Chapter Text
Age 0-2
The world was soft and warm.
That was the first thing Miles knew. He didn't have words for it, not yet, but he understood warmth, the feeling of fabric wrapped around his tiny body, the distant murmurs of voices, and the occasional rustling of movement. Any sound came muffled as if it had to push through layers of thick fog before it reached him. Sometimes, the voices were closer and softer. Sometimes, they were sharp and curt.
Usually, they were just angry.
There were other sounds, too. Tiny wails, hiccupping sobs, the shifting of weight against padded surfaces. He wasn't alone. He never was.
Yet he always felt like he was.
Hands lifted him, and he stiffened at the change, the abrupt shift from the familiar heat of blankets to the air outside. A moment later, he was pressed against something else, something warm and breathing, something alive. A steady heartbeat thumped beneath his cheek.
A voice rumbled above him. Not directed at him, not really. Directed about him.
"Poor thing. No one's come for him."
The voice belonged to one of the caretakers. He knew that much. He had begun to recognize them, by sound, by touch, by the way they handled him. Some hands were rough, hurried. Others lingered, uncertain. When they held him, he felt something different. A pause, a hesitation. He was used to it.
A second voice, lower, a whisper. "You know why. Two tails. It's ghastly that we even took the thing in. He's not natural."
"Shush you," The first voice rebuked the second, "Like such a thing as natural even matters. Those are strong tails, two strong tails. They could choke someone to death with those tails when he grows up..."
Two tails. He had not just one, but two tails. That was more than a little bit odd to my memory. He was pretty sure that humans didn't have tails at all, but whatever they currently were had a tail. Them having two tails set me apart.
That was pretty familiar.
Later, when the warmth faded and he was settled back into his crib, he lay still. Listening.
The world stretched beyond this place. He knew it, though he had never seen it. Through the walls, he could hear the distant chatter of older voices, the laughter of children, the scuff of feet on wooden floors. The world was full of people. More than just the ones here.
But none of them came for him.
He had a name. He had heard it, over and over, spoken by those who fed him, who wrapped him in blankets, who carried him from place to place.
Miles.
Just Miles. No other name, no attachment, no whispered promises of a family waiting for him. The other children, he had heard their names spoken differently, with expectation, with certainty. But his name was always just that.
An orphan's name. There were more than a few times people argued around him.
The weight of it settled over him like a second blanket. Miles shifted, stretching his small limbs, feeling the pull of something behind him. Something that moved with him, brushed against his legs.
Two tails.
The two tails he'd heard so much about. They were fluffy to his touch, like the soft fur of a young puppy. Which really narrowed what type of body he'd ended up in. Miles knew that he had fingers too, four fingers and two thumbs. From what he'd been overhearing, the first tail was normal though the second wasn't, no one said anything about hands being weird. Miles was pretty sure it meant he was some sort of animal person, like Sonic the Hedgehog and his pals.
That was concerning more than a bit.
Either Miles was living in a happy-tappy world, which given the comments he could overhear about how 'freakish' he was, so he held doubt, or Miles was going to be emboldened into the dangerous and wacky adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. It didn't take him long to put an 'Animal child' named Miles with two tails with Miles 'Tails' Prower.
The genius inventor adventure 'brother' of Sonic the Hedgehog. Miles himself didn't recall a lot of the lore regarding Tails' childhood, just that he was bullied and met Sonic when the dude crashed his plane near him. Tails then fixed it up and the rest was history. The Power Duo of the Sonic franchise was born. Many lives were saved, many worlds, and even an entire timeline.
He hadn't been a particularly smart man in his prior life, so there was some pressure to live up to the legacy of that.
When in such a delicate stage of his biological development, the months blended together for Miles. It wasn't like he could do much more than swing his limbs around and breathe air. All he had were the natter of the orphanage workers and prospective parents.
What he could do is run numbers in his mind, keeping it as sharp as possible. Boredom for the basic arithmetic soon overcame him though, as even the most complicated equations Miles could remember from his past life were too easy for him to do.
Eventually, Miles' eyes developed enough to see light. This verified his earlier theories of being in the world of Sonic the Hedgehog when a humanoid with a dog's head, a great dane's to be exact, popped into his vision constantly to feed him.
