Tails walked into the living room with his tablet in his hand. His family looked at him with curiosity and confusion, wondering what he had been up to.
The loud shouting from Commander Walters and his everlasting threats that dominated the living room vanished.
The tablet Tails had been so keen on having displayed content that only G.U.N. agents and the Commander should be able to access.
He had that- oh so- precisous information since Tails, the day before Longclaw was to Green Hills' baseball field, hacked into G.U.N.'s servers.
Tails was really bored that day. And there wasn't anyone he could be with. His brothers were having a friendly spar.
And, sure, he could participate in them or watch them, but it just wasn't Tails' thing.
And besides, he didn't want to bother them.
And he couldn't be with Maddie and Tom, either. Maddie was working, and Tom was cleaning the house. Doing chores that weren't fit for him yet (at least that was what Tom said).
So, to cure his boredom, he started hacking G.U.N. After all, besides being something fun, it could be useful in case G.U.N. puts their noses back in their lives.
And besides, if Eggman hadn't come back, Tails wouldn't even know what would happen to them.
And, after an hour, he successfully got into the G.U.N.'s database. Tails had to admit it was a little bit challenging. They had a pretty good secure system. One of the best human secure systems he had ever seen (not that he had seen a lot, but the techniques they used were quite advanced).
But not advanced enough for him, of course.
So he began exploring, and, at first, it was just boring military stuff until he stumbled upon a section all about them.
Needless to say, Tails had to see this section.
However, what the section contained contained a lot of things he hadn't been expecting...
That section was filled with mostly outdated threads about what they would do at Sonic in case they could capture him. These threads were… quite disturbing, to say the least. A lot of them were about dissection, cloning, experimentation, and other equally disturbing things.
Much to Tails' relief, however, most of them were made before Eggman had come back.
The rest of the files were a lot tamer, thankfully. Most of them were only reports of what G.U.N. agents had observed when they spied on him and his brothers. There was one section that caught Tails' attention. A file labeled 'Project Shadow', which was locked with a password. Tails wondered what it was about, but he was so immersed in the files about them that he ended up not cracking it.
Then, after hours of reading every thread he possibly could—and reading every fine detail the thread contained—Maddie came to his workshop to say dinner was ready.
Tails had contemplated telling his family about his findings. However, as he saw Sonic excitedly telling them how the spar went, Knuckles being confused half the time but still happy nonetheless and the only one who laughed at Tom's jokes (when he understood them), and Tom and Maddie's happy expressions, he decided to keep this information to himself.
After all, G.U.N. was getting more accepting of them. And the most concerning threads regarding them were almost a year old.
And besides… G.U.N. hadn't even noticed he had hacked their database. Tails had made sure of that.
And then, with Longclaw coming back, he had genuinely forgotten about it...
Until G.U.N. came to their house, of course.
Since G.U.N. hadn't known they had been hacked, it was ridiculously easy to enter now that he knew the ropes. And when he did (in quite a rush, of course), sure enough, there were a lot of new threads about Longclaw.
That were extremely similar to the old Sonic ones.
He had a plan to threaten Commander Walters with the secret data. He could expose G.U.N.'s dirty deeds to the world and ruin their image. That could be the gateway to making G.U.N. not do anything… drastic to Longclaw, and it would also, hopefully, make G.U.N. leave them (and Longclaw) alone for good.
So, after entering the living room (filled with Commander Walters, Longclaw, and G.U.N. agents all confused at his sudden appearance), he began showing G.U.N.'s data centers.
"How did you access those databases?! They are almost impossible to hack!" Commander Walters exclaimed as Tails showed his very 'interesting' findings on his tablet.
"I have my ways." Tails answered quite bluntly.
Then Tails began explaining what he had found.
"I'm sure the President and the new-arising alien activists wouldn't appreciate such..." Tails began as he finished explaining everything questionable that G.U.N. had written about them. "Threads from G.U.N." Tails finished, smirking slightly, seeing as his plan seemed to be working out. Commander Walters looked more and more nervous as he exposed his plans further. Longclaw looked relieved and a bit surprised. While Tails couldn't see his family, he was pretty certain they were relieved too. And proud of him as well.
"Are you threatening me?" Walters replied, looking even more flustered than before.
Tails grinned and said, "Maybe. After all, I do have a lot of information that none of you would ever want to go out into the public."
Commander Walters sighed quite aggressively and then stopped for a few seconds, seemingly trying to find a way out of this.
But Tails knew there was no way out of it.
Eventually, with Commander Walters probably realizing that he could lose his job if he allowed Tails to share that information, said. "Alright. What do you want?"
The plan had worked!
"To leave Longclaw alone." Tails started, as he did his best to not show his excitement over this.
"And to stop spying on us." Tom said, interrupting Tails and getting into his living room, taking advantage of the situation Tails had provided. "To just let us be. We're not asking for much- you've already spied on us for months."
