Chapter Text
Shadow the Hedgehog had not been having a good day.
He frowned as more GUN agents barrelled down the hall towards him and Tails, firearms raised against them, primed to shoot. How many men did this base have defending it? No matter. As he had with the others, Shadow channeled his chaos energy in his core, using it to teleport around the agents and send them to the ground or hard against the walls with well-placed kicks and jabs. It was almost too easy.
One agent, however, seemed better prepared for him than the others. Likely their commander. He stood at the far end of the hall, several yards away. The man raised his gun at Shadow, barrel glowing a sickly red-orange, before firing. Shadow dodged around the shot with a teleport, moving expertly to its side. He reached the agent a few strides later, ripping the laser gun from his hands before the soldier could react. It skidded across the concrete floor with a harsh grating of metal against stone. Twisting around, Shadow grabbed the soldier’s arm and threw the man towards the opposite wall. He hit it with a muffled thud , then crumpled to the ground, too dazed to be an obstacle any longer.
While Shadow moved the guards into a pile against the wall to clear the way, Tails flew up and around him, darting the last few feet to their destination: the collider control room. The fox removed a device from his backpack and began furiously tapping away on its keypad.
“Don’t worry, Shadow. I’ll have the door hacked in no time!” Tails informed him cheerfully, “We’re right on schedule. Sonic and Knuckles should be at the other control room soon.”
Shadow gave him a nod. He started for the door to join Tails, but stopped. Stooping down, Shadow noticed with a sickening dread that the guns these soldiers were wielding were more advanced than the ones they’d raised against him a year ago, when he’d escaped. Dots connected in his mind, and Shadow realized that the red-orange glow of the commander’s laser gun had likely been from their latest experiment, the one he’d asked Sonic and his friends to help him stop:
GUN was trying to artificially create their own chaos energy.
Stone had been the one to inform Shadow of GUN’s plans. Just one month ago, the former henchman had approached him at the Wachowski’s residence in Green Hills.
“I know you probably never wanted to see me again, but I discovered something you’re gonna want to see.” Despite all that had happened, Stone still wore a nice black button-down and black slacks. Even his dress shoes were immaculate. Whether he dressed in black because it was his personal taste, or out of grief, Shadow didn’t feel the need to ask.
“And what’s that?”
The man rolled his wrist, pressing a button on his glove. A tiny egg drone rose from a metal band at the base of his palm and began projecting a hologram. The red image flickered before clearly displaying a map of the United States, as well as an array depicting seismic activity. A timelapse played, showing the recorded activity across the past few months. Shadow noticed a disturbing amount in California, outside Los Angeles.
“What is this?” he demanded.
Stone didn’t flinch, despite the sharpness in Shadow’s tone. He rolled his eyes. “Seismic activity in California’s been on the rise. While that’s not completely out of the ordinary, look at where it is.”
The ex-agent hit another button on his glove, and the map zoomed in on LA county and the surrounding area. “All of the activity,” Stone continued, “is coming from the same place. What’s more-”
A new set of graphs appeared on the hologram, labeled “Chaos Energy.” The readings were incredibly high, almost on-par with what Shadow remembered seeing on his charts during his time with the government fifty years ago.
“-is that it looks like they’re harvesting chaos energy.”
Shadow’s ear flicked impatiently. “Who? How?”
Stone waved his other hand. The entire image flickered before a new window opened, playing drone footage, dated a week back. Shadow watched as the drone approached what looked like a perfectly normal grassy area, with scattered trees and shrubs. His eyes widened when the drone passed through a hidden barrier, revealing a massive concrete complex, complete with armed guards and dozens of personnel milling about.
A truck pulled out of what looked like a loading area. The logo on the side read “GUN.”
Shadow had tried to go alone to conduct more reconnaissance, but he hadn’t snuck out of the house as quickly as he’d hoped. Soon after he arrived outside the GUN facility, Sonic had appeared beside him in a flash of blue light. Naturally. Shadow was tempted to brush the other hedgehog off, to tell Sonic he wasn’t needed, that this was something he needed to do alone, but the events of the past year had soured the Wachowskis– especially Sonic– to GUN, too. And, as much as Shadow hated to admit it, taking down an operation this big on his own would be difficult.
