Hey, sorry for making you wait this long for this chapter. I struggled with it a little and even then I'm not sure how much I like how it turned out. It feels a bit incomplete and I've tried to rationalise this to myself by saying that this is because - due to not having any sort of plan other than snippets and scenes in my head - I'm trying to lay some more pieces of groundwork for stuff that will come up later. I'm also keeping chapters to a restricted length so stuff that I would have written at the end is going to end up in the beginning of the next chapter. Please help me out by letting me know what you think.
Gadget wondered how Sonic and Tails could keep the pace that they did. After hours of running around Dr Eggman's expansive former fortress they still walked into the resistance headquarters like they had energy to burn while he was puffing and trying to keep up with their energetic strides. To go at the speed of sound mission by mission was one thing, to go all day was inhuman. They strode ahead into the main computer room with him trudging behind them, daydreaming of being able to soak his aching body in the bath tonight.
"Shadow! Where were you?!"
Sonic froze mid-step. Gadget stared at him curiously, noticing the tenseness in his shoulders and the slight bristling of his back spines. Sonic turned sharply with an irritated look on his face and he opened his mouth like he was about to berate the speaker and then abruptly aborted that motion. Shadow was there in the room. So was Silver, standing in front of him with an icepack in one hand and the broken husk of Omega behind them.
"What happened to Omega?" Tails gasped, rushing over to the other two hedgehogs. He got between them and pushed them aside to stand in front of the war robot, gazing up at it in disbelief as though someone had torn up his artwork. "I worked so hard to get him back up and running. Who could have done this?"
Tails turned to Shadow. The black hedgehog's eyes narrowed irritably at the stink-eye being sent his way. "I don't know what happened," he said, folding his arms standoffishly. "I also just got here."
"I did it," Silver admitted, looking as vexed as he possibly could with unfocussed eyes.
"You?" Tails gaped, turning to Silver in surprise. "Why?"
"He went on a rampage at a local hospital. He's still keen on his self-appointed mission to get revenge on Infinite. With death. Lots of death."
"Why is a battle robot of Omega's calibre in the streets to begin with?" Shadow asked critically.
"He wasn't," Tails answered. "At least he shouldn't have been. Knuckles was going to send him off to do another search and destroy mission for robots in the countryside. They're still popping up every now and then. With orders like that, what made him want to attack a hospital?"
"Omega doesn't take orders he doesn't like," Shadow replied.
"He's a robot. He has to fulfil his orders, whether he likes them or not. Or at the very least follow his programming."
"He's not a normal robot. There's a reason why Dr Eggman never built another robot like Omega. The AI he's outfitted with is one of a kind but it's so advanced that it is able to rewrite its own programming, which allowed him to become insubordinate to Dr Eggman. He has likely twisted his orders such that he gave himself the freedom to fulfil the goals that he wants, not the goals we need him to meet."
"That's terrible!" Silver exclaimed. "Why do we keep an awful robot like that around?"
"He does have a few problems," Tails conceded, "but he's growing and he does grow on you after a while. With a little hard work we may be able to help him develop a conscience yet."
"What about the hospital?" Sonic interjected. His body went taut like a spring, ready to zip off.
"It's not on fire anymore," Silver replied. "Part of the building might still be structurally unsound and some people were injured in the attack but not fatally so. That's a good outcome, all things considering…"
"Still, though," Tails muttered, "why attack a hospital?"
"It's the hospital where I dropped off Infinite a couple of weeks ago."
Gadget hadn't properly fully processed those words when a sharp breeze blew by him to the exit and Sonic was gone. It distracted him for a moment, in which he stared at Silver dumbly until realisation had his fur rising in agitation. The other three continued talking and Gadget heard their voices but the clarity of their words blotted out as he turned and ran, hot on the Blue Blur's trail and hoping that when he left that morning Infinite had taken advantage of the lack of supervision to not cooperate with his doctor's orders.
