teleonomy, or, the genesis of divine, terrible things

by divisionbell

Summary:

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination.

There's something to be said for cosmic inheritance and killing your father for the second time.

Notes:

this work is a non-linear narrative. certain details are left deliberately unclear and some relationships up to interpretation. characters are older here. some body horror, but nothing too explicit.

                Heredity. That's what the Professor had called it.

                "A genetic inheritance of sorts," the Professor had explained. The unnatural light of White Space had caught the curve of his spectacles, rendering the sockets of his eyes deep, punctured. "A passing of certain characteristics or traits from parent to progeny. First proposed by Mendel, later developed by Bateson and Fisher and the like. Think of it as a form of legacy, if you will."

                "Legacy," Shadow had repeated. Between his shoulders, Black Doom's mark had prickled.

                "Yes, in a manner of speaking." The Professor had looked at him, seemed to consider his next words with caution. "The Black Arms, for instance, deem their progeny a living legacy, the colony being the most direct means of reproducing desirable, dominant Black Arms traits. Unwanted, recessive traits that imperil the Black Arm's orthogenesis are. . . excised."

                Shadow had sneered. "You're talking about eugenics. Speak plainly, Professor. What of hybrids, then? I hardly think Black Doom would consider his bastard a 'living legacy.'"

                The Professor’s face had remained expressionless, but regret had bled, tentative, into his tone. "Son—"

                "Don't call me that."

                The Professor had gone silent. The tide of Shadow's anger had shifted and rolled, the relentless, abyssal presence of Black Doom's power thrumming at the base of his skull, at his spine. Without a word, he had skated away, his chest tight, ignoring the concerned glances Rouge and Maria had thrown his way. He had more important things to focus on.

                He had a father to kill again, after all.

---

                "'I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination," Sonic read. Beneath his fingers, the pages crease. "The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town?'"

                Above them, the night sky is cloudless, pinpricked with stars. The shattered moon is an eye, watching, ceaseless for all that it's unseeing. Beneath them, the grass is wet with evening dew, the air perfumed with sea spray and night-blooming lilies. White and thin, the lilies spot the cliff Shadow and Sonic sit on like bone spurs. Their heads bob in the breeze, a thousand perfect, moon-bleached bodies.

                Sonic's voice is quiet. It reverberates against Shadow's ribcage, low and warm. "'Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth?'"

                "'Where does madness leave off and reality begin?'" Shadow finishes, speaking for the first time that night. Next to him, Sonic's chest rises, slow and even. Shadow isn't sure if he himself is breathing. "'Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?'"

                Slowly, Sonic closes the book, index finger marking the page. He handles the book with care, its age-cracked spine settled against the slope of a strong, muscled thigh. In the quiet, Shadow lets his head tilt back, quills brushing against the bark of the tree they sit beneath. For a moment, the two of them simply exist, listening to the waves crashing against the shore below.

                Sonic, as is his wont, is the first to break the silence. "This required reading on the ARK or something?" he asks lightly, jokingly. "Seems kinda spooky for a baby hedgehog."

                "I came out of stasis precisely as I am," Shadow corrects. "And don't call it 'spooky,' cretin."

                "Creepy, then," Sonic supplies instantly, and even without looking at him Shadow can see the shape of his shit-eating grin. "Heeby-jeeby material. The full jinkies. Spine-tingling, goose-pimpling, bone-rattling—"

                Shadow shuts him up with an elbow to the ribs. "You have made your point, hedgehog."

                Sonic shuffles away, laughing even as he rubs at the spot Shadow had hit. It's a soft laugh, more a good-natured huff than anything else. It's nothing at all like the boisterous, bulletproof laugh he dazzles the media and fans with at press junkets and global tours, that he had hurled, like a blow, blighted and brilliant in the blistering gold granted by the Chaos Emeralds, at the void-like mass of the Time Eater mere days ago.

                No, this laugh is much more preferable, Shadow thinks privately, glancing at the hedgehog when the other isn't looking, taking in the blue of his fur washed pale in the moonlight. It's proof, in a way, that he's here, in this space, in this time, hale and whole and alive. Living, as all good, God-made things do.

                Shadow wonders what it's like. If Maria could have done the same, in another timeline where he was a little more selfish.

                "I'm just saying—" Sonic says, pulling Shadow from his thoughts as Sonic resumes talking. Incessantly talking. "This seems a little intense for a young person to be reading, y'know? Immortal-upon-creation Ultimate Lifeforms or otherwise. You sure this was one of your favourites?"

                He lifts the book to emphasise his point. Shadow can barely make out the title at the top of the dust-eaten black linen cover: Shadow over Innsmouth. He considers his answer.

