A/N: This chapter…I'm not sure what I was going for, but I messed with the formatting in it in several parts to give a sort of hallucination to the reader that they're experiencing this madness and psychosis along with Sonic. This site doesn't allow it, so I can't show it. Guess you're going to have to imagine it.

He cared more for that dress than he originally thought. The dress was him. It made him happy. It made him believe in a time where he was happy, for a little while. He missed the colors of it, the girl who made him believe that magic ruminated in the air by invisible fairies, and Shadow came by, and told him he wanted him to come back once he recovered, but he didn't want him to drink, anymore. To not end up like his father.

Sonic held the seagreen dress in his arms like it was a miscarried infant, and cried.

It was his brother, his missing sister, and he thought he killed yet another child in his existence.

The womb accommodated for all of its children. It opened up, and never let any of the patients out. The blue colors reminded Sonic of the sea. The water where Coney Island was once pristine. And his mother promised to take him there. So he can find out that his childhood wasn't wholly miserable.

The dress smelled like coffee and cappuccino. And he loved it like it was his own. It was his, it was his, it was his.

The doctors and nurses told him it was time for Shadow to go, for the womb to shut off all visitors from her crevices. Shadow held onto him, locked onto his ankles, told him to never leave him here, and he told him he had to stay, and he will return.

So many people left me here, they never came back, Shadow…They left me at Belham, never came to visit me, and I want you, Shadow, I want you the most…

He told him he would come back, and if not, he can be correctly labeled as a traitor. Sonic's hands felt nice, warm and soft, even the one that was burnt, badly scarred and treated with antiseptic and lotion…

He never wanted to let him go. But he knew he had to.

"Goodbye."

The womb was cold again, and it turned into an even darker shade of blue.

He sat in the grotto, holding onto his scarred body, and listened to his heartbeat, the sounds of the nurses and patients passing by him, the sounds of the carts carrying their lukewarm food…

They made Sonic only eat a dinner of meatloaf and peas and carrots. Nothing else, except with a cold cup of water with a sliver of ice.

Everyone else received more than that, even dessert.

And his food was the coldest, the meat still pink and raw, the peas and carrots still partially frozen.

Can anyone in this Godforsaken place actually cook? This is still cold! And I'm not drinking ice cold water with ice cold food!

He lifted the tray and threw it across the room, then threw up in the bathroom due to anxiety, his lovely Shadow leaving him…His lovely pearl, his lovely flower…Make his blood-scarred hands touch him and kiss him, make him feel alright in this futuristic hellhole, where they served translucent liquor to him with his pills.

He tossed and turned in his pink sheets and blankets, thinking about him.

He was as precious as a jewel. He was like an opal, shining in many different colors. He would serve him better food than cold meatloaf, he would give him the dress again, and he would be lovely and loved again, the dress shining like a tourmaline.

Did he really love him? His mother warned him about this kind of thing.

Love was dangerous, unkind, it would tear his heart into red, silk ribbons, but he couldn't ignore Shadow any longer, and his legs constantly twitched, his eyes were affixed to the ceiling, he remembered the collages he did of the teenage girl being pricked by needle-like eyes as everyone looked at her shabby fashion. And he believed that he looked like that girl, his shabbiness and his craziness and his drunkenness proudly displaying to everyone in the world, where he was then locked away, in a hospital that claimed would keep all the sane people out of her Glorious Womb, and they would be safe here, in their blue oceanic nursery.

He fell asleep.

They talked in group.

And Sonic felt he couldn't say much of anything.

It was the same situation as to why he was here. He was crazy. He was drunk. They were going to detox him again, and send him to a halfway house he would quit after a few days and go drinking again. The detox was the only way he could prevent dying from his withdrawal. And dying seemed like a viable option at this point. A patient was smoking a cigarette during group, needing to relieve stress of a post-traumatic incident, and she was sent to the same room that Sonic once was acquainted with, the room that helped him sleep off his Haldol, and would he love to sleep in it again, the room full of pillows, the room that he took comfort in as the medicine melted off his bones and skin.

More salve on the hand that was bitten by flames. He flinched, but it still wasn't the worst pain he felt. He still missed Shadow. And his heart hurt for him even more.

The monotony continued throughout the day. Cold breakfast. Cold lunch. Cold dinner. Everyone else had a warm meal. He had cardboard cutlery, while the rest had real silver spoons and knives, except for the woman who smoked a cigarette during group.

Ashy blond hair, with red lips, green eyes, and she always shook, nervous, smoking yet another cigarette and setting off an alarm in the hospital. They told her to smoke it during their designated cigarette breaks, but she claimed she needed one now. She was going through detox as well, and her veins throbbed and prodded throughout her body. Heroin addict. Of course, Sonic replied.

