Chapter Twenty-Two: Awaiting Sprint

Somewhere among these trees is the hedgehog that I love. The one I know loves me. And he wants me dead.

That singular threat spins around and around in my head. This isn't the first time the Metarex turned him into one of them, but this is the first time I've known that while he was a Metarex. Last time, it was just a horrible surprise.

This is a nightmare I hope to wake up from. My life doesn't feel like my life. How can this possibly be real? Even as I run, hammer in hand, I feel like my mind isn't present in my body. Like my mind floats above it all. Screaming at me.

Wake up!

WAKE UP!

What do you do when all hope is lost? When every action you take just prolongs your suffering? How do I keep moving forward when I feel no bigger than a child raging at the moon overhead? What would Sonic do?

At what point would he just give up?

Amy kept running forward toward the town where Chris waited, though only because momentum continued to carry her. A swift wind tore past her and she almost didn't feel it against her skin. She didn't have the capacity to deal with such extraneous details. Not when she struggled to hold the important ones in her head.

Find Chris.

Run him back to the Blue Typhoon.

Get off-planet.

Somehow process the fact that Sonic was once again a Metarex.

Somehow process the fact that Sonic's fate might be Cosmo's fate as well.

Amy winced. No, no, that was exactly the sort of thing she couldn't think about now. The pain of those thoughts strangled her to the point that she stumbled in her racing pace. She shook her head, like she could shake off the thought, and refocused her attention on gaining speed once more.

It didn't escape her that the role she was playing would be better served if Sonic played the part.

Amy came up on the small town just as she thought she couldn't run further. She slowed until, with a few final stumbling steps, she came at last to a stop. She gasped for air, bracing her free hand against her hip as she took a second to gather herself. An exhausted mist hung just in front of her eyes. She blinked rapidly to clear it.

At least, until she realized the mist she saw was not exhaustion but instead slowly dissipating smoke. A haze that draped the whole town. The kind of haze that lingered long after the flames had been put out.

Her racing heart turned to stone in her chest.

From here, she couldn't see the damage done, just the warning that the destruction had been wrought. And if she could see the smoke like a heavy haze from here, than the damage done was not small. Which meant this wasn't an accident. It was an attack. An attack with a singular explanation.

"Oh no," Amy breathed. "Sonic, what have you done?"

A new obstacle stood before Amy. A new thought to process: if Amy searched the damaged town, would she still be searching for Chris?

Or for his body?

-X-X-X-

Tails's View

Tails's eyes snapped open. After spending what felt like hours plumbing the depths of the Chaos Energy within himself, his physicality crashed down on his shoulders. Angel's hands reached out to steady him before he fell. "Did you get it?" Angel asked while Tails was still trying to remember how to breathe.

Tails choked on the first breath of air he tried to suck in. He cleared his throat and tried again. "I don't know. I think." He swallowed and continued, "I felt something but it was like I couldn't latch onto it."

He lifted his head to see the frown on Angel's face. "Sorry," he added. It didn't feel like enough. But he barely had enough air to spare to say that much.

Angel shook her head. "It's not your fault. He must be running. That always used to make it hard for me too."

But still possible. Angel may not have said the words, but Tails still heard them in the silence that followed. For all that Sonic had once believed in Tails enough to leave him to fight the Metarex aloneduring the Changed War, still Tails found he was not enough. If only Angel could take care of this, but the fact that she still wasn't perfectly solid meant she wasn't an option right now. Solid enough to touch, but not solid enough to interact with her own Chaos Energy. Tails curled his fingers into fists at his sides but he was shaking so much that his fingers couldn't hold that shape for more than a few seconds.

"I'll try again," he said, even as he knew he couldn't, at least not with any better result.

Angel clearly knew it too. She was already shaking her head while the words were still falling from his tongue. "Save your strength," she said. "It'll be better if you're still able to fight when Sonic shows up."

"Then let me."

The voice was so small, a weak offer rather than a demanding command. But even in its current state, Princess Nova's voice still claimed the whole attention of whatever room Nova entered. Tails twisted around to see Nova leaning heavily against the doorway of the engine room. Shadow stood there, inches from her side. His fingers were curled into fists, as if sheer force of will was stopping him from dragging her back to the infirmary. Tails could hardly blame him. Nova's skin was as pale white as the t-shirt she wore, which looked larger than a tent draped over her fragile figure. Her wings drooped like gray leaves drenched in the midst of pouring rain. Her hair itself was soaking wet like she actually had been caught in a rainstorm.

Even so, Nova's lips curled in a firm grimace and the eyes she fixed on Tails were as stubbornly Nova-like as ever.

"Mom," Angel breathed.

In response, Nova just held her hand out in front of her, still staring at Tails, not so much as sparing a glance in Angel's direction. Though Nova didn't step away from the doorframe supporting her, the look on her face seemed like enough to set the whole room on fire. "I tracked Shadow's Chaos Energy with guidance before, and Sonic's as well. I can do it again."

Tails shifted his eyes to Angel. She stood stiff and staring, making no move toward the girl who would grow into the woman who in one timeline would have been her mother. But now their positions of power were reversed. Angel had lived many years more than any of them now, and Nova looked like a mere fraction of herself in her current state. After a moment, Angel just slowly shook her head. "Mom, your magic is damaged. There's no telling what that might mean for your connection to Chaos Energy."

Nova's expression didn't so much as twitch. She kept her eyes fixed on Tails and her hand stretched out in front of her. She offered no further explanation other than her gaze. It took Tails a second to recognize the emotion behind her expression but when he did, the realization sent a tremor through his body.

Hope.

