Speedy's note: My apologies for the wait, guys. Life happened and decided to throw a rather persistent illness at me. It seems I can't keep up with the three weeks schedule I so boldly announced to some of you... Here's hoping I will manage to do better with the chapter after this one. Hope dies last, after all. Happy reading.
Hedgehog Morals
After having tried in vain to cheer Knuckles up, Tails decided to try it through distraction. Anything else but reminding him of the crappy day he'd had until now. In lack of something more suitable for it, and after having any offers for food or drinks repeatedly declined, the young fox picked the first best thing at hand – the mess of airplane parts all over his workshop.
He started rebuilding the biplane and while he was at it, he showed the pieces to Knuckles and explained in all detail what they were and what they did in the plane. He doubted Knuckles understood what he said, but he thought the echidna would need to hear and see something different for now. Knuckles didn't complain, he simply sat there slumped on the sofa and replied to questions with one-syllable words.
"This is the propeller shaft…" Tails' voice echoed a little due to him having his head behind the engine cowling. "It distributes the power from the engine to the propeller. It can spin at over 5000 rpm. To withstand the forces caused by this, it needs to be always well-lubricated with a special sort of oil, and it's one of the engine parts that are being cooled if necessary. Unless it's really cold outside of course… Like when I fly up to your island in winter and it's freezing again. You know, we'll have to go sledding down your mountains the next winter, Knuckles. … Knuckles?"
Tails pulled himself out of his plane when no answer, not even the expected non-enthusiastic 'uh-huh', came. The two-tailed fox turned around, just to find the sofa unoccupied. "Knuckles?"
Slowly the fox walked over to the sofa, looking around in the workshop. The doors were closed, but Knuckles was nowhere to be seen. Actually, Tails wasn't even sure how long he was gone… The Master Emerald guardian was good at sneaking around silently.
"Knuckles?!" No answer came and Tails sighed. Just where had the dreadlocked picture of misery gone while he wasn't watching? The fox twirled his tails. "Just hope he doesn't do anything stupid…"
A thick beam of daylight fell through the small kitchen window. Outside, below the cliff the house sat on, the ocean twinkled in deep sapphire blue and above it, the sky was free of clouds, a wide, endless blanket of cyan.
Sonic smiled a little to himself as he looked away from the window again. He could still take his run later… The day promised to stay the same perfect weather it had already been in the early morning.
The blue hedgehog turned back to the pot in front of him, still absentmindedly stirring the stuff in it. As the wooden spoon slowly circled through it, the chili was starting to give out the smell Sonic loved like no other. He reached to adjust the temperature of the oven, then opened the fridge and took out a glass of sausages. One by one, he let them slip into a second pot, filled with hot water.
"I… didn't know you could cook…"
Sonic had not heard any footsteps and Knuckles' sudden words surprised him. He turned his head, a small smile darting over his face. "Actually, it's about the only thing I can make without burning it." He returned to stirring the chili. "Besides frozen pizza," he added after a moment of silence.
Knuckles didn't comment on the light-hearted statement. Sonic couldn't see him, but he didn't seem to move from his position on the threshold to the small room and almost a minute passed in awkward silence while Sonic felt the echidna's eyes on his back. "We… need to talk," Knuckles said then and his voice was little more than a whisper, hesitant, reluctant, strained and not at all fitting Sonic's picture of his stubborn, hot-tempered friend.
"Okay." The blue hedgehog shrugged a little as he turned around halfway, still stirring his chili, but looking at Knuckles, and the sudden thought that at the moment the echidna was more the blue one of them struck him. It was nothing like Knuckles to talk. Tails talked.
Sonic eyed the echidna, how he stood there still in the doorway as if there was some kind of invisible wall keeping him from coming all the way into the kitchen. He was chewing his bottom lip, his body just like Sonic's own showing definite traces of the fight they'd had, not even a great amount of Tails' first aid equipment had been able to conceal them. The right of his large hands clawed into the wood of the doorframe. Probably he didn't even know Sonic was looking at him, because Knuckles himself was staring at the floor as if the tiling was the most entrancing thing he had ever seen in his life.
He almost looks like Tails when he was small and broke a glass or a plate and was scared to tell me. The comparison would have seemed ridiculous to him at any other time, but at the moment it ridiculously fit.
"I… I want to…" Knuckles shifted his weight between his feet.
"Say sorry?", Sonic felt compelled to continue the half of a sentence. Given the pure look of guilt all around the echidna, it seemed obvious to him.
"No." Knuckles shook his head, still looking down, the thick, long dreadlock-spines falling over his face. "Nothing I can say will ever be enough to apologize for what I have done."
