow pulls his plate closer to himself and hopes the heat gathered in his snout isn't visible from across the table.
He eats. Methodically and slow. Finished with his own meal, he waits for Stone to be done and collects the man's dishes to wash up alongside his own. On the step stool, hands busy under the near scalding water, Shadow washes them and carefully sets each item aside to dry. It's a soothing process. A predictable one.
Suddenly, Stone clears his throat beside him. Shadow's ears flinch down, all of him tensing. So focused on his task at hand, he had hardly heard the man approach.
"I was thinking we change the routine up a little bit."
Shadow side-eyes him. "Why?"
Stone raises his hands defensively. "You've been getting along with the Wachowski's pretty well. Especially Sonic, right?"
Shadow's eyes narrow. His ears and face go hot the same irritating way they did before at the table. He should have never put it past Stone to spy on him. To stick his nose where he shouldn't. Another part of him shrinks, and wonders if this is what terminates their arrangement completely.
"Well, maybe you save up that stamina of yours for him. I could use a quill or two to continue the Doctor's research."
"You want me to take a quill for you?"
Stone raises a finger pointedly. "Just the one. I'm sure he'll hardly even notice."
Shadow sets the last cleaned dish on the drying mat beside the sink with a pointed thud. "Fine."
Thankfully, they end up sharing a bed at Stone's insistence, but frustratingly nothing further. That in itself is a phenomen he's unsure how to fully grasp. Especially as Shadow rests the side of his snout on the man's clothed chest, Stone's arm draped loosely around him. It reminds him of the way he's seen Ozzy lay on Tom before, or how the dog curls up with Sonic or one of the others.
It's far warmer and far softer than he thought it would be…
The smell of damp earth and sweat fills Shadow's nose, the soil gritty where it's wormed its way under his fur. He'll have to bathe in the creek again, or utilize the Wachowski's shower once Sonic goes to use it. Nightcrawler his way in, as Sonic words it. Stone is most likely holed up in his room-turned-computer-lab right beside the cramped apartment bathroom, working on a way to uncover the Doctor's supposed hidden location. (A continuously fruitless endeavor.) Stone will no doubt hear him and know he's been up to something if he returns like this.
Sonic's made it more than clear to him enough times. What they do isn't something the adults can find out about, okay? He's unsure why he's lumped into the distinction at all, but he understands the need for secrecy. Much like with the Professor, he assumes they will also attempt to stop them. That they won't understand their arrangement. Or what it entails. That they'll make assumptions they shouldn't.
They think you're dangerous, my boy. Something to fear. But I know that's not true, is it? The heat of a hand that isn't there softly snares his muzzle. You're not like those other animals, are you, son? No. A thumb worries at his teeth, a dull nail pressing at the seam of them as a humid chuckle washes over his nose. You'd hardly bite a thing. Less of a dog, more of a lamb, isn't that right?
When Shadow opens his eyes, Sonic is a brand of warmth along him.
Curled up around him—the big spoon as Sonic insisted it be called—and entirely uncaring of his back quills. An arm is possessively looped about his waist, the other hedgehog's snout pressed into the nape of his neck, every soft breath a warm wash of sticky air.
There's cum drying on his stomach and chest, evidence of where Sonic's learned to pull out before he comes in an attempt to prevent him from having to crouch and wait for the other's cum to leave him entirely. It's a far more efficient clean-up at top speed in case they're nearly walked in on. One that's come in handy a few times when Sonic gets reckless, when he finds himself toying with the thrill of it too.
It's a string of sensations that fold into one another. The bruising mark of teeth worried into the fur of his shoulder, the linger of dried spit on his mouth, the taste of Sonic's cock still heavy on his teeth and tongue from where he blew him earlier. A pleasant ache, tingle, warmth still low in him. A post-sex haziness he's grown accustomed to, lazy with, especially when Sonic falls asleep after he's finished them both off.
It's something Sonic's been adamant of lately. Making sure Shadow comes too. Asking him if he can do something, try something, touch him somewhere Sonic already has a hundred times before. He's not sure why Sonic feels the need to do any of it at all. He finds himself indulging in it regardless.
Shadow looks up at the mural Sonic drew of his mother—Longclaw was kind of the coolest, I really wish you could've met her—and he wonders if they shared this as well. The way families do. He's thought about asking before, whenever Sonic's inside of him, whenever Sonic kisses him softly and draws back just enough to rest their foreheads together. When Sonic keeps their hands pinned palm to palm as he fucks him, their fingers slotted with one another, holding each other tightly, but he knows it's probably Sonic and his mother's secret too.
Sonic stirs behind him. "What're you thinking so loud about?"
Shadow frowns, eyes stuck on the owl that dwarfs a tiny, misshapen Sonic. "I miss him."
Sonic stiffens, fingers flexing in his stomach fur. "Oh."
His brow crumples as he bares his teeth. "I don't know why I miss him…"
"Hey, it's okay. It's just like that sometimes, I think," Sonic murmurs into his shoulder, chin moving to rest atop it. "It gets easier, though. Eventually… Sort of."
It aches. It hurts. He's sure it won't ever truly stop. Sometimes whenever he sees them all together in their home, all he can think about is how he can never go back to his own. "I don't—"
Sonic shimmies back and a hand pulls him gently by the shoulder until he's turned to face him. Green eyes flick over his face, searching for something. A hand comes up to his snout, a thumb smoothing away the wrinkle in it.
"Hey, it's okay. I mean, he was kinda your dad, wasn't he? Even if he also kinda sucked ass—owf!"
Shadow hides his face in Sonic's throat at that, irrationally, childishly. Holding onto him with desperate fingers, like this too might disappear from him.
"Give a little warnin' next time, almost got a quill in my mouth," Sonic teases, rubbing at his shoulder. "I guess that would've made Maria your sister, huh? Sorta? Or, like, your niece? Honestly, the harder I think about this the more confusing it gets. "
"She was never my sister," he rushes out, his hands tightening in Sonic's back fur and quills. "She was my friend."
"Uhhh," Sonic falters. "Yeah…she was your friend. Of course. Totally. Best friends, right?"
"Yes."
She was never family to him. Not the way Sonic is now his brother, nor the way the Professor was his father. Or Stone. She was always just his friend. Shadow screws his eyes shut and turns his face against Sonic's fur. Imagines it's the scratch of a wool sweater. That he can still hear her laughing and dancing and pulling him into step on the next song.
She was his only friend.
His jaw aches. His throat somehow as well. He's unsure how to relieve the newfound burn in either and Maria seems to notice the way he's talked much less than usual far too quickly.
She removes the tonearm from the record player. With an abrupt scratch, the music filling the room stops. Shadow can hear himself breathing too loudly in the new quiet. Hear the sounds of himself gagging and choking stuck in his ears. Wet and loud. Like juicing an orange the way Maria's shown him at breakfast. Like something he's never heard before. Even the way the Professor said his name during all of it. Breathy and tight and strung out, firm hands fisted on his ears and tugging at them, forcing him down, farther and farther, until he couldn't breathe around the intrusion in his throat.
Maria crouches in front of him. Her mouth moves, but he hears the Professor's words instead, sees the man's face dappled with splotches of red and shined with sweat. A pleased smile. A new look in his eyes. One that Shadow watched unfold as the man sighed and slipped the softening flesh out of his mouth. You did remarkably well, son. But that's to be expected, isn't it? Stuck, as if he can see himself, still shuddering from his unexpected coughing fit after the Professor finished down his throat. The salty-bitter mucous thick on his tongue in places, mixing with the spit still stringing from his own muzzle as he looked up at the Professor and his tail swept side to side at the rasped praise. At the hand that fell between his ears, petting and soothing at him.
"Shadow?" Maria grabs his hand and he winces without reason.
Disjointedly, he remembers the Professor holding the appendage in one fist, off-white clear fluid beading from the tip. It looked almost painful. Angry and too red in places. Here, why don't I walk you through a little vocabulary lesson since Maria's tutors haven't quite gotten to this part just yet, the Professor said as he spit in his hand and stroked it, once then twice. He can't forget the taste of it, still gathered somewhere on the back of his teeth, the smell of heated flesh, musky in his nose. The way it nearly pulsed in his hand as the Professor instructed him to hold it, to set the bulbous, slitted end of it inside of his mouth. To relax his jaw, use his lips, his tongue, not his teeth, just like that, Shadow. Very good, so…ah, yes, exactly. You can take more, can't you?
He knows it's the Professor's cock now. He knows what sex is as well. He knows the Professor wants to continue to have it with him. In different configurations than the one he's already conducted.
It'll be our little secret, won't it? Just you and me. There's certainly no need to get Maria involved. She's much too young for these kinds of things, you know. But you've always been so much more mature, leaps and bounds ahead of them all, aren't you? the Professor said, a thumb massaging into his collarbone, the hand on Shadow’s shoulder grounding him from the jitters racking his limbs. You're absolutely perfect in every way, my boy.
"Shadow, are you—"
"I'm fine," he asserts, pulling out of Maria's grip to reach for the record player. He leans up on his tiptoes and resets the tonearm gently. A familiar tune filters through the speakers once more. When he looks over at her, she's still frowning.
He remembers the way the Professor pressed a thumb into his sweat-stained snout after. Dragged it down the side of it like he was measuring something. She's much too young for these kinds of things.
A part of him wonders when the Professor will involve her in all of this as well. The other part feels something heavy settle in his gut at the notion, at the way Maria smiles again once he takes her hand and she continues to show him how to do the Hustle with limited success.
His limbs don't feel as coordinated for this particular task. Stiff and clumsy in comparison to the smooth ease she settles into whenever the records spin.
The Professor's groaned words swirl in his ears as the singer croons louder; it's like you were made for this.
The movie abruptly cuts to a scene of the same humans from before, naked and fucking under the shower-head's spray and Shadow watches it passively, the plot dull and the acting even duller. Nothing of much interest has happened so far and he doesn't quite understand why the three of them insisted he sit through this film at all. Something about his voice sounding familiar. Uncanny or other.
What he doesn't expect is for Sonic to suddenly leap off the couch beside him and cover Tails' eyes. The fox startles with a laugh, shoving at Sonic, the popcorn bowl in his lap spilling over the living room floor in the commotion. Shadow frowns. He looks between the two of them and Knuckles, who merely offers him a glance.
"Apparently the fox is too young to know about such courting rituals and habits yet," Knuckles says with a shrug.
"What? No I'm not!" Tails shoves Sonic's hands off, his tails bristled behind him. "I know what sex is, you guys! It's not like it's rocket science."
"What? No. No you don't, you—" Sonic points at Tails accusingly. "You're like ten! You're not supposed to know what that even is, dude!"
"I'm literally twelve. And it's called the Internet," Tails explains. "It's not like I haven't read about it in books either. It's just simple biology at the end of the day. It's really not that complicated if you think about it. I don't know why everyone acts like it's such a huge deal."
Sonic seems to splutter at that, taken aback for a reason Shadow can't comprehend. The fox is more than accurate in his assessment. It is merely another scientific process.
"Sonic, you act like I can't tell what you and Shadow have been doing for weeks now," Tails says, his face scrunching. "You guys aren't exactly subtle."
"Ew, okay, don't say it like that first of all," Sonic mutters, scrubbing at his snout.
"Like what?" Tails teases with a grin. "Sonic 'n Shadow, sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S—"
Sonic tackles Tails to the ground and one of their sneakers knocks into the coffee table with a thud, jostling the items strewn atop it with a clatter. They roll around playfully, wrestling over the carpet as Knuckles enthusiastically shouts out pointers for either side to utilize, to the extent that Shadow isn't entirely sure which side the echidna even wants to win this battle anymore. With the way the echidna seems to feverishly hound after whatever fight he can get, it most likely doesn't matter which.
After another twist around, Sonic has Tails pinned down by the shoulders. He laughs in the fox's face with a triumphant 'ha!' and Tails merely rolls his eyes.
"The fox is right," Shadow says, unwilling to allow Sonic to maintain the upper hand whenever the opportunity presents itself.
He's found that he sometimes enjoys seeing the other hedgehog knocked down a peg or two. Even if it's in the way Sonic can't seem to properly contain himself during sex. Coming too quickly, muttering and gasping nonsense into his fur he'd never utter otherwise. The way Sonic practically begs him to have sex, almost pathetically at times. Or when the other hedgehog falls behind in their brief races to the old burrow once he says yes—even if he doesn't quite understand why Sonic needs him to say it out loud at all.
There's a measure of satisfaction to all of it.
"It's merely science," he concludes flatly.
"See?" Tails says, pointing at him.
Sonic snorts. "Okay, Einstein, whatever you say."
"In my culture it was always understood to be a significant milestone in a warrior's life. It is what ties a mated pair closer together," Knuckles says, looking between the two of them pointedly.