                "Lovecraft was a reprehensible man," Shadow begins, "but his works were—compelling. Uncanny. Tales of terrible cosmic beings, alien wastelands. Scholars and scientists pursuing knowledge and forces beyond their comprehension." The yellow-green illustration on the cover of the book has faded with age, now no more than strange, spectral shapes. Like Maria and the Professor, returning to the continuum. "Tales of hapless men and boys, trying and failing to cope with a universe both vast and uncaring."

                Unbidden, his hand drifts toward the book. "The Professor had a number of first editions he allowed me to read between lessons and training," he continues. His fingers brush the cover and, by consequence, Sonic's hand. The contact sends a thrill up Shadow's wrist, his arm. "The one you're holding is one of a two early bindings personally owned by Lovecraft. I think Rouge said it's worth about twenty-five thousand rings, now. A collector's item."

                Realising his proximity too late, he snatches his hand back. He chides himself for his impulsivity, recognising the movement for what it is—an excuse to touch, an excuse to assure himself that this is real. Discomfited, he sits back.

                "To me, it's simply a book," he finishes, a little abruptly. "An interesting story by a terrible man. That's all."

                It's the most he's said in days. And Sonic simply stares, first at him, then at the book.

                "And you're letting me touch it," Sonic says, flat. "After you watched me house, like, ten chili dogs and get sauce all over my gloves. I'm getting bodega-chili dog all over a priceless collector's item." Sonic groans, head thumping back against the tree. "Rouge is gonna kill me."

                "You're being dramatic," Shadow tells him. He suddenly finds himself without the patience to indulge Sonic's histrionics. He reaches for the book again. "It's just a book—"

                "But it's not," Sonic interrupts, halting Shadow’s movement. Sonic lifts his head, keen, green gaze pinning Shadow in place. It's always a little stunning to be the subject of Sonic's undivided attention. Not that Shadow would admit that. "It's not just a book, is it?"

                Sonic shifts in place. Gentle, unrestrictive fingers slip around Shadow's outstretched wrist, at the junction where inhibitor ring and forearm meet. The breath, what little he had, leaves Shadow. Barring Rouge, he hasn't been touched with intention since White Space. Since Maria, since Black Doom, pale, thin hands in his and then writhing, alien flesh overtaking, the split of his ribcage, organs pressed to his diaphragm as the cosmos took root and ruptured, screaming, from the tender curve of his spine—

                "Hey."

                Shadow inhales sharply. Sonic's eyes are green and unflinching. They're the green of the Master Emerald, the green of tender, young things. The green, perhaps, Shadow thinks distantly, of that precious place the scientists aboard the ARK had called Eden.

                "You're right here," Sonic says, slowly, firmly. "You're with me. Not him. Not that monster."

                The words scrape out of Shadow. "Who?" His voice sounds strange. It doesn't sound like him. He hasn't sounded like himself since he let his family die again. "Black Doom? Or Gerald? Both were equally monstrous." He licks his lips. He tastes blood and something else, the fecund rot of a cosmic womb, the corrupted birthwaters of an alienage drowning him from the inside. "I must have inherited it from somewhere."

                Sonic's stare is unblinking, his touch unwavering. Does he know, Shadow wonders, how consuming of a force he is? How terrible, and sublime? Does he, too, consider his shadowed heritage, his legacy? Shadow knows about pictographs and angelic islands, about a blue force, wreathed in gold, come to sow retribution among defiant men and boys.

                Does he, too, crave understanding in the face of an uncaring universe?

                Shadow wrenches his wrist from Sonic's hold. Chaos energy threatens to spark from his fingertips, along his quills, hot-spitting-scathing. He needs to get away. He needs to leave emerald eyes and that damn book he should have left in God's cradle, the ARK.

                "I have to go," he says. Panic, toothed and sharp, has started to rear in his chest. "I have to leave."

                Sonic reaches for him. "Shadow—"

                But Shadow is gone in a bitten-out Chaos control!, leaving perfect white bodies and the spectre of blue behind. The shadow leaves Innsmouth, the shores lightened once more.

---

                He hadn't known who that crystalline faker was when he all but pummelled him into the ground, but he hadn't quite been able to shake his last words, a plea, shrieked, to the heavens as the faker had flung the last vestiges of his power at Shadow.

                "I want," the faker had screamed, the words wrecked, Shadow's own fury and desperation reflected back at him, "to exist!"

                Shadow had examined the sceptre left behind, tracking the unearthly, irregular geometry of its design. The faker had remembered him where Shadow had not, seemed to have known Shadow with a true, deep kind of loathing Shadow had only ever known in himself. Shadow had proclaimed his request for existence null, burning with the satisfaction of a fight well-fought and won, but still, the faker's words had clung to him as Shadow had left Dusty Desert, as he had returned to the too-bright planes of White Space.

