Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Westopolis was normally one of Sonic’s favorite places on all the Islands. The rolling hillsides on which the city proper was built afforded a breathtaking view of the harbor and, beyond that, the crystal waters of Westopolis Bay. On sunny days like this, he could climb up onto the roof of one of the city’s many red brick high rises, or even the lighthouse in the harbor, and enjoy some of the most scenic views on the planet in every direction. Hell, if the bay was calm enough, he might even set aside his fear of water and go racing across it just for the sheer thrill of it, and few things beat watching the last rays of sunlight create a brilliant ray of light across the bay, as if revealing a hidden bridge he could run on for eternity.

Unfortunately, two things were killing the vibe today. The first and most pressing of these was a sudden assault by Dr. Eggman’s forces. The old doctor had been strangely quiet since making off with one of the Chaos Emeralds following the whole incident at the Clean Sweepstakes nearly a year ago, never executing more than the occasional small scale raid or scavenging operation until today. Everyone figured he was trying to get a lead on the location of the other Emeralds and rebuilding his army before making his next big move, and the Restoration was too busy rebuilding their wrecked headquarters and networks to devote much manpower to hunting for the Emeralds themselves in the meantime.

That meant there were likely no Emeralds in Westopolis currently, which only further begged the question of what precisely Egghead was up to here. “Gotta say, Eggman really didn’t think this one through!” Sonic shouted as he ripped through another Buzz Bomber. “I mean seriously, a single front attack in broad daylight? Talk about low effort!”

“It could be a feint,” Amy replied through his earpiece. The sound of her trusty hammer crushing a robot burst through the speaker before she continued, ”Jewel’s sent out messages to the other nearby branches to stay on high alert, and we’ve got Whisper and Tangle watching for potential second waves . You just focus on taking down this bunch and we’ll go from there.”

“Don’t gotta tell me twice, Ames” Sonic replied as he sent an Egg Pawn flying with a kick to the dome. He glanced skyward to where the Tails was working to shoot down any missiles and drop pods that made it past the harbor’s defenses, his trusty Tornado weaving amongst enemy fire as if it were a dragonfly dancing around raindrops. “Any sign of where Eggman’s running this circus from, bro?”

“My readings indicate he, or whatever he’s using as a command proxy, is in the west most Egg Destroyer,” Tails replied. “The one taking shots at the lighthouse. I’d hurry up though, if I were you.”

Sonic Jumped up to the top of the nearest building and started roof hopping towards the lighthouse, noting with some concern as he ran the multiple flares of impacting gunfire that flickered around it. The Restoration had set up a shield dome of Tails’s design for it some months ago, hoping to protect such critical infrastructure from attacks like this, but Sonic had no idea how much punishment it could really take. “I’m on it, little buddy,” Sonic said as he bounced off another robot, sending it careening into the street below. “Though why you are telling me of all people to hurry is-“

“RAAAGH!” A familiar voice, echoing with rage, sounded up ahead, and Sonic saw a flare of electrical discharge arc over
The rooftops right after.

“Because Surge is headed that way too,” Tails said.

Right. The other reason Sonic couldn’t relax in Westopolis these days. Sonic grimaced and pushed himself to pick up the pace.

Surge the Tenrec was, more than ever, a wildcard. After getting a taste of the spotlight during Sonic’s stint as the Phantom Rider, Surge had more or less thrown off the “Kill Sonic” portion of Dr. Starline’s mental conditioning in favor of her “become the hero” directive. She and her sidekick Kitsunami wandered from place to place for a time, popping up briefly on the Restoration’s radar whenever they stepped in to help (to variable effect) with whatever crisis they happened to be present for, before putting down roots in Westopolis some six months ago.

And by “putting down roots” everyone really meant “Surge beat the stuffing out of a local gang, commandeered their warehouse hideout as ‘payment’ for her services, and dared the local authorities to try and make her move out”.

Since then, the two cyborgs had established themselves as “heroes for hire” (Surge’s precise words) and the self-proclaimed protectors of the city. The Restoration was initially concerned that they were just trading the gang’s relatively minor criminal enterprise in for a major potential threat, but for all her prickliness Surge and Kit were proving a reasonable, if ungovernable, pair of allies for the local branch.

In fact, setting aside Surge’s proclivity for property damage and the brutality with which they dealt with any crooks that ran afoul of them, Sonic begrudgingly admitted that she and Kit were doing good work. Criminal activity in the city, once a constant pain in the Restoration’s side, was at an all time low. This freed up time and resources for infrastructure repairs, upgrades, and aid work around the region that had gone neglected for far too lonh. Sonic wasn’t sure he agreed, but the occasional influx of street toughs with mangled limbs and burns at local hospitals was deemed an acceptable price to pay for peace and progress by the Restoration at large.

As for the locals, Westopolis seemed acclimated to, even happy with, the duo’s presence in the city. The younger cohorts, in particular, were big fans. On his last visit Sonic found a mural in the city’s largest park, courtesy of a local graffiti crew, depicting Surge, her face half obscured in shadow and eyes aglow with vengeful light as she stood in front of a stylized rendition of the Westopolis skyline. A declaration in blocky, black letters trimmed in yellow declaring “Mean Green is Watching” underlined the image, and Sonic was dumbfounded by the obvious care and respect the artists had put into their depiction. Then, today, he’d spotted a pair of young porcupine girls sporting Surge’s signature upright ponytail among the crowd while helping Amy evacuate the districts close to the harbor. The notion of Surge having an actual fan club nearly floored him, and the image of her spitting and snarling about a bunch of little kids jacking her style was comedic food he’d be savoring for weeks.

Sonic rounded the corner into the open square leading up to the lighthouse, and immediately was met with the flying remains of a well cooked Motobug. Fast reflexes alone dropped him into a roll before he got hit, and upon popping back up to his feet Sonic found himself witness to a truly poetic scene of robotic carnage.

Surge stood atop the smoldering remains of a gargantuan Caterkiller and several Egg Pawns, the severed head of the former dangling at the end of the wires she held in her grip like a grisly flail. Behind her, Kit was perched on top of a large fountain as a pair of water tendrils under his command crushed two more Buzz Bombers in their grip.

Kit noticed Sonic as he came to a stop and shouted something at Surge that Sonic couldn’t pick up over the din of battle around them. Surge whipped her improvised weapon around to smash a pair of Vultrons attempting to dive bomb her, then turned to face Sonic with a scowl.

“I thought I smelled chili and sanctimony,” Surge groused as her grip on the wires in her hand tightened. She hopped down off the wrecked Catterkiller and squared up to Sonic. “Here to see how the real pros trash bots? Or did the Restodorks ask you to present the latest lecture about restraint?”

A trail of sparks shot down each of her arms and collected around her fists with a menacing crackle. “I ain’t got the patience for the latter today, Lamehog.”

Sonic crossed his arms and took a moment to give Surge a once over, both because he hadn’t seen her in months and to show her he wasn’t intimidated by her posturing. Her stance, while aggressive, was more relaxed compared to the tightly coiled tension he remembered from their last encounter. He hoped it was a sign that she didn’t hate him quite as much as she used to, but he wasn’t holding his breath.

She’d also changed up her look a bit. She still sported the usual baggy yellow pants, albeit with the waistline belted a bit lower on her hips , and steel toed shoes. She’d traded in the loose, ragged black shirt he was used to seeing for a sleeveless, high-necked crop top in the same color that was a much tighter fit. The garments highlighted the wiry muscles of her exposed midriff and shoulders as well as it drew attention to the slight curvature of her torso and chest, though Sonic was confident Surge was thinking only of the former when she chose the outfit. She’d also kept the yellow sunglasses she’d worn during the Clean Sweepstakes, the sheen of late day sunlight reflecting off them hiding her eyes from his sight, and added a couple more rings (no doubt made of conductive metals) to her fingers.

Quite the fashion statement, Sonic concluded. Very “why yes sir, you are indeed about to get your ass handed to you by a girl” coded.

“Good to see you too, Sparky,” Sonic said. “Love the outfit, real summer vibe.”

“Cut the shit before I cut you,” Surge snapped. “Are you getting in my way or not?”

“I’m helping, if you can believe it,” Sonic shot back. “Or are all these bots just here on holiday?”

“We don’t need your help!”

Kit’s tendrils whipped one of the Buzz bombers he’d crushed through the air with surprising speed. The metal husk crashed to the ground just to Sonic’s right, a clear warning shot, and he glanced Kit’s way with a raised eyebrow. “Nice throw,” Sonic said to the little blue fox, deadpan.

Kit’s eyes flared a luminous pink and he spat on the ground.

Sonic sighed in resignation and turned back to Surge. “Look, Sparky, I don’t have time for a grudge match right now. Eggman might be on that ship down there and-“

”Is he now?” Surge smiled wide, her razor sharp teeth on full display. “How convenient. Kit!”

“Yes Ma’am?” Kit didn’t take his eyes off Sonic.

“Yes, Surge,” Surge hissed, and Kit flinched. “Protect the lighthouse. I’m going to teach Dr. Fatass what happens when you screw with my city.”

“On it” Kit affirmed, and with a concentrated blast of water from his hydro pack he launched himself towards the lighthouse.

Sonic glared at Surge. “I need him alive, Surge. We don’t know what he’s been planning.”

Surge’s grin grew even more manic, tiny flares of electricity popping out from behind her shades and dancing across her teeth. “Guess you better beat me to him then.”

Dropping the Catterkiller head, Surge belted it at Sonic with a thunderous kick. It only took him a moment to dodge it, but that was all the time Surge needed to blast off towards the coastline with a malevolent laugh. Sonic growled and set off in pursuit, the remaining streets between him and the harbor proper blurring into a mess of colors and sounds as he ran as fast as he safely could to catch up to Surge. The occasional Badnik whizzed past in his peripheral vision, and he cursed not having time to stop and make sure the machines didn’t cause too much damage to the city.

The streets shortly emptied out into a marina full of civilian ships, the Egg Destroyer in the distance a hideous black and red stain on the otherwise pristine bay. He caught sight of Surge just as she launched herself off the edge of the nearest dock with a blast of electricity and, seeing as he was finally in an open space, Sonic pushed himself to near his limit to gain ground on her. The familiar shift in air pressure that accompanied breaking the sound barrier brought a smile to his face despite the seriousness of the situation and the pit that threatened to open on his stomach at the sight of so much damn water.

Surge might be a pain in the ass,and he’d never admit it aloud, but Sonic appreciated the opportunity to go all out during run-ins with her.

The rumbling report of the Egg Destroyer’s weapons firing off another salvo brought Sonic out of his reverie just as he jetted off the shoreline and onto the water. Several of the missiles in the barrage dropped low and started skimming along the waterline towards Surge and himself. Sonic saw several fast moving wakes making a beeline for them as well. Aquatic Badniks deployed to protect the ship, no doubt.

Good. Every bot and shot headed for the two of them was both one less threat for the city to deal with and more fun for him. Sonic bobbed and weaved around a pair of Choppers that tried to bite at his legs with an excited woop. The shift In air pressure as he sped by pulled the two robots off course, and they crashed into each other with a satisfying crunch in Sonic’s wake.

At this point, Surge was mere yards ahead of him, but memories of how she nearly cooked him in a flooded room during the whole Dynamo Cage incident reminded him that perhaps it was best not to try and pass her while on the water. Sure enough, a pair of Manta tried to intercept her, only to fall victim to the lethal amount of current she pumped into the water around her with each step. Eggman either didn’t know Surge was in town or didn't expect her to get involved if he was going to use methods and units so obviously vulnerable to her powers as the bulk of his force.

More sloppy mistakes. The doctor’s ego blinded him to occasional critical details, but he wasn’t usually this careless. It was making Sonic’s quills itch with worry. He needed to figure out Eggman’s game before Surge quite literally ruined everything, and first and foremost that meant beating her to that ship. Fortunately, the incoming swarm of missiles gave him an idea.

Sonic’s eyes locked onto the first missile that would reach him, and narrowed. It was clearly heat seeking, if not under orders to chase him specifically, judging by its movements. If he didn’t want it to correct course and still hit him, then his timing needed to be just—

Now!

Sonic leapt and curled into a ball a mere moment before impact, the missile unable to adjust its path before passing underneath him. Sonic uncurled momentarily and pushed off of it, throwing himself towards the next closest missile to repeat the process. By pinballing from missile to missile in this fashion, Sonic was able to fully close and then pass with Surge without touching the water, and he laughed as the missiles behind him started crashing into one another in an effort to redirect towards their target. A barked expletive from Surge, muffled by the wind and subsequent explosions, was an added bonus.

With a final, mighty leap, Sonic landed on the polished steel deck of the Egg Destroyer and bolted for the hatch leading into the vessel’s interior. “I’m closing in on Egghead’s command center, little bro,” Sonic said into his earpiece. “You in position to pick me up if he tries to scuttle this thing with me on it?”

“Right behind you, Sonic!” Tails responded. “Just need to clean up the last of these flyers. ETA three minutes.”

“Betcha I’ll have him wrapped up before you- whoa!”

a bolt of lighting struck the deck in front of Sonic, forcing him to skid to a stop. A faint smell of ozone and a shift in the air followed, kicking his reflexes back into gear, and he hopped to the side just before Surge slammed down fist first onto the deck with enough force to dent the metal plates. “Watch your aim, man!” Sonic said as he planted his feet in a loose fighting stance.

“I am!” Surge growled, positively glowing with energy as she rose to her feet, singed fur and burnt skin flaking away as her healing factor kicked in. She dashed at Sonic and threw a series of electrified jabs at him. “You could have killed me with that missile stunt, fuckwit!”

Sonic bobbed and weaved around her strikes with a grin. “Aww come on, Sparky!” he said. “I knew you could handle it!”

“Arrogant fucking prick!” Surge screamed. She punctuated the statement with a spinning kick that caught Sonic off guard. Her heavy shoe drilled into his side, sending him rolling, and only having the wherewithal to curl into a ball and dig his quills into the deck stopped him from sliding straight off the ship into the water. Sonic kicked up onto his feet with a grimace, and only his slight speed advantage allowed him to dodge Surge’s follow up assault.

“Dammit Surge I don’t have time for this!” he shouted as he caught her foot mid kick with his hand. He threw her to the side, but Surge twisted around in the air with surprising grace to land in a crouch.

Huh. That throw would’ve sent her sprawling when last they fought. She’d clearly been training, and Sonic wasn’t sure whether that made him excited or afraid.

“Aww, is the big damn hero mad cause his actions have consequences?” Surge said with an exaggerated pout. She settled into a three point sprinter’s pose as more lightning crackled around her form. “Tough. I’ve got plenty of time to teach you some manners before I punch Eggman’s ticket.”

Surge launched forward at lethal speed, curling into an electrified ball of fury as she moved. Sonic responded in kind, and the deck was showered in sparks as the two living cannon balls bounced off each other. Sonic uncurled and prepared to counter Surge’s next attack, only for blaring alarms and the squeal of hatches opening on the deck to make them both freeze in place.

“Well now!” The oily voice of Dr. Eggman seeped out of several speakers posted around the ship. “I was expecting company, but both of you speedy little rodents at once? I could just jump for joy!”

Sonic scanned the deck, careful to keep Surge in his periphery just in case she acted up again. Swarms of flying Badniks flew out of the open hatches, forming a perimeter on all sides . Oddly enough, they weren’t attacking, just circling the area such that he would have to deal with a large group if he tried to escape, no matter which way he might choose to run. A large pair of elevators rose up at either end of the deck shortly after, each bearing a troop of Egg pawns armed with a variety of weapons. Guns, lances, riot shields, and Sonic even saw a couple giant hammers that would make Amy jealous in the mix. And in the center of the group closest to Sonic, the doctor himself, piloting a vehicle reminiscent of a flying octopus. Eight long, flowing tendrils made of armored cables hung off the main body at different angles, covered in sharp spikes that sparked with electricity and each tipped with a metal bulb. They twitched erratically, as if eager to attack. Eggman leered at him from within the familiar cockpit of the Eggmobile, slotted into the armored core of the vehicle like a cyclopean eye.

“Having fun you two? Sorry to interrupt your entertaining little spat, but you're making a mess of my property. Also I was starting to feel left out.”

Sonic smirked at his old nemesis. “Gee Doc, I didn’t take you for the jealous type! How about you just give up and we can talk through those abandonment issues? I know a decent therapist.”

Surge snickered. Sonic glanced at her with a raised eyebrow, and she tried to mask it with a cough.

“Hmph. Droll as ever, hedgehog,” Eggman said, “but I’m afraid I’m short on time. Do try not to take it personally.” Eggman snapped his fingers, and the Egg Pawns surged forward like a pack of eager hunting hounds, racing to bring their master a trophy.

Sonic turned to Surge, extending a hand towards her cautiously. “Truce?” he said, trying to present what he hoped was a winning smile

Surge looked at the hand like it was an unappetizing piece of food, then back at his face. “I’m gonna bust more bots than you,” she said, as if this were the most obvious fact in the universe.

“Does everything have to be a contest with you?”

“Spoken like a true loser,” Surge slammed her fists together and smiled wide, her sharp teeth gleaming in the sun. “Just try to keep up,” she said, and in a flash of light she barreled towards the nearest Badniks with a violent yawp.

Sonic smirked as Surge departed, then turned to face the Badniks between him and Eggman. “Game on” he said, then dropped into a spin dash. He rocketed towards the closest Egg Pawn, sawing through its metal skull and bouncing off the one behind it. He kept spinning as he ascended into the air until he was level with a group of flying Badniks, then released the built up momentum with a crack, blowing through several before they could react.

“Not so fast, hedgehog!” Eggman shouted as Sonic landed back on the deck and started running towards him. Three tendrils on his craft reared up like angry snakes and unleashed laser fire from their tips, peppering the deck in front of Sonic with lasers in an effort to force him back. The other five lashed out as Sonic attempted to weave around the beams, eagerly slicing at the air in an effort to skewer him on their spikes or, failing that, herd him into the firing arc of the lasers. One even sprouted a drill bit from its tip and tried to impale him. Sonic barely sidestepped the surprise attack, and the horrendous squeal as the drill ground against the steel deck of the ship left him wishing he’d brought ear plugs.

“Easy with the pointy bits, Doc!” Sonic taunted. “You’re gonna ruin your boat’s resale value!”

“Silence!” Eggman snarled.

Patience. Keep moving. Eggman’s machines always had a critical flaw. Sonic just had to stay alive until it presented itself. Another tendril whipped at his legs, and he flipped over it, only for it to wrap back around and attempt to constrict him. Sonic slid under it as it coiled around where he just was, noting as the tentacle passed over him that its armor was made of interlocking segments that bent and slightly separated to allow the underlying cabling to flex and stretch.

A plan started forming, but Sonic needed to test his theory first. He dashed forward as if to attack Eggman head on, and the three tendrils currently bearing guns swooped down to block his path with another salvo . Sonic dashed side to side in an attempt to get around them and, sure enough, a tiny gap in their armored segments appeared when they made a sharp bend to keep him in their sights.

“Enjoying yourself yet?” Eggman laughed as he unleashed another salvo of laser blasts. “I really must thank your stretchy friend for the inspiration. Adding full prehensility really elevated this little beauty to another level!”.

“I’m sure Tangle would be real flattered to hear that, Doc!” Sonic said as he slid to a brief stop, surrounded by several advancing Egg Paws. He paused just long enough for them all to aim at him, then jetted off towards the nearest edge of the deck as they opened fire. The poor Badniks barely had time to register he was gone before they were scrapped by friendly fire.

“In fact, why don’t I go find her for you, and you can tell her yourself!”

Eggman snarled and began frantically entering commands into his console. Four of his vehicle’s tendrils sprouted claws from their tips and shot after Sonic. “Oh no. No escape this time, rodent!” he shouted.

Sonic glanced over his shoulder at the pursuing appendages and smirked. A little further, and he pulled a 180, dashing back towards Eggman just as the first tentacle came crashing down in an attempt to grab him. The other three snaked around to try and give chase again, but found themselves stretched as far as they could reach in short order.

Jackpot.

Sonic singled out an area where the four tendrils, the vulnerable gaps in their armor now significantly exposed as they reached maximum length, roughly aligned and gunned it. Focusing all his energy into making his quills as rigid and sharp as possible, he threw himself into a flip and let momentum carry him.

He barely felt the resistance as he sliced through all four tendrils in rapid order, but the clattering of their severed lengths crashing to the deck told him the attack landed perfectly. Sonic fixed Eggman with a victorious grin as he landed near the tendrils’ twitching, sputtering remains. “Ready to call it quits yet, Egghead?”

Eggman pounded a fist against his console, face reddening like an overheated furnace. “Insolent vermin! As if I’d surrender to my inferiors. DIE!”

The tips of the remaining four tendrils burst open like blooming flowers. A high pitched whine built as they did, culminating in a cacophonous “thump” as they each emitted a massive blast of energy with enough force to push Eggman’s vehicle backwards several feet. The beams carved angry red scars into the deck as they advanced toward Sonic, and he scrambled out of the way with a yelp. As before, Eggman attempted to entrap Sonic in the crossfire, but with only half of his arsenal still functional Sonic was able to slip into the gaps between the beams.

Step by step, inch by inch, Sonic crept closer with each beam he dodged, until he was too close for Eggman to safely target. Eggman desperately tried to impale him with a tendril‘s spikes, but he was too slow. Sonic leapt and crashed through the windshield of the Egg Mobile’s cockpit, colliding with Eggman’s chest. The doctor let out a comically high pitched gasp as the impact knocked the wind out of him and pinned him against the pilot’s chair.

“Playtime’s over, Eggy Weggy!” Sonic said as he grabbed Eggman by the coat collar. “Time to spill the deets. What was the goal here?”

Eggman coughed and gasped as his lungs refilled with air. “And why would-wheeze-I tell you anything, hedgehog!”

“Come on Doc, don’t be difficult! You love a good monologue!” Sonic gave Eggman a rough shake. “This whole sloppy attack has to be a distraction for something, right?”

“Sloppy!? Just because your infantile mind cannot comprehend the intricacies of my schemes does not-“

“Ughhhh, then just ‘enlighten’ me already!” Sonic whined. ”You got Badniks breaking into a bank or something while I'm distracted here? Trying to disrupt the Restoration's supply lines?"

“Now see here-“

"Wait wait one more guess: you got a lead on a Chaos Emerald?"

Eggman just harrumphed and glared at Sonic, causing him to groan and throw up his arms. “What, you seriously expect me to believe all this was just to draw me out and into another one of your lame traps?”

Eggman’s moustache twitched in irritation and he adjusted his goggles. “Hmph. Narcissistic as ever. You’re not the only super powered pest in my life, you know.”

Sonic frowned. “So the attack is a trap. If not for me, then who?”

Eggman paused as his moustache drooped, clearly annoyed at his slip up, then he grinned wide and chuckled maliciously, leaning forward until his bespectacled eyes and bulbous nose all but filled Sonic’s vision. “For whom indeed?”

A chill ran down Sonic’s spine, and he looked over his shoulder. Surge was mopping up another group of Badniks, laughing as she drove a fist through the chest of an Egg Pawn and spun it about to use as a shield against the blaster fire of several others. So engrossed with the enemies in front of her, she was completely unaware of a smaller than average Buzz Bomber that was taking a bead on her.

Sonic took one look at the dart gun attached to its abdomen and shot off like a bullet.

”Look out!”

Chapter Text

Moments Earlier

Twenty-one. Twenty-two.

Today was a very good day for Surge the Tenrec. First Eggman spiced up what looked to be a boring afternoon with a horde of robots to smash, then Sonic’s dumb ass showed up and pointed her to the most important piece of scrap in the doctor’s forces. A chance to show Westopolis she can go toe to toe with the Big Bad Egg and show up Lamehog in the process? Surge didn’t know her birthday, but the universe was making a strong argument for today being the day with all these presents.

Twenty-five. Twenty-six.

Sure, Eggman was trying to wreck her city, and he would pay for that, but thanks to the Restoration and Sonic’s gang of dorks, Surge knew she didn’t need to worry about anyone getting hurt. She liked that about the Restoration. They handled the boring details and kept the civvies safe, letting her focus on the fun parts. Like seeing how many Badniks she could scramble with a single bolt of lightning. Her record so far was five!

“Thirty!” Surge said as she bore an Egg Pawn to the ground with a flying knee and caved in its face with a charged fist. She hopped back to her feet and flashed forward towards her next target, a lance bearing Egg Pawn. The robot tried to intercept her with the point of its weapon, but Surge tucked into a roll that both dodged the attack and obliterated its legs. The Egg Pawn flailed on the ground like a flipped over turtle as Surge cackled with glee.

“How’s your body count coming along, Hero Boy?” Surge shouted over her shoulder as she sought out her next foe. “Hope I’m not thrashing you too-“

A loud crash interrupted her train of thought , and she turned to see Sonic diving out of the way of the whipping tendrils on Eggman’s stupid octopus-vehicle. Surge growled and started running towards their fight. No way she was going to let Sonic overshadow her by taking down Eggman’s toy all on his own!

Her charge was interrupted by a large swarm of Vultrons that started encircling her like a murder of angry crows. Their reinforced steel beaks and talons snapped at her limbs as they dive bombed her, forcing her to backpedal several steps as they flew around her in progressively tighter circles. “Piss— off!” She screamed, focusing her mind as she threw her arms wide. Arcs of electricity shot out of her body in every direction, creating a dome in a small radius around her. Flexing her shoulder muscles, Surge forced more energy out of complex systems beneath her skin, causing the field to balloon as she walked forward. Her nerves were starting to burn from all the energy she’d been passing through her body, but she didn’t stop until the entire swarm was caught in the kill zone. Like mosquitos hitting a bug zapper, the flying Badniks burst into balls of fire with a series of pops as the electric field overloaded their circuits. If Surge wasn’t so enraged, she might have paused to enjoy the light show. Instead she just kept moving and cut the flow of power as soon as the last Vultur popped. A battle line of Egg Pawns had advanced on her while she was distracted with the Vultrons, and Surge snarled in frustration as she accelerated towards them. Why the hell were none of them going after Sonic?

The front most units in the group bore heavy flechette guns and thick steel riot shields, and they fired in waves as Surge approached. She dodged side to side, deftly avoiding being skewered by the burning hot metal flying through the air. Even so, near misses left her bleeding from several cuts across her arms and legs. The pain just made her angrier, and the anger made her faster. With a flip, she collided feet first with the shield of an Egg Pawn near the left flank of the formation, sending it sliding backwards. She planted her feet on the shield and bent her legs, the Badnik’s servos squealing as it struggled not to fall over.

“You cut up my favorite pants, ya tin fuck!” she screamed, then pushed off into a backflip as hard as she could. The already unbalanced Badnik flew backwards and crashed into a pair of Pawns wielding regular blaster rifles behind it. Surge landed on her feet as the three robots fell into a tangled heap and sped through the gap in the line that their demise opened before their fellows could react. An idea to really up her rate of destruction hit her, and she slipped behind another shield bearer on the flank. A flying tackle crushed it between her metal bones and its own shield, which she then tore off its arm mount with a violent twist. She brought it in front of her and planted her feet just as the remaining Egg Pawns locked in on her again, and her arm shook from the impact of their combined fire against the heavy steel slab. Snarling, Surge pushed back against the force of the Badnik’s assault, gradually picking up speed as her cybernetically enhanced leg muscles drank deeply of her inner power reserves. A sudden easing of the pressure on her shield indicated some of her assailants were pausing to reload, and she released the built up energy with a roar of thunder.

“Beep beep, assholes!” she shouted as she charged along the battle line at blazing speed, shield leading the way like a giant plow. Metal limbs scattered in her wake as she bowled over Badnik after Badnik. Several flechettes buried themselves in her shield as the Egg Pawns tried to slow her down, but this only succeeded in making it cumbersome to run with after one of them ended up impaled on the protruding metal shards. Surge cast it aside without breaking her stride, laughing maniacally as she bore down on the last few Gunner Pawns in the group. She jammed her fist through the closest one’s chest and greedily consumed its energy as she spun it about to shield her from its comrades’ blaster shots.

“Look out!”

A distinctly blue missile crashed into Surge’s side, sending them both into a tumble across the Egg Destroyer’s deck. Sonic yelped in pain as they came to a stop, his body draped over her back like a spiky blanket. Surge panicked at the close contact and bucked Sonic off of her, earning another pained grunt from him as she elbowed him in the chest. Surge shook herself as if that would somehow dislodge the memory of his gross little arms wrapped around her as she climbed to her feet. “The fuck’s your problem, Lamehog?”

Sonic groaned as he sat up. The broken remains of a large syringe dart were stuck in his shoulder, which he pried out with a hiss and held up to her. “Just saving your crabby ass from whatever was in this. Really hoping it’s not poison, by the way.”

Surge stamped on the pang of guilt she felt like it was a particularly disgusting cockroach and clenched her fists. How dare he think she needed his fucking protection! “You want a medal or something?” she said. “Unlike your pansy ass friends, I can take my own hits.”

Sonic rolled to his feet and snarled at her as he got up into her space. “A damn ‘thank you’ wouldn’t kill you, ya know,” he accentuated the statement with a jabbed finger to her collarbone.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” Surge slapped his hand away, sparks dancing between the rings on her fingers. “Maybe if you’d try to actually stop a bad guy for a change you wouldn’t have- HURK!”

Without any of his usual showboating to serve as warning, Sonic grabbed Surge by her throat, lifted her up, and slammed her onto the deck. Surge gasped for air and panickily scratched at his arm as he attempted to crush her wind pipe.

“You think I’m not trying?!” Sonic roared. He slammed her head against the ground hard enough that her vision briefly went white.

Gaia wept, when did he get so damn strong?

Surge’s vision refocused to see Sonic’s eyes boring into hers, bloodshot as if a sudden pressure had built up behind them. “Who are you to judge?! Do you have any idea what I’ve had to-“

Oh hell no. A sick part of Surge was thrilled to see Sonic drop the perfect hero act, but he was not gonna preach at her while trying to kill her. Surge gripped the arm throttling her as hard as she could, eyes sparking defiantly. “Didn’t ask,” she managed to say despite the crushing pressure on her throat. The air around them hummed as she gathered as much of her remaining charge as she dared, “and don’t care.”

Amps flowed through her arm and into his, causing Sonic’s muscles to seize and spasm. His grip on her neck faltered, and Surge upped the voltage as she took a relieved breath. Just a little
more juice should be enough to knock him out.

“Why stop there?” a sickly sweet voice urged her on. “You might never get a chance like this again. Finish the job.”

A sneering duck bill. Leather glove and swirling gem. The sense of floating, burning as he took notes. A blood haze began to descend over her mind, and Surge’s grip on Sonic’s arm tightened, the flow of energy rising further. She closed her eyes, and retreated into herself. One, two, three- deep breath in-

“Shut the fuck up” Surge told the dead, stupid, badly dressed, fucking DEAD platypus.

-and breathe out again. Her grip loosened. Sonic suddenly wrenched backward, his arm breaking free of her, then fell onto his side and tried to curl into a ball. Shocks of electricity continued to wrack his body as Surge shakily climbed back to her feet, wary as Sonic thrashed about in pain and snarled with impotent rage. Had she lost control for too long?

Her ears registered the sudden, ominous lack of clanking and gunfire, and her hackles rose in alarm. She raised her fists and spun about, only to see the few remaining Badniks on the deck arrayed in a loose ring around the general area, weapons raised but making no move to attack. Even Eggman himself was just floating there in his heavily damaged vehicle, watching intently as he leaned forward in his seat. “What the hell?” Surge muttered.

