Future Comes Back To Haunt You

Mephiles…

The hedgehog’s ears perked up at the sound of his name. He frowned, raising his eyebrows in confusion, wondering if he had heard that for real or not.

Mephilessssss…

The voice sounded like a hiss to him. A heated hiss.

He set down his mug of coffee and got up from the table, taking a few steps out of the kitchen.

He was a bit uneasy. The voice sounded a little too familiar to him, so he wondered if that was a bad thing. In fact, he realized that hearing voices was a bad thing, period.

Contemplating about whether or not he should wake up Shadow and tell him that he might be losing it again, Mephiles heard the voice again.

Mephiles the Dark… Oh, how you’ve changed…

Mephiles stopped shock still before quickly regaining his composure.

“Who are you?” He demanded. “And how do you know my old name?”

Old name?

It sounded a bit surprised.

“Yes… I’m no longer ‘Mephiles the Dark’. I am now ‘Mephiles the Hedgehog’.” He said quite coolly, scanning his eyes around the room. “Who are you? Show yourself!”

If you insist…

Then a dark mist appeared and began to take form. Mephiles gasped.

Standing before him, was an exact replica of who he had one been. Or at least he must have been… this hedgehog’s fur was graying a bit, and his eyes were a softer green, as if he was beginning to feel the effects of aging.

The expression on his mouthless face was formed into anger, surprise, and if possible… confusion.

“You’re… me?!” Mephiles yelped, jumping back in shock.

“Hardly… look at yourself…” The other said, shaking his head and waving a hand in his direction. “What happened? What are you doing here?”

“I should ask you the same… isn’t this dangerous for our existence? You talking to me? Oh, what if Shadow saw you?”

“Shadow?” The Old Mephiles’ eyes widened for a moment, before narrowing. “He’s… here? Wasn’t he trapped? I thought that nuisance friend of a robot of his turned against him and tracked him down for the Humans…”

“This is worse than I thought! You’re the ‘Me’ of the timeline if I had killed that blue hedgehog, Sonic!” Mephiles backed up into a wall and shook his head. “You shouldn’t be here! This won’t be good for anyone!”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know just what will happen!” Mephiles started explaining unintentionally as his fear started to overtake him. “Dark is the one in control and he‘ll try to make you kill Shadow or something!”

“Dark..?”

“He’s the demon that’s controlling your thoughts! You don’t know he exists because he has twisted your thoughts into believing that that is the real you! But it’s not! It’s not!”

“What are you blathering about?” Old Mephiles moved forward and tilted his head to the side, giving Mephiles an almost calculating look. “There is no demon here but us…”

“No! No! We aren’t the ones who are demons! It’s Dark! Dark!” Mephiles shook his head frantically and shrank away a bit. Old Mephiles took another step forward and Mephiles howled: “Get away from me! You’re crazy! Insane! Unsound with that thing in your mind!”

“I would have to say that you are the insane one here…” Old Mephiles shook his head and raised an eyebrow, voice eerily calm . “What have you been doing in this timeline?”

“Not what you’ve been doing!”

Old Mephiles took a look around the room and took in a few hints, piecing together this little puzzle.

“Who else resides here?”

“Shadow and Rouge…”

“Shadow and that bat!? What are you doing here?! Shadow is one who trapped us, remember?”

“But, Shadow is my friend! My closest friend!”

This comment nearly knocked Old Mephiles over, literally. His eyes widened in disbelief, and his entire body tensed up after stumbling back a step or two. Then he clenched his hand into a fist, growled deeply under his breath and lunged forward at Mephiles, slamming him into the wall by holding his arm against Mephiles’ chest, earning a cry of fright from the crystal hedgehog.

“What was that?” Old Mephiles seethed as he pressed all his weight into keeping Mephiles against the wall, who was beginning to hyperventilate.

Mephiles could almost hear Dark’s voice underlining his voice. Mephiles started shaking and he swallowed hard as his eyes widened as much as they could, Old Mephiles close enough forward that he could feel the heat of his breath from his nose.

“Well?”

“Sh-shadow… is-is m-my f-fr-friend…” Mephiles couldn’t help but stammer. He knew what this Mephiles was capable of. Out of instinct, Mephiles bit him in the shoulder to get him to let go, and as Old Mephiles drew his arm back with a hiss of pain, he pulled away and shot to the other side of the room.

“Shadow! Help!”

“You ask for his help? What has happened to you?! How can you even be me?!”

“I’m the you who figured out what was going on with Dark!” Mephiles yelled, taking refuge behind the couch. “I’m the you that went the right way! I’m the real Mephiles!”

“You speak of drivel! What have they done to you, to warp your mind into believing these lies?”