So yes, he’d relented, and asked Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles for help. Because it was practical. Because it would be more efficient. Definitely not because he had grown to consider them his friends.
And they’d agreed. Because they hated GUN as much as he did. Because the uncontrolled synthesis of chaos energy could threaten the safety of millions. Definitely not because they’d grown to consider him a friend, too.
Of course, the four of them hadn’t told Tom or Maddie about their plans, but they didn’t need to know. They’d only want to get involved, which would put them in danger. After what Shadow had already put Tom through himself– guilt resurfacing in his chest at the memory– he didn’t want the man to get hurt again.
Shadow kicked away the chaos energy gun in disgust. Back when the government had found him, they’d told Shadow that his innate chaos energy would lead to breakthroughs in their planet’s technology. The world would be better protected, they’d said. He’d be saving people by submitting to their tests, they’d said.
Shadow knew too well how that had turned out.
Before long, Tails’ device beeped, and the glass door leading to the control room slid open. Shadow appeared by his side a moment later, and gently nudged the fox out of the way so he could step inside first. Despite the information about this facility that they’d gleaned from both Stone’s and Tails’ investigation, it was better to be safe than sorry. Shadow had gotten to know Tails well in their time together, and knew he was capable in a fight, but Shadow also knew he far outclassed the kid in strength and speed. If a turret popped out of the ceiling, or the control room exploded upon entry, Shadow would be fine. Tails, not so much.
When Shadow slunk inside though, nothing happened. The room was dark, but he could make out rows of computers and terminals, but no defense systems sprang to life to greet them. Desks were strewn with clipboards, papers, and pens, and the room smelled of coffee and cheap pastries. In short, it looked lived-in, like it had been used often.
At the end of the room was a large glass wall. The other side of the panel was completely dark, save for a faint light from the other side of the collider. It reminded Shadow of an endless void, or maybe a single star in an otherwise empty sky.
The information they’d collected indicated that beneath the concrete GUN facility lay a large, empty chamber housing a kind of atomic collider. Shadow didn’t understand all of the science involved, but Tails had said that in order to obtain stable chaos energy, GUN had to have been hitting increasingly heavy atoms together with enough force to cause ripples in reality. The empty void before them was the collider then, just powered down.
Good. It being on would only complicate things.
“Hmm. No sign of any defensive measures,” Tails whispered as they passed by a row of computers. “I don’t think they were expecting anyone to find this place.”
“Much less us ,” Shadow agreed, “Question is, why isn’t anyone here?”
The halls had been swarming with guards, but strangely, none had sounded any alarms. Worry began to swirl in Shadow’s stomach. Had they been allowed to get here?
Tails jumped up, hovering over two rows of desks before landing on a chair in front of what looked like the main console. He spun himself around once– he was still a kid, after all– before putting on a serious face and refocusing on the keyboard and monitor in front of him. The console quickly sprang to life, filling the screen with readings taken from the collider tests, likely the cause of the seismic activity Stone had recorded. As Tails reviewed the data– copying it to the hard drive he’d brought– Shadow stood to the side, acting as lookout. He couldn’t help but glance over to the other control room and search in the darkness for the familiar silhouettes of Sonic and Knuckles. The latter filled almost the entirety of any doorway he entered; it wouldn’t be hard to see him, even from this distance.
A few minutes passed, then a few more. Still, no sign of the others.
“Surely they didn’t get lost,” Shadow muttered, arms crossed. He tapped a foot against the carpeted floor. It didn’t do much to combat the growing nausea he felt.
The fox’s tails twitched with a similar nervousness, and he glanced back at Shadow. “You think they got captured?”
Movement from across the collider grabbed both of their attention.
“Oh great! That’s them!” Tails said. He tapped on the screen of a gadget he’d connected to the terminal. “All they have to do is flip the corresponding switch, and the collider will deactivate!”
