Chapter 11: Reveal

After receiving an invite to meet Rouge again, Amy readied herself to leave Metal alone again. He had slept in late that morning – again – and was happy to just eat. She decided that, before she left, she really ought to tidy up a little, and so took out her vacuum cleaner, remembering then that Metal had seemed confused about the name the day before. She shrugged the idea off, deciding that she could demonstrate it to him, and plugged the vacuum in, taking it first to the couch, where Metal was sitting eating, and where most of the crumbs were. His chewing slowed a little and he frowned at the vacuum in her hand. Thinking nothing of it, she turned the vacuum on and pushed it forwards.

Amy yelped as her arm was pulled away from her – the second he heard the vacuum in operation, Metal had kicked it out from under her. She fell forwards to the floor, where she scrambled around onto her back, sitting up in time to be doused in a shower of dust and fluff as Metal tore the vacuum apart.

"What are you doing?" she cried, before coughing on the cloud of dust she had inadvertently inhaled.

The vacuum fell to the floor around her, broken into four pieces, and Metal stood over her, covered in dust, looking vaguely embarrassed.

"What was that for?" Amy asked him.

He looked down at her, and, for a long moment, they remained that way, as little strands of fluff frittered to the ground around them.

"That was my vacuum cleaner," she eventually said, standing up before him. "It's used to clean up dust and dirt. It's not an enemy robot you have to destroy."

Metal's finger did that fidgety thing they did when he was hesitant about something, and Amy suddenly understood him.

"You're on edge because Eggman's robots all turned on you," she said. "And you thought my vacuum was another robot because of the noise it makes!"

Metal's lip twitched, but he did nod in agreement.

"Oh, well, in that case, I'm sorry," she conceded. "I should have explained it to you before I switched it on."

He blinked rapidly as a small strand of fluff went into his eye, and when he did little else about it, Amy's eyes wandered down to his hands. He wasn't wearing his gloves, though she suspected that even with his gloves, with their torn seams, he would be unable to fish anything out of his eyes without seriously injuring himself.

"Here, let me get that for you," she said, removing one of her gloves. "Now just hold still, okay?"

She took a firm hold of his chin in one hand – which was necessary as his head was twitching every time he blinked – and with her other hand, very carefully moved to remove the fluff from his eye. When her finger neared his eye he closed it tightly.

"You need to keep your eye open," she told him.

He bared his teeth at her.

"And you need to not behave like a wild animal!" she snapped.

He opened his eye, but she noticed his irises were glowing a little.

"Don't look at me like that when I'm just trying to help you," she complained as she began carefully removing the fluff from his eye. "You know you still have a lot to learn about good manners."

Once she had successfully removed the fluff, she released his chin, the glow in his eyes fading. She started to tell him he was welcome, but her voice trailed off when a strangely sweet and innocent look grew on his face. A second later, he sneezed, spraying her with dust. She closed her eyes and held her position for a moment slowly opening them again.

"Let's get you cleaned up," she said flatly.

She moved into the bathroom and he followed her. She first brushed the dust and fluff out of his quills and fur before doing the same to herself. She then played her hands over his face to clear any excess, something he shirked away from a little, his eyes glowing as she did it, but he quickly calmed down again when she was done. They then returned to the living room, where Amy retrieved a sweeping brush. She was not entirely surprised that Metal just watched her sweeping up the mess he had created, but she was pleased that he did at least pick up the remains of her vacuum cleaner: though she was a little less pleased when he simply piled them up on top of the breakfast bar and then planted himself on the couch again.

"Alright, I have to go," she told him. "I won't be long, it's just brunch with Rouge, so this time please, please, please do not follow me. Do you understand?"

Metal gave her a slightly cold look.

"I mean it, Metal," she insisted. "It's just brunch, in the city, there is no reason whatsoever for you to follow me, okay?"

He still just stared at her, and eventually she sighed in defeat.

"I'm going to assume you do understand what I'm asking of you, and I'm going to go, please don't break anything or eat all of the food in the house before I get back."

Still he stared at her blankly. She sighed again and went to the bathroom to check her reflection for any stray dust one last time before grabbing her purse and heading out to meet Rouge.

"I have generated a lot of interest in your work," Rouge said to Amy.

Amy smiled stiffly. Rouge had that look on her face that she only ever got when talking about jewels or money; it was the sort of look a person would normally get when talking about a new romantic relationship they were in, but for Rouge, the look only manifested for the material.

"So I hope you have a clear schedule," the bat added.

"Well, that kinda depends on Eggman," Amy dryly replied.

"If he bothers you, call me," Rouge immediately responded.

"And you'll go out with Sonic, Tails and Knuckles and fight Eggman for me?" Amy asked.

"No, I'll send Shadow and Omega over," Rouge replied.

Amy smiled.

