Chapter Text
"Three...two...one." The spaceship's glass curved the echo of her voice, its burnished walls cupping her stifled giggles. "Ready or not, here I come!"
Stars twinkling in an endless sea of space, Maria Robotnik was on the move.
Shadow the Hedgehog sighed from a ceiling beam, soon glancing out of the sprawling window. A handicap was already in place, passionately enforced by Maria herself. After all, he was so fast and strong. And she was not, so went loudly unspoken. Her days sequestered in sterilised sheets ran their mouth on the topic.
His time limit for hiding in hide-and-seek had to be far shorter, then, she lobbied. As if Shadow would deny a request from her, his sole friend on this spacecraft where he was created. But there was sense to it. He could run laps around the sprawling complex in the same breath Maria called for him should he wish.
But the handicap was never needed.
"Shadow...! I know you're in here!" Blue pumps pitter-pattered on the floor far below. "If you're not in the next room, you're always in another one right after...!"
The support beam chilled his quill folding by his ear, his scoff proud. Her win would always be in reach, to be sure. But never spoon-fed.
He dangled a leg from the joist, foot pointing to the carousel of chambers that made for the connective tissue of the Space Colony ARK—a bespoke, government-funded laboratory that the confines of outer space sealed into confidentiality. As for its purposes, its name gave away as much. Those who were more than intelligent enough to figure those out—to pursue a career in the stars where the government's shadow still stretched—had the smarts to keep their heads down and on their work.
Sealed off rooms would be the sole reserve of scientific experiments, the laboratory's architects clearly decided. Be it for security or precious air circulation, the majority of chambers in the ARK's hull shared the same, spanning roof. One that blocked off the antagonism of outer space, through which the ship continued its torpid roll around a planet marbled green and blue.
Within this artificial ecosystem, scientists reigned the dominant species. Draped in straight-hemmed lab coats, those white curtains shrouded their figures, research, and lives beyond the bloated capsule they were all inside for however long was needed. Or funded.
Through that cloud cover of lab coats, Maria's dress fluttered a lone patch of blue.
"—Found you!" Her laugh arced a rainbow up towards Shadow, shining through surrounding storm-grey. "Gosh, how do you get so high up? I keep imagining you shimmying up there…"
He leapt down to the floor before pouting at her giggling. "My strategies aren't meant to make you laugh."
Yet laugh Maria did, as if he had told a joke where he hadn't. But such was often the case. She would laugh. He would not. A disparity over which they always shared a smile after.
"All right. Now it's your turn to seek!" She re-adjusted the blue headband on her hair, finger-combing the blonde locks her seeking had dishevelled. "Remember, you must count from a hundred, Shadow. You absolutely must!"
He crossed his arms. "You said this would be our last round."
"Yes, for you to hide. You know hiding is my favourite part."
She balled her fists with an adamant smile. Shadow beheld the way her eyes caught the ship's clinical light and gave it new colour, the way they gleamed so strikingly blue.
"…I do know that." One, slow sigh later, he was closing his eyes. "All right."
A whispered cheer and Maria scarpered off, those quick, tapping steps of hers flicking off the ARK's steel walls.
Shadow's eyes stayed closed. The footsteps of researchers trickled in, their mutters unwelcome in his dark sanctuary.
Always count slow, Maria had instructed him, utterly earnest. You breathe in deep. Deep as you're able! Then you count.
He breathed in, the sterilised air near-ammonic. Then began.
"One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven..."
He breathed out. The temperature-controlled lounge chilled his counting to faint mist.
Maria's instructions would be followed to the letter. Shadow the Hedgehog—the Ultimate Lifeform—always won his battles on the fairest of terms, never forfeiting when victory was within reach. Especially not when its giggles carried through like bell chimes, rushing farther and farther away.
He had yet to reach one.
On a dark, grassy hilltop, bluebell-scented dew nudged Shadow awake.
"...Another memory."
He sat up, craning back to take in the night sky. Stars used to be so easy to find for him, back up on the ARK. Where before he simply had to glance out the window to take in their speckled, otherworldly light, he had to look up for them now. It was one of those things that only made sense by becoming his reality: how the sheer brightness of the planet, for which Maria had bubbled with so much adoration, meant the surrounding stars were washed out for the people on the planet. The planet he was living on now.
