Am I slow in updating or am I slow in updating?

This story is tough. But I'm so excited to share more of it now. One more update for 2023 it is!


Chapter Seven: Shudders

May 6th, 2006

If you'd have asked me a week ago what I would be doing now, there is absolutely no way I would have guessed I'd be three years in the past, starting a small baking business with Cream on a waystation as a way of fighting the Metarex. I'd say I've done weirder things in the past, but I don't think that's true.

Chasing Sonic down into one of Eggman's heavily-enforced bases almost seems like clear and rational thought compared to this.

But it's not like there's any better way I can contribute. Until the Blue Typhoon's repaired, we're stuck on this waystation. Standing still. Basically just waiting for the Metarex to find us.

I know I should be thankful for the chance to take a breath. We were thrown back in time and straight into a war flying a craft that was practically falling apart midflight. I'm pretty sure this is the first real chance Tails and Chris have had to sleep. Not that they aren't helping the engineers with repairs, partially to keep the costs down and partially just to make sure the fixes are done right. But at least they're both sleeping some of the time. And that time spent sleeping isn't done while also standing upright.

The problem is that it's hard to feel grateful when none of this feels real. I keep trying to figure out what's different this time, compared to the last time we jumped back in time. Is it because it felt like a blessing last time for things to be undone? Or maybe it's because we were given a chance to process? Or could it be because our current situation feels surreal?

After all, we're basically running a bake sale against the Metarex.

Amy looked up from her notebook at the sound of the dinging timer in the kitchen on the Blue Typhoon. Beyond the space of the kitchen, she could hear the whirring and clanging of tools as repairs on the Blue Typhoon continued. At least the kitchen was still operational. Otherwise, Amy had no idea how they would've raised the funds needed for the repairs.

As Amy pulled another warm loaf of bread from the oven (and against all odds, Amy was really starting to grow nauseated by the scent of fresh-baked bread), Cream wandered into the kitchen. She stared at the pad of paper she held in front of her as she walked, the end of her pen pressed against her lips. The sight made the corners of Amy's lips pick up into a smile. Proud to see her friend growing into a self-sufficient young woman, even if Cream's body didn't reflect that.

"Everything okay there, Cream?" Amy pulled the oven mitts off her hands and placed them alongside the now-cooling bread.

"I may have mis-scheduled," Cream said without pulling her eyes away from the paper in front of her. Cheese hovered worryingly over her shoulder.

"And that means…what exactly?"

Finally, Cream lifted her head to look up at Amy over the coils of her pad. "Would you mind making a delivery?""

Amy shrugged. "I doubt I'll have the same charm as you," she replied, offering Cream a wry smile. "But sure, I can do it. Why? Do you have a specialty recipe to make?"

Cream's cheeks flushed. "It's not that I don't trust you or anything!" she insisted quickly.

Amy laughed. "I'm not offended, Cream. I don't mind making the delivery if you want to work on something."

Besides, maybe taking a walk would be enough to remind her that this was real life.

-(-)-

On her way off the Blue Typhoon—a tray of bakery wrapped in a flowered handkerchief cradled in her hands—Amy passed Cosmo in the hall. The girl hung on a doorway, peeking around the corner and into the engine room. Amy paused and followed Cosmo's gaze. Inside the room, Tails sat working on the innards of the Master Emerald's metal pedestal, the shattered remains of the Master Emerald above his head. Amy pulled her eyes back to Cosmo's face to see the worried crease between Cosmo's eyes.

"He's just doing his best," Amy told her.

Cosmo jumped at the sound of Amy's voice. After a second more, she pulled her gaze away from Tails to look back over her shoulder at Amy. "He's working too hard," she said in a small voice. She glanced back at Tails for a second, as if to make sure he hadn't heard her. Though Amy wasn't sure it would be such a bad thing if he had heard; Cosmo wasn't wrong, after all.

"It's what he knows best," Amy said with a sigh, taking a step forward to stand beside Cosmo. It was easy to remember how relentlessly focused Tails had been when he was younger when he looked younger again to match. "If he can do something, he gets it done. He wants to be as much of a hero as Sonic is."

The words tasted sour as they left her mouth. After all they had gone through, that was what she had to say about Tails? It felt like such a weak assessment of Tails that it was practically a lie.