Another agonized grunt brought Surge’s attention back to Sonic, who was now on his hands and knees. Panting, almost hyperventilating, he tried to stand, only for a wave of crackling, purple tinted energy to roll through his body and rip the strength from his limbs with a scream.

Purple? That wasn't her. A ripple of concern (about the situation in general, not him dammit) brought Surge to kneel beside Sonic. She reached out to touch his shoulder, only to recoil when a jolt of whatever energy was running amok inside him leapt into her hand. It didn’t really hurt, hell she could feel her own energy reserves jump up as her body processed the strange power source. It just felt wrong, like she’d just dunked her arm in sludge. “Talk to me, dammit,” she said, “What’s happening?”

“Nononono” Sonic’s voice was a low, hoarse drone, gradually rising in volume as he shook with increasing intensity. He slammed his fist against the deck with a snarl, the metal groaning as if sick. Surge tried to pull back at the outburst, but Sonic grabbed her ankle with his other hand. More of the foul energy flowed into her, causing her head to swim. Unfamiliar images strobed past her eyes faster than she could process, and only the vague sense that someone called her name brought her back. “Whu?” she stammered as her vision cleared.

Sonic had managed to get up to one knee while she was on her head trip, his fevered eyes struggling to focus on anything, a hand now clinging weakly to her right forearm. Pain, fear, and an all too familiar rage warred for control of his face, his quills soaked with sweat. ”-run” he was mid-sentence as Surge’s ears tuned back into reality. “Find Tails.”

“The hell’s the nerd got to do with-“

“JUST. GO!”

Sonic pushed Surge away with another burst of that surprising strength, sending her stumbling backwards. The horrid purple energy paralyzed him again as soon as they broke contact, and Sonic threw his head back with an ear splitting howl. The sound echoed across the open expanse of the ship’s deck, a warning siren that sank into her skin and rattled in her skull. Surge’s fight or flight instinct, normally hard stuck on “fight”, quavered in the face of the primal fury that underwrote the sound, and she wasn’t alone: Eggman barked a panicked “Take him down!” at his Badniks, and the robots seemed to hesitate before advancing.

“You could just let this happen” the sickening voice of Starline chimed in again. “No one would know.”

Surge sneered at the notion. No one was gonna wreck the hedgehog’s shit but her, period.

Surge zipped towards the closest group of Badniks. A high speed leg sweep brought down the nearest, a Spear Pawn, and she wrenched the weapon out of its hands as it fell. She leveled the weapon at the next nearest one and, in a moment of ingenuity, channeled electricity into it. With a crack not dissimilar to a gunshot, lightning shot from the spear’s tip and lanced into the robot, cooking it from the inside out until it went limp.

Oh fuck yesthat was satisfying. She was so getting one of these in her size. Hell, she was gonna ask Kit if he could forge a whole supply.

Surge saw Eggman turn about to make an exit and gave chase. The rest of the Badniks ignored her in favor of the doctor’s final order, and one particularly oblivious Egg Pawn’s head served as a stepping stone as she sought to get level with Eggman’s flight path. She adjusted her grip on the spear as her leap reached its zenith, and with a shout threw it like a javelin. Her aim struck true, and the spear embedded itself deep into the starboard engine of the retreating craft just as it began to accelerate away from the fight. The engine sputtered, then burst into flame, sending the vehicle into a spin. Its four remaining tendrils flailed about comically as the vehicle crashed and skittered across the deck like a drunken spider, eventually coming to rest in a smoking heap. Eggman was still struggling to disengage the Eggmobile from the wreckage, the docking clamps squealing and clanking ineffectually as he muttered angrily, when Surge reached the downed craft. A rictus grin creased her face as she leaned in to pull him out. “Hey Doc, how ya doin?” She asked, all saccharine kindness and sharp teeth as she grabbed him by the coat.

Eggman struggled against her grip, and Surge tsked. “Stuck huh? Poor guy,” her voice dropped into a growl, “”let me help you.”

Surge wrenched Eggman out of his chair and tossed him to the deck with a muttered “whoopsie daisy”, then planted a foot on his chest before he could scramble away. Eggman scowled up at her, Surge’s grinning visage staring back at her in miniature from the reflective, cracked lenses of his goggles. “Surge,” he said, monotone. “What a pleasure to see you again. How’s living in Sonic’s shadow going?”

Surge’s smile dropped. Her eyes flared with power, and a jolt of electricity shot through her leg, into the metal bands on her shoes, and down into Eggman’s chest. Eggman, to his credit, grit his teeth through the shock, the sudden reddening of his face the only sign of just how much pain she was inflicting on him. “Not smart, provoking the living battery running a current through your bloated heart, chucklenut,” Surge sneered as she continued to tase him. “So how about we skip the part where I beat the sass out of you, and you tell me what the fuck you did to the hedgehog.”

Surge cut the flow of power, and Eggman took a steadying breath. “Of course,” he began to smooth out his disheveled moustache with unsettling nonchalance, “I forgot you’re not the sparkling conversationalist he is. I’d love to help, but only have theories. The injection, after all, was not meant for him.”

“Oh I’m aware,” Surge said. “We’ll get to what it would’ve done to me and whether I’m gonna snap that thick neck of yours for it. Hit me with one of these theories for now, Ratstache. Make it a short one, I get zappy when I’m bored.”

Eggman took a deep breath and grumpily adjusted his goggles. “Considering one of my goals was to give you a power boost that’d elevate you above that blue menace, for which you should be thankful, he’s likely getting a boost of his own. Given the nature of the power source used and past data-“

“Tick tock, asshole,” Surge put more weight on her foot.

Eggman lifted his head up as much as his position allowed and tilted it in an effort to see past Surge. His eyebrows shot up so high they looked like they might leap off his bald head, and he gulped. “In conclusion, I believe we’re about to have a much bigger problem to deal with than each other, dear girl.”

The sound of something heavy pounding its way across the ship was all the warning Surge got before she was lifted into the air by a meaty paw, then flung through the air with such force and speed that she barely felt the shatter of glass around her as she passed through a window and crashed into a console on the ship’s bridge with a shower of sparks. Surge’s nerves screamed at her as her body instinctively gulped up energy from the damaged machine to fuel the repair protocols of the Metal Virus in her blood, a particularly intense pain in her chest indicating the nanites were rushing to mend at least one broken rib. Pressing through the pain, she managed to stand and take stock of her situation.

The bridge of the Egg Destroyer was a mess of broken glass, sparking cables, and a nascent electrical fire, all courtesy of her violent arrival. Emergency alert lights span in their ceiling casings, making beams of orange light dance across the sleek outlines of dark grey steel consoles and workstations. Glowing monitors displayed camera feeds and tactical read outs that Surge was sure Kit would go nuts for if he were here. A small team of blocky looking red drones floated about the room, entering commands into consoles and cleaning up the mess she’d made. One approached her with a fire extinguisher in its spindly arms, and Surge sent it spinning away with a swat before it could douse her in fire suppressant. This room was too small for a scrap with something that strong, whatever it was. She needed to get back out to the deck where she'd have room to maneuver.

Something heavy collided with the bridge roof, and Surge heard it huff like it was tracking a scent. Her breath stilled and her muscles tensed, all sound save the low crackling of the sputtering console fading into the background as she focused. A moment passed. Then another. The mystery thing- had its hand been blue?- continue to thump around on the roof, it’s snuffling intermixing with increasingly frustrated growls and scrapes of something sharp against metal.

“Come on, asshole, come throw down or fuck off” Surge muttered under her breath. The sound of a distant plane on approach momentarily caught the thing’s attention. It roared, and the ceiling rattled as it began to move away. Surge released a ragged breath in relief, muscles loosening as she prepared to make a break for the broken window.

Then the drone with the fire extinguisher finished reorienting itself and resumed its duties, the blast of compressed chemicals cutting through the quiet like a backfiring engine in the dead of night, and all hell broke loose. The monster, for Surge refused to assign any other name to something that could so unsettle her, flew into a frenzy of growling as it began beating on the roof with manic intensity. Several panels came loose and fell to the floor and, realizing it might be trying to collapse the whole room on her, Surge threw herself out the window, survival instincts dictating that she no longer care if she would have time to prepare to fight it on her terms or not. Her landing back on the deck was far from graceful, but she managed to roll back to her feet quickly, ready to face the thing head on.

Less ready, it turned out, for a sheared off chunk of the bridge’s roof to collide with her at high speed. She rolled into the hit, shoulder screaming in protest as it took the brunt of the force on behalf of the rest of her body as she fell to the ground for the third time in as many minutes. "Fucking– ow,” Surge said as she rolled onto her back. Her eyes, shut tight against the pain, flickered open just in time for her first good look at her new adversary as it leapt off the roof of the bridge, rising high into the air before descending on a collision course with her. Surge rolled to the side, and it crashed to the deck with a resounding boom. “Sonic?!” Surge sputtered as she got back to her feet. “The fuck happened to you, man?”

The hulking monstrosity, despite being easily near twice her height even with his hunched over posture, was still recognizable as Sonic in a broad sense. Same face and green eyes, albeit twisted with an uncharacteristic, predatory rage and a mouth full of fangs that nearly put her own to shame. Still blue of fur and quill, but shaggy and darkened to a mix of midnight and, near his hands and quill tips, frosty tints that made him look as if he’d been dipped in ink and gone months without grooming. Even his shoes, somehow, were still there, despite his massive change in physique, though the needle sharp cleats and spikes on the banding were new. If it weren’t for all the ways he looked– off- the too long arms and sharp angled ears, the protruding brow and metal shearing claws, she’d think she was staring at some juiced up, edgy relative of her nemesis. Instead it was like someone who had never seen Sonic in the flesh tried to draw him blindfolded based on a particularly angsty teen’s description. He stopped in his tracks at the sound of his name, a low growl still reverberating from his chest as he stared her down like he resented breathing the same air as her.

“It is still you in there, right Speed Bag?” Surge tried again as they slowly circled each other. “Sonic?”

The Sonic-thing’s face twisted, pain briefly mingling with the rage before his mouth split into a baleful roar and he threw himself at her claws first. Surge hopped to the side before impact, and the beast’s claws dug shallow furrows in the deck as they raked across it in pursuit. A follow up back hand nearly clocked her in the head as she moved to flank him, but again she was able to duck under the strike, hit him with a lightning fast kidney punch, and dash back out again before he could get a hand on her.

Three things were apparent to Surge. First, she was a fair bit faster than him in this state. Good.

Second, even without the claws, those arms were packed with enough muscle to crush her green ass like a grape. Problem.

Third, that punch she just landed should’ve hurt like hell, but he tanked it like it was a mosquito bite and, if anything, was just angrier now as he pursued her across the ship. Big problem.

Solution? Move faster, hit harder, and keep hitting him until he drops. Surge grinned, power jumping off her in waves as she accelerated, becoming a crackling green streak as she ran laps around
The beast. She drifted closer with each lap, baiting him, and when he tried to intercept her with one of those giant mitts she cut inward to drop a right hook across his jaw. Spittle flew from the beast’s mouth as the blow sent it stumbling sideways.

Faster. Surge doubled back and hit him with another shot to the kidneys before he could recover. The beast roared and snapped his fangs at the empty air where she just was, Surge already circling around him again.

Harder. Surge dashed behind the beast and threw all her momentum into a kick to the back of his left knee. With a pained growl and a crack of tearing ligaments, he fell down onto said knee, and Surge followed up with an elbow strike to the back of his head.

“Harder, damn you!” Starline screamed in her ear as the circuits in her limbs thrummed with power. Surge screamed as she came at the beast head on again, rolling under one more clumsily swiping claw and popping up to catch him under the chin with an overcharged uppercut. The beast reeled, the force of the electric discharge knocking him onto his back. Surge wasted no time in straddling his chest (or trying to anyway) and raining a deluge of increasingly rapid strikes on his head.

“Stay. The. Fuck. Down. You. Giant. Bitch!”

Each word was punctuated with a blow, then two, then more. Surge quickly lost count of how many times she hit him, adrenaline and a low grade headache from spending so much charge buzzing in her ears. Her vision blurred, and someone, maybe her, maybe Starline, was laughing as the collision of fist to skull reverberated through her arms. A high, desperate voice shouting hers and Sonic’s names finally managed to pierce the fog, and as she finally stopped pummeling her foe for a moment and came back to herself she saw Tails hopping out of his plane as it rolled to a stop amidst the wreckage scattered all over the deck. He flew towards her, tails spinning frantically and his eyes watery with anguish. For a moment, it was Kit staring back at her, and she was the one lying on the ground, pummeled to near unconsciousness. Shame, unexpected and potent, roiled in her gut and throat like bile. It took a long moment to force it back down.

Which was all the time the beast needed to recover his senses. With a snarl of renewed rage and a flexing of muscle, he threw Surge off him. For a moment, she was weightless, and then a massive fist hammered her back down to the deck with a deafening clang. The steel surface buckled around her, and she coughed up a thin stream of blood as he grabbed her, lifted her up, and slammed her back down two more times before throwing her like a discus. Surge flailed as she tumbled through the air, and she could tell by the rapidly growing amount of blue in her field of vision that she was heading towards a very painful impact with the surface of the bay.

“Hold on, I’ve got you!” Tails shouted. He snatched one of her hands out of the air, the two briefly twirling through the sky together before Surge managed to grab his other hand so their combined weight and momentum was more evenly distributed.

“Nice catch, Brains!” Surge said as they soared higher above the ship. Tails spared her a quick glance in acknowledgment and the lingering fear in his eyes set her teeth on edge, guilt once again churning inside her as she started fumbling her words. “And I’m - ugh, sorry. I didn’t know how else to stop him, and-“

“Thanks,” Tails mercifully cut her off . “I’ve caught Sonic like this so many times I could do it blind. And I saw the fight from above: He wasn’t this out of control the last time we dealt with his Werehog form. You were just defending yourself.”

The kid really did work at making himself hard to hate, didn’t he? Surge would have to ask Kit how he did it. “Yeah I guess I-Wait, this shit’s happened before?!”

“Years ago, before the war and the Metal Virus” Tails explained. “Eggman isolated negative energy from the Chaos Emeralds in a weapon designed to awaken and control Dark Gaia. Sonic got hit with the blast and absorbed a heavy dose, then started transforming at night. I don't know why he's changing while the sun's still up now."

“Eggbrain tried to collar a god?!” Surge said. "That’s—stupidly on brand for him.”

“Half a god, but I’m getting technical,” Tails said. He suddenly swerved to avoid the soaring wreckage of Eggman’s octopus-vehicle, his grip tightening so Surge wouldn’t slip out his grasp. Surge swore as the wreck nearly clipped her legs, and her eyes widened as she watched the Werehog bounding across the deck of the Egg Destroyer, arms extending to lengths she normally associated with the dork’s lemur friend to grab and whip wrecked Badniks at them.

“It’s like I didn’t even hit him,” Surge said, crestfallen. Beating shit up was supposed to be her specialty, dammit!

“Ever the disappointment,” Starline sneered.

“That’s bothering me too,” Tails went into a brief dive to dodge another improvised projectile. “The change made him more durable last time, but not like this. I wasn’t faking my concern down there: that pummeling would’ve at least knocked him senseless before.”

Surge’s wounded pride latched onto that statement like a life preserver. “So what’s the plan then? You’re the smart one here.”

Tails grunted as he struggled to gain altitude. “Right now? Keep us both alive while I come up with a better one. Staying airborne helps with that first part, but I can’t do this forever,” he glanced down at her again, apologetic. “No offense, but you’re heavier than my usual passengers, so I’m wearing out quicker than expected.”

Surge snorted in amusement. “None taken: metal bones, remember? So how did you get him back to normal last time?”

“That’s the problem: I didn’t,” Tails said, his breathing becoming notably labored. “Dark Gaia sucked the energy out of him when it tried to reach full power. No negative Chaos Energy, no Werehog. My instruments didn’t detect a Chaos Emerald in the area when we arrived, so I don’t even know what’s making him change this time!”

The syringe dart, Surge realized. “Eggman injected him with something. Delivered it via dart gun,” she omitted the fact that the shot was meant for her. She wasn’t about to let the kid currently holding her some fifty feet above open water know his best friend had gone monster mode because of her.

Tails considered her words in silence a moment as he dipped under another scrapped Badnik turned missile. “Eggman does have one Emerald, and that’s just what we know of. Maybe he somehow found a way to collect or concentrate its negative energy? He’s always had a knack for finding new ways to store and manipulate the Emeralds’ power.”

“You’d know better than me,” Surge would’ve shrugged if she wasn’t busy hanging on for dear life. “I leave the science shit to Drippy. How would we even know if Lamehog’s juiced up on evil rock magic right now?”

“Besides the fact that ’evil rock magic’ is the only thing that did this to him before?” Tails smirked, then became pensive again. “Let’s see– the energy’s incredibly unstable during the initial transformation, so a lot of excess gets thrown into the environment around him. See anything like that?”

Wait. “Purple energy that makes you feel like absolute shit if it touches you?”

“I was never crazy enough to touch it, but the color sounds right. You got a taste, I take it?”

“Perks of being an energy leech,” Surge said with a frown. This was gonna suck ass. She looked up at Tails, jaw set. “I might have an idea. Bring us around and drop me on him.”

Tails’s eyes looked like they might pop out of his head. “What?! Are you insane?”

“Oh he has no idea” Starline laughed.

Surge imagined punching Starline until his skull popped, and that finally shut the old ghost up. She flashed Tails a grin that was more confident than she felt. “Just trust me, kid. I’m no god, but energy’s energy as far as my batteries care. We play this right, and I might be able to drain him enough to knock him out at least.”

Tails sighed, clearly unconvinced, then winced as the muscles in his shoulders twitched. “Well, since I was gonna have to set you down soon anyway– just- try not to kill him?”

It took effort, but Surge nodded in assent. “Alright then,” Tails said, panting, “hold on!”

Tails poured on another burst of speed, arms straining as he hauled Surge up and over the deck of the Egg Destroyer. The Werehog stared up at them, head cocked and hands flexing open and closed like he was trying to puzzle out how to reach them, and Surge locked eyes with him. Her heart started pounding in anticipation, and with a deep breath she let go of Tails’s hands. The wind howled in her ears as she fell towards her target, arms and legs spread wide. The Werehog snarled up at her and braced to catch her with his claws as the distance between them shrank, and Surge smiled triumphantly. “That’s it, dumbass,” she said. “Gimme a hug”.

Colliding with the Werehog was like crashing into the world’s fluffiest brick wall. He barely staggered under her weight as he snatched her out of the air, while her everything was screaming in pain even before she found herself pulled into a spine crunching bear hug. She kept her senses enough to grab onto one of his meaty shoulders as he attempted to flatten her against his chest, and focused every ounce of will she could muster on a single command to her weary body: feed.

The effect was immediate, the now familiar oily sensation making her temples throb in discomfort as her energy reserves refilled. The slideshow of images played before her eyes again, twisted visions of locales both familiar and not racing past at a rate that almost made her swoon, but still she held on. The Werehog roared in surprise and grasped her in a paw, tried to pull her off, but Surge dug her fingers into his shoulder like a hungry tick on an artery and refused to be dislodged.

“Run!” a shadowy figure, backlit to the point of obscurity by burning buildings shouted in one of the alien scenes playing in her head. “Run and don’t stop.”

Fuck you, mystery person. Surge’s veins felt like they were about to combust, but still she pushed her body to drink deeper from the seemingly endless supply of foul power. The Werehog pulled at her again, harder this time, and in a burst of savage determination Surge bit down on his shoulder as hard as she could, the outraged howling of the Werehog a mere murmur amidst the riotous, boiling blood in her ears. She could feel the batteries grafted to her bones nearing capacity, and she divided her attention between continuing to draw power out of the Werehog and shooting her own electric charge back at him as best as she could. White and purple sparks danced across both their bodies as the two of them became an organic closed circuit, snapping at each other’s heels like snakes fighting over territory.

Slowly, agonizingly so, Surge felt the torrent of sickening power slacken, but she didn’t stop until she felt the Werehog’s arms fall away, the fight finally going out of them. Only then did she relax her jaw and hands, pushing off from the Werehog so his unconscious body fell backwards, rather than onto her, and collapsed to the deck herself. She lay there, propped up on her elbows in a daze as Tails alighted onto the deck and rushed to kneel beside the Werehog’s limp body. He pulled out a gadget Surge could only guess the purpose of, and it pinged a disjointed series of tones after he laid it on the Werehog’s chest. He sighed and looked at Surge, this time with gratitude.

“He’s alive” the relief was palpable in Tails’s voice. “I can’t believe that actually worked,” he said with a tired laugh.

Surge did her best to smile in return. “Kind of surprised myself,” she said. “Wait till Drippy hears I-”

A sudden spasm rocked her stomach, and Surge barely rolled onto her side before she vomited onto the deck.

“Fucking hell,” she groaned.

Chapter Text

Sonic awoke with a quiet gasp, the fog of a nightmare half remembered and quickly dissipating in favor of the feel of stone digging into his shoulder blades and a heaviness that seemed to permeate his whole body. It was dark, the few stars strong enough to shine down on him despite the light pollution of Westopolis twinkling defiantly in the sky beyond the red warning lights of a nearby industrial crane. Waves could be heard nearby, letting him know he was still near the bay. A dull pressure at the back of his skull, like a nascent headache, made him groan. How had he made it back to shore?

He heard the familiar voices of his friends talking lowly nearby, and willed his aching muscles to bring himself into a sitting position so he could locate them. They were gathered by a nearby building, a fish market judging by the stalls out front and the big wooden tuna hanging above the door. Black scorch marks marred the brick facade of the place, and the busted husks of multiple Badniks were strewn about the street. A burly old penguin, probably the owner judging by the matching tuna on the apron he wore, was discussing the damages with Tails, or more accurately with the holographic projection of Jewel coming out of the Miles Electric in his hands. Tails himself was clearly only half listening, as he kept glancing worriedly at the clustered group of Whisper, Tangle, and Amy as they argued.

Sonic stood up, his legs shaky, and after taking a moment to ensure he was steady enough to move he made to walk over to them, when the feeling of eyes on him made him stop short. Glancing about, he saw Surge seated on a small stack of crates, half shadowed by the awning of the merchant’s stall behind her. She was leaning forward, elbows resting on the knees of her torn up pants, and was oddly still and calm as she watched him. Her cybernetic eyes, unblinking, glowed with a soft teal light against the black backdrop of her facial fur and, flanked by her green quills, reminded him of a nocturnal predator watching potential prey from within a sheltering bush. Her head tilted slightly to the side as he stared back as if she was trying to puzzle something out about him.

Cool glowing eyes aside, Surge never struck him as the contemplative type, and as such he wasn’t sure he preferred her curiosity to her hostility. Beside her, Kit nervously adjusted the straps of his hydropack as he watched Sonic’s friends with thinly veiled suspicion. Like Surge, his eyes glowed in the dark, turning them into dark red pinpoints that lent an incongruous air of danger to his unassuming, tiny frame. He blinked owlishly at Sonic upon noticing him, then turned to Surge and tugged gently at her pant leg. She blinked and glanced down at him, some unspoken communication rapidly passing between them in subtle gestures, and then Surge looked over at Sonic’s friends with a scowl. She whistled loudly to get their attention, then lazily waved in Sonic’s direction.

Tails was the first to react, shoving his Miles Electric into the old penguin’s hands and flying over to hug Sonic with such speed that the backdraft from his spinning tails nearly knocked the poor bird over. Amy was close behind, and if not for Tangle wrapping them all up in her tail with a happy whoop and a shout of “group hug!” the combined impact would have knocked Sonic right back to the ground.

Only Whisper hung back, though her lips bent into a tight smile as she watched the display of friendly affection. Despite the warm climate in Westopolis, the wolf was still wrapped in her tactical cloak and heavy gloves. She stood calmly at attention with her sniper’s mask resting over one eye and her trusty wispon unslung and resting easily in her hands. Sonic had worked with her enough times to know she could ready and fire multiple pinpoint shots in the blink of an eye from that deceptively relaxed stance. It made Sonic wonder what trouble she was still expecting.

“Easy there gang,” Sonic said with a laugh, “still finding my legs here!”

”Sorry,” Tails smiled wide as he let Sonic go, Amy and Tangle quickly following suit. “You had us worried for a bit. How do you feel?”

Sonic held his arms wide and gave himself a once over. “Sore, but everything’s where it should be. What’d I miss? You all looked crazy serious when I woke up.”

Everyone’s expressions fell. Tangle started wringing her tail anxiously. She and Amy looked to Tails, who sighed when it became apparent they were letting him take the lead. “What do you remember?” he asked.

Sonic crossed his arms and turned his eyes to the sky. The pressure in his head was making it hurt a bit to focus. “I remember- kicking Eggman’s butt. Had him cornered, in fact. I was trying to get him to talk, and something he said-”

His eyes snapped back to Surge, who was now very pointedly not looking at him. “The attack was a ploy. To draw Surge out and inject her with— whatever the heck I got hit with.”

Everyone turned to Surge, who continued to stare sullenly at the pavement. Kit stepped in front of her protectively, hydropack churning as it powered up, but stopped short of lashing out when Surge laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“You could’ve told me the dart was meant for you,” Tails said to her, more hurt than angry to Sonic’s ears.

Surge stood up with a defiant sneer. “Why, so you could act all holier than thou and blame me for everything? I didn’t ask for Eggman to target me, and I definitely didn’t ask Mr. Hero to take the shot for me.”

Tails threw his arms up in exasperation. “Because it’s useful data! Knowing the injection was likely tailored to your biology and augments could help us figure out how it’s affecting Sonic!”

Surge’s jaw worked futilely for a moment as she struggled for a retort, then snapped shut. She scratched her head awkwardly and, in a surprisingly sincere expression of contrition, said “I-shit, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Surprising,” Whisper’s tone was as dry as a desert.

“Fuck you too, Fangs.”

”Ladies!” Sonic shouted. Fighting was the last thing he wanted right now. The pressure exploded into a spike of pain like bees swarming inside his skull, and he had to take a steadying breath. “Hedgehog’s still in the dark over here. Less sniping, more helping, please.” Ignoring Surge’s muttered protests over being called a lady, he turned back to Tails. “Give it to me straight, little bro: what happened?”

Tails took a deep breath and ripped off the proverbial bandage. “You turned into the Werehog and attacked Surge. Me too, when I intervened.”

Sonic’s eyes widened, and the pressure in his skull suddenly uncoiled in response to Tails’s words like a rising sleeper. He could feel, almost see the beast in the little corner of his mind it had burrowed into now, and it became aware of him too as it roused itself. Simmering anger radiated from it, and a phantom sensation like claws raking across his shoulders made him shiver.

This didn’t make sense. During the Gaia Incident the Werehog, for all its wild impulses and aggression, had still felt like a part of him. He could negotiate with it, work with it. After the initial shock of the first change, it didn’t take long to come to a kind of understanding that allowed him to remain mostly himself, even when the big guy took the wheel at night. He tried to reach out and connect to it like he did back then, only for the buzzing pain to start up again and make him wince. The Werehog snarled as if struck and pushed him away, then went back to its quiet probing at the boundaries of his consciousness.

”Do you need to sit down, Sonic?” Amy, ever the caregiver of the gang, asked worriedly. ”You look like you’re still in a lot of pain.”

“I’m fine,” Sonic said, a bit too quickly to be truly convincing. “Just got an unexpected reaction from the big guy when I went to find him in the old noggin. He’s back alright, and surlier than normal.“

“You can talk to the damn thing?!” Surge was incredulous.

Sonic shrugged. “Kinda? I just get feelings and impulses from him, but he definitely understands ideas I float his way.” Anxiety crept through him as the Werehog pushed against his mind again. He swallowed it, put on what he hoped was a brave face. “Or he did before. He's either not interested in talking or something else is making it hard to connect this time around.”

“Huh.”

Surge and Kit both were staring at him with a level of interest he found disconcerting now. “What about Eggman?” He asked, trying his best to ignore the curious cyborgs.

“Slipped away during the mayhem, as usual,” Tails said. “His ships retreated not long after you turned, save the one you and Surge were already on. You, uh, kinda disabled its navigation functions when you chucked Surge into its main console, so it’s dead in the water.”

Sonic winced and gave Surge an apologetic glance. She scowled in reply. “That’s something I guess.”

Tails nodded in agreement. “I doubt he kept much research data on a combat vessel, but I’ll be heading back out there ASAP to see what I can salvage from its on board computers.”

“Thanks buddy,” Sonic ruffled Tails’s hair with a smile, earning a laugh for his trouble. He turned to his gathered friends and gave them his most practiced, confident grin. “So what now? Anyone up for an Egg hunt?”

Silence fell like a shroud over the gathering, and Sonic’s stomach with it. Amy sent Whisper a disgruntled glance, and if Tangle gripped her tail any tighter Sonic was worried she might hurt herself. “So-“ Tangle began.

“Fangs thinks you’re dangerous and need to be contained. Business Bug more or less agrees, Pinkie very much doesn’t,” Surge interrupted cheerfully. “Stretch is trying to play peacemaker.”

”Wants to trust you, but sees Whisper’s logic” Kit added clinically. Then, with a tiny smirk: “also afraid of directly challenging her due to emotional attachment.”

“Heh. Lemur’s fucking whipped,” Surge snickered.

Tangle sputtered as Whisper’s face reddened. “Really Surge?” Amy said, hands on her hips.

“Whaaat?” Surge whined dramatically. “He’s not some goddamn kid who can’t handle bad news. Plus we’ll be here all night if you four keep tip-toeing around shit. Now we can cut to Lamehog saying his piece and some Gaia-damned decisions can be made.” She gave Amy a mocking half bow. “You’re welcome” she said with a mischievous grin.

The Werehog snarled, a spike of indignation spilling off of it and raising his heart rate as he processed Surge’s words. “Guys,” he stammered, “you can’t be serious. Werehog or not, It’s still me! Sure there’s some differences this time, but I’m sure I-“

“You can’t know that,” Whisper interrupted him, her calm, quiet voice ringing out more than usual due to the lack of other noise in the area.“Like you said, the rules have changed. Too many unknowns.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s a threat!” Amy retorted, making no effort to hide her emotions as she punctuated the statement with an angry stamp of her foot and her hands clenched into shaking fists at her sides. Blood was rushing to her face in her anger, tinting the peach fur of her muzzle until it nearly matched her pink quills. “He’s overcome worse, so there’s no reason to believe he can’t keep control of it now that he knows the Werehog’s back!!”

“Reckless to believe he can without proof,” Whisper said with the slightest shake of her head. “You’re too close to this, ‘s affecting your judgment.”

“And your paranoia’s affecting yours!“ Amy snapped. “Not everything’s a betrayal or tragedy waiting to happen, you know!”

Whisper’s ears flattened against her head, and Tangle came to her defense. “That’s not fair, Amy, and you know it. Whisp just wants everyone to be safe. Sonic included.”

“I’m afraid I have to agree with Tangle, Amy,” the digitized voice of Jewel chimed in. The old penguin was clearly uncomfortable as he brought the Miles Electric over to the group so she could join the conversation, and nodded gratefully when Tails took the device off his hands so he could return to cleaning up his shop. “Sonic’s strong willed, certainly, but I also can count on one hand the people who have a chance of taking him alone in a fight if he loses control again."

