Chapter Text
“(Shadow) Shadow. Look, Shadow (Shadow)..." Treetops spin in a circle as sun rays blink behind Maria's head. She smiles lovingly under the golden halo with her curls hanging over her ears. "Is it everything you dreamed it would be, Shadow (Shadow)...?"
"Maria..." Shadow pulled his eyelids apart to blink tearfully at the ceiling. He looked past the intertwined fingers on his chest and over the scarred shoes that faced the entrance. His lost purity recaptured the best of him when he saw sunshine swimming through the door's wooden slats. He adjusted his sore body into a sitting position.
Amy Rose's muggy breath touched his fingertips to remind him that her body was clinging to his fur like leather. The artificial life form succeeded in shedding her latex grip as carefully as his hands would allow. He rose to his feet with a stumble to the left and a stumble to the right. Refraining from glancing down at the girl below him, he hobbled into the nave of sunbeams with his hand in front of his eyes.
"(Do what you dreamed…dreamed…) Shadow..."
Shadow opened the door and let Heaven in, removing his palm to consume Maria's Kingdom Come.
"Do it for me…"
The rainforest was teeming with green and gold. Shadow lowered his arm completely, his eyes coming alive. As a testament to his reawakening, the soles of his shoes guided his body from tree branch to tree branch, touring him around the nirvana. The Earth was so young, so untouched, so pure. It unsettled him.
Shadow backflipped off a tree's limb and landed in a dell that stood across from a waterfall. Holding his unhealed chest, he pantingly scanned the vale in search of an ambush. Peace was a lie with a warm smile, after all. The ambush Shadow ended up shielding himself from was led by butterflies bursting forth from a parasol of ferns. They circled his head before winging into the heavens above.
Stunned, he looked earthwards to watch grass blades drip with the last of the rainstorm's pearls. Miles and miles of buds blossomed across the valley's emerald smile as sunlight pulled back the curtain of darkness. The anthropoid stood rigidly, a lone shadow in the bosom of Earth's heaven, feeling out of place and perfectly in it. After glancing from here to there to confirm that no one was eavesdropping, Shadow let his eyelids drop onto his cheeks. He tilted his head back and welcomed a kiss from the breeze; its humid breath slipped through his quills with the warmth of Maria's fingers, peeling back his defenses like snakeskin falling into a heap around his ankles.
The ultimate life form had never appreciated standing in an open field of peace two years ago. Despite his misgiving toward being alive (and therefore, purposeless), he was a blank music sheet ready to be written on by Earth's composer at this moment. Colorful birds perched themselves in a kapok tree behind him.
'Bird songs,' Shadow recalled, mind still adrift in its own lagoon. 'You said you wanted to see the birds sing one day. Didn't you, Maria?'
―"I wonder if birds look as happy as they sound whenever they sing. Do you think they sing at night, too, Shadow?"
―"The professor said that birds only sing at night when city street lights disrupt their circadian rhythm. It is often believed that they confuse the sodium lamps with the sun."
―"You really know everything there is to know about Earth! Don't you, Shadow?"
The hoods of Shadow's eyes lifted wistfully. 'Maria...' His fingers dangled open. 'I don't know anything anymore.' What he did know was that twelve-year-old Maria would've outshone the sun if she had been able to stand among the orchids with him.
On the night of Shadow's birth, he and Maria swore they would spend their forevers in the meadows of Earth. To inhabit Earth was one of their dreams, if not the. Such a dream was the only world Shadow had ever known―the only planet he had ever lived on―and now, he wished it had never been. He was alive, no longer a hydrogen atom in the Milky Way. What would this new life be like if he were to walk back into his childhood world of innocence now?
Could he relive that life in this one? Would such a pure and perfect universe let him return after everything he had seen and done?
'No.' Shadow sealed his eyes shut, giving the orchids and butterflies his cheek. 'As it shouldn't.' He opened his eyes to let them travel across the charred fate lines in his palm. 'Because these hands would only destroy it.'
―FFFZZZZ―
"Hm?!" Something black darted past Shadow's ear, snapping him into a battle stance. "What was that thing?!"
The speck whizzed all around him―left, right, up, down, backward, forwards―he couldn't keep up. It circled and circled and circled him until it had him flailing to protect himself from its movements, but his enthusiasm flung him into an entirely different ambush.
