Chapter 4: Wild
Amy paced about her living room, occasionally throwing harsh glares over at Metal, who remained seated on her couch, staring blankly back at her. She was not sure if he knew his pose was irritating her more and was doing it to torment her, or if he was just entirely oblivious. When she finally heard a knock at her door, she sighed in relief, and hurried to open it, ushering Tails in. He was carrying two brown paper bags, one containing what appeared to be a selection of basic groceries, and another that bore the logo of the restaurant Sonic had invited her to the night before.
"I hope this replaces everything you needed," Tails said as he handed Amy the bag of groceries. "I forgot to ask exactly what you needed."
Amy peered into the bag and felt a pang of guilt for being so abrupt with him earlier.
"Yeah, this is a pretty good selection," she admitted. "Thanks, Tails."
"And this is for you, buddy!" Tails said cheerfully, turning to Metal, who snatched the other bag out of his hand and tore it open like an animal.
Amy pouted as the contents spilled out over her couch, but, as the cyborg grabbed up a handful of fries and crammed them into his mouth, she curled her lip and turned her attention back to her groceries, quickly putting them away. Once she was done, she joined Tails in the living room, finding him facing Metal, who was halfway through eating one of two chilli dogs he had been given.
"Oh wow, he even has the same tastes as Sonic?" she asked.
Metal paused, his mouth closed around his meal, his eyes shifting to glare at Amy.
"Yeah, strange isn't it?" Tails responded. "He loves chilli dogs just as much as Sonic does!"
Amy yelped as Metal tore the chilli dog from his mouth and threw it onto her carpet. When he then spat the contents of his mouth onto her carpet she seethed.
"Tails!" she yelled, rounding on the fox.
"What?" he wailed.
"He just spat on my carpet, Tails!" she roared. "He just threw a chilli dog – and those things stain, by the way – onto my carpet, and then he spat more chilli dog and spit, onto my carpet!"
"I'll clean it up!" Tails quickly offered.
Amy grabbed Tails arm to halt his exit as he tried to flee to retrieve something to clean up the mess.
"He can clean it up," she said darkly, glaring at Metal. "You made that mess Mister, you can clean it up!"
Metal sat back on her couch and began picking at his teeth with the pointed end of one of his metallic fingers.
"Um, the thing is Amy, Metal doesn't, um, do domestic things," Tails said, ending his sentence with a small, nervous laugh.
"Well, the thing is Tails, if Metal is going to live here, he better start doing domestic things," Amy tightly replied. "Because I am not his maid, and I am not going to spend all my time cleaning up after him!"
"Eggman had service bots who did all the housework," Tails continued. "And there was a hierarchy of the robots at his lair. And Metal was right at the top. Right up there, just slightly below Eggman."
Amy rolled her eyes.
"Well you better explain to his highness Prince Obnoxious that he might have been royalty back at Eggman's lair, but he's my guest now, he lives in my house, and he has to follow my rules!"
Metal signed something and Amy's eyes widened.
"What did he just say about me?" she demanded, turning to Tails.
Tails made to answer her, but paused, studying her expression for a moment before apparently deciding there was no point in trying to deceive her.
"He said you talk too much," he admitted in a small voice. "Still."
"Still?" Amy snapped, turning on Metal.
He stared blankly back at her.
"I think he means from when he..." Tails began, his voice trailing off.
"When he kidnapped me?" Amy asked, leering at Metal. "Or maybe from when he kidnapped poor Cream's Chao friends?"
Tails gulped audibly.
"Amy, he's done a lot for us lately," he said carefully. "And I think he still can. We just have to give him a chance."
Amy sighed.
"Well, I do think anyone deserves a second chance," she softened. "But you have to start acting civilly, understand?"
She pointed at Metal, who simply looked back at her blankly.
"Uh, Amy, I have to go, will you see me out?" Tails said in a strange voice.
Amy frowned at him, but something about the way he was looking at her stopped her questioning him.
"Try to behave yourself until I get back!" she said sternly to Metal, before following Tails to the front door.
Tails moved outside and beckoned for Amy to follow him, closing the door behind her.
"He, uh, likes me and you," Tails said once the door was closed. "And we have a real chance of getting him on our side if we work with him."
"He doesn't like me, Tails," Amy flatly replied.
"If that was true, he never would have followed you back home last night," Tails answered.
Amy shifted her weight awkwardly.
"If he likes me, why is he spitting on my carpet and generally being rude?" she asked.
"Until not so long ago, he was a robot, Amy," Tails pointed out. "He was built to defeat Sonic. That was the only thing that was ever expected of him. Then Eggman started changing him, turning him into a real hedgehog, and now he's got a lot to deal with. He doesn't even understand eating, Amy. The first time he had to eat, he didn't understand why he felt hungry again a few hours later. He thought he only needed to eat once a day, like how he only needed to recharge his battery once a day as a robot. He's got a lot to learn. Go easy on him, okay?"