She was mostly grey from each ear, but black around the eyes. She had massive eye bags that one would expect from someone who needed to attend to children from infancy to teenage years. Little consistent sleep and high stress would do that to a person. She was sour-toned constantly, incapable of holding a smile for more than a few moments at a time.
Her name was Diane The Dane. The headmistress of the Orphanage. At least that was what people called her. If her name was something else, Miles certainly never heard it.
Miles' main form of interaction with her, after being fed and cleaned, was being picked up and shown off to people wanting to adopt. Most needed to only see the second tail and out came to talk about how 'difficult and costly it would be to accommodate'. So rarely did someone show interest in adopting Miles.
And when they did, it was always with a level of sleaze that gave Miles the shivers. So he'd do nothing but cry and cry in their presence and off they scurried. It was obvious to him that these 'parents' had plans that didn't actually involve playing happy families. The fact they couldn't handle a crying baby proved more than that to him.
Though... sometimes, just sometimes. Some couples didn't react negatively to his crying. They acted concerned, but Miles still ended up not going with them. Miles was more than willing to guess there were pieces of the puzzle missing, maybe they were inspectors, or maybe they found another child they thought needed them more.
There were a lot of reasons Miles never got adopted, these were just the reasons he could think of and the ones knew for a fact.
More time passed and Miles had truly started to be mobile. It was merely crawling, but it was enough to give Miles something else to occupy his time with. It also meant he could grab things to read whenever he could. The other kids in the orphanage didn't like this, so they made sure to take the things Miles grabbed off him, but that was a minor issue at the time.
Because he could read, these people had a language that at least looked and functioned close enough to English that Miles could read. He was ecstatic. Hungry for knowledge even. Miles would even go as far as to steal the few textbooks that orphan kids would bring from the public school they were going to.
"Diane," One of the other orphanage workers asked the woman, after having spotted me stealing a textbook on literal equations, "You don't think he can understand those books, right?"
Miles ended up rolling his eyes and sticking a tongue out at the woman's back. It was spotted by Diane but not the woman in question.
"I don't know," Diane responded, holding back a smile. "Miles is a smart kid, I'm pretty sure he understands most things we say."
"... I've said my bank details around that kid," The woman cast a suspicious glance.
Miles had to stifle a snort. Not that he had any use for her bank details, but the idea that a one-year-old was out to rob her blind was hilarious. Only a moron would think an infant could reach a phone, never mind operate one or get into a bank to operate an ATM.
The days passed in measured, quiet progress. As Miles crawled more confidently through the dim corridors of the orphanage, he began to discover his own little world, one of hidden nooks behind heavy doors, of secret spots where shafts of sunlight spilled onto neglected books and faded wallpaper. In those stolen moments, while the other children played or cried, he would quietly slip away to his favorite hiding place beneath a dusty window sill, poring over books that whispered secrets of numbers and letters.
Each page he turned deepened his understanding of a world he could feel only in fragments. Though the words were foreign, he was captivated by the order they promised, a world where logic and reason reigned. Even as hushed voices echoed down the hallways, reminding him with every whispered remark that he was different, an anomaly marked by his two tails, Miles clung to the silent lessons the books offered. In those moments, he wasn't merely the orphan with an extra tail; he was a seeker of knowledge, a mind already plotting its own escape from the fate others had seemingly reserved for him.
The caretakers, too, began to notice the small miracles of his progress. When Diane, with her perpetually tired eyes, cradled him in the early mornings, there was a gentle kindness in her touch, as if she hoped his brilliant mind would someday lead him far from the confines of the orphanage. But even her rare, soft smiles couldn't erase the sting of every derisive word or every furtive glance exchanged by those who saw only his oddity.
By the time Miles neared his second birthday, his movements had grown surer. He took tentative steps along the worn wooden floors, each one a silent rebellion against a world that had always labeled him an outcast. His inquisitive gaze, still unburdened by the full weight of the cruelty that awaited him, scanned every corner of his little universe, absorbing everything with an intensity that belied his tender age.