The moon poked out from dissipating sheets of grey, high above where he had fallen asleep. Soon, its turgid yellow pockmarked the billowing, white-freckled dark. The grass rustled as he sat up, the soil soft as it gave under his palm. Flowers and tall blades folded around him in dark blue streaks, the red stripes on his body dyed purple by the night in turn.
The faint starlight didn't reach Shadow's eyes. The frown marring his features only chiselled deeper as his thoughts wandered. Could he call reliving the past in his sleep dreams? Nightmares? Either way, from each such sleep he would rise zombie-like, necromantic, and bereft of closure. Of warmth. Of comfort.
Her eyes always shone so blue in his dreams.
An ache rooted beneath his sternum, sprouted in his head. The pain grew blaring. He pressed his palm to the growing crease in his brow, as if to push the agony away. Of all the memories to have of Maria, it was of her leaving him to look for her.
"I'll never find her again."
The breeze brushed away his murmur.
"—Shadow? This is Rouge." A beep from his wrist pierced the night. Her voice crackled over speakerphone. "Do you copy?"
Shadow sighed. Opening his eyes, he brought his wrist up. "Copy."
"Got an update on our mission brief. Have you had a look yet?"
He knuckled at his brow. The government had serpentine ways of issuing their directives to their operatives, making sure their methods of communications were unexpected and surprising. Receiving a call through fellow operative by day and larcenist by night, Rouge the Bat, was so mundane that it had to count as surprising him.
"I haven't." The lights of Station Square and Mission Street clustered like fireflies, resting in their city-nest in the hills beyond. "It must be urgent if you're bothering to call."
"Sorry, hon. Would love to get in touch more, but I prefer being chased to doing the chasing." Rouge laughed warmly at his cold front. "At any rate, one of us needs to make a detour to the ARK. Or what's left of it."
Shadow's eyes scrunched, his lip twisting.
"And you're directing me up there."
His dream resurfaced as an omen for the rest of his day. Luckily, he was never one to indulge in superstition.
"If you could." Rouge's mellow tones sauntered back in, predictably as ever. "Somebody got our favourite bumbling detective agency to handle getting Sonic's cake. That cheapskate trio suddenly reckoned themselves baker savants, so." She clicked her tongue. "Damage control's the name of the game for now."
The ache in Shadow breached migraine territory. The Chaotix Detective Agency lived up to their name once again—an insult added to the injury that was Sonic's surprise party, where everyone involved with saving the world at some point or another decided to trip over themselves celebrating the hedgehog.
"That asinine party," Shadow groaned. Every new detail he heard about said party was against his will—and utterly vindicated his decision to miss it. "Your time's better spent infiltrating the ARK."
"On the contrary!" she countered sunnily, dusky rather than noon-day in quality. "I always appreciate when my skills are in demand."
Shadow clicked his tongue. "For a price."
Knuckles the Echidna would be attending the party. Friend of Sonic, treasure hunter, and sole guardian of the Master Emerald: the all-powerful deity-artefact radiating Chaos—Chaos is power, power is enriched by heart, so the adage went. Moreover, it was the sole artefact that could empower or nullify the seven Chaos Emeralds: the harbingers of desire and destruction in this world that, should all seven be united, could grant miracles in answer to people's hearts.
Most of all, for Rouge the jewel-loving thief, it was a massive emerald that would be sitting pretty with its guardian at the party.
"What can I say, hon? When the echidna's away, the bat will play." She hummed happily. He rolled his eyes. "Now. I'm open to taking up the new brief, potentially. It'll cost ya. But I'm willing to take a simple trade this time around. Co-worker's discount! Just come on over."
"Don't joke." Shadow bared teeth. Rouge barked a laugh. "I'll be up there in fifty."
"Fifty?" She snorted as he got to his feet. "You going there sleepwalking?"
The propellers beneath his white and red shoes glowed orange. His eyes narrowed.
"Thirty."
Drooping bluebells snapped flat against the grass in a sonic boom. Soon, moonlight bloomed without a shadow in sight.
Shadow skated a straight shot over the plains in the outskirts of town.
He had no intel or maps on hand for the area and needed none. Open, vacant plots that were still accessible from a town over would be home to military bases and well-funded research facilities. One such private research facility was nearby—equipped with a rocket shuttle that would get him to the ARK.
He blasted off from the hilltop to the facility, itinerary firm in mind. Ten minutes to locate transport; ten more to secure a route to the ARK. Reaching the facility by minute four, he finished speeding through the facility's defences, armed and otherwise, by minute five.
