Chapter 24

Sonic's mind was dark. He floated in his body for hours - or, maybe it was longer than that, he didn't know. The stasis only ever broke from brief flashes of hot, when he would become vaguely aware of feeling sweaty. But even then, the uncomfortable, feverish heat would pass and he'd go back to floating. Second, after second, after second in total, unfeeling quiet.

Then the pain came. It started from somewhere in his back - just soft tingling. Then it turned into an itch, and then a burn. Then his whole chest was searing, and the void that he floated in became thick and heavy around him. He sank deep into the darkness. It covered him, suffocated him, and - Oh Chaos, he was drowning.

Sonic gasped awake in a cold shock, sputtering.

He tried to sit up, but he groaned and curled into himself, confused and aching and… wet? He inspected himself in confused wonder - he was drenched in water. His chest and shoulder was bound so tight that he couldn't take a full breath.

Feeling came back to his body with hell to pay. His head, his back, his feet… Shit, his everything ached. Blood pumped through his system like sludge; like it had curdled while he was catatonic.

"Wake up," a familiar voice barked. Sonic's vision cleared, and he looked up to see Knuckles standing over him, tossing a dripping wooden bowl aside.

"Knuckles?" he asked, and wiped the water from his face. Raising his right arm was almost impossible. "Why... How did -"

Pulling himself into the real world was excruciating and exhausting. Nothing made sense in his mind - there were pieces of information missing, replaced instead by doors and locks.

"We're out of time," Knuckles said. He crossed his arms. "Scourge is taking off with Amy tomorrow night and we need a -"

"What? Amy?" Sonic rubbed his eyes with one hand . "But I don't - I remember… dancing with her and then…"

"You got shot, Sonic," Knuckles said, point blank. "You knocked at death's fucking door, and you've been out for a week."

Sonic's head split open like Knuckles had driven a tent spike through it. The sheer number of memories that came pouring back into his mind made him dizzy.

"Oh, Chaos." Sonic pulled himself onto his knees and almost threw up from the motion sickness. "Help me up, Knucklehead! Where is she? What's he going to do? A week? Are you sure? How long does that leave until the Tournament? Has she been with him the whole -"

"Hold on, Sonic. You're not -"

"Now, Knuckles," Sonic ordered, grabbing onto Knuckles' shirt to pull himself up to standing. "I need to see her now."

Adrenaline woke him up, but still his body hurt. He could hardly shrug his shoulders without feeling the sharp pain of his muscles learning how to move again.

Knuckles grabbed Sonic by the shirt collar and yanked him up to standing. The large echidna held his full weight in his hands easily, keeping Sonic locked nose to nose with him.

"Shut up!" Knuckles growled. "You don't even know where she is, you don't know what the week has been like for us, and after what we did… you don't even know if she wants to see you. Just stop, for two seconds, and listen to me."

Sonic grit his teeth. He was a painful, useless heap of dead weight in Knuckles' hands, just like he had been all week. His friend was right - he had no idea what they had been through. He had been granted the cruel luxury of unconsciousness.

"Go on then," Sonic said under his breath. "Have it out."

"The night of the breakout," Knuckles said, relaxing his grip on Sonic just a bit, "Tails set off the distraction, and I took out the first round of guards that came to investigate. When all the fancy nobles started crowding, we took off back to the camp and waited for you at the meeting point we had set. All normal - all going to plan."

Knuckles' face contorted. Sonic winced. He could see how hard the week had been on the man - Knuckles' eyes were bloodshot and his muscles twitched trying to keep himself awake and standing. If this was what Knuckles was like, Sonic wondered with a sinking feeling, he couldn't begin to think how the week must've been for Amy.

"We waited over four hours, Sonic," Knuckles said. "Tails went to look for you every so often, but the longer we waited… He was terrified and I didn't - I didn't know what to do for him. And then… we heard shouting in the camp."

Sonic shivered.

