Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Now stone
seems to embrace this hallowed notion
of empty, of emptying space, this erasure, this sage
trace we sometimes leave behind. He is both

absent and present, a fading figure in a picture,
familiar, yet unrecognized,
                    ourselves at another age.

“If Stone Dreams” by Mary di Michele

Rumor goes around in carousels of office-break whispers: Robotnik has discovered (or perhaps invented) the trick to longevity. After all, look, look, see them? The two- no, not so obviously, quit staring, they'll notice. Yes, the man in the coat and his bodyguard? Assistant? Secretary? The agent. That one. Do you see? Subtly, carefully, look at them- I swear, I've worked here for the last decade, and they haven't aged one bit... How long has it been? Since 2015, yes, but the scientist’s been here longer... Maybe if we get our promotion, they'll give us a shot of the solution, stop us too, from aging.

Round and round. Stone hears the rumors. Robotnik eventually does too, and pays them no mind past the initial vain cackle and a twirl of the mustache: Maybe I should get on that, Agent Stone, a keto diet and regular cardio can only take me so far.

Robotnik doesn't even follow a keto diet. Stone just smiles up at him, and through his teeth offers: Maybe they will grant you two weeks off-site paid leave if you file for an expedition.

It's nice to speak in half-riddles around Robotnik, it keeps him engaged in an otherwise mind-numbing setting while they wait for this conference to start. Keeps him around Stone, eager to figure out what the agent is not-saying and move onto the next topic. Otherwise he'd wander off... and what a catastrophe that tends to be.

Now, it draws his attention back, like on a lure. He turns to face Stone again, leaving the room alone, having spent the last five minutes mercilessly raking his gaze along its patrons. Expedition to where, he asks.

The fountain of youth, Stone jokes in his professional, dry manner. It's always a gamble, when slipping these to Robotnik, no way of knowing whether the joke will be interpreted as Stone being an idiot and actually believing in tall tales or be appreciated in any capacity.

Robotnik rolls his eyes so hard, his body follows along with the motion.

Robotnik has dyed his hair for years, and whether that hides grey hair now isn't information Stone's privy to. He doesn't necessarily care for it either, but does distantly wonder if one day - maybe in five years, maybe in ten - he'll need to arrange for a toupee. Something extremely fancy and worth more than his own salary.

It's a funny thought. More of an inside joke with himself: look at you, brave little soldier, weathering another five years, another ten. Look at him, growing older with you right beside him. Is this it?

Not in a final ultimatum of a phrase. Not as a complaint. Don't take him wrong here.

When Stone cooks breakfast that is two sausages and three eggs to the left of 'keto', when Stone shows up at Robotnik's private apartment to restock his fridge and polish his robots, when Stone notices boxes in that apartment: medals and awards and laminated pictures from conferences, science cons, official events, pictures in which Stone is present, he wonders:

Is this it?

Have I made it? Has it worked out? Have all the roadbumps to this point payed off? Will the roadbumps onward pay off too?

When he thinks 'is this it' he isn't a trapped, desperate mouse in the cogs of a great metropolitan meatgrinder. He isn't scared of never breaking free. Instead, he is a baffled trapeze artist at the end of a grueling set, standing two feet on solid ground, panting, and reeling from the fact he's made it.

Five years, ten years, aging together. It's a good plan. A plan with no steps to it, just the vague goal of sticking around. He quite likes it, as much as Stone allows himself to like anything.

And then what he likes and what he doesn't like and what he tolerates all comes to a hissing halt. Clicks one by one and fizzles out of existence like an old storefront of TV sets shutting down for the night, images vanishing in a strip of light once you hit OFF.

Green Hills, Montana, there is a town with quiet people, people with nothing to say about the glass and the shards of metal lining a certain street. There is Robotnik, and then, sharply and with no warning, there isn't.

How can a man be replaced by five kilograms of shrapnel, another power surge, and the weight of an entire town's secret?

Moreover, how can Robotnik be. Brilliant and bright to the point of being an eyesore, self-made and self-built to the point of patenting his look and suing impersonators. How can Robotnik be replaced at all.

They don't tell Stone immediately. They don't have to: he's told by the badniks whirring into defense mode, he's told by the disappearance of a tracker dot on the lab's console. He's told by the silence. The silence, the silence, the silence. There is no memo and there is no call and there is no Ivo Robotnik in the registry.

Oh how fast do they scrub his inky mark of innovation from their corners.

Stone gets in the autopilot jet and doesn't remember putting on the flight suit, doesn't remember feeding the grand machine any coordinates. He just falls into the seat and his eyes are very, very dry. He has not blinked in a long time.

The pod closes. The lab dips into lockdown as the hangar ceiling splits. There is no AI voice saying 'good evening Agent Stone' or 'good 1 a.m. Agent Stone, shall I fly us at hyperspeed or turbo? Careful, one of these will peel your organs from your body, but I won't tell you which!'

It's all just silence.

The thing lands him- or rather he lands it on the outskirts of Green Hills.

Forty minutes. Forty minutes after whatever happened here. Stone is on-scene, halfway across the country, having activated Robotnik's usually stagnant jet-not-jet minutes after the hovercraft tracker disappeared. He's armed, he's ready to see a plume of smoke, rising high, high, up up up into the night, blotting out stars. Ready to see that thing ugly and mangled, ready to tell Robotnik something scathing, something mean and petty like "It was still in development, of course it crashed".

He knows he wouldn't. The thoughts pass along the back of his head in shivers and he casts them away, knows them to be born of fear and not of anger.

There is no smoke. There is no hovercraft. There is no Robotnik.

In a way, luckily, there is very little of Stone.

People don't tend to notice him. His flightsuit is all blacks. He tosses a short-crop jacket over it to somewhat resemble an outfit - and to hide the shoulder holster. He jogs into town, assumes a scared and wide-eyed expression, mouth open, hands hovering. He blends into the crowd.

There are people in the center, there are skid marks on the tarmac. There is the alien and his handlers and the exchange of meaningful glances: no one will tell, no one will ever say what happened, it stays within the town community. There are shards of metal littering the street.

In 30 minutes the government's array of machines and people fan over the town. They don't recognize Stone either. He has always been Robotnik's convenient shadow. And how can someone that no longer exists cast a shadow at all?

There is only one instance. A S.W.A.T.ie that pauses and gives Stone too long a look: do I know you?

Nothing comes of it, Stone looks too terrified, too feeble and civilian to possibly be anyone. The stare moves on. Stone dissolves into the crowd, into the town, and soon back into the woods where a folded, sleeping jet faintly blinks in the moonlight.

Not all of the fear on his face was necessarily a ruse.

He clambers into the jet again, and he's breathing too hard, eyes still too-dry. Years of damage-control and first-response training beginning to kick in, knocking grand cogs into motion: he needs to contact the blackbox, he needs to poke a few holes in Robotnik's savings accounts, leach a few million off before they're frozen, needs to quickly redistribute his assets, his property, his personal projects. Needs to salvage as much as possible before the crackdown onto Robotnik's leftovers is wrought in uncompromising waves.

The pod hisses shut. There still is no interface voice.

The flight back is short. Watching miles shoot up in ticks of hundreds is comforting. Just enough of a distraction.

The lab lets him in after its annoying, purposeful two rejections. Robotnik would've had the doors open in one biometric scan, but the system always fails Stone twice over before obliging: you've passed my test on your patience. This time he wishes it rejected him again. Again and again and again in stubborn humor of someone removed.

The blackbox is set to transmit every three seconds, straight to a server board on the second floor. Stone walks away from the jet, through the hangar, and the next five steps is all he needs to take care of. The next five steps. And then there will be five more. And five more.

That is okay.

He reads through the hovercraft's data, its dip into hyperspeed, Robotnik's vitals, where he got scared, where - elated. Where he got punched. Missile launches, rockets, fire. A collision. Another, another, 48 of them milliseconds apart- and then the 49th- the complete shattering of the hull, deactivation and detachment of both hover discs- Stone's hand has crept over his mouth, dry fingertips along his beard, along chapping lips. Smelling the jet's cleaning solution and air freshner under his nails.

A sharp change in air pressure, gravitational pull, and velocity- how. There'd been no crash site. There'd been no hovercraft, nothing. Nothing but shards of metal. What had happened there- yet unanswerable. Stone doesn't work with unanswerables.

He works in 'then who would know' and 'then where do I look' and 'then what's the right question to ask'.

Theoretically unemployed, Stone works.

Accounts, invoices, the transport and wellfare of dormant projects buried in the ocean, underground bases. There are things he recognizes at a glance, old work from before 2010, scrapped instructions and 3D models, single-passenger cars, atom teleportation rings, weather control projects, a new type of invisible chemtrail dispenser, an unfinished radar system for all of Robotnik's work: forever paranoid that G.U.N. would fancy stealing a single badnik for dissection and hoping its creator wouldn't notice.

He packages those same badniks into special anti-conductive packing peanuts, sets them to ship off into personal storage. Collects blueprints onto hard drives, encrypts them, hides those too, wipes the board computers of data, of access codes- downloads the music. Saves it and purges the original files.

He has no idea if it's what Robotnik would've wanted. But he can't imagine any of it passing into the hands of G.U.N. can't imagine Robotnik being okay with such an inheritor, okay with his legacy under the supervision of uncaring, uninspired worms. 

Stone reckons he's only a little better. The lesser of two evils. He tapes another box shut.

There was never a will. Like Robotnik expected everything to simply blip out of existence with his death- or maybe that never crossed his mind as much as it should've, the mortality.

Only the next afternoon does Stone realize the march of hours. He's still in his flightsuit. Still in the holster. He can't remember the last time he drank water.

It takes two days for management to even remember about Stone. They come to the lab and seem surprised that anyone's there at all.

He makes sure to look harrowed and frantic, dressed back in his suit. Begs them: please, please I want to resign. The lab went on lockdown two days ago and I've been stuck inside since. None of my SOS messages sent and it cut my phone off. Please.

They look scared of him, of his situation, like kids discovering a rabid animal in their basement.

It works.

He's awarded a bonus for emotional damages, decommissioned, and only ever invited for one round of questioning. They don't even shine a lamp in his face, don't hook him up to a single thing. It's just Stone, a table, and a bored profiler with a clipboard.

Describe what happened.

I was told to stay on my job post, but an hour before- um. Can I say his name?

Your boss.

Right, my boss. An hour before my boss was due to return, the entire lab went into lockdown- doors, consoles, all of his robots. My phone stopped working, and when I tried to access direct-connect codes through the database, all the files were gone. Two days later they sawed the door open.

What level of clearance did you have?

Card-wise, I could access the labs, his truck, and some of the storage units on-site. Information wise, even things he explained I'm sad to admit I never quite understood.

Mmhm. And 'sad' why?

(Ah, a slip-up, just a turn of phrase, and a lie at that. Stone sighs and folds his hands, wants to for a second answer: because don't you see he was brilliant? Don't you see the value of being entrusted with so much information? Don't you- can't you comprehend it even, the level of covalence, the level of give and take, the fact he'd even give at all.)

Just... I'm not one to speak ill of the... (Stone pauses, orchestrated, a test)

(The profiler glances at him dismissively, to him Stone already failed to be interesting or useful. What's left is just a checkmark by each question and a summary of: nothing important.)

Feel free to speak as much ill as you'd like, everyone seems to be anyway.

(Stone laughs and lies) Really? I haven't been part of the office gossip scene.

(The man shrugs, taps his pen) Why did you assume he was dead? (Ah, vetting if Stone might have exclusive information)

Well, his lab's been disassembled and he hasn't returned to work...

Maybe he's moved on? Deserted?

With none of his belongings and projects?

(A silence)

(So they don't have confirmation Robotnik's dead) (They don't have a body) (They even think he ran)

Has he ever talked to you about his future plans?

(5 years) (10) (Moving to Japan, disappearing off the map to work in sponsorship programs with private employers, relearning the electric guitar, showing Stone his favorite sushi place, getting into the deepfake scene, getting into bonsai cultivation, getting Stone a lab-farm so he can make him coffee from scratch. Taking a long trip to Iceland. Demolishing that orphanage and on its ground erecting something else, anything, a waterpark, a high-tech playground, a park, a pub street. Building an android, slapping out a hundred more patents, taking that two-week camping trip to look for the fountain of youth, but really just frying sausages over a fire and wrapping potatoes in foil to rest among the coals)

No.

They let Stone go with a formal apology for the 2-day lockdown in a hostile lab, a certificate of honor, and a hefty reimbursement.

Chapter Text

He moves to Geen Hills.

He's driving there, alone with the music, and it's only ten miles before the town unfolds across his windshield that Stone's face screws up and he has to pull over.

The pain hits him like a punch and its aftermath, breaking in pinpricks across his nose, into his eyes. He's always been a very quiet crier. Something else he thought he'd been too, was a rare one. It'd petered off a month into his first draft, and cryspells haven't hit him hard again until... Well.

The car clicks in emergency stop mode, counting off the beat to Stone's small, driver's-seat-contained breakdown.

He’ll do a lot of crying in the upcoming months. And it’s barely even summer. A cold year.

Stone’s job interview is all smiles and an assurance that of course he’s their best candidate. He doesn’t doubt that. The town’s small and Stone’s better than anyone else they could possibly find. Approachable, talkative man with good work experience and in-touch with his feelings, what with how he places his hand on his chest when he speaks, tilts his head, aw’s at compliments. Have I seen you before, he’s asked. He says he’d come here every summer to visit his aunt- who could’ve been a mother to him. Lovely old woman, shame she’s died, not longer before the… You Know.

The café owner – Karen, no joke – stares at him quizzically for a moment, as if checking that they’re both knowing the same know.

Stone vaguely tilts his head to the grand outside. Somewhere there is a street with skid marks. Her face clears, immediately taking him in as one of their own. After all, who else would know know.

He’s hired at a lovely café with lovely décor and lovely staff. It’s a quaint little place with a false sense of security, dusty, disgustingly cheap interior and cutlery, and people Stone resents now and will only hate more later. It's a hatred he'll run on, then, a sort of endless reserve to tap into. Pettiness, disdain. No secret where he'd picked that all up.

But right now, he's granted the spot at Karen's Coffee. He can’t stand his work and they can’t get enough of him. Somehow, a painfully ironic opposite to his last job.

Stone has a month before he tightens some coils and pulls some strings and seamlessly splits the stitches holding this place together. He will eventually be its sole proprietor and perhaps staff member. He already has plans for the backroom’s engineering. Already knows where to gut the walls and fit their gaping carcasses with wires, scanners, and processors. This mantra of eventual revenge fuels him to smile brighter and stand straighter and cry less in constant escape from the eyebags of a troubled man.

He cries at ‘home’. For now, this is a hostel, bed and breakfast. He’ll ruin its tacky homey atmosphere with his inkstain of a disposition for another week before moving again, into a more private yet probably equally upbeat house. The type that spells success and happiness with each splinter-trap fence post: white picket.

Stone sits on the floor of 'his' bedroom and itches to get inappropriately drunk. It probably wouldn’t take a lot, his tolerance is shit and the only alcohol Robotnik tended to keep was shamefully expensive and useless for anything other than ‘a pleasant buzz’.

He’d keep these bottles either alone or in pairs, two at the lab, two at his flat. Stone stumbled onto them numerous times – far more than regular cleaning and supply shuffling honestly warranted: all because Robotnik kept migrating them from one floor-height cabinet to another. Stone would duck down to open a drawer he knew had the backup toolkit and batteries, and he’d find huddled in the corner two specimens of money, time, and class.

Stone didn’t bother to explain Robotnik’s behavior or in any way rationalize it. He would’ve lost his own mind that way. The bottles and their inconsistent location could survive unexplained too.

Until one time Stone had to move them himself for lab safety reasons, and the next day Robotnik applauded that Stone finally ‘caught on’. Another game then. They started both moving the spirits then, a 750ml bottle of Mezcal and another of Bourbon. Elaborate hiding places, inconvenient storage shelves. Another behavior of Robotnik’s that Stone didn’t care to analyze. Just thought about it long enough, carrying the bourbon quietly to its new hiding spot, and came to enough conclusions: maybe he’s bored, maybe this is one of the only objects here that he won’t toss out for disuse but doesn’t care enough to keep constantly sorted and accounted for. Allows space for this sort of back and forth.

Stone lies down on the bedroom floor. Stares straight into the ceiling lamp, the back of his skull hurting from lying on hardwood, the back of his throat hurting from bottled pain.

He’d always aimed to understand but never to analyze and criticize. The Stone Homebrew Technique of Robotnik Survival.

Robotnik Survival. Look how far that got anyone.

Stone sobs and gets up.

There was an evening in some August when Robotnik caught Stone and told him to report a 100F fever. Whose? Stone had asked, staring at him bug-eyed, leaning away a little as Robotnik kept his elbow in a vice grip and only leaned in.

Mine, you dimwit. Dimwit by then had started to sound tame and even endearing. Beauty against the eardrum of the behearer or what has it. Stone almost did something indeed stupid like check Robotnik’s temperature, but the man was already dragging him down a marble hallway. They were in DC for several meetings and perhaps Robotnik wanted to cut them short.

Stone reported the doctor sick. Robotnik artfully appeared to cough in the vague direction of Walters, and soon they had a week off.

‘Week off’ meant nothing in Stone’s case: apparently, he were to pack for its duration and leave his mobile at home. Well. He remembers sighing over his suitcase and wrapping a mechanical coffee grinder’s handle in socks to prevent damages. Robotnik picked him up three hours later.

It was a funny looking car, like an ice cream truck had reason to turn sleek and evil. AI-driven, Robotnik wasn’t even in the front seat. Rather, he greeted Stone from the large sliding door, backlit by numerous screens and his usual blue LEDs. What are you waiting for, time is money and we’re on a weeklong weaning from Walters’ wallet. Ha! Didn’t even practice that one, how’d you like it?

Snappy, sir, you should explore a career in nursery rhyme writing. Stone stepped into the van and they were off.

There were three passengers in the back then: Robotnik, Stone, and an unmarked quarter of a satellite. Its brain. Motherboard, backup battery pack. Ingenious and compact and clearly awaiting its casing and its body. The final step of a process – one that the van’s fast, smooth progression down highway after highway promised to quicken.

Its hollow body awaited in yet another one of Robotnik’s safehouses. This one Stone was seeing for the first time, watching its lie of a shed with wonder as they approached. The rickety structure was outfitted with solar panels. And underneath it hid a two-floor basement. Hid the rest of the satellite’s pieces. Stone asked if it would have lasers and Robotnik smiled. Oh how casually it all fell together, this trip, the idea that Stone should come along and coexist with- oh god, this really was a secret.

Mobile at home, Walters misled as to the reason for a week off, and no other employees. Middle of nowhere too, and Stone’s sure that if either of them vanished out here, it’d take weeks to snag a single lead in the case.

He helped Robotnik finish soldering the pieces of it together, out on a tarp outside. All of it consumed three days, eating frozen dinner and catching hours in sleeping bags on the van’s floor. The space was unconducive for comfort, somehow more so than the lab. Stone brewed coffee over a portable heating pad. They had food at odd intervals. Sometimes it was late enough to see stars. Robotnik knew their names and Stone knows their mythology.

That’s the Phoenix, Stone said, pointing at Robotnik’s screen where it mapped constellations.

Ah, right, composed of the Ankaa – also known as the Alpha Phoenicis, of course… Then Beta, Gamma. Tell me your useless little fairy tale first before I hit you with the cold hard wake-up slap of truth.

Sir. It’s named after the Phoenix, a sacred bird the size of an eagle. Its feathers red, its lifespan vast, built of fire. It would build itself a nest and then combust it, down to ashes.

What a waste of time, all for dramatics.

It would-

I know what the Phoenix is, Stone (a roll of the eyes, it was dark out there, the doctor’s phone screen turned off, leaving their only illumination a faint red from the satellite’s body, on its final days of construction.) Rebirth, rise from the ashes, a way to cheat mortality, blah, blah.

Do you find any particular myths engaging?

Those with a lesson – especially one your colleagues are often adamant on letting in one ear and out the other (Robotnik snapped) How’s ‘respect the gods’ and ‘don’t challenge those with superior power’ sound? Hm? Already better, even if still trapped in such a useless format… Kid’s tales. Bedtime foolishness that wastes everyone’s time. Better read your snotty stupid spawn ‘baby’s first intro to the theory of relativity’, maybe then it’ll understand why time seems to freeze when there’s a slipper heading its way at the speed of light. (A breath. A sigh. Robotnik was prone to rants around Stone, especially off-work.) And what does the Phoenix myth achieve?

(Stone was about to answer: nothing, it’s just a mythical creature, when Robotnik continued)

That to live one must sacrifice themselves over and over? Psh. Silly and a bit too self-important. Living’s easy, Agent Stone.

How so?

(Robotnik turned to give him a sharp, mean grin then) Don’t die.

And then he went on to list the other stars in its cluster, went on about its meteor showers. About how there is not one but multiple binary star systems in it. Isn’t that peculiar Stone, stars gravitationally bound to each other, there is the brighter, there is the dimmer, A and B, the ‘primary’ and the ‘secondary’. But when they are of equal brightness, their names are left up to the discoverer. Left to take up space on paper, free of scientist convention.