“Nothing! Everything you believe right now are the lies! You weren’t meant to be like this!” Mephiles blinked and suddenly squeaked. Old Mephiles was now in front of him, arms crossed and a disbelieving expression on his face.

“This is what I was meant to be?” He said in a bored tone, shaking his head in disinterest. “I’d rather be this… not the little weakling you are…”

“I’m not weak! I’ve fought off the demon in our heads and won!” Mephiles countered. “I’ve endured probably more pain and malaise than you have! I’ve gotten sick and made it through! I’ve broken free of comas and trances! I have more abilities now! And I have a stronger will! Dark to a degree fears what I can do!”

“Illness, you say?” Old Mephiles expression changed to a slight degree of madness behind his eyes. “I have never once experienced this useless feeling.”

“Did you know that we’re also severely allergic to milk products?” Mephiles added.

Old Mephiles blinked a few times, then broke out into loud, fanatical laughter that echoed in the room.

“Allergies?! You have allergies?! How pathetic!”

Mephiles closed his eyes and turned his head away and whimpered. He was starting to get really scared.

As Old Mephiles’ laughter continued… it suddenly stopped with a punching sound, a grunt of pain, and a THUD.

Mephiles opened his eyes and looked up.

Shadow had apparently heard his cry of help or something and had punched Old Mephiles in the back of the head as Old Mephiles stood over Mephiles, laughing.

Old Mephiles was holding the back of his head as he picked himself up from the ground, glaring at Shadow before dissolving into a fit of laughter.

“So it is true? He hasn’t offed you, huh?” He managed between a laugh or two, snickering and forming an orb in his hands. “No matter… I’ll do it for him… the poor thing seems to have lost his mind… seems to be under the delusion that you two are friends… pity…”

“We are friends…” Shadow said, cracking his knuckles and carefully forming a Chaos Spear in his hands. “And I would appreciate it if you left him alone…”

“I suppose… but that’s making it too easy!”

Old Mephiles threw the orb, and Shadow threw the Chaos Spear. They both collided in the air, and canceled each other out.

“So, what’s up with you?” Shadow said, quickly shifting his eyes to Mephiles, who gave a nod to show that he was alright. “You look a bit old. You’ve got some grey in your quills and fur…”

“Two hundred years will do that to you.” Old Mephiles said, narrowing his eyes again. “I’m physically at least forty something, and I’ll admit my eyesight is failing a bit… but I can see you haven’t changed much at all…”

“I don’t age… and it’s only been a year since I met you…”

“A year?! You know very well it was ten years before that as well!” Old Mephiles spat. “That’s what I really find irritating about you… you can’t get your days straight!”

“Actually… if I may…” Mephiles spoke up, raising his hand into the air as the other hedgehogs turned their attentions to him. “It was just a year ago. There was some time traveling involved, but this Shadow hadn’t meet the just born us until after meeting the broken from the scepter us. It’s all a bit time paradox mess!”

Old Mephiles blinked, raising his eyebrows slowly.

“Again… he’s delusional…” Old Mephiles muttered, shaking his head.

Mephiles twitched. He didn’t like someone questioning his mental stability around him, much less when he could hear them clearly. What made this worse was that it was his old self that was saying so…which was ironic when Old Mephiles was the truly insane one.

“I am not delusional…” He growled, narrowing his eyes at his old self. “You’re the one who’s mad…”

“I’m not the one believing all these lies…”

“They’re not lies!” Mephiles barked, getting to his feet and baring his teeth at Old Mephiles. “I was there through all off it and I know what’s a lie and what’s not…”

Old Mephiles let him trail off slightly when he gave him an almost reassuring pat on the back, and said in a tone that someone might use to coax a kitten out of a tree: “It’s alright… You believe what you want to… I’m not here to change it…”

“Then why are you here?” Mephiles swatted the hand away and took a step or two away from him to stand next to Shadow.

“Merely a little fun before I need to trick those kids…” He said simply. “I don’t have to worry about anything going wrong and erasing me from time itself while I’m here because I, myself, do not exist in this timeline. I can do whatever I want, because my existence is already void here… I can see that from what I see standing in front of me…”

“You really are a nut! What even made you think of that?!” Mephiles exclaimed.

“You call me the ‘nut’, while you stand beside our greatest enemy, not even giving a thought to kill him or anything like that?”

“Of course I won’t hurt Shadow! It’s not us who want to do that, it’s Dark!”

“And who is this ‘Dark’ you keep nattering about?”

“He’s the part of you two that makes you a demon…” Shadow explained, getting to it before Mephiles. “He’s like an extension of you… or a parasite…”

“I would compare him to rabies!” Mephiles declared, crossing his arms. “He makes you insane, and changes you into something you’re not. He’ll take complete control over you if you’re not careful, and he can even take control of temperatures, body movements, and what you see… He’ll drive you insane enough to want to jump off a bridge and drown…”

“… Jump… off a bridge..?”

