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I.
It moves like the wind. Like a gale. Cold and swift, so swift as to be almost invisible. Something that is felt rather than seen or heard, carrying a chill that bites into her flesh and attacks her bones.
Its hands are cold and its fingers are sharp, mechanical ligaments wrapping about her limbs, digging the cruel points into her soft pink flesh.
It moved so fast that neither of them saw it coming.
Being in love with the fastest thing alive is a spectator sport, but Amy Rose’s keen eyes were magnetized to Sonic when his doppleganger swooped down and snatched her.
It carries her off like some grotesque, metal bird of prey, a vicious glint in its dull, dark eyes as she thrashes ineffectually in its metal talons, screaming for her hero to come and save her as the wind snatches the tears from her eyes.
Sonic! Help me!
She feels its grip tighten as it embraces her.
It’s okay. I’m here.
II.
It doesn’t even look like him. That’s what upsets her more than anything.
It’s wrong. All wrong. It’s jagged and angular in all the places where he is smooth and curved, sleek and streamlined in all the places where he is spiky and windswept.
Its wrongness is not skin-deep. It goes far deeper than the frame of monocoque titanium and reinforced blue metal tektite that has been crafted into something that bears only the vaguest resemblance to her beloved.
No steadfast heart of gold beats behind its breastplate. Instead, a 250cc 4-valve orgone fusion engine growls and churns in its metal guts.
This thing was not made in his image, nor in the image of its creator. It is a mockery. A sick parody. It does not belong.
Not content with stealing the likeness of the one who stole her heart, it has now stolen her, too.
III.
She screams until her throat is raw and cries until her eyes are as red as its own, and part of her hopes that this petulant resistance will eventually encourage it to strike her down as cruelly as it had swept her up. To end her suffering, and free her from this nightmare as she prayed he would.
She cannot bear to be apart from him.
Why hasn’t he come to save her yet? What’s taking him so long?
Her cards had directed her to the Little Planet, and that was where she’d found him. He’d scoffed at her insistence that they were to be married someday, dismissed her as some crazy fangirl- as if he didn’t have enough of those already.
He’d rolled his eyes, but at least he’d seen her.
When the facsimile stares at her, it seems to look straight through her.
IV.
Can something that was never truly alive be dead in the first place?
Its orgone fusion engine no longer roars, sputtering pathetically as its claw-tipped fingers rake lines in the scorched earth.
It neither lives, nor dies. It simply is.
She weeps into Sonic’s chest, trembling, feeling a stab of guilt at the way her heart flutters as he permits her to hold him, almost swooning as he gingerly pats her back, murmuring awkward reassurances that she’s okay.
He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t need to.
But she finds herself casting one last glance back at the wretched, crippled thing as they walk off into the proverbial sunset.
It looks straight through her, and the back of his head bears the dying heat of its hateful gaze before the embers burn themselves out.
In spite of herself, she feels sorry for it.
V.
It comes back, of course.
It always comes back.
The very sight of it chills her blood as effectively as its touch had chilled her at the Little Planet, but it barely pays her any heed. Its internal CPU contains a system that is capable of executing mathematically logical enactment and a simultaneous analog neuro-connection between all components, analyzing and processing billions of bytes worth of variables per second, but its sophisticated artificial intelligence is not like a normal computer.
It has the capacity to feel as well as think. It feels hate, illogical and unquantifiable, and so it has also developed the capacity to be single-minded in its hatred, dedicating its processes and instructions to the accomplishment of a single goal:
Surpass. Exceed. Destroy.
It wants so desperately to win, to beat him, that it can think of nothing else.
It’s a lot like Eggman, that way- and a lot like Sonic too, she supposes. It’s doing a better job of imitating him now than it ever did before. It still meets his bravado and cockiness with silent contempt, but its hatred for him is veiled by a veneer of indifference that’s not so dissimilar from the way he rebuffs her own flirtations.
He knows she loves him. She knows he loves her, too- he just doesn’t know it yet, and that’s okay. He’ll come around eventually. One day, he’ll see that they’re fated to be together.
One day, he’ll grow up. He’ll learn to take things seriously- whether it’s his robotic doppelganger, or the woman he’s destined to grow old with- and when that happens, she’ll be there.
VI.
It seems to spend even longer chasing Sonic than she does, sometimes, and eventually she gets to wondering about the sort of toll it must take.
