Chapter Twenty-Eight: Modes of Morality
May 14, 2006
Dear Diary:
We have reached the point in traveling where the silence has become suspicious rather than a relief. It's only been a few days since we last encountered the Metarex. But the Metarex we encountered was Sonic.
Amy doubled-over in pain, like a knife struck straight through her center. "You okay?" Tails asked.
Amy peeked up to see Tails looking over his laptop at her. Amy pressed a hand against her chest as if that would be enough to heal the aching there. She took in a deep breath to cool the hideous heat and straightened again. "I'm okay," she confirmed. Though that was only in a world where the definition of the word 'okay' was something else entirely.
Nonetheless, Tails returned his eyes to the laptop in front of him. He sat on one side of the kitchen table while Amy sat with a notebook on the other. A teapot sat between them—an offering from Cream—but Amy kept forgetting it was there. Kept forgetting to take care of herself in the normal ways that should have been second-nature to her by this time in her life.
Hence why she was trying to write. An act of self-care. As if the act didn't hurt more than it helped.
The working theory is that the Metarex are holding Cosmo hostage so that Sonic has to submit to their will. But we don't know that for sure. She could also be a Metarex. Or…I was going to say 'something far worse.' But I can't compare fates anymore. Every option is a nightmare.
I still can't we believe we left them behind on the waystation. I know C2 said if we didn't, we would all end up killed or caught. But it's like logic doesn't have any place in my head anymore. All there's room for is regret.
Sonic would be so disappointed in me.
Amy pressed her hand to her face. Even through her glove, her skin felt hot. "I thought writing was supposed to make you feel better," Amy groaned.
"It always makes me feel worse at first," Tails agreed. "It's like I have to face the worst things before I can move past them."
"All it makes me realize is how horrible a girlfriend I've been," Amy muttered. She tore her hairband out from among her quills and immediately replaced it. "And that just made it sound even worse because Sonic is literally a Metarex right now and I'm just worried that I've been a bad girlfriend."
"You don't sound horrible," Tails said. "But if it helps, I feel like I've been so worried about what we witnessed with Sonic, I haven't even spent time processing what that might mean for Cosmo."
Amy rested her chin on the kitchen table. She reached out to grab the end of the spoon in her teacup and twirled it through her lukewarm tea. "This is like the most depressing club meeting," she muttered.
At least as long as Amy twirled the spoon through her tea, she wouldn't be able to see her reflection in the surface of the liquid. See the dark circles under her eyes and sunken expression. These days, it was hard to remember she had a physical form, a body she needed to be taking care of. Not just a mind that writhed in the midst of a raging storm of guilt and horror. If she didn't forget she had a body in addition, then she might be too overwhelmed to keep moving forward.
Amy slid her eyes up from the tea that she had no intention of drinking to the fox sitting across from her. Over the top of the laptop, Amy could see Tails's eyes sliding from left to right as he read the screen in front of him. "What are you working on?" she asked eventually.
"I'm reading up on the history of the conflict between Greengate and Majyk," he replied.
Amy stiffened in her seat. Ice shot up from the base of her spine to the base of her neck. Flashes of images she would rather forget sped through her mind. Walking through the ruins of Greengate, the ruins of Majyk. Cosmo sobbing as she told the story of how her people had been destroyed by the Metarex. Nova gasping in the throes of a panic attack brought on by the trauma she had experienced at the hands of the Metarex.
This is the only thing war leads to: the end of everyone, Amy thought. She swallowed the nausea rising in her throat.
"What else is there to know?" Amy said tightly. Her skin buzzed as if in warning to end this conversation before she fell apart entirely.
"I don't know," Tails relented, "but maybe something. It's just that…I can't stop thinking about Black Thorn." Amy scowled at the sound of the Metarex leader's name, but Tails didn't look away from the screen to see her expression. He just continued, "I can't stop thinking about the fact that she's the daughter of both the fairies and the Metarex."
"So what if she's the child of Romeo and Juliet?" Amy snapped, unable to hold her tongue a second longer. "That doesn't change a thing she's done! The lives she ended! What is being done to Sonic and Cosmo in her name!"
Tails's eyes flashed up to look at Amy over the laptop now. Only then did Amy realize she was on her feet, her hands slammed down on the table in front of her. Only then did Amy feel her body shaking with every heavy exhale.
"You saw what she did to Sonic," she whispered. One of her hands curled into a fist so her knuckles dug into the wood of the table. "Who cares what she is?"
Tails said nothing. Maybe he was shocked to silence or thinking about Amy's words before he responded but his silence sent Amy's stomach burning. Until she snapped, "Don't look at me like that! Don't look at me like I'm being unreasonable! Like I'm saying something crazy! She's been twisting time and making fake Chaos Emeralds and stealing Planet Eggs. She kidnapped and tortured Sonic and Cosmo. She killed the Seedrians and the fairies and magicians and who knows who else. It's not crazy of me to not care about her why."
