Treasurehunter: Thanks; I'm glad you're still enjoying it!
Parslie: Read on, and more shall be revealed ;)
FriedBrickWall: Er...you really want Knuckles to hug Tails? (Knuckles: Jeez, don't you think the poor kid's scared and confused enough already?) As for the toolbox issue...(bows) Your wish is my command, read on ;)
Ri2: Thanks for reviewing :D And yeah, it looks like it, on both counts :(...
Guardian's Log No. 11462
My arm is killing me. For the record, that kid has some pretty sharp teeth in that head of his. But I'd do exactly the same thing again (unfortunately, I'd lay odds that so would Tails).
I have a...well, not exactly an idea. More like the beginnings of one. I need information, I need people who know everything that's going on and I need people who'll be prepared to let me in on both of those things. In short, I need the CDA and fast. But I've no idea where to find them; all I have to go on is a cryptic message that Espio gave me, something about moons and ridges.
In the meantime, I just have to hope that void doesn't come in here. The bots I can handle, but not the void, and Tails is out for the count. I know that's what I wanted, but I think I'm gonna have to wake him up pretty soon. I don't like the idea of being trapped in here; the sooner we move, the better.
--Knuckles the Echidna
Dear Diary
Knuckles almost strangled me and slammed me onto the ground. I'm probably gonna be bruised all over. Thanks a lot, Knucklehead! He ran away from a couple of bots too. And the void, although Sonic doesn't like that either so I guess that one's okay. Wish it had been Knuckles who fell off the rails though. He's taking watch right now. He thinks I'm sleeping but I'm not. I can't. Every time I sleep I keep seeing Sonic fall. He falls and I try to catch him but I always miss. Even though it didn't happen exactly like that it in real life, I still keep dreaming about it.
--Tails
The sound of someone knocking a pebble with their foot woke Knuckles out of a doze he'd never meant to take and he started in irritation.
"Where's Sonic?"
The echidna stared at the cave entrance where Amy was standing, and took a deep breath in a vain effort to gain patience. The last thing the kid needed was to see Amy and hear her prattling about Sonic.
"Kid, I am really not in the mood for your usual burblings right now. No offence but either you get out or I get violent." It was half a bluff; Knuckles could no more attack Amy in cold blood than he could fly home by flapping his arms. But he was damn sure he could throw her out if he had to!
"I don't believe in violence," Amy said, with unusual primness. Knuckles rolled his eyes.
"Trust me, kid; it exists."
"I don't believe in it but if you don't tell me where my Sonic is right now I'm gonna reach up and pull your spine out through your nose and garotte you with it!"
The echidna regarded her steadily for a few minutes, then crossed the floor and grabbed Amy's hammer, wresting it away from its owner so fast and so hard that Amy didn't even have a chance to think about protesting.
"You were saying?" he said, hefting the weapon casually in one hand as though it weighed next to nothing - and it did, to him.
"Where's Sonic?"
"He's...not here."
Amy planted both hands on her hips and glared. "I can see he's not here. I want to know where he is; I've been following you for a week now!"
"Liar." It wasn't an accusation, simply a statement of fact. "Sonic was still with us a week ago."
"Almost a week, then! Where is he now? And give me back my hammer!"
"Not yet. I've not seen one like this before; it's unusual. I want a closer look."
"Unusual?" Amy looked at it somewhat suspiciously, as though she thought Knuckles might have switched hammers. "Are you sure that one's mine?"
"I've no idea," retorted Knuckles, who was beginning to appreciate why Sonic had so desperately wanted to avoid confrontations with this girl, "but it's the one you arrived with. As for what happened to Sonic..." The echidna sighed. Sometimes his strict honour and abhorrence of lies was a damn nuisance. "Sonic had a rail-grinding accident and fell. He's dead, kid." And I hope you have more luck coming to terms with that idea than Tails.
