It started with the letters.
Marcus discovered the first one three days after Vista View, tucked into the doorframe of the safehouse he and Rouge had been using as a temporary base of operations between settlement liberation runs. It was a folded piece of notebook paper, slightly crumpled, decorated with hand-drawn stars and hearts in purple marker. The handwriting was large, loopy, and practically vibrating with enthusiasm even in its static, written form.
Dear Shadow,
Hi!! It's me, Tangle!! From Vista View!! Remember?? I'm the one with the tail!! You probably remember the tail. Everyone remembers the tail. Anyway I just wanted to say that watching you fight those robots was THE COOLEST THING I'VE EVER SEEN and I've seen A LOT of cool things because I go on adventures ALL THE TIME but you were like on a WHOLE OTHER LEVEL and I can't stop thinking about the way you did that thing where you shot the gold energy without even LOOKING and—
The letter continued for four pages. Front and back. The margins were filled with doodles of what Marcus assumed was supposed to be him, rendered with the artistic skill of someone who was very passionate and very bad at drawing. The Shadow in the doodles had enormous red eyes, comically exaggerated quills, and was perpetually surrounded by sparkles and the word "COOL" written in block letters.
It was signed with a small drawing of a lemur tail curled into a heart shape.
Marcus stared at the letter for approximately ten seconds.
Then he folded it precisely, placed it on the table, and walked away.
"Fan mail?" Rouge asked from the kitchen area—if you could call a hot plate and a salvaged mini-fridge a "kitchen area"—where she was doing something with coffee that involved a level of concentration usually reserved for bomb disposal.
"Nothing important."
"Mmhm." Rouge's tone carried the specific harmonic frequency of a woman who knew exactly what the letter was and was choosing to be amused rather than informative. "Nothing important. Delivered by hand to our classified safehouse location. With hearts on it."
"She probably followed us."
"She definitely followed us. I spotted her three times during our approach yesterday. She's not subtle." Rouge brought two mugs of coffee to the table and sat across from him, crossing her legs in a motion that the chair survived only through what Marcus assumed was structural engineering far beyond its design specifications. "She's also been asking about you."
"Who has she been asking?"
"Everyone. Sonic. Tails. Amy. The Restoration volunteers. The coffee vendor on Fifth Street. A mailman who I'm fairly certain has never met you. She cornered a GUN operative yesterday and asked him what your favorite color was."
"My favorite—" Marcus stopped. Pinched the bridge of his nose. An extremely human gesture that felt surprisingly natural on Shadow's face. "She's known me for one day."
"Some people form attachments quickly."
"This isn't an attachment. This is a fixation."
Rouge sipped her coffee with the serene composure of a woman who was enjoying someone else's problem. "Jealous?"
"Of what?"
"Nothing, nothing." She waved a hand. Her eyes sparkled. "I'm sure it'll pass. First-hero-crush. Very common in young adventurers. She'll move on to Sonic in a week."
She did not move on to Sonic in a week.
The second letter arrived the next day.
The third arrived six hours after the second.
By the end of the week, Marcus had received fourteen letters, a hand-knitted scarf in black and red (which was, he grudgingly admitted, surprisingly well-made), a box of cookies shaped like chaos emeralds (which the White Wisp ate before Marcus could stop it), and a small carved wooden figure of Shadow the Hedgehog in his arms-crossed pose that was actually quite detailed and must have taken hours to make.
He also found Tangle on three separate rooftops.
Not his rooftops—she wasn't that bold, or at least not yet. Adjacent rooftops. Nearby rooftops. Rooftops that happened to have line-of-sight to wherever Marcus was operating, from which a lemur with very good eyesight and a tail capable of reaching improbable distances could theoretically observe the Ultimate Lifeform going about his daily business of saving the world and looking cool while doing it.
The first time, Marcus ignored her.
The second time, Marcus ignored her harder.
The third time, he turned his head, looked directly at the rooftop she was hiding behind—her tail was visible, curled around a chimney, its tip twitching with the involuntary excitement of someone who was very bad at hiding and possibly didn't fully understand the concept—and stared for exactly five seconds.