The tiny image of Jewel turned to Sonic with sad eyes. “I’m not saying we need to lock you up, but until we know how to reverse or manage your- condition- and especially until we know whether Eggman has the means of controlling the Werehog, I can’t in good conscience just let you run about unrestricted. You could end up hurting a lot of people, yourself included, and I’d be failing as both Director and, more importantly, as your friend if I did nothing to prevent such an event”

Sonic was breathing heavily, trapped between his rational mind’s understanding of Jewel’s position and a primal revulsion, egged on by the Werehog’s rising agitation, at the idea of being benched.
Contained. “So what, you expect me to just sit around and wait for a solution to fall into our laps? This is my life we’re talking about here!”

“I’m just asking you to take it easy and have a little faith in us, in your friends, while we figure this out” Jewel held up her hands placatingly.

Sonic was having none of it at this point. “Faith? Like the faith you have in me right now?” he snapped. Jewel cringed at his words, hurt. He didn’t care. He looked past her at Tails, ignoring an involuntary twinge in his arm muscles as the Werehog began to hungrily pace back and forth through his mind. His little brother wouldn’t stand for this, right? “Tell ‘em, buddy,” he pleaded. “Tell them this isn’t necessary.”

Tails’s eyes were watery, the Miles Electric shaking a bit in his hands, but he didn’t back away. “I- I believe you can beat this,” he sniffled, and his eyes hardened, “in fact I know you will. But I know you, Sonic. You’ll never forgive yourself if the Werehog hurts people.”

Sonic’s head dropped. A buzzing was building in his head, making it harder to think, and his eyes were burning. “Not you too, buddy.”

“It’s just until I can do some research. Once we fix-”

The dam broke, and the rage escaped. “And if there’s nothing to fix? If the big guy’s just here for good this time? What then?” Sonic was hyperventilating now, voice cracking with stress. A spark of purple energy flashed in his eyes as he stepped forward to loom over Tails. “You going to put me under permanent house arrest? Assign me minders ‘for my protection’ and make me get permission whenever I want to go outside? Where’s the damn line, Tails?!”

Something sharp pricked the inside of his mouth, and he tasted iron. It distracted him enough to notice that Tails was cowering now, one eye closed as he clutched the Miles Electric to his chest. “What’s happening?” the panicked voice of Jewel was still coming out of the device’s speakers even though the camera was obscured. Whisper, behind them, had snapped her mask into place, and Sonic heard the low whine of her wispon charging. Even Amy had conjured her hammer. Sonic brought a finger to his mouth. Blood was trickling from his lip, and the reason was easy to discern: a too large fang had sprouted in his mouth and pierced the flesh. He looked back at his hand, and winced when another jolt of violet energy skittered across his fingers.

“Sonic?” Amy asked, stepping towards him slowly, cautiously. She wasn’t putting the hammer away.

Sonic barely heard her, eyes fixed on the shivering, terrified form of Tails. His little brother. His best friend. He took several faltering steps backward. “I-Tails-I didn’t-” He turned, ready to bolt, but Surge was already there, eyes sparking with residual power from a recent expenditure of speed. The Werehog seemed to shrink back into its hidey hole in the face of her cold stare, as if frightened. “Get out of my way, Surge” Sonic said, cursing how weak his voice sounded.

He expected her to try and restrain him, strike him, maybe even mock him, but instead she just stood there, head cocked as they stared each other down. After a tense moment, her expression softened into something resembling compassion. “Doesn’t matter much to me,” she said quietly, “but you run now, you prove them right.”

There was a challenge hiding behind those words. Sonic didn’t have much in the way of fight left in him, the Werehog having apparently carried all his adrenaline away with it as it fell back into hiding, but he squared his shoulders to meet it. “You have an alternative to suggest, Sparky?”

Surge smirked, apparently satisfied with his answer. Her gaze shifted to Sonic’s assembled friends. “I can do it,” She said, earning incredulous looks from everyone. “I can keep an eye on him.”

“Absolutely not,” Whisper’s voice, distorted by her mask, crackled menacingly. “You’d try to kill him as soon as we left you alone with him.”

“Says the bitch still pointing a gun at him,” Surge fired back derisively. “If I still wanted to kill him I’d have tried it on Egghead’s ship. I had ample opportunities."

She stepped past Sonic to approach Tails, or rather Jewel’s projection, live again now that Tails wasn’t holding the camera of the Miles Electric against his body anymore. She flashed the beetle a shark’s grin. “But if you want additional assurances-“

Jewel blinked quizzically, then sighed and pressed a palm to her forehead. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

“Oh I am. In fact I insist, Sparkles,” Surge chuckled. She crouched down so she was eye level with the projection. “Standard daily fee, plus expenses, and I keep your poster boy nice and safe and happy.”

“Are you seriously trying to extort us over this?!” Amy said, hands tightening around her hammer’s handle. "That's scummy, even for you.”

Surge rolled her eyes. “Oh no, Sonic’s groupie has a low opinion of me. I’m crushed. How will I ever recover?”

"Groupie?!” Amy hefted her hammer and began to advance on Surge. Kit slipped in front of her with serpentine grace before she could get close, however, drawing a surprised squeak from her as he spread several water tendrils wide to block her way.

“Enough!” Jewel said as her image started flying. Her wings twitched rapidly and a piercing sound screeched out of the Miles Electric’s speakers, stopping everyone short and causing Kit’s water tendrils to fall apart as the sound disrupted his concentration. Satisfied with the cessation of hostilities, Jewel’s wings stilled, and with narrowed eyes she asked, “Now then: why the sudden willingness to help, Surge? Our file on you is pretty clear as to your opinions on Sonic.”

Surge shrugged. “Besides a big ass paycheck and the opportunity to pummel Lamehog into submission if he starts losing it? Not sure I need another one.“

“I’m not an idiot, Surge,” Jewel pressed, antennae twitching in irritation. "You'd never help him for payment and petty pleasure alone.”

Surge spread her palms wide. “Maybe the idea of you proper types having to rely on us ‘scum’” she shot Amy a pointed look, “to solve a problem tickles me. Maybe I’m bored.” She jabbed a finger into the projection of Jewel, making it glitch out. “Doesn’t matter. You want Sonic safe and monitored, he and his ugly ass alter ego don’t want you to chain him up. Drippy and I have the speed and means to keep tabs on with him without locking him down, my powers can knock out the big fucker if he tries anything, and best of all?”

Surge’s eyes gleamed with menace, “Neither of us would hesitate to put Hoggy’s head through a wall if the job requires it. Face it, Sparkles, you need us.”

Jewel fell silent, thinking, and Surge glanced over at Kit, who was still imposing himself between her and Amy. “Assuming you’re good with this too, Drip?”

The red light of Kit’s eyes winked off and on. He looked at Sonic, then back at Amy, and finally at Surge again. “I-if that’s what you want, ma’am.”

Surge shook her head, “Not your boss, pal, and not what I asked. Are you ok with taking this job?”

Kit’s whole body shivered and his face twisted with intense concentration for a moment before he turned to Jewel with his jaw set. “Add-” a pause and a steadying breath, "add some insurance for damages and I’m in. I’ve got expensive equipment in my lab he might break.”

“Jewel,” Whisper said. “You can’t be seriously considering-”

“Fine” Jewel said, clasping her hands in front of her, “with one caveat: Tails will check in on Sonic daily by comms and in person weekly. If he so much as suspects you’re abusing my trust or endangering Sonic, the deal is off, and I’ll have a warrant drafted for your arrest sent to every city from here to the continent. With a significant bounty attached.”

Surge clapped her hands and laughed. “Oh hoho! Beetle’s got some teeth on her. I both love it and accept your terms.” She rose back to her feet and started walking away, slapping Sonic on the shoulder hard enough to hurt as she passed him. “Show these dorks to the hideout Drippy. I’ll run ahead and prepare the place for guests.”

In a flash of light she was gone, leaving everyone staring awkwardly after her. “This is going to be a disaster,” Whisper grumbled as she eased her mask off and powered down her wispon.

Tangle scratched her head with her tail and placed her hands on her hips. “It’s actually kind of nice of her when you think about it! Not the whole extortion thing, of course, but offering to help at all is- good?” She paused for a moment, then slapped a fist against open palm. “Yeah, I’m gonna say it’s good.”

Kit looked up at Tangle incredulously, then at Whisper. “She’s incredibly naive,” he said, drawing another round of sputtering complaints from the lemur.

“Optimistic” Whisper corrected as she put a calming hand on Tangle’s shoulder, smiling slightly despite herself. “Somehow it grows on you.”

Kit scoffed. “If you say so”, he said, then started walking. “This way please.”

Sonic lagged a little behind the others as they all followed behind Kit. Tails noticed and cautiously flew over as he ended the connection to Jewel and put the Miles Electric away. “You ok with this, Sonic?” he asked as he landed beside him.

Sonic felt the Werehog stir at the question, its eyes probing him as it waited for him to answer. He played Surge’s words over again in his mind, placing them alongside everything else she’d done since their run in near the lighthouse what felt like days ago and trying to make a cohesive whole out of it all. “I guess so?” he said. “ Kind of waiting to see how they plan to keep tabs on me without tying me down. You were right, by the way: I really don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“I know,” Tails said, giving him a quick one armed hug around the waist. “And for what it’s worth I don’t think she’s lying. She could’ve tried to finish you off after she knocked you out, but she didn’t.” Tails scratched behind his ear as he stared at Kit’s back. “And in a weird way she kind of stood up to Whisper and Jewel on your behalf back there. They’ve changed, I think, over the last year.”

Sonic reflected a moment on Tails’s words. “Maybe they have,” he said, managing a smile for his little brother. “Guess I’ll have plenty of time to find out while I’m stuck here with them, eh? A regular social experiment!”

Tails chuckled. “Just try not to push their buttons so much that Surge forgets she’s being paid to protect you.”

“Who, me? A button pusher? Slander.”

Tails laughed, louder this time, and Sonic chose to believe, at least for the moment, that things would be ok.

Chapter Text

“What in the blazing hell are you thinking, girl?” Starline fumed as Surge skidded to a stop on the roof of her and Kit’s hideout, a three story, boxy warehouse at the far end of the industrial section of Westopolis’s harbor. She imagined him pacing around agitatedly in her head, that ridiculous hairdo of his coming undone as he ran a hand through it in frustration. It was a beautiful image, and Surge smiled as she unlocked the roof access hatch and slipped inside.

”Still working on it, but if it’s pissing your dead ass off?” Surge said as she started turning on the lights. Talking out loud to the old ghost seemed to make him easier to manage, she’d found. “I’m thinking I’m onto something good. ”

The hideout, Surge was proud to say, was actually quite homey for a repurposed warehouse. The high windows around the top of the main chamber were obscured with thick green tarps suspended from wall mounted rollers. Thick ropes hung down from each roller that, when pulled, could raise the tarps to let natural light into the space. Dropping them back down, in turn, just required tugging on the edge of a tarp like a paper towel dispenser. Inefficient for regular folk, especially given the ropes didn’t come down anywhere near the closest floor, but when you could move so fast that a wall might as well just be more floor or spider around with the aid of hydro kinesis it was just another opportunity to practice your skills. Also, it was fun to just swing around on the ropes sometimes.

It had been Drippy’s idea to set things up this way, making mundane tasks around the space most efficiently done via creative use of their powers, if not outright requiring it, wherever it made sense. It kept them sharp during downtime, and Starline, after all, hadn’t had utility or enjoyment in mind when crafting the augments that gave them said powers. Finding uses for them beyond combat, therefore, was one more clump of dirt tossed on the old bastard’s grave.

It also made the place feel like it was uniquely theirs. Their first real home, at least as far as either of them could remember. That was what Surge really loved about it, truth be told.

Below the windows, a ring of raised platforms supported on concrete struts ran around the perimeter of the room, save the street side wall where the large shutters that could open to admit trucks and other large vehicles were located, in a giant ”U“ shape. Enclosed cabins, accessible from the main floor via metal staircases leading up to small catwalks at the ends of each arm of the “U”, ran along a portion of each arm. Formerly offices for administrative work and break rooms for the warehouse staff, the gang Surge took the place off of, The Jackdaws, had converted them into a crash space for members who didn’t have their own place, complete with a simple kitchen and a couple showers. Kit made some upgrades to the kitchen over the months they’d been living there and turned a section they didn’t need for basic needs into a sterile lab space. He was a kid in a candy shop when she agreed he could buy the equipment for it with The profits from one of their first big scores, and had plans to expand it if he could find the right instruments, but otherwise they’d been content to use the cabins for the same purpose as the old occupants.

Good thing they hadn’t tossed out all the extra cots. She zipped downstairs to the little corner of the main floor where they’d gathered the gang’s things that they hadn’t found a use for or disposed of yet, and selected a mattress that looked marginally cleaner than the others and a frame that still had most of its springs, zipped them upstairs to the section of cabin farthest from where she and Kit slept in less than 15 seconds flat, and had some sheets laid out in just as long. It wasn’t five stars, but Lamehog was practically a hobo per the data Starline had beamed into her head about him, so he’d be fine.

“It beats sleepin’ in a damn tree,” she muttered as she tossed a pillow onto the cot. She should probably set one up for Brains too, come to think of it. If he was as attached to the big idiot as he seemed, he’d want to sleep over during his weekly check in. Another 30ish seconds of running and lifting, and a second cot was set up next to the first.

“Well, when your whole hero charade falls through, you can at least be the world’s fastest maid,” Starline said wryly when she finished. “Not the purpose I had in mind for you, but when the materials you have to work with are so–sub par–”

“So happy to disappoint you,” Surge snarled back, pushing down on the slow stream of shame the old ghost was trying to start up. Realizing she really didn’t need to do any more prep work before her new client to lmoved in, Surge zipped back down to the main floor to wait for Kit to arrive with the dork parade.

The main floor of the hideout was where she and Kid had made the most changes. One long wall was now dedicated almost completely to an engineering/forge space for Kit’s use, another investment in their independence that allowed him to repurpose all manner of scrap into devices for their business as well as undertake the occasional personal project. A speed boat engine currently dominated the space, lifted up on hoists. Kit was insistent that they needed a boat for jobs requiring them to go out into the bay, and the engine was his first step towards that end.

Across the room, a far more chaotic mess of equipment, mostly free weights and one extremely ruggedized treadmill, made up her workout space. For the exceedingly rare day where it was so hot or rainy that she didn’t want to run around town. Hardening the treadmill so it could handle both her top speeds and the accompanying electrical discharge had been a particularly difficult, error prone task, but the pride Kit took in perfecting the design made all the times it tried to kill her by flipping over or bursting apart mid run worth it.

With a final check to make sure the doors to the basement were still locked and the front doors were unlatched, Surge flopped down on one of the ragged couches arranged in a semicircle near the center of the room and yawned. The area was originally supposed to be a space where they could meet with clients, but once it became clear that people generally felt safer meeting with “Mean Green” on their own turf they turned it into a general hangout space and command center for the business, complete with a mini fridge, a small television, and a couple game consoles. Surge turned onto her side and looked up at the bank of computer monitors hanging from the warehouse’s old bridge crane, and ran her eyes across them. Data from monitoring devices Kit set up for their clients streamed by her vision, camera feeds and sensor statuses blinking in and out of sight like fireflies as the displays cycled. As expected, Eggman’s attack drove folks inside for the night while The Restoration assessed the damage and began critical repairs, so there were no alerts at the moment.

No need to head out on patrol tonight, she decided, and was glad for it. She refused to show it in front of Lamehog or his buddies, but her encounter with the Werehog had worn her out, the strain of siphoning away all that gross ass Chaos energy while he tried to rip her limbs off leaving her muscles thrumming dully. Even with her healing factor, she knew only sleep and a good meal in the morning could truly revitalize them. Tiredness pulled Surge down into the couch, and she let her mind drift, savoring the moment of quiet after a long, long day.

And almost immediately the dysfunctional fucking thing started digging up images of Sonic from throughout the day. Writhing in pain on the Egg Destroyer. Staring in abject horror at his cowering little sidekick. Practically slumping in defeat when she stopped him from running away. Surge sat up with a frustrated groan and put her head in her hands as her guts churned. The ghost of Starline in her head was an asshole, but he wasn’t wrong this time: what the hell was she thinking, volunteering to play guardian to the man she’d been built to replace, to kill? She didn’t need the money that badly. Hell, she barely needed the money at all, and she certainly had been more than happy to go the better part of a year without dealing with him. She played back what she said to Sparkles, picked apart the words like she was performing an autopsy.

“Maybe the idea of you proper types having to rely on us ‘scum’ to solve a problem tickles me,” she’d said, and she meant it. The idea of those smug assholes owing their precious hero’s life to her of all people, having to smile and say “thank you” through gritted teeth when all was said and done, was appealing. She sneered. It was the least Hoggy’s fan club deserved for enabling his treatment of threats like Eggman as if they were a damn game, in fact.

That extended to Sonic too. This could have been avoided if he’d just offed Dr. Eggfuck any of the countless chances he’d had in the past. Therefore she would relish every opportunity to lord his reliance on her over him and remind him of his weakness while this arrangement lasted. The old, programmed urge to prove herself superior awoke at the thought, bringing a pleasant buzz with it. It was familiar, comforting even as it nauseated her. She imagined the whole city seeing Sonic laid low, forced to follow her orders, and the flow of dopamine picked up speed.

“No,” Starline said, and the relaxing neurochemicals were violently cut off by a clenched, spectral fist encased in leather. “No treats until I say so, girl,” he said, voice oozing condescension. “You’re still hiding from yourself. From ME.”

Foolish. She knew leaning into the programming gave the old bastard a foothold. Surge shivered as the hand began clawing around in her skull, tossing its contents about like a toddler hunting for a favorite toy. He turned over her thoughts and emotions from the day like stones in a beloved collection, holding each one up for her and gauging her reaction before moving on to the next. Experimenting on her, even in death.

“I thought we were past the point of such deceits,” he said with mocking disapproval. Another image, the look of horror on Sonic’s face upon realizing just how close he’d been to losing control tonight. Surge tried to hide the little twinge of compassion she knew was rising up in her from the probing, dead eyes. She failed.

“Oh? How adorable,” Starline hissed in her ear. “Feeling sympathy for the fool now that he’s a monster too, little weapon mine?”

“Stop,” Surge said weakly, tears building in her eyes and painfully reacting to the slowly rising electric charge within her.

“Or maybe you think if you help him confront his demon you can expunge your own?” Starline laughed.

Breathe. Panicking would only make him stronger. “Fuck you,” Surge said, firmer than before.

“I’m not some aberration conjured by a jumped up stone. I’m in your every cell, girl. You’ll have to annihilate yourself if you are so hellbent on-“

“I said: FUCK YOU!” Surge screamed, thunder cracking the air as bolts of electricity danced through and around her body. The nearby TV absorbed a series of shocks, and its screen burst in a shower of sparks and glass. Sharp pain lanced through her skull, her body not ready to handle so much output so soon after her earlier exertions, but it served a purpose. The pain drowned out the sickening voice of the butcher who made her like radio static, and when she allowed her body to relax again he did not come back.

A faint smell of smoke drew her attention to the wrecked television. She’d forgotten that it was one of the few devices in the building Kit had yet to harden against such outbursts, and now some of its components were beginning to burn. “Damn it,” she groaned, and sprinted off to grab a fire extinguisher from Kit’s workshop. Her speed enabled her to put out the smoldering machine before it became a full blown electrical fire, but not before a proximity alert popped up on the monitors. Kit, no doubt, drawing near with Sonic and his cronies in tow. “Shit shit shit!” She said, and in a whirlwind of motion swept up the broken glass and dumped the television in a corner where, hopefully, no one would see it. She returned to the couches just as the main doors slid open to admit her visitors, and she slapped an exaggerated grin on her face as she greeted them with arms thrown wide. “Welcome to the Thunderdome, bitches!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

The assembled group stared blankly at her. Whisper frowned and shook her head. “Is- is that really its name?” Tails asked.

Surge’s arms drooped. “Yes? What, you don’t give your places cool names?”

Sonic laughed loudly. “I think you’ve read too many comics, Sparky,” he said, eyes twinkling with mirth. “But sure, Thunderdome. Love it.”

“I think it’s a great name,” Amy said with a smirk. “It’s cute. Very—you.”

Smartasses. “Just get the fuck in here so we can get you oriented,” Surge growled as she sat down.

The group gathered around the seating space, Sonic taking a seat across from Surge. Amy sat down next to him, while Whisper remained standing a good distance away. Surge rolled her eyes, but didn’t press the matter. She knew Fangs keeping her gun slung across her back was likely the best she could hope for.

“This is an impressive piece of work!” Tails gushed, eyes wide as he flew in a circle around the monitor bank. “Such a creative use of this old crane too!” He took a closer look at a screen, rubbing his chin. “That’s a lot of camera feeds.”

“Creepy,” Amy muttered.

“They’re monitoring clients,” Kit glared as he used his water tendrils to climb up to Tails‘s elevation. One of the tendrils started creeping towards Tails, but Kit called it back with a twitch of his hands. “Willing clients. They pay for extra security. Cameras. Motion sensors. Etcetera. Anything gets tripped, we’re alerted.”

Tails nodded, apparently oblivious to Kit’s glowering. “Fascinating,” he said, “I’ve wondered how this whole ‘heroes for hire’ business functioned ever since I first heard about it.”

“Ooo, ooo! Does the business have a cool name too?” Tangle was suddenly right above Surge’s head, dangling upside down by her tail from a light fixture. She shadow boxed the air, “Something dangerous sounding like ‘Maelstrom Inc.’ I bet!”

Surge yelped and fell gracelessly off the couch onto her back. “When the fuck did you learn to be sneaky?” She groused as she sat up.

Tangle uncoiled her tail and span in the air to land on the couch and with a mischievous grin. “Whisper’s been teaching me some tricks so I can help her do recon ‘n stuff! Pretty sick right?”

Surge turned to glare at Whisper. One cold blue eye cracked open to look back, lips parted in the first full smile Surge had ever seen from the taciturn wolf. It was horrifying. “Super,” Surge muttered sourly, “real happy for you, Stretch.”

Tangle snickered with pride as Surge climbed to her feet. “Now that we’ve blown off some steam, let’s talk business,” she said, favoring Sonic with a grin full of daggers “Specifically, ground rules for your time with us.”

Sonic leaned back and crossed his arms. “I’m listening.”

Surge began ticking off rules in her fingers. “Rule one: you sleep here. There’s living space on the upper level, and I’ve set up a private spot for you. With an extra cot for Brains if he wants to stay over during his check ins.”

She glanced at Amy with narrowed eyes. “And I do mean only Brains. No overnight snuggle sessions or whatever other gross shit you and Pinkie get up to. Not in my house.”

Amy buried her reddening face in her hands and Sonic looked so shocked and angry that Surge thought he might try to run again. “Not that it’s any of your business, but we’re not involved like that,” he snapped. He scooched away from Amy on the couch as if to emphasize the point.

Odd. She would’ve pegged the little sycophant as exactly Sonic’s type. “Right, my mistake,” Surge awkwardly pressed past her error. ”Rule two: you want to leave the city limits, I come with. No exceptions.”

Sonic nodded stiffly in assent, but asked, “and how are you going to enforce these rules? Since we’re all so concerned about me losing myself”.

Saying that out loud clearly hurt him, and Surge found she had no interest, at least for now, in hitting him while he was down. “That’s why I needed Drippy’s buy-in for the job,” she said, looking up at her fellow cyborg. He was still hovering protectively near the monitors like he expected Tails to try and break them, but upon hearing his nickname he lowered himself back to the ground and stood at attention.

“At least one of you remembers their purpose,” Starline whispered.

Surge mentally flipped off the doctor. “Do we still have extra trackers from the Hayfield job?” she asked Kit. For a moment, she worried he might not, and her rapidly improvised plans would fall apart before they even got rolling.

She need not have worried. Kit, bless his enhanced brain, caught on quickly. His floppy ears twitched, a subtle sign Surge had learned meant he was searching his memory, and he nodded. "One moment,” he said as he scampered over to his work area and began to rummage through his finished projects. Less than a minute passed before he returned, a tablet connected by a cable to a thin metal band covered in sensors in his hand. “Arm,” Kit said as he stopped in front of Sonic.

Sonic reluctantly complied, and Kit snapped the band shut around Sonic’s wrist. “Rule three,” the little blue fennec slipped flawlessly into the rhythm of Surge’s presentation, “you will wear this at all times. It’s designed to send an alert to Surge and mine's phones if it comes off, the signal is lost, or, once I finish syncing them, if you are ever more than 30 miles away from both of us.” He entered some commands into his tablet, then adjusted the band so it was snug on Sonic’s wrist. “It can track your biometrics as well, so if we learn any markers of an impending transformation I can instruct the band to send out alerts for those as well.”

“Again: creepy,” Amy said, expression sour. “Why even build something like that?”

“Long story,” Surge said. “A rich client, one of our first, was convinced someone was planning to abduct his kid and decided to pay us to protect him. This little beauty was our way of keeping tabs on the boy without placing him under house arrest. Your situation reminded me of him.”

“You didn’t just, I don’t know, play bodyguard for the kid until his dad was satisfied nothing was gonna happen?” Amy asked. “Like normal people?”

“-But then the kidnappers would have never made a move,” Kit said like it was the most obvious thing ever. “And Surge wouldn’t have broken the ring up and handed the members over to the Restoration for prosecution.”

“Who knew a gang of hardened kidnappers would all have glass jaws,” Surge sighed wistfully. “That was some good work we did.”

A beat of silence. “You used a child as bait for a sting operation?!” Amy shouted.

“With signed parental permission!” Surge clarified. “And there hasn’t been a kidnapping in Westopolis since those asshats’ busted up mugs made the news, so again, you’re welcome,” she snarled. Amy’s jaw worked futilely, and Whisper looked up at the ceiling with a long sigh as Surge continued, “Which brings me to rule number four: you all keep your nose outta our other business. That means none of those moralist lectures you love. I don’t tell the Restoration how to handle their shit, so you don’t get to tell us how to run Monsoon Security.”

“I knew it had a cool name!” Tangle crowed with glee, drawing disapproving looks from Amy, Kit, and Whisper. “Sorry.”

Surge chuckled. At least one of the dorks appreciated style. “And as far as I’m concerned you are free to do whatever your little blue heart desires otherwise. Go for runs, mingle with the locals. Fuck, eat chili dogs till you puke!” She said with a smile. She held her hands out to Sonic and his assembled friends. “Questions? Concerns? Or are we all in agreement that this plan kicks ass?”

Whisper looked ready to throw water on the whole idea, but Tails beat her to the punch. “Call me crazy, but yeah, I could see this working,” he said as he flew down to examine Sonic’s new wrist band. “You’ve clearly put an impressive amount of thought into this, especially considering you must have come up with the idea less than an hour ago.” He gave Whisper a pointed look as Surge preened over the compliment, “but it’s ultimately Sonic’s call. What do you think, bro?” he asked, taking Sonic’s hand in his.

Sonic looked at the wrist band, expression carefully neutral. After a moment, his jaw tightened and he nodded. “Yeah, this might work,” he said, then stood up to face Surge. Stiffly, he extended his hand to her, “let’s do this.”

Surge smiled, this time without a hint of malice, and shook the hedgehog’s proffered hand. “Pleasure doing business with you. Let’s get you settled in.”

Surge and Kit led the group up the stairs and to the room she’d prepared for Sonic and Tails via the most circuitous route, pointing out the kitchen and showers as they went. “We don’t keep much on hand, so feel free to pick up some soap, extra socks, or whatever else you need tomorrow,” she said as they neared the lab space. “Hell, I’ll spot you the rings if you need ‘em, I love making the Restodorks reimburse me.”

Sonic laughed at that, and Tails stopped to look through the thick glass windows of the lab. “Whoa, is that a hematology analyzer? I didn’t think non-medical facilities could get those!” He shouted, tails wagging excitedly.

It was Kit’s turn to indulge in some grand standing, and he did so with gusto. “I built it actually,” he said, favoring his rival with a smug look of superiority. “It’s pretty easy when you can source scrap parts from the local hospitals.”

Tails frowned. “Well, yeah, of course if you have ready access to the parts it’s easy,” he said defensively, then scratched his chin. “Actually, I never even thought to ask the hospital in Emerald Hill if they could spare parts,” he gave Kit a hopeful look, “would you, um, maybe be willing to share the schematics with me? I could offer one of my designs in turn.”

Kit twitched and his eyes briefly glowed an angry red, but Surge caught his eye and gave a subtle shake of her head. He swallowed and let out a deep breath. “M-maybe,” he said through grit teeth, then snapped his fingers. “Actually, now that I think about it, I should calibrate the instruments for tests. Your condition,” he said to Sonic, “likely has a blood borne element, given the injection. We can take a sample in the morning.”

Sonic grimaced. “If I gotta. Why build a fancy med lab anyway? Can’t afford a doctor?”

That made Kit’s commitment to staying professional evaporate. “That’s private,” he snapped, then angrily turned about and stomped through the lab doors.

“Oh, buddy” Surge whispered sadly to herself, then turned a glare on Sonic. “I’ll explain later if it matters. Until then? Rule four,” she growled.

Sonic rolled his eyes and raised his hands in surrender as they resumed walking. “My bad, don’t kill me for being curious,” he grumbled.

They came, at last, to Sonic’s room, and Sonic sat on one of the cots she’d set up, his friends crowding in behind him. The cots were simple things, thin mattresses on metal frames draped with drab brown sheets, but Surge vouched that the sheets were soft and warm enough for comfortable sleeping. “My bed’s more or less the same,” she said, “so trust me, you’ll sleep fine once you get used to them.”

Sonic bounced on the cot a couple times to test its firmness, then nodded. “Sounds good,” he said, and he suddenly sounded very tired. He looked at his friends and plastered a wan smile on his face. “Looks like I’m all set!” he said.

Amy frowned and wrung her hands together. “Are you sure you’ll be ok here?” she asked, voice quavering. “We could still-”

“I’ll be fine, Ames,” he said, and if he didn’t mean it he did a good job of faking it. “Tails will make sure of it.”

Tails nodded, back straight and eyes steely, if a bit watery. Amy sighed and stepped forward to give Sonic a quick hug, causing him to tense up. “I’m going to ask Jewel to give Whisper and Tangle leave to help me look for Eggman,” she said as she stepped back and wiped away a tear. “We’ll call as soon as we learn anything.”

Whisper tilted her head slightly in affirmation, and Tangle gave Sonic a thumbs up. “You can count on us, pal!” the lemur said.

Surge groaned and made an exaggerated gagging noise. “Right, I’m all mushed out and need some damn shut eye. You dorks can let yourselves out once you’re done blubbering at each other.” She turned to leave, hands in her pockets, before anyone could see the sadness in her eyes. All those friends worried about the lucky bastard. Must be nice, she thought.

“Surge,” Sonic said, stopping her in her tracks.

She glanced over his shoulder at him. “Yeah?”

Sonic smiled at her. It was, she realized, the first time he’d ever smiled at her without a hint of bravado or mockery. “Thank you,” he said.

Surge didn’t fully suppress her visible shock, or the little twist of positive feelings the words elicited in her. She recovered quickly, however, and glared at him before turning away again. “Save it,” she said as she continued walking. “Just making some rings off your sorry ass.”

“All the same!” he called after her, and Surge started walking faster.
—-----------------------

When Surge returned to the main chamber, Kit was seated at one of the long metal workbenches in his area, examining the burnt out television. He glanced up in acknowledgment of her, and Surge struggled to meet his eyes. “You found that fast,” she said quietly, nodding to the broken machine.

