The ticking hands on his watch feel arrhythmic to his heart during the countdown.
Each tic echoes through his body ant out into the shadows.
It's almost time. Each approaching second gets slower, like a wounded animal, missing a leg. Bleeding out as it approaches.
We are all that bleeding animal, he thinks to himself. Our stumbling almost deliberate as we give up towards the end. You can see the difference between the struggling beast and the one that resigns to draining in real time.
Almost everything about this farce resembles the latter.
He picks at the roots of his mustache. Sometimes hairs get uprooted.
It's the nature of things.
Dr. Robotnik's heart stops for a brief moment as the spotlight hits the curtain. Tearing the illusion of the darkness from the audience's perspective. Tearing the illusion from the idea that darkness really hides anything in this world. It just keeps it at bay.
The curtain parts and light spills into the void behind it. To the keen eye in a clever head that knows what it's looking for, the structure of the set is apparent.
A beating heart keeping everything together.
The layman sees a crying blue hedgehog on his knees next to a bed in a hut. In the bed is another hedgehog. This hedgehog is also blue.
Steam escapes it through ragged airducts. Trembling fingers freeze and resume shaking in mid-gesture. Everything is stilted, even his eyes. Even at the back of them.
Teeth press hard against the corner of a lip until it bleeds.
The show is about to begin.
~there's not~
~cornwallace~
"This is the final time I lose you, O' Uncle~!" the hedgehog on his knees cries to the corpse under the the blanket which he twists and almost rips in his unforgiving grip. "I cannot bare it a third time! I will not!"
"Hast thou considered contribution?" A voice asks.
The rest of the hut exists in your fragile perspective. You are impressed, you are amazed, you are concerned.
A squirrel's arms crossed over her vest over torso as her as her eyes and their trajectory aims at her legs. One crossed over the other. She leans against the frame of a doorway.
The light paints vibrant hues into her red hair. Making it look almost alive.
Reflective.
"Belittle me no longer, woman," he scoffs, crossing his arms as well. "Your god could not and cannot save us, even if its designs were such."
"What a chance you fostered." Her eyes rolling.
Trying to escape.
She rolls her neck and her body follows the rhythm out of her position in the frame of the door. She looks at him with uncertainty and fear as she speaks with confidence. "What an uncivilized culture, the breed of your decisions and their making belong to, Sonic."
She points at him. Her finger shakes and then it doesn't.
And then it shakes and then it doesn't.
Somewhere between a mechanical scoff and a deeply human huff, a noise escapes our star.
If you listened closely it might resemble scissors tearing through raw meat with the onset of rot behind it.
Flaps tearing, withered. It speaks. "Your puddle consumes nothing. It dries in what's left of the sun's destruction. Every single day, more burns and less soothes. You have some fucking nerve saying that to me."
His eyes are uncertain. Sonic's eyes are uncertain.
Ivo stands, grabbing his coat and checking his watch in the faint light of the house of the theater.
It tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, tics along with his suspicions of timing, along with the rhythm of his own feet walking out of the theater.
The corner of his mouth drawing blood, leaking it down his chin.
He frowns and discreetly attempts to swallow it all.
Opening the door that leads into and out of the theater, he pukes into a trashcan. It comes from him fast and hard, tearing the acid from his stomach and esophogus and slapping an almost flat disc of nearly digested goo into the bottom of the newly refreshed trashcan liner.
Ivo spits several time into the open can.
Licking the inside of his mouth he tries to gather the residue of the feeling he just understood within himself and spits again.
"We weren't expecting you yet, sir," Snively says, approaching him in the hallway. "Are you alright? Do you neeeed anything?"
"Shot, now," he says, cutting through the formality of it all.
Colin digs around in his bag very briefly and produces a plastic grey object that vaguely resembles an uncircumcised penis.
He lift's Ivo's shirt around his backside and tugs downwards at the back of his uncle's pants. He places the lip of the plastic tip against his backside and the device clicks.
The skin around Ivo's knuckles tightens.
Colin tries to settle him down, to steady him but he's too small to anchor him in such a capacity.
Dr. Robotnik pulls his pants upwards across his back as he drains what's left of his stomach into the trashcan.
It sounds like he's screaming, and Colin has trained himself well not to flinch.
Shaking his heads out of the throwup hole, the Robotniks make their way down the two hallways.
One of them leads to the bright lights outside and then into the darkness of an alley. The other one leads to the wings of the theater.
And either way, he smiles.
And either way, he's gotten what he's wanted.
In one scenario, his eyes are filled with blood reflecting off the shadows in the moonlight. What's left of the corpses leaking out from the bodies, under the dumpsters and into what the less informed might describe as a street.
In another scenario, he steps out into the illuminated stage, to uproarious applause. The vacant expressions of his audience reflecting back to them through his own teary eyes.
Either way, he says the same thing.
"I've done what I've done here for a reason."
"You fool~!" Sonic says, as angry as he is desperate. "You've damned us all~!"
"Fear of damnation exists for the pieces that cannot see their value as parts of the whole," Ivo says sadly. "How can I help you?"
"You can't."
"I can't."
They speak at the same time, all of them, their words deflating into the squeaks of the rocking and rattling hinges.
A jacket unzips twice, and he removes the laser pistol from roughly the same spot both times.
Once, it blasts through Sonic's skull and Robotnik exhales before walking away.
Once, it cooks the plates, warming the metal underneath. Melting it. Sonic's eyes darting around even more desperately, trapped in the cooking metal shell. Even more uncertain and scared.
In both realities we're paying attention to, Colin asks from the shadows if there's an encore coming.
Watching his shadow mimic his movement against the harsh mockery of reality under himself and the light, in both realities we're paying attention to, Robotnik is disgusted and he says "there's not."
His fingers tremble and then they stop. He sees both realities at once.
Ivo's metal fingertips dig deep into his fleshy palm, and blood leaks violently from his fist.