The tail vanished behind the chimney.
A muffled squeak echoed across the gap between buildings.
Marcus turned away and continued with his day.
"She's getting worse," he told Rouge that evening.
They were sitting on the roof of their safehouse—their actual roof, not the performative IDW rooftop-brooding kind, just the practical flat roof of a converted warehouse where they could see the stars and talk without being overheard. Rouge was beside him. Close. Her wing draped behind him in a way that wasn't quite an embrace but wasn't quite not an embrace either. The White Wisp was asleep in Marcus's lap, curled into a luminous ball of contentment.
"Define 'worse,'" Rouge said.
"She followed me to the supply depot today. She hid behind a stack of crates. Her tail was sticking out the entire time. She sneezed twice."
"Adorable."
"Concerning."
"Concerning is when she starts collecting your quills. This is still in the 'adorable' range."
"Rouge, she left a note on the Tornado's windshield asking Tails what my sleep schedule is."
Rouge paused mid-sip. Her eyebrow arched. "...Okay, that's migrating toward concerning."
"Tails showed me the note. He was confused. He said—" Marcus adopted a passable imitation of Tails's earnest, slightly bewildered tone. "—'Shadow, I don't think this is normal fan behavior. I cross-referenced it with psychological profiles and it's exhibiting patterns consistent with obsessive fixation. Should I be worried?' And I said yes, Tails, you should be worried, because the lemur is watching me sleep."
"She's watching you sleep?!"
"I don't know if she's watching me sleep. That's why she's asking about my sleep schedule. She's in the planning phase."
Rouge set down her coffee cup with a decisive click. "Okay. I'll talk to her."
"And say what?"
"That Shadow the Hedgehog is a very private person who values his personal space and that if she doesn't respect appropriate boundaries, she'll be having a conversation with me that she won't enjoy." Rouge's smile shifted from amused to something sharper, something that had edges. "I can be very persuasive."
"I don't want you to threaten her."
"Who said anything about threats? I said persuasive. There's a difference." She placed her hand on his knee. Casual. Warm. Proprietary. "Besides, someone has to establish the perimeter. And I've always been territorial."
Marcus looked at her hand on his knee.
He looked at her face.
She was smiling, but underneath the smile was something real—something that went beyond teasing, beyond their usual banter, into the territory of genuine emotion that they both acknowledged existed but neither had ever directly addressed because they were Shadow and Rouge and they communicated through subtext and proximity and the careful maintenance of plausible deniability.
"Territorial," Marcus repeated.
"Mmhm." Her fingers squeezed his knee, just slightly. "Very."
The White Wisp stirred in his lap, chirped in its sleep, and burrowed deeper into his crossed legs.
The stars wheeled overhead.
Marcus didn't move her hand.
Meanwhile, on Angel Island, Knuckles the Echidna was doing something unprecedented.
He was staying.
This fact alone would have qualified as breaking news in any Sonic continuity. Knuckles leaving Angel Island was as reliable as sunrise—someone would show up with a plausible lie or a genuine crisis, and Knuckles would abandon his post with the reliability of a guard dog distracted by a particularly compelling squirrel. It had happened so many times across so many games and comics and shows that Marcus had started to wonder if the Master Emerald had developed Stockholm Syndrome about being stolen—oh, here we go again, see you in three to five business days, Knuckles.
But this time, Knuckles was there.
He was there because Marcus had told him to be there. He was there because, for the first time in what might have been the echidna's entire adult life, someone had looked him in the eyes and said your job matters, do your job, and Knuckles—who had always known his job mattered but had never felt like anyone else understood that—had responded to that validation like a plant responding to sunlight.
He was thriving.
Marcus received regular reports via the communication network that Tails had established—a system of linked relay stations that connected the major settlements, Angel Island, and the Resistance HQ in a web of real-time communication that was, in Tails's words, "basic but functional" and in anyone else's words, "the most impressive piece of ad hoc telecommunications engineering in the history of the planet, built by an eight-year-old in four days."