―SPLASH―
Shadow growled with pond water up to his wrists and ankles. Drenched in humiliation, he squinted at his dominator with one cantankerous eye. The tiny blur hovered in front of him, zipping left and right with an innocent blink.
...It was a goddamn hummingbird.
"Tch." Shadow closed his eyes and rubbed between his ears. "Just what I needed: more pests.”
Inside the cabin, Amy Rose was finally coming to. She yawned as she stretched her arms with the laziness of a kitty cat. "Oh boy," she said. "I can't believe how sore I am. Shad―..." Amy performed a double-take on the empty spot next to her. She gasped, sitting up with her palms on her cheeks. "Oh, no! I've got to find Shadow! He's probably―"
"Standing right before you."
Amy triple-blinked at her damsel, who was leaning against the open doorway too coolly for his own good. "Uhhh...Shadow?" Amy raised her finger before pointing it at him with the opposite hand still on her cheek. "Why are you all wet?"
"Hmph." Refusing to open his eyes, Shadow dug his pinky into his ear to fish out whatever Loch Ness Monster might've been in it. "Some questions are better left unasked."
Amy pushed herself up and dusted off her shorts, folding her arms behind her back to lean into him. "Are you sure you didn't go take a bath in the ocean or something?" Her question was posed with a giggle in the grammar. "Not that I would blame you or anything for it, but..."
Shadow turned his head indifferently, eyebrow convulsing. "An unplanned dive into something more original seemed to suffice."
Amy's orbs sparkled with humor. "Ohh, I see." She closed an eyelid as she playfully echoed him, "An 'unplanned dive,' huh?"
He glanced at her with his eyes ajar. “And may I ask just what is it that you find so amusing?"
"Ohh, nothing!" Amy tied her fingers behind her back for a moment before untying them to point one at her nose. "You're just responding to me more, that's all! But don't worry! I think it's a good thing!"
Shadow found himself annoyed by the fact that he couldn't provide a better response than, "Hmph."
Amy giggled behind her closed lips.
While she was enjoying their new dynamic, something else tugged at him. He named the perpetrator after he had his back to her, "What did you mean last night when you said it was all my fault?"
Amy winced at the offended rumble he had punctuated it with. She dropped her sad eyes onto her sandals and played with her fingers. Tears were coming up again, but she bit them down.
Shadow glared at the jungle unblinkingly. "Very well." He walked outdoors.
"What was that?" Amy looked up to make sure he hadn't actually left her. She was devastated to find that he had. "Shadow?!" Familiar seisms of abandonment hit her heart as the clanking sound of his metal shoes grew farther and farther away. “H...Hey! Don't go!" Her hand implored his back to return to her. "Come on, Shadow!"
Shadow was already a dot.
Amy disguised her devastation with flaring anger. "Oooh, I hate being left behind!―Shadow!" She chased after him in a knock-kneed sprint. "Wait for ME, Shadow!"
"I would advise you to stay right where you are," he recommended from afar.
"No way!" Amy clapped back. "What're you, insane?!"
"It'll be safer for you here." Shadow's tone was mild in temperature. There wasn't even a hint of fieriness, just his cool sense of composure.
"We're supposed to be looking for a way out together, remember?" Amy mentioned, not nearly as cool-headed as her clearly ungrateful ‘maiden.’
To her, Shadow's stride was infuriatingly graceful and smooth, like he ruled the very earth he walked on without needing to repay it for saving him. His elbows would reach the level of his waist as his arms swayed with purpose instead of Sonic's leisure, milking the superiority complex. "It is best that I find one of the seven Chaos Emeralds on my own. Professor Gerald once said that the Mystic Ruins was the home of the Master Emerald. If so, then one or all of the master's servers would naturally return to their original location after separating in space. That is, unless that pathetic military has confiscated them first, which would call for an entirely different quest much sooner than what is necessary."
The way Shadow's voice darkened gave Amy a little tremor. It was horribly easy to picture him bathing the windows of a military base in blood. She didn't want to see that―neither the red windows nor the bloodthirsty Shadow―because this Shadow wouldn't do that. This Shadow was supposed to be Maria's Shadow, right? The Shadow who fought for love, not destruction.
"G.U.N. doesn't have any Chaos Emeralds," Amy testified. "Not even Dr. Eggman has one! We've all been looking for them ever since the Biolizard split them up!"
Satisfaction dripped from Shadow's reply, "Then my search will begin here."