                Black Doom's mark had been the cold of the void between his shoulders, along his spine. The spaces between his ribs had ached with it as the flesh of his back had been torn open, wretched wings contorting out of the made-up parts of himself.

                "Struggle all you want," Black Doom's projection had declared, hellfire eyes cutting through Shadow's dogged, heaving rage. "You will be mine."

                His, his. God and man and the unmoving will of the cosmos. He was made in the image of his father, created in the most organic, visceral sense. His existence, determined for him at a molecular, divine level by gods and scientists both. Biological determinism at its most base form. His body, not his, not truly—was it ever?

                "This isn't who you are," Maria had insisted, her grasp on him hard enough to hurt.

                Wasn't it?

                "I want," the faker had screamed, "to exist!"

---

                "'Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage.'"

                Rouge watches him with caution.

                "He's been asking about you, you know," she tells him. She's neon-washed in the pulsing lights of Club Rouge, her words nearly lost to the thud and sway of the music, the laughter and shifting of hundreds of bodies. "He's concerned."

                "Unimportant," Shadow dismisses. He shuts off his phone, cutting off the conclusion to an archived copy of the Shadow over Innsmouth, and shoves it into his jacket pocket. His head pounds in time with the music’s 4/4 beat. He grabs his now-empty rocks glass. "I have no time for his whims."

                Rouge, of course, sees right through him. She cocks her head, a thin eyebrow lifting. The pendant earrings she wears glint in the lights of the club at the movement, as striking and perfect—as sharp and stolen—as the rest of her.

                "Whatever you say, hon." Her gaze flits to the glass, to Shadow's hand and the fine tremor building there. Imperceptible to most, this single flaw in the machine—but then again, Rouge isn't most people. "Another?"

                "Another," Shadow agrees, grateful for this one kindness. He pushes his glass toward her, streaking condensation across the marbled bar top. "As strong as you can give."

                "It won't do any good," Rouge warns, taking the glass and replacing it with another. Two-fingers' worth of bourbon, neat, just as Shadow likes it.

                Shadow curls his claws around the drink. The bourbon slides down easy, uncomplicated. "Nothing ever does."

---

                The fight had been the usual song and dance. Another protracted, convoluted scheme to hurl their bodies at one another, to sink fangs and claws into the raw-edged, vital meat of one another. Anything for the thrill of it, the bloodiness of it, the ozone-sharpness of their Chaos signatures falling into lockstep as Sonic had buried his knee into Shadow's stomach and Shadow's hand had closed around Sonic's windpipe.

                There had been a headiness to it all, the slender column of Sonic's neck between his claws, the click and swell of his throat as he had fought for breath. He had writhed and bucked beneath where Shadow had him pinned, his own claws tearing into Shadow's sides, hard enough to draw blood. Green, green, against the white of his gloves.

                "That Chaos Emerald and I have a date with a monster!" Sonic had declared moments before, cocky and bright and determined.

                Shadow had smirked, eager for a fight—for a distraction. "Well then, it'll be a date to die for."

                And what a monster he had been. That consuming, relentless star-song of Black Doom's powers, calling to him from the void of space surrounding the Space Colony ARK as Sonic had chased him down. It would have been simple, it would have been natural to answer the call, to invite the cosmos inside. Sonic wouldn't have stood a chance, not against this. Not against him.

                Sonic's fist had slammed into the side of Shadow's head. Shadow's vision had gone white, the blow stunning. In the seconds it had taken Shadow to recover, Sonic had tackled him to the cold metal of the suspended rail networks outside the ARK.

                But Shadow hadn't answered the call. He had told Rouge some bullshit about fighting Sonic on equal terms or not at all when the blue blur had taken off with the (fake) Chaos Emerald, but really, it had been fear. Fear of the ease with which the cosmos had reached out to him, had slithered tendrilled and reaching into the recesses of his mind, to manifest, agonising and unstoppable, at the tips of his fingers. It would have been simple. It would have been natural. He could have killed Sonic in between breaths. Just like that.

                The bruise at his temple had faded, the lines of broken skin at his sides had knitted closed. But the feeling of Sonic beneath him had haunted him, the knowledge that, for a single, terrifying moment, he had considered crushing the vulnerability out of himself and his rival for good—

                Maria, sickly, defiant, brilliant Maria, had thrown off her grandfather's hold and faced Black Doom with all the incandescent fury of a dying star. "Shadow will never serve you! He's nothing like you!"

                Wasn't he? It's as the Professor had said—it was heredity, a genetic inheritance, perfect cellular reproduction of the very worst parts of the Black Arms' legacy. Shadow was a warrior, a destroyer, the sole vehicle for Black Doom's absolute rule. But he was also Gerald's creation, his greatest achievement. A cure, and then a weapon of a madman torn through with grief.

