Shadow snapped out of existence and reappeared in the lobby of GUN's shooting range.

In another few seconds, Rouge would realise that he had left Team Dark's quarters. Then she would storm out of the room, throw her phone onto the table and reboot Omega so she could spend half an hour complaining to him about how she'd had enough. It's always something with Shadow – everything has to be difficult, and I'm going to sound terrible for saying this, but he's exhausting to deal with when he's depressed, and I'm scared that he's going to do something rash –

Shadow blinked several times and shook his head. He didn't know whether his memory or his imagination was to blame for Rouge's familiar tirade becoming warped beyond recognition.

'Shadow?' The safety officer manning the range leaned over his desk, holding out an ear protection headset. 'Can you please –'

Shadow walked past him and swiped his ID card. 'No.'

'I still have to ask.'

'It doesn't even cover my ears.'

'It's company policy –'

Shadow groaned and slammed the door shut behind him. 'Give me a break.'

Gunfire blasted intermittently. The firing lanes were sparsely populated by GUN agents doing shooting drills with paper targets.

He walked over to the booth on the far left. He'd used it so many times that there were faint scorch marks on the ground from the thrusters in his shoes. A metal ammo box, scuffed and scratched, sat beneath the shelf in the corner.

Shadow placed his gun on the shelf and got down on one knee. He entered the code for the combination lock –1951 – and took out a 12-round box magazine, loading it with .45 ACP cartridges.

'Do you want a speed loader?'

He stepped back and looked to his right. People usually didn't talk to him, but she couldn't be speaking to anyone else. The girl in the next booth turned to face him – and as she turned, her gun pointed in his direction. His hand shot up, and he grabbed her wrist, twisting her gun back towards the range so quickly that he heard her joints crack.

'I want you to improve your muzzle awareness.'

She turned pale and held the gun in both hands, staring at the paper target in front of her. 'Y-Yes.'

He stepped back into his own booth, loaded the final cartridges into the magazine, and then slammed the magazine into the gun. 'Of all the people here, you aimed at the one person who you can't accidentally kill. Get it together.'

'Right.' She peeped around the barrier between the booths. 'I'm sorry –'

He ignored her and raised his gun with one hand, looking down the sights with both eyes open.

Two soldiers walked past on their way out, and they stopped to stare at him. 'You know that Berettas are standard-issue now, right?' one of them asked.

'Damn,' Shadow muttered. 'No, it never occurred to me that the United Federation might have changed their standard military firearm in the past 50 years. Thanks for letting me know.'

'All right, simmer down,' the other soldier said. He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. '… Is that a 1911? Why the hell are you using that –'

Shadow exhaled and opened fire, emptying the 12-round magazine in three seconds.

'T-There's only one bullethole,' the first soldier said.

Shadow ejected the magazine, and he briefly considered hurling it over his shoulder, at the soldier's head. 'Are you done?'

'But that's not possible –'

Agent Boulder stepped back from his booth and yanked off his ear protection before stomping over. 'Men, I can hear your bullshit from all the way over here. What the hell is going on?'

Shadow tipped his head in the direction of the target, and Boulder squinted at the range, following Shadow's line of sight. 'You've got to be kidding me. You two – that's normal, and he's not even using his damn abilities. Get back in your booths.'

'If he has abilities, then why does he need to use guns?' one of them protested.

Shadow slammed the gun down on the table and turned so that he could glare at them. 'If you have guns, then why do you need to know how to fight hand-to-hand? Do you hear yourselves? Piss off, both of you.'

'But it's a waste of ammo!'

'Your department gets 875 billion dollars in funding each year. I don't think we need to start rationing bullets.'

'But –'

Shadow shoved past them, opened the door to the lobby, grabbed the headset from the safety warden's desk, walked back to the booth, and put the headset on backwards so it covered his ears.

The soldiers' complaints faded away into white noise. He hefted the ammo box off the ground and put it on the ledge inside the booth before beginning to load another magazine.

Every now and again, Rouge would ask him why he still kept and maintained his guns when he rarely used them in the field. She had a point, though he hated to admit it. During the Black Arms invasion, he'd used guns, knives and rocket launchers. He had even crashed his motorbike into a horde of aliens more than once. But now that his memories were mostly restored, he no longer had to rely on physical weapons. How he fought may have changed, but one thing hadn't – the fact that he would use any means necessary to achieve his goal – and that meant using whatever was at his disposal.

He loaded his gun again and raised it. The paper target had been replaced, and he fired another 12 rounds, emptying the magazine in 2.9 seconds.

'Is there … to that?'

He pulled his headset down so it hung around his neck. It was the voice of the same girl from the booth next to him.

'What?'

'Is there a trick to firing that many rounds that quickly? With that type of gun, no less.'

He reloaded while he spoke. 'Being fast isn't the point. Work on your accuracy first.'

'I-I'm accurate enough.'

He glanced up at her paper target and scoffed. 'Sure. Are you accurate enough to neutralise someone using a civilian as a shield?'

She set her gun down and stepped back from the booth. She held a water bottle in her hand. 'We have hostage negotiators.'

Shadow turned to face her. 'And what do you think we do when they fail the negotiations? Pack it up and go home?'

'No, but –'

'We usually have someone take out the target while the hostage negotiator stalls for time. If we can get a sniper on location, then great. If not, then we have to get one of you to do it.'

'In that case, doesn't speed still matter? You can only stall for so long.'

