(Copyright Act Admissions/Lanham Act Disclaimers. This piece infringes copyrights owned by Sega and DiC. It is not a product of Sega, DiC, or Archie Comics. All available rights are reserved.)

Four Mounds, 2 Fructidor 3228

Tails didn't get why Rotor wanted to trudge straight back to Knothole instead of going to town. There was still room to ride in the back of the pickup truck.

"I don't trust any doctor who would treat people like us," Rotor explained, the silver frame of his backpack looming over his head as he turned to plod away through the tall, shadowy trees.

Tails stood in the gravel on the side of the road, sun beating down on his shoulders and gnats swooping about his head, and pondered what Rotor meant. Sally always took him to the Doctor in Four Mounds instead of other doctors because this doctor hated Robotnik. Tails hated Robotnik, too, just like Sonic! And Sally . . . and Rotor, too. People who fought Robotnik were good, and they had to stick by one another. Right?

He was jarred out of his thoughts by Sonic's heel pounding on the pickup's tailgate. "All aboard, Tails!" he called, leaning over to offer a hand up. "Unless you think you can outrun us."

The mental file on Rotor was casually dropped into the jerk drawer as Tails turned his mind to more important matters. The fox dug his red sneaker toes into the dusty stone and kicked into a sprint. When his right sole slapped the asphalt of the road he leapt, and ground and gravel and car dropped away beneath him.

Tails was weightless. He was flying. He could do anything . . . .

His toes skidded over the lip of the tailgate and Sonic caught him by the shoulders in an airplane ride, laughing as he swung Tails's feet clear of where Quinn lay sleeping and groaning in his blankets and bandages. Tails loved to ride in the back with Sonic! The wind blew loud and cool on your ears and your tongue, you could lean over the side to see the yellow lines shoot by, and because Sally was driving in the cab, Tails could sit against the side of the pickup bed and talk with Sonic as much as he wanted.

"So the bear jumps out from behind the truck, all 'freeze, dickhead!'" Sonic lifted his quills halfway and made a hand-gun in the air by his head, two fingers for the barrel, a thumb as the hammer. He let his pink tongue loll from the side of his mouth—there weren't any retards in Knothole, but Sonic had told Tails about them.

The fox couldn't help but giggle. But he knew, of course, that the soldier who had threatened Sonic was not really the picture next to doofus, n. The soldier had been a bear, a big strong one, with an automatic pistol. "What did you do?" Tails asked, ears turned attentively forward.

"Well," Sonic smirked, lifting a single finger next to his head and shaking it in warning. "Here's some advice for you, little bro: when someone tells you to freeze, don't."

Tails nodded, filing it away. When someone tells you to freeze, don't. "Did you run away?"

"Run away?" Sonic laughed. "Who do you think you're talking to, Tails? I ain't afraid of five of Robuttnik's jokers, whether they're packin' pistols or powder or plasma! There ain't man alive that shouldn't be afraid of the Hedgehog!"

"Yeah!" Tails cried, throwing a punch of his own in all the excitement, a tight right hook that cut the air under his own chin. "Did you beat 'em up real good?"

"Tails," the hedgehog continued, getting up off his butt and onto his knees, his hands out before him, the left spread like a sculptor's hands about to work on clay, the right like his own about to work on a speedbag. "First I—" he blinked and scratched at one of the cuts on his face. "Did I mention the vixen?"

"No."

"Oh, okay. Well—oh," he sighed as he felt the pickup's motor slide into a lower gear, saw the thick, hot, cricket-buzzing wheat fields fall away around them. "Finish the story later, little bro, alright?"

The Doctor's office was in a little red house right on the edge of town. The Doctor himself looked like the most mournful person in the world: a wrinkly-snouted old pug dog with soft white fur, a soft black face and a soft voice. "Why hello again, Ms. Squirrel," he said, opening the front door a crack at her knock. He called Aunt Sally Ms. Squirrel. He called Tails Mr. Fox. He called everyone like that. Behind her Sonic and Antoine were carrying Quinn (mostly Sonic). "My word, you look quite badly hurt."

"That's why we've come to the best doctor in the entire district," Aunt Sally smiled.

"Indeed," the dog nodded in polite agreement. "Where's the cash?" Aunt Sally reached into her vest and pulled out a rubber band full of paper money.

Later Tails might sneak away to see if the town kids were playing football out by the tall grain silo with the dusty-sweet scent. But for the mean time Tails would rather stay in the Doctor's office, a room at the back of his little house. It was cooled by a dripping-wet air conditioner hanging on the windowsill and its chill tile floor, speckled black like a swallow's egg. There was a rough, thick-legged wooden table to sit on while the doctor had a look at you, and walls were covered with neat jars of chemicals like alcohol (isopropyl) and peroxide (H2O2) and posters that were pretty gross and really cool! In one an old man's teeth got brown and small in gums that looked wet and soft like watermelon (ADVANCED PERIDONITIS) (Tails had checked; that was a gum infection). And he had a guy without skin—not for real, of course (that would be so gross Tails wasn't sure he was cool enough to look at it), but a drawing of the muscles and their names. The fox stood on a round cushioned stool and frowned closely at the red and white ribbons in the outturned wrists. "Did Aunt Sally hurt her flexor carpi radialis?" he wondered.

"No," the Doctor answered in his calm, quick voice, "Miss Squirrel sustained major trauma to her left forearm resulting in a partial tear of the tendon flexor digitorum superficialism—Mr. Coyote, please."