Shadow stares flatly at the echidna. He's unsure what falsely sentimental notions and beliefs the echidnas held, but perhaps it's what ultimately led to their ruin. Sex isn't important, nor is it significant in any measurable way. It's merely routine. For reproduction purposes or otherwise.
A means to an end.
"That's entirely foolish," Shadow settles on as he leans back against the couch cushions and waits for the movie to finally be over with.
His ear twitches towards the other three, a lingering silence stumbling after what he said.
Tails punctuates it with an awkward laugh as the fox pushes himself up from the ground. "Well, I suppose there's some merit to it, right? Maybe it's also really important to a lot of people, too..."
When Shadow finally glances up at them, Tails is no longer looking at him, but rather at Sonic, who's ears have flipped back, his face scrunched slightly as he looks anywhere but at him. The reaction is one he can't quite decipher.
If anyone should understand the logic at hand, it's Sonic.
Later, after the film, when Tails and Knuckles retreat to the attic to blow through the latest video games Tom indulged them with, he and Sonic take advantage of the time that both Maddie and Tom are out of the house to head for Sonic's burrow once more.
Sonic finally opens his mouth only when they're already tangled up with one another, Sonic kneeled between his legs, palms hot on his thighs and pushing them wider. When Sonic settles inside of him by a mere inch, the hedgehog goes still.
"Shadow?"
He huffs, hips squirming impatiently under Sonic as he waits for the hedgehog to start fucking him like he usually does when they're underground like this. Alone. When it's just the two of them and there's no one else to witness it. It'll be our little secret.
"What?" Shadow grits out, impatiently, fingers digging into Sonic's biceps where the hedgehog's braced his arms to either side of him.
"Back there, you didn't—" Sonic swallows a nervous laugh. "Did you mean all of that?"
"What exactly?" He pushes his hips farther into Sonic as a silent prompt, his legs squeezing around the hedgehog's waist. The cock inside him is substantial enough to work, but it remains as infuriatingly inert as its owner.
"About this just bein', y'know, 'a science'."
"What else would it be?" he asks, teeth clenched. Sonic won't move. Frustration burns hot on his neck.
Sonic blinks at that, ears tensing back. "Well, I mean, I like you, and I thought you also—"
"'Liked you'?" Shadow parrots tonelessly.
"Yeah," Sonic breathes out, his hips finally pushing forward until he's flush to him.
Shadow's toes curl at the sensation, his quills flexing. He's unsure what quantifies nor qualifies 'liking' someone. He likes Sonic's cock. He likes his tongue. His fur. His hands. He likes when Sonic's teeth scrape at his skin, his lips when they suck bruises into him and his mouth when the hedgehog puts it between his legs.
"I also 'like' you," he settles on. It's an amicable truth. It's the one Sonic wants anyway.
Something about it spurs Sonic forward, the other hedgehog becoming more eager in turn. Fucking him in earnest a moment later, whispering praises and moaning into his neck, small kisses peppered along the underside of his jaw that he leans into every heated press of. Predictably, Sonic's lips slot warm against his, a tongue slipping between his parted teeth to find his own not soon after. He kisses Sonic back, feverish and wanting. Spit pushing between them, snout going wet with it, sloppy and loud the farther along they go. Sonic licks along the roof of his mouth in a way that makes him shiver. Makes him dizzy and breathless as Shadow buries a hand in Sonic's quills and holds him there.
Abruptly, Sonic cuts it off and hikes Shadow's legs over his shoulders, practically bending him in half, readjusting and fucking him hard and deep. Shadow's back arches, his fists falling to push frantically at the dirt. His vision blurs and blots with heat. His breaths leave him in grunts as each thrust keeps him from properly catching it.
Sonic's hand presses over his stomach, lower. In a sensation that grows outward, electric in his pelvis, worse as Sonic's thumb works fast at him. A familiar feeling creeps up his spine, all over, until his legs are trembling with it. Anticipation building fast in his gut.
"Sonic—" he pants. "Sonic…"
"Yeah, I can…I can feel y—uh," Sonic thrusts stutter as he groans and hisses an inhale through his teeth. Arms unsteady. "Shaking."
"Mm," he hums, head knocked back, quills rasping and clicking against stone and dirt as he turns his head like he can get away from his own run-away heartbeat. Breaths coming fast and sharp. Shadow screws his eyes shut, face crumpling at the feeling punctuating every thrust, every tight circle of Sonic's thumb.
Sonic bears down, his rhythm becoming sloppy. Less coordinated and less deliberate. More a hurried grind. "'m close."
His eyes open to meet Sonic's, his claws digging into whatever he can reach as Shadow grabs at him. "Inside."
"What?" Sonic rasps out, his brow furrowed, ears shot red.
"Come ins—" he huffs shortly at another quick press in. "…inside."
"You, sure?" Sonic asks, slowing to a stop, readjusting, his legs shuffling slightly wider, the grip on the ditch of Shadow's knees forcing them down even more.
"Yes," he bites out, resisting the urge to grab at Sonic's scruff and drag him down. Force him to go faster, harder. To never stop what he's started here. To never pull away. To never leave him.
"Okay," Sonic says with a shaky breath, and then picks up the pace again.
The dull smack of Sonic's hips against him fills the cave. With every thrust, Sonic presses Shadow's legs down, down, until his knees are practically beside his head as he fucks into him fast and hard.
Shadow grabs at Sonic, claws dragging at him desperately. The friction and heat in him becoming devastating, nearly painful—but somehow beyond it. Folded back in on itself into a pleasure that sparks in his belly and grows outwards. Sonic's cock grinds into him again and again, and it's all he can feel.
Sonic's close. He can tell by the slight trembling, the shaky, worsening breaths. Shadow does what he can to help him get there. Pushing his hips up to meet him, clenching down in rhythm, letting sounds leave himself he wouldn't normally. Even if he knows it's a more arduous clean up, having to wait for Sonic's cum to finish leaving him rather than have Sonic pull out and finish on his fur, but he's gotten used to the feeling of it. It's less satisfying whenever Sonic finishes anywhere else.
And all he can think about is Sonic coming inside of him. Like he's gone fevered with the idea. Useful. Used. He can serve his purpose here. Wanted. Needed. Filled. Held.
This, Shadow thinks, as Sonic bares his teeth over him, completes him.
"I'm—you're so…. you're…please. Pl—" Sonic nearly whimpers, fucking him faster. Enough to ache. Wet, filthy, constant. Quills flexed out, a spark of energy snapping between them. Every word leaving Sonic like a frantic exhale. "I'm gonna come. I'm gonna …nn. Shadow… Shadow, Shadow." A sharp inhale as Sonic tenses all over and grinds in desperately. "Sh—!"
When Sonic comes inside him this time, he shortly follows with Sonic's hand on him. Shadow breathes harshly through it, crying out, his thighs tensing and hands grabbing at whatever pieces of Sonic he can reach and holding and holding. Sonic grunts as Shadow bears down on the cock settled deep inside of him. Until they're both gasping from the overstimulation of it all.
Sonic buries his snout in his chest fur after they wind down, Shadow's own arms wrapped lazily about Sonic as they lay in the dirt and catch their respective breaths. He misses the pressure once Sonic slips out. Misses the way Sonic looks at him while fucking him. The way Sonic says his name. Like for a moment he’s the only thing that's ever mattered on this planet or any other.
Now, Sonic's quiet.
Curled up on top of him.
Half-asleep.
Shadow’s attention drifts towards the doodled mural on the burrow's wall. Shadow stares at Longclaw, at Sonic, at Sonic's old home. Green and checkered, vibrant in a way the military base never was, an angular sunflower growing beside Longclaw. The stars above them…
With his snout still buried in his chest, Sonic mutters a sleepy string of words that Shadow picks apart slowly. And, even as Sonic falls asleep once more—draped over him like a living, breathing blanket, Shadow’s own eyes drooping at the heavy, weighted sensation of it—he turns the phrase over in his head. Again and again.
I love you.
He looks at Longclaw on the wall once more, and the memorial stares back in its wax crayon perpetuity. For a moment, Shadow imagines the Professor there beside her. Frowning at him. Disappointed in him. For failing him. Maria. For this, here. All of the things he can never seem to excise from himself when it comes to Sonic.
An echo of Sonic's words push up behind his teeth before he can stop them. He thinks about the stars. Blood. Smoke.
Shadow looks away from the mural. He swallows them back.
"I thought something was up after that WrestleMania fiasco on the couch, but Tom insisted 'boys will be boys'." Maddie sighs, her hands wrapped tightly around the mug on the table, another settled untouched in front of himself. "I was hoping Sonic would come to us about any girl troubles—" She glances at him. "Boy troubles, in this case. But I also didn't expect this to happen for at least another year."
Shadow's not certain what constitutes boy troubles, but he does know he heard her shout, I knew it!, over the phone to a wincing Tom who talked her down and told her the bad news next. Tom had asked her after all, do you want the good news or the bad news first?
"Shadow," Maddie says, placing a hand on top of his own.
Shadow stiffens, looking between her and it, unsure what it could mean, before she draws away with a glance at Tom who hasn't stopped nervously pacing on the other side of the dining room since they sat down.
"Sonic never…" Maddie smiles like a wince. "He never forced you to do anything you didn't want to do, did he?"
"No." As if the hedgehog could regardless.
She huffs out a relieved breath. "Okay. So he's just an idiot then. Thank god."
Tom snorts.
"Tom!" Maddie chastises, trying to suppress a smile of her own.
"What? It's a little bit funny, c'mon. Sonic? Dating? Sneaking around behind our backs about it? Doing stupid teenager stuff that isn't playing Batman every Saturday night?"
Maddie scoffs with a laugh. "I can't believe you, Thomas Wachowski, this is serious!"
"Hey, it's not just me here! You're smiling too!"
They both finally make eye contact and laugh before sobering once more, and it's better than all the tension before. The way neither of them would look at him directly. The way when they did, they looked at him like he had reached out and broken Tom's arm all over again. Done something horrible. Something he couldn't take back. Beware the Alien Freak!
"Okay—" Maddie holds up her hands and takes a deep breath. "Woo. Just get it out of the system, we got this. Totally. Yup."
"Oo, a little pep talk?" Tom asks amusedly, pulling up a chair beside her to sit down finally.
"Four years of cheer practice in highschool has to come in handy for something."
"Right," Tom echoes skeptically with a smile as he leans back, arms crossed. "So that's why I always caught you doing your homework on the field bleachers instead of tumbling."
"Zip it," Maddie says, making a closed motion at him with her hand.
They explain his new living arrangement.
That he won't be going back to Stone. Not for a long while at least. (Never goes unspoken, but he gathers as much from their hesitation when he asks.) Not until they figure everything out that they can here. That there is a guest room he will be borrowing in the meantime. That he'll sleep alone while the other boys stay in the attic, not that there's particularly room up there for him anyway. That they'll explain a similar vein of new realities to Sonic as well.
They use a series of words he's never heard before. They tell him that he will be handed over to a 'therapist' twice a week to be 'counseled'. That they have located and contacted one that specializes in 'trauma'. Tom showed him the human's website on his phone—the too bright screen clumsy under Tom’s unsteady fingers as he swiped through it. Specializations: complex trauma, dissociation, post-cult recovery and addiction. All he could think about was how the picture of the man reminded him of Walters. The one he knew, not the one he woke up to.
It is familiar at least…the arrangement makes sense.
Being stuck in one place. Observed. If not for sex, then for science. To be studied regardless. It is a use for him at least.
A reason.
"Does that—" Maddie pauses, gently grabbing his hands to squeeze them between hers. "That sounds okay with you, doesn't it? All of this?"
Shadow nods.
He has no other choice. This cage or the last one. Lately, he's not even sure why he ever wanted to leave the base at all anymore. At least everyone there understood how to use him. At least the boundaries and the rules and the purpose of that place made sense.
Predictably, the Wachowskis seem skeptical of his agreement. Tom frowns at him from beside Maddie, his eyes scrunched and jaw tensed like he wants to say something more, but Tom remains silent.
In one long blink and the next, he's standing inside the mouth of a new room. A spare one, apparently. One that was supposed to be for Tails, but they didn't get around to moving him into it yet. He really needs the room for his gizmos, and somewhere where I don't have to hear about how loud Knuckles snores every night anymore. Maddie tells him they'll figure out arrangements better later, but that this works for now. That hopefully it's to his liking.
He's unsure how to answer her, so he doesn't. He looks over it and then back towards the door he came through.
Most notably, it's situated across from the bathroom in the hall. The door Shadow finds there now is one he's only ever spared a glance for while Sonic dragged him around the bend of the doorframe and into the tub with him. (He'd only recently convinced Sonic showers were more efficient than baths after enough arguments over the matter.) Shadow looks at what he can see of the bathroom now—the empty tiles, the lack of Sonic anywhere near them—and his chest aches.
