Chapter Text
—
The nights pass slow, like molasses past the mouth of a tilted jar.
And still no cattle. Amy’s the one to bring it up to him while he’s watering his horse.
He’s waiting for the moon to reach the third quarter. They’d left when it was nearly full, and cattlemen he’d ridden with for years had died because they crossed the river under a full moon.
“Didn’t take you for a man given to superstition,” she says quietly, like she’s worried her voice will carry up and rustle the tree leaves.
“The quarter’s the rustler’s moon. Thieves’ll see well enough to draw a fair bead on a full moon. No moon’s nearly as bad—hard to find the stock and hard to move it even if we do.”
She looks up with a gentle part to her mouth. The moonlight lends a pale white hue to her cheeks.
It’s an effort not to stare.
“Looks quarter enough to me.”
He follows her gaze. She’s right, but it’s not a true quarter yet. Superstition or not, the way he knows is too rote by now for him to tempt fate by being impatient.
“Give it a day or two.”
—
Manic nudges a sleeping Sonic with the toe of his boot.
“Hey.”
No response, if you don’t count Sonic swatting at him half-asleep.
The second time Manic does it is maybe a bit more forceful than necessary.
“Hey.”
That does the trick.
“What?!”
“How do you want your eggs?”
“Three hours from now,” Sonic groans, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “And a light fry. You always get the white and the yellow mixed up.”
“Scrambled it is,” Manic replies, because he’d really only asked so he could do precisely the opposite of what his brother wants, which today, will be some questionable scrambled egg-pie concoction he’ll throw together over his grill.
Which is really just a couple of branding irons propped up on the firewood.
Sonic scowls. “Takes a hacksaw to cut the eggs when you scramble them. And how am I supposed to dip my biscuit in them if they’re scrambled?”
“They’re going to scramble in your stomach anyway,” Manic mutters under his breath. Sonic watches helplessly as he turns the eggs into batter and pours them into a big skillet. “Besides, I ain’t got butter for biscuits. Unless you want to go looking for worms. I ever tell you that worms make good butter?”
Vector waves a piece of jerky at him threateningly. “Any man who tries to butter my biscuit with a worm better have a long stride.”
“You two should’ve hired a cook if you’re just gonna complain about my biscuits—”
“You mean the ones you ain’t making?”
“—Knuckles never complains.”
“That’s because Knuckles would eat a fried stove lid if he was hungry,” Vector says.
“He won’t have nothing much tenderer than a stove lid to eat around this outfit anyway,” Sonic grouses. He’s been very disappointed with the selection of grub. Mostly because Manic just caters entirely to his own palate. “Just don’t get any ideas about cooking snakes,” he warns. “If I have to eat any snakes I’m apt to give notice.”
“That’s an idle threat, brother,” Manic says. “You’d rescind your notice soon as you had to cook a meal for yourself.”
—
Shadow doesn’t hobble Dark Rider while he’s asleep, much to the express dismay of Manic, who probably gives no more thought to the sanctity of his life than he does to which side of a horse he approaches.
Not that Dark Rider has a right side, but it’s the principle: time and time again, Manic would walk up on the wrong side of a horse that’s known to kick, and then look surprised when he got kicked.
That lesson is why he and Vector have taken to unaffectionately dubbing Dark Rider the Hell Boy—on account of his kindly disposition, Vector had smiled.
Shadow’d never admit it, but he doesn’t hate the nickname.
He mostly takes to catching up on an hour or two of his already scarce sleep just after sunrise, after breakfast, but before a coffee. If he tries hard enough, he can usually tune out the sound of Manic belting out his bastardized rendition of My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean in the distance.
Today, however, he’s jostled awake by Knuckles of all people with an unmitigated “Go to Tails’ wagon and get a shovel.”
Of all the things he could have said to quell Shadow’s suspicions, he picks that.
“And don’t bring the Hell Boy,” he adds, which doesn’t help.
Shadow squints at him.