So instead, Amy turned to Cosmo, holding out her bakery delivery. "Do you want to help me with a delivery? Maybe get out and walk for a bit?"

-X-X-X-

Sonic's View

Maybe…just maybe…Sonic could never stop running.

On the waystation, Sonic made himself scarce from the moment Amy told him to run. He barely stopped to rest. If he slowed down, he gave his mind time to think. If he closed his eyes, images of his memories played across the inside of his eyelids, images of torture. Even if he was at a time prior to which such things had occurred.

While his friends walked away from their nightmares, he had never managed to beat his demons back into Hell. No matter how fast he ran, no matter where he ran, he failed to outpace them.

But still he tried. He raced through the tiers of the waystation. Through the engineering bay, through the shopping district the next tier up, through the residential area that made up the rest of the waystation. He wove between the individuals moving about their business, leaving nothing more than a breeze in his wake.

He wondered if Amy regretted telling him to go for a run. If she had known the moment he started that he would never stop, would she have told him to go? She must be worried about him. His other friends too. Amy tended to be "a fixer." She found joy in helping others.

How it must feel for her to be with someone so utterly unfixable.

And finally, the ache of that thought stabbed Sonic's heart, squeezed his lungs, and forced him to slow to a stop. He stood at the edge of the highest circular tier in the waystation, the remaining tiers slowly rotating beneath him. He wished for a proper breeze. The artificial environment of the waystation was no substitute for the real thing.

Sonic never used to worry about how life worked. Nature always seemed to have things handled. It had been managing things since long before he was born, so who was he to interfere? And when he did get involved, it was always because someone was trying to manipulate nature. Whatever he did was to put things back into nature's hands.

But…what was happening now…was that nature or manipulation?

Time travel without Chaos Emeralds over and over again, in such a way that it sent the Chaos Emeralds screaming inside his skull before they scattered across the galaxy once more. Time Whisperers watching over the flow of time, though even they admitted that not all possibilities of time were visible to them, not to mention they were mysteriously absent at the moment, even his daughter-who-might-have-been.

Did that mean this was meant to be? Did that mean he was meant to suffer? He hated the way these philosophical thoughts rattled around his head. When did right and wrong get to feeling so complicated?

What he wouldn't give to be back on Mobius, fighting Eggman and his soulless mechs.

Sonic stretched his arms high above his head. His back and shoulders cracked as he did so, like his body was actually as old as his mind. But the lack of Metarex-made scars across his body said otherwise.

No more secrets.

The words echoed across his thoughts. The promise he had made to Amy in the future, in one version of their timeline. Maybe not in this version of their timeline, but knowing Amy, she probably still expected him to hold to his promise. But what was secret and what was simply a reality of how he lived now? Even so, she probably knew how he was feeling.

After all, she was the one who had told him to go for a run.

And since running was more than what he did—it was what he knew, when he started to doubt whether he truly knew anything else—he turned away from the edge of the waystation, from the darkness of space that had come to replace his blue open sky, and started running again.

He had just hit a stable pace when the first explosion rocked the waystation.

-X-X-X-

Amy's View

Amy had just turned away from the door to which she had delivered Cream's bakery, when an explosion sent her stumbling.

Cosmo caught Amy by her shoulders and steadied her before she went too far. When Amy tilted her head up to thank Cosmo, she saw that all the color had drained from her complexion. "Was that from engineering?" Amy asked.

But Cosmo shook her head as she shivered. "We're too high up in the station for that."

Amy straightened and twisted around on the spot, looking up and down the tier's street (more like an alley, honestly) for some sign of what had caused the explosion. Saw nothing obvious. Like the whole waystation was holding its breath, waiting for an explanation.

And then all the blue-white lights illuminating the street snapped to blood-red.

A low-pitched siren grew into a high-pitched wail. Screams of the waystation's habitants echoed around them, then rapid footsteps joined in the cacophony.

"Amy…?"

Amy twisted back to Cosmo, but the movement felt robotic. Like the synapses in her brain were delayed in their firing. "People wouldn't panic so much if this was normal to the waystation," she breathed.

Cosmo drew both her shaking hands to her mouth.

The Metarex had found them.

-X-X-X-

Tails's View

Tails stumbled in his sprinting down the hallways of the Blue Typhoon, but he scrambled to recover his footing, avoiding the face-planting alternative. His heart battered in his chest. It stole the precious space in his chest that his lungs needed to use to expand with air. But his thoughts swirled with too much panic to worry about something as trivial as sufficient oxygen.