He was pretty sure for a time his mother probably used heroin too. Until she made the switch to alcohol, cause she claimed heroin was too expensive, and that alcohol was usually cheap and legal. She made the habit of drinking cheap import beers until she soon drank Russian vodkas and wines. She claimed she hated the taste of wine, but it was the quickest way to get wasted.

She didn't want to remember her pain anymore. Of why she hurt. Why her breasts were scarred. Why she felt her vagina wasn't alive and had seeped snakes.

It was what once happened to Eve, she felt, when she gave birth. She gave birth to evil.

Sonic craved a drink, but they only allowed him some juice and ice cold water. With only three ice cubes. Why three? He wasn't sure. Four meant he would die and the entire hospital would be destroyed. It was what the Japanese believed.

The woman tried to smoke a cigarette during a cold dinner again, and was once again restrained, and sent to a ward for people who they claimed were "disturbed". Sonic tried to be quiet, mind himself and eat his cold food and try to participate in therapy and wait till Shadow returned, and his heart still ached for him, and he once wrote tentative letters to him on the side of the dresser with a needle, and they never knew about it.

"Sonic, what do you think right now of your therapy?"

He stabbed his meal of gamy meat. It was supposed to be ribs, but seemed more shredded, a pulled pork type food, but it still collected bones and carapaces in its barbecued dress. And it tasted like shit.

"Sonic?"

Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…

The Sirens surrounded him.

Their needle-like fingers crevassed his skin, made small little slits in his fur.

"Sonic, we've noticed you haven't really made any strides in your therapy since you've been…"

The Sirens called him further, the sea and the sky crowing outside of the womb, the glass beach that was decorated with the green blue and white stones. Their ghastly-white teeth contained words, their tongues licked the air as they kept telling him of everything they would tell him if he joined them. He kept eating the pulled pork, despite obvious disgust lining his face.

"…in here. You were diagnosed with possible schizophrenia, maybe schizoaffective disorder. Did you know your mother once had this disorder? Before we…"

Yes.

They hurt her. They hurt her as much as she hurt Sonic.

They drove a stake through her eye and expected her behaviors to disappear. Or so that's what he believed for a few minutes, before they were led back to discussions about parental abuse, rape, and other traumas. Sonic thought he might have not had any. But they bit his bones, tore into his skin, they made him sick with the memory pills, the parasites that ate away at his brain.

Was it real? Was it ever truly real?

His mother wasn't alive because of these bastards.

He soon turned to his room, while the sun was a golden coin. It was being turned away, into a blue moon, the womb hiding him off from the world that he could love if he was alive again. For now, his eyes were bruised, he was pink and frail, and his hands were only flippers. Hedgehogs also didn't receive their quills until they soon were birthed and the air had hit his back.

They might as well have been icicles that were formed. He thought of himself s cold. It was his apathy, his alogia and anhedonia, the symptoms that all the doctors had warned him about. He seemed emotionally distant as he gazed at the moon, not realizing that in the hospital, it was one of the most beautiful things anyone could see. He didn't care. His heart couldn't react to the cold face of the woman who gazed out at him.

The Moon Maiden loved him, what a beautiful queen of the sky, but he even believed he had ataxia and atrophy, lying in bed for many hours, writing letters to people who were already dead or who didn't care at all to listen to him, his manic mouth.

He carved small, intricate letters, and watched as the other patients went outside in their pajama's and scrubs "taking a healthy, friendly walk", letting the world see how crazy they truly were, as one patient screamed "Skip to my loopy loo" and the women who feigned pregnancy and was often in hysterics when they told them she didn't have a child. Sonic was once treated like a child by these women for a few minutes before the staff found out and took her away to another room. She used the silver spoons to feed him a jar of applesauce she thieved from the lunch room, along with a side of baby carrots. It was about the only nutritious meal Sonic had for a long time.

When they took her away, he felt that longing for his mother, the bitch who he knew wasn't truly a bitch, just a sick, ill, incapacitated woman.

Look at her, the voices said.

Look at her, how she's so dead inside.

She devoured her own drool, with the lunch of apple sauce and pudding and food smashed together and made into a tube into her stomach. Like Sonic was now, as the bitch nurses forced him to eat his meatloaf like a little child again, a mother bird regurgitating its worm for him.

She's dead Sonic, don't you see?

Don't you see that she's dead?

It's time for her to die a second time. She needs a mercy-killing.

Her eye was swollen and sore, purple and bruised. She moved her hands an inch away from Sonic preparing the peas and carrots concoction of her baby food, showing him that she was hungry, an infant who wanted to be fed by her father bird. She gurgled, like a deranged, sick animal.

Belham was one of the only hospitals she's been to that said lobotomy would be the only thing to fix her.