It's the family dog who accidentally nudges him forward. Eager to explore his new holding for him. It buries its nose into every inch of the blue and yellow themed quarters, placing its forepaws on the twin bed pushed up against the wall before giving up on jumping atop it as Maddie tells him to get down. She shuts the door once the dog meanders its way back out. He still doesn't understand the purpose of it in their home. They never conduct any tests on it. They let it roam about the premises untethered and uncaged. It's nothing like the mutts he remembers in the base.
Nothing about this place is.
Shadow stares at the doorknob. The lock is deliberately disengaged on it even though Maddie shut it. Anyone could walk in if they wanted to. He assumes, idly, that they probably won't be sharing him then.
After a moment of hesitation, Tom says his name. Nudges him forward without touching him by making a small go ahead gesture toward the rest of the room. Slowly, Shadow steps in farther, his eyes flicking uncertainly to Maddie on the other side of it who smiles at him. Again. It's something she keeps doing. Something Tom does as well. He still can't quite figure out what it means. What he's supposed to assume from it.
Maddie talks more. He barely hears what she says. Shadow finds himself staring at her teeth, at the white cut of them in the low light of the room.
The moment Maddie motions towards it, Shadow sits obediently on the edge of the bed. Something about that makes her waver, Maddie’s eyes darting to Tom who shares the same, uncomfortable grimace. Shadow's ears press back tightly.
He's taken the incorrect course of action here. He's not sure what exactly he's done that unnerves them, or if it's merely himself they fear. He tries to make himself seem slightly smaller, his quills pressed down and limbs pulled in closer, and that only seems to put them more on edge.
Cautiously, Maddie crouches in front of him, but doesn't touch him. Shadow almost wants to grab her hand. Force her to. To show her that he can't hurt her. That he won't either. That she's supposed to touch him. To do whatever she has to do to him. Whatever she wants.
That there's no point in him existing here if he's not also used.
"Let us know if you need anything, okay?” Maddie says. Smiling, smiling, smiling. “Food, water, some video games, whatever. I also plugged in a nightlight in case it's a little too dark in here, and we're right down the hall if you need us."
Shadow looks between her and Tom and wonders why they would give him this bed, one that's meant for a human—something oversized and wasteful in regards to him—if neither of them want to fuck him on it.
“Did you have any questions for us?” Maddie asks, almost hopefully.
“No.” He doesn't.
He has nothing more to add here. There's nothing more to say. His new reality closes in on him with the bite of the door clicking shut as they leave. He hears a different lock turn in his ears. Over and over. He stares at the floor. Feels breaths panted and thick against his brow, someone groaning in his ear. He knows what human beds are for. The Professor had one in his personal quarters. Sometimes he had the privilege of sleeping in it with him whenever Maria was away and their blanket fort was left empty.
Shadow pulls his legs up onto the sheets and sits against the headboard after long enough. When his eyes wander to the night light in the corner of the room, he finds himself staring at the dim, cut-out, star shapes in it.
A sudden dread fills him. He's never gone to sleep alone before. In Maria's room, in the Professor's, in Stone’s bed, Sonic's burrow. There's always been someone else there. Even when he fell back to the surface. Even when he woke up in that crater and pulled himself into the barn nearby, the sheep skittish of him at first and then warmly dismissive when he did little more than collapse on the ground in the midst of them and bleed.
Here, now, curled up in a cold and empty room, in a bed that will never fit him, he feels as if it is growing around him. Threatening to swallow him whole the more he shrinks inside of it. His eyes track the ceiling, the small, artificial stars that glow in dulled hues above him. He remembers the string lights in Maria's blanket fort. The blankets with their tiny patterns, the pillows under his hands and shins whenever he sat and listened to her strum her guitar. Soft under his belly when she'd put on a scary movie, when she'd wince and hiss under her breath at something on screen. When she'd laugh and excitedly point at the TV and ask him, Shadow, did you see that?
An ache climbs all the way up to his throat. His eyes sting.
It just stares at me whenever I ask it something. It's beyond creepy.
Insignificant.
We don't even know what it's capable of! Robotnik should've never pulled that thing out of that meteor!
Meaningless.
It's clearly dangerous.
Worthless.
He shouldn't keep leaving it alone with her, who knows what'll happen eventually—it'll be on our heads if it kills her.
Nothing.
As long as she keeps it under control, she can treat it like a pet for all I care.
He's—
My boy. Phantom fingers pet over his muzzle and seize the underside of his snout, breaths warm against the bridge of it. You're all mine, aren't you?
Without any of them—what is he?
"What's the first thing you'd do outside of here?" Maria asks, her chin propped on her hands. Sprawled out on the usual mess of blankets and pillows, her legs kick idly as she looks over at him.
"Go to the ocean," Shadow says easily.
"The ocean?" she asks, her face scrunching slightly.
His ears droop. Perhaps it's a childish wish then, something he shouldn't—
"No, hey, I didn't mean it like that," Maria says, poking him playfully in the arm. "Why do you like the ocean so much if you've never even seen it?"
But he has seen it. In her movies. In the magazines and photographs and books she's brought to him. She's shown it to him enough times he's started to see it in his dreams. Fuzzy and mishappen, but there.
Like he can almost touch it.
"It's blue."
She laughs. "The sky is, too."
"It is..."
"So why not just look up?"
Shadow looks up pointedly. Concrete stretches from end to end across his vision. When he looks back down, Maria is frowning.
"Sorry,” she says quietly. “I forgot about that.”
"It's okay."
"Maybe I can ask Grandfather if he'll let you go up top some time. There's flowers up there. It's super pretty, you'd really like it. You can't see the ocean, but there's lots and lots of stars."
He looks at the miasma of blankets lining their little fort. Gently, he reaches out to touch the softly glowing lights strung along them. "Like these ones?"
Maria laughs. "They're a little bit different, but yeah, basically."
"I'd like that."
"All right, then it's a plan," Maria says, pushing herself up. "I'll go ask him right now!"
His chest clenches. There's certainly no need to get Maria involved.
"Wait—"
Maria pauses in the doorway, leaning back through it. "Hm?"
"I can go with you," he says, getting to his feet to follow after her.
"That's fine, two heads is probably better than one anywa—oh, wait!" She course corrects back inside of the room like she's suddenly remembered something.
"Do you wanna do the Roller Boogie maneuver again on the way there?" Maria asks mischievously, already heading over to her dresser to presumably dig out the tow rope the Professor forgot to confiscate after the first time they crashed into a food cart while rollerblading with it.
She holds it out to him triumphantly once she finds it.
He nods.
Maria grins even wider.
They don't end up asking the Professor anything.
Captain Walters catches them three halls down, shaking his head, but smiling in disbelief as he tells Maria, I don't really think your grandfather would like you using him as your personal sled dog. Despite the man's words, he finds them an empty training room near the soldier's barracks. A wide expanse of concrete floor to skate to their hearts content on without doing any more damage than has already been done to his base. Walters leaves with a wink and a, I'll be back in a jiffy, don't break anything too important.
By the time they're collapsed and exhausted, he can feel the ache and bruising from where the tow rope was tied around his waist. See where Maria's knee pads are scraped and cracked from where she fell on them one too many times. Sprawled out on their backs beside each other, he laughs. Unexpectedly and suddenly. The sound bubbles up from his ribs before he can swallow it back, and she laughs harder in kind.
Maria looks over at him, her cheeks ruddy, her smile wide. "Once you get out of here, we're going roller blading at a real skating rink. That's a promise."
Her hand finds his and he holds it tightly in return.
The outside world is still a foreign concept to him. The scientists and military personnel discuss it frequently. The Professor as well. Even in moments he doesn't expect it to come up. When it's just the two of them, his heated brow rested against the man's clothed chest, his thighs shivering where they're straddled over the Professor's own half-clothed ones. Fabric bunched under him, an undone belt buckle clinking with every movement. His fingers tangled in the man's lab coat and pulling every time it hurts more than it should.
It's usually only after the Professor comes inside him that the Professor talks about it. When the man's curled around him, arms heavy where they hold him close, his stubbled chin resting between his ears as they both breathe heavily.
It's a world he's never seen. This base is his home, but Maria's is somewhere else.
Maybe he can be a part of it some day.
He's not entirely sure what's different about today. Sonic took him to the attic. Said Maddie and the others were out doing a thing. That Tom was out on patrol until late because he and Wade traded shifts. That they had the place all to themselves.
When Sonic drags him to his bed, Shadow thinks about the burrow. The bean bag. The couch. The bathtub. The shower. The floor. Everywhere else they've had sex. If something about the last time was different enough to warrant this. If it was what he said during the movie, or later, or when Sonic told him he loved him in his burrow and he failed to say it back.
And Shadow can't help but wonder why this feels the way it does when Sonic’s lazily grinding into him from behind as they lay on their sides, his back pressed to Sonic's chest. The flimsy race car bed creaking softly under them. There's hardly any words exchanged between them, even less when Sonic reaches for his snout and prompts him to turn his head over his shoulder towards him. Nothing more to say when Sonic's other arm wraps around him tighter, pinned under him and most likely numb, but Shadow knows that won't ever stop Sonic from pulling him in as close as he wants.
It's a softer, slower kiss than usual. Kittenish at times. Tentative nearly. It sends heat high in Shadow's face, up to his ears as Sonic pecks him on the nose and laughs in a warm wash of air against his snout. Sonic's freed hand moves to circle fingers over him while Sonic fucks into him slightly faster and harder. Shadow finds Sonic's mouth again, catching it with his, his neck pinching at this angle, but he doesn't care as he pants into Sonic's mouth and keeps searching for more. With a groan of his own, they separate. Spit stuck between them. And Shadow digs his fingers into the sheets as Sonic hooks a leg under his and pushes it up and wider and thrusts steadily.
Shadow's back arches at the sudden sensation. Head curved forward in a way it doesn't want to be, careful not to jab Sonic behind him with his quills as Shadow shoves his snout deeper into the pillow under his face and muffles every sound he's trying not to make. He bites at the case and stuffing until it goes damp with drool. Until he tears at it with clenched teeth. And Sonic's fingers work over him even quicker all the while, Sonic’s hips grinding into his ass in firmer ruts. Heat skitters in his gut, rapidly, too quickly.
There's no time for it to build. It hits him like a slap to the snout. Shadow hisses as he comes suddenly, knees smacking closed, his thighs trembling shut around Sonic's hand.
Sonic takes the opportunity to wrap both his arms around Shadow’s stomach and leverage himself up into Shadow in a near desperate rhythm. Frantic huffs bleeding into the back of Shadow's neck.
Shadow drifts along with it. Hazily. Staring at the other bed in the attic, the stairs, the haphazard decor. Clarity settles back between his ears slowly. He can hear the front door open in the distance downstairs. Footsteps. Talking. Bags rustling. There's a videogame running on the screen in the corner of the attic, intended to muffle the sound of the bed squeaking and the frame thumping. Their panted breaths. He wonders if they can still hear this. If he wants them to hear it. The murmurs grow closer. The TV in the living room comes on and he hears the familiar jingle of Speed from it. Sonic must've left the VHS in again. Typical.
Sonic groans into the back of his neck.
And Shadow hears footsteps on the stairs.
"Sonic—"
Sonic's arms squeeze around him reflexively at hearing his own name. A heated muzzle shoves into the side of Shadow’s throat with a grunted gasp and Sonic grinds up into him desperately, his feet scrabbling at the sheets. Shadow’s name gets whined out through Sonic's teeth, high and loud as Sonic's cock throbs inside him. As Sonic comes and Shadow relaxes into the feeling of it.
For a moment, he forgets what he was even listening for, until the footsteps reach the top of the attic stairs.
"Knuckles is—"
Sonic shoots up behind him. He tenses at the feeling as Sonic slips out abruptly. And before he can push himself to his feet, there's a sheet thrown over him in a whirl. A hurried, pretend you're asleep, before he hears Sonic's rapid steps and the dry cough of a beanbag as Sonic throws himself into one.
The familiar stomp of Knuckles’ shoes strike the wood flooring a fraction of a second later.
Shadow almost sneers. It's a weak attempt at covering this up considering they're both supposed to be playing the racing game across the room. Sonic had set it up to be in two-player mode for a reason.
"Hey, Knuckles, what's, uh—" Shadow can almost see the way Sonic's eyes dart towards him hidden on the bed as he flounders. “Hanging?” Sonic's voice turns up too high at the end, like even he knows this is a pitiful attempt at being nonchalant.
The echidna audibly sniffs. Loudly. Pointedly.
Shadow's ears flick back tightly. He knows Knuckles sense of smell is far more heightened than Sonic's, maybe the fox’s as well.
"You were mating with the Space Alien again," Knuckles says.
"I—" Sonic laughs uneasily. "Whaaat? Noo. Maybe I was just, y' know…" he hears Sonic make a motion, presumably with his fist, presumably to symbolize jerking off. Like an imbecile. "But Shadow's been dead asleep over there for a while."