Right now, he’s driving out to that same remote lab site. Every weekend for the next month he will have to set out like this, across half the country. He will have to visit half a dozen middles of half a dozen nowheres. And that’s already six weeks. He hopes the weekdays with their rotating blur of customers and the weekends with their fast whisper of lane dividers vanishing under his wheels will be enough to keep him occupied, keep him focused on things such as The Time and The Next Five Steps and Anything But Robotnik’s Ghost.

The last part might be most difficult. It follows him like the smell of smoke, tangy and persistent, the type of smell that paints itself against the back of your throat so there’s nothing left to do but swallow it and breathe with it and speak with it, every word. May I have your order? Will that be debit or credit? Solder smoke, the smoke of a broken machine, the faint smoke of a frying pan, breakfast.

Stone grips the steering wheel and takes the jeep offroad, exact coordinates, mobile left at home. He didn’t pack a coffee grinder this time, no point.

The shed still stands. The hidden access panel fails him twice and lets him in on the third. A joke that outlived its comedian.

Inside isn’t even dusty. The air filtration system may not be vast but it’s stubborn and powerful, chugging along. Some rooms stand empty, now void of the satellite’s limbs, yet feeling their absence in every meter of empty floorspace. The implied truth that something used to be and now it simply isn't.

They’d assembled the thing, fifth day into Robotnik’s sickweek. Set it up at night of the sixth. Careful of airplanes, weather, telescopes, radars… There was a rocket system ready. And then it was just Robotnik and Stone, huddled fifty yards away, lying flat on yet another tarp, remote balanced in Robotnik’s palm with a promise of something grand, something ready to take its first inhale.

Decolare (Robotnik says under his breath)

What’s that?

Romanian, you near-sighted inhabitant of a limited world. (A breath, the honey-like slow onset of a smile) It stands for takeoff.

(The button is pressed, and the satellite’s deeply modified rocket base ignites with something that’s not quite fire)

(There was never any discussion about its illegality, never any mention of how Stone better not do this, better not say that. Just the assumption that he wouldn’t. An easy assumption that he’s already taken Robotnik’s side)

(How lovely, that)

Stone now moves all the remaining projects into better storage, puts away loose screwdrivers, checks all the corners and pipes for weather damage, prepares the safehouse lab for dormancy. For a hibernation.

He likes to call it that. Because hibernations you wake up from.

(The satellite had eventually blinked into yet another pinprick among the stars. Robotnik exhaled, checked his monitors again, again, again. Turned to Stone with infectious glee) Let’s go celebrate.

They’d driven all the way back, putting the shed and its long, stretching fields into maze-like recesses of long-term memory storage. Stone didn’t ask where they were going. It ended up being Robotnik’s apartment.

Fetch the liquor (Robotnik had waved him off)

This proved to be a problem. The bottles, in Robotnik’s apartment too, had been hidden. By who, they couldn’t remember. Where, they couldn’t even begin guessing. An hour of searching later, they were drinking carbonated raspberry water out of champagne flutes, tired, disgruntled, and a tad dusty. On the screen, a proud new dot began its first lap around Earth.

Stone packs boxes from his car into storage now too. Projects unfinished, ones he’d managed to salvage. He replaces their ghosts in the trunk by other boxes. Finished things. Things he will eventually hide in a café’s hollowed shell.

Dinner is thawed in a microwave that locks its door against Stone’s insistent pull twice.

Chapter Text

He drives back to Green Hills, as fresh as a grieving person can be on a Monday morning. Gets dressed in the old, tacky apron, fixes his beard, and can’t do much about the state of his eyes. Old white women have always loved him for some reason, and Karen isn’t much different. Oh dear, is everything alright at home? She asks him while they’re opening up shop. Stone tells her it’s all fine, really, he just misses his aunt a little. She was, after all, much like a mother. Karen sighs and nods, tells Stone about her deceased first husband. Enigma of a man that never knew when to settle down and quit testing his luck. Worked in a factory outside of Green Hills in the early 90s. Disappeared without a trace in the woods come 2003.

Stone’s hands almost trip and let the cup fall, shatter. Management never liked him much: a passable undercover worker, yet afflicted with a devastating affinity for running straight off script. Either for snark or for messing with civilians. Or for moments like these. Accidental emotional investment. He asks her quietly, And how did you get through all that, if you don’t mind sharing?

Karen’s on the other side of the room, adjusting all the little tables and their little ugly chairs. You know, Abel, I don’t know how I did. (She stands and sighs for a moment, hands on her hips. There’s no melancholy there, she’s too old and busy for that) I cried my eyes out for weeks, and they never did find a body. I always thought oh good grief, maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to a funeral that fast- his poor mother wanted it though, I think she knew with her soul that poor Ethan was no longer with us. (Karen seems to remember where she is, and the memory of woodland disappearances slides off her easily. She resumes fixing up the café) But I was young and foolish, (She smiles to herself, righting a sugar shaker) thought my Ethan would come back for Christmas and ask me: oh Kary, did you really bury me that quickly? Why, I was just taking a stroll!

(She does a voice when she talks for him, the words of a dead man immortalized, a joking tone from beyond the grave)

(Stone’s been rendered immobile, watching her from behind the counter. A mug caught in limbo, loosely held in both hands and forgotten. White like marble statues. Hollow with its emptiness)

How long did you spend waiting (he asks her).

(She smiles) I’ve remarried now, but I’ll tell you a little secret, Abel (She calls him that because Stone picked his new name as Pazir Abel. P Abel. Pebble. A little inside joke, just for him and his reflection in the cup.) I still sometimes do. Especially on Christmas. Do you celebrate?

I used to.

What changed? (She looks up, forever well-meaning)

The person that I used to celebrate with is no longer around. (And it hasn’t even been a single winter without, yet)

I’m sorry, dear.

And I’m sorry about your husband.

(There is a moment of silent acknowledgment) (Stone mustn’t waste it. Really)

(Jokingly, he says) I imagine it'd be easy to go off-track in the woods here... Green Hills is an interesting place, I’ve strayed far enough from the forest as it is.

Ah, your aunt told you stories?

She very much did. Few times about the Blue Devil, but I think even that was a bit much for her. I wonder what she would’ve thought, had she made it to… Whatever happened that night.

Were you there to see it?

I was, (Stone goes back to polishing and putting away the cups) But I still can’t quite make sense of it. So much… (He fumbles, waiting for her to fill in)

Chaos, utter chaos, that night! First the street’s all torn up by that- what is it… (Karen pauses and snaps her fingers twice) Sonic. He appeared out of thin air! And after him that airplane. I always knew the government had some crazy things in those military bases of theirs… even X-Files said so in 93. (You don’t even know, Stone thinks) Oh dear, I’m glad the entire town saw it so we can all agree it actually happened.

Did your current husband see it too?

No, Nate was out of town… I haven’t talked to him about it much, but I think his friends at the game have. How do you even begin describing it? (She circles back behind the counter and starts up the coffee machine drip).

(Stone laughs in good humor, drying his hands) Well, it’d be fun to give it a try. Go on, pretend I wasn’t there. Pretend I don’t know.

(She smiles at him with that old-lady mirth) Oh where do I even start… Those two lunatics paused in the middle of the road, right by the Canyon diner- where the grocery is.

Mmhm

And the airplane opened up, and it was this man inside it, and he just wouldn’t stop talking. That little creature was on the ground- that's when I got there, when Wachowski was on the- (She makes a gesture with her hands, something hovering) the aircraft. He punched that guy, and that's when the entire town knew whose side we were on.

Right.

(She giggles) Really landed a solid on him, and we were all already running- I saw Wade pulling his gun out, you really had to be there. The guy talked some more, you couldn’t hear it very well- or understand… Hm, I think Wachowski ended up on the ground- ah, it’s hard to get it all in order.

Details really blur, now that it’s been… Oh, geez-

Almost two months. How time flies.

Please do continue.

And she tells him about lightning, about a ball of electric energy bouncing off every wall, leaving small divots in the brickwork, bulleting into the ‘airplane’ over and over, weaving a net of light in aftertrails. She says ‘countless times’ but Stone can guess it was 48. And 49 sent the thing shattering-

Gone into- sorry? Stone has to hide his frown in the process of wiping the counter shiny. A golden ring floating in the air. In one side and not out the other. Gone. Leaving overturned burning cars and crumbling walls. And five kilograms of shrapnel.

They get their first customer of the day.

Next weekend finds him collecting the badniks from a remote, reinforced storage site. Collecting their charging ports and their maintenance kits. He leaves them in his living room Sunday night, and Monday morning Karen tells him how she’s happy now, because things move on and get better, and Ethan’s ghost is a welcome one, not a dreadful haunting.

Like an old friend coming to say hi (she says) in memories and album photos.

Even if it makes you cry? (he asks)

Crying’s good (Karen sighs) it beats being stone-cold, then you’re as good as dead.

So Stone sits on his new living room floor and boots the badniks up. He’ll be fine. And yet at the first one’s inquisitive beep, his face screws up and he has to sag against a wall, fighting to keep his hands steady. Carefully unlatching the badnik from its spot on the charger, giving its lens a final wipe.

It takes a moment to think, to rise itself up, level with Stone’s collarbones, and just hover there. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Recalibrating the time spent in slumber, its coordinates, the local wifi networks, Stone’s vitals, the lack of its master.

Hey there, Stone hiccups at it. Lets get your siblings up and running too.

There’s only three as of now, more he'll pick up later. They circle his room low to the floor and slow, acclimating, like drowsy fish in a strange new tank.

He talks to them. Eventually they rise, pick up speed, blink and hum at him, and he dares give one a light pat. It doesn’t shoot his hand off, just lifts the panels hiding its arsenal for a moment in playful warning.

He puts them in free-roam mode under a stealth protocol. They can boot up when they please – as strange as that is to say about a robot – but can’t be seen by strangers. Sometimes they hide from Stone too. Sometimes they knock into full cups of coffee at home, spill them over his counter. He wonders what if-then’s Robotnik coded into them. If Stone is alone with a cup of coffee, then knock it over. If Stone is alone…

Then take orders directly from him.

Then prioritize his survival.

Then play him an arrangement of ringtones, tunes.

Then tail him from room to room.

Then

Then

Then

He wonders if they have diverse programming, if they've been gifted personalities. He'd grabbed every badnik he could, but for now his house is populated by the main few, including two older models, gen1. The ones Robotnik would occasionally let loose for fun. Stone realizes with a startle that he tells them apart. The set of their cases, the seams of their parts... They recognize him too. Loyal and written to be forever vigilant, forever on their way back from missions. Like automation could ever write human flakiness out of Robotnik's life. Perils of an orphan, Stone sighs- or maybe just someone with a terrible complex of control. Not everything needs pathologizing. 

It'd sent him all kinds of lengths, in his code and in his strict possessiveness of project blueprints, of the way none of his tech is easily replicated or modified unless you are intimately familiar with it, beyond first names. He'd worked on that tracking system to forever scan and pinpoint his badniks, his truck, his various other buggers that G.U.N. had set an eye on. Never finished it, waving it off as unnecessary, assuring Stone his stuff would shut down in the wrong hands.

Does that make Stone's hands right? Merely acceptable? Perhaps this is Robotnik's will, never penned legally, but written into every line of code. He shouldn't disappoint then. The badniks might tattle. 

Agent Stone cyberstalks Karen’s current husband: Nate. Pazir Abel helps Karen out at the café. Finds out where she’d always wanted to go. Green Hills is home, but it’d been one tinged with a stain ever since Ethan- thought that was nearly twenty years ago. She wants warmer, she wants new. Nate wants to stay. She wants the East Coast. Nate wants to stay. 

He toys with his army of alts, making them all march across Nate’s screen with friendly messages, a few fake emails, a call from an ‘old coworker’… Until the man pitches the planted idea himself.

The next day, Karen has gossip: Nate’s finally agreed to discuss moving, nothing’s settled down yet, but he’s really gotten around to the idea- oh but the café…

(Stone smiles) We’ll see how it goes, I’d always happily take it off your hands- with a fitting reimbursement of course. Make that the least of your worries.

He superglues a cup to the kitchen counter in some violent impulse of destructive, unshapely behavior. All three badniks fall for it, knocking the cup’s side and failing to send the thing toppling. They gather in a tight circle with the offensive beverage at their pulpit, running scans and whining. Stone sips from his other mug, watching them puzzle with a quiet smile.  Just for him and his reflection.

Anther weekend, another trip. Another storage house, two more rescued badniks, a stack of screens, the parts needed to make a hologram. The rest he can replicate, reproduce, rebuild. A Frankenstein project of abandoned blueprints and scavenged parts.

Things pick up pace. He’s handed more and more responsibility around the café. His earlier estimate of a month’s work putting him in charge was a stab in the dark. Now, nearing four months later, it is a reality. Karen's moving away in three weeks, but she’s handing the business off sooner: keys dropped into Abel’s palm and a firm pat on the shoulder-

I trust you, (she smiles and gives him a conspiratorial wink. He knows this isn’t because she suspects him or because something has given away the presence of a deep-running insincerity. This is just her way of doing things, like they’re a little secret to be shared. Stone winks back)

Have fun there. Send me a postcard.

Oh, you haven’t gotten rid of me yet. Take care of the place. It’ll take care of you too, it likes you.

Thanks. Really.

And maybe come see us for Christmas, if you’d like.

I’ll consider it.

Stoen sees her around town a few more times. He doesn’t touch the café yet. Not while she might glimpse the powertools he's dragging in. He can wait. Biding his time is all he has, preparing for Something. Because if he’s not doing that, if he’s not simply waiting, he’ll have to face a crippling fact:

He doesn’t know where to even begin with bringing Robotnik back-

Stone sits up rod-straight. He’d been resting his back on the couch, TV murmuring world news in a steady stream of preventable disasters-

Wachowski’s never seen him. Sonic’s never seen him either. Stone is in no way tie-able to Robotnik.

The badniks notice his alertness, immediately lift off from their resting perches and begin a security sweep of the room. He hushes them, calms them down like roused kids from a nightmare.

There’s problems with this plan, but the problems with the plan before this were far more substantial: it simply didn’t exist.

The entire police department has seen him, especially Wade. But Wade’s… Well, Stone could probably shave and dress in a t-shirt and jeans and speak with a lilt of a different accent and Wade wouldn’t place him at all. Maybe he wouldn’t recognize Stone even without those precautions. But it’s best to stray on the safer side. He needs Tom Wachowski somewhere removed from the police force and he needs to avoid appearing in the same pictures as him.

Stone calls up the local mechanic’s and asks if they have a part-time vacancy. Small towns and all. He’ll take a pitiful wage, he’s over-qualified, he’s polite and upbeat and loveable. He hires some disposable staff for the café.

By the time Karen and Nate let up Green Hills in their turquoise chubby little car, Stone’s due to start helping out at the car repair shop.

Two weeks later, Tom Wachowski’s car mysteriously refuses to start in such a creative way it leaves even him sighing about it and calling up a tow truck.

The repair shop greets him with a new employee. Just the type of person Tom seems to enjoy chatting to.

On Friday, Stone and him are already due to go for beers.

Chapter Text

He runs the café, takes his weekends on the road, slowly carting whatever he’ll need from safehouse after safehouse, he shows up to the mechanic’s and wrestles bulky, ugly, unrefined tech. He goes home and has to apply the first round of maintenance to the growing population of domestic badniks. He gets a postcard in the mail.

Every safehouse breathes with the smoke trail of a ghost. It’s the two failed attempts at every door, it’s the meticulously labeled containers, it’s the frozen dinners. Most meals old, and some new. The new ones are those Stone ‘likes’ because Robotnik would always drag it out of him. Snag onto something Stone expressed even minute favor towards and pull: do you like this? Do you? What do you like- you’re so dreadfully boring when you get like this. Not like you’re otherwise ever interesting either.

Mostly, he wanted to know so he could insult Stone’s opinions and interests.

He forgoes the meals clearly bought with his tastes in mind, and thaws the older packets, the ones Robotnik long ago bought for himself. A good sort of ghost was it? A welcome visit? Stone sits in silent underground labs in the middles of numerous nowheres and eats microwave meals from 2005. It’s always very quiet. Very empty. He blends into it well.

He plays pool with Wachowski. Come October, he meets Maggie. They hit it off over a game of poker that Tom abandons for his own wellbeing. He gets a good draw, but Maggie’s a wildcard. She keeps casting Stone looks. Assessing. Either a good people reader, or immune to this specific façade. Stone stays calm, and hopes she won’t go consulting Tom about it. Tries to charm her and quickly switches tactics instead to allowing an undertone of sadness to creep through the cracks. (Yes, my upbeat nature is a façade, it seems to say, yes you’ve caught me) (but it’s hiding only grief, the type you don’t ask a new friend about) (but only grief) (nothing more).

He compiles files on both of them. From bloodtype to first grade teacher’s notes. He cacthes a glimpse of something blue in the backseat of their car. Gone from one second to the next.

Late October, he’s almost done with every safehouse on the list. Halloween scoops big revenue for the café with its themed drinks, and then he closes it for ‘repairs’. Pipes in the kitchen had tragically started leaking and ruined the whole wall. No one saw it coming.

No one questions the powertools, the sound of drilling, of saws. Stone guts the place, calls in sick for his other job, 100F, and smuggles the badniks into his draped-up workspace for company. It’s dark inside, the overheads off and the windows drawn. The only light comes of white placeholder LED strips that run along the counters, the walls. Stone curls over the main counter and integrates the power cables and battery regulators and mounts for a holoscreen.

The badniks circle.

They’ve got nothing to knock over. When he sits up to a creak of his joints, he realizes he hasn’t eaten or drank in- oh god, nearing six hours. Lost to the hypnotizing process of creating.

The snack break makes him realize just how quiet this place is. Taking a pause to eat begins to feel wrong, in that sterile silence.

He puts on music.

Gets back to work.

November fourteenth, the place reopens, sleek new and shiny. He doesn’t care if people like it or not, he doesn’t need revenue to keep the business afloat. Stone stands proudly behind the counter, white button-up, new apron that’d just come in from an old tailor of Robotnik’s. The wall behind him is well-decorated, but it’s the knowledge of what it hides that powers and rejuvenates Stone’s breath.

Standing there, and knowing of the sheer destructive power just a few feet away… Flanking you, silent yet ready to do your bidding, it’s more addictive than caffeine.

He’ll tinker with it more, on weekend nights. Sync it up to his equivalent of the gloves: a touchscreen watch. Add his own shortcuts to the programming. It’s beautiful tech. Truly. Not a ghost, but a beast that’s willing to heed for another master- a temporary one, in any case.

Ethan’s mother might’ve felt when her son died, and Stone can’t identify any such thing.

It simply makes sense for Robotnik to be alive. Otherwise, surely, Stone would know. The world, too, would know. Would fall apart maybe. So if things are still going- and going so well, then Robotnik is still alive. Recoverable.

Stone plays pingpong with Tom and hams away at the barbeque with Maggie. Drops a haphazard comment about That Night and how he’s glad they’re okay. Shows his allegiance. Doesn’t mention his fake dead aunt. These two feel like the type to go digging. Instead mentions having had an ex from here whose name he won’t bring up because the breakup was that bad.

Their house has an attic window that’s sometimes open, sometimes closed. Stone takes one lovely November night to camp in the woods and watch.

One badnik with him. Quiet and dim. The snow under where it hovers slowly melts into an oval dip. It transmits readings onto his watch. Four lifeforms.

Stone sighs and whispers to it, if the doctor was here, he would’ve been updating you all this time. Then you could tell me from this distance exactly what they were. Shame you’re getting old.

It beeps at him quietly. Confirmation or offense or nothing at all.

Blue.

He sees it. It lives upstairs. He sees the way it moves.

Tom’s car breaks again. At the mechanic’s, he requests for Stone. Of course. Of course Stone knows why his car’s broken and can take a bit longer to ‘find’ and ‘fix’ the issue. Says it’s the cold. Says Tom and Maggie could do with a vacation of some sorts, god knows Stone’s been thinking of hitting up the southern hemisphere- or even the equator. Anywhere warm.

Then, at home, he slips Tom a travel brochure in the form of spam mail from a fake account. A gentle reminder. A remote spot marketed for ‘families’.

Over beer later, Stone tells him, if you and Maggie had a kid, that’d be the perfect place to spend a good week. Trips like that with my parents left me some of the best memories I have. I don’t know where I’d be now without them.

They take Sonic.

The problem here is, you can never truly remove Sonic from a single location, Stone realizes. If it? He? thinks they forgot something at home, he can just decide to ‘dip over’ and catch Stone rifling through the cupboards.

Stone lies there and watches the house, watches the badnik watch the house… Runs through his original plan, his backup plans… Send just the badnik in, get inside in a worker’s uniform, maybe the power company, have cameras on the Wachowski family to track Sonic-

He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for. There was a bag, there was something Tom threw. That much Stone’s gathered. But it’s that much. Nothing more. ‘Something’ and ‘something’ and no absolutes. He lies there and lies and lies and his jaw hurts the longer he clenches it. The house looms still and unmoving, mocking him with all the time he's wasted staring at it and not doing anything. Sonic hasn't come back, Stone could've had time, time, time to go looking- and now you've wasted that, and Sonic could appear any moment.