Kit nodded as he pushed away from the table and hopped off the worn leather stool he'd been using. “I noticed its absence, and I keep a tight inventory of our gear,” he said, “A burnt out TV wasn’t in that corner earlier today. Easy to put two and two together after that.”

Surge chuckled and smiled fondly at him. “Can’t fool that big ass brain of yours, can I? Sorry to make more work for you.”

Kit smiled back bashfully, “I-it’s fine, ma- Surge. You know I like to keep busy.” He glanced downward and rubbed his arm awkwardly. “i-if you d-d-don’t mind me asking, what happened?”

Surge hopped up to take a seat on the bench and started sullenly twisting the rings on her fingers. “Guess,” she said.

Kit’s head snapped up and his eyes flashed an angry crimson. “Starline.”

Surge nodded and grimaced. “Shoulda known getting involved with Sonic like this would set the old fucker off.”

“In your defense, the list of things that didn’t anger him was never very long.”

Surge guffawed. “Shit, I needed that. Good one, pal.”

Kit let out a brief chuckle, but then his expression turned calculatingly serious again. “Still, you’ve not had a blowout like this in months. A-are you sure this is a good idea?”

Surge waved a hand dismissively. “I’ll keep it together. Take extra runs, do my exercises. Keeping active always helps, and it’s not like I can’t tell Lamehog to piss off for a bit if I gotta get my shit under control. It’s only for a few weeks tops, knowing how fast his friends work.”

Kit nodded, but didn’t look fully convinced. “Ok. Still, i-if you ever need to pull the plug on this, I won’t-”

“What did I tell you when we took over this place?” Surge cut him off.

Kit sighed, then his eyes steeled as he held out a fist to her. “No more running,” he said, voice firm as he recited the words. “No more hiding.”

Surge grinned and bumped his fist with her own, then ruffled his head fur. As usual, she couldn’t resist letting out a little charge so it was left a puffy mess. “Fucking right, little man. We’ll figure it out.”

Kit laughed and swatted her hand away. “Ok, ok, I believe you.”

“Good. Don’t stay up too late, we both got a lot to do tomorrow.”

Kit nodded as he returned to the workbench. “I won’t, promise” he said as he slapped on a pair of magnifying goggles. “Just want to get a sense of what parts I’ll need to fix this.”

Surge zipped up to the room she shared with Kit, and finally allowed herself to look as tired as she felt. With a loud yawn, she cut the lights, kicked off her shoes, and flopped onto her bed. Fuck changing into sleep clothes, she decided as she removed her head band, and crawled under the blankets. She let out a happy little groan as she settled her head on her pillow and shut her eyes, eager to finally sleep. Her brain ran through all the fighting, scheming, and shocks of the day as she began drifting off, and she huffed bemusedly. Kit was right that the job was gonna be difficult, but she wasn’t worried.

Starline, after all, was positively seething after Sonic thanked her, and that alone, to her, was worth the hassle.

Chapter Text

Sonic the Hedgehog was bored. A bit sleep deprived too, truth be told, thanks to the Werehog’s constant snuffling about in his brain. It was the fourth day since he moved in with Surge and Kit, and while they so far were true to their promises regarding the relative freedom he would be allowed, Sonic was still chafing at the bit for some action. Running from one end of the city to the other, with frequent stops to see the sights or check out some new route he’d not known about before, had kept him well occupied for the first two days. It had been a long time since he last spent more than a day or two in a place that wasn’t Emerald Hill, after all, and Westopolis was full of cozy neighborhood parks and colorful storefronts that he was delighted to discover. Seabreeze Park near the lighthouse was his favorite, full of wavy palm trees, a trail that ran a full two miles of scenic cliffside views, and a wooden stairwell that led down to a little beach. Some enterprising souls had hung hammocks for public use in a large copse of trees, perfect for napping, and there was a small turnaround at the park entrance where food trucks gathered on the daily to serve food! A one stop shop for an outdoorsy hedgehog’s every need.

Unfortunately word got around that Sonic the Hedgehog, world renowned hero, was hanging around town with no apparent plans to leave by the second night, and now Sonic needed to play hide and seek with the local paparazzi whenever he went out. Normally, he’d just have fun with such attention, let them think they were cornering him, maybe even let them snap a picture, then speed away before they could pin him down, but he really didn’t want anyone to learn why he was still in town or who he was staying with. Gaia knew what his enemies might do if they learned about his current predicament, and he imagined Surge would forget her manners if he led any gossip hungry journalists to her doorstep. Hiding out with Tails on Eggman’s disabled ship and assisting the Restoration’s salvage crew gave him a way to lie low for the third day, but now Tails had departed for his workshop in Emerald Hill with the data he extracted from the ship’s computers to do some decrypting and analysis, and he wouldn’t be back for at least three days

This left Sonic profoundly directionless, and combined with the rising frustration pouring off the Werehog day after day he felt like he was about to run up a wall and straight through the roof if he didn’t find something more constructive to do. Fortunately, clearing his head with a morning run left him with an idea that might just do the trick, but he needed Surge and Kit’s agreement.

It was time, in short, to fire up the old Hedgehog charm. Mind filled to the brim with purpose, Sonic barreled into the main room of the hideout and skidded to a halt in front of the large engine Kit was working on, grin wide as a canyon. “Morning Kit!” he called to the little blue fox currently dangling from the bottom of the engine by two water tendrils. Another pair was holding an angled metal tube in place over a hole in the engine block while Kit, face obscured by a heavy welder’s mask , was using a small oxygen fuel torch to secure it in place. The fuel tanks, secured to his hydropack with straps, clinked against one another like a pair of metal wind chimes whenever he shifted his body.

“Hello, Sonic,” Kit’s voice, muffled as it was by the mask and the sound of the welder, was still noticeably unenthusiastic as he continued to work. “Did you need something?” he asked.

Sonic shrugged and rocked back and forth on his feet. “Just checking in with one of my gracious hosts,” he said cheerily. Curiosity got a hold of him, and he started circling the engine at a brisk trot. It was an impressive piece of machinery, polished steel and aluminum alloy that glistened softly in the warehouse lights, with a moderately sized jet turbine set in the middle of it that wouldn’t look out of place on one of Tails’s airplanes. "What ya workin on here?” he asked.

Kit paused, killed his torch, and lifted up his heavy welding mask to throw Sonic an incredulous look as he lowered himself to the floor. The two tendrils holding the pipe remained firmly in place, even as Kit used the two supporting his weight to rise up to eye level with Sonic like a periscope. “I-it’s at boat engine” he said, tilting his head back and forth as he examined Sonic’s face “Are you feeling ok? Prower’s notes didn’t mention anything about the Werehog causing memory or object recognition issues.”

It was weird hearing someone call Tails by his last name, but Sonic did consider it an improvement over Kit’s previously dogged refusal to acknowledge Tail by name at all. A sign of nascent, if begrudging professional respect between the two foxes, he hoped. “Hardy har,” Sonic said with a huff, crossing his arms. “I know what it is, but what’s it for? I can’t imagine you, with your hydra whatsit abilities, really need a boat.”

“I was serious, and it’s ‘hydrokinetic’,” Kit said with an exasperated sigh, “I swear it’s not that hard to remember- wait, you actually want to know?”

Sonic shrugged. “Of course! Tails always loves talking about his latest project, and I am crashing in your space.”

“I’m not Prower,” Kit grumbled petulantly, and Sonic winced. Great. Way to forget the little guy’s primary hot button there buddy. Sonic fumbled for an apology.

“But,” Kit’s expression softened with a sigh, “I suppose we do have some things in common.” He turned back to the engine, slapping his mask back into place. He invited Sonic to look closer with a small wave of his free hand, and Sonic gratefully accepted the olive branch. “My plan is to make a high speed jet boat,” he said, tapping on the turbine that dominated the device’s body. “So we can start taking jobs that require travel out into the bay.”

Sonic looked into the central cavity of the turbine like he might find answers to life’s questions in it. “Still don’t understand why you even need one. Couldn’t Surge just hitch a ride with you? Or run on the water?”

Kit shook his head as he suspended himself beneath the engine again and took out a flint striker. A couple metallic clicks, and his torch was lit again. “You’re thinking too narrowly,” he shouted over the hiss of the welder. “Yes, I can travel in water with ease for a good while, and Surge can run on top of it when she hits the right speed, but there’s limits. Can’t go too far out using just our powers or we risk being unable to get back to shore before we run out of juice. A boat gives us a place to catch our breath and lets us save our strength for when it's really needed instead of wasting it just getting onto the water.”

Sonic nodded. “Makes sense,” he said as he picked up a loose pipe and held it up to his eye like a spyglass. “Why all the extra bits, though? The thing looks ready to use already.”

“Maximizing output, for one,” Kit said as he started finishing up his weld. “I’m hoping to slot this into a body big enough to include a small sleeping space so it’s multi-day excursion ready without sacrificing speed. The secondary goal is a full conversion to electric power for efficiency’s sake.”

“Oh neat!” Sonic exclaimed. He started idly spinning the pipe like a marching baton. “So Surge could just give it a jolt if it’s running low on charge, right?”

Kit cut the flow of gas to his torch again and began spidering around onto the top of the engine. “Precisely,” he said, a hint of a smile in his voice. “You’re catching on faster than I expected.”

“Everyone assumes I’m dumb just because Tails is a freaking genius,” Sonic said with an exaggerated pout. “I get the broad strokes of all this machine stuff, I just don’t have a head for the specifics.”

Kit snorted. “Or the attention span, I’d wager.”

“Low blow, dude,” Sonic chuckled. “Need any help?”

Kit lit his torch again and adjusted the valves on its handle, focusing it into a concentrated, white hot flame. “You really are bored,” he said as he knelt and began cutting into the metal.

Sonic fumbled the pipe mid twirl and winced as it clattered loudly across the floor. “I’m that obvious?” he asked, and Kit hummed affirmatively. “Honestly,” he said, leaning back against the nearby workbench, “It’s less boredom and more just- twitchiness, I guess? I’ve never had to actively avoid trouble like this before, and it’s driving me nuts. The big guy’s bothered by the lack of action too, resents it even.”

He frowned, and his voice dropped. “He keeps grumbling and thumping around in my skull like it’s a prison cell and I’m the jailer.“ He paused, wondering if it was really safe to tell Kit all this. He watched the little fennec work for a moment, the precision and confidence with which the little guy operated his welder providing some small comfort as it reminded Sonic of his brother, now many miles away. “I’m afraid to sleep,” he admitted quietly, “even though I know that's just making things worse. What if he decides he’s had enough waiting around while I’m unconscious and unable to stop him, you know?”

Kit killed both the torch and his tendrils then lifted up his mask again, jaw set worriedly. “You’re still talking about the Werehog like he’s a completely separate person,” he noted.

Sonic shrugged sullenly. “I dunno how else to view him when he’s so- cut off. If he’s part of me still, it’s a part that despises having to share space with the rest of me.” He sighed and rubbed a hand over his tired eyes. “Ugh, that must make me sound crazy to you.”

Kit holstered his tools and sat down on the edge of the suspended engine block. “Less so than I wish it did,” he said, eyes distant as he gently kicked his feet against the side of the engine. “Starline left some-surprises- behind when he was rewiring our brains. The details are Surge’s story to tell, but in short her first experience with one was close enough to what you’re describing that I’m thinking we might be dealing with something similar. The next blood tests will confirm if I’m right.”

Sonic cringed at the reminder of just how traumatic Surge and Kit’s background was, but it was good to hear the little guy speak confidently about the next tests. The first round had only been able to confirm his blood was, as suspected, suffused with negative Chaos energy. So much of it, in fact, that Kit’s instruments were unable to discern anything else of value, like his blood was a radio transmission and the Chaos energy was a jammer. Tails and Kit had spent a full half a day arguing how to recalibrate Kit’s machines so they could peer through the “static”, Kit eventually deferring (begrudgingly) to Tails’s greater breadth of experience with the Emeralds.

The solution, they decided, was to integrate one of Tails’s Emerald Radars into the hematology analyzer and use it as a signal filter of sorts. Just as the radar device, on its own, could pinpoint an Emerald’s exact location within the wider field of energy it radiated, so too should it be able, in conjunction with the analyzer, to highlight what precisely was keeping the energy levels in his blood so abnormally high and filter out the noise. Or so the two foxes hoped. ”You think Eggman took a page out of Starline’s book with whatever I was shot up with?” Sonic asked.

Kit nodded. “It stands to reason, given Surge was the intended target.“ He grinned ruefully. “‘‘Brain fuckery’, as she calls it, was his specialty after all.”

Sonic busted out laughing. “That sounds like her alright. So, as one of two experts on ‘brain fuckery’ in the building, what do you think about my whole ‘be productive’ plan for dealing with mine?”

Kit thumped a hand on the side of the engine. “I’d say there’s more than one reason why I’m customizing a boat engine, but I imagine whatever you have in mind requires Surge’s approval, not mine. She’s on the roof, said she needed some exercise.”

Sonic nodded and pushed off the workbench. “I guessed as much. Just wanted to make sure I was on the right track before I pestered her about it.”

Kit smiled and propelled himself back onto his feet with the aid of more water tendrils. “I shall take you coming to me first as a compliment” he said as he turned back to his work. “And Sonic?” he shouted.

Sonic was already up the stairs and at the foot of the roof access ladder. He zipped back down to the catwalks overlooking the main floor and leaned over the railing. “What’s up?”

“Ease up on the charm offensive and just be honest with Surge,” Kit said. He looked up at Sonic, and his eyes flashed dangerously. “She’s been manipulated enough.”

Sonic gulped and nodded in understanding before vanishing up the ladder and onto the sunlit rooftop. As he emerged, he was once again impressed by the extent of the work the two cyborgs put into making the old warehouse into a home. A small grouping of raised garden beds, another one of Kit’s projects, were erected at the end of the roof closest to where Sonic popped out of the access hatch, rainbow chili pepper plants rising from the dirt in organized rows and displaying their riotously colored fruits like clowns on parade. At the other end a large canopy tent was erected, a pair of lounge chairs oriented towards the sea laid out underneath it and a hammock strung to its frame. Even the building’s industrial chimney was in on the fun: it was painted a shade of green close to, but not quite the same shade as, Surge’s fur, with an old, cracked basketball hoop bolted onto it. A shooting zone and shooting lines were painted on the ground in front of it in various shades of blue, and it was within this painted area that Sonic found Surge, a pair of black headphones over her ears and eyes shut as she poured all her focus into doing what might be the last thing Sonic ever thought he’d catch her doing.

Surge the Tenrec, proud menace to polite society, was dancing. Even more shocking, she was good at it. Really good, in fact. Six balls of tightly controlled electricity floated in the air around her in a pair of fanning arcs, three orbs apiece. Bound to her hands through dimly flickering strands of electric light, they crackled and hummed as she twirled and slid about the rooftop to a tune only she could hear. She bent backwards during a particularly complicated maneuver, and the orbs spun rapidly above her chest and head, casting streaks of neon light across her face as they passed within inches of her nose. She swept into a series of slower gyrations, and they lazily skipped through the air like an invisible partner as she flicked her wrists and swept her arms about in flowing arcs.

The interplay of light and motion was, in a word, hypnotic, and Sonic momentarily forgot his purpose for seeking her out as he watched the elaborate performance. Even the Werehog, normally torn between fear and a burning desire for a rematch when in Surge’s presence, abandoned his grumbling and scratching at Sonic’s mental defenses to watch curiously as Surge went into a low sleep, the electric orbs skimming the across the concrete surface of the roof as she span, then leaping into air as she ended in a lunging stance and threw her arms wide like bird’s wings . She held the pose, arms shaking slightly with the effort of maintaining her connection to the floating orbs. Her face, however, was relaxed, a serene smile on her face as she let out a slow breath.

Sonic would never have believed she could even be so at ease before now but, knowing what he did of her past, he was glad to be wrong. Finally shaking off the spell his shock had cast upon him, he opted to announce himself instead of just staring like a starstruck idiot. “H-hey Surge!” he shouted as he clambered onto the rooftop, “cool-”

Surge’s eyes popped open, and with a brutally fast whip of her arm all six electric orbs screamed towards him. Sonic yelped and leapt aside just before they pelted the access hatch with an explosive roar. “Whoa, whoa, Surge it’s me!”

Surge was already stomping towards him. “The fuck you sneaking up here for?” she snarled.

The Werehog snarled and snapped defensively, demanding Sonic fight back or get out of the way so he could fight. He tamped down on it. Barely. “I’m sorry! You seemed so focused and I didn’t-”

Surge’s nostrils flared and her eyes started to spark. “How much did you see?” her voice dropped into dangerous territory.

“I mean-”

“HOW. MUCH. HEDGEHOG?” she shouted.

“Just the last few moves, I swear!” Sonic shouted back, “Why’s it such a big deal? You were just dancing.”

Surge growled and looked away, arms crossed. “I-It’s not dancing! It’s– a complicated focusing exercise. Helps me practice control of my powers.”

Aww, she was embarrassed. Adorable. This was way too good an opportunity for teasing to pass up. “Sure looked a lot like dancing to me, Sparky. Really good dancing, even, and the light show?” He pursed his lips and held up his hand in an exaggerated gesture of approval. “Excellent! No notes.”

Surge shoved Sonic back angrily, causing him to slip and fall onto his backside. “Fuck you, Lamehog, I’m not getting paid to entertain you.”

Sonic threw up his hands in surrender. “Ok, ok, I’m sorry! Seriously, though, you’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about. Those were impressive moves.”

Surge loomed over Sonic a moment longer, fists shaking and muzzle reddening, before she spun away and began aggressively tugging at the rings on her right hand. “W-whatver, asshole. Why were you looking for me anyway? Figured you’d be out running about town, mingling with fans.”

Sonic sighed as he got back to his feet and walked over to the nearest section of the stone half wall running around at the edge of the roof. He leaned his hands on it and stared out towards the bay. “Running’s not keeping the big guy and I as calm as I hoped it would,” he said. As if to emphasize his discontent, the Werehog scraped a disembodied claw across his brain, and his hands clenched tightly at the burst of pain. “We’re both aching to do something more productive, I think.”

Surge looked at him over her shoulder. “Well now you’ve got me worried.”

“Aww, gee, I knew you cared.”

Surge scoffed but couldn’t hold back a small smirk as she walked over and sat down near him on the half wall. “Annnd just like that he’s fucked it up again. So, since you’re bothering to talk to me about it in the first place, I’m guessing you have something in mind.”

Sonic took a deep breath. Honesty, Kit said. “You and Kit go on night patrols right? As part of the hero business. “

Surge nodded. “Five nights a week. Semi randomized, Drippy says it keeps the dirtbags on their toes. Why?”

Sonic stood up and looked her in the eyes, all business. “I want to come along.”

“Fuck no,” Surge snapped out so quickly it looked like a reflex. "You and your moral moaning will just cramp my style when I gotta bust heads. Straight up Rule Four territory.”

“Hey, I can be a hardass when I need to. Just ask Knuckles about our first meeting.”

Surge shook her head. “One gullible guardian living in a hut isn’t the same as hardened street criminals. You hesitate for even a moment because you wanna redeem someone’s ass in the middle of a firefight, and you might not just get punched in the nose. I’m not hauling your ass back here with blaster holes in it.”

“I said I can handle it!” Sonic snarled, the Werehog rising up for a moment behind his eyes. He shook his head and grunted as he pushed it back down again. “Seriously, I’ll do things your way out there, and if things really start crossing lines I don’t want to I’ll just disengage and come back here for the rest of the night.” He turned pleading eyes towards her and frowned. “Please don’t make me beg. I get all blubbery and snotty, it’s really not pretty.”

Surge chuckled and grinned, eyes narrowed deviously and sharp teeth on full display. “Don’t tempt me with things I want, Hedgehog,” she practically purred, causing a nervous shiver to run down Sonic's spine, then hopped off the wall and stretched her arms over her head. “Fortunately my exercises-”

“Dancing” Sonic coughed into his fist.

Surge spun back to him with and her eyes flashed with an implied threat, “-have left me feeling generous, so I’m open to making a deal.”

Sonic frowned. “More rings? I’m not exactly independently wealthy, Sparky.”

Surge’s smile widened, and she clasped her hands behind her back while rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. “Oh no, you’re not getting your way that easily. You know what the worst part of being the only girl with superpowers like mine in this city is?”

Sonic shrugged as he followed her out into the center of the roof. “Not being allowed within fifty yards of the local power plant?”

Surge’s genuine laughter, Sonic learned in this moment, was throaty and surprisingly warm. “I’ll give you that one, but no. It’s having no one around to really challenge you, and sometimes I miss the feeling. You help me scratch that competitive itch, and maybe I find a way to incorporate you into some patrols and gigs.”

Sonic raised an eyebrow. “You- want me to spar with you?” he guessed.

Surge’s eyes lit up with a fire Sonic could only describe as hungry as she started circling him like a buzzard eyeing up a wounded deer. “Oh no,” she said, razor teeth glinting in the midday sun. “I have something much more fun in mind.”

—---

Two hours later, Sonic watched a pair of cargo ships pull into the harbor from their perch atop the lighthouse as Surge laid out her plans for what she was calling his “entrance exam.”

“The rules are simple,” Surge declared. “We’ll race three laps around the city perimeter, doing a loop around the lighthouse at the end of each lap. Kit will be tracking our movements and broadcasting a tone to your earpiece each time you clear a lap to help us keep track. After lap three, we cut inward and run to City Hall. First to touch the flagpole on top of the dome wins,” She pointed at a four story building near the center of the city, its brass plated dome shimmering as sunlight beat down on it. “If I win, you pay for dinner tonight for me and Kit. Good shit too, no skimping on fast food.”

Sonic nodded and grinned. This was definitely shaping up to be fun. “And if I win I get to come on patrols with you two. What else should I know?”

“Just two other rules: avoid property damage wherever possible, and don’t endanger the plebs. Everything else is fair game.”

Sonic glanced sidelong at her. “Even attacking each other?”

Surge nodded with a feral grin and twiddled her fingers at him. Sparks flew off them like snowflakes, popping and crackling as they descended to the ground. “It’s no fun without the option to play dirty, now is it?”

The Werehog growled in approval, but Sonic managed to keep a straight face. “Works for me,” he said. “When do we start?”

Surge’s reply was a bolt of lightning aimed at Sonic’s ankles. He jumped, and Surge sped off with a cackle.

“Right,” Sonic laughed as he briefly braced and then shot off into a full sprint down the side of the lighthouse. “I really gotta start expecting that”.

Surge’s head start was mitigated somewhat by her need to avoid crowded areas as they ran so as to avoid shocking people as she ran past. This meant a lot of roof hopping, slower than straight up running. Free of such concerns, Sonic could stick to the roads and thoroughfares in all but the most crowded areas while still moving at near top speed. Soon he had Surge in his sights again, the tenrec bouncing from rooftop to rooftop like a frog navigating a field of lily pads while he weaved around vehicles on the street below. A bend in the road up ahead forced him to run up the nearest building to join her on the rooftops if he wanted to keep on the shortest path around the city perimeter, and as he reached the lip of the building’s roof he pushed off into the air and set his sights on Surge, now just a couple buildings ahead of him

Sonic smiled wide. Time for some payback. Lining his body up with Surge as he flew through the air, Sonic twisted into a flip and brought his left foot down in a blurringly fast axe kick. The air cracked as his foot briefly broke the sound barrier, and a blade of displaced, fast moving air howled towards Surge. She heard it coming and managed to dodge to the side, but the blast of air crashed into the roof with crushing force and kicked up dust and small chunks of roofing tiles. Surge threw up an arm to protect her eyes, slowing her down even more, and by the time she was clear of the dust cloud Sonic was running parallel to her.

“What’d I say about property damage, chucklenuts!” She shouted.

Sonic stuck his tongue out at her. “Wouldn’t have damaged the roof if you had just let me hit ya, Sparks!” he fired back.

Surge laughed wildly. “Oh that’s how you wanna play? Alright.” she said, “let’s play.”

Surge raked a hand through the air, fingers crooked like she was trying to scratch at him. Claws of electricity leapt forth in response , whipping towards Sonic and forcing him to throw himself back to the streets below. He barely avoided colliding with a delivery truck as he landed and rolled under it and when he popped up and resumed running Surge was once again pulling ahead of him.

Adrenaline thrumming in his blood, Sonic’s face split into a manic grin as he jetted off in pursuit again, the Werehog howling with glee in his ears. A jolt of excitement from the big guy pierced his skull, and though it hurt the colors around him brightened and the sounds of the city became ever so slightly clearer. Sonic whooped as he poured on more speed, reveling in the realization that, for the first time since the big guy’s return, he and Sonic wanted the same thing.

Run. Chase. Win.

The contest became as much a running mock battle as it did a race now, Sonic and Surge both trying increasingly intricate ways of tripping up and setting traps for each other throughout the second and third laps. Sonic slipped up onto his one of
The beltways at the city edge and used the dense traffic to obscure his location as he pulled up alongside Surge, who‘d opted to run along the electric trolley rails below , then leapt out and slammed down in a drop dash right in front of her. Surge was thrown aside by the shockwave and lost precious seconds recovering , but got her revenge during lap three when she fired a concentrated blast into the metal roof of a warehouse Sonic was running for, forcing him to divert around the now
Dangerously electrified surface.

As they finished the third lap and entered the final sprint towards City Hall, Sonic was drafting behind Surge, waiting for the opportunity to jet past her and clinch victory, the Werehog egging him on as it huffed in time with his own panting breath. The dome of City Hall came into view, glowing like a beacon in the late afternoon sun, and he seized his opportunity. With a Mach speed hop and twisting kick, Sonic sent another blast of concentrated air flying at Surge’s legs, then slid left. The attack was carefully calculated, the angle perfect, and Sonic expected to slip right by as the blast knocked Surge’s feet out from under her.

Surge, however, had been waiting too. Throwing herself into a graceful backflip, she threw her arm to the side and tossed an electric orb she’d been concealing in her fist into the air as the blast flowed under her. It floated lazily for a moment as it gradually filled Sonic’s field of vision, then detonated in a burst of light and sound that struck Sonic like a flashbang. His vision obscured and ears ringing, Sonic stumbled and barely had the wherewithal to tuck into a roll. The Werehog roared in pain and outrage, and his presence bent and twisted around Sonic’s mind to the point he could barely tell where he ended and the big guy began. When the disorientation cleared up enough for him to pop back up to his feet, Surge was already clinging triumphantly to the flagpole, pumping her free hand victoriously. The race was over.

The Werehog didn’t care, and Sonic’s head was still too scrambled to fully hold back its roared demands:
Chase.
Catch .

Dark Chaos energy danced over Sonic’s limbs, and with a final burst of impossible speed he tackled Surge off her perch on the brass dome. They tumbled through the air for an endless moment in a tangle of limbs and fur, finally crashing to the ground on the next roof over. A couple more rolls, and they came to rest, Sonic pinning Surge’s arms to the concrete. He stared down at her, mind a jumble and eyes wide as he stared into the bright teal of hers, both of them panting with exertion. Her head band had come loose in the tumble, her long quills falling down around her shoulders like drapes and somehow softening the red blush of exertion coloring her face. His nose twitched, and the heightened senses of the Werehog assaulted his brain with the heady scents of sweat and ozone pouring off her. Her lips moved, clearly saying something, but his ears were still buzzing from a combination of her flashbang attack and the odd rumbling noise the Werehog had started making in his head. He blinked, shook his head, and the sounds of the world came crashing back into focus.

“Sonic!” Surge snapped. He felt her arm muscles flex against his grip as she grunted and attempted to squirm out from under him. “You’ve got five seconds to let me up before I fry your ass.”

Sonic released her arms and jumped back as if bit, the Werehog retreating to the back of his mind in confused terror. “Sorry,” he said, still catching his breath.

Surge sat up and rubbed her arms, hissing slightly in pain. “The fuck was that? You looked like you were gonna try and eat me for a moment there.”

Sonic rubbed a hand over his face, still trying to calm his breathing. Was that what he’d wanted? The now quiet jumble of instincts pouring off the Werehog didn’t offer any answers. “I- I don’t know,” he said at length. “My brain got a bit scrambled by that move you pulled, got me and the big guy twisted up in each other for a minute.” He sat down on the ground across from her, willing his thrumming heart beat to finally return to a resting rate. “Are you okay?”

Surge waved off his concern. “I’m fine, nothing the nanites can’t fix” she said, then frowned. “But maybe this was a mistake. We didn’t think about how Big Ugly might get agitated by all the activity.”

“No!” Sonic almost panicked. “Let’s not be hasty. Up until your flashbang trick threw everything into a tangle, he was actually pretty content. First time we were pushing in the same direction since this started, actually.” He smiled and did his best to look disarming, “And hey, soon as you told me to back off, he went running. I think he’s scared of ya.”

Surge smirked as she climbed to her feet and started looking around. Her quills swayed slightly in the breeze, brushing against the back of her legs, and Sonic marveled for a moment at their length. How the hell did that little head band of hers manage to contain those things? “Damn right he is. Now help me find my head band.”

Fortunately, the little metal circle wasn't broken and hadn’t gone far. Sonic found it at the other end of the roof and tossed it to Surge like a tiny frisbee. “So,” he said as he watched her bind her quills back up with such practiced ease that it seemed like sorcery to him, “I guess I owe you and Kit some food. You guys tried the food trucks that hang out near Seabreeze Park?”

”Fuck yes I have!,” Surge said enthusiastically. “Those beautiful bastards serve up the best shit in town, I swear. Drippy’s gonna be pumped”. She rubbed her hands together excitedly, then tapped her ear piece to open a channel to Kit. “Yo Drip! Hell yeah I won, so Hog’s buying dinner. Food trucks, ten minutes,” She glanced at Sonic with a devious smirk and said, “pick something expensive.”

Sonic groaned dramatically. “You’re gonna bankrupt me, aren’t ya?”

“Too fucking right I am,” she said with a saucy wink. She turned to go with a spring in her step, “now let’s go, we can talk details about night patrols while we eat.”

Sonic stopped in his tracks. “But I lost the race.”

Surge stopped at the edge of the roof and spun to face him, eyes twinkling like stars within the shadowy mask of her facial fur. “That was your stipulation, Blue, not mine. I just wanted a challenge, and you delivered. As far as I’m concerned our deal’s on.” She crossed her arms and leaned towards him. “Unless the poor hedgehog’s wounded pride objects,” she teased.

Sonic smiled as he approached her. That was-surprisingly kind of her. “I think I can handle some humbling after a solid foot race. Besides,” he said as he stopped in front of her. A dramatic pause, long enough to make Surge tense up, her eyes narrowing as he grinned up at her.

“I’m going to win the race to the trucks,” he finished, and shoulder checked her off the roof before she could react.

“You asshole!” She screamed as she fell, though Sonic swore he heard a hint of that rich laughter through the rage as he sped away.

Chapter Text

Night lay thick over Westopolis as Surge looked at herself one last time in the standing mirror set up in her and Kit’s quarters. As was now standard for night patrol, darker colors were the order of the evening, so she’d swapped her usual bright yellow pants out for the black and white body suit she’d originally worn for the Clean Sweepstakes and a matching black motorcycle jacket with golden yellow arm stripes and metal studs on the shoulder pads. She briefly considered switching into her racing sneakers, then discarded the idea in favor of her favorite steel-toed yellow shitkickers. The sneakers looked cool and definitely matched the sleek body suit a bit better, but this was night patrol, and night patrol was for busting heads. She adjusted her mirrored yellow sunglasses, making sure they properly obscured her dimly glowing eyes, and turned sideways to make sure everything looked right in profile. Properly badass, she concluded, though she noted with a frown that the bodysuit felt a smidge too tight.

