Work Text:
He lay on the ground, clothes smoking, mustache smoking, smoke thick in the air and being coughed out copiously from his lungs.
He was in fairly bad shape, but he could feel the healing already at work – the aftereffects (as he well remembered) of contact with the Master Emerald.
Unfortunately it hadn’t been very long contact; Granddad’s stupid hedgehog had appeared beside him, pressed it into his hands in the nick of time, and then yanked it away again as soon as they had reached the solid ground of earth. Little jerk.
Little jerk. It had saved his life, sure, but what good was that when everything that he’d thought about his life had turned out to be a lie?
He’d had family. He’d had family, a man who was blood family and a genius to boot, and no one had ever told him. They’d let him grow up thinking he was totally alone in the world, a freak who would never have anything in common with another living soul.
They had lied to him. In particular, she had lied to him. Sister Mary Catherine, his favorite nun in all the orphanage, the one who praised him when he did good and cuddled him when he was sick and picked him up when people pushed him down. (The one who he mentally cast as Mommy in his rare, embarrassing daydreams about what it might be like to actually have one.).
She had lied. He’d asked about his family all the time when he was little, and she’d pretended to investigate it for him, and she’d come back and lied that there was no one.
He’d believed her, internalized it, never even thought to question. Never done any of his own research. Oh, he was an idiot, an idiot, but it was them who had made an idiot of him and could not be allowed to get away with it.
“Not you,” he muttered to himself, as he started walking across the barren, smoking field. He didn’t even know what country he was in, but it didn’t matter – he would find the people who had done this to him and he would make them pay. “I saved the world, and everyone in it, but not you.”
He rang the doorbell. While he waited for an answer he tried to make his mustache presentable, but there wasn’t much to be done for the rest of him – he was still in his tattered spacesuit and broken goggles, still reeking of smoke.
A young dark-skinned woman opened the door – a caretaker, per his research. “Good evening,” he said, smiling, pulling out a pocketful of charm from somewhere. “I’m here to see Sister Mary Catherine. I’m an old friend.”
“Um. Is she expecting you?”
He chuckled, and it sounded sinister even to his own ears. “Oh, I don’t imagine she is.” Then he made an effort to focus on the girl. “Word to the wise, my dear: I don’t know what they pay you, but it’s not enough to compensate you for what’s going to happen to you if you don’t let me in to have a nice little chat with my old friend and teacher. Back away from the door now. I’ll be out of your hair in five minutes. Cross my heart, hope to die.”
She did make one more effort to obstruct him. “Sir, I- I’m going to call the police-…”
But she was already backing away, so he barged on in without feeling bothered. “As long as they’re not going to get here in the next five minutes and interrupt me, be my guest.”
He found his target in the living room, sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, wrapped in blankets and dressed not much different than he remembered her. Small and wizened now though, and with white hair.
“Sister Mary Catherine,” he said from the doorway. His voice came out soft and kind of uncertain – almost a question. No sign of the anger that had propelled him to a whole nother continent without even taking the time to shower and change his clothes.
She turned a little in her chair. “Can I help you?”
He assessed her voice and the quality of her movements, and decided they supported what the medical records said. Old, yes. Slow, yes. But not senile.
“Yes. I, um, I wanted to talk to you. It’s me, Ivo Robotnik. Um-. When I was little you used to call me Ivy.” (And he’d loved that, and when some of the other boys tried to spoil it by calling him Poison Ivy, he retaliated by going into their underwear drawers and rubbing everything with actual poison ivy. It was totally worth the beating they gave him for it.).
She reacted right away. “Ivy? My little Ivy? Is it really?”
“Yes – no no, don’t get up, here.” He came in and came over to her, and crouched down on the carpet so that she wouldn’t have to crane. “Here I am. Yes, it’s me. Ivo Robotnik, all grown up.”
“Oh my goodness.” She reached out and touched his cheek, and he found himself closing his eyes and leaning into it – like always. “It’s been a long time.” She laughed a little. “Have you come to say goodbye? I was told the cancer is operable, but, you know, they never really tell me anything.”
He swallowed. Pulled away from her. “It is operable; I looked at your records. But that’s not why I’m here.” He had rehearsed this over and over, and he would not mess it up. “Sister Mary Catherine, you lied to me.”
Her smile faded. “I what?”
“Lied. To me.” Talking was hard and the words came out stiff, but he pressed on. “About my family. About my-. My grandfather. He was alive. I’ve met him. And now I know.”
She pressed her lips together. Finally she said: “You know?”
“I know.”
“Oh Ivy… I’m so sorry. I never, ever wanted you to find out.” She reached down and grabbed for his hands and he let her, mostly because he was still sort of shellshocked by the whole meeting.
But then she started babbling, and shellshocked didn’t even begin to describe what it did to him. “I never wanted you to think of him again. That disgusting, evil old man!” He had only rarely seen Sister Mary Catherine this agitated. “The cold-hearted bastard. I hope God will forgive him because I never can. I told him not to do it – I told him, I said, You can’t take the sister and leave the brother here, what’s the matter with you, and he said Dear lady I can do whatever I want and Maria is adorable and he wouldn’t listen to a word I said. I couldn’t stop him.” She was squeezing his hands, surprisingly strong for someone so old. “I tried. I’m so sorry, Ivy.”
Take the sister and leave the brother here. Grandpa had rejected him, when he was too young to even remember, and his caretaker found that so upsetting that she wouldn’t even tell him about it. He… wasn’t sure what to feel about that, exactly, but he was sure that murderous vengeance was no longer appropriate. And that was a relief, actually. He didn’t want to harm Sister Mary Catherine.
Instead he stood up to go – he probably didn’t have much time before the police arrived. She struggled up out of her chair too, and he offered an arm to help her because she really was looking frail now. As soon as she was upright, she swooped in to hug him the way she did when he was seven.
He had easily a foot of height on her now, but still, his body remembered her hug and after a moment he found himself hugging back.
Maybe in retrospect it was a good thing he’d saved the world after all.
The End.
I'm still trying to work out how the whole Gerald Situation fits with what we were told about Ivo's history in earlier movies. Because given Ivo's age, "fifty years" of imprisonment doesn't seem to cover the gap - Gerald would have been out in circulation, living with Maria, while he was a kid.
Apparently Maria is ID'd as a cousin in the games somewhere, but as best I could tell, in the movie they didn't say so. Ivo *does* say he has no aunts/uncles though, so, that would make Maria a sibling in my book.
Anyway let me know what you think!