Meteor Kid Chapter 21: Gray Days, a sonic the hedgehog fanfic

A/N: Sorry for the long break. It was a busy and depressing time for senior and I needed to concentrate on college. Also I changed the narration into present tense.

Chapter 21: Gray Days

We hadn't met or spoken to one another since then. Shadow and us kind of parted away after that quarrel, he was avoiding us intentionally.

It was an irreparable mistake. We could have been there with him and probably prevent it, but we were not.

I always thought Shadow was immortal, we all thought like that because that was what he was, or at least seemed to be. We thought he would live forever, till world's end or even after. But he died, earlier than all of us.

"In the end, we still know nothing about that kid." Amy said to me once on the way back home, after visiting Shadow's grave. She said it with her head looking up, staring into the deep-gray sky.

"Have you ever met him in the future?" Tails asked. He was looking at my direction, but not me. His eyes were focusing on somewhere else, far from here.

"I wish I could say yes, but..." I sighed. The air surrounding us was moist, heavy and sticky. I didn't like it.

"I don't think he could have lived till my time."

I told my thought. It sounded sane, reasonable; logical, I mean.

"It's going to rain." Sonic interrupted. He was walking ahead of us, also staring at the dark sky. He was right. It rained almost immediately after his words.

But it felt odd, different. The raindrops were unusually hot, and they were black, as if someone began spraying boiling-hot ink down the sky. We were all surprised and started to open our umbrellas. But soon, the raindrops corroded through the fiber, and everything went black and scotching hot.

I woke up. The dream was extremely long and realistic. It wasn't the first time I had this dream. I have had it a few times ever after the series of incidents in Holoska, but this time it was most realistic, so real that I could not ignore it anymore.

"It's just the same dream, again and again...I guess it's the third time this month? I don't know why it keeps happening." Silver takes a sip. "Do you think it could be a precognitive dream?"

"Well...it's not impossible," Tails comes over and sits down by his side. "Considering your growing power...but still, I wonder what can be fatal to Shadow? We all know that he's-"

"Immortal? Exactly." Rouge's voice comes from the ceiling. She is hanging upside-down and doing sit-ups, which is part of the rehabilitation she has made for herself. "Silvy dear, if you really want to do something about it, I'd say go and warn him is the best way, regardless the result. Sure Shadow is under surveillance right now, but you can still visit him. I can give you his location."

"I...I'm not sure." Silver frowns. He looks down and stares into the mug, the water surface is still rippling a little, reflecting part of his face. "After all it's just a dream, right? Like all those dreams I had in the past...no, not exactly the same..."

It was way too realistic, too real for me to neither forget nor believe-

"I don't understand." He says to the reflection of himself in the mug.

"I don't understand either." Blaze sighs. She has returned from Angel Island, after spending a month collecting the chaos emeralds and trying to connect with them. "All I got were broken pieces of words."

"Maybe write them down, and we will figure it together when we're back to Tails' lab." Amy offers an idea. She had come to Angel Island with Knuckles' help to pick Blaze up. Now they are heading back together. "What are those words?"

"Well, it's..." Blaze tries to memorize. But she is soon interrupted by the sound of someone walking towards them uphill.

It's a girl about their age, hobbling slowly, and half-singing-half-murmuring something in an almost inaudible voice. She is holding her stomach with her back hunched and her head down. This makes her moves stiff and weird, as if she is injured or exhausted. At a distance of half a meter or so, she stops moving and falls on her knees.

"Hey! Are you okay?" Amy notices her anomaly and steps forward quickly to offer help, Blaze follows her closely. Then they are shocked at her appearance. The girl looks terrible. She is skinny, almost out of shape, the triangular shackles on her ankles and her tail, as well as the burns on her limbs limit her moves. Her fur was probably white before, but now has become a dirty gray, ruffled and tangled together, just like her ragged clothes. It's as if she had been through hell.

"Oh my..." Blaze exclaims. She comes to the other side and supports the girl together with Amy. "What happened to you!?"

The girl stops her mumbling-like song but does not answer them. She seems to use her last strength to lift up her head and peak at them through her long bangs. Her pupils are becoming diluted, a streak of hope and comfort flash on her face as she falls unconscious.

...

It's then a week later that the girl finally wakes up from her dying condition. Her recovery is surprisingly rapid. But what surprises everyone more are the first moves she has after becoming fully conscious. The doctor and nurses rush into her ward, finding her induce vomiting with her fingers deep in the throat.

"What do you think you are doing?!" The doctor rebukes harshly while the nurses are restraining her back to the bed. But soon, he seems to realize his gaffe and falls silent. After a few seconds, he calms himself down and moves toward the bed.

"Can you understand my words?" The doctor asks as he brings out a small vial of tranquilizer and a syringe from his pocket.

"Yes! Let me go!" The girl struggles harder as she sees him removes the caps and inserts the needle into the vial.

"Do you know who you are?" "Yes, but that's not important!" She continues to struggle and cries out louder, "I need to get that damned stone out before it's too late! You don't understand! I'm not killing myself nor am I crazy!"

"I understand what you mean, Miss," the doctor has finished drawing the dose, he removes the syringe and puts the vial back into his pocket, "you are referring to that foreign object in your stomach. Don't worry, we will perform a surgery to remove it as soon as your condition is more stable. So now please-"

"No! No! You don't understand at all!" She almost yells out with her husky voice. "It's not an object, it's alive! If I don't remove it right now, it will grow into my body and become part of me till my death! It feeds on my flesh and my life!"

"What are you even talking about-" The doctor is shocked by her raving. But soon, the happening of another bizarre event hushes him and the other ones, brings them even beyond shock.

The girl's abdomen starts to glow and gives out a soft, pale-yellow light.

Along with the light, a child's apathetic voice, with superciliousness and dignity, breaks the silence:

"Your ancestors chose to offer me with their flesh and blood; but your own worry is superfluous...you should feel honored that I spare you, for I spurn the cursed lineage that you belong to, Limn Hiemsima!"

The next second, several bright lights break out from her stomach and cut through-her abdomen along with clothes are split open, traces of blood and streaks of light across one another, sketching out a three-dimensional geometric shape, as if a flower made out of blood and light is blooming.

The girl is screaming in pain, but her voice is all swallowed up by the unknown, pale-yellow silence that fills the room. All the attention is not on her twisted teared face but her abdomen right now.

Slowly, a sphere-shaped jewel, about the size of an eyeball, rises up from her flesh. In tenth of a second, it absorbs in all the light streaks and falls on the ground. Immediately afterwards, the blood streams that were once floating in the air suddenly falls down under gravity and spill out on the girl's body as well as the medics around her. The girl, again, has lost her consciousness out of extreme pain.

Strangely, she seems to age a little after the jewel had left her body.

At this point, the monitoring record ends, with the medics hurry to move her out of the ward.

Everyone in front of the screen is in silent astonishment, except Shadow, who is trying to limit expressing more emotion on his face.

"That voice...is the Veritagate." He finally speaks out.

"...Now, where are they?"

...

(To be continued)

I kind of spent time diving myself into the robot animes and mangas of last century. They amazed me and inspired me a lot.