Knuckles' hope lasted about three seconds, the time needed for Amy to launch herself at him, hammer arcing towards his face. The echidna ducked under the blow, grabbed at random and twisted hard, putting all his considerable strength into it. Amy not only went down, she almost ricocheted off two separate walls as well.
"Finished?" Knuckles said tersely.
Amy glowered at him from under angry lashes. "You have a very, very sick sense of humour, Knuckles!"
The echidna stared at her, stunned. "Dammit, Amy, you think I'd joke about something like that?"
"I know you're jealous of me and Sonic's relationship!"
Knuckles choked. "Jealous? So...do you think I want to get it on with you or Sonic? Actually, don't answer that; I dread to think what you might have the gall to say." When Amy continued to glare at him and heft the hammer threateningly, Knuckles sighed. "Look, everyone says I have my bad points and they're probably right. But face it, I barely have a normal sense of humour, let alone a sick one. Give me some credit."
Amy's lower lip jutted out mutinously. "I don't believe you. You'd say that anyway, just to get rid of me."
"If I wanted to get rid of you, kid, I would do. I'm telling you the truth. Sonic fell over three miles. He's dead."
"He can't die like that!"
"He was neither immortal nor invulnerable. Something which I think he had a tendency to forget," Knuckles added under his breath.
"Fine." Amy drew herself up haughtily. "If you won't tell me, I'll ask Tails."
"You damn well won't!" Knuckles darted into Amy's path with surprising agility. "I've only just got him to sleep; I will not let you wake him up just to upset him again!"
"Scared he's gonna show you up for the liar you are?" Amy taunted.
Knuckles had, admittedly, been having a very trying time. If playing counsellor to Sonic and Tails hadn't been enough, he'd been dropkicked into the role of surrogate big brother and had to spend most of the last week trying to help Tails come to terms with his grief, made a promise he was already regretting and agreed to pretty much commit suicide for the sake of Sonic's memory, and now this brat was giving him problems.
So he brought one hand around in a casual swipe, one which sent Amy flying. Somehow she managed to twist in midair and land on her feet, hammer out and ready.
"Huh?" Tails started up from the floor and stared around, saw Knuckles and Amy apparently about to have a free fight and scrambled to his feet, still more asleep than awake. "Whassgoingon?"
"Tails!" Amy pounced. "Tails, Knuckles is being a jerk and he won't tell me where Sonic is. Where is he?"
Tails stared at her for a few seconds, then a haunted look crept into his eyes and he turned away, hunching over into a ball. Knuckles swore viciously.
"Thankyou oh-so-damn much, Amy Rose! You just screwed up big time. I've told you what happened to Sonic and if you don't believe me, I really, honestly don't care anymore."
Amy ignored him, focused instead on the fox. "Tails, what happened to Sonic?"
Tails didn't answer and Knuckles seized Amy by the arm.
"That does it! Get out!"
Amy struggled but even one-handed the echidna was far stronger and she found herself being propelled none too gently towards the cave mouth.
"You can't do this!" she shrieked, in defiance of current evidence. "I refuse to leave until I can join Sonic again!"
"I told you, kid, Sonic's dead. You really wanna join him, you just push me that little bit further. Or do the smart thing and get out of this cave. I'm not letting you upset Tails anymore; the poor kid's got enough to deal with without you making things worse." They reached the entrance and Knuckles turned Amy around to stare at her, and had the immense satisfaction of seeing her quail at his anger. "Now, are you going to walk out or be thrown out? You got three seconds to decide."
"Walk," Amy said instantly.
"Fine." Knuckles opened his hand and dropped her, with no small relief; he hadn't liked the idea of physically ejecting Amy, who was guilty of nothing more than annoying immaturity. "Then get going, and if I were you I wouldn't come back here until I've had a chance to calm down." He didn't turn his back on her – more for his own safety than out of politeness – but instead stood, arms folded across his chest, and watched as Amy stalked off into the night in high dudgeon. Only when he was sure she had gone did he turn around and go back into the cave. Tails hadn't moved, much to Knuckles' alarm.