Shadow kept his gaze on the other control room, and the figures inside. He couldn’t quite pin why, but something was off. “I thought we were going to destroy it?” he asked.
“We can’t blow it up without threatening the nearby towns. By injecting the system with a virus instead, we’re preventing it from being turned on in the first place–”
The quills along Shadow’s spine raised involuntarily. “Tails.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think that’s them.”
All at once, the lights in both control rooms and the collider itself turned on, blinding both Shadow and Tails temporarily. When he could see again, Shadow whipped back towards the opposite side of the chamber. Sure enough, the figures they’d seen weren’t an echidna and hedgehog. Instead, a small group of GUN soldiers stood in the control room, weapons drawn. If he squinted, Shadow could just make out Sonic and Knuckles in the back, bound by odd, glowing yellow cords.
He almost teleported to them, but remembered that Tails was still here with him. Capable or not, Shadow couldn’t leave his friend behind. It was a good thing he didn’t, because a heartbeat later more GUN soldiers appeared in the doorway behind them, chaos energy rifles trained on Shadow. His claws curled into fists, chaos energy sparking. They’d been made.
The soldiers parted, allowing another uniformed figure to enter the room. Shadow recognized her immediately. Tall, pale skin, dark hair pulled into a neat, professional bun. Expressionless face.
Not, not expressionless. Smug.
“You should have accepted my offer, Shadow,” Director Rockwell mused, voice clear and low. “We would have avoided all,” she gestured vaguely with a hand, “...this.”
Shadow’s fists closed tighter, and he took a step forward. “Never. I refuse to be trapped again,” he said with a growl. He let chaos energy build in his chest in anticipation of a fight.
Rockwell had the audacity to laugh. “Ha! Trapped? What does freedom matter when the safety of the world is at stake?” she sneered. “You and the others had your chance to come willingly. Now, the decision is being made for you.”
The director snapped her fingers, and an agent beside her raised a weapon and fired, aiming at Tails. A beam of yellow light shot from the device, wrapping itself around the fox, rendering him unable to move. The force knocked him from the chair to the ground, where he fell with a pained shriek.
Another soldier fired on Shadow with an identical weapon, only Shadow was faster. He dodged, sidestepping the shot. The soldier shot again, and again, Shadow dodged it, skating across the room. Shadow knew he could keep avoiding the tethers, but he was running out of space. The room was too crowded for him to go far, and the only areas he could teleport to were behind him, inside the collider. Not a good idea, especially if he didn’t want to leave Tails. It didn’t escape him that as the soldiers took turns shooting the strange bindings at him, more entered the room, limiting the battlefield, as it were.
It was up to him, now. The others were restrained, and it appeared that whatever the tethers were made of dampened their innate chaos energy. However, Shadow knew from experience that GUN wouldn’t kill them. It’d be too big a waste. All he had to do was avoid getting caught long enough to free even just one of the others, and they could figure it out from there.
Damn it.
“I already told you,” he said, quills sparking, “I refuse to be trapped again.”
Rockwell only gave him a neutral look. “You forget that the GUN hierarchy has changed since you were with us last, alien .” She spat the word like it tasted bitter on her tongue. “The brass in charge now don’t like repeating failed experiments .”
Suddenly, Shadow understood.
GUN wouldn’t kill Knuckles, Tails, or even Sonic. They’d proven in the past that the trio could be overpowered with enough soldiers and guns. In time, GUN might be able to get what they wanted out of them, especially if the Wachowskis were threatened along the way.
Shadow, on the other hand?
He’d proven himself that he couldn’t be controlled that easily.
He was also out of room to maneuver, out of allies, and running out of ideas. His stomach dropped.
The world moved in slow motion. All at once, over a dozen of the gathered soldiers fired, this time with their chaos energy weapons, the same kind he’d seen on the soldier in the hallway. Except, they weren’t all aiming for Shadow. Their rifles were trained on both him and the area around him. There was nowhere to run.