                When he had returned to White Space, Black Doom and the Professor had been indistinguishable from one another. Fathers in unholy arms.

                Was this madness, Shadow had wondered? Another amnesia-induced delusion? The bounds of reality had been rapidly deteriorating by this point as the Time Eater swallowed down the continuum. Black Doom's mark had grown, creeping along his spine and around his ribs.

                "Who is to tell," the Professor had responded when he had asked if this—any of it—was real, "how much is hideous truth and how much madness."

---

                The burrowing, the burrowing. Pathogenic, his alienage hooks itself into manufactured flesh, wailing star-song into lungs and vocal cords that aren't his. Punctured, as organ meat is to the vacuum of space. He can hear it, the call, the singing, the lift and pull of the cosmos—

                He hurtles upright and over the side of the bed, vomiting onto the floor. His stomach lurches and rolls, his eyes stinging and body shaking with the force of it. He barely registers the sound of rushed movement down the hall, the light slicing through his room as his bedroom door is thrown open. All he can focus on is the vomit and blood in his mouth and down his sheets and on the floor as his body attempts to cut the rot from the root.

                A presence at his side, smelling of amber and wine. Hands that don't touch but stay. Words, soft but firm and continuous as Shadow hurls his guts and panic onto his bedroom floor.

                "You're alright, hon," Rouge murmurs—and it is her, of course, of course it's her—as she shifts closer. Still not touching, but close and here, and that, right now, is enough. "You're alright."

                Heavy, metallic thumps sound at the entry to his bedroom, and a hard, modulated voice breaks through the sound of his gags and harsh breathing.

                "I HAVE ACQUIRED THE REQUESTED ITEM."

                "Thanks, 'Megs. Pass it over?"

                Shadow hears the whirr and click of Omega’s processors. "THERE IS EJECTED STOMACH MATTER ON THE GROUND."

                "And?"

                "I WILL NOT TOLERATE CONTACT WITH ORGANIC WASTE MATTER. EVEN IF IT IS THE ULTIMATE LIFEFORM'S."

                "You punched a hole clean through a man's chest the other day, but you're scared of a little vomit? Oh, I don't have time for this. Just toss it over, alright? Not at Shadow."

                The vomiting, by this point, has turned into dry heaving, his stomach having nothing else to give. His eyes are squeezed shut against the splitting thud of the headache at his temples, his bare claws ripping into his sheets as the panic slowly, unsteadily leaves him. There's a whoosh of air and a ringing sound, and soon enough his hands are being gently pried open, the cold of metal flushing against his burning skin. He recognises the shape of the object instantly.

                "Really?" he grates out, the words roughened and a little breathless. He squints open his eyes just a sliver. "The popcorn bowl?"

                The dimmed shape of Rouge smiles at him from the side. "What, your family didn't have the designated chip-and-sick bowl? You missed out."

                Inexplicably, Shadow laughs. It catches in his throat, and he coughs on a thick clot of blood. From the doorway, Omega manages to make a disgusted sound.

                "YOUR HIDEOUS MIDWESTERN TRADITIONS CONTINUE TO REVOLT ME. THIS DOMICILE WILL NOT TOLERATE SUCH AN AFFRONT TO CIVILISED SENSIBILITIES."

                Rouge snorts. It's an ugly, loud sound, entirely unbecoming of the poised front the bat is so careful to maintain. "You've never once been civilised, 'Megs. Now, be a doll and grab us something to clean this up with, won't you? Some water, too, perhaps."

                "I AM NOT YOUR BUTLER," Omega retorts, but he turns on his heels and stomps back out into the hall anyway.

                Shadow brings the bowl onto his lap, claws scratching against the thin metal surface. His stomach gives a weak lurch, but all that comes up is bile and bloodied spit. He gradually, painfully adjusts to the light of the hallway infiltrating his bedroom in the Team Dark apartment, gritting his teeth against the worst of the headache. Rouge settles on the bed next to him, a palm's distance away. She's still in the clothes she wore to the club.

                For a moment, neither of them speak.

                "When did you get back?" Shadow eventually asks, for lack of anything else to say. His mouth tastes foul.

                Rouge sits back, hands sinking into the covers. "Twenty minutes ago, give or take?" She blinks blue-shadowed eyes at the ceiling. Beneath her meticulous makeup, she looks tired. "You certainly have an excellent sense of timing, sugar."