Machines can deal with acceleration stress far more effectively than most living beings can, but Sonic never seems to get tired, even as the robot’s orgone-fusion engine belches smoke, its circuitry straining desperately to sustain the output to its offensive matrix, flaying away its reinforced blue metal tektite coating in blackened flakes that scatter like leaves on the wind.
Metal Sonic falls, and does not rise again. Sonic’s taunts fall on deaf audio receptors as its actuators slacken, and Amy notices that his trademark, cocky smirk has a malicious edge to it that puts her in mind of a cruel child pulling the wings off of an insect.
She does her best to suppress these troubling thoughts. They feel like a betrayal of everything she has built her life around.
She puts Metal Sonic out of her mind eventually, but then another of Eggman’s robots comes for her.
Once again she’s running, but this time it is her who is being chased. Once again, she has become a satellite to the primary target.
The robot pursues them through Twinkle Park, its mechanisms and components screaming voicelessly, and when it catches her she is reminded of those hateful red eyes, the cruel metal grip, the callous disregard for the defenseless little animals whose only crime had been to stand, unwittingly, in the way of Eggman’s arrogant conquests.
She screams for her hero to save her, but he does not come.
This time, she will have to save herself.
VII.
As it turns out, she can’t save herself.
As it turns out, not all of Eggman’s robots are mindless, unfeeling, evil instruments.
The worst day of her life so far has been full of surprises, and when Gamma lets her out of the Egg Carrier’s detention block, there is another surprise waiting for her.
The sight of him makes her flinch, once her mind has processed the familiar silhouette. Her arms erupt in goosebumps as if chilled by the touch of smooth metal, and her throat tightens as if compressed in the grip of hydraulic claws.
For a moment, she’s afraid she might scream.
Metal Sonic floats.
She takes a tentative step towards it, then another.
The robot does not move. Suspended in its liquid prison, it can do nothing but stare.
She raises a hand, pressing her palm against the stasis tube as her shuddering breaths cloud the surface of the glass.
The glowing red dots of its eyes follow the movement.
It sees her, she realizes. It has no choice.
IX.
She doesn’t think about Metal Sonic again for a long time. Not until the Final Fortress, and the Metal Madness that follows it.
None of them saw it coming.
It’s a team effort to save the world, this time. Cream is so scared and she’s being so brave and Amy is so proud of her, but Sonic just carries on with his usual routine of wisecracks and one-liners, offering no words of reassurance besides corny declarations about the real super power of teamwork.
Metal Sonic derides them as insects and weaklings and worse, braying about his superiority in a horrible digitized tirade that makes her miss the days when he was silent, and when his thoughts were private.
The dragon is slain, inevitably, but her knight of the wind doesn’t stick around longer than it takes to taunt his foe about another defeat.
Team Chaotix chase down Eggman as he tries to slip away in the aftermath, owed a payday and looking to collect. Knuckles chases after Rouge, spurred to action as she half-jokingly lets slip her intent to steal the Master Emerald, and Amy feels a pang of jealousy- whether for the bat or the gemstone, she’s not quite sure.
What must it be like, she wonders, to be coveted by someone as beautiful as Rouge?
To be cared for and protected by someone as dutiful as Knuckles?
Metal Sonic’s broken body is left in the custody of Shadow, and the robot that seems to have partnered up with him and Rouge. It looks a little bit like Gamma, she supposes. A superficial resemblance, in the same way Metal Sonic could be mistaken for his organic counterpart at a distance.
Amy chases after Sonic. Tails does too.
They both yell for him to wait up.
He doesn’t.
Many years later, someone will confide in her that they struggled with the sensation that nothing about themselves was truly their own. That they were simply following in the footsteps of others because it was more comfortable than charting a path of their own.
Yeah, she will respond, with a smile turned bitter and weary with age. I know how that feels.
X.
Eventually, Amy catches up to him.
It’s not simply a case of being faster than him. Nobody is faster than him, and she is the first of many to learn this the hard way. Persistence hunting is the key to the only way to wear down this kind of quarry.
She’s not the first person to realize that determination is the key, but she succeeds where Doctor Eggman, Metal Sonic, and other persistent rivals have failed.
He asks her if she wants to get a coffee some time, and she manages to veil the fluttering of her heart with a lazy smirk that she feels she must have learned from him.
For a split-second, she’s almost tempted to say no. To cut off her nose to spite her face, just to see the look on his.