The first thing Infinite saw when he began to wake up was white. Just white. He must have been dead this time for sure—the last events he remembered were so non-conducive to his survival that he couldn't imagine any other possibility. His vision blurred, too weak to focus at first but as he regained awareness he couldn't be bothered to work his eyes into clarity. He couldn't stand to look at the world and his eyes must have suffered somehow in the attack, is what he told himself of the stinging pain around his eyeballs. He blinked and dispelled the blurs with a few shakes. It took considerable effort to shift his head even slightly from one side to another. On his left he saw white wires squiggling away from his body, connected to machines with readings rising and falling sluggishly. Each breath he took strained against the gentle constriction of a bandage around his chest and made a humid chamber out of an oxygen mask. The tendons in his neck felt so taut that they might break as he lifted his head to survey the rest of the room only to find that it was cordoned off with a green curtain. A sick sense of déjà vu came over him and he let his head fall back onto the pillow. A sinking feeling washed over him as he wondered about Gadget and the void and, subsequently, the Phantom Ruby. His heart stung thinking about him but he refused to think too deeply about that. It was probably just the god of death anyway, cutting his heart out in preparation for judgement. It was a whimsical hunch that urged him to turn his head to the right, despite how difficult it was and how his brain jiggled in his skull with even the slightest movement. He remembered there being a table. Would it still be there in this afterlife reconstruction?
A pair of horn-rimmed glasses with thick lenses looked back at him, sitting on the table as innocuously as he remembered. The very air around him became oppressive, clogging his ears and nose and stuffing his throat as a powerful tide of despair ripped him under. He tried to move, reaching for the glasses. Later on, he would have no idea what compelled him to think or do what he did given how difficult even the smallest of movements was. His very veins tried to prevent him, as though he had mortar instead of blood pumping through his heart. Every muscle under his skin felt like it had turned to wire, or rather that wires had been pushed carefully into every muscle fibre and still stung. He'd just had a thought that wholly convinced him that if only he were able to see through those glasses he might glimpse Gadget lying in this purgatory with him to await the weighing of his own heart.
Putting the glasses on made his vision blurry again. His head lolled to the side; he was so exhausted he could barely lift it properly. Even with the lenses on the area around the bed was nothing but whites and greens but he kept looking for even the smallest splash of red. He found it, leaning his head back and looking upwards. The red hung above him like a tiny sun or maybe a bomb (or both. Dr Eggman had once fancied that a sun would make a fantastic bomb) with a leak in its system. It drooled seamlessly like a river down the side of some invisible mountain but instead of reaching some sort of estuary or delta the river curled into his left arm. He raised his arm as much as he could and the red river moved with it, plugged into him with a white patch that reminded him of several memories that he couldn't quite grasp.
A gentle snuffle beside him followed by a yawn interrupted his thoughts. Infinite let his arm fall and turned to find the source of the sound but it was all green and white. He lay in wait until it appeared, a red being rising like the setting sun in reverse and peering over him with wide, white eyes.
"You're awake," it muttered.
"Are you Death?" Infinite asked.
The red thing stared at him for beat. And then: "What?"
"You've come to take my heart. I didn't deserve it in the end."
"I'm not… you're… where do you think you are?" the red thing finally settled on.
"Somewhere west of the setting sun. Just hurry up and cut it out. Would you tell me how much it weighs?"
"No, I'm not going to cut out your heart, I'm not qualified to do that. You've got to stop wearing my glasses, they must make you see strange things. And I need them besides."
The red creature reached over but Infinite did nothing to stop it. It took hold of the frames and lifted the glasses off his face. Without them he saw much clearer and once the red wolf had his glasses back on his own face he smiled a forced smile back at Infinite trying to tell him that everything was okay but his eyes were sad and frightened.
"Oh…" Infinite choked. It was not a sob. No. "You look spirited."
Gadget chuckled half-heartedly. "I wish I could say the same for you. You look like death warmed over."
"Yours must be light. That's why you can stand there while I can barely move."
There was a long silence after that. Gadget wasn't quite sure how to respond or what Infinite was referring to that had something to do with cutting out hearts and weighing them. It sounded like a brutal ritual. He was beginning to think that perhaps he could just ask about it until Infinite spoke again:
"I'm thirsty."
"Yeah, I'd say so," Gadget nodded. "That's just a side effect of the medication they used during surgery. They gave you fluids intravenously but it's probably been almost a day since you last drank anything. I can go and ask the doctors if it's okay to give you water now."
"I haven't felt this thirsty in years," Infinite continued as if Gadget hadn't said anything. "Why have you brought my soul back to that town?"
"That town?" Gadget echoed curiously.
"The town without water… where I grew up."
"Er, I can't say I've heard of it."