Commander Walters opened his mouth to probably retaliate that 'we weren't spying', but Maddie cut him off before he had a chance.
"We know G.U.N. agents have been spying on us—don't deny it."
"Alright…" Commander Walter sighed once again, but this time less aggressively. "Let me just get the paperwork…" Walters replied, clearly annoyed. He probably thought this was finally the chance to do all of those... disturbing things to an alien.
How wrong he was.
As he stormed out (to probably find G.U.N. agents who could give him the necessary paperwork), Longclaw gave him a look of immense gratitude, making Tails feel warm and happy inside. His family was so happy too, especially Sonic. They still couldn't say much since there were a lot of G.U.N. agents. Nevertheless, everyone was just content that everything had turned out way better than they had expected.
Eventually, after all the paperwork was dealt with and everything was resolved and talked over, lunch was long forgotten. Commander Walters and the G.U.N. agents began leaving their house. The sun was already leaving by then.
However, unbeknownst to them, someone, among all those G.U.N. agents, was camouflaged...
And that someone was...
Agent Stone…
A week passed since Tails (and Tom and Maddie) had successfully threatened G.U.N.
Sonic wouldn't be separated from his found family. Longclaw wouldn't be separated from him again. And G.U.N. would finally stop putting their noses in their lives.
And she couldn't be more grateful.
And, she had to admit, this whole debacle made her trust Wachowski's family (besides Knuckles) more. The fact that they were so willing to make her safe and, most importantly, make Sonic happy made a very big difference.
While Longclaw pretty much didn't understand a thing Tails had said during his intervention, she knew it wasn't easy. That it wasn't easy to find those files.
No matter how much Tails denies it.
She took her time, after G.U.N. left, to thank them properly. They all said it wasn't a big deal.
But to her, it was.
Eventually, dinner was served. Later than usual, apparently, but that was to be expected considering what happened.
And she, for the first time, tried some human food.
Maddie, right before G.U.N. invaded their house, had searched to see what owls from Earth ate. While she did work in a place where she helped a lot of earthly animals, Longclaw's kind rarely appeared in her line of work.
Maddie had found out that, among other terminology from her work that Longclaw didn't understand, they ate a lot of very similar things that she did—mice, frogs, birds, snakes, fish, and other kinds of similar animals.
Specialists warned against feeding human food to earthly owls, even though they could technically eat it.
Maddie still believed it would be alright, however, since Mobian's bodies were similar to human ones. Apparently, she used some kind of machine that her work provided to know better what was healthy for Sonic, right after the whole Robotnik thing.
And she couldn't deny it—the food of the humans was quite tasty. That evening, she enjoyed 'roast chicken'.
And then, during the next few evenings, she experimented with other dishes, and they were all pretty good. Of course, she still loved eating mice. But it was nice to experiment with other foods, especially as delicious as humans' food apparently was.
She tried to help around the house as well. Now that she was living with them, it was the least she could do.
She also took time to search on a 'computer' for more information about therapy. Once she finally got the gist of how to use a computer, thanks to Tails' help, of course, she understood a lot more about therapy and what was involved, and she's heavily considering agreeing to what Tom and Maddie had proposed to her.
She tried to ask about Carl as well to Tom and Maddie. But each time, she was interrupted by literally anyone. Either it was Sonic wanting to show a 'movie' called 'Speed' or Tails showing some new thing he had done (and Longclaw had to admit, she took quite a liking to him. Not only did he take the military out of her head, but he was just a really good kid. And Tails and Sonic were really close, too.), or Knuckles calling her (and his parents) to go watch a movie.
She had to admit she was still quite wary about Knuckles, even after a week of staying with their son and the Wachowskis. But her relationship with everyone else was getting better. And while a week ago she would never have imagined any of this happening, she was pretty content with how things were turning out.
Especially because their son was really happy. And she was so happy that she finally-
The doorbell rang.
Sonic immediately stopped the movie they were watching.
"Longclaw, let's get to the door! It's a surprise for you!" Sonic said, being the first one to speak after the doorbell rang.
A surprise?
She wondered what it could be. How did even Sonic find time to make her a surprise?
Hello everyone! I hope y'all enjoyed this new chapter :)
First of all, the part where Tails essentially blackmails G.U.N. was inspired by the last chapter of Anywhere But Here by appending_ficI, on ao3. (Check out their fic btw, if you haven't. It's basically the second movie but better lol)
Second of all, I apologize for the shorter word counter than the usual. I promise that next chapter will have, at least, the same usual word count. These last few weeks I've been in vacation, so I haven't had that much time hahaha.
Also, tomorrow, I'll be continuing my internship. So that will take quite a lot of my time. And then I'll have school and internship. So, updates will become less frequent. I still think I'll be able to update monthly, but no promises. At least, my school's schedule this year will be better than last year. And I have less subjects, so there's that, at least 😅😅 (My life is really boring lol).
But anyways, have a good morning/afternoon/evening/night :] (time zones are necessary, but they stink hahaha)
