Why don't you look? Why don't you look? Why don't you look? At those dull blue eyes.
You have stolen their light, yes you, you there.
He used to be so happy. So carefree and young. But you let him be tainted.
It's all your fault.
Your fault. Your fault. Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.
/
When Sonic was young, he always imagined himself going out in a line of fire with the world itself at stake. Longclaw always told him the best way to go out was in his sleep at an old age, but who wants to live past ninety anyway?
As he grew older and had more close calls, he prayed that he would go the way Longclaw suggested. But besides that, he never put much thought into his death.
Until now.
Now, he was falling, and he was falling fast. And there was nothing he could do to save himself.
And he didn't want to die. He didn't. He was just so upset. So scared of what was happening. But it's too late now. He's about to hit the rocks below him. And not even Sonic the Hedgehog could survive a fall like this.
And God did he fall.
Sharp rocks greeted him from below as he moved closer to them.
Sonic took a deep breath and closed his eyes. It will be over soon. It will be over soon. It will be over soon-
Then it stopped.
He was floating in midair. He heard the familiar spinning of two yellow-orange tails above him, white-gloved paws grasping him from under the arms.
He felt himself lifted even more before the paws let him go, face-planting into the grass. A sharp blow to the ribs had him curling up in pain as a familiar voice started screaming at him.
"What the hell were you thinking I'm going to fucking kill you. You are so lucky I have you chipped. I- " If Tails didn't have fur, his face would be red, and not just because of the lack of breathing he was doing right now.
And Sonic just took it.
He deserved it.
He was horrible.
/~/~
"Sonic, do you ever feel bad about everything?" They were Tails' living room. Sonic had his old console out playing Tomatopotamus three.
"What do you mean, buddy?" He asked, collecting more gold rings as his hippo danced around the jungle. This is so much better than that Mushroom Planet game.
"I mean...do you ever just feel sad all the time?" Tails said as his hippo character died again, Sonic pausing to revive him for the fifth time since the game started. Sonic himself was crushing it. He was already on level seven.
But something in his peripheral vision made him pause. He pressed a button on his console and the game did too.
Because Tails was crying.
Big, fat, ugly tears running down his face. He wiped them only for more to form then sink into his already damp fur.
Sonic sat up and scooted closer to his brother. "Bud...have you been feeling that way?"
"M-maybe."
"Oh, Tails, you should have told me sooner- no, I mean, thank you for telling me, ked. I'm going to book you a therapist appointment now, okay?"
"O-okay." Tails croaked as Sonic started to sit up to grab the landline.
"Hey," He put his thumb on the kit's chin, moving his head to look him in the eye. "It's going to be okay, buddy. We'll get through this."
"Thanks Sonic." Tails said as he smiled pulling a tear drop to the other side of his face.
=
"T-tails?" He stammered right before a harsh pressure came across his face, knocking him back to the ground as a red mark started forming on his cheek.
He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but Tails wouldn't let him. "No, I don't want to hear it. Do you realize what you did to me, Sonic?!" He pulled at the soft green scarf around his neck, exposing the deep purple marks around his neck. "This!" He pushed himself into the hedgehog. "You did this to me." He wiped his wet eyes with his paw as he pulled back away from him again.
"What are you...When did I...I-"
"Two weeks ago Sonic! Two weeks ago you were having a nightmare at my house and I went to wake you up and if I hadn't pushed my distress signal..." Tails choked with his next breath, a tear going down his muzzle, the breeze jostling his bangs around. "You would have killed me!"
Sonic felt like a boulder had been picked up and pressed onto him. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move. As if he was the one being strangled.
He felt himself dropping to the ground, paws over the dirt holding him up, a queasy feeling rumbling in his stomach.
"You're supposed to be the one looking after me. This isn't fair. None of this is fair, Sonic!" Tails was full-on sobbing now. A blubbering messing of wet golden fur shone in the moonlight.
