"Are you absolutely sure about this?"
"I'm sure." Reason smiled at him. "Unless you wanted to do it yourself?"
Miles frowned. "I wish I could."
"Then it can't be any other way. Don't worry, I know exactly what to do. I lived it too, after all."
"Thanks for this."
"I haven't even done it yet." She laughed, filling herself a bottle of sickly sweet life support liquid.
"You will." Miles smiled sadly. "Oh, watch out for me next time I show up. I'll be pretty moody."
"Do I need to say anything special?"
"You will anyway. I'll be back for you soon." He brushed a hand across her cheek, then never was.
Reason shrugged, going to take a swig of her last meal.
It was odd what you could get used to.
Miles' whole body hummed with familiar agony, his mind numbed from familiar atrocities, his sanity strained under the familiar passage of eternity.
How many eternities exactly, he'd lost count, but he knew he deserved every moment, his body burning away and being rebuilt with every passing instant.
The outer surface of the Death Egg had been the first step. A simple display on a timed rotation, as above, so below. Show the stars, show the Earth - lightless, dead. It was done all too quickly, robbing him of his chance to procrastinate.
Next, Miles had hand-built every crumbling storeroom, every Happy Days tube, every twisted corridor. And in every tube, he had gently laid each tiny skeleton by hand, each replaced using the cloning machines. A stable time loop using the same bones wouldn't work, after all. Perhaps for the first few loops, but after a million years? Sixty million?
So, instead, he bred children for slaughter. Grown and broken in the cloning vats, never even opening their eyes, but alive enough to die, so that their Earthbound copies might live.
Alive enough to damn him countless times over.
Miles didn't know, one way or another, why Happy Days existed, why he had been taken, if there was an original cause to all this madness. But the answer was now him. He had handcrafted the worst horrors of Happy Days with painstaking care. He was the one who built the assault team to kidnap one naïve young fox and lock him into this hell as penance for the crimes he was only now committing. He was now the sole cause behind this madness, all better to take control of the situation.
All in preparation for this one desperate gamble.
A bulkhead exploded as his friends arrived. Here, of course, in hot pursuit, looking to rescue him.
The question wasn't if he'd win. He knew he'd win. Their bones were catalogued among all the rest, after all. Their tubes lay empty, waiting for their inevitable occupants.
Miles pulled a metal helmet down to complete his armoured disguise, orange metal covering white and black fur, black and crimson visor concealing his luminous gaze.
The question was what the universe would let him do when he did.
"Good morning, little one." Miles smiled, brushing a white-gloved hand across pink cheeks like he had every day since she'd been born. "Can you feel the sunshine?"
Lifting the tiny girl in one arm and two tails, Miles drew mechanical curtains, allowing warm light to flood the chilly metal room with glorious brightness.
"Taydol!" Bright blue eyes staring up at him, stubby pink fingers yanking at golden orange fur.
"That's me." He grinned. "Your daddy… uh, left me to take care of you."
He tickled her with the white tips of his tails, drawing out squealing laughter as she tried to bite down on them.
"It's just going to be you and me for a while, but don't be scared. I'm going to be right here with you the whole time." Miles winced as tiny teeth chomped down on his tail. "I'll never leave you alone. Not even a single day."
Endless Miles swarmed around him, pushing rings into his body to keep him alive without his Chronos state. Like they had every day since she had been born. Like they would every day until she went into Happy Days, never abandoned, never forgotten.
Miles smiled once more. "I promise."
And so Miles arrived at an end, a beginning, and a middle once more.
Everything was an end, a beginning, and a middle.
Time was funny like that.
Reason slept peacefully on his lap, her orange fur starkly contrasted against his own.
He let her sleep, gently humming a familiar song as he waited, gently kneading the orange fur on the top of her head.
He was in no hurry to reach this particular beginning.
Miles sighed, ash drifting from his mouth as he memorised every strand of fur, traced every detail into his mind. Not so much lost as stranded in his thoughts.
Finally, Reason stirred, blue eyes opening to look into his rainbow gaze.
"Is it time?"
Miles nodded, hand outstretched. Light blazed out around them, blinding bright as time dilation came to an end as quickly as it began. At least from an outside perspective.
"Try not to cry." Reason leaned up, nuzzling him under the chin.
The pleasant warmth around them was gone. Replaced by deathly chill, cool light with a dull red glow. Cleanliness with rust.
"I'm not." Miles looked away.
Away from her.
Away from the grim red orb he'd constructed. Its writhing metal tentacles limp, its control centre vacant. Waiting for its first host.
She was the only one with a neural interface after all. Any surgery on him would either regenerate as fast as he could cut, or deplete his rings, killing him.
It was the only rational choice.
However much he might hate it.
Reason pulled his head back towards her, her smile filling his world one last time.
"You will." She pressed her lips against his briefly before pulling away. "You always do."
She stuck her tongue out at him, dropping clothes on the floor in a heap at his feet before hopping into the grim machine. Metallic tendrils reached for her, pulling her into their embrace.