"Amy walked through the night to drag you here - and after we had kidnapped her, for Chaos sake!" Knuckles' voice grew gravelly and pointed as he tried to contain his anger. "I grabbed her and she looked at me like I was… bad. The way she shouted at us - held a knife at Tails… and Tails had to step in. Made up some story. He could've gotten hurt, dealing with Scourge. This whole week, he could've gotten seriously hurt. We've been starting shit around the camp or busting into Scourge's tent to try and distract him when things get bad but… there's only so much we can do."

Sonic noticed that Knuckles's shirt was stained red, blooming from somewhere in his side. Spatters of the bloodstain were fresh.

"Did Scourge… do that?" Sonic asked.

Knuckles glanced down, chagrined to see he had worked himself up to bleeding again.

"Better me than her," he said, and looked away.

"Is she…" Sonic started to ask, but the thought had no end. Is she… What, he thought? Angry? Injured? Okay? Stupid, small-minded questions with obvious answers, he knew that. But still, like a fool, he insisted on trying to ask.

"We've managed to keep her from any physical injuries that she can't come back from, but…" Knuckles looked away. "Sometimes I think that… maybe that wouldn't have been so bad. Maybe an injury would have been… better than what we actually did."

"I need to see her," Sonic said again. He pushed Knuckles off of him and took a few swaying steps, slow and in control of himself.

"I don't…" Knuckles weighed the options in his mind. "I don't think that's the best idea."

"Knuckles - be serious," Sonic said.

Knuckles blinked at him and crossed his arms.

"Oh, come on!" Sonic begged. "If you can look me in the eyes and tell me that you really think she doesn't want to see me, then I'll drop it! But I need to tell her I'm sorry, I need to start somewhere if I'm going to put this right, and I need to start now . I can't do that without… seeing her."

"What we need right now is a plan to get her -"

"I'm done coming up with stupid little plans without her, Knucklehead!" Sonic said, his voice rising over Knuckles'. "I need her . I need… to know what I can do - what she wants from me. I'll do anything - I'll burn the camp to the ground, I'll let her shoot me with a dozen more arrows. If she tells me to, I'll pack up. I'll leave this place behind and never see her again - I will! I'll do… anything to make her know that I - that I'm sorry."

Knuckles humphed and turned, gesturing Sonic out of the tent. "If Tails says it's fine, then fine. That's my final offer."

Sonic did his best to walk through the camp like nothing had happened. Like the world hadn't turned, for a week, without him. The rumbling whispers of the other thieves shadowed him. Their eyes burned into his back like the all-knowing eyes of Gaia. But he marched with Knuckles, eyes forward, stomping his feet and legs into waking up and working for him.

Tails sat at the back of Scourge's tent in a shadow, huddled tight under his coat. When he saw Sonic, his eyes lit up.

"You got him up!" Tails gasped. He jumped up to meet them and hugged Sonic around his middle, careful to avoid his wound.

"He sure did," Sonic agreed, and squeezed his brother as tight as he could. "Sorry I… Sorry for everything. For being out for so long, for scaring you... But I'm here now -" he held Tails by the shoulder with his good arm and looked him in the eyes "- and I need to see her."

Tails glanced at Knuckles and walked their group to a secluded section of the forest, not too far away from Scourge's tent.

"I - okay," he said. "But Sonic -"

Sonic didn't wait to hear the rest. He turned to make a beeline for the front of the tent. Without missing a beat, Knuckles reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder - hard. Sonic had to bite his lip to keep from yelping at the pain that rocked through his torso as Knuckles stopped him in his tracks.

"You heard him!" Sonic protested.

"You can't just barge in there, Scourge is -" Knuckles hissed.

"Then get him out," he snapped back.

"Alright, alright!" Tails said, jumping in to remove Knuckles' hand from Sonic. "Just calm down, both of you. We have to help Amy right now - we can't do that if we're at each other's throats already. Knuckles -" Tails looked at his friend, guilty "- would you mind…?"

Knuckles nodded and rolled his eyes. "I'll go start some shit. Easy enough."

"Keep it going for as long as you can," Sonic said.