It was just the time his fingers started to become dexterous enough to start tinkering with gadgets, a goal he'd been looking forward to for years.
So Miles' life wasn't too bad in comparison to some of the things he remembered happening to children around from his prior life. And he always had the hope of Sonic, when the name-calling, the bullying, and the disappointment got too much.
Sonic would bring with him adventure and Miles wanted that more than nearly anything.
Age 2-6
For a long while, Miles's days at the orphanage passed in unchanging monotony. As he learned to walk, a new set of social expectations emerged. He was expected to mingle with other children his age, to share in conversations about trivial interests, and to join in games of Tag, Catch, and even soccer. Yet none of these pursuits stirred any genuine interest in him. His mind was preoccupied with puzzles and ideas far beyond the simplicity of childish play.
Indeed, none of those common interests appealed to Miles. His peculiar behavior, accentuated by the unmistakable presence of two tails, marked him as different, a fact that his peers detected with unnerving precision. Children, it seemed, possessed an uncanny talent for spotting oddities, and Miles's extra tail was the ultimate sign of anomaly.
At first, the bullying manifested as quiet exclusion, a mere sidestepping of his presence during group activities. Miles tolerated this rejection with a stoic indifference; after all, he had little desire to participate in the frivolous games of his peers. His focus remained steadfast on nurturing his intellect, on deciphering the secrets hidden within tattered textbooks and salvaged scraps of paper.
When it first became apparent to Diane that the other children were deliberately leaving him out, Miles had timidly requested a toolkit, a set of tools that might help him further his experiments and discoveries. Instead of fulfilling that request, Diane chose to enforce a reluctant camaraderie by reprimanding the other children until they allowed him to join their games. This decision, intended as a remedy, soon proved to be a grave misstep.
What began as hesitant participation rapidly devolved into calculated cruelty. The children, masters of malicious compliance, turned their forced inclusion into an arena of torment. Overzealous tackles during soccer matches, relentless shins-kicks, and the cruel tugging of his two tails became common occurrences, each acts a reminder that Miles was an outcast.
Despite his tender age, Miles understood his situation far better than most children could. He realized that reporting the bullying would only lead to minor punishments for his tormentors, punishments that would likely cause them to double down on their cruelty. As the taunts and physical abuses escalated, and as disciplinary measures began to fall upon him for refusing to engage in unwanted play, a casual sort of resentment took root right in the knock of his soul. This bitterness was directed not only at his peers but also at the caretakers, especially Diane, who had, perhaps unwittingly, set him on a path where his differences rendered him vulnerable.
It was lucky that despite the punishments, his third birthday awarded him with the toolkit Miles had so asked for. It was enough that within the week, he'd managed to cobble together a crude remote control toy helicopter. The fun Miles had with that far eclipsed the bullying attempts during that month.
This was noticed by the village itself. A child MacGyvering his own remote toy helicopter was a feat to expect from a young teen with advanced electrical and aerodynamic knowledge, not a three-year-old fox with the extra tail. So new focus was brought to the orphanage, a new focus on a genius fox child, much to the disdain of the other children hoping to be adopted.
Even Miles didn't think much of the parents that came in, a lot of them liked the concept of a smart child, and most hated the way Miles would address them as if they were equals. Till one middle-aged couple came in, a pair of foxes actually.
They were taller than the average person Miles had become equated with, their tails were on the short side proportionally, that is. And their glowing red eyes were a touch concerning.
But the entire conversation between Miles and them was as pleasant as any conversation Miles had with people in his prior life. More so, it was the best parental interview he'd ever been a part of.
The couple settled into the small, worn chairs in the orphanage's common room, and the atmosphere shifted noticeably. Miles sat quietly on a low cushion, his prized toolkit arranged neatly beside him, and the couple exchanged a look of genuine interest before the man spoke.
"Tell us, Miles," he began in a gentle tone, "how did you build your little helicopter?"
Miles's dark eyes flickered with concentration as he picked up one of the toy's components, a piece of twisted wire, and held it up for emphasis. In his soft, measured voice, he explained, "I found scrap metal in the back room and used some of the wires from an old radio. I studied the pictures in the books and experimented until the pieces fit together."