Stone’s never been a project leader or a squadron head. He makes good soldiers and outstanding assistants and that’s where comfort lies and his nerve ends.

He punches a tree and goes home. The badniks, thankfully, are not programmed to recognize such nuanced failure.

Everything sort of stalls, sort of falls apart in that momentary hiccup. What’s the point of innovating and building upon Robotnik’s creations if Stone can’t quite use them? Can’t quite find the assertiveness to deploy them unto the unsuspecting world. ‘Get Robotnik Back’ is too vague a plan, and ‘Wait For Robotnik to Come Back’ reminds him a tad too much of Karen and her long dead Ethan. The woods eat up people mercilessly and often whole: remains scattered by animals and weather so thoroughly that the death may never be confirmed.

Stone sighs and melts into the back of his chair, hoping it can consume him whole and too, leave not a trace.

The badniks need charging, the coffee-shop needs maintaining. He orders creamer for it, orders stock, and finds comfort in the easy routine of it all. Cranks the janky engine of a car, fixes a windshield.

The Wachowskis come back from their trip and cap that window of opportunity. Easy and swift. Tom’s smile is radiant, met with an ‘I’m happy the vacation went well, you deserved it with everything you do for Green Hills’ from Stone. Tom claps him on the shoulder with a warm, well-meaning palm and tells Stone the same. How it’s impressive he runs two jobs, how it’s a shame he’s still single, oh by the way-

Stone fails to talk his way out of the blind date.

Winter tightens its hold with an icy cross stitch of wind and drizzle. She’s pretty in a way no magazine cover would host: very human. Tom’s old college friend from the next town over, Maira is a reporter with her side hobby of extravagant floral arrangements. The former fact is apparent in her speech: even if quiet, she hits her consonants like nails into Stone’s socially stunted coffin. Good day. I like your dress shirt, designer? True, cold weeks get crazy out here. Coffee?

They get coffee. He catches himself mumbling back at her a few times, too soft-spoken for his own good whenever someone new’s thrown into the equation. They used to think Robotnik came with a mutated set of social skills, but Stone's arsenal had never been impressive. Karen's coworker Abel is an easy role. Tom's mechanic friend is an easy one too. And it's been since freshman college that Stone's been on a date. An experience wholely unreliable because back then he wasn't the same Stone: wearing his last growth spurt badly, salvation army sweaters under leather jackets, grey jeans, highlighter-yellow shoes.

He sits there with his ankles crossed to prevent the treacherous bounce of an impatient leg and feels like he’s wasting time he doesn’t have. The saner part of his brain, the one that sounds like Stone’s first engineering and workplace safety 101 professor, wages an opposition: you do in fact have time. Oodles of it. You’re free from government duties and technically banned from them. You have no clear orders to do anything right now other than… Well, live. And that’s not even an order. You’re free. This isn’t a waste of time because you simply have no orders to waste time not doing.

Also when you think that way, you sound like him.

Always about the time wasted, always about trying to gamify or somehow benefit from otherwise friendly interactions.

Just enjoy your evening.

Stone does not even try to. There’s a moment where he considers pointedly enjoying the night out, but the prospect of it quickly loses all appeal when they start talking about hobbies and favorite pets and other benign things like movies. He’s almost tempted to veer the discussion into something like economics and the stock market. That, at least, cuts any form of personal sharing clean off.

When she asks him about his favorite band, he for some reason lies and says the Beatles. It’s not even a necessary cover-up. Just a pointless, kneejerk lack of truth.

When she asks his favorite color, Stone lies: orange. Hobby? Magazine collages. Ideal car? Toyota Camry. Favorite food? Carbonara.

Over the course of the evening, it snowballs. When they say their goodbyes, Maira is saying goodbye to a man she might as well not know. Stone smiles and waves and that engineering prof in his brain is shaking her head.

What does he even have to hide? The lack of a personality? That's not true. Stone doesn't have a favorite band, he likes 'Robotniks music' whatever it is. His favorite color is black and purple and blue but only together, he lines the lab with them. His hobbies are accounting math and engineering something coherent from the scraps left behind in place of a will. Is driving for five hours to a safehouse considered a hobby? How about lugging kilograms of fragile illegal tech across state borders?

Ideal car? He wonders where that truck is now. Wonders where they'd parked it, what graveyard.

He goes home and polishes the badniks. His reflection stares back from their refrigerator-white surfaces. Favorite food? Anything that isn't eaten alone. Even 2005 frozen mashed potatoes are good in the right company.

The memory of that first dinner together (if you could call a midnight meal 'dinner') seeps into Stone's mind with the smugness of an unbidden, cocky scientist: Poor old Agent Stone, how long will you fail to purge me for? I would've already moved on, you know this. Found a new assistant or simply forgotten you ever existed- ha, I wouldn't even need a replacement for you, your work is 'invaluable', as in it carries no value. Where-ever I am right now (I'm not dead) I've done a little bit of self reflection. I'll skip the first five pages, after all it's just about how perfect and efficient I am, which we can come back to later... But oh, what's that at the bottom here? On the very last page? I don't need Stone at all.

This feels like going in pointless circles.

That first dinner was someone else's tupperware spaghetti, shared because Robotnik refused to eat foreign food without having Stone run a taste test. A year and a half into working for him, a late night in his old lab. He'd spent most of the day finishing a new radio receiver for submarine communication, and then chipping away at a pet project while the contract of completion pended in his inbox. By then he'd already begun to let Stone hover over his shoulder and watch the work. It'd been that system of greedy tracking. Already, back then, in development. Later they watched a live stream from China, its launch of a brand new space probe, minutes past midnight.

Curious, Robotnik had pointed his fork at the screen, How much do you bet we'll hear about their next space project from Walters before even the news gets a whiff?

From spies? Stone had ventured.

Yep, who else... They'll ask us to outdo whatever China has planned next while NASA's floundering about with morals and ethics and whatever else goody two-shoe nonsense that boils down to 'we're not putting guns in space'.

Stone had snorted lightly. Back then it was still novel for him to laugh at Robotnik's commentary. Still but a sapling: occasional wheezes and snorts and startled smiles. Eventually, Robotnik would have to ask him to cap it while in public, lest he undermined Robotnik's 'menacing aura'. He never objected much to Stone finding him funny in the right contexts, as long as there wasn't anyone else present.

Would you put guns in space? He'd asked Robotnik.

Did they drop you on your head in the maternity ward? G.U.N. pity-hired you, I can just tell.. Tsk, and saddled me with their charity case employee- no I'm not putting guns in space. Newton's Third Law, Agent Stone, one bullet and you're already propelling the satellite with its armory backward at... Hm. (Under his breath Robotnik muttered math, on the go estimating a result based on numbers he'd plucked from hell knows where) at a speed of an inch and a half a second. Three point eighty one centimeters. And that's just one bullet... They'd want rounds, and it'd only escalate exponentially until you're fighting Earth's gravity and propelling the satellite into deepspace. (A breath) And the time to recalibrate? The air traffic up there? (He'd eaten another mouthful, eyes still on the live stream). Maybe I'll look into lasers. 

The rush of breathtaking innovation at light’s speed is gone now. Ripped clean off, leaving behind an ugly, fresh wound of mundanity he can find solace in but can’t enjoy. He feels whittled, hallowed empty by claustrophobic circumstance that leaves him pacing the living room and then pacing the backyard. Maira texts him about the good evening and how she wouldn’t mind catching a film with him eventually, since they both enjoy cinema so much.

Stone does not in fact like movies. Stone, in fact, actively dislikes them, and somehow the idea of soon being forced to watch one makes him only hate it more.

A week later it's somehow mid-December  and they’ve sat down for 2013’s Her – a sci-fi romantic… commentary? On the state of technology? Stone watches it through grit teeth, biding time he isn’t wasting, biding time he has, and hating every moment of it. A man falls in love with the siri-esque AI of his phone. Something that is rivetingly human and yet robotic, efficient beyond belief and with just the perfect sense of humor…

It- she? She leaves him, later, out of good intentions… Go on, live your life. Stone focuses not to bounce his leg and wonders if a pity breakup is better than being ripped apart by cruel accident. Then wonders what the hell he’s thinking things like that for.

The credits dig their white on black nails into his eyes with the lead’s name, Joaquin Phoenix. Robotnik’s gloved hand tracing a constellation. Robotnik’s gloved hand pointing out satellites.

They have dinner. Robotnik’s weird food pickiness on days he hasn’t gotten the chance to ruin someone’s ego. Robotnik’s readiness to eat right about anything the second he tips into weekday exhaustion.

They talk about the movie. About floral work, about collages. Stone lies that he makes collages because he likes creating a bigger picture out of elements not native to its meaning. Likes the patchworking of something new out of unlikely, discarded shards. Likes hunting down just the right scraps in a mess of-

(Maira looks at him with her very assessing, very personal eyes) Are you okay?

(Stone realizes he’d gone silent)

Just remembered a call I didn’t make (he tells her, unable to force his features away from their startled, blank quality) (oh god) (oh god).

Do you need to go now?

(He nods absently.) Probably- yes. Thank you for the dinner.

Hope it goes well.

So do I.

Chapter Text

He walks home- jogs- and by the time he’s skidding onto Longpine Ave, Stone’s taking it at full-sprint in his dress shoes and flapping cashmere coat. December burns its way down his windpipe, licks at his wide-open eyes, clouds the air with his frantic breaths- he slams into the yard’s fence, fumbles the mechanical lock twice and crashes onto his front lawn on the third try- trips over naked frozen grass and finally clambers up his front porch steps-

The badniks are awake- out of their charging ports and nowhere to be seen-

It’s me, Stone tells the quiet house, it’s me, it’s me-

They drift out of corners, fold their turrets, watch him make a jagged route downstairs with their red cyclopic eyes, he's treading mud. Stone gets into his basement, unearths his triple-hidden box of storage drives, shoves it into a backpack and shoots back upstairs, realizing he hasn’t hit the lights anywhere since he entered, path illuminated by a speeding badnik’s flashlight.

Thank you, Stone pants, hanging off the railing to make a sharp turn to his back door, One of you follow, stealth, lights off.

He takes the forest as a shortcut, sprinting over logs in the December moonlight, backpack held desperately to his chest, his single hovering companion bulleting along with him, lights and red cam off. In the distance, streetlights begin to blink through the trees and Stone almost trips on a branch- it snaps, whips the back of his calf, echoes through the woods with its bone-like splinter- he skids out of the forest, badnik already dodging down, hip-height- Stone pulls out the magnetic handle he fashioned from an unfinished badnik carcass- it clips onto the top of its round chassis and creates the illusion he’s carrying it. Perhaps a fancy cooler, a projector, a dozen excuses: anything to hide the fact it hovers.

It’s a fast sprint across the street into his café. The only place with tech capable of displaying the insanely customized filetypes Robotnik kept his unfinished blueprint projects under.

He gets in, heart in his throat with the recklessness of running across town (even if at night) with the badnik out and visible- he locks himself in, blinds down-

Latte with steamed Austrian goat milk- he barely gets the words out, breathless, and the lab shifts, comes alive and unfolds like strange winter flowers in bloom. Pinks and blues and the flicker of holograms. He’s already connecting the hard drive.

It’s not the first, not the second.

For a moment he’s sure this is still somehow Robotnik’s old joke- third time’s the charm, but in reality Stone never sorted these well, having shoved decades of Robotnik’s work onto wherever it’d fit in those 42 hours of lab lockdown. He flicks through list after list, realizes he has no idea what it’s saved under: a comprehensive name or a series of numbers.

It’s the fifth hard drive: older projects, projects that were never meant for G.U.N. He swallows against a dry throat, fingers shaking from the cold- there it is. R-GDAR 7/20/2012: Robotnik’s Gamma detection and ranging- Stone didn’t know it’d been in development since 2012.

He pulls up the .ir – a bastardized type of file that he can only compare to powerpoints if they managed to break into a fourth dimension. The coffeeshop counter sparks alight with a series of slowly rotating models and a few panels of text, code, data- hand written notes? Stone’s breath is only now winding down, staring at what Robotnik must’ve scribbled on a napkin and then scanned into the file… It’s like stepping into a home you thought burned down.

Stone takes a moment, just one moment to bask in it, in the glow of neat hologram lines and in the slow idle motion of their spinning models. Like sitting at the bottom of a pool. A stolen second of peace.

The badnik hums a quiet arrangement of notes. Perhaps elation, perhaps simply a way to break the settled winter silence. Stone moves. Steps towards counter, running a hand down his face to brace for the next five steps. Once more he’s teetering on the edge of a new never-before-done trapeze set. Hands dusted and heart in his throat. If he lands them – the five steps – he reckons that’ll be one of his most impressive feats as of yet.

R-Gamma DAR is Robotnik’s multi-abandoned tracking system of anything he’s ever worked on. In theory, and if actually complete, it could scan – as Robotnik put it – even places the sun didn't know about. Could pinpoint with damning accuracy where each of Robotnik’s projects sat. From what Stone remembers, it was supposed to rely on a specific alloy, one present in every of the doctor’s creations. He’d use it to inscribe his initials on the insides of metal cases and the backs of complex motherboards. Vain and territorial and oh so incredibly convinced that his creations should never be separated from their creator.

So if Robotnik built it, this system can find it.

Somewhere, there is a shattered hovercraft-

Stone’s telephone rings.

He fumbles for it terribly, fingers cranky with cold and adrenaline- letting it slip and plummet to the floor with its shrill cry and bright screen. His wallpaper is of an old Greek fresco, cracked much like his screen could’ve ended up were it not for the sudden movement of his sole badnik companion-

It’d shot out a turret panel, caught the thing a foot off the floor.

Thank you, Stone manages past the spike in heartrate, the horrible rush of things happening- he grabs it off the badnik, slides the green pick-up icon across the name Tom W.

Pazir?

Yes? Stone answers, trying to sound normal, whatever that may be- like he isn’t still breathless with the run, with the realization, with the way his life’s opening its hangar ceiling with opportunity: you can find him- Tom? Everything alright?

That’s actually what I’m calling you about, Tom chuckles. Wade called me.

Stone’s stomach plummets, suddenly feeling the cold more than ever, shuffling his coat shut. About what, Tom?

There’s a silence, oh god there’s a silence- only a few beats, only a few, and it doesn’t have to mean anything. Stone already regrets only bringing the badnik- he didn’t have to, didn’t have to trip and become fallible to sentiment like this. It’s not a pet, not a kid, it’s not snentient. He should’ve left it at home, because if they’re outside right now, Wade and Tom and the entire police department that saw him working with Robotnik, that by some stroke of a miracle hasn’t recognized him yet…

If they’re outside, if they barge in with their guns drawn, Stone can explain the lab, badly but he can. But the badnik? A machine that Tom is uncomfortably familiar with and would recognize in the millisecond it’d take for the turrets to deploy… It’d be over. He’s sailing across the 50 foot drop, hands outstretched for the next trapeze bar. If he latches onto it or not depends on what Tom has to say next.

Some of your neighbors saw a figure getting into your house without turning the lights on. I know you were on a date with Maira- sorry if I’m interrupting… anything, actually- Tom sounds like he’s realizing a lot of different things and also regretting making the call-

But no. Wade hadn’t suddenly recognized Stone. Lovely, lovely Wade. Stone hopes he never gets prescription glasses. Hopes his own forgettable face and forgettable presence and forgettable shadow to Robotnik’s larger than life authority will carry him a little longer. While Tom’s realizing why Stone might’ve sounded a bit out of breath, Stone has a chance to shove all the earlier panic down, far away, and smile into the receiver.

Oh, scared me for a second there, that was me. I realized I was getting a landline call from our mother when my sister texted me about it. Had to run home and pick up. Thanks for the concern though.

There’s more silence, Tom’s listening, listening, listening in the way friends don’t. Listening in the way police officers do. When he finally answers, it’s unintentionally slower than normal: I see. Didn’t know you had a sister.

We don’t talk, Stone answers at what has to be a normal response speed. Normally, I mean. Outside of family emergencies.

Oh… Well, I hope your mother’s alright.

Thank you, she is now.

There is silence again, this time uncomfortable, this time heavy. Stone’s grabbed on this time, survived this jump, but he can tell the upcoming swing is now weighed by the suspicion of Tom Wachowski.

I’ll leave you to it then, Tom finally says.

Good night, Stone replies and hangs up.

For once, the sense that time is, in fact, wasteable because it is running out seems apt.

Stone pockets his phone, jaw set. Things are about to begin falling apart. He hopes that’s just anxiety speaking. The voice of a fellow cadet on their first conscription, one who’d sat against Stone in the ditch and whispered We’re all gonna die we’re all gonna die.

He’d told the guy to shut his trap back then, also freaked out of his mind, clutching an M4A1. Now Stone plunges his fingers into the blueprint’s display to rotate the model, dig through pages upon pages of information, his new lifeline. And by any means, maybe Robotnik’s too.

Before he had grasped at the beginnings of a solution, Stone never let himself consider that, somehow, Robotnik might need…

Well, help.

He puts on the music and opens a brand new .ir file, ready to untangle and straighten out the convoluted notes of a project vitally needed.

Chapter Text

Sunrise greets him through the slivers of tight blinds. Bitter and crisp, the light of it is white and oddly lively for only 6am. Stone detaches himself from the counter, where his fingertips have worn themselves sore against the screen’s display. He understands the point of gloves now, he really does- there’s a spare in one of the storage boxes, and he stands up only to fetch them.

On the way, he dares tilt the blinds open for a second, crinkling one down.

It’s snowed overnight. First of the year.

Stone blinks the night’s tendrils out of his swimming vision and lets go of the view. Maybe they’ll have a white Christmas. It’s the 15^th. Maira’s texted him to check everything’s alright. He texts her the same thing he told Tom, landline, mother, sister. Good thing he hasn’t lied about being an orphan or really divulged too much about his family. Something in her response gives him a suspicion Tom’s already talked to her. Maybe asked something too. Cross-referencing Stone’s confession.

He drinks yesterday’s coffee and returns to the counter. Robotnik’s left enough musings on how to best build the system but no concrete instructions – otherwise, Stone’s sure it would already be done. There’s an arsenal of possible versions, backed up by blueprint after blueprint, notes and calculations of power intake, range, output, how to fine-tune the dialing process.

Stone’s built enough scrap radios and radars during active service. And luckily his work ethic's been spared Robotnik’s debilitatingly high standards.

It doesn’t have to be pretty. Doesn’t have to look like an Apple byproduct. Stone can bear some exposed wires and mismatched paneling as long as it works, as long as it finds the hovercraft.

The badnik sends data on Stone’s wellbeing to his watch. Numbers that scream: you need to sleep.

It’s a herculean effort to make the café fold itself back together, stuff the exposed, genuine innards of its nature back into the cutesy clean interior of a plain establishment. But he calls up the day staff and locks himself in the no-access backroom they don’t know about. The badnik’s dragging itself on a mere 13%, and when Stone lies down on the twin bed there for instances just like this, it drops itself at his feet, heavy to the point of permanent mattress damage.

How it is the 18^st already, Stone doesn’t know. He’s ‘wasted’ months before, sitting on his ass in Montana tightening the screws on his café’s interior design and having beers with the man that punched Robotnik and sent him somewhere that better exist once Stone finishes… This. And now things are moving faster than the calendar digits can keep pace with.

It rests on the floor now, a sleeping beast with half its organs yet missing. Not enough to breathe its first power current and light up in hodgepodge LEDs he’s compiled from abandoned projects, the mechanic’s modest junkyard, and department store components. Not yet. Soon. He rubs his eyes, smells the machine grease on his fingers, tastes old coffee and too many missed nights of toothpaste on his breath.

He’s ‘wasted’ months and all of it’s caught up in- god, only three days? The gamma radar is just as old, the first invention of Robotnik’s to Become since the man disappeared. But it’s not done yet. Stone pulls himself up from the floor. He’s exhausted what Green Hills has to offer, a mellowly floating blueprint demands components he can’t quite manifest out here. Not without the budget of G.U.N., not without the complex fabricator machines that Robotnik used to run dry, feeding his endless ambition.

But he can still salvage. He will have to drive to a safehouse and pick up leftover scrap from its storage. Tom’s called in with a totally innocuous weather-talk topic. As if there aren’t ulterior motives. Maira’s asked about grabbing dinner again. Karen’s called too. To ask how he’s been. She’d asked how he liked the Green Hills recent snow, and he wondered who’d told her. There wasn’t any concrete reason to believe it must’ve been Tom, but Stone’s heart beats in his throat with self-preserving fear. Healthy fear. Fear that makes him carefully migrate the radar’s half-finished body into a transport box and slip it into his car. His hands are shaking. It hasn’t stopped snowing. It’s dark. He’s been awake through nights, mostly, and it feels like far more than two have passed.

Stone loads two badniks with him as mandatory company and closes the café ‘for Christmas’.

Morning of the 19^th, he’s back on the road. Winter tires, a head that’s blissfully empty with exhaustion. Cereal bars he finds in the back are no doubt stale and old- and overall not a snack Stone’s totally sold on. He devours them with vigor, vanishing miles under the wheels of his jeep. He takes it off-road, to the exact coordinates. Mobile, of course, left at home.

The shed stands in half a foot of snow – better than the snowglobe quality Green Hills adopted over the last few days. The door fails him twice. Stone smiles.

