Stage Nine: Final Haunt

I shielded his fall, or so he thought.

He landed on the Black Comet on top of me, or so he thought.

He got up and ran off without me, leaving me there to the aliens, or so he thought.

Eventually GUN showed up and rescued me, tending to my wounds and carrying me with them as they tracked him down, or so he thought.

Not that he thought a lot.

Shadow ran through the comet, weaving in between the aliens as they fired their lasers at him. None seemed to connect.

"Shadow…" came that growling voice.

He stopped suddenly. Before him was that eye, the strange starfish creature that spoke with Black Doom's voice. It hovered there among the gray-brown walls, dotted with veins of pulsing red liquid among slain aliens in pools of green blood. Shadow never stopped for a moment to ask him self why the aliens had so many red accents if their blood was green, of course.

"Shadow… the humans have discovered our comet's presence…"

He rolled his eyes. "Of course they have. It's a big burning comet in the sky. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together here, Black Doom."

And if Shadow is pointing out the flaws in your brilliant plan, it must be pretty bad, right?

"There are shields throughout the comet that should keep them from progressing… activate them. Then we will isolate the last emerald."

Shadow took stock of how many he hand. Three from Westopolis. Fourth from the landfill. Fifth on Prison Island. Sixth on the space ship. I had lied to him, he decided. He was missing one.

"What if I want to get that last emerald by myself?"

"Then you shall feel our wrath!" The starfish threatened, hollow. "Do you not collect them for the promise of answers to your past? Do you not wish to know the truth?"

"Of course. How foolish of me," he apologized, lowering his eyes, trying not to smirk as he softened his voice. "Show me how to activate the shields."

The starfish floated over to a blue platform on the veiny, gray floor of the comet. "Press this switch…"

Shadow walked up to it and put his fingers on it… It spun beneath his hands, and a forcefield came up, blocking off his path.

"Now, take the Black Hawk to your destination…"

He looked up, across the raised walkway over a channel in the comet. At the end of it, one of those black creatures was floating there, waiting, yellow armor stuck to its head and body. Something about the way it stood there, the way it looked at him, reminded him of a chao…

He approached, and it bucked away from him.

"You shall have to tame it first."

Without hesitation, Shadow jumped up onto the creature and kicked it in the back of the head. It relaxed its wings enough to let him on the back and carried him over a rift, past a hoard of alien soldiers firing at him. It dropped him near another switch.

THey continued like this, Shadow running up to a switch and turning it, then subduing another black hawk. Even though he never crossed the same forcefield twice, Shadow couldn't stave off the feeling like he was getting lost, going in circles like some of the walkways, and every strangely-angled intersection made him wonder if he even knew what direction he was facing. He was starting to feel dizzy along with sick and tired. Something about this place turned his stomach; the flashing blue lights of the alien's energy weapons made his head throb…

The massive size of the comet surprised him; he was certain the interior was bigger than the outside. The black aliens mostly ignored him as he traversed through its walkways, shooting instead at nothing… he couldn't shake the feeling that the entire place might collapse, that he had to hurry, that he was running out of time.

Four of the shield generators had passed by the time he had to stop. He knelt over and retched next to one, waiting for Doom's eye to speak to him, to scold him for stopping when there was destruction to cause.

I didn't give Doomy the chance.

"Shadow, what are you doing? Are you seriously trying to help the aliens?"

"Of course I'm not helping the aliens!" he hissed at me, turning his head a little, wiping his mouth. "I'm baiting you like you baited me!"

He looked up, standing, and his jaw fell as he did. Behind me was a robot, red and gray, tall, with long arms and no feet. Shadow had more knowledge than he thought he did, and even without thinking he recognized that it wasn't one of Eggman's robots. It may have had some inspiration from him, maybe, but there was something there that didn't have that Robotnik family aesthetic. There was nothing soft and cutesy about it, and neither was it scary. It had a simple, human-like torso, and its hands were stubby and simple. The red plating on most of it had a much cooler tone than the oranges Eggman liked.

"Do you remember me?" came a voice from within, a deep voice, male, nasal, congested. "No, of course you wouldn't. Fifty years changes a boy, doesn't it?" Shadow thought he heard a smirk in the man's voice. There was a pneumatic hiss, and one layer of armor peeled away from the robot, revealing a graying man in uniform beneath shatterproof glass. He peered at Shadow with intense eyes, one green and one brown.

"You look familiar," came Shadow's reply.

"Then you don't remember. I am General Harold Anderson of Guardian Unit of Nations…"

"I know that much," Shadow sneered.

I put my face in my hands, wishing that either the throbbing or the embarassment would go away.

"I was also your playmate on the ARK. Shadow… I don't know what's happened to you. You aren't the person I remember. But either you need to come in with me, or I'm going to stop-"

To Shadow's credit, he was smart enough not to let Harold finish. Unfortunately for Shadow, I was there, leaping up to kick him in the face. Unfortunately for me, he was too fast; I wasn't on my A-game. He missed my foot by inches, planting his heel in my forehead. I cried out, falling, as he jumped from there, pulling a gun I thought I'd confiscated from nothingness. Of course I had made the mistake of trusting my senses…

The first thing he did was shoot around the cockpit. Sparks erupted from the sides of it, where the armor had receded. Harold flailed the mech's arms but he missed Shadow narrowly. "Hold still you devil!" the general shouted, sounding like the force of his voice might be too much for his face.

I leapt to my feet, starting to jump toward Shadow, but he merely vaulted off me. Of course. I couldn't stop him. I couldn't even touch him.

