Uwaah! Thank you all for your favorites and alerts!! Even though I've only gotten one review, I'm still in high spirits, so let's shoot for some comments, ja? :D
This chapter isn't very dialogue heavy...I think there's a grand total of seven words spoken in this round. XD A lot of emotions, though! Gotta love those moodswings. Enjoy!
-Laz
That night, I lay in my bed with anxious feelings of confused and happy romance. I couldn't stop thinking about Shadow. Knowing that he was sleeping in the next room over gave me chills of excitement like I was a child on Christmas Eve night. I wanted to get up and say hello to him and to tell him how much I appreciated that he considered staying with us for a month, but I fought it. It would be unbelievably foolish of me to do that; it would be something that I would do for Sonic.
That was another thing to do for Shadow: never make the same mistakes that I made with Sonic. I vowed to stop being overactive, stop being hyper (especially in Shadow's case; it would turn him away from me for sure,) stop being clingy, and not to obsess over him too much. The last would be a little hard to do. I came to realize that I loved him, so I naturally had waves of love-struck emotions, one of them in which was obsession. I would just tone it down a little, I decided. No proclaiming any marriages, no claiming that I was his girlfriend. I would just try to lower my display of excitement down to however mellow he was. Unfortunately that was really, really mellow. I would have to get over it.
And on top of that – just when I thought things couldn't get more complicated – I had a month to do something about it. I had to decide what to do; tell Shadow or keep it a secret. A month seemed so short, and I had so much to do in so little time. I had to win him and his love over, and I also had to win his presence at the house over. If he and I were supposed to be together, then I couldn't stay home and watch him go off to the military to work. Long distance relationships sent chills down my spine; for some reason the only result I saw in a long distance relationship was heartbreak. I wouldn't allow it to happen to me.
I rolled over and squinted at the clock next to me. 12:43 in the morning, it read. I had been up for nearly three hours merely thinking, and no matter how exhausted I was, I just couldn't fall asleep. Too many thoughts flashed in my head, overwhelming me with suspicions, happiness, and heart-throbs. I began to wonder what he thought of me. Was I just another girl in the world to him? Was I his secret love, or was I a worthless child that he pitied? He was at least kind to me; Shadow showed manners to me and listened to what I had to say previous times I encountered him, however few words we shared. He never tried to hurt me, either. So he had to at least like me a little bit. But for me, liking me a little bit wasn't quite enough. But I didn't want to force him to love me, either. I simply had to hope that his feelings were reflecting of mine.
I sat up. I couldn't stand being in bed any longer with swirling thoughts swimming through my head. Besides, I felt like there was something I had to do before I thought anything more about Shadow the Hedgehog. It was something like a tether, that, once broken, it would free me, once and for all from the past. It would give me a clean slate to work on, a clean canvas to start painting my love for Shadow on. I realized that it was Sonic; he was holding me back. Just like an anchor, weighing me down with mistakes and guilt.
I felt like a pair of eyes was watching me from behind my closet doors. I winced. Secrets were scattered on the inside of those pearly white doors; secrets, I knew, were the very eyes that were giving me strange feelings of heaviness. It was time to get rid of them.
I slid out of bed, turning on the lamp as my feet touched the carpet floor. I hardly winced at the light that now illuminated my room brightly; it was like I was trying to go to sleep in broad daylight to begin with. For a few minutes I stood in the middle of my room, looking around and preparing myself. Throwing away these secrets would take a lot of guts, especially after all those years of loving Sonic, and I hoped it wasn't going to hurt me too much inside. My heart raced as I looked at the closet door. Outside it was plain white, nothing special about it. It stood against the soft pink walls and matched the trim bordering my carpet floor. But inside, there was a magnificent place for me to retreat, to repair my romantically-confused thoughts. Inside, there was something that I never shared with anyone, ever. Cream didn't even know about it.
With a trash bin in hand, I walked quietly to the white doors and opened them slowly. I set the trash can firmly onto the carpet. Sure enough, the inside of the doors held what had always been there: loads and loads of secrets – pictures. Pictures of a blue hedgehog, both from newspaper cut-outs, magazine articles, and just from our own camera covered the doors. Hearts danced around them. The white was barely visible from behind the mass of photos. In my times of rejection from Sonic, I would run up to my room, open these doors and stare at them all, muttering "I love you" over and over again, pretending that he said them back. Each time I found a picture of Sonic, I would cut it out and add it on the door.
But now, I was there looking at them all in a different way. I wasn't about to say "I love you" to them. I never wanted to say it to them again; I hardly ever wanted to see them again. It was heartbreaking and shameful to look at now that I had just moved on. I knelt down on the floor in my rose-colored pajamas, looking at them all, remembering all the times that I had wasted my time chasing after Sonic. I seemed happy back then, too, but I knew that I was never truly happy. I never knew what happiness was. I hoped that my happiness would be true with Shadow's presence.