                Shadow's ears pin back against his head. He looks down at the bowl, its contents swimming with mucous and bile and green, green blood. "Ah." He feels a curl of disgust, and something else, something jagged, in his chest. "I—apologise—"

                "None of that," Rouge interrupts. "You know I don't care for apologies." She glances him over, quick and assessing, her gaze, for a moment, lingering on the blood in the bowl. "Especially not for this."

                "Still," Shadow insists, uncomfortable. It's not the first time Rouge has found him after a particularly bad nightmare, but he feels the sting of embarrassment and unease all the same. "You shouldn't feel the need to check in on me. I can handle my own messes."

                Rouge hums, eyes still on him. She looks at him in a way he can't interpret, and it takes conscious effort to stop his quills from rising defensively at the scrutiny. Shadow has never been good at reading people, and even after years of partnership, Rouge still evades him.

                "Consider it prioritising a valuable asset," Rouge eventually decides on. Her words are deceptively light, but, past the careful faceting, Shadow can feel the weight of them. "After all, I can't have my business partner falling apart on me."

                It's a sidelong, slippery way of saying "I'm here." Neither of them is particularly good at vulnerability, but this, at least, Shadow can recognise for what it is as he lets himself sink carefully into her waiting side. There's a velvet slide of movement as Rouge's wing comes to shield his exposed back, careful of his spines.

                "I can still feel it," Shadow admits into the soft, secret space where Rouge's neck meets her shoulder. "Black Doom's mark. It—writhes. Inside me. At night." He swallows down blood and the acidic wash of the nightmare. "Sometimes I think I can hear it speak."

                Rouge considers this. Her voice, when she speaks, is quiet, careful. "What does it sound like?"

                "Stars. The sound of space. The ARK, maybe, before—well."

                "Does it sound like Black Doom?"

                "Yes. No. This—this is older. Crueller." Shadow closes his eyes, thinking of a blue dress and blue fur. "Sweeter."

                Rouge says nothing else. The fine, thin membrane of her wing brushes between his spines, where Black Doom's mark had dug into stolen flesh. Shadow's breath hitches. The words slither out of him, liquid and strange.

                "'That shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory.'" Memory banks itself against the shores of the unreal, and for a moment, he can hear it. The call. Abhorrent and perfect. Panic seizes him once more, his claws gouging into metal. "Rouge—"

                "I saw you, at the end of it all." Rouge lifts her head to look at him. The cut of her teal gaze is piercing, unflinching. She never was afraid of him. "I said that I'd be here after it's all said and done. And here I am. This is real, Shadow."

                "How are you so certain?" Shadow demands. He can't bear to look at her, but he forces himself to, her wing unmoving, unwavering from where it shields him, from where she touches him brazenly, unabashedly at the place where the cosmos had made its indelible, dooming mark. "How can you know for sure?"

                Rouge laughs, then. Jewelled and sharp and just shy of cruel. Undaunted, exhausted as she is, and all the more magnificent for it.

                "We're alive, hon," she tells him, like it's a promise, like it's an indictment. "That's as real as it gets. And if you can't trust in that, then I suppose you'll just have to trust in me. Alright?"

                His chest shudders on an inhale. He trusts her. Fuck, he trusts her. "Alright. Alright."

                "Alright," Rouge repeats. She tucks her wing closer, and something unevenly, uncertainly unfurls inside of him.

                Omega takes that opportunity to appear at the doorway, one massive pair of claws clutching a mop and bucket and the other very carefully holding the requested water, for some reason poured into a stemmed martini glass. He takes them in with his unblinking red stare.

                "I EXPECT PAYMENT FOR MY SERVICES," he announces, reliably unmoved, and as Rouge lets out a long-suffering sigh, Shadow thinks he can ignore the call for just a bit longer.

---

                "I made a Faustian deal with that monster to create Shadow," the Professor had confessed, staring up at the eldritch mass of the Black Moon. "Now it seems that we all have to pay for my sins."

                The Black Moon had stared back, its unblinking eyes watchful, its infinite wheels circling. From it had emanated a low hum, pitched too quiet to truly be a sound. But Shadow had heard it. He had felt it, that low-frequency funeral dirge, the cold hymn of space, once secreted away in the very marrow of him, now unfurling, tentacular, at the base of his skull.

                The Black Moon had loomed endless and impossible high in the brilliant heavens of White Space. The Professor had spoken of sins—was it celestial coincidence, then, that the helm of the Black Arms had resembled a seraph? Hadn't the Devil once been an angel, before the Fall?

                "So my powers, that symbol," Shadow had begun, dread slithering through him. "They're all connected?"

                "Black Doom wanted me to make the perfect warrior for him," the Professor had told him, cold, rueful. "So these new abilities are all part of his grand design. You two are linked by blood."