"Why are you being so forgiving of him?" Amy asked, her tone softer as she was genuinely curious. "Like you said, his entire purpose was always just to hurt Sonic."
"Yeah, he's still not exactly ready to be Sonic's friend," Tails admitted. "But he is my friend, and I trust him, and you have to trust him too."
"Tails, I know he looks a lot like Sonic, but don't let that cloud your judgement."
"Amy, I've been friends with him since he was 80% robot. And now that he's 80% organic, yeah, he does look a lot like Sonic, but that hasn't changed how I view him at all."
Amy nodded, before shivering.
"You said Eggman used Sonic's DNA to make Metal real?" she asked.
"Metal was always "real"," Tails replied.
"You know what I mean," Amy sighed.
"And yeah, he did use Sonic's DNA to grow body parts for Metal."
"How exactly did he get Sonic's DNA?"
"Are you kidding? The amount of times Sonic's fought Eggman, you don't think he's ever come away from a battle with one of Sonic's quills in his shirt or some of Sonic's sweat, spit or blood on one of his robots?"
"That's gross, Tails."
Tails shrugged.
"But it's true," he said.
"Yeah, and I suppose it's better than what I was thinking," Amy admitted. "I thought maybe Eggman had secretly stolen some of Sonic's blood while he slept, or something."
She sighed.
"I have work to do today," she said. "Can I trust him alone in my house?"
The look Tails gave her was probably one he thought would inspire confidence, but instead, it only reaffirmed her concerns.
"I'll figure something out," she said. "I better go. Before Metal eats all the groceries you bought me."
Tails nodded and they said goodbye, parting ways. Amy moved back into her house, wondering as she went how Metal would react when she told him he was going to have to accompany her while she worked. Her mind shifted instantly when she reached the living room, where she saw something that ought to make her mad, and yet, made her laugh at how ridiculous it was: Metal had carefully used strips of the torn brown paper bag his meal had arrived in to cover over the mess he had made on her carpet. He gave her an ever-so-slightly self-conscious look, and she thought that maybe Tails was right: maybe there was hope for Metal. He certainly was clueless about ordinary life, and maybe once she had domesticated him he would actually prove to be a helpful ally.
"That's cute, but it has to be cleaned up, not covered up," she said, moving into the kitchen.
She soaked a cloth and moved back over to the mess, where she began by using the torn paper to pick up the chunks of discarded food. She disposed of them and then set about trying to clean up the stains left behind. After several seconds of dabbing at it with the cloth, she realised that the most she was doing was wiping the stains further into the fabric. She sighed and sat back on her heels, noticing from the corner of her eye that her first aid box was still on the breakfast bar. Deciding she would need an industrial carpet cleaner to finish the job she was on, she discarded her cloth and returned to her first aid box, opening it up.
She was at first surprised to find the contents sparse: though when she considered how often she ended up playing nurse to her friends, she reasoned it was probably not so unusual. She had hoped to find some antiseptic, but decided she would just have to buy more while she was out.
"I'll just wrap you up until then," she said aloud, as though Metal had been privy to her thought process before reaching that conclusion.
She picked up a roll of gauze and Metal turned around, with a strange fluidity to his movement, and fixed his intense eyes onto it. Behind him, her fridge door slowly swung shut, and, as it did so, Amy spotted something attached to it.
"Oh! I have an idea!" she blurted out, dropping the gauze and hurrying over to the fridge.
As she reached the fridge, Metal turned and started the open the door again.
"No, not that!" she scolded him, pushing it closed. "This!"
She removed the small magnetic whiteboard from her fridge.
"You can use this to talk to me!" she said, showing it to him and pointing out the marker pen clipped to one side of it.
Metal frowned a little before reaching a hand towards the pen. As he got close to his target, his hesitated, before very carefully posing his hand, and very gently lifting the pen between his thumb and forefinger. At the sound of his clawed, metallic fingertips tapping against the whiteboard, Amy realised then why he appeared to make such cautious movements, like closing her door carefully and picking anything up carefully: his hands were still the weapons they always had been. The fingers of his other hands clacked against the board as he took hold of it, and Amy released it to him, nodding at him encouragingly.
"Tell me if there's anything you need, or anything you want me to know about you," she offered.
He gave a singular, stiff nod of his head, and then posed the pen over the whiteboard. Amy smiled, but her smile quickly vanished when his hand began racing over the board, quickly filling it with a message.
"Oh wow, you've got a lot to say, huh?" she muttered warily.
Once he was finished, he turned the board around to show her his handiwork, and her shoulders slumped.