That should’ve been her first warning.
Coffee. Such a grown-up drink. Coffee and conversation.
Two things he has never indulged in, before now. Not with her.
XI.
She sits in the bathroom, hugging her knees to her chest.
Her eyes are wet and the rest of her is dry.
He asks, through the door, if she's okay.
She can't let him know that she's crying, and so she says that she's fine, and at that moment it's a lie and she hates herself just a little bit more for it.
Not him. She could never hate him. She hates herself. She hates herself for ruining this. For ruining him, for herself.
It won't be a lie, eventually. One day, she'll say that she's fine and she'll mean it.
Later, she'll wish that she could go back and tell herself that.
She could, of course, but she won't let herself give in to that temptation.
XII.
The first time he catches her crying is wonderful, actually, because he's there to kiss away her tears and hold her and say whatever it takes to make her feel better, and even though it doesn't she can pretend it does.
She just waits until she can't cry any more and then nods shakily when he asks if she's feeling better, thus taking the burden of her guilt and shame off of him and onto her own shoulders.
When it gets too heavy to carry, she lets it turn inward.
Little bits, choked down like bitter pills until they've formed a hard, black ball in the pit of her stomach that leaches the pain into her heart and into her bones like something radioactive, poisoning her by increments.
It'll poison him too, eventually, because she loves him enough to keep letting him kiss her.
He can't taste the bitterness in those kisses- or perhaps he can, and he's simply grown used to the taste. Perhaps he's just blind to it like he is to everything else, and can't feel the way her mouth twists and hardens against his.
Her lips used to be so soft when he kissed her. Now they are like tree roots, hard and gnarled with age, dug in too deep to be uprooted. She weathers the elements even as the biting wind of winter strips her branches bare, and the snow piles up around her roots as everything about her that was once bright and beautiful blackens and rots in the coldness of his embrace.
It’s not fair to blame the wind, she tells herself. Winter always comes eventually. It’s just her fault for thinking that the sunshine would last forever.
XIII.
Eventually, she grows tired of being left out in the cold, and so she builds a small fire.
The wind keeps blowing, and so she pushes her fingers closer to the flame.
Even being burnt is better than the numbness.
They have their first argument ever, and the fire roars, building as the cool wind tries to quell it.
The flames will not be smothered. If the wind tries to douse them, then the wind will be burnt.
The very oxygen that her lungs once breathed has become fuel for the flame, and all of her discontent comes pouring out in a great screaming inferno.
The fire consumes all, eventually. The wind cannot put it out; it can only spread it.
They both say things they cannot take back as she empties her lungs, and it turns out that the poison in her gut makes for excellent kindling, too.
The apologies they exchange later mean nothing. They have made liars of each other.
XIV.
I don’t know what you want from me, he tells her.
Clearly, she doesn’t say.
I can't keep doing this, she admits.
So what do you want to do, he asks, after a pause.
The same thing you always used to do, she wants to say.
She finally understands him, after all these years.
Ignorance really is bliss.
XV.
To her horror, she finally understands him, and they’re more alike than either of them realized.
He walked a road paved with good intentions, and she chased him down it. She made him break his own rule. Made him look back. Made him stop, eventually.
Her picture, in a heart-shaped locket, has become a millstone around his neck.
They say that only guilty people run, but what was he guilty of? Is it such a crime to want freedom, by any rationale other than Doctor Eggman’s dictatorial vision for the future?
To her, it may as well have been. It was preordained that they should be together. Her cards had told her so. It was fate.
One cannot fight fate, and yet she had always loved that he did.
Her love is a paradox, she realizes. Everything that she ever loved about him has become a wound.
XVI.
She looks to her cards for guidance, and they taunt her.
She has them spread out across a large, flat stone. The Fool. The Lovers, inverted. The Tower. The World.
The wind sweeps her cards up and spitefuly tosses her misfortune into her face, just to drive the point home.
A part of herself that she thought she’d left behind claws its way out of her stomach and climbs up her throat like vomit.
The first blow sunders the stone, splitting it neatly in two.
The two halves are pounded into rubble, and the rubble is pounded into dust until there’s only an impression in the dirt to show where that stone had once been.
She screams her throat raw and punches her knuckles bloody, her Piko Piko Hammer forgotten, her pain ignored. Adrenaline floods her veins like jet fuel, and the fire leaves only ash in its wake.