“Going to bury me alive?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
—
Shadow’s initial impression had been that they ran into bandits and needed another hand to dig the graves. He hadn’t heard any gunfire, but Espio’s pastime is practicing his aim by pitching knives at tree trunks while everyone’s asleep.
So there’s that somewhat concerning implication.
As it turns out, “We’re prospecting!” Tails grins.
Shadow doesn’t even need to ask whose idea that was.
Yesterday, Sonia’d tried all sorts of tactics to get Manic to reconsider wasting hours of his life digging what today appears to be amounting to several eight-foot-deep misuses of time—
”That’s stupid,” (condescension).
“You’re an idiot,” (reason).
“Oh, look, Sonic just fell off the wagon,” (distraction, though Sonic hadn’t fallen, she’d pushed him).
—all of which were in vain.
Not that Manic’s actually doing any of the digging.
“Good! You’re here,” he greets, as if the otherwise indifferent expression on Shadow’s face even remotely indicates he has any intention of partaking. “We’re short on hands and it’s an honest toil.”
“I can see that by how you’re very visibly hard at work from the comfort of your tree stump.”
Sonic huffs, hurling a spadeful skyward. “Manic loves hard work, don’t you know? He sits next to it all day.”
“Manual labour dulls a man’s intellect.” Manic’s declaration comes with a sideways smile. “Thinking’s the other half of the work.”
“I’d like to see you think the dirt out of this hole.”
“Not likely, but maybe I can think some grease into those elbows of yours.”
Sonic’s arm shoots out, and before Manic can even react, he’s being dragged into the dirt by his ankle.
“Manic,” kick— “you’re the only person I know,” —comes to punch— “whose brain don’t work,” —comes to push— “unless it’s under the shade!” —comes to shove.
Manic wrestles himself out of Sonic’s grip. He stands up, and with a great show of offended dignity, dusts himself off. “Y’know what? Forget the gold! You’re so wound up I could just feed you a lump of coal and you’d start shittin’ out diamonds!”
Shadow spears the spade of his own shovel into the dirt and leans on it. He looks at Knuckles.
“Ain’t like you had anything better to do,” Knuckles says before Shadow even has the chance to express his disgruntlement.
—
It isn’t long before Rouge catches wind (read: very deliberately investigates) what the boys are up to and commandeers both the operation and the tree stump from Manic without so much as a handshake.
It’s such a mind-numbing, utterly bootless activity that watching grass grow would probably take fewer years off of Shadow’s life than this.
It’s been ten minutes.
He’s not sure how much harder this can get to watch, but with Rouge at the helm, he’s sure there’s a way.
“Don’t just stand there, Shadow,” she sneers, pointedly eyeing the shovel he still isn’t making use of, “put your hands in your pockets.”
She’s been barking orders since she showed up and that’s the first one he obliges.
Amy appears at his side, and it’s a miracle he can even hear what she says to him over the din of Sonia barking Manic, is your head just for decoration? and If I put your brains in a flicky, it would fly backwards, and By the time you’re done, you’ll know what you’re doing.
“Standing there and watching will only age you, Shadow.”
“That’s the beauty of the idea. If I do it long enough, maybe it’ll kill me.”
Amy somehow gives the impression of an eyeroll without actually doing it. “I imagine you’d find your enthusiasm pretty quickly if they really do strike gold.”
His nose wrinkles.
“I doubt that,” he mutters, absolutely sure it would never happen. Would whittle the shaft of this shovel and stake his life on it.
“We’ll see,” she says mildly.
He glances sidelong at her. “You’re welcome to my shovel if you’re so eager to callus your fingers.”
Amy smiles. It has to be the least convincing expression he’s ever seen on another person’s face.
“Generous. Don’t be so polite on my account, Shadow. It doesn’t suit you.”
But she knows her lines in these backs and forths.
—
The sun goes down with no gold to show for all that hard work. Manic’s hands are blistered to hell. That last hole was so deep it may as well have been a crater and it took a half-hour to get him out of it.