"I heard that there used to be wells there but they were dried up long before I was born. There were some small occasions when it would rain but I don't really remember. The drought began when I was a youngling. They hoped it would only last the one season but the rains never came back and the water stores ran empty. There were water-storing plants that people used to talk about but taking a trip out of town to get to them was dangerous. If you didn't die from the sun before you reached one it might poison you with its toxin. Water and food cost more money than most people had but I learned a lot of tricks to help deal with being thirsty—suck on stones to swallow your own saliva, steal fruit from the gardens over the wall, kill your enemies and drink their blood-"
"Excuse me, what?"
"What ever worked."
"You're joking. Please tell me you're joking about what you just said."
"You lived or died depending on what you were prepared to do to survive. In the end, I was prepared to leave but I knew it wouldn't be easy to make it across the desert alone when there was no food or water in town, except what was there over the wall. It was by a weird coincidence that I met a man who was willing to ship me out of town for an immaterial cost, for which I had to kill him. Is this what you wanted me to confess? My first sins on this earth, beginning with me being born in that wretched place?"
"Infinite…" Gadget croaked. His throat felt dry and tight all of a sudden. It was almost too sensational of a story to believe but then again, so was the scale and devastation that the world had endured only a few months ago. The intensity of it made him tremble, as well as a niggling fear that once Infinite sobered up – if he remembered any of this – he would be mortified by the vulnerabilities he had just blurted out here, probably without consciously meaning to.
Infinite sighed. "Can't even have my real name back. I suppose that's fair."
"Inf—I mean…" Gadget stammered, not quite sure what he actually meant. He could probably get Infinite to reveal it right here and now but a part of him felt that that would be as good as using him. He resigned himself to being swayed by his better nature. "You just rest, focus on getting better." He put a hand on Infinite's wrist, stroking the fur in a way he hoped the jackal would find soothing. "I'll be back later."
"Don't leave me!"
Gadget's eyes widened, startled not only by the high-pitched desperation in Infinite's voice but also by the speed at which he twisted his hand around to grasp his wrist. He whimpered.
"Don't leave me alone to stew in my sins, taking on the weight of all the souls in my path. I don't want this! I'll go to hell without trial, just don't make me do this!"
"Whoa, whoa! It's okay; you're okay," Gadget tried to soothe him while gently prying his hand off his wrist. "You're not going to hell, you're not even dead yet."
"I won't take them with me!"
With his hand forcibly freed, Infinite reached across himself for the catheter dripping blood into his left arm. Gadget's ears flattened and he quickly lashed out to pin it down against Infinite's torso.
"Don't pull that out! It's helping you!"
"I'm beyond help! You can drown me in the river of fire until my flesh melts off my bones and my skeleton crumbles to ashes!"
Though Infinite was weak he began to squirm restlessly and fluffy fur became slippery with the twisting and writhing. Gadget threw himself over Infinite's body to hold him down and keep both arms at his sides. In front of him the numbers and lines on the monitoring screens rose worryingly, the ECG made a sudden jump. Gadget turned to Infinite, hoping to see some semblance of sanity return but he had his head tilted back, betraying nothing about his expression. The wolf raised a boot, blindly kicking around beside the bed for the nurse call button that he vaguely remembered hanging from the bedframe on the right-hand side. He turned his head away to face the curtain, finding it all too frightening to look at the life monitoring equipment or Infinite's face in the midst of the fit. His heart thudded so hard he was sure that it was the reason he was trembling while seconds felt like minutes, making him wonder several times over how long it could take even just one nurse to respond. He didn't hear footsteps arrive but the rattle of the curtain was loud enough to alert him to the arrival of medical help. The bear nurse yanked him off Infinite and dropped him to the floor with seemingly no care as to whether he even landed on his feet or not and then with a single motion, honed by years of practise, grabbed Infinite's arms and had him restrained on his back with his arms by his sides.
Gadget rose to his feet and brushed his fur down, looking at Infinite sadly. The nurse spoke to him firmly, trying to get him to answer simple questions. With a resigned sigh Gadget realised that there was probably nothing else that he could do right now, so he left, drawing the curtain completely closed behind him. It was the only mercy he could offer in this semi-public ward, however small.
On his way out, every part of him drooped as though he were walking towards some sort of despair. Despite the bustle of the hospital at work around him, his footsteps sounded lonely to his ears as he stepped out of the ward and into the corridor about to face the inevitable trial that he'd been putting off for the past two weeks.