For Harold's part, he didn't let this faze him. He kept on sweeping the mech's giant arms around, shooting a blue laser at Shadow. Blue. Huh. Appropriate. It caught Shadow a few times, sending him spilling to the ground, but he always got back up, and the few times I got to him before it did, he just knocked me over when I got there.

Suddenly there was a ding, like the sound of an oven timer, and Harold growled. "Last chance, Shadow. For Maria! Turn yourself in, now!"

"Never! This is between me and Sonic!"

"What?" the GUN commander sputtered. After taking a second to recover, he dismissed himself. "Nevermind. Antimatter cannon, fire!"

Now, I'm sure it wasn't actually antimatter, but a blue glow came out of the robot, growing, erupting from it. Shadow ran away, waiting for the glow to dissipate.

I'm pretty sure he didn't see me just standing there as the blue glow swept over me.

He came back, reloading his weapon. He glanced up at the robot and snarled, "I'll deal with you later."

Then he walked up to me. I stood still, smirking.

He put the gun to my forehead.

"Are you sure you wanna do that, Shad?" I asked, smirking. Still, I closed my eyes. I had half an idea what was coming, and even though I wasn't afraid, I didn't need to see it.

"What the hell are you doing?" Harold demanded.

He fired. The bullet passed through me harmlessly, pinging off the mech's armor behind me.

"You can't piece the armor there!" came Harold's voice, incredulous and smug. Shadow dropped the gun and backed away.

"What the hell… Sonic? How?"

I chuckled, shaking my head. "Repeat after me, Shadow. So we can stop with the antimatter cannon already."

He nodded, nervously, color fading from his muzzle.

"Harold, this is Sonic. I'm fighting with Shadow for control. Give us a minute, will ya?"

Shadow repeated my words, exactly, intonation, voice rising exactly like mine.

Harold was silent within the mech for a moment. "I don't have a hell of a lot of time, Sonic. Get him reigned in before I have to take you in."

Shadow looked between the mech and me, green eyes wide. "I… I don't understand. Can't he see you? Why didn't the bullet work?"

"I'm not actually here, Shadow. I'm a hallucination. All of this is a hallucination: me, Doom, everything. We're standing on a particularly large piece of debris in the meteor herd, not the black comet. There are no aliens, near as I can figure, given the amount of attention GUN is giving to you." I bit my lip, thinking; Shadow bit his lip, too. "Hey, ask Harold if there are aliens."

"Harold, are there really aliens?" Shadow asked, his voice rising, whining, like my own in my earliest memories.

"What aliens? Do you mean the artificial chaos?" He responded, sounding worried through his stuffy nose.

Shadow sat down on the rock below, his voice getting small. Even as he sat I could see the purple ceilings and lined floors of the comet fading away to plain old rock. Reality was setting in. "But I remember fighting with you.. I remember running along the ARK… Helping Eggman…"

"All in my body. All of our battles have been… in our head." I walked over to him, kneeling. "I'm the real Shadow. I always have been. You're a piece of something physical Gerald put in our head, blended with the worst in me, the things I couldn't accept. Remember what Rouge told us? 'Your memories might not even be real, you know?'"

His lip began to quiver. "What about Maria? What about… all the things they did to her?"

"That was real. She sent us to Apotos in the escape pod with her dying breath. Maria's the only part of this that is real, except my friends."

"And what about Black Doom?"

I frowned. "He's just something my mind made up to make it easier to accept the things Gerald's device are making you… making us do. That's why he looks like a satanic dark chao. I mean… do you really think aliens would look like the devil?"

"Sonic," came Harold's voice from the mech, "My reinforcements are going to be here in about two minutes. I really need to have you in custody by then."

I nodded, and Shadow did too. Good. I was getting control back. I spoke out of my own mouth, and suddenly Shadow was the one kneeling next to me. "I'm going to empty Shadow's gun and throw it the other way. Take it easy on me. I feel awful."

I stood up, picking up the gun, and unloaded it, removing the clip. I tossed it across the little sphere, and the strange gravity sent it flying off into space.

The mech produced handcuffs from a compartment on its side. "Awful? Awful how?" There was a little hint of sympathy in his voice, and I could almost hear a stuffed up little boy in his place.

"Didn't you see Shadow throw up?"

"I thought it might be guilt."

"I'm so lost… Sonic, am I really just a thing in your head?" Shadow asked desperately, his image fading away before my eyes.

I held out my hands behind my back, nodding to Shadow, wincing as I felt the cuffs snap around them. "It's not," I told Harold. "I've been feeling it, too, ever since Lethal Highway. I think whatever physical thing in me that caused Shadow is responsible."

"We think Gerald put some kind of microchip in your brain. Eggman and Rouge are working on deactiving the control device Ivo found in the Iron Gate as we speak." Harold cleared his throat. "Eggman thinks he can save the Shadow personality from the device and then wipe it remotely. I don't know why he'd want to do that."

"Shadow's more than just a program, Harold. He's a piece of me, and he was good to Tails. He deserves saving."

I closed my eyes and sighed, and then everything was black.

Author's Note

Quite a few of my readers at DeviantArt did not like this chapter. Many claimed to have found it confusing.

To address that concern, I just wanted to let you know two things.

One is that at least one of the readers who found it confusing understood it on re-reading. He said he needed to give himself time to understand the twist. And boy, is it a doozy of a twist.

The other is that I WILL post the ending next week. Even if I don't, it's literally linked on my deviant art page. I have the first and last chapter of this posted on the FRONT LEFT of my Deviant art page. The link to the last chapter is UNDER the thumbnails. Make sure to go down to the author's comments for a link to the epilogue as well.

Thank you all so much for your support: your favorites, your follows, your reviews. I hope I don't disappoint you. I just need you to bear with me a little longer.