Knuckles shifted and a subtle sense of wrongness jolted him instantly from half-aware sleepiness to confused alarm. He opened his eyes not to sky, but a wood-beamed ceiling and instead of sand beneath him he was tangled in blankets. He struggled to free himself, opened his mouth to shout but found it too dry to do more than croak, and flopped back, gasping.
Belatedly he remembered his injuries and was surprised to feel nothing more than assorted dull aches. How long had he been out?
As he tried to gather his wits he heard footsteps. Knuckles struggled to get upright, determined not to be caught flat on his back at least. Before he had quite managed it Sonic was leaning over him.
"Knuckles?"
"No, the Drakon Emperor," Knuckles rasped irritably, as he finished extricating himself from the blankets and sat up.
Sonic, as always, was heedless as always of the sarcasm. He handed Knuckles a glass of water from the bedside table.
"Here. How're you feeling?"
"Guess," Knuckles grunted but accepted the drink.
Sonic shrugged, "Well Terry said that dose we gave you was pretty strong so I'm guess you feel at least a little better than you look." He smirked. "Course that's usually the case anyway."
Knuckles was quite as capable of ignoring retorts as Sonic was and didn't rise to the insult.
"Dose? You drugged me?" That explained the muzziness anyway. "Who's Terry?"
"He's one of the humans, he's sort of a doctor."
"I think I've had enough of human doctors, Sonic." Knuckles allowed his anger to creep into his voice. He looked around the room. The fact he was indoors should have clued him that Sonic had found help somewhere, but it galled him to have not been consulted about it.
"Nah, it's okay. This one's on our side."
"And how does he know which side 'our' side is?" Knuckles banged the glass bang down on the table, sloping some of the water onto the varnished surface. What happened to laying low?"
"We needed somewhere safe to lay low, Knux. You were in pretty bad shape for a while. I asked Chuck if we could stay here, and he asked Terry for help fixing you up."
"Chuck." Knuckles repeated. "Another human."
"Yeah. Chris's grandfather." Sonic's momentary seriousness seemed o have worn off and he was positively smirking as he listed yet another name.
"Anyone else?" Knuckles asked pointedly. "Do you plan to invite round the neighbourhood at large?"
Sonic's answer was interrupted before it began by the bedroom door opening. A tall man--even for a human--walked in.
"You're awake!" he said.
Knuckles rolled his eyes. "I'm me and I'm awake. Correct. How did I ever manage without people around to tell me these things?" He glared at the newcomer. "More useful would be to tell me who you are."
"Oh, well I'm Terry." He walked across the room and stuck out his hand. Knuckles ignored it.
"Ah, yes, the one who drugged me."
Terry looked taken aback. "I gave you a painkiller. That's not quite the same--"
"Don't worry about Knuckles," Sonic cut in. "He doesn't get a lot of practice at being friendly."
"Oh..." Terry said again, clearly not sure what to make of this. He turned to Sonic instead. "Actually I came up to suggest that you get some sleep, and since--" he hesitated over the name, "--Knuckles--is awake now..."
Knuckles glanced sharply at Sonic, who did appear tired, now he came to look more closely.
"What's my being awake got to do with your going to sleep, Sonic? I have trouble seeing you as the 'hovering anxiously at the bedside of the afflicted' type."
Sonic shrugged. "No. I'm more the 'making sure the afflicted doesn't beat seven shades out of the people trying to help him, if he wakes up in a panic' type."
"Oh." It was Knuckles' turn to look abashed.
Terry cleared his throat in the awkward silence and Sonic spoke up.
"Terry, why don't you fetch Chris and Chuck?" He looked sideways at Knuckles. "Better make sure we're clear on who else isn't to be beaten up in a panic hadn't we?"
Still feeling rather chagrined, Knuckles refrained from commenting. He nodded brusquely to the older and younger human when they were introduced.
