Chapter Fifty-Four: The Flawed Space Between
Our footfalls tap out a rhythm, reminding me of the thought I hoped I had left behind me. But closing the door isn't the same thing as making someone on the other side of it go away. So now, as we're following the glow of the six Chaos Emeralds to a seventh that we'll hopefully reach before we reach Black Thorn, there's only one word pounding in my head:
Unworthy.
Unworthy.
Because how am I possibly going to be able to do this? Save the universe? And stop Black Thorn? I know I'm not going in alone. We'll fight Black Thorn together. We've beaten a bunch of Metarex before. But Black Thorn isn't just a Metarex.
The Chaos Emerald Sonic held out in front of him led their way through a short spiral of hallways. Not a single Metarex crossed their path now that they were inside this building. Because Black Thorn really didn't think they would get this far? For a plan complicated enough to involve the manipulation of time itself, a simple assumption like that seemed like an awfully big oversight.
"Are we sure the Chaos Emerald is reaching out to another real one?" Amy called up to Sonic. She and Tails ran in his wake, just a pace back.
It wasn't an unfair question. The hallways grew colder and colder around them the deeper they got in the building. It felt like the same cold that the fake Chaos Emeralds gave off. By this point, Tails could see his gasping breath as bursting clouds floating out from his lips.
Tails explained between gasps, "Our scanners can't…always tell…the difference. Chaos Emeralds…can."
Sonic abruptly skidded to a stop in front of a door. Tails and Amy slid to a stop behind him. Sonic's arm stretched out in front of him so only inches separated the door and the Emerald. Tails had to squint to endure the brightness of the Emerald's light now. "Did Eggman give us any details about this room?" Sonic said.
Tails focused his attention on the headset's visor right in front of his eyes. With a few flicks of his eyes, he navigated through the info he'd loaded back on the Blue Typhoon until he found the file he was looking for. "Looks like a massive lab," he said slowly. "The image is pretty low res so I can't tell what for."
"Give you one guess," Amy muttered, wrapping her arms around herself like she was trying to keep herself warm.
"Guess that makes sense," Sonic said, arm falling back to his side. "They use the real Emeralds to make the fake ones. So if there's a bunch of fakes ones in here, the real one probably is too."
He glanced back at Tails with a question in his eyes. A familiar question. When Tails saw it, he nodded. So Sonic turned back to the door, revved up a spindash, and drove straight through it.
Tails and Amy slipped through the space Sonic left behind even as the dust continued settling. Tails had only begun to get a sense of the scale of the room soaring multiple floors above their heads, like they were at the bottom of a tall cylinder, when the floor beneath their feet started to move.
The three of them stumbled before regaining their balance. The section of the floor just inside the room was slowly lifting up like an elevator. It was only a small section of the floor that didn't stretch out to touch any of the walls around them, but perhaps that fraction of distance was a good thing. In the walls all around them, lined up in rows and columns with military precision, were fake Chaos Emeralds. Like on Shining Birch and Rusted Maple's ship but on a massive scale. It looked like the fake Emeralds went several deep. There were hundreds, if not thousands in this sterile white cylinder of a room.
Sonic lifted the Chaos Emerald he held so they could all see its glow continued to increase. Which made their decision to continue on the open-air elevator already pushing them upward.
To where though? Tails managed to turn away from the fake Emeralds, even as their cold clawed beneath his fur, to look toward where they were heading. At the center of the room, a metal column stretched upward, separate from the piece of floor they stood on. When Tails's eyes followed it upward, he saw that it ended in a circular platform above their heads and growing ever closer. Like it was the center of a flower while Sonic, Amy, and he stood on a petal. "Up there," he said.
Sonic and Amy followed his gaze. "Get behind me," Sonic said after a moment, his expression darkening.
Tails and Amy both stepped back. Amy shifted the messenger bag full of the other Chaos Emeralds so it hung between her and Tails and behind Sonic. Their elevator rose up to align with the central platform until they could finally see it, see its slick metal floor with something like a stasis pod at its center, seemingly empty save for the single yellow Chaos Emerald floating within.
Which Black Thorn stood directly in front of.
Their petal of floor shuddered to a stop and locked into place. None of them moved. Not even Black Thorn. She observed them almost passively as she leaned against the capsule holding the Chaos Emerald. Her teal hair was swept over one shoulder and spilled down toward her hip. Her Metarex-metal limbs stood in stark contrast to something so organic as her hair. Her blood-red eyes, however, landed somewhere in the middle.
Sonic bent his knees a fraction of an inch. He looked like he was readying to bolt for the Emerald despite Black Thorn standing there. "I wouldn't, if I were you," she said suddenly, eyeing Sonic's stance. Her voice was hardly a whisper, but even then it was impossible to ignore how robotic it sounded.
