Chapter Thirty-Eight: Myth-making

Dear future me,

I hope that by the time you read this, everything that's happened to you, everything you've done, all of it makes sense. I hope you know enough about yourself to not be shocked when the fake Chaos Emeralds use you. Or, even better, know that they didn't use you. You know something in you reached out to them. You know it's your own fault that you became Dark Super Tails, the same type of creature that scared you when Sonic became it. You know that there's something inside you that's so angry and scared and destructive and scary and violent. And maybe you'll be okay with it.

Can you teach me how to be okay with it?

I've been trying to figure out how to be okay with it. I tell myself I was desperate. I tell myself my life was in danger so of course I panicked. But I didn't even realize what had happened to me until Amy told me. I wrecked my hand and didn't feel it, I was so focused on fighting. And I had to be! But…

I don't like what I became. Was it me? But it had to be me, since I didn't even notice anything unusual was happening to me. Which means there's a part of me that's so angry and violent…

Does that mean I'm not good?

I'm not a philosopher. I don't have the tools to answer these questions. Are there even tools for untangling questions like these? What is good? What is evil? Is love and hate a binary or a spectrum? Is there a definitive answer? We can't possibly all have to answer it for ourselves. If we did, how would we ever coexist with our differing answers?

I'm getting further from answers, not closer, the more I think about these things. So I hope you, future me, are smarter than I am now. And even if you aren't, I hope you learn to forgive the parts of you that are less than perfect.

-Tails

The Chaos Emerald sitting off to Tails's side kept drawing his attention. He would be writing a sentence and then he would realize he was staring at the Chaos Emerald again. For how long he'd been distracted, he didn't know. His consciousness had been fuzzy for days now, a mess of overstimulation and pain in his hand. Focus was his only comfort, as it meant a brief period of time where he didn't need to understand what had happened.

But he did need to understand.

Tails reached out with his good hand and trailed his finger along one edge of the Chaos Emerald. It was probably his imagination, but the light blue Chaos Emerald seemed to glimmer gently when Tails touched it. Almost like the Emerald sought to comfort Tails. Not that he felt particularly deserving of such a thing.

A fact Tails felt most confidently since he was presently hiding in Cosmo's room.

He couldn't exactly ignore his failings when he was forced to face Cosmo's empty bed while he sat at her unoccupied desk. Not that Tails sought punishment, not exactly. He wasn't a masochist, dwelling in pain for the sake of it.

Tails simply hoped to face the truth of things.

The truth of things was not a long list of positives. Sonic was a Metarex. Cosmo was an insurance policy for Sonic's continued compliance. Nova was the last of her kind. Time had fallen so much to pieces that the Time Whisperers wondered if it could be salvaged. And that was all before Tails sunk into dwelling on what the fake Chaos Emeralds had made him become.

He realized he was avoiding his friends. He also realized that probably wasn't sitting well with them. Which was why he kept trying to find new places to hide on the Blue Typhoon. For sure, he was going to get a lecture at some point about how they needed to handle their pain together. None among them was an island, they were stronger together—Tails could practically write the lecture himself.

But Tails also realized he couldn't face his friends yet. Not while he was so filled with shame. It was so hard to meet the eyes of his friends when the only reason Tails could bear to look into his own eyes was because he hoped to find answers to his questions there.

Only weeks ago, Tails, Sonic, and Amy had all reached out to the fake Chaos Emeralds on an armada of Metarex ships. Sure, it had been an act of desperation after all other options had been vetted and found inadequate. But still the fact of the matter was that Tails had reached out with his own Chaos Energy for the Chaos Emeralds' cold cousins before. Yet, this time seemed different. Maybe because he had become Dark Super Tails? But why would that be different from any other use of his Chaos Energy?

Tails hadn't long been a user of the Chaos Emeralds. Still he would prefer to hand them off to Sonic and let him use them to their best potential. Most days, if he was willing to go so deep into his honestly that it became vulnerability, he still felt unworthy of the Emeralds and the Chaos Energy within himself. Even though…how could he feel so unworthy of something that made up his very being? It was as though his dive into the darker version of the Energy of the fake Chaos Emeralds was a marquee with flashing lights that proclaimed, "This right here is why you are not worthy of the gift of miracle-making."

Tails lowered his head to the surface of Cosmo's desk, still staring at the Chaos Emerald. His finger no longer trailed the Emerald's edge but instead rested against the sharp corner. The Emerald glowed bright with its own light. An object so unreal in its glowing that it seemed like it must be inherently good.

But that wasn't true, was it?

Tails often forgot the truth of the Chaos Emeralds, even though Sonic so often wielded them and now, so did Tails. But even when faced with reality, sometimes the rhythm of fairy tales felt more true than truth. Even if they were lies, the stories were simple and that granted staying power. And so fairy tales and truth took their turns in Tails's head. Even as he begged his brain to traverse the labyrinth of reason so he could find his way out of fretful obsession.

The Chaos Emeralds are miracle-makers…

…no, the Chaos Emeralds are gems of immeasurable power swayed by the heart that wields them.

The Chaos Emeralds are used by heroes like Sonic to protect the universe…

…but they were also used by Perfect Chaos to destroy Station Square.

The Chaos Emeralds are warmth and the fake Chaos Emeralds are ice cold…

…but can't fire burn so hot that it blazes blue?

And so he circled through his thoughts again and again, hoping each cycle through that this would be the time he struck the truth. But no, Tails kept finding himself in the same place with the same thought:

How can I be good if it was so easy for me to become something so full of hate?

The glow of the Chaos Emerald sparked a bit brighter for a heartbeat before mellowing out to its same steady glow once more. Like it was trying to tell Tails something. Like it was still trying to tell Tails something. Like it felt Tails's labyrinthine thoughts and knew just where he should turn right, but Tails kept turning left and getting more and more lost.

As it turned out, as smart as Tails was, he hadn't uncovered all the secrets of the universe. He hadn't even figured out all the secrets within himself.

The beeping of Tails's communicator at his wrist interrupted his thoughts. Though Tails had built new versions of the communication headsets they all preferred, he had made the choice not to wear his. After all, would the signal his hiding was meant to send mean as much if he made himself easy to contact?

He still wore his old communicator, though. He wasn't stupid enough to make himself unreachable in the midst of an emergency.

And since his friends had seemed to honor the message he was sending thus far, this sudden interruption gave him pause. Tails lifted his head from the desk, staring at the device around his wrist as if it was some unknown specimen. When it kept on beeping its alert, Tails guided the communicator toward the sling where his injured hand rested so that he could flip the lid and answer the call. "This is Tails."

No video popped up on the communicator screen, which meant whoever he was talking to was probably using their headset. For a moment, the caller said nothing. As if they were surprised he had answered. Not that Tails could blame them. He had already spent the last few days avoiding his friends; they probably had expected him to ignore their call. So rather than hanging up, Tails let that silence hang to allow his friend the time to collect their thoughts. And after a long moment—

"Tails?"

The voice was a whisper. Barely a whisper. A prayer more than anything ekse. Small enough to be nothing more than a myth, a bedtime story. For a heartbeat, Tails couldn't process what he was hearing. And then his heart stuttered

and

stopped.

He took a strangled breath and even then, he could barely manage to choke, "Cosmo?"