Stargazer
It must have comforted him that for all of its wandering, his home was a constant in the sky.
A pearl embedded in black velvet.
That was what the ARK resembled most nights, as it drifted noiselessly through space and beyond the jagged sliver of a shattered moon. A jewel guarded by the sheer vastness of its surroundings, hidden to all except those brave enough to seek it.
She'd never seen it glow so dimly before, as light wafted out from the orb in a slow, hazy bleed. Like the rest of the world she'd remained oblivious to its existence, and indeed it seemed as though tonight it wanted to shrink from view, cloak itself from prying eyes. But every night since the Professor had made its presence known, for the past three months, she'd opened her window slats and watched it sail across the darkened sky.
The space colony was in stable orbit and held no chance of reentry, so she couldn't blame fear for her recent insomnia. Besides that, her faith in Sonic and Shadow's handiwork ran too deep for doubt.
Something else bothered Amy Rose.
Little things, she supposed. The way her kitchen filled with fragrant cinnamon after she pulled sugar cookies from the oven. Chasing Sonic across the beach on a sunny day, her steps puffing the sand. Shopping with Cream. These little things she enjoyed that could have been taken away in less than half an hour, she found meant much more to her these days. So she baked more cookies. Ran harder. Laughed for longer.
Live moved on, and Amy knew it was futile to heed the past. Though she preferred not to think about that near-brush with doom, instead turning her attention to the sunnier side of life, every once in a while the memory would make itself known. Even on those sunny beach trips, the ARK drifted back into view. Like a scar, it would raise itself silently beside the faded moon in the clear blue sky.
Each time it did, someone would have to change the subject. Let bygones be bygones.
She startled as an emerald flash illuminated the leaves of the trees beside her window. That bright of a light usually heralded a swarm of robots, but Eggman wouldn't dare. Not while she was awake.
Amy slipped her feet into her boots, which lay beside the door, and pushed it open, peering through the jamb to a thin wisp of smoke that was being carried off by the wind.
Her front door had a walkway that crossed a shallow, stone-ridden stream and a redundant little wooden bridge. Her boots clanked across their curved planks as they carried her towards the source of the disturbance-
"Shadow?"
He was staring at his hands for some reason, scrutinizing the smoke pealing from them. Then he looked directly at her and said, "I don't recognize this place."
Amy stopped cold. She wanted to ask a million questions, but her instinct to aid others turned a question of intent into, "Where did you want to go? Maybe I can help."
The way he struggled with that-the way he half-turned and scrutinized the gaps in the trees-she'd have thought no one had ever offered him a lending hand before.
"You wouldn't know anything that would help me," he said, heading towards the brush from where he'd emerged. "Good night."
"Hey! Hold it, mister." Her indignant tone froze him in place. "Now maybe you did wind up here on accident, but I don't believe in coincidence. Remember up there?"
As she pointed to the tiny gem in the sky, inexorable in its orbit, he touched his forehead as if he'd had a migraine-passed as soon as she opened her mouth to ask what was wrong.
Shadow had always seemed distant, lost in his own world. But now he appeared genuinely perplexed, blankness replacing that melancholy demeanor she'd on the ARK. Her heart beat faster as a possibility she'd only entertained in the peripheral blurted from her lips.
"Shadow," she said, "do you even remember me?"
There was a pointed silence.
"It's loud here."
It wasn't a yes and it wasn't a no. Amy didn't know what to make of his response at all until she realized why he'd said it: the silence was filled with ... noise.
She opened her ears and was shocked to find that the background she'd taken for granted crowded her mind. Water burbled over rocks and the wind, once soft, now yanked on her dress, tugging it around her legs. The leaves on the maple trees scraped each other in endless, minute cacophony, the insects they housed an orchestra all their own. Bullfrogs bellowed low, mournful choruses while crouched somewhere in the tall grasses.
As it was wont to do, her mind drifted back to the sheer quiet of the space colony. How she'd deemed it creepy at first, this lonely, dusty place where you could feel time slip you by as you sailed high above the Earth, the sun almost too bright to count the hours.
To Shadow, that silence, that emptiness had been his home. To Shadow, everything alive must have seemed foreign.
"Who was he?"
Amy blinked, mistakenly thinking for a second he'd meant Sonic. But, just to be sure: "I'm sorry, he who?"
"The original."
Of course, that didn't mean anything to her, and he probably knew this. She didn't know how, but he'd acquired habit of testing people lately, asking them things they had no business of knowing and then reflecting upon their answers with the same indiscriminate disappointment etched in his face.
She hated feeling like she were betraying some kind of trust she'd never agreed to. But she didn't honestly know, so why should she count among the discards?
Her words must have meant something once. He just couldn't hear them now over the din in his head ...
"This planet seems so strange," he said at last. "Warm when it shouldn't be, cold when it's not convenient. The air constantly shifts, changes. I don't know how you can stand it. And yet, this chaos, this perpetual change … " Giving up the ghost, he turned back. "Nothing lasts. So I suppose it shouldn't matter."
He touched his forehead a second time before drawing his gaze toward the shining space colony, something softening in his expression as he did. It must have comforted him that for all of its wandering, his home was a constant in the sky.
She looked back to her own tiny house, to its heart-painted door and its silly wooden bridge and its trellis where roses grew in peace, and felt a pang of regret for something she'd never even lost.
"I just wonder," he said, "if he is worth remembering."
Amy stood in the moon's gentle blue light, wondering at his sudden absence, while all around her the forest swayed and roared in silence.