The butt of the gun cracks the top of its skull and it caves in like a melon. Concave and gushing. He is screaming. Brain matter clinging to his rifle.
That thing, still laughing. Cackling madly as if there was no such thing as pain.
It's not you it's not you it's not you.
Screaming into himself, he desperately tries to drown out the voices.
He brings the rifle down again. And again.
Every single time the empty weapon connects, more of him is lost.
Laughter transitions to gargling. Eventually, silence from the creature.
Sobbing, exhausted, he collapses.
The cocking of a rifle and cold steel digging into her neck snaps her back to reality.
"You put your hands behind your head and I mean forthwith." A familiar voice. Antoine's. "Forthwith!"
She can't see his reflection in the ringpool but she knows he's there. Slowly, nonthreatening, she complies. The wrist irons tighten around her left arm, clicking and locking into place. Her left hand guided downwards behind her back by the chain, her right with the muzzle of the rifle. The other cuff locks around her right wrist, linking them together.
"Rise," Antoine says, not waiting for it to register before pulling her up by the chain.
Tails struggles to her feet, stumbling, almost losing her balance. Antoine lets go of her and backs up a step. "Turn around."
Tails meets his gaze from behind the rifle. She notices the safety is off and Antoine is practicing poor trigger discipline. Her third eye screaming. She says nothing.
"How did you escape?"
"Escape? I don't-"
"Silence. Rotor." He calls behind him. "Rotor! Approach promptly! Forthwith!"
A moment. The walrus, approaching. "Y-yes sir?"
"Did you restrain this woman?!"
"Sir, I didn't think sh-"
"Fie! A fetch I wish to not hear!"
"We confiscated her weapons. She hasn't hurt anybody, Antoine."
"That you're cognizant of. I told you to restrain her to prevent any and all incidences."
Rotor doesn't say anything. Tails doesn't say anything. Antoine sighs and nods towards the path back up the hill.
"Move," he says.
Antoine almost pushes Tails rather than guiding him into the seat in the tent in the middle of town.
The entrance flaps still swaying about.
"Hostility, eh? That's how you're playing it?"
"You approached armed."
"No ammo."
"Donning our dearly departed Princess Sally's vest."
"Which I left in."
"Not a soul saw Tails leave, or Ari for that matter. We've got nothing to go on but the word of that dragon."
Her sarcastic sneer reforms into a deadly serious frown. "What have you done with her?"
"Done with her? Excuse me, we don't lock up residents the same way we do impostors."
Tails sighs, leaning back against her hands into the seat. "Look, let me talk to Dulcy. She'll straighten this whole thing out."
"Oh? And what doth she know of your magical sex change, Miles Prower? If that ist who thine be?"
"Yeah," she laughs bitterly. "I'm Miles Prower. She knows me. She can-"
"I'll not hear it," Antoine says, cutting her off. "I'll not have you brainwashing our citizens with your nonsense until I've gotten to the bottom of it! Do you understand?"
Suddenly, an alarm goes off. He double takes through the flaps of the tent. "Stay here if you value your life."
Before she can even respond he's scurried through the tent's flaps, leaving her alone in the darkness. She notices the coach gun in the corner, and before too long she starts hearing gunshots.
There's a moment that never happens, but there's a dream.
The way Dulcy holds Tails is motherly and nurturing.
No matter the crisis of identity Tails was undergoing, it was always endearing to be wrapped in her tail. Watched over. Cared for. There's a moment of vulnerability that parallels her childhood. She's not cognizant of it when she wakes up. She doesn't remember any of this.
A piano is struck playfully in the distance and she finds a comfort in uncertainty.
There's a knock on a door that she can't remember the last time she felt comfortable knocking on. Her knuckles withdraw timidly but she's met with warmth.
Only in this dream that she doesn't remember.
"Tails?"
"Hrm?" he looks up, puzzled.
"You sure you have everything?"
He stops for a moment. She stops for a moment.
Burning hot oil splashes against her face as she stuffs the shotgun into the robot's chest and unloads both barrels. She screams in anger. In pain.
She tries to remember they're just robots no matter how much they scream like her friends, alive or dead.
Empty shells eject from her weapon as she stuffs in two live rounds and blowing the sides out of a Sally look-alike that's assaulting Antoine.
Callously, she picks up his assault rifle and tosses it to him.
Not even the neck of a dragon takes well to plasma. When Dulcy starts choking on her own blood, her final decision is to take as many of them out with her as she possibly can.
That's probably what makes Tails lose it. She's lost any and all opportunities to speak with her in the future and she knows it.
She's on her own before she even has a handle on herself.
Shells fall into the bag, One hand holding the bag open the other hand casually tossing the shells in. It all starts to feel a bit disingenuous.
The planet skips but the sentinels have yet to fall. She rushes out of Ari's hut and towards the defensive line.
Sonic's door opens and he drifts out like a ghost. His pallid skin hanging from his bones as he no longer has meat or blood - just ragged flesh hanging from a rickety structure that floats along the ground.
Under his skin in five places, emeralds glow different colors.
The sentinels crashing to the ground sends tremors that knock everything off balance.
Tumbling down. She recovers on her belly, the wind knocked out of her. Struggling to breathe. She crawls towards the remains of what she tries to recall as a friend.
The fastest thing alive ironically eludes her at such a slow pace.
Time's not exactly frozen, more like a forming glacier.
Light shines brightly, warmly from under the skin, discoloring it. Shadows of bones.
Trembling hand reaching outward.
Pulsating wires and veins latch themselves to the base of Robotnik's chair and quickly infiltrate the integrity of the floor beneath him and the ground well beneath that. The very building his corpse resides comes to life in a most unnatural way.
Sludge leaking from its circulatory system. Language defies it, for at first it speaks with pure id.
It's not a slug, it's creation, she thinks to herself as a brief glimpse of the puddle of all flashes before her eyes and she holds her breath.
Awkward and broken, she can empathize. Instinctive hand unknowingly reaching towards it.
There's rain and there's blood in the future. She can't tell how much of it is her own. She embraces the crumbling earth.
It's the foot of a dead dragon that sends her along her way. Crashing into the warmth and the light and the cold harsh ground. She can hear the gurgling laughter from the neck of the dead dragon as her decaying head finally meets the ground. Upside down, eyes still staring.
Soaring through the air, she claws at the light.
Air escapes her.
Tails is pretty sure her ribs are broken. Her screams, along with her body, are enveloped in the light.