Chapter 12: It's over

It had been about a week since Tails and Marine had broken up, and despite them still temporarily living in the same house, Tails had hardly seen her. This was thanks to a combination of her avoiding him and him working on his machine in most of hid spare time. Sonic, Blaze and Silver had had regular meetings (in front of the TV of course) to discuss what to do about Cloak Man.

"Hey Tails, what's up?" Sonic strolled in casually, smirking as he saw Tails with oil all over his face.

"Do you live here now?" he glared at the hedgehog, he had been in a pretty bad mood lately - for obvious reasons, and couldn't help being a little jealous of Sonic, being able to hold down a relationship so well.

"Chill out buddy." Tails let out an annoyed grunt as he sat next to him, trying to fathom how Tails could make so many wires without his head exploding.

"Well, you're notoriously lucky. Give me a hand with this." Sonic nodded and crawled under the machine next to Tails, the same sea of wires that he had seen the last time he looked were still there, but most were connected. "No thanks to your 'help', I'm almost done with this, but there are four wires which I forgot to label. Which ones should I connect?"

"You want me to guess?" he stared at Tails blankly.

"You seem to be lucky with everything else." The fox shrugged.

Sonic stared at the machine for a couple of minutes, before closing his eyes and pointing at them, "Eeny-meeny-miny-mo." before Tails could protest with his method of choosing, he had jammed both ends together.

"AGH BLADDY HELL!" the two heard Marine yell, and looked up to see a rather large hole in the cieling, the raccoon's rather fierce looking head poking over it from her room.

"Heheh," Sonic scratched his back, grinning nervously. "Um. Sorry...?" the hedgehog took Tails' glare as his cue to leave.

As the hedgehog walked into the living room, he saw Silver lay on the couch half asleep, where he usually was - one o'clock was a little too early for him. Sonic grabbed a cushion and threw it at him.

"C'mon Silv, we're gonna get cloak man again, remember?"

"Ugh," Silver eventually recovered from his tiredness and summoned the strength to sit up, "Did you get the fake emerald off of Tails?"

Sonic opened his mouth for a moment as he remembered why he had gone to Tails in the first place. After considering the risk of going in with Tails' current mood, he decided that it would be better to let Silver take the risk of getting a spanner thrown in his head. "You go get it." He threw him off the couch and sat there himself as Silver went for Tails.

Sonic waited for a few seconds, his ears raised before he heard what he expected to.

"OW WHAT THE HELL!?" Silver ran back into the room clutching his head, after a few seconds he looked at Sonic in disbelief, "He threw a wrench at me!"

"Did you get the emerald?" Sonic asked, trying not to start laughing.

"Erm, yeah." Silver threw it to him. "Can we go over the plan again? I'm a little woozy." He rubbed his head again.

"Well according to Shadow, Cloak Man has six Chaos Emeralds now, he'll be looking for the seventh. Tails has got a cloaking device inside this house, so the minute he turns it off Cloak Man will probably be here, then we kick his ass, grab a real Chaos Emerald and use Chaos Control to get to your world before he can get it back." Sonic inhaled deeply, "Got it?"

"Nope, but let's go."

"Wait. We need Blaze first, where is she? She's been pretty distant over the past week."

Silver panicked, "How shoud I know? I don't know. Not with anyone." he folded his arms and turned away, swearing under his breath as he realised how obvious he had been.

Sonic was not fooled, he stood up. "Where is she?" He asked sternly, his voice was almost scary.

Silver looked at him blankly, then slouched on the couch, "I'm not getting into this."

"You'd better tell me!" Sonic moved towards Silver, but was stopped by his psychokinesis.

"Find your girl yourself, and don't involve me." He turned Sonic towards the door. The cerulean hedgehog glared, but left.

--

Shadow the Hedgehog was sat at the very place where he and Blaze had first kissed, he was sat with his back against the tree. It was mid August, and the sun was as bright as ever, he turned to Blaze, who he had his arm around. She was leaning on his shoulder and messing around with his white chest fur with her finger. He wasn't completely fond of her doing this, but let her as she seemed to like it.

"Have you told Sonic yet?" Shadow asked, keeping his eyes on the lake, this question made Blaze squirm a little awkwardly.

"Not yet."

"You must. Soon." Blaze sighed, she couldn't argue with him. She didn't doubt that Sonic was growing suspicous of her increasing attempts to annoy him.

Almost as he spoke, an uncomfortabley familiar voice almost rattled the trees, sounding fairly frantic. "Blaze! Blaze!?" It was Sonic's voice coming from nearby. She looked at Shadow, who had the same emotionless face as always. He nodded towards the where the sound was coming from, motioning for her to go. However, she didn't have to, as a blue figure had just emerged from the tree behind them. Blaze looked up nervously at Sonic, who seemed to have frozen, lost for words. Shadow stood up cautiously, ready for Sonic to make an aggressive move. He didn't, he stood almost still with his bottom jaw almost hitting the floor. "I'll leave you two to..." Shadow tailed off, just raising his eyebrows as he walked away slightly hastily.

"B-Blaze ... why?" Sonic stuttered, Blaze's amber eyes gave him a pitiful luck that cut through him like a knife through butter. Blaze, as you can imagine, was feeling more emotional than usual, much more emotional, she hid her tears and shook her head. "What did I do?" Sonic carried on talking, "I mean if it's about not having s-"

"N-no, Sonic it's not." Blaze was getting tearful, she couldn't help but admire Sonic's restraint. "I don't think, it was ever...going anywhere..." She noticed Sonic almost shrink in size as she spoke.

"But-"

"It's over, Sonic." Blaze shook her head, using her arm to wipe the tears from her eyes. She turned around and walked away, going into the trees as quickly as she could to get out of the poor hedgehog's eyesight.

She took one last look behind her before pushing her back against a tree, she tilted her head back to push away some more tears. She but her hand against her chest, unabe to decipher why she felt so bad about this.

"Blaze, are you ok?" Shadow jumped down from a branch above her, making her leap a few feet in the air.

She took a second to get over the shock, she had never felt so vulnerable, "Why did you just abandon me there!?"

"It would have been much worse for Sonic and I had I remained there."

Blaze pushed him backwards, a split second before her hands set on fire, "What about me? Did you think about that!?" She sighed, locking up her emotions, a habit she seemed to have lost recently. "I'll meet you here tommorow, same time as always." Shadow nodded, his face as cold as ever.