Puppet

Here he is again.

Unaware of the one who managed to force his eyes to linger, far longer than they'd ought too. The silent breeze, whipping octaves of whistles pass their ears, loud over the quiet of their shared space.

Dewy as the morning humidity, he continued to blink away the fog from obscuring his vision of the one who stood in front of him. He could almost be fooled to believe that the other was staring at him. Though, he knew that just wasn't the case.

Those eyes didn't follow the hunched shoulders which drew in even more on themselves nor the movement of arms curling around their own fleece covered waist.

Black.

The color of mourning and new beginnings. Growth and sophistication. Change. He was blossoming through these changes all at once, a heavy misfortune hitting him at different hours of every day; harder each and every time. Everything about him was changing, his previous isolation only growing, shifting to a silent resentment and then an acceptance. Temperament had all but bled from his very being. His anger, a prominent emotion weaved into his very nature gone. Replaced by that bizarre silent, but somber acceptance.

He said nothing, not even as he chased him down every time vanished from his sight. Not even as he hid in the deepest of burrows, too dark for normal eyes to see. Even when he moved to stand by him, there was nothing spoken. Just an inhale, stream of smoke and then silence.

Shadow cried.

There was no one to see it.

….

Like many times before the body fell forward and like every other time, his hand reached out to catch it. The heavy pressure of dead weight on his arm had begun to normalize itself within his mind, the previous horror fading along with the weeks that's gone by.

But still, he could not look at his body in the eye. Never abling himself to stomach staring into black eyes that never blinked back at him; black eyes that over-turned their violet predecessors.

He... it was getting skinnier. The legs were beginning to give out more often. It slumped in its trot forward, the hunched like nature making it even more alien to him.

There'd been no counting how many miles he walked a day, searching and following hollow limbs that still carried the strength to walk on their own. Stalking a body that never slept, never ate, never bathed. Things it no longer had any need for, it was disturbing how many things they now had in common.

Relating more to a shell of a person than the actual being himself. The one that smiled so rarely so, a smile littered with sharp teeth that'd resemble one of a predator, not an obsessive plant-eater. The most alluring smile Shadow had ever seen…. It disgusted him at first. It disgusted him, until the moment he'd known he'd never see it again.

…never?

Since when?

"There's no need to throw yourself into searching guardian." It'd been the first time he'd heard his own voice in weeks. He'd refrained himself from talking to it as if it would respond back. There was no one there left for him to talk too. Still, at the end of the first week, he tried. He tried so hard. Even though he knew there was nothing there, that he'd watched the life being stolen out of those very eyes right in front of him... he still tried.

It never responded, not to anything he said... or anything he gave it.

The island had vanished, the master emerald along with it too. It vanished…

…and it took Knuckles with it.

Like a magnet drawn to another, a pet looking for its owner. The guardian may have been gone but his body never stopped searching. Its legs would always carry him in the same direction, South. Despite the Island crumbling into the sea, further into the east. The body always moved South.

It always walked south. It always stumbled south.

...and he followed it.

A/N: Hope this was as sad as I intended it to be.