Salty tears mingle with coppery blood as she weeps into her fingers.
She’s a monster. She always has been. She never stopped being a monster; only the ideal of her knight in shining armor could keep that dragon in its cave.
XVII.
She is a monster, and eventually she finds she has made her peace with that.
A monster cannot be happy in the company of those it haunts and frightens, and so she does the noble thing and quietly cuts all the people who still love her out of her life entirely.
She leaves a note for the closest thing she ever had to a mother. Her little sister gets a little kiss goodbye on the top of her soft little head, and she’s not awake for it.
Gemerl was never a suitable replacement for the baby she lost, the baby that she never had in the first place, but she finds him waiting for her in the hallway and so he gets a hug.
The angular metal planes of his body are a cold comfort. Reassuring. She doesn’t deserve the supple warmth of Vanilla’s embrace, or any of the softness Cream still has to offer, and so she leaves.
She doesn’t run. She just walks. She’s in no hurry.
XVIII.
She walks until her feet have blisters, then keeps walking until her blisters bleed.
Then she keeps walking.
The Fool. The Lovers, inverted. The Tower. The World.
She means to leave it all behind.
She leaves the life she knew before, and finds herself back at the place where it all began.
She meant to make this place her cave, but another dragon has already made this place his domicile.
Its orgone fusion engine bristles and roars and spits flame at the sight of her, and she is without her hammer, without her knight.
Nobody’s going to save her this time. Not even herself.
She shuts her eyes.
When she opens them again, the robot is mere feet from her. Staring.
She didn’t run.
They’re both silent for a very long time.
When she finally speaks, Metal Sonic listens. It doesn’t interrupt her, and though it doesn’t answer her, it seems to understand what she is saying.
Even when she’s done speaking, it says nothing.
The silence is a peace offering, shared between them.
XIX.
She doesn’t run. She walks, and he walks with her.
Time passes differently here. Often, it seems not to pass at all.
Days drag on into months, but this place still feels static. Untouched. Clusters of golden Rings still spin between the verdant fields and cloudless blue skies of Palmtree Panic, throughout the majestic, stone-hewn corridors of Tidal Tempest, the shimmering euhedral clusters that give Quartz Quadrant its name.
On the planet below, it’s been more than twenty years since she set foot on this place. Here, it’s as though she never left.
The perpetual night of Stardust Speedway’s sky is speckled with pinpricks of light, presiding over a neon-lit acropolis, vibrant and alive in a way that none of the grotesque factory-cities that Eggman had erected as monuments to his own ego ever were.
Metal Sonic watches the little animals scampering merrily about the pristine metal flooring of the facility where he was created, nesting in conduits and turbines, making a mockery of everything that he had once stood for.
He does nothing.
He feels nothing.
Nothing except Amy’s fingers threading through the cruel metal claws that his creator had intended should find their way to Sonic's throat, to squeeze and crush and rend.
Servo-actuators whirr quietly as his open hand folds hesitantly around hers.
Suddenly, he feels.
He feels afraid that he might hurt her.
She squeezes his hand, utterly unafraid, and smiles for what feels like the first time in years.
His creator never programmed nor built with him the capacity to smile, but for the first time in his service history, he finds himself wishing that he could.
XX.
She doesn’t run.
He flies, and she flies with him.
She’s cradled in the reassuring firmness of his grip, the thrumming of his turbine punctuated by the rhythm of her heart.
The wind rakes its fingers through her hair and pulls her mouth into a breathless smile. It reaches into her chest, pulls the weight out of it and throws it away.
She’s free. Freer than she’s ever been in her entire life.
She doesn’t know where they’re going.
It doesn’t matter.
They can go anywhere. They can do anything.
Over yawning pits and floating platforms, through shuttle loops and off of Springs, beneath the canopy of cloudless day and starlit night, past a Time Post that spins as the air rushes to fill the vacuum left in the wake of their passage.
Running wild, fast and free, leaving behind the lives they knew before.
She feels the metal claws embrace her as the world simply melts away around them.
She doesn’t know where they’re going, but she knows that it’ll be okay.
Metal Sonic does not speak, but the tightening of his hand around hers says it’s okay. I’m here.
She has found her flame, burning within what she took for so long to be an empty suit of armor. Now that she no longer needs to be saved, she realizes that the dragon was her knight all along.