Trigger warnings applied. Don't own Sonic Underground. Duh.

Small feet splashed through the sewage, soaking the legs that pushed them and leaving the shoes that clad them drowned and heavy. Short, quick breaths escaped into the warm air of the stuffy underground tunnel. A panicked little heart beat fast, sending blood and adrenaline surging through the child's veins as he hurtled down the path. It smelled awful, and he probably smelled awful, but the child was used to it. He ran and ran, desperation clouding his vision, stumbling, falling, getting up again, running. He had to get away.

"Kid!"

Larger feet splashed through the water some ways behind him. The child squeaked in fear in spite of himself, the shout causing his heart to leap and his body to tremble and falter. He cried silently, his breath coming too harshly for it to turn to real sobs; instead, it was more like ragged, breathless gasping. He spat stray droplets of sewer water from his mouth and coughed, but he didn't slow down, even though his mad splashing was a dead giveaway to his location.

"Boy!"

He ignored the angered yell that echoed down the tunnel and surrounded him in cold fingers. He ignored his own regret. He ignored the sound of the blast and screams long gone that reverberated in his mind. His ears rang as his head pulsed from over-exertion. His skinny shoulder ached from the weight in his hand that dragged him down.

A bony hand shot out and clamped around his arm like a snake. The child was yanked back, his joint twinging painfully at the pull. He cried out, tugging at his arm and struggling uselessly in the sewage. His pursuer, a rat thief, shook him violently, grabbing onto his other arm and forcing him to release what was in his sweaty palm. The gun dropped to the bottom of the river of filth, eliciting a cry of desolation from the small child.

"Giovanni!" he wailed.

The rat thief rattled him once again, fury lighting up his eyes and twisting his face viciously. There was a flash of momentary hesitation, a hint of sadness, in his enraged expression, but in a blink it was gone. He snarled into the child's face.

"What the fuck d'you think you tryin'a pull, you little shit?" he hissed. The child cried and scrabbled at his hands. He tightened his grip harder and the child shuddered in pain. Giovanni swallowed down his remorse; remorse had no place in a criminal's soul.

"Answer me, Manic!"

The little green hedgehog snivelled. His struggling had ceased and he now hung, defeated, withered and hopeless, in his captor's vice grip. Giovanni gritted his teeth.

"What were you gon' do with that gun, huh?" he questioned harshly, "You gon' kill Megalodon?! Huh?! You gon' kill yourself?! What, Manic, what?!"

"Shut up!" barked the child through his angry tears. Giovanni gave him another good shake.

"Don' even start, Manic. You in deep shit this time, you little punk. I'm tellin' ya, Ferrell's gon' have your ass on a platter for this!" Giovanni snapped, locking Manic's two small hands in his own large one and beginning to drag him back down the tunnel. Manic's fighting picked up in vigour again, and he pulled and kicked and bellowed against Giovanni's forward force. It was no use, though, Giovanni was stronger.

Manic was dragged back through the rushing brown water, his shorter legs stumbling and fumbling to keep up with Giovanni's relentless pace. He was getting even filthier than he already was. His arm and shoulder were aching from being yanked on. His tears made tracks down his grimy cheeks.

He was being taken back. He was going to be taken back to where he'd run from. They had to go back through the bloody cavern. Through the death and killing and hate. Through the flesh and fetor and lifeless eyes. His screams echoing off the tunnel walls were his only indication that he was breathing at all.

"Manic!"

Something was wrapped around his legs. He kicked them out at it, hoping to loosen its grip on him. It wasn't working, it was just getting tighter! He pumped his legs, bucked at the hands, slapped and punched at the bodies crowding him. The heat... it was too hot!

He screamed again, this time in despair and desperation. "No! Get away! Stop!"

"Manic, hey!"

Fingers curled around his shoulders, grasping tightly and shaking. He flinched and swiped at the offending appendages.

"Just... J-Just go away!"

"Manic, it's us! Open your eyes!"

