Disclaimer: I do not own Sega's version of Sonic the Hedgehog! But I own mine.
This story was written in 2004, the year of my eleven/twelve year old childhood, making this my very first story. It's rather out-dated, yet I have trimmed a few split ends. However, I couldn't edit this without changing the basics, so I preferred not to change them drastically, but to improve the writing style and initial depth, so bear with the story's attitude. The story's timeline is after SA2 and it's meant to be a taaaad dark, but it's suitable for PG-13.
Now, before you continue, please tolerate the beginning conflict and the plot in general. I was one of those old writers around when ShadAmy first came around the ben and the main idea isn't above original, but very many find it enjoyable. So, that all being said, please do enjoy your time with this story and continue reading through the first chapter. My job is to make you smile, frown, cry, laugh, all that good stuff!
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Chapter: The Pink Premature Heroine
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::Opening Prologue::
For a year Space Colony Ark has been just another star on Orion's belt. A star that no one looks at, including her. Her mind has been on other things. More...'important' things, which just so happen to be planning a date by the moonlit beach, deciding whether white with a veil or pink with ruffles looked better on her, and of course, naming future-hogs in diapers!
...Ah, all those silly little dreams she secretly knew would never come true, and they'd all censored out the memory of Space Colony Ark and the evidence that it was technically she who saved Planet Earth from extinction by convincing a shadow who'd misheard the light. She never thought of herself as any kind of heroine when she already had a hero to do her saving, anyway.
Her hero, alas, hadn't been seen in six months, yet it didn't discourage her from fantasizing him. During those six months, she had seen blue at every corner she turned and on every boulevard she walked. She saw blue in the sky when she looked up, blue in the ocean when she looked down, (oh, how ironic; he hates the water, but it's bluer than him!), and in the laces of the new pair of boots she purchased. She saw blue in the newspapers flashing a cheesy grin and on the magazines rocking that famous thumb's up of his. She had missed him to tears and sighs. She had missed him to hallucination and insanity.
Six months before his disappearance, he had talked less, stared more, never rescued on time, and disappeared all the time. He wasn't impatient anymore, he was indifferent. Yet, there had been some kind of bipolarity - some kind of bipolar depression, whereas he was suddenly bluer than blue, and then suddenly perkier than ever. So, it was natural, that she'd want to fling herself at him and crush him into a hug until she heard his ribs crack when he returned to Station Square. Yet, what was unnatural was the queasiness in her abodemn at the thought of seeing him again. Queasy wasn't a good feeling, and when she saw him and he saw her, she had no desire to smother him in lip-glossed kisses and sobbing hugs. His eyes didn't 'wink with a twink', as she had petnamed their green personality. They were these staid, stale kind of smileless jade...well, things to look at.
He didn't greet her. His lips contorted into an upside down smirk, and he glared instead. She rubbed her ankle with her toe-nail in angst at his change of character and, in self-conscious shame, looked down at her feet.
She talked and he mumbled. She walked and he staggered. Their shoulders brushed, but she didn't feel the unrequited magic she normally would. She hated brushing shoulders with him, she hated it when he didn't look at her, she hated it when he walked too slow, and she hated wondering if he hated her.
When they boarded the train for the Mystic Ruins to see Tails, she had never heard him murmur, "Pathetic..." in such a foul breath as he did when he watched the city's gray towers warp into the jungle's green trees outside the window.
That habit of verbal-hatred was a quote used by the only hedgehog her hero was morphing into it.
And she hated it.
*~*Mystic Ruins*~*
A blue zoom zig-zagged between the jungle's maze, taking the trees' hair with it.
It was time to escape -
A pair of red sandals stepped over the tall grass and stood in a pigeon-toed pose. A white glove with a bracelet glinting on the wrist cuffed the side of a beige muzzle as a mouth opened, big and wide, "OH SONNNN~IC~!"
- because the chase was in play.
"SOOOON~IC!? WHERE ARRRR~E YOOOO~U?"
The game of cat and mouse.
"This is getting a little old, DON'T YOU THINK?" The nasally voice shouted, hearing herself echo back to her. "Darn it! Why does he always have to play so hard to get? Not to mention leave a poor defenseless girl like me alone in a place like this! Doesn't he know Tails's Workshop is in the other direction?" She puckered her lips, jutted out her hip to lean her hand against it, and tapped her foot impatiently.
But then, suddenly - oh! just beyond the trees! - there was the two-second sighting of the blue fugitive on her right!
She blinked, her 18mm eyelashes accentuating the cuteness of it, and cried out in an overdramatic squeal, "SONIC!" The predator pounced after her prey in her red shorts and white tank top. "SONIC! WAIT FOR MEEE~!" The pink hedgehog pleaded between her pants. "C'MON, SONIC! WAIT UP!"
Amy Rose was running around the Mystic Ruins chasing zaps and zips of blue, but it wasn't to hammer him down until he agreed to take her paw in marriage. It was to cheer him up and make him Sonic again...and then discuss how many little hogs they'd have in the near future. He said he needed to take a few laps around the Ruins to clear his head before they reached the Workshop, but Amy wasn't content with his lies. By now though, she was gaining on him and had finally caught sight of his figure in the sphere of blue speed-light.
Sonic the Hedgehog wouldn't even peek back over his shoulder as if he hadn't noticed her chasing him all this time, but he seemed to be speeding up.
"HEY! What are you doing?! Slow down, wouldja?! Y'know I can't run as fast as you can, Sonic!" Amy huffed and puffed, still grinning in sweat, but all her funning dropped off her face when something moist and wet hit her cheek - ...a teardrop. Sonic's teardrop. 'S-Sonic...?' Her scared expression switched to a visage of determination.
No, that was it - she was going to accomplish this mission and bring 'Sonie' back.
A chill ran down Sonic's spine and frizzed all the way up to his quills; she was closer than just a moment ago. Amy swung out her Piko Piko Hammer and slammed its massive head against the jungle floor to launch herself into a high jump. The shadow above Sonic began to triple in size, and once it had blocked his sun completely, he looked up just to see a laughing, hysterical Amy with her arms and legs spread out like a flying squirrel. They both collided and rolled down a mudslide, both tangled in arms and legs, squeals and hollers, until they eventually reached the bottom of the hill's somersault coaster. Sonic's muzzle was buried three-inches deep in mud and all the worms wriggling in it. He hacked up the muck and its fetid flavor after surfacing, with Amy's legs and arms hugged around his near-broken back.
Amy Rose snuggled his head of spikes and claimed her trophy with the usual giggly line, seemingly unfazed by her mudded and flimsy clothes, "I got you now, my dar~ling blue KNIGHT!" - for some reason, she was hoping this was cheer him up; the usual routine to knock him back into the Sonic-habit, since he had lost the routine long ago.
The blue hedgehog groaned hopelessly, seeing as he was pinned on his stomach and baring the weight of a lovesick obsessor's bearhug. The look of hopelessness faded and was replaced by lip-quivering anger. He lifted himself, causing Amy to slip off his back and land on her rump in a splatter of brown sludge. She let out a whimper after having skinned her elbows on a bed of rocks.
After wincing from the sting, Amy wiped her cheek, flung her head up and gave him a confused scold, "Heeey! Whatcha' do THAT for?"
Her light complaint betrayed how she really felt; at heart, she was scared. Sonic's fists clenched, before unclenching and letting his fingers dangle.
"That's enough, Amy..." he exhaled calmly. He didn't turn around - he was cleaning out his ears with his pinky, but his body language was stiff; off. He couldn't even fake acting like himself!
"What's your problem?" Amy petted her temper and her fear; calmness on Sonic the Hedgehog was like a Red Alert. "What? My hero forgot how to have a sense of humor? Loosen up, Sonic! Have some fun!" She splashed some mud on his back laughingly, hoping to lighten both their moods.
