Tremors

The door at the end of the long corridor opened automatically when Sonic neared it, sliding open just in time for the speedy hedgehog to slip through the opening gap. He would have been way too fast to stop if it hadn't.

Sonic didn't waste any time looking back as the metal floor of the base was replaced with the grass of some sort of meadow with randomly distributed chunks of rock on it. They continued further inland, and at the horizon Sonic spotted the electric lines following a railway track up to a building.

He tore his eyes away from the faraway train station. He still needed distance. The hedgehog raced straight up a small hill and just when he was almost at the top of it he dared a look over his shoulder.

It was right in time to see the small part of the building that wasn't underground, the part they'd just emerged from, being eaten up by a green fireball. A second later, the ocean behind what had been an entrance to Aquatic Base seemed to get a dent where the water rushed into the no longer sealed rooms. Another heartbeat later a second fireball, but this time glowing in so bright light it seemed more white than green, shot up from the middle of this 'dent' in the water.

Sonic had the foresight to leap behind the next group of rocks and throw himself to the floor, making sure to cover Tails with his body. His quills ridged instinctively, sharp blades pointing outwards, but they provided little protection from the pressure of the shockwave that rolled over them almost as soon as Sonic was fully down. A deep, rolling sound like thunder followed directly behind it and the tremors lingered on for another few moments.

And then it was suddenly… silent. No more booms of explosions, no more alarm sirens, no more computer voices. Just the distant sound of waves hitting the rocks of the coast and the troubled wind coming from the sea.

Gasping for more reasons than just the high-speed running, Sonic slowly picked himself up. "Tails?" Only quiet sobs sounded from the little fox. Sonic knelt next to him, carefully running his hand over his head, smoothing gentle fingers over the flattened ears. "It's okay, Tails, it's over…"

"Nothing's okay!" Tails shot to his feet and for an instant he looked really as if he wanted to hit Sonic, but then he flung himself at his friend, crying into his shoulder.

Sonic could only wrap his arms around him. He didn't know what to say. He had by now realized that Tails was right and saying everything was fine was a totally stupid lie. Nothing was fine. They'd left Knuckles behind. Okay, he'd pretty much begged for it, but they'd left him behind. They'd never left anyone behind until now. Never. And Sonic didn't know how, if he would ever cope with that. He slowly stroked a flat hand over Tails' back, still wanting to say something but not finding any words. As if he'd totally forgotten how to speak. He blinked and felt a single drop of water run down his cheek. But he couldn't cry! How'd he comfort Tails like that?

The little fox however suddenly stiffened in Sonic's arms, winding out of the hug. "Sonic, we have to go and find him!"

The blue hedgehog quickly wiped the tear away. He'd never want Tails to see anything like that on him right now. "Tails, what –?"

"We have to find Knuckles!", the two-tailed fox exclaimed. "He's gotta be out there somewhere!" He grabbed Sonic by the wrist and pulled him back towards the coast.

"But Tails, he's… I'm sorry, but…" Sonic shook his head, brushing another time over his cheeks right below his eyes, reluctantly following Tails. "Tails, listen…"

"No, you listen! We have to hurry! He said he'd swim!" Tails continued to drag Sonic along, back down the hill.

The blue hedgehog shook his head. How should he explain to his little bro that… He found it hard believing it himself, understanding it, yeah, accepting it. But…

The fireballs were gone by now, but the ocean was still fuming, giant white bubbles coming up from various spots. It would need long until all the air from inside the base had found its way to the surface.

A little bit of the green glow still hung over the stirred-up water, like a thick shape of fog, and just as Sonic looked at it, a small, green shining shape shot out of it. It rocketed up diagonally away from the cloud of fog, to what was probably around fifteen meters high, then it suddenly flickered, the green's intensity losing out erratically until it was gone and revealed a small form in deep crimson that continued to fly with the impulse it had had until gravity gradually began to kick in. It dropped towards the blue sea in a perfect parable and caused a big splash when it went underwater.

Sonic's feet had stopped without any of his doing and now Tails was effortlessly yanking on his arm. "That… can't be…"

"See? There he is!" Tails finally let go of Sonic's wrist, instead hopping on the rocks, almost at the water, wildly waving both arms. "Knuckles, we're over here! Here! Knuckles!"

Sonic still stared at the spot where what he still didn't entirely believe was their friend had dropped into the water. Something was wrong… "Tails, fly over there and check what he's doing. He should be up by now."

Tails stopped jumping around and turned to him, eyes wide again. "You think –?!"

"Hurry!" If Knuckles was hurt or something, he'd drown out there. "I can't swim to get him, Tails!"

Thankfully the fox seemed to have understood. He jumped up, twin tails spinning into action, and flew out over the water to where they'd last seen the echidna.