"I-I'm sorry Tails."
I'm sorry Tails.
I'm sorry Tails.
I'm sorry Tails.
I'm sorry Tails.
"You're right. It isn't fair."
Isn't it?
~/~
When will you learn? All you ever do is screw everything up. Constantly. That's why Longclaw left. That's why they let them take you. All of it. It's all your fault, Sonic.
All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it.
~~~~~
Sonic didn't sleep at all that night.
He planned to. He even went through his whole nighttime routine, minus wishing Tails goodnight and tucking him in, like he always does when he's spending the night here.
It hurt to look at the retractable couch Tails used to lie on, so Sonic turned away and buried his head in a cushion. After a few hours, when night had made everything stand still except for the crickets chirping outside, Sonic gave up and rolled back over.
He looked up at the ceiling to avoid the red couch again. There were patterns up there that he liked to look at sometimes. His mind would connect them to see whatever he wanted to see.
And tonight, he saw a hedgehog. A small round non-mobian one with spikes and a pointy face. But there was a problem, though there weren't any other critters for it to be friends with. All Sonic could see were angry human-like faces and scary-looking jungle brushes.
The poor guy was alone.
All alone.
And the angry faces were coming closer. And closer. And closer-
Sonic closed his eyes. He didn't want to see it anymore. He preferred to have the darkness consume him and then have to think about it for even a second longer.
He didn't want to think about it.
It felt like five years until he opened his eyes again. He looked back at the lonely hedgehog above him and wondered how his life was, living alone, going from place to place without as much as one friend to talk to.
No neighbors.
No friends.
No family.
But when he looked again, he knew that wasn't true for this little guy. Because the more he looked, the more critters he saw on the textured ceiling.
There was the profile of a fox, standing in a running pose beside the hedgehog.
A hungry badger, eating a mealworm right above the fox.
Another, slightly smaller hedgehog, in the left-hand corner of the room.
And an echidna digging a messy hole represented by a hole in the wall Tails hadn't managed to repair yet.
He wasn't alone.
He just had to look a little more.
/-/-/-/
"Amy, I need to talk to you."
"Sonic I'm- "
"Now, Amy. I need to talk to you now." It was early early in the morning. Earlier than Sonic was accustomed to waking up, not that he went to sleep.
Amy was holding her watering can over her patch of bright pink peonies. Sonic grabbed her paw, causing her to drop it and pulling her away from her flowers and into his business.
Amy sighed, "What's the problem now?"
"I strangled Tails."
"What?" She rubbed her eyes, suddenly a little more awake and panicked. "Again?!"
"No." Sonic held his paws up. "Not again...I just...I...Bad things have been happening Amy. Really bad things have been happening to Tails and I keep seeing it over and over but each time he turns out to be fine and I just...I can't stand it anymore."
He looked back at his pink friend, expecting her to be angry. To hit him. To scream his ear off. He deserved it. He deserved all of it.
But instead, she just smiled.
"I'll get the rest of the gang."
She took his paws in hers. He didn't push her away this time.
/~/
Deep sky-blue eyes.
They lit up everything that came their way.
But one day,
They went away.
Becoming a bluish shade of grey.
And my world was forever darker.
~/~
"First of all, Sonic. Thank you for meeting with us." He winced as he heard Amy's voice grow more weepy towards the end of her sentence. "I'm sorry we didn't do this earlier, but, to be honest, Sonic, we were scared of you."
Of. They were scared of him. Not for him. Of him. And he understood why. He had to. Who wouldn't be scared of him? He was scared of him. After realizing that he-
The small yellow-orange-furred body below him gasped for air. Claws poked at his paws, trying to tear him off, begging for his throat to be released. A wispy gargling sound came out of him.
-after realizing what he did to Tails. The not-a-clone Tails. The real Tails.
His best friend. His charge. His brother.