"That's just a whole bunch of ones and zeros!" she pointed out. "A lot – a lot – of ones and zeros, but that's all it is!"
Metal sighed and turned the board around, roughly wiping it clear with his arm. He then once more rapidly wrote all over it and turned it around for her to see.
"Thats... A bunch of numbers and letters?" she responded.
Metal sighed and again wiped the board clean with his arm and again the pen raced over the board.
"That's just a bunch of dots and dashes!"
Metal threw the board down and Amy made to tell him off, but fell silent when the board broke on impact, one shard flying off and impaling into her wall. She started at the damage for a long moment before turning wide, accusatory green eyes to her houseguest. When she found him picking at his teeth she growled, squared her shoulders and balled her fists.
"You are impossible!" she raged. "Just... Try to behave yourself while I'm at work."
Amy melted out of her anger when Metal's head titled over upon her uttering the word "work."
"I'm going to work now," she said.
Again, his head tilted at the word "work".
"Work?" she tried. "You know, a job? That thing you do to earn money to buy food?"
His head tilted when she said the words "work", "job" and "money" but he looked focused when she said the word "food". Amy folded her arms with a pout.
"Of course you don't know what a job is," she grumbled. "Prince Metal Sonic never had to work a day in his life, living at the top of the robot food chain in Eggman's lair."
She sighed. With no life skills and apparently little clue how to survive or look after himself, Metal did quite literally need her help.
"Okay, I'm going out, I will try to be quick, you try to behave yourself, okay?" she said.
He said nothing, his expression remained blank, but he did blink, and Amy supposed that was as close as she would get to a statement of compliance from him.
"Goodbye then," she said, turning from him.
She picked up a slightly worn jute bag from by her front door and headed outside. She moved quickly, hoping she would not meet Sonic or Knuckles or anyone else she knew while she was out, as she doubted she had the mental will left to lie about her current circumstances. She moved along the beach, picking up and discarding shells and driftwood. She was looking for the best of the best, items she could use to manufacture a project. Amy, like Tails, needed to earn money. The local mayors paid rewards and retainers to Sonic for the protection he offered them, but Tails had to earn money working as a mechanic, Knuckles lived freely in the wild and so had no need for money, and Amy earned money crafting centrepieces and garlands. It was something she had only ever done as a hobby, but, when she wanted to have her own home, she had been forced to find a way to make money. Sonic and Knuckles were hardly experts on how to earn money, and so Amy had sought advice from the one friend they had who did actually know how to earn a living.
At first, Rouge had wanted Amy to use her tarot reading skills to earn money. She had even approached Amy with business cards for her service: but Amy had always viewed her tarot cards as something personal, something she used for guidance in her own life, and she had never felt right using them for others, least of all for profit. Rouge had been more than a little irritated that Amy would not do readings for money, but eventually softened and suggested she sell her crafts instead. Rouge would often help Amy source both imitation and real jewels, and the bat would even often point customers in Amy's direction. The work suited Amy, as she could do as much or as little as she chose, and that flexibility was welcome when a good part of her life involved fighting Eggman and his robot army.
Once she had what she needed from the beach, Amy moved inland to the woods, where she began collecting mosses and harvesting flexibly lengths of birch that she could use for weaving. As she bent down to pick up a pine cone, she heard a branch snap somewhere behind her. She paused before slowly standing up and looking about herself.
"Sonic?" she called out.
It was not unlike the blue hedgehog to sneak up on her as part of a joke.
"Knuckles?" she said a little less enthusiastically when she received no reply. "Tails?"
She turned around twice on the spot, but saw nothing. She quietly dropped the pine cone into her bag and made to leave, the feeling that she was being watched proving to be too much for comfort. She took a step away, but the sound of rustling undergrowth made her stop abruptly and spin around.
"Oh!" she yelped, as a small dog crept out of the shadows into her line of sight. "Aw, you're so cute!"
She crouched down and placed her bag at her side, reaching out a hand. The dog crept a little closer, and, the moment before it did something unusual, Amy noticed that it made strange noises when it walked. It stopped a short distance from her hand and opened its mouth, and Amy was momentarily paralysed with fear.
Inside its mouth, rather than teeth, its jaws were lined with double rows of metal spikes.
Amy yelped and leapt back, her hammer materialising into her hands. The dog leapt at her but she deftly whacked it with her hammer, sending it crashing into a nearby tree. It bounced off the tree, landed on its feet and rounded on her without hesitation.
"Uh oh," she muttered.
Next Chapter: Amy continues to fight Eggman's latest cyborgs, and unfortunately there is more than one of them. Metal comes to assist her, but the battle leaves him (literally) falling apart and she is forced to take him to Tails for help. Things get complicated when Sonic shows up and Amy is reminded again that Metal both hates Sonic and is entirely lacking in any social etiquette. Chapter 5: Help