The filth sludged down his back in dripping gunk as Sonic just stood there enduring the onslaughts.
After what felt like hours, he whirred around and chewed out between his teeth, "ENOUGH, Amy...! Pl-please." He sounded all out of breath and more so, out of patience, in resemblance to a rabid werewolf foaming at the mouth.
Amy stopped in mid-throw; her hands full of mud that was sloshing all over her bony knees.
...The birds cat-called and the squirrels tutted...
"...I don't..." His limp hand curled into a fist. "I don't really...know what's going on with me, or what's been wrong lately..." - and suddenly he looked so scared of himself - "...but I need some time to just...figure it all out, okay? I don't want to be like this - especially around my friends. So just...I need some time." Sonic closed his eyes and reopened them to the jungle without any color of emotion in them.
His legs began to squat forward as they got into position - he was going to run again, run and leave her here. Amy heaved herself up off the ground in such panic she almost fell backwards.
She hurried to him, hands asking for his embrace so they could both cry together, eyes watering for his submission to her, "S-Sonic...but you HAD time! You've been away from all of us for six months!"
Sonic whipped his head back to her, letting her see for herself the face of a nasty sneer and tearful, red eyes as he added more injury on her with his subiminal threat, "DON'T follow me!" He looked down with the droop of his ears, skulking into looking like a scolded puppy within a split second. "...Amy..." He relaxed his eyes into a shut to cool himself down, and then looked at her calmly, "...Not right now, okay?" His nostrils flared mucus as the wet sheet of moisture glistened off his eyes, "J-Just...not right now."
"...Sonic..." Amy whispered in a knowing sense to prove she was aware of his self-torment and would be the one to save him from it.
"...D-Don't touch me, Amy...please..." He was begging her.
"It's okay, Sonic..." Amy called for her Sonie and not this one.
Amy crept up closer to him and touched his shoulders, smiling in 'understanding.' Sonic's muscles flexed under her touch.
It was over.
"I said don't TOUCH ME!" Sonic spun on her with a violence in his scream that he never even used on his enemies.
His eyes were afire as if the veins in them were bleeding, his face was blotted in shadows, his teeth were fangs to Amy's imagination as mucus dribbled from his nose, his fur was a blackened cobalt instead of blue, his pants were jagged and slobbery, but Sonic the Hedgehog's outcry had been spluttery between a sob and a growl, like he was terrified of his own actions while full of hate for hers, and that scared her even more.
"..." Speechless out of her mind with no rational explanation to cope back to, Amy backed up in fear of this new monster, and tripped over the rock embedded in the mud.
Her back slammed against the hard floor, arching a breathless yelp out of her. When she managed to double over and roll onto her side in the mud, she cowered up at Sonic the Hedgehog with brown sludge sopping down the side of her traumatized face. But that monster, that blue demon was gone, and there stood a horrified blue hedgehog.
"I-I..." He looked at his palms, shaking and almost to the point of...tears? "A-Amy..."
The Sonic in front of her wasn't breathing right and his eyes were of fire and water. Though looking past his madness, there wasn't any aminosity shearing off him; there was regret, pain and fear. He stumbled up to help her and shower her in repetitive apologies, but she smacked his hands away, tearing up in the eyes.
"Don't TOUCH me!" Amy shook her head, eyes squeezed shut, and tears down her cheeks. "What's wrong with you, Sonic?! WHY have you been acting like...like someone else?! Why won't you let anyone i-in...?"
"...Amy..." The unrecognizable hedgehog gulped hard and painful, "...it's because I need you," his pointing finger shook into a gesturing palm for her to back away from him, "...I need everyone, to leave me alone. That's all I'm asking for!"
"You were alone! You've been alone! So now that you're here, you should've known that I was going to do my best to try and bring you back! I've spent all my time--"
"Exactly, Amy! So maybe if you spent some time away from me, you'd make time to grow...UP!" His pitch went higher in a sing-song chirp as his head perked up with the shrugging out of his arms in the most sarcastic mockery. "...You and I both know you deserve to give yourself b-better than what you've settled for. You're not twelve anymore, you're thirteen, A-Amy! STOP glomping me with all these sugar-coats and bias praises about Ark! Stop acting so oblivious to what's HAPPENED a year ago, like you don't even care, like you're spitting on it on purpose! I CAN'T..." He turned away and grabbed at his head, shaking it furiously and sobbing angrily with a tone torn between a beast and a peasant, "I can't, deal with it anymore, it's making everything feel worse!" His laugh was dry, his eyes' yoke were prickling with unshed tears, his pupils weren't focusing, and he was salivating.
What the heck was going on? Where did this come from? What was 'everything'? When did he use such big words? And why did he look like such a morbid monster?
Again, his actions randomized into him sinking his face into his hand and clenching his teeth with an agonizing shame.
"..." Amy crept closer with all the longing in her eyes as she dragged her feet onward. "Son--"
"No," He snapped his head up and showed her the cannibalism in his bloodshot eyes, "The color BLUE is holding you BACK. Go to school, Amy...! Live! Get a career, make your own happiness, chase a life, instead of your 'heroic' Sonie~," His throat grew sore and tight as the ferocity in his face softened into grief, "...because Sonie can not be your life goal forever after you find out he's not...as squeaky-clean as you think he's made up to be..."
Amy's face was frozen in a wet-eyed frown, but her pupils just seemed to shrink smaller and smaller after each word he tongue-lashed at her. Sonic jerked around to leave. But before he did, he rotated his head, slow motion making the air a depressing darkness.
His dead eyes pulsed behind his shoulder as he whispered emotionlessly, "...Do not...follow me. Do not...come near me...for a long, long time, Amy."
With the last words of slow burn, Sonic the Hedgehog, the Sun of Station Square, sprinted out of sight with his new deformity. Amy sat there on her knees, stricken with 'how?'s and 'why?'s. A tear squiggled down her cheek. It lingered on her chin, before bouncing off her bracelet in a soft 'ping' once it leaked.
He had never snapped his bipolarity at her. He was forever kept his cool no matter how much she irritated him, but, for the past year, Sonic was angry in a quiet manner; always angry at the air. But at what in specific? The world? Or...or just h-her? The abandonment and betrayal Amy that had been worn for five seconds soon melted into fury.
Amy Rose squeezed the muck in her fingers and jumped up on her feet, "FINE!" she cried to him as he wandered far out. "Y...you know what?! Who NEEDS you, anyway you…you…YOU JERK! You....you...OOOH...y-you...!"
No comment back; Sonic disappeared over the hill - disappeared like he always did. That part hadn't changed.
She cringed back in shock and tears but then became a volcanic hurricane all at once. "G'HEAD, THEN! RUN AWAY LIKE A COWARD! FORGET YOU, S-SO CALLED HERO!" She kicked up some mud after him and broke down the opposite road. "I HATE YOU, SONIC!"
Amy Rose's scream traveled for miles and miles; research explorers tripped around and held their hats to see the flock of crows leaving the direction of the scream.
*~*Nightfall*~*
Hours later, the pink hedgehog was wandering the jungle, lost. She had been lost for a good few forevers, and if only she had known it were night already.
"I HATE YOU, SONIC!"
Urgh, hearing her own voice was giving her a migraine.
"...That was wrong of me," Dragging her feet, Amy slowed to a stop in front of a lake. "I should've went back after him, no matter what he said. I should've helped...I should've tried harder to figure out what was wrong with him, and what he's transforming into..." she bit her tears back. "Oh, Sonic..." She collapsed onto her skinned knees and continued to stare at the riddling waters.
Amy dipped a finger in the lake and swirled it in the moon's reflection upon the waters.
With a whining gasp, she blinked up at the night sky. "…Aw…the moon's out already?"
Amy dropped her eyelids in thought of what she said today, forgetting all about the time and place she was in.
"I HATE YOU, SONIC!"