Tails's brows drew together so that tension knitted at the center of his forehead. Without breaking eye contact with Amy, Tails reached out to press his laptop closed. "You don't have to care about her why," Tails told Amy patiently. "But I do need to understand. I guess because if I can't explain why that girl did all this, that scares me more."
Amy's scowl deepened. Rage continued to burn through her, but like a flash of oil in a pan sparking a fire to life, the fire in her quickly exhausted itself. Her knees shook even though all she did was stand. She collapsed back into her seat.
And though Amy hadn't challenged Tails or questioned him, he continued anyway. "If Black Thorn led the Metarex through all this, hurt so many people again and again and she did it without a reason why, then all order in the universe crumbles. It means that we can just be pure evil. People can just hurt others and feel nothing. That's the sort of universe where you can't trust anyone, can't assume that people are working from their own best intentions. It's a universe built on not just selfishness but hatred. And that's the sort of universe I can't bear to think we live in."
Tails wasn't looking at Amy anymore. No, his gaze he directed down to his closed laptop. He slid his finger along the edge of the computer as if trying to brush the dust away with his white gloves. For a second, Amy thought that Tails had reached the end of his point. But then, without looking up, he said, "At least if she had a reason, regardless of what it was, regardless of how flawed that reason was, at least it means the universe still makes sense. Or at least it would mean I could believe that not just anyone could be capable of what the Metarex have done. Maybe then I can believe in an end to this. Maybe I can believe in some sort of life for us after this, even."
Amy swallowed. She wrapped her fingers around her teacup, just to give her hands something to do. But as soon as she gripped the cup, it started rattling against the saucer beneath, revealing how much her hands were shaking. She pulled her hands away quickly and buried them in her lap to hide them. "A life after this?" she repeated. She swallowed the scoff that rose up in her throat. She hated that her initial reaction to such a sentiment was derision. When had she become so hopeless? How could she have become so hopeless without her own notice?
"A life after this," Tails agreed. And then after a beat, he repeated it, a bit more forcefully this time.
Amy's eyes shot back up to find Tails glaring at his closed laptop. His lips twisted into a grimace. Amy's heart jumped up to the base of her throat. "What aren't you telling me?" she said in a low voice.
"I overheard Angel and C2." His immediate response, his eyes flashing up to Amy in an instant, shocked Amy enough that she jumped. She had thought she would need to pull the answer out of Tails, but it was like he had been waiting for her to say the magic words. It took Amy a heartbeat to process her shock before she could even process what Tails had said.
Realized that Tails was talking about an overheard conversation between Time Whisperers.
"Angel suspects that time may be too damaged to fix," Tails said.
"What does that even mean?" Amy growled, leaning across the table.
But Tails shook his head. "I don't know. I imagine it's not any better than when we are on Earth and our dimensions started to converge."
Amy furrowed her brow. What Tails mentioned felt vaguely familiar, like it was from another lifetime entirely. And as it was from a life several timelines divorced, the fuzziness of the memory was to be expected.
Back when they had all been on Earth, it hadn't been by choice. Instead, Chaos Control gone wrong had thrown them across whatever threshold divided dimensions. But when they returned to Mobius, it had been to stop that threshold was blurring away entirely. If they hadn't gone home, their worlds would have converged and time would have come to a complete halt.
"So we could be trapped in a universe in eternal war with the Metarex?" Amy barely dared to whisper.
"And that's if time doesn't stop entirely or simply end all life in the universe," Tails agreed.
"And there might already be nothing we can do." Amy slid down in her seat. But even sitting upright took too much energy. Like even her bones were melting away. Hope…find hope. If even Nova could find it, shouldn't Amy be able to in the face of this sort of news? But as she prodded the dark sea in her gut, it simply rippled in response to the disturbance. It did not at all recede.
It's just a new adventure, isn't it?
Amy blinked. Sonic's voice popped into her head without her summoning. Sounding far more optimistic than she expected the current version of him sounded, if he had a voice at all.
Don't spend all this time worrying. Go do something about it.
She pressed her eyes closed. "It's not that simple," she whispered to herself. To the Sonic that lived on inside of her.
When she opened her eyes again, she found Tails watching her. Amy just shook her head.
Trying anything is better than giving up.
That's what Tails was doing, wasn't it? Reading up on the history of the Metarex conflict. Trying anything, no matter how small. Even after he'd heard Angel and C2 discussing the possibility that time would never be the same, he still kept holding on. Sitting still, wallowing in fear would not get them anywhere. Even if it ached in the hollow of her chest to do otherwise.
Inhale. Shuddering exhale.
She would ache. She would accept the pain of holding onto hope in the face of nothing more than despair.
She would bring the Sonic in her head home.