Chapter Text
He is gently awoken by the brightest star in the sky. It’s almost refreshing, not waking up to darkness. Maria hadn’t had the chance to show him a sunrise; she was not the earliest of risers.
He’s landed amidst a whole lot of nothing. Open fields, no trees, tumbleweeds abound, exposed bedrock. Absently, he almost recognizes it from background shots of La Ultima Pasíon , but they’d never stopped arguing long enough to reveal where they were.
His inhibitor rings click back into place like they hadn’t survived crashing through the atmosphere. Not a scratch, and no less pull on his nerves than usual.
For a moment he pauses, considering the horizon. In his mind’s eye, he can already picture a blue blur, flashing briefly in the distance and then right at his feet, beckoning him to join his colorful little crew.
But nothing appears. The sun is warm in his fur, on his quills, and under his feet. He would run towards it, if it didn't threaten to blind him. And he’s had enough of being blind to the world.
To the west he goes.
Whether or not anyone actually wants to find him, he’s not going to stay put and do half the work for them. The sun continues to rise, pinks giving way to oranges and yellows, the blues nowhere to be seen as of yet.
He’s had enough of blue for now.
The terrain grows as he skates over it, flatland sloping into smooth foothills until it cuts into jagged rock. That’s when he decides to start teleporting from peak to peak, before the rock can tumble beneath his feet. On the other side of the mountain range, it slopes again, but less smoothly than the other side and with tiny valleys nestled in between. That’s where he sees the first signs of civilization.
He spends too much time gazing at the small farmhouses and ranches before he’s dodging pillars of concrete and obnoxious horns blaring his ears off. Who would put such a nuisance upon such a gorgeous natural landscape? What stupid humans.
In mere moments, a blast of salt fills his nose and a breath later, the sea greets him in kind.
Too far. He’s got no idea how long he’ll have to run to find land again if he commits. He shifts his weight and rides the waves back to shore, sand crystallizing under the fiery trails of his skates.
He goes out of his way to avoid any traces of the concrete wall of hell, probably too far. Even more buildings and sounds push him away from the south, but perhaps going north is a bit more promising.
It’s rolling and lush, unlike where he landed. Trees and bushes dot the land like scenes from the more idyllic films Maria had showed him. He stops to admire a flock of colorful birds coasting overhead, while a strange sound grows behind his back.
It’s a car; much smaller than the tanks and trucks that had hunted him down in the city, but far louder and entrenched in dust from the rough land. It’s not roaring towards him like the G.U.N. convoys had, in fact it’s so slow he has to squint to make out the small human heads distinctly peeking out the sides.
Then it echoes—no, it’s doubled—across the plain, where there’s another cloud of dust and smog, just as filled with people. Between then, a small gathering of deer-like creatures are grazing on the plain.
Then, that blasted horn again. At his right, a car is just yards away from him, stopped short and gaping with wide-eyed humans of all shapes and sizes.
The harsh static of a radio cracks into the air—too much like G.U.N.’s angry callouts, and Shadow’s fist sparks.
A scream, a POP, and a walkie-talkie falls out of the human’s hand, littering the ground in dark plastic pieces.
Shadow takes off before any more cars roll up. He’s more careful with his route; he avoids the well-treaded ground and cuts between foliage, sending a few herds of animals roaring to safety. It only takes moments for him to find the concrete, flat and ugly and cordoned behind a huge fence he hadn’t realized he ran right through.
Evidently, the humans weren’t done with their sick experiments in this day and age. What did they have to gain from trapping wildlife behind fences and walls? Even if it seemed so lifelike, it still rang cruel in his mind.
He keeps running.
The foothills come back, perhaps a bit further south than when he first ran through them, because they’re defined by sharper cliffs with ravines carved through their feet. A single misstep, a moment’s hesitation would send him into free fall, but he goes from top to top in only a few flashes.
He could keep going through every range—on and on until he can’t move anymore, but a flash of color catches the corner of his eye. A whole spectrum of blue that couldn’t be encompassed by a loudmouth with a mean right hook. From the darkest navy through turquoise to a muted teal—all of it spreads across the horizon, covering north to south completely by ocean.
He hadn’t seen it, back in Tokyo. It was dark, the whole world had been swallowed by darkness, the only colors in his sight were pitch black and the city’s bright neon. In London, the muted cloud cover hadn’t allowed any color to breach the gray river or the city’s aged stone.