The woman leaned forward, her glowing red eyes reflecting warmth rather than the sternness that some others had shown. "That's quite impressive," she said. "Your method shows a clear understanding of mechanics, even if it's rudimentary. What do you plan to create next?"
For a moment, Miles's gaze shifted downward, his small fingers absentmindedly tracing the worn edge of his cushion. Then, with a quiet certainty, he answered, "Something that flies higher. Something that doesn't just hover, but soars. I want to see how far I can push what I know."
It was his only real means of becoming good enough to fix Sonic's plane in the future. If he could grasp the aeromechanics of smaller objects first, the mechanics of lift itself, while also exercising and creating skills in engineering, then there wouldn't be a question when the time came of if Miles could fix Sonic's plane.
The man nodded slowly, clearly impressed by the clarity of the child's ambitions. "It sounds as if you have a vision, a spark that is rare to see at your age. We believe that with the proper tools and a supportive place to learn, you could develop that vision into something extraordinary."
A soft smile touched the woman's lips as she added, "We'd be honored to help you, Miles. We have a workshop where you could work without distraction, where every bit of your creativity could be nurtured."
Miles's eyes widened slightly at the promise of a new environment, one that seemed filled with potential rather than the usual gloom of the orphanage. For the first time, he felt that his peculiar talents and extra tail were not burdens, but marks of distinction that could lead him somewhere beyond the relentless cruelty of his current home.
The conversation flowed naturally from that moment. The couple asked about his favorite parts of the books, the specific mechanics behind his helicopter's design, and even his ideas for future projects. In return, they spoke of their own experiences with invention and art, sharing stories that resonated with a depth that Miles rarely encountered.
Things stopped there. There had been promises of a return, there had been smiles and grand plans of adoption. But nothing came of it. They never returned.
It was unusual for him, but Miles couldn't help but cry over it. It had been the first time since he was capable of speech that Miles had cried, for some of the newer caretakers working in the orphanage, it marked the first time he'd ever cried at all before them.
It was so shocking that Diane couldn't not try to uplift his spirits.
"A Lot of people like the idea of children, just that's it, the idea of children. Not actually having children," Diane comforted Miles a week afterward, "They make grand promises, and that's all they want to do. I'll tell ya, if I ever see the pair again, I'll be giving them a piece of my mind."
It was cold comfort, but comfort all the same. For hopes to have risen so high and fallen so fast, it was something the rest of the orphanage could feel on their toes. Many might have expected sympathy among the kids; they would've had this happen to them at least once, but the truth was that they took joy in Miles's misery. Joy that he hadn't been picked and would never get picked.
Even children can take solace in the idea there is someone worse off than them. It was then that Nicknames started being applied to Miles. The most obvious one wasn't the first, because it was obvious to the kids living in the orphanage Miles was sensitive to his duo of tails, if they knew that then Diane did and she wouldn't be easily convinced any such nickname wasn't bullying.
Egg-head, and Gears-for-Brain, were the common ones. Focused on his mechanical skills rather than his deformities. Miles had first thought the first nickname was a reference to Eggman, but nothing else seemed to indicate that Eggman was even active yet. Which Miles supposed was good, but bad for his boredom.
It was by his fourth birthday that things shifted for the worse, gone were the quiet days of tinkering, here were the days of raw dread. Diane had gotten sick, leaving the care of the orphans, like Miles, to the general staff. In a normal orphanage, this wouldn't be much of a problem, but for some reason the people manning this one were scummy.
For the lack of a better word.
Miles was sure Diane wouldn't have hired them if she had the choice. They let the kids run rampant whenever they were left in charge. Furniture would end up smashed, children would be hurt, and knees mainly skinned but a few broken noses and black eyes would pop in at times. But most importantly, at least for Miles, was how quickly things got broken. Nothing was off limits, TVs, remotes, his collection of electronic gadgets that he'd been amassing.
Everyone involved took a tormented glee in smashing his things.
But what they didn't realize?
Their carnage left Miles with more to play with. He used the broken stuff with far greater access than he'd used the prior scraps Miles had found lying around. There was enough variety that Miles was able to couple together a pc from the materials, it was slow and needed to run based on old software from around twenty years prior, but it was a workable base for Miles to program with after he managed to nick a keyboard from the local library.
