Honesty is the Best Policy {Comic Edition}

Chapter 21: Eliminating All Doubts

The world was a blurred mess. A pink hedgehog in an orange tutu angrily stomped towards her target with her comically large, spiked hammer in only one of her hands, swinging it around haphazardly as if it weighed absolutely nothing. Out of the crowd of people, she emerged. Her target didn't have any time to react as she rushed towards him and, despite him being considerably heavier than she was, grabbed a fistful of black leather and lifted him well above her head. "You will pay!"
"In what??" he asked, shaking in pure terror.
"In blood," she growled, tightening her grip.
A golden streak shot across Scourge's vision, and Rosy was sent flying into a particularly tall patch of grass and disappeared between the blades. Shadow landed in front of him and crossed his arms, looking rather disappointedly down at Scourge where the other hedgehog was now sitting on the concrete path in stunned silence. "You're kind of pathetic, you know. Honest has tasked me with keeping you safe, but I didn't realize it would be this much work."
"W-What do I owe you?"
"Nothing. Not because I'm feeling generous but because I don't like to keep up with the debts I'm owed."
Scourge breathed a silent "woah".
"Oh, wow~, I see why people consider you the poster child for all the many edge lords of the world," came the voice of someone running towards them. The person slid to a stop between them, their red fur visibly fluffed up against the chill autumn breeze. "Hey, Shadow~"
Shadow tilted his head in confusion. The intruding person was none other than Fiona the Fox. Addressing him in a sing-song manner was Sonic's thing. Not like Shadow was okay with Sonic doing it. "Um, may I help you?"
"I don't know, can you?"
Scourge promptly stood up and dusted himself off, adjusting his sunglasses too as they had almost been shaken off his head in the violent encounter with Rosy just moments before. "That's enough, Fi. Don't you have a student council meeting to get to?" the kingly pineapple asked.
Fiona closed her eyes and "pft"ed, putting the red binder she had been holding in both hands under one of her arms. "Hrmph, fine." However, before she left, the red fox winked at Shadow and said, "I'll see you after lunch." She then left towards the cafeteria building.
Scourge looked sideways at him once she was a good distance away. "'After lunch'?"
Shadow rolled his eyes. "She's in my fourth period class," he explained. "She thinks I'm just soooo cool. What do you tell people like that whenever you want them to leave you alone?"
"That's the million mobium question now, isn't it?" Scourge started walking towards one of the cafeteria's other entrances and Shadow followed. "Fiona thinks I've got some glorious plan to take over the world that will make us both completely set for life. If I tell her that I have no intention of taking over anything, the whole universe will implode," Scourge explained, gesturing to, well, everything. "'Scourge the Hedgehog doesn't want to do bad things?' 'He just wants to be left alone?' 'That's not the Scourge we've all been trained to hate!'"
"I completely get you," Shadow told him. "I may not have as many expectations from me as you do, but I can't just tell Fiona I'm not those things. I am those things. I'm just not, you know, into-"
"Pointless flirting? But you accept at least that much from my dumb twin."
Steam started puffing from Shadow's head. That's how Scourge knew he had said the wrong thing.
"I don't accept anything," the darker colored hedgy told him. "That guy's obsessed. He's sick."
"That guy." He said it like he was a stranger, like he was putting him at a distance. Still, the more Scourge talked to Shadow, the more he realized that what was going on between him and Sonic was worlds more complicated than how it sounded when you heard about it from others. Kind of like Scourge's existence as a whole. At least if you believed what Honest said. And Scourge kind of had to. When someone gets so unbelievably emotional over something, it's kind of hard not to believe them. Plus, her name was Honest.
"How did you get to be so normal?"
Scourge was jarred from his thoughts by that seemingly out-of-place statement. "I'm not."
"What, does it make you uncomfortable to address that? It's okay for you to make me uncomfortable, but I can't do the same to you?"
Scourge laughed. "Alright, I see your point, but what am I supposed to tell you?"
Shadow took a breath and sighed on exhale. "Prison didn't change you like you say it did. That would make for an interesting story, yeah, but I think it's something else."
"Do you know how I got to prison?" Scourge asked. Shadow seemed genuinely curious, so he continued. "With Sonic considering me a threat and with all my previous zone trespasses over the years, they found enough to condemn me." Scourge looked around solemnly at all the students gravitating towards the cafeteria building. "Anyway, I think it actually improved my image. What good is a king-killer if he's a phantom who can't be caught? I want people to see me as a flesh-and-blood guy, you know? I'm one of them."
"You want people to think of you as a king of the common people? Why do you even care? Doesn't Honest call you 'the king of air and empty space?' Who are these people?" Shadow asked.
"Well... She's talking about the old kingdom. I conquered the world. Anyways, I don't know exactly why I'm 'normal' as you call it, but if you really must know, I've always been this way." The green hedgehog lifted his head from where he had been watching his feet this whole time, electing instead to focus on their destination looming at the top of the hill, at the far end of the courtyard. "Since my very first memory at the start of my consciousness."
"What the heck are you on about?" Shadow asked.