                Shadow hadn’t been able to look at Maria, then, as the Professor had spoken. Her blue eyes, wide and concerned and understanding. How terrible, how damning it had been to be understood in this moment.

                "As you grow in power, so does he. He will either take control of your mind and make you his ultimate weapon—" a pause, so minute Shadow had almost missed it, "—or take over your body and be reborn in you."

                Heredity, heredity, heredity. He'd never even had a choice, had he?

                Shadow's hands had curled into fists. His anger, his grief had been a bullet lodged between his ribs.

                "You made me the ultimate lifeform, Professor," he had said, words bladed, made to strike, made to hurt. Made, made. He'd never had a fucking choice. "Black Doom is a fool. I'll take this power and use it as my own."

                Like father, like son. The Black Moon had watched on.

---

                "I found you, Shadow!"

                Shadow crosses his arms tight over his chest. The seat of the Dark Rider digs into his lower back where he leans against it. Beyond the guardrail of the beach road he's parked on, the sea hurls itself against the rocks, sea foam choking darkened tide pools.

                "How did you find me, hedgehog?" Shadow asks, curt.

                A kick of wind ruffles his quills as Sonic skids to a stop at his side. He's wearing a bomber jacket run through with sewn-on patches, a knee brace at his left leg. The light of the streetlamp catches his fangs where they poke out of that easy half-smile of his.

                "A little bat may have slipped me your location," Sonic says, impish. His eyes flash with delight at Shadow's responding sigh. "A pretty jewel in exchange for some harmless intel? She seemed to think it was worth it."

                "I'm sure she did," Shadow mutters. He digs his claws into the leather of his jacket. Sonic's eyes tick to the movement, back to his face. "If you've sold the echidna's precious emerald in exchange for my whereabouts, you've made a poor investment. I see now why the fox handles your finances."

                Sonic scoffs. "Har har, old man." He leans against the guardrail across from Shadow, tucking his hands into his jacket pockets for warmth. Shadow catches a rare glimpse of peach skin in half-fingered gloves before the sight disappears. "It was just some junk I had laying around from some hotshot sponsor. One of those tacky, bedazzled Chao eggs, or whatever."

                "A Fabergé Chao egg, you mean."

                "Yeah, that." Sonic scuffs the toe of his shoe against the ground impatiently. "Doesn't matter. Rouge loved it, and now I'm here. Easy-peasy."

                Shadow considers whether he should tell him that there are, currently, only three known Fabergé Chao eggs in existence, one of which is already in Rouge's possession. That he had, in essence, given away what could have been a very attractive bargaining chip for information he could have realistically bought with a shot of bottom-shelf vodka.

                Whatever. He isn't responsible for what, or who, Sonic wastes his resources on.

                "Well, you're here, you've found me, and now you can leave," Shadow states, pointed. "Easy-peasy."

                Sonic's grin grows. "Always so eager to get rid of me. You're not even gonna ask what I’m here for?"

                "To interrupt my peace and quiet, obviously." He uncrosses his arms and turns to the Dark Rider, fishing his keys from his pocket. "Goodbye, Sonic."

                "Hey now," Sonic protests, and Shadow hears his shoes scrape against the asphalt. "Just give me, like, a minute, yeah? Maybe two, tops."

                Shadow's mouth thins. His fingers curl around the keys, the teeth digging into his palm. The sea breeze rustles his quills, carries with it the smell of salt and lava rock. Exhaustion tugs at him, the unease from last night's nightmare lingering. He really should just leave.

                He turns back on his heel. "You've got one minute."

                Sonic's grin widens. He withdraws a hand to pat the guardrail next to him. Shadow, reluctant, pockets his keys and joins him. He leans his forearms against the salt-rimed steel, gaze directed out toward the raging waters. Sea foam, white and frothing, colonises the rocks, hundreds of inchoate eyes and mouths blinking and gasping open into the air before the next wave snuffs them out.

                "So?" Shadow prompts. "Your minute is ticking away."

                Sonic rolls his eyes. He reaches a hand into his jacket. "Give a guy a chance, Chaos. First off, I wanted to give this back—"

                He withdraws a fabric-wrapped bundle from his jacket. The fabric is silken under Shadow's touch when he takes it, printed with orange squares resembling the roof tiles prolific in Spagonian architecture. Shadow carefully pulls the fabric away with a claw to reveal his copy of Shadow over Innsmouth. His stomach gives a strange lurch.

                "Figured you'd want it back," Sonic explains needlessly, watching him. "Collector's item and all."

                Shadow stares at the lettering across the cover, washed out beneath the amber of the streetlamp. The waves beat themselves against the rocks below, the sea foam hissing, a chorus of hundreds of voices, muted, a deepwater susurrus risen to the surface. The unease strengthens, beaches itself against his ribs, sticky and cold.

