Written for a challenge on Livejournal. An excuse to explore the depth of two of my absolute favorite characters ever.
His words came out positively garbled. His eyes were wide (wider than normal, anyway), his ears were down, and his mouth had dropped to just about his neck. (or at least, where his neck was supposed to be, anyway.)
It took a few moments before he could begin speaking in complete sentences again. "Wh-what did you just say?"
Sally's eyes were narrowed. Her hands were folded across her chest, and her hips were turned to one side, so that most of her weight was on one foot, rather than the other. "You heard me, Sonic hedgehog."
Sonic's gloved hands clenched into fists, unclenched, and then clenched again, in an almost pleading gesture. "But…but that can't be right! I mean…After all this time, after all we've been through together…it can't be that easy!"
Sally's scowl became a bit more engraved into her face. No wonder, to his mind- her face seemed to be permanently stuck like that these days. "And why not? I know of all the difficulties we've been through for the last ten years. Don't you think I do? Why shouldn't some things come easy in our lifetime, once in a while?"
"Because it doesn't make sense!" Finally, his words were coming back to him. Finally, his thoughts could be put together in coherent sentences. Finally, his speech was gaining momentum. It wasn't quite what he could manage with his feet, but he was Sonic the Hedgehog- everything he did was fast.
"It doesn't make sense! You, of all people, should see that! I mean, you're always usin' your noggin instead of…of anything else. I'm the one with the gut instincts! I'm the one who's always looking before leaping! Heck, Sal, I'm the one who thinks with…" His eyes squinted then. He was going to hate himself in the morning for saying this, but right now, he didn't care.
"I'm the one who thinks with my heart, and not my head. But you…You don't do that! It doesn't make sense for you to do that!"
As he spoke, he noticed that Sally's look of irritation was shifting to one of amusement. Her scowl had shifted only slightly, so that it became a slight smirk. Her upright ears were now flicking back and forth, until one was leaning forward while the other was leaning back; the lids of her eyes had dropped to half-mast, and one eyebrow had raised while the other got almost too close to a clear diamond-blue eye.
"Hmph. I'm not making sense? Well, here you are, talking about sense, and getting worked up about it. Call me what you will, but that doesn't seem like you."
Silence, now. A horribly stony, cold silence, that seemed to fill space and time itself. (though, if one listened closely, they could hear the very soft, very faint sound of Sonic's brain shattering into a billion, glass shard-sized pieces.)
He sighed a shuddery sigh, and then said the only thing that could make sense to him. He repeated the words that Sally had said, and had made him freak out in the first place.
"I love you."
Sally was now fully smirking, all dignity and royal poise now all but forgotten. "You see? It wasn't so hard, was it?"
Sonic groaned. "Yeah. Sure. Whatever you say. I gotta go, now- I got one mondo headache."
She just laughed, and gave him one kiss on the nose.