"You and I are too busy for that right now," Rouge added. "We have to get our priorities in order."

"Right," Amy agreed. "When there's money to be made, who cares if Eggman is destroying a whole town?"

"Okay, now you're just being facetious," Rouge said with a pout.

"It's fine, I can handle it," Amy acquiesced. "Send your orders my way."

"Are you ready to be rich?" Rouge asked her, that lovestruck look returning to her face.

"Yes," Amy replied, trying to suppress her sarcasm.

"Well if you're not going to get excited about it with me, how about this…" Rouge began, adopting a sly look that made Amy wary. "Work quickly enough and you could get a decent pay-out in time to buy that stunning dress you think you can't afford but desperately want for the gala."

"The gala…"

Amy sat back hard in her seat and sighed.

"Honey, you've been going on about the gala for weeks," Rouge pointed out. "Don't tell me you've changed your mind about going now that you have a little boyfriend drama in your life."

"I don't have boyfriend drama in my life, Rouge!" Amy argued.

"Don't mess this up for me, Amy, the gala is the perfect place to network," Rouge continued. "I need you there. You're the face of the brand I'm selling."

"Can't you just be the face?"

"Amy, "handmade" implies a certain…"

"Homeliness?"

"Exactly!"

"So we're back to that again…"

"It's a compliment!"

"How?"

"There's a type of strength in the ordinary, you know."

Amy paused. Had Rouge chosen any word other than "strength", she would have dismissed her, but her choice was, entirely without her knowledge, one that spoke to Amy, in light of Metal choosing the Strength card for her.

"Besides, networking is the fun part of business," Rouge added. "You've been working so hard, don't you think you deserve to have a little fun? Buy yourself that lovely dress, run a comb through Thistle's quills and bring him along."

Amy sighed slowly.

"Or don't, because apparently you still haven't told Sonic about him, for whatever reason," Rouge said dryly.

"It's not like that," Amy said. "It's complicated. I can't just… I need time to explain it to Sonic, I can't just turn up to the gala with Thistle."

"Well, you know what they say: no time like the present," Rouge replied.

"Yeah, I know, I should get onto it, I shouldn't put it off," Amy said, rolling her eyes.

"Then do it."

"I will!"

Rouge sighed.

"Turn around."

Amy did as Rouge asked without any expectation, and so, when she saw Sonic walking down the street towards her, she almost fell out of her seat in shock.

"Don't put it off," Rouge told her, standing up.

Amy turned back to her abruptly.

"Oh, Amy…" Rouge said with a sigh as their eyes met.

"Stop that!" Amy snapped, standing out of her seat. "I'm a grown woman and I can handle myself just fine!"

"Hey Ames, Rouge, how's it going?"

Amy replied to Sonic's greeting with a squeaky, awkward laugh. Rouge folded her arms and gave Amy a hard glare that sobered her a little.

"We were just talking about the gala," Rouge said.

"Oh yeah?" Sonic responded. "Are you taking your new boyfriend, Amy?"

Amy froze.

"Knuckles told me you were seeing someone," Sonic added. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I, uh…" Amy looked at Rouge, who gave her a wry "I told you so" smile. "I guess I thought you'd be mad?"

"No way!" Sonic casually responded. "I think it's great! Am I gonna get to meet him before the gala, or…?"

Amy began rubbing one of her arms and she avoided Sonic's eyes as she desperately tried to think of a way to lie herself out of the situation she was in. She never lied to Sonic, and telling him she had a boyfriend was bad enough, there was no possible way she could look him in the eye and talk about Metal as though he wasn't their former enemy. When her mind remained blank and she started to feel the pressure of the silence following Sonic's question, she turned desperate eyes to Rouge, who simply and firmly shook her head. She then looked about herself for any sort of distraction, willing to find any excuse – no matter how insignificant – to avoid finishing the conversation with Sonic. When she spotted a small yellow shrew girl standing at the base of one the tall trees lining the city street, she grasped onto the moment.

"Oh no!" she blurted out, pointing over at the girl. "Look at that poor little girl! She's lost her balloon – or ball – or cat – or something – in that tree! I should go and help her!"

Amy started to leave but was halted abruptly when Rouge put a firm hand on her shoulder.

"I'll take care of that, you two stay here and talk," she said, stepping past Amy.

"I really don't mind helping her!" Amy called after Rouge.

"And how exactly are you going to get up that tree?" Rouge called back over her shoulder, flicking out her wings to demonstrate her point.

Amy wilted before turning a nervous grin to Sonic.

"I thought you'd been pretty quiet lately," he said as their eyes met. "And now I know why! So where'd you meet this guy?"

Amy pursed her lips at the realisation that she was literally unable to lie to Sonic's face.

"Little Planet?" she responded in a small voice.

"You were back on Little Planet?" he asked.

"M-hurr," Amy mumbled non-committally as she shook her head.

