Chapter Text
Shadow’s first memory was in darkness.
He came to awareness encased in rock, unable to move, or speak, or even open his eyes. But he remembers feeling the strange presences around him in clusters of heat signatures, he remembers the chaos sparking within him. He remembers cracking through the shell to be met with cold fluid and prying stares, waking up in a cage he never really left.
This feels eerily similar; like his body is frozen but his mind awake. Who are you? He wants to ask, Where am I? Fear seeps into him. Maybe they’ve captured him again, put him back into stasis. But he can’t do anything. It’s like he’s not really here, a ghost floating above his own corpse. He hears whispers through the black.
“Can’t just kill him.”
“Like…Morally, or literally?”
“Let’s be generous and say both.”
He fights for control, but he already feels himself slipping away, his body refusing to wake up to this new nightmare.
Why won’t you people leave me alone?
.-
Earlier.
They fired her.
Just as well; someone had to be on the chopping block after a weapon of mass destruction rose out of the goddamn river Thames. It’s a testament to G.U.N.’s influence (and the current regime’s absolute terror of alien threats) that they weren’t all being dragged in for war crimes. Rockwell knew she’d lost her job the moment those blast doors opened. They lost the second key (and arguably the first key) on her watch. Not that her plan didn’t work; she had all the intruders in one place, ready to be detained, and would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those meddling…hedgehogs. And whatever the hell the red thing was.
Okay. Even she can admit that’s not something the good guys would say.
She still had time enough before they kicked her to the curb to map the readings from the explosion of the Eclipse Canon, to catch a trailing speck of energy spike that was small enough to be mistaken for a glitch but was most definitely headed back to Earth like a droplet from a stream. Time enough to rough out a tracking algorithm and predict where it would land, and time enough to choose to keep all of it from the eyes of her superiors.
It wasn’t just to give the old fuck-you to brass. The Eclipse Cannon was powered by chaos energy. Chaos energy comes from the so-called ultimate lifeform. Ergo, the hedgehog was the true W.M.D., and should not be left wandering through Oklahoma unsupervised.
The odds of landing in Oklahoma twice were astronomical. Rockwell assumes there was some level of conscious aim involved, wonders absently at who taught a lab experiment the location of the 50 states and why, and if he knows the capitals too. But what she does know is, Project Shadow can not return to the hands of the people who weaponized it. The last thing this planet needed was another nuclear deterrent. Call her a sap but it’s true.
She left London 31 hours ago. She’s still the first one to get to the crash site, as the sun sets on the middle of nowhere. No one would have seen or heard it unless they were looking for it, and she’s confident that she’s the only one looking for it. Maybe the locals saw the light streaking over the sky and assumed it was a shooting star, or an airplane.
It didn’t leave a crater so much as a series of burn marks in the field from what appeared to be a semi-controlled landing.
Rockwell readied her stun gun.
She finds it at the end of a trail of ashes that may have once been grass. Her stomach clinches. The first thing out of her mouth is --
“Poor thing.”
It surprises her. But that's all she can think. The thing is covered in dirt and ash, curled up in on itself, not in the rolling attack form the blue one uses, but scrunched up in pain, almost rigid with it. Her analytical side would think it was already dead, in some kind of rigor mortis if it weren’t for the low level hum emanating from it, that chaos still alive and well.
The shape, the shoes, and hints of red are unmistakable. It’s Project Shadow alright. Getting here must have used the last of its strength.
It looked so small like this.
Rockwell grumbles. She had come prepared to reason with the alien, to subdue it if necessary. Not to…ugh. She holsters her weapon and heads back to her truck to get an old blanket to wrap the thing. When she was a kid she once tried to rescue a baby squirrel by wrapping it in a towel and putting it in a shoebox. Her parents made her leave it in the garage. It had frozen to death by morning.
She should be wearing gloves. Or a hazmat suit. She kneels by the hedgehog with the blanket, half expecting it to spring awake and blast her halfway across the state. She reaches out hesitantly.
The quills fizzle with energy, prickling like hair in static, but it doesn’t wake up. She weighs her options and throws the blanket over it.
Another crackle of static, but nothing else. The blanket stays intact.
“Here goes nothing,” she mutters. She gingerly moves the body, wrapping it in the second hand truck blanket from her father, who got it as a freebie for donating to PBS in 2003. It’s much lighter than she expects when she lifts it. It’s like picking up a child. Ugh.
She carries it back, debates putting it in the truck bed before opting for the passenger seat. Debates again before buckling the seatbelt over its limp body; seeing the ears and head of quills poking out from beneath the blanket.
She leaves it in the car when she has to stop for gas. It shifts and rustles.
A tall guy at the station eyes through her windshield.
“Is your dog okay?” He asks.
She puts the gas pump back and sighs. “He’s fine. He just gets cold.”
