Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Sonic’s going to kill me for this,” Shadow growled. “And it’s all your fault.”

Tails gulped nervously. He looked around for Sonic on instinct, but of course Sonic wasn’t there; he was away for the whole weekend, and he’d left Shadow in charge until he’d got back. Tails hadn’t expected that to be too bad, given Shadow tended to avoid him at all costs, but now he was faced with a furious Ultimate Lifeform and he had no idea how to escape.

Shadow only got angrier when he didn’t say anything. “Tails, it’s two in the morning!”

“I’m nearly finished!” Tails protested. “Sonic would let me stay up a few more minutes to get this done, I swear.”

“That’s not good enough!” Shadow snapped. He grabbed Tails roughly by the arm and pulled him away from his workbench without even giving him the time to put away tools properly. “You’re going straight to...” He trailed off before saying the word ‘bed’ as Tails’s stomach chose that moment to complain loudly. “When did you last eat?”

“Um.” Tails squirmed nervously in Shadow’s firm grip. “Dinner?” he said hopefully.

“Which day’s dinner, Tails?”

Tails hung his head, realising he was caught out. “Yesterday...”

“You haven’t eaten all day?” Shadow’s fury grew white-hot as he dragged Tails towards the kitchen. “He told me to keep an eye on you while you’re working, damn it!”

Tails plucked up all his courage and said, “Doesn’t that mean it’s your fault I forgot to eat and stayed up late, not mine?”

Shadow gave him a withering glare that made the rest of his argument flee his mind out of sheer self-preservation. “Sit at the table and stayed there,” he snarled.

By this point, Tails was a lot more tired than he was hungry now he had stopped working. If he had the choice, he would have just gone straight to bed, but he didn’t exactly feel like saying that aloud when Shadow was this angry. Instead, he just went straight over to the table as soon as he let go of his arm and sat down to wait quietly while Shadow made him a sandwich and shoved it in front of him. If this was Sonic, Tails would have asked how his day was, but today he just ate his sandwich as quickly and quietly as he could before Shadow got any angrier with him, then headed straight upstairs to get ready for bed.

“You don’t have to follow me,” he said when he realised Shadow had gone upstairs with him.

Shadow folded his arms. “After this, I do not trust you to brush your teeth without getting distracted.”

Tails really did want to argue that point, if he hadn’t done exactly that twice this week already. Sonic wouldn’t have minded, though, which made him miss Sonic so hard it hurt, but it didn’t feel like it was a good idea to say that out loud right now. All he had to do was survive the next two days, he reminded himself as Shadow glared at him all the way until he was actually in bed with his eyes closed. Sonic would be back then, and then Shadow would leave again, because the one mercy in all of this was that Shadow had already refused to move in with them. Two miserable days, and then it would all be over.

* * *

Eight in the morning was far too early to be woken up after going to bed at half past two, but Shadow just called that his fault and physically dragged him out of bed anyway. Tails gave up and dragged himself off to shower, grumbling words under his breath that he was fairly sure Shadow would scold him for if he heard them. It was official: Shadow was an evil tyrant revelling in the petty control he had over Tails’s life for the weekend.

The next round of unspeakable cruelty came when he made it down for breakfast and found a glass of juice instead of a cup of coffee. Shadow didn’t even let him have coffee at all, not even when he pointed out he hadn’t had much sleep last night; he just insisted it wasn’t healthy for kids and refused to hear Tails’s logical arguments for an emergency exception. The fact that Sonic never minded if he had coffee didn’t work either, as if Shadow thought he was better than Sonic or something like that. Tails did eat his eggs and drink his juice, because he didn’t really think he had a chance of properly resisting against Shadow, but then he stormed off into his workshop and slammed the door really hard in Shadow’s face. Shadow growled in frustration, but he also left him alone for a while, so Tails counted that as a victory to him.

Finally he got to keep working on his scanner project from last night. Part of him wanted to keep being upset that Shadow had made him stop, but as a quick half-hour turned into four hours and all the bugs still weren’t fixed, he had to admit that he really wouldn’t have finished it last night either way. He still thought it was cruel to make him get up so early in the day, though.

Shadow opened the door with a soft knock while he was busy trying to get the focussing array to work properly. “It’s lunchtime,” he said.

“Give me five minutes,” Tails grumbled, then he quickly realised what that answer was going to give him and added, “Uh, please! I’m just adjusting this and it’ll take me an hour if I have to start again. Five minutes.”

Shadow considered that for a moment, then sighed. “Five minutes,” he agreed.

In the end, it actually took six and a half minutes for Tails to finish adjusting the incredibly tiny focussing dials until everything was absolutely perfect. He still had to work out a bunch of bugs in the code and fix a few other issues, but he didn’t want to make Shadow come and get him again when he’d already gone over the five minutes he’d asked for.