Other hospitals moved past it.

But she was very ill. Very drunk, very schizophrenic. It was bound to be done.

Was this memory just simply an illusion? Sonic thought about it, as he wrote more love letters on the desk and dresser. He wrote one to Shadow, and wrote one to his mother.

Dear Mother.

She ate through the tube, and she gurgled happily. The only sound Sonic knew she could make these days.

This memory wasn't real, he told himself. It never was. She was dead. Accept it, you piece of shit.

The voices kept talking to him. Culling him out of his letter.

Dear My Brightest Sun.

She called him that, years ago.

If that was a real memory at all.

The alcohol made her poisoned with hate.

She wasn't always so crazy…

The candy she gave him wasn't always filled with thumbtacks.

She loved his older brother, when he was inside her.

The baby still screamed in his head.

Blayze grabbed him as he wrote, blood collecting on the carapaces of the letters.

YOU MADE MOTHER FORGET ABOUT ME!

WHY DID SHE LOVE YOU MORE THAN ME?

Dear My Dreariest Day.

His brother was still alive, and so was his older brother, wrapped in pink, swaddled in womb-juice and attached to umbilical cords that kept them alive, their life support.

Did you know that I'm the same as a flower?

If you pluck a flower, you put it in a vase full of water. This is the thing that keeps the flower alive for a little while. But eventually, it dies. Nothing can save the flower. Nothing can save us. You're coming with us, and you're going out of this womb with us until we die.

No, I can't, he said.

The flowers wilted slowly, minute by minute. Sonic could do nothing to stop it. The flowers kept crying for him to die with them. But he refused! They thought he was suicidal!

COME WITH US.

MOTHER WILL LOVE YOU.

LIKE SHE LOVED US, SONIC.

Dear My Cornflower-Blue.

His mother said he was a cornflower blue, and it was her favorite color. She said he was sweeter than a mango, her favorite fruit. She said Sonic was the name given by adoring angels. She said she saw his name imprinted on forget-me-nots.

SHE CALLED YOU PRETTY THINGS AND WE WERE FORGOTTEN.

I WANT TO BE CALLED A CORNFLOWER.

A CERULEAN.

A PERIWINKLE.

WHY ARE YOU THE LUCKY ONE?

I WAS SIMPLY STRANGLED!

I WAS SIMPLY STRADDLED BY A MAN THEN KILLED.

The children hungered for him, they pulled him closer, and he could feel the womb pushing, the infants ready to be revealed to the doctors and nurses, the sirens of the sea.

Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…

They thrust their breasts into his mouth.

WHY DO YOU GET TO DRINK THE LIQUOR OF THE HEAVENLY MAIDENS?

WHY ARE YOU SO GODDAMN LUCKY?

Blood seeped in the flower's faces. The womb pushed further, and blood splashed in the blue canvas of the painting of the hospital room, the same one the hipster made, a week ago.

The red and blue. It made a beautiful centerpiece in this hipster's gallery, the lunatic painting with the wilting flowers and the crying clown, with his beautiful shining dress, a statement to all those Communist's and the government that wished to not listen to the ninety-nine percent.

The flowers, shining like bloody bullets, they grabbed Sonic's legs and ushered him further out of the womb, the place where he felt safe, into the outside world. The lady's uterus will thank them. Sonic was in development for over many years, and it was finally time for him to come out, with placenta all over him, the liquor of the siren's ready to lavish his tongue.

Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…

Further he went in his insanity, and the devils and bullets continued to usher him further, out of the blue cave and into the doctor's offices, a sea green welcomed him when they discovered that Sonic was a very special, very sick hedgehog.

No one cared about you unless you were sick, Sonic thought.

No one cared about you unless you had some sort of special illness.

Have Oliver Sachs research you…

…Realize that Blayze would've never been loved by him.

The insanity lingered, he could taste fairy's blood on his lips.

The dragons told him he couldn't have their gold.

The sea maidens rocked him to sleep with their gentle waves, gave him a warm mug of milk and a sleeping pill.

Mr. Sonic, you must go to sleep now…

Mr. Sonic…

Give him an injection of Haldol…

Spring withered away, and summer was just wuthering to its warmest night, and soon, would become cold again, scented with the smells of apple butter and cider.

The bullet petals had covered their faces, the placenta was stitched back in the womb, Sonic reentered inside, and the sea maidens told him it was all over now, he can go back to sleep. They had needles as large as his arm, and he could imagine thrusting the entire needlepoint into his asshole, just to get him to calm down, inebriated into his Elysium with his little magical fairies that told him that freedom was only one sleeping pill away, and an extra dose of Haldol.

Maybe some milk too, for some good luck.