Sonic shook the thought away and tried to focus back on what Amy was blubbering about, tissue-catching stray tears as she recounted the last few weeks of misery. "-we were just so worried about you."
Sonic shuffled in his seat. He never liked seeing Amy cry. Seeing anyone cry was hard enough, but this was Amy. She was the girl who could take down twenty botniks before noon and still have the time to go for a picnic with him. And he'd been hurting her. He'd been hurting everyone on his team, but especially her.
Her and Tails.
He took a deep breath. He needed to fix this. All of this
"Look, I'm sorry guys. I don't think any of you would actually hurt Tails. I just...I can't help it...I'm trying to though I am."
"It isn't just that, Sonic. It was the imagining blood on your paws and- "
"-Trashing my burrow."
"Attacking Eggman for no reason." Knuckles leaned back in his seat, happy to have contributed to the conversation.
"And then it was what you and Knuckles did to the workshop. God, Tails was so upset about that." Amy wiped another tear from her eye, shooting an evil glare at her red echidna friend.
"I said I was sorry!" Knuckles protested from the other side of the couch.
"You should be!" Amy threw a throw pillow at the echidna, scowling before she took a deep breath, willing herself to be more ladylike as her mother had taught her years ago. "And there was trapping Shadow in the for emergencies only prison bunker that we agreed not to use unless we really had to!"
"Oh, Shadows in there. That's why he hasn't been at his spot staring into the dark forest every Tuesday and Thursday at noon."
"Knuckles...Knuckles how- why do you know he does that?" Amy furrowed her brow, paws in her lap.
"Sometimes I join him." The echidna blinked at the empty looks he was getting from around the room. "What? I can have friends besides you guys."
There was a moment of awkward silence before Amy broke it. "Anyway, Sonic we don't think- no we know, that you aren't stable enough right now to take care of Tails."
"But he's my-" She held a paw up, signaling for him to stop. "You aren't. You need to do some things first."
"Fine. What do I have to do?"
"Well, for starters, I know a real great therapist."
/~~~~
"Hallucinations can be caused by many different factors," His therapist, a cream furred shrew told him after gesturing him to sit on a soft leather cushion so she could take her rightful place at her desk in front of him. "Do you have a family history of schizophrenia? Have you ever taken any drugs? Has there been more stress in your life lately?"
"No idea. No. Sorta."
"Are you currently on any type of medication?"
"Do Flintstone Vitamins count?" The shrew just shook her head. She had told him her name as they were going into her office, but his mind wasn't with his head and he'd already forgotten it.
"How much of sleep do you get?"
"A full fifteen hours." She wrote something down, "Can you tell me more about that? What are your dreams about? Do you have a lot of nightmares?"
/~~/-
Are the lines back?
Are they the right ones?
/~~———
Terror.
That was all Sonic could feel as he saw the blue plane swerve into the frozen lake, one wing damaged by Burnbot. Sonic ran faster as the old evil scientist above him cackled.
He ran until he had to slide across the icy surface of the lake, Tails trapped in his plane ahead of him.
Seeing reinforcement arriving and wanting to cause more peril Burnbot activates buzzsaws into the ice, submerging the plane even more and Tails clawed at his buckle.
Sonic ran as fast as he could over, but the icy water was already up to the kit's chin.
"Tails!" He called as he tried to pull his brother out. "Tails it's going to be okay." He said as the kit let out small whimpers. He was going to get him out of this. He had to.
But the water just pulled him down farther and farther. And Sonic couldn't swim. There was no getting out of this.
Tails was going to drown.
"Sonic?" A small voice stammered.
Sonic?
Sonic?
Sonic?
Mr. Hedgehog?
Mr. Hedgehog?
Mr. Hedgehog?
"Mr. Hedgehog, are you still with me?"
"...Oh! Yeah, I- I'm fine...I..."
The mouse put down her clipboard and looked him in the eyes. "Do you dissociate like this often, Mr. Hedgehog?"
"Dissociate?"