Though Knuckles' tolerance towards their hosts improved over the next few days, his mood didn't, and if he was honest Sonic had to admitted that his own nerves were getting a little frayed by the confinement as well. The enormous house could hardly be described as cramped quarters but the risk of being spotted meant that getting outside was out of the question and Sonic had decidedly itchy feet.
Scouring the news for word of Robotnik, to no avail, was not improving matters either. Not only would he rather enjoy a good fight after the days of forced inactivity, but he had to admit he had no plan B for getting them home. If they couldn't track down Robotnik, the Emeralds, and the device which had brought them here, they were stuck.
In the absence of any further developments, the news media seemed to have quietly the dropped the "aliens among us" stories, except among the fringe press which threw in the occasional article among the more outlandish tales of alien spaceships and flattened crops.
"Don't see Robotnik going in for making pretty pictures in hayfields somehow," Sonic commented, turning a page of the magazine he was scanning. They'd made a habit of checking the stories in case something about either them, or Robotnik turned up. This meant an awful lot of sifting through the almost believable, to the completely ridiculous. So far they'd found nothing that even seemed worth following up.
"For a species who've never had real alien contact before, these humans expend an amazing amount of energy talking about it." Knuckles threw another magazine aside with a snort. He had a growing pile of them beside the chair he'd commandeered after refusing to stay in bed. He stood up and limped the length of the room and back, hands curling and uncurling in frustration.
"I know he's here," he said. "I know the Emeralds are here."
Sonic didn't bother to ask if he was sure, or how he knew. Knuckles' intuition when it came to the Emeralds was generally reliable. He didn't both to remind him that he was supposed to be staying off his feet either--he looked like he was barely hanging on to his temper as it was.
"I don't suppose you have any clue where here..." Sonic ventured after a few more moments of fruitless reading.
"I'm not a walking Chaos compass, Sonic!" Knuckles snapped.
"Stay cool. I'm only saying," Sonic raised his hands. "You never had any trouble finding me, when I had them."
"That was different. That was on the Island. Close to the Master Emerald. Close to me." The annoyance faded from Knuckles' voice and he screwed his face up in concentration, trying to explain. "It's not like I can just shut my eyes and point out a direction. I just get a... a sort of impression of where they are. On the Island I know the zones well enough that an impression is all I need. Anywhere else on Mobius it's more difficult. Unfamiliar. Here..." He grimaced. "It's just too far. The distance is..." His voice trailed away again. "The Emeralds and the Master are linked, Sonic, and I don't know what it would take to break that link, but I can feel it and it feels--" He broke off as Chris and Terry entered the room and his tone changed abruptly. "Well it doesn't feel good."
Sonic didn't answer for a few moments. He'd never heard Knuckles talk so much at once, let alone about the Emeralds, and was faintly annoyed by the interruption that had caused him to clam up.
"We'll find them, Knuckles," he said. "We will."
"We'd better," Knuckles muttered, sitting back down, looking, inasmuch as Sonic could tell, rather embarrassed at having said so much.
Terry looked between the two of them curiously, then shrugged and dropped a pile of magazines on a nearby table.
"Latest batch of wide-eyed theories for you," he said. "And how's my sunniest-natured patient today? Walking around when he shouldn't be I see."
The tension was broken and Sonic grinned. Terry had recently adopted his own successful strategy for handling Knuckles' unveiled discontent, which entailed ignoring it completely.
Knuckles scowled at him, but there wasn't much feeling in it and he seemed, if anything, rather relieved to have the subject changed.
'Not good', was the least of it, if Knuckles was honest with himself. The link he sensed between the Emeralds felt taut, strained almost to snapping point. Or was that merely his own strung-out nerves at being trapped in this alien place? Some echo of his own unease at being so far from the Floating Island and Master Emerald?
He couldn't be certain, and the uncertainty itself nagged and chafed at him, until he wanted to lash out at something, anything, just to distract himself from it for a while.