"Are you alright?"
Tails didn't answer, didn't even blink.
"Hey." Wearing what amounted to a pair of mittens or boxing gloves didn't make snapping your fingers very easy, but Knuckles still made a valiant effort. "Hey kid. C'mon, snap out of it. Are you alright?"
Tails blinked once, slowly, then gradually came to focus on him. "Knux?"
The echidna straightened up slowly, a kind of wary concern still on his face. "You alright?" he said for the third time.
Tails shivered. "I keep seeing it, Knuckles."
"Seeing what?" Knuckles asked warily; he wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer.
"I keep seeing Sonic fall. Even though I didn't really, I do. And I always try to catch him but he always falls too fast and I see him hit the rock."
The echidna shook his head. "That's just your conscience playing tricks on you."
"Yeah...yeah, I know, but it doesn't make it any easier." Tails started to run his namesakes through his hands, a nervous habit that he hadn't indulged in for years. Knuckles reached out and caught hold of his arm, not ungently.
"Kid, you keep that up and you're gonna be bald as a rat. You gotta have a neurotic tic, bite your claws or something."
There was a short pause.
"I didn't mean that literally, Tails," Knuckles said at the end of it.
"Amy's gone, right?"
"Yeah, she's gone." The echidna sighed. "Go back to sleep, kid."
"I can't sleep."
"Try." Knuckles turned his head away, returning to his seemingly endless vigil over the cave entrance.
An hour went past in complete silence before Tails said, "Knuckles?"
The echidna glanced over at him. "I told you to go back to sleep."
"I did, but then I, uh, I woke up again," Tails said lamely. Even to him, it sounded pathetic. "Knuckles?"
"Hm?"
"Sonic...did he..." Tails swallowed hard and took the plunge. "Did he scream? When he went over the rail? 'Cause...you know...I was too far up ahead to hear...so did he?"
"No," Knuckles answered. Although he'd have said the same thing if the hedgehog had, in this case it was true; Sonic hadn't screamed. The echidna had seen the sudden dawning realisation in the hedgehog's eyes, the knowledge of what was happening – and that had somehow been far worse than a scream of terror; Knuckles was sure he'd take that last image of Sonic to his own death – but he'd never screamed.
Tails picked up an apple and bit into it absently, much to Knuckles' relief. He'd been wondering what the hell he'd do if the kid didn't start eating.
"I think...it was how he'd have liked to go. Right, Knuckles? Right?"
"Yeah." No need to lie that time, either; Sonic had been doing what he did best and, although it was a somewhat morbid thought, had pretty much died laughing. "In a way, it's better for him to have died as he lived; fast. I don't think he'd've been happy dying of old age."
"I guess." Tails padded across the floor and sat down next to the echidna, then looked up at him. "But don't you go anywhere." It was meant to sound flippant or even casual, and instead came out purely appealing. Knuckles snorted.
"No chance of that, kid. I swore on the Master Emerald, didn't I?"
Tails hunched over into a ball, hugging both knees into his chest. It was a position he'd been adopting more and more since Sonic's death, and Knuckles wondered vaguely if he ought to worry about it. Then again, perhaps the kid was simply cold; the emeralds knew that Knuckles was!
As if in answer to his unspoken wish, a sudden warmth jerked the echidna's gaze downwards to where Tails had – finally – fallen asleep and was slumped against his leg. Startled, Knuckles started to pull away, then stopped. If it was easier for the kid to sleep there for some reason, then let him.
He regretted his selflessness a moment later, when Tails reached out in his sleep and wrapped both arms around Knuckles' ankle in a death grip, snuggling up to rest his head on the echidna's boot. The cynical part of Knuckles – that part of him which seemed to exist just below the surface – wondered if this was the kid's way of making sure he didn't do the dirty on him.