Sonic stood as close to the water as he could get, tapping his foot onto the wet rocks, the spume of the incoming waves sprinkling onto his fur as he watched Tails fly, then hover over the spot Knuckles had disappeared. Right now the hedgehog hated himself for not being able to swim, for being too afraid of water to learn it.

Out over the water, Tails suddenly stopped spinning his tails and dived head-first into the sea. Sonic stood on the tips of his toes to get a better view of what was going on, but it didn't help much. He didn't see anything of Tails anymore either. Five, six, seven, ten, near twenty endless seconds passed until the two-tailed fox shot out of the water in what looked like a geyser, trashing his tails for altitude. His hands held around Knuckles' right arm.

Sonic chewed his lip for the mere moments it took Tails to reach the coast. Knuckles dropped onto the ground when the fox let him down as a dead weight, entirely motionless. Kneeling next to him, Sonic looked just briefly at the pale face and the closed eyes. "Don't do this to us now, Knux, please don't…"

From his other side, Tails reached to shake the echidna. "Knuckles, please! Say something!"

To Sonic's big surprise, Knuckles stirred at the shaking, giving a spluttered cough. Quickly the hedgehog had him by the shoulders and pulled him into a sitting position, knocking his flat palm onto the echidna's back. "Come on, breathe!"

It wouldn't have needed the prompt. Knuckles was breathing either way. He spent almost twenty seconds coughing hard, but he was breathing, so that was something, Sonic supposed. The bit of tension suddenly failed the echidna when he managed to stop coughing and he would have fallen backwards, but Sonic caught his weight and held him up.

"Keep breathing, Knux. Slowly," the blue hedgehog advised. He knew a lot about how it felt having almost drowned. He could enlist a long row of experiences, one of them not older than a few hours, others from years ago, and neither of them were exactly pleasant.

"Don't… worry… I'm kinda…fond… of it," Knuckles gasped out, letting his head drop against Sonic's arm and his eyes still only half open. Holding him like that, the hedgehog could feel him shiver, faint tremors trapped under his soaked fur, but it was so much better than the terrifying stillness when Tails had pulled him out of the water.

"You better be." Sonic smiled a little, relief washing its sweet way through him, now that it was sinking in Knuckles was alive and breathing and looked like he would stay that way.

Tails nodded eagerly. "You got us so worried!"

All the echidna managed was a weak smile and a small nod back before his eyes fell shut again. It took almost a minute that Sonic and Tails spend exchanging worried looks until his breathing had finally calmed and he looked at the others again. "Remind me next time that trying any Chaos Control or turning super on fake Emeralds is a stupid idea." He glanced up at Sonic. He still hadn't protested that Sonic was pretty much the only thing holding him upright, and somewhere in a distant part of Sonic's mind it registered as rather alarming. "Now I know how you felt when you appeared before me on Ark."

The hedgehog smiled again, latching onto the idea that Knuckles was probably just really tired and that he wouldn't want sympathy, at least not the open kind. "The copies always seem to suck," he agreed, focusing on addressing Knuckles' statement and not his dishevelled, soaked appearance.

"Well, they run the Tornado…" Tails shrugged.

Knuckles and Sonic exchanged a glance. "That's about everything they're good for," the hedgehog remarked.

"Agreed." Knuckles smiled wearily, but it came out crooked and more like a pained grimace on still far too pale cheeks.

"You don't look so great," Sonic remarked after all, still not entirely sure if the echidna could sit without help. "Think you'll handle the way back? We can take the train from here to the city, and that's relatively close to where we parked the Tornado, I think. Probably takes forever, but that hardly matters now, huh?"

The guardian nodded, pulling slightly away from Sonic's hold on him to sling an arm around a propped up knee. "As long as you don't want me to race you there…"

Sonic grinned at the returning humour. "We'll do that some other time if you must insist on it."

Knuckles gave a dismissive shake of his dreadlocked head, water dripping from the tips of his spines. "Not really."

Tails smiled at him. "I could have certainly found us a few aerial shortcuts, you know?"

"Sure you could." Knuckles also smiled, allowing Sonic to help him to his feet.

The hedgehog held onto the echidna's arm a tad longer, first to assure he would stay on his feet unaided, then to keep him from getting away. He had refrained from confronting his friend while down, but now that he was upright, anger was having a far easier job at replacing the sharp ache of worry and Sonic could no longer keep it to himself. "What did you think you were doing there?! Playing the sacrifice act?! What made you think your life was less worth saving than ours, huh?!"

Knuckles tore his arm loose from Sonic's grip on him. "It was no sacrifice play! I made a decision, Sonic. I evaluated the situation, I made a decision, and I acted on it. That's what you do all the time, hedgehog! Minus the evaluation bit, perhaps."

Sonic snorted. "Stop trying to dodge this. This is not about me!"