He struggled against the vises of the Haldol. He wanted to talk to his brothers, ask them why they were so hostile, why they hated against their own skin and blood. Sonic had took care of Blayze! Sonic had loved the unborn child when he found out about him! They hated him, for simply being lucky, for being physically healthy when he was born, and his mother once was loving, as loving he was to her, when she ate her dinner of mashed food. Not at all appetizing, not at all like anything his mother once would eat.

He once mashed a hot dog for her to eat, straight from the gas station, just to give her happy memories of her alcoholic years. And some milk too, though Sonic knew she no longer had breasts.

She gurgled softly, as Sonic watched TV. His mother wasn't capable of much thought or even simple words, but in a rare display of affection even when she was alive and her brain was still intact, she held his hand.

He wished it never had to be this way.

Dear My Death of Me,

I loved you. I still love you. And I will make you happy. I will make you happy by stopping this bloodline of insanity. First it was my grandma and grandpa. Then it was you. Then it was me. And I don't want the same to happen to Tails, even if he's not mine genetically.

I want to let go of these memories. First, I must tell you the truth, of what really happened to you. To my doctors, to everyone else I lied to, and I thought they wouldn't care much further to hear the story.

I bastardized myself, just so I can lie about what happened to you. You were cruelly mistreated. And I'm sorry for covering up the damage the mental health community has caused back in the '90s, back when autistics were regarded as cold, unfeeling robots, like they would've said about Blayze, and that schizophrenics had no future, no way of getting any better. This hospital still used lobotomy. I wasn't sure why. These people were just as sick as you are, thinking that stabbing someone in the brain would fix your disease.

Belham never rolled with the program with stopping lobotomy and shock therapy. They said you were crazy, that you really needed it, and I thought it would help. I was young, about 10 years old, alright? You probably don't remember. I took care of Blayze at the time, and I really wasn't 15, I really wasn't really trying to get out of high school, for fuck's sake, I protected myself with that false memory, I was 10, and dad soon disappeared and last I heard, he had a heart attack and died. He died when I just got out of college (dropped out, possibly due to mental illness and my drunkenness). And mother, I tried to care for you! Doctors told me everything to do, like make sure you take your medication, swirl it around in pudding, crush and mash your food into a tube, and soon mother, you couldn't have sex anymore because you were this corpse that was alive but God knows you were closer to death than anything. Molested me? Maybe you did. I don't fucking remember. Father never said a word. I hated that bastard. His fingers were always gray and dirty and his breath smelled like cigars and he always read the newspaper and ignored you and me and he always read the police reports. Always fuckin' read them. "Hey, did you know that some guy…" I don't care! I'm glad he's gone. You though, I never could let go of you. You babied me when I was five years old, even though it was wrong, even if you touched those disgusting places of mine, I still loved you. I couldn't stop those feelings from coming up. I hated myself, but soon, you were just a blow-up doll for any man to come over and fuck you. I couldn't do anything. They told me they had business to take care of, and I was sure if I protested to them raping you, they would kill both of us, and now I feel like I raped you when I couldn't do anything to stop it. The unborn child I heard about too. That you were raped by another man, you had a child, and my father, he stabbed you and you had to go to the ER. He denied the whole thing happened and the doctors looked at your file, saw you were schizoaffective, and they…

didn't believe that you were being abused. They just thought you made the whole damn thing up.

I loved you. I felt bad for you. I felt responsible for your death.

Then I had to kill you. It was euthanasia. I still didn't want to do it. But I did.

I made you choke on your food. You puked, and you choked on your puke. And I sat back and watched. I let you die. I called 911, and I was very disturbed by the whole situation. They said I was insane, and I wasn't responsible for your death. But I knew I was. You know how big of a punishment it is here for assisted suicide. I swore I did it for you.

The needle was loosening in his grip. His lids were heavy, and the letters appeared slanted and archaic. He expected the bullet flowers to take him away from the desk and outside of the mother's womb, but they waded away, the pool of Haldol in his blood dissolving them.

What will they do now that they know?

I'll go to jail. I'm sure I can't have a slap on the wrist and a warning. I was sane when I did it. What do I tell Shadow? What do I tell him that I'm a murderer?

I couldn't let go of her life because…

I was responsible for her death.

The needle slipped from his fingertips. He slept with tears in his eyes. The moon waned on them, making them appear a cornflower-blue.

No one seemed to notice the letter on Sonic's desk. No one seemed to care. And Sonic's truth was unspoken.

The womb was shut, the morning reflected on the panes of the windows, to convince them that it was light, and not at all a dark moment in their lives. The sun bled in his vision, it screamed as it birthed yet another galaxy and devoured another one, and Sonic simply held his silver spoon prominently in the new galaxy's mouth, feeding it peas and carrots. Mother's favorite meal.