After knocking out a guard and picking up their rifle, Shadow sidled up to the opening doors to the control room, the overseer of shuttle launches therein.
A wavering voice in the control room had his ear flick.
"But…" Female; young adult. "They said if we wait a day, more personnel can—"
"That's their canned response, Anne. We didn't even get past the secretary," another replied—stammering, too. Male; about as young. "We might—we might not see tomorrow if we wait. The space-time anomalies, they're—they're only growing and they're not going away."
"So we're supposed to go to the ARK ourselves?" Anne's voice tightened to a squeak. "That's… Rohan, neither of us have the training—"
"I know! It's practically suicide, I know…"
As Rohan babbled trailing off, Shadow's eyes narrowed.
"Then…we have no choice. Do we?" It was Anne. Something hardened in her meek voice. "We… We have to go… For the good of the people."
Shadow grit his teeth.
"One of us does." He strode past the entrance swiftly, red eyes stern on his associates-to-be. "Our interests align."
A short, league-wide flight of stairs separated him and the two human scientists—Shadow on the upper level, them on the lower.
They still flinched at his advance.
Shadow stopped before the first stair-step of few, facing their wide-eyed stare again. He followed their gaze to the rifle in his hand—the one he took from the earlier guard. It was at his side, safety on and pointed at the floor.
A precious second stretched in suspension as Shadow looked back to them. Rohan's sharp, black eyes darted between Shadow and the gun in his han, his breaths shallow as he gulped. Meanwhile, tremors radiated from Anne's shoulders, amplifying to her rising hands, her open lip. Both their hair, evidently kept neat as a norm, were tousled in patches from harried, sweaty-palmed tugs.
But beneath Anne's tied-back red hair, above her mottled flush and crooked glasses, her eyes shimmered a cutting blue.
Shadow's heart twisted. His scrutiny softened.
He tossed the gun down the stairs.
With every clatter of the empty rifle down the steps, Anne and Rohan gave smaller and smaller flinches. Eventually, their shoulders dropped in staggered blinks.
"The guards I incapacitated will wake up soon," Shadow said, their attention snapping back to him. "Loan me a shuttle and I can resolve the disturbance on the ARK for us both."
He made no move to approach. Rohan's brows furrowed. But one jerky glance over to Anne and she nodded back in earnest.
They each ran in opposite directions past the empty rifle, activating two large terminals that bracketed the rows of smaller computers in the room.
A resounding clatter and lights flooded the adjacent chamber, a reinforced shutter climbing open an elongated window. Hydraulic valves fizzed in the distance as a small space shuttle rose into view.
Shadow took the first step down the short staircase. Then another, his pace now set. Steadily he advanced through the aisle splitting the centre of the rows of terminals as the shuttle rose to its full, deployable height, his fists balled, his stare focused.
Before he reached the entryway to the shuttle's chamber, Anne rushed up to him.
"I had to adjust it quickly, but the ear clip should fit," she said, stumbling over her words. In her hand was a transmitter. "It won't reach the inside of the ARK, but we'll be able to communicate for your journey there, at least." She wet her lips after a trembling breath. "Make sure the ship is behaving as planned."
Shadow's gaze rose to her pallid face, her headset's boom mic leading to her worried lip. She adjusted her glasses. It took two tries. Her fingers were trembling.
"…You can tell the guards I threatened you into cooperating." Shadow picked up the transmitter. "The rifle should convince them."
Anne blinked. "But—"
"Count down the ground launch sequence from a hundred," he continued, affixing the transmitter to his ear. "Do it accurately and evenly." He turned to the airlock separating the terminals from the shuttle chamber. "If you can't even do that much"—he cast a stern look over his shoulder—"I'll throw this away."
Shadow walked on without looking back again. Anne stared after him. Her hovering hands had now gone still.
Soon, the airlock hissed shut behind him, startling her.
In a shake of her head, she rushed to the terminal next to Rohan's. A digital wireframe with live labels of the status of each module rotated on the displays.
"—Pre-launch checks done!" Rohan exclaimed, his exhale hot and sharp as he flipped down his headset's boom mic. "Just need you…" He faltered for a designation. "Uh—"
"My name"—a waveform popped up on the terminal's secondary display—"is Shadow."
Rohan blinked. Beside him, Anne's fingers stalled over her keyboard.
