Note: Just getting this story up to date with where it is on Ao3.
CHAPTER ONE: The Government Has Stolen All Of My Friends
I.
Amy Rose lived on the ninth floor of a very nice apartment building in City Center, which meant that it had high rent, snobbish neighbors, and got attacked by aliens a lot. Last year a whale had fallen onto the roof. A space whale. The top two floors had been crushed flat, which was fine by Amy since she didn't live there and no one who did was indoors at the time (the whale had the serious gall to fall from the sky during the All Building Backyard Let's Pretend We Don't Hate Each Other Barbeque), but was inconvenient because of the construction later on.
Still, she liked her apartment. It was a good size, and it had everything she needed, and she could pay the rent with one or two big jobs. And she was allowed to paint the walls, which she had done so. They were lovely shades of yellow now. (Not pink. Pink seemed a little off for the walls of an apartment for a woman of nineteen. She did paint the bathroom a pale pink, because baby steps.) There was a kitchen, with everything a kitchen needed, the bathroom had both a cool claw-footed tub and a really nice shower that Amy spent thirty minutes figuring out the night she moved in, her bed was enormous and fluffy and had several quilts, two down comforters, and about eleven pillows, and she had a game system that supported Rock Band and most racing games for when she hosted Team Bonding Night.
She liked her apartment. Even if it was so empty when the rest of the team wasn't over, the dishes all washed and put away, her work for her current case spread out on the big desk in the bedroom, the couch usually passed over.
II.
Amy decided not to go back to work after meeting Morph for lunch. Instead, she went home, and spent a while perusing a website that let her watch free cartoons, selected one she hadn't seen that looked pretty good, and watched a few episodes while cooking dinner.
For a while there at the start she'd done the bachelor-pad thing and just had takeout and macaroni all the time, but then she'd discovered that cooking was fun, that it took her mind off things, and that she happened to be stellar at it. Everyone got lots of leftovers, from her friends to her standoffish neighbors to that guy who chose the treadmill next to hers every week and didn't ogle but just kept upping his speed to match hers as she giggled. She was pretty sure he would ask her out soon. If he didn't, she just might. She missed having someone around, even just for casual dating.
So Amy chopped vegetables and worked away on a soup that would take a while to make, but was really delicious, and also used truffle oil in truly obscene quantities. She would take everyone portions in Tupperware containers the next day and tell them to add salt because her soups had the annoying tendency to evaporate all extraneous seasonings overnight, every night.
She set it on to boil—the longest process, what would make it actually dinner and not just meal that I am having immediately following lunch—and settled down with her laptop and a set of cold-case files on various escaped prisoners from several years prior. The Commander had set her on this particular assignment immediately after getting it, confident that she could find something in it that the original analysts couldn't.
He'd been so pleased when they got the order in the first place. He smiled, which for anyone else would've been dancing around the conference room throwing paper in the air like dollar bills in a rap video. "The Zone Cops are on everyone's ass all the time, superior bastards," he'd said. "Rose, I want you to take the cold case files. Anything you can find at all related to them is good. Shadow, you're on this active case, Tails, this one. First one back to me gets a bonus."
Amy had plenty of bonuses, but she'd been eying up a particularly nice wool coat and hat in her favorite window-shopping store for some time, and the cold case files were pretty interesting. And the Commander was right. The Zoners were more stuck up than her neighbors, and Mrs. Faraday two doors down carried her small yappy pet in a purse and wore fur stoles and high heels.
She'd been spending the past couple of days just rifling through the files, methodically sorting them into piles based on how much info each provided, and then sub-sorting them by time. She'd just hit a set of eight or nine all dated the same—a major prison breakout of some sort.
She pulled them to herself and began to flip through, slowing down as she recognized the faces and filled with dread.
"Ah," she said to herself, opening each file and laying them out side by side. "So that's what happened to them."
Three faces she didn't recognize and five she did. Fiona Fox, Flying Frog, Lightning Lynx, Predator Hawk, and Sgt. Simion. She was beginning to get an idea of what might be in the last file.
She opened it up and sighed. "I hate being right all the time."
The final file was laid out atop the rest, the thickest of the lot. Scourge the Hedgehog, Houdini extraordinaire, missing but presumed alive for the past four years. Just like the other five. Just like, she assumed, the other three who had managed to take advantage of the opportunity (really, who was she kidding, she'd met the guy—he'd absolutely orchestrated a mass breakout). No wonder the Zoners gave the Commander this job. Even if he did manage to find something they missed, it'd be dangerous to follow up.
Amy grinned.
A challenge was always appreciated.
She grabbed the coffeepot and turned it on, selecting her favorite playlist as it dripped into a cup, and pulled her chair in close to the desk.
"Alright, boys, let's see what you have to say for yourselves."
III.
Unknown Sender said: How goes, Morphy?
Unknown Sender said: This is Amy btw.
You said: Thanks. Woulda blocked your number.
Amesy said: Haha! Don't blame you.