Before he left, Knuckles looked back over his shoulder, an accusatory gleam in his eye.

"Just don't do anything to… make it worse. She's… " words failed him and he shrugged unhappily. "Not good."

Sonic pressed his lips together, annoyed at the insinuation that he would do anything on purpose to 'make it worse'. But he shut his mouth and took the blow. He had no idea what she had gone through the night of the kidnapping. He had no idea what had happened in the last week. He had no idea what kind of woman would be waiting for him in that tent.

"As long as it's Amy in there - even just a shard of her -" he promised Knuckles "- I'll spend as long as it takes finding all the pieces that I need to fix this."

Knuckles trudged off, and before long a fight broke out somewhere near the mass hall. Tails and Sonic watched each other in silence, listening to a thief shout about stolen dinner rations.

"Sonic," Tails said in a hushed voice. "There's… something you should know about Scourge and what happened this week -"

"If he did anything to her - anything at all - I'll kill him myself. Simple as that." Sonic looked away from his friend. Anger knocked at his doorstep. He shut the door hard, and bolted it tight. There would be a time for anger. For now, he just needed to see her. He just needed to see what was left.

"Get him out of there," Sonic commanded, his voice quiet and cold.

Tails nodded, and went to the front of the tent.

Amy was blessed with a few moments of quiet as Tails called Scourge away to handle a fight.

Those rare occasions without him in the room - the times she didn't have to be on high alert to keep him from hurting her - she cherished like gold. For a week, he had tormented her; starved her. And when he wasn't tending to the camp or enjoying a fit of violence, Scourge liked to pass the time by sitting across the room - just talking.

He was a narcissist, she realized that early in the week. She learned how to keep him focused on himself, so he wouldn't focus on her. If she would just listen; just ask him to tell her more, he could be appeased for hours at a time.

So she did.

He told her about the day that he learned he was betrothed to a Princess, and how he knew then that he was destined to rule the world. He told her about the last day he ever saw his mother, when she cried and held him close and told him that news had come down from the palace - he wasn't fit to be King. He told her about the day, years later, when he learned that his father had lied to him. His mother hadn't run off. No, she had leapt from a high tower in her despair, and left him behind.

He told her how strange it was, on that day, to realize that he didn't care about what his mother had done to escape his father's wrath. How strange it was to realize that, for as long as he could remember, he hadn't cared about anything except for her. The Princess. The power that eluded him.

He told her about how standing over his father's sleeping form - knife in hand - was the first time he had felt alive in years, and how the raking scar across his chest that he had received as penance for his treason had set him free.

He piled his traumas in her tired arms like laundry, and Amy listened to it all, trying to be just as unfeeling as he was about his life. But the more he spoke, the more she heard him. The more she wondered if this - he - really was all her fault; if there was some world where she could redeem him - wash him of his sins long past and scrub his heart clean of darkness.

Then he would hit her, and she would remember that she hated him.

It was a lesson she was doomed by her kindness to learn over, and over, and over again during the week. The lesson - his knife - stung her every time.

The tent flap opened after only seconds and Amy's heart sank - she hadn't gotten even a moment of reprieve, and the figure that entered the tent cast too familiar a silhouette, lit from behind by the waning daylight. It certainly wasn't Tails or Knuckles, come to slip her some food.

Amy let her head fall back onto the wooden stake, closed her eyes, and did what she always did when she didn't have the energy to manage Scourge - she pretended to sleep.

"...Ames?"

She gasped. Her eyes fluttered open. In the instant that his voice hit her ears, she was elated.

Then the tent flap fell into place, he stepped into the room, and Amy remembered. She remembered everything.

Looking at him, she felt the instinct to cry. But no tears came. She had nothing left to pour out for him. Thrust back into the raw fear of simply needing to survive, all she could do was shake.

"No," she said aloud, in a whisper.

Sonic's face fell into a pitiful sort of shock when he saw her.

"Amy," he said again. It came out a whisper - a plea.

He meant to take a step forward, but he stumbled and fell to his knees. Heartbreak took him to the ground and held him there; lording over him, pressing down on his shoulders.