He needed to get to the Blue Typhoon's back-up bridge. He needed to run diagnostics. He needed to figure out if the Blue Typhoon was whole enough to fly.

Because if it wasn't, he needed to give his friends some time to come to terms with the fact that they were going to die.

The communicator at Tails's wrist erupted in beeping. He reached over with his opposite hand to flip it open without missing a beat in his sprinting. "Tails!" Chris's voice shouted from the communicator. "We have confirmation that it's the Metarex initiating the attack on the waystation. How close is the Blue Typhoon to being able to fly?"

"I'm trying to figure that out now!" he shouted back.

Tails slid through the doorway of the back-up bridge and headed straight for the main console. The screen flashed to life, and Tails's shaking fingers stumbled over the keyboard. Windows burst open one after the other. Tails's eyes jumped across the data, sometimes having to read the same window twice to make sense of what he saw. "Most of the critical damage has been repaired," he reported. "The Sonic Driver hasn't been rebuilt and the Master Emerald's still in pieces. But our back-up power should be enough to power shields and weapons for a little while." Tails shifted his wrist so he could look the image of Chris on his communicator in the eye and exclaimed, "We're good to fly!"

"I'll spread the word. You prep the ship," Chris replied immediately.

Tails nodded though he had already turned his attention away from the communicator so he wasn't certain Chris caught the gesture. "Then I need you and Knuckles on board, ASAP."

"Roger."

Tails flipped the communicator closed, wincing as he did so. He only realized his error now. Realized that without an intact Master Emerald, Knuckles wouldn't be much help getting them in the air. Not that the error mattered. Chris was smart enough to figure it out without Tails needing to take the time to call him back and make the correction.

Instead, he rubbed the exhaustion from his eyes and got to work.

-X-X-X-

Sonic's View

The initial explosion knocked Sonic from his feet. But because he had just reached his running pace, he didn't just fall. He went flying.

He didn't have the opportunity to make sense of his body leaving the ground before it crashed back down again. Face pressed against the warm metal floor, Sonic took one heartbeat, two heartbeats to catch his breath. He pressed his palms against the floor and pushed himself upright. Hated himself for how much his arms shook with the effort. He tilted his head back to look out the space waiting just outside the boundaries of the artificial atmosphere.

To where awaited a massive Metarex spacecraft.

He wasn't certain what emotion flooded his body first: quaking fear, deep in the marrow of his bones, or furious anger, like a fever in his forehead.

How?

How had the Metarex found them so fast? After they had launched themselves across the galaxy to who-knows-where using the fake Chaos Emeralds? Could it be nothing more than coincidence? But even if these Metarex didn't realize who in particular they were picking a fight with, they were otherwise attacking a non-aggressive waystation.

Sonic climbed the rest of the way to his feet. A snarl curled his lip. He gave power to the small fraction of anger in him. Better that than fear.

Time to stop running away. And start running toward.

-X-X-X-

Amy's View

Amy and Cosmo twisted through the crowd on unsteady legs, made no more stable by the quaking ground beneath their feet as the waystation shuddered under the blows of Metarex fire. Amy's fingers twitched at her side, wishing for her hammer, not that it would do her any good. She could fight individual Metarex. But she couldn't go "mano-y-mano" against an entire Metarex spacecraft with nothing more than a hammer.

As long as the Metarex remained in their ship, Amy doubted they stood any sort of chance.

The wailing of the siren blew out Amy's eardrums. The fierce red lights burned Amy's retinas. Bodies collided with Amy's and sent her spinning. It took all her focus to keep her feet beneath her. Her temples throbbed with the effort.

The crowd around them rushed against them, pushing the opposite direction. Because while escape pods seemed to be spread out along the outside edge of the tier, Amy and Cosmo pushed toward the center column piercing through all tiers of the waystation, holding it together. The column housed the only means of getting between tiers. The only way to get to the bottom tier, the repair bay, the Blue Typhoon.

Amy shoved forward and forward.

Too many bodies, too many limbs.

Heat and panic and frantic heartbeats.

Would getting to the Blue Typhoon even make a difference? Would they run? Would they fight? Could the Blue Typhoon even fly?