"Right… Shadow." Rohan licked his lip, his nods gaining momentum. Anne began typing again. "We've got the boarding doors open for you in advance. We, uh, activated the walkway and the elevator awhile ago, too. But it'll take a couple minutes for you to reach—"
"—I'm secured in the cockpit," Shadow interjected.
His sentence died in his throat. But sure enough, the display said as much: the safety restraints of one of the shuttle's seats were engaged.
"C-… Copy that." He swallowed after quickly shaking his head. "Initiating launch sequence."
"Anne," Shadow said, expectant.
"I've shut off the countdown protocol and will count down the launch," she replied promptly, to Rohan's bewildered stare. "Ready, Shadow?"
"Ready."
At his calm confirmation, Anne breathed in deep.
"One hundred…!" The facility blared and hissed, deploying the rocket ship, shedding the protective holds to ready its breach unto the stars. "Ninety-nine… Ninety-eight…"
Anne kept on counting. Strong and steady at every stage of the rocket's preparations. Her gaze and Rohan's darted over the different figures popping up on their terminals, recording the temperature and speeds of the emissions and mechanisms working through the bellows of the launch. Even through the clamour of metal, steam, and alarms, her voice peaked at a loud plateau as she projected from her diaphragm.
"—Three… Two… One…!" Anne's fingers whitened gripping her boom mic, her eyes flashing blue. "Lift-off!"
Steam and smoke spewed onto the viewport. The propellants' lights bloomed blinding, flickering as though they couldn't contain their own light as the shuttle rose faster and faster still.
By the time the voluminous smoke cleared, the shuttle had vanished. Next to the ship's digital wireframe on the terminal, a miniature schematic popped up, showing the rocket's distance from the planet and its outer atmosphere.
"Systems stable," Shadow reported, his voice clear over the wireless transmission. "Update me a minute before arrival."
Rohan stammered wordlessly. Anne took over, opening the line as she massaged her throat to say, "Copy."
"What even is he…!?" Rohan hissed once the line closed, raking his fingers through his hair. "He's— He's not supposed to be able to talk with that much G-force! No one is! And—" He zoomed in hurriedly onto a section of the wireframe. "He's not even suited up! None of the protective gear's been released…!"
Anne worried at her bottom lip. Her silence had Rohan leaning down, frowning in concern at her.
"Regardless of what he is"—she sighed out a breath—"we just need to hope he can fix whatever's haunting the ARK."
"…Haunting." He scoffed absently at the word, checking the display again. "In any other case, I'd laugh, but…you might not be wrong. " Sure enough, the shuttle was breaching the outer atmosphere. "It's been abandoned for ages, right?"
"From what I've read…" Anne's gaze shuttered. "It was more than abandoned."
Up on the shuttle, as one scientist told another what she had read of the decades-old, covered-up, leaked-regardless scandal of the Space Colony ARK, Shadow the Hedgehog—contained in those very annals, gestated within the ARK's walls as a brainchild of the infamous Professor Gerald Robotnik decades past—laid back in his seat.
The remains of the forsaken laboratory—now a piece of detritus floating in space—drifted no more than a coarse grain of sand amidst a rising tide of stars.
"The government get what they ask for and they try to shut it down." Rohan blew out a breath in a pause in Anne's recount. "A test-tube baby of a weapon, though… Grown in a lab, just to destroy. That's twisted."
"…You should know," Anne said carefully, "that that experiment was called Project Shadow."
She kept her gaze trained on the display. Rohan's stare drilled a bruise into her temple.
"…Project…Shadow?" Rohan was clutching at his head again, both hands up there. "He's— He's the weapon? The—… One of the projects the government massacred the ARK's scientists for?"
"Most likely."
Anne's attention stayed trained on the display. Something drained out of Rohan.
His stare shifted to the display's miniature of the shuttle, rising into space. Of the creature that could scarper up a rocket ship in seconds. The lifeform that could speak through the G-force of a flying rocket with ease.
"What the hell did they put in him?" he mumbled.
Anne pursed her lip. "That's…never been disclosed."
In the cockpit above, that growing piece of grit of the ARK reflected in Shadow's half-lidded eyes.
"Not in full, at least," Anne continued. "But one thing recovered from the ARK in Gerald Robotnik's research was alien DNA," she said as, soon, Shadow shut his eyes, "a species called the Black Arms."
Shadow's last day on the ARK was Maria's last day in this world.