“He made me do it once.”

“…”

“Actually, it was more like he pushed me to such a broken and desperate state of mind that it seemed like a good idea to get rid of him… Shadow saved me before I died…”

“You almost drowned..?” Old Mephiles said slowly, his expression showing some concern about the state of mind of this alternative version of himself. “… Because of him..?”

“Granted… I wasn’t too happy at first… bit and scratched Shadow, then tried to slash my wrist with my claws…” Mephiles held up a hand and wiggled his fingers to show off his razor sharp ends to them.

Old Mephiles almost seemed a bit disturbed now. One might have seen his eye twitch if they were watching him.

“I’ve also died twice now… both times to break the ties between me and Dark.”

“Died… twice…”

“Drowned. See, we can’t swim… at all. We sink like rocks. The second time was that I was too injured to survive a faked heart attack. ”

“If you died… then how...?”

“Shadow helped revive me.”

Old Mephiles turned his attention slowly to Shadow, his eye twitching visibly now. However, when he spoke, his voice remained calm and composed as usual, but with a bit of a strain.

“… A-anything else I should know about..?”

“Like what?”

“Anything… related… to us…”

“I have panic attacks when I’m really scared…”

“Panic what?”

“Panic attacks. It’s like…” Mephiles trailed off for a moment, thinking of an accurate way to describe it. “It’s a terrifying experience. It’s almost like having a heart attack, but you can’t really die from it…”

“But you did once…”

“That was because I was terribly injured.”

“How did you get injured?!”

“Fighting Dark. He broke my ankle, sprained my wrist, and hurt me internally. I was bleeding a bit from a few cuts, and blood loss makes me dizzy.”

Again with this talk about Dark! Old Mephiles barked in his mind, but simply nodded to mask over it.

“And… you bleed?”

“Of course! Everyone does! It’s just that we hadn’t seen it before we were first injured by Shadow.”

“… When..?” Old Mephiles was getting confused.

“After we had fused to him, and split apart. Dark had invaded his mind, and tried to kill us and Rouge. That’s when the real us was reawakened. Turns out that Dark had kept that part of us in a comatose state for nearly ten years.”

“And the real us is..?”

“Me. This me. The one talking to you.”

Old Mephiles took in the appearance of this new form of himself. Dark blue fur, pale crystal tips on the quills, ears, tail, and eyebrows. The hands and feet were made of the same color of crystal, with the transition point between flesh and rock being at the wrists and ankles, with feathered crystals fraying off those points. The tail had a few shards spiking off the end. His eyes were a lime green, void of any slit pupils like his own. The sclera was a pale, soft red… very different than the blood red his took on when he became a crystal hedge-beast.

His mind sorted through all of this carefully and he made his conclusion about this universe…

Something must go terribly wrong with his plan, and he is reduced to a barely recognizable and jumpy hedgehog, who is best friends with the very hedgehog that had casted him into the world of darkness to begin with.

In other words: He screwed up.

“Fine…” Old Mephiles said, snapping his fingers and opening up a swirling blue portal. “This is clearly a demented dimension… but don’t think this is the last you’ll ever hear of me…”

“Uh… before you go…” Mephiles added, looking half considering about not wanting to say anything at all. “I think I should mention that you should stay away from the red Emerald…”

“Oh, really?” Old Mephiles was looking like he was getting increasingly annoyed by what this Mephiles had to say. “And why is that?”

“… B-because it not only adds to your insanity, but it also increases Dark’s power over you, and if you make any contact with it… it causes you pain…”

“I’ll keep that in mind…” Old Mephiles said with a roll of his eyes and with a tone that clearly stated that he wasn’t going to keep that in mind at all. “But like I said… you haven’t seen the last of me…”

And with that, he exited through the portal, which closed up and disappeared without a trace.

“‘Haven’t seen the last of me’..?” Mephiles said slowly.

“That sounds almost cliché…” Shadow shook his head. “It’s probably nothing to worry about…”

“Well… I have to say that that was really… bizarre…” Mephiles raised an eyebrow and plopped onto the couch in a heap. “You know… for a moment, before you showed up, I thought I was having a mental breakdown again…”

“Well… we can see you’re not…” Shadow said. “Hey… since Rouge won’t be back from that mission until tomorrow… you… wanna watch TV?”

“Why not? I can’t sleep now, after that…” Mephiles picked up the remote.

“Same…”

After trying a few channels, they found something that they were willing to watch. Cartoons.

“Hey, Shadow?”

“Hmm?”

“I hate Halloween…”

“Me too…”