Knuckles's reports were brief, practical, and delivered in the clipped tone of someone who took his duty seriously and wanted everyone to know it.
Day One: "Island secure. No hostile activity. Master Emerald stable. The echidnas' spirits are at peace. Going to do perimeter checks."
Day Two: "Perimeter secure. Found evidence of drone surveillance—small unit, Eggman-tech design. Destroyed it. Sending debris to Tails for analysis."
Day Three: "Two more drones. Destroyed both. Someone is watching the island. They won't be watching much longer. Reinforced the shrine's defensive barriers. Haven't done that in a while. Should have done it sooner."
Day Four: "No drones today. Either they've given up or they're changing tactics. I'm ready for both. The Master Emerald is... I don't know how to say this without sounding weird, but it feels calmer. Like it knows I'm here. Like it's been waiting for me to actually DO my job instead of running off every time someone yells for help. ...Don't tell anyone I said that."
Marcus didn't tell anyone.
But he did smile.
Knuckles was, beneath the stubbornness and the gullibility and the fists-first approach to problem-solving, a guardian. That was his identity. That was his purpose. Not a fighter, not an adventurer, not a supporting character in Sonic's story—a guardian. The last of his kind, carrying a responsibility that predated recorded history, standing watch over a power that could reshape the world.
And when the narrative actually let him do that—when it didn't drag him off the island for every crisis and team-up and crossover event—Knuckles was magnificent at it.
The drones he'd been destroying were almost certainly Neo Metal Sonic's. The damaged robot, retreating with compromised systems and an existential crisis courtesy of Marcus's intervention, had apparently decided that the Master Emerald was still worth pursuing—but from a distance, cautiously, probing rather than attacking.
And Knuckles was catching every probe. Destroying every drone. Maintaining the perimeter with the diligent ferocity of a guardian who had finally been given permission to be nothing but a guardian.
The Master Emerald is safe, Marcus thought, reading Knuckles's Day Four report on the communication terminal at HQ. Neo Metal Sonic can't get to it. The Master Overlord transformation can't happen. Another catastrophe prevented.
Keep going, Knuckles. You're exactly where you need to be.
And then there was Mr. Tinker.
Marcus hadn't planned this part. Of all the variables he'd been tracking, all the timeline deviations he'd been engineering, the relationship between Eggman's amnesiac alter ego and Sonic's best friend was one he hadn't anticipated.
But it made perfect sense.
The reports came from the settlement volunteers who were monitoring Mr. Tinker's village—not aggressively, not as a surveillance operation, but as part of the broader Resistance effort to maintain contact with outlying communities. The volunteers mentioned, in their routine check-ins, that Mr. Tinker had a new friend.
A two-tailed fox.
Tails had started visiting the village during his downtime—which was limited, given his role in building and maintaining the communication network, but which he carved out with the deliberate intentionality of a kid who had decided something was important and was going to make time for it. He'd gone initially, he told Sonic, because he was curious about Mr. Tinker's mechanical aptitude. The toys the man built were good—not just aesthetically, but engineeringly. The joints articulated smoothly. The mechanisms were elegant. The designs showed an intuitive understanding of mechanical principles that went beyond hobbyist craftsmanship.
Mr. Tinker was, after all, Eggman. His conscious mind had forgotten everything—the wars, the robots, the world-domination schemes, the centuries of accumulated genius—but his hands remembered. His fingers knew how gears meshed. His instincts understood load-bearing structures and energy transfer and the thousand tiny mechanical truths that separated a master engineer from an amateur.
He just used them to make toys now.
And Tails—Tails, who loved machines the way poets loved words, who spoke the language of engineering as fluently as his native tongue, who could look at a mechanism and understand it the way other people understood faces—had found in Mr. Tinker a kindred spirit.
Their friendship was, according to the volunteer reports, adorable.