Antoine had been far away from the fighting because he used a Poiccard L7 long-range sniper's rifle (once he'd let Tails look at the disassembled firing mechanism, but non! non! insisted that Tails keep his arms behind his back). But when he was running to meet up with Rotor's car he'd stepped on a bottle, and now he was sitting on the doctor's table, shirt sloppily half-buttoned and his toasted fur matted with sweat, holding out his bootless right foot. Lengthwise along the sole was a little line, bloodless and almost invisible. Sonic leaned against a bookshelf behind the coyote, observing the injury with bored disdain, tapping his toe insistently against the tile.

Tails felt a little embarrassed for the coyote and turned his eyes back to the gross, neat exhibit of the visible fox's wrist, leaning over at the waist with his tails up for balance like a peacock. Flexor digitorum superficialism. He traced the red lines with his gloved fingers . . . "Is it this part here, by the wrist?"

"Please hold still, Mr.—yes," the Doctor confirmed, glancing over his shoulder to see where Tails was pointing. "You have quite the interest in anatomy," he remarked as he went back to work, pressing fingers to either side of the line and opening a thin, pink slit.

"You just have a really cool poster, is all. It's a lot better than the encyclopedia."

"You read about medicine in an encyclopedia?"

The fox's tails snapped down , one against each leg. His snout tucked low, Tails could see Sonic still staring displeased at Antoine. Was he listening?

". . . It was rainy out," Tails muttered, his hot ears plastered against his skull. Once when Sonic had taken him deep into the forest south of Knothole for target practice, Tails had announced proudly that Rotor was going to teach him algebra, with two placeholders, 'variables,' Rotor said. Sonic had snickered and shook his head. That Rotor, he sighed. He's the kind of guy that reads a dictionary on the beach . . .

"Well, Mr. Coyote." The Doctor got to his feet with a whiny grunt and brushed his hands on his long white coat; Sonic's ears perked up. "There's very little inflammation," the pug continued, "clotting and scabbing along the length . . . . It's unusual for a wound on the bottom of the foot to heal so cleanly."

"That is good, yes?" Antoine said, peeking his eyes from behind their squinting lids.

"Oh no, I'm afraid not," the Doctor replied calmly, crouching down to pull a rust-crusty red toolbox out from under a white porcelain sink. "It will have to come off. Mr. Hedgehog, if you would please assist?"

Antoine's eyes were bloodless and white as the midnight moon in a winter sky. "Whuh—wh-wh-wh—" He couldn't stutter out a full word before Sonic leapt heavily onto the table, landing on hands and feet like some wild hunt-beast, and easily wrestled Antoine into a full nelson.

"Thank you, Mr. Hedgehog," the Doctor said calmly as he flipped open the latches and squeaked open the toolbox to reveal a grease-stained hacksaw. The mount was spotted with rust like the skin of an old banana and the blade was as toothless as the old mouth in the poster, clotted with soft clumps of something black.

Antoine's frail arms pulled weakly against Sonic's harsh grip, his mouth flapped like a hummingbird's wing: "B—bbbbbbbbbbbbut, but certainly it cannot—I am unusually sensitive to pain, and this—it cannot—it doesn't hurt very much, not at all—"

"No, I'm afraid it does hurt quite a bit," the Doctor replied, flicking a finger against the saw and loosing a shower of metal oxide. "Normally, I would offer a patient an entire bottle of whiskey, but I'm afraid there simply isn't any time. Mr. Hedgehog?"

Sonic turned his eyes to Tails and gave a sharp wink. "Sure thing, Doc." He wrenched Antoine further back on the table, laying his legs out nice and straight.

The dog nodded, took a firm grip of the coyote's bare ankle and pressed the soft blade just under the knee. "Thank you very muCK—" With a hollow chop the toe of Antoine's left boot slammed into the Doctor's wide chin. "Good gods," he growled in agony, squeezing his snout in both hands, "you have to hold him—"

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

Antoine's legs bicycled in the empty air, heels pounding the table like an terrified toddler, his eyes squeezed fiercely shut, so terrified that even Sonic had to fight to keep his pretzel-hold: "C'mon, Antoine! Take your medicine."

"Non, eeeeemon dieux, non,nonononon eeeeeeEEEEEE! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—"

"What the hell is this!" Aunt Sally filled the door, her left hand in a wrap of tight white bandages and her right hand in a fist. Tails shuddered—it was Sally's behind-doors voice: behind the doors of one of the Knothole conference rooms after something had gone wrong, like an underwater volcano. Tails had never heard it himself. It made him shiver, almost cry. It was terrible, so terrible to hear—

"ZUT ALORS!" Her scream washed through the room and slammed off the walls like a heavy wave, trembling through Tails' bones. "Talk! What the fuck are you doing?"

Tails had to say, just to make her stop: "Son—We—It's a joke." He lowered his eyes to the floor, wanted to disappear, to run away through the fields . . . .

Antoine had spilled onto the floor in a sobbing heap of tan fur and tears. Sonic was a storm of tears and laughter, pounding the table with his open hand. "You should've seen him! The look on his face—"

Sally snatched the Doctor's tie like a leash, pulled him nose to nose. "You went along with this?"

"Mr. Hedgehog paid me twenty sovereigns," the Doctor explained calmly. "In cash—Ms. Squirrel, no!"

Ms. Squirrel should take two tablets of amoxicillin daily and avoid stress on her left arm for two weeks, and that included bashing Sonic in his laughing face. So she lowered her cast and clumsily swung at Sonic's cheek with her off-hand. His own hand flashed and caught it, crushed it—

Sally gasped in pain and he dropped it like a rattlesnake.

He scrambled off the table. "Get a funny bone," he muttered, stomping out the door.

Sally massaged her hand against her cast, the air empty of all but Antoine's quiet gasps. "Bastard," she muttered.

Tails just looked at his sneakers. It was kind of funny. It was a pretty cool joke, he guessed.

But he wished he hadn't smiled when Sonic winked.

Tails hated it when they fought.


VT2, Kain Blackwood - 2007