Disclaimer: Sonic characters (Sonic, Tails, etc.) belong to SEGA. The rest (Stew, Susan, etc.) are mine.

A/N: spd243, this is the story you've been waiting for!

Just over a year ago, I started writing the first draft of this story on paper—thus, I thought it would be appropriate to post this first chapter today.

Earlier this year, I started reading JudasFm's Rising Star. Ironically, it shared some things with my story. This was complete coincidence—I completed the entire first draft before touching Rising Star. Do read her story—it's amazing. This, in the meantime, is my attempt to tell the story in my own way.

I hope you enjoy!

Player Two: How Tails Met Sonic

Late August 1992

Chapter 1: The Twin-Tailed Fox

Two. Such a strange number. The only prime even number, it makes a difference between singular and plural. Humans are built in twos. Two eyes. Two arms. Two legs. Two hands. Two feet. Two genders, which, when together, can make a child. And for one particular child, the number two made a huge difference in everything.

As far as he could tell, Miles Prower was a normal kid. He walked normally. His eyes looked normal. And he talked normally, didn't he?

No, scratch that. Sometimes when he got really excited in explaining something, he'd start blabbing. Still, he didn't understand why kids would leave when he did.

They did a lot of things he didn't understand.

For example, why did they call him stupid? He most certainly wasn't stupid. He was reading the encyclopedia A when others were reading "Flopsy Goes for a Walk," and that was when he was six.

Or how people's personalities could change so quickly. One minute they were nice, but the second they saw his extra appendage, their expressions turned sour.

Was something so wrong having two tails? And why did they care? It wasn't their body. Honestly, Miles would have been okay with his two tails if it weren't for the way people reacted to them. Why was he considered a freak?

Miles had been pondering this for years. He asked people this, and if he didn't get a dirty look, he was told to go ask his parents—which he would have gladly done, had they still been alive.

Six years ago was a very long time ago, especially to seven-year-old Miles. Sometimes he tried to picture his parents in his head, but all he could come up with was a loving caress. He wished he could've had that loving caress again, but he couldn't. Not at the orphanage, where he had lived for four years, and nobody wanted to adopt him, and certainly not now. He had been living on the unkind streets for almost two years now, and he, unlike many kids, knew he wasn't looking forward to his eighth birthday. After all, it was just another day, and his days, as of late, he could count on being horrible.

"Hey, where do you think you're going, speed limit?"

Miles didn't bother turning around. He already knew it was Stew, the self-proclaimed "biggest, baddest bully on the block", and he knew the gang wouldn't be far behind.

"Hey, I'm talking to you!"

Miles kept walking. Sure, he was scared, but if anybody knew it except for him, he'd surely be kicked. Maybe Stew would leave him alone if he kept his mouth shut.

No such luck. The next thing he knew was Stew ramming him into a wall.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you!"

Miles reluctantly and fearfully raised his eyes to meet the seething, gray opossum. Stew's own stormy gray eyes glinted with hate as he smacked the fox across the face. "Din't yer parents teach ya to respect yer elders? 'Cuz I ain't seeing it," Stew spat.

Miles looked out of the corner of his eye to the other kids that happened to be playing on the block. They were watching, but as usual, they just stood there, balls in hand, jump ropes still. He knew they wouldn't be any help to him. They never were.

If he had to guess, it was because they were afraid of him. Captain Stew and his gang were the toughest and the oldest (being sixteen) kids on the block. You challenge Stew, and you'd probably end up on the floor, bleeding, if you were lucky. Kids stayed out of the way, so they were mostly left alone.

So why did he target Miles?

"H-hi, Stew," Miles stuttered, trying not to breathe in the stench of Stew's breath as the opossum leaned in and placed a rough hand on Miles' neck.

"Listen to me, freak. I catch ya anywhere near my chili dog again, I'mma make sure ya don't get another bite to eat that day. Got it?" The huge hand tightened its grip on Miles as its owner snarled in the boy's face.

Miles nodded dumbly. Don't touch Stew's chilidog. Ever. Got it.

All he had wanted was something to eat. After all, it had just been lying out in the open, and he'd never even tasted a chili dog in his life. He was so hungry…

"Good." Stew dropped his prey disgustedly. "Now go away. I don't wanna see yer ugly hide for the rest of the day."

Wordlessly and as quickly as his scrawny legs could carry him, Miles picked himself up and scrambled away from the bully. He was lucky all he had was a couple of bruises and a sore neck.

Was it so hard to get what he wanted for once?

His stomach growled as he went back to digging through the garbage—well, what was left of it. Come live on the streets if you want to lose weight quickly, he thought food he'd found lately was few and far between, and he often had to go hungry. If he happened to be really lucky, he'd stumble upon the trashcan of a family with finicky eaters. The kids' parents weren't happy, but he sure was. Food was one of those things he could never get enough of.

The other was knowledge. Miles loved reading. He'd read anything. Fiction helped him to escape this torture he had to call life, but he preferred non-fiction. Non-fiction, he thought, was much more useful. He learned the names and appearance of edible plants and other things. However, it wasn't botany that interested him the most. What caught his attention most was aviation. As long as he could remember, Miles loved airplanes. He often spent hours in the small village library hunting up and down the shelves for books on the subject, and every time a plane flew over, he wished he were flying in it too.

Speaking of the library, it would've opened by now. Maybe the librarian had something good to give him to eat. She was a nice lady.

He rushed off, leaving the trash can lid clattering behind him.

Many of the people Miles had met in his short life hadn't been that nice to him.

Of course, the librarian wasn't one of those people.

"Hello, Miles," she called cheerily to the young fox.

"Hi, Library Lady," Miles replied happily. That was his nickname for her. She had told him her name was Susan, but she didn't mind the nickname. It was cute.