"He showed me how he makes the joints move!" Tails reported to Marcus during one of their evening communication sessions. The fox's face, rendered in slightly grainy holographic projection by the relay system's limited bandwidth, was alight with the specific joy of a genius who had found someone who spoke his language. "He uses a modified cam-and-follower system for the walking toys—it's SO elegant, Shadow. The efficiency ratio is like ninety-three percent! That's better than some of Eggman's actual—"
Tails stopped mid-sentence.
His ears flattened.
"He's... he's not Eggman anymore. Right?"
"No," Marcus said. "He's not."
"Because when I'm with him, sometimes I... I forget. That he used to be. He's so nice, Shadow. He made me a little airplane. A wooden one. It looks like the Tornado. He said he didn't know why, but something about me made him think of airplanes." Tails's voice went small. "Do you think he... remembers? Not everything, but like... do you think some part of him knows who I am?"
Marcus considered this.
In the original IDW timeline, Mr. Tinker's eventual return to being Eggman had been facilitated by Starline—the platypus using a combination of psychological manipulation and technology to forcibly restore the doctor's memories. It had been presented as inevitable, as though the good in Mr. Tinker was just a mask, a temporary aberration, a glitch in the system that would eventually self-correct back to villainy.
Marcus hated that interpretation.
Because it implied that redemption was impossible. That people—even fictional people, even people who had done terrible things—couldn't change. That the kindness Mr. Tinker showed was fake, a malfunction, something to be fixed rather than protected.
And that wasn't how the Sonic franchise was supposed to work. Sonic's world was a world where second chances mattered. Where a weapon created to destroy could choose to protect. Where a robot built to be a copy could struggle with questions of identity and purpose. Where a treasure hunter and a spy could become partners who trusted each other with their lives.
Where a mad scientist could forget his madness and become a toymaker who made children smile.
"I think," Marcus said carefully, "that Mr. Tinker is who Eggman could have been if things had gone differently. And I think that the part of him that made you an airplane did it because making things that fly is what he loves, and some things go deeper than memory."
Tails was quiet for a moment.
"Can I keep visiting him?"
"Yes."
"Even though he used to be—"
"Especially because he used to be. He's proof that people can be more than their worst choices, Tails. And he needs someone who sees him as he is now, not as who he was." Marcus paused. "Besides. You deserve a friend who understands machines the way you do."
"I have friends who understand machines."
"You have friends who appreciate machines. Mr. Tinker speaks machines. There's a difference."
Tails's holographic face broke into a grin so wide and warm that the relay system's limited resolution almost couldn't contain it. "Yeah. Yeah, there is." He fidgeted. "Thanks, Shadow."
"Hmph."
"I'm going to take that as 'you're welcome, Tails, I value our friendship and I'm glad you're happy.'"
"Take it however you want."
"I'm taking it."
The communication ended. Marcus stared at the blank projection space for a moment, the faintest ghost of warmth in his chest that the White Wisp, still perched on his shoulder, chirped approvingly at.
Eggman stays as Mr. Tinker. Tails has a mentor figure. Another piece of the timeline shifted toward something better.
Now if I could just deal with the lemur.
The lemur situation escalated on Day Nine.
Marcus was conducting a solo patrol of the perimeter around HQ—a routine sweep that he performed every evening, partly for security, partly because Shadow needed solitude the way other people needed oxygen, and the quiet hours between sunset and full dark were the only time he could reliably achieve it.
The White Wisp was with him, floating alongside his shoulder in its usual position, its bioluminescence dimmed to a soft nightlight glow. The air was cool. The stars were emerging. The distant hum of the Resistance base faded behind him as he moved through the scrubland that surrounded the facility, his hover shoes silent against the packed earth.
It was peaceful.
For about four minutes.
Then he felt it.
A presence. Behind him. Approximately forty meters back, moving when he moved, stopping when he stopped, maintaining a consistent distance with the kind of deliberate precision that suggested either professional surveillance training or obsessive dedication.
Marcus knew who it was.
He kept walking.
The presence followed.
He stopped.
The presence stopped.
He turned around.
