Chapter Thirty-One: Wake Me When the Nightmare Ends

I listen to Angel's plan. It's a backward version of the plan I might have come up with. Which tells me that Angel's plan is the one we should follow.

When she suggests that C2 and she take on the responsibility of piloting our smaller crafts to put up a defense against the Metarex craft alongside us, my immediate instinct is to question the idea. But I don't. I wait. And when I wait, Angel explains.

I broke out of the Metarex trick. Angel didn't, not on her own, not without me. I've got the better chance of navigating how the Metarex use their fake Emeralds to taint the power of our real one.

Because we have to break out before we flee. Otherwise, Amy and Shadow and Nova…they might be lost.

Forever.

Though it went against Tails's instincts, he lowered himself to the ground once again. He gathered the Chaos Emerald in his hands. Watched the way the fake Emeralds tainted its normally steady Energy into a flickering disaster.

When he woke Angel, he expected to leave her to this task. She was a Time Whisperer with experience traversing the subconscious. Not to mention Sonic's daughter with experience navigating the Energy of the Chaos Emeralds. But Tails was the one who had seen through the Metarex trick. Angel hadn't. He had the better chance of helping his friends see the same.

Tails glanced at Shadow beside him. Even in the depths of unconsciousness, Tails found tension marring Shadow's expression. Tails didn't know if he would be the easiest to wake. He only knew Shadow would be of most use in a fight when the Metarex decided to break the stalemate.

-(-)-

Tails opened his eyes to the ruins of Mayjk. Haze filled the air and dust gathered around his ankles, but there was no one living to be seen. He stared steadily ahead to avoid looking at the no-longer-living littering the ruins.

Tails had no idea how large these illusions could be. How far from him Shadow might be.

What would Shadow's worst nightmare be? Tails wondered, hoping answering that question would tell him where to go. And Tails knew the answer immediately. The nightmare hadn't been this place, this destruction, but the potential of what else Shadow might find among it.

Tails started walking. Then running. Time was ticking. How long did they have before the Metarex gave up whatever game they were playing and opened fire?

And then, as if Tails was in the midst of a lucid dream of which he claimed control, there was Shadow all at once in front of him. The hedgehog stood staring blankly into a closet that stood impossibly in the middle of the street. "Shadow!" Tails shouted.

Shadow didn't twitch. He just kept staring. Whatever he gazed upon had him caught within its spell.

Tails slowed up a few steps behind Shadow and closed the remaining distance at a walking pace. "Shadow, it's not real," he tried. But still Shadow didn't so much as flinch, even with Tails nearly beside him. So Tails stepped up to Shadow's side and looked inside the closet with him.

At Nova's corpse.

Tails recoiled, stumbling backward, nearly tripping over his tails in the process. His head swam, his stomach churned. Nova's dead, Nova's dead, Nova's—

She wasn't though.

Tails forced his legs to steady. Sucked in a breath and paced out the exhale. Shadow hardly blinked. Grief had frozen him.

It was so hard to believe this wasn't real. Even as Tails focused his thoughts on the image of Nova lying on the floor of the backup bridge of the Blue Typhoon, unconscious as she navigated the trick the Metarex were manufacturing specifically for her, Tails's brain tried to bully him into believing that the Nova before him was the real one. So Tails did the one thing he knew would force his brain to see reason. He reached for Shadow's arm and watched his fingers slide through Shadow, as if one or both of them weren't there at all.

Tails's breathing steadied.

"Shadow, this isn't Nova," Tails said, his voice far steadier this time. "We found Nova. She's alive. She's hurt and sick but alive. Remember how we found her? Remember how she has Airin's Disorder? How you carried her back to the Blue Typhoon?"

Shadow twitched. His eyes flicked in Tails's direction before snapping back to Nova's corpse before him. "Don't play with me, fox." Shadow's voice was hardly a whisper. It sounded like hope he was crushing down before it got the better of him.

"Touch her," Tails told him. So gently. Far gentler than he had ever been with Shadow before. "Then you'll know."

Shadow scowled. His eyes flicked in Tails's direction once more. But then, he stepped forward. He crossed the threshold of the closet and knelt at Nova's side. The fur at his knees absorbed her blood. He reached for her face, for the hair coated in cooling sweat. And Shadow's hand fell right through Nova.

Shadow blinked. He stared at Nova.

"This isn't—"

And then Shadow vanished from his own nightmare.

-(-)-

When Tails opened his eyes again, his senses were assaulted by a suffocating metallic scent. The scent so strong it seemed to pass right through his nose intact enough as to coat his tongue.

He realized it tasted like blood.

He spun where he stood. He knew this was Nova's nightmare, knew to expect he'd find himself wholly unfamiliar, but it was stomach-twisting to realize he stood in a child's bedroom. Even before his eyes fell to the blood streaked across the floor.