"But that's okay." Metallic speakers crackled out from the machine as it writhed into life, orb snapping shut, liquid flowing into the chamber. "Sadness just means that we're still alive, in the end." A metal tendril brushed his cheeks where tears would come before she turned away, dragging herself to the first of many tasks as caretaker of Happy Days. "I'll see you soon, my beautiful little dream."
Daughter, sister, dearly beloved, granddaughter… and Mama.
Miles wiped a glove slowly across his lips, then again over his cheeks, blinking rapidly as he too turned away.
One final end, one final beginning still to reach.
"Is it done?" Miles whispered ashes into the frigid air.
"Of course." Mama... Reason settled down alongside him, metal coils trailing gently around him.
"And they're all… happy?" He swallowed around a hard lump in his throat. Five Happy Days tubes stood before him, on their way elsewhere. Five familiar bodies drifted suspended within.
"All except you. You are a troublemaker." Mama buzzed in amusement, lightly squeezing him in a steel embrace. "They are perfectly happy in the heavens you built them. And the first of the rabbits has been seeded."
"Is it over?" Was there anything he missed? Anything forgotten?
Anything else he could do?
"It's over whenever you want it to be. Your choice has always been the only thing keeping you here."
Miles shattered. Shards in the shape of precious gems tumbled from him, one in each colour, seven in all. Breaking away, fading, disappearing to the surface of Little Planet, so long ago, where Sonic might find them, where, perhaps, they'd always been, waiting for when they were needed.
And one pitifully small fragment remained, charred and smouldering, shivering and broken. Miles fell to the floor, coughing up white ashes until he threw up black sludge. Grey tears streamed down white cheeks as his fur became yellow-orange once more, permanently this time.
Endless hands supported him, but no longer his own. Cradling him in metal as Miles, for the first time in forever, became temporal.
"Take your time." Mama stroked his fur. Loving. Patient. "As much as you need."
Miles straightened at last, twin tails twirling around one another in endless spirals.
"Thank you again for this." He pressed his hand against the crimson glass, staring at the sleeping fox within, her expression serene. "And I'm sorry for… everything."
"I will get to spend the rest of my life telling you how much I love you." Mama gently placed him down. "And who knows? You kill a rabbit, not a fox, and there's a whole lot of future out there for me to see you again."
"I hope so." Miles trailed his fingers across the glass, blue eyes damp. "I... love you too, Reason."
Mechanical laughter spilled out all around him.
"Liar."
Miles turned away, tears spilling into his fur. "You'll find out if it's true or not next time I see you."
"Hah. Then it's a date. Take care of yourself until then, little dream. Someone will have to, after all."
Reason shooed Miles onto one final elevator, brushing over his fur one final time in farewell before this too ended. An ovoid shuttlecraft sat waiting for him at the top, black and crimson in colour, all prepped for launch.
He was the last passenger to board.
"Ugh. Where am I? That last bot was something else."
A blue hedgehog straightened, hand on his head.
"Try not to move too much."
"Tails!" Blue spines streaked over, skidding to a halt before an upturned hand.
"Trying to steer the spaceship, Sonic."
"Oops, sorry pal. How did we all get away? How did you get away?"
"Turns out all I had to do was quantum disentangle their thermovoltaic dynamic regulatron to overload the local chronosphere's transitional mainframe." Miles grinned. "Kids' stuff, really. We're just heading home now."
"Uh. Wow. Okay, little buddy. Great work." A gloved hand patted his shoulder. "Proud of ya."
"Ugh. Anyone get the number of that- wait? Where are we? How did we-" A red echidna bolted upright.
"Tails did a science thing." The blue hedgehog waved both hands to discourage further inquiry.
"Oh, uh, okay. Guess you didn't need us to save you this time after all, Tails."
"I just got lucky while you distracted them is all, guys." Miles rubbed the back of his head, an embarrassed grin forming on his lips.
"S… Sonic? What- Tails!" A blur of pink crashed into him, upturned hand be damned.
"Ah! Not while I'm flying!"
The pink hedgehog ignored him, squeezing him tight. "We were so worried! Are you okay?"
"Thanks, Amy. I'm…" Tails blinked rapidly, staring out at the Earth growing large beneath them. "I'll be fine. Really."
It hadn't taken much time, relatively speaking, to tweak the cloning vats in order to make four perfect clones. Even less to copy over some memories.
He'd asked Reason to try and bring the originals here if she could.
He'd asked her to never, ever tell him if she succeeded.
Somewhere, behind and above him, his past self had already finished his ordeal. His friends had died, happy. Reason and Doodle had lived out their lives hopelessly loving him.
All the evils of Happy Days had come to pass in the blink of an eye, with the world still intact and none the wiser. And all the loose threads had somehow been dealt with to the universe's satisfaction - unchanged, but different.
He had done it. It had taken so much, and given him so many scars in return, inside and out, but he had finally escaped Happy Days. He, no, they were all going home. It was finally, finally over.
"Hey, wait a second. Is that Cream?" The echidna turned in surprise. "What's she doing here?"
Miles' tails went dead straight as he stiffened in horrified realisation.
"Oh, rabbits."