Sonic cocked an eyebrow. It wasn't like that had been the first little quarrel they had had about a misunderstanding on Knuckles' behalf. Although things like that hadn't happened in quite a while, they weren't too long ago to forget.
"I… called you a traitor," Knuckles said quietly into the silence. "More than that, I thought you were it. I thought… I thought all the things we did together… could have been just show. I thought for all that time you had just acted as my friend and then you had stolen the Master Emerald. I… doubted you. I doubted the friendship we had. The last time I doubted you that easily, I didn't really know you. This time, I should have known better than to believe you to be a thief. But I didn't. I came here, the worst insult there is on my lips, and attacked you. All because of my own failure to do my job and to interprete what I see." He took a shaky breath. "I am a shame of a guardian, and I am a shame of a friend. If we would go by the old law of my tribe, you would have the full right to kill me and I wouldn't resist. Kill me and let me be forgotten."
Sonic blinked, shock slowly working its cold path down his spine. He didn't really mean that, did he? But there he stood, head hung low, shoulders slumped and his hand still interlocked with the doorframe, but by now it seemed more as if he needed it for support. Suddenly Sonic wished in front of him stood just a little kid that had broken a piece of dish and not a teenaged echidna that looked like he was on and about to jump off the cliff behind the house.
"Knuckles?"
For a short second the echidna looked up at him and the cold feeling shot through Sonic again at the look in his eyes. Surrender. Defeat. Shame. He would have never expected to see either of those in the dark violet of Knuckles' eyes. Then he looked down again and the hedgehog was almost glad.
Sonic took a slow breath. A joke and a light comment wouldn't bring him out of this situation. Why me? First, he had to serve as a bad excuse for Knuckles not owning a punching bag, and now this.
For a moment he studied Knuckles, casting about for something remotely intelligent to say to talk the red idiot out of his weird sense of honour and morals and that stuff.
"You're right," he said slowly. He paused, but Knuckles didn't look up at him, and Sonic continued. "I don't give a damn about your tribe and their laws."
Knuckles didn't say anything, nor did he move, and Sonic stopped stirring the chili. He turned off the oven, leaning against it, arms folding on his chest.
"You know what I thought when I first met you?", he asked.
The echidna shook his head.
"I though that red guy is an idiot, an asshole, an enemy and probably a lot of other things," Sonic continued. "I was proven wrong on all of these things but one. Sometimes you really are an idiot."
Had the hedgehog hoped to get the usual reaction of anger out of Knuckles, he was disappointed. Knuckles was silent.
"Maybe it really comes with your weird job." Sonic tipped his head to the side, watching the echidna. "That you're so suspicious. You fell for Eggman a few times and you see traitors and Emerald thieves and people abusing any trust you might give them behind every rock and every bush and every tree on your island. Or on this planet."
The hedgehog sighed. "The world isn't full of Eggmen, y'know? I don't want you to trust and like everybody you meet. Nobody does that and it'd maybe really make you a bad guardian. But you aren't. It's the end result that counts and so far you always got your Emerald back and in one piece. That makes you much more successful than Eggman, 'cause he's always screwed in the end of something, and you are fine in the end of something. So, on my terms, that means you're a good guardian." At any other time the hedgehog would have added a 'relatively', served with a grin and wink. Now, he held his tongue against it.
Knuckles was still chewing his lip and Sonic wasn't sure if anything he said was useful to cheer someone up.
"So much to that." Sonic sighed again. He hated speeches, he really did. The only few people he knew that enjoyed long monologues were Eggman talking about how brilliant his latest failure of a plan was and Tails in a fit of exited technobabble. Sonic himself didn't enjoy being the only one to talk when there was more than one person around, but at the moment the other person in, or rather half in the room was as talkative as the oven he was currently leaned against.
"How many of my friends do you know, Knuckles?"
The red echidna shrugged. Hey, a reaction at least…
"Well, there is Tails. He's more than a friend to me; he's my little bro. And like all little bros he sometimes gets on my nerves. When he was smaller, there were moments when I wanted to put him into some cupboard and leave him there for a while. Today, sometimes he talks more to his machines down in the workshop than to me, and if he talks to me he quite often talks about his machines down in the workshop. Still, I know the little guy loves me and I love him.
"Then there's Blaze, a princess from a different dimension who thought she didn't need any friends at all. In that part, the two of you are pretty alike actually. She's always serious and hardly makes any jokes. The complete opposite of me, I guess…
"Amy's sometimes too much of an annoyance. There were times when I really thought I should spindash her, just so she can't run after me anymore. It's no fun being chased when you're tired after some sort of massive fight with giant evil monsters. But anyway, even if she's an annoying girl with an even more annoying crush on me, she's still a good friend… In a weird kinda way sometimes.
