Chapter Eight: What We Left Behind
We are all going to die.
No, we're not.
We should take the time left to say our good-byes.
Absolutely not, we can't give up now. Not after everything we've been through.
I hold my breath as the two voices in my mind go to war with one another. I know which one will win out; it's the one that always does. But sometimes, I wish the other voice would win.
I'm so tired.
Tails pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut as tight as he could. He built up the tension in his forehead, just for the sake of releasing the tension again. It gave him a second to brace himself for the images before his eyes once more.
The images of the Metarex firing on a space station that likely would have been spared had the Blue Typhoon and her crew not come upon it
"How much more time do you need?" Tails demanded of Chris via their intercom system. His eyes didn't leave the video feed even as he asked the question.
"Five minutes tops!" Chris cried out breathlessly in reply. He sounded like he was running.
"Roger." Though Tails spared the brief heartbeat's worth of time to be grateful Chris couldn't see the added pinch of tension between his brows. He didn't know if he they had even that much time; he didn't have a feed from the space station to see how their shields were holding.
But it didn't take a genius to figure out that it was probably "not well."
The heat of guilt built up in his chest. And though, scientifically speaking, heat was supposed to rise, this heat fell to build a weight in the pit of his stomach. It boiled like acid. And the thing was, the sensation was all the anticipation of guilt for a choice made but not yet acted upon.
Because Tails wasn't stupid enough to believe the Blue Typhoon, in its current state of disrepair, could save the waystation. No, once Amy, Cosmo, and Sonic returned to the Blue Typhoon, his plan was to run.
So much for heroes.
He counted the seconds as they built into minutes. The acid burning his stomach lining rose up his esophagus like a threat. His hands wrapped around the controls tighter and tighter until he believed he could break them in his grasp.
Where were they where were they where were—
The door hissed as it slid open behind Tails. He spun around so fast his spine twinged with pain in protest.
Amy spilled into the room before the door slid open entirely. Her green irises were nothing more than dots in a sea of white. Tails had barely opened his mouth to ask why when Amy gasped, "I lost track of Cosmo."
-X-X-X-
Sonic's View
Sonic stumbled back a step, and his heel slipped against the edge of the ground. His stomach plummeted beneath him even as he found his footing once more. "You were dead," Sonic said.
Green Fichus chuckled, his laugh like one piece of metal scraping against another. "The Metarex are capable of time travel. Surely resurrection is within our reach."
Sonic's hands shook at his sides, and he balled them into fists to disguise his fear. But you weren't back during the last time shift, Sonic thought. But he bit down the words before he loosed them from his tongue.
"Fine, you want another beating?" Sonic said instead, though he failed to manufacture the smirk that might feign his confidence. "I did it once, I can do it again."
"Except you didn't, did you?" Green Fichus tilted his head to one side, like he was nothing more than an inquisitive puppy. "Princess Nova of Majyk holds that honor. Meanwhile, if I remember, you played the role of bait."
With his last word, Green Fichus thrust himself forward toward Sonic. Sonic threw himself sideways and scrambled out of reach. His gloved hands and sneakered feet slid across the slick surface. It took him a couple heavy heartbeats longer than it should have to shove himself upright once more.
Despite Green Fichus's heavy weight, he slid to a stop at the edge of the tier and straightened once more. "It would seem we've traded roles," the Metarex purred.
Sonic's heart dropped even before his brain caught up enough to make sense of Green Fichus's words.
Green Fichus—is—bait.
A metal arm wrapped around Sonic's throat from behind.
The arm lifted Sonic from the ground so his feet kicked uselessly at the air. He threw one foot backward. His heel struck metal, but the metal offered no give.
The arm stiffened against Sonic's throat.
He reached up to claw at the arm. But already the strength in his arms melted. He choked. There was no room in his throat left for air. His fingers slid against the metal and found no purchase. Someone must have secured weights to his wrists because they fell to his sides, and he couldn't lift them again.
He choked. He tried to kick backward again but his heels barely brushed the metal behind him.
He choked.
The edges of his sight accumulated shadows. The center of his sight blurred as though filled with tears. And it might have been.
No.
NO.
I can't be one of them again.
This is a nightmare.
This can't…
Green Fichus leaned in close enough to Sonic that he was clear in Sonic's otherwise blurry vision. "It's so nice to have you back, Blue Seed."
That was the last thing Sonic knew before a vacuum sucked up the last of his reality.
-X-X-X-
Amy's View
Amy raced out of the repair bay, hammer in hand, Knuckles following half a length behind her. "Where did you last see her?" Knuckles shouted.
