"Why didn't you say anything?"
"Because it would've scared everybody."
Shadow is furious and terrified and heartbroken, staring wide-eyed at the wound already festering with tell-tale venom.
Rouge is slumped against a brick wall, breathing with some difficulty. She'd come here, to this dark place, in secret to assess herself, but with her senses dulled by the venom's spread, she failed to notice him there until she lifted the sleeve of the jacket and revealed the wound, seeping sickness through the bandaging. She had snarled at his flashlight, then threw herself at its beam, and he simply knew.
"No," he whispers, almost choking on the word.
"Honey."
"N-no."
She watches him shake his head, like a child, stirring his quills with the motion.
"No."
"I'm so sorry."
He is trembling, reaching out to her, unsure.
"You need to accept this. Okay?" She doesn't know what she's saying, but she was always good at soothing his distress, as far as he could be soothed. "It happened. But I'm still here." She winces in the light. "I'm still me. Rouge. See?"
He opens and closes his mouth, shuddering.
"I… I haven't got much time, but for now, I'm still me. Okay?" She grits her teeth, gingerly covering the injury under her sleeve. "Honey, I know this is… I'm… I'm scared, too. But…"
"No!" He doesn't raise his voice, yet it seems to echo within the otherwise abandoned, overturned room.
The sun is setting on both of them.
"Not you. It… It can't take you away from me."
"I love you, honey." It's an admission of defeat, the likes of which he has never heard her utter before. It's also the first time she has expressly said it – "I love you."
Her words break him. He falls before her, hitting his knees, his breath suddenly out of his chest, leaving him gasping.
"Tell the others…" She closes her tired eyes, basking in the light. "Tell them… I…"
She barely seems changed, to him. Still, she looks just like the woman he has spent years of his immortality with. The woman who took him off the street and fed him and taught him manners.
"They'll understand. You… You don't have to tell them anything."
"Not you," he whispers, crawling up to her, into her waiting embrace, sharing her spotlight. "Not you. Not you. N-not…"
She captures him as he nestles against her, caressing the sharp length of his quills, kissing his ears.
He buries his face in her chest. He can smell it, being this close to her. The infection.
The flashlight has enough juice left to run for a couple more hours.
Amy hasn't stopped crying. She functions, but with tears, abusing herself to keep her loved ones safe from the howling things outside, the hammer so slick and heavy in her aching hands that she sometimes drops it or lets it go mid swing and has to call another, sapping a little further at her precious resources. She wonders if she'll simply run out of hammers, someday, and if that'll be the end of her.
Close beside her in the fight against the infected is Knuckles, barking orders at the others whilst buying them enough time to pass by safely. Frequently misunderstood and clumsy in his stress, he bravely shoulders leadership without the qualifications Sonic once had.
"Go back."
"No."
"You… are making… a mistake, honey."
"I love you."
Rouge keeps her eyes closed because the light is uncomfortable, although Shadow has tried to blot it out, except for a beam across her face.
The flashlight is dead but there are windows.
He isn't sure why and he dislikes hurting her like this, but she is less like herself in the dark. So he lets a little light in.
Her breaths are slow and ragged. She frequently seizes her arm, keeping the trembling limb in a grip of iron. Her arm, in the dark.
He is in a strange, disturbing state, himself. As if he isn't quite present. As if part of him has gone away. Faded. He is darker than his surroundings but he cannot see that.
"They… need you."
"You don't understand."
"Please… go back… to them."
"I can't go without you."
"You… stupid… beautiful…" She lets her arm go, allowing it to writhe, and blindly caresses his face. Unaware that she is streaking venom across his cheek and jawline. "They'll probably… die… out there."
He has to switch some parts of himself off.
The bat suddenly lurches, hacking. Shrinks away from the light.
He can feel the trembling of their bodies outside. Hears their claws and fists, digging for a way in. Smells their putrid breaths. There are not many of them, not at this hour, and they are crying for a place to hide. He hopes the barricade will hold.