Nothing. Empty scrubland. Rocks. A few scraggly bushes. The distant silhouette of the base against the darkening sky.
And one bush that was slightly wider than it should have been, with a gray-and-purple tail coiled around its base that its owner had apparently forgotten was visible.
Marcus stared at the bush.
The bush stared at nothing, because it was a bush, but the lemur hiding behind it was almost certainly staring at him through the branches with those enormous, luminous eyes.
"Tangle," Marcus said.
The bush rustled.
"I know you're there."
More rustling. A small cascade of leaves. The tail—which had been attempting to remain motionless and was failing spectacularly, its tip twitching with the involuntary excitement of a tail attached to a lemur who was this close to her fixation object—retracted behind the bush in a rapid, serpentine motion.
"...No I'm not," said the bush.
Marcus closed his eyes.
He breathed.
He considered his options.
Option A: Walk away. Ignore her. Continue the patrol. Accept that Tangle the Lemur had apparently decided that stalking the Ultimate Lifeform was a viable hobby and would continue to do so until she either lost interest or was stopped by external intervention.
Option B: Confront her. Have a direct conversation about boundaries, personal space, and the difference between admiration and obsession. Potentially cause an emotional scene. Definitely cause an emotional scene. Tangle did not experience emotions at normal volume.
Option C: Chaos Blast the bush.
Option C was tempting but counterproductive.
He went with a modified Option B.
"Come out," he said.
A beat of silence. Then, slowly, with the sheepish reluctance of someone who had been caught doing something they knew they shouldn't have been doing but had been unable to stop themselves from doing anyway, Tangle emerged from behind the bush.
She was wearing camouflage.
Or rather, she was wearing what she believed was camouflage—a green t-shirt with brown splotches painted on it in what appeared to be acrylic, paired with a headband made of actual leaves that she had apparently glued to a strip of fabric. The effect was less "stealth operative" and more "craft project gone sentient."
Her tail swished behind her. Her enormous eyes were wide with a cocktail of emotions that included embarrassment, excitement, guilt, and an underlying current of intensity that made the hair on the back of Marcus's neck stand up.
"Hi," she said.
"Why are you following me?"
"I'm not following you."
"You are literally wearing homemade camouflage and hiding in a bush forty meters behind me."
"That's... coincidence."
"Tangle."
"Okay maybe I was following you a little."
"Why?"
She fidgeted. Her tail coiled and uncoiled in rapid spirals, a nervous tic that Marcus had come to recognize as her equivalent of nail-biting. Her eyes darted left, right, down, and then—unable to resist the gravitational pull any longer—locked onto his with an intensity that was frankly unsettling.
"Because you're amazing," she said.
The word came out with a weight that ordinary syllables shouldn't have been able to carry. It wasn't a compliment. It wasn't fan appreciation. It was a declaration—a statement of absolute, unshakeable conviction delivered with the fervor of a convert professing faith.
"You're the most incredible person I've ever met," Tangle continued, and the floodgates were open now, the words pouring out with the unstoppable momentum of a dam break. "The way you fight—it's not like Sonic, Sonic is cool but he's like flashy cool, he's like fireworks, but you're like—you're like lightning. You're controlled and precise and dangerous and you don't waste a single move and every time I see you do the chaos energy thing I feel like my heart is going to EXPLODE—"
"Tangle—"
"—and you're mysterious. You don't talk much and everything you say matters and you have those eyes—"
"Tangle—"
"—those RED eyes that look like they've seen things that nobody else has seen and you carry it all inside you like this WEIGHT but you keep going anyway and that's—that's—"
"Tangle."
She stopped. Her mouth remained open, mid-word, frozen in the act of articulation. Her tail had wound itself into a knot behind her—literally knotted, a complex figure-eight that she was going to need help untangling later.
Marcus took a breath.
"What you're describing," he said, with measured calm, "is not a healthy reaction to meeting someone one time."
"It was a VERY impactful time."
"That doesn't matter. You don't know me, Tangle. You saw me fight some robots. That's it. You're constructing a fantasy around a person you've had one interaction with, and the fantasy has nothing to do with who I actually am."