"Tier three!" Amy shouted, but she didn't waste energy to turn her head around and shout in his direction. She kept her eyes straight ahead as they raced for the elevator at the center pole of the space station, like on all the other tiers. Even on this, the lowest tier—not to mention the one tier with no residential space—there were so many bodies to push against, to weave between. But down here, it was the reverse of the problem Amy had before on the higher tier.
Before, Amy had been trying to escape the elevator.
Now, she needed nothing more.
But clearly the tier that housed the space station's repair bay also housed general docking as well as escape pods. A steady flood of space station visitors and denizens poured from the elevator to make their desperate escape from the Metarex. Amy scanned every face they pushed past in the hopes that one would be Cosmo.
They couldn't have been that separated by the crowd. Surely, Cosmo must have made it into an elevator by now. But Amy didn't see her, didn't see her. Amy glanced down at the communicator wrapped around her wrist, hoping against hope that Tails would call and report Cosmo's unexpected arrival back on the Blue Typhoon. Maybe Sonic would sweep through and grab Cosmo on his own way down through the space station.
Amy skidded to a stop beside one of the elevators with its doors still shut. Knuckles slid into her as he made his own stop, but Amy didn't bother to comment on it as she straightened once more. When the elevator dinged its tiny bell as notification of its arrival, the sound sent tremors across Amy's shoulders. It sounded so commonplace as to become bizarre to her ears. The doors shifted apart to allow a steady stream of space station residents out. But the effort was anything but organized. Some shoved, some stumbled, some spun around to shout at someone else, stealing away the precious seconds they had to escape.
"Aren't there stairs on this thing?" Though Knuckles was just behind her, he shouted the words into her ear to be heard above the cacophony around them.
"If there are, I don't know where, and we don't have the time to waste searching!" she shouted back.
Instead, they waited for the elevator to empty. Amy bounced on the balls of her feet, readjusting her grip on the handle of her hammer every other second. When the elevator finally did empty, Amy and Knuckles were the only two to climb in.
No one else was so foolish.
Amy held her breath as she stared up at the glowing numbers changing above the door. Beside her, Knuckles cracked his knuckles while he did the same. For just one second, Amy's eyes dropped down to her communicator to make sure she hadn't missed a message, hopefully one informing them that Sonic and Cosmo had arrived on the Blue Typhoon, that now was their chance to escape.
No such luck.
When the doors pulled open on their floor, they had yet another panicked crowd to contend with. But Knuckles bared his teeth and stepped forward, which was enough to part the sea. Amy followed in his wake. She searched the face of everyone they passed. Cosmo had to be among them. She had to be, unless she was already on her way down to the Blue Typhoon. There was more than one elevator after all; they might have just missed each other.
"Knuckles, slow down!" she shouted up at him. Speed wouldn't help them here.
"We don't have time!" he shouted.
"So we can't waste it by rushing!" It struck her, at the shadowy edges of her thoughts, how un-Sonic-like such a thing sounded. Such a strange thing for his girlfriend to say.
But there was a timeline where Amy learned that, as much as she loved Sonic, she was complete on her own. And so she shoved the concept even deeper into the depths of her thought.
"Cosmo!" she cried.
Knuckles echoed her. But if Cosmo replied, they couldn't hear her. So with Knuckles leading the way, offering dangerous-looking glares to anyone who seemed to be considering getting in their way, they twisted through the tier's crowd.
Cosmo was the last of her kind, the final Seedrian in existence who hadn't otherwise become a Metarex or been eliminated by them. She shouldn't be this hard to pick out of a crowd. So either she was…
…or she wasn't part of the crowd.
They called her name. Again. And again. And again. Amy's screaming tore at her throat. She convinced herself she imagined the taste of blood on her tongue, even though it was probably from the tearing. Moisture accumulated in the base of her throat. And then that moisture started to accumulate in the corners of her eyes.
She looked above her. The shield still shivered pale blue with each impact from the Metarex ship's fire. Every so often, a vaguely female voice reported the remaining shield integrity to the space station, though among the rest of the noise, Amy couldn't make sense of it.
Her eyes flashed down to her communicator and willed it to flash to life. Cosmo had to be okay. They had only been on a delivery. Amy hadn't meant to leave her side. But that was all that had happened. They had just been separated. The Metarex had yet to break through the shield so the only possible explanation was that Cosmo was fine. They just hadn't found her.
"AMY!"
Amy skidded to a stop at the sound of her name. She spun on the spot, raising her hammer as she turned. But no one in the crowd looked her way. Instead, they twisted around her like they were a river and she was a rapid.
"AMY!"
She twisted to the right. And without hesitation, she shoved through the crowd. She distantly heard Knuckles's voice behind her. "Cosmo!" she screamed both for her sake and Cosmo's.
It had to be Cosmo.