He had ran far faster than he did on that day. Right then, running with Maria's hand in his, he had never panted harder in his life.
Sirens screeched throughout the ARK. Even then, no alarms could drown out the stampede of the government's soldiers storming the ARK, shuddering the ship's plated floor.
Shadow clenched his jaw as he ran for the chamber with the last escape pod. How many other scientists were even left alive on the ARK, he couldn't say. But Maria was alive, with him. Even if all he could do was run away, at least he could have them run away together.
Once they arrived in the chamber, his heart stopped.
The remaining escape pod was no pod but a platform—a narrow circle lying in the centre of the chamber, its control panel closer to the chamber's walls. Someone else had to activate it from the outside.
In a silent, fast nod, he had Maria resting by the wall while Shadow studied the escape pod that needed setting up. He approached the heart of the room as he balled his fist, his mind racing. He could manage something. With his super speed, his power, his Chaos abilities—he would figure something out.
Right as he stood on the pod's platform, a tube of reinforced glass sealed him in from the ceiling.
Maria had closed him into the pod. By himself.
He spun around to her stumbled onto the control panel by the wall, her blue eyes narrowing in pain.
"—Maria?!"
"Shadow, please. I beg of you…" Her fist wrinkled her dress, pressed so hard against her chest. Running so hard had already taken a toll on her body. "Do it for me."
Her murmur barely filtered through the escape pod's glass. Muffled. Deadened. She barely had the strength to stand, propped up against the panel controlling the escape pod, or even to smile. Yet smile she did, as she kept on speaking.
But he yelled over her.
"Maria…!"
Shadow clutched at the glass, his throat rent with her name. The joints of his fingers threatened to snap, pressing so hard against the pane closed around him, his face utterly stricken.
"For all people who live on that planet..."
Her mouth kept moving. But the bashing of his fist against the pod's glass wiped out her weakening voice. All his power and he couldn't break out. That Maria ever sealed him in there—that she was sending him away—numbed him of his strength to break free just when he needed it. Just when, at any, every cost, he needed to be by her side. All he could do, through souring eyes and a scraping throat, was plead her name.
"Sayonara"—something in the periphery shuddered. The soldiers had to have breached the doors—"Shadow the Hedgehog."
Warm. Tired. Filled with an emotion for which Shadow would never find a name. Such was the last smile Maria Robotnik gave before she sent him into the dark of space, down to the planet marbled with green and blue. The planet that mirrored the ARK every day for as long as he could recall. The planet that he saw her gaze upon every day with the most reverent, longing wonder.
The planet that had her murdered.
"—E.T.A. one minute."
Rohan's voice tore through the silence. Shadow, opening his eyes, sat up straight.
"Copy." He unfastened his restraints—a formality from the start for him, but most protocols would stall if he didn't indulge it.
"Oh, and Shadow. Before comms go out when you enter the ARK, just— Good luck. And…" Rohan trailed off. Frowning, Shadow side-eyed the transmission. "Take care."
His brows jumped.
In his sights, just beyond the cockpit, the ARK was in plain sight: a grey husk with its insides torn apart, the damage invisible to the untrained eye. But palpable to those who lived through it.
Soon, the rocket ship descended onto the ARK's outer skin. Shadow left the shuttle.
The transmitter that had been on his ear crackled to silence on the ship's dashboard.
Shadow's breath fogged densely to the point of crystallisation, the ARK's internal temperature regulators long gone in its gutted core.
Only scratched, bullet-punched plating hermeneutically sealed the laboratory's interior from the boundless black and cold of space. Bacteria and decay never survived the subzero of space. Nor did anything organic they could subsist off of. The ARK's abandonment—its forceful, bloodied emptying—led to the perfect preservation of its ruins.
But something had still tampered with them.
"Space-time anomalies…" Shadow looked around with narrowed eyes, Anne and Rohan's conversation coming to mind. "They must be warping the ARK's interior."
The layout of the chambers had changed. No function allowed for the easy swapping of the ARK's chambers with one another. The guiding picture in Shadow's mind overlapped with the malformed jigsaw before him, the pieces forced together in a way that seeped unease into him.
Above all, in one of the chambers was a podium: slim and synthetic, a short pole planted in the middle of the room. On its surface hovered a large, amber jewel. One that startled Shadow.
"A Chaos Emerald? Here?"