She’d have to get a new one the first chance she got. Most Islanders finished growing upon reaching adulthood in their mid teens, a range she definitely fell into based on her blood tests, if not earlier, but she apparently was an exception and was still filling out a bit. Whether explicitly because of Starline’s alterations to her physiology or not, she couldn’t say.

A stranger to her own body. One more piece of her identity that bastard had shattered like an unwanted toy. Gaia wept, but now she wanted to put her fist through the damn mirror.

As if acknowledging he ever existed was an incantation that summoned him, Starline’s ghost yawned in her ear. “Is this little pity party why we’re taking so long to get ready?” he asked. “And here I was worried you were primping to catch the hedgehog’s eye.”

“Piss off, old man,” Surge grumbled, turning back to face the mirror head on. “You’re crazy, and even if you weren’t it’s not your business anymore.”

A shadow appeared in the mirror behind her, indistinct but for the telltale shape of a bill and malicious, wine red eyes. It slinked up behind her and laid ice cold hands on her shoulders. “Oh but it is my business, girl. What kind of creator would I be if I didn’t concern myself with the company my precious children choose to keep?”

“He’s not company” Surge insisted, mocking Starline’s tone on the word “company”. “He’s a client.”

“Of course, of course,” Starline sneered. “And what are we calling that little incident this afternoon then?”

“No idea what you mean,” Surge said quickly.

Too quickly. The shadowy Starline sank his claws into her shoulders, and she was thrown into vivid memories. The thrill of the race, of having to truly push herself to the limit for the first time in months. Enjoying time spent with someone she should despise.

That brief moment, staring up into those wild, deep green eyes, before she’d realized Sonic wasn’t in full control of himself.

“There it is,” Starline hissed. “Do mine eyes deceive me, or was someone excited for a moment?”

Surge growled, stomach twisting in revulsion at the memory of Sonic’s hands on her arms. At herself
for allowing it, if only for a moment. "Adrenaline and shock,” she insisted. “it's not like I get tackled to the ground on the regular. Won’t happen again”

The apparition watched her reflection in silence a moment longer before releasing his grip with a satisfied hum. “Good girl. Never forget that there are limits to my tolerance for rebellion.”

“Like you’d ever fucking let me,” Surge growled. Giving her jacket one more angry tug to disperse the shadow, she spun away from the mirror to go find Kit and Sonic.

She found them near the lab mid conversation and, curious as to what Sonic and her best buddy could have to talk about, she posted up at the nearest corner to give a listen.

“-And that’s why bone marrow tests can reveal the root cause of blood related diseases and defects,” Kit was saying as he adjusted the shoulder straps of the lowly hissing hydropack he’d donned for tonight’s patrol, “and why a transplant can be effective treatment.”

Sonic whistled and leaned on the windows looking into the lab, fingers drumming on the glass as he examined the instruments inside with wide eyes. “Dang, I had no idea. So if the next blood test is another dud-“

Kit grabbed one of a pair of hoses dangling from his pack and slotted it into a port on the thick glove covering his right hand with a pneumatic hiss. ”I’ll be considering a marrow test, yes,” Kit nodded, “but I don’t have the tools to take a sample currently. Or local anesthetics for the pain.”

Sonic shivered and scrunched up his nose like he’d just eaten a whole bucket of lemons. “Yeah, gonna be a ‘no thanks’ to getting my bones drilled into without numbing. You seriously learned all this in just six months?” he turned his head and raised an incredulous eyebrow at Kit.

Kit attached the other hose to a matching apparatus on his left hand and gingerly moved his arms about, testing his range of motion. It made the fabric of the parka he’d donned crinkle like an accordion, the fabric whispering against itself with each motion. “I mean I was studying when I could while we were moving about, but the lion’s share?” he scratched his head bashfully. “Yes.”

“That’s impressive as hell, little guy,” Sonic said appreciatively. “I can’t imagine learning something so complex so quickly.”

Kit cinched the wool lined hood of the parka tighter as if he planned to sink into it. “Y-You’re just saying that,” Kit said with a grumble, though Surge saw from her hiding place that his tail was slowly wagging beneath his coat. “It’s nothing Prower couldn’t do,” he said.

Sonic leaned against the window with a cocky smirk. He caught Surge watching them when he looked up, and gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Sonic T. Hedgehog does not ‘just say’ things, little dude. Tails is smart as hell, but his passion’s engines and computers. It’d take him a lot longer to wrap his big old head around this biology and medicine stuff, if only because it’s not as interesting to him.”

He held out a fist to Kit. “Respect. For finding your jam and owning it.”

Kit eyed Sonic’s hand like it might bite him, but gingerly extended and bumped a fist against it anyway. “T-thanks, I guess,” he shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “I-I just wanted to understand how Starline’s augments had changed us. So I’d know how to fix us if anything started to break down.” He smiled shyly. “But it turns out bodies are fascinating machines in their own right, so I kept going.”

“Hell yeah, dude! Life’s too short to not pursue your passions and learn new things.”

Despite a small tinge of jealousy over seeing someone else trying to befriend her best buddy, Surge was beaming. Damn Sonic for being so irritatingly sincere, but it was good to see Kit getting some encouragement. “That’s what I keep telling him!” She said, approaching them at last. She wrapped Kit up in a headlock and gave him a playful noogie, eliciting a fit of laughter from the normally dour fox, “but maybe Drippy’ll actually believe it if he hears it from more people. You could be the youngest doc in the history of the islands if you wanted, Drip.”

Kit tried to sink even deeper in the folds of his parka. “Ma’am, y-you’re embarrassing me!” he laughed.

Surge leaned in and poked Kit in the side with an amused growl, drawing more laughs from both him and Sonic. “Oh that one was on purpose you little shit! How many times do I gotta tell you to use my name?” she said.

Kit managed to wriggle out of her grip, cheeks flushed with mirth. “G-guilty as charged, Surge Ma’am” he said, his eyes glinting mischievously.

Surge shook a fist his way. “You’re lucky we got business to get to, Drip,” she said, then leaned a hand on her hip. “Speaking of, are we ready to hit the streets, or do you two need more male bonding time?”

Sonic chuckled and gave her a thumbs up. “I’m good. Eager to get out there, even,” he said, then looked her up and down with mild interest. “Nice threads. The cyberpunk convention in town?”

Surge snorted and twirled around to show off the outfit. ”Don’t hate just because I wear it better than you ever could, Lamehog” she shot back haughtily, still grinning as she started sauntering towards the exit. “Let’s get out there, we can talk strategy on the move.”

—-----------
“Seriously, how are you not sweating buckets in that thing, Kit?” Sonic asked as they reached their first stop of the night, a balcony high up on a skyscraper near the financial district. “It’s downright balmy out, even up this high.”

Kit scrambled up next to him and pulled the tendrils he’d been using to climb back into his hydropack. “The coolant unit on this pack would fuse to my back and give me frostbite in minutes without the extra insulation," he said. He’d pulled the hood of the parka up once they’d started the patrol, and combined with the tinted goggles he wore to conceal his cybernetic eyes he looked more like a mountain climber than a mercenary. “Also foxes don’t perspire to cool off. We pant. did Prower never tell you?”

Sonic’s jaw snapped shut and his eyes widened like his world had just blown up. “I always assumed he was really used to heat from all the time he spends with engines, and the tongue thing was just a nervous tick,” he said, voice distant. “Shit, now I feel insensitive."

“Aww look,” Surge was seated on the railing of the balcony and leaned her head back to regard Sonic with a toothy grin. “He’s learning. Hurts his little brain, I bet.”

Sonic flipped her off and Surge cackled in reply. “What’re we stopping here for anyway?” he asked, looking out over the sea of lights that was Westopolis at night. “Besides the killer view.”

Kit fished a small projector and tablet out of the inner pockets of his coat and laid the projector on the balcony’s railing before activating it. A holographic map of Westopolis appeared in the sky in front of them, covered in symbols and data readouts, and Kit started pointing out the relevant features. “Central location, for one” he explained , pointing at pixelated representations of all of their faces, clustered around the same location on the map. “That’s us, obviously, and the lightning bolts are businesses and homes that have bought our monitoring services.” He began tracing lines on the tablet with his finger, calculating distances between their location and the sites with active monitoring devices and then drawing a circle that connected them all, leaving them with a wheel-like image overlaying the map. “As you can see, 60% of all our clients are within a five mile radius of this building. From here, Surge or you could reach any of them in minutes.”

He tapped on a corner of the tablet screen, and an audio feed opened up with a burst of static. “This building is also centrally located and tall enough that a lot of radio and cell signals go past or bounce off it,” he said, fingers flying across the screen as he calibrated the radio scanner. “Local police feeds, news broadcasts. If it’s traveling the airwaves and I can decrypt it, I’ve got at least a decent chance of intercepting it from up here.”

The static resolved into a steady stream of chatter, mostly Westopolis PD officers checking in with and responding to requests from their dispatchers. Sonic shifted uncomfortably. “Do the cops know you’re listening in on their chatter?” he asked.

Surge shrugged. “They can bitch about it all they want, but there’s no law against listening in to the unencrypted stuff so long as you don't use the information to commit crimes.”

Sonic crossed his arms, raised an eyebrow, and started tapping his foot impatiently as he stared her down. “And the encrypted channels?”

Surge chuckled darkly. “Not our fault the local law’s cryptography sucks ass,” she said.“Besides,
We mainly use the police chatter to stay out of their way. We’re not looking to replace them, and meddling with their shit when we’re not wanted would be the fastest way to ruin the business.” She flashed her teeth at Sonic. “The infamous Phantom Rider wouldn’t be thinking of narcing on his hosts now, would he?”

Sonic made a valiant effort to retain his stern expression, but he soon cracked. “I guess I’ve broken the law for the greater good once or twice,” he said with a chuckle. “Wouldn’t wanna be a hypocrite.”

“Good man,” Surge said, turning back to Kit. “So what’s the route tonight?”

Kit started drawing again, creating a rough loop that weaved through each of the client sites on the map, with occasional diversions into other parts of the city between sites. “I’m thinking we will run this route tonight. It covers the South Slopes shopping district, where we don’t have clients yet and thus don’t usually go. Incidents like the Eggman attack always embolden some of the more organized gangs and draw in opportunists from out of town. Both might try to hit shops in the area that are still under repair.”

He double tapped the screen and the route started flashing green, then blue. “You’ll stick with Surge tonight, Sonic, so she can walk you through how we work and see how you handle any action. We can discuss letting you run a route of your own next time if you can keep the Werehog controlled tonight.”

Sonic nodded. “Makes sense,” he said. “What about you though?

Kit gestured to his tablet. “I’ll be here monitoring things. Any incidents pop off, I’ll meet you on site.”

“Okay then!” Sonic’s enthusiasm was infectious as he rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Ready when you are, Boss Lady.”

“Boss Lady,” Surge said wistfully. She rolled backwards off the balcony railing into a hand spring that landed her next to Sonic. “I like that. Keep calling me that, Hedgehog” she said with a playful elbow to his side. She pointed to the first site on the route and gave him a challenging look over the rim of her sunglasses as waves of electricity started pulsating around her. “That's the Deerling Building, the big red high rise in the heart of downtown. Try to keep up.”

She blasted off the balcony and into the night with an excited whoop, Sonic hot on her heels as she began her descent towards the streets. This is what she lived for, the wind whipping through her quills and her heart trying to climb into her throat as gravity carried her towards the gleaming lights of the city below. She looked to the side and saw Sonic falling beside her, unfiltered joy etched onto his face as he speared face first through the air like a champion diver. He caught her looking at him, and her face split in a grin to match his own. “Aim for the power lines!” she shouted to him, pointing down at the rapidly approaching shadows of the wires crisscrossing over the streets. Sonic gave her a thumbs up and spread his arms out, tracking sideways so he was heading towards the lines over the street parallel to her target. With practiced confidence, Surge curled into a ball and started spinning, electricity spiraling off her like she was a runaway turbine.

Three. Two. One! Surge uncurled with a shout and threw her collected charge behind her and earthward, converting a huge chunk of her downward momentum into forward motion as she crossed the last couple dozen feet to the wires. She spread her feet out, and landed on the wires in a crouch, the metal bands of her shoes singing against the power lines and casting sparks behind her as she settled into a grind with an exhilarated laugh. She rode the line for a good hundred yards or so, then crouched low before throwing herself off and onto the rooftops. To only mild surprise, Sonic landed next to her mere moments after, the two quickly settling into (for them) a leisurely pace as they sped through the night.

“Not bad, Boss Lady!” Sonic called to her as they hopped a gap. “Been a minute since I last BASE jumped.”

“Well you’re clearly not rusty!” she shouted back. “Now focus up! You’re here for work, not thrills, Blue Boy!” She commanded, her manic grin belying her true feelings.

Sonic laughed, and the two settled into companionable silence as they both reveled in the unfettered freedom of night running. Spotlit billboards and roof top light fixtures whizzed by like snowflakes in a blizzard, and before long Surge saw the silhouette of the Deerling building rising up in the distance. She snapped her fingers, creating a crack of electric discharge, to get Sonic’s attention, then pointed at the approaching high rise. “Roof!” she shouted, and Sonic nodded in understanding. With synchronized bursts of speed, they shot up the side of the building and skidded to a halt on the rooftop.

“I didn’t realize we would be stopping at each site,” Sonic said.

Surge knelt, pulled a small yellow device out of her coat pocket, and set it on the roof. “Only for a minute if all’s well. This little fella’s gonna run diagnostics on the building and our installed devices, checking for any signs of tampering or recent breaches that our tools didn’t catch. We get the all clear from it, we move on. Anything gets flagged, we investigate and report our findings to Drippy. Rinse and repeat at each site.”

Sonic knelt down next to her and watched the cycling lights on the scanner as it did its work. “How did you land all these contracts anyway?” He asked.

“Public presence and word of mouth, mostly,” Surge said. “Most of them we either helped out with a crisis or did a couple of one off jobs for before they signed on. It’s why we patrol areas with no active clients,” she explained. “The more people see us out and about lending a hand, the more trust we build, the more calls we get.”

She turned her face to the sky. “Free advertising just by doing what I was gonna do anyway,” she said, expression softening as she momentarily lost herself in pleasant memories. “Doesn’t get much better than that.”

Sonic regarded her silently for a moment. ”Riiiight. Advertising” he said, his smile turning sly.

Surge grimaced. “The fuck you implying, Lamehog? Spit it out.”

Sonic stood and turned to walk away, an overstated lightness to his step. “Oh nothing, it's just- you sure you didn’t, I dunno, start caring about this town at some point?”

“Saw right through you,” Starline grumbled irritably. “He’s good at this.”

Surge glanced sidelong at him, flushing slightly. “S-so what if I have?” she stumbled over the words. “You saying I’m going soft?”

“Oh goodness, no” Sonic said, laughter lurking behind his words. He spun back towards her, leaning forward to catch her gaze in the grip of his green eyes. “I’d say ‘cold hard bitch with a secret heart of gold’ fits you better.”

Surge froze, her face blooming into a full on embarrassed blush as she scrambled to salvage the wreck her brain had just become. Stupid, charming bastard. “Well-that-I mean-”

A burst of pain behind her eyes made her flinch and quietly hiss. “Careful, girl” Starline snarled. Sonic noticed her sudden, pained expression, and looked ready to ask if she was ok when the scanner emitted a series of chimes.

Thank Gaia for distractions. “Scan’s done!” Surge said, a little too loudly, as she eagerly snatched up the device. She tapped her ear piece and connected to Kit’s frequency. “Deerling Building’s clean,” she said, “moving to the next site.”

“Roger,” Kit’s voice chimed in her ear. “All’s clear on this end so-hang on-”

Sonic raised a questioning eyebrow, and Surge held up an index finger as she waited for Kit to continue. “What’s up, little man?” She asked.

“A motion sensor at First Bank of Westopolis just tripped, then I lost it. External cams don’t show anything, but I can’t pull the feeds from inside at all. Has to be a jamming device’s doing."

Surge grinned, eyes sparking behind her glasses. “Sounds like we’re dealing with someone competent for a change,” she said eagerly. Kit must’ve connected Sonic’s earpiece to the conversation, as the hedgehog was practically dancing with excitement and gave her a thumbs up when she looked at him. “Hoggie and I are ready to crash the party when you are, Drip.”

“Already enroute. Try to stay out of sight until I get there, we don’t know how many we’re dealing with.”

“Wouldn’t dream of leaving you out, pal,” she said, then cut the line.

Sonic threw a couple punches in the air. “Alright, time for some action!” he said, bouncing in place. “Race you there?”

Surge laughed. “Do you even know where the FBW is, dude?” she said.

Sonic stopped his excited bouncing, expression falling. “Oh-right” he said, scratching his head. “Lead the way, then,” he said sullenly.

—--------------

The First Bank of Westopolis was one of the older buildings in town, its main entrance framed with marble columns in a style borrowed from one of the ancient human civilizations on the Continent. Ionic, Surge was pretty sure Kit had called it. A steeply angled granite roof topped the three story structure, and a scene of Islanders of varying subspecies dressed in ancient garb, all engaged in one form of trade or another, was chiseled into the triangular facade of the street facing side of the roof. A regular temple to greed, Surge thought with a derisive snort, but at least they paid extremely well. All the windows she could see were dark, but as she watched from a nearby rooftop she thought she saw a faint light move across a window on the second floor. Sonic, taking advantage of the fact that he could move faster than most could see without leaving behind a spark trail like she would, had just ran a wide circle of the surrounding area, and reported that there was a single truck parked on the street behind the building, and he found one of the bank’s rear access doors propped open.

Someone was in there alright, and she’d bet her favorite headband it wasn’t the night guards. She glanced over at Kit, who was pouring over a holographic blueprint of the building as Sonic peered over his shoulder. “What’s the game plan, Drip?” she asked.

Kit hummed absentmindedly and fiddled with the blueprint a moment longer before speaking, the hologram casting splotchy patches of light across his face as he worked. “Main vault and safety deposit boxes are both in the basement, but since Sonic didn’t see any lookouts on the surrounding streets and rooftops they probably have people posted on the second and/or third floors to keep an eye out while the rest of the crew works on cracking the doors” he said. “If they’re smart, that is.”

They probably were, went the unspoken follow up. Idiots didn’t bring signal jammers to their heists. “So is there a way to get in without alerting them?” She asked.

Kit switched over to a 3D model of the building, created based on his initial scans of the place when the bank came on as a client. “There’s an access door on the east side of the roof, which should lead into a maintenance stairwell. Someone could sneak in that way and catch them off guard from above, but we don’t know how far along their operation is.”

“So we need to make sure they stay nice and distracted while the trap closes,” Surge’s teeth glinted with menace in the dark. “I’m very good at that part.”

Kit smirked as he put away his projector and tablet. “Too true. You go in loud, and I’ll come in the back, scuttling their vehicle on the way,” he said, then looked over his shoulder at Sonic. “You get to that roof access and work your way downward once the ruckus starts.”

Sonic looked more than a bit confused. “I’d have thought the sneaky stuff would be more your jam, little dude,” he said.

The hood of Kit’s parka rustled softly as Kit shook his head. “They might be expecting Surge and I, but they’re definitely not expecting you,” he said. “I’d like to maximize the shock value of your involvement, if that’s ok.”

Sonic nodded and grinned. “I do love surprising fans and enemies alike,” he said, then bowed with a dramatic flourish. “I’ll try to make my entrance memorable.”

Surge rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “Just don’t get yourself in trouble with your showboating. Unlike Eggman’s scrapheaps, gangsters know how to aim,” she said.

Sonic blew her a raspberry. “Yes, Mother,” he said.

“Prick” she shot back, but smiled. She cracked her knuckles and slammed her fists together, lighting them with a charge that cast menacing shadows across her face. “Ready to fuck shit up as soon as you give the word, Drip.”

Four tendrils of frigid water crept out of Kit’s hydropack and lifted him into the air, a violent grin creeping onto his muzzle as he snapped his goggles over the pulsing lights of his pink eyes. “Let’s get to it then,” he said, then spidered away into the night on liquid legs with surprising speed and almost no sound. Seconds later, only small patches of ice remained to indicate he’d even been there with them.

“Cool,” Sonic said, drawing an exasperated groan from Surge. Thankfully, he kept quiet after that, the anticipation of an upcoming fight rendering him tensely silent. Minutes passed with agonizing slowness, and just as Surge thought her muscles might pop off her bones if she had to wait any longer her earpiece chirped.

“Go,” was all Kit said, and she shot off with a flash of lightning, covering the ground between her and the bank’s entrance before the subsequent boom of thunder rolled through.

“Bank’s closed, motherfuckers!” She screamed as she crashed through the lobby doors.

Chapter Text

The trio of goons watching the entrance, armed with a mix of wispons and slug throwers, their faces obscured by balaclavas, barely had time to raise their weapons before Surge slammed her fist into the closest one’s, a monkey of some sort based on the brief glimpse she got of their tail, stomach. A satisfying crunch announced that she’d broken at least one of the primate’s ribs, and with a snarl she gripped him by the vest and threw him at his comrades. With a satisfyingly terrified yowl, the thug crashed into the taller of her two remaining enemies and they went sprawling, their guns clattering across the marble floor like dice on a game board. The remaining thug was much quicker on her feet, diving out of the way and unleashing rapid bursts of fire from their wispon in Surge’s direction as they rolled into a kneeling stance. Surge ducked behind a pillar, multiple lasers thumping into the stonework and knocking chunks out of it a second after.

“The crazy cyborg bitch is here!” The thug she’d floored with the one she’d turned into a living missile shouted as he clambered back to his feet. He produced a matte black, solid ammunition pistol from a hip holster, and joined his remaining associate in alternating covering fire as they retreated towards the teller pods at the rear of the lobby. Gaia-damned cowards didn’t even bother grabbing their downed comrade as he groaned in pain in the middle of the lobby, Surge noted with disdain.

”That’s ‘Miss Crazy Cyborg Bitch’ to you assholes!” she shouted back while gathering energy in her hands. A moment’s focus, and the power manifested above her palms as two orbs of crackling, unstable energy. Diving out of cover, she sent them whipping across the room and released control of them as they passed above the thug’s heads. For a moment, the lobby was lit up like it was daytime, a resounding snap of thunder following in the light’s wake. The thugs screamed in a combination of surprise and pain as the light and sound discombobulated them, and the stream of suppressive fire they’d been maintaining came to a halt.

Surge was across the lobby and engaged with the pistoleer, a dog, before the thunder crack faded. Barreling into him shoulder first, she slammed him into the facade of the teller pod behind him and wrenched the arm holding his weapon towards her. One blindingly fast palm strike to the elbow snapped the bone, and Surge caught the pistol by the barrel with her free hand as he reflexively dropped the weapon. A quick crack across the head with the butt of his own gun, and the canine dropped in a silent heap at her feet. The sound of a door opening caught her attention, and she looked up to see the final thug slipping through a door into the depths of the bank, shouting for backup as she ran.

Surge loved it when they ran. Cackling as she bounded after her quarry, she kicked open the door they’d run through and entered the skylit atrium beyond. Darkened offices and meeting rooms interspersed with potted ferns flanked the atrium on both sides. Two long, ornate rugs ran the length of the room’s flanks, and a set of stairs leading up to the second floor offices sprouted from the midpoint of the wall on each side. Couches and tables were arranged in circles at irregular intervals like satellites around the center of the room, where an ornate bifurcated staircase descended to the basement! level. Rapid footsteps clicked against the marble flooring of the stairwell, and a squad of goons, seven in total, came charging up the stairs into the room. Five joined the remaining thug from the lobby and took up firing positions around the nearest couches, while the final two made for the doors at the far end of the room with sacks full of loot strapped to their backs. Shots lanced towards Surge from the gathered thugs, and she moved in a serpentine pattern across the floor to avoid the firestorm, bullets and lasers chasing her like angry hornets. She closed just over half the distance to their position before the thugs figured out that it was more effective to spread their shots over a wide area like a net, given her speed, and forced her to dive behind and flip a table over as cover from the fusillade of suppressive fire.

“Watch your eyes!” The survivor from the lobby called out over the din of battle. “She’s got flashbangs!”

“Someone tell the boss to hurry up!” Shouted a burly bear wielding a refurbished Eggtech repeater cannon. The sheer amount of blaster shots that thing was throwing down range made him target number one by a mile, but Surge couldn’t break cover without risking sprouting a new batch of holes in her body now that the assembled thugs had a solid firing pattern going. Her healing factor would patch up all the most lethal wounds up, she knew, but enough damage would leave her incapacitated and unable to stop the crooks’ escape.

Worse, she’d look like a fucking chump in front of Sonic if she got shot up by these twerps, and there was no way in hell she would give him the satisfaction. “Got a whole mess of goons here in the atrium trying to keep me pinned,” Surge said as she keyed on her earpiece. “If either of you boys are in position to flank, now would be a good time.”

“Ask and ye shall receive, Boss Lady!” Sonic replied. "Coming in hot.”

A moment later, Sonic burst through the second floor access door on her left, a struggling avian thug held in front of him by the shirt collar like a living battering ram as he ran. With a woop, he tossed his captive down the stairs and grinded down the railing after them. Hopping off at the bottom (and jamming a foot into the avian’s chest on landing), he streaked towards the dug in thugs and threw himself into a roll. He crashed through one of the couches, reducing it to splinters and sending the three thugs behind it sprawling like bowling pins, then uncurled into a spinning kip up and clocked another thug across the face with the heel of his foot as he briefly lifted into a one armed handstand before flipping back onto his feet.

Ok, Surge admitted, that was pretty cool. She would not be outdone, however, and with a roar of fury and a mad glint in her eye she vaulted over the table and sped towards the nearest threat.

“Is that bleedin’ Sonic?!” the bear bellowed, spinning his cannon towards Sonic as the hedgehog dropped another one of his comrades with a hurricane force punch to the gut. The barrel of the cannon began to spin, and Sonic was too busy with the other thugs to notice.

Hell no was she gonna let that stand. “Eyes on me, fucknugget!” Surge shouted as she landed on the thug’s back and wrapped her arms and legs around his neck and torso. “You’re mine!” she hissed in his ear, then released a blast of electric current straight into his spine. The bear howled, limbs convulsing, and the cannon let off a few sputtering shots that went wide before its barrel ground to a halt and the gun slipped from his hands. He bucked about for a long few seconds in an attempt to dislodge Surge’s grip, but she held on determinedly and kept pouring energy into him until at last, with a moan, the bear collapsed to the ground, and Surge rolled off his limp, slightly charred body to stand next to Sonic. The four still conscious thugs, three still clambering back to their feet amongst the wrecked bits of their cover, ignited energy blades and stun batons and started circling them cautiously. Surge span and put herself back to back with Sonic, fists raised as she sized up their remaining enemies. “Having fun yet, Blue?” she asked, huffing slightly as adrenaline continued to pump through her system.

“Oh just oodles, Sparky,” Sonic snickered, a hint of a growl in his voice. “It's been a minute since I’ve been in a tussle with real people,” he said. “Not nearly as durable as a bot but a lot craftier,” he continued, then prodded her gently in the back with his elbow. “Thanks for the save by the way, taking out that bear before he could start shooting. I owe ya.”

“Damn right you do,” Surge laughed, but as footsteps echoing from the floor below, along with a curious, distant thumping sound, announced another wave of enemies was inbound she didn’t allow herself to relax. “Now focus up," she said, fists lighting up with power. She locked eyes with the thug nearest to her, another canine of some sort, and flashed them her toothiest smile. “Playtime’s not over yet.”

The canine gulped and started backing away a few steps. “Fuck this,” he said, then bolted for the back doors. “No one told us this psycho was buddies with fucking Sonic!”

He made it maybe ten feet when a chunk of ice the size of a medicine ball collided with his face, dropping him to the ground where he curled into a ball to clutch at his broken nose. Kit, ice crystals clinging to his outstretched gauntlets, emerged from the doorway the thug had been running for, rising up on tendrils of supercooled water that cast fog into the air and left trails of frost as they carried him about like a vengeful arctic spirit. A trailing tendril dragged the shivering form of another thug, one of the loot carriers that had slipped out earlier, into the room with it. It whipped out and sent its captive spinning across the slick marble floor like a hockey puck , then began twitching in the air like a snake primed to strike as it rose up to a level with Kit’s dangling body. Kit’s face, buried in the shadows of his hood such that only his muzzle and the reflective lenses of his goggles were visible, turned to regard the last three thugs with quiet menace.

The ensuing panic of the last three thugs was as understandable as it was futile. One tried to run for the nearest stairwell and was clotheslined by one of Kit’s tendrils, which then proceeded to engulf heir prone body and freeze it to the floor in a thick sheet of ice. The other two, to their credit, tried to attack Surge and Sonic in an effort to force their way back to the stairs their allies were likely to be coming up, but their panic made them sloppy. Surge blinked out of the way of the clumsy stab of her opponent’s blade and dropped them with a high speed knife-hand strike to the back of the head, and when she spun about, Sonic already had the last thug, a monitor lizard’s, weapon arm locked behind their back and was forcing them to the ground. The lizard hissed and kicked in a hopeless bid to get away, and Sonic looked like he was trying to talk the bastard into surrendering like the goodie good he was.

“No time to negotiate,” Surge snapped at him, “We got more coming”.

Sonic scowled, but nodded stiffly and grabbed the back of the lizard’s head. The air blurred around him, the lizard’s head made an echoing crack against the marble floor, and the struggling ceased. A quick check to ensure the lizard was still breathing, and Sonic stepped away, jaws set and eyes smoldering with restrained aggression as he walked to stand beside her. He was breathing heavily, more so than Surge thought he should be after what was honestly, with the three of them working together, an easy fight. Without stopping to think about it, she laid a hand on his shoulder to get his attention, and lowered her shades a fraction so he could see her eyes. “You holding up ok, Blue? Big Ugly isn’t raising too much of a ruckus in that thick skull of yours?” she asked carefully.

Sonic laughed shortly, but the tension in his eyes remained. “He’s-maybe enjoying himself too much,” he said, “but I’m managing. He really wants me to stop pulling my punches and snap these guys in two.” He frowned and a slight shiver ran across his shoulders. “The whole reason I wanted to talk the lizard down was because the Big Guy wanted to snap their neck, and-well I was worried I was starting to want it too.”

Surge’s grip on his shoulder tightened a moment in a show of support, then she realized what she was doing, brought her hand stiffly back to her side, and wiped her palm off on her leg. “You’re doing good-for your first time” she said, pointedly looking away from him. “Just keep your cool a bit longer and we’ll be done here.”

He nodded again, then looked at the stairs leading down to the basement. He narrowed his eyes and said, “shouldn’t the ones I heard coming be up here by now?”