Shadow scowls at the scant filter of light through the bedsheets on top of him.
"You still have not told the Lord of Donuts or the Pretzel Woman you are courting him yet."
"Yeah, well, I don't have to."
"It is tradition for a warrior to ask for the blessing of their elders to pursue a courtship with another."
"We're not echidnas, dude," Sonic retorts. "And this is the Wachowski household. And I was kinda the first fuzzy, little guy in it, so I think if anyone's stupid ‘rules’ apply here, it'd be mine.”
Knuckles huffs and Shadow can practically see the way the echidna’s arms would cross, his brow creased heavily.
“You're not gonna tell them, are you?” Sonic asks, quieter.
“It is not my place to do so.”
Sonic lets out a relieved whoosh of air. “Whew, okay. You really had me there for a sec, I—”
Heavy footsteps suddenly grow closer.
“Hey, hey,” Sonic scrambles towards him in tandem. “Knux, buddy, what're you doing?”
The sheet is wrenched off of him in one go and Shadow levels the echidna staring down at him with a snarl of his own, already halfway to his his knees in the rumpled bed sheets, fist poised to strike. It's Sonic who barrels into him and drags him back farther into the bed and away from the echidna glaring at him.
“Space Alien—”
“He has a name, dude!”
“—what are your intentions with the puny hedgehog?”
“...’puny’?” Sonic mutters incredulously behind him.
There's still drying cum staining his crotch and thighs, a concentrated mess of slick and otherwise smeared in the sheets that he's sure is more than visible now. Sonic will have to scrub them again. The fool can't be bothered to ever think ahead long enough to lay down a towel half the time, despite him repeatedly reminding the hedgehog to do so.
Shadow looks pointedly between the cum on him and Knuckles, his lip lifted in a silent snarl. He shouldn't have to spell it out for the thick-headed oaf. It's more than obvious.
“Well?” Knuckles tones, leaning closer.
“That's none of your business.”
In answer, Knuckles grabs him by the shoulder and Shadow feels more than he sees Sonic reach around him to grasp Knuckles’ forearm in a silent warning as well. Caged between the two, Shadow can feel the heat from both of them, their hard breaths ruffling his fur and quills. Something about it sends the fur along his spine on end.
“If you hurt Sonic, I will make your end an unpleasant one,” Knuckles says, low and promising.
Sonic laughs far too loudly at that, an uncharacteristic note of nervousness to it as he abandons his hold on Knuckles’ arm to wrap his arms fully around Shadow instead. Holding him from behind, Sonic rests his chin on his shoulder. With his back quills tensed out from Knuckles' continued stare down, Shadow can feel the way Sonic flinches as they dig into his chest, but the hedgehog refuses to budge.
Stubborn. Idiotic. With some point to prove here that Shadow hardly understands.
“Hurt me?” Sonic snorts. “Okay, pal. Have you met me? Actually, wait, have you met him? This guy wouldn't hurt a fly! He's like a total softy deep down in there. Like, deep-deep down, but it's there.”
Knuckles hums skeptically. Seemingly unconvinced.
Sonic unravels himself from him and shifts so that he's settled beside him instead, their hips and legs notching with one another like second nature as Sonic keeps one arm slung around him. Presumably in case Sonic has to drag him away from the echidna again. Not that Shadow has any intentions to harm Knuckles. Not unless he's been given reason to.
“I will be ‘keeping my eye upon you’ as the Lord of Donuts says.”
“Cool, awesome. Great, even.” Sonic gives Knuckles a thumbs up. “As much as I'm super stoked you've got my back, buddy, I also really need to get us into the shower before Maddie sees us, so—” Sonic makes a vague motion with his hand. “Do you mind…?”
Knuckles shoots him one final look before retreating down the stairs with heavy steps.
Sonic sighs, sagging against his side with a loud sigh. “Sorry about that.”
He's heard Sonic describe the echidna and fox as his best friends before. Brothers as well. The other two describe Sonic similarly in kind. He imagines that if he didn't quite grasp the intentions of what someone wanted from Maria, he may have behaved the same way.
“He gets a little overprotective sometimes,” Sonic continues, sliding out of bed and grabbing him by the hand. “C'mon, let's getcha scrubbed up. You'll have to blip out from the bathroom after, but at least you'll be clean.”
Shadow waits for Sonic to zip down the stairs and call out to the house that he's going to use the shower in a blur that's thankfully far too fast to make out what's on him. He teleports himself into the bathroom once he hears the shower start, removes his shoes and gloves and socks, and pushes the curtain aside as he steps inside. It's a routine they've done enough times to perfect it by now.
Under the spray, Sonic hums to himself, scrubbing at his quills and Shadow waits for his turn to be under it. He frowns at the tiles. He's unsure what to make of Knuckles knowing what they've been up to. Or Tails for that matter. Sonic seems unbothered, and yet…he can't rid himself of the feeling now that it's there. Can't swallow back the bile in his throat. Like his stomach can no longer sit still. It's an entirely foreign sensation as Sonic cracks an eye open, clingy suds running down the curve of his muzzle, and then smiles at him.
Shadow’s heart stutters in his chest—and he no longer knows why.
His official first day and night in the charge of the Wachowski household is spent burrowed under the blankets of his new sleeping arrangement.
Maddie returns periodically. Tom as well. As if they're taking shifts to check on him. They offer food. Water. Entertainment. The same way they did before. He refuses it all. They don't touch him. They don't force him out of bed or strap wires and nodes to him or drag him onto the running track when he doesn't cooperate. A plate is left at the foot of his bed the fourth time Maddie checks on him, a simple meal of buttered toast and a few apple slices left on it. He eats the apples and leaves the toast behind. A sickly feeling swarms him at the yeast-y stench the bread leaves behind. Like something rotting that isn't. Bad breath, aged. Sour.
It's when the faintest bit of light breaks through the window and filters through the bed sheets pulled over his snout, that he hears the door open once more. The curtains rattle as they're pulled shut. Blissful darkness chews up the room once more. A weight settles on the bed and Shadow stiffens. His chest clenches so hard and so quickly he can no longer tell if it's anticipation or fear. He waits regardless. For whatever this new inevitably may bring him.
“I had a few questions. If you're willing to answer them,” Maddie says. Another light pressure occurs on top of the comforter, closer to him.
He can only assume it's her hand. The urge to reach out for it overwhelms him. Shadow curls up slightly tighter instead.
“You can tell me to take a hike if you don't want to answer any of these. I know you're trying to get some rest right now.” Maddie sighs. Papers rustle, presumably in her lap. “I just need to address this one sooner rather than later.”
Shadow peeks out from under the blankets, unfurling enough to look at her, his ears perked forward. Maddie tries to school her expression, keeping it as neutral as she can, but he doesn't miss the way she almost startles. Maria always told him his eyes glow in the dark. He can only assume they're doing the same here. That Maddie finds them, him, unnerving in some way.
“Did they ever—” Maddie clears her throat. “Sorry.” Maddie smiles like it pains her, the nightlight illuminating her oddly. “Determine your reproductive capabilities at all?”
Shadow looks skeptically at her papers. “I’m infertile.”
“Right, of course.” Maddie nods, and then pulls a face like she's eaten something slightly bad. “But did they ever test your compatibility with other, you know…space hedgehogs? Specifically.”
There had been other specimens in the lab. On the base. But none like him. Nothing like Sonic or the fox or the echidna either. He'd been singularly alone in that regard. Even if he had gotten along with the lab rats and the lab mutts. They all had a mutual understanding of their purpose inside their cages. One that made sense. Implicitly.
“No,” he answers, finally. Once he realizes she's waiting for him to speak and that his silence isn't answer enough for her.
“Great,” she says, far less enthusiastically than the word warrants. “I might need to borrow you for a sec then. Just to check something.”
She leads him into the bathroom across the hall. And, if she hadn't explained her intentions the whole way, he may have misread them. But she makes it more than clear she needs him to do a specific test for her. Two times, maybe more. That she'll need to conduct blood tests as well, a scan later to be sure. Doubly so. Just in case, is the words she uses.
“I'm honestly not even sure these’ll work with—” Maddie gestures at him with the box in her hands. Another one already settled on the sink counter. “Let’s just say you're the first of the boys to even have this kind of thing be a possibility. Or, a maybe at least.”
Shadow looks at the box on the counter. Pregnancy test isn't hard to make out. He looks back at her flatly. “I lack a regular menstrual cycle or an estrus one. This is a redundant test.”
More accurately, the Professor had been unable to determine or track one. He can only assume that reality hasn't changed. Nor does it matter.
"Well, your anatomy isn't really like anything I've ever worked with before. So, I just wanna be sure. Do you know if you can produce viable gametes…" Maddie rolls her hand, smiling awkwardly. “Or anything at all really?”
"No." He's not sure how or why he'd know that at all. Most of the testing the scientists conducted was on his energy expenditure and abilities. Only the Professor ever utilized the rest of him.
She holds the box in her hand out towards him. "Maybe we do a test just in case. Just to say we did it."
He takes it. He knows there's no point in refusing anyway.
The procedure is a slightly awkward affair.
One he conducts clinically while Maddie waits outside the door. Something she insisted on the moment he clambered onto the toilet and she put her hands up, a sharp woah, okay, leaving her as she backed out of the door. He's not sure why she even cares. She's a doctor to the animal species on this planet. She conducted his medical exam upon his arrival with Stone the first time the man brought him to their house. She's seen all of him and more. She's probably seen worse. Grosser.
Things more disgusting than him…
He waits for the test to develop. Crouched beside the sink counter. Unsure where to place himself while he waits for this to be over.
"Stone…” she starts through the door, slightly muffled. “Did he ever...?"
He sighs sharply, glaring at the tiles. "I asked him to have sex with me."
"And he agreed? Even though you're—" Maddie pauses pointedly. Something she's done frequently. “You.”
His teeth clench hard enough that he hears the blood rush in his ears. "I’m not a child."
He feels like a broken record. Like one of the vinyls Maria tossed after the needle kept getting stuck in one particular groove and only spat warped static.
“Okay…" Maddie says.
Quietly. Nearly defeated. In a way that makes the fur stand on his nape. That turns his stomach. Misguided pity is a sour taste going down. Pathetic, to think that she believes a human could hurt him. Any of them. Sonic or the others. That any of this could ever hurt him. That's he's—
A sharp beep startles him. Sends his quills flaring out before he smooths them down with an annoyed huff.
“Can I come in?” Maddie asks.
She doesn't need to ask. There's no point in it. He says yes anyway. Because he knows it's what she wants to hear from him. Because he knows she won't do anything if he doesn't conduct himself how she expects him to.
Maddie checks the first test and then the second one and sighs loudly. “Okay, all right. At least we don't have to deal with that on top of everything else.” She trashes them in the bin beside the toilet and washes her hands methodically, in a way he's sure she's done a thousand times after handling her patients. Somehow it still stings in a way he can't decipher. “We'll keep an eye on you just in case, though. I don't exactly want to be jumpscared here with another one of you—and I don't really think you do either.” She falters, her eyes skipping to him when he doesn't answer. “Right…?”
“No.” It's what she wants to hear, so he says it.
He stares at the waste bin and when Maddie speaks again he hardly hears her. A short hum disrupts her a moment later. Maddie picks up her phone with a curse and a be right back as she leaves. The door shuts softly behind her. With a brief glance towards it, Shadow puts a tentative hand over his stomach.
He thinks about it, briefly. If he could. If he'd even want to be. If he even had the choice. It's not a thought he's had before. Not even one he's ever considered either. Perhaps it would've only been an inconvenience between him and Sonic. The most he knows about babies is from Maria's TV shows, what Maria herself told him, all only in passing and entirely in the realm of fiction. Fantasy. Baby toys she joked about and never played with anymore. A baby cousin she'd met once…
The Professor never told him much about the matter. He’s unsure what function one would supply regardless. Perhaps it'd merely become an obstacle, something standing between him and how they can use him. Shadow looks down at the bin and the sticks thrown into it, their negative lines glaring back at him.
Perhaps it'd only ever get in his way.
Later that night, when the apple slices from earlier prove to be inadequate. When the regular meals he's had at Stone's and the meals he's shared in the Wachowski home have shaped his appetite for the worse, he teleports outside of his bedroom door. Without his shoes, he moves silently through the house. Shadow strays close to the dark that's wrapped itself in bends about every corner and avoids the silvery strings of moonlight spilling through the windows in long fingers. It makes the house seem otherworldly. In the military base there had been two, simple states to the endless, looping maze of it. Dark and light. Without windows, there was hardly ever an in-between.
Now he can't help but envy the simplicity of it.