He sleeps first, then fights the microwave over dinner. The space is still empty, most rooms bearing scaffolding that used to uphold heavy two-person lift jobs of satellite machinery. Yet other rooms hold whatever materials Robotnik didn’t use, or crafted as draft projects just to check he could fit that much processing power in under 2 kilograms, that he could make something the size of a baseball accelerate to 570mph in three seconds flat.

It’s the 20^th, and he’s disassembled enough old projects to gift the radar system its last few vital puzzle pieces. The badniks roam bunker rooms like sharks in a submerged city, slow and meticulous around every turn of every corner. Stone has to force his way outside against snow a few times, mostly to treck his way to the jeep and back. Underground, time slips from him even worse, replaced with endless playlists and dry eyes hidden behind a welder helmet.

Topside, Stone realizes it’s night. The winter sky breaks open like an overripe fruit, gutting itself across the black expanse of cosmos in splatters of stars, constellations, the milky way. He’s caught standing there, snow seeping into his pantlegs as if trying to reclaim his human warmth, leach it until he becomes one with the landscape on any heatmap. Until he disappears even more, even more than he already has.

The Phoenix is not visible this time of year. Some part of Stone’s brain, the one that isn’t anybody’s voice, just a reckless quiet part that’s all his own, whispers: it’s ashes now.

Build it back up again.

Stone’s reworked the blueprints, taken his own experience – both academic and hands-on – to streamline the design, cut corners, make it feasable for the limited everything he’s working from. And it’s not just materials- he plods the rest of the way to his jeep. It’s undeniable, even this far into successfully parsing and recreating Robotnik’s notes, that Robotnik’s brilliance is light years ahead of any attempt Stone can shoot into the dark. Tooth and nails, he’s fought to understand the machine, how to assemble it, what he could afford to cut. What he could afford to change.

He resurfaces on the 23^rd, bleary, as if the snow had been successful in consuming him whole, reforming Stone to match its blank slate surface. The music’s become background noise, his hands bear the inside seams of technical gloves.

The radar waits eagerly for its last few pieces. Stone for a night shares its quiet slumber, the anticipation of breaching a hibernating state. He’s been walking his last five steps in a trance of too-wide eyes and an utter disconnect from the time of day, gifting his wakefulness for the radar’s cause. So close. Just one more leap through the air, carried by equal parts engineering familiarity and equal parts utter luck.

Every time he hooks its body to a simulation or a power source and the thing doesn’t go up in flames, it feels like curbing freefall, latching onto the trapeze.

When he realizes that the feat of completing R-GDAR beta1 is utterly impossible due to the gutting lack of its final core component, it feels like flubbing the very last jump.

Stone sits back from the simulation screenings. The code isn’t enough to quickly handle the massive data-dump that a potential scan in all three dimensions would generate. Into his memory stabs one of those scanned-in napkin notes: something about a second crack Robotnik planned to unleash upon this exact issue. A new code. It’s not included anywhere in the .ir file. But it’s referenced- Stone tears into it with the clawing hands of a falling man. It’s referenced like Robotnik’s already completed it. And just kept it-

Somewhere else.

The realization feels like waking up. Stone’s combed through every safehouse he’d been aware of, all throughout summer and fall. Every part, every project there. Yet, somewhere should exist a complete, misplaced drive with the updated radar code.

And there’s only one place left Stone never visited.

The final journey to his car is made both easier and infinitely harder by the snow. It clings onto him, beckons him into the betraying softness. It also supports the makeshift sled on which Stone drags the wrapped and packaged radar. Complete, all but for what one might equate to a machine’s soul.

He has the badniks melt his car out from the snow, and then trail before it all the way to the road, leaving dual tracks where his jeep’s wheels can manage. Like reindeer. Similarly glowing red in the night.

Turning onto the road feels surreal, he hadn’t expected to rejoin civilization quite so soon. Even if the whipping departure of roadsigns and billboards, as well as a dotting of fellow rear lights, can barely be called ‘civilization’.

Not yet. He has a few hours until any city begins its slow consumption of Stone’s horizon.

Chapter Text

When the time comes, suburbs flash through his windows first. Brightly lit and shifting with Christmas displays that spill colors onto the snowy banks. There’s a transitionary period after them, something not quite the desolate structural emptiness of suburbia, not quite the heart of the city. Outskirts where two-three story studio buildings lie undecorated. Among them is yet another one of Robotnik’s well-kept secrets.

A first-floor garage, a well-renovated second-floor flat, and a third-floor laboratory. The latter is comparably poor. Far scanter than his actual places of work and safehouses, almost like an afterthought. Stone can imagine him reviewing the floorplan and belatedly realizing the lack of a science hub. Stone’s never seen it used.

The garage lets him in, one error, another. The third scan has its door peeling open, scattering ugly, dirty snow onto the driveway.  

For the first time in maybe a week, Stone is forced to slow down. It catches him off guard and plummets him straight into a moment of stillness: when the front door lets him in on the first try.

The notion that Robotnik somehow forgot is silly. Stone suddenly remembers many an evening, standing right in this garage with three grocery bags, trying to convince the fingerprint scan that he was indeed a whitelisted profile.

The door opens into mellowly cold darkness. Compared to the outside that exhales December spirit across Stone’s neck and wrists, it’s almost warm.

He’s in a living room. A familiar living room. Shoes toed off, standing there with his hands empty and gloved. His brain seems unhappy to begin producing thoughts and observations, having made itself too comfortable in the broiling, selfless stream of numbers, schematics, lines and lines of code that don’t fit.

Now he’s forced to survey something that isn’t a screen or a metal art piece of innovation. His thoughts stutter and Stone buffers there, caught in the present’s utter lack of any conclusions and the slowly creeping avalanche of memories.

Eggs and crepes for breakfast, an occasional science conference live stream that Robotnik would talk over, stand up and pace for, gesticulating and complaining about its contents even though he’d been the one to turn it on. Dressed down, either in a 100% cotton unnecessarily well-fitted t-shirt or a red diamond-stitch robe. Stone would be on the couch then, sometimes in a full suit – or on luckier days sans the jacket. Other times, in overpriced sweats and a smart sweater. Sitting there and listening politely with his usual blank attentiveness. If prompted, he’d chip in. Dry humor the doctor either misinterpreted as idiocy or would pause at, mid-pacing, turn a bit at Stone, regard him with a smirk and crinkled eyes. Not laughter but an amused ‘I see what you’re doing, you’re engaging in conversation with me, without the inherent animosity my rants usually devolve into. I see it.’

Stone had seen him too. Seen his sharp cackles at the kitchen counter and his maniacal distant giggling when he’d lock himself in the study and begin sketching: pen on tablet screen, silly ideas he’d show Stone later over coffee as they stalled and waited for the rain to start and provide ample excuse to stay locked-in longer. He’d slide the tablet over, point with sharp clicks of his pen at various diagrams and doodles — reinventing zoos, redistributing the entire public transit system, designing elevator-equipped manholes.

My world, Robotnik would say, zooming into his contraptions on the endless digital canvas, this is what my world would look like.

One morning Stone said into his mug, You could make this world your own already.

It’d prompted a pause, the stilling of digital pentip just millimeters off the glowing surface. A dictatorship?

I never said that.

Robotnik had snatched the tablet away, spinning in his barstool with the momentum, Do you think I’d make a good emperor, Stone?

If anybody could pull off a modern dictatorship with flare and class, I’d say there is no competition, doctor.

Robotnik had grinned and just as quickly lost it: They’d make me attend more royal events then. And insist all of my work is rerouted to handling departments… Stone, I’d have to waste time on politics. (Before Stone could say anything, the grin had returned) No situation is ever an ultimatum- the universe is so full of random chance that one must never settle for a roadblock. Compromise, the most annoying and conductive feature of mankind. (He’d set his elbows back on the kitchen counter after another spin) You’d be a pawn.

You’ve said I am already, Stone had remarked lightly without malice. Robotnik tsk’d and rolled his eyes.

A political one. I have no interest in wasting my precious minutes holding an audience with farmers A through Z. You, on the other hand, have nothing better to do with your day, we’d put you in a hollow crown and name you emperor, have you deal with the menial daily chores of world domination…

Like convincing farmers A through Z to quit revolting.

(Robotnik snorted) Convincing, yes. And then I’d have such a rich bank of time to draw from, I could get everything done, Stone. I’d build those farmer-convincing machines while you rotted away at formal events and galas.

So…

(Robotnik, forever animated, like he was in a hurry to ring the most out of every conversation, had waved a hand to shut Stone up. Rollied his eyes again) Yes, so exactly like now. Without the crown and the farmers.

I wish they sent me to events and galas as part of the job description, Stone had taken another sip, absently watching Robotnik send the tablet’s canvas spinning with a flick of two fingers. Instead of meetings with Walter’s backup dancers.

(Another cackle) Oh, wouldn’t it be so much better if every one of their gracelessly template-born powerpoints came with a dance number? Maybe I should get on that…

I’m sure, of all people, you’re the only one at G.U.N. who could pull that off. Only one to make it work.

Ha, what backhanded flattery. (Robotnik had snapped and gotten up to leave or pace again) Only one in the world.

Now, on the 24^th, Stone rubs his eyes in the kitchen, runs the palms of both hands up his face, down onto the nape of his neck. He smells like smoke and molten plastic and old socks. His eyes are for once not dry. Only one in the world indeed. Sometimes alone in that onlyness.

The empty, silent apartment hits him like the 49^th collision against an already shattered, empty hull. He barks out a raspy sob that catches him and the quiet building off guard. The prototype hovercraft had been single-seat only and Stone had somehow allowed that, never bothering to demand space for himself- not in the brainstorming stage, not in the final blueprint’s model. Had just allowed Robotnik to build it, as always, with only himself in mind.

Another sob, the type he fails to breathe around, it hurts the back of his throat, catches on it raw like a fresh wound. He's happy for the lack of neighbors, happy that he left the badniks shut down in the jeep’s back- strange, manic spikes of elation in the overwhelming, nauseating pain of now, too, being fucking alone.

He staggers back, hits the wall, rattles its scant framed occupants: ancient rice paper with calligraphy and a postcard. The dam of muted, colorless thoughts breaks, floods him with icky, oversaturated exhaustion, pain, regret, hatred for something unidentifiable. Stone slides down the wall until he’s pressed between its cool surface and his own folded legs, and he cries. Cries loudly and messily, open-mouthed gasping like he’s locked in a fighter jet without his oxygen tank. Even on the hostel's floor, it'd never gotten this bad.

'Robotnik built the hovercraft with only himself in mind' is a thought Stone's attention snags against in the mess of long-untapped emotions. It's simply untrue. One of those thoughts that some people let run away from them, thoughts that turn into ugly monsters, spur arguments, make you say things you don’t mean. Stone catches it now.

That coffin of a thing was built single-seat because that’s what was requested by G.U.N. An advanced hover machine for solo piloting. But the project had been young and oh so new, years away from being finalized and ironed out. At least that was the plan, of course Robotnik already had a prototype, the issue was its battery and speed capacity, far from finished- until Sonic entered the picture and Robotnik remodified the entire thing to run on endless alien power.

Stone’s crying with his full voice in it, the type of low wailing that sounds like a distant wind through an abandoned building full of old, cracking doors. The wind slams the doors shut occasionally – the wail is punctuated by sharp, teeth-clacking sobs. The type that hurt your entire body, attempt to yank your lungs up into your mouth. The hover wasn't single-seat due to stubborn 'onlyness'. It was fucking required.

He’s always hated lying about Robotnik, hated nodding along to office gossip, about his worst qualities – though often true – and hated that final interview before his decommission. They didn’t even let him say Robotnik’s name, just to keep the records free of more black bars: redacted, redacted, redacted. Everyone expected Stone to be secretly in on it, like a double agent from the country of Hatred trying to pass for a native Robotnik Support City denizen. They expected a wink from him, a nod, saying I get it I hate him too but work is work, though I’m with you all, I’m with you.

That wasn’t ever the case. He’d always been with him. Always so resolutely on Robotnik’s side, always in his corner of the field, always meeting him halfway in every rant: whatever it is you’ll be saying, I won’t challenge it, won’t make you pause and have to justify why this and how that. Understand but never criticize. Never analyze. Just take at face value and keep up pace- he cries in a way that threatens to trigger his gag reflex, back of his throat pained and cold with every panicked inhale.

And he understands, and he knows that the statement ‘Robotnik only ever had himself in mind’ is so far from the truth it’s a leap of logic one could break every bone making. Robotnik’s problem was he cared too fucking much. It manifested in putting people in their place, in designing new world orders, in swiftly circumventing world wars, in restocking his freezer to include meals he’d bullied Stone to name as favorites.

The hover was for solo piloting but there’d been two flight suits.

It’s so loud inside his own head and so dark where his palms mercilessly wipe and wipe at his eyes, that it takes an unguessable amount of time for Stone to hear it.

Something’s moving in the kitchen.

His crying cuts off so abruptly it feels like a power outage. Leaving him reeling for a moment, trying to place the noise, trying to guess his chances of fending off danger right now.

Oh.

It’s the coffee machine. Whirring and clicking with its quiet morse of burbles.

The preliminary adrenaline subsides and Stone lets out another residual sob, a shockwave he can’t quite dodge- there’s more noise… the fridge is humming, and in another room, the radio’s begun some peppy monologue too obscured by walls and a gradual upturn in ambiance. The flat comes alive.

A roomba rounds the corner. One Stone’s rather familiar with: a longterm resident of the second floor. It looks like a close relative to the badnicks, albeit bound to a life near the ground: Robotnik had built it before he perfected hover technology. It tottles around on a set of caterpillars.

And now it pointedly heads at Stone. He’s never seen it drive with so much silent intent - its hasty b-line across the room seems almost menacing.

The coffee machine clicks done. The fridge beeps of all things. Another sob is dragged out of Stone, mindless and barely noticed.

The little guy stops a foot or so away, pauses for a second- clearly an older piece of tech, no matter how well it's been preserved. After a moment of deliberation, it lights up the subsurface display, one usually limited to air temperature, weather, and time.

Now the roomba’s surface reads: get it together.

Stone lets out a watery chuckle, wipes at his sore eyes- laughs again. The roomba does a neat 180 and takes off towards the kitchen.

It smells like not only coffee but food. Stone can’t not follow.

Chapter Text

This studio had stood a loyal servant for Robotnik’s half-hearted attempt at homelife for over two decades. Stone sometimes wondered whether this reluctance to move somewhere… well, better and newer was a facet of too busy a worklife or too uprooted a childhood. Either way, the apartment barely had any Robotnik Classics installed. The counter is just a counter, the TV is just a flatscreen. The walls were redone twice just to upgrade the ethernet and electricity bandwidth but they’re far from overstuffed. The café’s own engineering (done by Stone, to boot) is leagues ahead of the rather casual – even tame – amount of wires that run this house. The floor is just the floor, same for the couch, the coffee table. Things mostly don’t glow or hover aside from a few vanity trinkets like Robotnik’s funniest and least convenient invention ever: a nightlight you can’t touch.

It’d been constructed on the precipice of Robotnik’s hover-tech breakthrough. When he was still fighting his way through a frontier no one’s ever braved before. Things kept tipping, losing balance, falling over, running out of power in under a minute. They conducted the tests, then, over heavy-duty nets after too many a prototype failed to hover and sent itself shattering across lab floors. Eventually, they had to nailgun foam to the ceiling because prototype “Gullible-12” decided to shoot vertically up when finally given power, instead of crashing down like its more underperforming predecessors (Robotnik named a lot of his prototypes variously demeaning adjectives).

It knocked loose five ceiling tiles and a light, raining Stone and Robotnik in buckets of dust and clipping the doctor’s scalp with a tile corner. It was the second or so time that Stone had to apply first-aid at the lab, and it was also when he found out Robotnik’s hair was black only because he dyed it.

This is absurd, Robotnik had circled the lab’s dust-grey table, floor, and blast-radius equipment, holding an ice-pack to the back of his head, We need to move somewhere with cement ceilings.

They did eventually, into a brand new commissioned off-site lab and hangar. The one that Robotnik would program lockdown protocols into, the one where he’d assemble first a jet, then a not-jet, then that damned aircraft. To honor Gullible-12, they’d written gullible on the cement ceiling. Stone on a ladder, its base held loosely by Robotnik. The ladder had been stable. There was no need to hold its metal rungs with beautiful, gloved hands.

Every few weeks, Robotnik would jab at Stone- Wow, who’s written gullible on the ceiling, and Stone would oblige, look up, act surprised. One time, Robotnik covered it up with his second-draft ‘invisibility’ reflectors, hiding the word. When Stone looked up and - in fact - did not find ‘gullible’ on the ceiling, it’d opened the floodgates for a ten-minute laughing fit and two weeks of teasing at Stone’s expense. And ‘teasing’ from Robotnik did often turn out expensive.

It'd get glue poured on his shoes, suits ruined with machine oil, grease, coffee, either flicked or spilled on Stone with a lot of malicious, joking, purpose. Robotnik would wear work clothes on-site, things older and already mucked up by the hard labor of invention, and Stone would still be expected in a suit. At least the first year and a half, until the side of it got caught on a cackling engine sprawled mid-table and almost killed Stone. (An exaggeration, it could’ve fallen on him and broken a bone, but also it could’ve broken itself if Stone didn’t right it in time, and that would've made Robotnik livid, which would, in turn, kill Stone.)

After that, unless they had a scheduled inspection from G.U.N. or a conference to attend, Stone would arrive in Robotnik’s idea of casual. Some of those outfits cost more than double-bedroom rent in New York. Turtlenecks, snugly fit sweaters, buttondowns without their corresponding suit jackets. Robotnik didn’t want an eyesore around the lab, allegedly. Maybe he just liked buying clothes and had run out of his own wardrobe space.

God knows the flat rarely saw new furniture. Stone reckons that the couch has been here since Robotnik bought the floorspace. It’s perhaps one of the most human aspects of the entire apartment.

The counters have seen many a dinner between the two, many instances of flour spilled while Stone was cooking, many instances of a knocked-over wine glass, felled by wild gesticulation. Counters can be wiped up though, cleared of most marks. So can the floors, walls, coffee tables.

The couch though – while kept a pretty uniform grey – is broken-in. Creased where human bodies have sat on opposite ends, watching the storm outside and discussing the oil trade, where Bolognese sauce was once dribbled on accident, where the bottom of a hot mug left the arm rest slightly deformed, where countless times Stone has slept.

It is impossible to wipe it of personality, impossible to erase the years Stone has walked in to find Robotnik napping on it haphazardly, years when the entire surface was cluttered by papers and two laptops, forcing Stone and Robotnik to occupy the carpeted floor in front of it. The only way to conceal its personality would be to trash the whole thing, send it to a landfill, replace it with something new and sleek and quiet.

It wouldn’t be good to sleep on it then, not at all. The charm, now, is that it’s familiar. Somehow more so than Stone’s own bed at home, because that’s just a mattress, and this is Robotnik’s couch. Robotnik’s proof of a lived-in house. Proof that Robotnik was once real. No matter how much the world tries to reject that.

Proof scatters the walls, too, in framed images. Robotnik’d always been very particular about what goes up and what gets quietly sorted into boxes. On his grey and white and occasionally salmon walls is calligraphy, a piece of embroidery: that of a pink kingfisher, letters, a few awards, a few postcards he simply bought like checkpoints instead of getting in the mail. A few newspaper clippings. One of the oldest is of a university paper, headlined as ALL ITEMS IN A 40 METER RADIUS OF THE C-BUILDING’S LAB DISINTIGRATED.

Meanwhile, boxes hide photographs. Somewhere, collecting dust. Stone is in those pictures. That Stone had had notions of a five-year plan.

This Stone takes his next five steps to the kitchen.

Unbending from the floor sends an ovation of joint cracks and muscle pain up Stone’s body. It screams at him with just how long the last week’s been, spent curling over a project and uncurling only in the hard floor confines of a sleeping bag. How did he get here, how did he so thoroughly lose himself in the race of chasing ghosts. He’d thought he understood Robotnik’s decimating spirals of work, the type that’d whittle him down to bone and finally run that endless energy source dry for a few days. Now he thinks the understanding has been corrected, carved into his own skeleton: you thought you understood but now you see.

The kitchen is lit, waiting for him with fresh coffee and a fridge compartment he hadn’t been aware of: a second microwave seemingly capable of defrosting packed meals straight from the freezer. Mushrooms, potatoes, and gravy. Stone’s never been a fan of mushrooms, culinarily and conceptually. Considering Robotnik’s track record of refashioning every freezer to keep whatever food Stone fessed up liking, this can’t be it. This has to be made for Robotnik. It clicks: a mechanism of self-salvaging. Many of Robotnik’s inventions have programmed scripts of reacting specifically to Stone. Usually, this includes more insults or less loyalty. Sometimes it includes locked doors. The floor bot has those too, lines meant specifically for when it ID’s Stone and runs over his shoes.

The script that identifies and reacts to crying is perhaps one that overwrites any sort of recognition.

He takes the food, the coffee, warm and offered with no expectation of pay or even gratitude. Swallows another hiccupping sob and sits down. The distant radio keeps its quiet chatter. All that’s missing is a whisper of rain, but winter only grants snow.