"Shadow isn't anything like a friend, neither are most of the other guys I know.
"And then there's you. The stubborn red echidna that lives on a flying island, isn't exactly a conversationalist, takes a lot of things too seriously, cares about his giant glowing stone more than about most people he knows, has quite a bad temper at times and lives according to weird, outdated morals.
"And I myself am a speed junkie that runs around saving the world from freaks like Eggman, but actually enjoys it. I need the thrill, the adrenaline, the adventure. I always take things easy and don't plan my actions. Probably I'm not really the showcase hero either."
Sonic made a pause, finally, breathing in and out a few times, still watching Knuckles. "You're probably wondering why I tell you these weird things about all these people. I tell you because in a way we're all the same. We're people. And people make mistakes. A lot of things all of us did would have been easier if we wouldn't make the mistakes typical for us. If Amy wouldn't scream so much and run around wielding that hammer, if Tails would explain his inventions in a way anyone else could understand half of what he says, if I would start making a plan before doing something, if you would be a little less the proud," he couldn't reign in the breath of sarcasm now, "guardian from the lonesome island. But you know what? I wouldn't want that. I like my life, and I like my friends. Just the way they are."
The blue hedgehog's eyes wandered over Knuckles, trying to find out if anything of the fuss he was talking here was showing some sort of effect. But the echidna was still looking down, the tip of his right foot drawing over the floor.
"No, I am not going to kill you, or do anything else you probably expected me to do for whatever weird reasons. It's enough work talking so much…" Sonic huffed out another sigh. "Knuckles, most of the people I know and even call friends have tried to kill me at least once. When we met, or at some other time. Don't know if your morals know the concept, but I don't care much for what someone did in the past. Clear the argument, say sorry in some kind of way and be friends again. That's how hedgehog morals work, I guess. So, the two of us had an argument, a neat little fight outside and now you're saying sorry and we eat some lunch together."
He took another deep breath looking at his friend's slumped shoulders. "And please, stop looking like a sheepish five-year-old."
Knuckles looked up at him, suddenly confusion written in his eyes. "I look like what?"
Sonic shrugged. "Like Tails when he was small and did something he thought would make me mad at him."
Knuckles stared, blinked, and shook his head. "Oh." His hand finally left the doorframe to rub the back of his head.
Sonic mentally kicked himself for not saying the thing about five-year-olds earlier… It would have probably spared him a lot of useless talk, and an embarrassed Knuckles was much easier to deal with than a guilty feeling one. It was a lot less out of character.
"It's really… that easy for you?", Knuckles asked into the short moment of silence.
"Yeah, I guess. I'm an easy hedgehog. Easy is more fun, you know?" Sonic smiled a little. "Do me a favor and be a little more easy as well, huh?"
Knuckles actually nodded. "I'll try." He hesitantly smiled as well.
"Fine. And don't forget what I told ya, took me a lot of hard thinking…"
Again Knuckles' hand rubbed over the backside of his head. "I'm afraid I have already forgotten some things out of it. Too much talking at once. It's like when Tails talks and…"
Sonic laughed at the look on the echidna's face. "I get it. Don't you ever force me into doing a Tails and talking my own ears off again, okay? I need them, or I'll look like you."
The echidna's face was crossed with a short grin that actually reached his eyes for a little moment, but then he nodded firmly. "I won't. Promise."
"Good. Now say sorry and we're friends again and can get to the part with the peace-making snack." Sonic grinned back at him.
"Uh, okay… Sorry." Embarrassment was back on Knuckles' face in an instant, and for that instant he did look like the five-year-old again. Suddenly Sonic wondered what five-year-old Knuckles might have been like. Gullible, probably.
Sonic was still grinning, forcing himself not to follow the train of thought any further. "See? That wasn't too hard now, was it? Next time, we'll just handle things that way directly. Less stressful and stuff."
"Okay…" Knuckles smiled sheepishly.
Sonic turned around to the oven again. The chili had stopped smelling and also the water with the sausages wasn't exactly boiling anymore. "Damnit. Now my lunch is cold."
"It's not that warmth would make the stuff much more edible," Knuckles noticed, stepping to Sonic's side and throwing a look into the pots, the usual dry tone slowly working its way back into his voice and Sonic was incredibly glad to hear it.
"You don't have any good taste, grapes-eater," he said, playfully elbowing the echidna. "Get some fruits. Peace-making or not, I won't share my wonderful chili dogs with someone as blasphemous as you."
Knuckles chuckled and Sonic sighed inwardly. Normality. Thank Chaos. Now we just need to track down the Emerald thief. It'll be just like always. A smile darted over the hedgehog's face. They could do that.