It's loathsome, how his body betrays him here. Hunger a gnawing pang he's not used to. Maddie had told him the kitchen was available to him whenever he needed it, all of their food stored within it as well. It's late. The others should be asleep by now. Sonic amongst them. He's unsure if he's meant to avoid running into him or not, but he can only assume Tom and Maddie's attempt to isolate them from one another would signify as much.
In the kitchen, he attempts to find what familiar food he can. What Stone usually prepared for him was adequate. He hadn't minded any of the meals the man had made, but he doesn't see anything remotely similar in the fridge. He closes the refrigerator door once the light becomes too bright. When he has to squint to see through it. He heads for the dry foods Tom showed him the first time he visited their home. Boxes of things. Somewhat familiar. He remembers Maria eating cereal. Milk. In the early hours, when morning still felt like night despite the hard fluorescence overhead.
Shadow teleports onto the counter to reach the cabinets and bring what he needs down to his own level. The cereal tinks softly against the bowl. Unless he wants to open the fridge again, he'll have to eat it dry. Crouched on the countertop, Shadow manages to finish putting together his meal and carries it down to the floor where he sits against the sink cabinet and eats methodically. Quietly chewing, he rolls it between his teeth and lets it turn soft so that it doesn't crunch, and only swallows when he's sure it won't be heard.
His ear twitches towards the living room after a moment. To the quiet hum of the TV he somehow missed before. The even quieter voices muffled slightly beneath it.
"I should've noticed it sooner."
"I know." Tom says, like he's repeating himself for the fifth time
Maddie makes a frustrated sound in return. "Why didn't I see it?"
"Hey, no. Don't do that to yourself. You did what you could, we're not mind readers here."
"I went back and looked at all the notes I took after his first exam here and it's—" She pauses and Shadow hears the sound of fabric on fabric, like she's turning on the couch, pulling her legs up onto it the way he's seen her do whenever they've all watched a film together. "It's all right there, Tom! I just didn't think anything of it at the time. He sat there and he didn't even flinch or anything. He barely even reacted to any of it. He just…stared."
"Okay, but plenty of kids do that with doctor's visits. So, that's not that unusual."
"He had bruising, Tom."
"Bruising, like…?"
"In his mouth. Like up here, all the way—" Shadow can only assume she's gesturing to something as it goes quiet. "I should've known sooner…I don't know why I didn't see it."
She'd examined him thoroughly the day Stone first dropped him off. Worried about how he was healing. How falling from space might've affected him. It was only a short time after Stone and his arrangement started. He hadn't realized any of it could bruise him. He only ever assumed he was incapable of being hurt, that none of it could ever leave a mark. Never one that would last anyway.
"Look, you're just gonna run yourself ragged with this. We know now, and that's gotta count for something, right?"
"Yeah," Maddie says quietly. "I guess it does."
"This whole parenting thing's getting a lot more complicated than I thought it'd be," Tom mutters.
She laughs wryly. "I also didn't expect it to involve fuzzy, space critters, but here we are."
"I really think we'd kill it at PTA meetings, just saying." Tom says.
"Well, Green Hills High might be an option, if you go and talk to them about that little privacy problem first."
"Hey, it's in the works, all right. I've been dropping off coffee to the principal at least twice a week. I think he's really starting to come around to it."
"Mmhmm," Maddie hums skeptically.
"Do you really think Sonic's gonna wanna sit in a classroom all day?" Tom asks.
"God no. But it'd at least be an option. Tails definitely will. Maybe Knuckles."
"You think Shadow would go eventually?"
"I…" Maddie falters. "I don't know."
"Yeah, you're right," Tom sighs. "I guess it's more like a 'should he’?"
"I really don't want to trap him in here, but I also don't know what could happen if he—" Maddie pauses. "If someone, you know…took advantage of the situation and we didn't know about it."
"Right," Tom breathes out heavily. "yeah."
"Ugh, I don't know if we're even doing the right thing here. He hasn't even left his room, what if we're just making this worse, what if he's—"
"Woah! Okay. Look, I get it, but he's probably just tired for one thing, and two would you rather send him back there?"
"No," Maddie concedes.
"Exactly. This is the best fit we've got for him until we figure something else out."
"Maybe you're right," Maddie says.
"Well, I wouldn't be a Wachowski if I wasn't."
Maddie snorts. "Okay, hotshot."
"Taking one right out of Sonic's book there, are we?" Tom teases.
"Don't remind me," Maddie groans. "I've thought about hiding that tape at least twelve times."
"Guess it makes sense he'd latch onto something called 'Speed', though. It'd be kinda weird if he was really into 'Slow'."
"Ignoring that absolutely horrible excuse of a pun—"
"What? C'mon."
"Doesn't Shadow sound a little bit like Jack Tavern?" Maddie asks.
"Actually, now that you mention it, maybe a little bit..." Tom makes a considering sound. "Weird."
Shadow retreats back to his room once he hears them get up from the couch. He cleans up his impromptu dinner and the kitchen behind himself in a blink. He doesn't leave a trace behind. As if he was never there in the first place. Never existed at all.
And for a moment, when he's lingered in the doorway of his bedroom, the knob cold in his fist, he thinks he feels the presence of someone else standing down the hall behind him. It's familiar. The charge of chaos energy gathered softly in the air, like potential, and when Shadow inhales, he smells Sonic—a curl of ozone and tinny earth. The fur on his nape stands on end. A familiar anticipation runs hot in his belly.
When Shadow looks behind him, there's no one there.
He's had a few close calls of getting spotted, sure. But he's pretty sure Shadow hasn't seen him yet.
Even now, he's got one ear tilted towards Shadow's room, just in case the guy decides to wake up and leave it again. Not that he's done that a lot at all. Much, really. It'd be a little worrying, if he wasn't also trying to play see you later with the guy right now.
Sonic digs his thumb into the photo he's holding. His face burns hot. He's not even sure what it is anymore that's got him so tangled up. What's winning out here. Embarrassment (at himself), disgust (with himself), or how much he kinda, sorta also hates himself a whole lot right now.
The conversation plays over and over in his head. Like a bad song. Like something horribly catchy. Maddie had sat him at the dining table the second he'd gotten back from his run that night with Tails and Knuckles. She'd said he wasn't in trouble, that they needed to talk, which usually means he's sort of in trouble anyway. He'd laughed it off. Joked around. Said something super-duper corny to ease the tension, like usual.
She hadn't laughed. She'd barely even looked at him, constantly checking her phone instead. Clearly worried and clearly distracted, like that time Ozzy came down with something bad enough to land him at her vet clinic for an operation. Tom had rolled in off a late shift, still in uniform, and sat next to Maddie across the table. And that's when he knew he had to be in trouble for something. Especially when Tom didn't respond to any of his quips. To anything really. Instead, Tom looked a little bit like he might throw up or something. Like he'd seen a ghost and was still all rattled by it.
It started out good. Great even. They'd said Shadow was going to be staying in the house for a while. Indefinitely maybe. Which, exciting, cool, awesome! He super loved that part of the equation. But Tom and Maddie shared a long look before Tom opened the flood gates with a hey, bud, is there anything you wanted to tell us? About Shadow, maybe?
Like an idiot, he'd said nope. Laughed. Waved them off. Rattled something out about how they better find somewhere else for Shadow to sleep besides the attic, considering it's a bit of a full house now.
He told us, Maddie had said. Evenly. Quick. Like ripping off a bandaid.
And he'd fallen against the chair back with a whoosh of air out of his mouth, chest aching like the tail end of a sucker punch.
“What?”
“You could've come to us, Sonic. We wouldn't have been mad at either of you, I would've definitely told you to think about it a little more, wait til you're both ready for that kind of thing, to be safe about it, but—”
“Woah, woah, woah! Hold up a sec.” He puts his hands up in time out motion. “What exactly did Shadow tell you?”
And then, it'd spiraled out from there.
He'd spent half the conversation hot in the face and wishing he could disappear until the next bomb Tom dropped on him. A big one. Like a tactical nuke of a thing to say to someone.
It started out innocuous enough. That Shadow had left during the movie earlier. Which, yeah, he noticed, but it was during his top ten favorite scenes and he assumed the guy just had to take a leak or something. But, apparently, Shadow had tried to do something he shouldn't have. Like something he seriously shouldn't have. And that—professor, doctor, weirdo whatever—Gerald Robotnik was genuinely way, way worse than he ever thought the guy could be.
The nausea was the first part that hit. The second was remembering everything he ever did with Shadow all at once. Like some horrific, nightmare movie starring himself as the horny, idiot, douchebag who missed literally every single sign and then some. Because fuck. Fuck? What the—
Sonic sighs.
He rubs his thumb over the half of the photo he's folded over so only Shadow is visible at the moment. He's not sure he can stomach the other half right now, not when she feels like an accusation or something.
And he feels a little bad about holding onto this thing ever since he snagged it from the base and stuffed it in his quills, but Shadow looks so different in this picture it almost hurts. Shadow's still kind of unsure, yeah. A little aloof, awkward maybe, but his eyes feel a little brighter. Happier. Maybe. Probably because of who's next to him, though. And Maria looks nice. Kind.
He frowns.
Maria also definitely didn't try to fuck Shadow, so maybe she's winning all kinds of awards here for that…
The other half of the couch dips and Sonic stuffs the photo back into his quills without looking over. He only knows it's Tom because he heard his walk, the little signature heel scuff on one side. Like he's still favoring it. Like sometimes he’s still hurting.
The guilt settles thick in his throat. He's zero for three on not letting the people he loves get hurt here, and the list just keeps getting longer and longer.
“Hey, bud.”
Sonic draws his knees up onto the couch and rests his snout on them. Face partially hidden away from Tom's scrutiny.
“Yeah,” Tom says. “One of those days?”
“You have no idea,” Sonic drawls sarcastically, full well knowing Tom has every single idea of everything that's going on by now.
“Hit me with it then.”
Sonic grimaces, his quills flaring uncertainly at the offer. “Yeah? Where should I start?” He laughs through his teeth, swiping at his face. “With the fact I'm the idiot who shoulda thought with my head instead of, y’know—” He gestures at his lap. “Or that he has every reason to seriously hate my guts forever, and I…” He draws his legs in tighter against himself, his chest aching and aching. “I thought he liked me or something. I dunno…not like it matters now.”
Tom sighs.
Sonic turns towards Tom at that, gesturing sharply. “And I know, okay! I know I screwed this up! I, like, really messed this up! And you're gonna do your whole Donut Lord thing where you bring up your dad and something he told you and it's supposed to make me feel better or whatever. But I don't—I don't think I can fix this one.” Sonic's face stings all over, his eyes burn hot. “I think I really hurt him.”
“You think you did?”
No.
He's scared he did. He's freaking terrified. He's not even sure if he did. Or didn't. He's not really sure of anything much anymore, but he's pretty sure he did something here that he can't take back. That he ruined everything. That Shadow's only ever gonna look at him and see his stupid, fucked up dad or something, because he couldn't keep his dick in his p—
“Hey.” Tom's hand clasps his shoulder. “Bud, breathe.”
He shrugs off Tom's grip. “I am breathing! I'm—!” Sonic makes a frustrated sound, face buried in his hands before he drops them. “I'm fine, okay? Whatever. Forget it.”
When he goes to slip off the couch, Tom snags his arm.
“Wait a sec, all right,” Tom says. “Let's talk about this.”
He yanks out of Tom's hold with a frown. “Yeah? What's that gonna do?”
“Okay, Mr. Teenage Attitude,” Tom quips, the way he usually does when he's trying to defuse him.
“You're the one cornerin’ me here!”
“Because I know you're gonna take off and run yourself into the ground here. And I'd rather—” Tom makes a snipping motion. “Nip this in the bud while we can.”
“What’s there to even talk about? This one's pretty cut ‘n dry, isn't it?”
“You're scared you hurt him, right?"
Sonic deflates at that, shrinking back down as he sits on the couch again. “Yeah…”
“And you might've. I can't say you didn't and I can't speak for Shadow here either.”
His ears press back tightly.
“That doesn't mean you can't talk to him about it.”
Sonic glances at Tom from the corner of his eyes, a miserable feeling pricking his fur.
“Look, you've been avoiding the guy, I get that. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably do the same,” Tom says. “But you both live in this house, you're going to have to cross paths eventually. You can't dodge him forever, super speed or not.”
“I can try,” Sonic mutters.
“Call me selfish, but I'd like to have dinners where we all eat at the same table instead of whatever group a and group b thing we're doing right now. It certainly makes clean-up easier.”
“Sorry I'm totally inconveniencing your dish duties.”
Tom makes a noise between a sigh and a frustrated sound. And it's something he's getting really used to hearing lately considering how often it's happened the past day or two. “Look, just try and talk to him, okay? And if you need one of us there to mediate, we're all ears. Got it?”
Sonic's face scrunches up. “Yeah, please, no.”
“It’s really no skin off my teeth here. Just, uh, maybe no funny business.”
