Stage Ten: GUN Fortress

The next thing I knew, I was warm and something soft was under my throbbing head. Warm hands of different sizes were wrapped around mine, one rubbing the back of my thumb, the other laced between the fingers on the other side of my hand. And familiar voices, voices I'd been scared I'd never hear again, were speaking in hushed tones.

"Eggman.. why are you doing this for us?" came Tails' voice, curious. He squeezed my hand a little tighter, thumb holding still on mine.

"Tails, how delightfully naive of you! It's like I said to Amy not all that long ago. If I were to let Shadow go, he would destroy the world I intend to rule. For the time being, my interests, GUN's, and yours are all the same."

"But you could have just let Sonic die," Amy came back from the other side of me, her fingers loosening the grip between mine. "And you didn't… and I'm glad you didn't, but… I thought you wanted to kill Sonic?"

"It's cause…" I tried to explain, my voice hoarse, the words difficult, "…'cause he wants to kill me.. who gives… a rip… if I die?"

"Sonic!"

I wasn't prepared for the hugs that came, but if I weren't the tiniest bit queasy yet, I wouldn't have minded them. I could feel tears landing on me; I didn't know who they were coming from. Half the time I couldn't tell which squeak of reassurance was which. I started to sigh with relief, but then I felt something new: a large hand, maybe larger than mine, patting me on the shoulder. For a second I tensed, flashing back to a different hand on my shoulder… but his touch was gentler than Gerald's, and it lingered just a second longer.

"I would have been very cross if you hadn't pulled through," came his sneering, angry voice, shaking a little bit. He sounded so much like his grandfather, and yet there was something there that Gerald had never had. An affection, almost. A respect I'd never gotten there. A softness, like Maria's. "No one gets to kill you but me. Especially not some damnable microchip!"

I smiled and opened my eyes. Amy's green eyes stared down at me, Tails' blue, and Eggman's gray. He'd taken off his glasses, which was a shock to me, and looking back I can't see much reason why he did. His eyes looked more like Maria's eyes than Gerald's. For the first time in almost fifty years, that resemblence didn't bother me. Maybe there was a little Maria in him. Maybe that was why we had so much fun trying to stop each other, all these years. Like we stopped Shadow…

"What about Shadow?" I asked.

"Right here," came a voice I almost recognized. I started a little bit, the jump sending a wave of pain through my head, not to mention my stomach. Amy grinned and stepped aside, and a black hedgehog stepped into the circle. Black, red, upward-turning spines… just like I looked before the first time I regenerated. A perfect replica of how I used to be, of how he looked when I first started to hallucinate him there…

"Shadow?"

"The doctor was able to disable the devices the professor used on us. There should be no more hallucnations of aliens or urges to kill. Unless, of course, it's fun." Shadow grinned, that wild grin I remembered wearing only once, the one that came to define him. He stuck his nose up in the air a little.

"Shadow," came Harold's voice from afar, "Disabling the chips did some damage to our mainframe. Rouge could use a hand fixing it."

"Right. Sorry, Sonic. Duty calls. I guess you really aren't the ultimate life form, taking so long to recover."

He huffed and walked away.

"Not to sound like him," I asked, grinning even as I felt my eyebrow raise, "but what the hell?"

Eggman laughed maniacally, but it didn't have the edge it usually did. I'd never heard him sound so happy. "He has no idea. I copied the code off Grandfather's microchip, used GUN's primitive brain scanning to glean some of your memories of being him, added in a little of Gamma's source code, and voila! A piece of the most glorious acheivement in my grandfather's history will live on forever, even after I finally put an end to you. And hopefully, now, no one will mistake the two of you for one another. You're different colors now, after all. "

Tails rolled his eyes, grinning.

"Is this really a good idea?" I asked.

"Probably a better one than a suicide run into Mad Space," Tails quipped, glaring at me.

I glared back at him a little, but I couldn't help but smile through it. Still, there were so many questions to ask, and I was afraid if I didn't get to them while everyone was in the same place, I wouldn't get my answers.. "Eggman… how did you convince GUN to let them use their mainframe? Are you even going to be able to get out of here?"

"I didn't convince them of anything." He smirked, his gray eyes glinting in the fluorescent light. " How do you think I've been able to stay under their radar all this time? Harold is family, has been ever since I intercepted the letter he wrote my father about Maria." He paused a second, smiling a shit-eating grin, letting the implications sink in. Somehow, given how much I had to fight Eggman, the idea that Harold had been helping him from inside GUN all along didn't really surprise me. Eggman must have decided I didn't really follow what he said, becuase then he added, "I'll slip out the back door during a shift change, and no one else is the wiser." He watched my expression for a moment. He must have been unimpressed with what he saw or something, becuase he suddenly put his glasses back on. I wondered if I'd ever see his eyes again, instead of those mirrored blue shades.

"So.. you're really fifty years old?" Amy asked me. Her voice slipped into a purr as she added, "I guess that means some day you'll be robbing the cradle." She reached over and touched my chest, and this time it didn't remind me of Maria.

Despite the pain it caused, I rolled my eyes, and I think I saw Tails do the same. As I gently pushed her hand away, Tails did what any good friend would do: he changed the subject. "That does raise a lot of questions. You told me you were fifteen. That's a thirty five year difference…"

"I'm fifteen this time around. I'm usually good for about thirty." I was about to ask to explain later, but Eggman jumped in to my rescue.

"The original Shadow was engineered using Chaos and the chao as a pattern. Chaos is effectively immortal, but chao are not. Most chao die after five or so years. However, a chao that is well cared-for, motivated to stay, will go into a coccoon and emerge as an egg. The resultant chao retains most of the previous chao's memories, but can develop in dramatically different ways."

Eggman kept going about the evolution of chao, turning to a computer terminal and typing into it. No doubt he was looking up information to explain even more details. Tails and Amy both looked at me, and we all rolled our eyes in unison. Give a nerd a question, and he's gonna want a dissertation.

"Oh, don't roll your eyes at me," he snapped, not bothering to glance back at us. "I don't know about you, but I would really rather Sonic regenerate if old age gets him before I do, and the only way that's going to happen is if you two fools take proper care of him."

Amy and Tails both giggled, and I chuckled. "Gee, Eggman, I'd almost think you cared."

"Of course not. I had to agree to this for Harold to cover my exit," he glanced back at me, looking over his spectacles. "What do you take me for, some kind of hero? Now shut up and go back to sleep, so I can lecture your friends."

For the first, and so far last, time in my life, I did exactly what Eggman told me to do. I closed my eyes, and dreamed of banana sundaes in Westopolis with Tails and Maria. I haven't dreamed of her since.

Author's Note: We're not done yet! A short epilogue will be posted within moments of this chapter, and that's the end of the story. Just click that arrow to finish up, and thank you for reading!