Hovering on the kitchen counter in utter stillness is the untouchable nightlight. Robotnik never called it an accidental creation, but Stone always believed it to be. The idea behind it was a nightlight that’d hover (well done, this part worked) that you could grab whenever you wanted (not so easy). The thing hovered from all sides. If you attempted to reach for its circular yellow surface, it’d eventually start hovering away from your hand as if against a repelling magnet. The only way to usher it around the apartment was through a series of hand motions that’d send it propelling in… some direction.

After working on the Badniks in the doctor’s absence, Stone now can't imagine it being accidental… It’d need an installation of h-up panels along its entire surface area, and by then Robotnik had already figured out making Gullible-12 only go up or down. Perhaps the issue was wiring, making every panel fire up at once and propel the nightlight away from every obstacle. Or maybe it wasn’t an issue at all. Maybe sometimes Robotnik built stupid, inconvenient things for fun. Maybe he should’ve built more.

Stone remembers why he’s here. Specifically to track down Robotnik’s creations. Or one specific one. Right. He hasn’t tasted the food at all, but it’d been warm and it’d been food, and the coffee washes most of that taste down in scalding gulps. He’ll need to find the new code, unearth it, turn the apartment upside-down if he has to.

That’s tomorrow.

Stone leaves the plate and cup there, drags himself across the room to find an old marvel that’s begun to feel like a friend. The couch smells like dust but feels about the same as it had, last time Stone caught his due hours of sleep here at the flat. He folds into it now, realizing the temperature’s mellowed enough to not seek warmth in curling up. The quiet whirr of floorbot’s caterpillars hums somewhere across the apartment. He mumbles: wake me later, to the open air, and hopes that something somewhere heard him.

Stone falls asleep with a sore, drying face and a surrender to the sort of rest which submerges you in a vague echo of the past day’s work. Not a single coherent dream.

Resurfacing is difficult.

He wakes to morning light and kitchen lamps that stayed on, unattended. The floorbot beeps somewhere nearby and quickly shuts off. Stone blinks with heavy eyelids and feels where eyebags ache from too desperate a cry prior. Later, in the mirror, he sees dried tracks going sideways down his face, in the direction of his ear, and wonders if he’d been crying in his sleep. It’s still the 24^th, just the morning of it. The radio’s been chatting away all night.

Stone changes into new clothes (his, his clothes that are still here, have always been here), has breakfast, coffee, and with an inexplicable surge of energy starts the process anew.

The third-floor lab in its rather unused and therefore uncluttered space, offers just the perfect area to park a near-completed radar. He lugs it to the mini elevator, sends it off, and climbs the spiral staircase up. The service elevator is really only for inventions, but considering it was built with about 200 kilograms in mind, Stone and Robotnik have both rode it between the floors – usually separately from each other and twice at the same time.

He climbs each stair and thinks about it. About how it was near the end, when he’d gotten too comfortable with existing by Robotnik indefinitely and Robotnik got too comfortable with being a real person when alone with Stone. And Stone had dared to climb into the lift – fold himself into its low ceiling – on his way to the lab. Robotnik had seen and gasped at the perceived slight- raced across the room to jam his hand into the closing door and shove himself inside too, elbows and knees and shouting: how dare you abuse this privilege?

The door had wheezed closed and then they sat there, pressed into each other, breathing stuffy, angry air. Robotnik’s hands braced on the ceiling and wall, back pressed into the top corner. Stone nearly lying on his back, curled into a shrimp, legs folded with his knees hanging over his face. Robotnik was very warm. An overheating CPU. An overworked machine. Or just a human person.

He gets to the third floor. The lab is largely how he remembers it last, barely populated. He drags the radar onto a platform, lifts it to table-height, prepares the surgical equipment… and leaves back downstairs. Now to find the code.

For such a neat workspace in his storage units and truck, Robotnik’s apartment is only faux-tidy. The second you open a cupboard or check the back of any closet, there are heaps of abandoned, barely labeled boxes. Especially if it’s things he doesn’t see an immediate need for. Stone hopes the .ir file he’s looking for doesn’t fulfill that category.

So he combs the labeled project file database first. Then the boxes full of hard drives for upcoming commissions. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Rubs his hands down his face-

B-NIK_repatch 1/12/2020 jumps out at him from the list. Recent. The badniks he has with him definitely don’t have it, and Stone knows Robotnik never finished coding it, much less integrating it throughout his arsenal. He’d been too busy with… Well, everything that led up to his disappearance.

Stone pulls up its… excessive list of changes and updates.

METADATA PROCESSING INTEGRATION

ADVANCED DATA PARAMETERS PROCESSING REPATCH

-is among the list. Stone rushes to his car and whispers I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I hope this doesn’t fry your little brain, to the one badnik he picks at random. Powered on, it tails him to the lab. If a technically unfinished update fries the poor thing, he’ll have one left with him here. It’s a necessary sacrifice. A desperate one.

The repatch installs for two agonizing minutes. For an even worse 30 seconds, the badnik refuses to wake back up.

(Stone tells them apart. This one caught his phone in the café. He’s happy to have never named them. Hurts less to face loss that way. He’s happy – by that logic – that Robotnik was only ever Robotnik and barely 'Ivo'.) Stone grits his teeth (Robotnik, to Stone, was ‘Ivo’ only twice.)

It blinks awake. The screens instantly get dumped with lines of code: system specs and installation details. Stone doesn’t have the time or energy to pick through it: he requests it display the updated data search terminal.

The information is easy to put in from memory, nay a moment lost to floundering recollection. Search for .ir files. Prioritize those marked as duplicates. Prioritize those with similar data as [sample] (he feeds it the radar’s incomplete blueprint). Prioritize searchterm R-GDAR + gamma detection and ranging. Searchfield within 50 meters radius.

It stares at him for a second and then lifts off, deploying its thin red scan-line to sweep the apartment. Stone watches it with a heaving chest and hope high in his throat.

In Robotnik’s bedroom, under his bed, is a box the badnik zeroes in on with uncompromising efficiency. Stone feels like an outcast on holy soil, stepping into the bedroom. 

It had never been explicitly off-limits. Robotnik liked that: not specifying where a hard boundary sat, expecting Stone to accidentally trample all over it so Robotnik could scream at him. Or move the boundary. Having seen it wasn’t actual torture to let someone in a little bit closer. Move it just an inch to the side and wait for Stone to flub it again. Never tell him about it either. But Stone would know. Would know when suddenly touching his prototypes became okay. When out of nowhere he could occasionally pick the playlist. When he could reach over and touch. That boundary had been crossed when patching Robotnik’s bleeding head in the lab, Gullible dead in the ceiling. Not torture. Boundary moved. His hand on Robotnik’s shoulder to shake him awake. Not torture. Boundary moved. His hands getting caught by two gloved ones in a ‘prank’ while trying to hand over coffee. Not torture. Boundary moved. His shoulder on the couch, suddenly feeling the weight of a leaning head.

Not torture.

Not torture.

He kneels by the bed and drags out its hidden secret. A filing box with no label. Holding his breath, Stone opens the lid.

Chapter Text

A thin layer of dust weeps onto the floor as Stone reveals a tightly stuffed selection of seemingly unrelated items: a few notebooks, another smaller box, plastic-encased pictures… Stone moves to pick through them quickly to find the hard discs- but the first item is already stilling his hand. All the air leaves his lungs – all the air leaves the room – Stone is suddenly back in Albania kneeling on rotten planks, hands steady on the wires of a bomb, 1:49, 1:48, 1:47… Everyone else has vacated the room, minimizing losses if he is to fail, but he can’t fail, Stone doesn’t fail. Stone only makes mistakes he can come back from – even back then. And death isn’t one of those.

Ndaloni, he’d whispered, Albanian for stop. Pleading it. Ndaloj tik-tak, said with numb, parted lips. It had not in fact ndaloj’d its tik, tak, tik, tak. He’d lifted another wire, trailed it up to the base, gloved hands, gloved hands.

(Robotnik’s thumb on the button, Decolare, decolare, decolare.)

Stone lifts a notepad out of the box, one already flipped open and resting at the very top. In Robotnik’s fast, looping handwriting, Stone reads (tik, tak, tik, tak, tik) his civilian address. His own personal storage unit’s address. His birthday and his blood type and a short, succinct list of his allergens. Hates mushrooms and cilantro with three exclamation points written at the bottom. Don’t forget! Circled and underlined. Hasty yet with vigor (tik, tak, tik, tak). Then a list of the cologne scents he favors, all guesses of course but the doctor had always been sharp with his sense of smell. His favorite frozen meals.

Another page is hard to contextualize. Necklace??? Tacky, doesn’t go with every outfit. WRONG. Can be worn underneath, hidden. <- suffocation hazard if attacked? Cufflinks? WRONG SAME ISSUE not universal outfit. Bracelet. [Here the page takes a break and devolves into Robotnik’s dying pen getting tested in angry, fading scribbles.] Bracelet <- lab hazard. Ring? LAB HAZARD. Has connotations. <- WEIRD!

His eyes flick in panicked worry from the small page to the box again- Stone sees (tik, tak, tik, tak) the partially obscured spine of a book he’d lost three years ago: Greek myths and history. A truly tattered tome that had seen a lot of leafing, and which Stone thought he’d (tik, tak, tik) never see again. Stolen? No, Robotnik couldn’t steal from him if he wanted to, Stone swallows against a dry throat, reaching for the next thing, the next thing. Robotnik couldn’t steal, because everything Stone had, he’d give up immediately- surrender fully and without doubt. Sacrifice himself over and over, to ashes, to dust, if Robotnik so much as asked or looked at him a certain way or left his door unlocked or let himself fall asleep on his side of the couch while sitting with Stone. He lived those allowances, breathed them, thinking this is it, I’ve made it, thinking five years, ten.

Tears spring to his eyes as he lifts an ancient picture preserved through the necromancy of lamination: their first year working together- or, it wasn’t together back then. His first year working for Robotnik. Taken by an insectlike surveillance device in its first five minutes of life: a camera test. Robotnik takes up most of the frame, leaning in to study his creation, goggles on, waiting for the thing to spontaneously give up and combust, delicate mechanism and weak legs going up in electric flames. A victim to being fed its first battery.

Stone had stood across the room, distorted by the fisheye lens’s pull. He’d still played the role of a faceless agent back then, a potential rat for G.U.N. and a definite nuisance in the lab-

This unexpected snapshot had caught him standing on his tip toes, chin lifted, eyes huge, leaning sideways to catch a glimpse of the creation process, of the machine waking up. Genuine interest. Immortalized on accident. Hand in the cookie jar: greedy fingers trying to grab onto the rung of Robotnik’s world, hang on, just for a second. Tik, tak. Tik, tak.

Robotnik had printed it out. Turned it analog, turned it real. Preserved it. The next picture is from their first mutually attended conference, standing in the second row of three: scientists, military, other agents and assistants. Robotnik's sneaking a middle finger to the camera, masking it as a twirl of the mustache, and Stone is watching him do it.

(The conference was terrible, he hadn’t learned to distract the doctor yet – hadn’t even dared trying to hold a conversation.)

Then a picture Stone had taken of Robotnik – years into his vigilant post by the doctor’s side, the man lying on his back, blood-red coat tails splayed under him, dark goggles, mouth slightly ajar, fully engrossed in the task at hand. He’s got both arms up, a unique soldering iron held to the belly of an eggpod. He hadn’t even known. Hadn’t known of the snapped image. Wasn’t supposed to ever find out. Stone blinks through tears, remembers the smell of that lab, watching Robotnik like someone under hypnosis, barely breathing, heart up in his throat at the sight of how the doctor made machinery sing in his hands, made it laugh and breathe and live, even if the forty-nine prototypes before it burned to ash, the fiftieth would soar (decolare, decolare).

There is a USB- or US-RB, rather, that Stone fishes out next, reaches feebly for the badnik, beckons it closer. It unlocks the port without asking, lets Stone look at the files on a projection-

Maps of Japan, Scotland, Alaska, tourist spots and pointedly un-tourist-friendly spots, airway flight maps he could take the jet on- or two jets, solo-seat ones flying in tight formation. Not racing. Stone could out-pilot him on a broken zeppelin but he wouldn’t dare, and that in turn would agitate Robotnik to high heavens. Architectural plans for kitchens and greenhouses. Robotnik’s musings of his own five, ten years.

More notebooks – some so incredibly old Stone realizes instantly that they’re from Robotnik’s distant, murky childhood. He peeks inside with reverence, gaze dashing over handwriting that is far less refined, yet outlining equally as complicated topics, labeling diagrams. He flips into a drawing of what must be Robotnik himself standing on top of the globe with his arms in the air, lightning striking all around him. Ruler of the world (you’d be the pawn, a ruler just for looks, tik tak tik tak). The figure in the drawing has violently orange hair. Stone did,  long ago, wonder quietly about the black dye.

He flips through more pictures, more childhood memorabilia, and finally uncovers a hard drive.

Before he can rip himself away from it all, removing the hard drive reveals a small gift box. Stone could argue that a slim chance of him not opening it does exist. That he could right now choose to walk away.

It’d be a lie. Miles away, in Green Hills, his phone rings and rings and rings. 1:47, 1:46, 1:45, sweat rolling down his face from under the military helmet. A nest rendered to ashes.

Inside is a delicate silver chain, supporting a flat pendant. Disc-like and engraved with a… sun? Stone traces his thumb over the symbol, flips it over: numbers he can’t immediately identify the meaning of are soldered into the surface with a second, shinier metal. In the box, too, is cardstock paper with fancy, red borders.

Don’t get lost.

               - IR

He had cut the wire with a deafening snip and an even louder silence in its wake. The bomb had stuttered quiet, swallowed its last tik, its last tak, and gone dim. He’d breathed out, shaky, the elation of still being alive crashing into his chest with burning heat. Five hours later Stone would get shot for the first time.

Now he fails at suppressing the prickling in his nose and locks the pendant’s chain at the nape of his neck, letting it fall over his shirt. Sits there in front of a devastatingly private box for two more seconds before getting up and taking the hard drive back to floor three.

Everything feels lighter, like he’s a second from floating away, like trying to run and hit and fight in a dream when you’re small. Stone no longer faces that problem. All the punches and all the bullets in his dreams connect.

Robotnik would jot cramped words down constantly, keeping up with his own brain. But he didn’t do it to use for reference later, never as a way to archive information- all’s to say, Stone cannot compartmentalize that notebook page of his own personal information. It makes his brain run in circles.

He’d always aimed to understand but avoid analyzing… Criticizing. But the Stone Homebrew Technique of Robotnik Survival fails and fails and fails: he cannot understand. His hands attach the hard drive, scroll to look for-

R-GDAR (1) EDITED_final (2) Final repatch (edited) FINAL – unfinished (2) EDIT 7/20/2012

Most of its contents have been tattooed onto the backs of Stone’s eyelids, he knows them like he knows the smooth weight of an M4A1, like he knows the resistance of a coffee grinder handle. He spots the new information quickly.

Reworked code. A sorter for the feedback dump, to easily and effectively categorize data by location, type, altitude, active status, and year of production. Give the radar less to realtime display and chug through. Mercy on its limited brain. Compartmentalize. The compound Robotnik had always used to mark his creations was a homebrew branch off of Ytterbium – something Robotnik synthesized on utter accident once (though he’d never admit it to the wider world, would claim it as a genius invention). Stone never did get an answer about if it was radioactive or not.

He hooks the radar up, cables like a heavy, rubber-encased nervous system, the cervical nerve about to gift it the final piece. He has one key left to press. Enter.

UPDATE INITIATED

SYSTEM INTEGRATION: // 2%

Stone stands there, fingers pressed to his pendant, watching the code run a neat, beautiful line.

///// 12%

Once it’s done, he’ll take the radar and a portable tablet module up, up, up to the roof. He knows, realistically, that one layer of cement ceiling won’t have any effect on a machine this powerful. But the human part of him, the part that knocks on wood and tries to avoid spilling salt… That’s the part that will haul his Frankensteinian creation upstairs.

///////// 25%

Then it’ll… Well, scan everything, and Stone will find him wherever it is that Robotnik went. He stares at the load bar ticking up, mind full of portals and yellow rings and the blackbox reporting a change in gravity.

////////////////// 47%

And what if it’s a different planet? Stone thinks. What if it’s a planet galaxies away. Or a different universe- He bites the inside of his cheek and watches 50% turn into 51%.

If it’s a different planet he’ll steal a rocket.

If it’s a different universe he’ll invent- or mooch off of Robotnik’s inventions and create a portal. Because fuck it. He will always do whatever it takes. There is simply no other option.

/////////////////////// 64%

He is getting his doctor back no matter how or from where. Because getting this radar up had been the last five steps, and the next five will become clear once he’s on that fucking roof emitting a radar pulse thousands of times more powerful than what the US military and NASA could ever dream of.

//////////////////////////// 72%

They’d all abandoned Stone. And he’d let them. His sister, who moved the second she could get away, his teachers that liked his grades but hated his attitude and his difficult last-name, his unit manager, six other soldiers which couldn’t bear to be in that room in Albany, with the bomb, with Stone whose heart was in his throat. Every single-

 ///////////////////////////////// 86%

-G.U.N. manager that he was assigned under. Walters. G.U.N. in general – believing him so easily it was almost an insult, when he said he didn’t know a single thing. They let him go. Everyone always did.

Robotnik would make him stay double overtime. Make Stone practically live in the lab, right along with him. And then have him over, at this place, on his couch, watching his stupidly pedestrian TV.

//////////////////////////////////////// 98%

Stone closes his eyes. Robotnik never left him if he could help it. At every fancy dinner Walters forced them to attend, at every convention. And when there was no other way – when Robotnik could not bring Stone with him, be it because of clearance or other (that coffin of a thing was built single-seat because that’s what was requested) reasons, he’d repent. In his own small ways. A second flight suit. Minigolf in the lab. A new sleek windbreaker for Stone which could withstand a stabbing. In his own small ways which were unbearably huge. Even when Robotnik got frustrated and annoyed and frayed by company and locked himself away somewhere, it was always a lock ready to surrender against Stone's biometrics. On the third try, that is.

It was cute and Stone wasn’t sure how aware Robotnik was of this pattern. If it was a conscious effort or not.

It couldn’t have been. Stone wasn’t even mad in the first place, to be left behind a little bit. It’s what he’d always expect first and foremost. Considering his job position, it’s what made sense. Considering his history, it's what he habitually expected. Robotnik’s shadow. Always a step behind.

He opens his eyes, and 100%, INSTALLATION COMPLETE, blinks back up at him.

A shadow. Always a step behind yet always with you.

Outside is bitingly cold.

The badnik trails him up there, one grabber extended to carry a wad of cables handed over by Stone. The roof houses an unused greenhouse. Stone doesn’t know whether it came with the property or was left redundant after one of the doctor’s projects. Now it will hide them from the snow.

In the making since 2012, reworked countless of times, never finished by its original creator, the radar system is ready.

Stone holds his breath and – like a first responder about to save a life with two defibrillators – activates its pulse.

Several things happen in short succession.

A NASA shift manager unlucky enough to work through Christmas spills her coffee, eyes bugging out at the readings on screen. Two dozen UFO enthusiasts worldwide startle awake the second their machines begin to violently print anomalous readings. Five or so infants within a six-mile radius of the radar pulse wake up to a strange ringing in their ears and immediately begin to wail. Stone gets ambushed with a surprise headache. Three different people attempt to call Walters. Most birds worldwide gets super confused. The president’s phone starts to ring.

Somewhere very, very unbelievably far away, a line of code begins speeding across one cracked, cobbled-together screen.  

Chapter Text

He blinks the darkness away, temples aching like from a loud noise. The badnik seems unaffected – the world at large keeps spinning, even if Stone feels entirely untethered as his fingers reach for the screen where diagnostics explode in quickly updating patterns. The further something is away, the longer it’ll take to show.

He zooms in on the map: another feature of the update. Instead of data dumping numbers, they can now be placed on a diagram of the world. It's laggy - extremely laggy - but it works. He sees hotspots: a blaring cluster in the ocean – another he guesses as one safehouse, then the next. He spots this house too, far less populated by dots. Zooms in further, clicks on one at random- Dustbiter v2.1 : 2014 : functional : active

That must be the floor vacuum, Stone thinks. Clicks on another. He’s just delaying the inevitable, really. Asshole Nightlight v0 : 2015 : functional : inactive. Right, because it’s turned off. Okay. So functional means it’s overall intact, and the last part is whether its turned on or off at the moment. Year of creation… useful, okay. He clicks another, expecting the badnik, and is instead faced with Pheonicsis B : 2013 : functional : active

Next to that dot is another, which Stone quickly clicks and verifies is the badnik. It snaps into clear sense, then, and Stone quickly takes off his pendant and sends it flying across the greenhouse-

The dot moves. The status, when he clicks it again, turns to NON-FUNCTIONAL / MISSING INFORMATION : NON FUNCTIONAL / MISSING INFORMATION.

He breathes out a fascinated laugh, face hurting from the magnitude of his grin. Don’t get lost – IR. Isn’t that peculiar, Stone, he picks himself back up and walks across the greenhouse, hooking the pendant’s chain onto a finger and returning to the tablet, stars gravitationally bound to each other, there is the brighter, there is the dimmer, he switches map options from FLAT to GLOBE and a few new dots light up: satellites, A and B, the ‘primary’ and the ‘secondary’. Living’s easy, Agent Stone. It’s like seeing a family photo, dozens of glowing dots which are Robotnik’s, and which Stone often helped haul, polish, power, and test.