Surge froze in place. Sonic was right. Worse, the sound of running feet was now conspicuously absent, and the distant thumping noise had been replaced with a much closer whining sound from downstairs. “Well that’s not goo-”

With a percussive roar that set her ears ringing, the floor in front of Surge ruptured in a hail of marble shrapnel, sending two of the downed thugs sailing into the air and forcing Sonic and Surge to dive back into cover. Kit cried out in alarm from his perch, and two water tendrils shot up to grab the support struts of the atrium’s skylight and slung him up and away from the shrapnel cloud. A shadow flew up through the billowing dust and raining stonework with a mechanical roar, and Surge barely had time to notice the targeting laser it was painting the couch she’d hidden behind with when a small missile blew it asunder and sent her flying backwards. A sharp pain bloomed in her right leg as a sharp chunk of wood buried itself into her thigh, and she hissed in frustration when she slid to a stop and realized the damn thing was embedded deep enough that she couldn’t run without removing it first.

Something she didn’t have time for right now, given the fucking power armored freak that landed in front of her, its jet pack shutting down with a sputter of flame. Nearly six feet in height, the hulking orange and black armored figure reminded her of one of Eggman’s machines, but moved with a fluidity she’d never seen from even the most advanced Badnik as it clanked towards her, smoke still billowing from one of its shoulder mounted missile pods. Indeed, she saw an Eggtech logo on one of its shoulder pads, hastily scratched out and painted over with a stylized badger’s head. Its heavy, armored limbs were capped with burnished steel gauntlets whose fingers reminded her of talons as they flexed and clicked together. It stopped about five feet from her, the yellow light of its helmet’s visor glaring down at her, and the fingers ground against one another as it clenched its fists with a whir of servos.

“I’m disappointed,” a vaguely male voice droned, heavily distorted by the helmet. “I was hoping to put this suit through its paces in a proper fight with you, Greenie. No matter.” He panned his head side to side, scanning the room, and barked at the three thugs that were coming up the stairs behind it. “Get the loot out to the loading dock and wait for me! Backup vehicle’s on the way. Watch out for Sonic and the pipsqueak.”

The thugs scattered towards the back of the room, one stopping to wrestle with the sack attached to the one Kit had drug back into the room, as the armored man turned back and raised an arm to point at her. “I’m going to enjoy taking out your little hedgehog boyfriend next,” he said as the fingers on the gauntlet split open to allow a heavy gun barrel to slide out. “He’ll appreciate this hardware more, anyway.”

Shit shit shit sh-

“I got you!” Sonic shouted, zipping by and scooping her up into his arms a split second before the air was riddled with bullets. He sat her down behind the desk in an open office and looked over her worriedly. “I think I moved too fast for it to track,” he whispered. A frustrated, distorted bellow from the atrium confirmed his statement. “That’s- that’s a lot of blood. Are you going to be alright?“

Surge grabbed the large, jagged splinter and began working it out of her leg. “Pain’s an old pal. I’ll be-guh!-fine as soon as I get this out,” she said. She gave the splinter another wrenching pull, and her vision nearly whited out from pain as an inch of it came free. “What-ack!!-the fuck is that thing?”

Sonic looked cautiously over the top of the desk. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered.

“The one time I actually want you to talk, and you’re stupefied” she growled as she gripped the splinter again and prepared to pull. “Fucking great.”

Sonic either didn’t hear or ignored her. “That’s an E-series chassis. How the hell did they manage to convert an E-series into a power suit?!” he said with a mix of disgust and awe.

“The-gah!-fuck’s an E-series?” Surge’s hand slipped off the splinter again. Another inch and the damn thing would hopefully come out.

“Advanced Badniks, each one unique,” Sonic said. “Eggman used Flickys and other semi-intelligent critters as cores for most of them so they could better think and adapt, then loaded them up with a heinous amount of weapons and gadgets. He stopped making them years ago after some gained full sentience and rebelled,” he explained. “There’s two still kicking about that I know of, but this guy’s definitely not wearing one of them. I didn’t think there were any pieces left of the rest.”

A final tug, and the splinter came loose with a quiet squelch. Surge took a relieved breath as she felt the Metal Virus nanites in her blood start knitting the wound. “So what if the asshole turned one of Eggdork’s prized tin men into a puppet? Badnik shells break just as easily as the real thing.”

“You don’t get it!,” Sonic said. “The only Eggman bot more of a pain than an E series is Metal Sonic himself. We’re talking advanced tracking, reinforced armor, heat seeking projectiles. Hell, some of them were almost as fast as me. We need to be careful.”

Surge gingerly applied weight to her wounded leg and found it could support her again. “Sounds like you’re just scared, Hedgehog,” she said derisively as she stood to her full height. “I’m taking another crack at the bastard now that he’s lost the element of surprise.”

“Dammit Surge, this isn’t the time for your superiority complex!” Sonic ground out.

“Fuck you and your psycho babble” Surge shot back, arcing electricity running up and down her limbs. “Back me up if you’re so worried.”

“Surge!” Sonic shouted, but she was already moving, sparks trailing behind her as she bore down on the armored hulk, its back currently turned to her as it scanned the atrium for her. “Payback time asshole,” she snarled, rearing her fist back to strike.

The armored thug’s shoulder pads tensed and his jetpack ignited, filling the air in Surge’s path with flames and forcing her to divert up the nearest wall. He span in mid air, the vents on the jetpack rotating on gyros to maintain momentum, and jabbed an arm towards her, gouts of flame roaring out ofit as the arms’ claws retracted to make room for a flamethrower’s nozzle. Surge poured on speed to keep ahead of the wall of flame, sweat beads forming on the back of her neck from the heat. Fire alarms started blaring, and the building’s sprinkler system kicked on with a hiss. Surge thrilled at the sight of water cascading into the room from above, then saw the armor’s targeting laser flickering against the wall ahead. She cut back down to the floor, noticing Sonic out of the corner of her eye crashing into the hulk’s side and knocking its aim off, causing the missile salvo to go wide and hit high on the wall. Dust cast off by the explosion mixed with sprinkler water, coating her sunglasses with a thin film of wet particulates that made it harder to see, but she didn’t have time to stop and take them off.

Besides, she only needed to distract the big fucker another couple moments. Already, the water droplets in the air were slowing to a halt, vibrating as they hung in the air like a slowly growing swarm of wasps.

Surge smiled, knowing what came next. As if suddenly magnetized, the water surged towards the armored thug and coalesced into a rapidly growing snake that wrapped around one arm, then the other, and finally across his chest before pulling tight and constricting his dangerous appendages. Garbled grunts of frustration flowed out of the thug’s helmet, and he sank to one knee as the water snake continued to gain mass. Surge skidded to a stop, took off her filthy sunglasses, and looked up just in time to see Kit slingshot himself off the skylight’s support struts, his hood flying back and the water tendrils flowing out of his hydropack trailing behind him like streamers as he shot towards their shared foe. He slammed into the thug’s jetpack feet first, the tendrils wasting no time in wrapping around the thug's armored body like a hungry starfish. Frost spread across the suit wherever the supercooled water touched, and the thug’s grunting took on a panicked edge as he redoubled his struggling.

“These,” Kit said as he leveled his gauntlets at the shoulder mounted missile pods, “are excessive”. High pressure, supercooled water blasted out of the hand mounted water cannons, flash freezing the pods, and with an aggressive twist of his hands two water tendrils reached up and rent the pods into frozen chunks of scrap.

“Fucking sick, Drippy!” Surge shouted as she charged the restrained thug and shattered his frost encrusted helmet with a charged up right hook, revealing the Islander within to be a badger with bloodshot, wide eyes. Wires sprouted from a rubber skull cap on his head and ran down into the suit’s body, giving Surge an idea of how he was operating the suit, and he cursed and spit at her as he continued to frantically thrash against his watery restraints. Surge followed up with a left cross, knocking out one of his fangs and temporarily cutting the stream of expletives. “What kept you so long?”

“Had to make sure his friends didn’t escape” Kit replied nonchalantly as he sent a frigid tendril questing into the suit for more parts to crush. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Always thorough, that’s why I love ya, little buddy” she said. Using the upper edge of the suit’s chest as leverage, she pulled herself closer to the panicked badger and gripped some of the cables attached to his head. “These look important,” she grinned down at the badger, leaning in so her sharp teeth dominated his field of vision. "How's about we see what happens if I rip 'em out?”

Sonic, who’d begun disarming the unconscious and wounded thugs now that the armored badger was incapacitated, looked up from the canid he was kneeling beside. “I’m not sure that’s-”

Surge yanked on the wires. Hard. Then shit went sideways.

The badger yowled in pain and suddenly engaged the thrusters on his jetpack, rocketing backwards and slamming Kit into the nearest wall. Kit shouted in surprise and pain as his hydropack was crushed, supercooled water spraying across the wall and flash freezing portions of it. Kit’s water tendrils, deprived of both fuel and Kit’s focus, collapsed in on themselves, as did the larger water snake, and as the badger heaved his armored bulk away from the wall Kit fell to floor, whimpering amidst the wreckage of his pack.

Surge saw red. “Kit!” she roared as she blasted off towards the badger, electricity lancing off her in chaotic bursts. She threw a wild haymaker at the badger's face, and a steel clad hand intercepted the punch. “Get the fuck away from him!” she screamed as she began to throw every ounce of energy she could into the metal arm holding her fist hostage, all reason fleeing her mind. Electricity pulsed through every cell of her being in rising waves, her body screaming at her to stop before she burned herself out.

She didn’t listen. Kit was hurt. Her brother was hurt. This fucker needed to pay. Smoke poured off the badger’s armor, servos groaning in the arm holding her off. Something in the arm sparked and blew out, causing the badger to snarl in pain. The arm’s grip weakened, and she tried to throw her other fist at the badger’s sneering face, but the badger jerked his head back and her reach fell short.

More power, her fevered mind demanded. She just needed more-

The badger roared and backhanded Surge across the face with his other arm, sending her sprawling. Before she could recover, thick metal talons closed around her throat, and he lifted her up to look him in the eye. Her outburst had set some of the wires attached to his skullcap ablaze and burst blood vessels in his right eye, which now glared at her like an angry, dying sun.

“You’ve ruined a very, very expensive piece of hardware,” the badger’s voice was a sonorous bass, dissonantly calm when considered alongside the utter rage in his eyes, ”and I’m gonna collect restitution in spades, girlie”. He snarled, his remaining teeth gleaming in the low light as his muzzle scrunched in rage, and he engaged his jet pack again. They rose into the air, and he began to laugh. “Tell me,” he said, “how high do you think we need to go before the drop would kill you?”

“F-fuck you,” Surge rasped, eyes shut tight and hands scratching at the metal digits around her throat. The jet pack’s engine whined, plumes of fire shooting out of every thruster as they began to pick up speed. The badger lifted her up above his head, clearly intending to use her as a shield when they crashed through the glass skylight they were careening towards.

And then they stopped. Surge opened her eyes, looked at and beyond the perplexed face of the badger as they hung stationary in the air, the jet pack’s engine straining mightily to no effect, and if she had enough oxygen left in her lungs she would have laughed in nervous disbelief at the gigantic paws now warped around the badger’s armored feet. Still standing on the atrium floor, the Werehog’s arms were stretched far beyond what should be possible as his gargantuan muscles strained with the effort of holding onto the hulking power suit. With an animalistic roar that made him sound close even from way up in the air, the Werehog’s shoulders flexed and he shot up towards them, his arms rippling like banners in the wind as they retracted into his rising bulk. He crashed head first into the power suit’s back with no apparent concern for his own safety, and the three of them crashed through the skylight and onto the roof. Surge rolled out of the badger’s suddenly slack grip and stood on shaky legs, eyes wide as she watched the Werehog go to work on destroying the screaming badger’s heavily damaged suit. Mighty claws dug into the thick chest plate as the Werehog held his prey down and cracked it open like the powerful armor was a clam shell and the badger piloting it was the meat at its core. The suit’s piloting compartment, now exposed to the air, was a cushioned bubble at the center of the suit’s sharp edged torso, and Surge saw more control wires attached to collars around the badger’s arms and legs. Sonic’s warning forgotten or disregarded, the Werehog grabbed the badger in a meaty paw and ripped him out of the suit with one vicious pull, wires sparking and a few small spurts of blood escaping the badger’s head through the violently disconnected ports on his skull cap as the Werehog brought him up to eye level.

“Wait!” the badger called out, voice rising nearly an entire octave in his panic. “I-I surrender! Please-”

The Werehog roared, spittle flying off its fangs and spattering across the badger’s face, then slammed the badger to the ground with bone crushing force once, twice, three times.

The big bastard was gonna kill the guy at this rate. Surge didn’t really care, but she knew Sonic would, and that was apparently enough to compel her to speak. “Oi, big guy!” she shouted at the Werehog.

No response. The Werehog slammed the badger’s concerningly limp form against the roof once more. "Sonic!" she tried again.

That got the big bastard’s attention. Whipping to face her, the Werehog’s snarling expression suddenly relaxed into more of a sullen scowl, big eyes widening in recognition. Tilting his head to the side, he let out a curious huff, as if to ask her what she wanted.

Well that’s not what she expected. “That’s enough,” she said. “He’s not gonna hurt anyone now.”

The Werehog glared down at the broken form of the badger and his power armor, and snarled. “Hurt blue fox friend,” he suddenly said, his voice a deep rumble like stones rolling down a hill, and Surge’s eyes almost jumped out of her head. “Hurt tenrec,” he continued, growing angry again, and he moved to grab the badger. “Needs to pay.”

Ok. He could talk. Sort of. Surge had no idea what to do with this information besides keeping the conversation going. “He’ll pay,” Surge assured him, arms raised placatingly as she approached. “Just not like this.”

She came alongside the Werehog’s massive flank and reached a hand out to carefully touch his shoulder. “Don’t do something Sonic- you’d? Fuck this is confusing- regret.”

The Werehog glared at her. “Sonic weak. Let tenrec get hurt.”

She scowled back at him. “I got myself hurt, ya giant dumbass. You-Sonic told me yanking on those wires was a bad idea. I didn’t listen.” She moved in front of him, and knelt to check over the unconscious badger. She found his pulse, weak but steady, and nodded in satisfaction. She stood, and stared the Werehog defiantly in the eye. “Let me rephrase,” she said. “you’re not killing him, and I’ll drain your ass till you pass out again if that’s what it takes.”

The Werehog stared silently at her for a moment, then let out another huff that shifted into a low rumble. A shiver passed through its form as purple Chaos energy arced up and down his body, and he seemed to sink in on himself as his fur lightened and his limbs shortened. A moment later, Sonic stood in front of her again, blinking rapidly as if just awoken from sleep. “Whu?” he said, then noticed the crumpled form of the badger at their feet. “Oh, Gaia. I really did-”

“Werehog out and save my life?” Surge finished for him with a slight twist of anger at the admission. “Yes to the former, and if you breathe a word about the latter to anyone I’ll clobber your ass.”

Sonic wasn’t looking at her, eyes glued to the blood caked on the badger’s fur. He held out his hands, ungloved after his transformation into the Werehog tore them asunder, and saw the blood on his palms. “I killed him,” he said. His whole body began to shake like a leaf as he sank into a seated position.

“Whoa now,” Surge said, kneeling in front of him. “Deep breaths. He’s not dead, and this isn’t your fault.”

“The hell you mean this isn’t my fault?!” Sonic shouted at her. He was nearly hyperventilating “Do you see my hands right now?!”

“I’m not blind, dumbass” Surge snapped back, then took a calming breath to reign in her instinctual hostility. “Did you tell these pricks to rob a bank tonight?” She asked, eyes hard.

Sonic narrowed his watery eyes at her. “What?”

“Did you?” She repeated.

“No,” he said.

“Did you tell this asshole in particular to hook himself up to a retooled Eggdork monstrosity and try to kill us?”

Sonic shook his head.

”Good,” she said. “ Not your fault then. What was the last thought you had before Big Ugly took over?”

Sonic looked down and sniffed. “That you and Kit were in danger,” he said, voice still shaking. “That I didn’t want to see you hurt or- or worse.”

Surge smiled at him. “And I might have been, a couple times over, if not for you. It physically hurts a bit to say it, but I’m grateful for that.”

Sonic let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a hiccup. “Yeah, well- had to pay back your hospitality somehow,” he said. He brought a hand up to rub across his face, stopped short when he saw the back of his hand was as bloody as the palm. “Still, I should‘ve-“

This fucking guy. “Should’ve what, Hedgehog?” She said, “should’ve let Badger McMadfuck choke me out? Would you rather it was me lying in a heap on this roof?”

“Of course not!” Sonic snapped, Chaos energy rippling across his form for a moment and making him wince in pain. “It’s just-I’m not supposed to- you know," he gestured at the carnage around them.

“Says who?!” Surge demanded. “I sure as hell didn’t. What’s so damn special about you that you have to play by different rules than the rest of us?”

Sonic shrugged. “I dunno, people just-expect it of me, I guess. The big damn hero needs to be better than the bad guys, and all that.”

“Oh is that what they expect?” Surge asked, unable to mask her rising anger. “Or is that just what you think they want? Worried the idiot masses won’t worship you if they think you aren’t a fucking saint?” she sneered .

“No!” Sonic said, glaring at her. “And screw you for thinking as much. It’s just- ugh, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Then fucking help me understand, dammit!” Surge threw up her hands in frustration. “What’s the point of holding yourself to these lofty fucking standards that none of your enemies respect and no one told you to stick to?”

“Because I promised myself dammit!” Sonic snapped back, tears now freely flowing down his face and breathing once again rising in tempo as he threw himself to his feet and started pacing. “I promised myself I wouldn’t become like them!”

A beat of silence. The rage began leaking out of her like air from a balloon, watching him fall apart like this. It hurt in ways she was unfamiliar with and didn’t like. “Like who?” she asked softly, moving the stand next to him.

Sonic was actively not looking at her. “Eggman,” he said. “Starline. The Deadly Six. All of them.” He sighed and was silent for a long moment. “I’ve seen a lot of death,” he said quietly, eyes fogging over with memories. “Too much. I-I can’t remember a time in my life when more than a few months passed without someone plotting to destroy the world or conquer it. And every time they tried, people died.”

He looked at his bloody hands and clenched them into tight fists. “I know that I’ve got the power to end it. Easily, at that. Hell, I almost did a couple times, when Egghead really crossed a line, but I promised myself I wouldn’t add to the body count. That I would never cross the line after him.”

Surge’s eyes were burning. Damn things must’ve gotten dust in them. “Why not?” she asked.

A deep, shuddering breath. “Because if I start? If I take that easy road and kill, even once?” He looked back at her, eyes haunted. “I’m scared that I won't stop there. Why not just keep doing a thing if it works, ya know?” he said. “I mean, if it keeps the people I care about safe, what’s the harm in killing another crook? Why even bother with pesky ‘what ifs?’ like whether people can change or not?”

He shrugged. “The fame and all the accompanying expectations, real and perceived , came later, and I let them hold sway over me. They helped keep me away from the line.” He looked down at his hands and said, “or at least they did before my big hairy dark side came back and decided to start dragging me towards it kicking and screaming.“

Surge grit her teeth. “So what then? Keep fighting the same battles over and over again, beating yourself up whenever someone dies, whether you pulled the trigger or not? Rinse and repeat till you snap from the stress or some asshole finally manages to kill you?”

Sonic grimaced. “It does sound pretty insane when you put it like that.”

“Because it is!” Surge said. “You honestly think people would be happy if you croaked so long as you didn’t break this little code of yours? That Brains and Pinkie and all your little friends would want you to choose keeping your shiny reputation over fucking survival?”

“That’s not what happened here and you know it!” Sonic said. “He wasn’t a threat anymore but the Werehog-I- was about to murder him anyway.”

”But you didn’t! Gaia wept, Blue, but you’re exhausting” Surge whined. “If I whipped myself like this every time I blew up during a fight I’d be fucking dead, healing factor be dammed.”

Sonic shook his head sadly. “I only stopped because you stepped in. What if you weren’t here?”

Surge groaned and put her head in her hands. She was gonna blow at this rate. “What if, what if, what fucking if? Where the hell did that go with the flow attitude that makes me want to cave your face in go?” She asked, a bitter, tired laugh escaping in the midst of her tirade. “I was here. You’re safe, I’m safe, Drippy’s safe, the fucking badger’s” she glanced at the the thug’s mangled body, “-alive. So what if you needed help to reign Big Ugly in?”

Sonic scowled at her. “And if you weren’t being paid to be here,” he asked, “would you have even bothered to stop me? Would you have even cared in the slightest? I need to know I can handle him when and if no one's around to help.”

It was a fair set of questions. Four days ago, before he’d come crashing back into her life, she would have been able to answer “no” to both without hesitation. Only now, when the questions caused a jolt of pain and terror to run through her, did she truly realize this had changed. Sonic was watching her carefully with sad eyes as she struggled with herself, and she could feel Starline at her back, watching her just as intently. Knowingly, even. “I-“

Sirens wailed in the distance, reminding her that they were still at an active crime scene. The bank’s fire alarms must’ve finally notified the local authorities that something was up. Surge backed away from Sonic with an annoyed huff. ”I’m gonna check on Drippy and make sure all these punks are nice and gift wrapped for the cops,” she said. Sonic stood to follow, but Surge stopped him with a sharp jab to the chest with an index finger. “You are going back to the hideout. Clean yourself up, get your shit together, and wait for us to get back. This discussion is not over.”

Sonic stared her down for a moment, jaw working like he wanted to say something, then nodded. “Yeah. Ok,” he sounded positively exhausted. “It’s probably for the best that the locals don’t see me like this anyway.”

———

An hour later, Surge and Kit slipped through the front door of their hideout. Surge had turned her jacket into a makeshift bindle with the aid of one of the bank robbers’ broken wispons in order to carry the heaviest parts of Kit’s wrecked hydropack that he identified as critical to building a new one, and she had the bent frame of the same cradled against her hip by her other arm. Kit insisted he was fine to carry some parts himself, but Surge wouldn’t hear it. What were big sisters for if not carrying heavy shit?

Sonic was seated on one of the couches at the center of the chamber, and at the sound of the front door clanking shut he stood and shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Need a hand?”’ he asked.

Right. Unfinished business time. Surge scowled at him and clutched the bent frame of the hydropack tightly to her side. “I’ve got it,” she said, shifting the handle of the bindle around on her shoulder to illustrate that the weight didn’t bother her. She brought the parts to Kit’s primary work bench and carefully laid them out, Kit instructing her as to how he wanted them laid out. “I’m heading downstairs,” Surge told him once everything was laid out on the table. Kit looked up at her worriedly, and she patted him on the shoulder. “I’m ok,” she said softly as she put her jacket back on, then turned to Sonic and squared her shoulders. “You’re coming with,” she told him.

Kit wrung his hands as he looked back and forth at the two of them.. “Is-is that a good idea, Surge? He asked.

“I really must agree with the boy,” Starline muttered grumpily in her ear. " This is a big risk "

“Shut up,” Surge growled through her teeth. Kit’s sensitive ears picked up the sound, and he cringed. “That wasn’t for you,” Surge said apologetically, tapping on her head.

Kit nodded sympathetically, then opened a drawer at his work station and pulled out a ring of keys. “Just- call me if you need me,” he said as he tossed them to her, then turned to start examining the scattered parts on the table. Surge turned towards the stairs leading to the basement, gesturing with her head for Sonic to follow.

The basement stairs ended at a heavy steel door, its blue paint chipping and the metal rusting in clear testament to how low of a priority Surge and Kit considered it. Surge unlocked the door, and it squealed as if in pain as she opened it and waved Sonic through ahead of her before turning on the lights.

The room beyond was dominated by the building’s water heater, furnace, and backup generator, all showing signs of recent repairs and upgrades at the hands of Kit or similarly skilled individuals the cyborgs had worked with, but Surge ignored them and ushered Sonic past them towards the back wall.

“Surge?” Sonic asked as they arrived under a flickering overhead light fixture. “Those look like cages. Why are there cages in your basement?”

Surge took off her sunglasses, eyes watering like they always did when she came down here. She looked silently at the cages, roughly her height and about five paces wide on each side, for what felt to her like a very long time as she worked to steady her nerves. “Don’t worry,” she said quietly, “they’re not for active use.”

“What are they for then?” Sonic looked like he thought the rusty metal bars might bite him.

“They’re a reminder,” She stepped up the bars of the closest cage and laid a hand on it. Breathe in. Breathe out. She turned to face him, eyes glowing dimly in the low light. “We need to make some things clear if this is going to keep working,” she explained. Slowly, agonizingly so, she started walking in a wide circle around the cages.

“The Jackdaws-the gang we took this place from- were into all sorts of nasty shit,” she said, eyes hardening as she recalled the building’s former occupants. “Arms dealing, extortion, smuggling,” she slapped a hand against the bars of the cage she was walking past, knocking flakes of rust loose. “Trafficking.”

Sonic’s breath caught, and his eyes widened. Surge pressed on without letting him speak, afraid she’d lose her nerve if she stopped talking. “They had a family of four in here when we hit them, folks who had been displaced by an earthquake in Marble
Hill. They’d separated the parents and kids.”

She grabbed on to a bar, hand tightening until the metal groaned and rust clung to her glove. “Seeing them made me wonder:” electricity jumped out of her hand and started bouncing from bar to bar, until the whole cage was glowing, “had Drippy and I passed through cages like this, on our way to Starline's lab?”

She let go of the cage. The metal where her hand had been was red hot, and she bared her teeth as she watched the sparks of electricity dancing among the cage bars slowly dissipate. “I went ballistic. Would’ve abandoned the plan, marched upstairs, killed every last Jackdaw I could find and fuck it if I died in the process, if not for-”

Her voice broke, shoulders shaking with rage. Breathe, damn you. “We’d been clashing with the Jackdaws for a few weeks,” she continued, “the first big threat we tried to take on. This-kid, really, barely older than Drippy, sought us out. He and his brother were orphans from the Eggman War and fell in with the gang for safety and a place to stay, but the gang boss was starting to lean on them about 'debts owed' and they wanted out. Offered to be our inside man and cut the alarms the night of the raid.”

She shut her eyes. “When I dragged him in here to demand answers, he broke down. Discovering the gang were traffickers was the straw that broke the brothers' backs and overcame their fear of reprisal. The kids started crying too. So much noise-”

She shook her head. “That’s when it hit me: we were all prisoners in that room. The kids and their parents in their cages. The boy and his brother, indebted to and threatened into compliance by their leaders. Me with my demons and my programming.”

Her eyes opened. The cage was between her and Sonic now, and she stared at him through the bars. “Kit and I made our own promise that night as we broke a leg of every Jackdaw we rounded up in the building besides those boys and made it real clear they’d get worse if they didn’t get their shit together or leave town once they did their time: no more prisoners, no more cages, not on our watch.”

She stepped out from behind the cage and came back to stand in front of Sonic, eyes defiant as she held his gaze. “I ask for pay because Kit and I need to eat, a place to sleep, and to build this place up so we can keep that promise. It’s the means, not the end, and if you so much as imply as much again I will beat you to a pulp. We can’t all get by on the good will of a world we’ve saved too many times to count.”

Sonic gulped and nodded. “Why- why didn’t you kill them? The other Jackdaws, I mean.”

“Because once they were beaten and broken they weren’t a threat, and I have enough ghosts in my head,” Surge replied. “Make no mistake though: if it had come down to Drip’s life or mine, weighed against theirs?"

She gave him a significant look. “Let’s just say I won't hold myself responsible if I’m trying to haul someone up a cliff and they choose to let go out of pride and spite,” she said, the sick part of her laughing quietly as Sonic’s face twisted before her eyes softened. “This isn’t your world we’re in right now, Blue, where the bad guys have their allegiance welded onto their bodies. It’s my world, full of the innocent, the desperate, and absolute monsters all jumbled together, none of whom have the damn courtesy to tell you what they are at first glance. So we do our best, and we don’t let mistakes, or the fear of them, eat us up and push us to put the weight of the damn world on our shoulders.

“That’ll get you killed out there, Blue, and dead heroes,” she concluded, “even inspiring ones, can’t save anybody. Better to be a living one with dirt on your hands, if you ask me, and if that’s too much for you to swallow then you’re not coming on another patrol. Period.” She walked past him, heading for the door, her mind settled and strangely calm now that she'd bared herself to him.

“And to answer your question: yes. Yes I would have stepped in to hold back the Werehog tonight, payment or not. And I’ll do it again, as many times as I have to until Brains and Drippy figure out how to get you out of this cage.”

“-I don’t know what to say to that,” Sonic said as she opened the door to head back upstairs. She glanced back at him, heart twisting at the lost look in his eyes.

She smiled sadly back at him. “Then don’t say anything, and think about it instead,” she said. “Take all the time down here you need to do it.”

She closed the door and took a shuddering breath before she returned to the main floor of the hideout. Kit was still at his workbench sorting the pieces of his hydropack, and when he saw her he trotted over and hugged her legs. “Are you ok?” he asked quietly.

He always worried about her when she went downstairs. Couldn’t stand the place himself and would only go down to fix things if she came along to keep him distracted. “I’m okay,” she said, resting a hand on his head. “It was-good, oddly enough- to get all that off my chest.”

Kit stepped back from her. The poor guy looked on the verge of crying, but he kept his back straight. “You should rest now,” he said.

“Pot, meet kettle,” she shot back with a smile as she turned to head up to their shared room. An idea struck her, and she turned back to him. “Actually, one thing before I turn in.”

Kit tilted his head curiously at her, ears twitching.

“Get a message to Business Bug. Tell her I wanna renegotiate our deal.”

Chapter Text

Two days later

“Sonic? Are you even listening to me?”

Sonic jerked and sat up straight on his cot. Tails was staring at him with a tight frown on his face. True to form, the little fox finished his work decrypting the data from Eggman’s ship sooner than predicted out of sheer determination, and so when Kit messaged him to announce he’d like his input on the results of Sonic’s latest blood tests Tails set out for Westopolis in the Tornado almost immediately. He’d just arrived this morning, and while Sonic noted the rings of sleeplessness beneath his eyes he knew better than to needle his little brother about it. Tails would sleep when he was certain he’d done everything he could, and no sooner “Sorry, bud. Something about Ames, Whisper, and Tangle?”

Tails sighed. “I was saying they got a lead on a possible Eggman outpost on one of the small archipelagos south of here. Given the proximity, we’re hopeful it’ll have data on what Eggman has injected you with. Or maybe it’s a listening post monitoring things here for him and we can set up a way to listen back. Whisper and Tangle are going to infiltrate it tonight.”

Sonic smiled, or tried to. “That’s great to hear, buddy. I’m sure the girls won’t let us down,” he said.

Tails sat back in the folding chair he’d borrowed from the main chamber of the hideout and crossed his arms. “You are nowhere near as excited by the news as I thought you’d be,” he said, eyes furrowed. “Heck, I half expected you to go running to Surge to beg for permission to join the operation.“

Sonic shrugged halfheartedly and started plucking idly at his gloves. “Yeah, well, you know- I figured everyone would prefer I stay far away from any Eggman stuff until we know what’s happening with my body.”

Tails’s muzzle split into a rueful grin. “How very logical of you. Now I know something’s up.”

Sonic laughed. Tails stood and moved to sit beside Sonic on the cot, fluffy namesakes twitching curiously behind him. “Talk to me,” he said, “what’s eating you? Besides the Werehog, I mean.”

This was Tails. Sonic trusted him more than anyone. Still he sighed and was quiet for a moment, unsure of how to begin. “It’s just some stuff I’ve been trying to puzzle out the last couple days. About that night I went out with Surge on patrol,” he said.

Tails frowned tightly. “I’m still not sure whether to be furious at you both for taking such a risk or just happy that Surge discovered the Werehog can still be reasoned with,” he said grumpily.

