dream, explore the mysteries

Nine’s head thumped painfully at the temples and his vision kept wanting to slide out of focus. He rubbed at his temples on one side of his head with a white-gloved hand, a grimace fixed on his face. On the ground, his beloved mechanical tails were sparking and occasionally twitching, but otherwise lay useless. How had it come to this? What could only have been a few hours ago, he was in the Citadel of the Grim, alone, staring out at the repaired shatterverse. He had everything he’d ever wanted: a place to live far away from everyone else, where nobody – not even the Chaos Council – could ever bother him again.

And he’d thrown it all away. All for the sake of seeing his one friend again. For a bitterly brief reunion, before he was taken from Nine again.

He didn’t hear half of Maruui’s protestations on his behalf because of his last flashback, but he’d certainly have objected to ‘person’ as a suffix. He did, however, catch the part about someone else fixing his tails.

“No,” he growled, his voice hoarse. “No one touches my tails but me.”

Someone messing around with his tails, his lifeline, didn’t bear thinking about. Nine couldn’t imagine the damage these morons could do poking and prodding his precious creations. All he needed was access to tools and he could sort it out himself, the way he always did. He didn’t need anyone.

Kaison’s neighbours had azaleas planted along the fenceline of a remarkable shade of blue. The vivid colour pushed through the darkness at the edge of Nine’s vision, demanding his attention. He turned his head away from them.

The taller human did relent, at last. Nine’s expression loosened and a look was all he could manage for gratitude in the moment. His brain honed in on the last thing Kaison had said: …until I know for sure they didn’t follow you. It hadn’t really registered before, but the human knew something. As he took a slow, heavy step towards the garage, Nine’s brain ticked back to the computer he had accessed earlier in the visitor centre. He hadn’t gotten a lot of information from it – at least not a lot which made sense – but it had been clear that Meinville was a place where aliens were not welcome. If that was common knowledge, perhaps the group who had attacked him and Sonic were also well-known around here… or at least, well known to adults. Maruui’s endearing excitement and hedgehog-like optimism was punctuated by the very question Nine also wanted answered. Nine kept his eyes on Kaison as he pushed himself up the driveway, feeling like he was moving through treacle, waiting to see if he would divulge who ‘they’ were.

By the time Nine was crossing the threshold of the garage, his tails felt like they weighed as much as the Chaos Council’s mothership and everything beyond the object of focus was blurry in his vision. He rubbed his eyes and gave himself a mental shake; this was not a safe place to pass out. He reached for a stool next to a workbench and missed, stumbling backwards, but managed to catch himself. Since the stool towered above him, Nine decided it was probably safer to keep low, and sat down on the floor of by the workbench instead. With some effort, he reached back and pulled one of his mechanical tails onto his lap. It kept drifting in and out of focus.

“Screwdriver set?” He muttered.