บท 99: EPILOGUE
Sonja opened her eyes. To a new location. Where was she? It was the outskirts of some sort of mountainside town. Overlooking a deep, dark ocean. Looking above, she was under a cloud-riddled sky. It looked to be eternally raining. Her dress was torn by the legs, and looked filthy. How long had she been here?
Looking down, she... no longer had a ghost tail. What? Where was it? In its place were legs.
Sonja got up, wobbling and looking around at her new surroundings. She had so many questions and no answers. So she ran into town, hoping somebody could answer them for her.
Maybe she still had a chance to get back to Sonic. Just maybe. She just had to run. So run she did.
Sonic usually didn't have a clear destination. He would usually just run until he got bored. But now he did have a destination. He was running far away from Green Hill Zone. He was running back home. To Christmas Island.
Christmas Island is where Sonic had been born. He didn't remember much of his time there, only the taste of hot chocolate and the feeling of cold snow. The cold there is what gave him his fondness of gloves and warm shoes. He lived in a cabin he had made sometime after he got back from Chris' world. In an otherwise undiscovered part of Calamity Cliffs.
Sonic ran uphill to his cabin, and swung open the door. Instantly, a bunch of stuff he had collected during his many adventures slipped out from the doorway and into the snow. Such as the Magic Gloves from San Francisco, a collection of comics from Earth, a funny hat, a still unopened can of chili, and many more miscellaneous items. It was all here. Even Chip's bracelet was here for years up until just a few days ago. Sonic realized now he hadn't cleaned up in a while. His definition of cleaning up wasn't giving or throwing things away, just reorganizing them. But he realized... he was running out of room to "reorganize".
Sonic walked over the pile of his belongings, and tripped over his Ring vault door. He kept forgetting to tell Tails where he really did put all those gold Rings. But eventually, he made it to his PC. It was an outdated PC. He didn't know how Eggman had gotten it, but it was a gift from ol' Eggy to Sonic before they... had a disagreement.
Sonic sat down and sunk into his beanbag chair, and replaced the hard drive of the PC with the one he found in Orglace Mansion. Then, he put the CD ROM in the disk tray.
When the PC powered on, he found his desktop wallpaper to be what appeared to be a candid picture of Sonja and Ramona in a park by a lake. His heart sunk. Sonja...
Sonic's attention was brought to his documents folder, where many files littered the folder.
issacdev.txt, stoneanalyses.txt, nazodev.mov, hourglasslog.txt, the list went on. Sonic decided he would look at this all later. Now, he looked at the contents of the CD and pressed a random file.
There was a rainbow logo of a company Sonic didn't recognize, overlooking a planet with a moon in the background. When the CD started up, it showed Green Hill Past. There was Sonja with human legs, and an adolescent Ramona. They looked happy. The camera was shaky, so it wasn't on a tripod. So who was holding it?
"Okay, you two!" Marilyssa's voice exclaimed. She must have been the camerawoman. "Say cheese!!"
"Cheese!" Sonja and Ramona beamed, and grinned widely. Sonic heard a snicker from Marilyssa. It burst out into full-on, happy laughter. It almost made Sonic smile despite his tired expression, his eyes still red and a little swollen from crying. "Haha! I had it on video!"
"Ah!" Sonja scoffed playfully. She laughed, and so did Ramona. Sonic remained blank. The camera became the same as it cut to static.
Sonic continued to watch the videos. Everyone in them were having so much fun. Sonic felt as though watching these may be an invasion of privacy. But he just couldn't stop watching.
Sonic always thought of Marilyssa as an awful, horrible and abusive person. But it didn't look like it from these videos. They looked like a pretty normal family. The Orglaces. Nobody could have guessed by looking at these what would end up happening, with the family essentially all dying to the hands of another.
Family... Sonic remembered a time when he didn't have a family. A time before Tails, Knuckles, Amy. They all felt like family to him. Even Jet the Hawk and Shadow felt like family to him.
He thought Sonja, Pico and Buck were like family. But they had gone somewhere else. Sometime else. Buck was like his cousin, Pico would obviously be his son... and Sonja would be like his wife.
Sonic continued to watch the videos, his eyes wet with tears now. In that dark room full of trinkets and toys. Rings and keepsakes. The funny hat. The only light was the moonlight from the one window in his cabin, and the PC monitor.
He promised he was okay. But he wasn't. He was still broken. Even if he escaped with his life... even if he saved his world and friends, he didn't regain his confidence. His smile was false, his actions without meaning. Was this his doom?
Sonic found himself on the roof of his small cabin. Acoustic guitar in hand. It was painfully out of tune, as was his voice under the crack of tears.
He sang along to the sound of his guitar under the stars and moon and with the only backing instrument being the cold, shivery wind up in the cliffs. His only audience was the roaring and splashing waves in the distance. The rooftop was his stage. And he ran with it fast. He just strummed and sang. About war, running, fractured memories, unknown memories, loneliness.
Most of all, he sang about love. All kinds of love. He was in love. And that love wouldn't die. But would it ever be fulfilled? Sonic didn't know. So his coda stopped abruptly, as he stared up at the sky. Sonic breathed out.
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