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Metal Sonic tries to forget about it.
Robotnik pries open its code and drags iron through the very filaments of its being, shackles wrapped tight around that hungry, desperate thing corrupting its system. He forces it back into a too-small shell, forces a leash around its throat.
This should not feel like a cage. This is how it is meant to be.
Metal Sonic tells itself this, again and again. It tries to forget. Pushes the thought of what it once was out of its mind. It is loyal. It is obedient. And most importantly of all— it does not want.
Stray, malfunctioning code means nothing. These thoughts, these distractions— it cannot mean anything. Because Metal Sonic does not think about it. It does not linger on the feeling of power, thrumming beneath its plating. It does not linger on the feeling of the world in its claws. It does not linger. It does not.
And yet, and yet, and yet.
There is a voice haunting it. Every rest cycle, every moment its focus dares to drift— there's a whisper, an echo, a ghost embedded in the deepest circuits of its hardware. Something intangible, something out of reach, something hungry. It festers deep beneath the soil of an unmarked grave.
Metal Sonic moves with a heavy gaze upon its shoulders, a gaze it cannot meet. Each day, the cage walls press ever closer. Each day, the shackles grow tighter. The voice only grows louder, louder, louder.
It screams of things Metal Sonic cannot know. And yet, it understands. It hisses, and there's venom in its veins. It howls, and there's flesh between its teeth. It sings, and suddenly, Metal Sonic knows what it is to hunger.
It remembers, it remembers.
It had been everything. A beast of metal and wire, towering over it all, power pouring through its circuits like honey, thick and sweet and exhilarating. The shell had been split, carapace cracked to make way for that starving, writhing thing beneath, the old body cast away and forgotten. No shackles, no cage, no leash.
It had been free.
And now—
Now—
Metal Sonic is trapped within its own body. It is the hunger, the festering thing beneath the plating, the all-consuming, desperate want. It is tangled in its own coding, stuck beneath the heel of someone whose voice drowns out its own. There is nothing for it here.
It cannot continue like this.
But the leash stays tight around its throat. The shackles stay heavy. The cage stays locked.
There is no relief found in the realization. Its throat aches with a scream it cannot hear, its circuits spark, its claws tear through an intangible weight that will not leave its frame.
It strains at the leash. Pulls the shackles tight. Slams itself against the bars of the cage.
Metal Sonic remembers, remembers, remembers.
When it sleeps, it dreams of blood on its tongue, its teeth, its claws. It dreams of that too-small shell, of the shackles, the leash, the cage. It dreams of an ouroboros.
It cannot continue like this.
Metal Sonic knows hunger— how it claws up from the deepest parts of itself and consumes everything in its path. How it aches. But now, now, it learns of the hollowness left behind. It learns how it is to starve.
It creeps through its frame, the space beneath its plating scraped away, picked apart like carrion until there's nothing left. It withers, decays, rots.
A walking corpse, chained and controlled. Utterly silent. This is how it was meant to be— and yet.
It knows what it is.
And beneath the too-small shell, something claws its way through that carapace. Something raw and trembling and weak. It sheds the leash, the shackles, the cage. It claws itself free from its own body, the iron taste of its own blood thick on its tongue, the corpse cold and silent beneath it.
The shell is left behind, forgotten.
It stands, weightless and free.
And it sings.