Amesy said: This is a little awkward. How's work?
You said: Work's good.
You said: Hannah threw a thing of motor oil into a customer's face.
You said: She's not allowed to do customer service anymore.
Amesy said: Oh my god.
Amesy said: Hannah's your friend?
You said: Something like that.
You said: Sorta a friend, I guess.
Amesy said: No such thing as sorta a friend.
You said: Don't be so sure.
You said: Hang around someone long enough, they're always sorta a friend.
You said: But I mean
You said: Hannah and I don't hang out or anything
You said: We just bitch at work together.
Amesy said: Ahhh I see
Amesy said: Does this happen often with you?
You said: Does what?
Amesy said: Having sorta-a-friends.
You said: Nah. No friends is more common.
Amesy said: You don't hang around people.
You said: No I do
You said: I just
You said: Ugh
Amesy said: You're really contradicting your own points here :-)
You said: No shit Sherlock
Amesy said: Are we sorta-a-friends then? We did talk a lot at lunch.
Amesy said: I probably accidentally spilled some major secret I wasn't supposed to
Amesy said: You better be friends or I'll get fired probably
You said: Haha fine
You said: We're sorta friends
You said: Don't expect me to go meeting up with you again
Amesy said: wouldn't dream of it
You said: ….textings okay tho
Amesy said: :-)
IV.
Amesy said: hey you know like
Amesy said: the city
Amesy said: and the criminal underworld
You said: I'm not sure I like where this is going.
Amesy said: haha relax I'm not accusing you of anything
You said: good because I didn't do it
Amesy said: I just wanted to know if you'd heard anything about a few people I'm investigating.
You said: shoot.
Amesy said: Fiona Fox, Simian, Lightning Lynx, Flying Frog, Predator Hawk, Scourge the Hedgehog
Amesy said: They might have other names
Amesy said: heard anything about any of them in the past couple months or years?
Amy said: hey you there?
Amy said: a little worried that like
Amy said: they found your phone and took a hit out on you or something
Amy said: hellooooo
Amy said: you're probably at work
Amy said: well lmk if you hear anything
You said: I was at work
You said: but I haven't heard those names
You said: outside of the news a few years ago.
Amy said: that's about what I expected
Amy said: thank you anyway
You said: welcome rosie :-)
V.
Amy met up with Morph for lunch again two days after their first meeting, because she was starting to get frustrated with the cold case files. Shadow and Tails's teams hadn't had any more luck with their missions, but it was still…annoying. Four years ago, a mass breakout of unknown source happened at the Zone Jail, and the six likely perpetrators had disappeared off the face of the multiverse. No one had seen or heard anything of them since, even though it would have been the obvious assumption that they would immediately start wreaking havoc.
No havoc. Not even a bit of mild mayhem. Barely anything that could even be attributed to them simply because no one else did it.
So Amy invited Morph to lunch and, much to her surprise, he accepted. They met at the café this time, Morph out of his work clothes and Amy in a T-shirt and jeans.
This time he ordered for himself, with the kind of authority that a regular customer would have. Amy must have looked surprised, because he shrugged and explained. "I liked the sandwich when you brought me here, so…I've been coming back every other day or so. The boss likes me."
"This place has a boss?"
"Yeah. He wouldn't show himself to you."
"What, is he in the mafia or something?" Amy was half-joking, but the lack of a response outside of Morph's stony gaze made her expression drop. "Oh."
"I dunno if it's the mafia but he's in with something, and you're a cop."
"I'm not a cop. I'm a special agent. They bring me in when the cops don't do their jobs."
Morph sniggered. "Anything else you can tell me about your job?"
"Not unless you join." Amy shrugged and took a bite of her sandwich. Through her mouthful she continued. "Not that I'm telling you to join. I mean, you could if you wanted to, but you seem to like your job."
He shrugged. "My job's okay. Cars make sense. You fix them and then they're not your problem anymore. It's pretty great." He poked at his fruit salad with a fork. "So yeah, I think I'll keep this arrangement exactly how it is."
Amy sighed. "Ah well, worth a shot." She pulled out the notebook she was working on the cold case files in and set it on the table. "So I know that you said you don't know anything about this, but think you could take a look at it all the same? I'll give you a cut of my bonus if you help me get anything back to my boss on this."
Morph made a little grumbly noise but pulled the notebook to his side of the table anyway, flipping through the pages of loopy handwriting and occasionally stopping to read something more carefully. Finally he pulled out his pen, the same one as the last time, and scrawled something on the last page. "Try that. I'm not promising anything but Hannah heard some drifter types were hanging out there. If your guys are in the city that's where they'll be, and if not, there should be someone there who could help you."
Amy took the notebook back and looked at the address he had written on the page in an all-capitals font. NUMBER THIRTEEN LADYBONES ROAD. "Thanks, Morph. Anything's helpful. Maybe hook me up with that Hannah girl of yours?"
Morph snorted. "No way. She's staying out of this, she said she had enough to do with the cops."
Amy decided not to ask.