“What’s the breed?”
“I have no idea.” She smiles thinly. “He was just the saddest one in the pound.”
It’s still asleep when they arrive at the house. She puts Shadow on the fold-out couch in the TV room in the basement. She exchanges the ratty PBS blanket for a slightly thicker IKEA one. Still, the hedgehog doesn’t wake up. She can’t tell if it shivers from cold, or chaos energy, or…fear. She eases onto the fold-out next to it, puts her feet up. It’s been a long two days.
Then the security motion alarm goes off.
.-
Agent Stone knows that the Doctor is dead. He only bothers to track the lingering energy signature from the Eclipse Cannon explosion out of scientific curiosity and mild concern for environmental contamination. At least that’s what he’s able to convince himself of on the arduous trek to Oklahoma.
The trail ends at a quaint little house, hours away from the crash site but somehow still in the middle of nowhere. America is big.
He powers off The Van (not nearly as fun to drive as The Crab, but almost as well equipped) and switches to the handheld tracker. The signal is definitely coming from here. He circles the house, looking to pinpoint the source.
“Can I help you?” A familiar voice calls from the porch. Stone steps away from the side of the house to meet her.
“Director Rockwell.” He resists the urge to give a sardonic salute.
She’s not in uniform, the good director has gone incognito with jeans, boots, and a loose flannel. She still has that braid, though. Stone is in uniform, he’s swapped out his back-up black suit for the back-up back-up black suit that was, inevitably, tucked away in the back-up, back-up, back-up stash of Robotnik Tech that got him here in the first place.
“Not ‘director’ anymore. Just Rockwell.”
“You don’t have a first name?”
“Do you?” She raises her eyebrows. “ Agent ?”
“That’s classified.” Stone gives her a self-deprecating smile. She appears to begrudgingly accept it.
The tracker in his hand beeps incessantly. There’s only one thing it could be. “I think there’s an alien in your basement,” he tells her.
“That a problem?”
Well, probably for someone. Is it Stone’s problem? He thinks back to Shadow and his deadly serious analysis of the telenovela. Gabriella should kill them both. The narrow-eyed precision when he crushed the avocados for “revenge guac.” Stone was just trying to be nice to him while they passed the time, the poor kid was so dead set on vengeance he couldn’t see the irony baked into his own gravitas. There was an almost heartbreaking sincerity to him, a stark counterpoint to Gerald Robotnik’s unrelenting casual cruelty.
Stone bites back a sigh, decides he might as well stop lying to himself. “I just want to make sure he’s okay.”
Rockwell presses her lips together. Then she gives a him a long, slow blink of resignation, and jerks her head toward the door.
“…come on in.”
.-
“Nice place,” Stone comments. “How’d you get it so fast?”
“It’s in the family.”
She doesn’t bother giving him the tour. She leads him straight to the basement. It’s clearly been renovated into a TV room, with soft carpeting and even a microwave and some cupboards for easy access popcorn. There’s a movie playing with no sound, Stone watches a few frames before clocking it as Independence Day. And curled up on the foldout couch, looking decidedly comatose under a striped blanket, is Shadow the hedgehog.
Rockwell takes her place back on the couch next to him. She doesn’t seem all that concerned. Stone eases onto the end of the foldout, the two of them framing Shadow at 90 degrees. Shadow remains still, eyes squeezed shut and form rigid. Stone places a careful hand on his quills. He feels the static fizzling from him.
“Why’d you bring him here?” Stone can’t help but ask.
“I’m containing the threat ,” she says tiredly, like it should’ve been obvious. “Normally I’d eliminate it but…can’t just kill him.”
“Like…morally, or literally?”
She shrugs. “Let’s be generous and say both.”
“He’s been like this the whole time?”
“So far.”
Stone’s brow furrows worriedly. “It’s like he’s fighting himself. All his strength is working to contain the chaos energy.” His bracelets are noticeably absent. “They must have used inhibitors to keep him stable.” He starts to get an idea. “Do you still have access to the files on Project Shadow?”
“Legally, no.”
“What about un-legally?”
“That’s not a fucking word.” She gives him an icy look. “Look man, I haven’t slept in 36 hours.”
“Neither have I. You want a coffee?” He offers almost on instinct.
“Are you insane?”
“Maybe.” He settles a hand absently on Shadow’s blanket, feels the tremor underneath. “But I know for a fact you’re not equipped at all to contain him, so what were you really trying to do?”
Her jaw clenches at being so blatantly called out. She looks like she might punch Stone right off the couch, but then she deflates. “I had to do something .” She risks a glance at Shadow. “I had to get to him before they did. That’s what I know. And if you’d like to join me on my…foray into national treason then…fine. But he can wait until tomorrow, and --” she jabs a finger at him. “So can you.”
She turns over onto the couch away from him and stubbornly shuts her eyes. She still has her boots on.