"Do you ever check out of reality?"
"Oh...um...I..."
Lifeless blue eyes stared through his soul.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
Tails is dead. Tails is dead. Tails is dead.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
His limp hand in his.
"Mr. Hedgehog?" The therapist's tone was higher now, concerned. Sonic shook his previous thoughts away. "Please, doc, call me Sonic."
"Okay...Sonic. When did you start having these thoughts about your brother getting hurt?"
"...Oh, the night after he was kidnapped I had a dream that we didn't get to him in time, and he got hurt."
"How hurt?"
"Raped."
"I see."
Sonic wiped his eyes, which somehow had become wet. When did he start crying? Heroes aren't supposed to cry!
"Mr-...Sonic I think what you are experiencing is called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder- "
"PTSD? Come on, I'm no veteran. Sure, I save the village on occasion, but I wouldn't call that war...I just-"
"You don't have to be a veteran. That's a common misconception." She tapped her pen to her clipboard like she was thinking. "Imagine your bad memories are items crammed into a messy cupboard. Whenever something brushes against the cupboard, everything falls out. Someone may try to cram those items back in and close the door, but the best way to stop the items from falling again is to organize them."
"I don't own a cupboard." His therapist ran a hand over her face and groaned at that. What was he missing? Is this almost over with yet?
They talked for a while after that, mostly about Tails and Sonic's relationship, always dancing around the strangulation incident that both of them knew was going to have to be talked about. But for today, they focused on getting Sonic familiar with his diagnosis.
He was sent home with a prescription for five different meds that he had trouble saying the name of.
Ser-tra-line?
Flu-o-xe-tine?
O-lan-za-pine?
And the promise to meet with the woman twice a week.
He didn't tell her about the suicide attempt, he didn't tell anyone. It was something he and Tails silently promised not to speak about. They didn't want to worry anyone. Maybe they should have though. It would have been easier for Sonic to get through this had he had people watching him more closely. But alas, nothing to do about it now.
/
Sonic kicked at the sand beneath his shoes. Sometimes if he tried hard enough the wind would pick it up and make small sand devils that were fun to watch.
This wasn't one of those times. He was kicking out of genuine anger. The problem was that he didn't know what he was angry at. Who he was angry at.
Cursing under his breath, Sonic flopped down into the damp grass. It had rained the day after his suicide attempt. Almost as if the sky decided to set the mood for the upcoming days.
He felt a lump underneath him and pulled the bag of medication he had just gotten out of his quills. Maracas sounded with the sway of the pills.
Five. They prescribed him five different medications. Five.
Five. Five heroes, four teammates without their leader. Five.
Five. Five more days until the next Eggman attack. Five.
Five. Five more seconds with paws around that neck, and he would have killed his charge. Five.
He groaned and he curled up into a ball, wishing for the world to go away. Wishing for himself to go away.
It was all too much.
But if he gave up now, what would happen to Tails?
He had to stay alive, if only for that kid.
Sonic wasn't sure how long he stayed like that. In a ball in the grass as the wind picked up and the sun went down. As the sky became dark, the only light was from the moon and the stars. And still, he stayed where he was, going in and out of consciousness as the wind picked up, blowing between his quills, causing the poor hedgehog to tremble and curl up tighter.
It was quiet, except for the occasional coos of owls or rustling from the bushes. But Sonic could hear the footsteps coming closer and closer to him very clearly. Still, he stayed where he was, half hoping it was some wild critter that sought to finish him off.
It wasn't a critter. And it wasn't wild. But Shadow was seeking to finish him off.
"You thought your puny little bunker could contain me, Hedgehog?" Shadow with a quick jab to the blue hero's ribs with his foot. "Get up. We have unfinished business." But Sonic just laid there unmoving. There was nothing anyone could do to make him want to fight right now.
"I said, Get. Up!" Sonic uncurled just a little to see the fire in Shadow's eyes. He's never been scared of the guy. Sonic wasn't ever scared of anything. Until now.