He wasted no time picking up the Emerald. But the moment he did, a wrongness flooded his core, coursing from the gem itself. Sick emptiness. Someone gripping one of his insides to wrench it wrong-way up.
"It's a fake." His grip tightened around the gem. "A horrible, despicable—"
The edges of his vision pulsed with an unforgiving heat. Shadow already had no love for forgeries or imitations. But the Emerald before him reached far deeper than simple distaste.
Shadow shook his head harshly, willing through the discomfort deep in this gut. Disdain still persisted in his glare.
"Why am I so angry…?"
Something was tainting the Chaos Emerald. His affinity for Chaos energy alerted him, every hackle stood on end at the miasma brewing putrid within. If he wasn't shackled by the mission, tasked with logging whatever anomalies were on the site, space-time or otherwise, the gem's shards would have splayed across the ARK's floor by his own hand by now.
"It's just a counterfeit," he said, as if convincing himself.
—SO SUITED FOR YOU, NO?
The ARK's cold air sharpened. Its chill steamed to outrage on Shadow's skin.
"Black Doom?" He whipped around, laser sights for eyes scouring the hull. "Impossible! I brought an end to you and the Black Arms—by my own hand…!"
Soon, his stare could have burned a hole through the brassy Emerald, his chest heaving with emotion. The alien race of the Black Arms—their leader, Black Doom—had almost taken over the world before. But Shadow stopped them. Using the Chaos Emeralds, using Chaos Control, he warped the Black Comet, their home and their weapon, that they had tried to destroy the planet with up past the stratosphere, right into the beam of the Eclipse Cannon in outer space. Black Doom, so tied up in Shadow's being, in his pain, should have stayed gone.
The Black Arms. The ARK. Maria. Everything about this day—about these anomalies—seemed to target Shadow like laser-sights, burning pin-points into his skin.
SO QUICK TO DISMISS WHAT IS SO CLEAR. Black Doom's voice reverberated with sickening mockery. SO WILLING TO AVERT YOUR GAZE FROM THE OBVIOUS LAID BEFORE YOU...
That whip-like, white-hot rage crashed over Shadow anew, the lungs of his good sense gorged full with it.
He gripped onto the fake Emerald tight. Questioning its presence could come later. Black Doom's voice alone had Shadow blast off to hunt down the source—down the fracturing, intestinal corridors undulating through the ARK—to where that odious, drawling laughter begged for a beating.
The chase broke through the ARK's walls. The planet below seemed to glow against the void of space, the stars in-between. The propellers of Shadow's shoes scored a heatwave through the ineffable view, a streak of black and red corkscrewing through the neon green, yellow, and cold gunmetal of of the ARK's exterior, their sinuous rails and tessellated barriers making more than a sufficient pathway for Shadow.
Security measures that were supposed to be dormant ended up triggering. A rocket fired through a gigantic porthole in the belly of the ARK and skated fast over its exterior, barrelling towards the only pathway Shadow could take.
But a silhouette glanced atop the rocket before disappearing behind it. Doom's Eye's silhouette. A floating, six-pointed, ugly starfish of a thing; Black Doom's third eye.
"—Chaos Control!"
Time petrified around Shadow in a billowing wave, the fake Emerald pulsing in a glow in his quills.
Shadow's eyes twitched wider. He never considered whether a fake Chaos Emerald could be used to conduct Chaos Control. He had never needed to before now, with his only goal before him. For a moment, the vaguest question reared its head: why did he try using Chaos Control on this false replica? And why had it worked?
The memory of Black Doom's laughter in his mind fixed his scowl back in place, answering his questions for him: none of that mattered.
"At least I could put this fake to good use."
In that standstill, like a runaway train fighting for headway against a boulder-blocked tunnel, he shot towards the head of the rocket, hurtling a storm of punches and kicks down, down into its surface, pummeling dents into the frozen rocket until its mottled metal fractured and cracked.
Time flooded onward. The rocket exploded to shrapnel. Shadow hit the ground and bolted.
He chased down Doom's Eye to the extremities of the ARK. Or what should have been its extremities.
After Shadow leapt off an edge to a lower platform, the rag of space-time twisted, drooling a bloodied, sickened purple.
"What…?"
Shadow kept running, though not without lancing agitated looks to his surroundings—to his long-destroyed home distorting before his eyes. Straight, hexagonal beams twisted, suddenly animal, broken, prehensile. Debris once inert in space suddenly gained momentum, warping in the stained pink-purple of space.