“I probably would have forgotten to eat,” he admitted to Shadow, hoping that would get him out of any trouble for being late.

“I thought you would,” Shadow said, holding out a plate with a sandwich on it.

Tails breathed a quiet sigh of relief and took a cautious look at the sandwich. It was much nicer than the angry one he’d got last night, made with fresh bread, ham, cheese and lettuce. Only the ham had been in the fridge before, which meant Shadow must have actually gone out to get more stuff instead of just using the ham and the slightly-stale bread Sonic had left. Sonic wouldn’t have minded if he took his food back into the workshop to eat there, or more likely to forget to eat until it went off and got thrown away, but he didn’t even need to ask to know that Shadow wasn’t about to accept that sort of thing. He sat at the table instead and tried not to look like he was enjoying the sandwich too much. He didn’t want to give Shadow the satisfaction.

The worst part of it all, Tails thought as he quickly cleared up the last of the bugs and moved on to some overdue routine maintenance on his plane’s engine, was that his efficiency was vastly improved by having taken the break. Sonic just brought him some food when he was in the middle of a project, but not only had Shadow’s sandwich been better, the enforced lunch break had really helped him to focus when he got back to it. That left two options for Tails to consider: either he could stick to his guns and keep being stubborn, or he could apply scientific principles to the problem, accept that he was wrong, and make a different conclusion based on new data. Framing it like that made the decision easy, so he finished stripping and cleaning the engine, put it back together, and made his way back out a few minutes before Shadow would have come to get him before dinner.

“Shadow, can we watch a movie after dinner?” he asked.

Shadow froze in place, completely disarmed by that one simple question. “I... suppose so?” he said, sounding completely uncertain. “I see no reason why not.”

“Thanks!” Tails sat at the table and very deliberately didn’t complain about the excessively healthy plate that Shadow put in front of him. “You know Sonic never makes me eat this many vegetables or go to bed on time even though he asked you to do it, right?” he said instead, making sure there was no way he could sound like he was complaining about that.

Shadow hesitated, then nodded. “I know,” he admitted, “but I still gave my word that I’d look after you as well as I can while he’s gone.”

Tails wanted to argue that point, but he could see the logic in it. Besides, it really was making his work better, even if he was just slightly too proud to admit that out loud in front of Shadow. Instead, he just ate his dinner, tried not to look like he actually enjoyed most of the vegetables the way Shadow had cooked them — except the broccoli, which he had never liked and still didn’t — and tried to think of which movie he wanted to watch the most. Sonic never made him stick to age-appropriate things, but that wasn’t a fight that was worth having today; he was just going to take the easy way out and find an animated film on his list instead.

* * *

Tails still didn’t like the enforced bedtime, but Shadow had easily been able to overpower him and Tails had surrendered after being dragged upstairs. Of course he felt better after getting a full night’s sleep, even if he still had to glare at Shadow on sheer principle when he came to wake him up at 8am sharp. Tails kept the thought to himself, though, and he didn’t even complain about having to sit at the table and eat a healthy breakfast with juice instead of coffee again, which he thought was awfully nice of him given the cruel treatment.

“You cannot spend all day in your workshop again,” Shadow insisted in a perfect demonstration of exactly that kind of cruel treatment.

Tails’s jaw dropped open. “Why?” he asked. “I’ve got too many projects on the go!”

Shadow shook his head. “It’s not up for debate,” he said.

“But...” Tails started, then he gave up when he saw the death-glare the hedgehog was already giving him. “What did you have in mind?” he asked instead, forced to accept defeat.

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” Shadow admitted. “I am open to suggestions, as long as it’s out of the house.”

“I’ve got to look up some options!” Tails said, quickly finishing off his breakfast so he could go and do some research. Unfortunately, there weren’t any newly-opened theme parks with a suspicious number of egg puns locally, which meant his first idea of finding a way to sic Shadow onto Eggman so he could sneak back home was a bust. The research did turn up something that he now desperately wanted to go to, but he couldn’t help but wonder if that was different enough for Shadow to let him do it. Sonic would have been really excited for him, of course, but Shadow was too busy being determined to be a good influence on him.

“I did find something,” Tails said nervously when Shadow came over to see what he had in mind. “There’s a trade show on about an hour from here. It’s not my workshop! It’s a trade show with lots of people showing off cool tech stuff! That’s really different!”

Shadow considered the idea, then shrugged. “It’s an acceptable compromise,” he decided.

“Really?!” Tails beamed at him despite his best attempts at staying calm and not giving anything away. “Can we fly over? I just finished cleaning out the Tornado’s engine yesterday and she could use a test flight anyway.”

“Fine,” Shadow said, swallowing a reluctant look so quickly Tails almost didn’t see it. “Lead the way, I suppose.”