Shadow started to say something then, but Sonic couldn't quite catch it. "Huh?"
"I said, are you just going to lay there and take it? Or are we doing this?"
"Oh...I...fine do it."
"Excuse me?" Sonic just grumbled back. "Beat me up. Do it." He wasn't prepared for the shocked/concerned/angry look Shadow would give him after that.
"Sonic," Shadow never said his real name (not that that was his actual first name), it was always 'hedgehog' or 'faker' or even the occasional asshole, but it was never Sonic. "Are you okay?" Shadow's paw was cold and clammy on his forehead. Was he...checking for his temperature?
No. His rival wouldn't do that. This was Shadow he...they hated each other...he couldn't be concerned about him.
Shadow was talking but Sonic couldn't hear him. It was as if a thick sheet of glass was between them.
"What?"
Shadow said something else, but he couldn't "-I said why are you out here in the jungle like this? When have you last slept?"
"Ummm...I...I dunno I-" He felt two arms wrap under his arms and pull him. He took a deep breath, wiping his eyes free of tears as Shadow helped him walk all the way home.
"You better not pull this stunt again, Hedgehog." He said as he helped Sonic into his hammock.
"Wouldn't dream of it."
—/—/—
The lines are back. The lines are back. The lines are back.
Will everything return to what it once was?
——~——
Sonic had to wait three months before his friends allowed him to be around Tails again, and even then, it was only for a short time and under supervision. It was only ten minutes at first, but it gradually built up in the coming months to when he saw Tails for an hour and a half every Wednesday and Friday.
Still, his friends were wary of letting him near the kit. And technically, Sonic didn't have to do this. Law enforcement was not involved, and Sonic still had legal custody of his yellow friend.
"Hey buddy," Sonic pulled open his arms, inviting but not forcing his brother to hug him. Tails just shook his head and sat on the other side of the couch as Amy sat on the hanging armchair, palms together in her lap. She never took her eyes off Sonic for a sonic second during visits like this. But she'd grown a lot more relaxed since the first visit.
"How's the inventing going, buddy?"
"Fine." Tails told him, looking away. He was the one who asked for this visit, but still couldn't help but be short with his older brother.
Sonic apologized during the first meeting they had. And the second one. And the third one. And a few more after that. But still, no matter how much heart he put into his apology, Tails continued to be slightly resentful/afraid of him.
The team dynamics changed, too. For one thing, the others saw Amy as more of the leader. A few weeks ago, Sonic signaled Knuckles to smash a botnik, but the echidna paused until he got a gentle nod from Amy.
It was infuriating, but he understood. He had to understand.
He did this.
"Okay," Amy said in her authoritative therapist voice, even though she had only taken one psychology class in her thirteen years of life. "Now that it's been a while, we can talk about..." A muffled whimper interrupted her, "...what happened."
Sonic knew he should look over, but he really, really didn't want to.
But he still did.
Tails muzzle was wet with tears, knees squeezed into his chest. Sure, he had cried before in these visits (and usually, he ran off too), but never this much, and never this loud.
"Bud..." Sonic started, "I am so so sorry- "He was interrupted by the yellow fuzz ball throwing himself in his lap.
Tails let out another whimper, burying his face in his brother's beige chest.
Apparently, he was already forgiven.
"Please..." He sniffed and looked up, emerald eyes meeting sky-blue ones. "Just don't do it again."
"I won't. I promise. I'm so so sorry. I promise." Sonic told him, hugging him tighter, face buried on the top of the kit's head.
And they stayed like that, they stayed like that long after Amy left, deeming Sonic well enough to care for Tails.
"Maybe we could all go on a camping trip?"
"Don't push it."
Sonic smiled, looking down at his kid brother in his lap. Things won't be entirely back to normal for a long time. But this is a good start.
Yeah, this is a start.