It was time, I thought as my heart jolted. I snapped my eyes shut, preparing myself one last time.
I reached up and grabbed hold of the top picture by its corners. Sonic was smiling, holding a peace sign to the camera, completely unaware of what I was doing. Before I had time to second-guess myself, my ears were met with the shredding and groaning of paper. I quickly let the picture go, feeling power rise up as I did so. I felt like I was rising high above everything as I saw it drop it to the ground. The edges were now curled up, Sonic smirking at the ceiling. I gazed down upon it, frowning at it. I felt guilty but I knew it was time to let him go.
I went at the one below it. A grayscale Sonic waving at the sky from the top of a crushed robot. The rip was more satisfying than the first. The one to the right of it was my next victim; a blue blur, running past the camera in an unidentifiable setting, now dashing on the soft floor. I could feel the fibers separate as I pulled it off the door. I shook as I took hold of the next one, closing my eyes. He was standing above Tails, Knuckles, Cream, and I. I watched that one fall to the ground like a leaf from a tree.
And so it went. I tore all of them down, and soon I didn't even look at the pictures. I didn't care about Sonic's feelings toward me anymore to the extent that I didn't want to see his face at the time. The pictures fell from the doors, rip by rip, tear by tear. When everything was done, the white could be seen so clearly, it almost looked blinding. I scooted backward and leaned my back against the foot of my bed to look at my work. I hugged my knees as a mixture of feelings welled up within me. All of the pictures were gone, but strangely, I felt invigorated. I felt like I was finally in control.
But I kept one close to me, though. It was a photo of Shadow and Sonic taken after they had defeated one of Dr. Eggman's, our archenemy's, fleet of robots. Shadow stood with quiet glory and pride of his work; I remembered that fight clearly like it was the day before. He came out of nowhere, just when we felt like we were overwhelmed. Shadow threw down about fifty robots in one huge explosion, which caused a huge tremor. Everyone in the neighboring city started panicking. It attracted the news station, and they arrived just as we finished off the last robot. Sonic had pleaded Shadow to stay where he was, being a good sport towards the black hedgehog, and Shadow did so (though he didn't like it) as Sonic climbed up the mound of broken metal bodies. He posed in a way that, compared to Shadow, was the main hero of the day. I felt like Sonic ruined the picture, but Shadow made me hesitate to shred it up like I did the rest.
I took hold of it, covering up Sonic's face with my thumb. I stared into Shadow's sincere eyes. His handsome face was so intoxicating that my heart raced when I was looking at it, and it was just a photograph. I touched the paper. If only he was really sitting next to me, watching me get rid of all my Sonic pictures. I felt like he would be proud of me somehow. I wondered if he thought I had wasted my time while chasing Sonic. I really hoped that Shadow didn't rule me out when it came to companionship, let alone romance. I was different now.
I got up and went over to my desk to get a pair of scissors. In one snip, Sonic's half flew to the floor, landing face-down. I held Shadow's side with a carefully steady grip. He stared into my eyes, jumpstarting my wild imagination and made me dream of him gazing passionately at me. I broke out of it, facing reality now. Shaking my head, I admitted that I was becoming more of a mess by the second. I really wished that Shadow would one day fulfill that dream for me because he wanted to, not because I asked him to. Maybe it wouldn't be so hard.
My eyes wandered to my mirror on my vanity to my left. My pink quills were tangled into a mess, but the other thing that I noticed was that my cheeks were red. They weren't red out of embarrassment or love-sickness, though. I stepped closer to the mirror, realizing that my eyes were red and watery. They stung, too. My cheeks felt stiff; I had been crying all this time and didn't even know it. Hopefully I didn't make it too much of a racket, I thought, I could cry really loudly sometimes.
I stared back down to Shadow's picture. My eyes started drooping all of a sudden, and I felt a heavy feeling of exhaustion. It was probably one in the morning now – way past my bedtime. I tip-toed back to my closet, dumped the torn pictures into the trash can and returned it to its original spot next to my desk. When I went back to my closet, I knelt down on the carpet again and hung Shadow's picture on the door with a pink heart. His grayscale figure looked both real and fake to me. It would have been better if it was in color, showing off his red and black coloring.
Still, it looked nice against the blank white wood. He would stay in there, protecting me from anything that tried to get me in my room when I was asleep. I shut the closet doors and stood up. The job was done. Step one was complete, and I knew I had a lot of steps ahead of me in order to win Shadow over in a month. I turned out the light and got back into my bed, pulling the covers up to my shoulders. The warmth engulfed me and brought my eyelids down like anchors.
"This isn't a phase. I know it…" I whispered to myself as my eyes closed, "…Shadow's the one."