He stepped back into the booth and picked up his gun. 'It matters, but it's still not the priority.' He opened fire – 2.8 seconds. 'The faster you are, the better reflexes you have to have.'

'But …'

'Unless you're the damn blue blur himself, then forget it.' The single bullethole in his target stared back at him like a dark unblinking eye. He sighed. 'I remember when people would actually come here to shoot.'

He put the headset back on. A few seconds and a few rounds later, he heard another voice. But he didn't stop this time. He kept loading magazines and firing rounds until the movements became automatic, shaving milliseconds off his time with every burst.

What was the point? He didn't need weapons. He was a weapon. And even if he kept training for the sake of it, he would always hit his head on a glass ceiling – the limitations imposed by the firing rate of anything that had a trigger.

Everyone he'd ever loved had been torn away from him by gun violence. Maria had been shot in the back. Gerald had been executed by firing squad. Yet even after he'd regained his memories, he still found himself with a gun in his hands.

Maybe he wanted his stubbornness to serve as a reminder. Every time someone at GUN saw him with a firearm in his hands, a twisted part of him wanted them to remember that the agency's legacy was still stained with blood. He wanted them to remember that if they began to repeat the past, he would be there to put a stop to it, using their own weapons against them, if necessary.

His earpiece vibrated. 'Ceasefire, sweetheart.'

He stiffened. Then he took out the magazine and stepped back from the firing line before turning around and pulling his headset off. 'Really?'

Rouge stood behind him. She gave him an unimpressed look. 'We were just talking about gun safety. Would you have preferred it if I grabbed you by the shoulder instead?'

'Of course not.' He turned his back on her, stepping back over the firing line, and began loading another magazine. 'What do you want?'

'I want to know what you're doing here.'

'I'm training.'

'Honey, you're either going to break a record or break your trigger finger … and you haven't broken your personal record in months.'

'Why are you bothering me?'

'I was coming to check on you, out of the goodness of my heart.'

'You're not my handler.'

She slammed a fist against the wall of the booth, startling him, and he looked back over his shoulder. She gave him a fierce look. 'Handler? Is that how you want to play this?'

He tensed. 'Well … you aren't. You're our team leader.'

'I'm not your handler or your team leader right now. Listen, I've watched you chainsmoking on the roof in the rain, and I'm watching you try to drown out your thoughts with gunfire –'

'That's not –'

'– And I'll be damned if watch you end up at the bottom of a bottle at Club "Rouge".'

'You know that alcohol does nothing for me.'

'And neither does nicotine, yet here we are.'

They glared at each other, and he tightened his grip on the gun, slipping his finger beneath the trigger guard.

Rouge slumped against the wall of the booth. 'Look. When you go off on your own … or throw yourself into your work … or even refuse to smile, I don't say anything. Because that's just you, and that's fine. But this is different.'

'Aren't I allowed to change?'

Rouge turned pale. 'Darling, this isn't what change looks like. You know that, right?'

He was silent.

'You know, even if you have changed, there's one part of you that hasn't.' She stepped into the booth and began to prise the gun out of his grip, one finger at a time. 'You're still running … or skating … away from your problems.'

The gun fell out of his hand and landed on the ledge with a clatter.

'… I don't have a choice.'

'You always have a choice. Even if your circumstances are out of your control, you can still choose how you deal with them.'

'Leave me alone.' Even through the headset, his voice sounded exhausted.

'Sorry, darling.' She lifted his headset off, bringing clarity to her voice. 'I always want what I can't have, and I still want you to be happy.'

A barrage of rounds were fired from further up the range, and Rouge winced. Her ears twitched violently. With her sensitive ears, the fact that she had toughed it out this long in the shooting range was incredible. He swiftly took the headset out of her hands and placed it on her own head, covering her ears. 'Go.'

'But –'

He dropped the gun into the lockbox and closed the lid. He gave her a weary smile. 'Go.'

She reached out, but he was already dematerialising, and her hand dipped into an effervescent green glow, leaving him with the afterimage of her frustrated smile.

He would give it one more chance. He'd spent his whole life looking for answers. Surely there had to be some waiting to be found, somewhere –

Snap.

He looked around. He was standing in the middle of a nondescript street outside an apartment complex in Station Square. Once again, his mind had brought him to a place that had nothing to do with him.

A deep, overwhelming sense of despair flooded through him. It was almost indistinguishable from the moment that he'd been put into stasis. He'd felt like he was drowning then, and he felt like he was drowning now.

He heard the sound of a sliding door followed by the click of shoes descending concrete steps, and he turned swiftly, looking up.

There were very few people that he listened to. On one hand, Abraham likely thought that Maria was the only person who could talk Shadow down. On the other hand, Rouge had never known Maria, and she probably believed that Sonic could talk Shadow down as well.

Yet there was a third person who had been his guiding light – a voice of reason in the face of insanity. Sonic had saved the world countless times, but if it wasn't for her pleas aboard the Ark, then there wouldn't have been a world left to save. She was the reason that humanity was still here, in spite of Shadow's best efforts.

She descended the steps, reading a fanned deck of glittering purple tarot cards as she walked. She had her hammer slung over one shoulder.

He still remembered their first encounter. In a moment of seeming colour blindness, she had hugged him with the same fearlessness that Maria had all those years ago.

'... Amy?'

She looked up, and her eyes brightened, sparkling like diamonds. 'Shadow!'

He stared at her, almost unable to believe his eyes. For once, his mind hadn't brought him to a place – it had brought him to a person.