She could smell the tears building up, seething out, pouring down...daggone it. Amy sniffled and hid the shame of her face in her hands.
"Sonic…" She sobbed, choked, and hiccupped as her ears flattened against her head. "Just how could this day get any worse…?!" The lion's roar of thunder startled Amy's left ear to spring up. As if she had chanted the mystic spell in elfin, down came the gallons of rain. Amy blinked her disbelief while being soaked down, and then growled out as she flailed her fists before inhaling the breath to holler, "…WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?!"
Thunder and lightning lighted the undersides of the whirlpooling clouds above. She spent another hour marching in the slush and downpour whilst slappng tears off her cheeks, and spent another in search of an exit from the jungle in hopes of finding Tails' Workshop.
'And I have to get back to Sonic! I can't leave him like this!' Lightning electrocuted a tree beside her and torched its leaves into embers of fire and smoke. In tears again, the pink girl leapt out of the way of a flaming branch that had snapped off.
"Why is this happening…?" Amy went from jogging to running as the hoots of owls turned to maniacal laughter. "…Why is this happening?!"
There was nothing to see; everything was black, eyes and fangs in the trees and bushes were of demons, the air was the color of blood, and the clouds above her were swirling tornados. In spite of the everything, she kept on running to escape this nightmare she had created in her head, she kept on falling and crawling in the mud, she kept on running for a life that was never in danger. Once she'd squeezed her eyes shut and started wailing, her toe tripped over a vine on the road. Her sob caught in her throat and gurgled out in a choke as things went in slow motion from there - her body being yanked forward, her head snapped back, her arms in the air, her eyes pinprick dots of green, the world turning upside-down. Then it sped up, just as she skidded face first into the puddles. She slammed her palms down on the ground and pulled her face out of the dome of hard mud. Shaking, sobbing and slobbering, Amy retched up the brown sludge she'd inhaled.
"S-Stupid rain…" Amy almost scratched her eyes out to get the muck out of them.
But just when she was smudging tears across her muzzle with the heels of her hands--she stopped. The wind blew her hair sideways, making pink strands straddle across her wide eyes. There was a gap of missing earth in front of her; a meteor-crash. Amy crawled to it on her belly and peeked into the hole's depth. She squinted; her vision was soggy and weak in the rain that fell harder than chunks of hail, but once her concentration had concentrated, her pupil sucked back into her green iris.
The lightning lit the dark.
There, lying in cakes of mud on its stomach, was a ball of black fur striped in splints of red. Trickles of mud and rain oozed down its black face.
The lightning flickered out and the vision was lost in the dark again.
...Amy covered her mouth and wheezed out a shuddery breath; she didn't need to think about it, or ask if she was imagining it. Instead, she denied it, "I-It's not him...he died a year ago...!"
Like a reactionary spasm to her lies, her stomach sucked in and throbbed. The voice in her head was telling her she was nothing but a fool in pink.
The hedge of ebony quills, streaked in scarlet, and the white, rusted air-blades layered in dirt and animal feces, belonged to no one else. Even if it was him, she didn't want to see his dead body, or remember how she pressed her fingertips against the glass of the space shuttle and grieved about his death by the slightest for less than twenty-four hours and no longer.
[A/N: PAUSE. Before you go thinking this is one of those, "Shadow's plummet from Ark in Mystic Ruins" storylines, understand I was one of the first to write that plot, so don't go sneering that I am a copycat or this is your average said plot. Try to sit back and enjoy yourself without thinking such prejudice thoughts.]
"Get a hold of yourself, Amy…" Amy Rose stood up dazedly and gulped as she wrinkled the hem of her shorts. She tried to close her eyes, regain her sanity, and about-face, but karma wasn't having it.
Her clumsy footing made her slip and slide down the hole's muddy walls that she clawed at to stop or even slow the quick and frightening speed she was skidding on. She tumbled in front of the body. Amy hugged her shivering self as the rain beat down on her shoulders, drowning her in her slicked down fur and cheese-thin clothing that was as transparent as soaked plastic, enough to see the pinks of her nipples and the goosebumps pimpling her breasts. She had no choice but to lift her mud-caked face and see the truth lying a foot away from her behind all the tears. Roots, vines, destroyed flowers and even moss had grown on his body, shackling his wrists and ankles, greening his back and spikes, making him a part of the Earth, and making him a proper grave.
"I-It is him..." She knew it long ago, but it made her feel less woozy to say it aloud, but much more uncomfortable with mixed emotions.
The unnerved pink hedgehog edged near the anicent corpse. She whimpered and longed out her hands to touch him to see if he's alive, but she was...hesitant to find out. That's right, 'hesitant' sounded better than 'afraid.'
Animals that looked dead were known to do the most unexpected and unpredictable things, most likely spring to life and attack, but this wasn't a suspenseful horror movie on Lifetime. This was reality.
"Sh-Shadow...?" Amy stressed on the syllables of his name, trying to will him awake by her plea without having to web her fingers through his fur and check for a pulse. "Oh God, y-you're..." 'He crashed here like a meteroite, all the way down from space...he'd saved everyone that day, and no one forgot that.'
Amy Rose was lying, once again.
She had forgotten about Shadow the Hedgehog over the one-year period.
Tails, Knuckles, and even Eggman had forgotten, or rather, never mentioned Ark, Professor Gerald or Shadow the Hedgehog. It's like it never happened. It appeared to her now that Sonic was the one who never forgot.
Sonic was the one, who turned citizens of Station Square away when they or the G.U.N. military thanked him for saving their world over and over again and then remarking how Project Shadow was the villian Sonic had 'thankfully' ridded them of. Even those who thanked him without spitting on Shadow's name, never mentioned Shadow or their 'sorry' for Sonic's 'loss'. His clash with Bio-Lizard made him even more famous, but he'd became a shadow of Station Square. He looked at her digustedly, with his lip curled back around his teeth, when she worshipped him in her compliments of being her hero and everyone else's hero in general. But she never worshipped Shadow. Never spoke of him. Never cared to think of him. That name had been lost a long time ago.
Amy Rose's now quaking fingers squirmed out to Shadow again, but then cringed back into her palms as a tear dripped off her top lip with the rain.
Had Sonic been the one hurting, and the one resenting her because she praised him the most, due to Shadow's ignored glory?
Her dripping bangs dangled over her face.
Amy just stared at the black creature's face, inhaling it all in, trying to imagine Sonic's pain, trying to feel it, and make it her own, but she could only think one selfish thing, '...You're the reason Sonic hates me.'
The glare that had always been there - the cleft in his eyebrows with the red highlights in the arches of his eyelids - was stuck on Shadow's expression, even in his death. They always say if you frown too much, your eyebrows get stuck together. Did that household myth prevent him from smiling?
'Shadow...S-Sonic...' Amy hiccupped a little on a sob as she rested her hands on Shadow's furry back.
Red eyes flunked open.
Amy gasped and scrambled backwards on her hands, her jaw dropping open. She was going to die. She was sure of it. Sure of it the moment she saw his eyes fly across the jungle and catch hers, which then seemed to mirror how she'd die in his hands.
Yet, she could've sworn to have heard a helpless, "...Maria..." coming from the ethereal blackness lying a few millimeters away from her.
The Lord of Hades rose up like a shadow who'd pulled from the very Earth with his forked quills being a crown for all his damnation. He was beautiful and he was ugly, an alluring monster whose eyes ate her in two.
Rain rolled off Amy's eyelashes as they flickered feverishly in overwhelm. She could hear the bones under her flesh chattering while his shadow towered over her along with his quill-crown blocking her view of the clouds above his head. Shadow's eyes darkened into a burning glare, and his fangs came into sight.
Amy wept his name, inhaling rain, "...Sh...adow..."
