When I was a kid I wanted to be like Tails.
I know it seems nuts, but you didn't live with him. And at times I still wish that.
Like right now.
God this must be hard on him.
I feel like I'm a million years old when he helps me walk along the hall. It feels like a million miles. I'm exhausted when I sit on the floor and wait for the bath water to run. Yeah, I'm afraid of water, but in the bath I'm all right. As long as it's not cold. Cold water I can't stand. I had to have a cold bath once, for a bad fever, and it took everything I had not to go nuts completely. I almost lost it like eighty times, and I was in there for ten minutes. Even when I was a kid I was stubborn.
When he shuts the water off he goes to help me in but I don't let him. I need to feel like I'm in control of something.
He sticks his feet in and I have to go for them. I love tickling his feet, he always goes nuts. And he does, getting water in my eye. I don't give a shit though, at least I made him laugh. He looks pretty thin. I should ask him if he's eating. I don't think he is.
He asks me to tell him a story, then jumps up and says he has to go do something. Okay then.
Don't think for one second I don't know how much he's putting into this. How he's handling it is beyond me. I knew he had a lot of inner strength, but I didn't know if he knew where to find it. I know we're being strong for each other's sake, working together like always and being twice as good as we are alone. But he has no idea how close I am to falling apart. Every day I get closer to losing it and just giving in to the creeping blackness I can feel in the back of my head. But no matter how far it gets, no matter how much I want to, I have to stay back. I have to stand strong for him.
Like I said, I always wanted to be like Tails.
Don't laugh.
Ever since he was born, he has always been everything to me, no matter what. He never lets me down, never gives less than everything. He says he does it 'cause I do and he wants to make me proud of him, but I'll always, always be proud of him, and you don't learn those things. That comes from inside of you.
I sure didn't get it from my family.
Tails reminds me a lot of myself as a kid, only a lot more timid. He's afraid to put himself out there. I hope this has nothing to do with my long shadow because he has a lot more to give than I do.
I realized this a while back, when he was a little over one, just a baby really, and his mom had given me one of those colour-by-number jobbies so I didn't have to go to school. It was one of those math ones. It comes easy to me, it always has, but when I was seven all I wanted to do was play outside and I could never concentrate. She didn't let me out of it this time, though, and she sent me upstairs. I was mad but not mad enough to not do it, since I figured it wouldn't take too long. But when I picked it up off the table all of the spaces were carefully coloured in, a little scribbly but good, and I got really mad. When I realized that he had to have actually done the math I ground my teeth. I knew Tails was smarter than I was, but did he really have to show off by doing my work for me? It was a picture of a pizza, which Tails had never seen before, since we had no TV and didn't get mail, and Tails had not been to town yet. So I knew he had no idea what a pizza looked like.
But to colour it he would have had to be able to read as well. I hated reading with a passion and always managed to get out of it. The letters made no sense to me and I couldn't understand why they moved all the time. So now I was jealous band/b mad. How come he could read and I couldn't? And how dare he do my sheet? Was he trying to make me look bad? I stormed over to the bed we shared and yelled, even though I had been told not to wake him up, "TAILS!"
He woke up and looked at me with half-closed eyes. It took him a second to recognize me, but when he did he rolled out of bed and wrapped his arms around my legs in one of his massive little hugs and shouted happily, "SONIC!"
For a minute I stood there, feeling amazing and special and stupidly happy because I was the centre of his whole world, and I knew he loved me more than anything in the world. It's hard to describe how I feel about Tails, but we understand each other. I was about to pick him up to hug him back like always when the paper crinkled in my hand and my anger surged again.
"Why did you do this?" I asked.
He looked at the paper and recognized it happily, then said, "I help, Sonic! Is it good?"
"No! It's bad! You did it all wrong!"
"Uh-oh," said Tails. "Wrong, Sonic?"
I no longer knew what I was talking about because I was mad and I told him he was wrong.
He stuck his finger in his mouth and backed away from me. Then he burst into tears.
I couldn't stand it when he cried.
I hated it.
I forgot my anger and picked him up. "Don't cry," I said.