Amy gave a quick glance behind her to make sure she saw the green head of Cosmo bobbing behind her, though the red panic lights painted everything a warped version of itself. Even so, Amy caught a glance of the suggestion of green and twisted forward once more.

Amy felt naked without the headset she had grown accustomed to in the alternate timelines in which she had lived. She missed being able to connect on a plan on demand. Not to mention being able to know that everyone was okay.

Was everyone okay?

A queue awaited her at the elevator in the center column of the waystation. Amy skidded to a stop, grinding her teeth to smother the urge to shove her way to the front of the line. After a moment, she regained her composure enough to say, "It's okay. We're going to be okay."

Not that she expected her words to comfort herself. But maybe it would be enough to reassure Cosmo. She turned to offer Cosmo the truest smile of comfort she could fake.

Except she met the eyes of a stranger.

Amy's heart froze still.

She twisted on the spot, searching for Cosmo's among the eyes of dozens of panicked strangers shifting and shoving around her. "Cosmo?" she said. But in her fear, her voice was hardly an audible sound at all.

Amy shoved against the strangers, against all logic. She twisted between bodies. No one bothered to try to move out of her way. She was the crazy one, after all, the one moving away from safety or least the option of possible escape. She pushed and they pushed. Her racing heart strangled her so that she couldn't get Cosmo's name out.

Bodies shoving. And bruising. And strangling. Not even enough room to drag her hammer out. She drowned in the bodies and the fear…

Alone, she couldn't make the ground she needed. The panic of the masses was stronger than her panic alone. Until the crowd's movements finally shoved her back into the elevator and the doors sealed shut.

-X-X-X-

Sonic's View

Sonic never used to think of himself as a hero. When he was just fighting Eggman, the experience was easy enough. The whole thing had felt like a game then. He could call himself an adventurer and be done with it.

He only decided to go along with the label of hero when he had grown older and his enemies grew larger. But the word wasn't his own. Which maybe justified the way his heart raced faster than his feet as he ran toward the Metarex ship opening fire on the peaceful waystation.

But maybe even then, he wasn't a hero. Maybe the Metarex only fired on the waystation because Sonic and his friends had sought refuge here. Then he was just a coward using living creatures for shields.

And now they all paid the price.

The shields on the waystation held—for now—but that did not deter the Metarex as they fired a barrage upon the space station. Missiles exploded against the station's translucent shield, so the shots shattered into pieces almost like fireworks. And though the shots failed to break through, the force of fire still reverberated through the station. Sonic felt it through the soles of his shoes, up through his legs, vibrating out of the palms of his hands. The shaking made it feel like threads of electricity buzzed beneath the surface of his skin.

He raced on in the opposite direction of everyone else. He had no idea where they intended to hide while the entirety of the station was under attack. Maybe there were escape pods? That would mean Sonic could buy them time, offer up a distraction.

So he ignored the way each explosion sent his already racing heart into arrhythmia. Ignored the way the fur at the base of his skull stood on end, trying to anticipate backup since in this timeline, he didn't have a headset available to him to offer up the service.

And he raced for the highest point of the space station.

Sonic was already on the highest habitable level of the space station, but one more metal tier hung above his head as a sort of ceiling that prevented easy civilian access to the highest point of the space station. But there was one section of that ceiling that didn't extend to the same distance to the tier beneath.

Sonic raced for that point, moving around the edge of the station to avoid the panicked flow residents. And when the sky—the emptiness of space—opened up above his head, he pulled his body into a ball and used the acceleration to push himself toward the gap.

He bent his knees to land, fingertips of one hand brushing the ground for further stability. The metal shuddered beneath him, but it was almost matching the time of the racing of his heart. He pressed his palm against the metal for further purchase to shove himself properly upright.

And froze.

The space station shuddered beneath his red sneakers. The citizens beneath him cried out in fear. Uncertainty. Would the shields fail? Would the Metarex break through or chase down the escape pods? Sonic wished he could return to such uncertainty.

The certainty before him was so much worse.

The quaking, the explosions, the voices, the voices, they were all sucked into the vacuum of space. The pressure pushed down against Sonic's ears.

All was silent.

Except for the voice of the forest green Metarex before him as Green Fichus sneered, "As it turns out, Blue Seed, you can't kill me. It's too bad you are far more mortal."