Author's Chapter Notes:

I still do not own Sonic the Hedgehog or any other characters you may recognize.

Shadow had never realized how many dangerous objects were lying around his house.

Not obvious things, like knives and guns. Even Shadow, painfully ill equipped to care for children as he was, knew that knives and guns were not to be handled by two year olds. He'd rushed through his house at his supersonic (Geez, he hated that word) speed and had banished those items to the depths of his closet, which was locked and the key had been placed in an area where the children could not possibly reach.

No, his house was full of dangerous things. Deadly things. Little things. Hey, how was he supposed to know that the spare change in his couch cushion would somehow end up in Sonic's mouth? Or that he'd try to swallow it? Or that swallowing pennies was not conductive to a toddler's well being?

And heck, the aspirin bottle said it had a child proof cap! He was definitely going to have a few words with the manufacturer once he made sure Amy hadn't swallowed any and after his chat with the guy in the hospital's ER counter.

And call him crazy, but if a baby Echidna can figure out how to unlatch a safety pin and stick it inside his arm so far it drew blood, somehow Shadow had a hard time believing in the pin's, well, safety. Who's warped idea was it to call them that?

One good thing: He was 95% sure that Sonic shoving Q-tips up his nose was not permanently damaging. However, Shadow was going to seriously punish him somehow. Not for the Q-tips, but for the graffiti Sonic had written on Shadow's bathroom walls using Shadow's toothpaste.

He was beginning to wish he hadn't thrown that aspirin bottle away when he found Amy playing with it, because he could really use a couple right about now.

He finally managed to get most, if not all, potentially hazardous objects locked in that little closet with the guns and knives (A closet he was beginning to have trouble closing). At last, he sank into his comfortable couch and closed his eyes, his exhaustion causing him to start dozing almost immediately…

…For about two minutes. Then:

"WAAAAAAAAA! You et da Massa Emered! WAAAAAAAA!"

"OWIES! No hitties me, Uckles! Weave me awone!"

Shadow was on his feet in an instant, panicking slightly as he raced to where a screaming, sobbing, disconsolate Knuckles sat, using his little fists to pound on an equally upset Sonic.

"What in chaos are you two doing?" Shadow snapped as he pulled the two apart.

Knuckles looked up at Shadow, tears streaming down his face as he pointed an accusatory finger at Sonic. "He ET da Massa Emered, Attow," he said. He wiggled out of Shadow's grasp, grabbed his Master Cantaloupe, and handed it up to the ebony hedgehog to verify his claims. "See?"

Shadow inspected the spherical object and sure enough, there was now a Sonic shaped bite mark in the cantaloupe.

"Sonic?"

Sonic's Toddler Sense told him that he was in deep trouble. The hedgehog looked up at Shadow with an innocent 'Who, me?' expression on his face.

"Is it, Sadoe?" he asked, the picture of youthful purity,

Shadow wasn't buying it. "Did you do this?" he asked, showing Sonic the cantaloupe.

Sonic hung his head. "Yes," he said guiltily.

"Why did you eat Knuckles' cantaloupe?" Shadow asked.

"Emered," Knuckles muttered behind him, his arms crossed in a why reminiscent of the adult Knuckles. Shadow noted with some irony that the movement, which was intimidating when Knuckles was a full grown Echidna, now just made him look cute and cuddly.

Forcing his thoughts back to the matter at hand, Shadow asked, "Why?"

"Dunno," was the answer, as the child kicked the ground with his foot, his eyes firmly downcast.

"You don't know?" Shadow asked incredulously. How on earth could anybody do something and not know why they did it?

Then again, he remembered, this is Sonic he was talking about. Thinking things through had never been a strong point for his blue furred rival. Which, while it was frustrating for just about everyone, had some advantages, one of them being the fact that Sonic didn't get nearly as many headaches as Shadow did.

A headache like the one he was nursing now.

"Go stand in the corner," Shadow ordered, pointedly ignoring the hurt look Sonic gave him. "And stay there until I say you can come out."

Lower lip trembling, the cobalt blue hedgehog sulked off to his punishment, leaving Shadow alone with a still somewhat hysterical Echidna on his hands.

"Is da Massa Emered go die?" Knuckles asked him, looking like he was going to start bawling again.

Shadow did not even try to point out the flaws in Knuckles' childish logic, he'd spent far too much time with the Echidna and knew logic would get him nowhere.

"I can fix it," he told Knuckles, feeling extremely foolish.

"Wealey?" Knuckles asked, an obvious glimmer of hope shining in his eyes.

Shadow just sighed and walked around the apartment, pulling down the blinds on all his windows to ensure no passersby could be able to look in and see him giving first aid to a cantaloupe.

After this was done he took Knuckles and the Master Cantaloupe to his kitchen table, took out his first aid kit, and—feeling more foolish by the second—he took some bandages and wrapped it around the cantaloupe, covering the bite mark. Then he handed it back to the two year old.

Knuckles was thrilled. "You did fix da Massa Emered, Attow! Tank you!" he hugged his cantaloupe to him and rushed off, presumably to find a safe, Sonic-free place to hide the darned thing.

Shadow leaned back, closed his eyes, and decided then and there that he despised kids.

"Mis'er Adow?" a sweet little voice called from behind him.

Shadow couldn't take much more of this. He opened his eyes and glared at Amy Rose, who was smiling up at him with her hands behind her back.

"What do you want?" he said peevishly, wanting her and the other two Mini Banes of his Existence to drop off the face of the universe and leave him alone.

Amy showed him her hands, and he saw with a sinking feeling in his stomach that she held nearly half a dozen of his landlady's favorite, prize winning violets.

"I give you," Amy said, literally beaming.

Shadow numbly accepted the flowers. "Amy, why did you pick these?" he asked.

"I membered," Amy said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"You picked the flowers because you remembered something?" Shadow asked.

Amy nodded. "I membered, when I no happy, my Mommy give me fwowers. Dat make me happy."

Shadow blinked, not quite understanding yet. "So?" he asked.

Amy frowned, wondering why he didn't seem to get it. "So, I give you fwowers, cuz you no happy. I give you, make you happy!"

A figurative light bulb went off in Shadow's mind. "You gave me flowers to make me happy?"

Amy's smile was back, and she nodded furiously. "I give you! Give you, be happy!"

In spite of himself Shadow smiled. Amy Rose, no matter what her age, could always find ways to make him remember Maria. She could make him remember when he was happy.

"Go on and play, Amy," he whispered, fingering the violets long after she'd run off.

Amy had succeeded in what she had set out to do. For the briefest of moments, she had made him happy.