“...fine.” Stone isn’t sure if this is a display of trust or just complete exhaustion on Rockwell’s part, to let her guard down like this. He shrugs his suit jacket off, and gets up to turn out the lights. He’s not leaving her alone with Shadow. Shadow doesn’t take up that much space, there’s plenty of room for Stone to lay down as well. What an odd assortment the three of them made sharing this family sized couch. Despite how amped up he is, he feels sleep creep up on him in the dark. From the light of the TV, he sees Shadow’s ear give a small twitch.
How did we end up here, my friend?
.-
Before, when the memory of what happened to Maria would replay in Shadow’s mind, it would stop when they - when she was gone, like the world ended in that moment, and refused to go on. But this time it’s different. This time, he remembers what happened after.
The Professor once compared Shadow to the valve on a gas line. He controls the flow of the energy; but too much pressure, and he breaks.
Shadow took out every guard in a 100 meter radius. Maybe he killed them, maybe he didn’t, he wasn’t in a state to tell the difference. Then he glitched through the facility, rage and grief coursing through him with no outlet. He exploded through the walls, his energy colliding with the stored canisters they’d already harvested from him. The destruction was uncontainable. Shadow lost control. The chaos took over, took a toll on his body and forced him to his limit.
Walters found him in the rubble, a huddled burned husk of himself, unable to stop the hot tears from falling. Even with all his gifts, he was nothing more than a child unable to process his loss. He hated himself for being so weak.
They dragged him to the stasis chamber. Shadow tried to struggle, but all the fight was drained from him. He knew this wasn’t the usual containment period. They were going to bury him. He felt the panic course through him as the cryo fluid rose up over his air shoes. Is this it? Is this how they finally get rid of me?
.-
“ Leave me alone.”
Rockwell and Stone both snap awake at the same time. They’re light sleepers, field trained, of course. This has the unfortunate effect of Rockwell hitting him in the face with her braid while Stone’s arm flails up to knock into her chest.
“There’s real beds upstairs, you know.” She shoves him out of her way to stumble over to the hedgehog.
“It’s your house.”
Stone reaches out to Shadow. The quills crackle with a red spark. Stone hisses and pulls his hand back.
Shadow isn’t awake, but his form has relaxed into something more natural, he’s coming back to himself, twitching underneath the blanket. And he’s talking. Wonderful. A halo of pulsating energy starts to build around him. Stone has the sense to climb off the couch. He takes Rockwell’s arm to pull her away from Shadow. She whips around and strikes him in the throat. He chokes, but doesn’t stop pulling until they’re both in the far corner of the room pressed against the wall, like he’s used to the treatment.
“What’s happening?” Rockwell stares as the red light courses through the basement.
Stone catches his breath. “I think he’s having a nightmare.”
Before she can give him the Are you serious? look, Shadow’s still unconscious form begins to rise, floating above the couch wrapped his own personal lightning storm.
“What is this, the fucking Exorcist ?”
“Now that would be a good --”
Rockwell sees the tipping point before Stone does, she grabs him this time and pulls the both of them to the floor and the energy bursts through the room. The TV screen cracks. The lights explode above them, and instinctively she shields him from the falling glass. She’s had to do the Get Down Mr. President more than once (never with the actual president but once with the VP). The room goes dark and silent. Shadows body falls back onto the couch with a springy thud. There’s a scorch mark on the walls where their heads were moments ago.
She gets off Stone and shakes the glass from her hair.
“Don’t mention it,” she tells him. It’s nearly pitch dark in the basement, but she can still see Shadow breathing. Which is an improvement from his physical condition a few hours ago. He’s no longer trembling.
“That could’ve been worse,” she mutters. She picks his blanket up from off the floor and sits back on the edge of the couch. She rubs her eyes.
“He’s dissipating the energy in waves.” Stone examines Shadow. “It’ll get worse unless we restore his inhibitors. He can’t control his powers otherwise. This place has insurance, right?” He takes up Shadow’s wrist. Rockwell realizes he’s checking his pulse.
Shadow murmurs again in his sleep. “ Go away.” Stone shushes him, surprisingly gentle.
“It’s alright. You’re alright. It’s just me.”
Satisfied that Shadow was stable for now, Stone tucks the blanket back over the hedgehog and joins her at the end of the fold-out. Rockwell lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. She can’t really see his face in the dark.
There’s something Rockwell can’t reconcile. “He was more powerful than anyone there,” she says quietly, a strange don’t wake the kids instinct taking over her. “But…he never tried to escape. Not really.”
Stone answers like he’s given it a lot of thought. “They put the fear in him when he arrived, made him understand who was in charge.”
She thinks that’s all he’ll say, but then Stone keeps talking, low and hushed like a confession. “He was animal enough to torture and human enough to manipulate, that was the real genius of it all. He let them use him because they made him believe he had no other choice.”