“Trust me, that's—” Sonic waves a hand limply. “Pretty sure that ship has sailed and sunk. Titanic style and everything...”
And it's still super mega weird in a way, knowing that Tom and Maddie know what he's been up to. He's pretty sure it's just as awkward for them considering the way the twenty questions game of it panned out at the table too. He knows they weren't oblivious to his search history, even before Shadow came into the picture. He was just glad they never really said anything about it.
After a beat of silence, Tom pats his back, careful of his quills. “All right, good talk.”
Sonic snorts. “You're kinda bad at this.”
“Mirrors calling your name in neon, pal,” Tom deadpans.
“Hey!”
Tom raises his hands like he's innocent, purposely a bit of a goofball about it. It gets them both laughing regardless. And when Tom offers to heat up leftovers for him, he says, okay, a little softer than he means to and then abruptly realizes he hasn't exactly eaten all day. Much in the past few, honestly.
Settled at the dining table, Sonic plucks the old photo out of his quills and carefully unfolds it this time. He looks between Maria and Shadow and then frowns.
Tom sets a plate down in front of him, and he realizes he still doesn't have it in him to eat a lukewarm, slightly limp-bunned chili dog right now. Somehow. An impossible feat, really. He stares at Maria in the picture and he can't stop wondering if she ever figured it out. If she ever tried to do anything about it. Even worse, he can't help but wonder if she got hurt too. He feels ill for even considering it. Like there's something wrong with him for ever thinking that at all.
Tom gently snags the photo with two fingers and turns it towards himself as he sits down beside him. “That’s her?”
“Yeah.”
Tom nudges it back towards him. “Guess we got her to thank for that whole makeover with the moon, huh?”
“What?” Sonic coughs out a laugh despite himself, startled. “C'mon, dude, don't joke about that!”
“Okay, so this is where we draw the line?” Tom says. “All right, I get it.” Tom leans back in his chair with a put-on smile, arms crossed.
Sonic drags his plate closer and picks over the edge of the bun. He mashes a piece of it between his fingers, rolls it around until it's a little ball of old dough and then drops it. He glances at Maria again, this time her stare feels even worse somehow. “Do you think she knew..?”
Tom scrubs at his face for a moment and then drops it with a sigh. It's odd, he thinks, the way Tom doesn't really look at him. “Maybe. Probably not. Not about that at least. Not unless he told her. It seems like it'd be obvious somehow, sure. But it's, uh—” Tom trails off, his usual smile falling until it's an uncomfortable grimace. “It's not.”
Sonic shifts his plate back and forth with his fingers, listens to the soft grind of ceramic on the wood and knows he should put a mat under it, that Maddie wouldn't want him scuffing the table up. He keeps doing it instead. His chest hurts more than he thought it ever could.
“He's got a lot of stuff he's carrying with him, but he's not the only one here, you know,” Tom says. “Ten years is a long time to be alone out there…”
“What? No.” Sonic smiles over at Tom and it feels wrong somehow. “I barely even noticed it! Like they say, time flies.”
“Right.”
Tom's eyes never leave him and Sonic hunches slightly. “What?” he mutters when it continues on and on, his face hotter than ever at the scrutiny.
“I can't blame you for latchin' onto the first crush you've ever had like this. For what it's worth, sometimes you seemed happier for it. Both of you. I don't know…” Tom gestures vaguely. “Maybe I'm getting too old for this and just seeing things here, but I really think he liked you more than you think.”
His ears perk forward. He glances at Maria and Shadow in tombed technicolor. Tom only ever saw him and Shadow doing the whole ‘friendly hedge-bros’ routine together. The best of buds stuff. Maybe he was a little touchy feely at times, but he's like that with everyone in the house. Tom never saw the other stuff.
And maybe a part of him noticed it, too. The way Shadow was a little different on the days they never did anything more than game or watch movies or help out in the kitchen together. That even after they'd had sex, when they cuddled or washed down in the bath or the shower, when he groomed Shadow's quills and fur for him, and when Shadow returned the favor in kind—there was a different sort of vibe to Shadow. Something a little softer around the edges…
Sonic folds the corner of the photo under his fingers, flips it back and forth and looks at the way Shadow's smiling in the picture and can't help but smile a little too. When Tom leaves him be, he finally lets his eyes burn hot all the way. He lets his vision swim and blur. Feels that needle-prick feeling in his chest rise up to his throat until it’s spilling over quietly. Until he buries his face in his arms on the table and thinks about Longclaw, about sunflowers and checkered grass, and how he hates that he can't stop wishing she was still here sometimes, so he could ask her if he's doing the right thing still.
If he's royally effed this one up too or not.
Shadow doesn't return to the unoccupied supply room for days.
The Professor stands by while the usual tests are conducted. Watching silently instead of praising him after he pushes himself past his limit during a run, after they report a higher energy output than ever. The Professor doesn't touch him or look at him as he turns from the room with the rest of the scientists and leaves him all alone in the middle of it.
Shadow thinks about the man's cock in his mouth constantly. When he's in Maria's room. When she's talking to him. When he's talking to her. When he's answering the yes or no questions the scientist give him while the nodes are stickied to his temples and chest and back. Can you feel this? A dull pressure on the underside of the foot where they've deadened one of his peripheral nerves to test the functionality and recovery rate of it. No, Shadow says, while he remembers the Professor coming down his throat.
It's all he can think about anymore. The way the Professor talked to him, during and after. Softer, slightly rasped, all praises and with none of the expectations he can't ever seem to meet anywhere else.
The Professor's undivided attention.
He still remembers when he first woke up, when the Professor looked at him like that all the time. Starry, awed, impressed by the smallest action he made. He's not sure when it tapered off. Why it hasn't come back.
At the least, he knows what he can do to try and make it happen again.
Shadow proposes the idea first this time. He gets a hand on his ear for it. A firm reprimand. A nervous, furtive look around before the Professor smiles thinly. Tells Shadow to follow him. Back to the room. Back to where it started. And it feels right. It is right. It scratches down his spine, all the way to his flicking tail as he finally has the Professor's eyes on himself and only him.
And he chokes like before. And he gags. And he tries harder; tears involuntarily tracked on his snout and spit everywhere down his chin and throat. But he's good at this. The Professor tells him as much. Reminds him of that fact every second of every moment he fucks himself into his mouth and groans through his teeth.
He tells Shadow the same exact words the next time they're alone again. When Maria’s away, visiting her parents, in a world he can't ever reach, a world he probably never will—and he's in their blanket fort, on his back, the Professor's fingers knuckle deep inside of him as he stares at the star lights snagged in the blankets overhead and thinks about a sky he's never seen and pushes himself back into the feeling. Good boy, good boy…my boy.
He doesn't expect it when the Professor suddenly leaves him empty. The words ringing in his ears. Bile high in his throat.
When the Professor grabs him by his scruff and turns him over, he holds onto the pillow Maria said was his after they built it together. After she suggested the idea, stating the beds were too boring. After they slept side by side in it, curled up together. He whines into it now, teeth clenched into the fabric until he comes up for air and smears his face against it when it hurts, hurts, hurts. Feverishly, Shadow listens to the way the Professor pants his name and wants him and loves him like this, and he knows it's worth it.
It'll always be worth it.
The Professor's hand tightens over the back of his neck, pushes him down harder—smothers him under himself.
This will always be worth it.
Shadow can't stop thinking about the feeling in the hallway. Sonic. He knows Sonic had been there at the end of it, that the other hedgehog had fled the moment he turned around to check.
It is a trend that continues over the next few days.
Sonic haunts the corners of the Wachowski home, and Shadow finds himself stumbling after any sign of Sonic throughout it. Maddie and Tom seem glad every time he leaves his room to search for him, even if they don't know the reasoning for it. It quickly turns disappointed when he doesn't join them for movies or outings or the other innocuous activities they try to rope him into.
Tom's the one who tells Maddie it's probably for the best anyway, that Shadow should lay low considering Stone's gone off the map since they took Shadow in fully. Shadow knows Stone isn't a threat. It merely means the man's found some kind of sign of the Doctor that he's been waiting for.
Once more, he finds that he and Stone have something in common here.
And any time Shadow so much as thinks he's caught a glimpse of Sonic anywhere in the house, the hedgehog is already gone by the time he takes a second glance in order to be sure. The smell of earth-y loam and petrichor lingers, though. The thrum of energy that he can only ever attribute to Sonic lingers like an after-image he can nearly touch.
He settles into the Wachowski household fitfully as a result, retreating back into his room when his attempts prove fruitless. When the others seem uncomfortable around him. When Sonic isn't there to buffer the space between them.
It only worsens when he gets in a fight with the fox after Tails attempts to repair his air shoes and breaks one of the boosters by accident. Tails had offered, citing a recording he had of Shadow's last use of them, that one seemed to lag point-zero-zero-five seconds behind the other.
All he could think about was the schematics the Professor had made of them. A gift, the Professor had called it once he completed them. Something to improve his performance on the next trial, a total elimination of friction.
Tails had come away with a bruised eye, part of his face swollen, his fur blood-smeared with a bag of frozen peas held to it later. A glare sent his way while Knuckles acted as a wall between them. Once Tom and Maddie had gotten home, they tried to figure out both sides of the story and when Shadow refused to share his side of it, Maddie had sent him to his room. Grounded. He's not even sure what the word entails, but he can only assume he's meant to stay put until they fetch him again.
With a deliberate carefulness, he sets his air shoes near the bed. He'll have to sneak into the garage with them tomorrow. Repair them himself. He can't trust the fox to do it. He can't trust Tom either. Any of them. The Professor entrusted them to him and no one else.
Shadow sits on the bed and watches the sun slowly set outside the window. He glances at the calendar Tom tacked onto the wall. It'll help you keep track of your appointment dates once they start up. Pawing at his snout and the blood still copper-y in his teeth from where the fox kicked him across the face, he grimaces.
His first 'therapy session' is quickly approaching. Somehow too close and too far away all at once. He'd rather get the endeavor over with, figure out what he will be dealing with already instead of constantly wondering what he'll need to do once he's finally there.
Tom had explained the process to him somewhat. In a brief, mostly one-sided conversation he hadn't fully understood the point of.
”I get it,” Tom says, hammer rested in his lap now that he's finished tacking up the calendar on the wall. “I had to go to therapy pretty young too. It's not fun. It's a bit weird. You don't really wanna talk about these things with someone, and definitely not some random…”
Shadow remains silent even as Tom trails off. He assumes this conversation started because he's shown a particular lack of enthusiasm towards the whole prospect so far. He's not sure why there's a need to show any kind of acknowledgement at all. It will happen regardless. Whether he wants it to or not.
Tom seems to reach for his shoulder and then second guesses himself about it a moment later. “And I’m not gonna sit here and say I totally get all of it either, but my mom wasn't exactly winning any parent of the year awards. My dad didn't really know all what was going on ‘n I didn't want my brothers to know besides what they were already dealing with—” Tom huffs, and then laughs wryly. “Let’s just say it was all kinds of a mess, but when my dad got us outta there, it was almost more confusing. It's, uh…it's hard to figure out a lot of stuff after that.” Tom smiles at him. Shadow doesn't smile back. “Hopefully this can help you sorta navigate it. Maybe. But if at any point you feel uncomfortable or don't want to continue or anything, you let us know, okay?”
Tomorrow morning.
That's when he will finally meet the scientist that the Wachowski's are loaning him to in order to conduct this so-called psychotherapy experiment. He's unsure what kind of trials and procedures such a study will entail. Maddie claims he merely has to talk to the man. He's still unsure how that is an effective method of data retrieval. Tom explained that sometimes the man will ask him questions, and that part he can understand at least.
There's a knock on his door.
Shadow's ears pin back. He says nothing and it cracks open a fraction.
“Is it okay if I come in?” Maddie asks.
Permission. He doesn't understand this. He doesn't get why they keep asking and asking and— He huffs out his answer. A grunt of air instead of an affirmation. He's found that's enough for them most the time.
Maddie pushes the door wider with her shoulder, a plate balanced in her hands. The way Knuckles is attributed to grapes, somehow he's been assigned to apples. Maybe it's because it's one of the only things he's eaten regularly in their home. She sets the plate of apple slices down beside him and he eyes it warily.
You're only here because Sonic still likes you for some reason! His ears flick down. The fox’s angry, heated words weren't untrue, even if they had been said in the thick of the moment. Even if it's because he threw the first punch and Tails was just defending himself from him. Beware the Alien Freak!
Knuckles had pulled him off Tails. Scruffed him by the back of his neck and shoved him flat onto the floor, a knee dug into his back until he stopped trying to claw out from under him. Shadow hadn't missed the way Tails looked at him. Wide-eyed, cornered, backed up against the coffee table and breathing heavy, blood smeared across his muzzle from his nose and lip. What is the meaning of this? Knuckles had asked, the baritone rumbling through him. He hadn't been able to say it. That he needed Tails to stop. That all he had left of the Professor was his shoes. That he trusted the fox to help him repair them and then Tails had hurt them. He'd—
“Tails apologized by the way.”