                "Yes," Shadow says automatically, unable to draw his gaze from the title. "Rouge would have been upset if I'd misplaced it."

                He slips the fabric from the book. The black linen feels cool to the touch, the pages liable to crumble like salt if he looks away.

                "Like Lot's wife," he murmurs, his words nearly lost to the waves. The lettering bleeds into the linen, glinting lowly in the streetlamp's light, as if ichor. "Looking backwards."

                "Huh?"

                He doesn't quite startle, but he does go rigid, having nearly forgotten the presence of the other hedgehog at his side.

                "Nothing," he snaps, perhaps too harshly. He pushes down the knee-jerk spark of Chaos energy in his fingers, instead focusing on tucking the book away into his jacket pocket, the volume just slim enough to fit. It feels unaccountably heavy where it sits against his ribs. "I was simply taken aback that you were capable of thoughtfulness, is all."

                "Not exactly a 'thank you,' but I'll take it," Sonic says dryly. He takes Shadow in from where he leans loose-limbed against the guardrail, elbows hooked over the edge of it. The wind catches at his messy quills. "I read the rest of it, by the way. Guess that was the second reason for finding you, to let you know." He tilts his head, snout scrunching just slightly. "Kinda on the nose, don't you think?"

                Shadow looks at him sharply, claws ghosting over the shape of the book. Sonic meets the blade of his stare easily, steadily, a smile at the corner of his mouth. Shadow doesn't trust the look of it at all.

                "I mean, c'mon," Sonic continues, testing, green, green eyes fixed onto Shadow's. "The main character turning into the thing he's scared of the most? Intergenerational cycles of monstrosity, doomed to repeat themselves?" His eyes are the green of the Master Emerald, the green of tender, young things. The green of Shadow's blood, tainted and borrowed and beautiful only when Sonic's claws are covered in it. "You'd think you and Gerald were using this hack's work as a blueprint."

                "You don't know what you're talking about," Shadow says, cold, hard, quills bristling. Tension creeps up and along his shoulders, inching upwards, readying for—something. "You know nothing about me, hedgehog."

                But Sonic is unmoved. Knowing, despite it all. "Don't I?"

                He's right there, then. Bare claws closing around the leather of Shadow's jacket, muzzle inches from Shadow's. Shadow's heart damn near stops in his chest at the proximity, the reflexive snarl catching in his throat. It's like standing in place seconds before lightning strikes, the air charged with ozone, with potential. Sonic's eyes are so green.

                "'But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me,'" Sonic says, breath ghosting across Shadow's fur. Sonic, relentless, unafraid to take and take and take. "Do you see yourself as a monster, Shads?"

                Shadow's lip curls over fangs, but it's overwhelming, the heat of Sonic's touch, the danger of Sonic's closeness, and Shadow's rage, white-hot, burning fast, gutters as his breath does, staggering out of him as if wounded. How terrible, he thinks, distantly aware that he's begun to shake—from anger or fear he doesn't know—how maddening it is to be understood.

                "'Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me.'" The consonants ripple out of him, plosive, penetrative, as his flesh had been beneath his father's will. As his skin is, overheated, the ridge of Sonic's knuckles inches from his chest. "'Yet perhaps a greater horror—or a greater marvel—is reaching out.'"

                Sonic's smile doesn’t reach his eyes. "Are you the shadow over Innsmouth, Shads?"

                "You should fear me." His claws circle Sonic's wrist, eyes slipping, ineffable, toward Sonic's mouth, the impossible encased between his ribs, at the base of his spine, crawling outwards. "Fear what I was. What I could become."

                "C'mon, Shads." Sonic looks at him like he's something terrible, like he's something worth wanting. "You should know by now that I don't scare easily." His gaze, unfathomable, the green of wretched, beautiful things, eclipsed by the closeness of his mouth, the sharpness of his fangs, the lambent, unnatural heat of his stare beneath the streetlamp's light. "It'll take more than doom to make me leave."

                "I wish," Shadow says, unable to breach the distance between them, but wanting, in that clawing, heaving, grieved way he's so rarely wanted before, "you wouldn't stay."

                Sonic's muzzle brushes his. Dangerous, and real. The waves crash below. "Nah. The worst things always do."

---

                He had killed Black Doom, again. He had watched Gerald and Maria die, again.

                "But you don't know what's going to happen!" he had all but screamed at them, desperate and so utterly, utterly terrified.

                "I know I'll see you again," Maria had insisted, her hands cradling his face, soft and hopeful and everything Shadow was never made to be. "And if fate draws us apart, I will always be in your heart."