Much to his disgust he found himself hoping Robotnik still had the Emeralds--at least he was a known quantity. Knuckles couldn't remember how much, if anything, he might have told to his captors but he knew he'd told them about Sonic in spite of not wanting to, so he had to accept that he may have said more.
What might he have answered? What questions would it have taken? "How did you get here?" maybe? If he had answered, would his explanation, babbled through drugs and pain, have made enough sense for them to figure out that these "Chaos Emeralds" might be something worth having?
A sudden burst of restlessness drove him abruptly to his feet only to gasp and sit back down as a lancing pain shot up from his foot. Clearly that little stamp across the room and back had been a bad idea. The two humans and Sonic stared at him. He glared back, and offered no explanation.
What was driving him to distraction as much as anything else was Sonic's apparent complete lack of urgency. True, he complained at not being able to get outside and run, but largely he seemed to be treating this as some sort of vacation.
Knuckles however was unable to shake off a constant nagging sense that he was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing--or at least not enough of the right things, and plagued by thoughts of all that could be happening back on the undefended Floating Island. Every minute's delay seemed to conjure up some new possible threat, and there wasn't even any guarantee they'd get back at all.
He should never have left. Shouldn't have let himself be drawn into Sonic's fight.
Guilt.That's what the feeling was. He may as well admit it to himself if no one else. Even though out loud he'd blamed Sonic, it was he who felt guilty.
Guilty for not having reached Robotnik in time to stop him. Guilty for having let the Emeralds be scattered for Robotnik to steal. A litany of failures, right back to guilt for not having recognised Robotnik's intentions when he first crashed on the Floating Island.
Even guilt over his recent weakness in captivity, at having given away Sonic's presence. Regardless of the fact it had turned out not to matter--he'd made a decision not to reveal it and had failed to carry it through.
Stop, he told himself firmly. This line of thought was going nowhere. He forced himself to stop casting about for things he could have done differently. Things he'd change. It was difficult to put the thoughts aside, but he'd had a lot of practice. Living completely alone you learned how easily the mind could run itself in circles--run itself ragged. You learned to control it if you didn't want to go mad through it. You learned when to let things go.
Let it go, he told himself now, shutting his eyes and forcing his breathing to slow.
"Hey, you all right?" It was Terry who'd spoken but the other were moving towards him too when Knuckles' eyes flew open again. He grimaced. Of course one of the advantages of living completely alone was you had peace and quiet when you were trying to pull yourself together.
"Fine," he snapped, aware that he was failing to keep the annoyance from his voice. "Just tired."
Sonic gave him a sceptical look, the admission too unusual to be believable. Knuckles returned his gaze, silently daring him to challenge the statement.
"I'm afraid that's to be expected," Terry said, not noticing this byplay. He gestured at the magazines and newspapers. "We'll shift this stuff downstairs, so you can get some rest shall we?"
"Thank you." Knuckles inclined his head stiffly.
Sonic held his gaze a moment longer, clearly itching to say something, then shrugged.
"Sleep tight."
A few hours later, Knuckles felt he had himself more under control and was able to respond impassively to Sonic's mocking tone when the hedgehog entered.
"Feeling in a better mood after our nap are we?"
Knuckles turned from the window where he'd been staring out.
"Yes." He was quietly amused at the flicker of frustration across Sonic's face at this lack of reaction, and continued in the same composed tone. "It was helpful in reducing the urge to--how did you phrase it--'beat seven shades out of people'."
Sonic gave a little snort of laughter and moved past Knuckles to look out of the window himself.
"Not much fun waiting around like this is it?" he said without turning around.
Knuckles shot a startled glance at the hedgehog's back.
"No," he allowed. "It isn't."
Sonic spun back to face him, the momentary quietness vanished.
"Nyah, it won't be for long. Wherever Robotnik landed he won't be able to resist shoving his oar in. And as soon as he does we'll be there." He grinned. "Right?"
Knuckles regarded him, marvelling at his confidence. Wishing he could share it. He settled for inclining his head in a nod.
"We will."
---End Part 5---