Susan Liddle was, in one word, ordinary—although she was a white poodle like the model Bertha Inwood, there was no way you could ever get the two mixed up. Susan was average. Plain-looking. Plain-spoken and shy. Regular, almost boring. The youngest of six, she was the kind of person who could enter and leave a room during a conversation and not attract attention in the least—thus, when she'd quietly announced that city life was not for her and that she'd be moving to the tiny Westview Village to be a librarian, nobody had protested. Nonetheless, this did not deter Miles from liking her all the same. It had been two years since that frigid January night, but their friendship had only grown stronger since then.

It had been an "empty" day for Miles that day, because it was the day after the orphanage had shut down—Miles hadn't had anything to eat since then, even with his efforts to dig things out of the trash. Susan's husband, a rather plain Labrador known as Evan, had been taking out the trash when he'd spotted the tiny, starving fox-child digging through it.

"Susan!" he'd called, and she'd immediately rushed out to see what the problem was. The moment she saw him, a deep pang of sympathy hit her. She hadn't even noticed Miles' second tail until she'd had him sitting confusedly in a nice, warm bath.

Wait, didn't I already wash his tail? she remembered thinking, just as bemused as the boy sitting in the tub before her. She'd scrubbed that one thoroughly, so how…? At that moment, the tiniest tuft of the tail she'd washed peeked out of the water. She abruptly stopped scrubbing. Miles had realized at the same time as her what she had seen, so he dipped it back under again, but Susan had seen enough. A two-tailed fox? That was just about the weirdest thing that had happened to her in her life, and she stared openly at him until she felt something trembling in her hand.

She looked down at the hand, with the second tail still clutched in it—it was shaking, and when she looked back at its owner, he too was shivering like he was still outside in the snow. It hit her like a brick—he wasn't cold anymore; he was scared she was going to hurt him, now that she had seen his flaw. That was why he had hidden it from her. He was frightened from the chance that she would throw him out, back into the snow because that was how he'd grown up, thinking that his extra tail made him worthy of needless abuse. In fact, now she wondered why she hadn't noticed him before, what with the stuff he likely dealt with. She loathed that kind of abuse, and she stopped it wherever she had the courage to do so.

So instead, she smiled at him, continuing to scrub the tail. "There, there," she soothed, "I'm not going to throw you out. I promise."

He'd looked up at her curiously, which only made her smile that much more.

She'd allowed him to stay the night, but the next morning, he'd insisted on leaving after breakfast—"I don't want people to bother you just because you took care of me," he'd said quietly, the tiniest smile peeking out from the little face. "But thank you anyway."

Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she had no children of her own, she took a special interest in the small vulpine, and made a mental note to keep an eye out for him.

By chance, she'd found him sitting forlornly on the steps of the library the next day, and she'd invited him in. What wonder lit up his face as he took in the sight of all those books, running about, laughing with joy as such it seemed he had never known in his short life before! She'd had to quickly shush him when some patrons gave them funny looks, and he immediately lowered his tone of voice, but the joy was still there.

From then on, day after day, they'd established a little routine at the library. He refused her efforts and offers to take him home, honestly believing that harm would come to her if she helped too much, so she contented herself with bringing him secret small gifts of food and watching him sit in the great green chair, devouring the food and the books in the library. There he was now, twin tails wrapped around him like a blanket, reading a book about airplanes that was far bigger than him. She smiled as he watched him.

Once she'd brought him a toothbrush and a travel-sized tube of toothpaste, and it shocked her when she saw how happy he was over the "gift". He had hugged her tightly and ran into the library's bathroom to use it. To think that such a sweet boy would have to live such an unfortunate life! It made her heart ache. She wished she could help him more, but the library was only open from ten to five on weekdays—and she couldn't stand to think of what the poor soul had to do on weekends.

Today was Friday.

She called for him to get the little snack she could afford to give him. When he didn't answer, she smiled. He was too engrossed in his book. Thus, she walked up to him.

"Miles?"

He looked up, innocent blue eyes glittering.

"Here's a snack for you," Susan said, smiling as she handed him the cookie.

"Thank you," he replied genially.

She smiled again, going back to her desk. She wished she could spend all of her time watching him, but being a librarian came with plenty of hard work.

A few hours later, she looked up again to see that it was already closing time. Miles was still sitting in the same position, the only difference being that he was a lot farther in the book, and his snack was gone.

It made Susan sad every time she said it, but she found it in herself every week to say the three words:

"Miles, it's time."

He glanced up with his big, intelligent eyes that seemed to look right through her. "Okay," he said, closing the book somewhat reluctantly and getting up to give it and the empty plate back to her. "Thank you."

"See you on Monday," Susan returned.

As he smiled widely back at her and walked out the door, she sighed. He really was one of a kind.

A/N: If you read and review nothing else of mine, please review this story! This holds a special place in my heart because it is the first novella/novel-length fan-fiction I have every completed through a first draft. This is the story I really want to get feedback on.

And please, no flames or comments on "why are Tails' eyes blue" or "hey, this isn't in the game". My head continuity is based in the games, but it has things added here and there.

Thank you, and did I mention please review?

Kopo: Yeah, that's how it is at our library too…but I have been to a Barnes and Noble where they had a Starbucks inside. So…maybe the rule here is you can, so long as you don't make a mess? I don't know. XD

Kalex Chwell: Ah, thanks. :) I like stories like this too… It's just sometimes it gets old, because many people write the same thing without changing much. But I'm glad you decided to give this one a chance! Hmm, I suppose it's because bullies tend to be older and physically bigger than those they're intimidating… Usually. So in a sense, I guess it is easier. Thanks!