"But...!" 'But what?' Amy reconsidered their prospects. Finding the end of the jungle's maze was ideal, but finding the Chaos Emerald would allow them to teleport anywhere. Since Shadow owed her, she could probably convince him to help her find Sonic in one of the Sonic spots she had mapped out.
"If that's how things are," Amy crooned, enlightened by her new point of view, "then why not let me help you? I may not have a map, but I can point out the hot spots when they turn up! Maybe I can even check the Chao Garden while you look around the jungle!”
Shadow's muzzle turned toward his shoulder, but his eyes didn't turn toward her. "Can you recall where that is?"
"You bet!" Amy made fists with her hands and nodded enthusiastically. "Like an elephant!" she forswore, not remembering a thing.
"And is the path to the Chao Garden safe?"
"Of course it is! There's nothing in the Mystic Ruins that I haven't handled before! You're on my turf, remember? And the first step to finding an emerald together is slowing down for one of your teammates!"
To her surprise, Shadow slowed down. He waited for her to catch up to him with his arms crossed, face blank, and shoulder turned toward her direction.
By the time Amy reached his side, she was already out of breath. "You...sure are...a fast walker, aren't cha?" She stood up straight after regaining her energy. "Whew! That was an exercise."
"We don't have much time," he pressed the matter at hand. "We need to find that Chaos Emerald before the sun sets."
Amy nodded. "Right!"
Shadow nodded back, unfolding his arms. The two hedgehogs parted ways in a glade. Untrue to her word, Amy came upon the Mystic Temple's pasture instead of the Chao Garden's trolley tracks. What drew her curiosity was a yawning underpass that looked like it had been tunneled into the temple by a giant serpent, but the more likely culprits were explosives left by crooked treasure hunters. Amy couldn't deny that if she was a Chaos Emerald, she would definitely take shelter in the Mystic Temple. With this in mind, she primed herself for an adventure.
Meanwhile, Shadow was investigating the Lost World, completely unaware of Amy's expedition in the same shrine. His eyes walked across ancient hieroglyphics of Chaos Emeralds on an aquatic room's limestone walls. The eroded warriors holding them resembled the red echidna in Sonic's circle, but their embossed faces weren't the only relics that lit the dark hallways of his memory.
"This place feels...familiar to me somehow." Shadow touched his forehead with his fingertips to shake off his Déjà vu, reopening his eyes drowsily. "But how can that be possible?"
"AAAAaaaaAAAHHHH!"
Shadow whipped around with his feet apart and hands clenched, glaring at the adit behind him.
"SONIC!"
Anxiety choked the black hedgehog. "Amy." He bolted into the tunnel without a rocket boost from his air shoes, which compelled his concerns to bend toward the defunct jets. "What?!"
"Sonic, I need you! PLEASE!"
Shadow's head came up. His pupils dilated. Fire. The hedgehog broke his run with the sides of his heels. A turret of flames blocked him from going further.
Up ahead shivered Amy, who looked petrified as she calculated her slim chances at dodging the moving pillars and fire traps that ringed her. The back of her sandals were singed, indicating her run-in with the inferno.
When the fire before Shadow was finally sealed away by the trap door in the floor, he thundered, "Hurry!"
Amy's head turned toward to the voice, reuniting her eyes with Shadow's. Flecks of hope illuminated her pupils. "Shadow!"
He offered his calloused palm, but she was too timid to take it. "Now!" he roared, bringing her nearer to tears. "Before it returns!" He shook his hand at her.
Amy realized that he was talking about the firetrap. She closed her eyes and threw her entire body at him, her heel just missing the geyser of flames that shot up behind her.
Shadow caught her. "Argh―!" He shrank in height from the pressure that her weight was putting on his hamstrings.
Amy squalled, "Shadow―"
“I'm fine," he snapped. Shadow's calves shook like tea kettles due to the heat boiling in them. He used the resilience firing up and down his thighs to unbend his legs with a grunt.
"Sh-Shadow―"
"Just hang on."
Amy's surroundings spiraled into a kaleidoscope of colors before she could blink. The striped hedgehog had the velocity of a Starstreak missile―veering left and swerving right, yanking her through the universe and into a world that Sonic only saw. Shadow was both so out of control and entirely in it that gravity seemed to kneel at his feet, and somewhere between it all, a sensation that had strictly been affiliated with Sonic began to throb in her tummy. As the vantage point became a prism, Shadow launched straight for an oculus of light that was too bright for Amy to look at, so she covered her face with his throat. The heat from the radiation melted away after motion came to a standstill, but Amy kept her eyes behind her hands.