When Sonic's stance didn't change, though, her red eyes narrowed. She pushed off the pod to stand up straighter. "Oh, please. The Metarex forces on this planet may be offline, but they continue to toy with your allies in space. I'd be happy to tell them to stop playing and finish the job."
Sonic stiffened. Straightened, as Black Thorn demanded. Tails winced. The Metarex around Greengate weren't an armada at all. They were just there to keep the Blue Typhoon busy.
Tails had been played.
Black Thorn's posture softened by a degree. "That's better, isn't it? No point making the end harder than it has to be."
"Not sure what it is with you bad guys, but you all sure do love to hear yourselves talk," Sonic said. It was the sort of thing that should have been nonchalant, but Tails could hear in Sonic's dead-even tone just how far from nonchalance he was.
"Might as well," Black Thorn agreed. "It's a way to pass the time, given the process has already begun."
Tails's stomach dropped. What?
As one, every single fake Chaos Emerald surrounding them began to burn with a newfound light. Tails lost all the air in his lungs, all feeling in his body. The cold of the Emeralds' collective Energy drifted toward where they stood like it was a breeze. Tails realized now that thin channels ran between each row of fake Chaos Emeralds, and Energy began to spill into those channels too.
"Is this building just a giant bomb?" Amy exclaimed.
"No," Black Thrown said patiently. Her eyes remained as impassive as ever. "I've learned from our past mistakes that a massive implosion can be stopped."
"From the plans of your father, you mean," Tails cut in suddenly.
Black Thorn's red eyes snapped to Tails in an instant. While her eyes moved, the rest of her body was eerily still. "Yes. My father. Did you expect to catch me off-guard in your knowledge of that?"
Tails's hand curled into a fist at his side. He didn't know what he expected. But none of what was happening now was it.
"My father's vision for the Chaos Emerald duplicates was limited to their use in the Forestation Project," she explained. She leaned back against the capsule holding the real Chaos Emerald as if it was anything else. "He only understood the Lights so far. He had no sense of how the Chaos Emeralds could manipulate time itself." She gestured widely with a metallic hand. "Which is why we're here."
The fake Chaos Emeralds flashed with a blinding light. Tails threw up his arm against it. When it faded a moment later, Tails saw Sonic stumbling backward, one hand clutching at the back of his head. Amy grabbed him and pulled him in toward her before he stumbled back off the edge of the platform.
Black Thorn watched the whole scene with the ghost of a satisfied smile. "That was one of Silver Fir's better ideas, including the Energy of the Chaos Emerald duplicates in the technology that made you pliant to our will. With a reaction as aggressive as this, I'd say you're close to full burnout."
"Been there and back again, Thorn," Sonic said cheerfully, even as he winced against the pain. "Don't think you can count me out so easily."
Amy's eyes flashed over toward Tails. "Are you okay?" she barely dared to breathe into the headset's microphone.
Tails offered her the fraction of a nod before he turned back toward Black Thorn. But Amy's question was a good one. Sure, Tails felt the cold of the fake Chaos Emeralds filling the room. And sure, last time he'd given into the fake Chaos Emeralds, he hadn't known it was happening. But right now, he felt no surge of anger. Even the refrain of his fear quieted in his head.
Right now, all he felt was sadness.
Like before, when they had first learned that Black Thorn led the Metarex, all Tails could think was that he needed to understand. Understand how someone could reach this point. How someone could be raised from birth to be a creature so full of nothing but sadness and hatred. Was understanding really the most important thing at this point? Tails didn't know. But it was the only plan he had.
Tails slid forward into the space Sonic had just vacated when he stumbled backward. Black Thorn stiffened immediately. "Don't!" she snapped.
Tails halted, showing her his empty palms. "So you're using the power of the fake Chaos Emeralds to create a time-space event on a massive scale. But if your father didn't teach you about the Chaos Emeralds, who did? Your mother?"
Black Thorn fully burst into laughter. Beneath the laughter, there was an additional layer of sound that crunched like crushed metal, and it took Tails a concerted effort not to fold his ears forward for protection against it.
"My mother?" Black Thorn exclaimed when she finally stopped laughing. "The people of Majyk may or may not have a good understanding of Chaos Emeralds that they could have taught me. I wouldn't know. Because when my mother realized what she had done, she abandoned me." When she said that, even the remnants of sarcastic joy evaporated from Black Thorn's expression. She cast her eyes to the side. She huffed through gritted teeth.
"Because you were a Metarex?" Tails said slowly.
Black Thorn's eyes flashed back up. She took a threatening step forward. "No, not because I am a Metarex. I am not a Metarex. I am not a fairy. I am nothing!"
Her last word hung in the air, reverberating off the walls back at them. Even the fake Chaos Emeralds seemed to respond to Black Thorn's scream. Their brightness flickered before recovering.