Tails's eyes followed the streaks of blood like footsteps down a muddy path. To where a young woman lay still. Nova knelt beside her. The wings that hung from Nova's back were torn to shreds.

"Nova," Tails breathed.

Nova's face was streaked with blood but not with tears. Her eyes were wide but unseeing. Her head turned slowly away from the woman before her and toward Tails. "Tails," she said. Her voice was steady. Almost too steady. Then, "This isn't how it happened."

Tails's breath caught in his throat. It took a moment for him to choke out words around it. "You know this isn't real?"

"I've lived through it too many times in my memory to believe a fake version."

She climbed to her feet. Along with blood, a thick syrupy liquid dripped from her shredded wings behind her. Her eyes remained preternaturally wide, even as she claimed to know what she saw wasn't real.

"Are you…okay?" Tails said eventually. He wondered if he should ask about the scene in which they stood. If he should ask what parts were real. But that wasn't why he was here. They didn't have time.

Nova hummed a response. Neither clearly positive nor clearly negative. Her eyes slid back to the woman lying on the ground. Nova released a heavy exhale. Tails could hear how it shuddered. "How do I wake up?" she asked.

"You, uh…" Tails swallowed. Tried again. "If you touch something, your hand will pass through it. You'll know for sure it's not real and you'll just wake up."

Nova nodded. She knelt back down beside the woman on the ground and reached for the woman's hand.

And then Nova vanished from her own nightmare.

-(-)-

A hallway. An endless hallway. Tails's stomach dropped out when he realized he had once stood in the real version of this hallway. One with a beginning and a very brutal

End.

"Amy!" Tails shouted.

His own voice echoing back at him sparked electricity in his spine. Though he knew this was a trick, nothing more than a nightmare in Amy's head, Tails still felt like he would turn and find himself face-to-face with a Metarex.

He remembered sprinting down the real version of this hallway with Amy landing in the footsteps he left behind. Shining Birch and an entire army had just passed them by and he and Amy followed behind, as if the Metarex were leading the way back to the Blue Typhoon.

They ran until they found an open doorway.

And within…

Tails turned. And there it was. That open doorway. Except this time, Amy stood in it, haloed by the light spilling into the hallway.

Tails swallowed.

This isn't real, Tails reminded himself. It wasn't real when it happened and it's not real now.

Still, Tails's legs quaked beneath him as he stepped forward to stand in that doorway beside Amy. He joined her in looking into that room. Looking at the body of Sonic the Hedgehog.

"It's not real, Amy," Tails whispered. He couldn't urge his voice to a louder volume. Not here, not while holding such an important vigil.

"Then where is he, Tails?" Amy's voice was void of inflection. Like her existence flattened to this single moment where time hung and the world ended. "If this isn't real, then tell me where Sonic is."

The Sonic-copy in the capsule at the center of the room stared wide-eyed at nothing. His jade eyes were flat, like they belonged to a stranger rather than Sonic. Tails knew Sonic's eyes to be sparkling. If they weren't doing that anymore, how could this be Sonic?

But Tails had known Amy for a very long time, nearly as long as he'd known Sonic. Knew her so well that there was even a timeline where they had a child together. Which meant he knew Amy's question did not have so simple of an answer.

"He can't save us, Amy. Not this time."

Though it felt like stepping out to the edge of a cliff beneath which jabbed up the sharpest of bolders from the surface of a crashing ocean, Tails turned his back on the image of the Sonic-copy so that he could step in front of Amy and face her.

Her own green eyes, so similar in shade to Sonic's, glistened emptily. She hardly seemed present at all, even as she was trapped here.

"I don't want to live in a universe without him, Tails."

She spoke so suddenly, so unprompted, that the fur on Tails's shoulders stood on end. Shocked him enough that all the words he might have said fled him.

"I know I'm supposed to be strong enough on my own," Amy continued. "I know you had to figure out how to go on without Cosmo before. But I don't know how to believe in anything after this if Sonic doesn't survive."

Tails twisted back to look at Sonic's body and dared to ask himself the same thing: what if Sonic didn't survive this?

Tears threatened in Tails's own eyes. He closed them, hoping the eyelids would dam the flow, but still they slipped through the gap.

A future without Sonic.

A future without Cosmo.

Tails reached out to take Amy's hand. His hand slid right through. Right, they were still in the midst of a Metarex trap. The longer they lingered in this place, the more danger they were in.

"Then we do what he'd do," Tails said. "We keep running."

And Tails opened his eyes.

The Blue Typhoon swam before him. He choked on the tears in his throat, tears he brought back from a nightmare into the waking world. A hand wrapped around his own. Tails turned his head to find Amy's teary eyes waiting for his where she lay beside him. "We keep running," she whispered in agreement.

And that was when the first shot slammed into the Blue Typhoon.