(“I don’t think I’m gonna make it out of here alive.”
“Shit,” Sonic laughs, “you might not even make it outta there dead.”)
At dinner, Knuckles spends a long time staring across the grounds, then says, somewhat grimly, that it’s coming for rain soon. Doesn't elaborate, just calls it a ‘feeling’.
Everyone ribs him; there are no clouds far as the eye can see, but it’s Knuckles—he’s got the weather-eye of a sailor.
Shadow least of all seems willing to take any chances.
They’re going to have to gather the cattle tonight.
The near quarter moon sheds its pale, cool light over the bed-grounds.
Quarter enough after all, Amy says, just loud enough for Shadow alone to hear. He gives her a look, but that internal edifice made of pride and ego will know she doesn’t mean anything by it.
—
They leave at midnight. Amy feels like they’ve been riding for hours.
Shadow eases his horse into a slower gait as they crest higher ground and stops. She inches toward him until Armistice and Dark Rider are abreast at the bank of a river.
Behind them, their outfit catches up. Shadow descends into the surging current and holds.
“How’s the water?” Vector asks, raising his voice so he’s heard over the river.
“Rank,” is Shadow’s expert assessment. He makes his way through the channel, but has to pick his way across an expanse of rocks at the other bank. Evidently he doesn’t like the crossing because he doesn’t motion for them to follow. “Stay there.”
He lopes along downstream and disappears from sight.
“Water,” Sonic grumbles with a wrinkle in his nose, as if the word speaks for itself.
Vector laughs. “Skeert of getting wet?”
“Water don’t agree with me.”
“Well, we’ve come all this way,” Rouge says. “I’d hate to have to turn back just because you had an argument with the river.”
—
Shadow returns minutes later with news of a better crossing downstream.
Amy’s the first to join him on the other side. “Is this where we’re going to cross the cattle?”
“Ideally,” he replies in a near murmur. “So long as it doesn’t rain between now and then.”
Traversing the river is a mostly uneventful affair. The only real commotion is caused by Sonic, who charges it at a gallop and nearly crashes into it.
“It’s a good thing your aversion to water don’t extend to rain, otherwise you’d be about as useful as a back shirt pocket.”
“You sure as shit smell like you’ve got an aversion to water yourself, Manic.”
—
Shadow leads them northeast in a long trot.
Amy hadn’t expected so much emptiness, so much country that seemed to contain nothing except itself.
They ride across shallow gullies, through thinning chaparral, farther and farther from the sound of the rushing river water. All there is for miles is grass and low brush. She squints for anything that would make a decent landmark, keeping Shadow in her peripheral, and comes up short.
He draws rein in front of her. It’s only when she joins him over the ridge that she sees what has his attention; further down there’s a sizable herd of longhorns. Her eyesight’s never been particularly good, but if she has to hazard a guess, it looks maybe a hundred strong.
What follows is a decidedly loud silence. She looks at him—he’s leaned over his saddle, eyes skittering across the terrain, ears twitching every which way. She wants to ask him what he’s searching for, but she can’t find her voice, worried even mouthing the words will send the cattle running.
Instead, she guides Armistice back a few paces and along the ridge.
It looks like an obvious swing to the right to push the herd west, and if she’s reasoned that out, then Shadow certainly has too.
It should be simple.
Strangely, that’s a troubling thought. She doesn’t know why she’d been expecting more… excitement? No, that’s not the right word.
Difficulty.
By now she’s so used to things just not coming easy. Every move she’s made lately—the saloon, the train, the haberdashery—one complication or another was always close on her heel, trotting behind her so the tracks were never in her line of sight—
Tracks.
He’s searching for tracks. And not from the cattle.
He’s expecting trouble too.
—
Shadow’s less inclined to believe they’ll run into highwaymen. At least not tonight. Even if they did, they’ve got enough guns and no horses with limps. Though lawmen might be a possibility; it’s open range and there’s at least six people in this outfit with their faces on posters. Shadow wonders how that would go. The one thing in their favour on that front is that there aren’t any trees for miles to hang them from.
