Fading Shadows
By: The Nevermore Raven
Chapter I
Disappointment

Notice: Hey! wanted everyone to know I submitted this story for Myz's fanfiction of the year contest. I would greatly appreciate if you vote for this story when contest time arrives! The contest opens November 25 and closes on May 1.

A.N. Master Metallix was kind enough to point something out. This is a WHAT IF? This is a grimm and bleak parallel universe of Shadow. My penname implies angst after all! This story will not be part of my primary epic. I am aware several characters will be OOC (out of character).
-What if Shadow had endured the attrocities of Shadow's First Life?
-What if Shadow had the pure heart and modest personality of my profile?
-What if the people he knew offered him no attention?
This is the result...

The days of my bitter life are becoming longer and duller as many days pass. Though days go by and the world keeps turning, it keeps turning without me. I feel detached, for I am not of this world. I never have been part of the world. I am wandering through the city where the only people I know reside, for decades passed since I was forgotten and left in a storage room. The sky is bleak, a solid sheet of dark grey clouds that provides an incessant drizzle of rain, and yet it reflects my feelings. Many tall buildings tower into the sky, adding more to my sense of lowliness as my fur dampens from the assault of the sky.

Why, you might ask, am I so depressed? I am so melancholy for I am alone. I have no family that lifts my heart up each day. I have no friends to worry about me and let me know that I make their lives better for them. I have no family, therefore I have no home. Home is where the heart is, after all. My home is nowhere and everywhere; nothing and everything; existent yet impossible; easy to find, yet lost forever in the ravages of time.

I am the miserable and the abandoned. The people I know stopped me in my tracks as I was about to bring the world to an untimely end. We waged battle among the stars far above the highest clouds in the sky. Something about this group stopped me; they were friends with each other, allies. The sidewalk I walk upon is poorly made, having countless cracks and potholes, caused by the endless barrage of sun, rain, ice, and time.

I walked through a large puddle, causing small splashes and ripples to flow along its surface and causing my shoes to become ever more soaked. My soaked fur was cold, causing my skin beneath to become numb as more water dripped from my nose, joining the many other drops that fell to the ground. As I stopped the very disaster I had started not long before, I had hope in my broken heart. They were friends with each other. Maybe then I could become friends with them. If only I knew better.

I developed a fondness for the group of heroes. My fondness and hopes are in vain, and I realized that my hope would not be answered as the heavens above rumbled in the distance. I stared out at the road beside me, watching as the splashes of the puddles became more constant, turning from a light scattering of moisture to a torrential downpour. The heavens echoed its first roar in a second stanza, and my fur was becoming colder and heavier by the minute.

After I had bothered to stop a disaster, a sense of despair has trapped me in a cage of darkness. I am alone, stranded in a desert devoid of life and warmth. I sighed inwardly as a scream rang out from the steady song of the raindrops. The voice sounded familiar. I turned my head towards the sound to see the source of the noise, and I saw a hedgehog girl with pink fur. Amy Rose, I remember you so well. The girl let out a roar of frustration as she put a hood on her raincoat up to protect her hair. "My hair is ruined! I can't go and see Sonic like this!" The girl stomped her foot against the ground and it happened to land in a puddle, sending a splash through the air and getting moisture on her shoes. The rose female growled in anger.

I decided to help her out, for I had the natural urge to do so. I nonchalantly walked over to her as fat raindrops drenched my quills and bothered my crimson eyes. "Would you like some help, Amy?" I asked in my smooth and deep voice, causing the girl to gasp and stare at me with her large green eyes. The pink girl blinked and replied, "Oh, it is you, Shadow. No, I do not need any help, thank you. I must be going."

Amy trudged beyond me and into the distance. I sighed again. Amy ignores me, Sonic ignores me. Knuckles, I have not seen his violet eyes for days. I was feeling numb and burdened by the attacking clouds of grey above. None of the individuals I have seen as potential friends have bonded with me in the manner that I hoped they would.

I lost something that mattered to me years ago, something that mattered to me far more than anything else; my family. In acts of cruel and audacious greed, a trusted institution that is meant to protect the people beneath it destroyed the very people it was supposedly protecting. The government murdered my family in cold blood, for it wanted to control me. It wanted to control the very power that I hate. If I lacked the power that is bestowed upon me, my family could still be alive. My memories once were memories of laughter and love, of fire.

A jagged streak of lightning ripped across the sky and flared in a brilliant blue flash. I retreated from the exposure of the open and approached a nearby building in an attempt to find shelter from the rain. The rain plummeted upon everything around me in thick sheets as if God's angels were pouring thousands of buckets down upon the city in which I wait.

A crash jolted the air, and in its aftermath rumbled the air with such an intensity that I could feel my soaked chest rattle. Heat from my body was whittled away by the tempest winds and barrage of cold needles. Before me was an alley where numerous trashcans and dumpsters produced hollow metallic protests as the rain struck them relentlessly. The way Amy said my name lacked energy and joy. She sounded disappointed.

My matted fur clung to my skin and my quills sagged from the weight of rain they carried as I noticed stairs ascend from the sidewalk and up to a door of a brick building. The door was not what appealed to me. The stairs were relatively dry beneath, and there was a clearing under them. If I was to shelter there, I would be protected from above and from three sides.

The stairs were in a corner where the brick building joined a second one that was not even with it in length. From above, the building was shaped like an L. In addition, the area under the stairs was raised above the sidewalk around it, and so it would be harder for floods to reach. With a sigh I walked into the hovel and squeezed moisture out of my pelt and lay down to sleep against the cold and rough cement.

As I waited through the rain, I wondered about the others. I have tried numerous times to socialize with Sonic, Amy, Tails, and Rouge, yet none of them will bother to be kind in return. Sonic hates me, apparently because I am the fake hedgehog that is a threat to his once unique gift of speed.

Tails is constantly studying Doctor Eggman and determining what the crazed genius is plotting to do next. Amy is blindly chasing after Sonic, and Sonic just shakes the poor girl off his foot and sprints away. Rouge and Omega are the only friends I have. Rouge is on an assignment, and Omega has bonded with Tails. I resolved that I would try to bond with each of them one final time...