"But—"
"I'm not mysterious. I'm private. There's a difference. I don't speak much because most things don't need to be said, not because I'm harboring some deep, romantic, tragic inner world that you can unlock with enough enthusiasm. My eyes are red because of my genetic engineering, not because they've 'seen things.' And the chaos energy isn't magic—it's a tool. A weapon. It's not romantic. It's destructive."
Tangle's lower lip trembled.
Her enormous eyes, already large enough to qualify as a biological anomaly, grew larger, filling with a liquid brightness that Marcus recognized with a sinking feeling as the precursor to tears.
Oh no.
"You think I'm stupid," she whispered.
"I don't think you're stupid."
"You think I'm some dumb fangirl who can't tell the difference between a crush and a real feeling."
"I think you're a brave person who fought robots alone to protect her hometown, and I think you deserve better than a fixation on someone who is fundamentally incapable of giving you what you're looking for."
The tears didn't fall. They hovered, trembling, on the edge of her lashes—a quantum state of sadness, simultaneously crying and not-crying, the emotional superposition of a lemur who was experiencing her first real rejection and didn't know what to do with it.
"What if I'm not looking for anything?" Tangle said, very quietly. "What if I just... want to be near you?"
Marcus said nothing.
Because he didn't have an answer for that.
The White Wisp, which had been observing this exchange from Marcus's shoulder with the wide-eyed fascination of a creature witnessing a nature documentary about its own ecosystem, chirped softly.
The chirp, if Marcus was interpreting correctly, roughly translated to: She's sad. Fix it. You're the Ultimate Lifeform. You can fix anything.
I can't fix this, Marcus thought back at it, despite the impossibility of telepathic communication with an alien jellyfish. I can't fix a character who was written without the tools to handle emotional complexity. She doesn't have the depth for this. She was designed to be enthusiastic and brave and appealing, and nobody gave her the internal architecture to process rejection or heartbreak or the nuance of unrequited—
He stopped.
Because he was doing it again.
He was thinking of her as a character. A construct. A collection of design choices and writing decisions. A checklist of traits assembled by a creative team and published by a corporation.
But she was standing in front of him with tears in her eyes, and she was real here, and real people—even poorly written ones—deserved more than a critique of their source material.
"Tangle," Marcus said, and his voice was... different. Softer. Not Shadow-soft—Shadow didn't do soft—but the closest approximation available. The gentleness of someone who was choosing, deliberately, to be kind, even though kindness was not his default setting and even though the recipient was someone whose existence he had philosophical objections to. "You can be near me. But you need to be near me as a person, not as a fantasy. That means respecting my space. No following. No surveillance. No letters—" He paused. "Actually, the letters are fine. But no more than one per week."
Tangle's ears perked up. The tears receded. Her tail began to unknot itself with the slow, tentative unfurling of hope.
"One per week?"
"One."
"What about the scarf? Can I make more—"
"The scarf was... adequate."
"ADEQUATE! He said ADEQUATE!" She bounced on her toes, and the motion propagated through her frame in the way that everything propagated through every female frame in this universe—extensively, dramatically, and with flagrant disregard for the laws of physics. "That's basically 'I love it' in Shadow language! I KNEW you liked the scarf!"
"I said adequate. That means—"
"I'M GOING TO MAKE YOU MATCHING GLOVES!"
"I don't need—"
"RED AND BLACK! WITH LITTLE CHAOS EMERALDS ON THE—"
"Tangle."
She stopped bouncing. Looked at him. Her eyes were still enormous, still shining, still radiating an intensity of focus that was, frankly, a lot. But the tears were gone, replaced by something warmer—not the manic fixation of before, but something... softer. Calmer.
Still too much.
But less.
"One letter per week," she repeated. "Respecting your space. Being a person, not a fantasy."
"Yes."
"Can I still think you're amazing?"
"You can think whatever you want. Just... think it at a reasonable distance."