In the heart of the blemishing space, the black hole pulling in the strings tethered to the wrongness, was Doom's Eye.
Rage spiked in Shadow again. "You'll regret coming back…!"
Doom's Eye only gave him a slow, derisive laugh. Shadow's roar broke through his clamped jaw.
The ship's debris turned to projectiles, the twisting ground turned to traps, launching their spikes and snapping their maws at Shadow. But he side-stepped and dove through the air, every moment he was touching the ground spent tearing through each obstacle and foothold to get ahold of Doom's Eye.
"Do not test me." Shadow chased the Emerald's spiking signatures, deeper into the warped pocket of space-time that was the coiling, labyrinthine ARK. "Show yourself! Or you will have my wrath to pay...!"
His yell grated against the ARK's shifting walls, faded fast to the empty of the infected space-time that creased a paper ball out of the Space Colony. Black Doom's laugh bubbled like burnt, viscous oil—uncomfortably close and vexingly faraway.
YOURS? The question rang out as if Black Doom were humouring a dim-witted child. DO NOT FOOL YOURSELF, SHADOW THE HEDGEHOG. DON'T YOU FEEL IT?
Shadow struggled to keep his breathing even. Red sparks spittled from his eyes, irises brightening hotly, too fiery to contain. Whatever put his judgement to the flames was burning up his body from the inside, too.
YOUR POWER...IS MINE.
A headache smashed into Shadow's skull.
He collapsed in a cry—clotting, black miasma swiftly stabbed him from behind. Then his back carved open, something shoving out.
On his hands and knees, he fought to stand. But a dark, unfathomable gouging in space-time split open its jaw, its teeth settling around Shadow's crumpling form as the miasma stuffed him down. Consuming him whole.
With the last of his strength, Shadow broke out to keep chasing Doom's Eye.
Wings had sprouted where Shadow's back quills should have been. Now those quills had turned to dripping scapulae. Gruesome. Alien. Sludge for feathers and tar for coverts, his new wings had him bulleting through the air, across gulfs that would have required more creativity from him to cross if he weren't able to fly like before.
"What…is this…?" His eyelids fluttered. "This power…"
Fatigue wore away at Shadow's marrow. But he kept on sprinting, kept on flying, running on the fumes of his anger, confusion gnawing at its edges. He should have taken stock of whatever had invaded his body. Whatever had suddenly granted him the power of flight in such a grotesque form.
But the miasma kept chasing him. Black Doom's laughter kept taunting him.
Shadow reached out, crawling towards that deep, loathsome cackling. Towards wherever Black Doom was hiding, even as his body burned like a furnace with the doors to the white-red coal left wide open, the flames only spreading further, to reaches beyond saving.
But the miasma caught up to him. Clutched his body close, right into its muggy mouth, darkness watering from it.
Nothing can keep me down. The thought scored a blinding scar on Shadow's psyche. Nothing…!
Once more, a writhing quiet claimed the skin and insides of the ARK, the dark portal swept away with him.
The last round of hide-and-seek between Shadow and Maria had just begun.
Soft beeps. Whispering valves. Step by step, Shadow built a slow, steady rhythm walking through the ARK's chambers. Another house rule when it was Maria's turn to hide: Shadow walked during his turn to seek.
"…I doubt she's here."
Despite murmuring to himself, he did a visual sweep. Harsh white lights flushed out even the dust motes that thought to stuff themselves in even the smallest crevices of the Space Colony ARK. Only those who had spent their whole lives unfamiliar with anything but the unfeeling, inorganic maze of the ARK—a spaceship built to keep all its secrets on show—could think of anywhere to hide themselves and actually succeed at the task.
Shadow cast a look aside. Shafts of warm light painted brass and gold onto steel, spilled from a wide viewport of the chamber over—the only space in the laboratory where the lights instilled anything other than exposure and scrutiny.
"The greenhouse." He walked up to its viewport. "She must have stopped by here."
He stopped before the window, its golden spotlights casting the red on him orange. Only the few botanists recruited onto the ARK would be allowed inside, tending to the only garden on this side of outer space. Research in sustaining organic alien life on a plant-level was lucrative enough to justify a plot on the ARK.
Once more unto the past.
"I've always wondered why it's called a greenhouse," Maria had mused aloud to Shadow, rocking on the balls of her feet as they were on the outside of the greenhouse looking in. "There's plenty of colours here, not a lot of it green."