The control room exploded in a shower of plastic, metal, and glass. Shadow found himself launched backwards into the shattering window as one of the chaos energy bolts struck him square in the chest. Mimicry chaos energy, unfamiliar and aggressive, coursed through him as he fell into the collider. It was like he had been simultaneously struck by lightning and dumped into a vat of ice water. Shadow couldn’t even scream. He couldn’t do anything but fall down, down, down.
From the control room above him, he thought he heard Tails scream his name.
After what felt like an eternity, Shadow hit the metal base of the collider, hard. The force of the impact caused his body to roll a few times before finally stopping, the sound echoing around the massive chamber. He tried to open his eyes, to get up, but the not -chaos energy felt like a thousand tiny shards of glass invading his system. Breaths came in and out in short gasps.
He heard footsteps approach the edge of the control room he’d fallen from. Rockwell, no doubt.
Shakily, Shadow attempted movement, putting an arm under him to try and push himself up. The pain caused him to wince. Inhaling sharply through his teeth against the pain, he managed to rise to his knees. His vision wasn’t quite clear yet, but Rockwell’s figure above him was unmistakable.
And neither were the next words out of her mouth.
“Turn it on.”
Machine whirring filled Shadow’s ears. He glanced between either far side of the room, where large circular arrays began to spin faster and faster, lighting up in menacing shades of red, orange, and yellow. Sparks flew around the chamber until finally a massive, thick laser shot between the two sides of the collider, the same sickly red-orange as the agents’ weapons. The impact was like thunder.
And Shadow had fallen directly in the middle.
The point where the collider beams met was about forty feet above him, but the electricity still made Shadow’s fur stand on end, staticky. He pushed himself to stand, though his body had different ideas. Shadow figured he’d have to settle for crouching on one knee.
“Are you insane ?” he shouted, not totally sure his voice would carry over the roar of the collider. Another shock of not-chaos energy surged through him at the effort, threatening to send him back down. “You’ll kill us all!”
To his surprise, Rockwell heard him, or at least understood his meaning. “Sacrifices must be made in the name of progress,” she shouted back down to him, as if it justified anything.
Shadow could hardly believe what he was hearing. Sonic probably would have quipped that the red glow of the collider even looked evil.
“If we don’t shut this down, it could threaten millions of lives! Is that a risk you’re willing to make?”
Rockwell’s expression remained stony. “It’s one I’m authorized to.”
She stepped back, then turned towards the door leading out of the control room. The director then gave orders to the agents around her, but Shadow couldn’t make out what they were. He watched as a GUN soldier hefted Tails over their shoulder like a bag of potatoes and followed after her. He had to get to him, he had to–
The place where the collider beams met grew in intensity, causing a wind to pick up in the massive space.
No, not a wind. A vortex.
Shadow barely had time to react as his body was lifted off the ground and sent towards the center of the collider. He activated his air shoes to escape its gravity, trying to steer himself towards the other control room. If he could get close enough, maybe he could teleport inside. The pain from the not-chaos energy had waned enough that crossing the distance would be difficult, but possible. Right now, all Shadow needed was possible .
The window was only about fifteen feet away now, but it might as well have been on the other side of the universe. When Shadow had gotten close enough to it to see through the tinted glass, he caught a familiar blue blur bouncing around the room and into the GUN agents Rockwell had stationed there. If he weren’t in danger of dying, he might have even smiled.
Ten feet to go now. Five or so more, and he’d be close enough to try teleporting.
GUN’s men taken care of, Sonic sped to the glass, pressing both gloved hands against it. Shadow released a small gasp of relief when he realized the blue hedgehog was not going to try shattering the window. That would only endanger Sonic and Knuckles– who appeared to be unconscious– more.
“Shadow, come on! You gotta get out of there!” Sonic shouted, voice muffled by the glass.
“What do you think I’m doing?!”
Seven feet.
Six feet.
Five–
The vortex exploded.
Red, orange, and yellow light filled the room, and the last thing Shadow saw before his atoms were torn apart was a look of abject horror on his friend’s face.