                And then she had parted from him again, that vital part cleaved from him again. The Professor had said nothing, had only watched, impassive, as Shadow had reached for them, had pleaded for them to wait, to stay, please, God, won’t you stay with me just this once—

                But only the void of White Space had stayed. Only his grief, that cruel bullet, lodged between his ribs, in the same soft place where another bullet would soon rip through Maria's chest. Only the shivering, flagellated expanse of his back, Black Doom's absence carved from him.

                He had stood, shaking, blood running down his legs. The very ground had been stained with him, this last germ of a terrible, cosmic legacy, with only the heavens of White Space to witness him.

---

                "'It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of Nature and of the human mind.'"

                The shattered moon is a de-winged seraph, the ARK a dormant cradle in the night sky. Shadow drinks in the smell of salt and night-blooming lilies, the sweet, liquid warmth of bourbon in the plastic cup in his hands.

                Sonic's fur is the blue of Maria's dress, his eyes the green of Shadow's blood where he lays beside him, his own plastic cup in hand, watching him with an easy half-smile. Hanging from the branches of the tree above them, her wings cascading over him, Rouge reads from the book in her hand. Not only has she outdrank them tonight, but she's also somehow managed to do so while upside-down. The hand not holding Shadow's copy of Shadow over Innsmouth is currently curled delicately around the neck of the bourbon bottle, nearly empty.

                Down on the beach, they can hear Omega attempting to shoot invasive green crabs from the rocks, irate after Shadow had challenged him to count how many grains of sand there were and then had deliberately made him lose count.

                Rouge's wings brush against Shadow's spines. "'Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?'"

                "What a windbag," Sonic announces, and Shadow kicks him, none too gently, in the shin as Rouge continues.

                "'The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror.'" The whisper of the page turning, the click of Rouge's claws against glass. "'Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon.'"

                There's a rattle of artillery fire from below the cliff, followed by a triumphant shout. Rouge closes the book with a shake of her head, white locks tumbling gracefully around her.

                "I'll have to agree with Blue on this one, hon," she tells Shadow, falsely apologetic. She hands the book back to him, then takes a massive slug of bourbon from the bottle. "This is a little too, mm, academic for my tastes. How can one man go on about his discovery of unimaginable horrors and still manage to be so painfully boring about it?"

                "You two are incorrigible," Shadow scoffs. He rests the book in his lap, away from the wet grass, and takes a smaller, much more reasonable sip of bourbon from his cup. "But I can concede that Lovecraft is not for everyone."

                "He definitely should've been left in the 50s," Sonic quips. He trails his free hand through the grass, the blades sticking to his gloves. "Also, some of the shit he was spouting? Yeesh. Xenophobic as all get out. He'd do numbers on forums." He takes a considering sip of bourbon, snout wrinkling at the taste. "Chaos, how do you guys drink this stuff? It's like gasoline."

                "Keep insulting the things I enjoy, hedgehog," Shadow warns. "See how long it takes before I make good on your self-sacrificing tendencies."

                Sonic's mouth curls into a dangerous little smile, sharp with suggestion. "Is that a promise, big guy?"

                "Good grief," Rouge mutters above them, before clearing her throat. "Boys, as tantalising as this show is becoming, this bottle isn't going to finish itself, and we should probably stop Omega before he starts actively endangering wildlife."

                "Aw, but we're having so much fun!" Sonic protests, but he downs his drink with a grimace anyway, leaning bodily across Shadow for Rouge to pour more bourbon into his cup. Shadow resists the urge to spike his knee into the hedgehog's gut and obligingly holds out his own cup for more.

                They drink and talk and let the night air carry their voices as Omega ravages the shores below until the moon dips below the lip of the horizon. Sonic is propped against Shadow's legs, Rouge's wings over his spines. The two argue about everything and nothing, their back-and-forth singular and familiar, constant and real.

                Shadow presses a single white lily between the last page and back cover of Shadow over Innsmouth and drinks more bourbon. It doesn't do any good, his metabolism burning through the alcohol too quickly for him to truly get drunk, but he feels, for the first time in a long time, lighter than he has before. Not hopeful, never hopeful, but—lighter. Like the shadow passing over Innsmouth, the shores to be lightened once more. God and Earth and good, precious things to continue inexorably onward.

                The cosmos calls, sings low, sings sweet from the dark, abyssal spaces between the ARK and shattered moon. And Shadow allows himself to breathe.

Notes:

have you got a cool 25K USD on hand? if so, you too can own shadow's copy of shadow over innsmouth.

anyway I played sonic x shadow generations one (1) time and said hm. lovecraft would love black doom and the black arms as much as black doom loves radical highway.

new to the fandom but stoked to once again push my cosmic horror agenda on my latest interests. drop a comment if you want to talk about it.

find me on tumblr or twitter.