Here, it’s as if the entire rainbow has emerged within a single color, and it’s taken all his senses hostage at once. Even at this elevation, the salt air reaches his nose, the breeze whipping sharply at his quills, and the birds have a melancholic trill to them.
He glances down at the nearest valley; nestled in the middle of it is a rundown barn, probably older than him, with little more than the remnants of a fence surrounding it. A perfect place to hide, if a secret bunker built into the mountains themselves is out of the question.
It’ll do.
It’s not long later he’s lounging in the hay loft, under a chunk of missing roof that allows just enough space to see the stars without leaving himself out in the open. His only company should be the light and the wind, but he hears more.
It’s not the wandering herds he’s learned graze nearby, nor could it be the occasional birds nesting in the nearby almond grove, and it’s absolutely not the roars of the cars that rarely come through the narrow dirt road.
No, it sounds distinctly like the zoom of the fastest being in the universe.
Shadow sighs. So much for a quiet night.
He teleports to the stable side of the roof, not even bothering to search the hills. He’s better off waiting and listening, like he did before.
The zoom echoes again, off the hills and through the trees, kicking up dust that won’t settle for miles.
“Took you long enough,” he says.
Only the squawks of a flock robbed of sleep answer him.
Then, a blue streak comes barreling right for him.
In a blink, he’s on the ground and blue meets the roof.
“The surprise attack was never going to work twice ,” he warned with a lilt to his voice. But he turns to find the entirely wrong shade of blue standing there.
Too dark and flat, with no quills out of place and no quills at all, in fact. The moon reflects off the metallic surface of its head, otherwise lit by a pair of eyes even more red than his own.
Passively, Shadow realizes, it doesn’t look anything like the robots he had trashed at the Eclipse Cannon. Those; big, bulky, and distinctly boxy. This Sonic-like thing is a genuine attempt at impersonation, with extensive detail thrown out in the name of innovation. Its limbs are too thin, what passed for hands were merely claws that looked sharp enough to cut through anything, and he immediately knew not to give it the chance. It’s body is a smaller concave cavity that whirls to life as the red beams that passed for eyes narrowed at him.
That, at least, the imposter has correct.
The claws disappear and transform into a cannon, growing quickly with a light that sparks with an all-too-familiar power.
Shadow disappears. From the nearest foothill, he can see fire sparking in the dry grass he’d just stood in. He can also see the imposter’s arm canon lighting up again, and away he goes.
He reappears on the dirt road; nothing will catch fire here, and it’s perhaps for the best that humans don’t come through here anytime soon. The hillside that got blasted in his stead isn’t sparking to life, but the hunk of bedrock it’s exposed won’t do well for a would-be rockslide.
He’s spent too long thinking; he has to dodge-roll out of the way this time. He looks up only to check what the robot is doing now, just to see it charging right for him. He can’t think of where else to go—the mech crashes into him, barreling them both through the grass. Shadow laments the mud that’s going to be stuck in his quills for ages more than the pain.
The mech has him pinned, its lightweight appearance bearing no weight on how firmly it’s holding him down. It holds his legs in place, bearing its claws down upon his chest, and if Shadow could open his eyes any wider, he’d see nothing but a blue silhouette with a fist raised above him, ready to deliver the final blow.
But no words would save him here. He must act.
Shadow plants his arms underneath his back and kicks up, shaking the robot off and curling into a tight spin dash. By the time his attacker rears back upon him, he’s spinning forward in a flash of light, barreling through the imposter like a buzz saw.
He stops just in front of the old grove, the birds giving him plenty of grief. Behind him, the rotting barn is no more, and what little wood left standing is kindling another fire. A quick lap around the debris chokes the flames out before they can breathe in the soft evening breeze, and Shadow doubles back through the field. What pieces of the mech that remain are few and far between.
A large bit of the blue headpiece flickers with destroyed circuits and wires, like a pulse desperately trying to fuel a missing heart. But those sinister red eyes never light up again.
Shadow blasts it another time, just to be sure.
And just like that, he’s on the move again. He won’t be spending the rest of this night lounging about, and perhaps the next several, just to be safe.
But its not fear that propels him forward; not for himself, at least, then for the quiet, bountiful valley that now bears the scars of his wake.
He can’t let it happen again; not anywhere. And he's not going to.