Sally was alone for the first time in days. She had requested that Silver teleport her (alone) to the ruins of Knothole. She noticed that the cracked walls had the same phrase graffitied over and over again: Watch me unravel.

Knothole looked the way it did when Sally had first arrived into this timeline. Cracking facades. Fading colors. Broken memories.

The girl clutched her bow staff tightly, as if expecting to be attacked any moment. The atmosphere was that tense. She walked down the cracked street and stopped at Sir Charles' aka Uncle Chuck's old diner. The red roof was a greyish fading shade of red. The indoor tiles were dusty and some uprooted. Tables were toppled over and the shelves were ransacked. Sally stepped through a broken window, careful not to cut herself on the glass, and stepped inside the dinning area.

This place held so many pleseant memories now soured by circumstance. There was the time Antoine had asked Sally out at age eight, holding a dirt covered wad of weeds in the place of a boquet. Then there was the incident when Tails had publicly questioned Sonic about where babies come from (in response, the flustered hedgehog had told him to ask Sally). And nobody can forget when all of the Freedom Fighters had a brutal food fight on Thanksgiving, somehow causing Sonic and Sally to have their first kiss.

That life seemed a thousand years away, rather than two hundred.


"Knuckles," Sally inquired later that day. Silver had picked her up ten minutes late and accidentally teleported her to Antarctica rather than Angel Island. Twice. After that, it was decided that Sally not go anywhere without assistance.

The old wrinkled echinda spun in Sally's direction with calm patient eyes, turning from the stew he'd been brewing. "Hm?"

"Did you and Julie Su ever get together?"

Knuckles almost dropped hiz spoon from the blunt question. Recovering, he set said spoon on the quartz counter and chuckled nervously "Well, in context..."

"You did?" Sally probed, leaning against the counter.

"We never got married," Knuckles admitted as he pulled out a bottle of spices and poured a pinch into the stew. Clicking his tongue, he continued. "But we did have a daughter,"

The Princess smiled proudly. She was an aunt. After all, she and Julie Su had made a pact that they'd be the aunts of each other's children. She had had every intention of holding her friend to that. "Mind telling me about her?"

Knuckles snorted curtly. "Yes, actually,"

Sally was silent for a moment, questioning Knuckles's sudden change in demeanor. Then she pushed further. "What's her name?"

Knuckles's purple eyes bored into Sally's. The two had a mental standoff right then until the echinda sighed. "Lara Su," Sally definitely didn't expect him to continue. "She was red, like me but had her mom's pink bangs. She wore glasses and predominantly the color black. My daughter..." He chuckled softly. "was a little unruly and stubborn like me, but she always had good intentions," His face darkened and he looked away. "She wanted to be the next Guardian of the Master Emerald. I tried to teach her and she tried to learn, but... she was deemed unworthy by the echinda tribe. She became resentful toward the tribe and even her mother and me, claiming it was our fault somehow. The next day... she ran away. I never saw her again,"

Sally was silent. Why was it that Lara Su's situation reminded her so much of Sonic's? She lost her dream. He lost his girl. She ran away never to be found. He made himself known and infamous through villiany.

Then again... they both were dealt bad hands by life and had lashed out in response.

"How old is she?" Sally brought herself to ask.

"If she were still alive... she'd be one hundred and ninety four,"

Sally's jaw dropped almost comically until she remembered that it was two hundred years in the future and Knuckles himself was two hundred and sixteen. So... did that make her two hundred and fifteen?

"Guardian echindas don't age the same as other echindas. We live much, much longer. Lara Su's most likely dead from old age, as is Julie Su. All I can hops is that it was old age that got her and that she lived a fullfilled life..." He sighed and looked wistfully out the window. "Maybe then I could feel like I didn't screw up as a father,"

All the Princess could do was swallow and nod.


A/ N: I promise the next few chapters will be better. Well, goodnight.