Amy burst through a crowd and crashed into the side of a metal building standing at attention at the side of the narrow alley. She stumbled back a step, blinking disorientation from her eyes.
And then a hand grabbed hers.
"Cosmo," Amy breathed, even though she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to shake off the stars exploding like fireworks before her eyes.
"Not exactly."
Amy opened her eyes to see standing before her—
—a complete stranger.
A young fox—maybe about Tails's current age, not actual age—stood before Amy. Her fur was somewhere between red and strawberry blonde. And though Amy didn't recognize her, the fox looked up at Amy with knowing eyes.
"You need to get off this ship," she told Amy.
"No kidding," Amy snapped. She must have misheard the fox. She must have not heard her name. And they didn't have time for a case of mistaken identity.
She twisted away. And the fox hand on hers tightened. She yanked Amy back, and Amy stumbled from the force. She ended up at eye level with the fox, her eyes a piercing green to match Amy's. "We don't have time to mince words," the fox said before Amy could say anything. "I'm C2, and we need to get off this station now."
Amy blinked. Despite the cacophony surrounding them, Amy could hear every beat of her thudding heart. They reverberated inside her skull. "C…2?" she breathed.
But how could this be C2? Amy blinked and for that brief second, she saw an image of C2 painted on the inside of her eyelids. A red-headed little girl, hair pulled back in pigtails or a low ponytail. C2 looked like a human girl, whether she was trying to look mortal or appearing as a Time Whisperer. This was not the same girl.
"I know. I'm a fox. Didn't exactly plan on you seeing me in my mortal form and time's all sorts of messed up," C2 explained glancing over her shoulder even as she spoke. "It was hard enough for Angel to get me here, but it's the best chance we've got. Now let's go!"
C2 yanked on Amy's arm and the force was enough to wake Amy up. She dug her heels in after a couple steps and shouted, "Not without Cosmo!"
C2 twisted her head back to look at Amy over her shoulder. "If I'm here, then it's already too late. Now all we can do is worry about changing that future before she's actually lost."
Amy's heart plummeted. Down from where it echoed in her head, down from where it belonged in her chest, down to the pit of her stomach.
And when C2 turned again, Amy caught sight of the fox's twin tails.
-X-X-X-
Tails's View
Tails twisted toward the door behind him when he heard it slide open with a prayer in his heart and no air in his lungs. Only the sound of that door was enough to pull his hands from the controls he otherwise clutched for dear life.
And standing in the doorway was Knuckles, Amy, and…a stranger.
Tears streamed steadily down Amy's face.
Neither Knuckles not the fox with them commented on the tears, which meant they hadn't just started. No, they had been coming for some time now. "Cosmo…?" Tails breathed.
Amy pressed her lips together. Knuckles's hand clenched into fists at his sides, his eyes cutting away.
And the young fox stepped forward, "Short version, since we don't have time to waste." She pressed a black-gloved hand to her chest. "I'm C2. Actually C2, in the flesh, not a Time Whisperer. And right now, I exist because on this space station, you don't manage to save Cosmo and Sonic. If you want a chance to change the future and save them, right now you have to run."
Time froze.
Not literally. It was only Tails's world erupted. Tails's world that had all sound and sensation sucked from it in a moment. It took Tails a moment to collect the shattered pieces.
Cosmo and Sonic…both MIA.
C2…now mortal? A pinkish-orange fox rather than human. Dressed in an oversized white t-shirt, black leggings, black boots. And peeking out from behind her back—
—twin tails.
Tails swallowed. His eyes flicked to Knuckles's first, and Knuckles wouldn't meet his. Then his eyes met Amy's. Unlike Knuckles, Amy looked back at Tails, even as tears streamed down her face. She said nothing, didn't offer him a gesture, just met his eyes. But that was enough to see into Amy's soul, or at least its shattered remains.
And realized that the ever tenacious, never deterred Amy had gone up looking for Cosmo. And that this girl who had chased after Sonic with all the obsession of a fangirl, came down with C2 instead.
Which meant he too saw only one reasonable choice before them.
And so Tails turned back to the controls of the Blue Typhoon. In the time it took him to turn, the world blurred before his eyes. It was a good thing he knew this craft as well as he did because it looked like he would be navigating the ship out of Metarex fire without the use of his eyes.
Cosmo…
The Blue Typhoon's feeble engine stop-gap kicked into gear and lifted them off the ground.
Sonic…
Tails triggered their cloaking.
Cosmo…
Tails braced himself as he slid the Blue Typhoon out of the repair bay and into space. As he left his best friend behind. And Cosmo.
Cosmo…
Cosmo…
He left the two people he loved most in the universe in the hands of the monsters they most feared.