Stone returns the pendant to its intended spot and switches back to FLAT. Best case scenario, Robotnik’s battered machine and the man himself were dragged to some top secret hangar or bunker, and it’ll be a case of driving there with a gun and driving away with his doctor in the passenger seat. A sharp change in air pressure, gravitational pull, and velocity- But that’s the best-case scenario, and Robotnik had never, ever complied with those.

He pulls up the hovercraft’s ID, one he’d hastily noted down sometime in the café, those last few days before he left Green Hills. Inputs it. Taps the little magnifying glass: find.

It loads.

And it loads.

And it loads.

And then he gets an error message: invalid map setting.

Stone swallows down nerves and switches from FLAT to GLOBE. The Earth is dark. There is not a single dot. Nor is there one in orbit.

Okay. Stone zooms out.

And zooms out- and zooms out and zooms out and zooms out and zooms out, fingers clicking against the screen in urgency-

There is one lone dot, somewhere so far away Stone couldn’t even find Earth anymore if he tried.

He’s getting cold and the numb pad of his finger clicks it instantly. Gullible1000 v3.4 : 2020 : non-functional : active.

Another laugh is forced out of him, a little hysterical. Seeing the familiar name for a hover device- then the status puzzles him. Broken but powered on. He opens the additional data dropdown, studying the lightyears of distance on display.

He opens the log.

It stretches on for what feels like, also, light years. Stone watches where the status changed from functional to non-functional, that night in Green Hills. Where it powered down for weeks before being reactivated. Where it powered down again. It’s like watching a timelapse of Robotnik being alive – even if somewhere out there. It means he survived the jump. That’s already a step forward.

On that topic. What the hell next.

Stone heads downstairs, hypnotized by the information on screen, almost running his shoulder through a corner with how much he’s not looking.

In the lab he fumbles for one moment, like missing a limb. His watch isn’t synced to this house, and the fact he takes an extra five minutes to set it up isn’t stalling. He’s not stalling. Stone turns to the badnik and tells it: I’m not stalling.

He sends the data across Robotnik’s screens: older models, only half holographic. Deep space. Robotnik is somewhere in deep space. It’s not even a constellation and it’s nameless, and it’s so so so far away Stone feels it break like an ache across his gut, a shapeless hurt.

I’m not stalling, he tells the air again.

He realizes he hasn’t eaten since waking, then, when he sharply wants to cry. His secondary field training which aims to eliminate the failings of a human body screams red flags at him: that he can’t do his job if he’s this affected, that he’s this affected at all because of the lacking food. Not anything else. Get yourself together and eat. He’s not stalling.

The counter welcomes him with its pristine youthfulness – a part of the house seemingly above aging. Stone opens the fridge in a trance, examining the expired and molding vegetables, meats, and combusting bottles of juice. Even Robotnik couldn’t evade decay. Deep into the bottom shelf, Stone spots a bottle of Mezcal, hidden somewhere painfully obvious. Ta-daa. He wasn’t the one who hid it there, long ago. That’s for certain.

He eats something from the frozen compartment, barely tasting it.

Light years. Three light years. That’s a hell of a lot of distance. Stone has seen distance be utterly dominated by hyperspeed jets and hovercrafts and Robotnik’s attempts at teleportation which were stalled in their infancy by the man’s disappearance. He’d managed to collapse a pear across the room, one telepad to the other, where it appeared so electrically charged they couldn’t handle it without rubber gloves.

You could say, the doctor had snided: that it had all gone a little pear-shaped.

Now, staring at his plastic tray with rice and peppers, Stone has to agree. It really has. It really has.

He sighs, drags his hand down his face. There’s snow falling outside the window in white clumps against overcast grey sky. He realizes the time is beyond him and checks the clock- almost 3pm. The radio still murmurs on, having blended into the apartment’s ambiance since being switched on by an ancient code, one meant to salvage from a crying fit-

Now that the chasm of inaction opens, Stone has time to think. He imagines what the circumstances might've been for Robotnik to create that – the radio, the floorbot, the food. That last bit is a clue: food and coffee being triggered at the sound of crying could imply that most of Robotnik’s lowest moments were born of accidental hunger. Not unreasonable. The radio switching on though… That’s loneliness. That’s to combat fucking loneliness. Distract and create noise.

Stone could’ve done that. Stone could’ve replaced that part of the code.

He wonders if there’s a series of if-then’s that leads to Stone being speed-dialed by the apartment’s surveillance system. If: Robotnik pours another cup of machine coffee down the drain, then: dial Stone so he can brew some on the stove. If: Robotnik needs someone to nod along for three hours of monologuing, then: dial Stone so he can sit there.

If: Robotnik is crying, then: please for the love of god dial Stone, why aren’t you dialing Stone. He massages the bridge of his nose and pulls the tablet closer, sinking his fingers into the house’s organs and fishing for that very subfolder. He goes to request admin, types in the correct command-

ERROR. ACCESS DENIED.

He's almost stumped- it's different codes for different prompt windows, but Stone knows this one too... He'd never advertised the fact, so Robotnik was never tempted to change it... How come it's failing him now- Oh.

Stone types it in again. Same error.

So he goes one more time.

Of course, the third lets him in. It's so frustrating and it's like coming home at the same time, except your house is perpetually on fire. Stone smiles weakly and keeps digging.

It’s beautiful code, really. Always has been. It bleeds Robotnik all over every line, written in a language he himself invented and all his machines run on. Without its knowledge, Stone wouldn’t have been able to rig his café, much less assemble the radar- don’t think about the radar don’t think about the radar, light years, light years.

He checks the audio-commands folder, scrolls by ‘computer, music!’ and ‘computer, evil music!’, and ‘laugh track’ and ‘lockdown’. Finally finds what he’s searching for under ‘failure’. He doesn’t like the section name one bit. In a flight of petty impulsivity, Stone forces his own if-then into the system. Call Stone. If everything is bad fucking call Stone.

That’ll show him.

He identifies the misdirected anger – thank you secondary training – and tries to reign himself away. There is work to be done. It’s somehow 4:30pm. The badnik is long gone due to battery shortages, resting at its charging port. Sleeping.

His mind’s full of every useless venture. Stone contemplates if he could’ve spent his bonus for emotional damages better than buying a brand new mid-quality wardrobe, since the stuff he had from Robotnik’s picking was painfully fancy for Green Hills. If he should’ve moved on right then, let civilian life absorb him. Become Pazir fully, told Maira he hated collages and didn’t give two damns about the Beatles and then kissed her while meaning it- he’s not sure if he even remembers how to do that anymore.

Moot, all of it. He would’ve always ended up here one way or another. There is no place for him somewhere which isn’t a step behind Robotnik. A shadow lost without its anchor. He’s not surprised at this conclusion and can’t deny his voluntary agreement to it. At every crossroads where he was given the option to deviate, he always thought twice and never did leave.

No point in breaking that pattern now, right?

He picks himself up from the barstool and dredges back to the third floor, booting up the sleeping terminals, hoping to cobble together the next five steps.

There is no straight flight path to that planet, obstructed rather inconveniently by the gravitational range of a black hole. Isn’t space supposed to be huge? So huge you’d be lucky to even run into anything out there? Stone projects the potential straight-flights at different times of the year, hoping that the Earth’s position could in some way influence his chances-

So it could. He’d have to wait five years for the perfect window.

Stone whispers, you’re joking, under his breath, you’re joking and it’s so funny- cue laughtrack.

The lab breaks out in that one overused studio recording. It’s jarring but adds levity. Stone thinks.

Considering what sits under the ocean in one of Robotnik’s bases, plus the sudden wealth of time, Stone could arrange a… rocket? Rescue pod? Technically, flying there, then flying back with the doctor is highly inefficient. Space and resource wise. The better case is sending it there empty and having it bring the doctor back... Which Stone hates. It robs him entirely of control over the operation: what if it lands on the other side of the planet? Hm? What if Robotnik’s hurt in some way, handicapped from the crash, which would inhibit him from traveling? Or what if he’s developed a pulmonary condition that would make cryosleep- fuck, he’d need to invent cryosleep – risky or downright impossible?

What if he’s dead? Already. Right now.

No. Stone frowns and pulls up the hovercraft’s activation logs again. The recent most change was three weeks ago, status momentarily switching from active to inactive and back. So he’s alive (or it’s always on active and that was one outage. A bad electromagnetic storm. Wildlife issues. Solar power shortage. Anything).

Okay, let’s say for Stone’s sanity that he’s alive now. But what’s five years later? He bites the inside of his mouth, remembering time dilation. The planet’s bigger than Earth, has three moons, and is closer to the sun. So time’s slower there- only slightly so. Okay, that’s good. At least every one year for Stone isn’t something stupid like ten for Robotnik. Okay-

Next issue: traveling 3 light years would take… Stone doesn’t dare pull up a calculator, feeling Robotnik’s judgment breathe down his neck even here-

About 500 years. That can’t be right, please don’t let that be right- Stone pulls up the calculator.

480. 480 years. That’s Earth years though, it’d be less for Stone in the actual pod (if he were to make the round trip) but… it’d be the same 480 years for Robotnik to wait, give or take.

Fuck.

Robotnik’s not immortal, there is no fountain of youth, and he would most certainly be dead. That’s not even counting the 480 years back. This is so stupid, so clunky and so ugly that it sits like a carved-up wreckage in the beautiful, sleek plane of everything up until now. Stone feels inadequate, looking at the calculator. It’s his fault he doesn’t have the wicked creative chops to fix this, because he’s sure Robotnik would-

A daring thought shoots through Stone’s head.

He has the planet’s coordinates. He has a radar pulser.

Stone sprints for the roof- simple morse. Simple morse can do it, ....  .  ._..  _ _ _ which is just hello- no, that's a waste of time. What does he open with? ‘It’s Stone?’ also stupid, wasteful. He hovers over the clunky radar. He can’t offer Robotnik anything but has to ask for help. How predictable- well, he doubts Robotnik would ever see him for anything more than an occasionally useful yet utterly unsavvy assistant. He’s not ruining his reputation by asking for help.

Stone quickly taps out in the direction of that planet: help me bring you home. I don’t know how-

His finger stalls almost immediately.

The crash of fear into his system kickstarts his heartbeat into that of a heavy sprint. What is wrong with him. Moody, impulsive, and most of all stupid: transmitting not only at this frequency but also inviting a response back is painting a bullseye so large on this house- on Robotnik himself, that it would probably be visible from that very planet 3 light years away.

The government may think Robotnik is missing entirely, but without the radar and Green Hills gossip, they’re likelier to think him in hiding, rather than believe he’d been dropped off somewhere in deep space. And now Stone’s broadcast to fucking everyone that- whatever it is they can extrapolate from those 2 sentences. Mortifying. His secondary training screams: you need sleep desperately.

He drags himself downstairs in a haze of You Fucked Up adrenaline, ordering the house into Stealth mode, watch on high volume in case Robotnik responds in morse. He hopes he doesn’t because that could compromise them further, and yet he hopes he does, because then it’d be a message from Robotnik and Stone could breathe a little easier.

It’s already getting dark outside, damned winter. Stone thinks about beaches and endless sun with the same nostalgia as one might think of home. He’d grown up solidly in Chicago, so no. The wistfulness is… earned through other means.

He deposits himself heavily on the couch and thinks about one of the scant times it was ‘Ivo’.

Hawaii, a trip taken while Robotnik was supposed to be developing a new type of remote control: work so mind-numbing, Robotnik had initiated bloodthirsty rounds of ping-pong in the lab just to avoid even thinking about the assignment.

Pack sunscreen, the doctor had told him gravely one day, we have a flight tomorrow at five a.m. sharp. Then his expression had melted into a conspirator’s joy, no in-flight service unless you want to play flight attendant and serve me wine and lunch, though I doubt that’d be productive. Three guesses as to why, agent.

Stone had sifted through possible answers (both real and trick ones) so quickly, his tired mind now can’t imagine doing the same. Robotnik had been in a sour mood because of the remote, so Stone angled for trick-insult.

Um, because I’m not pretty enough to be a stewardess?

Robotnik wagged a finger, looking at his monitors again, his back to Stone: that’s one down, Stone! Wrong. And I lied about the three guesses, life is cruel. (A smile here, turning back to face him and leaning on the desk) Or, rather, I am. (Smile drops) Because we’re taking the jet and it’s a two-hour flight. Next question: where to?

Three guesses?

(Robotnik smiled wide, catching on that Stone’s playing the previously set rules. It wasn't even a cruel smile. He was just… happy. Maybe. Elated. Or just friendly- all those words felt like sacrilege to think back then. Like even the mere thought disrespected Robotnik’s image) I won’t tell you. Greedy.

(Stone had smiled too, just an uptilt of the lips, trying to estimate in a radius from DC where Robotnik could shoot off towards) Alaska?

What in that over-frozen hell could I possibly need Stone? Two toes less on each foot?

Give me a hint? (Slight tilt of the head, big eyes the doctor hated when utilized against him).

(A frown) Don’t do that, you manipulator. Fine. Joke incoming! In a nuclear attack, they say the only thing that will survive is cockroaches. Which means little will change in America’s government. Laugh track. (The lab exploded with audience applause.)

Stone snorted lightly and watched the way Robotnik was still glaringly hyper-sensitive to being found funny in all the right places. Intentionally, reciprocatively funny. Not being laughed at. Stone was always happy to grant him that honor like it was brand new every day, every hour even. As long as Robotnik kept talking and kept making jabs and jokes and beautiful insults.

(The anecdote clicked into place. Nuclear test sites or hangars… Everything on US soil was too close for a 3 hour flight-)

We’re going to Hawaii?

(Robotnik clapped patronizingly) First guess! I’m disappointed, robbed me so cruelly of the chance to insult your floundering errors. Well, there’s always tomorrow! Actually, don’t give me a chance tomorrow either, Stone, we’ve got a lot of very delicate work ahead of us- block out my schedule or whatever it is you do when out of sight.

They had shot across half the country and miles of ocean. Stone still prepared Robotnik a smoothie for the midway point of their flight. It’d been a slightly older model which came with two seats.

He lies back on the couch and tucks his face into a throw pillow from Turkey. The smell is stale but welcoming. The struggle to equate his jeans and subpar grey jumper, badly kept beard, eyebags, and scattered mind to the excellent state he was in back then is insurmountable. He can’t imagine shaving and getting into a tailored suit right now. Can’t imagine solving riddles like that on the fly and somehow having enough hours in the day to pack for two people, indeed block out a calendar, make a smoothie, coffee, and still arrive twenty minutes early before takeoff.

They’d headed to a long-abandoned secret base off the coast of Hawaii where Robotnik was hoping to fish out some old floppy disks. If this was for blackmail or research purposes, Stone didn’t know. Why they couldn’t send badniks after them, Stone didn’t know too.

Instead, it was about an hour of searching for the thing on a speedboat, then two hours of scuba diving back and forth, Robotnik aided by an underwater self-propelling flashlight while Stone had to use a handheld one, and then thirty minutes back to shore.

But Stone had blocked that schedule out for three days, as instructed.

Watching Robotnik change into an offensively colorful beach shirt and slap on huge sunglasses, Stone realized why they didn’t send badniks after the disks.

Robotnik was here for a vacation.

So was Stone.

Now, he imagines that if not for the remote control assignment, this wouldn’t have happened. Because now, better than ever, he understands the painful misconception of wasted time. The date with Maira, the days he spent not actively moving along his plan to retrieve Robotnik. Even having breakfast felt like a waste. Of course vacation would too.

But this was spite. He didn’t want to work on the assignment so he wouldn’t. He’d spitefully, purposefully waste three days and then slap the remote together expertly in two.

Stone had put on a straw hat, hiding his smile with a tip of the head. Understanding Robotnik. Seeing the way the cogs turned. Addicting, all of it.

They’d hit the bar, then the beach, Robotnik playing a tourist in full flair- then by the end of their first day turning to Stone with a frown and telling him it was all tasteless. Can you even comprehend this level of cultural appropriation? (He’d sounded so indignant, so hurt, someone painfully familiar with the government’s disgusting, controlling nature) I’m not even from any specific country and this is glaringly obvious.

You’re… Not from anywhere? (Stone had overstepped and asked where he shouldn’t have. Maybe the bar was to blame).

(A boundary moved.)

I was made in a lab, agent. (A joke, sure, but mostly a kneejerk defense from coughing up information. Stone huffed a quiet laugh, letting it be just a joke, nothing more. Letting Robotnik move the conversation along- except he’d circled back and revealed something that could’ve knocked Stone prone with its genuine sincerity) The orphanage didn’t have any of that archived, but my parents weren’t American.

Gene testing for lineage exists.

I know.

(Robotnik had dragged them back to the jet, saying: I have something to show you. It was a sandbar-esque island off the coast of nothing. A few tropical trees and some scant bushes. Way too many crabs. A metal trapdoor in the center, and another safehouse basement of Robotnik’s. Oh and a mirage-pad the size of a car which obscured the island from ship radars, satellites, and everyone, everyone, everyone. Another hidden part of Robotnik. Stone hopped out of the jet and made soft contact with the sand.)

Most of the alcohol worn off and hangover canceled by one of Stone’s packed pills, they’d built a fire and chased down crabs- together. Stone with his pants rolled up and Robotnik with his shirt open, jogging across the sand on opposite sides of the beach, trying to corner crabs and throw them into the shared bucket. The memory is so surreal he’s almost tempted to doubt it on occasion. All he's left to do though is be grateful it was real.

Stone had cooked their catch while Robotnik disappeared into the basement. Dinner with a side of unfrozen vegetables and rice. Then coffee and some incredibly stale chocolate. Tipping his head back to look at the sky. Endless with its stars.

Doctor, can I ask a question? (He’d felt emboldened. By everything. Calmed, too, by the location and the allowance to rest on company time.)

You know, Stone, keep in mind that every teacher lied to you. There are bad questions. Think twice, which is asking a lot.

Since I don’t think at all, yes. (But he’d thought about it ever since Hawaii.)

Bullseye. But I won’t pass up shedding some light on your dilapidated ruins of a brain. Ask away.

Doctor, who gave you your name? (Stone didn’t look at him, studying the sky, still. It was safer that way. Because he was undertaking a tremendous risk.)

Robotnik was quiet. Just the sound of waves and a dying fire. Finally: Which one, Stone?

Your first name.

So the ‘Robotnik’ part isn’t what’s confusing? (Derailing the conversation, joking tone.)

(Stone lets him.) No, that makes quite a lot of sense actually. (Spoken with a smile.) Curious about the other.

Learn to ask a question specifically, your hobby of being vague is uniquely hideous.  

(It felt like a trap of Robotnik’s making so Stone braced for the bone-crushing snap of it, once he'd inevitably misspeak) Apologies. I’m asking about the origins of your first name.

(A pause. Quite long.)

Be more specific. Say it.

Ivo.

(Silence. A silence which is so large it rivaled the night sky and Stone finally dared to look at Ivo.)

In Stone's memory Ivo is sitting on the other side of the fire, arms looped around his knees loosely, watching the ocean. Hair all out of sorts and skin angry from the day’s sun. There’s a certain speculative calmness to him Stone doesn’t see often. He wonders how long it’s been since the doctor’s been addressed that way – and when it was last pronounced right. Stone did his goddamn research, week 1 of the job. Just in case.

When the quiet was broken, it was Robotnik’s own obviously baiting inquiry: Who gave you the name Agent Stone?

My parents had a sense of humor.

(He watched it shock a melancholy smile out of Robotnik. He memorized it. Memorized it. Memorized it so maybe someday when he’d be falling apart with his face hidden in the couch he’d have something good left to think about.)

The question remained unanswered, then, and Stone wondered if the exchange implied ‘Ivo Robotnik’ was a name crafted by G.U.N.

Wondered if, like ‘Agent’, Ivo stood for something. An acronym maybe. Intelligence Verified Operative… Who knows.

Except he knows now. Because that ancient notebook was signed Ivo. Because at the end of those three days, back in DC, hosing sand off the jet, Robotnik had shut off the water supply without warning. It forced Stone to lift his goggles and lower the firefighter-grade hose, turning to watch his boss in the hangar’s doorway.

Go home after you’re done, Robotnik shouted across the space, I’m tired of you. And clean my desk, I’ll be needing all the space available for that plebian remote.

Yessir, Stone shouted back. Robotnik left without turning the valve back on, forcing Stone to do the legwork—the usual.

When he went to clean the desk, illuminated only by a screensaver in the otherwise dark lab, Stone had found it strewn with papers. He saw the decorated edge of one peeking from behind another, the first few letters of its title discernable. A birth certificate.

Aware that the lab was crawling with surveillance devices manned by one hugely nosy individual, Stone made sure it was clear he’d seen and recognized the document’s nature before neatly shuffling it into a pile along with the rest and stowing everything away. Not having taken a look.

The next day, Robotnik had stared at him for a very long time. The way he did at puzzles or mysteriously broken prototypes.