"I wrong," he sobbed, "an' Sonic mad now!"
"No I'm not," I said, ashamed for waking him up, yelling at him, then making him cry. "You're good, Tails, I'm not mad."
"But I did wrong, Sonic!"
"No, you did it right. Sonic is wrong."
"No!" he insisted, firmly convinced I was never wrong.
I sat down and asked him to show me his colours. He rhymed them off, pointing to each one in turn, then looked at me expectantly.
"That's-that's great, Tails," I said, a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew it was stupid to be jealous of a baby who didn't know he was too young to do what he had just done, but I was, and it made me feel dirty. "Um...how come you can do the numbers, big guy?"
"From you!" said Tails, smiling happily. He started to clap his hands and said, "Two time two is four an' three time two is six an' four time two is eight!"
That was how I had learned my times tables.
He had been sitting there at the time, but I hadn't known he'd been paying attention, let alone understood what I was doing.
I had taught him something.
For the first time I felt proud of myself, like I had done something that mattered for once, and I hugged him and told him what a great job he had done. He laughed his happy baby laugh and bounced up and down in my lap. "Yay!" he shouted and then I took him downstairs to show Rosemary what he had done.
"Look what Tails did, Rosemary," I said, showing her the paper. She took it from me and looked at her baby. "That's really nice, Miles," she said, but she didn't seem to mean it. "I can't believe how big you're getting."
She looked like she really didn't believe it, as if Tails doing this was a bad thing. Later I realized that Tails was scaring her, since he was learning so fast, and I supposed that if I had a kid who didn't grow like other kids maybe it would freak me out.
She told me I could go outside and I shook my head. "No. I didn't do it. Tails did."
"Well, that means Miles can go, but someone needs to watch him," said Rosemary.
"Then you do it," I said stubbornly, although I always got very jealous when he spent time with her. I wanted him to spend all his time with me. "I didn't do what I was told so I can't go out."
She smiled at me and laid a hand on my head. She wanted to hug me but knew I didn't like being touched, except by Tails, because you don't tell a baby he can't give you a hug.
"I'm proud of you, sweetie," she said. "That's a very grown-up thing to say."
She was proud of me?
First I was proud of myself and now she was proud of me. I was having quite the day.
She gave me another sheet to do and I went upstairs with it, trying to keep it away from Tails. He kept grabbing at it and laughing, like it was a game. I sat him down on the bedroom floor and went to work on the math.
"I help!" said Tails, crawling over and trying to take my pencil. I guess he thought he could colour with it.
"No, you did one already. Go over there," I told him, pushing him away. He came back and tried to take my pencil again, so I turned away from him and told him to get lost.
I rarely told him to go away so he sat there and thought that one over. Then he crawled over and sat beside me and said, "I help Sonic!"
I told him to be quiet and bent over the paper, chewing on the end of my pencil. I chew on pencils like they're made of chocolate.
It was a picture of a starfish with sunglasses playing the guitar, but I usually guessed the colours on these things and I had no idea what to guess. If it were me the guitar would have been red, but it was such a silly picture it was probably orange or something.
I managed to figure out what number red was, since I knew that red was the short colour and besides, a three letter word wasn't that hard to read. Well, sometimes it was, depending on how I was feeling that day. I stared at the first colour and for a minute it started with a b, but then it turned into a p and then a b again and then I mixed it and the word under it together, and I threw my pencil at the wall in frustration. "IT'S NOT FAIR!" I yelled at Tails, who was sitting there sucking his thumb, which only made me more angry. "How come you can read and I can't? I hate you Tails!"
He took his thumb out of his mouth and looked so sad I felt guilty. I didn't mean what I'd said, he was just the poor victim of my frustration. He crawled over to the wall (which had a lot of pencil marks on it) and picked up my pencil, then brought it over and offered it to me. I had the strange feeling he was sad for me, and not because I'd yelled at him. "Tails help?" he asked.
I took the pencil and sat him in my lap. "Yes, Tails can help," I said, trying to figure out how. Then I had an idea.