The second that he hit the dirt, Sonic was certain that time had stopped. He was certain that the world had gone dark.

He could see a ring around her neck. A blackened bruise like a collar gripped her throat with long, heavy fingers, spreading all the way down to her shoulders. Blood trailed down her temple from fresh wounds, and she was still in his shirt from the party. She was still covered in his old blood, and stuffed into his stolen boots, and adorned in the remnants of her ruined garment.

Amy didn't move; didn't say a word as she watched him - wondering if she really was delirious and he was just a ghost conjured up by a cruel, starved mind. But then -

"Amy…"

A third time, he said her name. She had never heard it sound more pathetic than it did in his mouth.

Sonic scraped himself off the bottom of the ocean to start his crawl toward her. His knees dragged across the floor as he fought the drowning gravity of his regret.

"No, no, no," Amy protested.

The closer he got, the more sure she was that he was real. The more urgent was her total rejection of his presence. The more she needed to run, flee, get away from him.

But she could go nowhere. She could only watch him get closer - his eyes wide and concerned, his hands outstretched for her - and beg him no, no, no.

"Stay where you are!" she cried at the height of her panic.

He listened and froze, just an arm's length from her. His hands went up in the air.

"Don't," she whispered.

"Okay," he conceded, soft and soothing. "Okay, I'll stay right here, I promise. I'm right here."

Responsibility circled above them like a scavenger - waited to see who would be the first to offer themselves up on its unforgiving altar.

"Ames," Sonic said. "What… what can I do?"

She said nothing. Her silence convicted him - called him to repent when all he really wanted from her was punishment.

"Won't you… yell at me, or something?" he begged to fill the quiet. She looked so small tied to the tent pole. So broken. There was no light in her eyes, but Sonic couldn't actually be sure of that. Not when she refused to look at him.

"I'd give anything for you to be mad at me," he said. "Please, Amy, would you just… say you never want me to see you again? Say that I'm horrible, say that I don't deserve to live, say that you hate me -"

Amy's ears flattened. She blinked at him; confounded and furious that he seemed to have no idea.

"You think I hate you?" she asked in quiet disbelief. "That's what you want to hear?"

"...Of course you do," Sonic said, fearfully studying her reactions like they were a sacred text.

Amy lunged for him - her anger a roiling monster that craved physical penitence. It wanted to tear him limb from limb - collect back all the blood and flesh that he had torn from her chest to satiate his own fear. But she was held back; a feral beast chained in place, snarling and snapping.

"Idiot!" she shouted, her quills wild and hanging in her face. "What more do you want from me! What more can I do!"

"I - What do you -"

"I don't hate you, and I never did!" Amy cried, driven to the edge of madness by her grief. "Sonic, I love you!"

Sonic stopped breathing. His heart fell into his stomach.

"No -"

"I silenced it!" Amy said, her voice cracked and hoarse. "Again and again, I silenced myself for you , and all my love… it was so unbearable - it could have consumed me. But I'd have done anything for you - I'd have let it swallow me whole if you had asked -"

"Amy," he whispered. He closed his eyes.

"- I love you!" she insisted, her eyes angry and shining. "With the kind of fervor that destroys Kings; with the kind of zealotry that starts wars, I love you! Even right now - right this very moment - Sonic, I can't stand it. I hate you. And I love you, I love you, I love you -"

"Please -"

"- And if you had just let me say that a month ago - a week ago! If you had just let me tell you every day since it became the truth; I love you…" Amy's voice broke.

"And if you had let yourself hear it -" she said, still straining against her bonds to do what? She didn't know "- then maybe this all would have been different for us! But you - You were scared. You ran, and you ran, and you ran. Sonic, if you didn't love me -"

"Amy, I do - "

"Don't lie to me!" she screeched, unable to bear hearing him say it. "You loved whatever it was you were trying to protect with all this - the thrill, the freedom, yourself. Not me. Look at me, Sonic - Look at what we've done…"

He did. She caught her breath and swallowed hard, letting all the dust settle around them. Letting him see what was left. Ash, and anger, and blood, and bruising.