Shadow crossed his arms in a simple hum as botanists in protective gear handled their experimental plant life in the soundproofed greenhouse. Maria had a point. Only spots of green flourished in the miniature wilds sustained in the ARK's garden. Much of the stalks and bark would have entirely changed palettes on a given day. When the ARK's lights switched off to maintain the personnel's circadian rhythm, some of the palest plants would scintillate like the stars encompassing them.
"Though I hear that some of the plants they grow here are native to the planet below," Maria added. "Like the ones over there." She indicated a quieter corner of the warm-lit chamber, one housing a modest garden. "I've read about those ones in the library. They're called flowers. Some are the same species but appear in different colours. Each flower also means a different thing to another, even depending on the colour! Isn't that just fascinating?"
She turned from the flowers to Shadow with a gleam in her eye. Shadow, who had been studying Maria's effusive talking instead, gave the flowers some consideration.
"I…don't know if I would say that." His grip pulsed on his arm. "I don't like it. The idea that others have a say in what these flowers mean. It makes me wonder…what would they decide, if they could tell us? With their own words…"
Such was his conclusion. One that took longer for him to find the right words to express than how it felt, springing forth in him, that corkscrew wrongness to the idea shocking a short, deep thump in his chest. He pursed his lip. It was one thing to think so strongly about these flowers. It was another to actually voice the thought out loud.
Yet when he regarded Maria once more, her brow furrowed with a deep earnestness. A pregnant pause.
The dedication had him blink. At times, the weight of Shadow's words would dawn on him when Maria considered them so seriously this way.
Yet while it surprised him, it never posed an issue. He would never say things he did not mean. Not to Maria.
"I believe you're right." She nodded after a long while. “Perhaps if the flowers could speak, they would protest." After another moment, she giggled. "Could you imagine? One of those pretty flowers throwing a fit over people speaking for them?"
Shadow turned aside. Then shrugged. "I'd understand."
She gave a bout of laughter. He glanced at her. She returned the look, beaming at him. Subtly, yet no less warmly, he smiled back at her.
"Which one do you like, Shadow?" She leaned down to him, prompting while gazing upon the flower garden. "I won't tell you what they mean, so as not to spoil it. Just pick one that speaks to you."
Shadow followed her gaze, evaluating the plot in the corner. There was no large variety to lose himself over, though the species that were present were winsome, if in an ordinary way. Yet one particular bunch of flowers stood out of him, their shade of blue enduring in the greenhouse's warm light.
"The blue ones."
"You like the bluebells, then! I almost didn't notice them myself. They're quite plain, no?"
"The others are too loud."
"They haven't even said anything." With a grin, Maria touched around her bottom lip, considering the flowers seriously. "I can't really pick a favourite. But one I always love looking at are the camellias—those red ones there."
She gestured their way, refraining from the rudeness of pointing. Shadow pouted at them in the meanwhile. Their bulbous, flaring shape and vivid saturation scrunched his nose.
"…They're…eye-catching," he granted.
Maria hid a laugh behind her fingertips quite poorly.
He was content to let the matter rest there. But then she said, "it's because it's red like you, Shadow! That's why I keep coming back to them."
Words left him in the lurch. The cavity where reciprocation ought to lay taunted him.
Eventually, his attention settling on the red camellias once more, he muttered, "They mean something. Right?"
"They do. But I think it doesn't really matter now, with what you just said. People decide what they mean. And what they mean to me is that they're as dramatic and pleasing to look at as you are."
Shadow blinked at her. Maria smiled at him. They shared another look before the only spot of gold on the ARK.
He lowered a brow at her. "Dramatic?"
"Aw, don't make that face! It's a compliment!" Her laugh bubbled over. "You're quite striking, you know? Especially when you talk."
"Impossible." He clicked his tongue while looking away. "There's no performance to my words."
"Oh, I know that! You might just be the sincerest person I know."
Shadow let out a breath during his and Maria's current bout of hide-and-seek, staring once more at the flowers.
No botanists or bystanders lingered in or near the greenhouse this time. Sure enough, the bluebells and red camellias mingled in the plot tucked in the corner of the chamber, that microcosmic rainbow that spoke to the planet below. Planted a few rows away from each other but aligned to the viewport so that, at a certain angle, they looked to be side-by-side.
He gave the flowers a trace smile. Then kept seeking out Maria, his pace unwavering.