Shadow returned, the sky glazed with orange liquor, and Shadow held the dress again, telling him of the great things his child had done.

"It gave that little girl hope."

"It helped our business. Everyone liked seeing you in that cute dress."

"And of course, I thought you were…"

Sonic glanced in his eyes. There was honesty. There was appreciation. The letter still appeared blue in the grotto of the woman's sorrow, and oh Shadow! If only he could tell you the horrible things he did! The things he did to murder his mother, to make sure his brother had a good life before his mother allegedly murdered him, the sun stared at him, about to place him underneath her glowing gown that brightened one half of the world, and he was calm, for a moment, when Shadow told him.

"I thought you looked…cute in it too. Maybe you should wear it more often. You make people smile in it."

He never really made anyone smile. He was often told he was too negative, a drunkard, selfish, and many other things, but Shadow told him of that love he had in his heart for him. He could feel it hurting inside him, and he wanted to nurse it, the child, the infant it was…

"I know you're sick."

Sonic nodded. He could hear the nurses telling him to put his food away, but he truly was hungry, but he was hungrier for Shadow's love, and he wanted to swallow so much of it he would choke. Like mother. The vomit was his love for her, and he hated himself for even believing his love had killed her.

"But I want to help you. I don't know how long you'll be in this hospital. What did they say on how long you needed to be here?"

Shrugging, with the mashed potatoes affixed to his tongue, he said, "Maybe a month or two. I was here for maybe…" He swallowed, the lump of clouds sinking inside him. "A year. But that was…years ago. I'm sure this place is different now. But hey, they lobotomized my mother here that many years ago too, so I'm not sure."

"They…what?"

"Lobotomized her. Drove a stake through her brain. Soon she couldn't eat by herself. I had mash her food in a tube and inject it inside her. That's what they did to me for a while cause I refused to eat I guess. These people are bastards and will just hurt you, my friend. I don't know why the police took me here. Buffalo Behavioral Health is a better damn place than here. Belham is for sociopaths and real crazies like me. Everyone just…pisses themselves and eats cold food and meanwhile I see black widows near their cooking supplies and think someone is going to die. And hear people telling me that my apartment is up for rent and anyone can come in any time they want to look around, and then these people…with their fucking baby, you know? The baby cries, all night long, and I can't get to sleep. It reminds me of Blayze and I hate it."

He eyed the desk with his carved note to his mother. He wanted Shadow to glance at it, realize that there were false memories and real memories, and he couldn't tell them apart. He wanted these memories to be real, that he was a good person and had hated his mother and was never responsible for her death. The needles struck his eyes, the pain throbbing in his lids, and he looked back at Shadow, the nurse taking away his dish. So much for cold food.

"You never told me you had a baby brother, Sonic."

"Yeah, and he's dead. My mother probably killed him, but we're not sure. He could've had SIDS. No one knows. My mother couldn't tell me. She never got charged. Because you know, by the time anyone had any suspicion she basically became a vegetable. So they didn't think it was her at all."

"Is this true, or is it…"

He was warned of Sonic's delusions, his rantings about memories that weren't real. Shadow remembered that he heard doctor reports that he rambled about how he met his baby brothers and they planned on killing him with bullets and drowning him inside some kind of fetal juice. Whatever he could've meant. Sonic rubbed his sore ass, the Haldol being injected just hours ago, and drool escaped from his lips. The nurses surrounded him, like a geriatric about to die on the plains of medication and piss-smelling dayrooms, and they told Shadow that it was time for him to leave, as after all, Sonic was about to take his medication. Insert Seroquel XR inside his banana pudding, and he would sleep like a geriatric shot by his family because he could've had rabies. He rolled around in his grave, smiled with his banana pudding-rotted teeth, and he waited for the worms to come, to decompose him, to vilify him, to make him go to Hell after he killed his mother.

The carved letter to his mother still remained unread by anyone in the hospital.

Was it really a real letter, or was it some kind of guilty fantasy, bred by both the true and false memories?

He rubbed his fingers against the letters in the desk. They felt real. But so did the black widow that crawled from the ceiling into his bed, biting him and sending him to another deep sleep. The afternoon rolled away, and it was night, the activity hour where they watched old Batman movies and sometimes Fried Green Tomatoes for the women.

And now get a mirror and look at your vaginas…

He remembered he once choked on his mother's vagina (possibly) and he screamed, the women pissing themselves in fear.

The letters still were real to him. So was the inevitably of being in the hospital for a long time, the womb that captured him, the lips of the siren's always asking him to drink their milk. They gave out cartons every few hours, telling him he needed his calcium. The lady tried to smoke a cigarette again, and was put in seclusion. She smeared shit all over the walls, cause she was callous, and heinous.