—
Shadow didn’t know what he’d been expecting heaven to look like, but it wasn’t this. He found himself floating through a void, everything pitch-black, aside from far-away pinpricks of red light in the distance. Stars , Shadow realized. Was this where they went when they died, too?
Pain from the artificial chaos energy still lingered in his chest, and he was aware of bruises forming on his body where he’d hit the bottom of the collider. Once, while with Maria, the two of them had found a dead bird outside their facility. It was the first dead thing Shadow had ever seen. He remembered feeling confused and sad for the poor creature.
“Don’t worry, Shadow. It’s in heaven now.”
“Heaven?”
“Where we all go when we die. My mom said it’s beautiful, and we won’t ever hurt anymore.”
Maybe when he found her, they’d be able to figure out why he still did.
And where exactly he was.
Out of nowhere, a strange tugging sensation pulled at Shadow’s… well, his everything, and suddenly he was falling, hurtling towards one of the red stars in the distance, passing countless others. Shadow noticed that each star, which had seemed identical from a distance, was slightly different up close. Some were more orange than red, others pinkish; some brighter, duller. One constant between the stars, however, was the thin, reddish threads connecting each star to those around it, like flies caught in a web. Shadow looked down at himself, finding a similar thread connecting him to a star far, far away. He could barely see it anymore.
Chaos energy surged once more within him the farther and faster he fell, coming off Shadow’s body in sparks, and he scrunched his eyes closed against the pain. His claws flew up to grab at the fur and quills on his head to find something, anything to ground himself.
High-pitched ringing filled his ears as images began flashing before his closed eyes, all tinted the same angry red that surrounded him.
First, he saw what looked like a perfectly normal human teenager, in a garage. The kid was tall, had a mop of dark hair, and was enthusiastically jamming on a guitar with a friend. Shadow had learned enough about guitars from Maria to know that this kid had no idea what he was doing. The clothes the teen wore and the decorations in the garage suggested that it was sometime before 2024, but Shadow didn’t recognize any of it from his time in the seventies either. Perhaps the eighties? Nineties? He couldn’t tell.
The next flashes showed Shadow a place he was sure he’d never seen before: a massive, futuristic city, lit with neon and large, holographic signs. The focus of this vision was a man standing outside what Shadow assumed was a kind of dive bar, with steps leading down to the main entrance. He looked similar to the other human; he was also tall and had dark hair that just reached his shoulders, though he was clearly much older. Shadow had never been a good judge of human age, but the man’s tattoos and beard led him to guess mid-thirties. He was leaning against a wall smoking a cigarette when a pink-haired woman approached him from behind. As the man moved to greet her, Shadow noticed that his left hand was made completely of metal.
He was also sure he’d seen this man before, but couldn’t place where.
Before he could analyze the scene any further, Shadow was thrown someplace else. It looked like a more normal American city, but he couldn’t tell where, exactly. Rain poured down on wherever it was, and he watched a lone man step out of a nondescript black car, headed for some fancy-looking building. He was dressed far nicer than anyone Shadow had ever met– other than Stone– in a fine black suit. When he finally caught a glimpse of the man’s face, Shadow realized that he looked identical to the smoking man he’d just seen, only much better groomed, and his left hand wasn’t metallic.
Wait.
The visions all came back, cycling through each other at increasing speed. The teen and his friend continued playing music, the man with the metal hand joked with his companion, and his doppelganger in the suit entered the building, pulling out a sleek-looking handgun. The teen struggled to play a chord, the man laughed at something the pink-haired woman said, the now armed man in the suit aimed and fired at someone. The teen. The man with the metal hand. The assassin. The images kept flashing, disorienting and confusing, until finally something changed, and Shadow felt his skin crawl.
Although the images continued to flash before his eyes, they were all looking at him now.
It was at this moment that Shadow had an epiphany, one so weird that it managed to briefly distract him from both the excruciating pain still racking him and the terrifying realization that the individuals he was being shown had noticed him, wherever and whoever they were .
He did know this man.
Sonic rarely stopped talking about the guy.
Now if he could only remember his name…
Shadow didn’t have a chance to think about it more before he collided with the star, and the universe exploded again.