Shadow curls into himself.
“He can take another look at them tomorrow if—”
“No.” His heart thuds sickly. “I'll do it myself.”
Maddie sighs. “We can help you, if you need us to. If you ask. Tails can fix them, but you have to trust him to—”
“I can fix them,” he asserts. This argument is fruitless. It has no purpose. No end. He's not helpless. He's not weak. The Professor gave him the shoes and as an extension of himself, they're his to make right again.
“Shadow.”
He looks at her. He uncurls his fists when he realizes there's snaps of energy flickering across them.
“It's okay to let us help you.” Maddie holds out her hand towards him. “Sonic's needed our help before, and he's trusted us to be there for him. Sometimes you can't do everything alone.”
No.
He's not like them. He's not. He is not sixteen years old like Maddie keeps insisting, her evidence ending and beginning with the fact his and Sonic's measurements happen to be the exact same. He is not a teenager or merely a hedgehog either. He's something else.
The Professor showed him what he was, what he was capable of as well. He will never be like them. He was never meant to be like them.
He knows Maddie will not allow this to rest. He employs the only strategy he has left. He curls up away from her, quills bristled out so she can't touch him. So none of them can.
Maddie leaves the room quietly, the door softly shutting behind her without locking. He imagines it locking anyway. He sees the cramped storage room on the military base behind his eyes whenever he closes them, and this new cage whenever he opens them.
He tries to sleep.
It doesn't work. He smells him. He hears him. The Professor isn't there, but he is. He always is. Maybe that's the reason Sonic hasn't come back for him yet, because the other hedgehog can taste him there, see him in every writhe and pathetic moan.
When Shadow unfurls to look at the ceiling, he sees the faint stars again. He thinks about Maria.
Everywhere he turns, he's met with another ghost.
Once he determines sleep is fruitless, Shadow sits up. He smooths down his quills methodically and stares at the far wall, at where the small cut-out patterns from the nightlight have stretched into something unrecognizable and monstrous.
On nights like this, when he finds it difficult to sleep, he teleports to the roof. The stars, the real ones, calm him. They make it easier to close his eyes and find at least a moment of stillness sometimes.
Settled near the round attic window, Shadow frowns at the night sky high above him. Pine needles rustle on their limbs. Crickets chirrup, thin and reedy, down below in the backyard. With his legs tucked in close, he holds his hands over the inhibitors on his ankles and tries to keep them from pulling at the fur on his arms. A bad habit he's determined to break now that it's started.
His eyes drift towards the attic window before long. The absence of Sonic beside him is somehow a physical wound, one that aches the longer it stays open. Like a lifetime ago, Shadow can hardly remember how it started. In the same breath, he can never forget it.
Sonic's eyes flick down to his snout, the other hedgehog leaned in close, his game controller forgotten somewhere in his lap in his attempt to show Shadow the correct buttons to push on it.
He can feel the way Sonic's breaths suddenly quicken against his muzzle. See the moment Sonic's snout darkens under his fur. Sonic is warm. It's a notion he only realizes now that Sonic is this close to him.
“Hey, uh…?” A breathy, nervous laugh follows. A hand shifts closer to his thigh, Sonic's knuckles brushing it lightly. “Would it be super mega weird if I kissed you right now?”
Shadow shuts his eyes. He snags the fur on his wrist and pulls at it until it stings and does it again, and again. Until strands tear free and it burns. They told Sonic. Tom and Maddie both told him. All of it. Too much. Everything that doesn't matter, everything that shouldn't matter. He knows Sonic took it all the wrong way. That he assumed the Professor hurt him, did something to him somehow, the same way Tom and Maddie have concluded. That he's dirty now. Or infected. Or wrong. That there's something about him Sonic can't stand to be around any longer, and that's why Sonic hasn't—
That's why he—
His ear twitches towards the hurrying sound of familiar feet.
His heart settles somewhere in his throat. A rush of wind washes over him as familiar sneakers come to an abrupt stop beside him and he doesn't have to look up to know who they belong to. It's like he can feel him. Entangled somewhere along himself, Sonic's energy twisted irrevocably into form with his own.
When he finally cracks an eye open, Sonic is there, sitting down beside him, his legs bent close to his chest the same way his are, arms looped loosely around them. He's never seen the other hedgehog look quite so dejected before.
After a moment, Sonic reaches into his quills and, without looking at him, hands something over.
Shadow takes it after a moment.
It's folded over, only white visible on the outside, but he knows exactly what it is without seeing it. Recognizes it before he even sees her face. His own beside her. Everything goes still. All he can hear is the blood rushing in his ears, feel the sweat pricking his nape as he stares at the photograph.
“I, uh—I found it.” Sonic starts, limply. “Y’know, back at the base. I sorta took it before the whole scary, magic marble thing.”
Shadow smooths his thumbs over it. There's a surrealness to it, like wading through a dream the longer he looks at it. “Why did you keep it?”
“I dunno.” Sonic shrugs. “You looked happy, I guess…”
This is the only photo he has of her.
The only thing he has left. He tried to go back, shortly after Stone found him, only to find a crater where his home used to be. Nothing. Not even the dead.
His fingers shake. He tries not to crumple the edges as he stares at Maria’s smile. His own. I don't know what I'd do without you. He remembers the day they took the picture, Captain Walters offering to take one of them after they first built their blanket fort together over the TV. Before the Professor brought him to that extra laboratory storage space for the first time. Before all of it. Everything.
Somehow, impossibly, he looks no different in this photo than the times he's seen himself in the Wachowskis’ mirrors. Or Stone's. Or even the vague memories of needing to clean himself up in the Professor's own personal quarters, stood atop the small plastic stool in front of the sink. The one that made it so staring at himself in the mirror was unavoidable every time after.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Sonic asks quietly.
Shadow doesn't need to ask what Sonic is referring to any more than Sonic needs to elaborate. “There was no reason to."
"Yeah..." Sonic laughs bitterly, swiping at his face. He can see the aftermath of something there now, the way Sonic's muzzle is still damp in places despite the run it took to get here. He didn't think Sonic could cry. That he'd ever have a reason to. "Sure there wasn't."
Shadow frowns. "I don't see why it would've been relevant to bring up."
"Because we had sex, dude!"
He merely waits for Sonic to elaborate. Guilt a foreign, heavy feeling in his gut when Sonic's eyes shine a little too much at the corners.
"It's—" Sonic huffs. "Tom said—" Sonic scrubs at his face and snarls under his breath. "He said I could've hurt you, that you probably didn't…that you might've not understood what was going on, or that I—that I might've—"
Shadow sneers. "He entirely misunderstands our arrangement."
"But see, that's the thing! It's not an 'arrangement'! This isn't—I didn't want you to—" Sonic looks over his face in tight flicks like he's trying to find something. "It's not supposed to be just an 'exchange', or a 'science', or whatever you said it was before! It's different. It's supposed to be different…"
Shadow isn't sure what to say. He can practically taste Sonic's own guilt, even if there is nothing to be guilty of here. Even if he's a hypocrite in the matter as his own stomach twists with it.
"If I was hurting you, you would've told me, right?" Sonic says, miserably, hopefully.
There was never a need to. Sonic never did.
And it wouldn't have mattered if he was hurt regardless. Sex is entirely immaterial. As meaningful as a handshake. It is merely a tool intended to serve a purpose. The same way he is as well. It means nothing, and something that means nothing can't hurt him.
You can take more, can't you?
It can't.
Always such a perfect boy for me, aren't you, Shadow?
It…
"You didn't hurt me," Shadow says, his legs pulled in closer to himself.
Sonic breathes out a hard sigh, as if the air has left him all at once. Deflating with it, Sonic leans into his shoulder before remembering himself and pulling away just as quickly.
"Sorry," Sonic mumbles.
Sonic’s newfound unease around him chafes. It sits bitter in his mouth and grows.
"I like you a lot, I really really do, but I—" Sonic swallows thickly. "I don't think we should keep doing anything right now. Not until…" Sonic gestures at him loosely.
"Until what?"
"You see that shrink guy Maddie mentioned for starters. She said I should probably go to him too. So—" Sonic shrugs with a weak laugh. "I guess we're still in this together sorta."
Shadow clenches his teeth, hands curling into tight fists.
This is precisely what he didn't want. Without sex, Sonic has no reason to continue administrating his affections to him. To touch him and hold him and lay beside him.
He will find warmth with none of them any longer.
"We can still be friends, though, right?" Sonic asks.
His brow furrows as he looks up at Sonic.
"Unless you, uh—" Sonic laughs, hands raised. "Don't want that?"
"No," Shadow exhales too quickly and Sonic's ears flip back with a flinch. "I do."
"Really?" Sonic's voice cracks at the end and he clears his throat. "I mean, yeah, 'course you do—" Sonic jabs a thumb at his own chest, ears perked forward and smile wide. "Who doesn't wanna be best buds with Sonic T. Hedgehog?"
Friends. Not family. Not brothers. The tight feeling in his chest unravels and keeps unraveling.
His friend. Sonic is his…
Sonic grabs him into a sudden hug that he returns after a moment of hesitation, slowly, and then desperately, his fingers grasping and clinging onto whatever he can reach.
Shadow doesn't realize his eyes have gone hot until he's hiding them in Sonic's shoulder. Until he's shaking and he doesn't even know why. All he can think about is the photo. The roller skates he found. The TV. The blanket fort. The mural she drew on the wall in the cryo-tank room. To my Best Friend Shadow…Love, Maria.The remnants of her in scattered pieces. The fragmented memories that slip faster through his fingers the harder he clings to them.
She's gone. She's gone and he doesn't know what he's supposed to do now. He was never supposed to—
"I'm sorry." It leaves him raggedly. Horribly. He can feel the scratch of Maria's sweater under his snout. Smell her. Hear her. Everywhere, like she never left him. "I didn't—"
"No, hey, no it's not. It's not your fault, dude."
He shakes his head.
She's dead because of him. She's dead. All of it. Everything. It's always been because of him. Because he couldn't. Because he. It's like you were made for this. It's clearly dangerous. It'll be our little secret. It shouldn't be around her, who knows what it could do. Alien Freak. Always such a perfect boy for me, aren't you, Shadow? Aren't you? Aren't y—
"None of it's 'cause of you," Sonic says, and Shadow holds onto Sonic even harder.
You're my friend, and you can do or be anything you want. She was the only one. The only thing he had and he—
"I should have—” He bares his teeth against Sonic's fur. “I was right there, and she…"
"Don't," Sonic says firmly, drawing away from him, just enough to keep his hands on his shoulders. "Don't do that, okay? It's not gonna fix anything. You're just gonna run yourself into circles thinking like that. Trust me."
He can see it. The same loss gathered in the lines of Sonic's face. Where the pain draws deep on his muzzle.
He says the only thing he has left to offer, "I'm sorry."
“Hey!” Sonic shakes him lightly. "Stop apologizing already!"
He bites off the reflexive word. Tucks his chin down instead and tastes smoke in the back of his throat, feels the hot burn on his fur and the dusting of ash on every shallow inhale.
Sonic hangs his head with a defeated sound and then straightens back up, frowning at him. "Listen, I get it. It's stupidly easy, right? All of it being on you. That makes total sense, doesn't it? It's wayyy easier that way…but something bad happened, and she's not here anymore. That's not on you, man, that's never been on you."
His gaze flicks between Sonic's eyes, searching. "Do you believe that?"
Sonic winces. "This isn't about me, okay? It's about you, dude."
"Longclaw's death was because of the Echidnas," he recites, the same way he's always heard the story told. Sonic's gone over it enough times with him. Whenever they'd rest in his burrow, underneath Sonic's mural, the both of them stuck together with sweat and spend.
"Well," Sonic laughs bitterly, smiling but not. "Someone had to lead them there that day, so."
He's quiet for a moment. He pulls out of Sonic's grip and watches Sonic's hands fall back to his sides. "Then we're both hypocrites."
"Yeah..." Sonic huffs. “So much for that talk on the moon, huh?"
Shadow looks up at the moon in question, the lower part of it gathered like a scatter of flat, yellowed teeth.
Sonic whistles sharply. "Sure did a number on that thing."
"Yes," Shadow agrees. "I did."
"Gonna blame yourself for that one too, huh?" Sonic asks. Shadow grimaces at Sonic who knocks his palm into his shoulder playfully. "C'mon, I got a Flathead Lake with your name on it if you want one?"
It's a conversational shift that knocks him off kilter. Makes it slightly easier to gather himself.
He's heard the name before. Strange beverages that Sonic's attempted to needle him into trying since the first time he sat in that beanbag in the hedgehog’s attic. He's unsure what's so important about them.
