AN: This is based off of some shit that went down with my roommate at the beginning of March. She's been in the hospital for a month now.

Because I get ideas from everything, I started to wonder what a schizophrenic Shadow might look like.

This is a first draft, of course. I wrote this thing in about two hours.

It's not flash fiction, but I felt that it belonged in this collection.

"Tunnel Vision"

It was a troubling thing for him, you know, like those annoying sharp pains in your foot that you get every so often. At first, it was little more than an inconvenience. Nothing more than a burst of cold wind that caught him off guard when he stepped outside.

But then the wind kept on coming, hitting him over and over again with more force behind each subsequent blow. Everywhere he went, there were people looking. People talking. People laughing. People saying things like oh my god, did you see that? Did you see what he just did? Did you see that? Look at him, he's a fucking mess. He can't even walk like a normal person! I can see him shaking from here. What is that? Is he really doing that? Oh my god. What a disaster.

He brushed them off when he was at work, because he had come to expect those comments from his coworkers. He couldn't blame them for resenting him; after all, he was the Ultimate Life Form. Everyone knew that he was the superior being, one who was not to be challenged. That was in the beginning, when he took his first steps on solid ground. The quick slices cut his flesh into tender strips, but he found it relatively easy to keep his hand clamped down over the wounds, tolerate the sharp flashes of dull pain, and keep moving forward. He was still confident in himself then.

Then more things started happening. Then he had some truly awful things happen to him, things that he would never speak of because he couldn't remember them, and he lost his memory. The voices carried on as relentless as ever, beating him all about the head every time he found himself in agony.

Oh my god. Look at him. Why the hell is he so on edge all the time? Does he have a perpetual stick up his ass? He's so fucking pathetic. He can't remember anything. Isn't he supposed to be the Ultimate Life Form or something? What a sad sack! If he's the Ultimate Life Form, I must be God.

The voices followed him home. They kept him awake at night. Stop it, he would plead, rocking back and forth with his head in his hands. Damn it, leave me the hell alone!

He'd shudder himself into a coma that way.

Every morning, they sat at his kitchen table and drank coffee with him and snickered. They stalked him all the way to work and whispered insults about him to each other in the streets, always loud enough for him to hear. They stood outside his third-floor window and laughed and screamed.

One day, he made a comment to his partner, Rouge, about the group of people who always loitered by his window. Those teenagers outside are annoying the hell out of me, he remarked. They always distract me when I'm trying to get paperwork done. The Commander should really do something about them.

Rouge only nodded and tiptoed her way out of the room. Her office was right next door to his; and in six years of working for the agency, she had never heard a single word from beyond her window.

The months slipped by, and he never opened his mouth again. His performance at work suffered. He was lucky if he got an hour of sleep each night. His hands had started shaking and wouldn't stop shaking for anything. He carried twice the tension in his shoulders that he had before. He grew increasingly anxious and missed days upon days of work as a result of his fear to get out of bed. If he buried his head in his pillow and thought about other things, things like Maria and his distant past, the voices wouldn't be quite so loud. Maybe they could read his thoughts.

That was what he feared.

The voices eventually grew faces. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy. They would point at him and laugh and laugh and laugh. His Commander, all the G.U.N soldiers, E-123 Omega, and Rouge. They would talk in rooms where he wasn't present and talk about him. He could still hear every word they were saying – of course he could – and they knew this. They had to have known.

Have you seen Agent Shadow lately? Yeah, he's been acting a little weird. Weird?! My God, he's lost it, Agent Rouge! The poor son of a bitch has lost his mind! He should be locked up somewhere. You can't even hold a conversation with him anymore; he won't say a goddamn word. I know... I feel so sorry for him. He doesn't need your sympathy. He needs to be hospitalized.

He heard all of this while he was locked in the bathroom, silently sobbing into his bloody hands.

Everyone followed him home and crawled into bed with him. Hey you, they all whispered in his ear, you're a piece of shit. You're a mess. You're less than a loser. You're less than a lowlife. You're nothing. You see, nobody would give a damn if you were to just disappear. In fact, the world would be such a better place without you in it. You're not doing anything for anyone. You know, nobody likes you and nobody ever has. You're weird. You're creepy. On top of it all, you're ugly as hell! It's physically painful just looking at you. Do us all a favor and pull the plug.

After years and years of rolling with the punches, his pride had been whittled away to nothing. He nuzzled his face in his arms and laid there, cold and helpless, warmed only by the lines of tears that dripped down his face and stung the corners of his mouth. Everybody laughed twice as loud whenever he made the slightest sound: when he sniffled or flipped over or moved to angrily wipe at his eyes. Fingers pulled at his ears, telling him that he'd better listen up, because the truth was coming in hot.

And it came in disguise, night after night, just as it had for what felt to Shadow like forever.

He stared at the opposite side of the room through half-closed, burning eyes and imagined the sound of silence. What would it be like to slip away into that infinite blackness beyond the window, forever putting to rest the voices that had tormented him for countless days and nights? Could he really do it? Could he really pick himself up and run away from it all, leaving behind the brittle bones of his Ultimate life for the phantoms to pick at and laugh over without his spirit to wound?

The voices wouldn't allow him to dream or to sink into the realm of unconsciousness for more than a few minutes, but they encouraged these dark fantasies of his. That's it, that's the ticket, Shadow, they would collectively mutter to him. That's the first step. Keep thinking about that faraway place, keep picturing it in your mind, and someday you'll actually get there.

"Someday soon..."

One day somebody left a website up on his computer for him when he got to work, a website where people constantly smeared lies about him all over the Internet. Shadow the Hedgehog was a mistake. More than that, he was the disembodied hand that had reached out and shoved the ship into the iceberg. He was a formerly decent rival who now lived to suck Sonic's dick. No, that wasn't right. He had never amounted to anything good at all. He was a little emo bitch who cut himself while he cried about Maria. Speaking of Maria, she was a whore. He was trash. Worthless filth. It was a mistake that he had ever been created by that crackpot Professor. He didn't deserve to live. He had to be scrapped. Erased from canon.

Erased from existence.

He shook and shook until he snapped.

~End~