A jolt of self-awareness startled Manic into obeying the command and opening his eyes. He panted and rasped, coated in a sheen of cold sweat, as he tried to get his vision to focus on what was in front of him rather than what was playing in his brain. His confused body quickly backed up against the wall beside his bed and he rooted frantically with wild eyes for something he couldn't quite place. Safety, maybe? Reassurance? Familiarity?

"W-Wha..."

Sonic was the closest to him, the blueness of his fur shocking Manic back to reality. He blinked and searched around for the dash of pink that blazed just behind the blue, Sonia's worried eyes peering down at him. Manic felt the drop in adrenaline come down hard as his terrified high fell through the sky back down to the land of the living. He breathed a tremendous sigh of relief, falling back onto his pillow and flopping a dead arm over his eyes as exhaustion attacked his twitching muscles.

"You had a bad dream," Sonic told him. He was shifting from foot to foot—a nervous habit.

"Manic, are you okay?" Sonia asked, concern burning in her gaze. She looked shaken, like she might start tearing up at the wrong word. Manic swallowed and nodded feebly. She frowned, "You sure?"

"Yes," he croaked, "It was a nightmare, like Sonic said."

"Will you tell us what it was about?" she asked.

Manic clamped his mouth shut reluctantly. He really would have preferred not to relive it, but he knew his sibs were just as stubborn as he was, and he definitely wasn't going back to sleep tonight after that memory. He sighed and it came out heavy, burdened, and sad. Sonic and Sonia went rigid immediately with rapt attention and Manic smiled slightly. He sat up facing them and prepared himself for an unfortunate trip down memory lane.

"It... was a memory from my childhood," he said quietly, "I don't remember what age I was. I never really paid attention to my age anyway but... Anyway, a couple of our guild members were hired as heavy muscle for a turf war. It was good money, y'know? Nothin' wrong with it. Nothin' unusual. Some gangs around the streets pissed each other off and decided to get physical—same old story. Only this time, the fight spread down to the sewers, a little too close to our guild headquarters... meaning a lot of our bunch not involved got swept up in it unintentionally..."

Here Manic paused. His eyes glided over his siblings briefly before flicking back down to his joined hands. Sonic and Sonia exchanged a glance, their eyes communicating emotions that could only be said without words.

"Including you?" guessed Sonia gently.

Manic swallowed and his jaw tightened. "Well... I was there, I guess, but I didn't participate. None of the kids did, but that didn't stop them from... from... becoming collateral damage. I, uh, may have witnessed some bad stuff, and then may have proceeded to, uh, do some other terrible stuff..."

"Manic..." One look at their expressions had him instantly on edge.

"I didn't kill no one!" he spat out, defences rising as his insecurity of what his siblings thought of him kicked in. Sonic and Sonia only looked taken aback, though, and he immediately regreted his sharp tongue; he was still in street-mode. "Sorry."

The images flooded his mind, images of blood splattered ground, bodies with their brains blown out, the sewage stained a sick reddish brown, and unfortunate survivors of the battle suffering through fatal injuries that they were doomed to die from. He shuddered and comforting hands shot out to support him through his waking nightmare.

"I'll never forget that scene," he murmured in a daze, his eyes glazed with the memory, "The noises, the chaos, the carnage; it was the most violent thing I've even seen. The smell was... strangling. The smell of death and hate and fear. I ran off with a gun, something crazy driving me to end it—though whether it was the life of the rival gang leader or my own I still have trouble separating. One of the guild members, Giovanni, caught me and stopped me, but in those moments... man, I can't even bring to words what that impulse was, how it made me feel. All I know is that, if Giovanni hadn't stopped me, something irreversible would have happened that night."

Sonic and Sonia's faces were grim, and they solemnly chose not to say anything. Words were useless in these types of situations; they'd seen enough of traumatised victims to understand that. Sometimes, silence was the only armour that could be donned to confront a tale of horror with.