“Aw, come on buddy,” Sonic complained. “I already told you why we did it, and it was working too! Up until that power armored creep showed up, I was feeling better than I had in days, and the Big Guy was calm as could be!”

Tails held up a hand. “I’ll admit your reasoning has merit. The Werehog is part of you, cut off from the rest though he may be right now, so it does figure that he would be as annoyed by sitting by when he could be helping as you are. Can’t take the Hero out of the Hog, if you will.”

Sonic whistled appreciatively. “Nice catchphrase, think we could trademark it?” he said with a smirk.

“Don’t change the subject,” Tails said scoldingly. “If this isn’t about what you did that night, then what’s bothering you? Was it something Surge did?”

Sonic slumped back onto the cot and stared at the ceiling fan above him, spinning drowsily in the warm air of the room. “More like some things she said. After she got the Werehog to pull back, we had a bit of an argument,” Sonic explained. “I was pretty torn up over how I’d lost control, and Surge laid into me about it. She demanded to know why I was so worried about ’what ifs’ and was more concerned with a code that made no sense to her than with my own survival, to keep it short.”

Tails scowled. “I’m not sure she’s qualified to be lecturing you about how you’re managing the stress of all this. Or your personal philosophy for that matter.”

Sonic shook his head. “I wouldn’t call it a lecture so much as explosive frustration: she wanted to understand why I was being so hard on myself more than anything, I think.”

Tails hummed thoughtfully. “It’s unfair of me, but I’m a little surprised she’d care to try understanding you at all,” he said, rubbing his chin. “More proof she’s changed, I guess. What did you tell her?”

Sonic sighed, scuffing his shoes against the floor with lazy kicks. “The truth. That I swore to never kill if I could at all help it. That I worry what would happen if I did. ”

Sonic had never shared that information with anyone besides Tails before, and the little fox knew it. No one else, after all, had been there with him almost every time he’d fought the likes of Eggman. “That’s- wow. How did she react?”

Sonic replayed his argument with Surge for what felt like, and may well have been, the hundredth time. “It threw her off, for sure, though she was still pretty mad. She- and maybe this sounds crazy- seemed almost worried about me after that. Kept on me about beating myself up for needing her help with reigning in the Big Guy.”

Sonic swallowed uncomfortably. “I snapped back that I had to be sure I could handle him myself. That I couldn't count on people being around next time, especially not her unless Jewel was still paying her. That hurt her, I think. ”

“How do you figure?” Tails asked. “Surge hasn’t exactly been shy about her mercenary proclivities.”

Sonic shrugged. “She got real quiet, like I’d knocked the wind out of her. That and- well, I don’t think I should say much without her permission, but when we got back to the hideout she showed me some things. Things that really drove home what she and Kit are up to here.”

He sighed as he wrung his hands together. “She’s trying so hard to do right by people, little bro. They both are. The whole mercenary schtick is so they can do it their way, no masters or bosses, and they’re crushing it.”

“Sounds like you’ve come to really respect them.”

Sonic glanced at Tails, who was now watching him curiously. “You’ve seen what they’ve done with this place, how protective they are of this town. You said it yourself at the start of all this: there was no reason to expect her help, given our history, but here we are, guests in her home.”

He sat up and his eyes brightened, fingers tapping out a simple rhythm on the cot’s metal frame “And then she lets me join in on her work, just cause I had a hunch it would soothe the Big Guy. Even treats me to a foot race! Do you know how long it’s been since I got to have a foot race with someone without begging or making them mad enough to attack me first? Cause I can’t remember the last time.”

Tails chuckled. “Can’t say that I do, either.”

Sonic grinned wide as he got into the retelling, “Man, you should’ve seen it! No rules, no holding back, just pure speed vs. speed, wit vs. wit. She can really keep up, and the tricks she’s figured out with those powers of hers! Did you know she can basically conjure stun grenades on command?!”

Tails was smirking at him now, legs crossed as he listened intently to his brother. “Oh, really? Please, tell me more.”

“Seriously, bro, it was sick!,” Sonic gushed, throwing his arms wide for emphasis. “I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun in a race. And the fight with those goons?! Poetry in motion, little bro, at least until the armored badger showed up. We worked really well together, and damn but she’s efficient with her-” Tail’s rising laughter cut him short. ”What? What’s so funny?” he chuckled, Tails’s mirth as contagious as always.

“N-nothing,” Tails said as he worked to stifle his laughter. “I’ve just never seen you so- enthusiastic- when hyping someone up before. It’s surprising.”

Sonic blushed and rubbed the back of his head. “Aw, come on man, it’s not that weird. I brag about all my friends! How could I not when you’re all so awesome?”

Tails didn’t let it go, his smirk returning with a mischievous glimmer in his eyes. “Oh, so Surge is your friend now, is she? Does she know that, or is that just what you want?”

Sonic shifted uncomfortably. “I mean, we both had fun racing, and at dinner after, and I really am impressed by how far she’s come in the last year,” he said, a slow drip of sadness entering his voice. "Then she took a big risk bringing me along on that patrol, and instead of being grateful for her kindness I had to go and suggest that she only cared about how much money she could make off my problems. Stupid of me,” he sighed. He noticed a loose thread on the drab sheet covering the cot and began to sullenly pick at it. “I’m worried she’s gonna throw up her walls again after I screwed up, but yeah, friends would be cool” he admitted.

The Werehog, whose silence this morning had an air of uncharacteristic sulking about it, wuffed at him grumpily from its territory in his head, as if to affirm that yes, indeed, he had screwed up royally and should feel bad about it. “Figures,” Sonic grumbled. “First person in years I’ve had to really work at befriending, and I muck it up. How did I ever manage to win Knux over?”

“Multiple fist fights and saving his island from getting blown to bits,” Tails said, deadpan. “Not exactly a one to one situation,” he concluded, and gave Sonic a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. "May I be blunt?” he said.

“Always, little bro,” Sonic said. “You know I trust you and that ginormous brain of yours.”

Tails smiled and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “If there’s one thing I would say you and Surge have in common, it’s that you usually don’t let other people’s opinions about you bother you much, your current worries being an adorable exception to the rule.”

Sonic’s nose twisted sourly. “Who are you calling adorable?!” He sputtered, setting Tails off into another fit of laughter as he trapped him him a headlock “Ugh, my own brother, mocking me in my time of need,” he said with a dramatic growl, egging Tails on to greater heights of mirth as he gave him a playful shake. “The nerve of some people!”

“Stoopppp, I’m sorry! Lemme go!” Tails wailed between fits of laughter. Sonic obliged, and Tails wiped a tear from his eyes as his breathing steadied. “Seriously though, have you considered just talking to her about this? It’s possible she’s not as upset as you think she is.”

Sonic leaned back on his hands. “I’ve wanted to, but she’s not been around much the last two days,” he said. He crossed his right foot over his left knee and bounced it nervously. “Clean up work at the bank and meetings with the local PD and Restoration branch about who gets what’s left of the E-series turned power armor, Kit says, though I think he’s covering for her a bit. I’ve not pressed the matter cause I don’t want to get pummeled,” he said with a wan smile.

Tails glanced at the clock on the wall. “Well it’s not quite noon yet. Maybe you can catch her before she finds a reason to head out for the day?” He said. “Apologize, if you think you need to. You’ll feel better, regardless of how she takes it.”

Sonic nodded and let out a deep breath. ”You’re right,” he said, his expression hardening. “If she accepts my apology and we end up cool again, awesome. If not, that’s her right. Gaia knows she doesn’t owe me anything.”

He hopped his feet and gave Tails a confident grin. “Thanks for the pep talk bro. I think I’m ready to face the angry, shark-toothed music now .”

Tails gave him a thumbs up and a wink. “Any time, bro,” Tails said. “Try not to overthink things and just be your honest self. Maybe toss in some of that effusive praise you were throwing around if you really wanna win her over.”

That sly glint had slipped back into his little buddy’s eyes. Little mischief maker must have picked up that compliments made Surge glitch out in hilarious fashion too. “I’ll keep a couple bits of praise in my back pocket for emergencies,” he grinned back, then slipped out the door.

As he stepped out onto the catwalks above the main chamber, he heard the sound of a table saw running and saw Kit, clad in his protective goggles and a leather apron, cutting a metal rod into pieces of roughly equal length at one of his work stations. The machine was making quite a racket, so Sonic decided not to try and shout over it and just zip over to talk instead. “Heya, Kit!” Sonic said with an exaggerated wave of his arm as he slid to a stop near the work area. “Whatcha making today?”

The dour fennec must have been used to Surge appearing out of nowhere while working, as he barely flinched at Sonic's arrival. “Hello, Sonic” he said, not taking his eyes off the saw as he cut one more length of rod and tossed it onto the small pile of like pieces he’d created. “Surge got it into her head that she needs a staff and/or a spear after she learned she can shoot lightning out of them like a rifle on Eggman’s ship. ‘Shit’s gonna be tight as fuck’ were her exact words, I believe. ”

He killed the power to the table saw and bent over the pile, examining them closely before pulling two off the pile and carrying them to another table. “I’ll be melting these down and mixing them with other metals to make test pieces. Need to find an alloy with the right mix of density, flexibility, and conductivity" he explained, still not looking at Sonic. “Very dry stuff, sorry to say, plus metallurgy is still relatively new to me. Would this be something Prower would be familiar with?” he asked.

Sonic grinned and nodded. “Oh, definitely. Tails built his own forge in his back yard just for projects like this.”

Kit’s ears flattened a little against his head. “I’ll- have to ask him for some guidance then. I-if you don’t think he’d mind.”

“Knock yourself out,” Sonic said. “I think Tails appreciates having someone to nerd out with.”

Kit hummed gratefully. “Good to hear. So, what did you need?”

Time to be brave, Hedgehog. Sonic took a deep breath. “Is Surge around? I-uh- was hoping to talk to her.”

Kit glanced at him, eyes flashing a neon pink briefly before he looked back at his work. ”She m-might still be in our room,” he said, jaw tense. “She likes to sleep in when she can, given the late nights we keep. She’s usually awake by now, but I won’t bail you out if you wake her and get chewed out for it.”

“Duly noted,” Sonic said with a nervous smile. He turned to sprint back upstairs but stopped short when Kit grabbed his arm with a surprising amount of strength.

“Don’t upset her again,” Kit said, eyes darkening to red pinpoints in a sea of black. The fur on the back of Sonic’s neck rose in alarm, and he nodded nervously. Kit blinked, and his eyes were back to their normal sullen pink, the transition so fast Sonic wondered if he’d just hallucinated the transformation. Kit released Sonic with a stiff nod, and if Sonic ran off to find Surge a little faster than planned he didn’t think anyone would blame him.

The door to the cyborgs’ shared room was shut when Sonic arrived, but he saw light slipping out from behind the curtains covering the inward facing windows. For a moment, his limbs felt heavy, and the Werehog grumbled nervously in his ear. A frown and a tensing of his shoulders shook the nerves off, and he reached up his hand to knock. The sound of his hand banging against the cold metal reverberated out into the main chamber like the tolling of a rusty bell, and Sonic’s nerves began to fray again as the sound slowly faded.

“Whatcha want, Lamehog?”

Sonic stopped short just as he was about to knock again. Surge’s voice, muffled by distance and the door, didn’t sound tired or irritated. Or at least no more irritated than usual, thank Gaia. “How’d you know it was me?” he asked.

Shuffling sounds and a rustling of fabric. Making the bed, or just getting out of it? “Drippy doesn’t knock, and I can’t see Brains coming up here unless it was an emergency.”

Fair enough. “Well um- I was hoping to talk about-stuff. From the other night.”

Damn it, man, pull it together! It’s just a conversation. With Surge. The girl who’s housing you, is surprisingly cool, and could throw you through a wall if she wanted. No sweat!

“Riiiiight. Stuff. Very descriptive,” Sonic dared to hope Surge’s voice sounded more amused than annoyed. “Sure, I guess. Door’s unlocked.”

Sonic opened the door and stepped into the low lights of the cabin, eyes adjusting quickly as he took in the space. Along the far wall a faded red corduroy couch and matching ottoman sat beneath the shuttered, outward facing windows, a set of beige pillows and a knitted blue blanket strewn across its length. A three-headed lamp stood in the corner near it, the two lit bulbs on it providing most of the room’s illumination. A simple metal ceiling fan, likely the only original fixture left, spun lazily above the room, creaking lowly as it rotated. A table with an abandoned card game laid out on it and two folding chairs rounded out the space, along with a bunkbed that took up much of the right hand wall. Surge was just finishing up making the top bunk as he entered, and she rolled off and down to the floor with a graceful twist of her body, landing silently before him on her bare feet.

Sonic’s brain short circuited briefly as it registered her state of dress, and he quickly spun away from her. “Sorry!” He said, voice cracking a little as the Werehog growled in annoyance. “I should have asked if you were dressed yet.”

Real smooth, Sonic. The Werehog growled again, and he could feel it trying to exert its will over his limbs and make him turn back around.

“The fuck you talking about, Hedgehog?” Surge’s irritation was audibly rising. “I am dressed. You think I sleep in my damn combat threads?”

Surge walked around to stand in front of him, hands on her hips as she scowled. The tension left Sonic’s shoulders, if only because the Werehog was getting what it wanted now, though his face still felt uncomfortably warm. Yes, he conceded, Surge was in fact clothed, but the black athletic shorts and yellow, scoop-necked tank top left a lot less to the imagination than her usual outfit. The shorts came barely a quarter of the way down her thighs, leaving a tantalizing amount of the well muscled, green expanse of her legs exposed, and one strap of the tank top had slipped off her left shoulder, revealing the full sweep of her collarbone on that side for a moment before she pulled it back into position. Combined with the mess or her unbound head quills, the complete picture lent a softness to her features that left Sonic feeling like he was in dangerously intimate territory.

His eyes twitched downward again before he could catch himself. Hell of an inconvenient time to learn he was a leg man. Surge must've picked up on his discomfort, a positively devious grin splitting her face in two as she leaned towards him. He took a faltering step back, and she snickered. “Awww, what’s the matter, Blue?” she teased, her grin somehow growing even wider. “None of your fan girls ever let you hang out in their bedroom?”

Sonic set his jaw, eyes glinting competitively. Some verbal jousting was just what he needed to regain his dignity. “No,” he said, opening with a bit of truth before presenting his counter strike. “My fans have more class than that, thank you kindly.”

A flash of indignation and- surprise, perhaps?- crossed Surge’s face as her expression slipped and a spark leapt out the corner of one eye. Point for Sonic. “How boring of them,” she grumbled, her eyes lidding in calculation. Slowly, her grin turned sly as she slipped back into his personal space, eyes glowing brightly beneath her eyelashes as they ensnared his gaze.

“Such a disservice to you, too, leaving you high strung and unprepared like this,” she said, voice rumbling low in her throat as she brushed past him on her way to the couch. Sonic’s face began to heat up again as his eyes followed her towards the back of the room until she stopped in front of the couch and turned her head just enough that he could see one smoldering teal eye watching him over her left shoulder. Too late, he realized she’d laid a trap for him with the very deliberate way she held herself, back straight and legs tensed as they crossed over each other like a dancer about to start a routine.

”I mean, Gaia wept, Blue,” She said, laughter behind the words. “You’d think you’d walked in on me naked the way you’re burning up.”

don’tthinkaboutthatdon’tthinkaboutthatdon’t-

The Werehog thought about it, and as Sonic’s face just about burst into flames he swore it laughed at him before settling back down with a pleased rumble. “I-um-” Sonic stammered, struggling to piece his brain back together.

Surge burst out in a fit of cackling as she spun and fell heavily onto the couch. “Holy shit, dude, you should see your fucking face!” she said. “If I’d known you were so damn easy to fluster I would’ve messed with you like that ages ago.”

Well at least she was in good spirits, even if it was at his expense. He crossed his arms and turned away from her, more to deny her the satisfaction of his relieved grin than out of actual hurt. “You’re a menace,” he said.

“Gaiadamn right I am, Pervhog” Surge said proudly. “Now sit down before you pass out from all that blood rushing to your face and let’s get this over with.”

Sonic obliged, taking one of the folding chairs at the table as Surge put her legs up on the ottoman, arms crossed over her stomach as she sank into the couch cushions. “I’m guessing this is about the stuff we talked about?” she asked.

Sonic took a deep breath and nodded, folding his hands in front of him. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about everything. What you told me and showed me,” he said. Glancing up, he saw that Surge was now very still in her seat, her relaxed posture belying the intense interest in her eyes. “I wanted to apologize, first of all” he said, Surge’s eyebrows rising high in response. “I knew you and Kit weren’t just in this for the money, and still I accused you of having purely mercenary intentions in my case. That was wrong.”

He wrung his hands together. This was the hardest part, and he pushed through it. “You’ve really made a change for the better in the last year,” he said. “You both have, and it’s been a privilege to see this incredible thing you’re building these past several days.” He took a deep breath as he gathered his emotions. “I might not agree with all your methods, but I respect the heart behind them, the determination to do good and keep your hard won freedom in the process.”

He smiled at her. “You’re a good person, Surge, and I’m sorry I thought otherwise, even if only for a moment,” he said.

Surge blinked owlishly at him, a dusting of pink on her muzzle. “I-shit, dude!” She growled, somehow slumping even deeper into the puffy cushioning of the couch. “Why do you gotta be so fucking hard to hate all the time?!”

Sonic sat back sharply as if she’d just shocked him. “I’m- sorry? Should I be sorry?” he said. “That might be the weirdest compliment I’ve ever received.”

A bitter chuckle. “You should be sorry, asshole,” Surge said. “Just when I was preparing to go back to keeping our distance from one another, you gotta pull this shit!”

She sat up and pulled her knees towards her chest, hands sparking with electricity and singing the fur near them. If it hurt, she didn’t show it, but still Sonic cringed sympathetically. “You know, this was supposed to be a simple fucking job. Just a big paycheck and maybe a chance to humiliate you a bit,” she said grumpily. “But here you come again, complicating shit with your cornball humor and your fucking sincerity, reminding me you’re-fucking decent and shit- and every time you do it gets under my skin like a fucking sliver. What am I supposed to do with that, huh?”

Sonic scratched the back of his head. This was the farthest thing from how he’d imagined this conversation would go. “So- you want to go back to hating me?” he asked, dumbfounded. Hell, he felt bad that he hadn’t truly appreciated the fact that she apparently didn’t hate him anymore before now.

“Yes!” Surge screamed into her knees, but then she shook her head. “Or not. I don’t know. Would it really be so bad to do that?” She asked, popping head up just enough to look at him over the tops of her knees. There was a bit of steam coming off her eyes as her energy conducted to the gathering moisture in her tear ducts, her face twitching in pain. “Just- you know- ignoring each other unless we have to interact or I feel like kicking your ass?”

Sonic frowned and shook his head. “One, I don’t think I ever hated you to begin with. Didn’t understand you? Sure. Annoyed by your constant attempts to make me lash out at you whenever we met prior to this? Definitely. But I never hated you.”

Against his own survival instincts, he stood and walked over to sit beside her on the couch. She tensed as he sat down, but didn’t lash out. “Even if I did,” he continued, flashing her another smile, “I don’t think I could go back to hating you now. You’ve proven way too fun to be around for that.”

His grin turned cocky. “And two: you may have won our first race, but I’m pretty sure I remain undefeated in terms of actual fights between us.”

Surge laughed again, that warm, throaty quality that Sonic enjoyed creeping back into it. “No fucking way. I would’ve whooped your ass when I had the Dynamo Cage if I hadn’t overloaded the damn thing at the last second!”

Sonic wiggled his hand in the air as if to say “maybe”. “Now who’s dealing in ‘what ifs’?” he teased, earning a half hearted backhand to his shoulder for his trouble. “Though I would gladly spar with you if you wanted to settle things with a rematch. Pretty sure those sick new moves you’ve been learning would make you a challenge even without that thing giving you a boost.”

Surge sniffed and dragged her left hand across her face to clear away the tears that were clinging to her eyes. “I-might like that actually.” she said. “That power armor made me realize I need to start practicing on something tougher than my training dummies and street trash.”

Sonic fixed her with a raised eyebrow and a grin, and she rolled her eyes. “Ok, yes, and it would be fun. Happy?”

Sonic grinned triumphantly. “Immensely.”

“Smug little shit,” Surge muttered

“Guilty as charged,” Sonic said with a shrug. “Though if it’s humility you want,” he continued, “I will say this: you were right.”

Surge’s head shot up, eyes wide. “About what?” she asked.

“About me,” he said, his renewed confidence in his ability to talk to her making the words flow out of him like water. “Maybe I put too much pressure on myself, take failures too hard, and should get more comfortable with relying on others to do the right thing when needed. Tails already told me something similar to that last one a couple times, and I thought I was getting better at it.”

He laughed ruefully. “Guess I still have work to do. Doesn’t help that the last time I was this out of commission, Eggman almost took over the whole planet.”

Surge let out a sudden, satisfied sigh as she closed her eyes, and Sonic almost did a double take. “What was that for?” he asked.

There was mischief in Surge’s eyes when she opened them again. “Just savoring the moment. Gaia knows when I’ll get to hear you admit I was right again.”

Sonic blew her a raspberry. “Well don’t get used to it. I’m also willing to admit that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I busted the knee caps of particularly slippery bad guys so they weren’t-well, slippery anymore, but I stand by my commitment to non-lethality. People deserve the chance to change.”

“Even Eggman? After everything he’s done?” Surge asked, a hint of ice entering her voice.

Sonic nodded. “Sorry, but yeah, even him. He’s done the right thing just enough times to keep me hoping he’ll see the light someday.” He leaned in to whisper conspiratorially, “But between you and me? definitely at the top of my ‘slippery bad guys with breakable knee caps’ list now, if I can ever manage to catch him. Sometimes I swear the man has a teleporter built into his coat or something, he’s so good at vanishing on me.”

“That’s a horrifying thought,” Surge said, growing somber again. “I still worry you’re giving him too much credit, though. Some people just don’t want to be redeemed,” she said.

Sonic shrugged. “Well, if there’s one thing I value as much as life itself, it’s the freedom to live it how you choose,” he said. He glanced over at her and winked, “And a wise woman recently taught me that, if someone uses that freedom to throw themselves off a ledge, then that’s their choice and I shouldn’t feel guilty. Cool gal, you’d like her.”

Surge blushed and looked away from him, grumbling something about corn and punching things. Another point for Sonic, he thought with a mental fist pump. They sat in companionable silence for a moment, the creaking of the ceiling fan generating pleasant white noise, before she spoke again.

“I’m sorry too,” she said, almost too quietly for him to hear, and just like that she had him off balance again. “For assuming you were just a glory hound who didn’t care about the consequences of his actions. I’d chalk it up to my programming, but that- well, it feels like a flimsy excuse now that I know Starline didn’t really understand you when he built me.”

Her fingers grasped at one another, blindly hunting for rings she wasn’t currently wearing, and she winced again. ”It’s easy to forget I only popped out the tube a couple years ago, with all the data and false memories Starline fed me,” she said. “Even easier to forget that you and most other people have been navigating this messy world a lot longer, dealing with shit the best you can.”

She sighed and pinched her nose. “I guess what I’m trying to say,” she said, “is that it was wrong of me to assume your life was so easy before now-and maybe the world’s problems are big enough that it needs us both to make it better.”

Sonic grinned. “I’m down for a little good cop, bad cop dynamic,” he said eagerly.

“Just don’t you ever let the self-sacrificing hero shit graduate to a full martyr complex on me,” she said, electric arcs bristling off her shoulders like another set of quills. “You don’t get to die unless it’s of old age or with my hands around your throat.”

The Werehog growled approvingly, and Sonic swallowed a lump in his throat that wasn’t entirely composed of fear. “That’s- a hell of a way to tell someone you care about their safety,” he finally said with a nervous laugh.

“I’m fucking serious, Hedgehog,” Surge growled. “I got plans to beat your ass in so many sparring matches, so you gotta stick around.”

Sonic busted out in a laughing fit, hands clutching his stomach. Suge held out a moment before breaking out in one as well, the two of them leaning back into their respective seats on the couch. When he finally calmed himself, Sonic held out a fist to her. “Friends?” he asked.

Surge looked at the proffered hand pensively for a moment before smiling back, the first full one he’d gotten out of her in two days. She poured a little charge into her own fist when she bumped it against his, and Sonic couldn’t suppress a yelp of surprise at the jolt. “Not enemies. Baby steps, Blue,” she said. “

Sonic gingerly shook out his hand. “Slow's not my usual style, but I’ll take it,” he said gratefully, eyes twinkling as he smiled back.

For an interminable moment they remained there watching each other, and Sonic felt his face flush again as he realized he’d missed that toothy smile of hers. An unfamiliar nervousness came over him as Surge turned her head to look at the ceiling, expression relaxed into a content grin as she brushed a stray quill back over her shoulder, but before he could analyze the feeling any further a knock on the door frame snapped both of them to attention. Surge was on the other side of the room faster than blinking, doing her best to look nonchalant as she leaned against the bunk bed’s ladder, and Sonic slapped a well-practiced look of cool disinterest on his face as he glanced towards the noise.

Kit stood in the doorway, eyeing them both suspiciously. “If I’m not interrupting,” he said carefully, eyes narrowing dangerously at Sonic, “Prower and I would like to see you in the lab. We’re done interpreting your test results.”

Sonic nodded, hopping off the couch while putting on his most winning smile. “Excellent! I’ll be there in a minute, Kit, and thanks.”

Kit nodded stiffly and, with a final, curious glance Surge’s way, slipped back out the door as silently as he’d come. Sonic let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding, and looked to Surge. “You coming?” he asked.

“Yeah, just lemme change into my normal clothes first,” she said. Her tank top had bunched up a bit while she was lounging on the couch, exposing some of her midriff, and she anxiously adjusted the garment. She noticed him watching her, and her eyes narrowed. “Wouldn’t want to distract you from the Brain Trust’s presentation, after all“ she teased.

Sonic stifled a snort of laughter. “Please,” he said, “As if I’d disrespect our favorite foxes like that.”

He turned to leave the room, but couldn’t resist a final counter blow in this new game of “make the other blush” they were, apparently, going to keep playing. “If you really mean it though” he said, tapping his face as he winked at her, “put on your sunglasses too. Your eyes are the real distraction.”

Surge let out a choked, indignant grunt, and Sonic zipped away towards the lab with a chuckle.
—--

“Right then. bad news first” Tails said, bringing up multiple images of test results and what Sonic assumed were microscope images of his blood sample, mercifully free of the purple tinted Chaos energy that had washed out the first sample’s images, onto the large computer monitor in the lab. He clicked the wireless mouse he was holding twice, and a close up of what looked like tiny purple jellyfish centered itself on the screen. Sonic’s heart leapt into his throat, and Tails grimaced sympathetically. “Yeah. Metal Virus,” he said, ears flat, “a whole new variant, to boot.”

Surge pushed herself off the wall she’d been leaning against, eyes suddenly white with electric discharge. “The fuck’s Eggfuck doing making new MV variants?” She snarled. She stared at the screen like it had insulted her, fists clenching and unclenching erratically.

“We’ve got a couple theories,” Kit said, wheeling the stool he was sitting on over to Surge and resting a soothing hand on her shoulder. Sparks jumped along his arm, making him wince, but he held on until Surge took a steadying breath. “Let’s start with what we know for certain first, though,” he said, then nodded to Tails. “Continue, Prower.”

“R-right” Tails said nervously, sparing Surge a wary glance as he turned back to Sonic. “You haven’t turned zombot on us,” he said. “So it’s safe to say this new strain used the stabilized variant Dr. Starline made when-building,” Tail’s face twisted uncomfortably at the word, “-Surge and Kit as a jumping off point.”

“Fucking shitbird platypus” Surge groused. Now that she was calm again, she looked at the image more closely. “It’s the wrong color, though,” she said. “The nanites in our blood are silver, with Starline’s stupid fucking logo on the head.”

“Good eye,” Tails said, turning back to the keyboard and entering a series of commands. “That’s because of the little extra Eggman’s added to the structure. Check this out.”

The image on screen zoomed in closer to one of the nanites's trunk, and a deep purple sliver of something distinctly not metallic could be seen even with the reduction in image quality. “The fuck is that?” Surge asked.

“Chaos Drive” Sonic supplied grimly. “Chunks of crystallized Chaos energy GUN used to power their vehicles and drones, back before Eggman wiped them out in the war,” he said. “Eggie figuring out how to miniaturize them like this puts all kinds of trouble on the table.”

Tails nodded. “I agree,” he said, still typing in commands “especially since he designed these to pump out negative energy, based on the readings from your first tests.”

Kit hopped off his stool and approached the screen as the image shifted again, this time to a short video of the nanites moving about in the sample. Tiny arcs of dark purple electricity jumped off the nanites at irregular intervals, along with an occasional flash of green energy. The nanites seemed to suck in the green energy somehow, and Sonic noticed a degraded Chaos Drive in one nanite regrow a chunk of itself afterwards. “Prower tells me your body gives off an abnormal amount of ambient Chaos energy, whether as a matter of genetics of because you've used the Emeralds so much” Kit said. “It would seem the nanites feed on this ambient energy to recharge the drives, which in turn lets them pump more negative energy into your system.“

Sonic hummed pensively. “Explains why the Big Guy’s back and not going away despite there being no Emeralds around to sustain him,” he said. “Any idea how they’re making him more insistent about what he wants?”

“This is where the theory craft begins,” Kit said. He gave Tails a nod, and with a click the blood sample image vanished from sight, replaced by strings of characters Sonic could not even begin to make sense of. “These are data packets I was able to capture from the nanites in your samples as they talked to each other. Cross referencing with similar data packets I’ve managed to decrypt from Surge's and my own MV nanites, they appear to be monitoring various biological metrics.”

He took out a laser pointer and highlighted some numbers amongst the decrypted portions of the data. “That there’s a blood pressure reading, and that,” he pointed at a more complex grouping of numbers, “Looks almost like numbers from an EEG to me.”

He looked at Sonic and Surge, who both stared blankly back at him. “Brain activity measurements,” he said with an exasperated sigh, Tails bringing up an image of a brain on screen as he continued. “Based on what triggered your transformation at the bank, I’d wager they’re monitoring for high-beta wave activity, which indicates stress or hyperarousal. Prower hit the sample with a sound wave of a similar wavelength and the nanites went nuts.”

“‘Chaos is power, enriched by the heart’,” Tails said, sending Sonic a knowing look.

Surge made a sour face. “Come again?” she said.

“Something a ghost told us once,” Sonic said. “Basically, it means that Chaos energy reacts to your emotions and desires.”

Surge looked back and forth between him and Tails, eyes wide. “A ghost,” she said, deadpan. “Like an actual, ‘woooooo, spooky’ ghost?” she wiggled her fingers as she said it.

Sonic and Tails nodded. “They’re more common than folks realize,” Tails said. “This one, thankfully, was a friendly little echidna lady. She was a priestess and a guardian like Knuckles a long time ago.”

“Fuck,” Surge let out a breath. “You can keep the ghost shit for yourself, Blue. I’ll stick to gangsters and robots.”

Sonic smirked at her. “Didn’t think you’d scare that easily, Sparky.”

“Fuck scared,” Surge shot back. “I don’t screw with shit I can’t hit.”