"You're safe now," Shadow monotonously said.
Amy's hands opened like doors. She blinked at her knees. "Huh?" The she-hog looked around at the flooded chamber they were in before looking up at the hedgehog who had saved her. "Where are we now, Shadow?”
Shadow looked at the torches. "I'm not sure." He impassively reciprocated Amy's gaze. "Are you hurt?"
Amy looked over her thigh and touched her heel, lamenting, "My sandals...! Ooh, those were my favorite ones, too! It looks like they got caught on fire a little." Regret spilled from her revelation, but then the spill thickened into a flood of explanations, "I got trapped in that minefield back there because I thought I saw something that looked like the Chaos Emerald, see, but then it turned out to be a quartz crystal instead, so I―...W-Woah! Watch it!"
Shadow placed her tingling feet on the floor. "We don't have time for misapprehensions," he curtly pointed out, showing annoyance in both his face and his voice. His breathless speaking style came off as unusual to her until she remembered that his body had almost gone limp thanks to her blunder.
"I'm sorry," she offered. "You got hurt because of me, didn't you?" Even though he had put her down, Amy's hand stayed on his shoulder to emphasize her remorse.
Shadow simultaneously looked and pulled away. "You shouldn't even be here in the first place." His glare met her gawk. “What happened to the Chao Garden?"
Amy had a change of heart. "Well, excuse me for just trying to help!" She crossed her arms and turned her head away from him. "I found this place first and thought it would be a good idea to check it out! I was only looking for the Chaos Emerald like you asked me to, but you can't even appreciate my efforts!"
"Hmph." With the austerity of a soldier, Shadow walked past her like she hadn't sassed him at all. "I can't get a pulse in this place, so to continue our search here would be pointless."
Amy's cheekiness disappeared. "A pulse?" She followed Shadow with a blink. "Like, a heartbeat?" She halted in her steps after he stopped walking. "Can you actually feel the Chaos Emeralds, Shadow?"
Shadow angled his head to stare at what Amy thought was an ordinary mural. "Amy."
The seriousness of his call made her shut up. Her words wormed out of her mouth at the last minute, "What is it now?"
He looked back at her intensely. His red eye seemed to flicker with flames from some unexplained urgency. "I want you to follow me from here on out, and I don't want you running off without my permission. Have I made myself clear?"
"Your permission?" Amy drawled, gobsmacked. "What am I, a baby? I don't need anyone's permission to do anything at all!"
“I'm growing tired of this. We're wasting more time." Shadow headed for the wall before she could finish fussing at him. The dead-end slid sideways to uncover a secret passage.
Instead of commenting on the neat escape hatch, Amy commented on his attitude, "What's with you all of a sudden? I'm not some three-year-old who needs to be babysat because she can't behave, you know."
"Hmph." Shadow set foot in the cavern. "I beg to differ." His dig had a microminiature smirk in it.
"Don't let my cute looks fool you!" Amy loped up to his side, blending in with the shadows. "I can pack a reeeaaal punch when duty calls!"
"There isn't any doubt in my mind."
"There better not be!"
Their voices grew smaller the further they walked. Because the unorthodox team was at the mercy of Shadow's stamina, they followed the gravel in the dark at a slow pace. Shadow's heavy breathing worried Amy along the way, but he deflected her questions every time by indirectly making her seem like a liability.
"Stay close to me," he would remind her, despite how she was stronger than him.
Amy had to resist the urge to grab onto his tail for guidance. "Stay close to me so that I can actually see you."
In the timeliest manner possible, the sun hailed them from the end of the underpass. Amy jogged outside to cherish the fresh air. "Aw’right!" The fourteen-year-old bounced up and down. "We made it!" She hugged her hands together and twirled around to the physically fifteen-year-old hedgehog, batting her eyelashes at him. "Good work, Shadow!"
He nodded in acceptance of her compliment, but he was too busy navel-gazing to absorb her praise.
Amy walked up to Shadow, ducking a little to see his hanging face. "Hey, are you okay? How about we go looking for that Chao Garden together this time? You could rest there if you're feeling run down and whatnot. What'd you say?" She was cooing to him like he was a child she had to look after because it was in her nature to coddle dark knights of his sort.
