Chapter Text
It was meeting day.
Amy HATED meeting day.
It was hard to enjoy the one day a month when all of Team Sonic was stuffed into business attire and set up in one of GUN’s many meeting rooms. If it was just a debriefing on major threats it wouldn’t have been so bad. Coming up with preventative strategies was interesting and took actual brain power.
But not every meeting required thought. The current presenter speaking was droning on and on about Team Sonic exceeding the “property damage budget” they’d been given by the government. A glance at her teammates at least had her feeling less alone; Sonic, Tails and Knuckles all looked just as angry as she felt. How DARE they imply that saving lives had a budget? Unable to get a word in - they had tried before, but it just made the meeting last longer - Amy settled for glaring a hole in the paper in front of her. She wished Shadow or Rouge was here. They were far better at getting the GUN officials to listen to them.
A bright light indicative of Chaos Control flashed, sending Shadow, Rouge and Omega crashing into the table in the middle of the room. Amy looked up in slight relief and delight, but the smile on her face dropped as she took in the scene before her.
The powered-down Omega was missing several components, including most of the front and back plates that protected his internal circuits from damage and water, an eye, and their whole right arm. In their left arm, they held an unconscious Rouge who was covered in blood from a cut that slid clear across her forehead, her wings bent at an unnatural angle and her breathing shallow. In from of them both was Shadow, whose inhibitor rings hung loosely from the belt at his side, not in their usual position upon his wrists. Shadow used the last of his strength to meet the pink hedgehog’s eyes with an apologetic glance before the ultimate life form collapsed. He would have dropped to his knees on the rubble that was formerly the table if the rebar through his chest hadn't propped him up like a macabre scarecrow.
Team Sonic jumped into action immediately. Sonic put Rouge as his priority since she was movable and scooped her up in his arms as carefully as he could before shooting off to the local hospital. Tails knelt at Omega’s side to start assessing the damage to any power sources. He did his best to restore life to their metal friend to get an assessment on what had managed to take down GUN’s top agents.
Amy and Knuckles were left to tend to Shadow, Amy's fingers sliding under the hedgehog’s chin to feel for the pulse of his jugular vein, however faint it might be. When she couldn't find it, she felt her heart drop into her stomach. Knuckles was busy snapping the rebar behind Shadow off so they could at least lay him on his back.
“Knuckles I'm not getting a pulse! Work faster!” she ordered, watching in abject horror as the hybrid’s healing factor struggled, stitching and tearing and restitching around the metal embedded in his torso. Finally, a satisfying snap sounded and Amy and Knuckles eased Shadow onto the ground.
“I need you to pull this out of him!” Amy ordered, pulling off her thick cardigan sweater and tucking it underneath Shadow's head, the hybrid’s eyes glassy and unfocused in a way that she’d never seen them. Lifeless.
“No way Amy, he'll bleed out!” Knuckles refused.
“He won't bleed out if he can heal the GAPING HOLE IN HIS CHEST!”
Everyone else watching was in awe and shock as Amy chose to ignore the echidna’s protests, moving to brace Shadow’s lifeless body by kneeling across his torso. Using her body weight and an arm across his collarbone, she wrapped her hand around the rebar and pulled.
Being that she could nearly out-muscle the echidna who had refused to help, it shouldn't have been as much of a surprise that she was able to dislodge the rebar; even if she nearly gagged from the noises it made. Once it was removed she tossed it aside, moving now to the hole itself.
“Get me a light and an emerald,” she demanded, ignoring how every part of Shadow that she was touching was soaking her in blood. Someone -Tails?- tossed her a pocket flashlight and she turned it on, prodding around the hole in Shadow’s chest. She tried to ignore the bloodstained carpet she could see through the wound.
There, narrowly missed by the rebar and cozied up to the hybrid’s heart was a small green organ roughly a third of the size and pulsating with a slowly dying green light. She looked back up at Knuckles, who presented her with a chaos emerald. The yellow gem was set in Shadow’s hand, his inhibitors clicked back into their usual position. The mysterious glowing organ glowed a little brighter as if perking up with the contact with an emerald, but its larger counterpart was still.