Is there a problem? Stone had acted unaware on purpose, and did so badly. So Robotnik could tell Stone knew that he knew. It was almost asking for trouble.

But Robotnik’s face had just soured, proceeding to look away quickly. He’d muttered:

Yeah, you are.

It left Stone smiling to himself for most of the day. He had in some regard won – at least that’s what he’d like to think. Shown Robotnik that he didn’t take miles when offered an inch. That he wasn’t greedy beyond what he needed. And what he needed was Robotnik smiling at the crab bucket and serenely watching the ocean and finding an excuse to have Stone say ‘Ivo’. He didn’t need to invade a heavy past, especially when its bearer wasn’t present.

Now, falling asleep on the couch, Stone can’t really imagine a future.

Chapter Text

Observe in time his beard has grown
into the jug as man and vessel merge.
Together they seem content. He sleeps
because the wine has been drained.
There's no more stress, nor straining for he

no longer feels his hip, his brain, this unbearable
lightness. Now stone
seems to embrace this hallowed notion
of empty, of emptying space, this erasure, this sage
trace we sometimes leave behind. 

“If Stone Dreams” by Mary di Michele

And he does. He does dream, even if for the first few weeks - in that hostel - every night was a void of emotional exhaustion and sleep that felt like it lasted seconds. He’d have a nice evening cry and then drop like dead weight onto the old-school feather pillow. Wake up hours later, feeling like only seconds had passed. That seems like worlds away. No café, no radar, no direction on a spinning compass.

Ultimately, now is not much better. Empirically. Café, radar, and still a spinning compass.

Except, sleeping on the couch, the faint traces of a smell long-associated with comfort lingering in the air, in furniture. And sleeping there, he dreams.

The presence of muddy military days is nearly irremovable from his sleep. Even mundane slice-of-life dreams will have their flashbacks and scenes set very far away from home.

He’s half-kneeling in front of a ticking bomb. His dream doesn’t render the numbers on it well, but he knows that he is painfully and bitterly out of time. He is also out of options. He doesn’t have the right tools and he doesn’t know the right wires, and if he tries to approximate, this building’s going up in dust. His squadron is already out of the unit, leaving just Stone and the bomb and someone else.

Robotnik is across from him, sitting on the floor, wearing ugly combat camo, soot on his face, a helmet. In the dream, Stone gets dropped knowledge that they’ve been in the field for a long time, that Robotnik should’ve therefore left too.

Stone notices he’s wearing his usual silky suit, the one which catches light and gifts it back as a purple sheen. He looks up at Robotnik who’s watching him. I don’t know what to do, he says at the doctor.

Why am I supposed to tell you? You’re all out of hints.

(The bomb ticks its vague countdown.)

Stone pleads, If you don’t, we both die. Both of us.

Aha! Mistake, Aban! (oh god) You could always just leave. (a few seconds, he’s thinking) Or am I talking to Pazir?

Stone stares at him, Robotnik looks younger here-

Please just help me.

My hands are tied, Robotnik gestures with clearly free hands. Then continues with gusto: If not Pazir, what about Agent Stone? (A sharp drop of theatrics, serious all of a sudden) Get your shit together.

I have and it’s not working.

Then try again.

Stone feels so afraid it hurts his chest in a very tangible way, the weight of an unbroken sob, the shadow of a desire to end all this, to retreat so far backward, inward, that it stops hurting and never ever does again. It hurts so much he wakes up gasping an anxious inhale, one that grates into his lungs and shreds them, bleeds them of adrenaline. He lies there, clutching the throwpillow with unyielding knuckles, some half-asleep part of him still waiting for the bomb to go off, eyes wide open against the dark.

The radio still plays. 

He tries to shove his inhales into a breathing rhythm, one he would loudly run through in the hopes of Robotnik subconsciously mirroring – in the days before a deadline or after a canceled project pitch. It used to work back then, sometimes. It doesn’t really work now. He thinks of the dream, of falling back asleep or just closing his eyes and imagining himself getting up from the floor, grabbing Robotnik, and dragging him outside. Away from it all. He knows there isn’t time, and by the dream’s logic, the bomb would go off the second Stone even contemplated escape.

He should’ve. Years ago, he should’ve. Dragged Robotnik ‘outside’. Fought for a break in his schedule and forced him on a vacation which wasn’t petty and wasn’t-

It wouldn’t have worked, he knows. Robotnik is his work and his work is untouchable, immovable. Marked with ytterbium and scattered across the galaxy and always aiming to carve the sort of world Robotnik envisioned... but Stone is in no place to demand Robotnik abandons all that. For what? For Stone? For five years side by side with him? Ten? Silly.

Stone realizes he would trade the world for that. Trade everyone who he hates and everyone who he cares about, would trade the sun and moon, because yes it’s ugly, yes it’s codependent, but they’ve always been two very broken people in vastly different ways. Together. There’s no other choice. He can’t imagine what Robotnik’s like wherever he is, and he doesn’t want to imagine what he himself will become the longer they’re apart.

The radio cuts off.

It’s a silence he doesn’t like, and didn’t expect to miss so sharply. It’s dark now. Night.

The fridge shuts off too. He hears the hum gurgle quiet abruptly- and then a clatter through the dark, something rolling-

Stone shoots up, eyes pained from crying and sleeping and crying again…

The untouchable nightlight rolls across the kitchen floor, dead. Stone swallows past a dry throat.

He clears his throat to try and summon his sole badnik when a loud, truly terrible noise concussions through the house. It’s something between a truck running into a million cymbals and a hyperspeed jet breaking the sound barrier or both of these things at once- before all of it collapses back in on itself, like in reverse, and nearly sucks the air out of the room.

Stone’s ears pop, he feels dizzy, disoriented, everything is once again in utter silence, utter darkness, hard brakes, deadly stillness.

His sense of balance has been thoroughly stirred and he slumps off the couch on accident, rolling onto the floor with an unfortunate slam of the elbow- eyes trained at the ceiling, waiting for something, maybe cracks in the plaster, maybe another grand noise that’ll shake frames off walls. His breathing slowly becomes louder and louder, and Stone belatedly realizes that instead of the breathing getting louder, his hearing is just returning. He hadn’t heard himself falling off the couch, hadn’t heard much at all until now-

His breathing, distant car alarms, and the undeniable noise of something shuffling around on the roof- a heavy rolling, a thunk. Stone wrenches himself upward, even if the floor’s tilting and his feet struggle to carry him at the speed he demands- Stone scales the stairs, arms working double to pull himself along the railing, then again, stumbles on the landing, hits the wall, wrenches himself off of it-

He bodies the last door open with a shoulder.

It’s a disaster.

Quite literally, it looks like an airplane disaster. Grey-white metal clawing skid marks into the snow, wires and pieces of it strewn in chaotic spirals, the greenhouse with its windows blasted gone, just the metal wiring looming, skewed and ugly, over the wreckage – half of it wiped down and deformed by a force Stone can’t imagine, all rubble. Stone stands there, feet planted ready for a second wave of action, terrified straight out of dizziness, heaving winter air as snowflakes resume their twirl through the black- there’s no impact crater, and this doesn’t look like a plane, his brain’s catching up – too small for one, so it’s some sort of drone… It’s really hard to tell with the state of it, how dark it is, middle of the night, cars continue their choir of wailing-

There’s a sound under all of that. Under Stone’s heartbeat and the alarms and a distant trainway, there is a sound.

A human sound.

Stone doesn’t have children of his own, but he remembers that with small nephews, if you were around one long enough, you could tell its cry apart from other children. And people you know well, listen to well, you can tell apart when it's them coughing or laughing or even sighing. It is a form of attentiveness that borders with love. It is knowing somebody so well that the smallest of vocalizations confirms in your mind-

That’s Robotnik.

Stone breaks into a sprint that’s half tripping on metal and snow and half loping big great jumps over rubble to get there faster faster faster. He can hardly see. The biggest chunk of it rests on the far side of the roof.

He rounds the ripped-apart tech and finds what is unmistakably a mutated remnant of that hovercraft’s actual seating pod. The leather is old, discolored even in the darkness, ripped, and against it, nestled in its hold, held up by a tattered seatbelt (Stone’s insistence, long, long ago), is Ivo Robotnik. Stone vaults over a large chunk of the hull, lands on the other side and immediately pivots to the doctor whose head is tipped back at the sky a tad too limply, eyes obscured by goggles.

The last foot of space Stone skids over carelessly on his knees, instantly wet with snow, hands flying to detach the seatbelt. He takes a millisecond to check the sky, make sure nothing else is falling in their direction-

The pod shifts. There’s a terrible metal screeching as it drags against the roof's concrete- away form him. Stone’s heart drops as he realizes it’s being pulled to the roof’s edge: a part of it's hanging over the ledge, connected to this half with thick, straining power-wires. Stone slams his thumb into the seatbelt’s clasp and-

It doesn’t budge.

He tries again, getting his hand under it for leverage, tugging at the stubborn next-gen plastic- notices it's melted together. His knuckles are momentarily pressed to the feverish hot of Robotnik’s solar plexus. They come away feeling dusty. Stone looks around wildly for something sharp as the pod drags another inch away, another cry of metal, fuck him for not carrying a screwdriver with a foldout blade anymore. Fuck him for getting soft.

Stone locates a piece of the hull which looks holdable and menacingly jagged- it's so dark up here, reaches for it, all happening so fast he feels like he hasn’t blinked since bursting onto the roof, eyes dry and wide and focused-

When he turns back to Robotnik with the piece of metal, he’s being studied with an expression between pained and annoyed- Robotnik is conscious, and as Stone reaches for the seatbelt again, brain in a stupor on what to say, Robotnik emits a grandiose sigh and bemoans, clear as day:

“Oh, not you again.”

Stone’s heart twists itself painfully in his chest, not even at the words but just at the impact of hearing Robotnik’s voice. He grabs the seatbelt again just as Robotnik swipes up a lazy hand into the side of Stone’s face-

He makes contact. Tattered gloves to messy beard.

Stone’s world sort of tilts with the light slap. Robotnik’s face falls so quickly Stone feels vertigo, just as he hooks the metal’s edge against that damned seatbelt and starts to saw, occasionally glancing up at Robotnik whose hand is still against the side of Stone’s face, still on his jaw, still two fingers against his ear shell. It keeps patting him there, pat pat pat, warm and tattered and smelling of something earthy in the wrong way- the seatbelt is stubborn, good, high quality (also Stone's insistence, long ago)- the pod shifts again, screeching closer to the edge.

Stone grits his teeth to pain, realizes he’s wasting time and drops the metal, instead stabbing a numb finger into his watch’s interface. Turning to look at it shifts his face out of Robotnik’s reach and the hand falls away. It hasn’t even been a minute.

There is finally a gap to afford exhaling, inhaling, and staring at Robotnik. Robotnik’s goggles reflect the inky sky and the occasional red winking from the distraught ship, then a blue glow from somewhere within its mechanism. Stone’s got fists in the seatbelt. Robotnik’s arms are limp until they aren’t and he’s reaching up to poke harshly into the middle of Stone’s forehead, emitting a robot 'zzt' through his teeth with the motion.

Stone flinches on instinct, and Robotnik just rasps, “Double-checking complete.” Tonal shift, “Oh of course you’re real, you’re wasting time-”

“I’m waiting, the seatbelt can’t be dealt with-”

“Waiting for what, Stone!” Robotnik shouts at him, and Stone’s trained to recognize panic – but also shock and concussions and a million other things- and that’s when the badnik shoots across the roof towards them. Robotnik mutters, “Who invited you,” just as the laser cutter powers on.

Stone beckons it, holds the seatbelt up and taut-

It’s ripped out of his hands as the pod’s yanked sideways, this time sliding over a foot across the roof, wires whining under the pressure, metal crying out against the cement. Stone’s fingers explode with pain as he stumbles and scrambles after it from kneeling. Robotnik is jostled roughly, punching out of him a loud exhale- the badnik speeds over too, activating a flashlight. The harsh beacon of it throws everything in ugly, shadow-lined contrast.

Stone chases after- and with the light now sees there is laughably, horribly little space left until the ledge. He feels adrenaline slam bile into the back of his throat, grabs the seatbelt again, and shouts at the badnik: “Do it.”

The badnik hesitates, eye trained on Robotnik.

Stone shakes the black material: “Cut the belt.”

It stares.

Its primary owner is back. Stone realizes his requests are now once more secondary. It doesn’t stop him from begging a third time, now more plea than command.

“Please cut this.” He stares at its familiar white form. Its red unblinking eye.

And that’s when it breaks out of the hesitation, turns, and zips its laser with surgical accuracy along the belt’s plastic clasp.

The tension makes it almost explode open, Stones grins in some strange impulse as he hooks his hands immediately into Robotnik’s armpits to lug him out.

He pulls with his core, his legs, his arms, and sends himself flying backwards, away from the metal corpse, kicking in the opposite direction as if underwater, as if pulling Robotnik free isn’t enough and he needs to ensure they’re safe four times over-

The disruption and weight change immediately trigger the mangled hovercraft into a violent, graceless plunge straight off the building’s edge. It's swallowed by the dark.

They sit there in the snow. Stone with both hands locked in Robotnik’s flight suit, Robotnik with one arm bracing against the ground and the other holding onto the side of Stone’s neck- both watching the metal vanish from view.

When the sound of it crashing deafens the night, they both flinch.

And then once more it’s quiet. Just a plume of smoke and two sets of heavy breaths. The car alarms have stopped.

Stone can’t tear his eyes away from the ledge, can’t tear his hands away from the flight suit, but he monotones, “House electrical and all systems status report.”

The badnik doesn’t budge and Stone is reminded again that he is no longer in charge, and that the reason for such dethroning is in his grasp right now. Alive and shaking and carrying with it a faint smell of moss and stale lake water. He manages to blink when snow falls in his eye and finally looks away.

Robotnik does not look healthy. Stone felt it while dragging him – it was too easy, he’s too light. He’s starkly bald and his mustache is wild, coarse, badly maintained, and ginger. Stone can see it now, in the soft spotlight. The hand Stone can feel on his neck is alive with tremors. He is alive and in that vitality, he seems to teeter on some edge of utter physical collapse. Stone swallows bile, having not looked into the shades once – where eyes may hide, may study him back, all his flaws, or may simply lie closed – and addresses the badnik again, “House electrical and all systems status report. House electrical and all systems status report.”

It works on the third time, even if he has to sound like a broken record to make it happen. As the badnik loads, Stone begins to pick them up, draping Robotnik’s arm over his shoulder and standing. He’d escorted countless soldiers like this. It has never felt more important than now.

The badnik tattles off that the power box has been decommissioned, backup power is in use, battery is estimated to last between fifty hours to a week. “Start the bath, one hundred Fahrenheit,” Stone tells it, because his watch isn’t synched to this place which is so infinitely inconvenient, “Lockdown protocol, jam radars, scanners, scramble camera footage in a two mile radius. Power up your sibling, get my car ready.” They reach the door downstairs and the badnik shoots off to wake the house back up-

“Bossy,” Robotnik mutters near his ear, he sounds in pain, “I don’t like it.”

“Yeah well,” some manic, desperately scared and elated part of him decides to talk back, “Get back on your feet faster if you wanna do anything about it.”

It’s like hitting the brakes on any further conversation, and by the time Stone gets Robotnik down the stairs, the man’s head is lolling, ankles curling with every step as his feet tangle. The final few yards, Stone bodies most of his weight and drags him, spurred by the heartbeat he can feel where palm meets ribs.

The house has awoken partially, half the lights still off. Stone kicks towels onto the floor and lowers Robotnik down in the spacious bathroom – the size of which always felt unwarranted. Now it seems like a godsend.

“Doctor, can you hear me?” Stone tries, snapping his fingers by the right ear (he's back he's back he's back he's back), a sense of urgency coursing through his body. At least three things at once are quickly speeding in the direction of uncontrollable chaos:

• Something is wrong with Robotnik medically (time sensitive?)
• Huge plume of smoke outside + neighbors probably heard all that (time sensitive!!!)
• Stone’s insane beacon of a signal hours ago (was time sensitive yesterday, worse now!)

Robotnik mutters something in return.

Okay. Stone sighs, “Sorry,” and peels his goggles off- Robotnik flinches hard the second he’s accosted with bathroom lights, Stone doesn’t get a glimpse at his eyes but at least both seem to be there. He quickly fills a toothbrush cup with water, turns the lights lower, and props the doctor up, holding the water to his mouth. Two sips satisfy Stone and he mutters something he forgets immediately – maybe that he’ll be right back – and sprints out of the bathroom.

Fire extinguishers are plenty in the apartment, and Stone falls out of the front door with one under each arm. The wreckage is very easy to find- there are sirens in the distance. Firetrucks. Or police. That 100 degree bath is going to waste this time window.

He douses the wreckage in waves of foam that mix with the snow- then just as he’s about to turn and run back to the house, he sees it.

The disgustingly familiar blue glow, peeking its head from within twisted metal.

Stone feels his face scrunch up, mixed feelings of self-preservation and duty flooding his head. It’s what this entire mess stemmed from. The root of the problem. The first rotten piece which contaminated something beautiful and healthy. Ultimate power in the hands of someone who never knew self-restraint.

A key for the next step of innovation.

The sirens draw closer. He really does not have time to stall, so Stone does what he thinks is right. He’s only human.

On the way back he shuts off every light, kicks a duffel into the center of the floor, and starts to toss anything he can imagine needing inside – mostly medicine, he realizes belatedly. “Firetruck ETA?” Stone calls to the badniks that zip across the house, closing blinds manually and checking window locks. He prepares to parrot the phrase twice more so it’ll take but-

“Two minutes,” chirps his watch, and Stone almost trips on the couch.

“Thank you, make it ten,” Stone answers, resuming shoving boxes of utterly illegal files and project drafts into a secret cupboard in the kitchen island. “Jam navigation and create a roadblock if necessary- topple a telephone poll, I don’t care.”

He remembers Robotnik’s constant internal conflict about digitization versus keeping boxes upon boxes of physical media. Pictures, books, old childhood notebooks… Stone lugs them across the room now, saving Robotnik’s endless possessions once again: theoretically re-employed, he works with a speeding heart.

Everything illegal dealt with, the more personal possessions can rest for now, he doesn’t have the time to hide them too. And if they’re seized, he’ll break into the government’s weirdest vault – if need be. “Take this to the car,” Stone motions to the now two filled bags and jogs to the bathroom.

He’d meant to at least rinse Robotnik down, the more he smells like mold, the more Stone gets worried about alien contaminants. But it’ll have to wait. “Doctor, still with me?”

No response. Stone doesn’t let it get to him, manages to tear Robotnik up off the floor, and begins the terrible process of relocating him into Stone’s car. He locks the house down entirely, makes sure both badniks are with him, Robotnik in the fully flattened shotgun seat, and peels out of the garage. He’s lucky he never unpacked – most of his shit from Green Hills is still in the ca-

He should’ve set the pod’s remains on fire. Utterly, unforgivingly, on fire. So they can’t scavenge any of it. To ashes. To ashes. To ashes.

Stone pulls in a breath, brakes, and gets out of the car.

The flamethrower in the garage is heavy, especially since he doesn’t bother with the shoulder strap. Stone rounds the building like going to war all over again. He can tell by the slosh, the weight, that it’s still fueled up. That he might lose his eyebrows.

Stone turns into the alley where Robotnik’s masterpiece of hovering technology still emits weak streaks of smoke into the night sky. Seconds after, the fire truck stops somewhere on the other side of the building.

Stone inhales, turns his face away, into his shoulder, and pulls the stubborn trigger.

The alley erupts in fire, closer to white than orange, because this too is a Robotnik invention. Old and mechanic and without a single touchscreen, and made expressly for destruction. Destruction of things meant to be fire-resistant, of projects that turn out so ugly they can’t be allowed further existence, projects that he doesn’t want the government to ever lay hands on. And maybe – Stone thinks as the side of his face hurts from the heat – Robotnik’s desire to occasionally create something of massive destructive power.

He doesn’t know how long he forces the flame. How long he destroys a hover meant for solo piloting. How long he destroys what brought Robotnik home. He knows pieces remain on the roof and hopes they are inconsequential or too confusing to be useful.

The heat sputters, gasps, and drowns. The nozzle coughs a final thin stream of smoke, and Stone’s left with a significantly lighter flamethrower, now silent and quickly cooling in the winter wind. He puts it back haphazardly, closes the garage. The stench in the air is impossibly revolting - melting, burning, mechanical smoke.

He turns and runs.

Only in the driver’s seat, shooting toward the interstate, does Stone realize the radar’s been destroyed too. He’d left it in the greenhouse. And the last he’d seen of that, it was half-flattened by the collision.

He drags a hand down his face, dry fingertips along his beard, along chapped, bitten lips. He smells the flamethrower’s grease and that strange moldy tinge under his nails. A sharp change in air pressure, gravitational pull, and velocity… and now again, back. He hopes Robotnik won’t need a decompression chamber, oh god.

Stone looks over to the doctor.

He’s being watched back.

Robotnik is lying with one arm over his creased forehead – not how Stone left him – and peeking out from under it with eyes plagued by shadows. Stone almost feels like crying again, from elation, and instead beams down at Robotnik with a smile that hurts his face- before turning his eyes back to the snowy road, “Welcome back Doctor.”