The flight went perfectly, because the Tornado’s engine was working even better than usual after yesterday’s maintenance. Tails flew more carefully than he usually did, because he thought Shadow might be a tiny bit nervous about flying and he didn’t want to make him regret agreeing to let Tails go to the trade show today. He was fairly sure the trade show staff weren’t banking on a plane touching down in their parking lot, but after one look at Shadow’s glower, they quickly decided not to argue with him about that. If nothing else, that made a change from the usual stores Tails flew down to visit, whose staff weren’t afraid of him and tended to ask him to bring a boring car instead.

To his utter relief, Shadow didn’t supervise him too closely or set any particular standards on what he could do here, but just trailed along behind him while he looked at all the most interesting gizmos on display. He filled a notepad with sketches and ideas of things he could do and various ways he could improve on the ideas of some particularly stuffy corporations he always enjoyed showing up whenever he could. There was no better feeling than releasing open-source schematics for something some greedy company was about to try to sell for a lot of money, and Tails ended the morning with several new ideas for how to do exactly that, just by listening to the corporate spiel and getting whatever glimpses he could of the tech while they were showing it off.

“How many more things do you want to look at there?” Shadow asked when they broke for lunch at a nearby café.

Tails took a big bite of his panini to give himself a moment to consider that, but there weren’t too many exciting things besides the ones he’d already seen and he already had enough greedy companies to show up for now. “I’m done, actually,” he said.

Shadow nodded thoughtfully. “Can you take a detour on the way back home?” he asked.

“Sure!” Tails said. “Where do you have in mind?”

“Nowhere in particular,” Shadow said. “The landscape just looked nicer than I’d expected from above, that’s all.”

Tails beamed at him, all his complaints about his unwanted overlord long forgotten. “I’ve flown over this place so many times I know exactly where to take you,” he said, quickly making a mental list of all the landmarks he wanted to fly over to take Shadow’s breath away. He was rewarded by a quiet nod and hurried to finish his lunch as fast as he could so he could get back to the Tornado without wasting a moment of show-off time.

By the time he got halfway through his long loop around the local area with Shadow asking occasional questions about the things he saw below, Tails had realised he’d completely misjudged him. It almost made him want to have Shadow keep looking after him, because he already knew that he didn’t have the self-control to make himself go to bed on time and eat healthy food like this, even if it made him feel this much better.

It wasn’t even a surprise any more when he found he got more done in the few hours between dinner and bedtime than he had all day yesterday. This morning had given him all the inspiration he needed and the afternoon had given him a break he would never have taken on his own, so he sketched out as many schematics as he could before he forgot his ideas, then started to throw together prototype circuits to get a good idea of how he might get some of them to work before Shadow came to send him off to bed. This time, Tails just decided to go willingly.

“Thanks, Shadow,” he said.

Shadow gave him a surprised look. “Really?”

Tails nodded. “Really. I’m glad you were here with me this weekend.”

“I thought you’d be glad to see the back of me tomorrow.”

“Actually...” Tails bit his lip, but it just felt mean to keep the thought to himself after how badly he’d been fighting him all weekend. “I wish you’d stay here with us forever,” he said, then he fled upstairs to go to bed before Shadow could say anything about that.

He slept great, because of course he did after such a long day, and he dreamed about half-sketched circuit diagrams until the front door slammed open with a bang that shook the whole house. Tails sat up, yawning, but he wasn’t bothered; Sonic never had the patience to open the door like a normal person. He tried to make himself lay back down and go back to sleep, because it was two in the morning and Shadow definitely wouldn’t want him to be awake right now, but curiosity drove him out of bed. He sneaked right out of his bedroom, flew over the creaky floorboards and settled in a quiet spot to eavesdrop on the pair downstairs.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Shadow was saying in a hushed voice.

“Um...” Sonic sounded wary. “About what?”

Shadow hesitated almost long enough for Tails to fall asleep on the stairs. “About moving in,” he said more quietly. “After this weekend... that is, if the offer’s still open.”

Sonic gasped. “Really?! You mean that?”

“I do. And be quiet, Tails is asleep.”

“Oops, sorry,” Sonic said, only a little more quietly. “What changed, though? You were pretty set on never living here.”

“Someone has to look after him,” Shadow snapped, “because you’re clearly not.”

Tails laughed to himself and went back to bed as Sonic rose to the bait and the two hedgehogs started to bicker downstairs. Apparently, he was getting his greatest dream and worst fear all at once, because his days of pulling all-nighters to spend thirty hours straight working on interesting projects and eating only junk food for weeks on end were now officially at an end. That probably shouldn’t have made him smile as much as it did, he thought as he let himself drift back off to sleep over the muffled sounds of a friendly argument rapidly brewing towards an all-out fight downstairs.