"Hey big guy," I said, pointing at the first word, "do you know what colour this is?"
"Yeah!" he squealed.
"Can you tell me something that's this colour?" I asked.
He made a thinking face. I knew that he knew the words, but didn't know how to say them.
I tried my best to be patient, but I was terrible at it and I started to wiggle my leg. He put his hand out and pushed on my knee. "Ssh," he said sternly.
I sat still and started chewing on my pencil instead.
After a while he said, "Look," and pointed at his eye.
"Blue?" I guessed.
"No," he said. "Look."
"White?"
He repeated himself and pointed at his eye again.
"Pink?"
He sat and waited patiently.
Then I realized he was talking about the inside part of his eye. "Black!" I said, and he jumped up and down in my lap and clapped his little hands. "Yes yes yes!" he said, and I laughed and put a black crayon line over those horrible letters. Then I asked him the next one.
"That's easy!" he cried. "You!"
"Oh, so it must be purple, right?" I said.
He started to laugh really hard, saying, "Sonic not purple!"
"I know," I said, tickling his tiny little feet with my finger. The size of his feet were a wonder to me, since even at seven I knew that my feet were not small, and at the time his were no bigger than the palm of my hand.
"I was just bein' silly, big guy," I said, drawing a line over that word too, and he started to wiggle in excitement, throwing his arms around me.
We finished the rest of the words and I figured it was okay if he helped with the colouring, so we did that together. Tails always did everything with his left hand because I did, but I knew that he could use them both because he used his right when he didn't know I was there and he wasn't paying attention. I thought he was really lucky to be both-handed, as he called it.
We brought the picture to Rosemary and she smiled and taped it to the wall with Scotch tape in all four corners.
"You boys did a wonderful job," she said, and this time she meant it. "You can go outside and play now, sweetheart."
I knew that I couldn't, though. Tails had gone quiet in my arms and I remembered that I had woken him up. "I gotta wait for Tails," I said, and I went back upstairs. I was tired anyways so I just went to bed with him.
I pulled up the blanket, careful not to pull it over his head, and I realized that I had been really mean to Tails. He loved me for no reason and he had only wanted to show it by helping me. I had yelled at him and told him to get lost and that I hated him. That gave me a sick feeling inside.
"Tails?" I said.
"Sonic?" he said sleepily, turning his head to look up at me with his blue eyes, with an innocence and trust I wished I was still able to feel but that had been stolen from me.
"I'm sorry I yelled at you," I said softly. "I was mean and that's not nice. I didn't mean it, I was just mad."
He just nodded and said, "I know."
I almost cried. I felt an intense hatred for myself for what I had done. I felt so dirty I wanted to run downstaris and give him to Rosemary so I could suffer my shame alone.
He just kept looking at me.
"I love you, Tails," I said, and if I had blinked the tears would have fallen, but I would not, could not let him see me cry.
He only smiled and closed his eyes, and hugged me with his little arms.
I learned a lot about Tails that day. I grew out of my jealousy eventually to admire his quiet strength, his unshakeable loyalty, his incredible patience and his deep understanding of me. Sometimes I felt he knew me better than I ever would. That was the first time I yelled at him, but it wasn't the last, and all the times I lost my temper and took it out on him he would just sit quietly and let me vent, never taking it to heart, just being there for me and never letting me be alone. Only now I did feel alone, because I felt like I was somewhere he couldn't come, and I knew I was suffering because of it. But as well as he knew me, how could he understand? He didn't have to do what I did. The world didn't rest on his shoulders all that often, now did it? I was being called on to perform above and beyond again and again and again, and the demands never stopped. I was almost afraid of each day, because I didn't know if I would have to go and save the day no matter how much I didn't want to. Besides, if Eggman didn't kill me, I would. My body was falling apart and I knew it. Why didn't I tell Tails about it? You try telling your best friend and your little brother that you're falling to pieces in every way possible and there's nothing anyone can do about it. You tell him that you feel like your very existence is being pressed on by some evil force that you can't control. Because I've tried. It's the hardest thing I ever had to do.
That's why I didn't do it.