Suddenly, Shadow crippled to his knees as if that name had punched him, and the effect of danger was instantly forgotten about. He steadied up on his arms and tried to stand again just to keel over in pain in the end. His alarmed grimace never stayed off hers as his panting mouth salivated. Amy, for the third time, gulped down her fear and leaned in little by little, but he jerked back and tensed himself into a defensive stance. Right then and there, Amy did not see him as a murderous somebody, but a frightened anybody.
"Who...are you?" The hedgehog's shadowy voice rasped, but gaspingly too. His eyelids were twitching - fighting to stay open. "What do you want? ...SPEAK."
The only thing Amy could muster was the hoarse, "I-It's...me…d...d-don't you remember?"
Without another warning he winced; his arm snaked around his chest and his curled fingers clung to the white star of fur. Amy moved her attention away from the face twisted up in agony and brought it down to the white glove that was now blackened in blood.
"Shadow, you're bleeding!"-And from the heart.
Amy watched him collapse, shriveled up and hysterical. His body began convulsing from head to toe until he froze into unconsciousness and hypothermia again. Amy's fist hovered by her mouth in sympathy and panic of what to do.
Oh God, what to do?!
She touched his soaked back with the scared tremors in her fingers. No temperature. He didn't feel like anything but bristly hair that hadn't been combed in a millennia. Amy stroked through the knotted mats of fur and the moss growing on it to feel over scabs and crusts of old blood.
There was only one thing left to do.
Amy nodded to herself and balled her hand into an encouraging fist. She had to do it, because she'd never leave a soul out here to die.
With her tank top and shorts drowned to the small hips and flat stomach of her dripping-wet body, Amy hiked up the slope's walls to find shelter nearby in knee-deep mud. She spotted a cabin a little further up the road. The cabin's roof was hidden under beds of vines, mounds of dirt and broken tree branches, but she still prayed to whatever God up there someone would offer them a night to stay. In minutes, Amy was climbing out of the large meteorite crash site with Shadow's limp body dangled over her back. She failed many times before with the result of Shadow toppling back into the concave bottom like a puppet without strings, and had to use a vine to tie them together.
"Oi, Shadow," Amy puffed as she tried the effort again. "You're heavier than you look..." 'Has he really been out here for a year? That long?' Her thoughts spoke in worries.
All atmospheric electricity contracted to one area in the middle of the thunderstorm as Amy reached high ground. The earth was showered with purple lightning bolts that rampaged in tantrums, almost hitting Amy and Shadow. She dove into a puddle and scrambled under a large leaf big enough to be mistaken for a green kanoe. She clinched the sides of it and pulled it over her and Shadow's head uptill the lightning shower was over. When she reached the cabin's porch, she remembered her manners and knocked first. The door was worn and less than sturdy, but she didn't want to be rude. Amy looked around the jungle to occupy herself. Still waiting, she wiped her stuffy nose and heaved Shadow's body a bit higher up onto her back to keep him from sliding off.
Nobody answered.
"Hello?" Amy knocked again.
Not even a creak on the wood inside the cabin to say that someone was coming to the door. The devil-born eyes watching her from the jungle terrain numbed her will to keep herself under control, and the growls grumbling from the bush beside her caused her to snap.
"Is anyone H-HOME?!" Amy coughed and sneezed, sobbed and slobbered. She shivered from Shadow's hot breath smothered into her neck and the cold weather raising hairs on her skin. "I need h-help! Oh, please! Please help me!"
Her knees sagged into squats; Shadow was getting heavier. She could feel the blood from his chest bleeding itself into her own fur.
"Anybody, please!" Amy knocked harder and flattened herself against the door to emphasize her desperation as she sobbed harder, "S-Shadow needs help! He'll...he'll die! Please, HELP me!"
No one was coming for her, or 'Shadow.'
"...Arrrrgh, is ANYBODY, HOME?!" She banged and banged on the door with her fist, and then used her foot to kick at it to exercise her temper.
The door itself flew wide open at the demand of her sandal and granted her access. She stood in the doorway blinking in dumbfound, before remembering Shadow's condition. Amy hand-swept the debris and leaves off an old blanket that had already been laid out on the mold-guttered floor and rested Shadow down on it with extra caution as though he'd break. She massaged her thumbs into his shoulders all the way down to his forearms to knead in some warmth, and then sat up on her knees, sniffing up her cold. The cabin had one room and one room only, with two windows, an independent mat to brew a fireplace, a few shelves of empty or broken jars, and a badly-patched roof that leaked nearly as much as it rained outside. It was indisputable that no one had lived here by the roaches and mice hiding behind the crushed cans wedged in the back of the shelf. She'd have to adapt.
Amy kept tabs on the thunderstorm outside and the black hedgehog, whose now curly-furred body, was forming a rumpled spot in the blanket from the rainwater drenched on him.
"…If I don't hurry to keep him warm and healed…he could probably get blood poisoning! But that storm is suicide…!"
Although she had no knowledge of whether an artificial entity was immune or prone to infection, she wasn't going to risk her lack of it. Amy bit the tips of her gloved fingers and watched Shadow breathe out fogs of white through his nostrils along with a forced exhale that appeared to hurt him.
He looked so helpless, like she everyday...
"But Shadow might die if I don't do something now!" She might've known he was immortal, but instinct conquered memory.
The storm orchestrated louder as the winds howled and the rain roared the moment she closed the door behind her. She had to strain to walk through the air current's gravity. It would change directions here and then, blow her right, then blow her left, and sometimes make her spin in a dance with a twisting mini-tornado. The pink hedgehog could find no wood in the storm or the godforsaken cabin, so she'd just have to chop her own. She smashed the stomach of trees with her Piko Piko Hammer and carried as much as she could back to the shelter. When she got back, Shadow was still out cold, and in a critical state. His white patch was now entirely red.
If he'd been out there for a year, then where'd this wound come from? Was it an old wound that had opened up?
Amy dumped the wood on the wooden floor and clambered over to Shadow to rest a hand on his frowning forehead, almost trembling that she had even touched him. His body had temperature now, but it was at a freezing temperature, like metal left out in the snow.
"I have to get this campfire going, but before that..." Amy stripped off the bottom of her tank top, balled it up, and rinsed it in a bucket that had filled up with water from the rain dripping through the roof.
After she'd lapped up the blood on his chest feathers, she rubbed an herbal tea leaf into the crux of the wound she found out in the jungle that Big the Cat had taught her to identify from Poison Ivy. Once this was tended to, she grabbed the nearest rock, dumped herself on her rear and curled her tongue to the side of her mouth as she burned the rock's friction against wood to recreate what cavemen did. Of course, since the wood was sodden and drying it with her clothes did little to no good, it was hard to burn anything. Although, it wasn't impossible. Not after an hour of in between nurturing Shadow, anyway. At the final try, she alighted the wood into a hiss of fire on the already arranged fireplace, and grinned. She dragged Shadow next to the fire by the armpits, and found unused muscles she never knew she had.
All was finished, and this was all she could do. Amy folded her legs into their tucks and watched Shadow from behind the fire. Shadow's eyelids, muzzle, forehead, and lips - the beige appendages quirked up in an arrow-like smirk - glowed with the firelight. He didn't look scary or unpredictable. He looked - and Amy's eyes gentled with this - safe.
All was quiet and intense, except the natural exceptions.
Drops of water on the bucket's pail. Wind threatening to destroy the roof overhead. Rain tackling the door. Mice squeaking and roaches crawling up the windows.
Amy crushed her legs against her chest and plopped her chin on her knees. The embers of the fire filled her eyes, manifesting them into burning emeralds. The burning emeralds watered, and she dropped her face in her knees, her shoulders soon trembling with her smile.
...What now?
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In case you haven't realized - the excuse disguised as point, is that Sonic is turning into "Shadow," because of the theme of losing a friend and being emotionally torn between good and bad, sane and insane, so that's the route I took. We always see Sonic so well put together with his feelings, so I wanted to stash him into some mania from the loss of Shadow. I do enjoy psychopathy, after all.