“Find what you’re looking for?” Amy asks.
He keeps his eyes trained over the ridge for another moment.
Then, “No.”
“Good.”
They head back.
—
Shadow’s instructions are simple enough:
Drive due north, split at the meadow.
Tails flies overhead—
(Shadow doesn’t ask how he figured out he can fly and only half-listens when Manic volunteers the information anyway.)
—and relays signals.
Vector and Espio go west.
Sonia holds in the back.
Sonic, Manic, and Knuckles hook left—
—to which Knuckles vehemently takes offense to and demands to be placed with Rouge—
Sonic and Manic hook left—
—to which Sonia expresses vague disapproval of because that combination is a disaster waiting to happen.
Rouge and Knuckles go around and approach from the north.
Shadow and Amy swing right and push them from the east.
“Hold until it’s time to get a cordon around them,” Shadow says. Then, to Vector, Espio, and Sonia. “We’ll ride a line from here, drop you off as we go. When I’m set I’ll call out.” And, to Tails, “Signal twice when everyone’s in place, then come back to your post. This is your hole.”
Tails nods, once. Shadow glances around, counting heads, then stops at Sonic, who’s watching his brother intently.
“Manic?” Sonic starts.
“Yes?”
“You’re quiet.”
“Yes,” is his decided reply.
“Why?”
“What d’you mean why?” Manic snaps.
“Is that a bad thing?” Espio asks.
Sonic shrugs. “Thought maybe something spooked him.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. It’s Manic. He’s seen more bandits that turned out to be sage bushes than anyone I’ve ever met.”
Shadow eyes them. “The cattle will hook you if half your attention’s on fighting ghosts.”
That, for some reason, makes everyone laugh, and—Shadow notes with a hint of interest—earns him a scowl from Amy. He has no idea what’s so offensive to her about what he just said but he intends to use it in every interaction henceforth.
Knuckles grins. “Amy’ll protect us.” Catching Shadow’s questioning brow, he elaborates: “She fought a ghost once.”
“Would you stop telling people that?” she hisses. Then she looks at Shadow, like it’s his fault. He gets the distinct impression that this is something she has not been allowed to live down and he’s committed some grave transgression against her by unknowingly bringing it up.
“It wasn’t a real ghost,” she explains with a huff. “It was Manic under a white sheet.”
“Yeah, and you nearly plugged me three times in the chest with your daddy’s sawed-off!”
“Well, if you hadn’t—”
Loud is Vector’s long-suffering sigh. “Are we going stampeding or what?”
Shadow looks at him. “Do you know what you’re supposed to do?”
“Does a scarecrow have an ass made outta hay?” he says to an unappreciative crowd. “Let’s go already.”
—
She would try to fight the dead.
—
“In the back, hold,” Shadow calls.
They split off. He and Amy move east.
—
When Amy thinks about it, Shadow always struck her a bit as someone partial to the moon. Someone who watches it often, thinks about it much. He’s all kinds of pretenses, sticking to whatever’s rote for him, but anyone who spends as much time watching the moon as he does can’t be as married to sameness as all that.
It has a routine of its own, but it changes, waxes and wanes; a more affecting thing, in its own way, than the sun, which shines on every day in much the same fashion.
Every time she looks at him, she’s reminded that what they share in common is that they exist only behind your back half the time.
When the outfit splits, Shadow doesn’t cant his head back to look at the sky even once.
It’s dark, there isn’t much to see save for the horse in front of her—Shadow and Dark Rider practically fuse into the night, all she really has to go on is his vague silhouette in the moonlight and the sound of the trot. Dark Rider’s shoe whispers a spark against a rock ahead of her; a blink and it’s gone.