"Weird place to meet," Sonic mused.

"You and I met on Little Planet, Sonic," Amy pointed out.

"Oh yeah, I guess we did!"

He sounded so genuinely surprised, Amy realised that he had genuinely forgotten their first meeting. She supposed he meant it kindly, as in he had known her so long, he barely remembered when or how they had met for the very first time, but it still stung to hear that what was, for her, such an important part of her life, was barely even a flicker of a memory for Sonic. Her eyes wandered from him, looking over at Rouge, who was standing in front of the little girl by the tree.

"Are you alright there, sweetie?" Rouge asked, leaning down to bring herself closer to the little girl.

Amy smiled when Rouge's question was, at first, met with silence. When Rouge's question was finally responded to however, Amy's smile vanished and her heart stopped.

"Oh no!" she breathed, grabbing Sonic's arm. "Look!"

He turned to look over with her and she felt him flinch in her grasp as he too saw what she did. After Rouge had asked her question, the little girl had raised one hand, as though to point up into the tree: but instead of pointing a finger, a metal claw had burst out of the palm of her hand and locked around Rouge's throat. Sonic started towards her, but another, identical, child leapt at him, a metal clamp flying out of its hands and grabbing his thigh. Sonic stumbled to a halt as the apparent cyborg wrapped itself around his leg.

"Amy!" he cried.

Amy yelped and leapt into the air, backflipping over the top of a third cyborg child. They all looked identical and – until their robotic arm extensions appeared – were indistinguishable from a real, biological child.

"Hey, that guy's fighting with a little kid!"

Amy looked about herself, her heart steadily pounding faster and harder as she came to a series of realisations, each more terrifying than the last: there were more little yellow shrews spawning all over the street, coming from seemingly nowhere; the street was busy, they were still close to the cafe, which was almost full with customers; and, lastly and by far worst of all, the cyborg latched onto Rouge was emitting a rhythmic beeping sound that was slowly raising in pitch.

"Bomb," Amy said, looking about herself desperately. "Sonic, they're bombs!"

Sonic renewed his efforts to wrestle himself free of his attacker, but seemed to be having more difficulty than he ought to have.

"Rouge!" Amy called out to her friend.

"Get everyone out of the street!" Rouge called back, her voice strained against the cyborg's claws clamped around her neck.

"These things are pretty solid!" Sonic said, straining against the cyborg latched onto him. "Amy, don't let them catch you!"

Amy nodded and summoned her hammer, taking a strong stance and swinging with all her might as one of the pseudo children leapt at her. Her hammer collided with it and barely knocked it off course, but the reverberation through her weapon back into her arms and down her entire body was excruciating.

"Ow!" she whimpered, lifting her hammer again with shaky arms.

Sonic looked about himself before giving Amy a look she really didn't like.

"Amy, get everyone out of the street," he told her. "Then get away to safety. Tell Knuckles and Tails what happened here. And get Shadow."

Amy shook her head.

"I'm not leaving you, Sonic!" she argued. "Not like this!"

Amy reasoned that, since Tails seemed to be in communication with even Shadow, all she needed to do was send him a message and he would do the rest. She dodged another cyborg child and leapt back, quickly taking a photo of the cafe she and Rouge had been dining at. The photo included Sonic under attack, and so she sent it to Tails, hoping he would understand the problem and the location. She then turned her attention back to the problem at hand, ducking and weaving her way back to Sonic. With all of the cyborgs now trailing metallic claw arms with them, the people in the streets and cafe had begun to flee, and so she focused her attention on freeing Sonic.

"Amy, don't do that!" Sonic warned.

Amy ignored him, swinging her hammer down onto the top of the cyborg's head with all her strength. Again, she was hit with the reverberation of the impact, but she had succeeded in cracking open its metallic skull. It sparked and buzzed, and the beeping sound it had been making dissolved away. Bracing herself, Amy hammered it again and again, until it finally fell from Sonic. As soon as he was free, he leapt into the air, launching a spin dash at an approaching cyborg. It broke and stumbled on the impact, but Sonic fell awkwardly away from it, rising to his feet and touching a hand to his head, swaying around as though the impact had knocked all of his senses out of him. Amy turned to help him, but paused when she noticed something on the ground by the still smouldering remains of the cyborg she had just crushed. She crouched down and retrieved a length of paper, a jolt of sickening fear stabbing through her as she read the message written onto it.

"Give back Metal Sonic."

Amy stood up and saw Sonic standing by the remains of another cyborg he had managed to destroy, and he too was holding a piece of paper. He threw it down and ran towards Rouge to try to help her and Amy quickly dashed over to check what it had said.

"This will continue until you surrender Metal Sonic."