Miles managed to take what he could and also build a USB fryer, a USB flash device that uploaded a specific kind of virus into a computer that would scramble the system files. It wasn't the greatest invention, as there were methods around such a thing working, like the lack of external USB ports being the easiest one, but it was good enough to break any computer Miles could find in town.
Useless against the future robots Robotnik would send against Sonic. But if developed further, Miles could easily use it to attack the actual computers in the Dr.'s bases.
Given the chaotic mess that the orphanage had fallen into, Miles knew he couldn't exactly keep his new gadgets under his bed. They'd broken the helicopter he'd kept there, so a better spot was needed to store his stuff.
He'd found that the basement boiler room was never used, the building had long been converted to electrical heating, but the room containing the boiler remained. A long and deep clean was needed before Miles would keep his stuff there, but it was easily done.
No one ever bothered him while he was in the room, no one even bothered to look inside. Why would they?
He also started to train his tails, Miles knew from what little he knew from the franchise that 'Tails' could use his duo of tails to achieve flight, much like a helicopter could. That required a lot of muscle to build up to. In theory.
In fact, the first week of training was enough for him to hover. It wasn't enough to fly, but it was more than enough to give him an unfair advantage in the long jump, he was outjumping the kids in the 10-plus age range. It was another reason for kids to be jealous of him, another reason for their bullying to intensify.
Luckily, things eventually calmed down as Diane recovered within two months. Fewer people were working in the Orphanage after that though, Miles even noticed intense screams during the middle of the night that followed some departures. No one disappeared, Miles had seen these people around town after they left, but it did point Diane in a different light for Miles from that point on.
In fact, something had changed about the kind matron during her leave of absence. Miles wasn't sure if it was just that he'd gotten old enough to notice her true demeanor or if the brief mysterious illness had just affected Diane's character. Either way, this was a harsh change that only seemed to apply to people other than Miles himself.
To him, she was still a sweet kind, grandmother figure whereas with other orphans she'd become strict, and demanding.
It was like she knew what they'd been up to while Diane had been sick and was super pissed about it. Miles certainly hadn't told her, while better, he had not been a perfect angel either, and tattling on the misbehavior of the others would get him called out just as quickly.
It wasn't long before this change in attitude made Miles feel very, very paranoid about interacting with Diane. Being nice to him didn't change that he knew this behavior wasn't universal, and Miles had too many memories as an adult to not find the behavior suspect. The long-term isolated meetings between the two became awkward and full of long silences. The tension rose so much that at times Miles would speak technobabble, using framing in the terms he was currently researching to draw out nonsense to talk with.
One day, things were extra tense as she put him in one of the living room areas the orphanage had and locked the door. It was typically where one went to meet with prospective new parents, but being locked inside the room was a new experience for Miles.
He didn't like it.
A full half-hour passed before a sign of Diane returning. Miles started to examine the room in full, searching through the stuffed toys in the right corner of the room for signs of cameras without it being obvious that was what he was doing. He rooted through the blocks on the other side of the room, then, absentmindedly building a house out of the knock-off Lego bricks as his mind came up with possibilities.
It was then that he spotted a vent grill, it was several feet high up on the wall, higher than Miles could reach while standing on a chair. He understood from other children that they could crawl about in the vents with room to spare, and Miles was the smallest current resident of the orphanage, so it wasn't like he expected to get stuck trying it. The vents did, however, only lead to the basement, which had been locked earlier that day by Diane, or the roof. Both would be hard for a normal child to escape from, but Miles wasn't an ordinary child. He could fly…
...in theory.
Miles stood from his chair, his courage gathered to reach the roof of the orphanage regardless only for the door to the room to suddenly click open with a roar of noise behind it. It was a shocking noise, something that Miles had never heard in his life as a two-tailed fox, it was a celebration.
"Happy birthday!" A crowd of people led by Diane screamed as the woman in question entered the room with a large cake. The cake had six candles and read on it, Happy 6th Birthday Miles.