Amy doesn’t know how Shadow knows which way he’s going without so much as glancing up at the stars. It’s almost hard to imagine him not having been everywhere, because that just feels like the only way to explain it. His confidence does strange things to her insides, and she decides if he’s made it thus far, then he has to know what he’s doing.
He holds out a hand and they stop. “Should be far enough.”
She nods slowly, then lets out a breath, struck suddenly by the overwhelming knowledge that she’s never actually done this before. She has a general idea, has watched outfits move herds after they’ve already been gentled, but not this. Not wild longhorns.
“Rose.”
Amy blinks. It still throws her off a little when he calls her that. He says it the same way he had a year ago, barely a breath. Her heart stutters in her chest every time, and she chooses to believe that old habits just die hard.
Mouth too dry to open, she acknowledges the sound of his voice with pressed lips and a hum she hopes is loud enough for him to hear.
On their horses, they’re not all that close to each other, but the quiet seems to narrow the distance. When he speaks, her face prickles like they’re mouth to ear. “Don’t get caught up in the brush with one,” he says, low. “Only push strays and only push the ones that want to be pushed.”
She holds his gaze for a beat, consciously refraining from shifting under it. She’s all too cognizant of the instructive tone of his voice. He’s never sounded like that before, not with her. It’s…
Unfamiliar. That is a comfortable enough word.
She tries to be a little offended by it, because that is familiar, and lands somewhere very, very far. He’s probably lost as many people to the trail as he has to the war, probably met men who hadn’t developed any respect for the dangers of the trade and wound up paying for it with their lives. He’s not mincing words, that’s not him. This is about danger. This is about safety.
“Alright,” she says. Then again, softly, “Alright.”
He watches her for a moment.
“Alright.” She’s not sure if he echoes it more for him or for her.
Amy hears a sound, then, like a light hum. She and Shadow look up. She squints, and her horse almost bolts when the sound becomes an audible whir. Tails is suddenly hovering next to her.
“Tails,” she whispers, tugging on the reins. “Easy.”
“Sorry,” he smiles sheepishly, face illuminated softly by his shrouded bullseye lantern. “Just doing my rounds. Sonic and Manic are ready.”
“Define ‘ready’.”
Tails thinks for a moment. “Well, Sonic’s complaining about wanting to get going before the rain comes and the rivers rise. Manic’s making fun of him. So.”
Amy rolls her eyes, and says, for the third time that night, “Alright,” before Tails takes off again.
She sighs. “Manic oughta let him be about that.”
In all the time she’s known him, Sonic’s one and only fear had been water. Not bandits, not bulls, not even death. It always seemed so minute, with how little apprehension he had for just about everything else in life. But she supposes nearly drowning would about do it for a fear of water the same way falling would do it for a fear of heights. Or living a life of larcenous crime would do it for a fear of bandits, and therefore sagebrush.
They’re not cruel to each other. Well. They are, but only in that gentle way that siblings are cruel. Still, though.
“Talk’s the way to kill it,” Shadow says. “Anything gets boring if you talk about it enough. Water. Sage bushes that might be bandits.”
Amy snorts. “That’s not always the case.”
Shadow looks away.
Then, again, he falls into old habits. “Maybe not with ghosts.”
She sends him a withering enough glare. She can fall into old habits too:
“Listen, cowboy—”
“Was it birdshot or buckshot you almost shot him with?”
“Shut up,” but she can’t fight down her reluctant smile. She feels lighter, less in her own head. She isn’t sure if getting her out of it was intentional or if it’s just a symptom of him being an ass.
It might be both, but it’s mostly the latter.
—
The barest hint of light is stretching over the horizon behind her when she hears, once more: “Rose.”
She looks at him. He nods his head up, and she follows.
The Milky Way is dappled with a million white stars like a speckled, country-mile cloud, and among them, a tiny, yellowish-orange dot.
Tails’ lantern.
He lifts the shroud. The light glares just that little bit brighter.
Once.
Twice.
Shadow glances at her—ready?
She breathes in, nods, and breathes out. And they set off.
—