She scrunched the paper into a ball in her fist and and threw it down, running at another little artificial child that was chasing after Sonic. She caught up to it and hammered it into the road, once more finding a message hidden within it. A breeze passed over the mess and flipped the note over, and she saw what it said.

"I know you're hiding it."

Amy looked over at Rouge, who was still in the clutches of the cyborg. She was trying to fly up, but clearly it was too heavy for her to get more than a few inches off the ground before she would sink back down again.

"Rouge!" Sonic called out to her as he tried to fight his way to her.

"I'll take it up into the sky," she called back to him.

"Don't do that, it's a bomb!" Sonic warned her.

"That's why I have to do it," Rouge replied. "I can't let it go off down here and hurt everyone else!"

"Rouge!" Amy cried.

She ached all over, but she forced herself onwards. She only made it a few steps however, before stopping with a yelp of alarm as something flashed in front of her. A cyborg fell to one side of her, staggering about with a crack up the length of its torso, and a hedgehog landed at her other side, glaring at it with narrowed, focused red eyes.

"Shadow!" Amy gasped.

"What is this?" he asked, standing up and stalking towards the cyborg as it righted itself.

"It's Eggman," Amy said. "Shadow, you have to help Rouge! Leave this one to me!"

Shadow disappeared in a flash and reappeared beside Rouge, and, content that he would help her, Amy turned her attention back to the faltering cyborg in front of her. She swung her hammer down onto its head, but this time, it hardly made a dent. She let out a cry of frustration and tried again, but, as her second effort was even poorer than her first, she realised two things: first of all, the cyborgs were so hard and heavy, she was wearing herself out a lot quicker than usual; and secondly, a small part of her mind couldn't help but wonder if any of the weirdly bioengineered bots were as sentient as Metal had been right from his original incarnation. She tried to shake the thought from her mind and pushed herself to raise her hammer again: but before she could bring it down, the cyborg grabbed its arms around her legs and another leapt onto her back. They locked metal arms around her body so tightly she could feel her lungs being compressed and she struggled to fully inhale the gasp that erupted from her when both of the cyborgs attached to her started that same, ominous beeping sound the one attached to Rouge was making.

"Sonic," she said, her voice faint and breathy as she struggled to breathe.

Sonic neither heard her nor noticed her plight as he was surrounded by the remaining artificial children, only managing to hold them back thanks to his vastly superior speed. Shadow was trying to break the cyborg off of Rouge, who was starting to look faint, her knees bent and her body slouching. As Amy watched, Tails arrived with Knuckles, and together they tried to approach her, but shortly found themselves standing back to back with Sonic, all three of them surrounded. Sonic began telling Tails to start flying everyone else out of harm's way, but his voice started to sound muffled as Amy's legs buckled beneath her. As her knees hit the road, she blinked to focus her eyes, the lack of air to her lungs starting to make her excessively dizzy. She saw a blur of something by Rouge and forced herself to focus, her vision becoming clear at the exact moment that the cyborg attached to Rouge suddenly swung out wildly to one side and then rocketed up into the sky. It exploded high overhead, and by the time Amy had lowered her eyes again, something was suddenly directly in front of her.

Amy froze as Metal ripped the arms off the cyborg clinging to her legs. He then grabbed it in both hands and flung it up into the sky, quickly doing the same with the one on her back. They both exploded high up in the sky, and as Amy watched the angry blast clouds of red and black darken the sky, Metal pulled the remains of the metallic arms from her body. She numbly put her hands on his shoulders when he grabbed her waist in both hands and lifted her a little too high off the ground before lowering her back down onto her feet in front of him. She lowered her eyes from the sky to look at him, too overwhelmed to even think straight. His eyebrows inched up and she nodded, understanding his unspoken question. He then released her, and, in a flash, he was in amongst Sonic, Tails and Knuckles, grabbing the cyborgs by their extendable arms and flinging them – sometimes with just one hand – into the air. One after the other they blew up high overhead, out of harm's way.

Shadow helped Rouge to her feet and Tails punched a victorious fist in the air as Knuckles slapped Metal on the shoulder and called him Thistle.

But then, the one thing Amy had been dreading the most happened: Metal turned around and came face-to-face with Sonic. Metal straightened his back and squared his shoulders, his gloves hands forming into claws as his eyes fixed onto Sonic in a death glare. Sonic, however, grinned at him, putting one hand on his hip and rubbing a finger at the underside of his nose.

"Long time no see," Sonic said. "And I see you're trying even harder than ever to be just like me, but you're still totally hideous, Metal."

Next Chapter: Metal doesn't waste time reminding everyone how much he hates Sonic, and Knuckles, Rouge and Shadow don't exactly warm to him. Amy and Tails rush to Metal's defence, but only manage to convince one of their friends to give him a chance. Sonic and Amy have an extended argument about Metal living with her that leaves Amy distraught: but she receives comfort from an unexpected source. Chapter 12: Divided