Kit seized control of the conversation again with a cough and turned back to the monitor. “I’d like to set up a proper, full body scan to be certain, but my theory based on the data available and Prower’s knowledge of Chaos energy’s mechanics ” he highlighted the area just above the brain stem in the image with his laser pointer, “is that we’ll see a particularly dense collection of nanites here. These areas contain the parts of your brain that handle stress responses and arousal, and if that’s what is meant to trigger your transformations the nanites would focus on it.”

“They might even be programmed to irritate that part of your brain to amplify stress signals” Tails chimed in. “To make it harder for you to reign in trigger reactions.”

Sonic frowned, his face flushed. That explained his irritability, and why the Werehog had thrown a fit when he walked in on Surge. “So they’re trying to destabilize me. To what end?”

Kit shrugged. “We’d need to understand what Eggman intended for them to do to Surge to be sure. Hopefully the nanites are still operating under the assumption that you are her, and the data packets will reveal just that.”

Tails returned the monitor to its resting state and spun his chair around to face everyone. “I know it might not sound like it, but this is good news, Sonic,” he said. “We’ve beaten the Metal Virus before and we can do it again. Kit’s been studying the Starline strain for months, so his notes give us plenty to build theoretical treatments off of.”

Sonic smiled, though he couldn’t banish the tension building in his shoulders. “Thanks buddy,” he said, then turned to Kit. “You too, Kit. You guys work well together.”

Tails popped a thumbs up at Sonic and Kit’s ears twitched, his blue cheek fur tinged purple as he looked down at the floor. “I-I guess we do, and Y-you’re welcome,” he said.

Surge yawned loudly. “Well this has been way more heavy shit than I’m used to handling this early in the day,” she said, shoving her hands in her pockets. She shared a glance with Sonic, and he knew she wasn’t just talking about the foxes’ presentation.

“It’s almost one PM,” Sonic countered with a smirk.

Surge didn’t miss a beat. “Exactly,” she said, spinning towards the door leading out of the lab, “and I’m gonna need a wake-me-up and some exercise to wrap my head around it all.”

She stopped at the door and fixed Sonic with an expectant look. “Well? Let’s go.”

Sonic froze in the face of her command. “Oh,” he said, “y-you want me to come with you?”

Surge nodded slowly. “Uh, yeah,” she said, emphasizing the words like he was stupid. “No time for a rematch race like the present, and it’ll do us both some good.”

Sonic glanced at Tails and Kit. Kit was watching Surge intently, and Tails had that sly grin on his face again as he spun back around to continue typing. “Go ahead,” Tails said, a mischievous tone only Sonic, trained by years of hanging with his little bro, picked up on. “It’ll be a couple days at least before we can do the body scan, so there’s no need to hang around here waiting.”

“Ok,” Sonic said uncertainly. He walked over to Surge and stood awkwardly in front of her, arms stiff at his sides. She opened the door and gestured for him to go first, and when he continued to stand there uncertainly she rolled her eyes.

“Idiot” she grumbled, then grabbed him by the arm and practically dragged him out of the room. Only Sonic saw her grin.

“Have fun you two!” Tail’s sing-song voice trailed after them.

Chapter Text

“So what’s the plan, Sparks?” Sonic asked as Surge led him through a small shopping area about two miles inland and uphill from Westopolis’s harbor. Barely three minutes of what Surge considered mild parkour across the rooftops and powerlines leading up from the harbor brought them this far, but now that they were back at street level she’d slowed to a lazy stroll. “I thought we were heading out for a race, not a shopping trip.”

Surge shook her head. “Need my pick-me-up first,” she said. “This place up ahead has the best stuff. Plus we gotta respect the vibe, Hedgehog,” Surge stepped aside to allow a ladybug pushing a stroller to pass them as she spoke. “This neighborhood’s too chill for sprinting.”

She gestured to a quaint cafe nearby with its pastel colored outdoor tables and matching umbrellas to drive home the point. Individuals, couples, and small groups alike were seated about the area, enjoying lunch, pastries, and cups of coffee over quiet chats, an open laptop, or a good book. Across the street, a flower shop showcased its fragrant wares on wooden racks and tables, enticing passersby to come in and browse, and in the middle of it all a small fountain, carved into the likeness of an alligator in an old-timey firefighter’s uniform operating a water pump, burbled pleasantly as more Islanders rested or talked with one another on the surrounding iron benches.

It was peaceful, this little street, almost cloyingly so. Surge decided months ago that she liked it precisely for that reason, and made it her go to place for the odd occasion when she needed to chill out for a minute. Taking things slower around here when she wasn’t actively responding to a problem was a subtle gesture of gratitude to the folks that made the place run.

After all, even after coming around a few times a month for almost half a year, Surge still felt like she was intruding on the place, her brashness and rough aesthetics clashing with the calming aura of the neighborhood like an angry slash of red paint on a white canvas. Folks were generally kind about it, especially the shop and cafe owners (her rings spent like anyone else’s, after all), but still she felt the rare odd stare she got and noticed the occasional parent pulling their child a little closer to their side in the corner of her eye as she walked past.

She quietly snarled, causing an otter gawking at her to quickly look away. Let the dweebs stare. Let them be scared, or jealous, or whatever the hell else they wanted. Surge the fucking Tenrec did not care and would not apologize for a Gaiadammed inch of -

“You’ve really become adept at lying to yourself lately, dear girl,” Starline cut into her thoughts like a knife to the gut. ”We both know they’ll never love you. Not like they love him,” he hissed.

As if on cue, Surge became aware that Sonic wasn’t right behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder to see where he’d gone. A family of shrews were gathered around him, about twenty paces back, and Sonic was kneeling down to indulge their child, a little girl who clung to her mother’s skirt for security, in some quiet conversation. Something he said made the little girl giggle. It was sweet, but the moment was soured for Surge as her heart pumped a toxic cocktail of jealousy and despair through her veins that made her head throb and her fists clench.

He made the whole people thing look so effortless, the charming bastard. It wasn't fair, and Surge wasn’t sure she’d ever felt her - otherness, she guess was the word- so keenly in months. That ungainly mix of flesh, metal, and rage that made her feel like she didn’t quite fit in this world, and never would.

“It hurts, doesn’t it? Realizing you’re, at best, people’s second choice,” Starline’s voice dipped into a dangerously hypnotic purr. “Then again, if he wasn’t in the picture -”

Shut. Up. Surge pictured her hands around the old bastard’s throat, her rational self still present enough to know better than to listen to him. Sonic didn’t rip her social skills out like a weed when rebuilding her fucking brain from scraps. He wasn’t the one who was still trying to reduce her to a dark caricature of him from beyond the grave.

Hell, he said it himself, he was impressed with her efforts to forge her own way. His ego didn’t need to know it, but that had meant so much to hear.

“Gaia help me, she’s even defending him now,” Starline sounded like he was about to vomit. Surge braced for the usual burst of pain that usually accompanied such flagrant defiance of her programming, eyes shut tight as she tried to regulate her breathing.

A moment. Then two. It was all Surge could do not to whimper as the headache built into a roar in her head.

“Miss Surge?” A squeaky little voice shot through the roaring like a sudden burst of fireworks in the night. “Are you ok?”

Surge jolted in surprise, the pain in her head dissipating like a fog, and opened her eyes to stare in confused silence at Sonic and the two elder shrews, the latter of which were looking at her with unmasked concern. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth split in a sneer, but before she could snap at them a tiny tug on her leg drew her eyes down. The little shrew girl was staring up at her curiously with wide, golden brown eyes that almost blended in with the tawny fur of her face. Her blouse had tiny blue butterflies embroidered on it, and combined with a matching hairpin she was horrifyingly cute.

Surge’s eyes widened in near panic. “Yeah? Whatcha need, kid?” she asked, and immediately wanted to punch herself in the face over how gruff she sounded. She knelt down to the kid’s eye level and took off her sunglasses in the hope that it would make her less threatening.

The little girl gasped quietly and her eyes seemed to get even bigger at the sight of Surge’s cybernetic eyes. “So Shiny!” She said excitedly. “Why do they glow?”

Surge shifted uncomfortably. Lots of surprisingly positive reactions to her eyes lately. “They’re, uh, mechanical. Wish I could tell you how they work,” she shrugged awkwardly, “but I was kind of out of it when they were put in.”

“Robot eyes” the little shrew said, drawing out the words like an incantation. “Do they make you see gooder, like my dad’s glasses?”

Surge smiled thinly. This damn kid was gonna raise her blood sugar to dangerous levels if she didn’t pass out from stress first. “A bit. I-uh- see real good in the dark. Like I have flashlights in my head.”

The little girl bounced in place excitedly. “Like my friend Tommy! He’s a cat. I shined my flashlight at him at a sleepover and his eyes got all shiny too.” She leaned in close, expression deathly serious and her voice dropped to a whisper. “Yours are prettier, but don’t tell Tommy. He’d get jealous.”

“I don’t even know Tommy,” Surge said, utterly lost. “How would I tell him anything?”

The little shrew giggled, and Surge desperately wanted to put on her sunglasses and hide her slightly reddened face now but was scared to move lest she upset the maddening little thing. The kid leaned back and was practically vibrating with so much excited energy that it made Surge wonder if the adorable little monster was gonna pop. Was this what Kit felt like when he was building explosives? “You’re funny,” the little shrew said. “My dad says your dan-danja-,” the kid fumbled the word, face flushing with embarrassment.

“Dangerous?” Surge supplied with a frown. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the kid’s dad cringe.

“Yes!” the little shew practically shouted. “Dangerous. But Mr. Sonic says you’re really nice and I think he’s right.”

Surge glanced at Sonic, who was beaming at her with a grin she’d classify as only a little smug. He gave her a wink and an encouraging nod.

“Did he now,” Surge muttered contemplatively, not taking her narrowed eyes off him. He waved her on, face split with an excited grin she was pretty sure matched the kid’s, and she glowered at him. “And what else did Mr. Sonic say?” Surge said sourly.

“That you’ve got cool, pointy teeth and I should try to make you smile so I can see ‘em,” the kid said. She leaned in again, even closer this time, voice again dropping to a whisper like she was sharing state secrets. “I think he likes you,” she said.

Surge’s head jerked downwards to resume eye contact with the little shrew so fast she almost pulled a muscle in her neck. “You’re shi-kidding me,” she said, barely catching the curse word before it leapt out of her mouth.

The kid giggled again. Was fucking everything funny to her? “Yep! He looked real happy when he told my mom and dad how nice you are,” she said with confidence, like she’d figured out a puzzle the silly grown ups around her never would. “I get happy when I talk about my friends, too.”

Friends. Right. Surge let out a nervous breath she hadn’t known she was holding and tried to change the subject. “What’s your name, kid?” She said.

“Suzy! Suzy Shrew,” the little girl said proudly. She turned and pointed at the older shrews. “That’s my dad Stu and my mom Daisy,” she said brightly.

Stu waved awkwardly at Surge, and Daisy smiled serenely, almost suspiciously so, at her. Surge favored them with a tiny wave back and narrowed her eyes at Stu, making him gulp nervously.

Talk shit about her to his kid would he? She’d fucking show Stu. Surge turned back to Suzy and dropped her voice into a conspiratorial whisper of her own. “Your parents seem nice,” she said.

“The nicest,” Suzy whispered back.

Surge chuckled. “Think they’d wanna see a magic trick?” She asked, grinning widely so Suzy could see all her teeth.

“Pointy,” Suzy said reverently, then beamed back at her with her own needle-like teeth and nodded. “Definitely!”

Surge stood, held up an index finger, and focused. A tiny ball of electricity formed and floated above her fingertip, crackling and humming lowly. “Check this out,” she said, and with a mental push she sent the ball drifting away, a barely visible strand of energy tethering it to her as it bobbed like a fishing lure in the air. She extended another finger, then another, each finger summoning another ball of energy as it uncurled, until a cloud of four dancing lights were drifting through the air. Surge subtly moved her hand and fingers, up, down, closed, extended. Each motion made one or more of the lights dip, jump, or roll . She flicked her other hand , and two more lights joined the mass, weaving around their fellows like runners on an obstacle course.

“Mom, dad, look!” Suzy shouted, running in amongst the lights and trying to catch them. Surge, stifling her laughter, made sure to pull whichever light the little shrew reached for just out of reach to avoid zapping her. Slowly, Surge led the giggling Suzy in a circle around Sonic and her parents, drawing a small group of onlookers in the process. Another child, a gecko boy, joined in the frolicking, his parents looking on with wary amusement, and Surge had to strain herself a bit to keep the tiny balls of lightning away from their grasping hands.

This was awesome. She‘d never used her powers to just show off and entertain like this. She noticed Sonic watching her instead of the kids, that goofy ass smile plastered on his face, and she sent the swarm of lights floating over his head with a mischievous grin. Sure enough, he was soon assaulted by the children, both vying for the opportunity to climb up on his shoulders to get closer to the lights again.

“Whoa, whoa, one at a time!” he shouted, nearly falling over as the gecko boy suddenly latched onto his right leg. The tiny lizard scrambled up his back to his shoulders, tickling Sonic to the point of hysteria , and stood up on his shoulders with the confidence only a member of a species well versed in climbing could pull off. Surge continued moving the lights out of reach, slowly pulling Sonic towards her as the gecko shouted for Sonic to give chase like he was commanding a beast of burden and Suzy ran in happy circles around him, jumping after a singular ball that Surge kept hovering near her level.

Time for the finale, Surge decided as Sonic and the kids got within just a few feet of her. Raising her right arm above her head, she pulled all the lightning balls together, fusing them into a single larger, crackling ball of energy that she held high, spinning above her extended index finger like a basketball. Her limbs were shaking slightly with the effort of maintaining such tight control over the flow of charge leaving her body for so long, and she was starting to sweat, but it was so worth it. With an exhalation of breath she fired the ball of lightning up into the air, letting it burst with a boom of thunder only when it was high above the rooftops.

“That. Was. SO. COOL!” Suzy exclaimed, jumping up and down. A few people among the onlookers clapped in agreement.

“Wasn’t it though?” Sonic said, laughing as he reached up and lifted the little gecko off his shoulders. The boy's mother came over and took the squirming, giggling lizard off his hands, giving Surge a grateful nod before carrying him back into the crowd. “I told you she was cool.’

“The coolest,” Suzy said. Without warning, she threw herself at Surge’s left leg, hugging it as tightly as her little arms could. Surge sputtered in surprise, arms going wide like she might catch fire if her hands came into contact with the kid, and looked to Sonic for help.

Help that was not coming, if Sonic’s laughter was anything to go by. Asshole is loving this, she thought, albeit with surprisingly little venom. She looked down at Suzy, who was looking up at her with starstruck eyes as she let go of Surge’s leg, and a happy warmth washed over her.

“I’m really glad my dad was wrong about you,” Suzy said. “You’re super nice.”

Surge looked over at Suzy’s parents, and her expression fell when she saw Stu’s face still bent into a concerned frown. They locked eyes, and Surge’s gaze turned so cold it could freeze water as Stu slumped guiltily.

“Well, I- wouldn't say he’s wrong,” Surge said grumpily, hand's crackling for a split second with power. How many fucking times did she have to prove herself before people stopped looking at her like that?

“I am dangerous,” she said, eyes taking on a feral edge as she stared Stu down. “Or at least to bullies I am. Know any bullies, kid?” She asked, voice turning sinister.

Suzy, gloriously oblivious to Surge's mean mugging of her dad, shook her head earnestly. “No, Ma'am,” she said.

Surge’s heart melted as, for a moment, Kit’s face in one of his happier moments flashed behind her eyes, and she immediately dropped her grimace and knelt down to Suzy’s level. She smiled warmly and reached out to ruffle Suzy’s head fur, employing the same trick she did to fluff up her little brother’s hair and getting a delighted squeal out of the little shrew for her trouble. “Then you got nothing to worry ‘bout, Suzy,” she said gently. “Now get on back to your folks. Mr. Sonic and I have business we need to get back to.”

“Ok,” Suzy said, momentarily disappointed, but she quickly recovered her spirits and went skipping back to her parents and grabbed onto her mother Daisy’s hand. Daisy gave Surge a happy wave, and when Surge fired one last glance at Stu he gave her a tight lipped, but respectful nod before he turned to lead his family back to whatever business Surge and Sonic’s presence had interrupted.

“Bye Surge!” Suzy shouted as she and her mother turned to follow. “Have fun on your date with Mr. Sonic!”

Surge’s face flushed as her brain disconnected for a moment, and she forgot to say bye in turn. Sonic sidled up next to her as she stood there, dumbstruck as she watched the shrews disappear into a nearby shop, and brought her back to reality with an elbow bump to her side. “Have fun?” he asked as she turned to regard him.

"Actually, yeah” Surge said slowly, the happy feeling interacting with the little shrew enkindled still sustaining her. She glanced at him, and her smile turned wry. “Once I got over the abject terror of interacting with that exuberant little fluff ball, anyway. You are evil for that, Blue."

Sonic laughed uproariously. “Good to know your weakness is happy children, Sparks. I know just the little rabbit to reign you in with next time you go rogue, now.”

“Don’t you fucking dare!” Surge snapped back mirthfully and made a halfhearted attempt to shove him into the fountain that he sidestepped with ease. “What the hell was that all for, anyway?” she asked.

Sonic shrugged innocently, but Surge didn’t miss the mischief in his eyes. “Why I have no idea what you mean, Miss Surge,” he said.

Surge glared at him disbelievingly. “Cut the shit, Blue, the kid ratted you out. You told her to talk to me. Hell, you must’ve persuaded her paranoid fucking dad to let her talk to me.”

Sonic waved at another passerby. Surge noted with some amusement that he suddenly was struggling to look straight at her. “Ok, you caught me,” he said bashfully. “You looked-sad. Like you were feeling left out. I-didn’t like seeing you like that, I guess” he finished lamely.

Oh really now? Surge glowered at him and gave him a light punch to the arm as they started walking again . “I ain’t looking for pity, dude,” she said grumpily.

Sonic gave her an equally sour look as he rubbed his arm. “Oh so pity’s the only reason I could have for wanting to cheer you up?” He said. “That’s news to me. Or was that a different tenrec that I expressed my respect for back at the hideout?” He suddenly stepped in front of her, stopping her short with his hands on her shoulders and his eyes widened dramatically. “Please don’t tell me you have an evil twin,” he said in a nervous whisper.

Surge snorted derisively and shrugged off his hands. “So what, you decide I’m worth a damn and suddenly it’s your job to keep me happy?” she asked as she stepped past him. “And keep walking,” she hissed. “We already made a scene once with those kids.”

“Fine,” Sonic relented, trotting a moment to catch up to her. “Gaia forbid anyone else assume we’re on a date, right Miss Surge?” he said with a cheeky grin.

Surge pushed down on the unexpected, though not wholly unpleasant, twisting feeling in her gut. Damn you, Suzy, for giving him ammo. “You wish, Pervhog,” she grumbled, turning her face away from him to hide her blushing.

Sonic’s face creased with worry, and after a moment of visibly wrestling with himself he asked, “do you really think I wouldn’t just- want a friend to be happy?”

Sweet, naive little hedgehog. “Still trying to push the whole ‘friends’ narrative, eh?” Surge said.

“I’m nothing if not persistent,” Sonic turned his nose upwards proudly, “but if it makes you more comfortable we can just say I’m giving you a PR boost in exchange for your help. I wasn’t about to let little Suzy’s dad talk like you were some hardened criminal and go unchallenged.”

Surge hunched her shoulders and shoved her hands in her pockets so the people they passed couldn’t see her clenched fists. “Yeah-well, like I told the kid, he’s not wrong. Not completely.”

That was underselling it, a sad little inner voice supplied. Hell, even as far as she’d come, she still might have hauled off and socked Stu in the face for talking shit if not for his kid’s presence. She sighed and her shoulders tensed like a heavy load was stretched across them. “A lot of them just see the madwoman who tore up Central City still. Maybe they always will, much as it pisses me off to say it.”

Maybe she was that madwoman still, went the unspoken follow up.

“It wouldn't hurt so much if you’d just stop fighting your nature,” Starline added darkly.

“Fuck ‘em” Sonic said, a hint of the Werehog’s deep bass growl underlying his voice. Surge jerked in surprise and almost missed a step. She turned wide eyes on him as he shook his shoulders like he was shrugging off a sudden chill and coughed.

“Didn’t-” Sonic said, voice raspy, and he coughed again like the Werehog was a piece of food lodged in his throat. “Didn’t expect the Big Guy to have a strong opinion on this,” he said with an awkward chuckle. “But we’re in agreement: you’re not that person anymore, and you deserve respect for the awesome work you're doing. I’ll tell people that as many times as I have to in order to drive that point home, and if they still won’t accept how cool you are now they can stuff it.”

He smiled brightly at her and gave her a gentle elbow to the shoulder. “That goes double for you, Sparky. No more self deprecating talk on my watch,” he said sternly. “You will believe you're awesome or so help me Gaia I will annoy and embarrass the hell out of you until you do.”

Surge realized she was staring at him in borderline awe and mentally slapped herself back into gear. Damn it, but there was something about the cocky bastard when he got assertive like that. “Threats and foul language?” She said with a laugh. “I must be rubbing off on you.”

“Worse things have happened to me,” Sonic said nonchalantly, though now he was the one blushing. The two of them shared another laugh and lapsed back into silence as Surge continued to lead the way further down the street. Confused feelings about the last several minutes itched at Surge’s brain as she walked, and she did her best to set them aside in favor of admiring the colorful buildings and the various wares on display in their windows. A jewelry store in particular almost drew her in, the shiny rings made from almost every metal imaginable on display making her fingers itch with want, but she kept moving.

Finally, as they rounded a bend in the road, she saw their destination: a squat brick building, barely two stories in height and painted a pale green, with a mosaic of a beach front at sunset and a sign that read "Café Del Zeke” on one wall. Small metal tables, painted the same shade of green, were arranged haphazardly in front of the building and in the small courtyard adjacent to it, and as they neared Surge gleefully breathed in the earthy scents of teas and coffee that wafted out the front door, courtesy of a large ventilation fan built into the front wall that anyone with a lick of sense would realize was deliberately positioned near where drinks were made.

“Finally,” She said with a rapturous sigh as she subconsciously picked up speed. “Get ready to have your mind blown, Blue.”

Sonic scrunched his nose skeptically. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a caffeine lover. Stuff makes me feel like I gotta run around the planet a few times just to calm down.”

”Blech. Hell no,” Surge stuck her tongue out to emphasize her disgust. “I want to punch walls enough without that shit sending me into overdrive. We’re here for the tea. Shit’s magical, dude, trust me.”

Inside the café, a controlled storm of activity was in progress. Customers waiting for their orders milled about, their chattering a mellow counterpoint to the dizzying orchestra of a hissing espresso machine, whistling tea kettles, sizzling sandwich presses, and burbling coffee machines the staff behind the counter operated with practiced ease. Periodically one staff member, a pigeon who was serving as a runner, would bring a steaming mug, tea pot, or plate to the bar and shout out a customer’s name. A few people gave them, or more accurately Sonic, curious looks as they hopped in line to order, but none of them dared approach after Surge hit them with a stern glare.

“I should go on not-date’s with you more often,” Sonic whispered to her. “I haven't been out in public this long without being swamped by people in years.”

“Aww, poor popular Hedgie,” Surge pouted at him, lower lip quivering dramatically. “Life’s so hard for him. Needs the big bad cyborg to keep the rabid fans away.”

“Shut up,” Sonic laughed.

The last person in front of them placed their order, and the pair of speedsters found themselves before the disheveled but smiling sloth wearing a tricolor beanie striped green, black, and orange at the register. Surge smiled brightly as she leaned an elbow on the counter and dropped her sunglasses enough to look over their rim at him. ”’Sup, Zeke,” Surge said coolly. “Been a minute. Business is looking good.”

“Well hey there, Surge!” Zeke said, his voice a warm baritone as he stuck a hand out for a high five that Surge enthusiastically accepted. “Things have been buzzing around here, for sure. Me and my merry gang of coffee addicts can barely keep up, even juiced up on our own supply,” he said with a grin.

He glanced over at Sonic and his eyebrows crept up under the brim of his hat. “But Wellllll now,” he said jovially, "enough about me and mine, sister. Is this who I think it is?”

“Yup,” Surge said, turning and slouching against the counter with both elbows as they both gave Sonic their full attention. “Sonic, Zeke. Zeke, Sonic. Say hi, Blue,” she said, eyes glinting merrily as she flashed her teeth at him.

Sonic extended his hand, which Zeke accepted graciously. “Nice to meet ya, Zeke. Cool place you got here.”

“Thank you kindly and welcome to it,” Zeke said. A clatter of porcelain on porcelain made him glance over his shoulder, and he waved on a member of the staff who’d almost dropped the tea pot she was carrying at the sight of Sonic wearily. “I heard you and our favorite merc might have been palling around during that mess at the bank, but I wasn't sure I believed it. Not to gossip, but she’s not exactly expressed glowing opinions of you in the past.”

“Still ain’t,” she said with a smirk that she hoped conveyed to Sonic this was all in good fun. “We only just recently buried the hatchet.”

Sonic smirked back at her. “Been telling stories about me to the local businesses?” he said. “Should I be hurt or flattered?”

Surge stuck her tongue out at him. “Screw you, Lamehog. Zeke’s a good listener and his tea’s cheaper than therapy.”

Zeke laughed. “Well if I didn’t believe you two were chums before, I can see it now, and any friend of Mean Green here-”

“Business associate,” Surge corrected him.

“-is a friend of mine,” he said, sparing Surge an amused, skeptical glance. “Now, what can I get you two?”

Sonic stared up at the menu, eyes wide and clearly overwhelmed at the plethora of options before him, and Surge stepped in to help out. “Two of the usual, Zeke,” she said. “And a couple grilled cheeses.”

Zeke nodded and started ringing up her order. “Two hugs in a cup and some grilled cheesies coming right up!” he said, finishing his calculations with a flourish of his long clawed hand. “Eating in or you two taking it on the run?”

“In,” Surge said, ignoring Sonic’s curious stare, and plopped some rings on the counter. Zeke quickly checked her math, and she waved him off when he offered her change. “Gotta tip my favorite tea wizards,” she said.

“Right on,” Zeke popped open the register and sealed her payment inside. “Have a seat and I’ll have someone bring it out,” he said sunnily. “Table service is the least I can do when I get two honest to Gaia heroes in my shop.”

Surge and Sonic both thanked him, and as they weaved through the crowd to an open table in the courtyard Sonic favored her with a curious grin. “ 'Hug in a Cup', huh?” he said. “Not what I would have thought your favorite drink would be called.”

Surge shrugged self-consciously, crossing her left foot over her knee as she slouched into her seat. “That’s not it’s real name,” she explained, “just something I blurted out when I tried it. Zeke thought it was cute, and wanted to drive home that the biggest news in town frequented his café, so he started changing the name of it on the menu.”

“Fun and business savvy,” Sonic said appreciatively. “I can see why you two get along. What was the original name?”

Surge leaned her head on her palm, lips pursed thoughtfully. “Coastzone Fog, I think?” she said. “Or something like that. It’s steamed milk mixed with herbal tea made from some plant that grows way south of here. Mellows me out and clears my head like you wouldn’t believe” she said.

She licked her lips in anticipation of the treat to come, then grew somber. “Zeke says there’s a lot of tenrecs on the island he sources the leaves from, so maybe I was from there and drank a lot of this shit before-well-”she waved her hand in a “you know” motion as she choked a bit on the next words she wanted to say.

Sonic sighed and nodded. “Right. So 'Hug in a Cup’ is-”

“What the girl whose face I’m wearing called it, or felt about it. Maybe,” Surge said. “The only possible memory of hers I’ve ever had, triggered by fucking tea and milk of all things,” she laughed ruefully.

Sonic crossed his arms and frowned thoughtfully. “That’s heavy. Ever thought of heading out there? See if anyone on that island recognizes you?”

Surge blew out a long breath. “Shit, cut straight to fucking heart faster, why don’t ya?” she groused, then fell into contemplative silence for a long moment, the chatter around them fading into the background as she probed the void where her memories should be. “Once or twice,” she said quietly, “but it’s probably a bad idea.”

She looked at him, eyes misting over a bit as she tried to put on a brave face for him. “Even if someone there recognized me, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t recognize them in turn. I’m-” a shuddering breath, “I’m pretty sure that girl’s dead, Blue. Best to let her rest and just- move forward.”

Sonic nodded, but his jaw tightened angrily and his eyes clouded over. The pigeon from Zeke’s staff dropped off their tea fogs, quickly excusing herself with a muttered “I’ll check on those sandwiches” as she sensed the tension in the air, and just as Surge was about to ask if he was ok he gripped the hand she’d laid on the table with surprising strength. “I’m-sorry,” he said slowly.

Surge frowned, equal parts confused and angry. “I thought we established that I don’t blame you anymore,” she said, pulling her hand back.

He let go without resistance, his hand going strangely limp as he stared at the table like he could see right through it. “I know,” he said. A little jolt of purple Chaos energy danced across Sonic’s quills as he lifted his eyes to meet hers, and the fire in them took her breath away.

“I'm sorry I didn’t break every bone in Starline’s body when I had the chance.”

Surge’s mouth went dry, the temperature in the courtyard suddenly stifling. She grabbed her tea fog and took a hasty gulp, nearly burning her tongue, as Sonic continued to cut through her with his eyes. The mellowing effects of the drink gave her enough of a voice again to say, “That’s- maybe the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me,” with a nervous grin.

The sound of Starline gagging flitted through her head. Nice.

Sonic chuckled, whatever spell that had fallen over them breaking at the sound. “You would find wishing violence on that old platypus flattering," he said. "Should’ve tried it sooner.”

Thank Gaia he was back to his goofy ass self, Surge thought. Another few moments of that stare might have melted her into a very not badass pile of goo, and she’d have never lived that down. “What can I say,” she said, leaning back in her chair again to take another sip of her tea. “I know what I like. Now drink, Hedgehog, before it gets cold.”

Sonic obliged, gingerly sipping at the beverage once, then twice, before smacking his lips thoughtfully. Surge watched him expectantly over her own beverage.

“Holy crap,” he said after a moment, eyes wide. “This is amazing.”

Surge snickered into her mug and took another sip. “Fucking right it is,” she said, preening. “The grilled cheese doesn’t mess around either. Never doubt me when it comes to food and drink, Blue.”

“I won’t! Man, I gotta bring Tails here, he’d love this,” he said, cradling his cup reverently.

Surge smiled softly, reminded of her own little buddy. “Kit loves Zeke’s turkey club, but crowds and attention still make him nervous,” she said. “Remind me to get the boys both a sandwich to go before we leave. We can drop them off at the hideout before we head out for that race.”

“You got it, Boss Lady,” Sonic said, then held out his mug towards her. “To moving forward,” he said.

Surge happily clinked her mug against his and took a hefty swig, the tea cool enough now for bigger sips. "Only way worth going," she agreed.

Sonic leaned back in his chair and sighed contentedly as he swallowed his own sizeable gulp. "How'd you find this place anyway?" he asked.

Surge let out a long, joyous breath as a fond memory overtook her. “So I was hunting down a crew of armed robbers one day. The idiots booked it in a stolen car when I found them, like that'd fucking help them escape, and-”

So began almost two hours of exchanging stories about their respective escapades from the last year and laughing at the collective hubris of their various foes. By the time they agreed they’d spent enough time chatting and were ready to run, the dregs of their drinks were cold, their sandwiches were a delicious memory, and Surge couldn’t recall the last time she’d felt so relaxed.