Chaos Emeralds are fueled by the heart. Fake ones are too, Tails reminded himself.
Black Thorn's shoulders hung heavily as she stood panting, still in front of the last real Chaos Emerald in the room. How long did they have before before even all seven Chaos Emeralds together wouldn't be able to stop the fake ones? Was Black Thorn right? Had they already reached the point of no return?
But those thoughts were little more than pesky gnats buzzing around Tails's brain. Right now, all he could see was Black Thorn calling herself nothing.
"Being a child of two worlds," Amy said suddenly, "isn't nearly as fun as it sounds. That's what Angel said."
"As if that Time Whisperer has the first idea! At least she was loved!" Black Thorn shouted. She took another threatening step forward, and Tails threw up an arm as if that would be enough to protect Amy and Sonic behind him.
"I am the child of worst enemies, which is not the tragic love story you'd hope for, not when you're the child left behind," Black Thorn continued. "No, Majyk has never accepted outsiders readily and discriminate based on origin alone. I would never have a home there. And as for the Metarex, they don't serve me. They serve in my father's name. I am a symbol at best, a mistake at worst."
The glowing of the fake Chaos Emeralds started to generate more than light. A high-pitched keening sound screeched from all around them. Tails heard Sonic grunt, and when Tails glanced back, he saw Sonic's eyes squeezed tightly closed. Amy could barely hold him upright. How much longer would he be able to hold up against the burnout? Would Amy be able to save him from the worst of it one more time?
But what would any of that matter if Black Thorn's grief destroyed everything anyway?
"I follow Dark Oak's final will because it aligns with my own," she snapped, pressing her hand against her chest. "You cannot begin to understand how such a will is formed. How irredeemable the universe is. How irredeemable I am."
Unworthy, Tails's mind whispered to him. Just the once before it went quiet.
"I know," Tails whispered.
Black Thorn's eyes flashed. "How dare—"
"I know," Tails repeated again. As realization dawned on him just how much he really did know. How much he had always known. That's what he had been trying to put together about Black Thorn all along. He stood a little straighter. "Because my parents abandoned me too."
And with that, Tails fanned out his twin tails behind him.
For a minute, Black Thorn just stared. All around them, the fake Chaos Emeralds grew brighter and brighter until they weren't a massive collection of individuals but an entire wall of light. Tails could feel himself beginning to shiver now, but the cold of the fake Energy didn't penetrate any deeper than surface-level.
Black Thorn squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. Tails used that slim second to slide himself ever so slightly closer toward her. He could hear the static of Amy's sharp intake of breath over the headset. By the time Black Thorn opened her eyes again, Tails had settled.
"I know what you're trying to do. Even though it's already pointless," Black Thorn said in a low voice.
However, the fact that Sonic was silent behind Tails told him it very much wasn't.
"No, I get it," Tails agreed. "It was kind of statistically likely to be orphaned on our planet when we were kids. The odds of someone from Mobius showing up here and having that same story as you are probably pretty high. We're all children of war from that planet."
Black Thorn said nothing. She stood more stiffly than before. Her back still pressed against the tank holding the Chaos Emerald but her stance was much less relaxed now. The light of the fake Chaos Emeralds flickered as if to mirror her unease.
Which was likely exactly what was happening. Because the fake Emeralds were connected to her.
"My parents probably thought I was an abomination," Tails admitted, wincing as he used the same word Silver Fir had chosen to describe Black Thorn. "Though I don't know that for sure. I was too young when they abandoned me to understand what was going on, much less why.
"But I do know that's why I got picked on as I grew up." Tails let his tails drift obviously behind him. "Well, one of the reasons. Guess I'm weird in more ways than one." He smiled, despite the fact that the universe was ending around him. He worked to channel Sonic into the space while Sonic himself was otherwise occupied.
Black Thorn furrowed her brow, still not speaking. Tails guessed she was no longer sure what he was doing. To be fair, he wasn't either.
"It took me a long time to find friends who accepted me for who I am," he continued. "I'm not for everyone, but I am for them. And then the people I wasn't for didn't matter so much."
"What's your point?" Black Thorn snapped suddenly.
She kept staring at Tails, but her eyes were even shaking now. The fake Chaos Energy drew in closer to them like an advancing tide. A threat that felt inevitable. That should have felt inevitable. But no longer did.
Black Thorn continued, "Is your plan to point out how much I've failed before the end? To point out how utterly alone I am? I have never been anything more than a tool to everyone in this universe. And now that tool is fulfilling that purpose as demanded."
Sonic stumbled half a step forward behind Tails. Tails's eyes flashed back to see Amy still at Sonic's side supporting him. Sonic had one eye completely squeezed shut against the pain of the Chaos Energy trying to burn him out. "You're more than what the Metarex made you, Thorn," he grunted.