His whispers hang in the air. Rockwell thinks she can feel their heartbeats, two slow one rapid, syncopating through the springs.
“You know a lot about Project Shadow,” she says finally.
“You appear to be neighbors with it.” There’s no accusation in it. Just curiosity.
“We’re not too far from where he first landed. Word gets around. My whole family was scared of aliens, I made it a career.” She doesn’t bother asking Stone about how he got into the business. They’ve both done their fair share of questionable things for their superiors. The world nearly ended two days ago, and they were partially responsible for that too in their own ways.
“We can’t change what happened,” Stone says, as if reading her mind. “But…”
“He needs our help,” she finishes begrudgingly. Things have really gone sideways for Rockwell at an alarmingly rapid pace. “Goddammit.”
Time to break out the un-legal shit.
.-
Stone nearly whoops with joy when he finds out Rockwell stole her G.U.N. laptop to track Shadow. He races to The Van with it.
“I wouldn’t get too excited,” she warns him, following him into The Van. The sun is rising behind them. “It’s more than likely all the specs on the inhibitors were stored as hard copies at the original facility, which last heard was --”
“Sucked into a miniature black hole, yeah, not my idea.” He plugs her laptop into The Van’s computers. “I’m not looking for those, I’m looking for the specs to the Eclipse Cannon.”
“That’s beyond top secret --”
“Oh, please.” Sometimes he wishes his record wasn’t so heavily classified. Nobody gives him credit for his skill. “Gerald must have based the Cannon on the original chaos energy harvester, I can reverse engineer that.”
“In the back of a van?”
“In The Van.” Stone corrects her. “This might take a bit. You should stay with him, in case he wakes up again.” Stone’s racing thoughts catch up to him. “I’m not saying that because you’re a woman. Your skill set just isn’t particularly useful at the moment.”
“I could kill you right here.” She’s very serious.
“You should know that in my standard work environment that kind of talk is tantamount to flirtation.” He looks up from the holograms briefly to give her a smirk. Yeah, she might kill him right here. Not that she’s his type or anything. He’s just having fun. The Doctor’s not the only one with a mischievous side.
She flips him off. “You could at least make me that coffee first.”
Stone takes a glance at the download progress and flips on the milk steamer.
.-
Shadow’s eyes open slowly. There’s something wrong. There’s no fluid, no cold. There’s something light and fuzzy on top of him. He pushes it away. It’s a cheap blanket. His body doesn’t feel right either. Like his limbs are made of lead.
There’s a woman sitting next to him sipping a latte.
Shadow jolts upright and falls off the couch. He tries to spark up his powers but nothing happens. His head is pounding. He can’t get his legs under him. He backs up against the corner. His heart’s beating too fast. What is wrong with him?
“Jesus, relax --”
“ Stay away from me.” She watches him try to hide like it doesn’t matter. Of course it doesn’t, he’s defenseless. He can’t even run.
She stands over him with a skeptical look. He glares at her. She rolls her eyes and squats down to his level. She glares back. She drains the coffee and tosses the cup. Shadow flinches at the movement. Maybe she did that to test him, see what he’d do.
Her glare softens a fraction. “ Relax. We’re not gonna hurt you.”
“Oh yeah? Who’s ‘we’?” He doesn’t think he’s met her before, but she has the severity of a soldier. But this place doesn’t seem like a typical prison.
“Two newly unemployed operatives and a stolen laptop.” She deadpans. “You fell from space, do you remember that?”
Oh. Right, that. He starts to notice the broken glass on the floor, the scorch marks on the walls. It’s happening again, he can’t control it.
“Stone is making you new bracelets, to set your powers right.”
Stone? Robotnik’s Stone?
“Until then…” she continues, “What’s your minimum safe distance?”
“What?”
“The distance I need to be so you don’t vaporize me when your time bomb goes off.”
“...I don’t know.” And it’s true. He doesn’t. He can’t remember the last time he didn’t have his inhibitors. Probably because it nearly kills him every time he takes them off.
“Oh, wonderful.” She sighs wearily, chewing her lip. Then she gets up. Shadow doesn’t move. What is he supposed to do, here? Does he follow her? Is he meant to stay behind? He tracks her movement as she dusts off her jeans.
She gives him a look, a what am I going to do with you? look. He’s used to that by now. But what she says surprises him. “You don’t have to stay. I can’t make you. But if you do, I can protect you.”
I don’t need your protection. But…what would he do, on the outside? He’s been sheltered, sequestered really, his whole life. The first thing he did when he got out was return to the place where he was kept. The world he knew was fifty years long dead.
He doesn’t answer. She doesn’t seem to mind. “Just think it over.” She heads for the stairs.
“Wait,” something occurs to him, something important. “Where are the emeralds?”
“...the what?”