This story was written in 2004, the year of my eleven/twelve year old childhood, making this my very first story. It's rather out-dated, yet I have trimmed a few split ends. However, I couldn't edit this without changing the basics, so I preferred not to change them drastically, but to improve the writing style and initial depth, so bear with the story's attitude. The story's timeline is after SA2 and it's meant to be a taaaad dark, but it's suitable for PG-13.
Now, before you continue, please tolerate the beginning conflict and the plot in general. I was one of those old writers around when ShadAmy first came around the ben and the main idea isn't above original, but very many find it enjoyable. So, that all being said, please do enjoy your time with this story and continue reading through the first chapter. My job is to make you smile, frown, cry, laugh, all that good stuff!
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Chapter: The Pink Premature Heroine
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::Opening Prologue::
For a year Space Colony Ark has been just another star on Orion's belt. A star that no one looks at, including her. Her mind has been on other things. More...'important' things, which just so happen to be planning a date by the moonlit beach, deciding whether white with a veil or pink with ruffles looked better on her, and of course, naming future-hogs in diapers!
...Ah, all those silly little dreams she secretly knew would never come true, and they'd all censored out the memory of Space Colony Ark and the evidence that it was technically she who saved Planet Earth from extinction by convincing a shadow who'd misheard the light. She never thought of herself as any kind of heroine when she already had a hero to do her saving, anyway.
Her hero, alas, hadn't been seen in six months, yet it didn't discourage her from fantasizing him. During those six months, she had seen blue at every corner she turned and on every boulevard she walked. She saw blue in the sky when she looked up, blue in the ocean when she looked down, (oh, how ironic; he hates the water, but it's bluer than him!), and in the laces of the new pair of boots she purchased. She saw blue in the newspapers flashing a cheesy grin and on the magazines rocking that famous thumb's up of his. She had missed him to tears and sighs. She had missed him to hallucination and insanity.
Six months before his disappearance, he had talked less, stared more, never rescued on time, and disappeared all the time. He wasn't impatient anymore, he was indifferent. Yet, there had been some kind of bipolarity - some kind of bipolar depression, whereas he was suddenly bluer than blue, and then suddenly perkier than ever. So, it was natural, that she'd want to fling herself at him and crush him into a hug until she heard his ribs crack when he returned to Station Square. Yet, what was unnatural was the queasiness in her abodemn at the thought of seeing him again. Queasy wasn't a good feeling, and when she saw him and he saw her, she had no desire to smother him in lip-glossed kisses and sobbing hugs. His eyes didn't 'wink with a twink', as she had petnamed their green personality. They were these staid, stale kind of smileless jade...well, things to look at.
He didn't greet her. His lips contorted into an upside down smirk, and he glared instead. She rubbed her ankle with her toe-nail in angst at his change of character and, in self-conscious shame, looked down at her feet.
She talked and he mumbled. She walked and he staggered. Their shoulders brushed, but she didn't feel the unrequited magic she normally would. She hated brushing shoulders with him, she hated it when he didn't look at her, she hated it when he walked too slow, and she hated wondering if he hated her.
When they boarded the train for the Mystic Ruins to see Tails, she had never heard him murmur, "Pathetic..." in such a foul breath as he did when he watched the city's gray towers warp into the jungle's green trees outside the window.
That habit of verbal-hatred was a quote used by the only hedgehog her hero was morphing into it.
And she hated it.
*~*Mystic Ruins*~*
A blue zoom zig-zagged between the jungle's maze, taking the trees' hair with it.
It was time to escape -
A pair of red sandals stepped over the tall grass and stood in a pigeon-toed pose. A white glove with a bracelet glinting on the wrist cuffed the side of a beige muzzle as a mouth opened, big and wide, "OH SONNNN~IC~!"
- because the chase was in play.
"SOOOON~IC!? WHERE ARRRR~E YOOOO~U?"
The game of cat and mouse.
"This is getting a little old, DON'T YOU THINK?" The nasally voice shouted, hearing herself echo back to her. "Darn it! Why does he always have to play so hard to get? Not to mention leave a poor defenseless girl like me alone in a place like this! Doesn't he know Tails's Workshop is in the other direction?" She puckered her lips, jutted out her hip to lean her hand against it, and tapped her foot impatiently.
But then, suddenly - oh! just beyond the trees! - there was the two-second sighting of the blue fugitive on her right!
She blinked, her 18mm eyelashes accentuating the cuteness of it, and cried out in an overdramatic squeal, "SONIC!" The predator pounced after her prey in her red shorts and white tank top. "SONIC! WAIT FOR MEEE~!" The pink hedgehog pleaded between her pants. "C'MON, SONIC! WAIT UP!"
Amy Rose was running around the Mystic Ruins chasing zaps and zips of blue, but it wasn't to hammer him down until he agreed to take her paw in marriage. It was to cheer him up and make him Sonic again...and then discuss how many little hogs they'd have in the near future. He said he needed to take a few laps around the Ruins to clear his head before they reached the Workshop, but Amy wasn't content with his lies. By now though, she was gaining on him and had finally caught sight of his figure in the sphere of blue speed-light.
Sonic the Hedgehog wouldn't even peek back over his shoulder as if he hadn't noticed her chasing him all this time, but he seemed to be speeding up.
"HEY! What are you doing?! Slow down, wouldja?! Y'know I can't run as fast as you can, Sonic!" Amy huffed and puffed, still grinning in sweat, but all her funning dropped off her face when something moist and wet hit her cheek - ...a teardrop. Sonic's teardrop. 'S-Sonic...?' Her scared expression switched to a visage of determination.
No, that was it - she was going to accomplish this mission and bring 'Sonie' back.
A chill ran down Sonic's spine and frizzed all the way up to his quills; she was closer than just a moment ago. Amy swung out her Piko Piko Hammer and slammed its massive head against the jungle floor to launch herself into a high jump. The shadow above Sonic began to triple in size, and once it had blocked his sun completely, he looked up just to see a laughing, hysterical Amy with her arms and legs spread out like a flying squirrel. They both collided and rolled down a mudslide, both tangled in arms and legs, squeals and hollers, until they eventually reached the bottom of the hill's somersault coaster. Sonic's muzzle was buried three-inches deep in mud and all the worms wriggling in it. He hacked up the muck and its fetid flavor after surfacing, with Amy's legs and arms hugged around his near-broken back.
Amy Rose snuggled his head of spikes and claimed her trophy with the usual giggly line, seemingly unfazed by her mudded and flimsy clothes, "I got you now, my dar~ling blue KNIGHT!" - for some reason, she was hoping this was cheer him up; the usual routine to knock him back into the Sonic-habit, since he had lost the routine long ago.
The blue hedgehog groaned hopelessly, seeing as he was pinned on his stomach and baring the weight of a lovesick obsessor's bearhug. The look of hopelessness faded and was replaced by lip-quivering anger. He lifted himself, causing Amy to slip off his back and land on her rump in a splatter of brown sludge. She let out a whimper after having skinned her elbows on a bed of rocks.
After wincing from the sting, Amy wiped her cheek, flung her head up and gave him a confused scold, "Heeey! Whatcha' do THAT for?"
Her light complaint betrayed how she really felt; at heart, she was scared. Sonic's fists clenched, before unclenching and letting his fingers dangle.
"That's enough, Amy..." he exhaled calmly. He didn't turn around - he was cleaning out his ears with his pinky, but his body language was stiff; off. He couldn't even fake acting like himself!
"What's your problem?" Amy petted her temper and her fear; calmness on Sonic the Hedgehog was like a Red Alert. "What? My hero forgot how to have a sense of humor? Loosen up, Sonic! Have some fun!" She splashed some mud on his back laughingly, hoping to lighten both their moods.
The filth sludged down his back in dripping gunk as Sonic just stood there enduring the onslaughts.