The navel-gazer uncrossed his arms. "Resting is not an option." He turned his head, a habitual dodge that kept her from seeing too much, which made Amy wonder if he was upset with her again. "I can't stay in this condition for much longer. There are too many hazards in the offing. That is why I need to use the daylight wisely."
Despite how much he avoided saying the word "threat" in clear English, it occurred to Amy that Shadow was telling her that he felt defenseless without a Chaos Emerald. "Oh, I see...that is serious." She looked at the clouds. "Hmmm...and I can't dowse because I don't have my rods with me. Huh."
Shadow was as silent as an emerald.
Amy dropped her fist into her palm. "I know! Why don't we do this? Knuckles said that the Chao here have a natural affiliation with the Chaos Emeralds, so they're always close by. If we go to their garden and find one, you can relax a little. It's always been a safe place, as far as I remember. How does that sound?"
Shadow's head nodded at the ground after what felt like years. He shared his eyes with her. "I suppose that it sounds better than nothing, given the circumstances."
Amy's pep came back. "Then what are we waiting for? Let's get this show on the road! I'll lead the way, of course!"
"Be my guest."
"My~ pleasure!"
With that, the adolescents went on their way. Amy descried Shadow's curiosity as his eyes followed the animals in the canopies. At times, he would pause and block her from walking onward as families of civets, anteaters, or red squirrels trotted by, presumably thinking that he needed to protect her from them. Amy showed Shadow that everything was fine by kneeling down to beckon a squirrel to climb into her palms. She lifted the nut gnawer to her face and rubbed noses with him.
Shadow watched their intimacy unfold with surprise. Amy released the tiny squirrel into a tree, giving Shadow room to inquire about her affinity with nature.
She was happy to answer with a simple, "I've always gotten along with animals! I even saved Birdie from Eggman once! That's what I called him―the little birdie I saved, that is. And Gamma―he was Dr. Eggman's robot, but I convinced him to free himself. No one should have to live under anyone else's control, especially not someone like Dr. Eggman's. We should all be free to choose our own fate, wouldn't you say?"
Shadow eyed her. "You seem to have a way with those who are different from your kind."
Amy grew sunnier at the thought. "I kinda do, don't I?" She looked up as she rested her fingertip on her chin. "I really miss the both of them, though. They really helped me grow." She smiled with her arms opening to the sky like the petals of a blooming flower. "I hope they're living freely without a care in the world! I'll bet Birdie is on some big adventure as we speak!"
"Hm...―Hm?" Shadow's gaze discovered the macaws in the tree above them. The rainbow parrots cocked their eyes at him as they squawked. "They have a problem, do they?" he figured, amused.
"I think what they're trying to say to us is, 'Hello,'" Amy opined. She put her hands up to the corners of her mouth and shouted, “Hello up there! How are you today? That storm was pretty dreadful, wasn't it? I hope all of you made it out okay!"
Shadow appeared to take a very keen interest in her conversation with them, even uncrossing his arms to let them hang open, but Amy couldn't read his mind. It was obviously cottoned with intense thoughts, maybe even troubled ones, yet Amy liked to think the opposite. Filling in the blanks on her own, Amy beamed at the idea of a clueless, almost innocent Shadow the Hedgehog seeing the world through her eyes for the very first time.
"Amy," Shadow suddenly said with a serious voice.
"Hm?"
"We have to keep moving."
She saluted him. "Aie, aie, Captain Shadow!"
"Don't call me that."
"Why not?"
"Because I resent it."
"No need to take it to heart. I was just trying to lighten you up a little!"
"The only thing that will 'lighten me up' is finding that Chaos Emerald."
"Then in that case, say no more!"
They spent the spare hours of their tour looking for the trolley that would lift them out of the jungle's maze, which became pretty hopeless over time. Amy didn't let the morass of drawbacks put a dent in her current mood, though. Shadow opened an eye at her as she skipped in front of him, bobbing her head to some free-styled lyrics:
"I got out my map and chose a place where I wanted to go. I know that your lucky color is that cool shade of blue. I guess I'm soooo~ easy to understand. I just do, whatever, comes to me NAT-urally~!"
"You do realize that there is nothing to be happy about in this situation, don't you?"
"Huh?" Amy blinked over her shoulder with a finger on her lip.
"Yet somehow you still manage to be despite that fact," Shadow noted.