She snapped a salute—energetic, slightly crooked, absolutely endearing despite Marcus's best efforts to resist it. "Yes sir, Mr. Shadow sir! Reasonable distance! Got it! Starting now!"
She turned and bounded away into the scrubland, her tail uncoiling behind her like a streamer, her voice carrying back to him on the evening breeze: "ONE PER WEEK! I'M GOING TO MAKE THEM THE BEST LETTERS EVER! EACH ONE WILL BE A MASTERPIECE! LITERATURE! ACTUAL LITERATURE—"
Her voice faded with distance.
Marcus stood alone in the gathering dark.
The White Wisp chirped.
"Don't say it," Marcus told it.
The Wisp chirped again, louder, with an unmistakable note of I told you so.
"I said don't say it."
Chirp.
"She is not growing on me. She is a structurally flawed character with no narrative depth whose existence in this continuity represents a fundamental—"
Chirp chirp.
"—a fundamental failure of character design that prioritizes appeal over—"
Chirp.
"I'm arguing with an alien jellyfish."
The Wisp settled smugly onto his shoulder.
Marcus stared at the stars.
She made me a scarf, he thought. It was actually warm. And the stitching was surprisingly skilled. And it was the exact right shades of red and black.
And the cookies were good before you ate them all, you luminous parasite.
The Wisp trilled happily.
Marcus turned back toward the base.
Behind him, somewhere in the scrubland, he could faintly hear Tangle narrating her walk home to herself in an excited whisper: "—he said ADEQUATE! That's like a TEN out of TEN on the Shadow scale! I need to tell Whisper! She's going to FREAK—"
Whisper.
Marcus's eye twitched.
I had forgotten about Whisper.
One problem at a time. One crisis at a time. One poorly-written character at a time.
He walked back to the safehouse.
Rouge was waiting on the roof.
Of course she was.
She was sitting on the edge, legs dangling, wings folded, silhouetted against the star field in a way that was—objectively, factually, indisputably—the most beautiful thing Marcus had seen in either of his lives. Not because of the IDW proportions. Not because of the impossible figure or the calculated allure or the way the moonlight turned her white fur to silver. But because she was waiting for him. Because she always waited for him. Because in every continuity, every timeline, every version of this story, Rouge the Bat positioned herself exactly where Shadow the Hedgehog would return to, and waited, and was there.
"How'd it go?" she asked.
"I established boundaries."
"And?"
"She's going to make me gloves."
Rouge laughed. A real laugh, bright and warm and entirely unguarded, the kind of laugh she almost never let anyone hear because Rouge the Bat was not in the business of letting people see her undefended.
But she let Shadow see it.
She always let Shadow see it.
Marcus sat down beside her on the edge of the roof. Close. Close enough that their shoulders touched. Close enough that her wing settled against his back with the familiar weight of a gesture that had been repeated a thousand times.
"She's a lot," Rouge said.
"She's a lot," Marcus agreed.
"But she's not bad."
Marcus was quiet for a moment. Thinking about letters and scarves and cookies and a girl with a tail who fought robots alone because it was the right thing to do.
"No," he said. "She's not bad. She's just..."
"A lot."
"Yeah."
They sat in silence. The stars burned overhead. The White Wisp dozed. The base hummed with distant activity. Somewhere to the north, Knuckles was guarding the Master Emerald with the focused devotion of a man who had finally been told his job mattered. Somewhere to the south, Tails was probably planning his next visit to Mr. Tinker, his young mind buzzing with mechanical possibilities and the quiet joy of a friendship built on shared language. Somewhere to the east, Sonic was running, always running, but running toward things now instead of away from them.
And somewhere in the scrubland west of the base, a lemur was composing the first draft of next week's letter with the reverent intensity of a poet crafting a sonnet, her tail curled around a pen, her enormous eyes fixed on the paper, her lips moving silently as she searched for words big enough to contain what she felt.
She would need a lot of words.
She always needed a lot of words.
But for the first time, she was going to try to make each one count.
END OF CHAPTER 7