After what felt like hours, he whirred around and chewed out between his teeth, "ENOUGH, Amy...! Pl-please." He sounded all out of breath and more so, out of patience, in resemblance to a rabid werewolf foaming at the mouth.
Amy stopped in mid-throw; her hands full of mud that was sloshing all over her bony knees.
...The birds cat-called and the squirrels tutted...
"...I don't..." His limp hand curled into a fist. "I don't really...know what's going on with me, or what's been wrong lately..." - and suddenly he looked so scared of himself - "...but I need some time to just...figure it all out, okay? I don't want to be like this - especially around my friends. So just...I need some time." Sonic closed his eyes and reopened them to the jungle without any color of emotion in them.
His legs began to squat forward as they got into position - he was going to run again, run and leave her here. Amy heaved herself up off the ground in such panic she almost fell backwards.
She hurried to him, hands asking for his embrace so they could both cry together, eyes watering for his submission to her, "S-Sonic...but you HAD time! You've been away from all of us for six months!"
Sonic whipped his head back to her, letting her see for herself the face of a nasty sneer and tearful, red eyes as he added more injury on her with his subiminal threat, "DON'T follow me!" He looked down with the droop of his ears, skulking into looking like a scolded puppy within a split second. "...Amy..." He relaxed his eyes into a shut to cool himself down, and then looked at her calmly, "...Not right now, okay?" His nostrils flared mucus as the wet sheet of moisture glistened off his eyes, "J-Just...not right now."
"...Sonic..." Amy whispered in a knowing sense to prove she was aware of his self-torment and would be the one to save him from it.
"...D-Don't touch me, Amy...please..." He was begging her.
"It's okay, Sonic..." Amy called for her Sonie and not this one.
Amy crept up closer to him and touched his shoulders, smiling in 'understanding.' Sonic's muscles flexed under her touch.
It was over.
"I said don't TOUCH ME!" Sonic spun on her with a violence in his scream that he never even used on his enemies.
His eyes were afire as if the veins in them were bleeding, his face was blotted in shadows, his teeth were fangs to Amy's imagination as mucus dribbled from his nose, his fur was a blackened cobalt instead of blue, his pants were jagged and slobbery, but Sonic the Hedgehog's outcry had been spluttery between a sob and a growl, like he was terrified of his own actions while full of hate for hers, and that scared her even more.
"..." Speechless out of her mind with no rational explanation to cope back to, Amy backed up in fear of this new monster, and tripped over the rock embedded in the mud.
Her back slammed against the hard floor, arching a breathless yelp out of her. When she managed to double over and roll onto her side in the mud, she cowered up at Sonic the Hedgehog with brown sludge sopping down the side of her traumatized face. But that monster, that blue demon was gone, and there stood a horrified blue hedgehog.
"I-I..." He looked at his palms, shaking and almost to the point of...tears? "A-Amy..."
The Sonic in front of her wasn't breathing right and his eyes were of fire and water. Though looking past his madness, there wasn't any aminosity shearing off him; there was regret, pain and fear. He stumbled up to help her and shower her in repetitive apologies, but she smacked his hands away, tearing up in the eyes.
"Don't TOUCH me!" Amy shook her head, eyes squeezed shut, and tears down her cheeks. "What's wrong with you, Sonic?! WHY have you been acting like...like someone else?! Why won't you let anyone i-in...?"
"...Amy..." The unrecognizable hedgehog gulped hard and painful, "...it's because I need you," his pointing finger shook into a gesturing palm for her to back away from him, "...I need everyone, to leave me alone. That's all I'm asking for!"
"You were alone! You've been alone! So now that you're here, you should've known that I was going to do my best to try and bring you back! I've spent all my time--"
"Exactly, Amy! So maybe if you spent some time away from me, you'd make time to grow...UP!" His pitch went higher in a sing-song chirp as his head perked up with the shrugging out of his arms in the most sarcastic mockery. "...You and I both know you deserve to give yourself b-better than what you've settled for. You're not twelve anymore, you're thirteen, A-Amy! STOP glomping me with all these sugar-coats and bias praises about Ark! Stop acting so oblivious to what's HAPPENED a year ago, like you don't even care, like you're spitting on it on purpose! I CAN'T..." He turned away and grabbed at his head, shaking it furiously and sobbing angrily with a tone torn between a beast and a peasant, "I can't, deal with it anymore, it's making everything feel worse!" His laugh was dry, his eyes' yoke were prickling with unshed tears, his pupils weren't focusing, and he was salivating.
What the heck was going on? Where did this come from? What was 'everything'? When did he use such big words? And why did he look like such a morbid monster?
Again, his actions randomized into him sinking his face into his hand and clenching his teeth with an agonizing shame.
"..." Amy crept closer with all the longing in her eyes as she dragged her feet onward. "Son--"
"No," He snapped his head up and showed her the cannibalism in his bloodshot eyes, "The color BLUE is holding you BACK. Go to school, Amy...! Live! Get a career, make your own happiness, chase a life, instead of your 'heroic' Sonie~," His throat grew sore and tight as the ferocity in his face softened into grief, "...because Sonie can not be your life goal forever after you find out he's not...as squeaky-clean as you think he's made up to be..."
Amy's face was frozen in a wet-eyed frown, but her pupils just seemed to shrink smaller and smaller after each word he tongue-lashed at her. Sonic jerked around to leave. But before he did, he rotated his head, slow motion making the air a depressing darkness.
His dead eyes pulsed behind his shoulder as he whispered emotionlessly, "...Do not...follow me. Do not...come near me...for a long, long time, Amy."
With the last words of slow burn, Sonic the Hedgehog, the Sun of Station Square, sprinted out of sight with his new deformity. Amy sat there on her knees, stricken with 'how?'s and 'why?'s. A tear squiggled down her cheek. It lingered on her chin, before bouncing off her bracelet in a soft 'ping' once it leaked.
He had never snapped his bipolarity at her. He was forever kept his cool no matter how much she irritated him, but, for the past year, Sonic was angry in a quiet manner; always angry at the air. But at what in specific? The world? Or...or just h-her? The abandonment and betrayal Amy that had been worn for five seconds soon melted into fury.
Amy Rose squeezed the muck in her fingers and jumped up on her feet, "FINE!" she cried to him as he wandered far out. "Y...you know what?! Who NEEDS you, anyway you…you…YOU JERK! You....you...OOOH...y-you...!"
No comment back; Sonic disappeared over the hill - disappeared like he always did. That part hadn't changed.
She cringed back in shock and tears but then became a volcanic hurricane all at once. "G'HEAD, THEN! RUN AWAY LIKE A COWARD! FORGET YOU, S-SO CALLED HERO!" She kicked up some mud after him and broke down the opposite road. "I HATE YOU, SONIC!"
Amy Rose's scream traveled for miles and miles; research explorers tripped around and held their hats to see the flock of crows leaving the direction of the scream.
*~*Nightfall*~*
Hours later, the pink hedgehog was wandering the jungle, lost. She had been lost for a good few forevers, and if only she had known it were night already.
"I HATE YOU, SONIC!"
Urgh, hearing her own voice was giving her a migraine.
"...That was wrong of me," Dragging her feet, Amy slowed to a stop in front of a lake. "I should've went back after him, no matter what he said. I should've helped...I should've tried harder to figure out what was wrong with him, and what he's transforming into..." she bit her tears back. "Oh, Sonic..." She collapsed onto her skinned knees and continued to stare at the riddling waters.
Amy dipped a finger in the lake and swirled it in the moon's reflection upon the waters.
With a whining gasp, she blinked up at the night sky. "…Aw…the moon's out already?"
Amy dropped her eyelids in thought of what she said today, forgetting all about the time and place she was in.
"I HATE YOU, SONIC!"
She could smell the tears building up, seething out, pouring down...daggone it. Amy sniffled and hid the shame of her face in her hands.