There wasn't a single thing in this current life that prepared Miles for this. He'd never received a birthday cake before, he'd never seen anyone living in this orphanage receive one either, neither adults nor kids. Miles hadn't even been aware that he'd missed his fifth birthday last year, till now the young Fox believed he'd been four still.
Miles had expected this to have been some sort of trap, not a surprise birthday party. To go from planning to escape the building to being given birthday cake was such a large swing in mood that Miles found himself just staring at the folks as they surrounded him singing Happy Birthday to him.
"What the fuck!"
"Miles!"
There wasn't a person in sight as Miles made his way through the orphanage in the middle of the night. The changes with Diane had continued, she was ultra-strict with everyone, even resulting in physical punishment such as slapping kids across the face or spanking them hard enough to force them to stand for several hours, or worse laying on their stomachs while sleeping.
But even though Miles had been largely exempt from these actions, his curiosity had grown to such levels that he had to investigate. So for two weeks, he stayed up later than usual, he took notes on when the caretakers, especially Diane were asleep and the nights that she stayed in their office bed, a strange thing in hindsight, compared to when she went home.
With this information, Miles knew that Diane wasn't here tonight, but he did need to watch out for two caretakers, two of the stricter ones. If caught there wouldn't be a massive deal, but they might take the chance in over-punishing him now and deal with the fallout from Diane later, just for the satisfaction. Luckily, Miles had further trained his hover, and his spinning tails sounded a lot like the spinning of the fans that went on throughout the orphanage, so he was able to silently move through the building without floorboards creaking or any such noises drawing attention to him.
He still had to deal with one or two doors that had been between him and Diane's office but those weren't loud enough to matter. If there was a single point of maintenance that the orphanage took pride in, it was the silent doors. None of the workers could stand the squeak of an unoiled door hinge.
When Miles finally got to Diane's office, he found the door unlocked and the room empty as he expected. There was a tall file cabinet behind an oak desk with a leather-bound chair between them. But those weren't the files Miles was interested in, those were deeds, chains of parentage, and physical copies of the orphanage's financial records.
Instead, Miles turned on the laptop Diane kept on the desk and pulled out a USB flash drive he'd prepared for the moment. The regular operating system had been locked out, and password protected. Miles expected the password to be easy to crack but didn't want to waste the time it would take to crack it if Diane took even the most simple of precautions, such as spelling it with a mix of letters and numbers in unusual spaces. So he compiled a simple Linux-sk operating system based on the bits of open-source software that existed here, which ran on the USB flash drive once connected to the computer.
It was slow, but Diane hadn't set up protections within the standard operating system the computer had against an outside OS accessing the files, so Miles was on the easy road to her files.
The first thing he looked for was some sort of diary, a thing he expected older folk to do. But if Diane kept one, it wasn't on this laptop. The next thing Miles tried was looking through orphan files; this was where the oddities started compiling themselves in his head onto a list. They listed the orphans by their weight, height, eye color, and the animal type they were, but nothing about personality and history. It was a list as if they weren't children to be adopted, but animals raised to be a certain size and weight.
A chill ran up Miles's spine that felt like spiders were tap dancing on it.
There was a list of potential parents for each child, but they were listed as parents rejected. This included kids that Miles had been told had been adopted, instead, the file listed them as bought. The rejected parents were given a rational reason on the page for why they were rejected.
Usually money, but a few were rejected for inefficient will. A claim that Miles required more context to figure out what it meant. But the children who were 'bought' were never given a reason.
Miles copied the files over in batches, planning on reading them all later from the safety of his boiler room when his curiosity led to him reading over his file. It was more than chilling. There'd been only three sets of parents that had shown genuine interest in adopting Miles, two more sets that Miles had even been aware of. The first two were folks that Miles barely remembered, but they'd been rejected for much the same reason as others he'd read about.
The final couple had been the duo from just before Diane's sick leave. The duo showed such a public interest in Miles that the young fox had genuinely thought he would be adopted. But had disappeared just as quickly as any other would-be parent after that. Diane had said they only showed up for the social clout that looking into adopting would bring them into their social circles.
Diane's files showed a different story, such a different reason for disappearing. Because they'd been written down as Deceased.