The thought occurred to Knuckles for the first time that he was all Tails had, that if he died the kid would be completely alone. It was a sobering realisation, and a little frightening.
I'll have to take him back with me.
The idea wasn't a new one; he'd known for some time that it would come down to that, ever since Tails had commented about the echidna getting a little brother after all. Knuckles couldn't abandon Tails, not now. The kid wasn't even into double digits yet; he'd been with Sonic for most of his life and didn't know the first thing about surviving on his own. Granted Sonic had only been a few years older when he'd first tackled Robotnik – and won – but Sonic had also been on his own right up until meeting Tails.
Knuckles shifted his weight very slightly. Tails' grip had tightened and he was cutting off the echidna's circulation. He could already feel the numbness setting in.
The echidna looked around. He could still see occasional yellow flashes against the sky as the distant bots fired on their targets, creating a strange kind of ethereal beauty and turning to red when they crossed the void.
The bots and the void...looks like Sonic was right. Robotnik is in on this.
Admittedly there wasn't much of the night left, but it was still one the echidna never forgot. Standing in sub-zero temperatures (so different to his tropical island) and not even able to walk about to keep himself warm, or restore the feeling in his foot, and he was incredibly relieved when Tails stirred some hours later and finally opened his eyes.
"My head hurts," he complained, somewhat groggily.
"I'm not surprised," Knuckles told him. "Lying on metal-studded boots does that."
"Huh?" Tails squinted up, then down at Knuckles' booted feet and realised. Frowning slightly, he looked back into the echidna's face. "You mean I've been down here all this time?"
"Yeah."
"Why didn't you say something?"
Knuckles snorted. "Are you kidding? It's been all I can do to get you to sleep. I wasn't gonna risk waking you up just to tell you to go to sleep again somewhere else."
Tails pushed himself to his feet, stretching. "Are we getting outta here?"
"Yeah." Knuckles looked out the cave. He wasn't sure if the void was getting closer or if it was just imagination, but he didn't like the idea of going out the way they'd come. "Yeah, but not that way."
"How then? Through there?" Tails pointed to the side tunnel and Knuckles shook his head.
"No, that only leads into a smaller cave. We'll go out the back way."
The fox frowned. "But there isn't a back way."
"Soon remedied." Knuckles stood in front of the back wall, hands curled into fists and started punching, steadily carving a tunnel through solid rock.
Several hours later, the tunnel was almost ten miles long and Knuckles decided to call it a day; the light was rapidly fading and he was finding it harder and harder to keep tunnelling in a straight line. Dusting off his spikes, he turned and made his way back to the main chamber where he found Tails holding a piece of detritus in one hand and banging it with another rock, then tossing the rock onto an ever-growing pile to his left and taking another rock from a smaller pile on the right. Knuckles watched him for a few minutes to see if he could work out what the kid was doing, but the meaning continued to elude him.
"What are you doing?" he said at last, when the curiosity became too great to bear.
"Nothing!" Tails dropped the rock as though he'd been burned. "Well, I...thought I might...uh...I wanted to make something. Build something that could help you smash through the rock." He looked away morosely. "I thought maybe some of these different rocks could work." He squirmed awkwardly. "Dumb, huh? I just forgot I didn't have any tools."
"That right?" Knuckles glanced at his bag and thought what the hell. He wasn't sure if this was a good move, but if it took the kid's mind off Sonic, it was for the best. Tails' sudden interest in building again could only be good, right? "Maybe I can help you out."
"Yeah?" Tails shot the echidna a look that hovered between curious and wary. "How?"
"With this." Knuckles pulled out a canvas bag and tossed it over to the fox. "Happy birthday. Or solstice, or equinox, or whatever."
Tails caught it and bent double – he'd been unprepared for the weight – and opened it. His jaw dropped as he saw the tools inside and he stared at the echidna.
"For me?"
"Well, they're not for me," Knuckles said rather tartly. "Tools aren't my thing, kid. I know a hammer from a hacksaw. After that, everything's a spronket as far as I'm concerned."
