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In 2005, Shadow spends the better part of a year believing in black aliens, that he can jump into the cyberspace of computers and that he’s on the ARK again, trying his damndest, and when he comes to, in 2006, there’s a GUN emblem on his jacket and the dirty taste of betrayal in his mouth.
Rouge reminds him that they aren’t on anyone’s side. They’re rogues, not GUN agents, hardly even a team if the battle called for one victor. But something still isn’t right. It isn’t right to him that he should don the crest of murderers and be one of them, too, even if it’s only for the leg up. GUN has all the latest weaponry, all the latest tech and all the intel they need to follow the Chaos Emeralds around the world. Shadow wonders if he still cares about them. Certainly not the way Rouge does, with her big sparkling eyes and all. All seven together, and miracles can happen, sure, but not the one he needs. Asking the gods of Chaos to rewrite time and unmake him is considerable a task, at least.
Within a few years, he’s turned his badge in. When he needs to, he freezes time and breaks into their facilities, because GUN still has the best tech and weapons and busted Beetles for security. Shadow takes to solo missions, a life on his own away from Team Dark, away from trouble and Chaos and far away from Sonic. Maybe he’s the very blood and guts inside of Shadow, or perhaps just the guilt. Either way, Shadow can’t stand to face him. When Sonic catches up to him on Lethal Highway or finds him in the depths of space, Shadow just wants to turn away from him, and run, and run, and run. He spends something like years running away from him, until he realizes, one day, that Sonic isn’t chasing him anymore. Sonic stops chasing him, and Shadow stops running, and everything’s peachy like that: Sonic somewhere in the world with his happy little found family, and Shadow alone in a dark rainy alleyway, smoking half a cigarette against the wet wall. Of course he’s glad to finally be out of their story. Nothing left to lose means he’s won, doesn’t it?
It’s neither here nor there. Sometime in the middle of the 2010s, Shadow flicks his smoke into a puddle and takes off gliding, the only light in the night his burning hot steps. The alley expands into a block of concrete buildings, the furthest lined by a wire fence he easily scales. To Shadow, it looks unfinished, like there ought to be tunnels out from the center, like the wings of a facility ought to intermingle and cooperate. Perhaps it’s all a bad disguise, to pretend GUN is a cute neighborhood out here, instead of being what blows cute friendly cooperative cul de sacs to bits. Whatever the case, Shadow infiltrates the main corridors with ease, stealthy and breathless as he leaps himself between swinging red lasers. The Beetles seem to turn away just before seeing him, every time. Shadow adjusts his gloves on tighter. As if they stand a chance against him, regardless.
He’s crossing through a new doorway, which is what makes it happen at all, when it happens. Shadow’s never quite been able to put his finger on why he gets so lightheaded when alarm sirens go off, but the ones that blare suddenly over him, red lights flashing, perform the same trick. What’d he come here for in the first place? Help? No, it’d been— and the lights flash, and the sirens scream —it’d been for something, he’d come up onto this floor of the ARK for something…but he supposes it doesn’t matter when he finds her, instead, the tall silhouette of his sister turned toward the stars. When she faces him, Maria is stern. “Shadow,” she says, and she takes his hands and says something else very watery-sounding, very much like Shadow has cotton stuffed in either ear or a bucket over his head that she cracks with a wooden baseball bat. Thwong goes its metal against his head, splitting kindly his skull down the center to let the red flowers grow out. “Hurry, Shadow, it’s grandfather’s experiments! They’re— they’re—”
Behind him, in the GUN facility, a hard whack of metal does hit him, and he’s sharp to twist around and look at who’s guilty. The eyes that stare back at him are red as sunsets, like fire, like a mirror, and Shadow won’t admit it, that he takes a step backward from Metal Sonic then as if he’s afraid, but he does, and Metal just comes closer to his same tempo. Shadow blocks when the robot strikes and hits back twice as furious. Metal Sonic moves like a ghastly reflection, jumping to avoid a sweep of Shadow’s leg into his. He lands back down with a vengeance, a new flare in his shocking eyes, and catapults himself into Shadow like a blue cannonball. Shadow goes down grunting, but he isn’t out. Far from it. He’s on his feet the same second. The sirens sound from farther away. Quickly, he bounds from wall to chrome wall in the hallway they traipse, getting enough leverage to come down in a hard screw kick to the robot’s head. It spins around and the robot stumbles, and part of Shadow feels for him. He can relate to being built for one thing, whether that’s to save the world or destroy it, neither of them do properly know. They’re each the blood-rushing proof of what a Robotnik can do. Shadow wonders the answer, whether GUN’s gotten their hands on The Doctor’s eldest project or merely the blueprints to copy him. In one hard kick, he decides it, that only a cheap fake could be decapitated and left in a pile so easily. The real Metal Sonic always fought harder than that, the real Sonic harder still. Shadow frowns at the sparkling heap of wires, stepping over him to escape from the busted plate in the wall.