He thought everyone pissed themselves because they put too much nutrients in the juice. They added pills to the mix of orange and lemon juice. And it was why everyone was sleepy upon drinking it. There was a tea dispenser, and he decided to have some tea instead. He scalded his tongue on it, and they believed he tried to hurt himself.

"What do we do about that hedgehog?"

"He drools on himself, he rambles, and lately he's been writing strange songs about dead infants. He's been reading books that seem inappropriate for this place too…no one should be allowed to read Anne Sexton and the Xanth series. No one can read in here. It can hurt their fragile minds."

"Yes, only Time magazine! Only articles that are educational!"

Sonic could hear them across the hallway, but they pretended he was deaf. They believed he didn't had a real functioning mind anymore. He was just like his mother. Brain dead, drooling, and incompetent.

Sonic read science fiction and poetry books given by Shadow, but the hospital staff took them away, calling it "filth" and "a weapon against recovery". So the books were often contraband, and he remembered he once lost a book and the hospital never gave it back. They believed he tried to hurt himself with it, razorblades stuck to the pages, and Sonic said nothing, only shrunk in defeat.

"And you know those Kilgore Trout books he reads too? Disgusting! They have naked women on the cover, and they can be bought at porn stores! Why would he read such a degenerate man!"

Sonic once wrote to Kilgore Trout asking for him to sign his copy of his book, but he later learned that he was dead, kaput, gone, and so it goes, a writer who wasn't known anywhere but to him.

The letters on the desk still felt real, including the bullet flowers that dazzled in the window in the ocean of the sky, telling him, that there must be a way to recover, a way to get out of this wretched mother of memories and into the loving arms of the hedgehog who loved him since he first saw him.

He looked down. Depression oozed into his brain. He felt he wasn't worthy at all of his love.

"But I do," Shadow said.

The Haldol made his emotions stunted, blunted, and the nurses coaxed him into his room, where they saw the desk, but the words were still unread, and they still never cared about his struggles, despite being inside a mental hospital that smelled of rotten food and urine coated the walls like paint.

The nurses talked and chattered and laughed, expecting that Sonic was as dead as a vegetable. The hallway laughed about his prospects, being in the hospital for as long as a year or so. His son dying because he was dying himself. The night wards even laughed that they could shove food down his throat and he would choke, he would choke on his own vomit, and he would mercifully kill him, just like he did to his mother.

"Did you read that shit? What he wrote, on this desk, that shit about his mother and his family and all that? Do you expect to believe that? We saw on his records that his mother was here, and we didn't lobotomized her. We just gave her some medication. And she never took them. And she drank. The motherfucker believes he's a murderer. Believe that shit? Believe that shit? Believe that…"

He heard a cranky, screeching voice in his head, sounding like a strangled macaw wishing to voice out its final vocalization.

Kill him.

His claws grew, became as giant as planets, his jaws became worthy of odontophobics' fear, he became the monster that grew from the walls from his anxieties, his fears and his pain, and he choked the night aide until he gasped on his own vomit, and God how the night danced with the crazies! The lycanthropes howled, the women who had post-traumatic stress dreams screamed and pissed the bed, the pyromaniacs were sent to seclusion and also pissed that room, and the night howled, bloody and manic, the nurses grabbing their long steel needle full of a combination of several other medicines. He somehow grew resistant to the Haldol they said. The Seroquel doesn't do much good anymore…How could this beast, this tyrant, manage to wake up from his slumber, his cocktail mix of Haldol and Thorazine and Seroquel?

The claws raked at the man's neck, red marks searing like flames upon his white arctic skin. The nurses gathered around, shoved their breasts against him, asking him to drink their milk, drink the medicine that would send him to sleep.

Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…Mother wants to say a word about you. She says that she never abused you.

Bullshit, he replied.

She never made you drink her breast milk, she never made you eat her crotch…she says you're disgusting. And that's why you're here. You're very sick. Very ill. And you're going to be damned inside her womb. You're going to be damned like her other babies, her other bottles of alcohol she loved like her babies, and her husband who fell to her curse. The silent curse made him not contact 911, he never went and admitted he had problems with his heart, with lung cancer from all of his cigars. The curse still went on, until you said you loved her. But you never did, Sonic.

Love us instead, they whined.

The false memories ached in his head. He could hear the womb opening, the Mother of All of the Sick Infants moaning, and he heard sighs, groans of the Earth! The sky broke open, rain let loose, the woman screamed, and blood drained from the man who said that his sadness wasn't believable, the desk that once was scrawled on with his secrets, the letters burned by the hellfires from the Mother's righteousness, her utter belief that Sonic would be damned.

The false memories…the false memories…

(A/N: These parts messed with the text to give the illusion that the voices speaking in Sonic's head were very loud and bold. This site doesn't give you that option, so you can only imagine that the voices are speaking louder than an air horn and static on a surround-sound TV.)