She eventually stops coughing, seemingly robbed of her voice. She pulls herself upright, into the light. A last attempt at resistance.
With a glance at the venom on her lips, he cups her face between his hands and kisses her.
Amy drags herself back, following the funny little lights Tails rigs up as he goes, because the monsters don't like the lights. The monsters still attack anyway, sometimes running toward the lights like they are drawn, even as the lights disorient or disrupt them, making them wail and sometimes they flee again. Sometimes, if one is quiet and doesn't touch an infected, a little light is enough to render it almost harmless. Wailing. Perhaps fleeing.
"You've been bit, Amy."
She's still tearful, as his voice echoes in her head. Reaching upward to feel the chunk missing from her ear, her expression twists again.
So did his.
"I have to go?"
"A-Amy."
The terrified band of uninfected survivors came first. It'll be hard, but Tails is a resourceful and strong for his age. Maybe he will manage.
She is a hero, to leave them, like this. Before she turns into something tragic.
Sonic would be proud.
Rouge no longer speaks. In the dim lighting of the candlesticks Shadow dredged up to compensate for nighttime, her eyes are strange. She convulses sometimes, her teeth sharp and menacing.
He sits opposite her and he doesn't feel well. He wonders if his unique construction has accelerated the process. The candles are strangely enticing, yet they repel him. Tug at the cords of his mind, but stab his eyes. He wonders what sort of monster he will make. He wonders if she will try to kill him before he has fully changed. He wonders, with what little of himself remains sensible, whether or not he made the right choice. Him and her and the candlelight.
She wanted him to kill her. He considered it, too, but she looked too much like Maria.
Amy is surprised by how the monsters don't attack her anymore. She is exhausted in ways she cannot explain, dragging her hammer like deadweight. Colours are all odd and the light is piercing, like the tips of knives about to cut into her eyes. But the light makes it a little easier to recall her name. This, she figures, is why the hordes were at their worst at night, but why their cries were their most tragic in the day. It's all going so fast. Days, lulling by in jerking, drowsy moments.
Shadow wakes suddenly when he feels a hand on his chest, pressing nails into his fur with painful, powerful force.
Rouge is over him, breathing on him, her teeth bared and saliva threading between.
He doesn't fight. Doesn't intend to.
She makes a sound. It's a husky sound, sort of like the sounds she used to make, but it's wrong.
He waits for her to tear him apart but she doesn't.
She stares into him, her aquamarine eyes piercing every layer he has built up over the years, and just as abruptly she releases him.
He sits up as she turns and skulks away, leaving the comforting aura of the candlelight. Without a word he forces himself to stand and lurches nauseously after her. Each step becomes easier in the dark, but his brain seeps with forgetfulness.
She encounters the barricade, then surges upward, clawing at a narrow window above them.
He tries to call out to her, now, but he has so little air.
Little lights. They will cause discomfort. And yet the lights seem to draw Rouge, also, like a moth to fire. And there is untainted flesh nearby.
Tails keeps lookout. But he hadn't anticipated a flying adversary and is quite unprepared for her when she unceremoniously crashes into him and thus throws him to the ground.
His scream causes a panic and further screaming.
She hisses, the fleshly pulse in her ears doing little to numb the pain caused by unpleasantly loud noises. Only becomes further incensed when his young fist connects with her nose. She recoils from the screaming, furry thing and rises to her full height amidst the other screaming things. Disorienting. A few bright lights. Where is she? What is she doing here? Why is she here? Images of faces, in beams of little lights rigged up. She knows these faces, but when she looks about at the people, she sees only strangers. Hears not the laughter of comforting times past, but the current screams of terror.
Tails' arm feels broken. He scrambles away from the looming bat. He needs help but all he has left are civilians who tend to be fairly useless. He recognises Rouge after a few seconds of panicked backtracking, however, and because she is not actively biting anybody, he momentarily has hope.
She is looking about with strange eyes and flattened ears, unsure what to do with so much commotion. She considers the lights.
"Rouge!"