"Can't you remember how you felt at the beginning of your existence?"
Shadow widened his eyes as if that question being asked of him were a surprise. "W-Well... My memories are a little... fuzzy... due to amnesia, you know, but I remember how it felt to be written as dead and then picking up again as if I hadn't been. That was pretty bizarre."
Scourge laughed at that, and Shadow looked at him curiously. "'Bizarre'? That's the understatement of the century."
"Well, that's the only way I can describe it," Shadow told him, defending his choice of words. "I'm sure everyone here's experienced it. Even the recolors and fan characters. Well, I guess not Honest, but surely she can think back to when she was really young."
Scourge nodded, squinting against the glare of the midday sun. "Well, it's like that. I've always been this way. I just only felt it for the first time later on, like, well after I had gained consciousness."
Shadow silently thought about Scourge's situation up until they entered the cafeteria and joined with the line. There they saw Honest jumping and waving further ahead. Shadow carefully picked his way along the line to join up with her. Scourge watched him go for a while. Should I follow him? Will Honest let me in as well? He eventually decided that he should and that she would. After all, what had Honest told him the other day?
You're part of my troop, my party.
Honest's philosophies were strange, and he didn't understand her reasoning most of the time, but still... he didn't know. Something about feeling accepted, even if he didn't know why, was comforting to him. All of his self-preservation instincts should be telling him to run away. For some reason, they weren't working right now.
Honest ushered Shadow into the line between her and the fan character behind them with a relatively straight face. However, once she saw Scourge, her expression immediately brightened. The corners of her dress, a cross between Cream's and Amy's, lifted with the aid of an invisible force, a style choice that defied physics. A cloud of sparkles and hearts erupted from utter nowhere, and Shadow didn't seem to notice, only staring at Scourge with half-lidded eyes, visibly annoyed by her overly enthusiastic reaction to the moss-colored monarch's arrival.
"Hey, Scourge," she greeted him, her large, fluffy tail swishing behind her. It didn't have much room to move in the cramped space, so it just brushed the white brick wall, resembling a giant, floppy paintbrush spreading invisible paint.
"Uh, hey," Scourge exclaimed, scratching the back of his neck awkwardly. Not only were her philosophies strange, but also were her... mannerisms? Something similar to this happens nearly every time they've met. He has wondered for a while now just what that kind of behavior could mean. However, Scourge always found himself going back to the same and obvious answer. Someone's ears perking and a smile forming nearly instantly were usually signs of something specific. The sparkles and hearts? However, even that didn't fit perfectly in the blank. Honest wasn't capable of such things. What Scourge was envisioning just wasn't possible.
"We're having chicken balls today."
That strange statement broke Scourge out of his daze. "We're having chicken what?"
Honest snickered rather dryly and struck a regal pose. "That's what I like to call the small and perfectly round chicken pieces we have a lot here." She said it as if she were incredibly proud of herself for coming up with that name. The green recolor of Sonic narrowed his eyes at her.
"What, do you think you're being funny or something?"
Honest returned the stare and put her fists on her hips. She was trying to appear intimidating, but instead she just ended up looking like a pouty little kid. "I think it's good for everything in my life to have a unique title. It makes everything just that more important." Honest then took one of the fists she was forming and held it in front of her, looking triumphant. "One day, they will sing songs and march in parades dedicated to what I have accomplished here, in this world that I have so painstakingly crafted from nothing at all."
Scourge found himself mouthing another "woah". Honest and Shadow were a great fit, weren't they? Both could easily impress him with words alone. Scourge knew the things they said were sarcastic, but their ability to stick to a theme or stereotype was just plain impressive to him. He felt out of place and at home with them at the same time. They were different people, yeah, but it wasn't like that prevented them from getting along.
The two hedgehogs and the cat inched their way through the line. Eventually, they made it to the food lines. Scourge just followed Honest and Shadow's lead, standing in one of the lines for the "chicken balls".
On their way to the table, Scourge could feel Honest's gaze burning a hole in the side of his head. However, when he turned to look at her, she appeared to be just mildly curious.
"Are you going to eat with us? Don't you usually eat with Infinite?"
"Y-Yeah, well... he's got a paper to make up for English, so he told me to leave him be for today," Scourge explained to her.
"I haven't seen him all day," Shadow told them. He was ahead by a bit. "But I'm not complaining. That guy's a pain."
When they got to the table, no one was there except for one of the fan characters Honest created, Dina the Hedgehog. Her quills were white tipped with pink, and she wore a cyan top with long black sleeves as well as a pair of matching cyan shorts and boots that kind of looked like Silver's. She had a large bang which she brushed to the right side of her face constantly. The bright colors of her design were probably the thing that alerted most people to the fact that she was a fan character. It was strange that Honest had a fan character which seemed so typical. After all, she created herself, and she looked nothing like Dina. Scourge kind of assumed Dina might've been designed that way on purpose. Perhaps she was part of some strange plan of Honest's to break lame fan character stereotypes. Who could know for sure? As Scourge took a seat at the large, round table, Dina kept her eyes glued to him the whole time.