THEY AREN'T REAL.

That was why they were called false.

I know you don't want to hear me out…

Whatever has made you sick, will eventually destroy you in the end. And you are nothing but a sick man who will lie in the dirt, waiting for the worms to come, you piece of shit.

The voices grew louder, until eventually, the letters in this chapter filled many pages.

I AM YOUR MOTHER AND YOU WILL SPEAK TO ME RIGHT NOW, SONIC. YOU ARE TERRIBLE FOR KILLING ME. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE A HORRIBLE, TRAGIC DEATH THAT NO ONE WILL MOURN. LIKE ROMEO AND JULIET, EXCEPT TO IGNORANT TEENAGERS EVERYWHERE WHO DON'T REALIZE THAT THE STORY WAS ALL ABOUT HOW TWO TEENS COULDN'T EXPERIENCE LOVE BECAUSE THEIR FAMILIES WERE SO DISTRUSTING. DISGUSTING HEINOUS PEOPLE, JUST LIKE YOU. JUST LIKE YOU…

DON'T LISTEN TO THE BITCH.

The sirens collected his blood. They piled him up on the shock therapy table. The room was dark, colored with chalk and blood and shit. The door shut with a mighty roar, made of real tin and metal. The doctors didn't care about him screaming. They didn't. They didn't.

I don't need shock therapy, he said.

I'm perfectly fine my mother is speaking to me she loves me she loves me…

Shadow.

The letter on the desk still remained, Shadow tracing his fingers on it, like he was blind and learning to read Braille.

"So this is what happened…"

THEY'RE GOING TO SHOCK ME SHADOW HELP

"This is what happened and this is why you don't…trust these people. But what are we going to do about…"

THEY'RE GOING TO SHOCK ME AND YOU'RE JUST SITTING THERE THINKING ABOUT LIFE THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING HOW ABOUT YOU EAT SOME GODDAMN FISH AND MAKE MY BRAIN BETTER WOOOOOO-WEEEEE WOOOOOOO-WEEEE MAKE THE MERRY-GO-ROUND FULL OF MURDER AND CORPSES I'LL PLAY IN THEIR INTESTINES

"Sonic killed his mother," he said. And the entire hospital listened.

The womb had blood flowing through her, but soon, the entire hospital, that once was a nice shade of cornflower blue, began to be white and yellow and green, like most hospitals were supposed to be.

"Now this can be like a regular formatted story," said God. He was alive again. Somehow. After Jesus had killed Him.

"But you were responsible for her lobotomy. You made Sonic kill her. You made him feel bad for her and you gave him the desire to want to kill her. You are trying to heal these sick people when you exacerbated their illnesses in the first place!"

Sonic glanced at his blue scrubs, smelling the scent, also, of piss and vomit, along with some blood.

"Sonic is seriously ill, Shadow. He's ill, and we have to fix him, we have to make sure he's okay to come out…"

"He's ill, yes," he said. "But you forget that you aren't supposed to psychically damage your patients so they never want to be ill again. This hospital…it was all a lie. It isn't a hospital, but rather a hellhouse. I see monsters crawling through the walls, I see the nurses with large breasts begging for Sonic to suck on them so he would be lost here forever. I see that you're nothing but monsters that only want the money. Sonic has no money. He worked for me and spent all his money on booze and his sick son with a disease that can only be cured by money and insurance."

The Haldol was coming in full effect, and his vision was blurred, torn apart by stars. Was everything he imagined the hospital to be…true? Was Shadow simply covering up for him somehow?

The desk seemed to fade away, a tide in Coney Island along with all the trash, the blue broken bottles and the seagreen beers, but he wasn't sure what the concoction was to Shadow stating that he saw what he saw. Shadow didn't want to be here. He didn't want to see the things he saw in this hospital. The monsters weren't always so benevolent. And neither was the Mother behind the womb.

"Seeing what Sonic sees, I can tell that he doesn't enjoy being here. He's not recovering. As a matter of fact, he's regressing. And you think he's getting better. Unable to read his shitty Kilgore Trout he brought a few times to my business, unable to drink coffee full of caffeine like mine, you are making him ill, and I want Sonic out of here tomorrow. I'm going to put him in that wellness center right beside you. He had good memories being there, and the doctors probably cared about him. But you're sick, heinous, spontaneous, wicked and nothing but an invective coming from a dung beetle…"

He couldn't hear the rest of his words. Static buzzed in his ears, the television set being turned on to nothing but white and black fuzz, the man saying that it was the most important channel in the world and that it told him lies.

Sonic heard things from the static, and had listened to their careful words.

This is all not real…

You're faking being sick! It's all a derelict daydream!

