bChapter Four/b

He didn't tell me then, though, and he still hadn't told me a week later. He didn't come back after his run that morning, but he sent me a text message saying that he had met up with Dr. Eggman on his way back and was going to have to stop him. I messaged him back, asking him where he was so I could come and help him, but he told me he would deal with it himself. I didn't go and visit anyone all week. I wanted to be at home in case he came back. I went to bed at a reasonable time though. I spent the week cleaning up my workshop. Yes, it was that dirty. At the end of every day I was more grey than orange.

He came back a few days later, looking extremely irritated, as if Knuckles had just bested him in a wisecrack fight, which he had only done once and would probably never do again. He slammed the door, which actually wasn't that unusual, and threw his shoes at the wall. That was unusual. I hadn't seen him take them off in forever. He wears them to bed, in case of emergencies.

"Uh, Sonic? I don't think that did much for the paint," I said lightly.

"I don't give a shit, Tails," Sonic said. "Why does the goddamn paint mean so much to you anyways? It's not like you spend time in here or anything."

Ouch.

"I guess you had a long day," I said.

"No shit, Sherlock," said Sonic, and he only says that to me when he's really mad. Which is to say once before, when he almost lost a race because he wasn't allowed to wear his sneakers during it. (The people he was racing thought they had rockets in them, but they cheated, almost making him lose).

"Ookay, I'll leave now," I said.

"What? Is that supposed to be news? Am I supposed to be surprised? Where are you going? Your workshop?" he sneered.

"Uh, well actually I was thinking about making dinner," I said. "Do you want anything?"

All of a sudden his strange behaviour vanished and he slumped. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm being an asshole and it's not your fault. You have a life and I don't. I shouldn't take it out on you."

"I don't have a life," I said. "My workshop is the world to me."

"Yeah. And it will get you somewhere eventually. You'll invent something amazing and everyone will love you," he said in a dead voice, collapsing in a heap on the couch.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"My feet hurt," he said.

"Have you been running a long time?"

"Yeah."

"He made you chase him?"

"Yeah."

"One of those bots that doesn't stop moving?"

"Yeah."

"It's a good thing you love running," I said.

He looked at me.

"I did."

"You don't?"

"Not anymore."

I sat down. "Explain it to me," I said.

"You love building planes, right?"

"Right."

"How would you feel if you were forced to build planes all the time, constantly, and not for yourself, but for everybody else? How would you feel if every time you built a plane somebody took it away from you, no matter how hard you tried to keep it?"

"I would feel...well, I would feel a lot of things."

"Explain it to me."

"I would be sad, because I would want to keep them...I would be angry, because of what people are making me do all the time...I would be frustrated..."

"Right," said Sonic. "You nailed it. That's how I feel."

"About..."

"C'mon Tails, piece it together."

"...running?"

"Running," said Sonic. "Yeah, I used to love running. I ran everywhere, all the time. Nonstop. Morning, noon and night. Never wanted to stop, always someplace to go. Then people started forcing me to run. Some people started hurting other people, and because I was so fast I could just run after them, stop them. But they don't stop. Now they bait me. Set up traps for me and try to rebuild me. Every time I think maybe I can run because I want to, I run because I have to.

"And I hate it."

"Then don't do it," I said. "I know it will be hard, but you have to ignore them."

"I can't," he said. "I can't do that. There's something in me that could never let me do that. But if I didn't have those damn things," he said, pointing at his shoes, "I would be able to."

"Want me to get rid of them?"

"No," said Sonic. "That would be just as wrong as ignoring them."

"I'm not sure how I would do it anyways," I admitted. "They're just about indestructible."

"Yay," said Sonic.

"But you run in the morning, don't you?" I said, remembering.

"I have to," said Sonic. "I'm addicted to the adrenaline now."

That hit me hard. Sonic had done so much running for so long that his body needed adrenaline just as much as a smoker needed nicotine.

Suddenly he started to cry, and with a shock I realized he must have been holding back all this time. It was the same horrible crying as before, but this time he was trying to talk to me and it wasn't happening.

"Ssh, you can tell me after," I said, and he nodded and let me hug him again.

From then on I stayed with him when he cried. There was no way I could pretend I didn't know, and I didn't really want to. He would cry until he fell into an exhausted, troubled sleep, sometimes for so long that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to stay awake. Even as he slept he cried sometimes, and I couldn't even begin to imagine the burden that was so horrible it caused the emptiness of his slumber to become corrupt. The one time I woke up as he was leaving for his run, he was slowly rubbing his head back and forth, back and forth, and then he rubbed at his swollen eyes just as slowly.

"What's wrong?" I whispered, and he didn't even seem surprised that I was awake.

"My head hurts," he said. "Every day I wake up, and my head hurts."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't say that," he snapped. "You have nothing to do with it. This all started a long time ago, before..."

He trailed off and shook his head.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I know what you meant, little buddy."

He got up and left.

The next day he shook me awake and asked me to come with him. "Sorry to wake you, but I..."

He didn't need to finish. In the dim morning light I could see that his face was wet and he was still shaking.

"You should have woken me earlier," I said, wiping the sleep from my eyes, but almost before I had finished he was shaking his head.

"Just because I don't sleep doesn't mean you shouldn't," he said. "You're young. You need to sleep."

"You're young too, Sonic," I said, and he smiled sadly.

"I was," he said.

I kept up with him pretty good, since he had taught me to run eons ago, but I'm sad to say I'm not really that fit. Sonic's right. I need to leave my workshop sometimes. But we were going along pretty good, and although every inch of me burned for oxygen that my straining lungs fought to provide, I was feeling pretty good.

There was a loud crack and Sonic disappeared.