She hears her name over the rest of the noise. Her gaze falls on the fox cub that has shakily gotten to his feet. His face, lit up.
"Rouge?"
Before she can respond, a brave and desperate survivor grabs a salvaged chair and slams it over the back of her head, causing pain and fear and she doesn't understand why any of this is happening to her.
Tails has is worst fears confirmed as he watches Rouge drop to the ground only to twist around with uncannily loose limbs, surging again and sinking her teeth into a thigh of a stranger, an unknown, without any attachment under the lights. With a yank of her head she pulls the man down and by that point Tails is trying to organise the people he can still save, but someone who tried to escape ended up letting more monsters in and he is suddenly airborne, soaring above the spreading infection.
Shadow is too late, watching with tired eyes as uninfected and infected alike race past him, his best friend currently gnawing on someone's arm.
Rouge finishes her devastating bite, then releases her victim and moves on. Allowing him to be this close, he can see the instinct within her to simply infect anyone she can.
She doesn't know any better, anymore. She isn't stalled by their unfamiliar faces. Any attempt to reason is drowned out in their screams.
He is quick enough to grab her wrist when she stumbles past him, as if delirious, venom and blood dripping from her jaws.
She blinks, glaring at him strangely.
He doesn't know how to communicate with her, doesn't know if she will understand, but attempts a whispered, "Stop."
Clearly upset by the screams, she seems caught between focusing on this hedgehog and the bodies scrambling all around, some of which are not yet tainted. She can feel it, their purity. It makes the fleshy pulse in her head ache.
"Please, Rouge, stop."
She doesn't remember language. She might not know his voice.
He doesn't know, but he begins to walk, pulling her after himself.
She yanks away from him, but despite hissing and snapping her jaws at nearby uninfected, she is lead through the crisscrossing chaos of struggling bodies.
Tails just needs to breathe. With breaths, he can think more clearly. But it's hard.
Amy has gone back to where she last left Knuckles. It was an accident, she tells him, as much as she reminds herself. Big hammer. So heavy. So tired. Even before she was bit, she was losing some sort of battle with herself.
Shadow keeps walking, dragging Rouge after him, and eventually, they reach the outskirts. Follow the road that leads out.
The sun will rise and neither of them will like it.
He has very little time but he notices that now, in the relative quiet, that she has become much less agitated and confused, moving more swiftly and with less protest.
She makes her wrong sounds, looks about with her strange eyes, but doesn't bite or claw at him at all.
"Oh, Rouge. I'm…"
Tails is filled with the most incredible relief as a curt voice calls out to him from somewhere. He doesn't mind that he's staring down the barrel of a gun, because on the other end is an uninfected survivor.
The sun is rising on the horizon.
Rouge sees it and snarls, but Shadow embraces her against himself.
"I'm so sorry," he whispers in her ear, as she begins to struggle.
She breathes, as if inhaling him. Turns against him, like she's getting closer to better listen.
He hums a brief tune, out of key.
Her struggles cease almost immediately.
"I don't know…" He is using all of his strength just to keep her close. He doesn't have to, because she is docile in his arms. "What else to do."
She dimly perceives something beyond the sickness that pulses inside. Like a memory. A face that matches his voice. Laughter over a dinner table. Battles against robotic minions. Friends.
"I love you."
To say that she understands him is to romanticise what she has become. He isn't like the other noises. He isn't disorienting or painful.
"I love you." He caresses the back of her head, bruised. "That's why… I'm taking you away. Where… maybe you won't hurt… anybody else. And maybe you won't hurt… anymore."
She closes her eyes and hides her face, burying it against his fur. She isn't sure why, but she trusts him.
He feels the light and it is welcome. "I'm sorry." He ran out of time.
Rouge lets Shadow gently pull her to the ground.
In the city, most of the infected hide themselves. Those that don't, suddenly remember. Some flee. They wail.
"You'll be okay, kid."
Tails murmurs his gratitude at the kindly stranger who set his arm.
Amy loses herself in Knuckles' motionless eyes. In remembering, she finds him again.