Being sick is the only way for anyone to care about you…

His hands were stained with blood, and he somewhat remembered what happened. The man in the white suit, grovelling on the floor was a blood stain in his neck, the nurses examining him, giving him care. More care than he ever received.

He was scrambled. His brain was fried, sunny side-up, and poached. Sonic wished to tell a nurse that he felt like dying, that he never wanted to be alive again, he didn't understand why anyone was alive and why anyone didn't want to be dead.

These stories were written on the wall, and he woke up, with the doctors and nurses reading them, enjoying his lyrical prowess. They told him that writing songs was the only way he could recover, and that his imaginations and delusions would soon fade away.

He was given Invega in his cocktail of medications now. Along with lithium and Paxil. He claimed the hallucinations stopped sometimes. It was all he could hope for.

The false memories still seemed abstract, a Picasso painting sliced together like the fried egg, the pan lined up with brown burnt edges…Had Picasso ever tried to make a painting using eggs? No, he never did. Sonic wasn't sure why he still had these thoughts. It was all a recovery process, all a recovery process…

He wanted to take them apart, make something new with the memories.

Make a story, make a song, make a lyric. He wasn't entirely sure. But the insanity he felt in the womb, it felt true, and he still heard static in his ears, he still heard his mother, he still thought of Shadow, wanting to see what he saw, and wanting to make the sacrifice to have a schizophrenic brain with his brain full of intelligence and verbal knowledge, as he wrote his novel, claiming he was close to completing it.

Am I in it? Sonic asked.

No, but you were an inspiration. And this hospital was an inspiration too. It's about a man who once believed in magic and faeries and dragons until he's sent to a hospital, and all the magic is sapped away from his life…

He took his pills, packed his bags, and Shadow waited for him, glimpsing at the hospital room full of confessions and the lunatic ramblings of someone who still was inside a hospital that gave LSD to their patients.

It was shut down shortly after that.

Sonic still wondered if the hospital trip was a thing that happened, or it also was a false memory.

"It was real," Shadow said, holding onto Sonic's hand tightly, smiling widely, while Sonic's child was displayed by the child who asked if they could go to the beach together, just the two of them.

"Were…the memories real about my mother? I…can't face that I…that I…"

The cafe much more artistic, with its chairs that looked to be made of real jewels and ivory, the walls that were clean, not at all crawling with monsters, the aquamarine and the brown still greeting him, along with all the pictures of the artists and writings greeting him with their wide-toothed smiles and grimaces.

"They could be real. But…I just don't know what I'm going to do with the possibility that it was real, Sonic. Assisted suicide, well, it is a pretty big deal, but…"

He wished he never had to see another side dish of peas and carrots again, of mashed potatoes, of limp meat.

"If you were right and that hospital…really did that to her in the '90s when they didn't even do lobotomies anymore…" He tried to laugh about it, thinking how ridiculous the hospital was, for still giving LSD to the patients, something that they've done in the '70s in some hospitals, and he believed some kind of evil magic was behind it. A man who wanted these people to be so damaged, possibly for money, maybe he was damaged himself, or maybe it all was a social experiment. To see how mad these patients possibly could be.

Despite the futuristic look of the hospital, with the sliding doors and the windows that weren't criss-crossed with black lines, the hospital had very little funds, and kept their patients there for years. The only way to suck money from them like a parasite. A louse that continued sucking at Sonic's blood.

"You're going to a rehab center soon," Shadow said, the grip on his hand tighter, firm, their eyes meeting, the manic wide pupils that Shadow once saw slowly eviscerating from his gaze. "You need help. But I thought you could perform a couple songs for this cafe before you go. Have a nice cup of hot coffee. See Rosie again, take her to the beach. And I'm sure we'll meet again, Sonic. I guess for once when I appeared sympathetic towards someone, it…"

He could catch a slight hint of a blush on Shadow. He never expected him to express his feelings towards him like this before. He poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup, Sonic expecting to taste like diabetic piss.

"Maybe my dad was right, when he actually was sober, that you should help those that…Well, you know what I mean, Sonic. You reminded me a lot of my father. And I wanted to make sure your life was a lot better. Cause I couldn't let go the memories of him too. He…wasn't a bad man. Just…misguided. Like you."

The cup didn't at all hurt his gauzed hand. Somehow, his wounds seemed to disappear, with the love of Shadow, and maybe for once, he began to believe there could've been faeries and magic in this coffeeshop after all, especially with the little girl who now seemed to walk with elvish ears, wearing seashells in her sandy blonde hair, her blue eyes as deep and as cornflower blue as the ocean…

Sonic tasted the coffee with a hesitant sip, and he smiled, for the first time in a long time. It was the best tasting coffee he ever had.