Not hope like Tails himself had experienced in the past, like the feeling of pure spring water pouring down in the midst of a drought, or the first breath of air after bursting from the surface of the cold dark ocean. No, the hope in Nova's expression was made of harder stuff. More like the corpse of a tree standing tall at the center of a snowstorm, knowing spring will return even with no sign of the sun in sight.

The Metarex slaughtered her people, should have killed her as well. And here she stood—however unstable—ready to make the next move.

Wordlessly, Tails strode across the engine room. Angel said nothing. Even Knuckles standing beside the remains of the Master Emerald held silent. For that moment, no sound existed except for the sound of Tails's footfalls against the metal floor. And once he bridged the distance, Tails placed the Chaos Emerald in Nova's open palm. Her fingers wrapped around the gem, even as they shivered with weakness. Shadow tensed beside her but voiced no protest, and so Tails followed his lead and took a small step back.

Nova pulled the Chaos Emerald in toward her chest and wrapped both her shaking hands around it. She closed her eyes. Dark petals pressed against both eyelids, though she certainly had spent a majority of recent hours in the depths of unconsciousness. Her posture looked like an embrace, a strangely delicate gesture from the normally hard-edged Nova.

And then her whole body began to glow.

Shadow reached for Nova but stopped himself with centimeters to spare. "Nova," he said in a low voice. A tight voice. Both a warning and a question.

"No more die," she breathed.

The glow intensified. Tails stumbled back, eyes widening in shock. This is normal, he reminded himself. He had seen Angel track Sonic's Chaos Energy before, had seen the way her body illuminated when she did so. But mere hours ago, Nova clung to life, ashy with exhaustion.

And now, Chaos Energy set her alight.

Alive.

So bright was her glow that Tails almost missed the sudden brightening out of the corner of his eye. After a heartbeat, he twisted toward it, just as Knuckles sucked in a sharp breath. The light was coming from the shards of the Master Emerald, the shards that now pulsed in time with the glow of Chaos Energy enveloping Nova's body.

"Amy," Knuckles breathed so that Tails could hardly hear him. And then was certain he must have misheard Knuckles. Because that didn't make any sense.

"What?" Tails asked.

"She was right," Knuckles continued, more like Tails caught Knuckles in the middle of a thought than like Knuckles was answering Tails's question. "I can't believe she was right. The Master Emerald needed hope."

And so Tails and Knuckles stared on as the hope of a shattered fairy—the fairy who had lost her entire people to genocide while she fought for her own life against an illness few of her kind survived—not only fueled her to search for the once friend that now sought to kill them…

…but also pulled the remains of the Master Emerald together and made it whole once more.

-X-X-X-

Amy's View

Amy had spent a great deal of her life in battle. Even before she stood at its center—a certain side effect of chasing after one Sonic the Hedgehog—she stood at its outskirts. She knew what it was like to tend to both your own wounds and the wounded.

But she would never grow used to stepping among the remains of the dead.

Amy held her breath and fixed her eyes on a point directly in front of her as much as she could manage. But she had to keep flashing her eyes downward to avoid mis-stepping and—

She swallowed.

At least the scent of smoke overwhelmed her senses. Never before had she been so thankful for the claustrophobia of ash.

Amy wanted nothing more than to twist around and flee as fast as she could manage in the opposite direction. Maybe if she got far enough away, she could convince herself this scene was from her nightmares rather than reality.

But no. She continued forward. They couldn't leave Chris behind. Not like they had left Sonic and Cosmo behind on that way-station. Even if that meant just finding his remains.

Amy halted and closed her eyes long enough to suck in a bracing breath.

Amy refused to think about the fact that Sonic was responsible for the decimation around her. But in refusing to think about it, her mind continually circled the thought.

Don't think about it.

This is what the Metarex had turned Sonic into.

Don't think about it.

But it wasn't Sonic, not really.

Don't think about it.

Remember how you always said he was not the things the Metarex made him do?

Don't think.

The Chaos Emerald pressed against her thigh through the bag she carried. She didn't dare touch the Emerald while her thoughts twisted in a confusing dance through her brain. But she tried to focus on the rhythm of the bounce against her leg, clung to the way the motion tried to ground her. She timed her breaths and her steps with the pace of that motion. Because if she lost her focus for even a moment, she would remember.

Remember the decimation around her.

Who had caused it.

The chasm of despair yawning open beneath her, threatening to swallow her whole.

Love and hope are stronger than hate and fear.

Those were Tails's words from what felt like a lifetime ago. A paraphrase of himself, something he had once said when Sonic had battled the Chaos Creature reframed following the defeat of Shining Birch during the Changed War. Amy focused on those words now as she picked her way over rubble. As she stepped through doorways that doors no longer hung from. As she crushed glass beneath her boots in her journey to step through the hole of a window frame the glass had left behind.

"Chris?" she dared to call out eventually.

Her voice echoed back to her, and Amy held her breath as she waited for a voice—Chris's or not—to respond. But no, only Amy's voice hung lonely amidst the smoke-soaked air.

Love and hope are stronger than hate and fear.

And so she refused to give in to the darkness haloing her vision. Instead, Amy stiffened her shoulders, adjusted her grip on her hammer and continued on.

The deeper into the village Amy moved, the less damage Amy witnessed, the more movement she saw as the citizens picked up the pieces. The low buzz of conversation was nearly smothered by the crackling of the flames. But not quite.

Love and hope.

"Chris!" Amy shouted again so that a collection of eyes turned to gaze in her direction.

Are stronger.

"Amy?"

She turned toward the sound of her name in time to see an ash-covered Chris stumble away from where he helped clean up damage and toward Amy. Her arms fell limp to her sides with relief so the head of her hammer bounced against the ash covered dirt beneath her feet.

Than hate and fear.

Inches separated the two of them when the first explosion hit.