"The usual?"

"No. Beer, please."

"Interesting."

Silver will be angry and hurt, which will drive him to work longer and lonelier hours until his work consumes him from the inside, leaving him hollow. It's as Blaze feared. He will eventually find a way to cope without her once she is gone.

Before this happens, though, this foretelling is not enough for him.

So she reassures him that she will be replaced. "We all are, eventually."

"But I don't want anyone else."

Sometime later he will remember vividly the hot hand on his shoulder, the velvety kiss on his cheek, the breath of the sincerest form of apology through her ruined dregs of pride.

"You'll make a better detective than I."

"I don't want that."

"I know."

He will remember sitting idly by, emasculated, to watch her pack her things. When she is gone and he is alone because he has been left to fend without her, he will sprawl out on her desk, swept clean, and her scent will remain.

The red web and the photographs and scenes of carnage will oversee all failures, constantly driving him to be better, because he is not good enough until this case is finally closed. The case that helped drive her away.

He will think, maybe she'll come back.

"I'm going for a drink, if you'd care to join me."

But it hasn't happened yet.

He'll recall wanting to say something acidic, wanting to grab her and throw her over that damned desk, wanting to kiss her, but stopping himself because she's been broken enough already. Instead, he says, "Okay," and hates himself for it when she smiles her gratitude.

"I'm fine." Shadow's crimson eyes betray him when he glances at Rouge's empty space, her perfume still lingering on everything. "But, please, once you've caught up with her, give her my... Well."

"I will."

Silver drinks cider and Blaze hardly drinks at all, yet she sinks into the nest of her arms as if to sleep it off.

"You're abandoning me, Detective."

"I'm no longer a detective," is the muffled reply. "Just Blaze is fine."

"Nah. You'll always be my Detective, to me."

"That sincerely hurts."

"Mmhm."

Eventually, they will leave and she will offer to drive him home, but he will choose a cab.

She will be left behind, standing on the sidewalk by the trashcans, watching him go. Formless in her coat, androgynous in her face, no longer that same striking heroine.

He won't be able to resist turning on the backseat to look back.

She won't know it, because she'll be hiding when he'll see her bury her face into her palm, seeking those tears that should be shed.

He'll want her back. Catering to the ghost she has left him with and finding it less sufficient than ever.

Amy is on television, waving an oversized mallet ineffectually at men in robot costumes whilst screaming incoherently for Sonic to rescue her. Her very first episode. She's not half bad an actress.

"You did say, once." Blaze's arm drops onto the bed, the remote dropping too. She's in her underwear, lost within that same abject void inside, warm tropical air flowing in from the window. "That it was your dream."

The door to the right suddenly opens and steam gusts out, engulfing Rouge as she exits in nothing but a towel that barely compensates. "What's the dream?"

"To be an actress."

"Whose dream is this?"

Blaze is still here. She hasn't left to find Rouge, yet. Silver still has time.

The cat no longer pretends to sleep and the hedgehog pushes his drunk aside to speak.

"Detective?"

There is no reply.

"I was just wondering. Have… Have you ever, uh, hated yourself? Just a little?"

Still, there is no reply.

"Detective?" Silver turns blearily on his barstool to locate his companion, his sullen, beleaguered frown clumsily morphing into a compassionate smile.

Blaze breathes so deeply, he knows she is asleep, with her face hidden in the nest of her folded arms. The remains of her beer glimmer in the brown bottle, pretty under the lights. Her tail is curled around her lower body, around the legs of the barstool, as if she and the barstool are one organic being.

"A peculiar mermaid," he whispers, daring to reach over and brush some lint off of her shoulder.

She doesn't stir.

"I'm sorry we didn't catch the killer, together. I wish there was some easy explanation. But I guess not."

Shadow brings a glass to the light, examining it closely for imperfections, inwardly disturbed by the unusual sloppiness of his work.

"I'm so angry. I wanna hate you but I just can't. It wouldn't be right. Because after all, you can quit and you can disappear if you want to, but you'll always be my Detective." The lint is rolled into a tiny ball, crushed by telekinesis. "You're abandoning me and I more than anything, I wish I understood you and I wish I could heal you. I really tried. Will I see you again, or is this really goodbye?" It seems so absurd to spend any mental energy is turning about lint. "Are some people just destined to be like you? Miserable, lonely and alone. Living in little boxes all squashed and mangled together. Literal boxes. Figurative boxes, too."

Shadow polishes a glass.

"You really do hate yourself."

"I love you!"

A neighbour bellows back a string of irritable curses and insults, because it is rude to yell like that.

Blaze is back.

Tangle's tree house, incomplete and rotting, resembles a tower from which the princess would fall to escape some dreaded monster within its walls, putting her trust in the arms of the knight, hoping to be caught.

"I love you, too."

The lemur is gone, but the cat is not.

It's hard to be thankful.

Blaze is alone with her voice and memories and the nothingness they ultimately amount to as she reaches for the ladder, seeking her ultimate escape. Freedom. She spends those rungs thinking about how the world turns and how most people move on, leaving the crippled few behind.

Silver hasn't spoken to her since the cab. But she's heard from Amy in a rather surprising publication that he and his new partner caught the killer. The pale hedgehog said he'd make it up to the cat, somehow, though the words were not unduly cruel, all things considered. But another consequence is that Rouge has returned to her bar and her life with Shadow, hopeful to no longer be assumed a monster. She is happy and this means she is no longer receptive to anything casual.

The world never stops turning. If it does, everyone will die. It doesn't wait for one or a thousand. Not for anyone. That would be the epitome of arrogance, to wish for such a thing, let alone to assume. It is strangely difficult to be happy for them, though. They're not in the void, only their voices. They don't have this nothingness inside of them, through which love falls and disappears.

For the cat on the ladder who unsteadily climbs and finds no place to settle in the screaming nothing, falling into it, for a change, to vie for some silence, to chase the love that evades her, doesn't seem like a bad thing. Likened to a princess, once, there is nothing to rule but this place of memories. Her kingdom is the void she's been looking into, leaning slowly and steadily toward.

Just then, her phone vibrates in her pocket, against her thigh.

She doesn't pause to read the text from Silver, suffering from a moment of vulnerability and a desire to absolve, hopeful for a response before he bursts. Even though he outran her some time ago. Even though she said he wouldn't.

The wood sags under her weight, a rung almost snapping beneath her heel in passing. The ropes have frayed. The supportive branch groans.

"Hmm." She's high enough to fall and seriously hurt herself, to gaze over the wall and into the neighbour's yard, continuing to climb unsteadily whilst discovering his wife in a swimsuit, doing laps in the pool. "Nice."

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Abyss