"Sonic…" She sobbed, choked, and hiccupped as her ears flattened against her head. "Just how could this day get any worse…?!" The lion's roar of thunder startled Amy's left ear to spring up. As if she had chanted the mystic spell in elfin, down came the gallons of rain. Amy blinked her disbelief while being soaked down, and then growled out as she flailed her fists before inhaling the breath to holler, "…WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?!"
Thunder and lightning lighted the undersides of the whirlpooling clouds above. She spent another hour marching in the slush and downpour whilst slappng tears off her cheeks, and spent another in search of an exit from the jungle in hopes of finding Tails' Workshop.
'And I have to get back to Sonic! I can't leave him like this!' Lightning electrocuted a tree beside her and torched its leaves into embers of fire and smoke. In tears again, the pink girl leapt out of the way of a flaming branch that had snapped off.
"Why is this happening…?" Amy went from jogging to running as the hoots of owls turned to maniacal laughter. "…Why is this happening?!"
There was nothing to see; everything was black, eyes and fangs in the trees and bushes were of demons, the air was the color of blood, and the clouds above her were swirling tornados. In spite of the everything, she kept on running to escape this nightmare she had created in her head, she kept on falling and crawling in the mud, she kept on running for a life that was never in danger. Once she'd squeezed her eyes shut and started wailing, her toe tripped over a vine on the road. Her sob caught in her throat and gurgled out in a choke as things went in slow motion from there - her body being yanked forward, her head snapped back, her arms in the air, her eyes pinprick dots of green, the world turning upside-down. Then it sped up, just as she skidded face first into the puddles. She slammed her palms down on the ground and pulled her face out of the dome of hard mud. Shaking, sobbing and slobbering, Amy retched up the brown sludge she'd inhaled.
"S-Stupid rain…" Amy almost scratched her eyes out to get the muck out of them.
But just when she was smudging tears across her muzzle with the heels of her hands--she stopped. The wind blew her hair sideways, making pink strands straddle across her wide eyes. There was a gap of missing earth in front of her; a meteor-crash. Amy crawled to it on her belly and peeked into the hole's depth. She squinted; her vision was soggy and weak in the rain that fell harder than chunks of hail, but once her concentration had concentrated, her pupil sucked back into her green iris.
The lightning lit the dark.
There, lying in cakes of mud on its stomach, was a ball of black fur striped in splints of red. Trickles of mud and rain oozed down its black face.
The lightning flickered out and the vision was lost in the dark again.
...Amy covered her mouth and wheezed out a shuddery breath; she didn't need to think about it, or ask if she was imagining it. Instead, she denied it, "I-It's not him...he died a year ago...!"
Like a reactionary spasm to her lies, her stomach sucked in and throbbed. The voice in her head was telling her she was nothing but a fool in pink.
The hedge of ebony quills, streaked in scarlet, and the white, rusted air-blades layered in dirt and animal feces, belonged to no one else. Even if it was him, she didn't want to see his dead body, or remember how she pressed her fingertips against the glass of the space shuttle and grieved about his death by the slightest for less than twenty-four hours and no longer.
[A/N: PAUSE. Before you go thinking this is one of those, "Shadow's plummet from Ark in Mystic Ruins" storylines, understand I was one of the first to write that plot, so don't go sneering that I am a copycat or this is your average said plot. Try to sit back and enjoy yourself without thinking such prejudice thoughts.]
"Get a hold of yourself, Amy…" Amy Rose stood up dazedly and gulped as she wrinkled the hem of her shorts. She tried to close her eyes, regain her sanity, and about-face, but karma wasn't having it.
Her clumsy footing made her slip and slide down the hole's muddy walls that she clawed at to stop or even slow the quick and frightening speed she was skidding on. She tumbled in front of the body. Amy hugged her shivering self as the rain beat down on her shoulders, drowning her in her slicked down fur and cheese-thin clothing that was as transparent as soaked plastic, enough to see the pinks of her nipples and the goosebumps pimpling her breasts. She had no choice but to lift her mud-caked face and see the truth lying a foot away from her behind all the tears. Roots, vines, destroyed flowers and even moss had grown on his body, shackling his wrists and ankles, greening his back and spikes, making him a part of the Earth, and making him a proper grave.
"I-It is him..." She knew it long ago, but it made her feel less woozy to say it aloud, but much more uncomfortable with mixed emotions.
The unnerved pink hedgehog edged near the anicent corpse. She whimpered and longed out her hands to touch him to see if he's alive, but she was...hesitant to find out. That's right, 'hesitant' sounded better than 'afraid.'
Animals that looked dead were known to do the most unexpected and unpredictable things, most likely spring to life and attack, but this wasn't a suspenseful horror movie on Lifetime. This was reality.
"Sh-Shadow...?" Amy stressed on the syllables of his name, trying to will him awake by her plea without having to web her fingers through his fur and check for a pulse. "Oh God, y-you're..." 'He crashed here like a meteroite, all the way down from space...he'd saved everyone that day, and no one forgot that.'
Amy Rose was lying, once again.
She had forgotten about Shadow the Hedgehog over the one-year period.
Tails, Knuckles, and even Eggman had forgotten, or rather, never mentioned Ark, Professor Gerald or Shadow the Hedgehog. It's like it never happened. It appeared to her now that Sonic was the one who never forgot.
Sonic was the one, who turned citizens of Station Square away when they or the G.U.N. military thanked him for saving their world over and over again and then remarking how Project Shadow was the villian Sonic had 'thankfully' ridded them of. Even those who thanked him without spitting on Shadow's name, never mentioned Shadow or their 'sorry' for Sonic's 'loss'. His clash with Bio-Lizard made him even more famous, but he'd became a shadow of Station Square. He looked at her digustedly, with his lip curled back around his teeth, when she worshipped him in her compliments of being her hero and everyone else's hero in general. But she never worshipped Shadow. Never spoke of him. Never cared to think of him. That name had been lost a long time ago.
Amy Rose's now quaking fingers squirmed out to Shadow again, but then cringed back into her palms as a tear dripped off her top lip with the rain.
Had Sonic been the one hurting, and the one resenting her because she praised him the most, due to Shadow's ignored glory?
Her dripping bangs dangled over her face.
Amy just stared at the black creature's face, inhaling it all in, trying to imagine Sonic's pain, trying to feel it, and make it her own, but she could only think one selfish thing, '...You're the reason Sonic hates me.'
The glare that had always been there - the cleft in his eyebrows with the red highlights in the arches of his eyelids - was stuck on Shadow's expression, even in his death. They always say if you frown too much, your eyebrows get stuck together. Did that household myth prevent him from smiling?
'Shadow...S-Sonic...' Amy hiccupped a little on a sob as she rested her hands on Shadow's furry back.
Red eyes flunked open.
Amy gasped and scrambled backwards on her hands, her jaw dropping open. She was going to die. She was sure of it. Sure of it the moment she saw his eyes fly across the jungle and catch hers, which then seemed to mirror how she'd die in his hands.
Yet, she could've sworn to have heard a helpless, "...Maria..." coming from the ethereal blackness lying a few millimeters away from her.
The Lord of Hades rose up like a shadow who'd pulled from the very Earth with his forked quills being a crown for all his damnation. He was beautiful and he was ugly, an alluring monster whose eyes ate her in two.
Rain rolled off Amy's eyelashes as they flickered feverishly in overwhelm. She could hear the bones under her flesh chattering while his shadow towered over her along with his quill-crown blocking her view of the clouds above his head. Shadow's eyes darkened into a burning glare, and his fangs came into sight.
Amy wept his name, inhaling rain, "...Sh...adow..."
