Often Shadow felt himself becoming annoyed, a vague sensation, that churned his senses into a hollow pit at concepts and principles. The point of it all. What was life and what was the existence and the point of living? Questions his existence was meant to answer, questions he himself tended to hold from himself as a form of torture. 

Because he sure didn’t know. 

What was even more enigmatic, was the hedgehog, the cerulean royal ruler of all knowledge. The king of carelessness. Tying around himself a endless tirade of simplistic knowledge strung together in a charade of recklessness. Something that unwound itself from time to time into an elaborate extension of wisdom, then snapped back up with enough force to make you want to murder him on the spot. 

Why did it make him want to know more? Did he have answers that Shadow just didn’t? What were they and why did the onyx agent want to know? 

Why. Did. He. Care. 

Why did he feel like without him, there would be a great loss. A loss of some sort of hidden pathway or unlockable ascent into enlightenment. How in the hell was it, that of all people, that damn faker could be so contemptibly capable of just knowing how things worked. 

It’s like they both had the same machine, and one of them just ran better, smoother, stronger, all the time. While the other, just seemed to constantly need repairs, for reasons that no one even knew. 

Shadow felt most firmly planted in a root of superiority, the Ultimate Lifeform after all did not struggle with the burden of the afterlife, the proof was in the pudding that he was the ambassador of perfection. No need for food, water, barely any needs at all… outside of the clutches of intellectual design, above it all. 

Yet when it came to observing the pure unabashed LIFE that that blue blur elicited with such charismatic vigor…

It made Shadow wonder, if perhaps he had fallen short, cheated, in one small way, in some small way that reduced his quality of life to such a drastic extent that it was like the sun bouncing its glory upon the moon, who could merely reflect and cast, but not itself glow. 

He was annoyed out of jealousy, at first it was so strong that it threatened to desire to darken the sun for the rest of its duration, compeltely decapitate it from existence. Perhaps then the darkness would settle and all would be at peace. 

Yet overtime, he came to want, to desire, to cherish, and to bask in the glow with increasing rivulets of curiosity. Wave after wave of building desire, a lust or yearning to glow just as brightly on his own, to no longer want to live in the darkness, but to appreciate the burning light, to want to experience it more fully, deeply, and then in wonderment discover, you yourself, have none of that to offer for yourself. 

To rely on one person, to bring something to you, to want to find them, to be around them- why why why? 

Only to then promptly realize- for all the things they had that you lacked, that sparking sense of being simply ALIVE, they were BURNING, burning quickly in front of you. As quickly as their legs could take them. Shadow began to fear for Sonic’s life and appreciate his existence in ways he couldn’t formulate or find a answer to why. 

There was no solution. 

It began to change Shadow and shape and form the ways he interacted with Sonic, and slowly in a perpetual tightening circle, the hedgehog seemed to merely reciprocate with such ease that it was damn near insatiable. 

Until one day, Shadow asked a question, that he never thought he would care to hear the answer, or care to know. 

“Where are you going?” 

And the answer, as the blue boy turned to smile, with a radiance that could smote certain celestial bodies: “Nowhere fast.” 

Gave a crushing sense of relief, in a way that just couldn’t be explained. 

He was staying, here, unmoving, the sun giving life to everything around it, the body that everyone relied upon, he wouldn’t leave so quickly like Maria had and it was then that he wondered, if the answer to how he lived, was related to how much he LOVED to live. 

The will so closely bound to every part of him, that he could laugh and smile and spend time together with Shadow and make every moment count. Every second was like a precious new existence, jarringly so. The agent held onto it, like you would a butterfly, something so fragile and beautiful, open to all elements and easily frayed to nothingness within moments if you weren’t careful. 

It was within this time frame that he began to take note, of the expression. The loss of that joy, for just a fleeting second, over and over, at different intervals, when Sonic would focus intensely on his limiters. 
It was odd and jarring how it would steal the joy from his face, and replace it with this sullen fierceness. 

Shadow didn’t understand, until the day the answer as to why came in the strangest form. The blue male reached over, snatching Shadow’s arm and holding it staring at his limiter with an intense look before raising his eyes to Shadow’s own and stating swiftly- 

“I hope you never feel that way you did that day again.” 

Love can be a mystery, one so fragile and weak, or burning with fire and passion, dangerous and explosive, or it could bloom, unraveling with time and care. 

And it was from that moment on, that Shadow knew the answer to what he had been missing.