They stared at each other, on their knees across the tent, scarred and war-torn; whispers of the people they had met months ago in the glen.

But this was what they had wanted - wasn't it? They had unmade each other with such fevered care. They had plucked and skinned and picked over until all their threads were pulled apart and all their layers were peeled away and they were but raw, beating hearts laid bare on the cold earth.

"This isn't love, Sonic." Amy said, her voice frighteningly even. "This is ruin. You can't have loved me - because if this is what it is… then I don't want it."

Amy sat back on her heels. By some miracle, she found one last tear, and it rolled down her cheek.

"You were always worthy of care - of my love," she whispered. "But I can't make you understand that, and you can't make me collateral while you figure it out. Until you learn… Until you can hear me, and know that it is a truth as expansive and complex as the universe itself that I love you … I refuse to forgive you."

Sonic closed his eyes and gripped onto the ring at his neck.

He let the silence - her judgment and sentencing; her love - fill his lungs until he was overflowing with it. Drowning in it.

He reached up and rubbed a tear from his eye. And then another. It hurt. It all hurt to hear. It was devastating; horrible. It was the truth.

"...You love me?" he asked. He could hardly believe it, and yet he had nothing left to convince himself that it was a lie. He had no choice but to hear her. She had saved his life, even the very moment that he had forsaken hers. She had saved him.

"I love you," she whispered.

Sonic grit his teeth. He fell onto his forearms, bowed completely before her. His chest heaved from the pain. Sonic gathered his courage - courage he knew he only had because she had given it to him - and began to dig his heart out from where it lay in the dirt.

Amy watched him. She saw a tear fall from under the cover of his quills and hit the dirt, wet and replenishing.

"I'm sorry," he said, shaking from the burden of his emotions. "I should have… I should have done so many things differently, but I was so afraid. I can't risk losing anyone, and -" he choked on the thought "- losing you - even just to… to have to stand by and watch you get engaged - it sent me into a panic, and then Scourge found out and -"

"Scourge," Amy gasped. Her emotions had been so total that she had forgotten. "Sonic, there's something you need to know about him -"

Voices, loud and urgent, cut through the heavy air of the tent. Their time was up.

Sonic pushed himself up and toward her, the fur of his cheeks still wet. He took her as best he could into his arms and held her face in his hands.

For as many milliseconds as he thought he could spare, Sonic looked deep into her eyes and drank her in. He wanted to see every scar, every bruise, so he could repay each and every one of them in kind to Scourge. He inspected her with gentle intention, turning her face this way and that to make sure she wasn't concussed or actively bleeding. The intense bruise at her neck killed him. Anger knocked at his door every time he thought about what might have caused it.

He caught sight of a flash of blue and paused. The hope of what he had seen set his heart beating in his chest again.

"May I?" he whispered.

Amy held her breath in his arms, still not quite comforted by his presence. But she knew what he had seen, and she nodded.

Sonic pulled the collar of his ruined party clothes aside with two fingers.

The blue… a silk flower pin along the collar of her dirty garment. The petals were ripped to shreds - a few were fully missing. The pearl in the center was long gone, lost and buried in the dirt like his tears. But still, the pin was there. It always had been. That pin was the last piece of them - the sign of life amongst the ashes. It was all he needed to know that he could still fix this. He could still find her, and find himself, and they could rebuild the house - together - board by board. That pin - that beautiful pin.

The pin that he hadn't thrown away all those weeks ago. The pin that she hadn't thrown away, either.

He looked back up at her. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. He had missed the soft blush of her fur, her nose, her dark lashes and penetrating stare... He took it all in while he still could - the feeling of her in his hands.

Knuckles shouted, loud and long from close outside the tent.

"Don't go far," Amy whispered, her gaze still angry and dark. "Stay, and listen. You need to know something."

"Anything," he pledged to her. "Anything at all for you. And I'll be back soon with a plan - you won't be here another night, I promise on my life."