Suddenly, Shadow crippled to his knees as if that name had punched him, and the effect of danger was instantly forgotten about. He steadied up on his arms and tried to stand again just to keel over in pain in the end. His alarmed grimace never stayed off hers as his panting mouth salivated. Amy, for the third time, gulped down her fear and leaned in little by little, but he jerked back and tensed himself into a defensive stance. Right then and there, Amy did not see him as a murderous somebody, but a frightened anybody.
"Who...are you?" The hedgehog's shadowy voice rasped, but gaspingly too. His eyelids were twitching - fighting to stay open. "What do you want? ...SPEAK."
The only thing Amy could muster was the hoarse, "I-It's...me…d...d-don't you remember?"
Without another warning he winced; his arm snaked around his chest and his curled fingers clung to the white star of fur. Amy moved her attention away from the face twisted up in agony and brought it down to the white glove that was now blackened in blood.
"Shadow, you're bleeding!"-And from the heart.
Amy watched him collapse, shriveled up and hysterical. His body began convulsing from head to toe until he froze into unconsciousness and hypothermia again. Amy's fist hovered by her mouth in sympathy and panic of what to do.
Oh God, what to do?!
She touched his soaked back with the scared tremors in her fingers. No temperature. He didn't feel like anything but bristly hair that hadn't been combed in a millennia. Amy stroked through the knotted mats of fur and the moss growing on it to feel over scabs and crusts of old blood.
There was only one thing left to do.
Amy nodded to herself and balled her hand into an encouraging fist. She had to do it, because she'd never leave a soul out here to die.
With her tank top and shorts drowned to the small hips and flat stomach of her dripping-wet body, Amy hiked up the slope's walls to find shelter nearby in knee-deep mud. She spotted a cabin a little further up the road. The cabin's roof was hidden under beds of vines, mounds of dirt and broken tree branches, but she still prayed to whatever God up there someone would offer them a night to stay. In minutes, Amy was climbing out of the large meteorite crash site with Shadow's limp body dangled over her back. She failed many times before with the result of Shadow toppling back into the concave bottom like a puppet without strings, and had to use a vine to tie them together.
"Oi, Shadow," Amy puffed as she tried the effort again. "You're heavier than you look..." 'Has he really been out here for a year? That long?' Her thoughts spoke in worries.
All atmospheric electricity contracted to one area in the middle of the thunderstorm as Amy reached high ground. The earth was showered with purple lightning bolts that rampaged in tantrums, almost hitting Amy and Shadow. She dove into a puddle and scrambled under a large leaf big enough to be mistaken for a green kanoe. She clinched the sides of it and pulled it over her and Shadow's head uptill the lightning shower was over. When she reached the cabin's porch, she remembered her manners and knocked first. The door was worn and less than sturdy, but she didn't want to be rude. Amy looked around the jungle to occupy herself. Still waiting, she wiped her stuffy nose and heaved Shadow's body a bit higher up onto her back to keep him from sliding off.
Nobody answered.
"Hello?" Amy knocked again.
Not even a creak on the wood inside the cabin to say that someone was coming to the door. The devil-born eyes watching her from the jungle terrain numbed her will to keep herself under control, and the growls grumbling from the bush beside her caused her to snap.
"Is anyone H-HOME?!" Amy coughed and sneezed, sobbed and slobbered. She shivered from Shadow's hot breath smothered into her neck and the cold weather raising hairs on her skin. "I need h-help! Oh, please! Please help me!"
Her knees sagged into squats; Shadow was getting heavier. She could feel the blood from his chest bleeding itself into her own fur.
"Anybody, please!" Amy knocked harder and flattened herself against the door to emphasize her desperation as she sobbed harder, "S-Shadow needs help! He'll...he'll die! Please, HELP me!"
No one was coming for her, or 'Shadow.'
"...Arrrrgh, is ANYBODY, HOME?!" She banged and banged on the door with her fist, and then used her foot to kick at it to exercise her temper.
The door itself flew wide open at the demand of her sandal and granted her access. She stood in the doorway blinking in dumbfound, before remembering Shadow's condition. Amy hand-swept the debris and leaves off an old blanket that had already been laid out on the mold-guttered floor and rested Shadow down on it with extra caution as though he'd break. She massaged her thumbs into his shoulders all the way down to his forearms to knead in some warmth, and then sat up on her knees, sniffing up her cold. The cabin had one room and one room only, with two windows, an independent mat to brew a fireplace, a few shelves of empty or broken jars, and a badly-patched roof that leaked nearly as much as it rained outside. It was indisputable that no one had lived here by the roaches and mice hiding behind the crushed cans wedged in the back of the shelf. She'd have to adapt.
Amy kept tabs on the thunderstorm outside and the black hedgehog, whose now curly-furred body, was forming a rumpled spot in the blanket from the rainwater drenched on him.
"…If I don't hurry to keep him warm and healed…he could probably get blood poisoning! But that storm is suicide…!"
Although she had no knowledge of whether an artificial entity was immune or prone to infection, she wasn't going to risk her lack of it. Amy bit the tips of her gloved fingers and watched Shadow breathe out fogs of white through his nostrils along with a forced exhale that appeared to hurt him.
He looked so helpless, like she everyday...
"But Shadow might die if I don't do something now!" She might've known he was immortal, but instinct conquered memory.
The storm orchestrated louder as the winds howled and the rain roared the moment she closed the door behind her. She had to strain to walk through the air current's gravity. It would change directions here and then, blow her right, then blow her left, and sometimes make her spin in a dance with a twisting mini-tornado. The pink hedgehog could find no wood in the storm or the godforsaken cabin, so she'd just have to chop her own. She smashed the stomach of trees with her Piko Piko Hammer and carried as much as she could back to the shelter. When she got back, Shadow was still out cold, and in a critical state. His white patch was now entirely red.
If he'd been out there for a year, then where'd this wound come from? Was it an old wound that had opened up?
Amy dumped the wood on the wooden floor and clambered over to Shadow to rest a hand on his frowning forehead, almost trembling that she had even touched him. His body had temperature now, but it was at a freezing temperature, like metal left out in the snow.
"I have to get this campfire going, but before that..." Amy stripped off the bottom of her tank top, balled it up, and rinsed it in a bucket that had filled up with water from the rain dripping through the roof.
After she'd lapped up the blood on his chest feathers, she rubbed an herbal tea leaf into the crux of the wound she found out in the jungle that Big the Cat had taught her to identify from Poison Ivy. Once this was tended to, she grabbed the nearest rock, dumped herself on her rear and curled her tongue to the side of her mouth as she burned the rock's friction against wood to recreate what cavemen did. Of course, since the wood was sodden and drying it with her clothes did little to no good, it was hard to burn anything. Although, it wasn't impossible. Not after an hour of in between nurturing Shadow, anyway. At the final try, she alighted the wood into a hiss of fire on the already arranged fireplace, and grinned. She dragged Shadow next to the fire by the armpits, and found unused muscles she never knew she had.
All was finished, and this was all she could do. Amy folded her legs into their tucks and watched Shadow from behind the fire. Shadow's eyelids, muzzle, forehead, and lips - the beige appendages quirked up in an arrow-like smirk - glowed with the firelight. He didn't look scary or unpredictable. He looked - and Amy's eyes gentled with this - safe.
All was quiet and intense, except the natural exceptions.
Drops of water on the bucket's pail. Wind threatening to destroy the roof overhead. Rain tackling the door. Mice squeaking and roaches crawling up the windows.
Amy crushed her legs against her chest and plopped her chin on her knees. The embers of the fire filled her eyes, manifesting them into burning emeralds. The burning emeralds watered, and she dropped her face in her knees, her shoulders soon trembling with her smile.
...What now?
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In case you haven't realized - the excuse disguised as point, is that Sonic is turning into "Shadow," because of the theme of losing a friend and being emotionally torn between good and bad, sane and insane, so that's the route I took. We always see Sonic so well put together with his feelings, so I wanted to stash him into some mania from the loss of Shadow. I do enjoy psychopathy, after all.