He eyes Sonic skeptically. "Maybe."
Sonic rolls his eyes in return. "All right, cool it with the funny guy schtick, that's my thing."
He huffs. His lips twitch into a small smile. He swipes it away quickly and grimaces at the wetness on his muzzle instead. As Shadow rubs away the last of the tears, he promises himself he won't allow another weakness like it again.
Foolish. Embarrassing. He's made enough mishaps in front of the Wachowskis as is.
"Race you to the kitchen?" Sonic asks, standing up and stretching his arms over his head.
This routine is easy to fall into at least. "It'll hardly be considered a race."
"Look at you, big guy! Comin' out of your shell.”
His ears pin back. Shame burns like a hot lick on his neck. Maybe he was never in it. Or maybe he always was. Shadow turns over everything Sonic's said, everything he feels when he thinks about Sonic. It no longer lingers like he's holding a breath he can't let go. It hurts, though, parts of it. This. Something about all of it. He's unsure how to navigate this, what any of it means anymore. What they are. What he's meant to do here. What he's supposed to do.
But Sonic doesn't reach for him—not the ways he's grown used to. Maybe he still wants Sonic to, maybe he doesn't. Maybe he never did. Yes or no; he's never considered either before. Maybe he was never supposed to have that choice.
Maybe it's not something that things like him were ever supposed to consider.
You can be or do whatever you want to. His friend. All he knows is that Sonic is his…
“Guess a good cry really will do that to you.” Sonic continues, oblivious to anything else besides the opportunity for a thrill at hand.
Maybe he can relate to the singularity of that. Of the ease of being once the mind has set itself to a task.
Carefully, Shadow gets to his own feet, his muzzle gnarled into a sneer that holds no true venom behind it. “You wouldn't know."
Sonic grabs at his heart dramatically, feigning hurt with a pout. "Oo, ouch, I almost felt that one. But you're gonna have to dig a little bit deeper."
"Just start the countdown already," Shadow says, crouching down, readying himself into a stance to be able to tear down off the roof the second Sonic says go.
"What're you so bossy for?"
"Count."
"Okay, okay," Sonic grins, crouching down beside him, tapping the toe of his sneaker with his palm. "You ready to lose?"
Shadow huffs, side-eyeing Sonic pointedly. "Second place might suit you."
“Wise guy over here, eh?" The hedgehog cups his hands over his mouth and shouts, "All right, racers, on your marks! Get set!"
"What are you doing?" Shadow hisses as he looks back over his shoulder at the attic window and the occupants sound asleep somewhere behind it.
"Don't worry, they both sleep like total rocks."
Shadow stares at Sonic flatly. "Rocks don't slee—"
"And go!"
Sonic's already gone by the time he blinks.
He snarls under his breath and takes off after him. When he tries to snap on his air shoes, he realizes he's left them in his room. It's the first time he's ever run without the barrier of his shoes between the open ground and himself. It's a clumsy affair at first, one that sends him far behind Sonic until he gathers himself properly. He's sure he will blister. Bruise. Bleed. But he'll heal quickly. The pain is negligible, a background thrum amongst the feeling of mud and grass and tree roots and the slip of pine needles under his paw pads.
Shadow follows the familiar glow and pleasant hum of snapping blue energy trailing behind the other hedgehog. Their race ends up winding through the forest sprawling Green Hills, until they're whirling past the border sign beside the highway and back into Montana again as Sonic whoops loudly, still pulled ahead of him by a substantial margin.
Shadow concentrates on the energy thrumming hot in his chest, humming in the cache of his inhibitors, and catches up in a blip without breaking stride. He tackles Sonic down into the grass in the front yard. They go down messily, rolling over one another, quills ripping up clumps of sod and loam as they tumble.
Abruptly, they slam to a halt in the dirt. Him on top of Sonic, triumphant, the other hedgehog pinned down by the shoulders.
Sonic smiles up at him. "Guess you got me."
The victory burns hot in Shadow’s chest, his sides heaving with the pleasant exertion of a good run. It lights up every inch of him in a way he hasn't felt in a very long time. Sonic pants hard under him, his hands resting loosely on his waist. It's a familiar scenario by now, more than familiar. And yet, somehow, it's nothing like it ever was—
A sudden, tiny flash of light blinks in front of his snout and Shadow recoils, eyes wide, quills flexed out and bristled.
“Woah!” Sonic catches him before he can over-correct. “I got ya.”
Sonic sits up fully as Shadow settles back on his haunches in tandem with him and Shadow stares at the gathering of lights in the yard around them. Confused, mildly perturbed, as they blink in and out of existence around them. Unsure of exactly what he's seeing, he looks towards Sonic briefly and then at the lights. He's not sure what he's meant to make of the phenomenon at all.
It's mesmerizing. He's never seen anything like it. Not that he can recall. Not that he's ever known...
"Oh, hey, firefly season already? That's kinda early,” Sonic says, laughing as he gently swipes one of the points of light off a taller clump of grass and holds it gently.
Shadow looks at the light shining rhythmically from between Sonic's fingers and then up at Sonic's eyes. The slight shine of it reflects in them with each new glow. He watches as another firefly blooms beside Sonic's face, illuminating it in soft gold-fluorescence before it disappears entirely.
"They look like stars…" Shadow mutters, reaching for where the light used to be beside Sonic's muzzle and accidentally brushes his fingers lightly over Sonic's snout instead.
Sonic smiles, grabbing at his wandering hand to hold it in his. The firefly comes to life again, a few feet away. More appearing around it almost as if in reply.
"Yeah, they're pretty neat, right?” Sonic squeezes his hand and turns his palm until their fingers weave together. “Tails says it's their butts that make that glow-y thing happen."
"Why?"
Sonic blinks at him. "Whaddya mean why?"
"What's the purpose of it?" he asks, even firmer.
Sonic shrugs. "I dunno. You'd have to ask Tails to be honest. He's the one who's really into bugs for whatever reason."
"Does it not bother you, not understanding why it happens?"
"Eh, not really. It's kinda just cool. Lots of things are like that. They sorta—" Sonic opens and closes his free hand to mimic the lights. "Happen, and that's really all there is to it."
Shadow holds his hand out. He doesn't expect one of them to land on him. He expects it to be as wary and cautious of him as most organisms. It settles on his palm. A part of him expects it to be warm as it blinks brightly. Instead, it feels like hardly anything at all. Like every time it disappears again, it was never there at all.
A light shines even though the star is gone.
"I think it likes you," Sonic says mischievously. "Can't believe you've already gone and replaced me with a bug, dude.”
It flies off.
Like coming out of a stupor, Shadow realizes they never did finish their race. He looks at Sonic who gives him an incredulous look back.
“What?” Sonic asks, oblivious.
With a lunge forward, Shadow shoves Sonic off balance as he gets to his feet and heads for the patio deck and the sliding door.
"Hey!" Sonic crows from behind him. "Cheap move!"
Shadow makes it to the door first and then blinks through it. Sonic yell-whispers, cheater!, at him as he shoots a smug look over his shoulder at the hedgehog who’s forced to open it slowly so it doesn't rattle or make too much noise.
He makes it to the fridge first. He only realizes he's tracked dirt into the house when Sonic points down at his feet, mouth covered up by his hand as he tries not to laugh. With an eye roll, Shadow opens the fridge door and drags Sonic towards it by his wrist. Humming to himself under his breath, Sonic points between the different colored bottles for a moment and then finally chooses two. A green one for him, and a red one for himself.
Sonic puts a finger up to his lips when Shadow closes the fridge door with a little too much force. For a second, they pause, but no one stirs. They quietly backtrack outside the patio door Sonic left open and Sonic slowly slides it shut behind them before letting out a heavy, relieved breath.
“Woo, I'm kinda shocked Ozzy didn't wake up for all that. I swear he loves sticking his nose into everything, especially when I'm tryna sneak out,” Sonic says before clambering up onto the patio railing.
For a few steps, Sonic balances on it like he's on a tightrope, letting himself wobble a few times with a laugh before pivoting in a slow circle, one leg held out playfully. And then he sits. Feet dangling off of it, a look tossed over his shoulder as Sonic pats the space next to him and raises his own soda like a silent prompt to hop up.
Shadow teleports next to Sonic. Inwardly, he preens at the way Sonic startles and then tries to cover it up by palming at the top of his soda and yanking off the metal cap. It fizzes with a hiss. Shadow’s ear twitches towards it. In front of them, the fireflies blink in the backyard like they're trying to form constellations.
"Well, go ahead, take a sip." Sonic nudges him with his shoulder, his own bottle held to his lips.
Shadow pries off the cap easily. Unsure what to do with it, he sets it on the patio railing beside himself. When he tries it, his first thought is that it's far too sweet. Nothing quite like apples the way it claims to be on the label. More like melted candy almost, sour in an artificial way. Bubbly. The carbonation climbs up to his nose and Shadow scrunches his face at the sensation.
It's not unpleasant, but it's not something he's used to either. It reminds him of the smell and quiet hiss of the drinks Maria used to stash in her room. She always offered him some, but he refused. The Professor had made it clear that disturbing his diet would tamper with any experimental results, and would delay a number of processes as well.
It was always better to go without.
"If you could go anywhere in the world right now,” Sonic starts beside him, feet kicking back and forth against the railing. “Where would you go? And that fistfight world tour we did totally doesn't count."
In a moment, fifty years closes between them.
Maria, Sonic, the two of them smiling at him the same way, alive, here. His chest aches in a way that feels as if his breath has turned against him. Shadow blinks and it's gone, but Sonic's still there. Another firefly briefly washes Sonic's face in softened hues and he can pretend for a moment that he never left that blanket fort, that she's settled under the string lights, strumming the guitar in her lap and humming under her breath as she tries to remember the next chord to play.
"The ocean."
"You've never been?" Sonic asks, surprised.
"No." Not really. He's skated on it, obviously. Used it to reach places before. Fought on top of it with Sonic. But he's never gone to it deliberately. He's never swam or played in it the way Maria always talked about.
Shadow looks out at the lawn. He can almost feel it still. The dry rasp of concrete under his limbs, the smell of old paperbacks and the steady hum of the squatted television. The way his fur would stand on end and any time he moved too close to the screen. "I haven't."
"Okay, then let's go tomorrow! Just you 'n me. San Fran's got some cool beaches, the waters a bit cold, and the sands not exactly all sand, but it's not like I'm going in anyway, so—"
"Not tomorrow."
"Huh?"
"Ill be occupied tomorrow..." Shadow's ears press back.
Tom had explained to him that, while it'd be more convenient, an online connection could be compromised by Stone or G.U.N. That Tom had vetted and explained the situation to his therapist and that it was all clear and good to go. Discrete, apparently.
Shadow's still not sure what it will be. What he'll have to do during it. If he should prep himself beforehand or not, or merely leave it up to—
"Oh, right. Therapy." Sonic perks up beside him. "Well, we could go after? I'll go with you! Tom won't say it, but he gets all nervous waiting around too long, so he'll probably lemme take you if I ask, or he'll have me tag along at least."
He's unsure of the plausibility of that scenario considering Maddie and Tom's scrutiny of the both of them. But they also seem to trust Sonic as well. Shadow turns the glass bottle around in his hands, thumb scrubbing over the label. Depending on how tomorrow goes, perhaps he won't be too spent afterwards to do anything after. Maybe he can finally see it then. Maybe it's exactly the way Maria described it. Like it goes on forever without end.
"Okay…" he says.
Sonic hums in reply, downing his own drink before dropping it back down with a sigh and a paw swiped over his muzzle. “Awesome! It's a plan then.”
Shadow frowns despite himself. Sonic's enthusiasm is infectious in a way, but not his own. There may be others at the beach. Humans. Animals. Things that aren't like him. He's still not sure where he fits into this world. If he is able to be a part of it at all or if he'll always exist entirely separate from it. Dangerous. Monster. Alien. Freak.
"'It can get worse'," Sonic says suddenly, and when Shadow looks over at him, his eyes seem far off. Like he's remembering something. "'But it can also get better.'"
Shadow makes a questioning sound as he sets aside his partially finished drink. The overly sweet taste worsens the longer it sits on his tongue.
Sonic shrugs, close enough Sonic's shoulder nudges into his warmly. "Longclaw used to say that. Usually when I'd messed something up or, y’know, banged up my knee or whatever." Sonic laughs quietly. "She said all sorts of stuff like that, and I never—I guess I took a lot of it for granted…I'm not sure. It didn't really seem like any of it mattered at the time and then—"
"She was gone."
Sonic looks at him and smiles thinly. "Yeah."
A thigh shifts comfortably along his own and rests there without expecting anything else. Shadow finds himself staring at the fireflies again before long, watching as they come and go in scatters. Always there, even when he can't see them.
And, even if he's not sure where he fits into this world yet.
Maybe this is a start.