"You know, it's crazy," Manic continued, oblivious to his siblings' stoicism. "Queen Aleena disappears, and in less than a decade everything goes to shit. All the thieves in the guild were homeless, pitiful people with nothing else waiting for them but robotisation or death. Every one of them. How did that happen in such a short time? It's insane, some of their circumstances... my own wasn't even top five, man. Like, picking up abandoned children was common down there." Manic swiped away a tear that had just barely broken out.

Sonia sat down close to him on the bed and gave him a squeeze. "You weren't abandoned, Manic. Mother didn't want to give any of us up."

Manic said nothing.

"You know that, right bro?" prompted Sonic, "You know she was only doing what was best? You know she loved us?"

"Yeah, I guess," Manic sighed. He ran a hand through his quills, "I... guess. I just wish... I don't know, man; like, why did she just leave me? She made sure you and Sonia had good homes, but me? I was found on the side of a street in a bad part of town at night. It just makes me wonder..."

"Manic, I'm sure she has a good reason," Sonia tried to comfort, though even she was aware of how unsure she sounded. What Manic spoke of was the truth, after all; Sonia didn't know how to approach it in a reasonable way that gave their mother the benefit of the doubt and her brother some solace.

Manic let himself humour her with a submissive nod. He'd been through a lot in his life—really, his sibs wouldn't even believe it. But he supposed that was the price for being brought up by a band of thieves: you get involved in stuff you otherwise would stay away from. For example, Sonic and Sonia didn't know that he'd been drinking for nearly all of his life—quite frequently actually—just for the sake of it. Or that he'd tried his luck with some of that golden, turn-you-high-as-a-kite goodness. Only a few though. He left that junk behind a long, long time ago.

It was these experiences that set him apart from his sibs. He wondered if that was the point his mother had been trying to make: to have him growing up under circumstances so low that he could never be considered a prince even remotely related to her. She only needed one prince and one princess, really. Why keep him? Especially now that she'd have a reason to reject him? He was scum, a thief, a street rat. He was beneath her. Lower than the dirt scuffing her shoes.

"Manic, it's okay buddy," Sonic reassured. "You can talk to us. It's okay." It wasn't really. He'd witnessed too much for it to be okay.

"Yeah."

Lies.

Manic had seen what became of those who didn't let go of the temptation of drugs and got themselves hooked. It wasn't pretty. Most of them ended up killing themselves—either by suicide, at the hands of the loan sharks, or by the withdrawal when they finally ran out of money.

He'd seen mothers lying face down in the sewer water, their bastard babies and abandoned children screaming for her to move, to say something. Too late.

He'd experienced the horrors of coming across a raping. The sobs and pleads of the victim forever echoing in his young mind.

He'd stumbled upon countless murder sites, killing grounds, and the results of gang wars—the one from his nightmare only one of many. Blood saturated ground, bodies with their gore and viscera littering the walls around them, writhing survivors of the battle suffering through injuries so brutal it was an act of mercy to give them sweet death.

Sometimes he wished he could turn back the clock, just for the chance to change what he ran away from, what he let happen time and time again. He could've helped so many people. But he had been afraid, because he had been young and weak.

He ran away.

Yeah, Sonia and Sonic would be horrified if he told them the whole story. Sure, being Freedom Fighters could get messy sometimes, but Manic still had yet to come across something so sickening and gruesome as to rival with the memories of his past (he refused to refer to it as his childhood), and he was sure that he never would.

"Thanks, guys," he eventually replied with a forced smile. "I'll be sure to take you up on that offer, but for now, I'm really tired."

Lies.

Sonic's face fell, but he quickly cleared it of disappointment. He clapped Manic on the shoulder. "Alright then, bro. Um... I guess we'll leave then. If there's anything else, though, I'm always all ears for you, man."

"As am I," Sonia added, giving him another hug, lingering longer than she had to. "Goodnight, brother. Love you."

Manic smiled at them. "Yeah, love you guys too. Night."

They both eventually left to go back to bed, though Manic doubted they'd sleep much, he certainly wouldn't. He sighed.

That was fine.

Lies.