"Oh, something isn't about you? That's new." Knuckles folded his arms, the flare of the sudden confrontation driving a little bit of the missing color back to his cheeks. "Then tell me, hedgehog, what do you think I should have done?"

Sonic huffed, opened his mouth, paused, closed it again. Although he had been very unhappy with Knuckles' actions, now that he was asked he couldn't come up with something intelligent to say in return.

Knuckles sighed, looking less bristled already, and really tired again instead. "See how much smarter you are than me, Sonic?" The guardian shook his head, again droplets of water flying from the drenched long quills, but when he continued it was with less heat. "You were the only one of us three who could get out of there in time by running. Without anyone to hold open the doors, there would have been no running. I'm a good swimmer, maybe not better than Tails, but with more stamina for sure, and I had the chance to use the residual energy from the fake Emeralds to save myself." He sighed. "I did think about it, Sonic. This was the best thing to do. The only thing perhaps. And let's face it, if the roles had been reversed you'd have done just the same."

Sonic uncomfortably shuffled his feet. He'd wanted to be angry with Knuckles. It was easier to be angry with him than deal with the fact he'd been terrified to lose his friend.

And he'd been terrified at what Knuckles had just called a role reversal. Sonic was used to being the one making the sacrifice. He pushed Tails into the space elevator to get him to safety, he was the one to jump into the way of robot fire and evil monsters trying to kill his friends. That someone else did that for him felt… wrong, and a part of him was almost ashamed by it.

He cleared his throat. "I… I just…"

Knuckles smiled, tightly and with visible strain, but understanding glittered in his eyes. "Next time you can be the idiot and I'll shout at you for it afterwards, how's that sound?"

Sonic almost laughed at that, then he caught the way Tails looked between him and Knuckles. "You okay, little bro?"

"No! Next time, I get to shout at both of you, because you're both idiots and you both have zero self-preservation instincts!" With his brow furrowed, Tails looked a mix of angry, worried and utterly adorable. Sonic fought the urge to hug his little brother to make him calm down, but he didn't think Tails wanted that right now.

The little fox took a deep breath instead, gesturing at the two of them. "Both of you always have to jump into the line of fire, for me, for someone else, for that stupid glowing stone or for whatever else looks like it needs saving! And I admire that about you. That's what makes you heroes. It's what I want to be and do, too. And it's also what I hate about you, because I always have to worry you'll get yourself killed by being the heroes!" He sighed, visibly trying to calm himself down, double tails agitatedly playing behind his back. "I know it's part of who you are, and that's okay. But sometimes it just sucks so much!"

Sonic caught Knuckles' look, and realized neither of them had expected that outburst, or was in any way prepared to deal with it, but it didn't look like they had any word in the matter.

Tails, eyes still narrowed and firm, looked straight at the echidna. "Knuckles?"

"… Yes?"

"Promise me you'll try to never do something like that in the base again."

Knuckles shook his head. "Tails, I –"

"Just do it." The fox's blue eyes looked determined. He surely wasn't going to take no for an answer.

Seeking support, Knuckles turned to Sonic, but the hedgehog just shrugged. "I really don't know what to say to this, Knux."

Knuckles sighed, looking lost and defeated and utterly groggy. "Is it okay for you Tails if I say I'll try my best?"

"I… guess I can deal with that, yes." Tails smiled a little, apparently unable to actually stay mad for long, in particular while Knuckles was looking like this.

"Great. Now are we all set?" Sonic grinned. It was faked for most parts, but it worked to start breaking the mood. "I'm starving. Aren't you?"

The red echidna shot him a look from under a raised brow. "You're always starving…"

"You are deflecting," Tails noticed, but he was grinning softly and the wrinkles around his eyes were more humour than anger again.

"It is working?" Sonic smiled back at him, for real now.

Tails groaned. "Yes. I feel like I didn't have anything real to eat in weeks. And this topic is tiring. Just… try to not die, and we don't need to have it again."

Knuckles nodded solemnly. "I'll try my best, really. Guardian promise."

"Oh, now that's the heavy artillery. How am I supposed to beat that?" Sonic feigned a reproachful look.

Knuckles shrugged. "That's your problem."

Tails nodded, finally a real grin spreading across his face. "It is."

"You'll pay for that. Somehow." Sonic shot Knuckles a not quite serious glare, but then he laughed.

"Now, where did you say that train was? I'm sick of standing here." Knuckles waved a hand around.

"Yeah, it's boring here. Nothing exciting ever happens in this place. Let's go." Sonic grinned, and with his lead the trio slowly made their way up the hill and headed out towards the next train station.


Speedy's note: As all of you guys have probably realised by now, this story is at long last approaching its end. There are three more chapters after this one that'll wrap up the loose ends and so on. Most of it is done and written, and I'll try to do a better job about uploading them in a reasonable timeframe than I did over the course of the story at large.