“What date is it,” comes the rasping inquiry, “And better yet, what year?”

Stone glances at the dash-

Oh.

“December 25, 2020. Merry Christmas, doctor.” He has to blink away tears, though they don’t flow like hours ago. He realizes his mouth’s very dry.

Robotnik sighs and it sounds a little wet, like it could turn into a cough. “You look terrible.”

Stone almost takes insult. Not at the comment but at its lazy, plain, unoriginality. No insult to his specific features, to the state of his beard (which a lot could be said about) or his clothes. Or his undeniably red, puffy eyes.

But it’s something. Stone cracks a wider grin and exhales a weak laugh, “I’ll get right on fixing that sir. On a note unrelated to looking healthy, what would you say your medical situation is currently?”

There’s a silence long enough Stone glances over again- Robotnik’s still watching him. There’s a flavor to his expression Stone is adamant to name, though not yet. It could be sadness. Could be just exhaustion.

“Doctor?”

“I’ll live to our next checkpoint,” Robotnik looks away. “Where to, anyway? I’d much prefer the bath at my place.”

“Too much attention on it,” Stone winces, “I may have used a… very powerful radar pulse from the roof, which I’m sure the government will have a lot of questions about. And not to mention the smoking remains of your hovercraft.”

“What radar,” Robotnik shifts in the shotgun seat, and Stone doesn’t miss his quiet gasp at something undoubtedly accidentally painful. “You utter rockheadeded, lichen-rotted thing. What radar.”

That’s better. Stone turns onto the road heading East. “Um.”

“Stone. Don’t make me infect you with my cultivated alien microbes.”

Oh, okay so that wasn’t an unwarranted fear, Stone thinks. “The R-GDAR.”

Robotnik scoffs, “I’m not in a state of health to survive your little jokes, Stone. Get on with it.”

“That’s not a joke, doctor,” Stone marvels at the flippant delivery of Robotnik’s threat. He really must be tired. “I recreated it from your blueprints. To attempt to um, locate your hovercraft. Sir.” It all suddenly sounds so stupid. Like he's a schoolboy showing off basic arithmetic to an old mathematician. 

More silence. Stone looks over again from the empty road.

Robotnik’s staring at him. Bloodshot eyes wide (pressure change, Stone thinks), mustache downturned.

“The new mustache suits you, by the way,” Stone forces himself to try and give Robotnik another dialogue tree to chase. This one seems to be giving him an unfair amount of trouble. Eyes back on the road. “I can’t imagine the steady hands and unflappable resolve one needs to shave the back of their head without modern razors, sir. It’s unbelievably impressi-”

“Oh shut up,” Robotnik barks, “You built the G-DAR? Just form nothing? Went and built it?” He sounds scandalized. Actually angry. 

Stone looks over again, beginning to fear for his ability to rule this one out just a little bit. It’s an upsettingly nostalgic feeling.

“It was the only way to find you that I could think of,” Stone accidentally gets defensive which old instincts scream at him is a bad tactic. He’s out of practice. He’s letting himself get personal. Eyes back on the road. Still clear. Robotnik’s ire bores into him almost tangibly from the side.

“Yeah so you just thought of it and built it? Little mister wonder here? Get a lot of gold stars for seventh-grade science fair?” Robotnik speeds, louder and louder. “And it worked?”

For a second Stone is caught thinking 'who the fuck is Mr. Wonder' and 'wow is he also off his game if he couldn't find a better comparison'. Then snaps to it, “Yessir.”

“Unbelievable,” he lets out, scandalized. Then a sigh. The shortlived energy seems to leave him, and when Stone glances back over, Robotnik is watching the window from where he lies. “You turned it on just a few hours ago, didn’t you?”

Stone checks the time again: early into the a.m.’s of the 25^th. “Something like that.”

“Mmm.”

The highway stretches infinitely and so does their silence. Stone’s happy just listening to Robotnik breathe, really-

“Turn the radio on at least, you soulless android,” Robotnik mumbles from the side. Weird request. Stone frowns at the road as he breaches the speed limit steadily.

“Wouldn’t you prefer your music, sir?”

There’s more shuffling, and a glance confirms Robotnik’s staring at him again.

“You have my music?”

“Of course I have your music,” Stone smiles so wide his bottom lip splits painfully, “Name the playlist.”

Robotnik blinks at him owlishly – perhaps a new hobby – and nods before uttering: “Red Christmas seems the most… applicable.”

“On it,” Stone smiles, and taps at his watch. It’s fast and practiced and reveals the ugly truth of his familiarity with the motions. A dad rock cover of Lady in Red spills from the car speakers like hot coffee. It warms Stone from the inside much the same. He can’t quell the smile and the tapping as his fingers chase after the beat along the steering wheel. And when the vocals start, Stone mouths them at the windshield, and his chest hurts with the utter joy of this development.

Robotnik’s back.

Sick, maybe, a bit off, sure. But alive. And right now. Not 500 years from now, not light years away, right here and right now in Stone’s car. It doesn't feel real. Warm, not a dream, human. He thinks of Karen and her Ethan that was lost forever and ever with no answers. Thinks of how she still waits for him, or at least for those missing answers. Thinks about Ivo on the beach and Dr. Robotnik in the lab and the blackbox where Dr. Robotnik stopped being entirely. Remembers standing in the lab and thinking: Have I made it? Has it worked out? Have all the roadbumps to this point payed off?

Will the roadbumps onward pay off too?

At least he knows the answers to the last two: yes and yes.

He loves it. Stone needs to allow himself to love a little more. Life’s too short, too unpredictable. He can’t waste another 5, 10 years simply ‘liking’ – and even then, barely so. The confidence to do this forever from now on fills him illogically and with burning promise. He feels drunk off the thought: he's back and he's here.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again. Ever,” Stone says at the road. Snow clumps at his windshield and is wiped away every few seconds at a steady rhythm. “It was a terrible thought. Please never disappear on an alien planet ever again. At least not without me.” It’s a painfully scary thing to say. To ask for.

Robotnik’s smile is audible in his lightly, kindly, mocking answer: “Oh agent, did you really bury me that quickly? I was just on a little vacation.”

Stone chokes out a laugh, unable to curb a single tear that dashes down his face. “Of course you were. And um, I’m not an agent anymore.”

“Wow, what did they fire you over? Accidentally installing malware from an email about herbal Viagra?” His voice is forgiving. Stone doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to forgive himself for the utter fumble of the last few weeks.

But he laughs again, “Um, left actually- and either way would’ve been written off as ‘mentally unfit’. Happens when they find you scared and shaking after two days trapped in a lab on lockdown.”

“Oh like you were actually trapped or scared.”

“Not because of the lockdown. I was-”

“My lab!” The panic in Robotnik’s voice is ugly the second he remembers. Losing something so unequivocally yours after a lifetime of losing people, things, places, and everything else imaginable – down to maybe his own name – must hit hard, Stone imagines. He realizes a second later he might be projecting.

“They cleared it, I imagine. The location might not be wise to visit anymore.” He can hear where Robotnik inhales to start throwing a tantrum, and quickly keeps talking over it, “I got most of your projects out of it though, redistributed across your safehouses, sir. Drivers duplicated and wiped. Anything I could, I removed before they closed it down.”

An exhale from Robotnik’s side. Stone makes the music a little quieter. The snow grows heavier. A white Christmas after all.

“And my badniks?”

“Safe and sound.”

“Where? I’ve only seen two here. I can’t believe you’d leave them to just collect dust in a safe house, Stone, they’d be lonely there.”

Stone shoots the road a quiet glare, because Robotnik loves to humanize his creations only when it inconveniences Stone or pulls at his heartstrings. “No. They’re at my place in Montana, doctor. Where we’re headed right now.”

He hears Robotnik instantly groan from the passenger seat: “For the love of every god from A to Z, Stone, don’t tell me we’re heading back to Green Hills.”

Chapter Text

Two hours into the trip and one hour into Robotnik’s restless sleep in which he mutters and drags wet breaths, Stone pulls into a motel parking lot. The music has been long turned into a whisper and Stone doesn’t yet touch the engine. Just sits there with his hands still on the wheel and blinks at the view, at a little teal van collecting snow, at the grey Subaru nearly buried by it. It’s overcast and the clouds refract streetlamps and highway lights, turning a dark purple-red. It’s beautiful because it’s winter, because it’s Christmas. Because Robotnik is back. It’s peaceful. The right kind of quiet.

Stone’s known a lot of different quiets:

His bedroom. Traffic outside. Quiet because he’s alone at home after school four days of the week.

Hidden by camo for hours, waiting in a dead silent forest.

The lab while Robotnik is off at a conference he couldn’t bring Stone to. While he’s off in a meeting.

The year where Robotnik was gone entirely.

Stone knows what it boils down to. This quiet is good because there’s his doctor, wheezing in his sleep.

He enjoys this moment of peace before it’ll all pick up pace again. Breathes it in, memorizes it. Looks at himself in the windshield and the rearview mirror. It’s a moment just for him and his beaten, cried-out reflection. Stone sighs and rubs at his face. His hands hurt. It’s a long moment. He has time.

Then he leaves the car, keeps it running, full of ambient noise, and jogs through the snow. It gets in his sneakers, against his socks, his skin, cold and painful. The receptionist is incredibly young, high, and so dejected from her surroundings she doesn’t even ask for Stone’s ID. When asked for his name, Stone accidentally says Abraham Eggan.

He feasibly cannot carry the doctor on his own, no matter how dearly he wishes to accomplish such a feat. In a perfect world, Stone would scoop him up and deposit him already in their room. This world is beautiful but deeply flawed. He reparks the car closer to their door and hopes no one is watching. They’d see a terribly dressed man (jeans, t-shirt, sweater, overpriced bomber jacket) drag a limp body across the parking lot (in a tattered onesie). 

He unloads the car, sends a badnik to scramble security footage of their arrival, then jogs back out and switches his license plates while the egg’s at work. Upon his return the doctor is still sleeping, and Stone washes his hands obsessively, suddenly feeling like a surgeon in front of a grand audience. His palms sting, and Stone only now notices they’re missing skin in patches. He realizes it must be from the belt being ripped out of them earlier. Or something else. He can barely remember the crashsite.

A fair share of field checks have been done by Stone, determining the survivability of other soldiers. He checks both ears with a flashlight – no blood. Nose, he does find traces of blood in, fresh but not excessive. Breathing is irregular, and as Stone listens, he can hear it’s not a clean sound. Congestion. He finds burns along the doctor’s hands as he peels his gloves off. Mechanical burns, from soldering or brushing against overheating machinery. Most old, one new. He cleans them. Careful yet efficient. Cleans his nails too, trims them. Disinfects everything. Then battles the flight suit’s clasp so he can peel it off like the gloves.

Doesn’t like what he sees. Hates what he sees. Farmer’s tan, bruising crisscrossing his chest where the belt almost broke him while saving his life, visible ribs. Other bruising, rashes that Stone recognizes as a typical Robotnik allergy to food or something airborn. He sighs into the quiet room with half its lights off and leans back on the bed’s edge, examining the marks. It makes him directionlessly angry. The badnik comes back, reporting success in all its given agenda. It joins its sibling in the corner.

He wakes up Robotnik. It doesn’t work all the way, the doctor barely responds and staggers to the shower he’s directed to in stumbling, zigzagging steps. Stone watches him go and contemplates the necessity of going after him and helping scrub him down, versus letting Robotnik keep his privacy – something the man fights over like it’s his own Great War.

Stone settles for surrendering Robotnik some clothes and waiting right outside with an ear pressed to the door, hand on the knob so if he hears Robotnik fall or start thrashing or something, he’ll be there.

The wait doesn’t feel long – not until there’s commotion that is, until the water shuts off. The cut-off jostles Stone from a stupor. He’d zoned completely out at the wall with half-lidded eyes. It’s not the first sign, but perhaps the strongest yet, of how tired he is. Under all the adrenaline, under all the relief.

He waits some more, then gently knocks on the door, “Doctor, are you dressed?”

There’s a nondescript answer that doesn’t penetrate the wood and Stone sighs before turning the knob, eyes on the floor just in case he’s screamed at for intruding… It’s quiet. He finds Robotnik’s feet on the tiles, a puddle accumulating around each, as Robotnik sits on the tub’s edge. He’s partially dressed, having given up half-way through the t-shirt which now hangs on his neck. The sweatpants are held even more dejectedly in his hands.

It's a bit of a circus, the next few minutes. Stone’s wearing socks which drench instantly, Robotnik is slippery on the tiles. He gets his arms through the shirt holes with far less help than the pants require, huffing up a storm from the effort. Stone’s torn between the burning need to keep touching Robotnik because he’s so real and so very warm… and yet the ingrained knowledge that it is entirely inappropriate given their professional relationship-

Stone frowns, with Robotnik’s arm around his shoulder as he drags the other back to one of the beds. ‘Professional relationship’. That’s not him talking, that’s training. Skipping work to go dick off in Hawaii together is not professional. Spending weekends on Robotnik’s couch and re-hiding the same bottle of alcohol around his flat isn’t professional. Letting your entire life orbit another person’s lack of one isn’t professional – and not a great relationship either. Except that phrase is fully reversible: Stone’s lack of a life that Robotnik focuses on- or focused on all the time. Like a hobby. Having a pet you do research about on your off-days for fun. Stone desperately needs to go to sleep, his mind is tripping down a spiraling staircase. He sighs and helps Robotnik – who never finished waking up in the first place – lie back down.

Before he’s lost to the world again – bad phrase, before he’s asleep – Stone forces two multi-vitamin gummies, an anti-congestional, and two anti-allergy tablets into Robotnik, then makes him actually climb under the covers instead of conking out on them, and finally lets himself step back.

A lot of things hurt. His chest, perhaps the most.

Stone turns and leaves.

Changed into something new, he gets back in the car and sets for the closest drugstore. Everything else is closed, and Stone laments both the date and the hour- though when the 24/7 McDonalds sign winks at him from a billboard, he starts changing lanes with nary a thought. The place is ruled by a small group of celebrating teenagers and a smattering of people dozing at lone tables. Stone over-orders on panicked, hungry accident and feels almost silly carrying the comically large take-out bag to his car. The salon inside smells of stale lake water and he gives the passenger seat a wipedown with disinfectant. He forgets to turn any music on at all. Soon the smell of fries and burgers overwhelms the interior.

Robotnik is still asleep. Stone devours a burger, wolfing it down too fast to taste, dripping sauce onto the wax paper it came in. Fresh, not recently frozen. He burns his gums – it wasn’t a long drink.

All the while, eyes glued to Robotnik, rationing out how often he needs to blink. It’s like meditation – counting out the doctor’s breaths, letting himself wonder if his heartbeat has stabilized. He needs to know. Hands, mouth, and beard cleaned with drugstore wet wipes, Stone clears the distance between his lone motel chair and the bed in two strides, dead silent on the brown carpet.

Two fingers at Robotnik’s neck. (He’s warm, alive!) He doesn’t wake (bad), but his pulse is only slightly elevated. The stress, probably. The shock of it. Stone breathes out and realizes he hasn’t inhaled in a second. His eyes sting again. Merry fucking Christmas.

In the bathroom he shaves, for the first time in years, entirely clean. Sure their only witness so far – the girl at the register (oh god, and the drugstore employees and the ones at McDonalds, he’s gone soft and stupid and he’s so tired) has seen him with a beard, but Stone hopes to muddy the search like this. Plus, his doctor already looks different. Stone’s just playing catch-up.

Washes his face, showers, applies ample product from the drugstore to his hair, lathers himself with soap. His knees sting where thin, now wet scabs have formed. The jeans he’d peeled off were rubbed-through at the knees, a little bloody. He can’t remember from what. His right arm doesn’t want to unbend all the way without a deep ache in the elbow. His head hurts.

His reflection looks different. Softer in the features, a little scared. His eyes are bloodshot- he should check Robotnik’s pulse again.

Stone pads out of the bathroom, dressed in spare clothes he’d packed (the ones he stripped stink of smoke, folded on the bathroom counter). He goes to check the pulse but he’s tired. So very tired. Stone sits down to do it. Eyes unfocused. The lights are off everywhere but the bathroom, casting deep shadows with only the slightest yellow illumination.

He studies Robotnik. Refreshes his memory of the man. Worries he’ll die in the night. He’ll die and Stone will wake up with a cold body. He needs to stay awake and make sure this doesn’t happen. He needs to stay awake. He needs to.

He wakes with a start, surfacing into a full-body ache and deep, yawning disorientation. Horizontal, a cheap sheet under his cheek- his face feels weird, itchy and sore, eyes almost stuck shut. Still air, loud, slow breathing nearby.

It comes back to him, crashes into his mind with a headache when Stone manages to finally open his eyes. Adrenaline in the words Robotnik is back electrocutes his system, fires him up, all systems online. Stone sits up. He’s terribly thirsty. The fading tendrils of a dream slough off him, let him go.

The doctor’s hand – he’d fallen asleep on the bed next to him, right, what time is it – has just finished moving quickly in a highly suspicious maneuver. Stone’s first conclusion is: he was touching me in my sleep. Or holding on. His second thought is: that’s stupid, this is Robotnik.

His third, as he rakes his eyes over a very insincerely sleeping Robotnik, is: no he absolutely was. This is Robotnik.

He thinks about the box under Robotnik’s bed. It’s almost juvenile. Not in a safe, not under the floorboards. Under the bed. Not even password-protected.

Stone lumbers off the doughy mattress. He feels like he’d fallen asleep down a flight of stairs. He’ll play along and pretend Robotnik is asleep too. With creaking fingers Stone gets the infrared thermometer and takes the doctor’s temperature. 100.5 flashes on screen. Stone habitually starts planning – if the doctor is too sick to travel right now, Stone will need to find a safer place to put him – and not a safehouse at that. They are not and never have been humane living environments. Tuck the doctor away somewhere and go off on his own, get a medic to look at him. An old colleague that defected? He knows a few. Stone’s safety and first aid training is unshakeable but he’s no doctor. How’s he meant to deal with pulmonary diseases?

Running a hand down his face, Stone remembers he’s shaved clean. Sighs quietly.

He gets dressed slowly and with his teeth clenched. There is a seeping of cold air from under the front door which curls into the fabric of his socks.

“I’ll be a second, just going to the car,” Stone says to the still air and leaves. Carefully. Slowly. Glancing both ways once the door has been cracked open. No one is in ambush. He stands and listens to sounds of excessive shuffling or breathing from the roof and overhang… Ducks back inside and crouches by one of the badniks to have it scan for lifeforms.

It doesn’t work great through walls but alerts Stone of no nearby heat signatures aside from the room’s occupants and the hot water pipes.

To the door again. Another slow inching of it past the jamb. It’s glaringly bright out, the snow reflecting an overcast grey sky. 11 am.

Stone plods to the car, looking around in a way he hopes doesn’t stink of paranoia. One of the boxes in the trunk has to hold the little flymite. He won’t send the badniks out in broad daylight to take a peek at the house – he can’t believe he fucking set something on fire right next to it yesterday. He doesn’t know how he’ll tell Robotnik the whole thing burned down. The winter air bites at him and bites at him.

The mite is found, sent off, the kettle in the room gurgles and sputters, Stone sitting at the little table and watching the mite’s readings ping off on a badnik screen. The TV is on quietly. A car had caught on fire… completely charred… mark unidentifiable. There are vans parked on that street which weren’t there before. Stone idly itches his jaw, the skin there feeling weird and tender. The doctor is still ‘asleep’- every time Stone glances over, there is a minute flicker of the eyelids shutting. He wonders what the silence is about – is all this awkward? The intimacy built up over years, washed away by time and distance? He needs to go to a grocery store. He can’t make himself, not when Robotnik is awake and likely to get restless in Stone’s absence. Stone gives the mite its command to return.

He'll have to embarrass himself so hard that the doctor is shocked into compliance.

Stone gets up and walks over, stopping by the bed’s side and taking a second to soak in the physical presence of his luckiest find. Then, wincing with the discomfort of it, Stone kneels beside the ‘sleeping’ doctor.

Elbows on the bed edge, hands clasped, Stone bores his eyes into the doctor’s profile and starts: “The house hasn’t been breached yet, we can’t stay here too long, but we haven’t been tracked yet-” this, he technically cannot know. Fully possible that whoever would be investigating a mysterious EMP at a residence that, even if unlisted, belongs to Robotnik is simply biding their time. “I’ll get us back on the move immediately but first I need to buy a few more things – short drive away, I won’t be gone longer than an hour.”

He makes his voice sound stern yet with a strong undercurrent of emotion. He doesn’t necessarily feel it but can draw from the endless reserves of devastation that Robotnik’s absence festered.

“I need you to remain here. I will come back soon, but I can’t stand to lose you again, please don’t go outside or do anything that may draw attention to this room, please,” and his trump card: “Ivo.”

There is no tell except for the loss of rhythm to Ivo’s breathing. For just a second.

Stone gets up, feeling yesterday’s commotion echo up his legs, and redresses to head outside.

In the car he slowly, as the wheels eat miles, winds his mind away from Ivo and back to Robotnik. So it doesn’t slip out later, after this intentional allowance of intimacy. He hopes the impact will keep his doctor out of self-made trouble until Stone’s return.

He needs to buy a coffee grinder.