Amy dreaded what she had to do next.
She rolled up her sleeves and took her gloves off, knowing blood-soaked cotton would only impair what came next. Popping the end of the flashlight in Knuckles’ hand so she had a clear visual, she reached both hands into Shadow’s chest cavity and grabbed his heart, starting to manually pump it. Knowing Knuckles was about to ask what he could do to help, she started barking orders.
“Keep that flashlight on his heart, tilt his head back and pinch his nose,” she ordered, starting to count the squeezes of his heart. Once Knuckles had done as she asked, she leaned over and pressed her mouth against Shadow’s to push air into his lungs. She did so twice, then started counting again until she reached thirty. Amy slowed her pace as she breathed for him a second time, hands stilling a little as she waited for his body to respond. When she didn't feel a pulse from the organ cupped in her hands, she kept squeezing.
“He needs a jumpstart. Can you do that power-boosting chant?” she asked, trying to ignore how the hole in Shadow’s chest had stopped stitching itself closed, and the superficial cuts to his cheek that should have taken a microsecond to heal remained. She tuned out the methodic echindian chanting as best she could, knowing the timing on it wasn't nearly fast enough to set the pace of a healthy beating heart.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Even with a glowing emerald, Amy had to pump Shadow’s heart and breath for him for far longer than any normal person would have. The paramedics that had arrived at some point were talking behind her she knew, trying to convince someone -Tails? Maybe Sonic or Knuckles?- that she should give up, that an hour without a pulse was far too long even for the perfect weapon. She felt her muscles aching, the pace starting to tire out her hands. Amy didn't notice the tears that had started to fall until her next round of breathing for him pressed her tears into his skin.
“Please. Please don't do this to me, Please don't leave me…” she begged quietly, to Shadow or Gaia or Chaos or whatever entity was listening. At this point, she would be more than willing to make a deal with Dark Gaia for her soul if it would bring him back.
Her prayers were answered.
On her next round of pressing her mouth to his, his body jerked and the organ she had been thanklessly pumping for 73 minutes jumped to life under her fingertips. She felt his mouth move against hers, choking on the puff of air she hadn't been quick enough to stop from giving him. Pulling back, emerald eyes filled with tears met ruby ones that were just coming back into focus. To her delight, the scrapes on his cheeks had vanished, healed over by the now enthusiastically shining chaos organ that had born witness to her efforts.
Feeling the cavity she had been occupying close in slightly as the hole in his chest repaired itself, she slid her hands from where they’d been cradling his heart. Amy barely registered the state of them or the room around them bursting into cheers as she leaned down to press her forehead to Shadow’s.
“See?” his voice rasped, weak and breathless, “I knew you could do it.”
— several months earlier—
“I still don't understand why you're telling me all this. It's all so complicated, what if I screw up and kill you? Why not Rouge?” a slightly flustered Amy complained over tea at her kitchen table, Shadow looking on with his usual stoic demeanour. On the table between them was a packet of CPR information and files from Project Shadow that he had brought her. A life-saving favour he had asked, putting her as the last ditch effort to save his life if his chaos stores ran out and his heart stopped beating. The gravity of the request was not lost on her, and while she considered the dark hog to be one of her closest friends, this was a level of trust she hadn't expected from him. The fact that his immortality was conditional, that he could die at all, was distressing enough.
“Because you are the only person I trust with this. If I go down in the field, Rouge is likely to be in the same attack. I will always make my way to you, you just need to do the rest until my body catches up and restores my chaos stores.” he assured, sipping at his coffee and observing her reaction. He knew it was a big ask.
“I don't think I can do this,” she said, worriedly scrubbing at her face until the dark hybrid knelt on the floor in front of her and pulled her hands away by her wrists, noting the pulse jumping under his fingers. At this angle, she was forced to meet his eyes through tears threatening to fall and what she found were crimson eyes burning with intensity.
“You can. And you will. This was not a decision I made lightly, Rose. Yours are the only hands I want around my heart”