He pressed a kiss to her forehead before he could think better of it and then pushed himself to his feet.

Sonic emerged from under the back of the tent into the cold. Night had already set in around the camp. Tails watched him from where he sat with his back to the tent, his eyes bloodshot and shining.

Tails held a finger to his lips and nodded for Sonic to join him. As Sonic settled on the ground, he heard Scourge's grating voice from inside the tent. He shuddered. The anger knocked at his door again just hearing him.

"What if…" Sonic heard Amy's muffled voice saying, "I refuse to go along with you? What if, the moment I'm alone with him, I tell the King everything you've done? I look like death - and surely he knows what you did to your father all those years ago."

"My father was known to be violent - brutal," Scourge said. "I'll play the victim - I am the victim. The noble son - the hero, who toiled away for a better life after his unfair exile at the hands of an insane and aging Lord. Waiting and working in hopes of one day being worthy of his long lost betrothed. I didn't do this to you - that horrible blue thief who kidnapped you did."

Sonic looked over at Tails, not sure he had understood. Tails nodded at him desperately. Sonic's mouth suddenly tasted sour. Amy's betrothed… if it was Scourge - which was impossible, surely - then was it he who…

"Is that the only reason why your father pillaged Greenhill?" Amy pressed on loudly. "After our engagement was broken? He was just… slighted? And volatile?"

Sonic's heart stilled. His vision went red.

"Probably," Scourge laughed. "Guess he was good at leaving scars."

Sonic sprang up and lunged toward the tent. Tails grunted and threw his whole body in Sonic's way just to stop him in his tracks. They went colliding to the ground in a thrashing heap. Sonic cried out at the brutal pain as his body hit the ground, but still he clawed his way back toward the tent.

To Tails' relief, Knuckles found them and immediately hauled Sonic to his feet, pulling him a good many paces away from the tent.

"Let me go!" Sonic cried. He thrashed uselessly against Knuckles. "Is it true? It can't be true!"

"It's -" Tails said. "Sonic, I'm sorry it's - it's why he recognized that ring you brought to camp - why this whole thing started. It was their engagement ring - his engagement ring to -"

"No," Sonic snarled, and winced as Knuckles dug his hands into his shoulders to keep him in place.

"And he was the one who busted the camp all those years ago, just so he could start -" Tails choked. He was crying. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"Let me go!" Sonic howled. "Let me go!"

"Get a grip!" Knuckles barked at him. "You can't go back in there. Give Scourge one reason to hurt her and he will - all that matters right now is getting Amy to the Tournament."

Scourge. Scourge was responsible. He was the root cause - the rot, the dark shadow haunting him. It was all Scourge.

Sonic unlocked the door and let his anger wake him back up. It pumped him full of new adrenaline; it demanded revenge. It turned him cold and sharp and desperate to collect on Scourge's deep, bloody well of debt.

He refused to let Scourge take yet another person that he loved from him. He was done with the camp, done with thieves. Done with honor.

"Let me go," Sonic snarled again, this time his voice was sharp. "I've got a plan - I've got to do something. I need… I need…"

He pushed himself away from Knuckles, who stood at the ready to catch him again, just in case he made a break for the tent.

But Sonic didn't. He turned the opposite way and strode toward the forest to leave camp.

"I'm going out," Sonic said. "One of you, stay with Amy. The other, gather our things and wait for me outside of camp."

Tails had to jog to keep up with the other two men.

"Tell us what you're going to do - tell us what we can do to help you," the fox said.

Sonic grit his teeth, angry at what he knew had to happen. He needed more than what he was capable of alone. He needed to bring the entire operation to its knees. He needed someone he could trust to get Amy to safety; someone who had power and numbers and resources. He needed…

"We're going to do exactly what Scourge did to us all those years ago." Sonic said. "We're going to pull the rug out from under him. We're going to steal it all back."

Sonic's eyes lit up, unflinching in the face of what he knew he had to do.

"We're going to bust up the camp."

And he needed Shadow to help him do it.