Amy pouted with one cheek puffed up. "That's just how I am, for your information!" She shut her eyes and puffed her chest out, placing her wrists on her hips as she announced, "I'm just a cheerful, cute girl who enjoys life!" The pink hedgehog marched ahead and sang louder in rebellion.
'Enjoys life…' Shadow rewound the quote in his head again and again until it was ingrained in his brain. Even then, he didn't understand the definition, being unable to relate to the activity himself, so he hmph-ed to redeem his pride.
―v-V-v―
“Mmph." Alarm charged Shadow's sixth sense like a buckshot passing through his ears. He threw his arm out in front of Amy.
Amy stopped to blink down at Shadow's elbow before double-checking his face for any clues as to what was happening. "Shadow?"
"There's danger here," he warned, his red eyes locked on the thickets that shivered twenty feet ahead of them.
The second after his caveat was accompanied by the sound of metal feet making their way toward the footpath in the distance.
Amy gasped as the wanderer appeared. Her hand jumped up to her mouth before being pulled down by her realization. "One of Dr. Eggman's robots!"
"The doctor's base must be nearby," Shadow calculated.
Amy moaned, "Not again!" She paused in mid-complaint after getting a better look at the robot. "Hold on a minute! Is that...?"
His body shape took after an egg, and his legs copied a chicken's walk. The middle torso―which carried one glinting headlight―was white while every other part of his frame blared red.
"But it can't be!" Amy disclaimed, shaking her head. She blinked widely at the bot to see if the image had changed, but it hadn't. "What's he doing here?!”
The robot decelerated to stand in the heart of the footpath. He was clueless about their presence as far as Amy could tell, but the reason revealed itself when he started careening like a sunken boat. His machine gun dug into the earth to break his fall. Amy looked down and saw blue sparks of electricity climbing up the robot's left thigh. The poor soul folded his legs under his body until it looked like a roller backpack, surrendering to his injuries.
Rather than seeing a poor thing that had no will to go on, all Shadow saw was an opportunity. "I'll take care of this while you make a run for it," he ordered.
"No, wait! Please don't hurt Mr. Robot! Shadow, stop―!" Amy's hand jumped out to grab Shadow's shoulder, but her fingers only snatched air. "SHADOW!"
Charging like a rhino, Shadow somersaulted into a ball, revved up momentum, and then rocketed off, shredding through ferns as he spin-dashed toward the robot. The bot rotated his torso so that he could face his new threat. Alerted, he grabbed the bottom of his machine gun and fired aimlessly; one missile managed to explode in front of Shadow, forcing him to fly back. Amy didn't have time to shout because the other missiles were narrowly missing her.
Screaming, the pink hedgehog ducked as the trees around her smashed the ferns beside her. Smoke plumed from the demolition, getting into her lungs and squeezing them tightly.
Shadow landed on his knee and palm. "Amy?!" He couldn't see her, but he could hear her coughing. "Amy―!" Another missile dynamited the ground under him, throwing him across the jungle.
"Guh!" Shadow cartwheeled away from the fuming crater to bury his heels into the ground. His fingers clawed up dirt until his body skidded to a halt. Shaking at the ankles, Shadow raised his head and growled at the robot, "I've had it with you and your games! You're through!"
"Enemy__identified." A laser beam parked on Shadow's forehead. "Enemy__identified. You__are__unnatural to the Earth. You__do not__belong."
Shadow stood tall and strong, fearlessly wearing the laser's red dot. "I am the ultimate life form,"―he ran at the robot―"and let me be the last thing that you ever see!"
The smoke clouding Amy's body cleared, adding red and pink colors to her silhouette. She unwrapped her arms to bring her fists down to her sides and sob, "Both of you, stop it! Stop it right NOW!"
The gunner robot aimed his weapon at Shadow's cranium just as electrical sparks covered the barrel, destroying its function. Shadow smirked in early victory before Amy's appearance wiped it off. He stopped short in his tracks, taking sharp breaths. The girl was standing in front of the enemy with her arms out and tears under her eyes.
Too overheated to question her, Shadow told her, "Out of my way, Amy!" He opened his palm to squeeze his fingers into a shaking fist that implied strangulation. "This is my chance to destroy that pathetic creature once and for all―"
"No!"
Shadow's pupils contracted.
"Don't you see?! He's already hurt―"
"You have feelings for something that you know nothing about," Shadow riposted. "Now I won't ask you again." He flung the arm of his balled hand. "Stand aside ―"
"He's my friend: Gamma!”