Black Thorn squeezed her eyes shut again, grief and scorn at war amongst her features. Tails took her brief pause as yet another chance to slide just a bit further forward.
"This is pointless," Black Thorn said tightly. "Stop speaking to me like I'm some misguided child. I know what I'm doing, I know the consequences of my choices. I will unwrite all of time and there will at last be peace. Sacrifices are necessary. You are not better than me for thinking otherwise. You have made similar choices. Or did you not kill my father?"
Tails sighed. Black Thorn's accusation weighed heavily on him, all the more so because it was true. Cosmo had sacrificed herself then. Sonic had been willing to, if Cosmo's sacrifice hadn't kept him alive. Tails was the one to ultimately fire the shot that made all those choices final.
"There is not a day that passes that I don't regret what happened at the time-space collision," Tails admitted. "We all did the best we could with the circumstances we had. But it cost one of those I love most in the universe her life, just as it cost your father his. And I will not do that again, not if there's any other way."
And Tails held his hand out to Black Thorn.
She stared. She stared and she stared at Tails's outstretched hand. Still so many paces stood between them.
"STOP!" she screamed.
Black Thorn stumbled back a step. Even the pod behind her didn't keep her on her feet this time. She slammed back into it and slid down to the floor. The fake Chaos Emeralds surrounding all of them raged with her. The power surged, gaining multiple feet toward the inside of the room. It nearly touched the back of the platform where Sonic and Amy were standing. How far had it reached outward beyond this building? Could it spread all the way outward into the universe?
Or did it need to swallow Black Thorn first?
Tears ran down Black Thorn's cheeks. She brushed her shoulder against them to sop up the liquid. Her hands hovered uselessly. The fact that they were made of metal probably meant they were no help at a moment like this. Despite her tears, her red eyes continued to blaze. "Don't do this. All of what's happening is the inevitable end," she said. "You can't make me believe there was any other…"
Choice.
Black Thorn wasn't raging at all, Tails realized. She was begging.
She had seen herself as nothing for so long, as an abomination for so long, that she had made peace with it and the deadly mission Dark Oak had set her to complete. To consider that anything else was a possibility, that was more shattering to her identity than her own death.
Tails had been in the exact same place only a few days ago.
When Sonic had come to talk to him about being Dark Super Tails, is this how Sonic had found his little brother? So focused on his own unworthiness that Sonic protesting it sent him reeling? It was, Tails knew it was. Because he had found himself there first, when he wrote that letter to a future version of himself.
Tails didn't take a step forward this time, too aware of Black Thorn's eyes and her threat to signal her Metarex armada to move harder against their friends. Instead, he slowly—so slowly—lowered himself to his knees. "Sonic's right," he whispered. "You're more than what the Metarex made you. More than what Dark Oak made you. The anger you feel is a signal, that's all. You're more than that."
Black Thorn shook her head. "Stop," she begged again, in a much smaller voice that could barely be heard above the vortex of Energy surrounding them. "Stop, I can't…I've done horrible things. Horrible things have been done under my command. I'm wiping out all life in the universe and you…" Whatever word she sought, didn't come. Her voice just trailed away as she stared at Tails.
"I know," he breathed. He thought of all the rage and hate that filled him as Dark Super Tails. Thought of the letter he wrote to himself after. And knew he spoke to the both of them when he said, "Just because you don't like what you became doesn't mean you have to always be that thing. Good and evil, you're not wholly one or the other. You can make a new choice."
Black Thorn released a laugh closer to a cough. "Look around you!" she shouted. "There's no new choice to be made. Fate's already been decided."
The fake Chaos Energy continued to inch closer, eating up the already finite ground they had. They had minutes, if they were lucky.
"You know all about the Lights, Black Thorn," Tails insisted. "You taught yourself what they are. You know some myths called them miracle-makers." Tails held his hand out one more time. "Let me prove it to you."
The fake Chaos Energy advanced further. Amy had to shift herself and Sonic closer in toward the center of the platform to avoid it.
"How do I know you won't just kill me?" Black Thorn demanded, wild eyes dancing to look at the Energy surrounding them.
Which meant she didn't want to die. Which meant she wanted to take back what she started. And that in itself was the fiercest hope.
"You have to believe in your future, Black Thorn," Tails said. "All of it."
Tails held his breath. He could almost see Black Thorn's brain working behind her eyes. The fake Chaos Energy crawled ever forward. It took Tails resisting all instincts of self-preservation to remain where he was. To wait. To believe.
Black Thorn scrambled to her feet. She slapped a hand on the side of the capsule and a door at its front slid open. She yanked free the yellow Chaos Emerald inside and shoved it straight into Tails's waiting hand.
"Please prove me wrong," she breathed.
And the Chaos Emerald began to glow.