Later, he realizes that if the flashing lights hadn’t distracted him, he’d be on his way home by now. Commander Tower’s keycard couldn’t have been far off, and then he could’ve launched the space shuttle and landed back up in the stars where he belongs. Because, on Earth, there’s no one left to miss him. But Shadow stays. Because, on Earth, it’s closing in on 2017, and the sky’s always bleeding red and nobody really says hello to each other anymore. Robots and Badniks litter his every path nowadays. It isn’t until he looks up at the face of the erected stone statue where the post office in Sunset Heights used to be, really looks, that Shadow understands. Arms folded, he squints in the sunlight and scoffs at Sonic’s failure. Leave it to Sonic to let the world collapse without Shadow to help hold it up alongside him. He shoots a fully charged Chaos Spear at the ugly statue, and the stone Doctor shivers and shatters into thousands of bits. Curiously, Shadow tilts a glance into the simmering hole it leaves behind, where dozens and dozens of his android copies begin to pour out. They’re shiny and red-striped and twice as tough as they fought ten years ago. He’s punching two of them in their unchanging faces, a fist thrown to either side, when his backup arrives, a hard crash-landing of Metal Sonic in the midst of it all. Shadow leers. Didn’t he already teach that thing a lesson? Regardless, he’s kicking and fighting for the right side, to Shadow’s surprise, gripping the wrists of an android to spin it around a million times fast; he watches it sail far into the distance and become rubble with the rest of them, with the buildings around this wartorn side of town. A hard slam throws Metal Sonic backward into a fire hydrant, one that bursts from the ground, leaves water gushing up in its place. Like instinct, Shadow shoulders the robot away, aiming a blast of Chaos energy from his hands toward the spray. The androids, soaking and dripping, sizzle to their knees.
Metal stays crouched beside the hydrant. Shadow gazes over him, sighing silently as he offers his hand out. The robot seems to think, if it can, seems to consider him there. Shadow wants to believe it the same way he longs to see green in the robot’s eyes, but instead, they’re a dark, piercing, violent red, and they aim at him with purpose. Metal Sonic takes his hand, only to lift him from his feet in a hard toss to the side. Shadow grunts as he hits the dirt. A certain kind of anger ticks in his chest, fury that he’d let himself fall victim to an enemy and the repulsion of knowing he’d had his guard down at all. Metal Sonic doesn’t need him. Metal Sonic isn’t laughing with dirt on his face, because he’d tripped on a tree knot just before the finish line of their forest race and Shadow stopped to yank him back up (because a win’s a win, but a good win is what really gets him going, what twists the cap off the cold beer they split after they’ve tied, and Sonic drinks excitedly back more than a fair half, sure, but he’s laughing, in that summer light, and things are okay, for once, there’s no such thing as a Black Comet and things are okay); Metal Sonic is a traitor. Blood trailing from his knee, Shadow stalks forward, wipes the gravel from his snarling face and pummels the robot fist by fist. Metal can only dodge so much. Shadow beats him and hits him til he’s short of breath, punches until his knuckles break bloodily through the gloves and Metal Sonic is nothing but dents and beeps. By the throat, Shadow grabs him, leaping up so quickly he feels the robot’s neck snap limp, though still those eyes glow red as the skyline behind them. “Chaos,” Shadow shudders out, then roars it— “Control!” and pauses time itself. In midair, he clutches the robot and keeps his second fist steady, a hard swing back to end the thing’s metal misery, but with time, he, too, feels frozen. Metal Sonic, the traitor, the enemy, just hangs there, a pathetic look about him. “You don’t have to do this, Shadow,” the killing machine might beg of him, or perhaps he’d be himself at heart, and his last words would be a smirked out, “Think this is the last of me, faker? Nice try.” Maybe they’d have gingham on the curtains above their kitchen sink, or maybe they’d be floral, but Metal Sonic takes to cooking, either way, and Shadow takes to eating. Metal makes dinner and Shadow keeps the place tidy, Metal picks up the groceries and Shadow pays, their first daughter’s colicky as all hell, but it’s okay, they take turns every hour or so that she cries. Shadow makes love to Metal Sonic, in their bed, because that’s what happens when they get to kissing and whispering over two wine glasses once the kids are asleep; it breaks his heart, truthfully, that he’ll have to break Metal’s, whenever the someday comes that he’s ready to tell him about his double life. It’s just that, well, every hedgehog has needs, and all, and Shadow needs to be attached to Sonic like a bug, like a burrowing worm that eats him from the inside out. Shadow needs the real breathing laughing taunting running loving writhing vexing Sonic like he needs it to be 1950 again, listening to Maria pluck the same wrong chord on her acoustic guitar for the hundredth time, Shadow needs his old passion back and he needs time to stop. He blinks whereas no one else can. In the middle of nothing, or everything, crashing burning buildings and the smell of asphalt, Shadow feels himself let go. It’s a dart prick of pain. Shadow lets Metal Sonic go, walks in from work one day and catches he and a Shadow Android clutching the white sheets, Shadow lets him go and feels that awful pinch of an ache in his blood as the world comes alive again around him.
“Yo, Shadow!” calls his ears over the noise of Metal Sonic hitting the ground, a splatter of dull gray parts, a long-winded spiral of a round bolt until it finally collapses. Shadow lands beside him. His gritty eyes blink again, disbelieving. Hands on his hips, Sonic whistles like he’s impressed. “Nice job taking care of him. And here I was thinking you were on their side.”
“What are you talking about, their side? What are you doing here, blue hedgehog?”
Sonic gives him a lopsided smile. “Coulda asked you the same question. Just so happens you’re hanging around Eggman’s base with no good reason?”
Shadow grunts, arms crossing. “Just trying to see what’s left to salvage of this place, since you decided to let Earth be overtaken.”
Shadow’s already started to walk forward when Sonic’s arguing, “Hey, do ya really think Eggman’d be so far ahead if I wasn’t trapped in space prison for months?” Sonic follows after him, really, he does, and that’s all it takes for Shadow to grin and pick up twice the speed. Sonic chases right after him. Really, he does.