"But...how...where'd you get it?"
Knuckles glanced away. That was the one question he'd been hoping Tails wouldn't ask. "I didn't, Sonic did. He saw it back in the Casino Zones on the roulette wheel and won it for you. Then what with one thing and another, he never got around to giving it to you. I grabbed it just before we left."
Tails continued exploring the box, mumbling happily to himself. Knuckles caught words like "three-quarter inch", "ratchet wrench" and "drill bit", none of which meant a great deal to him apart from one thing; the kid was looking happy and like himself for the first time since the rail accident. It wouldn't last, he was damn sure of that. Next would come the guilt, that feeling of how-can-I-feel-happy-when-Sonic's-dead-and-I-should-be-grieving-for-him, but at the moment it was good to see Tails relaxing.
"Are we going?" Tails asked suddenly.
"Soon. As soon as I've tunnelled out."
"How long's that gonna take?"
Knuckles shrugged. "I dunno. I've done about ten miles, and I don't think it can be much further. Tomorrow, possibly, or more likely the day after. Try and sleep; you'll need all the energy you can get."
Tails shivered. "That void thing's still out there, Knuckles. It's been growing. It's like it's feeding off the air, not just absorbing it. You know, like food? It takes it in and the more it takes in, the bigger it gets." He shivered again. "It was only big enough to kill a palm tree when me'n'Sonic first saw it. Now look at it."
Knuckles pulled himself onto a large boulder, one that was big enough to serve as a lookout point. He had no desire to see the void again; something about it seemed to suck all the reason from his mind. But if it hadn't been much larger than a palm tree when it started...a chill ran down his spine. Would it keep going until it engulfed all of Mobius? And if he and Tails went back to Angel Island, would the Master Emerald be strong enough to protect them? Knuckles rather thought it would; it was incredibly good at taking care of itself and its Guardians, after all, but it was one thing to think something was true and another completely to literally bet your life on it.
Tails abruptly looked up from his new toolbox, frowning. "Knux?"
"Yeah?"
"You know what day it is today?"
Knuckles frowned, trying to think. "I thought your birthday was in the spring."
"Not that." Tails picked up the tools and padded over to hoist himself onto the rock next to Knuckles and leaned against him, ignoring the sudden stiffness in the echidna's body. Knuckles opened his mouth to protest – enough was enough! – then shut it again, sensing that the kid was still hurting and that for some reason doing this helped. The fox looked up at him. "Knux?"
"Yeah?" Knuckles said patiently.
"It's been a week. Since...you know."
"Since Sonic?" The echidna had given up trying to get the kid to say the word death.
"Yeah. Since Sonic." Tails yawned twice. "Doesn't seem real, huh?"
It seemed pretty damn real to Knuckles, who had lost people before, but this wasn't the time or place to get into a debate. "No," he said aloud, "it doesn't."
"Still miss him," Tails mumbled, half asleep. "Real bad. But it's still weird to think he's been dead for a whole week."
"Yeah," Knuckles said quietly. "That's how it goes, kid. One day at a time. Then you realise that a full week's slipped past, and then that becomes two weeks, and a month, then six months, then a year. Time goes on." Glancing down, he saw that Tails was already asleep and smiled slightly. Good.
"It gets better," he said in a low voice. Reaching out in a gesture he'd never have even contemplated doing if Tails had been awake, he smoothed the fur on the back of the kid's head and looked up, staring into space, staring at that terrible day ten years ago when he'd woken up next to his mother's body.
Tails stirred in his sleep, instinctively snuggling closer to the warmth of the echidna's body, and Knuckles glanced back down at him.
"It does get better," he repeated softly. "You'll never forget Sonic, kid, but the memories won't hurt as much."
Okay, so admittedly this one was lacking a little in excitement and suspense, but it did have to be written ;) And future chapters will make up for it :P Please review!